By James Pethokoukis and Virginia Postrel

The
Democratic and Republican parties in America are fractured. Factions in each
party wrestle over questions concerning global trade, the effects of technology,
and the disruption of a dynamic economy. Populists on the right and
technocrats on the left want to manage society from the top down, eschewing
risk and promoting stability over growth and adaptability. They form a cohort
that Virginia Postrel called “stasists” in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies. To discuss
how this dynamism-versus-stasis framework is at play in American politics
today, I’ve brought Virginia back on “Political Economy.”

Virginia is a
Bloomberg Opinion columnist and visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for
Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She is the author
of The Future
and Its Enemies, The Substance
of Style,
and The Power of
Glamour.
Her latest is The Fabric of
Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: You were last on in 2016, and a
lot has happened since. Do you think that this pandemic has made American
society or is likely to make American society a more “dynamist,” risk-taking
society or a more risk-averse, “stasist” society?

Postrel: I
think it has revealed some of the divisions, heightened some of the divisions:
People’s interpretations of what to do and how we’ve come through that pandemic
very much reflect their inclinations about dynamism and stasis. Those of us who
are more in the dynamist camp tend to say, “Think about these vaccines. This is
a miracle that we were so able to do this so fast. Even 10 years ago, it would’ve
been inconceivable. And there was a lot of innovation involved in that, but
also some acknowledgement that doing things the traditional way was not
necessarily the way to go, that we needed to think about getting things done
quickly rather than with maximum procedural hoops.”

On
the other hand, there were lots of people who were making arguments for going
faster and got stuck in a lot of the procedural hoops. And I also think that
the FDA and the CDC did not bring glory to the technocratic cause. I admit I
was actually surprised by how incompetent the CDC was. And so this idea that
what you need are some smart people in a room, weighing all the risks and
benefits and sending out public messages about them has largely been
discredited, I think, because even when they knew the right thing to do or what
seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, they were like the bureaucrats
in every disaster movie ever who say, “Oh no, we can’t tell the truth
because the public will panic.”

And
it’s like somehow they never saw those movies. It doesn’t go well. So that’s
one thing. On the other hand, we have also seen how many people are extremely
risk averse and who would really like to stay in a world where every
conceivable risk to health is supposedly stamped out, regardless of the
consequences for . . . I don’t know, little children from poor families,
struggling small businesses, all these kinds of people who are really
sympathetic characters in our political narratives. At the same time, I can’t
say that the people who have resisted that kind of overwhelming “regulate
everything” impulse have covered themselves with glory because there was so
much hate being spewed and so much, well, craziness: people who combined
reasonable arguments about cost and benefits with conspiracy theories or with
highly politicized statements that didn’t acknowledge valid concerns. So the
pandemic has not shown America (or for that matter, the world) at its best. But
I think that dynamism has come through it in a different status from before,
but not necessarily a worse status.

Here’s what I would like to
believe (we can see how much of what I would like to believe actually sort of
drives my feelings here): What I heard before the pandemic was “What are we
getting for economic growth and technological progress and the disruption they
cause? What are we getting? We’re getting social media platforms. That is what we’ve
gotten.” And now we see that if you live in a rich, technologically advanced
society, you can make a lot of mistakes. You can poorly prepare in advance for,
say, a pandemic when there were roughly 1000 white papers over the previous five
years saying, “We’re going to have a pandemic.” You can not have any stockpile.
You can even have poorly operating government agencies, as long as at the end
of the day, you have an ability to create. If you have ability to react and try
to find a technological fix for this problem, it’s going to take you pretty
far. And therefore, maybe going forward, we should think more about those
things: the value of innovation, the value of a government that values
innovation.

That’s
a very good argument. I wish I made that argument.

But I would like to believe that
more people think that now and it’s such a sticky idea, that they will continue
to believe that years from now.

Yeah,
I think that idea is correct, obviously. I think we have shown even through all
the mistakes that the dynamism makes us resilient—far more resilient than we
would be without all these ways to adjust. Okay, there were white papers, but
the timing was unexpected. It took people by surprise. And yet people were
amazingly quickly able to adapt to it. We saw the adaptation in real time, and that
is really impressive.

I
think now, even the people who at the beginning had this kind of like, “Oh, we
should be like China” or “We should be like New Zealand”—nevermind we’re not an
island—those kinds of absolute lockdown, very brittle structures are showing
themselves to be not so great. So the idea of being able to innovate your way
out or to tap into the innovations that already exist. Everyone discovered Zoom
and even people who couldn’t work at home discovered these things because they
help them keep in touch with families, etc. I talked about the vaccines, but
also things like . . . I write about textiles, right? And so the ability of
people who were making non-woven fabrics for all kinds of things to pivot and
start making mask materials was pretty impressive. I mean, yes, we had some
shortages early on, but they didn’t last very long.

