Closer To The Ideal

Clay Shirky is writing about algorithmic authority.

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published. This is how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, it’s how Twitscoop’s zeitgeist measurement works, it’s how Wikipedia’s post hoc peer review works. At this point, its just an information tool.

Second, it produces good results, and as a consequence people come to trust it. At this point, it’s become a valuable information tool, but not yet anything more.

The third characteristic is when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority.

As the philosopher John Searle describes social facts, they rely on the formulation X counts as Y in C — in this case, Wikipedia comes to count as an acceptable source of answers for a particular group.

There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum, but the important thing is that it is a spectrum, that algorithmic authority is on it, and that current forces seem set to push it further up the spectrum to an increasing number and variety of groups that regard these kinds of sources as authoritative.

There are people horrified by this prospect, but the criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority is as a authority does.

David Simon writes the single most ludicrous, misguided, uninformed post about the future of the newspapers that I’ve yet seen:

The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism world is in slash-and-burn mode, cutting product and then wondering why the product won’t sell, rushing to give away what remains online and wondering further why that content is held by advertisers to be valueless. The mode is full-bore panic. And yet these two individuals, representing as they do the two fundamental institutions that sit astride the profession, still have a card to play, and here’s a shard of good news: it’s the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution…

Melodramatic. Two brave souls have the power to save the noblest industry on Earth, the 4th estate, they can perform “an essential civic good for the nation”, but only if they act bravely and wisely. It is a good setup for a movie. How is it that Simon got so far out of touch with reality that he doesn’t understand how sentimental and over-heated this is?

Simon is so desperate to save the newspapers, that he wishes they could break the law:

Most of all, I know that here you are being individually asked to consider taking a bold, risk-laden stand for content—that antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert. Would that every U.S. newspaper publisher could meet in a bathroom somewhere and talk bluntly for fifteen minutes, this would be a hell of a lot easier.

This by itself says a lot about how doomed the newspapers are – that their supporters think the only way to save them is by breaking the law. Having written this paragraph, Simon should then draw the obvious conclusion – that there is no legal way to save the newspapers. But he is deep in denial. He has a strong emotional attachment to the newspapers, so contemplating their demise causes him too much pain – so he escapes into fantasy:

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees.

I’m familiar with “a miracle might happen” reasoning. I went through a lot of this when my father died: “The doctor says there is no hope, but a miracle might happen.” Of course, now, looking back, I can clearly see I was deluding myself. Simon is at an earlier stage. He has not yet started mourning because he believes the thing he loves can still be saved.

He then indulges a fantasy in which he is someday regarded as a hero (I assume he will someday be embarrassed that he wrote this):

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert—resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue—you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Especially stupid is his dismissal of the idea that online ad revenue will someday be greater than what it is now:

Clearly, the product still moves. But to what purpose, when more and more readers rightly identify the immediate digitized version as superior, yet pay nothing for that version, and online advertising simply doesn’t deliver enough revenue?

He then makes a ludicrous comparison:

For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was—after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions.

So, somehow the fact that Americans are willing to pay money to get more content proves that they are willing to pay money to get less content.

Maybe the most funny thing in his whole essay is where he compares the brave, visionary geniuses who run the television industry with the stupid, crass, profit-obessessed buffoons who run the newspaper industry:

But unlike television, in which industry leaders were constantly reinvesting profits in research and development, where a new technology like cable reception would be contemplated for all its potential and opportunity, the newspapering world was content to send its treasure to Wall Street, appeasing analysts and big-ticket shareholders. There was no reinvestment in programming, no intelligent contemplation of new and transformational circulation models, no thought beyond maximized short-term profit.

Oh, those damn newspaper publishers! Always obsessed with short-term profit! Why can’t they be more like the noble, far-seeing statesmen who run the television industry?

But here is the saddest paragraph of all, the one that truly shows how much Simon is gripped by the past, rather than what is to come:

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished—some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day—the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work—in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies—they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism’s potential.

David Simon will only respect New Media once New Media is able to replicate what Old Media gives us everyday. And here, possibly, is the one and only thing that Simon and I agree on: New Media will never replicate what Old Media gave us.

This is reality: the newspapers will largely die, and nothing is going to take their place. There will be other forms of media in the future, but they won’t look or act like what the newspapers did.

