“Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.”
What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?
What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
Investopedia seems to agree with you: "Neoclassical economics theories underlie modern-day economics, along with the tenets of Keynesian economics. Although the neoclassical approach is the most widely taught theory of economics, it has its detractors."
This surprises me, as I thought Keynesian economics was the main view nowadays ("The central belief of Keynesian economics is that government intervention can stabilize the economy" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp#...).
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5wdup7/are_ec..., however: "The vast majority of all economists today work in the New neoclassical synthesis. This paradigm is essentially a combination of the best ideas from the New Keynesian and neoclassical trains of thought. The idea of separate schools isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be - these days ideas that work get added to the synthesis regardless of where they come from."
Be very wary of anything you read on /r/AskEconomics; contributors are regularly banned for asking challenging questions that point out deficiencies with the orthodoxy. It's essentially an echo chamber with the top level replies carefully vetted. What it highlights through that is the deep (and justified) insecurity that permeates the economic orthodoxy.
The Neoclassical school is laughably simplistic in its model of the world. To reduce an entire economy, with all its diversity and irrationality, to a handful of variables connected by simple relationships is frankly absurd [1], and really a reflection of economics' physics envy. They make strong claims about how the models are built robustly from micro-foundations whilst ignoring fundamentals such as irrational agents and missing variables, and blithely ignoring important problems such as the SMD result [2] which basically means only a single representative agent and a single representative commodity can be considered (I've seen models that claim much more than this, but practically the higher dimensions are immediately integrated out). That St. Louis fed model is considered advanced because they have 2 representative agents!
Moreover, the models don't maintain important invariants, such as stock-flow consistency, that absolutely must be true as a matter of accounting.
One might give some allowances for all these theoretical problems if the models validated and made reliable predictions, but when it comes to anything of importance, they're little better than a first order Markov model. It's frankly absurd, and a testament to the power of rhetoric and vested interests, that we've built so much of our political economics on such shaky foundations.
There's basically no alternative being seriously entertained in mainstream politics, even on the left, to what amounts to an academic justification for inequality, and that is why we are in the mess we are in, Trump and all.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2024/2024-01...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%...
Italian Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
Japanese Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle
Spanish Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle
Miracle on the Rhine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
was not meant ironically.
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
We still have https://search.marginalia.nu/ at least.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
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Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles). Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
And regressions to the mean. Wealth inequality and fascism come to mind.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.