Virginia Postrel has made a career out of seeing the extraordinary in the everyday — from the growing importance of “look and feel” in the products we buy, to the power of glamour to arouse our sense of longing, to tracing the history of humanity through its production and use of textiles. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Postrel joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss how the unleashing of everyday ambition has given us a world of everyday abundance — and why that world, for all its material blessings, still fails to satisfy. In a wide-ranging conversation, Postrel and Lindsey review how the early American republic transformed ambition and restlessness from traditional vices into the source of world-transforming dynamism, reminisce about the Bicentennial and compare it to the fizzle of the recent Semiquincentennial, review the wide variety of ways in which humans seek to “matter,” and speculate on the coming impact of AI and the future of mass full-time employment.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem podcast. I’m very happy to have as my guest today, my first return engagement on the show, my longtime friend, Virginia Postrel. Virginia, welcome to The Permanent Problem.
Virginia Postrel: It’s always great to talk to you, Brink.
Lindsey: Let me give you a proper introduction. Virginia Postrel is an author, an essayist. She’s the author of several excellent books starting off with The Future and Its Enemies. Most recently, The Fabric of Civilization. She’s an editor at the superb newish publication, Works in Progress. And she’s got a new podcast out with Charles Mann, who’s probably best known for his book 1491, but the podcast is called Everyday Abundance. So, tell us a little bit about it and the thinking that went behind it.
Postrel: Yeah. So, Charles and I had occasion to do a panel, or rather he was supposed to give a talk and then he said, “I want to interview you.” And I said, “No, they got you to give a talk. I’ll interview you.” This was at the Roots of Progress conference. And so, he had recently written a series of articles for The New Atlantis called “How the System Works” and had become very aware of people…
Lindsey: And those were just great, by the way. I feel like those should be part of the K-12 curriculum.
Postrel: Well, actually, so does he. And that’s what he wrote. So, let’s see if I can remember. There’s one about the system that brings us electricity, one about water, one about public health, and one about food. So, they’re all about these big complicated systems, where they came from, how they work, because he had realized that especially younger people have no clue, and people in general as well. So, that was what we were discussing, how to do this Q&A at this conference. But this led to a general discussion about how people don’t know where anything came from. When we talk about technology, we talk about things like AI and everything to do with computers as if that’s the only technology in the world. And in fact, we’re surrounded by all kinds of technologies. And of course I wrote The Fabric of Civilization, which is about textiles, which are one of the oldest technologies. And the root of the word technology comes from the word for weave. But anyway, one thing led to another and we came up with this idea of doing a series of podcast episodes where we explored the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies you didn’t even know were technologies.
Lindsey: So, what are some of your recent episodes?
Postrel: The most recent one is on doing laundry. Greatest invention ever, the washing machine, the electric washing machine. They don’t have to be electric now. They could be gas.
I keep thinking of the ones that are coming out. We have one coming out on blowing your nose, on driving the car, which is about not the invention of the car, but what had to be done in order to have driving as a regular thing. We did one on working out, about everyday exercise. The first one we did was on brushing your teeth. So, you get the kind of idea. There are all these everyday activities. One that we have coming out is shopping for groceries. And that actually has four different inventions in it, which are not the only ones that are needed, but we go from packaged goods to self-service grocery stores all the way up to scanners and barcodes. So, it’s all these things that people take for granted. Shopping cart, that’s the one I forgot. It’s just actually an invention.
Lindsey: In a previous life, I was a lawyer and one of the joys of my job… I was an anti-dumping lawyer. So, we represented clients who were exporting to the United States and accused of selling at an unfairly low price. To defend those cases, you had to know a lot about the production process as well as about the sales process and all their accounting details and so forth. But we always had to do factory tours and know something about how the production process worked. So, I got to do tours of everything from the lowest tech, just injection plastic molding cigarette lighter factories to high-tech, making the flat panel displays for laptops, all up and down the scale of complexity. And it’s always so much more phenomenally complicated than you can imagine.
Postrel: So much more phenomenally complicated. And one of my recent Works in Progress columns is about disposable diapers. And there I really, really wanted a factory tour, but they’re incredibly secretive and I couldn’t get one.
Lindsey: So, now that I’m on this current jag with The Permanent Problem, I find myself in this very peculiar and lonely position of simultaneously thinking that we really ought to be much, much more conscious of the incredible bounty that consumerism has given us and to understand the cleverness and ingenuity that had to compound over time to give us all these things. So, we should be simultaneously much more conscious and appreciative of that – and, simultaneously, much more conscious of the limits of what consumerism can do for our lives. The most important things in life are not the things you can buy at the store. And those are, for a lot of people, getting crowded out these days. And so, I find myself flopping back and forth between those two positions and angering everybody in the process.
Postrel: I was thinking about your perspective in the context of the Everyday Abundance podcast. And I was thinking that our stories are for the most part about unheralded people who created important things. And I think people who are really into their work tend to overemphasize the importance of work as a source of meaning in life, but it is an important source of meaning in life. Sylvan Goldman, who created the shopping cart, is an important guy in the world that we live in. He was also a philanthropist in different things in his town, but his legacy is that he changed our world in this little way. And most people, I mean, obviously I know his name. He’s not completely unheralded. You can find out things, but there are also people who are unknown or cases where things are misattributed, all those kinds of things. And then there are also people who get up every day and go to work and make sure that our water isn’t full of sewage and stuff like that. And those are not glamorous jobs and not just because sewage is icky, but just those are not the jobs that we tend to honor and they are really important. I think that’s an element of it is to recognize the things that are important that people do. No one will argue with you, Brink. I’m sorry. No one is going to argue that having a lot of stuff is the only important thing in life and that’s the source of all meaning. No one is going to say that-
Lindsey: Not explicitly, no. But they will tell me if the lines are going up on capitalism, you have nothing to complain about. That’s not capitalism’s job.