You mentioned fabrics, and you
had a book that came out during the pandemic in 2020, The Fabric of Civilization. And we’ve been talking a bit about
dynamism, which is an idea you wrote about in The Future and Its Enemies. That was in the late ‘90s.

’98.

So if you told the 1998 version
of yourself about this book that you were going to write, The fabric of Civilization, would the 1998 version of yourself have
said, “Yes, I can see myself writing that,” or would she say, “What
happened to me?”

I
think, yes, I could have seen myself writing that, because The Fabric of Civilization very much is about the progress of civilization.
It’s about science; it’s about technology; it’s about economic institutions
through the lens of textiles, which are a central technology in human life. In
fact, the word “technology” and the word “textiles” come from the same root,
which means to weave. It’s very much a continuation of the kind of interest in
the sources and nature of progress and learning. It is far less political, so
it’s not framed that way. But I think it returns to a lot of the themes and
interests that drove The Future and Its
Enemies. The Power of Glamour,
which came out in 2013, is the book that’s off the regression line because it’s
really about rhetoric and persuasion, which is something I’ve long been
interested in, but is very different from the themes underlying The Future and Its Enemies; The Substance of Style, which came out in
2003; and now this new book, The Fabric
of Civilization.

Does The Power of Glamour give you any insights into the power of social
media?

Yes,
which isn’t discussed in that book. One of the things that happened almost while
the book was in the press was this explosion, particularly of Instagram. And so
by the time I was giving talks about that book, the question about glamour had
gone from “How can we have glamorous celebrities in a society where there’s so
much transparency and so much information” to “Hey, aren’t we all creating
glamorous versions of our lives?” And yes, that’s what’s happened. Particularly
on these highly visual types of social media like Instagram, people create
versions of their life that are polished, that create projection and longing,
that hide flaws. And then, of course, they know all the things that are left
out, but then they look at their friends and they go, “How come their life
is perfect and mine isn’t?” And they go crazy. And if they’re teenage
girls, it’s worse, because teenage girls have craziness (so do teenage boys,
but I don’t have direct experience with that). So that’s one thing that it tells
us about social media: creation of glamorous versions of reality, including our
own individual, bottom-up reality, if you will.

One of the most famous books of futurism (I think people have forgotten about it) was the book Future Shock, which came out in the early ‘70s, by Alvin Toffler. And one of the themes of that book was that change was happening so quickly and there was so much progress in society and so much information, that it was basically driving us all crazy. And Toffler sort of later admitted that he got a lot of things wrong: We weren’t progressing quite as fast. He said that the economists all tricked him. But perhaps time is treating that book better and better, because it does kind of seem like we’re all being driven crazy.

It’s
been a long time since I’ve looked at that book, although I did actually meet
the Tofflers in the ‘90s. And the other thing about Toffler’s idea was this
idea of waves. And just like waves at the beach, the waves kind of overlap. And
so not everybody gets hit by this acceleration at the same time. One thing
that’s happened as we’ve become more and more connected is that it’s become
more and more simultaneous. And so I think some of the anxiety and some of the
craziness, for lack of a better term, comes from the fact that it’s very hard
to not be affected. It’s not necessarily that back when he was writing the
people who were less affected were deliberately less affected, but still it was
a slightly more gradual process.

When we were talking about the pandemic, I remember there was a Saturday Night Live skit where they were trying to run down what still works in society. I don’t think it was that long of a list. I think the NBA was on it because they were able to run their playoffs without all the players getting sick. I would say Amazon seemed to work pretty well, but if there’s one thing that did seem to work very well, it really is China.

China doesn’t seem to work quite as well as what many people thought before pandemic. Not only in limiting it without totally disrupting your society. (I’ve seen these videos lately of people in Shanghai, supposedly screaming, “Let us out. Let us get out of our apartments.”) We’ve seen that their vaccine is not very good. I’m wondering if this has also been a wake up call to people who think that China had figured out a different way to be an economically prosperous society that didn’t really involve economic freedom?

There
was a kind of “China envy” among smart people who want to get things done. Everyone
from Thomas Friedman at the New York Times to Donald Trump said, “Look at
the Chinese. They do all this great stuff. Why don’t we do it?” And that
reflects a genuine frustration with the incredible bureaucratic apparatus that
we’ve erected in the name of democratic participation against building things.
I think 90 percent of it is about building things: building roads, building
houses, building actual physical stuff. Now the Chinese pour a lot of money
down a rat hole, building things that aren’t needed, but we meanwhile are
making it impossible for people who make merely, say, $100,000 a year to live
in our most productive city. So there’s the thing.

