Balaji Srinivasan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Some parents would say there’s a potential maybe addiction risk, if that’s the right word, or maybe an attention risk. Then on the plus side, there’s a lot more information, more freedom of thought. If you’re an unusual child, you can connect with others like you more readily. How much do you think we know now those are positive tradeoffs? I think that, on balance, it’s more upside, more downside, like everything technology is doing. That’s my one-liner for the future: more upside, more downside. In this context, of course, downsides are obvious. You have kids who are less able to make eye contact because they’re staring at a screen all day. Literally maybe, their eye physically can’t focus at medium distance as much anymore. You’ve got kids who — it’s harder for them to focus on books and to do deep reading because they’re constantly distracted by all these notifications. The downsides are obvious. The upsides, of course, are that you have access to the Library of Alexandria for free any time. If you’re really good at math or computer science or have any interest like that, you can actually find other people. You’re not forced into this one-size-fits-all 12 years of quasi-jail that modern American public schools are. Instead you can self-educate and self-advance and level up. So on balance, I think it’s probably better. It’s probably positive on net. Though we want to figure out some way to ameliorate those downsides. You’ve given a very famous talk, or several talks actually, on the ideas of exit and voice in the global community — the idea that your ability to leave a government can induce liberty and wealth-creating policies. If we have a theory where exit is important as a source of liberty, how do we explain that liberty seems to be declining in all of the world’s leaders, or most of them?…

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