Postrel: By the way, I don’t like the word capitalism. I never have. I like the word markets, which is a different thing. But I do think that the fact that we only recognize in our public discourse about five different jobs is a problem. And so, that’s one reason for doing a show like this. Also, it’s just fun and interesting. And people have an insufficient sense of history. One weird aspect of having two Baby Boomers do it — I mean, I’m 66 and Charles, I think, is 70, but is that a lot of things that we remember are now history. And so, we have to explain about how did you count out cash change at the register before it would just tell you, and how did you put the sales tax in and all these kinds of things.
Lindsey: Everyday abundance gives us comforts, convenience, entertainment, and we shouldn’t turn our nose up at those, right? Those are really important. If you don’t think they’re important, try massive discomfort, massive inconvenience, soul crushing boredom, right?
Postrel: Yeah. Try washing all your laundry by boiling water on the stove and making your own detergent and all these things. I mean, you’ll have a lot less of your life to do whatever meaningful thing there is.
Lindsey: That’s right. Yeah. So, my argument is that those are important goods, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are even more important goods. All right. I want to switch gears to something you just wrote recently, this piece for the Libertyfund.org website called American Ambitions that you wrote as part of the commemoration of the American semiquincentennial, America’s 250th birthday. But before we talk about the essay, we both lived through the Bicentennial. So, we’ve lived through two of these things. And this one, I mean, just put aside the shambolic, corrupt screw-up of the national celebration. Just as a mass phenomenon, it was nothing compared to last go-round. That’s my impression.
Postrel: I mean, I can’t tell, partly it’s because we’re old. And when you’re 16 and having the Bicentennial or whatever — you were a little younger than me, 14 — it’s different. You’re doing things in school. Whereas when you’re just going on in your life, maybe not so much. So, that’s part of it.
Lindsey: So, there were national celebrations back then and they were stately and lovely, but there was enormous… First, there was just enormous commercialization. People were selling Bicentennial, red, white, and blue everything. Everything. And there were community projects. In our town, we painted all the fire hydrants to look like revolutionary war soldiers. That was a thing. And that was apparently a thing in communities all over the country. But I think maybe the most important, as far as why it was drilled into our skull so much, for two and a half years, every night we had a Bicentennial minute on CBS.
Postrel: On TV, which we all watched TV.
Lindsey: Right. There were three networks. The biggest one was CBS. Every night from July 4th, 1974 through December 31st, 1976, they had a minute-long break somewhere during the eight o’clock hour where some CBS person or celebrity or politician would tell what happened 200 years ago today. And then the whole Bicentennial minute thing became a cultural phenomenon, and people made jokes about it on sitcoms and so forth. So, the whole thing loomed so much bigger in our consciousness. Two rock bands that I followed in high school, Rush and Styx – I was a big Rush fan, casual Styx fan – they both had Bicentennial-themed songs that came out in 1975. So, a much bigger deal.
Postrel: I don’t know if you know, but Rush is having a moment.
Lindsey: I know. Of course I do.
Postrel: It’s been covered in Variety, so it must be true. I was never into Rush. But I associate the Bicentennial with two things. One was performing plays that we did in my high school, because I was very involved in theater and particularly making costumes to make a lot of pseudo-18th century costumes. And the other was being extremely sunburned because on the actual day of the Bicentennial, on July 4th, I went with this summer program, Governor’s school program that I was in. We went to the beach and I got the worst sunburn of my life. Nothing to do with the Bicentennial other than we went to the beach to celebrate. But this year actually, I also have a place in Orange County and we were down there and we went to Tustin and to the Tustin High School fireworks and picnic. And we had a wonderful Bicentennial. They had lovely fireworks. They had a band, they had food trucks. It looked like California, the crowd. There were lots of families, every shape, size, color, and age. Yeah. So, it was really nice.
Lindsey: Good. So, for a lot of different reasons that we have come to this state of affairs, but maybe the Bicentennial minutes were one of them: there was a poll that came out recently that the Cato Institute did showing the shocking number of people who don’t know what happened on July 4th, 1776. So, for people 65 and older, 72% of them identified it correctly, but for people 18 to 29, only 39% identified it correctly.
Postrel: Well, that’s not good. I thought Hamilton was supposed to cure us of that.
Lindsey: Doesn’t Hamilton seem like it was from a million years ago now?
Postrel: But yeah, right. I was going to say now it’s old. Yeah, those people were not born yet or they were not conscious.
Lindsey: Okay. So, let’s talk about your essay. You describe how the American Revolution launched a new kind of social order, a new dynamic, wide open order that democratized ambition. Ambition had been thought of as an elite capacity, dangerous – glorious, but dangerous, not something you want to see in ordinary people.But the freedom and economic circumstances of the new American continent brought forth a democratized ambition. And you describe it in all kinds of ways. So, tell a little bit more about that essay.
