Human Progress

Marian Tupy: Hello and welcome to Human Progress Podcast. Today, I’ll be speaking with Brink Lindsey. Brink is an American political writer and Senior Vice President at the Niskanen Center. Previously, he was, of course, Cato’s Vice President for Research for many years and a dear colleague. His books include, ‘Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism,’ ‘The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture,’ ‘Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter-and More Unequal,’ and ‘The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Became Richer, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality.’ Today, we’ll be discussing his latest book, ‘The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transformation From Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.’ Brink, welcome.

Brink Lindsey: Great to be here. Great to see you again. Great to be back at Cato, so delighted to be here.

Marian Tupy: Fantastic. So I want to first start congratulating you on your excellent book once again, ‘The Permanent Problem.’ It is clear, it is concise, it is very thoughtful and beautifully written. As a published author, I think the biggest change since we last saw each other is that I have a couple of books under my belt. I’m very envious of your style, if I may say so, and I really recommend the book to our listeners.

Brink Lindsey: Thank you very much. That’s kind.

Marian Tupy: So let’s start with the most obvious question. What is the permanent problem?

Brink Lindsey: Okay. So I stole that line from the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote a fascinating essay called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. That essay came out in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression. But he was brave enough then to argue that this global catastrophe was just an aberration, just a bump in the road in a much longer process of modern economic growth, a process that he believed would continue until, by the time his audience’s grandchildren were grown, by which he meant about a century from then, which means just a few years from now. He said that by that point economic growth would have proceeded to the point that what he called the economic problem would be more or less solved. And by the economic problem, he simply meant getting enough food, shelter, and clothing for people to keep widespread, serious material deprivation at bay. And so, with that economic problem more or less solved, he foresaw that humanity’s permanent problem would then loom into view. And that is, in his words, how to live wisely and agreeably and well with the blessings that modern economic growth have bestowed upon us.

Brink Lindsey: He got some things really wrong staring into his crystal ball. He imagined that by now we’d only be working 15 hours a week. That hasn’t panned out. Although maybe if you subtract everybody’s internet distraction time from the workday, maybe it boils down to closer to 15 hours a week than people might like to admit. But anyway, he got that wrong. But he got the big picture profoundly right, which is that this abundant future was coming. And also that moving from tackling the economic problem to facing up to the permanent problem would be traumatic for societies that were undergoing that transition. That they would have to unlearn the habits of untold generations. And he imagined that this transition would be, in his words, something like a, quote, “general nervous breakdown throughout society.” That phrase struck me as a pretty good description for the predicament that the United States and other advanced democracies have found themselves in the 21st century. We’re richer, healthier, better educated, more humanely governed than any people have ever been before. But what people are focused on these days is a lot of pessimism about how things are going and how things might go in the future.

Brink Lindsey: Economic growth has slowed to a crawl in most of the advanced economies. The US is a star performer, and even our growth rate is way down from 20th century average. Class divisions have deepened to the point of sparking a global populist uprising against governing elites and established institutions. Relationships are fraying, mental health problems on the rise, faith in democracy is wavering, and again, widespread pessimism is really one of the few things you can get people across the political spectrum to agree on. So I think the thesis of the book is that this predicament amounts to the fact that we are in this, in Keynes’s no man’s land between mass plenty and mass flourishing. That having achieved mass plenty, we’ve moved the goalposts as far as what makes for a successful life. It’s no longer just having food, shelter, and clothing. It’s having meaning and purpose and belonging and status. And I argue that we are providing those conditions for flourishing for a larger fraction of the population than ever before, 20, 30% of the people in the highly educated professional and managerial elite. But 70 or 80% of the people are still on the outside looking in, and our current way of life is not providing the conditions for flourishing that one would imagine would go with our level of technological and organizational prowess. So that’s the argument of the book.

Marian Tupy: Very good. So I liked what you said there about the old world dying, but the new world not being born yet. I think was it the Marxist of some kind who said that?

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. Gramsci is.

Marian Tupy: It was Gramsci. Okay. It was Gramsci. Because it seems to me that in America today we have both. On the one hand, people saying, things are so good for so many people that we are moving to the top of the Maslow hierarchy where all of our material problems are being tackled. And on the other hand, we have a hysteria of people who are saying things have never been more unaffordable. Basically, no, we have not moved from those lower ranks of the Maslow pyramid.

Brink Lindsey: Right.

Marian Tupy: So I can see how both would be true at the same time, or maybe both are false at the same time.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. So I think we are absolutely materially richer than any society has been before. There are a lot of problems in the intangible aspects of our lives that are hard to quantify. And so people who are discontent with the status quo grope for finding something quantifiable to say has gone wrong, and they look to make an argument about economic decline or material decline that just really isn’t consistent with the facts. So it is true that we are rich enough that we can basically take the fulfillment of our basic material needs for granted. There’s just nobody’s starving on the street. Extreme material, absolute poverty is just a tiny problem in the United States. But nonetheless, we enjoy these blessings with a kind of an asterisk, that is, that we get them only by spending the bulk of our waking hours for the bulk of our adult lives working 40-hour weeks to pay for this stuff.

Brink Lindsey: And for the blessed 20 or 30% at the top, they’ve got, that’s an arena for flourishing. You’ve got intellectually challenging jobs that offer a lot of autonomy and scope for creativity, that connect you with bright, ambitious people, that give you a nice quantum of social status for having this competitive job. So for them, the work arena is a better condition for flourishing than any workplace has provided before. But the rest of folks are in fairly low-autonomy jobs with a lot of scut work and maybe don’t even have control of their own schedules. And they’re always some stroke of bad luck away from losing their job, losing their car, getting into a serious hole. So they’re shadowed by both the precarity of their hold on mass plenty and also by the need to spend a lot of their lives in something like drudgery to pay the bills.

