Rick Perlstein's New Book Out on August 5

Perlstein's last book, Nixonland, was one of the best books of twentieth-century history I've read. It was thoroughly researched, well-written, chose interesting vignettes and topics to explain its arguments. Mostly importantly, it made a central point about what American society and politics were actually mostly like during the late 1960s and placed the counter-culture (you know, the hippies) of 1968, despite all the mythologizing, in context: it was marginal.

I hope his new book, The Invisible Bridge, on the mid-1970s is just as enlightening.

BTW, his books are characterized as biographies. While that is the frame he's chosen, this is really a publisher's line. I'd argue that they're much more general political histories or histories about the American mindset. Nixonland had a lot of Nixon biographical material, but more about other politicians, voters and newspaper articles, and historical events only tangentially related to Nixon.

On Technological Stagnation in Our Society

Brilliant article - Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit - on why, at an on-the-ground level, we're stagnating in terms of technological advances. The author makes three main, interesting points, with which I basically agree as a right-thinking individual:

1. The pace of growth of meaningful technologies has slowed. Where once we dreamed of life-changing technologies, such as the possibility dreamed of in the 1960s that we will no longer need to work because robots will take over menial labor, now we are left with the arid advances in the screens we type into, accessories like our iPhones, and special effects.

2. Partially, we, primarily America but also the western democracies, were spurred to new advances by competition with the "big dreamers" of the Soviet Union.

The author doesn't mention this, but it led me to think: will China, which still undertakes nationwide monumental tasks, damming the Yangtze and actually trying to explore space, spur us into action again? Or will the domestic interests of the wealthy, who value their current marginal material advantage over advances in the human condition, mean we would rather stagnant than compete by reorganizing our society? Alternatively, China also may itself collapse into disorder due to it

3. We have bureacratized our entire culture and society, and this has been accomplished by our business-managerial mindset. The bureacratization argument is my favorite part of the article and the one that rings most true for me:

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

...

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

 Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit finally offers a plausible thesis as to why our technological advancement is stalling from its heights in the 20th century. Compare it's argument to Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century , in which he shows that our GDP growth spiked then and is now declining.

Of course this rests on the assumption that the 20th century's advances: cars, planes, antibacterials, wide-spread vaccines, crops and farming techniques with higher yields, reduction in infant mortality, the nuclear bomb, entry into space, are all more meaningful and improve the human condition where they spread much more than the advances since 1970: medical care that can extend our life during our geriatric years and the internet, cheap shipping (really just an improvement on 1900).

I believe the natural evolution of our technology is towards machines doing the work that sucks, and we'll spend our time interacting with each other. But our failure of imagination is impeding that future, and enslaving us. I'll post something soon on why our government, like our inventiveness, no longer functions. Also planned for the future: what we should do to change this.