What Will America Be Like in 2050?
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What do you think America will be like in 2050?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
The coronavirus pandemic led to a dramatic increase in the number of people who work from home, followed by more recent attempts by many firms to get their employees back into the office.
What does the future hold?
The economist Alex Tabarrok argues that work-from-home appears to be a permanent and beneficial change in how work is structured, and that it won’t reduce productivity in the long run:
It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work from home (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits.
We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home … shifting from input metrics––do you show up?––to output metrics–did the work get done? … Workers value the option to work from home and many firms now advertise the options for hybrid work as a benefit … Work from home appears to have stabilized at around 25% of work days overall and stunningly, nearly 40% of work days for college educated workers!
What Is “Solarpunk”?
Brink Lindsey points us to a definition:
Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.
Lindsey expounds on that definition:
The “solar” part of the name is clear enough: the movement envisions a future built around clean energy … But what about “punk”—what’s that supposed to mean? It suggests an oppositional, countercultural stance: egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, frequently anti-capitalist, or at least anti-consumerist throwaway culture. Though the solarpunk idea is still too new and amorphous to have any rigorous ideological framework, it definitely gives off a left-wing vibe. You can see a clear solarpunk sensibility in the works of some prominent left-leaning sci fi writers: just mentioning books I’ve read, I’d include Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson and Makers and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during a recent live Q&A session on Instagram, spoke out against climate doomerism and called herself a big believer in the optimism of solarpunk. Unsurprisingly, the hostility to capitalism doesn’t appeal to people on the right, nor does the endorsement of self-proclaimed democratic socialists like AOC.
Lindsey is a fan of capitalism, yet urges those who agree with him to refrain from rejecting solarpunk:
These days I’m a “lumper,” not a “splitter,” actively seeking ways to combine and synthesize apparently incongruous ideas … So let’s look at the core of the solarpunk vision, stripped of the ideological baggage that some people attracted to that vision have brought with them. At the heart of solarpunk is the idea of an environmentally sustainable high-tech future—and that’s the right idea! And it’s the right idea not just because we don’t want to wreck the planet, but because we don’t want to wreck technological dynamism, either. The only way to put the anti-Promethean backlash behind us is to develop technologies that allow humanity and the natural world to prosper together, thereby undermining the indiscriminate cultural hostility to technological progress that currently bogs us down. This is the future that solarpunk envisions. To get to that future, we need as many people as possible to find it attractive enough to work toward, and to fill out those numbers we need people from all ideological starting points.
Beyond this core commitment to clean energy abundance, solarpunk also clearly embraces a countercultural sensibility—an opposition to business-as-usual consumerism. And that’s the right idea, too! But both solarpunk proponents who embrace it as a new species of anti-capitalism, and supporters of technocratic capitalist innovation who reject solarpunk for the same reason, are misunderstanding what is the optimal relationship between solarpunk and capitalism: not either-or, but both-and.
A Slippage Into Social Psychology
In a bygone newsletter, I highlighted Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic essay “I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up,” where he argued: “Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness … contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.”
How was his essay received?
In a podcast interview with the economist Glenn Loury, Harper shared that his article was mostly well received, while the closest he got to negative feedback was from readers who complained that although he might not want to talk about race all the time, a number of people do. “Some of my Black friends want to talk about it a lot,” they told Harper. “Others of my Black friends don’t seem to.”
His response:
My response is, you’ve got to treat them like people. So much of the anxiety around interracial social etiquette is that white people feel a profound and overwhelming guilt and sense of powerlessness, but also complicity at what they see as American history and ongoing problems around police brutality, or whatever. And they just want someone to tell them what to do. They want a fixed set of rules so they can do the thing they’re supposed to do to make them not racist. I’m a big fan of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and he had this great line where he wrote, “Neurosis has the structure of a question.” What he means is that people who are neurotic experience their whole world as anxiety about who they are and their place within the social order. What do authorities want from me? What does my boss want from me? What am I supposed to do? And they’re constantly anxious about who they are and what to do.