Marian Tupy: So in the book, you call capitalism the greatest engine of human progress, specifically noting that many of the things that our ancestors would have been concerned about, constant hunger, the infants…

Brink Lindsey: Burying half their children. Yes.

Marian Tupy: Yeah. Precisely. Things like that, that has been taken care of. But you raise a lot of questions about human flourishing. As you say, living wisely, agreeably, and well. Life satisfaction in America, in spite of the fact that life has improved and our material standards of living have improved over time, life satisfaction in America, according to Gallup, has remained pretty much the same. Between 1979 and 2025, roughly 80% of Americans say that they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. But only 20% of Americans believe that America is going in the right direction.

Brink Lindsey: Right.

Marian Tupy: So I guess let’s start by… What I want to get out of this conversation is to really nail down just how much of a challenge the situation is, how bad it really is. When 80% of Americans say that they are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, what is going on? Is it that bad is always stronger than good? In other words, there’s a certain limitation of imagination about how much better my life could be on my current income. Could I live in a little bit of a better house? Yes, sure. Could I have a swimming pool? Yes. Private swimming pool, that sort of thing. Could I travel business class? Yes. Whereas I could imagine millions of things in which my life could be much worse. Stepping outside of the Cato Institute, get hit by a car, learning that my mother has died, that my children have… That sort of thing. So is that part of the problem?

Brink Lindsey: So I don’t put much stock in or lean on these sort of self-assessments of life satisfaction. I think psychologically healthy people make the best of things. And so whatever the circumstances, you’ll find the happiness surveys of life satisfaction surveys find a lot of cultural variations. Latin Americans seem to report higher life satisfaction given their level of GDP than Scandinavian countries or Japan. So I don’t know that we’re getting a lot of useful data out of those surveys. So what I really more look at is the kind of conditions for a well-lived life. And there, first, work opportunities. The opportunities for challenging, fulfilling, interesting work are very good for a considerable fraction of people, but they’re not so good for the majority. And that divergence along educational lines has also translated into a big status difference between the well-off or the well-educated and everybody else. And it’s now translated into diverging paths of achieving those conditions that are the foundation for a well-lived life. So you have diverging odds of being in the workforce. So there’s been a very small drop-off in male prime-age labor force participation for college-educated men from the mid ’60s to the present. There’s been a big drop-off in labor force participation for non-college-educated men. They’re less connected to the workforce. There’s been a big divergence in the odds of getting married. So there’s a substantial hit that you take in the odds of getting married if you don’t have a college degree.

Brink Lindsey: There’s a huge divergence in the odds of growing up in a two-parent home, depending on whether your parents are college-educated or not. And then finally, just in recent years, we’ve actually seen a divergence in life expectancy. So rather than the poor catching up with the rich over time, they’re now pulling apart. So here, these are rich-country problems. So in context, they’re a lot better problems to have than poor-country problems, but they’re still problems nonetheless. And I would say, are we doing better than ever before? Sure. I don’t think that exhausts the inquiry. In a society organized around progress, a purely backward-looking standard of evaluation just isn’t dispositive. I think the work that the humanprogress.org does in raising awareness of the extent of our material progress, which is woefully underappreciated, is very, very important work. But there’s other things going on as well. And in some of those intangibles, there’s warning signs that things are going in the wrong direction. And then most broadly, I think there’s just the question of has progress in the art of living kept pace with progress in our technological wizardry and our organizational capabilities? And there, I think the answer is pretty clearly, no. If you told people 100 years ago what kind of technological and organizational marvels we would be capable of, they would just assume we were living in a utopia where all these intangible problems would have been easier to solve than the material problems. But it turns out the material problems were easier to solve.

Marian Tupy: Right. So what is our standard here? You don’t deny that one of the standards for judging modern society is looking into the past.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah.

Marian Tupy: There we are in agreement that things are just much better along many different dimensions. In fact, you have three main ways to human flourishing: relationships, accomplishments, experiences. Right? And if I were a medieval peasant, for example, then I’m stuck in relationships in my native village that I may not like. Maybe I’m working the wheat fields my entire life. That’s hardly…

Brink Lindsey: That’s right.

Marian Tupy: Very meaningful or exciting. I never traveled beyond the nearest town, so my horizons are restricted like that. But that’s just one standard. The other standard would be to say, “This is our life here, and here is an ideal or even a better kind of society that I can envisage,” and maybe that should be one of those standards. Maybe that’s something to appeal to.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. So I…

Marian Tupy: So you have in your mind a sense of what an agreeably… What an agreeable life should be, and you compare it.

Brink Lindsey: At least in broad outlines.

Marian Tupy: In broad outlines.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. I think some level of insatiable discontent is a motor of progress. If you’re just completely and totally happy with everything, then you’re not gonna get off your rear end and go change the world. So it is appropriate that we who are better off than any people who have lived before can imagine living much better than we do today. Yes, in the past, in the agrarian age, to quote Hobbes, “Life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but not solitary.” So people were miserable, they were poor, they had narrow, poverty-restricted lives, but they weren’t atomized or alienated. But their community was unchosen. Now, I think it’s a real liberation that you’re not stuck with your birthplace, that you can choose your own life, and that’s a great opportunity. Then the question comes along with, are we gonna develop the kind of cultural and institutional supports in these new conditions to encourage us to choose the kind of community that will help us to have satisfying lives? Because it’s just beyond serious dispute that for most people, the most important determinant of the quality of their life is the quality of their personal relationships.

