A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM)

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple hundred years ago a series of new technologies (steam, electricity, chemistry, mining, etc.) shifted the constraint again, away from land to capital. By capital I mean the physical capital of the Industrial Age, such as factories, buildings, and roads. More recently with the advent of digital technology (computers, packet-switched networks) the constraint has shifted yet again, away from capital to attention.

In the book I note that each of the two prior transitions came with dramatic changes to how humanity lives. In the transition from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age we went from being nomadic to sedentary, from flat tribal societies to extremely hierarchical feudal societies, from promiscuity to monogamy, from animistic religions to theistic ones. In the transition from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age we went from living in the country to living in the city, from large extended families to nuclear families or no family at all, from commons to private property (including private intellectual property) and from great-chain-of-being theologies to the Protestant work ethic. I then go on to make the argument that we need a similarly dramatic set of changes to get from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age, which explains why the incrementalist changes pursued in most developed societies have fallen far short. I then propose three increases to freedom — economic, informational and psychological — to help us with the adjustment that’s needed.

I have been happy with this characterization of the role of technology in human affairs. Big technological shifts change the binding constraint on humanity, which results in large scale reorganization of how humans live. What I have been struggling with is to what degree we can understand the features of those reorganizations. While they make a lot of sense ex-post, we are now finding ourselves in the midst of one and would therefore ideally learn from history. This is particularly important for two reasons. First, in the past transitions we often wandered in the dark for long periods before finding a successful model (those periods were often marked by extreme violence through revolutions, wars as well as mass death from disease and starvation). Second, in the current transition we don’t have a lot of time as we are faced with the ever accelerating climate crisis.

This is where I now feel I have had another breakthrough in thinking, which resulted in a “Duh” forehead slap. The first part of the answer is of course “incentives.” That much I had thought all along but the missing piece was considering why incentives had to change and that’s where measurement comes in. So here we go.

In the Forager Age, when the constraint was food, the measurement problem was almost trivial: everyone in a tribe sees how much food the hunters and gatherers bring back! It is either enough to feed everyone or not. In so-called immediate return societies (which had no storage) that’s literally all there is to it. With a bit of storage the story gets slightly more complicated but really not by much. I believe this explains many of the features of successful foraging tribal societies including the flat hierarchy and the equality of sharing.

In the Agrarian Age, when the constraint was land, the measurement problem got significantly harder: you can really only tell at harvest time (thus only once per year in many regions of the world) how well off a society will be. Again, I believe that this explains many of the features of successful agrarian societies, in particular the need for a lot of structure and strict rule following. It is crucial to keep in mind that these societies were essentially pre-scientific. So they had to find what works by trial and error. When they found a rule that seemed to work they wanted to stick with it and hard code it (much of this happened via the theistic religions).

In the Industrial Age, when the constraint was capital, the measurement problem got even harder. How do you know where a factory should be built and what it should produce? It might take years of process and product innovation to put physical capital together that is actually truly productive. I believe this explains much of the success of the market-based model, especially when contrasted with planned economies. Effectively the solution to the incentive problem moved from static rules to a dynamic process which allows for many experiments to take place and only a few of those to succeed.

So far we have seen how the prior shifts from food to land and then from land to capital corresponded to massive increases in the difficulty of the measurement problem. We went from nearly immediate measurement (Forager Age) to yearly (Agrarian Age) to multi-year (Industrial Age). This brings us to the current transition from capital to attention as the binding constraint.

While I don’t claim to know what the features of successful Knowledge Age societies will be, it is clear now that the measurement problem for attention exists on a decadal or potentially even hundred year scale. Take the current coronavirus pandemic. The last prior pandemic of similar scale, including economic impact, was the Spanish Flu about one hundred years ago. So as a society you may only find out if you have paid enough attention to pandemic preparedness every hundred years. It gets even worse when you think about a big asteroid strike on earth. Those happen roughly every million of years.

This is also true from the perspective of the individual. If you commit your attention to some artistic endeavor or research program. When will you know if your attention was well spent? Often not within your own lifetime. Some art that we today recognize as magnificent as well as science which we regard as transformative was dismissed, considered fringe or even actively fought for decades. And conversely, much of what was popular in the moment has not withstood the test of time.

The allocation of attention cannot and therefore should not take place on the basis of near term measurement. Markets are good for the multi-year measurement problem of capital but terrible for the much longer timescale one of attention. Much of World After Capital is about how to free humans up to allocate their attention as they see fit outside of any near term measurement system. Free to allocate their attention to what they believe will stand the test of time. One super important question that flows immediately from this, which World After Capital does not (yet) answer, is how that can result in enough attention on topics such as pandemic disease or the climate crisis.

PS History and society have tons of detailed events and features that are not explained by any of this – my concern is strictly with what I perceive as a very large scale pattern.