The Permanent Problem · Economics & Policy
TIER 5 Wed, 17 Sep 2025 09:13:03 +0000
My essay a while back about America's descent into post-literacy got a fair amount of attention, at least by my standards, so I thought I'd follow up by trying to put this phenomenon into broader historical context. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # The rise and fall of cognitive fitness | | Brink Lindsey --- | Sep 17 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- Prophets of cognitive decline (image capture of Devo, "Whip It") My essay a while back about America's descent into post-literacy got a fair amount of attention, at least by my standards, so I thought I'd follow up by trying to put this phenomenon into broader historical context. Here I'll try to explain what drove the mass improvement in cognitive abilities over the course of the 20th century, why that improvement was so uneven, and what is behind the current regress. I'll conclude with brief thoughts about how things could be turned around. #### **Literacy before industrialization** Literacy, and with it broader cultures of intellectual uplift, waxed at various times in the premodern past. But at the dawn of Western modernity, mass illiteracy was the rule. As of 1500, fewer than 10 percent of men were able to read and write -- and literacy rates for women were a rounding error. Thanks for reading The Permanent Problem! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Pledge your support Then came a trio of interrelated technological, cultural, and economic breakthroughs: the invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the "commercial revolution" stimulated by the discovery of the New World. The printing press dramatically increased the availability of reading material (a hand-copied manuscript cost the equivalent of a year's wages for a typical laborer), while the growth of commerce expanded the ranks of merchants and clerks who needed to read and write as part of their work. The Reformation, meanwhile, was at the center of the action -- encouraged by the spread of printing and in turn, however ironically, lending encouragement to the expansion of commerce. With its commitment to a "priesthood of all believers," Protestantism located ultimate religious authority in the Bible, not any organized church hierarchy, and consequently put enormous emphasis on the ability to read. Literacy climbed steadily throughout Europe over the ensuing centuries, especially in the growing urban areas, but surged much further ahead in Protestant (and, consequently, more heavily commercialized) northern Europe. Politics, in very different forms, then lent additional support to cognitive progress. In 17th century colonial New England, Massachusetts and Connecticut led the way, passing laws that required parents to ensure that their children could read and write and mandated that towns establish schools to that end. Here religious motivations were paramount, but there was more to the story: Massachusetts' original 1642 schooling law stated that children needed to be able to read and understand "the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country." The democratic idea then blossoming on American soil thus added further impetus to the encouragement of literacy: the developing vision of popular self-government was based on a high opinion of the capacities of ordinary people to participate in politics, and education was needed to develop those capacities. Compulsory, state-provided education first came to western Europe over a century later via a very different conception of politics -- namely, the "enlightened absolutism" of Prussia's Frederick the Great. His 1763 edict established state-provided education for children 5-14 (including girls, though curricula differed and enforcement for girls was more permissive). Frederick, who considered himself a man of the Enlightenment, saw the general value in a more educated populace -- but as the absolute dictator of Prussia, he had a special interest in upgrading the quality of his military officers and the growing state bureaucracy. As a result of Frederick's reforms, literacy surged in Prussia, setting an example subsequently emulated around the world. Just as starkly different versions of modern politics -- popular self-government on the one hand, centralized absolutism on the other -- converged on support for education, so too did two starkly different cultural expressions of modernity: first, the intense piety of the Reformation, and next, the anticlerical skepticism of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the great achievements of the Scientific Revolution, the cultural wave of the Enlightenment that swept through the North Atlantic world during the 18th century celebrated the power of human reason to unleash Progress with a capital P and identified ignorance and superstition as the chief roadblocks that needed to be cleared. Education, accordingly, was seen as the primary engine of social progress. This cultural wave continued to gather force during the 19th century, as the advent of steam power and the railroad brought progress into everyday life. The drive to expand education, and access to knowledge more generally, continued to gain momentum as a