Ben Sasse: prediction

Transcript context

…Wisdom’s too big of a word, but at the level of analytics, we’re not thinking at all, or we’re not thinking nearly aggressively enough about what’s happening as we transition from what I think of as the third-stage economy — industrialization — to this fourth-stage economy, where you’ve gone from hunter-gatherers to agrarianism to industrialization, mass urbanization, mass immigration to this new thing, which we don’t even know how to talk about yet. We don’t have a real name for it. The “postindustrial economy” is the way of throwing in the towel and saying we don’t know what to call this thing, that is, the IT economy, the service economy, the mobile economy, the digital economy. It’s useful to map those economics on top of local community neighborhoods. You had nomads, you had villages, you had urban ethnic neighborhoods, and you have whatever this suburbia-exurbia-mobile thing is. Lots and lots of our problems are that we don’t know what human capital is going to look like in this fourth stage. When you look at a state like mine, it’s a little easier to see what that transition looks like — I mean see what the disruption looks like, not transition, because that implies we know where we’re headed, and we don’t. Nebraska is 93 counties. Long ago before I was a politician — I’m one of five people in the Senate who’s never been a politician before. I’ve never run for anything until I did this, and I used to feel really free to just say whatever I thought, even when I thought it was witty, regardless if it would get me in trouble. And I used to joke that we have 93 counties in Nebraska and 12 of them have people. It turns out people from the other 81 counties don’t like that kind of joke. [laughter] I’m from one of those places, and it’s fun to think you’re from a place that has 80 head of cattle per person. When you parse Nebraska’s 1.9 million people, we have 750,000 basically in metro Omaha, we have 250,000 in Lincoln and a few small towns that it’s swallowing up, and the vast majority of the rest of the state is essentially built along a spine on I-80 or on the Platte River, where you have 25,000-person towns that are where the meat-packing plant is, where the truck dealership is, where the tractor dealership is, where the grain elevator is. There’s a regional hospital in most of these 25,000-person towns. That’s basically the scale, and then all the other places are much, much smaller. The third-largest city in Nebraska, we often joke, is the University of Nebraska–Lincoln football stadium on game day, when we have 95,000 people. But you fall from there to we have a 40,000-person town, then a bunch of 25,000s, and then these communities under 5,000. The vast majority of counties in Nebraska right now are rapidly shrinking, but we don’t understand how much they’re shrinking because we’re unable to account for the age migration inside the county. . The vast majority of counties in Nebraska right now are rapidly shrinking, but we don’t understand how much they’re shrinking because we’re unable to account for the age migration inside the county. In most of our counties, again 70-plus of 93, that are shrinking, the county seat is actually growing, so think about that. The county’s shrinking but the county seat is growing. What’s really happening is 65-, 70-, and 75-year-old farmers are moving to the town where they go out to dinner, or where they play golf, or where the assisted-living facilities are because they’re going to age and they’re going to retire in the community they’re from. But technological substitution for labor on these farms is that — other than the breadbasket of the world — we’re getting more and more agricultural productivity out of these counties than ever before in human history, but with rapidly diminishing labor inputs. I don’t think we’ve given much thought at all to what it looks like to think about these towns when you go from being a class B or a class C school to being a place that might not have many kids at all. I don’t think we’re thinking about the ex-urbanization of America as a reclustering around 100 to 250 towns in the country, or cities, but that’s really a lot of what’s happening right now. So there’s no wisdom there, but there’s analytics because you can see a lot of places in Nebraska that are rapidly going to shrink when this generation dies. You have a PhD in history from Yale University, American history, and I’m sure you’re familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner. This idea of a Turner thesis: America being shaped by its interaction with the frontier. In the physical sense, that frontier would appear to be closed; we’re not in the middle of the space race anymore. What today do you see as the American frontier that’s still shaping our dynamism?…

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