Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Storrs? Yes. Josh Storrs Hall. He’s got an entire section in that book where he is arguing that one reason we have simply ceased inventing and ceased having the heroic entrepreneurial energy to invent, is that we are not sufficiently exposed. Countries are not sufficiently exposed to invasion anymore. He basically says, look, for much of human history, before we had all this annoying liberal internationalism, if you were an underperforming society, you could simply be swallowed up by the overperforming society next door. Now we don’t let that happen, and that allows a softness and stagnation to take root and infect societies. I just think if that were true, among other things America would not be as dynamic a society as it is because we are much less exposed to invasion. Whereas a lot of societies that existed under that kind of martial threat and for that reason, have ended up with very martial cultures, at least for long periods of time, don’t seem to have that dynamism. I don’t think we would look at a bunch of the countries in Africa that have been fighting wars for some decades now on and off and say, “Wow, that’s amazing state capacity there. ” I think there’s something wrong with this theory because I don’t think it predicts enough about what societies are doing well, and what societies are doing poorly, and in what ways. What should the US federal government do to prepare for AGI? We should just lay off people, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.