Brink Lindsey: And that’s an area where once upon a time, when the world was poor, other people, your face-to-face relationships with other people, filled vital practical functions. Your spouse was a partner in economic co-production. Your kids were an economic asset that helped out on the farm and took care of you when you were old. Your neighbors were an insurance policy against hard times, and also the only source of entertainment, other than listening to the crickets chirping, was hanging out with your friends and talking. So over time, as we’ve gotten richer, a lot of those functions we’ve outsourced either to the marketplace or to the welfare state. And so other people, those face-to-face relationships, have kind of become just one consumption option in a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. And it is part of the transition to learning how to live wisely and agreeably and well amidst riches that we would have the kind of cultural supports and institutional supports to push us to focus our time on what really matters, which is the people who are close to us. As it happens, we don’t have those, and so we’re seeing a lot of fraying of human connection.

Brink Lindsey: And this is cashing out most fatefully in the declining rate of people getting married and having babies, so that now, not only in rich countries but around the world, more than half of people now live in countries where the fertility rate is below replacement. So this has been going on the longest in the rich countries and newly rich countries. So that puts the whole demographic sustainability of liberal, democratic, capitalist, cosmopolitan, affluent civilization in doubt. The human species isn’t gonna go extinct. There’s still populations that are churning out babies. They tend to be groups like the ultra-Orthodox Jewish people or the Amish. Both of those groups, the average woman has six or seven children over the course of her life. So at some point, if population declines to the point that those high fertility groups are a big enough chunk of the population, then the population will start rising again. But it will be a very different culture than the one we have today. I like our culture. I want it to keep going. And so I consider this fertility collapse to be an existential challenge for our way of life.

Marian Tupy: So Amish won’t be very hot on technological change and things like that. I want to come back to relationships and TFR a little bit later in the podcast.

Brink Lindsey: Sure.

Marian Tupy: But when I was thinking about living wisely, agreeably, and well, and then the number of criticisms, or rather you pointed out a number of problems in modern society, I wanna ask you about the danger of presentism. In other words, that we see a problem that is currently on the front pages of newspapers, and then we extrapolate from it a certain crisis that may destroy our society in the long run. So separating that which is fundamental to what endangers modernity from that which is just a passing trend. That’s what I wanna talk to you about, the possibility of adaptation and also technological change. So let me give you a few examples. You write in the book, “We are getting fatter, dumber, and our mental health is deteriorating.” It certainly feels like it, right? We have obesity, we have smartphone addiction, suicides, anxiety, lack of sex, and so forth. So obesity is already declining in the United States…

Brink Lindsey: Starting to, yes.

Marian Tupy: Because of Ozempic. Thank God for that. Increasingly large numbers of young people are switching off social media. Apparently, Gen Z’ers, the newest ones, are the best at that. Also, when it comes to new technologies, often there is a bit of a lag. I mean, it took us 60 or 70 years to figure out that you shouldn’t be drinking and driving at the same time, so there is that. Suicide rates are falling in rich countries outside of the United States. This may be a particular American problem, and I wonder how much of the anxiety crisis is simply a matter of measuring. So something like 90% of the increase in autism can now be ascribed to simply changing characteristics. So I’m not saying that the criticisms that you raise are incorrect. Certainly, a lot of people are talking about them. Question is, are we underestimating human adaptability and technological change which may resolve them before they reach some sort of a critical phase?

Brink Lindsey: Right. So I think that’s a very good point. We learn over time that some things that we thought were great turned out to not be good for us, and we figure out how to put them behind us. So it used to be 40% of American adults smoked. That’s not the case anymore. It used to be we covered our walls with lead paint. We discovered that was making us stupider, and so we stopped doing that. So these, we’ve got a, now looks like a deus ex machina for obesity. We’ve got a medicine for it. But the fact that this obesity wave happened is sort of symptomatic of the challenges of being rich. That when we were poor, we developed this kind of scarcity-based morality of self-discipline and self-control and resisting temptation, because if you didn’t stay on the straight and narrow, disaster was going to happen. As those material constraints lessened, there was an inevitable and appropriate and benevolent loosening up. People could indulge their desires more. They could, to a greater extent than in the past, follow an “if it feels good, do it” kind of path.

Brink Lindsey: But it turns out that over time, those qualities of self-discipline and self-mastery are still extremely necessary today. Today, not to keep you on the straight and narrow and away from falling into horrible poverty, but to keep you focused on the things that really matter, rather than trivial, distracting desires that ultimately don’t lead to your long-term happiness. So capitalism gives us what we want. We don’t yet have the kind of cultural supports to make sure that it gives us what we want to want. So we’ve got better access to healthy, delicious food than ever before, but too many of us gorge out on junk food to the point where 40% of us are obese. Starting to tail off now. Yay. We now, thanks to the internet and AI, have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. That has, alas, not led to a kind of new renaissance and discovering all these hidden Einsteins who were out there that didn’t have access to, weren’t plugged into the world’s knowledge base. Instead, we see raw IQ scores falling as people stop reading and just sort of succumb to weapons of mass distraction.

Brink Lindsey: So these, I think, are kind of predictable, not surprising rich country problems of learning how to deal with the temptation of plenty. I am hopeful that over time we will adjust to these things. But part of the adjustment process is people crying foul, saying things are going wrong, people writing books saying capitalism has gone off course so that it can then make a course correction. So yes, I don’t think we’re doomed. I don’t think this shows that modern economic growth was a sham. It just means that every success breeds new kinds of problems, and then you keep tackling them. So these are the problems we’re faced with right now. They’re serious. They’re causing a lot of grief for a lot of people, but I think there’s plenty of grounds for hope that we can get on top of them.

Marian Tupy: Yeah. Solution of every problem leads to another problem, very often smaller problems.

Brink Lindsey: Yes.

