This X post went viral earlier this month.
Murdoch, a columnist and data scientist, argues that the tone of a culture has serious economic impacts. Counting certain words used in books — for instance, progress, improvement, advance vs. worry, threat, at risk — Murdoch argues that an optimistic cultural mood actually was a cause of the Industrial Revolution in England. That is, the mood turned sunny before the economic advances occurred, and the economic advances occurred where the mood was sunny.
The chart above suggests that in the last generation or so, a more pessimistic spirit has taken hold in the West.
But “pessimism” is possibly too broad a term for the phenomenon here. Murdoch in the same X thread points to “zero-sum thinking.”
The essay linked there, by Ruxandra Teslo, pins our problems these days on a culture that has embraced zero-sum thinking:
“Nature, a top scientific journal, published an editorial last year arguing degrowth is desirable. Last month, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) blocked a partnership between an emerging start-up and the pharmaceutical heavyweight Sanofi on what appear to be tenuous grounds. This collaboration was focused on jointly creating a drug for a rare illness. In the short term, a likely outcome is that the drug simply won’t be developed. Looking further ahead, this decision could establish a troubling precedent, further jeopardising an already struggling biotech market. Mainstream outlets publish opinion pieces with titles like: ‘The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World’. All while we are confronting a very real ageing population problem. You might think of these occurrences as disparate, yet I perceive a common undercurrent: They signify a shift in elite thought towards excessive caution (safetyism), skepticism of technology, and zero-sum thinking. This shift poses what I believe to be the defining ideological challenge of our time.”
I think Teslo is correct, and in my forthcoming book, I call the mood “civilizational sadness.” Specifically, I argue that civilizational sadness is behind the collapse in marriage and birthrates.
Pope Francis tweeted on this topic:
If you think in zero-sum terms, you will think that more people just means we each get a smaller slice of the fixed pie. This view is behind the overpopulation fears that first got big in the late 1960s. In fact, if you look at that chart above, you see things turn to the darker right around the time Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.
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The cruel irony is that babies make people happy, and so fewer babies means a sadder culture. So, our culture makes us sadder, which makes us have fewer babies, which in turn leads to even fewer babies.
Dark, indeed.