Postrel: Well, the first thing you have to realize – and that we tend not to, because we think of ambition as a good thing – ambition was, it was a bad word. It was ambition and avarice. They were negative concepts right up to and I would say through the 17th century. Ambition, I mean, even Machiavelli wrote a poem about the evils of ambition and how it creates war and kills all these people. So by the time of the American Revolution, the meaning had softened, so that Adam Smith wrote about ambition, but it was always ambition within a sense of hierarchy. So, it was like you were ambitious to get elected to Parliament or you were ambitious to rise in the military. The idea that you might be ambitious to be the best runner in your local running club or something, that was not a concept that… The fact that they didn’t have really the idea of running for exercise, that really goes back to the 1970s – see our podcast.
But these small ambitions that Americans have, we don’t even think about them, but it’s a very, very American characteristic to have a million little ambitions. And Tocqueville thought, “This is a really weird country. Everybody is ambitious, but nobody has big ambitions.” And I think when he says these big ambitions, he’s literally thinking of Napoleon. I can’t prove that, but I think that’s the old notion of ambition. And particularly in the early republic, which is mostly what I was writing about, because I was also writing about the 250th anniversary of the Wealth of Nations. So, I was trying to look at Smith and look at that period and see what was changing there. In the early republic, by the 1800 election – Joyce Appleby, the historian whom I quote, makes a really good case that this sort of change is established securely by the election of 1800. There is just this notion that America is this society where everybody can do their thing, can pursue their happiness. And the great exception is the slave states, which are to this day an exception. We can talk a little bit about some of the research that I didn’t actually, I only hint at in the essay.
And so, you have this sense of people moving around, trying different things, leaving their hometowns, leaving their homes, coming back to their homes, settling the frontier. There’s just all of this. I mean, people using the term restless. It’s a very common word used to describe it.
Lindsey: And that was a bad word.
Postrel: Yeah. The people were using it were like, “What is with these restless Americans?” It’s so odd. Because even Adam Smith – in the Wealth of Nation, one of his big concerns is that there are various regulations and guilds and such that keep labor from being mobile and keep people from being able to move from job to job as opportunities arise. But even Adam Smith assumes that’s within the same town because people won’t move from town to town. Whereas Americans, I mean, it’s like we were selected as people who were willing to move great distances. And one of the disturbing things in recent years has been Americans have become less mobile. We’re still pretty mobile compared to a lot of countries, but people don’t move as often as they used to.
Lindsey: Oh, that’s right. So, your ambition overlaps a lot with the flourishing I talk about all the time. That ambition is a quest for self-improvement, to better your economic circumstances, but also to better your mind, to better your place in society. And it’s an attempt to realize your potential: Ive’ve got something in there, and I’m going to figure out what it is and I’m going to make it happen.
Postrel: Right. And one of the things when the country is very open is that people feel the ability to do that. And over time, and Tocqueville predicted this as well, you start to get lots of rules that are often designed to make things fairer that end up stifling people’s ability to pursue their ambitions or pursue their best self, whatever you want to say.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, I could say that the circumstances of antebellum America, putting aside the huge exception of slavery, were very conducive to mass flourishing. You had this wide open social order where within the constraints of the technology and knowledge of the day, people had more freedom to realize their potential and be all they can be than any large group of people, any society we’d ever seen before. It’s a celebratory essay, but it has a bit of an elegiac tone because-
Postrel: It ends on a down note.
Lindsey: Yeah. Because you talk about “the combination of economic circumstances and liberal principles” that made this happen, but economic circumstances today are quite different. You talk about back then, ambition was no longer winner take all, but there’s a lot of winner take all markets these days or winner take most markets these days. You talk about a diverse dynamic society with countless sources of status and respect. I feel like as we’ve nationalized our economy, the channels of competition have gotten – they include more people, but there are fewer of them. So, there are fewer ponds to be a big fish in than there were back in a country of an archipelago of small towns.
Postrel: I’m not sure that’s true. And part of the reason I’m not sure that’s true is that, as you know, I’m from South Carolina and my family is still there. And the towns that they live in have grown enormously. The one I grew up in, Greenville is huge. And the Charleston area where one of my brothers lived as well. And they still very much have many different little outlets for ambition. And even Los Angeles does. So, I don’t…
Lindsey: And there’s been a huge proliferation of subcultures that you can be cool in.
Postrel: Yeah, there are all these subcultures. I mean, I think our conversation about this is the problem is there are too many people like us who went to these elite schools. And of course, back when I went to Princeton, and I don’t know about you, but I mean, I just went there because I was a nerd. And it was more open than it is today, because somebody like me who went to a public high school in South Carolina and had a somewhat spotty preparation and just had really high SAT scores, I don’t think somebody like me could get in now. And in fact, it’s the case that fewer, even though South Carolina has grown tremendously since 1978 when I was applying and there were 13 people admitted, fewer people.
Lindsey: Oh, that’s interesting.
Postrel: The last time I checked, it was nine. Fewer people get in from South Carolina and the schools are better. So, the schools have improved. The population has grown tremendously and fewer people get into Princeton, which partly is because it’s more of an international university than it used to be. But it’s also because I think their idea of what is a promising student has narrowed. I can’t prove that. But that is the Tocqueville argument that as you go along you aren’t as willing to leave things open. But that said, I still think there are lots and lots and lots of niches for ambition and people…
Lindsey: I agree completely.
