When I was a teenager I read Tyler Cowan’s book Average is Over. It posited that two things are, basically, unique to the 21st century.
Globalised economies of scale
The Internet
The combination of these two things means that for any job, there is someone, somewhere in the world who can do that job better than you; and that this person can monetise doing that job to a global audience. The rewards are much higher but the opportunity for success is much lower as well. Cowan, iirc, uses the example of a violin player; if the best violin player in the world can upload their recordings to YouTube, they can get a potentially greater audience than any classical performer ever did in the 19th or 20th centuries, it also means that many will be less incentivised to patronise their local concert hall when they can listen to much better music at home. There is an obvious synergy here with a book released at roughly the same time, Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters as collaborator-cum-amanuensis. It states that monopolies are good and all great companies should aim for monopoly. In 2014 it made more sense for AirBnb to become the global, go-to landlord than to corner a particular market with local knowledge.
The Cowan thesis has to be tempered with the fact humans, globally, are getting dumber. The best person today is not necessarily the best conceivable person and it is, in fact, an embrace of mediocrity to insist on preferring them to laborious domestic policy choices needed to produce better people. Case in point, the U.S tech sector’s reliance on cheap labour due to poor talent selection mechanisms.
A book I read much later, at university, is called Forging Global Fordism. It interprets a number of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century as responses to Henry Ford, a titan of that age. What was so impressive about Henry Ford to The Nazis was not the fact that he was an anti-Semitic religious fundamentalist, or even the fact he made lots of cars but that the standardised process of making those cars meant that large numbers of unproductive people could be given high-paying jobs and differences of ability between workers erased. Journey to the End of the Night includes, some will remember, a lengthy stint in the Detroit motorworks as one of the many marvels of America; and Brave New World names Ford the true prophet of the new age (a judgment shared by Alexandre Kojeve).
‘Fordism’ can be generalised as both the opposite tendency to the Cowan Thesis and the whole telos of the historical period from 1825 to the present, in which it has been nebulously cracking up. In ‘modernity’ it suddenly became profitable/competitive to raise the standard of the average person in your nation. Napoleon fulfilled the prophecy of firearms by showing that a mass conscript army with muskets would defeat well-trained, quasi-mercenary armies of princes. If this is the case, it makes sense that your conscripts should be well-educated, or at least literate and modestly healthy. The increase of population itself becomes rational. It was not necessarily wise for Florence or Venice to seek more human beings as an end in itself but by the 19th century having more people was a fast-track ticket to industrialisation. Fordism could be said to simply be the fully realised version of the Division of Labour identified by Adam Smith: a group of unskilled workers cooperating will beat an incredibly skilled blacksmith at producing nails. Fordism makes man eusocial. Man may’ve always been social but he wasn’t eusocial. There was once, as the good Doctor tells us, an age in which monsters were born.
Forging Global Muskism. What is one Elon Musk worth to a state?
I am mainly interested in the consequences of the Cowan Thesis for the state. There already exists one picture of what the state will look like under the conditions of the future. We introduce a final text and that is The Sovereign Individual by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. The trends identified in this article will lead to those capable of thriving in neoliberal markets ‘exiting’ the state with cryptocurrencies and offshore banking. Of course, the witless masses will not be pleased with this; so the sovereign individuals will move to states which look a lot like Dubai or Singapore, run as corporations, which provide basic security and justice but have no welfare states. The same process will see millions of poor labourers in the third world move to the first, crippling the existing European nations. Of course, Mogg’s sovereign individuals aren’t actually sovereign individuals, to be a sovereign individual you must hold power over others; while the protagonists of MoggWorld are happy to be governed by the contracts of the free market which require enforcement mechanisms.
Can we entirely dispense with the nation-state? I cannot see how you could build something like SpaceX in a Moldbuggian Sovereign corporation. If you can’t build a car park under a local council, how do you suspect a city-state in which all property owners are also shareholders in the central authority will treat infrastructure projects? The ‘patchwork’ model is a recipe for the remaining Westerners to crowd into a small network of pseudo-sovereign city states while China handles all advanced manufacturing.
This article began, weirdly enough, as a piece on fertility rates, so let us use fertility rates to illustrate the impact of this transformation on policymaking. The average person isn’t having children because they are too busy. They don’t want to. They have their phones, they have a moderately comfortable standard of living and they’d rather keep that. In a commodified attention economy the vast majority are incentivised towards nihilism which, as the Master said, will be received by the decadent as a command to self-extinction.
Now, we are all agreed, there are some people who have the capacity to have huge families. How many women wanted to sleep with Mick Jagger in 1967? Imagine if he had impregnated just the women he did sleep with. Do you think they’d be jealous? Were the girls who slept with him jealous? Of course not. If one is interested in ‘raising the tfr’ an angel might whisper in your ear that, given the overwhelming majority of the population do not, really, want to have children; you would reap far greater rewards from incentivising the super-performers (not just those good at having sex but those with desirable traits) to have 20 kids each?
This is one of the directions in which ‘the State’ may go in to survive the process of transformation. ‘The State’ will become nothing more or less than a means of selection. The intuitive response from the critic who has read this article will be something along the lines of ‘if this is happening anyway, why do we need the state to do it’; the point is that if the state is going to do anything at all, its interventions will be efficient only if they proceed upon Meritocratic lines. The division I could already see happening between states in the 21st century was between those states which would fail to extricate themselves from Fordism, among which are counted the vast majority and those that, even without putting forward a conscious alternative, escape it. Those states which have continued to pursue the 20th century holy grail of giant populations, giant standing armies and the greatest happiness of the greatest number are now facing exploding national debt, ageing populations and demographic replacement.
It is said that every creed must conjure an apocalypse to inspire the faithful, Meritocracy is a wholly rational project and as such, nothing within it is ‘necessary’ and it strictly neglects these trifles. Around the same time as I read Tyler Cowan’s book, most Internet ideologies justified themselves by appeal to long trajectories of history ending in doom. Cliodynamics, I.Q shredders, the Mouse Utopia Experiment all of which were used to marshal support for an ideology as a purely instrumental solution. I feel, at heart, the “reason things are going wrong” is simply because humans no longer feel the need for society. The old goals, of happiness, conventional family life and mild prosperity are not only objects of indifference but also of mild spite. The decline of eusociality brought about by this process, in which everything is individualised and being the best individual becomes the goal of all, is driving the collapse of all competing social systems.
In the moments where we doubt the morality of Meritocracy, these observations offer some succour. Meritocracy is, essentially, a way of navigating the end of human eusociality in a way that preserves, in some sense, the Beautiful and the Good. This article has been attenuated by time constraints but I hope some can still see why.
It would be interesting to read more from you about this nihilism. Thank you as always.