Here is the only passage in the essay where he correctly notes that the newspapers have been dying for a long time, and the Internet is only speeding a long-term, secular trend:

Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets. While this was discussed in some circles, usually as a matter of mild rumination, little was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.

I’ve rarely read an essay where the author’s fear of change was so near the surface, so present in every sentence.

There are at least 2 ways to attack Simon’s ideas. One is offered by Brad Delong, who makes the case that the newspapers are often full of lies and misrepresentation, and so he generally finds his favorite blogs more interesting:

I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the “Daily Me” phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of… bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald)….

But there is a bigger problem: the army of small start-ups that want a piece of the New York Times’s market. Last year I spent $30,000 to start a new political web site. That is, I spent a small sum, and attracted a small audience. But there are thousands of entrepreneurs like me. Collectively, we spend millions each year, trying to establish sites that can take market share from existing newspapers. And every dollar we spend is a torpedo aimed at the old institutions of media.

In the old days, it took millions of dollars to set up a new newspaper. USA Today took 15 years just to break even. The large scale of the needed capital acted as a barrier to entry, and protected the newspapers from competition. Now a new web site can get going for just $100,000 (I’ve previously written about the costs of websites). Nothing can bring back the old days, when the newspapers could generate high margins, safe behind the barriers that kept competition limited. But David Simon doesn’t see this. Consider the static, unchanging nature of the world in which he thinks he’s living in:

Antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert

See, in Simon’s world, all of the owners of all of the media companies are known, and could be called together to meet, if only it weren’t for antitrust considerations. What Simon doesn’t see is the vast army of entrepreneurs who are just off-stage, waiting for the right conditions, ready to strike.

My world is very different from Simon’s world. Here’s the world that I live in:

1.) Consumers do not want to pay for online content, so if the newspapers put up pay walls, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

2.) However, if a miracle happens, and suddenly consumers are willing to pay for online content, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

Either way, more funding will continue to be invested in online media ventures, and the endlessly growing supply will drive down everyone’s margins. More so, we are in for a prolonged period of over-supply, which will drive down everyone’s margins very low, so those businesses that were built around the assumption of healthy margins (and that would include the major newspapers) are going to go bankrupt. A prolonged period of very low margins will mean that only those ventures that are built to survive very low margins will, in fact, survive. And, obviously, the web-based ventures, free of the costs of printing plants and distribution networks, sometimes even free of having an office, can get by on some extremely narrow margins.

There are no scenarios in which the newspapers survive.

As I recall, when I was getting into programming in the late 90s, and especially when I was getting into PHP, there was a debate about the value of light-weight scripting languages, such as Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP. Some old-school programmers insisted that working with those languages didn’t count as “real” programming – those languages were too easy. And many old-school programmers were critical of the performance hit one takes with the light-weight scripting languages. After all, for some tasks, a routine written in C will run more than 100 times faster than the same routine written in PHP. A two-order-of-magnitude difference in execution speed needs to be taken seriously. Of course, on the flip side, a programmer can rapidly prototype new software with a light-weight scripting language, whereas using C would take much, much longer, and then it would be harder to change once it was done.

Back then, the decision was seen as either/or: either use a light-weight scripting language, or use a lower-level language that is more efficient.

In recent years, the new style has been “both”: mix the high-level and low-level languages. Use light-weight scripting languages to prototype some software, then look at the bottlenecks and drop into a lower level language for those parts of your code that need the speed. For instance, consider what David Heinemeier Hansson says about Campfire, the chat software he helped developed. First written in Ruby On Rails, it soon became clear that the code that polls to see who is in the chat room needed to be as fast as possible:

We rewrote the 100 lines of Ruby that handled the poll action in 300 lines of C. Jamis Buck did that in a couple of hours. Now each poll just does two super cheap db calls and polling is no longer a bottleneck.

Campfire and a shared todo list is different because they’re not working on a shared resource. There’s no concept of locking. Or two people dragging the same item. So a 3 second delay between posting and showing up doesn’t matter. It does when you’re working on a shared resource.