Postrel: … hang out with elite, highly educated people, hang out in Washington and New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco have a kind of distorted view of the world. But not you and me, of course.
Lindsey: Of course not. Yeah, I agree that-
Lindsey: I agree that certainly, relative to the rest of the world, American ambition is still robust and exceptional. There’s still a sense of wide openness and you can be anything in America. That sense is more alive in America than it is in a lot of places. But I don’t feel like it’s as alive as it was in the 1830s and 1840s. It’s just a sense of limitless possibility and free land and every ordinary person, all they need is drive and will to make a success of their lives. And that just isn’t true anymore.
Postrel: Yeah. There is a quote that I didn’t use in the article, but that I read, I believe it was from Chevalier, one of the European visitors who quoted, who said, “The amazing thing about America is that a man can get off the boat from Ireland with nothing but the strength of his body and make his way…” He told this story, you’re like, “Make his way getting hired as a laborer and then get land and basically build a life.” And when you have a society which is hungry for labor, which was true in the United States for a very, very, very long time, I mean, I would argue it’s still true, but people don’t want to talk about that. But we had lots of land. We had lots of resources like timber and coal and things like that, but we were short on people, which is one reason that we had all these immigrants. I actually think, I’ve written about this on my Substack and I hint at it in the article. I actually think the problem was that we shut off immigration in 1924. And so, then the vaunted Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers all grew up in an America without contemporary immigrants. In other words, they had people….
Lindsey: And it’s in those communities that you see this all-American striving to better themselves and improve their condition at its most vital.
Postrel: And those are the generations that produced the anti-Promethean backlash, this whole thing as you’ve dubbed it. And this thinking came to me when Jason Crawford from Roots of Progress was interviewing me for something. And he was saying like, “Look, there were other times where you could have had an anti- Promethean backlash. Why did it happen in the ’70s?” And I was just like, “Why did it happen in the ’70s?” And then I started doing the math and it’s like, yeah, you had these three generations of people who grew up in an America where their contemporaries – so their parents, their grandparents, may have been immigrants, but they didn’t go to school with people who were first-generation Americans. They took the country and the prosperity and all of these things for granted. And then they became generations that focused more on, they really focused more on protecting their stuff. They became stasists, as I would say, in The Future and Its Enemuies. And so, now we have these new post-65 waves of immigrants, which are now creating, there’s a backlash against them. And that would suggest that we’re setting ourselves up 50 years hence for another…
Lindsey: Yeah, maybe.
Postrel: It might be true. Who knows?
Lindsey: We’ve had 50 years of mass immigration now, and I’m not seeing things unwind.
Postrel: Yeah. Well, it’s hard to unwind things as you know. Once they’re in there, they’re hard.
Lindsey: I would throw something else into the mix. I think the 20th century experience of World War I and industrialized slaughter or World War II in the Holocaust, and then the threat of nuclear annihilation, all of those convinced a whole lot of intellectuals that technology was bad.
Postrel: Oh, yeah. I mean-
Lindsey: And then that seeped into the mass culture by the ’60s with the Baby Boomer cohort.
Postrel: Yeah. World War I killed Victorian optimism in Britain and filtered throughout. It didn’t really filter so much into the US, but it had a huge effect in Europe. World War II and the Holocaust are…
Lindsey: Then a lot of those Europeans moved over and started teaching in American colleges.
Postrel: Yeah. This is more complicated, for whatever reason it happened. That’s a concern. But now we’re in the period – this is why people are hating on you, Brink – where the people who want to keep things, protect the status quo or go backwards, tend to do a lot of chin pulling about how everybody had a meaningful life when everybody had a good union job working on an assembly line, which is just nonsense. It’s just nonsense. First of all, that was a tiny percentage of the labor force, just happens to be concentrated in some swing states. Secondly, those jobs were incredibly boring. And if people had good lives because of them, it’s because they took the money and they had their family and the job wasn’t giving any…
Lindsey: The way I would put it, the jobs were dirty and dangerous and just awful, just physically awful. You read these accounts of assembly line workers and the first day on the job, they just can’t believe anybody can really do this every day. It’s so awful. So, they were bad, but…
Postrel: I had a high school teacher, my ninth grade social studies teacher, who actually had come to Greenville because he went to Bob Jones University. But he was from Michigan and he worked on an assembly line during his summers off in the automobile plant. So, this was in the ’70s. It would’ve been in the early ’70s, I guess. And the people would be so bored, they would deliberately wreck some of the things they were building.
Lindsey: Increasing sabotage in the ’70s.
Postrel: At that point was not so incredibly dangerous, so much as incredibly boring.
Lindsey: Yes. Yes. The jobs were not intrinsically fulfilling, but they put you on a escalator of rising living standards that moved faster than any such escalator had ever moved for any large group of people ever. And that feeling of just like time-lapse photography, seeing your circumstances change, that was exhilarating for people and made people proud of what they had been able to accomplish. Also, even though blue collar factory work was not the majority of low skilled work, it was the most salient and most culturally visible kind of low skilled work. And it was aspirational work to get a good factory job, you could end up with a middle class lifestyle.
