You should listen to your colleague Robin Hanson: culture was once the product of selection, as lots of small units competed with each other and many went extinct. Nowadays we are seeing cultural "drift" away from fitness, most blatantly in the below-replacement fertility rates which have become the norm in most advanced economies (the big exception being Israel, with its large ultra-Orthodox population who shift the norms upward). As a pro-natalist yourself you should agree something has gone wrong there. J. Storrs Hall's "Where Is My Flying Car?" is another example, showing how culture went the wrong way in the 70s against abundance and using more energy to accomplish more things, instead making it infeasible to build nearly anything and putting near infinite value on preserving certain non-human species. Perhaps we should respond to these problems with a "Let capitalism rip" option of for-profit orphanages raising children to be productive, but that's not the same as accepting the "creative destruction" of the status quo driving culture into the ditch.
Even in the coming—almost here—worldwide monoculture, there is still a “marketplace of ideas”: not as reliable as natural selection, but still somewhat effective. And in this marketplace pro-natalism and anti-regulation may yet win out.
I haven't read the book, but I dare say "western culture" is kind of important for the life and prosperity we are accustomed to here in the US. I think it's valid to be concerned about, e.g., becoming overwhelmed with immigrants who don't share the most basic commonalities with us, and that if widely adopted would lead to the loss of everything we care about. Rule of law, human rights, the existence of objective truth, the validity of private property, equality under the law, etc., ... basic enlightenment stuff. On top of that, just saying "meh" to the breakdown of the nuclear family and even religious institutions likely comes with serious downsides.
I think you are overestimating the amount of Americans that actually have Enlightenment values or even care outside virtue signalling them. I just don't think I'd shed a tear if America became more modern northern European or Emiratee. In fact I say one of the main problems in the world is the adoption of modern American values globally.
I think the opposite. I think Americans *think* they are very divided, and in some ways we are, but Americans and western Europeans take many values for granted as common ground which are not shared by people outside the west.
I love the angle and I will have to pick up the book (I quite enjoyed the case against education), but I quibble with one line - it is not "western culture" that is dominant, but rather Modern culture. As a explain in a recent piece, Modern culture was born of western economic and cultural development, but is not necessarily of it, and implying that it is does a disservice to basic human needs and freedoms:
My main issue with this take is that you leave economy to do philosophy. That's right Bryan, you have subjugated culture to something that needs to be figured out by market forces and be subject to them.
Is free market a product of our culture? There's an important question! In that case we're subjecting our culture to its own values and we are in a recursive type of situation! Should our culture contain self contradictory elements, it is bound to lose in this case.
What if culture stands above the free market as a principle that holds moral worth and therefore cannot be traded and put in competition without reversing some kind of moral order of things? Does that enter anywhere in Dr. Caplan's worldview or should the primacy of economics be taken as an absolute a priori before discussion is engaged in?
Cultures constantly borrow, fuse and synthesize through history and places. Culture and the ethic systems that are one component reiterate combinations of entertainment and discipline that procreate and produce effectively. Country cultures interact with and rely on state and capital (aka market) systems. Sounds like these books criticize much silliness that should be. However conflating west and capital is last century categories already left behind. Measured in terms of resultant output the majority of capital is non western. Calling something they choose as ‘western’ is misnaming the borrowing and fusing process that always happens. It isn’t foreign it is native cultural production.
And if the immigrant culture considers your women to be whores and has no moral scruples about raping them? Then what, Dr Caplan?
our whores are armed
How cultivated.
You should listen to your colleague Robin Hanson: culture was once the product of selection, as lots of small units competed with each other and many went extinct. Nowadays we are seeing cultural "drift" away from fitness, most blatantly in the below-replacement fertility rates which have become the norm in most advanced economies (the big exception being Israel, with its large ultra-Orthodox population who shift the norms upward). As a pro-natalist yourself you should agree something has gone wrong there. J. Storrs Hall's "Where Is My Flying Car?" is another example, showing how culture went the wrong way in the 70s against abundance and using more energy to accomplish more things, instead making it infeasible to build nearly anything and putting near infinite value on preserving certain non-human species. Perhaps we should respond to these problems with a "Let capitalism rip" option of for-profit orphanages raising children to be productive, but that's not the same as accepting the "creative destruction" of the status quo driving culture into the ditch.
Even in the coming—almost here—worldwide monoculture, there is still a “marketplace of ideas”: not as reliable as natural selection, but still somewhat effective. And in this marketplace pro-natalism and anti-regulation may yet win out.
What reason do you have to think it's effective at all?
Reason sometimes wins out over prejudice.
I haven't read the book, but I dare say "western culture" is kind of important for the life and prosperity we are accustomed to here in the US. I think it's valid to be concerned about, e.g., becoming overwhelmed with immigrants who don't share the most basic commonalities with us, and that if widely adopted would lead to the loss of everything we care about. Rule of law, human rights, the existence of objective truth, the validity of private property, equality under the law, etc., ... basic enlightenment stuff. On top of that, just saying "meh" to the breakdown of the nuclear family and even religious institutions likely comes with serious downsides.
I think you are overestimating the amount of Americans that actually have Enlightenment values or even care outside virtue signalling them. I just don't think I'd shed a tear if America became more modern northern European or Emiratee. In fact I say one of the main problems in the world is the adoption of modern American values globally.
I think the opposite. I think Americans *think* they are very divided, and in some ways we are, but Americans and western Europeans take many values for granted as common ground which are not shared by people outside the west.
"and that if widely adopted would lead to the loss"
If WHAT were widely adopted?
Cultural norms at odds with western enlightenment values.
Oh. Thanks.
I love the angle and I will have to pick up the book (I quite enjoyed the case against education), but I quibble with one line - it is not "western culture" that is dominant, but rather Modern culture. As a explain in a recent piece, Modern culture was born of western economic and cultural development, but is not necessarily of it, and implying that it is does a disservice to basic human needs and freedoms:
https://whitherthewest.substack.com/p/westernization-or-modernization
My main issue with this take is that you leave economy to do philosophy. That's right Bryan, you have subjugated culture to something that needs to be figured out by market forces and be subject to them.
Is free market a product of our culture? There's an important question! In that case we're subjecting our culture to its own values and we are in a recursive type of situation! Should our culture contain self contradictory elements, it is bound to lose in this case.
What if culture stands above the free market as a principle that holds moral worth and therefore cannot be traded and put in competition without reversing some kind of moral order of things? Does that enter anywhere in Dr. Caplan's worldview or should the primacy of economics be taken as an absolute a priori before discussion is engaged in?
Give an economic justification why you won’t narrate an audiobook.
"are much cosmopolitan than "
I hope the essays don't leave out random words, like "more".
Cultures constantly borrow, fuse and synthesize through history and places. Culture and the ethic systems that are one component reiterate combinations of entertainment and discipline that procreate and produce effectively. Country cultures interact with and rely on state and capital (aka market) systems. Sounds like these books criticize much silliness that should be. However conflating west and capital is last century categories already left behind. Measured in terms of resultant output the majority of capital is non western. Calling something they choose as ‘western’ is misnaming the borrowing and fusing process that always happens. It isn’t foreign it is native cultural production.