result. While formal schooling was limited to primary education except for a tiny elite, an explosion of increasingly affordable reading materials along with the development and spread of lending libraries and reading societies responded to the demand for intellectual uplift (along with escapist entertainment) among the growing middle classes. Here then is where things stood by the middle of the 19th century, just before the emergence of mass production and distribution. In the most advanced areas of Protestant northern Europe and the United States -- namely, Scotland, Prussia, and New England -- male literacy stood at 75-80 percent while female literacy ranged from 55 to 75 percent. England, slow to adopt compulsory education, was a bit of a laggard, with male literacy rates in urban and commercial areas around 60-70 percent, female rates around 50 percent, and considerably lower rates for both sexes in rural areas. In Catholic Europe, France was the clear leader, with literacy rates nationwide averaging around 60-65 percent for men and 35-40 percent for women, followed by northern Italy. The rest of the region lagged considerably: male literacy rates averaged only 30-40 percent in Spain, 25-35 percent in Portugal, and under 25 percent in southern Italy. In the American South, meanwhile, the plantation economy and lack of state education combined to produce white literacy rates that more closely resembled Catholic southern Europe than the American North, while teaching reading and writing to the black slave population was forbidden by law. The progress in cognitive fitness up to this point was due primarily to cultural forces, namely Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Political factors -- in particular, the willingness and state capacity to provide universal primary schooling -- also loomed large. Finally, economic considerations were important as well: the steadily falling costs of reading materials; the emergence of an early consumer culture in which reading featured as a major (and often controversial and even scandalous) source of entertainment; and, finally, the increasing complexity of commercial and early industrial society and, consequently, a growing middle class whose work depended upon the ability to read and write. #### **Economic complexity and "cephalization"** Beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century with the arrival of full-scale industrialization, that final economic factor -- the growing complexity of economic life -- swelled to revolutionary significance. The scale and speed of mechanized production and geographically far-flung distribution represented a huge leap in the complexity of the division of labor - and necessitated a corresponding leap in information processing to manage the surging flows of inputs and outputs. In other words, there was an accelerating takeoff in the demand for workers who needed abstract knowledge and technical know-how to do their jobs. The economist Frank Knight called this the "cephalization" of the economy: just as animals capable of more complex behaviors feature higher brain-to-body ratios, so does the complexification of economic activity result in a growing dependence on "knowledge work." The new giant business enterprises of the industrial era relied on increasing layers of professional managers to plan, oversee, and track operations, as well as armies of clerical workers to do routine recordkeeping and number-crunching. The fields of engineering, law, finance, and accounting, which provided crucial analytical and coordinating support for the new economic order, developed growing bodies of increasingly arcane expertise that needed to be mastered and applied. And on the front lines of production, blue-collar workers had to be entrusted with operating and maintaining highly complex and expensive machinery. The labor market, once focused overwhelmingly on recruiting and deploying skilled hands and strong backs, now saw steadily increasing demand for disciplined, attentive, and nimble minds. Supplying that growing labor market demand required enormous new investments in formal training. Over the course of the 20th century, starting in the United States and eventually spreading around the world, first high schools and then colleges and universities went from being tiny preserves of the elite to mass institutions. In America, the "high school movement" was a bottom-up phenomenon that crossed parties and spanned both regional and urban/rural divides -- and its guiding star was the fat wage premium offered to workers with a diploma. As of 1900, only about 6 percent of American kids graduated high school; by 1970, the share of high school grads had risen to 76 percent. The takeoff in tertiary education followed decades later: as of 1940, the U.S. college graduation rate was only around 6 percent, but then came the GI Bill and the transition to a post-industrial service economy and white-collar office work. By the 1960s, college students in America had come to outnumber farmers - an astonishing inversion of historical patterns. Here, too, the wage premium offered to college grads was the economic signal that triggered transformative change. It's little remembered today how far ahead of the rest of the world