Preamble This is going to be an experiment - I will read a book, try to summarize the narrative as concisely as I can as if I’m writing an executive summary for a slide deck, and then give some of my own commentary. Success looks like elucidation. The first issue is on
I read this book and felt like the authors were missing a few pieces. Once i put those pieces in place, i think the picture of the future looks a bit better.
At a few points the authors kept saying things like 'why make $X/year when you can make 3$X living somewhere else." In my case, I relocated from California to be closer to my family in Ohio, and I have no intention of ever leaving. My guess is that there are many such people like me; a college friend had a similar journey. He spent his early career in Washington DC, and then after a trip back home to Ohio, he said 'what am i doing here' and decided to relocate his family.
The world 'loyalty' stirs a powerful feeling in my heart, and I have a desire to help make the city i grew up in healthy and do well, because that just feels like it'd be an awesome thing to do. I've got no idea who you are, having just met you, but I have the impression you're working professional who just tinkers with ideas in his free time because it feels import to him to do so. I suspect people like us have never really been capable of exerting large scale influence in the past because specialization + the cost of communication made it so that much of the world was run by a kind of priestly class, which has always had its own incentives.
The kind of person who leaves their place of birth for a career has, for the last few decades or so, been exclusively the kind of people leading the world. So there's been something like a "high intelligence, high drive, but low loyalty" selection filter for global elites. I think the collapse of global order will lead to lots more effective forms of localized order. I know people of people who stayed home and never went out of state for college, not out of stupidity, but because they didn't want to leave their family and friends behind. I think the rootlessness the authors worry about is more an artifact of the economic and political selection mechanisms of the last 50 years than something true of all intelligent adults.
I read this book and felt like the authors were missing a few pieces. Once i put those pieces in place, i think the picture of the future looks a bit better.
At a few points the authors kept saying things like 'why make $X/year when you can make 3$X living somewhere else." In my case, I relocated from California to be closer to my family in Ohio, and I have no intention of ever leaving. My guess is that there are many such people like me; a college friend had a similar journey. He spent his early career in Washington DC, and then after a trip back home to Ohio, he said 'what am i doing here' and decided to relocate his family.
The world 'loyalty' stirs a powerful feeling in my heart, and I have a desire to help make the city i grew up in healthy and do well, because that just feels like it'd be an awesome thing to do. I've got no idea who you are, having just met you, but I have the impression you're working professional who just tinkers with ideas in his free time because it feels import to him to do so. I suspect people like us have never really been capable of exerting large scale influence in the past because specialization + the cost of communication made it so that much of the world was run by a kind of priestly class, which has always had its own incentives.
The kind of person who leaves their place of birth for a career has, for the last few decades or so, been exclusively the kind of people leading the world. So there's been something like a "high intelligence, high drive, but low loyalty" selection filter for global elites. I think the collapse of global order will lead to lots more effective forms of localized order. I know people of people who stayed home and never went out of state for college, not out of stupidity, but because they didn't want to leave their family and friends behind. I think the rootlessness the authors worry about is more an artifact of the economic and political selection mechanisms of the last 50 years than something true of all intelligent adults.