Marian Tupy: Like we used to die in famines by tens of millions. Then we got enough food, we became obese. Now we have Ozempic, which may be maybe decreasing some of our muscle mass, and then we’ll solve that with an improved drug, and et cetera, et cetera. So…

Brink Lindsey: And now we have to wait a whole two years to binge the next season of our favorite program.

Marian Tupy: White Lotus. I want to return to us getting dumber. So IQ scores are apparently falling now, I don’t think…

Brink Lindsey: After a century of increases.

Marian Tupy: Right. And I don’t know if anybody has presented like a definite argument why that is. So are we experiencing some sort of dysgenic effect? Smart people just marrying other smart people, less smart people having more children than highly educated smart people, or maybe better healthcare, that if you are really stupid and bungee jump and hit your head against the rock, the healthcare system is gonna save you rather than just going to die of natural, of cause.

Brink Lindsey: I think all these trends are happening too fast for either eugenic or dysgenic explanations to carry much weight. So we had 100 years of raw IQ scores rising during the 20th century, and now it looks like they’re starting to fall. That’s just too fast for genetic explanations to play a role. I think it’s all cultural that IQ tests measure your capacity for intellectual abstraction, and we live in this highly abstract modern world where that kind of book learning is necessary at every turn. And so as more and more of us got immersed in that environment over the course of the 20th century, we had those habits of mind that oriented our intelligence towards the kind of thinking that shows up in high IQ scores. Since the advent of television, deep literacy, really the ability to read complex texts and be immersed in the world of words that someone else has created for hours at a time, that all started going into decline with the advent of television back in the ’50s and ’60s. At the same time, though, we had this huge wave of increase in college education. So that was increasing people’s exposure to complex texts and to kind of the inducting them into deep literacy.

Brink Lindsey: So I think those were kind of fighting back and forth for a while, but it’s pretty clear right now that the percentage of people who are capable of, what I call deep literacy, and I borrowed that from a friend and colleague named Adam Garfinkle. But that kind of real facility with the written word, it’s in decline. We’re seeing it even now. So first, it’s a long-term story with TV distracting us. Once upon a time, books, which turned out to be the best exercise for your mind that we know how to devise, were also the most entertaining option that was out there in the culture. So that was a glorious time where there were huge, strong incentives for people to exercise their minds. With the advent of more accessible, easier, less demanding, kind of brain-dead entertainment, people have spent a lot more time doing that. They spend hours every day watching TV or looking at screens. Really, the majority of your waking life now for people in America is spent looking at a screen, and most of it’s not very intellectually edifying. So particularly as we shifted out of just the TV age into the TikTok and social media age, that’s showing up in that kids even at elite universities can’t tackle the reading assignments that were just totally run of the mill a generation ago.

Brink Lindsey: Again, I think we’ve just allowed the easy pleasures that are within our reach to distract us from the hard work we need to do to put ourselves in a position to have a full and satisfying life. So once growth has kind of filled in the material deficits that prevent you from having a good life, and there’s still material, our life expectancy is still way too short. So there’s a lot of room for improving material deficits as far as expanding longevity, fighting back against aging. But in a lot of areas, the material deficits are filled in. And when that’s the case, continued rises in material standard of living are really kind of adding bells and whistles that adorn a well-lived life rather than the actual vehicle to which they’re attached. The vehicle you have to build yourself, so you can’t outsource a well-lived, satisfying, challenging, fulfilling life. It’s effortful. You’ve gotta develop the self-discipline to focus your life on the things that matter most, on having a healthy body, on having a sound mind, on having fulfilling, dense relationships. And so we’re not doing a very good job on any of those fronts these days, but this is not the final chapter in mankind’s story. And I’m hopeful that we can cultivate the discipline needed to thrive amidst plenty.

Marian Tupy: Now, in the book… By the way, I always try to think about what technological solution could there be to problems that arise? How could we solve them? When it comes to falling IQs, I can see 10 or 20 years from now when filtering of embryos by IQ just becomes cheap enough that everybody engaged in an act of creation of new life will be able to select embryos that have a higher chance to have higher IQ, et cetera.

Brink Lindsey: It’s possible, yes.

Marian Tupy: But the underlying problem is there. In other words, it’s this easy life that you have identified has created problems. Social media have created a problem, meaning moving away from word culture to picture culture, that need to be solved somehow. Maybe there will be a technological solution to it or not.

Brink Lindsey: But even if you’ve got the kids with just great native brain power, they’ve gotta have their curiosity turned on and stoked and so it’s, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, no matter how sharp it is. It’s totally easy to waste a sharp mind with an intellectual junk food culture. So the cultural change is going to have to kick in even if we’re able to fiddle with the parenting process to load the dice in favor of smarter kids.

Marian Tupy: Now, in the book, you group the problems that you identify into three distinct brackets. One is slowing economic dynamism, then there’s the breakdown in inclusiveness, and then there’s the crisis of politics. So I want to look at them in turn. Let’s start with the inclusivity and class divide. Now, you rightly point out that blue-collar work has been frowned upon for a long time and that people in such jobs felt undervalued. Trump’s election may be seen as part of the counter-reaction to that state of affairs. But one could also make the case that the golden age for such jobs, blue-collar jobs, for example, is just beginning because the white-collar jobs will be eroded by AI, but you still need the plumber and the electrician to come to the house and take care of the stuff that AI cannot help you with. I recently had a guy come in and change a light on my ceiling because, as a typical intellectual, I couldn’t do it myself. I paid this guy $200 for an hour of work. So are we already seeing a rebalancing when it comes to inclusivity and class divide?