the United States was in its commitment to education. In western Europe, for example, enrollment in upper secondary education was still comparatively rare as late as the 1950s. But the economic logic that drove the American experience eventually proved irresistible everywhere -- and so mass secondary and tertiary education have become the norm around the world. It's for this reason that the economist Claudia Goldin labeled the 20th century the "human capital century." "The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century," she wrote. "It was that capital embodied in the people -- _human capital_ -- mattered. The odd thing, however, is that even though most industrial nations acknowledged the change, only one did much about it until well into the twentieth century." In a slender book from a dozen years ago called _Human Capitalism_ , I told the story of how rising economic complexity led to dramatic progress in cognitive fitness. You can see that progress, not only in increasing years of schooling, but also in the so-called "Flynn effect" -- the rise in raw IQ scores in the United States and other advanced economies over the course of the 20th century. The best explanation for the Flynn effect highlights the parallel between cognitive and physical fitness -- namely, the best way to strengthen some latent capacity is through regular exercise. Modern life -- not just in the classroom, but on the job and in everyday activities -- immerses you in abstractions, broad conceptual categories through which concrete experience is classified and explained. Relative to almost everyone in the premodern past, people raised in this environment tend to see the world through what James Flynn, discoverer of the eponymous effect, called "scientific spectacles" -- that is, the lens of abstract classification. Here he explains by looking at a typical "similarities" question on an IQ test: > When presented with a Similarities-type item such as ''what do dogs and rabbits have in common,'' Americans in 1900 would be likely to say, ''You use dogs to hunt rabbits.'' The correct answer, that they are both mammals, assumes that the important thing about the world is to classify it in terms of the categories of science. Even if the subject were aware of those categories, the correct answer would seem absurdly trivial. Who cares that they are both mammals? As I argued in _Human Capitalism_ , the abstraction of modern life is pervasive: fluency with abstraction is the master strategy for handling contemporary complexity. The highest rewards of income and status are reserved not just for those who excel at intellectual abstraction -- i.e., "school smarts" -- but also what I call social abstraction and personal abstraction. The former refers to our ability to switch in and out of various abstract "thin" identities (colleague, boss, consumer dealing with a business, citizen dealing with a government bureaucracy, etc.) and thereby interact constructively with strangers who also have mastered their corresponding roles; the latter describes our ability to weigh choices, not according to strict bright-line rules, but in view of the interests of an imagined future self. These different forms of facility with abstraction add up to a person's human capital. To a certain extent, they can substitute for each other: someone who's intellectually brilliant may be able to get by with less developed social skills and conscientiousness; someone who is a pleasure to be around and an incredibly diligent worker can get ahead even without great intellectual gifts. But the better stocked you are in all three forms of human capital, the brighter your socioeconomic prospects. #### **Cognitive inequality and the class divide** The central importance of fluency with abstraction, combined with the insight that such fluency is a function of exposure and repeated practice, explains why the cognitive uplift provided by industrialization and economic development, while dramatic, has also been extremely uneven. The subtitle of my book stresses this fact: "How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter -- and More Unequal." Here's an extended excerpt from the book that explains how contemporary social structures are organized around the capacity to handle complexity through abstraction: > We usually picture society as a pyramid, with the "lower" class at the bottom and the "upper" class at the exclusive apex. But for present purposes, it's better to think horizontally rather than vertically: core versus periphery instead of top versus bottom. > > At the dense central core of the structure sits the socioeconomic elite of managers, professionals, and entrepreneurs. Here is where things are most complicated: more information is processed, bigger pictures are seen and overseen, and therefore more highly abstract thinking of one kind or another is needed. Here the members of the elite earn society's highest material, psychic, and status rewards by directing, coordinating, and analyzing the head-spinning intricacies of twenty-first century life. Most have successfully completed long years of formal training at school. They tend to be good at analytical reasoning, organization, and follow-through. Building social networks and navigating