In between C and the light-weight script languages are those languages that added some extras, such as Java, C# and Erlang. Java and C# offer object orientation and automatic garbage collection, whereas Erlang offers automatic concurrency. The crew at 37 Signals has decided to re-write the polling in Campfire, using Erlang:

Last Friday we rolled out the Erlang based poller service into production. There are three virtual instances running a total of three Erlang processes. Since Friday, those 3 processes have returned more than 240 million HTTP responses to Campfire users, averaging 1200-1500 requests per second at peak times. The average response time is hovering at around 2.8ms from the time the request gets to the Erlang process to the time we’ve performed the necessary MySQL queries and returned a response to our proxy servers. We don’t have any numbers to compare this with the C program that it replaced, but It’s safe to say the Erlang poller is pretty fast. It’s also much easier to manage 3 Erlang processes than it was the 240 processes that our C poller required.

The diversity of language choices allows programmers to find exactly the right level of abstraction. When do you need programmer efficiency, and when do you need the code to execute efficiently? One needs a variety of languages so one can always get the right level abstraction for a given project. I think this is part of what Larry Wall was talking about:

Doing it right involves treating the evolution of the language as a pragmatic scope, or as a set of pragmatic scopes. You have to be able to name your dialect, kind of like a URL, so there needs to be a universal root language, and ways of warping that universal root language into whatever dialect you like. This is actually near the heart of the vision for Perl 6. We don’t see Perl 6 as a single language, but as the root for a family of related languages. As a family, there are shared cultural values that can be passed back and forth among sibling languages as well as to the descendants.

As I previously wrote:

Larry Wall is a deep thinker. And he has been developing a deep philosophy of computer languages. Yet the world of Java has, quite surprisingly, opened up and become a world of many languages: Groovy, JavaFX, JRuby, hecl, Jython, etc. No one would have guessed, in 2002, how much Java was going to open up. But while Larry Wall has been thinking about Perl 6, the Java community went ahead and created the reality that he was merely thinking about: “So there needs to be a universal root language… [and] shared cultural values that can be passed back and forth among sibling languages as well as to the descendants.”

I’ve written a little Java in the past, but I’ve always hated how heavy it is. Double casting a variable when you declare it leads to code that strikes me as overly verbose, for my purposes. Most of the time, I work on code that should be built quickly, and execution speed is not a concern. However, I’ve recently started studying Groovy, and I like it quite a lot. It is a light-weight scripting language that runs on the JVM. Using it, one can drop back to standard Java any time one needs a performance boost, or one needs to take advantage of a library that is specific to Java. You could knit together software made of Java pieces, using Groovy as the glue.

This, it seems to me, is the new style. We no longer face an either/or decision about high-level and low-level languages. Rather, the new pattern is, start high, and then drop down to a lower level whenever you need the extra power.

Sarah Lacy used LinkedIn to try to help a friends of her get a job. It occurs to her that the depression will be very good for LinkedIn:

In terms of ego and validation, I got the pride of knowing my network could help someone I care about. And not just help someone with something minor– help someone potentially find a new job. In this case she wasn’t laid off but, in an economy like this where hundreds of thousands are, survivor’s guilt runs high. Especially if you’ve been laid off before and viscerally remember that feeling. You want to be able to do something when you hear that kind of news, and LinkedIn offers that, whether it’s an introduction or just writing a recommendation for a laid-off friend. It was one of the first times an interaction with LinkedIn gave me that social media endorphin rush that I more commonly get with Twitter, blogging, Flickr or Facebook.

Rich and Happy has some predictions for 2009.  I’ve some predictions too, which I will record here. I put these things down in writing, mostly for myself. I’d like to be able to look back, years from now, and see what I believed at the end of 2008. It will be interesting to learn what I am wrong about. I am certain that by 2019 some of these predictions will seem embarrassing.

At some point (and I wish I could find the quote), Joseph Schumpeter said that people tend to view the early phase of a depression as a temporary blip, yet by the end of the depression people’s views have changed dramatically. What had been the fastest growing city is now among the slowest growing cities. What had been the most profitable industry is now the industry trying to recover from a glut of over-supply. Embryonic industries that had been growing rapidly in a small niche finally burst upon the main scene with a vigor that takes everyone by surprise. Regions and countries are surprised to realize that they have passed through an inflection point and cannot continue doing what they did before. Recall the universal surprise when the unstoppable Japanese economy of the 1980s became the no-growth economy of the 1990s. I think culture, religion, entertainment and politics are also transformed by depressions, in keeping with Schumpeter’s line “The social process is really one indivisible whole.” Yet out of that mix, he said, an economist must pluck certain phenomena and call them “economic”, and I will do the same here.

