If a Tree Falls on You in a Forest...
Risk needs perspective.
Partial list of ways people can't see the forest for the trees regarding important current developments.
"There goes the neighborhood" meets "the kids these days".
Worrying about car wrecks involving driverless cars
Fretting that new housing developments will change the composition of the neighborhood and more so worrying that developers will profit from it
Dreading that some immigrants (legal immigrants even) will use government services
Despairing that technology will displace some jobs and completely eliminate others
Panicking that cryptocurrency solutions might change everything from safe asset holdings to financial and consumer transactions, from how we transmit cash-like balances to how we make change
Agonizing over changes to the cultural landscape as new styles replace old
Catastrophizing that a change will be a change for the worse—environmentally in particular but not exclusively so.
Notice how some of these are generalized and obviously timeless. Although the others have very specific references to current-world developments, they too tell a story as old as time itself.
All of this serves to hold us back from a better world if not return us to a worse one. It stands in stark contrast to the great work being done by those brave enough and smart enough to know the way. I’m thinking specifically of those who participated in the Roots of Progress Institute’s October conference.
As Lynne Kiesling recently observed,
Overly prescriptive rules are barriers to building, innovation, and experimentation using the ideas we have, which also stifles our generation of new ideas. We can't use ideas because we have moved so far away from McCloskey's equality of permission. Using ideas and creating new ones [requires] reducing regulatory hurdles and creating an environment where both old and new ideas can be built and scaled into meaningful, substantive innovations.
Scott Alexander also shared insightful commentary:
Progress (as measured by things like total factor productivity) was fast for much of the early 20th century, then slowed around 1970. Nobody knows why; theories include shifting social attitudes, over-regulation, or simply exhausting the potential in a few big inventions like electricity and mass production. This slowing was a great historical tragedy: if progress had continued at pre-1970 rates, we would be twice as rich today. We call the ensuing period the Great Stagnation. There was plenty of innovation in computers (“the world of bits”), but real physical goods (“the world of atoms”) stayed disappointingly similar. Our great-grandparents grew up in a world of horse-drawn carriages and lived to see the moon landing. We grew up in a world of cars and jumbo jets, and live in it still.
…
It feels like the United States, after a fifty-year binge on over-regulation, has woken up, wiped the vomit off its chin, noticed it’s lost half its net worth, and started to consider doing something else. I am equally confused why it took so long and why it’s happening now.