Brink Lindsey: So we’re in the very early days of this AI revolution. Already the capabilities of the large language models are gobsmacking, and the progress in capabilities does not seem to be slowing down. This is a huge wild card in any… So in this book, I’m trying to do what Keynes did. I’m trying to look like 100 years down the road and how things could get much worse or could get much better. But that’s just makes… Always, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but throw AI into the mix and it just creates massive uncertainty. So I think the potential for AI to work out the way you said, that is, that it takes the hammer to the privileged position of knowledge workers in a way that specifically journalists have been hammered over the past 20 years, that’s entirely possible. And that we will have a revaluation of status so that people who can fix things and maintain things rise in social estimation. And I think that would be a salutary development. I know living through the dawn of the internet and all the millenarian hype that was associated with that time, we thought that authoritarian governments would topple and that we would have this kind of renaissance by putting the world’s knowledge in everybody’s fingertips.

Brink Lindsey: We would connect everybody and that would strengthen our social lives. A lot of that hype didn’t pan out. In fact, we’ve seen a dark side to the IT revolution, that every tool is neutral; they can be used well, they can be used poorly. So it was foolish and naive to think that there was only upside with information technology. We’ve seen some of the downside of late. With AI, we’re seeing these just magical kind of capabilities, but at the same time, with this consumerist mentality of the cult of convenience and comfort without a pushback that, no, you need to have self-discipline to really live well, then we’re seeing one of the first use cases for AI is just to outsource thinking and learning by students with, I think, disastrous potential outcomes. If already those of us who grew up in the pre-online world and developed bookish reading habits, I think everybody I talk to feels like their attention span has been dinged by the endless distractions of going online. But for kids that grow up with no alternative and didn’t get that grounding in the slow, effortful process of developing your thinking through reading and writing, that could push things very badly wrong. So we could get a lot dumber faster. I’m hopeful that we’re going to figure out how to use these technologies for our betterment rather than just for our spiritually empty distraction. And the change in relative status of different kinds of occupations is absolutely a possibility, and that would be great.

Marian Tupy: Yeah. One reason why I like the book so much is because you come at modernity from the perspective of a friendly critic. In other words, you are not the guy who is saying, “Oh, life would have been much better in 1350,” or something like that. You don’t project onto the past some kind of a rosy…

Brink Lindsey: Right.

Marian Tupy: You don’t look at the past with rosy filters. Let’s talk a little bit about life being too easy. It runs through the book, and how effort and difficulty is actually important for the formation of one’s personality and for flourishing and for finding meaning. So for a long time, I’ve opposed UBI, Universal Basic Income, because work, in my view, provides not just money that you can spend, but also a certain structure to life, meaning, a sense of accomplishment, et cetera. But let me play devil’s advocate and suggest that children and retirees are doing just fine without work. So does that not suggest that we can potentially thrive without struggle? I don’t meet that many 80-year-olds who say, “Oh, I wish I was still…” Well, there are some, but the rest of them is very happy taking cruises and going to visit beautiful places and stuff like that.

Brink Lindsey: Sure. So I think kids aren’t working for pay, but kids are working all the time. They’re learning, they’re figuring out the world, they’re figuring out how to get along with other people. Childhood is effortful, so they’re busy. Old people, retirees, some shrivel and waste away without the stimulation of the workplace, particularly ones in our line of work where that workplace was really intellectually invigorating. But they have the sense of accomplishment. They have a career in their rearview mirror that they’re proud of. That they, either proud of the work they did or they’re at least proud of keeping a roof over their family’s heads and being a productive member of society. So you’ve got this retrospective satisfaction with your life. But I think in general, whether it’s work for pay or something else, people need to have challenges in their lives. You, as I recall, were, I don’t know if you still are, but you were a fine tennis player. Tennis isn’t so fun without a net. You know? You need some difficulty to overcome to build your skills and to feel good about overcoming the challenge.

Brink Lindsey: With no challenges, life is boring. With overwhelming challenges, life is stressful and kind of agonizing and anxiety-provoking. You need this sweet spot that psychologists call it flow, where you’re at the right level of challenge that you can get completely immersed in an activity and time drops away and you just become at one with what you’re doing. That is a real high in life, and it comes from finding the sweet spot of challenging activity. So I think the WALL-E future, I don’t know if you know that sci-fi movie, where everyone is morbidly obese and scooting around in these hover chairs and drinking these drinks where all their calories are in this one thing. And so that’s just not utopia. That’s a complete waste of the human potential. And so to realize flourishing, what does flourishing mean? It means to flower, to bloom, to realize one’s potential, to develop and exercise your inborn capacities. And that is an inherently satisfying thing to do. So I think some kind of challenges are a necessary component of a well-lived life. Doesn’t have to be work for pay.

Marian Tupy: Another problem that you identify in the book, or a bucket of problems, has to do with the disintegration of personal bonds and a greater atomization of society. So in the final part of the book, you offer ways of fixing these problems, such as going small, or going more local, developing stronger bonds with people around you. But I wonder if the problem of atomization is really a problem of growing wealth rather than the massive expansion of the welfare state. Now, the two are connected because obviously you wouldn’t be able to afford a large welfare state without a booming economy. Nonetheless, if I wanted to make grandparents more reliant on their children or being willing to take care of the grandkids, if I wanted to make neighbors more helpful and concerned with their neighborhoods, and if I wanted to increase church attendance, I would start by abolishing the welfare state. I can see a lot of ways in which the welfare state has eroded the kind of mutual reliance that people had in sororities and fraternities 100, 150 years ago. So that’s where I would start. How do you feel about that?

