Byrne Hobart: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Musk example is similar to how some people will load up a horribly broken game of Civ where their civilization is losing. They’ve gotten so good at the game that they just need some noob to send them their save file which is complete carnage and they're losing their cities and then the fun is in loading it up and trying to win anyways. One thing you've written about that I find really interesting is — we're both fans of Fukuyama's book The End of History and the last quarter of that book completely contradicts the first three quarters of the book where he's just saying that these men at the end of history are pathetic last men who have no desire for recognition. They just want to be comfortable. You've made the comparison with that and big tech, at least before the crash. One of the things Fukuyama talks about in the book is — Once there is a great war, once there is a struggle that requires the first men of history who can withstand adversity and can accomplish great things, you won't have them around by the time when things have gotten comfortable for a while. Are there enough first men left in companies like Twitter and Facebook now that they do face adversity? That they can just reboot and go into wartime again? Yeah, I suspect there are. I think Tolkien gets it right that even if someone is born a Hobbit and they live in Hobbiton and have a nice comfortable life, they still have that capacity and yearning for adventure. And that in the right circumstances they will rise to the occasion and go ahead and do it. This seems to happen with a lot of countries when they face these great stresses. Sometimes a civilization just can't withstand it and it collapses and the sea people just take everything and then you have no civilization left and you're all just back to subsistence farming. But in a lot of other cases, even if they ultimately don't survive, they go through a very long decline because they do fight to maintain what they have for an extended period. It's hard to think of a mechanism by which you can eradicate that thirst for glory and that ability to rise to the occasion, unless it's like microplastics or something. Maybe that does constitute the end of history in which case hopefully we exported up enough microplastics to make sure that we don't have any last pockets of thumos. Sort of like the Scott Alexander riff about the steppe nomad invasion risk where it's an existential risk that comes along every couple hundred years. Yeah, you want to avoid that. I think part of having that kind of thumos and thirst for glory should be that you can't be so habituated to a life of ease and comfort and lack of difficulty that you just won't actually respond appropriately when there's an external threat that you need to respond to. Maybe you weren't first man material after all if you can't and you just want to stay on your couch. I'm sure we can sort of deplete that reserve. Post World War II U.S. was definitely a country where there were a lot more people who had taken very serious risks they've gone through a lot of hardship. I recently read a book The Economics of World War II which was comparing a bunch of countries and how their economies performed in World War II and one of the things that stood out about the U.S was that in a lot of terms of material consumption, the U.S didn't really look like a country going through a war. In most other countries you saw this decline in literally how much food people had to eat. Especially how much protein and fat they had to eat. Calorie intake had dropped by like a third in a lot of places by the end of the war but in the U.S calorie consumption actually went up. So on the home front, the U.S was inconvenienced by the war and things like gas and tires were hard to get, but people were still eating well whereas in a lot of other parts of the world people were literally going hungry so that their country could continue to fight the war. gas and tires were hard to get, but people were still eating well whereas in a lot of other parts of the world people were literally going hungry so that their country could continue to fight the war. Maybe there's some level of hermetic response where you you suffer a bit because your country is contributing to this and then you're heartier for it and the country has accumulated a lot of social capital and you had to get really good at organizing and building things and then maybe there is some level of suffering from conflict where you've totally had enough and you're never doing anything like that ever again and you're just too done. I think one of the interesting things to consider is the extent to which different countries fit into that model. I'm very interested in Japan and Japanese industrial policy and how the Japanese post-war recovery went and one of the annoying things about that is that I thought the question was — How did Japan have this wonderful post-war recovery? But when you look at a lot of the institutions involved, they don't start in 1945 or 1951 or whatever. They actually started before World War II. So you can actually sort of see World War II as part of this arc of the same historical process that continued post-war which is Japan wanted to be economically self-sufficient and independent and a country that could determine its own fate and during the last gasp of imperialism, one way to do that was invade countries with lots of natural resources, take those resources and then manufacture things at home. But when that became untenable then the next best option was be within the sphere of influence of the most powerful military in the world and be very closely tied to their import and export markets and then import everything you need under the protection of the US military and then export things to the US in order to pay for those imports. Basically run the same strategy just with someone else during the military part. In one sense that was a total defeat of the imperialist model and in another sense it was this strategic realignment but actually basically the same end goal. Very different external facing view of that goal but same ultimate idea. There's a book called Princess of the Yen which is mostly about Japanese central banking policy but it has some early bits about how the structure of Japan's economy works. The way the author describes it is that post-war Japan had a war economy in peacetime with lots of centralized control, suppressed consumption, and lots of heavy industry, heavy manufacturing. The modern structure of a lot of companies in Japan dates back to the wartime period, sometimes the post-war period. This includes the biggest advertising agency in Japan that was apparently a wartime, or immediately pre-war, attempt to agglomerate all the smaller ad companies into one big more efficient company that would free up resources that could be used for building battleships and other stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of the same story just being expressed in a bunch of different ways.…

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