through the twists and turns of bureaucratic procedures are second nature to them. They have motivations and expectations that keep the long term always in view. In sum, they are flush with human capital - which is to say, they excel at coping with complexity…. > > On the widely scattered periphery, meanwhile, are the members of the working class. They lack extensive schooling and have not done much otherwise to invest in developing marketable skills. They are less adroit at dealing with big, impersonal institutions. Their time horizons don't extend as far into the future. They are, in sum, less well adapted to social complexity. Most jobs performed by blue-collar and service workers are relatively simple and routine, and they offer only limited scope for advancement. The need for analytical problem solving, organizational sophistication, long-term planning, and personal initiative is correspondingly modest. > > Between the core and the periphery are the middle ranks of office workers and salespeople. The complexity of their work, as well as their socioeconomic status, occupies an intermediate position between that of the elite and that of the working class. And beyond the periphery, on the fringes of social life, is the chaos of poverty. People trapped here contribute productively to the economy only haphazardly or not at all. There is a chicken-and-egg relationship between the highly unequal opportunities for exercising cognitive faculties through economic activity and the highly unequal distribution of cognitive abilities across the population. Of course there is an important genetic component here: people are born with widely varying natural endowments for all kinds of abilities, including cognitive abilities. And this component has been accentuated by the turn toward "assortative mating" in which people tend to pair up with someone of similar educational background. But inequality of opportunity must also be seen as a critically important factor. People in the elite spend their working lives -- a big chunk of their waking hours -- stretching and honing their intellectual and organizational abilities; people in the working class, meanwhile, spend much of that time in drudgery and tedium. However cognitively unequal they were as they entered the work force, the gaps are bound to widen from there. And with no habits of developing and maintaining cognitive fitness, how well prepared are low-level workers to inculcate such habits in their children? The pre-school years are critical for cognitive development, and the evidence is clear that the children of professionals and managers grow up in a much more cognitively stimulating environment. And once kids are in school, well-educated parents are in a much better position to oversee their children's work and push them to realize their potential; indeed, they are much more likely to see such oversight and pushing as an important part of parenting. Accordingly, even bright and capable kids who are raised in less-educated, traditionally working-class households will have to overcome a deep gravity well to achieve upward mobility. It's unsurprising that relatively few reach escape velocity and make it out. #### **The stagnating demand for skills** In _Human Capitalism_ , I readily conceded the unevenness of cognitive uplift through economic growth but I still saw grounds for optimism. The problem was insufficient opportunities for cognitively challenging work, but it seemed to me that the ongoing course of capitalist development was steadily mitigating that problem. The best way to encourage upward mobility is to create more room at the top -- and that's precisely what the evolution of the occupational structure was doing. As of 1900, nearly 80 percent of the workforce consisted of farmers, manual laborers, and domestic servants; by the early 21 century, some 60 percent of employees were white-collar office workers. As I saw it then, policies that encouraged further economic growth were the most effective strategy available for increasing the demand for (and thus encouraging the supply of) human capital -- i.e., cognitive fitness. But looking back now, it appears that I wrote _Human Capitalism_ just as the relationship between economic growth and rising demand for cognitive skills was breaking down. The wage premium for workers with a college degree doubled from roughly 40 percent to roughly 80 percent between 1980 and 2000, reflecting the "skill-biased technological change" associated with post-industrial economies -- in other words, the rising relative demand for highly skilled workers. Since 2000, though, the wage premium has stagnated and even slightly contracted - in part because of increased supply as more kids attend and complete college, but apparently largely due to falling demand. Companies that once required a college degree for entry-level jobs are now beginning to scrap that requirement, and the job market for new grads has deteriorated badly: the unemployment rate for recent college grads this year is appreciably higher than the overall national rate. Even as relative demand for college grads softens, it's becoming increasingly clear that much of the recent increase in the percentage of young people who earn degrees reflects, not