But
what we’ve seen is that kind of extreme control makes a society very brittle.
What’s going on now in China is catastrophic. It’s not just that people in
quite advanced cities like Shanghai are now worrying about where they’re going
to find food. It’s that the entire Chinese economy is taking a huge hit because
of these lockdowns, which then hurts the party. I mean, if you’re Xi, you have
to worry about this, because what you’ve promised is “We’re going to deliver
the goods, quite literally, and make China proud and wonderful and everybody
well to do.”

I
think some of that—I was going to say nostalgia, not really nostalgia—but some
of that China envy has cracked a bit because it turns out that there are some
serious problems there. At the same time, I think that the impulse behind that
. . . not the authoritarian impulse, but the impulse to try to figure out how
we get out of some of these traps that we’ve built for ourselves where we can’t
do things. There’s increasing pressure against that. There’s increasing
frustration, both from the grassroots and from intellectuals and venture
capitalists and people of privilege, with the fact that it’s hard to do the
kinds of things that were easy to do in the US in the 1960s. I’m very interested
in where that is going to go. I follow housing policy in California quite
closely, and that was one of the first things I started following that tipped
me onto the problems that I wrote about, in The
Future and Its Enemies.

And now you’re based in California.

Yes.
I’m in LA.

There is a piece in The Financial Times, that I wrote about in my newsletter, about a couple of entrepreneurs in San Francisco who want to build a high-tech city-state in Silicon Valley where there’s less regulation. Can you build something like that in California? California has become notorious for bad zoning and too much regulations. Can you build a city-state?

You
can’t build something like that in Texas. I mean, you can’t. It would be very
hard to build it in any state in the US, because you’re asking the state
government to cede its sovereignty. And for some reason, state legislatures and
governors and such don’t really go for that. So I’m not sure. I read your piece,
and it was intriguing. But I’m not sure how they think that’s going to happen.
It makes the sea-steading things look wildly realistic because at least they
were in international waters. I suppose you could go to a very depressed area
and try to create a kind of enterprise . . .

It didn’t sound like they wanted
to go to a depressed area.

No,
but in Silicon Valley you can’t even build a six-story apartment building on
the main drag in Palo Alto.

Virginia, you certainly can’t
with that attitude.

Yeah,
right. I mean, I think it could change. But I think there is this tendency in
Silicon Valley (and it is great in many ways) to think tech can solve
everything and smart people can solve everything. And maybe they can, but they
have to look at what they’re trying to, the problems they’re trying to solve.
And you see this particularly in the many, many zillions of startups. WebMD was
the first one, I think, that said, “We’re going to reform the US health system
with technology.”

You
can’t ignore the political constraints and the regulatory constraints. You have
to figure out ways to change. And it may be that you can find a workaround. It
may be that you do campaigns. I mean, one thing that’s happening on the housing
front is that people who want to get more housing built in California are
getting things through the state legislature that override some of the local
restrictions and say, “If you have a single-family home, you can add an
accessory dwelling unit, granny flat, guest house, whatever you want to call
it. You can subdivide your property to allow for duplexes and fourplexes.”

It’s a start.

It’s
a start, and it is modest. I mean, these are modest things. They are not
neighborhood change; they’re not radically changing low-density neighborhoods.
They have the ability to significantly increase density without increasing the
feel of density; that is, when you walk in a LA neighborhood past a duplex or a
fourplex that was built in the 1920s or ‘30s, you don’t think, “Oh my God,
I’m in the canyons of Shanghai.” You think, “Oh, that’s a cute
place.” So this sort of thing used to be very common. And part of what
people who worry in a very practical way about the regulatory environment that
prevents housing from being built and being affordable is they try to think,
“Okay, what are the objections? How can we work around those objections in
a way that won’t please the most determined NIMBYs but will address the average
person’s fears?” And I think that is how you have to go. I mean, you have
to think like an economist. You have to work on the margin.

It seemed that there was a period
(and I might be completely misinterpreting your book on glamour) where we
viewed Silicon Valley and these entrepreneurs as particularly glamorous, and it
was kind of a bipartisan thing. I remember Marco Rubio saying that people on
the right should all be Uber Republicans. You had people from Google visiting
Obama in the White House. Not so much anymore. Does Silicon Valley have a glamour
problem?

Yeah, I think they do actually. And the funny thing is the peak of Silicon Valley glamour (and also probably the sign that it was about to come off) was the movie, The Social Network. Because that actually, even though it was kind of negative in many ways, attracted a lot of young people to think, “Oh, I would like to do this,” But it had an edge to it.

