Reading Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, it strikes me that this must have been the Mad Men of 1920. That was the publication date, but the story is set 50 years earlier, in a world poised on the edge of cultural upheaval. The characters are blind to how dramatically the world is about to change, and to how much better their lives might be if only they could break out of the social strictures of their time. They manage to be both charmingly quaint and tragically foolish. We care about them, but we also want to take them by the shoulders and shake them into something more like ourselves.
As Edith Wharton viewed the 1870s, and as Mad Men views the 1960s, so the fiction of the mid-to-late 21st century will probably view us. Which of our quaint but tragically foolish ways do you think it will emphasize?
As a libertarian, you will probably disagree, but I think the fact that many people hold the notion of personal property as sacred — the point of trumping all other policy considerations — will seem very odd at some point in the future. In discussing the pros and cons of some tax policy, these people will simply say “But it’s *my money*!” as if that ends the discussion. Some libertarians even used this as an argument against U.S. governmental aid to tsunami victims:
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0501b.asp
What I think this ignores is the fact that “ownership” wouldn’t exist without government. There’s nothing bonding the molecules of your body with the molecules of your car or your chair; the concept of “ownership” was invented by humans because it was useful. If you get past the point where it stops being useful and starts being a hindrance, there’s no reason to follow it off a cliff.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon the notion of “property”, but rather, merely make property rights the default — you earn it, you buy it, you own it — but keep in mind that it’s just a social convention and can be abrogated when needed, as in the case of sending aid to tsunami victims.
People in Western Europe seem to have accepted this mentality — you own stuff, but it’s not an absolute right that trumps all others, and people don’t mind being taxed for the greater good — although some countries might carry it too far.
Where to begin? Maybe we will have moved on from thinking the aquisition of stuff is the best route to happiness. Perhaps people will look back on the fear of losing their job and a family member becoming ill as a quaint and foolish way. Remember those quaint old cars? Millions of us used to sit in our metal boxes for hours each day, so proud of our self-bought isolation prisons. How quaint.
Computers may have moved on so far that most people will be plugged into a “Matrix” style MMORPG most of the time. How quaint, they will think, living the dull old real-world.
I don’t think cars are going anywhere, but I do believe that people 50 years from now will think we were crazy to allow people to drive cars at 75 mph on busy highways. In the future you’d probably be charged with reckless endangerment if you hacked your car to allow manual control.
More whimsically, the notion of government monopoly on currency could disappear with the advent of decentralized, easy to use digital currencies. Also, perhaps the notion of indefinite life expectancy will exist in a much stronger minority.
Well, I hope future fiction writers will emphasize the fear we had of a looming healthcare disaster — hundreds of millions of old people with health problems causing a crippling demand for a healthcare industry that already consumes 1/7 of our GDP — and their audience will marvel at what our lives must have been like, not knowing of the medical revolutions just around the corner…and I hope you and I will be there to explain it to them, and to shake our heads at the unstated assumption in your question that guys our age would not be around to see the end of the twenty-first century.
My guess will be something to do with the current free externalities of polluting.
@Bennett_Haselton: Whatever the merit of your criticisms, this libertarian strong-property-rights view is a minority one, and far from characteristic of the time. Characteristic views are those views that are so widely accepted no one bothers to debate them.
So it does not sound like the view you criticize is something people would think about much when looking back — unless, of course, it ballooned into a mass movement, in which case they would regard it as “ahead of its time”, not quaint.
P.S.: Do you think the poor should be allowed to unilaterally void contracts they’ve made on the grounds of “societal need to help the poor”? Do you think this would benefit them? Because a lot of the benefits you cite of voiding property rights are similar to this “benefit”: locally, it looks like a good idea, but it fundamentally changes the incentive structure.
In reading this it occurs to me that you might enjoy the recent Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris” which has a question like this as one of its sub-themes.
