This post's read time: 4 minutes
Hey friend,
Do you think I’m crazy?
In other words, do the things I say sometimes not make any sense to you, but you’re being polite and not telling me?
I ask this because I’m listening to the 80,000 hours podcast, and in a conversation with Cal Newport they’re talking about issues of productivity. Cal views this from the old-school meaning of productivity, the same usage as in the early era of industrialization, like the Marxist “the workers must own the means of production”.
He specifies, god bless him, that productivity in this regard is important for creating the standards of living we have grown accustomed to in the US, and frankly, in much of the world.
We expect that if things don’t take a terrible turn, more and more of a percentage of the world population will get leisure time, basic conveniences like electricity and running water, critical safety things like quality food, medicine and septic waste disposal. This is only possible through what he describes (quoting Drucker) as a 50X improvement in industrial productivity. So the old Marxist idea that capitalism was designed to enslave everyone isn’t quite accurate – industrialization was enabled by capitalism, but I think Marx and I would agree that the way we worship capital these days is bizarre.
“But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” – K Marx
Cal’s big idea is that we can optimize office work the way we did industrial work, and that we are being tyrannized by email. These are not new ideas, although he presents them well.
I’m not finished with the podcast yet but so far the glaring issue they do not seem to address is thus:
People do not do what is best for abstract community, they do what is best for their tribe.
I’m sure there is some deep evolutionary psychology underpinning all of this, but it is self-evident to any student of life. We need not look far for examples: office politics, teacher’s unions, etc. Capital is not the only vampire.
Any social structure, once sufficiently established, protects itself, usually aggressively and at great cost to other structures.
Trying to make work more efficient is great, but if it harms anyone, you’ll end up in a political process. Cal confesses that more efficient work might put people out of a job, or change their social status. He views this as a good thing, so that people can better handle family emergencies, etc.
He fails to confess an awful truth, possibly out of fear he would alienate much of his audience – the truth is that most of what people do is not very meaningful in terms of actual social progress. People in the middle class are working more today than they were in the 60’s. Cal blames this on email and hive mind?
I believe the issue is much more foundational. Why are we are short on electricians and house builders, plumbers and well drillers? What is everyone doing? I haven’t seen the numbers but I’m guessing they have found work which allows them to make the most social capital with the least effort.
Social capital means different things to different people – here I am using it to describe both one’s living, but also one’s status, access, and self-image.
The bottom line here (I am running out of time before work) is that until we can motivate people to change their behavior for a greater cause, they are going to remain stuck. This is part of my fascination with World War II.
The level of real productivity and innovation spurred by that existential threat was crazy, so much so that it often overshadows much of the horrendous waste – bad ideas and lost lives. The survivors became the “greatest generation” – because they survived atrocities they could have prevented? No, because they rose marvelously to the occasion at the last minute, when they could no longer pretend to be blind to what was happening.
Now, our big social existential threat is climate change and a fossil fuel crisis, and collectively, Americans are responding to it with a similar hand-wavey lackluster to how we responded to Nazism the first few years.
It’s not just making your office job more productive. I was able to lead a marketing team using the agile techniques Cal mentions, and got at least a 3X increase in productivity. Crazy, right? But those systems decay without a champion, and they won’t evolve without buy-in from everyone using them.
The big thing I want to figure out: How do you convince people to take action before an existential threat? I’m not talking about “mastering the complex sale” where you fearmonger by highlighting an institution’s greatest risks, but I see time and again the old joke my dad makes:
“Tighten the bolt until it snaps, then back off a quarter turn.” It’s amazing how prevalent it is not to take action until much later than the optimum time.
I think my time doing theater, and my passion for reading novels, has helped me immensely with learning how to put myself in another person’s shoes. Even then, I need to actively remember to do so – I need to make space for it.
My friend ilya lyashevsky, of ThinkHuman, certainly believes there’s a lot of room for improvement, especially with younger people. He views social emotional learning as something which must be done with purpose. In other words, our empathy is not innate, except at the most basic level – the empathy we need in a complex world is a complex empathy.
So we must figure out how to convince people, and I think Cal is too much the computers guy. The mere concept of continually doing things better is a minority perspective. Many of us are fine with getting to a comfortable level and then living our lives. Perhaps this is by definition: only uncomfortable people are willing to put in effort. On top of that, the idea to optimize in a universal and not localized way – that is the religion I wish to learn to spread.
I hope this makes sense to you.
What do you think?
Love
B