Brink Lindsey: So I’ll make a move that will irritate you, which is that I see the welfare state as an integral part of modern capitalism. That nowhere do we see a complex, technologically intensive, organizationally intensive division of labor without a strong state that provides more or less welfare functions. So it’s possible to imagine such a thing. It’s also possible to imagine a human being that’s 100 meters tall, but if you actually had a human being who was 100 meters tall, he would collapse under his own weight. So right now, we have no existence proof that modern capitalism with no welfare state is an option. There’s been a libertarian movement in the United States, not really much of anywhere else. It made zero headway in knocking back the welfare state, so I think libertarians need some kind of plan B other than abolishing the welfare state. But that said, what I have in mind, the future, the kind of the hopeful future I have in mind that is more localistic, built around giving, reimbuing our face-to-face relationships with family members and neighbors and community members with practical functions, that that will preempt the welfare state and allow people to live without the welfare state to a considerable degree.

Brink Lindsey: So if people, in particular right now, technologically, so you can imagine a world of small modular nuclear reactors and 3D printing and vertical farming where small communities… Small divisions of labor could have a degree of material affluence that we need gigantic large-scale divisions of labor to accomplish now. But in the here and now, if people are living together in communities, the things they can do are to reassume duties of care that had been outsourced either to private enterprise or to the welfare state, taking care of little kids, taking care of our parents and grandparents, and then educating the young. So I envision communities where people work at home, people live, they’re not traveling off to the office or to the shop. So everybody is stable in the community, which can create a much more child-friendly environment where there’s eyes on the street and you can have more free-range children instead of the kind of obsessive helicopter parenting that we’ve fallen into now. Where instead of warehousing our parents and grandparents in nursing homes, we can have them close by with AI caregiving robots to help out on the kind of grislier aspects of taking care of their failing bodies;

Brink Lindsey: And with AI tutors, not brain-rotting chatbots, but AI that’s configured to help kids learn rather than to help them avoid learning. I picture the homeschooling movement can continue to grow and have more and more people, with people exercising control over their children’s upbringing in their local community. So I picture that the libertarian future is one that’s not necessarily going to be one where there is the minimal state at the macro level, but we have a much more pluralistic world where there’s also freedom to set your own rules by different communities. And we can have a very pro-dynamism competition in rules between different jurisdictions, but also allowing people to live according to their values. And in that environment, a lot of the functions that we currently depend on the welfare state for, we won’t have to depend on it anymore.

Marian Tupy: Okay. So you have correctly identified the Wagner’s law that, as societies grow richer, virtually all of them increase their welfare spending. So that’s correct. But let me suggest to you that what you would like to see from the book, it seems, is a cultural change, going smaller, going more local, et cetera. What I’m advocating for is an incentives change. You basically say the welfare state is not gonna be doing these things and you, the citizenry, should be doing it for yourself as you did in 1850 and whatever else.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. At this stage, and this reflects distance I’ve traveled from earlier views, but to me, yanking away the welfare state is making a lot of people poorer than they are now. They have that form of wealth of access to government benefits. It goes away. You’re forcing people to rely more on their close-by folks because the old alternative is now gone. I want to create situations where people will choose to depend more on other people rather than being forced into it.

Marian Tupy: But there will always be a tension. If the government says, “We can pay for your child to go to a school,”

Brink Lindsey: Right.

Marian Tupy: Yes, you can opt out of it, but you will have to pay twice if you want to send your kids to a private school. So there’s going to be that tension.

Brink Lindsey: So if I can, it is easier for me to imagine our societies substantially outgrowing the welfare state than just outright legislating it out of existence. That is, if we are in these smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then people think that that’s a much better alternative than the old welfare state model was and they live according to that. And since they’re not dependent on the faraway big government benefits in the way that they were in the past, then the tax burden could go down as well because there just isn’t a demand for those benefits anymore ’cause we figured out another way to provide those services to people and we’re providing it to ourselves at the communal level. So to me, this is a path towards a more libertarian future, but it’s learning how to do these things for ourselves. And these duties of care in particular, we try to have daycare markets, but the problem is, this is very labor-intensive work, taking care of children, and we want capable, responsible people taking care of the most important people in our lives. So that introduces a real problem. Either it’s insanely expensive or it’s you pay people on the cheap and you get a lower quality of caretaker. So to me, this is reality screaming, “You really need to be doing this stuff for yourself at the local level.” And I…

Marian Tupy: Yeah. No. I totally agree with you. I just wonder what is going to be more effective at that. Appealing to people’s cultural change or basically saying, “Okay, from tomorrow onwards, it’s your job to do that.” But at the very least, it seems to me you would agree that we will need to have competition. In other words, inter-jurisdictional competition. We need, well, I don’t know if you would totally agree with it, but taking it away from the welfare state and maybe giving it to the states and let them play around with the extent of the welfare state so that Massachusetts can learn from Texas and Texas can learn from California and that sort of thing.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. And even more importantly, on the regulatory side that, so this is what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion, is this weakening relationship between growth and widespread good conditions for the good life for people, or for a better life, better overall life for people. Meanwhile, though, the crisis of dynamism is the weakening capacity of the system to just keep delivering growth, to keep pushing the technological frontier outward. And again, Mancur Olson identified this rich country problem a long time ago, which is the richer you get, the more people you have with a stake in the status quo. They’re doing well. The prospect of disruptive change is anxiety-provoking because it could knock them off their privileged perch, so they have an incentive to stop change. Also, the richer you get, the lower communication costs are, and so the easier it is to band together with like-minded people and organize to throw sand in the gears of creative destruction. And so that we see right and left. Meanwhile, we’ve got the knowledge economy has created this large class of knowledge workers, the professional and managerial class. And there is just, deeply embedded in that class consciousness, a sort of imperative to manage and control and rationalize everything in their grasp. But we see that in the public sector, obviously, with the growth of bureaucracy and with just one layer of government processes after another.