Having a society’s retirement system based solely on individuals saving accounts (401k’s, IRA’s, etc) is superior to a retirement system that brings Annuities (Private Insurance Annuities, Pensions, etc.) into the mix.
In our current system, your golden years will be largely based on when you were born.
Just to look at the market and ignoring inflation, assume that a person makes $ 48,000/yr and saves 10% of his income per month in an S&P Index fund.
– A person entering the workforce in 1980 had $ 485,000 after 20 years (2000) and 496,000 after 30 years (2010).
– A person entering the workforce in 1990 had $ 163,000 after 20 years. If the S&P triples in 9 years, this person will never catch up, because the market will triple for the person entered the workforce in 1980.
This is the best that can be said for our current system. At the worse, people put their 401k’s in cd’s/money markets, or don’t even put money into a 401k. They will need to work well into their 60’s and 70’s making it harder for younger workers to enter the workforce.
As an aside, Warren Buffet isn’t one of the best investors ever, he is just the one of the best investors born at a very lucky time.
I don’t know how to predict what will change. But I suspect that some of the change will be in the wrong direction. That is we now currently hold a position that is a pretty reasonable world view, but that the future will regard as wrong headed.
I imagine a world in the past where relying on government provision was a taboo. Yet there seems to be a much larger population of people now who think that only the government can provide them some of the things they don’t have. It’s more culturally acceptable today to accept government handout than I imagine it was in the past. Of course, my imagination could be entirely wrong. That’s not the point I’m trying to make.
The point is that I also wonder what views we currently hold, that future generations will *wrongly* dismiss. I fear things like a higher value on collective behavior and (consequently) looking down on the “quaint” ideas of individual freedom. I don’t know how realistic this fear is.
They will need to work well into their 60’s and 70’s making it harder for younger workers to enter the workforce.
Will A: I think you’re assuming that there is a fixed number of jobs, such that if the old people don’t vacate them, the young people won’t be able to occupy them. But if that were true, then how would you explain the quadrupling of the US population since 1900?
The fact that people *can* now work into their 70’s is an indication of our increasing lifespan. The fact that most people still expect to retire in their 60’s, indicates that we have gotten rich enough to support more years out of the productive workforce.
I veiw both of these as good things.
The health care crisis seems like it will probably look pretty silly in the future. It was so terrible! Medicine kept getting better and the costs for that better medicine was more than the crappy old medicine!
I think we are very close to the liberal views on homosexuality being not just mainstream but close to universal. Intellectually, I can’t say I have any real objection to homosexuality, I definitely have no problem with my gay friends being gay. On the other hand, I’m weirded out by seeing two guys kiss or hold hands in a way that I think will seem old fashioned and funny to my children.
The idea of privacy.
The drug war, central banking, and on a lighter note why it took Americans so long to universally accept soccer.
Interesting question. I recently visited the site of mounds built by a culture that lived in the Mississippi river bed near St. Louis (Cahokia) from around 700 A.D. to 1,200 A.D. I thought what life must’ve been like for these people for 500 years. Generations of folks knew no different. And what changed so that the population diminished? They think folks just started moving away. But, it seems like they had a good enough run to pile up massive amounts of dirt, by hand, with baskets.
Bennett Haselton – The idea of property rights was an emergent phenomena, much like language, that led to the increase in the number of people who used it because it worked. I encourage you to read Matt Ridley’s book. He gives a plausible account of the emergence of property rights. Note that gov’t emerged to help ‘sanctify’ the right and also not that you’d like use gov’t to de-sanctify for your own personal preference.
Having massive collections of CDs/DVDs will be one thing. Books will hold out for far longer, though.
Some people think that paper money will be obsolete, but I think that will take a while. The same goes for bullet trains or some other form of rapid mass transit.
The LGBT community will be far more accepted and I think this will be seen as a formative period in their history (and I think John McCain sort of sealed his legacy with his support for keeping Dont Ask Dont Tell”).
A lot more people will work from home and I think that will greatly affect business structure/organization.