ongoing upskilling of the workforce, but a decline in college standards. This consideration further reinforces the conclusion that skill-biased technological change is slowing down. And although the drop-off in relative demand for highly skilled workers may look like good news in the form of reduced income inequality, it also means that the economic incentives that encourage greater cognitive fitness are weakening -- as are the prospects for greater upward mobility. With the astonishing recent progress in AI large language models and their rapidly improving ability to automate knowledge work, there is little reason to expect a turnaround anytime soon. The process of creating more room at the top seems to be winding down. America's college boom started well before the rest of the world, so rising educational attainment should continue elsewhere for a time. But I've now come to the conclusion that my former faith in ongoing upskilling of the occupational structure was misplaced. Even though it has shifted to the right over time, cognitive ability still traces a Bell curve: humanity's native material places limits on how far "cephalization" of the economy can be pushed. And the power of economic incentives alone to wring more out of that native potential may have pushed about as far as it can. But what about politics and culture, the other social forces that can have a major impact on cognitive fitness. Just as politics -- through state-mandated and -provided education - served to advance the cultural values of Protestantism in preindustrial Europe and America, since industrialization began it has been a more or less reliable contributor to advancing economic values around the world. But the quasi-industrial model of state education -- with students sorted by age, and then sometimes by ability level, into classes that cover the same material at the same speed for everybody -- is likewise limited in how far it can push people to realize their cognitive potential. Repeatedly over the years, we see isolated examples of educational institutions and techniques that far outperform their peers -- and yet again and again, efforts to follow these promising examples at scale end in disappointment. In the United States, closing achievement gaps across racial and class lines has been a major priority of educational policy since the 1960s, yet in all that time nothing has happened to challenge the dispiriting finding of the 1966 Coleman report: by far and away the biggest determinant in variations in educational outcomes across schools is the socioeconomic status and family background of the student body. While schools do provide real intellectual uplift across the board (relative, that is, to nonattendance), they have proved incapable of ameliorating deficits in pre-school experiences and home and community life: there are large achievement gaps between the children of the well-educated and everyone else at the outset of schooling, and those gaps only widen during the K-12 years. Meanwhile, all the effort to shore up school performance for the bottom half of students has come at the expense of trying to get the most out of our most talented kids: spending on remedial education outstrips spending on gifted and talented programs by something like 1,000 to 1. And we have even seen occasional pressure to withhold more rigorous course offerings (e.g., the recent controversy in San Francisco over whether to eliminate algebra classes for advanced eighth graders) in a misbegotten attempt to purchase greater equality by suppressing achievement at the high end. The combination of economic incentives and institutionalization through politics powered the "human capital century" in the United States and its continuation globally. But as of now, the ability of this combination to promote further progress looks to be running out of gas. Even if educational attainment continues to creep upward, that will probably just be a reflection of its degradation as a signal of intellectual advance; clearer signals -- reading and math scores on standardized tests, and raw IQ scores -- show stagnation and even regress. #### **Weapons of mass distraction** So how about culture, the other great social force influencing cognitive fitness? For decades we've been mostly turning a blind eye to what has now become painfully obvious: contemporary consumerism -- in particular, commercialized entertainment delivered in the home or to the individual -- is systematically dumbing us down. Back in the early days of industrialization, things were very different. As literacy spread and printing costs plummeted, a new mass culture of the printed word emerged. And although sophisticates and snobs denounced the vulgarity of "penny dreadfuls" and the "yellow press," from our perspective today the hunger for intellectual stimulation and uplift was simply astonishing. Consider the popularity of political oratory, with large crowds gathering to listen in rapt attention to hours-long addresses read from written texts, full of ornate prose and byzantine syntax. Or read this fascinating Substack post that reviews Jonathan Rose's 1996 history _TheIntellectual Life of the British Working Classes_. Here's a taste: > To read this book is to be shamed by history, and perhaps to be redeemed by it too. > > Rose does not begin with a thesis. He begins with the lives that historians had neither the time nor the imagination to record: a miner who reads Plato underground, a servant girl found with a volume of Shelley in her apron pocket, a baker's son quoting Ruskin to an indifferent magistrate. These were not exceptions. They were, for a time, the rule. In their diaries, in oral testimonies, in battered memoirs, the question is not "why would they read this?" but _how could they not?