Brink Lindsey: You see nothing’s working. Okay, so the solution then is to add another layer of process on top of that. So we’ve got lots of dysfunction of managerialism run amok in the public sector. But I think we also see it in the private sector. We see it in the explosion of administrative staff on campus. We see it in the HR-ization of corporate life. We see it in the increasing use by employers of surveillance to track employees’ every keystroke and bathroom break. And we see it in helicopter parenting and these professional and managerial people on their off hours deploying those instincts to try to squeeze every drop of spontaneity out of childhood in the name of safety. So those impulses are deep-seated, and they have over time contributed to an increasing drag on our dynamism and on our capacity for pushing the technological frontier forward. I think for a number of decades we were quite complacent about all of this because progress in the world of bits in information technology was so rapid and amazing that we just said, “Okay, well progress has just changed domains. It’s moved out of the world of atoms into the world of bits, but it’s still awesome.” But that, I think we’re now coming to grips with the fact that there’s still lots of work to be done in the world of atoms to make life better.

Marian Tupy: It shouldn’t cost $100 billion to build 20 kilometers of rail in California and that sort of thing.

Brink Lindsey: Right. Of course. So on the left side of the spectrum, the seriousness that they take climate change and the degree to which they want to accelerate what I think will already happen anyway, a transition to cleaner energy sources. So they see that that transition is being slowed down often by environmental groups. So that’s changed their orientation. I think the rise of late with the prospect of renewed geopolitical competition with a peer adversary, now China instead of the Soviet Union, has a lot of people worried that China is the workshop of the world. They are the manufacturing powerhouse. We won World War II by out-producing our adversaries. So we worry if we get into a hot war with China how we’ll do. So that’s got people focused again on the capacity of our societies to be effective in the world of stuff. So we’re seeing a reorientation back towards the importance of recognizing what we’ve lost in our slowdown of dynamism. But tackling it is a huge problem. And I think one of the easiest…

Brink Lindsey: One of the most effective ways to tackle this is inter-jurisdictional competition. The whole, in China, the Shenzhen model, the special economic zones, and just more. So not only for dynamism and allowing different groups to have different rules to limit the exposure of those different rules, and so other people aren’t threatened by them. But then if they really take off and it looks like these different set of rules really is producing better results, then they could be emulated elsewhere. And then beyond that, beyond just the dynamism side, we’re just ineradicably culturally pluralistic people, especially under conditions of modernity. People are not gonna agree with each other on what the good life is. They’re gonna have different values. Having us all crammed together under one set of rules makes those value differences really high stakes and combustible and has produced a lot of the dysfunctional politics we’re experiencing now. To the extent we can hive off and live with people that think like us and live under our rules, I think that’s a…

Marian Tupy: So I should build a…

Brink Lindsey: More stable and more satisfying future as well. So I think having different strokes for different folks, different rules for different jurisdictions, would be a hugely beneficial instrument in pushing for progress.

Marian Tupy: It seems like I should be building a house next to yours. But I wanted to ask you a question about Joseph Tainter’s idea, which plays a part in your book about the declining returns to complexity. But you’ve already addressed that, so I’ll just recommend that people really look up that theory and how important it is that increased bureaucratization of society, for example, shouldn’t be allowed to strangle economic growth. Because when I think about economic growth, it’s almost like the decline of the Western Roman Empire is that everybody has their own favorite theory about how economic growth has risen. But ultimately everybody agrees that there had to be a competition between states, between entities, between legal entities, because without it, if you have just one, they are going to ultimately strangle progress.

Brink Lindsey: Yes. I would just say the bureaucratization of life isn’t just bad for economic growth and technological dynamism. It’s bad for kids. It’s bad to drain all the spontaneity out of life produces people that are sort of a kind of a learned helplessness. So if you want a more dynamic, thriving society of people who are excited to take risks and excited to explore frontiers, they need to grow up in an environment where they’re not surrounded and bubble wrap at every second.

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. So when it comes to over-bureaucratization, I can just about imagine a world where you have enough autonomous regions, I don’t know, let’s say Próspera and other places showing the way or the direction to the future. What I cannot imagine is overcoming a problem you have identified in chapter four, which is loss aversion. Right? So you note the declining GDP growth rate and write, “Much of the decline in our capacity for innovation is self-inflicted, a casualty of caution and complacency that afflicts the rich and the comfortable.” I especially like the phrase “capitalism had its legs broken” by things like NIMBYism, extreme environmentalism, and so forth. So at the same time, though, whilst we are being loss averse, we also hate the idea of low or no economic growth because you can see that Americans are very unhappy and the country is quite destabilized when we have no economic growth and things turn zero-sum very quickly. How does one overcome this loss aversion mentality in a realistic way? Recently, Tyler Cowen said that he will measure economic dynamism by how unhappy people are. In other words, he assumes that in an AI economically dynamic country, that people are simply gonna be pissed off and angry because everything around them is changing at a very fast pace and they have to constantly adapt, et cetera. So if psychologically we don’t want to be miserable and we are loss averse, then doesn’t that basically destroy any chance of high growth rate in the future?

Brink Lindsey: Yeah. I think it’s a balance, that is, you’re right that people are naturally small-c conservative, and the richer they get, the more naturally small-c conservative their instincts are. But at the same time, people are innately curious and want to find out new things and get bored with the status quo. And it’s not that people really demand overall economic growth per se, but what they want is rising real incomes for themselves. But the only way to give that for lots of people is to have the overall pie growing. So that demand, I think, is a great asset for those of us who are cheerleaders for dynamism and growth that they have that demand. Ordinary people have no understanding of what policies and institutions fulfill that demand by creating the growth that translates into better material living for them. So that’s an ongoing challenge, that most people don’t understand the mechanisms by which all the blessings that we enjoy come about. So it’s easy for groups of people to vandalize the machinery that’s producing all this stuff ’cause they don’t understand how it works. So that’s an ongoing challenge. I think we’ve seen over the course of the 20th century huge mass movements based on utter economic illiteracy. But the demand for the recognition that this really isn’t better off.