Predictions:

1.) At some point in the next 10 years, China will see enormous civil unrest. Every advanced economy on Earth has adopted some kind of free-speech-plus-elections model as the main method through which different factions work out their antagonism toward each other. If one industry is in decline, and another rising, the shift in power can either be registered at the polls, or it can be registered through violence. There is no third way. If factions need to turn to violence to work out their differences, then economic growth will slow.

2.) At some point in the next 15 years, India will replace China as the fastest growing large nation on Earth. India already has in place most of the civil rights that are necessary for sustained economic growth.

3.) In the USA, new jobless claims will reach a peak in the 3rd quarter of 2009. Unemployment will remain above 7% till 2011.

4.) During the period 2009 to 2014 the dollar will fall in value, relative to other currencies. The dollar fell from 2005 to 2008. It was heading toward a sustainable market level. The financial crisis drove the dollar back up because traders had made enormous bets denominated in dollars, and they had to buy dollars to unwind those positions. When the unwinding is finished (that is, when the financial crisis is finished) the dollar will return to the 2005-2008 trend. But the true value of the dollar is lower than even its lowest value of 2008. America, after all, now has both a huge trade deficit and a huge external debt.

5.) A falling dollar will help exporters. Exports will be one of the main sources of growth in 2010 and 2011. Exports will help end the depression.

6.) Private, foreign investment in America has stopped cold, but will resume when the dollar falls in 2010. After that, for 5 or 6 years, private foreign non-financial investment will be at an all time peak. Foreign investment in purely financial vehicles will be muted compared to the past.

7.) At the beginning of 2013, the Dow Jones Average will still be beneath 11,500. For the last 30 years, foreign money has been a factor in the upward trend of the market, but foreign money will be averse to re-entering the market when the dollar is perceived as needing to adjust downward. Also, the Obama administration will push through new regulations aimed toward reigning in financial speculation of all kinds, so the kind of leverage that was common during the last 30 years will be very slow to return. (I say this assuming that the USA won’t engage in deliberate high inflation, though deliberate high inflation is a viable solution that some liberal economists are thinking about. I think it is possible, but unlikely, that the Obama administration will follow this path.)

8.) During the period 2009 to 2019 we will not see 12 consecutive months where oil is above an inflation adjusted $150 a barrel. I have friends who think that oil supplies will soon run out and therefore, because oil is so important, the price of oil is going to skyrocket. I think the experience of 2008 offers a different model – oil is so important that the world economy can not grow when oil is expensive. Therefore, whenever oil gets expensive, the world economy will lapse into a recession, and the recession will bring down the price of oil.

9.) Conversely, from 2009 to 2019, any time America sees more than 4% annual real growth, oil will rise above an inflation adjusted $100 a barrel. I have friends who, earlier this year, believed that the era of cheap oil was over. I believe in something slightly different – the era of cheap oil during an economic boom is over. From now on, in the USA, we will only see cheap oil during economic slow downs.

10.) During the period 2009 to 2019 the medical industry will make slow, incremental progress toward understanding cancer. There will be no major breakthroughs during this period, though the possibility of a major breakthrough may come into view by the end of this period. When I say “major breakthroughs” I’m thinking especially of a silver-bullet, that is, a single process or drug that works against all types of cancer. I do expect to see more drugs like Herceptin that are useful against a particular type of cancer (thus, “incremental progress”). Is a single, silver-bullet type of treatment against all types of cancer even possible? By 2019 we should know whether cell processes (such as those activated by sirtuins) will allow for this approach.

11.) During the period 2009 to 2019 we are due for the emergence of new, deadly epidemic. Like the Pandemic of 1918 or the AIDs epidemic of the last 30 years, it will be something unexpected when it occurs. I don’t believe the next epidemic will be caused by avian flu, simply because the dangers that people make preparations for are rarely the dangers they are killed by. There is a reason why flying is safer than driving, and it’s not because strapping 200 people into a metal tube and hurling them at 500mph through the air at 40,000 feet is an inherently safe activity.

12.) During the period 2009 to 2014 the news industry will reach a critical tipping point. Online ad revenues will grow dramatically while print ad revenues will continue their decline. The kids who were 25 in 1996 will soon turn 40. Getting one’s news from the web will no longer seem hip, modern, cool or youthful. It will simply be the way that people get their news. Many older organizations will fail to adapt. Fortunes will continue to be made by the entrepreneurs who build media empires online. (I tried to say this before, but I said it poorly.)

