The Technology-Policy Gap
Over the past few years, I’ve heard many people reference the fact that Millennials and Gen Z are way more liberal than older generations. There are a few things that could explain this, including:
Millennials are the most educated generation yet, and more education tends to mean more liberal opinions.
The internet allows for people to be exposed to others from a wider range of backgrounds and opinions, and doing so could lead to more liberal opinions, as they are generally more inclusive than conservative counterparts (examples below). The younger generations, having grown up in a world with the internet, could have their opinions pushed left because of this.
Richard Nixon, a Republican, started the war on drugs, which was intended to target black people and hippies, according to one of his aides. He also contributed to the Southern strategy, an explicit appeal to racism.
Democrats are more in favor of welfare than Republicans. Welfare benefits poor people.
Democrats are more welcoming to immigrants than Republicans.
However, we also need to recognize that when Boomers were young, they were also more liberal than the older generations. This suggests that generations tend to become more conservative with time, which would also explain the initial point in this post. Further, this explanation would discredit the main point I’ve heard people make when referencing Millennials/Gen Z being more liberal: that the USA is headed towards a more liberal future. If those younger generations are just going to become conservative once they’re older, there may not be any net movement.
Being of the belief that we need to embrace change (as I explain in this post), it is disheartening to have to say “yeah, well…” when other progressively-minded people reference the leanings of young people as an optimistic indicator of the future. I then decided it would be helpful to figure out why people become more conservative with age.
There is no clear-cut answer to what would make people become more conservative with age, but one likely contributing factor is that people are uncomfortable with change that they can’t keep up with. I’m sure we’ve all encountered the stereotypical curmudgeon who complains about how things are so different nowadays, and it was better when things were simpler back in the day. This is exactly the point I’m getting at: the younger people who were born into the current age don’t struggle with it because they grew up in it, but the older people didn’t. This makes the older people feel disenfranchised in a way, which would make them wish things would stop changing so much. In other words: they’re conservative.
The important point to note when thinking about this is this: Times changing in any meaningful way within a single person’s lifetime is a new phenomenon. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and bicycles are only about 200 years old. It took 99.9% of human history to make it to the bicycle. Then only ~150 years to make it all the way to the Moon from there. This is an example of accelerating technological growth, the phenomenon whereby technology is not just increasing over time, but the rate at which technology is increasing is increasing over time. Here’s a rough graph of our level of technology over time, to emphasize just how crazy this effect is. The invention of bikes would be less than one pixel to the left of 2020 on the timeline:
Figure 1: An Estimate of Technology Level Over Human History
The reason this is relevant is that humans, up until very recently in our history, never had to adapt to significant technological changes. This means we never had an evolutionary need to do so, which is why we struggle with change: we never had a chance to evolve to be good at it.
The most concerning part of this effect to me is that it would suggest Millennials and Gen Z will not only feel the same effect as Boomers are feeling, but they will feel it even more. The diagram below shows why this would be, by showing the difference in technology level over the duration of the voting spans of the Boomer generation and Gen Z. The effect will be even more exaggerated if life spans increase, which many believe will happen, but is not guaranteed, considering the life expectancy in the USA has actually decreased over the last three years.
Figure 2: Technology Gap for Different Generations
So what we’re seeing is a system where the young people can keep up with the changing times, but as they get older they start to fall behind. I would guess that finishing school is the point when people start to fall behind, because they transition from devoting themselves to learning, to devoting themselves to applying. In doing so, they’re not left enough time to keep up with changes. Even besides this, we must be approaching the point where technology advances so quickly that even young people can’t keep up with all of it. This effect explains why people are becoming increasingly specialized in their training: there just isn’t enough time to become and stay an expert in more than a narrow portion of human capabilities.
The possible cause for optimism here is that the younger generations were the first to be raised in a world changing as rapidly as it is, so they may be better prepared to adapt because they realize they’ll have to. I still tend to believe the accelerating rate will be too much for most to handle. Just think, the world in 2020 looks more like it did in 1980 than it will in 2060; the forty years ahead will bring more change than the last forty years. In 1980, most people didn’t have computers or cell phones. Think about how much those have changed things, then think that 2060 will most likely bring even more revolutionary technology than that.
The biggest problem I see in this system is that technology will advance and change our lives, the economy, and the environment, regardless of whether politics keep up with it. Having politics fall behind technology is a dangerous thing, as it allows the few who understand, have access to, and are creating new technologies to take advantage of others without oversight.
We’ve seen this already, with Facebook spreading false information to taint the 2016 US elections. At the time, most people thought this was an accident on Facebook’s part, but recent private meetings between Zuckerberg and powerful Republicans, and refusal to ban false political ads even after being called out, make it clear that Facebook is intentionally doing this. Spreading false information to benefit yourself is harmful to a society, and should not be allowed to happen, especially at such a large scale as Facebook is capable of doing. But watching both Zuckerberg’s and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Congress hearing makes it clear that the politicians in Washington right now have very little understanding of how the internet works, and are not capable of making policies to adequately regulate it.
Another example is Exxon knowing, almost forty years ago, that their product was going to cause climate change, and then funnelling tens of millions of dollars to climate change denial. Clearly, the science has been out there for a while, and if we had more technologically and scientifically literate politicians, we could’ve caught it earlier and corrected course. Instead, we’re paying the price of human lives, and trillions of dollars of damages due to the increased frequency and size of natural disasters.
This effect will only become worse as increasingly-capable technologies emerge. We’ve started to see the effects of job automation in the manufacturing industry, but that’s only the tip of that iceberg. There is a coming wave of job losses due to automation, which will result in a huge unemployment and wealth inequality problem if not handled properly. As jobs are automated away, employees will lose their jobs, and the company owners will gain even more money than they already have, thanks to not needing to pay those employees. Taken to its end without government intervention, this will lead to a new and worse version of feudalism: The business owners would own everything and, without any more jobs to gain money from, the rest of the population (i.e. almost everyone), would have literally no income and would be entirely dependent on the elites’ willingness to share. Human history has shown that willingness to be about as low as possible, while still keeping the commoners content enough that they’d work. Applying this to a situation where automation has eliminated any dependence on the work of the commoners leads to a grim outlook.
To be clear, I know we have a long way to go before all jobs are automated away, but it is something that we’re constantly moving towards and should be conscious of, rather than blindly assuming everything will be fine. We need to be planning for this now, rather than reacting to it once it’s already a crisis. This is why I was happy to see Andrew Yang gain national attention for the message he’s trying to get across. Things like Universal Basic Income (UBI) and a robot tax (companies paying a tax for automated jobs, since that eliminates a wage from the company’s expenses) might sound like strange, unnecessary measures right now, but are what one day need to happen if we want to avoid a crisis. It’s better to start exploring these now so that we can work out the kinks while we still have time.
Path Forward
UBI and robot taxes are certainly leftist policies in today’s USA, and if we don’t have a progressively-minded population willing to elect politicians who are looking to adapt to changing times, we will continue to encounter issues from the technology-policy gap. We need to start paying more attention to the scientific and technological literacy of our politicians to make sure they’ll be able to lead us in the right direction, and understand our changing times. I know people who believe in climate change and evolution, but still vote for politicians who don’t. I think it’s time that factor starts playing a larger role, rather than dismissing it because “politicians don’t do science” or something to that effect. Ultimately, technology is like a rip current - you can try to resist it, but that won’t stop it, and resisting will only cause more problems.