_ > > Reading was a lifeline, a solace, and an assertion. > > "I read," said one ironworker, "because I wanted to say what I thought, not what I was told." > > The paradox Rose exposes is uncomfortable for modern sensibilities: that the working class once read _more_ seriously, more adventurously, and more democratically than today's university-credentialed elite. The era of mass print culture, which ran from the 19th century through the 1950s, existed in that unique historical juncture when the rising popular culture of mass entertainment was still new and underdeveloped, and the old aristocratic ideal of the life of the mind still exerted real influence as something worth striving for. Print culture reached the masses because it offered the same addictive benefits that people get today from scrolling on their phones: relief from the enervating toll of boredom, and escape from the stresses and disappointments of real life. But back then, the only technology yet available that offered those benefits -- the printed page -- also made significant cognitive demands of its audience. Meanwhile, premodern institutions and values -- in particular, the aristocratic vision of refined leisure -- still bulked large in the wider culture even as they were on the wane, shaping the aspirations of the upwardly mobile and status-conscious. Reading and amassing a fine library were sound strategies for edging ahead of the Joneses. In the United States this juncture gave us the great age of "middlebrow," a derogatory term concocted by snobs who looked down on ordinary people seeking self-betterment. Looking back now, it's just astonishing what a culture can accomplish when people actually look up to something. In America, starting in the late 19th century we got the Chautauqua movement, the creation of Lyceum societies and literary clubs in virtually every city and town, Andrew Carnegie's funding of thousands of free public libraries, and the rise of general-interest magazines like _The Atlantic Monthly_ , _Harper 's_, _Scribner 's_, _Collier 's_, and _The Saturday Evening Post_. We saw the last great burst of middlebrow in the years right after World War II: the rapid expansion of college attendance, at a time when the university ideal of learning for learning's sake was still vital, created a large audience among those new attendees for intellectually serious fare. And so we got the _Harvard Classics_ , the Book of the Month Club, and the peak in home encyclopedia sales. I was born into this culture: my parents were both first-generation college grads (my dad courtesy of the GI Bill), they were Book of the Month Club members, and we had the _Harvard Classics_ and the _Encyclop aedia Britannica_ on our shelves. I didn't have to live long, though, to see that culture disintegrate. Once the commercialization of entertainment got underway in a technologically progressive society, it was only a matter of time before less cognitively demanding means of capturing mass attention were developed. First came motion pictures -- but you had to actually go to a movie theater to see them. Then radio brought commercialized entertainment into the home -- but you could still read while listening to music on the radio. The real sea change came with the advent of television: a home appliance that can absorb your attention for hours on end and ask virtually nothing from you in return. Pleasure reading and widespread "deep literacy" have been in decline ever since. Meanwhile, the university's role as a countervailing force for high-mindedness was fatally undermined by the ongoing boom in attendance. As I wrote in an earlier essay: > The dramatically enlarged student body had different expectations of what an undergraduate education would provide: instead of knowledge for knowledge's sake, students were more interested in practical skills, the equivalent of vocational training for knowledge workers. By 1970, business and education degrees accounted for over 36 percent of all college diplomas awarded. Even so, inertia served to preserve something of the old sense of the cloistered ivory tower. In 1970, over 17 percent of students still graduated with degrees in English, history, foreign languages, or philosophy…. Meanwhile, course requirements for "Western Civ" and other broad surveys ensured a decent exposure to the humanities while on campus. > > But the dominant trend was clearly toward increasing vocationalism, and that trend has only accelerated in recent decades. After a big spike in the college wage premium during the 1980s, college came to be seen as the only reliable ticket to the middle class…. > > With college now the nearly-exclusive gatekeeper for the meritocracy, the further commercialization