And it was important work. It was clearly crucially important to the health and progress of the overall system. Ordinary working stiffs were arrayed on the technological frontier along with their managers and bosses and owners pushing the technological frontier forward in the steel industry and the automobile industry, et cetera. When they struck, when they exerted their collective power in those industries, that whole industry’s ground to a halt. And it was a national security crisis if the steel industry went on strike. Global security was at stake. So, these people knew in their bones that what they did was existentially important and it mattered in a way that I think is very different from what a lot of jobs in the post-working-class in today’s service sector are – jobs where they provide some kind of service and people are willing to pay for it, but people don’t have the feeling that what they do matters in a way that they did back then. And they don’t have the status. They don’t have the status as contributors to the commonweal that factory workers did back then. They were glorified and people now are not.
Postrel: Healthcare absorbs a huge number of those people.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: And everybody thinks health… I mean, people may complain about the system or it’s too expensive or whatever, but nobody thinks that being an x-ray technician is not important.
Lindsey: No, that’s right.
Postrel: Or spending the day giving women mammograms or even working in medical billing or answering the phones in an optometrist’s office or whatever. I mean, healthcare is a huge percentage of the economy. Many of the jobs that were once. Many of the kinds of people who used to do factory jobs now work in healthcare. Part of the problem is, is it’s a little gendered. I would argue it’s not super gendered. I mean, especially certain things like phlebotomists and x-ray techs and there’s certain kinds of jobs where I’ve encountered plenty of men working at them. But I just think when everybody worked in agriculture, everybody thought their job was important because food. And farmers today will still tell you that they have the most important jobs. That’s not a great way to make the rest of the other 98% of Americans feel. If we could convince everybody that farmers had the most important jobs, I don’t think that would be good for society, but anyway.
Lindsey: So, we spend a big chunk of our lives on the job. The majority of our working hours during most of our vital adult years, we spend working for pay. So, how that experience is has a lot to do with what the overall conditions for human flourishing are in a society. Do you have hope? So, jobs today are, they’re less dirty, dangerous. They pay better than they did before. My sense is for a lot of people, they’re not especially fulfilling. Most people, they’re not really very fulfilling. It’s mostly for the paycheck. That’s why they do it.
Postrel: And so, has it been from time immemorial. Yes. But the-
Lindsey: So, is progress getting people cooler and cooler jobs? So, one day everybody has a cool, fulfilling job? Or is progress getting so rich that working for pay becomes more and more discretionary?
Postrel: Well, I think the jury’s out on that. I think revealed preference is part of it. What are people going to want to do? But I was going to say about jobs. Another thing about today’s jobs, particularly ones that are lower skill or lower pay, is that they’re much more social than they used to be.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: Many years ago, probably 20 years ago, I talked to some people who owned a very nice – you probably heard me tell this story before – but a very nice furniture factory outside of Dallas. And when I say it was nice, I mean, it was not unpleasant to work in, but it was factory work. You still had to do it, but it was clean. It wasn’t particularly noisy. People worked in small teams. And most of the people who worked in it were immigrants. And the factory was unable to hire their children, even children who were blue collar because they would rather go and work at Target for less money because it was less regimented and more social. So, that’s a factor.
I’m not saying working at Target is the be all and end all of work, but people get a number of different things out of their work. Some people get a sense of flow and craftsmanship and intellectual stimulation, that sort of thing. Other people get the social aspects. And I think it’s a huge mistake to try to put everybody working at home. I mean, I’ve been working at home since 2000 and it has its advantages, but I-
Lindsey: No, I agree. It’s not for everybody, but it’s-
Postrel: If I didn’t travel and go to conferences and stuff, I would be miserable because I don’t have any colleagues.
Lindsey: Revealed preferences show up here too. And people really liked not having that two hours of commuting.
Postrel: Commute is a huge deal.
Lindsey: And people like being able to deal with their kids’ doctor’s problems during the middle of the day. So, when the call to return to the office after COVID happened, there were a lot of non-responders.
Postrel: Right. I think it’s really bad for people who are early in their career. I agree. Which also means they’re younger, they don’t have kids. They might even live closer to the job. There are certain things that become more important as you get older and you’ve already established your professional networks and friendships and stuff. But where do I think the world is going? I think that AI is going to, it’ll happen slowly. It’ll be complicated, but I think a certain number of… I think there is going to be some shift from some types of white collar work to more – how should I put it? – physical work.
Lindsey: IRL work, right? Touch grass work. In real life work, right?
Postrel: Yeah. Things where people’s physical presence is important. I was just at a conference, a really interesting conference, that the Abundance Institute ran on AI and music that had lots of people from music, musicians and producers, as well as tech and policy people. And everybody agreed that everybody’s going to want to do more and more concerts and connecting with other fans in person. All these things are the future. I mean, they’re already the present, but it’s just going to get more and more important to have that presence. My nephew is making really high-end furniture and doors and things like that. He’s a really great woodworker and studying for his contractor’s license. But that’s one thing. Another nephew on the other end of things is in Silicon Valley, making medical robotics. And actually, I have a lot of robots in my family. Another nephew is working on underwater robots that work on oil wells.
Lindsey: And this fits in with the broader cultural touch-grass or longing to touch grass again in an age where we’re just online all the time. So, you’re seeing vinyl records are back. Yeah. There are places you can go to play board games with people.