And here comes anti-racism and DEI and [it] says: Here’s the fixed set of rules you can follow that will mean you’re not racist––and that also signals to everyone else that you’re not racist. So the main pushback I’ve gotten is, Some Black people do want me to talk about race; other people don’t. How am I supposed to know? And I think this expresses an anxiety about an absence of rules. If we pulled back from this particular kind of interpersonal anti-racism, people would have to exercise judgments and take cues from Black folks about when they do and do not want to talk about race. The point I’ve made is, Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, and I’ll let you know when I do. But I think that makes people deeply uncomfortable because they would have to exercise judgment.
Loury responded with a question. You reject color-blindness in public policy while advocating for a de-emphasis on race in social intercourse, he told his guest. “Can you really have it both ways?” Loury asked. “Aren’t those things symbiotically intertwined with one another? If we do policy in terms of race, don’t we perforce invite personal relations in terms of race?”
Harper responded by noting that history affords examples of laws that were ostensibly race-neutral yet had racially unequal effects, justifying some skepticism of color-blindness in public policy.
“That’s a really different argument from saying that interpersonally, between two friends or colleagues around the water cooler, it’s racist not to acknowledge racial difference and that professing not to see color is a dog whistle,” Harper said. “On this last point, Coleman Hughes has been really good. He points out that there’s this case of terminal literalism a lot of people get where they say, Obviously you see color. You have two eyes in your head. The brain picks up race within milliseconds. And that’s not what anyone means when they say “I don’t see color.” They mean I try to treat everyone the same … There’s a huge difference between that and saying that we shouldn’t aspire to treat everyone the same in our interpersonal interactions. I don’t deny that there are examples, particularly in workplaces, where that can be a very difficult line to straddle. Nonetheless I think we used to straddle it more than we do now … There’s been this metastasis of critiques of color-blindness that’s gone from a political claim about how certain race-neutral laws aren’t race neutral to color-blindness as such is bad. And it’s this slippage from politics to social psychology that I find both bizarre and a kind of mismatch.”
Provocation of the Week
In an appearance at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., the novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discussed censoriousness, self-censorship, and their effects on artistic creation.
Some excerpts of her words:
Ayad Akhtar, who’s this writer I really admire, says that there’s a moral stridency in the way that we respond to speech, and that there’s something punitive about it. I think it’s true. I think people are afraid and self-censor. The single story—they then impose it on themselves. You have people who now increasingly think that you cannot write about experiences that you have not personally had. And I think that’s terrible for literature and for the idea of an imagination that is allowed to grow and soar. I don’t think that there’s any human endeavor that requires freedom as much as creativity does. I worry that what we’re looking at is the end of curiosity, the end of creativity, the end of learning, even …
It seems to me that there is a massive decline today in compassion and in moral courage. And I think that, in some ways, both are connected. On social media, there’s an expectation that you will not get compassion: You tweet something, and then people are coming at you, even your friends. I think it makes people hold back. And then, of course, the moral-courage part of it is that there are people who could speak up, and they don’t. I think what’s happening now—the books that are not being published; you open the newspapers and often there’s someone who’s been dropped from something—it’s often not because those in positions of authority really believe that what has been said was bad. It’s because they’re afraid of themselves being attacked.
With this kind of social censure hanging over people, it’s so much more difficult, I think, to create, to write … Even in the small space of a workshop—I constantly have to say to people, It’s okay. You can actually write that. Because you can see that they’re very worried about what the people in the workshop are going to think. I wish people would read more, and particularly read more imaginative writing. I think maybe it would make us a bit more compassionate …
What are we saying to ourselves about the self-censorship that we are promoting? There’s a sense in which on the left, it’s so easy to fall short of expectations. You’re supposed to know everything, right? And you’re supposed to know the right language to use. You’re not expected to ask questions. I think if more of us decided that we were going to, for example, be less vicious, a bit more compassionate, you know, maybe be more charitable when somebody says something, then maybe the tone on social media would change a bit …
Maybe the literature we produce will be a bit less narrow. You know, I don’t really find contemporary fiction very interesting … I’m constantly buying books … especially first novels. But I almost never finish them. I remember recently reading this book, and I thought, My God, everybody is good in this book. And that’s a lie. Literature should show us all sides of ourselves. And I read this book, and everyone was ideologically correct. Everyone had all the right opinions. I mean, I love this expression from H. G. Wells, that literature should be about the jolly coarseness of life … Just the coarseness of life will do.
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