13.) 2008 is later viewed as the beginning of a long era of Democratic dominance in the USA. Much like 1932 began a 36 year era for the Democrats and 1968 began a 40 year era for the Republicans, 2008 begins another Democratic era.

14.) 2008 is later viewed as the beginning of the end of the long era of party stability that began in the USA in 1868. Popular discontent with the 2 party system leads to experimentation that either allows 3rd parties to become viable over the long term, or simply allows the replacement of one of the existing parties with a new, dominant party.

15.) During the period 2009 to 2019 universities in the USA become the center of a new industrial policy. Universities are one of the USA’s few remaining strong points and so must be utilized to launch the next wave of sustained economic growth. Whereas the industrial policy that grew out of the 1930s largely focused on subsidizing agriculture and defense, the new industrial policy will focus on subsidizing high-tech innovation through what supporters will describe as mutually beneficial public/private partnerships (critics will describe these programs as giveaways of taxpayer money to private firms). Universities will become major exporters, though mostly they will be exporting technology and expertise, a fact which will make many US citizens uncomfortable. The extra money implied by this new industrial policy will at first enhance and enrich universities, though over the course of 20 years the universities will increasingly become the slaves of the private partners who put up matching funds, and this reorientation toward goals quite divorced from teaching young people must eventually bring an end to the university system that the USA built during the last 100 years. I can not guess if the replacement system (after 2029) will be good or bad.

16.) The Obama administration makes efforts to ameliorate the concentration of wealth that has taken place in America since the mid-1970s. However, in 2016, inequality in American wealth remains at higher levels than in 1970.

17.) The children of The Great Demographic Trough (I mean the low point of birth rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “U.S. fertility hit its low of 1.7 in 1976“) are now ready to have children themselves, but they face an economic downturn. The birth rate in the USA is already at an all time low. If you look at these numbers from the Census Bureau, you’ll see that the birth rate is now at the same level it was in the 1970s, a fraction over 14 per 1,000. This actually represents an uptick, given the aging of the population. The number will go down from here. The high birthrates of recent immigrants will be offset by the aging of the Baby Boom and the trepidation of the young who are facing economic uncertainty. (Certainly, it takes money to raise children nowadays. From the same article as above, written in 2006: “We do know that birthrates ticked up quite a bit among the most affluent,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Kids are luxury goods.”) In the medium term (2009 to 2019) the only thing that could offset this trend would be much greater immigration.

18.) The fertility rate will revive to high levels when strong, sustained economic growth returns – 2013 at the earliest. Articles that cheer “Fertility rate in USA on upswing” will disappear for the duration of the depression. Please note that the above mentioned birth rate and this fertility rate measure two different things: the first is a  per-capita measure, and the second is a per-woman measure. The first is declining but the second has been rising. The first has implications for society-wide institutions such as Social Security whereas the second has implications for the personal happiness of women and their partners. Because of the old age and large size of the Baby Boom, there is very little chance of the birth rate picking up any time soon. The fertility rate, on the other hand, is at a relatively high level right now and will go even higher when economic growth resumes. The USA’s civil rights tradition, and its flexible use of part-time and informal work, both contribute to an environment that enables US women to have more children than the women in other advanced economies feel comfortable having. 

19.) During the period 2009 to 2019 falling birth rates cause no harm to the economy. We read with humor these doomsday words from 1902: “A saving is effected in inconvenience and expense in rearing seven children instead of nine in an equal population, by which means the prosperity of recent years has no doubt been augmented, but the family and the country are eventually impoverished by their absence, though their loss may be partially remedied by a larger influx of aliens or a check to emigration. When the birth-rate falls to 28, the limit of public danger is approached.” The social/political system in the USA is flexible and will adjust. Having an old population is a new experience for the human race. The USA’s culture of innovation will allow it to make this transition gracefully. Also, expect “a larger influx of aliens.”

20.) During the period 2009 to 2019 fundamentalist Christians will face new political challenges. In particular, church leaders who claim that the USA is a Christian nation will be directly challenged by atheists, secularists and New Age spiritualists, who will be feeling energized by what they perceive as a positive change in the political and social milieu.