And
so I think that was kind of peak glamour in the sense that then the wheels started
to come off and it definitely has to do with social media. Partly I think maybe
it made the products of technology too familiar. The other thing is that Steve
Jobs was really glamorous and as well as charismatic. And there was this whole
generation that kind of worshiped Steve Jobs, and then he died and he was no
longer on the scene to epitomize the technology that people liked. I’ve started
teaching at Chapman University in Orange County, and what I see from my
students is that Elon Musk, to some extent, plays that role, but they are
always very quick to talk about how he grew up privileged or something. They
don’t want to give him too much credit. They don’t want to buy in altogether
with the glamour.

If Steve Jobs were alive today, I
wonder if the focus wouldn’t be, “Yeah, sure, he built this great company, but
he seems like a very disagreeable person.”

He
was very disagreeable, and it was known at the time and people hated working
for him, even though they loved working for him. And of course, he was in many
ways a very bad person. He was a terrible father to his daughter, his first
daughter. But yeah, that’s possible, I think it’s possible that the narrative
might have been more about his characteristics as a person as opposed to what
he did for the world or his drive.

One concern I have is seeing how
people turned on trade and how politicians have turned on trade. Even
politicians who seemed previously to have really liked to think trade was good,
now they think free trade is bad. And I wonder if we might see something like
that happen with technology, where they kind of turn on automation. When Andrew
Yang was running, he was talking about truckers rioting. We’ve had Bill Gates
talk about robot taxes. What have we learned about that issue? Since you wrote about
Luddites, about people rejecting technological progress, are there any lessons?
Is that something you’re concerned about? Or am I just concerned about
everything?

No,
I am concerned about that. I think at the moment, the anti-technology focus is
more a focus on bigness and power as opposed to automation. But the automation
thing and the robots and AI—all that fear ebbs and flows. And partly it’s
driven by the technology people wanting to exaggerate how fast things are
coming and how hugely transformative they are going to be. But this is a big
thing in The Fabric of Civilization
because for thousands of years, women all over the world spent much of their
time spinning thread, because in order to make any amount of cloth that’s worth
anything, you have to have a lot of thread or yarn to weave or knit it from.
For example: A pair of jeans requires six miles of thread, and before the
Industrial Revolution, the fastest spinners in the world (who were in India)
would have taken 100 hours to make that amount of thread.

That’s
100 hours just for the thread in the jeans. That doesn’t include weaving the
fabric; that doesn’t include cutting and sewing the fabric; it doesn’t include
dyeing, and it doesn’t include preparing the cotton for spinning. When the
Industrial Revolution comes along in the late 18th century, you start to get
spinning machines that automate that process. You have protests. You have both
violent protests—people attacking the mills physically—and you have nonviolent
protests—people going to the British parliament saying, “Do something. Outlaw
these things.” The decision is made that allowing these spinning machines
is good for society. It is good for society, it’s good for the British economy,
and it will ultimately result in more economic growth. All of those things turn
out to be true.

However, if you were making your living spinning, there was definitely disruption. One of the great beneficiaries of that decision were the hand weavers, because suddenly they went from being constrained by not getting enough yarn to weave cloth with, to having all the yarn they needed. And for a generation they enjoyed what one historian calls a “golden heyday” They were making good wages, plenty of work, everything was hunky-dory. Then wheel-turned power loops came in, and this is where we get the Luddites. So the original Luddites, who were hand weavers concerned about losing their jobs, were not ideologically opposed to technology. They were just self-interested people who rioted, broke looms, attacked plants, and were punished by the government. Many of them were shipped off to Australia. They were ironically the beneficiaries of an earlier generation of technological progress.

The
lesson I take from that is, first of all, we, as a society, as a world, get
better off when we allow these things to proceed. That’s number one. Number
two: There are disruptions and to the degree that we can mitigate the
disruptions for individuals, buy them off, so to speak, we probably should do
that. And the third thing is, just because you’re on top today does not make
you better than the people who are on the bottom. It just makes you fortunate.
And this is Friedrich Hayek’s old idea of merit versus value.

That the fact that something is valued in the marketplace at a given time is strictly a matter—he even put it this way—of supply and demand. And it doesn’t say anything about your merit as a human being, and we often conflate those two things. And that drives a lot of political . . . people feel they’re disrespected, and also people who are riding high, like tech people, think they’re better than everybody else. I mean, not everybody obviously, but that arrogance helps trigger some of the pushback. So yeah, it’s a struggle that goes back at least to the 18th century. But if you take the long view, you get what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment,” which is not only a single leap in technology, but a continuous building of both incremental and macro inventions that make everyone better off.

Unbelievable. Ending with both
Deirdre McCloskey and Hayek; you couldn’t end it any better. Virginia, thank
you so much for coming back on the podcast. That was awesome.

Thank
you. It was great.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Virginia Postrel is an author, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, and visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. Her latest book is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.

The post Luddites Then and Now: My Long-Read Q&A with Virginia Postrel appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.