Postrel: Right, right, right, right. So, I reviewed this book by Christine Rosen, whose name. I forget the name of the book, but it was all about how, oh, it’s so terrible. We no longer have physical bodies and it’s all about-
Lindsey: The Extinction of Experience. Is that what it was?
Postrel: Yeah, yeah. And it was just a terrible book. I expected to disagree with it. I didn’t think it would be a terrible book. Those are two different things, but there were four contradictions on every page. But one of the things that really struck me is, I don’t know where… Well, I know she lives in DC, but she certainly doesn’t live in my neighborhood because everything is like a Pilates class and a personal trainer and a massage place and a get your nails done place. It’s all about your body. It’s not about being online. And I think the whole looksmaxing thing is weird and the particular look is weird. But I think that’s also this physicality and even professions associated with it are part of the future because for people who are not intellectuals, this is often a very important form of self-fashioning.
But I do think that I sent you a link to my essay about Rebecca Goldstein’s book, The Mattering Instinct, because I really like her book. I think it makes a very important point. Well, two very important points. The first one is the thesis of the book, which is that human beings have an instinct to matter. And that is not just to matter to someone, but to matter in some sort of existential sense, to have a sense that all the things we have to do to maintain our individual lives are worth it, that if we disappeared tomorrow, it would matter in some sense. But the other thing, which is what I think is really important, is that she talks about how this manifests itself in very different ways among different personalities. And people have a tendency to think, if their sense of mattering is about achievement, they think everybody’s is about achievement. Which is what you wrote about Ned Phelps and his sense of flourishing is very – oh yeah, this guy won a Nobel Prize, he is very achievement-oriented. But other people, if their sense of mattering is all about family life or religion, they also think that’s the answer. You have to have their answer. And she has five different categories.
Lindsey: Right. Transcenders and strivers and competitors. So, I felt that overlapped a fair amount with my own attempted categorization of flourishing, right? I talked about projects, relationships, and experiences and-
Postrel: She draws it a little bit finer, but yeah because… No offense, I like yours, but I also think hers by drawing it a little more finely.
Lindsey: No, I agree. So, in particular, she breaks projects up into just achieving something versus being better than somebody.
Postrel: Which is a very big difference in personality type and how you see things.
Lindsey: To get back to the future of employment. In my book, attempting to sketch out a hopeful future, I sketch out one in which I think employment is not as big a deal as it is today. That is… that for lots of people who have interesting, challenging jobs, they’re workaholics and they go at it and they pursue flourishing and mattering that way and awesome. But for a lot of people for whom that’s never been in the cards, I look forward to the possibility of another kind of lifestyle emerging, one that would have to require a cultural break for it to ever get off the ground. It would have to require people really in mass-adopting a kind of threshold earner mentality, that I’m going to earn enough for this standard of living and that standard of living’s enough for me, and then I’m going to devote my time to other stuff. And I imagine that the technologies that we have going on today, particularly AI, are going to make that available sooner rather than later in the coming decades. Whether people take up on it or not, I don’t know. But I think there’s at least the possibility of creating a kind of post-mass employment lifestyle that I think can then circle back around and have real resemblances to the old antebellum period where there, the Republicans, the early Republican Party Republicans had their ideal-
Postrel: Don’t call it the antebellum period, because that sounds like you’re talking about the South. Call it the early…
Lindsey: Okay. Anyway, pre-Civil War America. So, the Republicans, their philosophy was the free labor philosophy. And of course that was drawn in stark contrast to slavery. But they also still had the idea that a wage laborer was at best semi-free, that he was dependent upon the will of somebody else for his support. So, Republicans broke away from that. They said there’s a big difference. He can quit and go work for somebody else. And they also said, “Hey, being subject to the arbitrary will of an employer sometimes beats the hell out of being subject to the arbitrary will of Mother Nature.” So, they upgraded employment, but they still saw wage employment and particularly an impoverished urban working class as something that was Europe’s problem, that we were blessed not to have. And so, they liked the idea that wage employment was just a way station, that you come here, you don’t have any skills, you get a job for a little while, you save up some money, then you go out and you open your shop or you start your own farm. So, in my 21st century/22nd century version of this, a lot of people work for a while, but then they set up being a proprietor of their own life or proprietor of their community – which may have a commercial element, but may not.
Postrel: Well, yeah. So, I think too, if we hadn’t made housing so scarce and we hadn’t tied health insurance to employment, we would pretty much already be at this stage that you’re describing. I have this hairdresser, who I go to twice a year. Anyway, she’s been working since she was 16. She has a ski clothing line that’s a totally separate job. And for a while she started a massage place, too, where part of her gimmick was that she hired people who spoke English, but it was very affordable. And she got completely disgusted with these young people who were… I mean, I got a lot of massages from them and they were very good, but they didn’t have her work ethic. She said, as long as they have their phone, I think she said their phone and their weed, they’re fine. And that’s all the money they care about earning. Now, I don’t know how they live. I mean, this is in LA, but I don’t know where they live. Maybe they live with their parents. So, she was disgusted. But that is a thing. I think there are two tricks in your scenario. It could very well be, and it could very well be good. But one is what people do with their time.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: Because for example, if you say, well, it’s really important to have flow, the psychological state between boredom and anxiety. And that is definitely true. That is a big part of flourishing. One of the very best ways, certainly the easiest way, most accessible way for people to have flow is by playing video games. And when people spend a lot of their time playing video games, even if they play video games with their friends and people like us say, all these people are wasting their lives playing video games.