I’m not sure about fiction, but I think that 22nd century scholars will find aspects of the 20th century Frequentist versus Bayesian debate completely opaque. The future will talk about probability using a three way split individual/situational/transcendental. Future scholars will try to decide if our objective/subjective boundary corresponds to their individual/situational boundary or whether it corresponds to their situational/transcendental boundary.
They will discover that most 20th century writers had a conceptual blind spot around this issue and wrote “… subjective … objective … blah … blah …” without any definite conception of what they meant. Future scholars will be unable to explain this and resort to muttering about the Flynn effect and how people were stupid back then.
@ dullgeek:
For those at the bottom of the income distribution, ones life expectancy once he hits 65 really has been pretty constant:
People who turned 65 in 1977, died around 80.
People who turned 65 in 2007, died around 81.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/workingpapers/wp108.html
So making those in the lower 50% of the income distribution who make it to 65 work longer 10 years longer than they did in 1977 when their life expectancy has gone up by 1 year doesn’t seem like progress to me.
@ dullgeek:
I wasn’t saying that the number of jobs would be constant. Let’s assume that in 19,841,984 A.D. x% of a country called Oceania is between the ages of a1 and a2. Let’s also assume that this x% has enough resources so that they don’t need to work.
Now let’s assume that Oceania makes structural changes that force that x% into the labor market in the years after 19841984 A.D.
I’m not an economist, but it is counter intuitive to me that this x% coming/staying in the labor market would make it easier for those who reach working age to get a job after 19,841,984 A.D.
It seems more likely that it would be more difficult for the Oceania young adults, which means that they will not be able to save as much in their 401k’s at the beginning for their working careers which would affect how they will be able to retire.
our concept of linear time. i once read a story about how jules verne had been getting visitors from the future and that was the source of his inspiration for books like ‘20000 leagues’. im pretty sure that story was true. if i were in the future and i were going to go back to the past to ‘introduce’ some ideas..i would surely pick a person who was known to history as being open minded to future concepts.
No more sex. No more eating. No more farting, either. I’ll miss that.
@ Will A: I think you might be missing my point, which is that the economy grows jobs as the number of people available to work in them increases. The supply of jobs is dynamic, and part of that dynamism is a *response* to the supply of workers. Which is why the economy has been able to cope with a quadrupling of the population since 1900.
Not only have the number of jobs grown, but they’ve also changed. The jobs that current retirement age workers had when they entered the workforce are pretty different than the jobs that current entrants face. Additionally the jobs that the current retirees are giving up aren’t being filled by the new generation. They’re getting destroyed because the economy needs less of that type of skill set.
How many old people are holding onto (e.g.) website design or social media or java developer jobs? The jobs that the older generation is holding onto are not the same jobs that the younger generation is trying to get.
Yes there’s some overlap, for example doctors and lawyers. But even in those fields, the younger generation is specializing in things that the older generation never did. The number of jobs available to the younger generation is *not* constrained by the older generation holding onto those jobs.
Frankly, what I think you should be worried more about is not the younger generation. Rather I suspect your worries should be more towards how the older generation will keep working if it wishes to, with only the skills for outdated jobs. You should be worried about the relative difficulty that older people have to learn new skills needed to meet the demands of the current economy.
I should also mention that I’m not an economist either. I just play one in the comments section. :)
In the future novelists will look back on our war on today’s War on Drugs as a quaint, stupid idea, similar to witch hunts and of course Prohibition.
@ dullgeek:
The jobs that the older generation is holding onto are not the same
jobs that the younger generation is trying to get.
Would you be so kind as to include some sort of link to data that backs this up?
It might be the case that 100% of America’s youth between the age 18-25 are all proficient at web design, java development, genome research, international patent law, etc.
It might also be the case that a relatively small amount of America’s youth is able to take these jobs.
If your point is that highly intelligent Americans who are technically trained in fields with high incomes will be able to retire comfortably, then no disagreement from me.