Brink Lindsey: And I can tell the difference between being better off and not. And I can tell when I’m being… Even a dog can tell the difference between being tripped over and being kicked. You can tell when things are lousy. That creates the opportunity for political elites to teach the public, “Okay, these are the rules that work.” We went through the whole Cold War. We had global learning that centralized planning doesn’t work. So even with all human foibles and the instinctive human attraction based on our ancestral environment of a small hunter-gatherer band of sharing everything with everybody, that socialist idea is intuitive at that small group level. Even with that psychological burden, we surmounted that challenge. We figured it out that, okay, you can’t substitute Gosplan for markets and have a thriving society. So it’s never easy, but I think the fact that humans want a better life means that creates a condition for those who can figure out how to actually deliver it to them to make the sale.

Marian Tupy: Last question. Living in a lousy way versus living wisely, agreeably, and well within a free, pluralistic society? How do we square the circle? Because my view of what living wisely, agreeably, and well may be very different from a guy who is perfectly satisfied living in his basement, the quintessential example, somebody who plays a lot of games, smokes a lot of pot, et cetera, et cetera. I would find such a life appalling, but who am I to tell this person that that is not living wisely, agreeably, and well? On the other hand, if we simply accept that 10% of able-bodied men in our society will choose that life and find it satisfying. Well, how is that any different from where we are today? In other words, aren’t you worried that even if all your hopes come to pass, the future may still contain a lot of people who will not be living wisely, agreeably, and well, just as they are today?

Brink Lindsey: So we can talk about flourishing at the individual level and then flourishing at the societal level. And I think there’s a lot of different ways. So I talk about projects and relationships and experiences. Some people are really focused on the projects and very light on the relationships. They do fine. Some people are great at cultivating amazing experiences and they’re not very practical about anything else, but they know how to live well that way. So that all works out with a lot of variation, a lot of different ways to have a good life. And then a lot of cultural variation in different kind of flavors of packaging those different ways of living a good life. At the social level, there’s a little bit less variety. So that is, I mean, to take one example, you can totally have a flourishing individual life without having children. You can’t really have a flourishing society unless a certain number of people are having babies, right? So I think you can’t have a flourishing society that isn’t a free society where people are the authors of their own lives and not yoked to some, not groaning under some tyranny and not having their spirits crushed by some benevolent, all-providing God’s state.

Brink Lindsey: But a free society means freedom to fail. Some people are just not gonna live wisely and agreeably well because we live in a fallen world and ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, people can choose wrong, right? And so if we’re gonna be free, that means we have to allow some people to choose wrong. I think we can create better conditions for people to choose well than we have at present. I do think a highly pluralistic world where we recognize the pluralism of different flavors of living well and that we’re not gonna converge on one flavor, and that would be boring if we did. I associate, to me, getting richer should mean a flowering of variety, not just everybody converging on a monoculture. So just as when capitalism broke onto the scene, it was criticized for producing kind of shoddy, one-size-fits-all, mass-produced merchandise that wasn’t the same quality as artisanal goods. But the thing is, it produced it so cheaply that it allowed people to have stuff that they never could have afforded the artisanal product. So now they have a lesser good, but a real good that they have access to that they never had before. As capitalism continued to grow, we learned how to not follow the Henry Ford example of you could have any color of Model T you want so long as it’s black, right? That we learned how to make kind of mass customization. So now in the economic realm, we see growing riches associated with growing variety of consumer options. I think a flourishing society should look the same. Instead of everybody converging onto the same track, we should create conditions for a flowering of variety. And I think a more pluralistic, localistic institutional environment is most conducive to that end.

Marian Tupy: And it seems to me that living in a pluralistic society doesn’t mean that you are voiceless, that you don’t have a right to opine, to persuade, to express your views about other people’s lives. In other words, it doesn’t mean that because we believe in pluralism that we are relativistic. I can still say to little Jimmy, “Spend less time playing video games in your room and go out and explore the world.”

Brink Lindsey: Yes.

Marian Tupy: And ultimately, if we are going to be living in a pluralistic society where people can choose their values and how they want to live, it should be possible for people to also appeal to them and to persuade them that some ways of living, such as living up to your best potential, are better than to waste your life on drugs and that sort of thing.

Brink Lindsey: And this is the ultimate challenge for Homo sapiens is, are we cut out for freedom? Are we cut out for being allowed to choose the good? Or are we just such a refractory species that we have to be lorded over to keep us in line? The dystopia Brave New World, I think, is a much better fit with the predicament we’re in right now than 1984. That is that the human spirit is being degraded not by a regime of fear, but it’s being degraded by a regime of narcotizing you with cheap pleasures. And at the end of that book, there’s this long monologue by the head of the society making this argument that human beings just aren’t cut out for. They don’t know what’s good for them and we have to take care of them. So I don’t believe that. I have faith that there is a human nature that wants the good, that it wants to connect to the outside world and figure things out and look over the next hill and see what’s going on. It also wants to connect with other people and make them an important part of their lives. And we have the great privilege of living in a very rich, technologically advanced world that gives more people opportunities to do those things. We just need to structure things a little bit better to guide people, not push them and force them in the right direction, but structure things where it’s easier to make the right choices than it is at present.

Marian Tupy: Guide them, persuade them. My guest today was Brink Lindsey. The book is The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. Brink, it’s been great. Thank you.

Brink Lindsey: Thanks a whole bunch.

Marian Tupy: Thank you so much. See you next time.