Lindsey: It’s okay if they’re playing with their friends.
Postrel: Yeah. But what if they’re playing with their online friends or whatever?
Lindsey: It’s a matter of degree, right? It’s just a matter of degree. The dose makes the poison.
Postrel: Right. Of course, that’s the case with anything. So, that’s one thing. And the other thing is at the risk of being ad hominem, and I don’t mean to do, but how much of your adult life have you spent self-employed as opposed to on a salary?
Lindsey: Yeah, none.
Postrel: Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t feel free. There is a constant source of anxiety. I mean, I have more risks…
Lindsey: I’m talking about early retirees mostly, right?
Postrel: Yeah. So, I like to pretend I’m employed, but my income suggests otherwise. So, let me put it that way. I’ve been self-employed since 2000, except for the three years I spent at The Atlantic where I had a half-time salary and, thank God, the world’s best health insurance because I also had cancer. But you are not in charge of your destiny in some sense. I mean, in the way that people who are not self- employed imagine that you are…
Lindsey: Sure.
Postrel: Who’s going to hire me? In my case, where can I pitch this? What can I do? But when I first moved into the condo that I’m talking to you from in 1992, there was a couple who lived across the way from us where the man was a court reporter and had a court reporter business. And the wife used to laugh at people who thought it was so great to have a small business. She was like, “Oh…”
Lindsey: Yeah. I’m picturing graduating from pressing economic considerations, right? Not picturing that cobbling together an Uber gig and a Mechanical Turk gig makes a good life.
Postrel: But I do think that these gig work kinds of things are a great move in that direction.
Lindsey: They create flexibility.
Postrel: Right, right. I mean, I was just being driven around on a trip to this conference I mentioned, going from the airport to the hotel. And one guy was retired from an engineering job and he basically drives Uber because he lives by himself and it’s boring otherwise. He said, “I get up, I exercise.” Then I’ll be like, “What am I going to do today? Oh, I might as well drive.” He plays golf twice a week.
Lindsey: So, what do you make of the inordinate pessimism about AI in the United States? And in particular, the pessimism that it’s going to make us so rich that we don’t have jobs anymore?
Postrel: Unclear on the concept. Yeah.
Lindsey: People are freaked out because they have no idea what they would do with themselves otherwise. Which to me indicates that we have a lot of social reconstruction to do, so that people have an idea of what’s important in life other than working for money.
Postrel: Well, I don’t think that that’s the source of the anxiety around jobs. I think it’s much simpler than that. I think people are just afraid of unemployment and not having money.
Lindsey: It goes beyond that. There’s existential fear of even if there’s a UBI, we’re all just going to be demotivated zombies.
Postrel: It exists, but that is among intellectuals. The general public being afraid about AI and jobs is not like, “Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job. What am I going to do all day just taking money from the government?” I mean, they’re worried, “Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job. How am I going to pay my mortgage and my kids’ tuition and my healthcare bills?” I think it’s just like the Luddites, the original Luddites. They were not idealists. They were just people who didn’t want to lose their jobs, but they benefited from the earlier wave of spinning machines. Anyway, so I think that it’s that. I think that everybody…
Lindsey: Do you have an intuition? Who knows is probably the only honest answer, but do you have an intuition as to whether AI is going to be an engine of income convergence and upgrading the more humbly skilled? Or is it going to be an engine of further inequality, so that there’s a small group of AI superstars who are enabled to do wonders and everyone else becomes… they’ve outsourced their brains to Claude and they’re way off the map.
Postrel: I think first we have to think about what’s already happened pre-AI and why it makes people discontent. We’ve gone through a long period where the poor got richer. The middle class stayed more less the same. The upper middle class got richer and the rich got richer. So, basically you had a lot of people who in the past, when we were kids, would have been middle class who are now, they still probably think of themselves as middle class, but they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, like $400,000 a year and buying very expensive homes. And what’s happened is people’s picture as a result of this, this mass affluence, what used to be a very rarefied lifestyle that did not affect most people’s perceptions of what was normal has become a model of what’s normal. Normal is going on ski vacations multiple times a year. Normal is taking a year abroad when you’re in college. Normal is…
Lindsey: Normal is what I’m seeing on Instagram.
Postrel: Right. Yeah. Normal is what I’m seeing on Instagram, which is glamour. I have a book on that. Doesn’t talk about Instagram because it came out too early. But normal is the lifestyle of people who are in the top 20 percent. Whereas 50 years ago, normal was the lifestyle of the people who are in the middle 50 percent or 40 percent. And so, people who are doing fine by any mid-20th century measure of doing amazing feel resentful because they’re left behind. So, that is the background in which we step into this AI thing. I don’t know. I think what will happen is there will be winners and losers, and it’s not going to all be skewed one way or the other. There’s going to be rearranging. And I think that part of the pessimism today, there are a lot of factors, political polarization, people just generally feeling out of control, aging society, that sort of thing. But it’s also the fact that journalism has been in a depression for 30 years, or for at least 25 years. All the people who are telling you these stories have seen their friends lose their jobs. They’ve lost their jobs…
Lindsey: From technological progress, from the internet.