of the campus experience proved irresistible. By 2020, history, English, foreign languages, and philosophy majors accounted for less than 5 percent of degrees conferred. Course requirements were scaled back or eliminated altogether; outside of the more rigorous STEM fields, college became a "buffet" of random specialized electives. Students started to be thought of as "customers"; climbing walls and lazy rivers proliferated. Here then is where things stand today. The intellectual uplift powered by economic incentives and managed through mass schooling has apparently reached its limits. Meanwhile, economic development has unleashed cultural forces -- namely, television and social media -- that actively encourage cognitive regress. The path of least resistance moving forward is dismally clear. What about AI? How is this latest technological breakthrough -- or ongoing series of breakthroughs -- likely to affect matters? Let's look first at the effect on economic incentives. To the extent that AI dramatically expands the supply of intelligence on tap in the workplace, the resumption of skill-biased technological change -- i.e., the tendency of technological progress to increase relative demands for highly skilled workers -- seems highly unlikely. Again, this has an upside in terms of reduced income disparities across skill levels, but at the price of reducing the relative market rewards associated with investing in building your brainpower. And AI's effect on culture? Two things seem fairly clear to me. On the one hand, the astonishing capabilities of today's large language models (and whatever their successors might be) open up the possibility for another round of transformative intellectual uplift. We already know that one-on-one tutoring is by far and away the most effective pedagogical strategy -- the problem is that, so long as the tutors have to be human beings, the strategy can't scale. AI tutors -- extravagantly knowledgeable, infinitely patient, fine-tuned to the specific needs of each individual student -- can change that equation. On the other hand, though, how likely is this possibility to be realized in a consumer culture that is organized around comfort, convenience, and absorbing entertainment as the highest goods of organized social activity? A culture in which mind-boggling financial rewards are available to whoever can come up with a new way to hijack and monetize people's attention? The early signs regarding the use of LLMs as a consumer product are hardly reassuring. Mass cheating by students. OpenAI's decision to make ChatGPT free for college students during final exams in a classic drug pusher move. The freakout by addicted ChatGPT-4o users when they lost access and ended up in sycophancy withdrawal. Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion that the solution to the growing crisis of disconnection and loneliness is AI friends. xAI's rollout of "AI companions" (one sexy, one foul-mouthed) and its offer of up to $400,000 a year for an engineer to help build AI "waifus." Whatever the theoretical possibilities for using AI as Iron Man suits for the mind, developing these technologies in the current consumer culture is much more likely to result in the mental equivalent of WALL-E-style hoverchairs. If we want to do anything with a chance of turning things around, we have to face up to the lesson that surfaces again and again in these essays: under conditions of mass affluence, there is no invisible hand leading us toward widespread human flourishing. Things used to be different: during the industrializing transition from mass poverty to mass affluence, the connection between economic growth and overall improvements in well-being was strong. Back then, growth meant less premature death, less physical danger and suffering, less drudgerous toil, less material privation, less shame and anxiety associated with obvious material deficits. And it meant greater opportunities to exercise and develop our minds in the process of making a living. But ever since we reached the point of capitalist development when serious material deprivation became exceptional and tragic, the connection between growth and flourishing has steadily weakened and is now largely severed. To "live wisely and agreeably and well" -- and surely that requires widespread and well-developed cognitive fitness -- we can't rely on our system for making a living to get us there. We have to redirect our focus and priorities toward consciously _making a good life_. We have already learned that we can't allow capitalist development to proceed unchecked in impinging on the natural world. In particular, we have worked to balance the needs of our economic system and the needs of nature by creating wildlife preserves and protecting them from industrial encroachment. Likewise, we are going to have to learn that we can't allow capitalist development to proceed unchecked in impinging on human nature. We need to set boundaries on the pursuit of commercialized comfort, convenience, and entertainment -- and create lifestyle preserves for the pursuit of effortful flourishing. Thanks for reading The Permanent Problem! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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