🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #62
Please check out some great highlights from my essays and interviews!
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Melior Mundus
Some self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. Some folks are already saying nice things about it:
Anyway, I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— How zero-sum thinking undermines American progress
— 6 Down Wing myths about the American economy and the world
Best of 5QQ
Essay Highlights
↕ How zero-sum thinking undermines American progress
A prevalence of zero-sum thinking — the reflexive view that gains for some necessarily mean losses for others — is a key element of what I call Down Wing thinking, which is typically marked by a pessimistic and nostalgic worldview that resists change and fears the future. In a new NBER working paper, “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides” economists Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva build upon the work of anthropologist George Foster, who proposed that many smaller, pre-industrial or peasant societies had a "zero-sum" worldview. The researchers surveyed 20,000 Americans in order to gauge their level of zero-sum thinking and how it might affect their political views. From the paper: “Individuals who view the world in more zero-sum terms tend to believe there is an important role for policies that redistribute income from the rich to the poor and that help disadvantaged groups (e.g., affirmative action for women and Black Americans). They also support more restrictive immigration policies.” Zero-sum thinking is an economy killer given how vitally important economic freedom and openness — openness to immigration, to free trade, to the disruption that always accompanies technological progress — is to economic growth.
🌎 6 Down Wing myths about the American economy and the world
On Monday, economist Lawrence Summers delivered a presentation, “What should the 2023 Washington Consensus be?,” at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Summers started out by framing the Washington Consensus as the principles that “undergird or have undergirded American international economic policy since the end of the Second World War.” He then noted that his old boss President Bill Clinton had wondered whether post-Cold War America would repeat the mistakes that were made after World War I or “recreate the successes” in the period since World War II. Then, Summers outlined six misconceptions he sees as pervading the current economic debate. Those misconceptions ranged from the idea that economic policy should aim to maximize the creation of American jobs, that the US economy has not fared well in recent decades compared to other nations, and that a domestic manufacturing renaissance should be a central economic issue going forward. The key takeaway from Summers’ presentation: Economic openness and global economic competition are at the core of the political economy that I believe will generate the sort of future that we’ll want to live in.
👩🏫 America needs better, smarter teachers. GenAI can help.
How do we increase teacher quality in the US? Increasing teacher pay is one path to better quality. But perhaps GenAI provides another given its tantalizing promise of boosting the productivity of lower-skill employees. Early days, of course, and educators across the country and world are trying to figure out the best way to insert this technology into education systems. Still, here are some early ideas and findings from my AEI colleague John Bailey: “Tutoring assistants: The capability of these systems to understand and generate human-like text allows for providing individualized tutoring to students. … Teaching assistants: Teachers spend hours on tedious administrative tasks, from lesson planning to searching for instructional resources, often at the cost of less time for teaching. As capable reasoning engines, AI can assist teachers by automating many of these tasks. … Student assistants: AI-based feedback systems have the capacity to offer constructive critiques on student writing, including feedback aligned to different assessments, which helps students elevate the quality of their work and fine-tune their writing skills.”
Best of 5QQ
Brink Lindsey is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center and author of The Permanent Problem on Substack.
You highlight the work of a few optimistic, pro-progress socialists. Is abundance thinking making a real comeback on the left?
The techno-optimistic socialists I discussed in my essay are pretty unrepresentative of the contemporary far left, which these days is overwhelmingly focused on social justice radicalism and generally indifferent or even hostile to technological progress. Still, it’s noteworthy that this current of radical opinion exists at all.
In the broader center-left, meanwhile, I do believe that abundance thinking is making a genuine comeback. The change of heart is being driven by events: in particular, climate change and runaway housing prices in metro areas around the country. In both cases, responding effectively to the problem will require massive building — of clean energy infrastructure and new housing, respectively. And although many progressives remain stuck in NIMBY mode, a growing number now recognize that artificial constraints on supply are a big issue and are calling for bold reforms. Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic are probably the most prominent advocates of this point of view, and they’ve now teamed up to write a book together titled, appropriately, “Abundance: What Progress Takes.”