Postrel: From technological progress. I would be the last person in the world to say the internet hasn’t been wonderful. It’s been fantastic. But it has wreaked havoc with my income. And I’m one of the lucky ones, partly because I spent years writing for Bloomberg, which was paywalled but subsidized. The opinion section was subsidized by the very lucrative Wall Street terminals. But all the people who are writing these stories in the traditional media have seen just absolutely… it’s been like being a steel worker in the ’80s. If you’re not in it, you can’t appreciate how bad it has been. And it’s gone on and on and on also like these Rust Belt industries. And that flavors the way the news is presented. It’s not the only thing going on.
Lindsey: I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair. So, my intuition…
Postrel: By the way, the big contrast is the way AI is perceived in China, which is partly a function of the government, but not really because the AI companies aren’t as controlled by the government and the government, the CCP, is a little nervous about them. But I think it’s because if we’d had AI in 1970 or 1968 or something, Americans would have perceived it through the history of all that post-war growth.
Lindsey: Yes, I think that’s a completely fair point. So, my intuition is that AI is likely to intensify inegalitarian trends. Ever since this transition to a post-industrial service economy, we’ve had what’s called skill-biased technological change. That is, technological progress has tended to increase the relative demand for highly skilled workers and reduce the relative demand for less skilled workers. And there are arguments that AI could go another way, that it could offer a disproportionate step-up to the productivity of the less productive. But my sense is that it’s going to turbocharge people at the top and that a whole lot other people are going to outsource their cognitive abilities to AI and are not going to be in a position to be masters of AI. They’re going to be dependents on it. And my sense is that a whole bunch of currently middle of the road down to scut-level white-collar work is going to get automated, and that is going to reduce relative demand for the bottom half of the white-collar knowledge worker class. So, I think our populist uprising right now is a long brewing reaction to decades of feeling marginalized both economically and culturally on the part of the non-college educated class. And these are the least articulate, hardest to organize people, and they’re causing a lot of commotion right now. So, if a good chunk of the knowledge worker class gets to feeling the same way, then I imagine lots of fireworks politically in the years ahead.
Postrel: Well, I tend to agree with you about low-productivity white-collar jobs. The people who grind out endless stupid press releases and send them to my email box where because they can just blast emails… Once upon a time, you had to get on the phone and call people up and it was painful on both sides if you weren’t interested. And to be honest, I have contempt for these jobs. Not for the people. I don’t know the people, but the jobs are stupid.
Lindsey: No, I do not weep for their passing. I do not.
Postrel: And if they go away because of AI, or if people are not spending their time making PowerPoints, but using AI, that’s one thing. But I think it’s more complicated than what you’re saying because, first of all, you’re going to see AI empowering people who are now not part of the ladder. I was just at this conference with musicians, and at one point early on, actually Charles and I were on a panel with somebody who’s a musician and producer and who’s won Grammy and is a very big shot. And he’s black, which is relevant because at one point, he says, “These tools, the people who are at Princeton are worried about these tools. The people, I don’t know what to call them, urban” – he was using all these euphemisms – “they’re embracing them. They’re using them. They’re doing stuff with them.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
Lindsey: So, we could see a big increase in these physical jobs and with some AI backing to make things easier to do the business in. So, yeah…
Postrel: He was talking about musicians, but yeah. And again, my nephew who has his furniture and contracting business, he uses a lot of AI to run his business. There’s a lot of this, especially among younger people turning to it. But you’re absolutely right. The people who used to just do perfunctory, write lousy papers and get Bs because the professors can’t give them what they deserve, will now use AI to write lousy papers. And I think eventually that’s just going to get weeded out. And my prediction, or I don’t know, I always hate to make predictions, but is that colleges are going to bifurcate and there’s going to be colleges that are about really learning…
Lindsey: Yes, for the life of the mind.
Postrel: College for nerds, the life of the mind. And then there are going to be colleges that are basically finishing schools. You go so that you have a social experience between the ages of 18 and 22. So, you have a chance to grow up, become an adult in a somewhat protected environment where you have football games and parties. And maybe there’s some modicum of something that resembles classes, but it’s not really pretending to educate you. It’s a finishing school. And there is…
Lindsey: Princeton in the early ’80s was a nice combination of the two, wasn’t it?
Postrel: Well, I didn’t do much finishing school stuff. I did go to basketball games, but unlike your legendary Beer Pong skills, I didn’t drink really. I come from a long line of teetotalers and I barely drink. And my friend group was mostly people who didn’t drink much either. So, that’s a different experience. But yeah, I mean, I have a tendency to think that… it’s not that you won’t necessarily have parties and stuff at the ones where it’s life of the mind, but you’re not going to be pretending that the people who are just there for the football – and I don’t mean the athletes, because the athletes are actually learning stuff, they’re learning athletics – the people who are just there for the football games are there for something else. Because why should you with AI?
Lindsey: So, I’d like to see that evolution. I think that would be a hopeful turn. With AI generally, I think the only attitude is just being very ready to change your mind about stuff as new data come in. The uncertainty is massive. The possibilities are exhilarating and terrifying. They’re not boring. So, for people like us, doing our third act in a time of wide-open uncertainty, it’s maybe not what we had in mind, but it’s not boring.
Postrel: Yeah, it’s not boring.
Lindsey: And you’re doing your part to interpret for what’s going on for all of us. And so, keep at it. Virginia, we’re at the end of our time, so I’m going to wrap things up here. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Postrel: Thanks.