21.) Nationalization of industry was pioneered in 2008 and will become much more common. What was introduced as an emergency measure will become normalized. The public will become comfortable with a modest amount of socialism, so long as it is not called socialism. By 2019, even normal, annual disasters such as hurricanes will be followed by nationalizations and recapitalizations of affected regional firms. This will open the door to enormous corruption, which must eventually provoke a backlash, but I do not expect the backlash to come till some time after 2019.

22.) 2008 is later seen as the beginning of the end of the middle class suburbs. The death of the suburbs is triggered in part by #9, the lack of cheap oil during economic expansions. The death of the suburbs is not noticed for decades, in the same way that the decline of urban centers after 1929 wasn’t noticed till the end of the 1950s (when newspapers began to run articles about “the urban crisis”). Only the middle class suburbs die. The wealthy continue to live in the suburbs, just as they have for several centuries (for instance, during the Black Plague of 1347, wealthy citizens of Pisa left the city and retired to their estates just outside the city).

23.) At some point during the period 2009 to 2029 the ice masses of Greenland melt, with the same horrifying suddenness as the Larsen Ice Shelf melt of 2002. More than most other events, this causes public opinion in most advanced nations (and all island nations) to focus on global warming as an imminent threat to their standard of living. Those people who have previously questioned the urgency of global warming are dealt a dramatic political setback by this event.

24.) During the period 2009 to 2029 various nations make various responses to the environmental changes that occur. Because so many of the changes are in response to events that cross national borders, legal precedents begin to accumulate that erode the sovereignty of nations. The precedents first arise from ad-hoc arrangements that nations stumble into on a per-crisis basis, but later harden into a general set of principles. The ideal of national sovereignty undergoes its biggest change since the Peace of Westphalia established the current system in 1648.

25.) During the period 2009 to 2019 the US Federal government takes over the financing of much economic activity that had previously been held in state and local hands. In some sense, this represents the completion of a process that began in the 1930s. The American political right-wing, which resisted the trend toward centralization, is now too exhausted and fractured to fight back. Policies that would have lead to the impeachment of FDR are now passed without any significant resistance. Liberal economists argue that the federalization of funding saves taxpayer’s money, and state and local officials, both conservative and liberal, will go along with the new policy, since they will feel they lack other funding options. No backlash will form till the Federal government uses its expanded funding power to push policies that are locally hated.

26.) During the period 2009 to 2019, and despite the continuing success of Silicon Valley, California loses its status as the Gold Coast of America. Newly progressive states, such as New Mexico and North Carolina, become the economic leaders. They are helped by the investments they’ve made to their university systems, and by the lack of hype (and over investment) they’ve experienced in the past (which leaves them with relatively low rents for houses and office space).

27.) During the period 2009 to 2019 greater government regulation is extended over types of work that  previously enjoyed some informality. Certificates will now be demanded for many jobs, such as auto mechanic and computer programmer, where previously nothing formal was required. During the 1930s, when the economy was in a bad spot, work relations were increasingly formalized, but during the boom years of the 50s and 60s the emphasis was on informality. Since the economy is again in a bad spot, it is reasonable to imagine another era of formalization is upon us. This may close some doors for the type of male who was only comfortable with informal arrangements, though it may be a boon to women, who may have benefited from formalized work arrangements (at least at the top tier of the economy).

28.) During the period 2009 to 2019 small farms will revive in the USA. I’m speaking here of commercial farms that have 20 acres or less. This is a category of farm that has been extinct in the USA for some time. The trend is lead by the CSAs. I have a friend who runs a successful CSA, and I asked her why she could survive when small farms disappeared a long time ago. Her answer: “The Internet”. It is the Internet that allows her to connect to her subscribers. The subscribers provide a 0% interest loan to the farm, since the they pay for the whole year up front, in the spring. The subscribers also provide free labor, as they occasionally volunteer on the farm. It is also the Internet that allows her to freely communicate with her non-subscriber customers, telling them what days she’ll be in what cities, what farmer’s markets. And it is the Internet that gives her all the information she needs about what crops can be grown next to each other, what each crop needs, and what plants repel birds or insects, thus allowing organic farming. Over the last 30 years the price of information and communication have fallen dramatically, and the effects of cheap information keep appearing in surprising places.

