This is Part 2 on Albert Wenger’s book World After Capital.
In the first post, I introduced six primary points underpinning Wenger’s thesis. As I’ve thought about them more, I think the core arguments can be further distilled into the following four components:
We’ve entered a new era in human history — Thanks to digital technology, the industrial era (1800-1990) has ended, and we are 30 years into the next epoch — the knowledge era.
What was scarce in the former era is abundant in the new era — In the industrial era, capital was scarce. In the knowledge era, capital is sufficient, and it is attention that is scarce.
Attention scarcity puts knowledge at risk — As capital becomes less scarce in the knowledge era, people are increasingly free to pursue personal meaning, something that the industrial era had little use for. Ironically, more free time doesn’t guarantee the expansion in individual & collective knowledge. In fact, there’s substantial risk of the inverse, that attention will grow scarcer, and with it, the knowledge & focus necessary to innovate successfully.
Capitalism alone can’t solve the problem — Market capitalism made capital sufficient, but on its own, is ill-equipped to avert a crisis of attention for three reasons. First, the problem of missing prices makes it impossible for capitalism to effectively allocate attention. Second, companies are still incentivized to capture the vast majority of human attention in the industrial era job loop, selling labor to buy goods and services. Third, power laws that determine the distribution of income and wealth are being rapidly accelerated by digital technology, thereby decoupling GDP growth from household income growth (e.g. stagnant wages). Too much wealth concentration ends up being economically corrosive, again making it difficult to deepen the knowledge & expand the focus necessary to innovate successfully.
In part 2, I want to visualize Wenger’s future through the lens of a child born in the U.S. in the spring of 2021.
18 Years Old in 2039
The year is 2039. You are 18 and were born in 2021, a COVID baby, as it were.
Life is fundamentally digital and physical. The reality, long-since established is that there is no social life without social media, which has served you in a multitude of ways:
made you aware of the vast variety of human experience
produced thousands of times over the emotions of anger, jealousy, happiness, disgust, fear, and surprise
provided an incredible medium for free self-expression
driven you throughout your childhood to participate in digital technology through back-end architectural pursuits (e.g. you’ve learned how to code) and through front-end, interactive pursuits (e.g. you’re a content creator)
28 Years Old and Economically Free
Now look out to 2049.
Your days typically take the following shape:
Code for 3-4 hours as a contractor for a large company in the morning.
Video calls with therapy clients for 3-4 hours from noon through late afternoon.
3-4 hours of homework/study for your doctorate in the early evening.
4-7 hours of leisure time, often spent with friends or consuming digital content (films, shows, games, virtual realities, listening rooms, podcasts, etc).
With work, entertainment, socializing, and downtime, you’re averaging more than 16 hours a day consuming digital media across a variety of devices.
Your annual income is $150,000+, thanks in large part to your software development contracting and the $3,000/mo UBI check you receive from the U.S. government via the recently passed Economic Freedom Act.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
In 2043, you graduated from college with degrees in psychology and computer science.
In your sophomore year, you started working as a software developer for a large multinational corporation that paid your tuition in exchange for the work.
In your junior year, you had a couple of friends deal with severe depression and became intent on finding work that would feel personally meaningful over the long-term. You chose to add psychology as a double major.
Your rationale was three-fold:
Coding would provide the intellectual reward of constant problem solving, while also producing a certain income security.
Income security from software development would allow you to also pursue psychology without depending on psychology to pay the bills.
Psychology would provide deep personal meaning, by helping to stem the tide of the depression epidemic that had been growing in breadth and intensity throughout your lifetime.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. A Wengensian Scenario
By 28, money feels sufficient, and beyond that sense of security, you feel purpose, poise, and meaning. You feel your knowledge compounding every day, and the world feels abundant.
But when you look around, you see everywhere the source of your inspiration to pursue psychology. You see a second world, a world in which millions of people are amusing themselves to death, seem to be living lives devoid of meaning and knowledge, syncing daily into purely consumptive existences.
When Wenger concludes that capital is sufficient, and that it’s attention that is constrained, he’s describing a future that resembles the stark duality of the scenario above.
There are two implications here:
That when capital is no longer scarce, we have more freedom to pursue personal meaning, a pursuit that has the powerful benefit of deep learning and the compounding knowledge necessary to mitigate the major challenges of 21st century life.
That when attention is scarce, we need to enact policies that ensure the protection of our attention, just as we have enacted policies to ensure the protection of our health (e.g. food ingredient labels, drug warning labels, clean air and water acts, etc).
Otherwise, Wenger argues, two things will happen; 1) companies incentivized to capture our attention and create addictions will succeed in the pursuit; and 2) robbed of our attention, we’ll struggle attain the depth of knowledge and breadth of focus we need to combat the major challenges facing our society.
Closing thoughts
I had intended to write 2 posts about World After Capital, but am finding it hard to merely synthesize the work, and that I am increasingly interested in exploring the implications, complications, and biases imbued in the arguments.
I’m going to take a break from WAC for a bit, but for a few reasons, I may write again on the ideas in this book:
// They touch on powerful narrative competitions that define human experience: abundance vs. constraint; finite games vs. infinite games; cultures of invention vs. cultures of nostalgia; pluralism vs. absolutism; promethianism vs. pastoralism.
// They are not easy and require grappling with— especially the idea that capital will no longer be scarce, or in other words, that everyone will have sufficient capital to meet their needs. There’s a lot to dive into here. As someone I recently discussed this with said, “capital may not be scarce when you’re the owner of a $10M SaaS business, but I can think of dozens of other scenarios where capital feels and is extremely scarce for people.”
// They ask readers to examine what role the past plays in shaping the future — Any argument that attempts to make the claim, “it’s different this time,” has to consider how the argument holds up in the face of seemingly predictable and proven historical cycles.