29.) Most societies have some hated outsider who is economically important, tolerance of whom is an important indicator of the possibility for economic growth. In the 1700s, in Europe, it was the Jew. (”Enter the London stock exchange, that place more respectable than many a court… There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and give the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt.”). In the current era, according to Richard Florida, a tolerance of gays and lesbians is an indicator of the kind of cultural openness that allows economic growth. This will continue to be true for the next 10 years, though gays and lesbians are rapidly losing their status as the hated outsider. By 2019 they will be replaced by some newer hated outsider, tolerance of whom is again an important indicator of the possibility of economic growth. Who will the new hated outsider be? Probably an old hated outsider: as immigration increases, resentment toward immigrants will also increase.

30.) During the period 2009 to 2019 an increasing number of jobs will become mobile. I’ve never gone alone with the hype that the Internet eliminates the importance of geography. I’m not sure if anyone ever  really believed that. I just did multiple searches on the two magazines most associated with the ultra-hype of the 90s, and with both magazines, the only references I could find were negative. Wired has been generally negative toward the idea of telecommuting (in 1994: “most employees still believe that physical visibility is necessary for promotions, and this will keep telecommuting from catching on” and in 2008: “As a columnist, I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead… but if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?”). And FastCompany took the idea that “Geography is disappearing” and called it a myth: “Geography still matters, because in a global economy, business clusters are important. Relationships also matter, as do shipping times.” All the same, Peter Drucker was certainly right when he suggested knowledge has no geography: “Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production… Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography.” At least in the USA, knowledge will continue to be the main driver of productivity gains and economic growth, and knowledge workers will continue to see an increase in their mobility, due at least in part to the Internet. The Internet is no longer new, but companies, and society, are still adapting to it.

31.) During the period 2009 to 2019 the trend toward home schooling will continue in the USA. Home schooling will become organized, with parents renting out buildings where their children can meet for regular classes. In other words, “home” schooling will evolve into an alternate, parent-run school system. The political backlash from the educational establishment will be a vicious, ugly thing to behold.

32.) During the period 2009 to 2019 the trend toward continuous, lifetime learning will accelerate. It will become more common to meet high school drop outs who build fantastic careers during their 30s because of the education they got during the late 20s. Supporters of this trend will celebrate the fact that “Continuous learning is still an American innovation; it is still considered absolutely unimaginable in Japan or in Germany.” Critics of the trend will complain that Americans are remaining immature and undeveloped till later and later ages. This particular criticism of Americans has been around for a long time. It is similar to what  Ernest Hemingway expressed in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber“: “It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives… The great American boy-men.” The criticism is valid when directed at someone who has, implicitly or explicitly, agreed to a responsibility which they then shirk, but it is not valid when directed at someone making a rational calculation about their economic future. The working class kid who drops out of high school to learn the skill of tatooing at a local shop might be making a valid decision based on the economy: all the high paying industrial jobs are gone, so why not train for one of the post-industrial jobs?

33.) New mental illnesses will emerge as people fail to adapt to the new abundance of information. Between 1870 and 1920 the abundance of food increased dramatically and so during the 1920s psychologists were able to diagnose a new mental illness, which they called anorexia nervosa. What had been historically scarce had become abundant, leading to a cultural disruption, and the first to manifest negative symptoms were America’s young girls. Likewise, over the last 30 years we’ve seen a very dramatic increase in the abundance of information. No doubt this increase, too, will cause some vulnerable young people to be overwhelmed in unhealthy ways.

34.) During the period from 2009 to 2019 economic growth in the USA will average higher than it did during the period 1998 to 2008. A pro-growth political coalition will make needed investments in basic infrastructure, raising productivity. Also, an increase in immigration and a falling dollar will lead to more total employment.

35.) During the period from 2009 to 2019 the debate over school choice is altered by the arrival of a new group: parents of children who’ve been bullied at school. A few incidents of brutal bullying will cause the American public to treat this issue more seriously than before. The politics surrounding the school choice issue change greatly as the issue becomes less about religious freedom and more the safety of the children.

36.) In the field of computer programming, the trend toward light-weight, high productivity scripting languages will continue. By 2019, all of the scripting languages that burst upon the scene this decade (Ruby, PHP, Python, etc) will be facing pressure from a new generation of easy to learn languages that will empower non-programmers to do a wide range of things that currently only programmers can do.