When hanging out with my nerdier internet friends, conversations about politics, policy, or the overall direction of society often follow the same structure. First, there will be an acknowledgment, asking us all to recognize that we live in the best time in human history; then, they will advocate for a set of policies that aim to achieve the highest possible GDP growth. The underlying assumption seems to be that if we can just keep pushing that number higher, both nationally and globally, we’ll be significantly better off.
More recently, instead of engaging in debates about specific policies or ideologies, I’ve taken to steering these conversations in a different direction: towards utopia.
The focus on GDP as the ultimate measure of societal progress is, in many ways, understandable. For nearly all of human history, increases in economic output and productivity have indeed translated into meaningful improvements in human flourishing. And if you did need to leverage a single metric to understand our trajectory, GDP (or some variant of it) would likely be the best choice.
But I think this correlation no longer holds in a meaningful way in the West. Once we reached the level of wealth experienced by Western nations in the 1960s, this correlation stopped being a meaningful indicator — and when countries increase their wealth or productivity beyond this point, it seems to no longer meaningfully bring about increases in wellbeing.
Understanding Utopia
Before explaining why I talk about utopia, it’s probably helpful to first explain a bit more about utopia. Utopia is a weird thing to understand, and most people have never seriously thought about it before, so here’s my short summary of how I view it.
Trying to envision what a utopia looks like has lots of thorny problems. In the more Christian heavenly version, where utopia is a place similar to our lives but where everything is just fantastic with no badness, we run into seemingly intractable problems. For example: if you play soccer, can you lose a game? Can you get injured while playing? Can other people be better than you in a way that makes you want to improve?
Another view of utopia, closer to the Jewish idea of the World to Come, is a future that is incomprehensible to us, where we just bask in the glory of the divine presence of some sort. This looks suspiciously like what transhumanists call “wireheading”—direct stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers (or something similar to doing lots of heroin), which most of us intuitively reject as an unfulfilling existence.
There’s also a form of effective altruist long-termist utopia that, instead of appealing to what current humans can appreciate, appeals to a successor to humans, who can experience more advanced forms of enrichment than we currently do. In the same way humans don’t want a monkey utopia filled with bananas, this also doesn’t align with my desires.
Typically when I talk about utopia, I find the more one tries to grasp what utopia may look like, the less they believe it’s a coherent concept or meaningful aspiration.
We’re Already There (Almost)
However, I think if you were able to communicate with someone who lived in the past, or in a very dysfunctional underdeveloped country today, utopia would be a very coherent aspiration. People’s lives were so difficult, filled with so much struggle and terrible experiences, that a world where all of their material problems were solved would actually be a completely different reality than the one they were living in.
I strongly believe that we already live in a world remarkably close to utopia, at least in terms of material abundance. The reason why many find the concept of utopia incoherent today is because it is nearly indistinguishable from our current reality.
Through modernity, we’ve given humans living in the West protection from the elements, an unlimited supply of food (and nearly all other resources), and protection from most diseases and illnesses that plagued us throughout history. This is so significant that pretty much no matter what improvements we have to make, it barely takes us any further. For F’s sake, we’ve even recently given everyone access to all the art ever produced in the world, available on demand, essentially for free, and yet it failed to push the needle, even the slightest.
Yes, there are still improvements to be made, which is why I think we’re at something like 99% of the way to a material utopia and not 100%. When we can enable all humans in the West to live healthy lives until 120ish, while bringing Western living standards to the entire world, we would be at, in my opinion, 100% of a materialistic utopia. However, the remaining gains to be had, compared to the changes of the past, feel like rather insignificant improvements rather than taking us to a materially different future.
The Real Challenge: Social and Psychological Enrichment
If we’ve largely solved the problem of material utopia, why doesn’t it feel like we’re living in utopia? This is where forcing people to confront utopia becomes truly valuable. It forces us to confront the fact that the things that separate our world from a true utopia are not primarily material, but social and psychological: greater personal equanimity, more compassion, fewer status competitions, stronger families and communities, a healthier lifestyle, more autonomy and purpose, greater equality of dignity, more emphasis on meaningful experiences and relationships.
This realization helps explain why I find traditional political discussions unsatisfying. Most political ideologies and policy proposals are still operating within the paradigm of material improvement. They’re trying to solve problems that, in the grand scheme of things, have already been largely solved, instead of focusing on the low-hanging fruit of social and psychological enrichment.
This is not to say that we should abandon practical efforts to improve the world. There’s still important work to be done in curing disease and distributing our utopian conditions to the whole world. But alongside these efforts, we need a parallel track of cultural and social innovation asking questions like: How do we create communities and norms that foster genuine human flourishing? How do we shift our culture away from zero-sum status games and towards more collaborative, fulfilling pursuits?
A Confusing Path Forward
Aside from some basic policy changes, I’m actually pretty uncertain on what this means for our political future. In our ever-increasing secular world, we rely on the state for pretty much all societal enhancements, but a lot of this project seems like a poor fit for the state.
In the past, religions played a crucial role in shaping values and social norms. With the decline of traditional religious belief in many societies, and modern cultural influencers being more focused on enhancing their own power, status and weird diets, I’m not sure how we meaningfully bring about cultural and social changes within our society. Perhaps what we need instead is a proliferation of “neo-religions”—secular movements and communities dedicated to exploring and promoting particular visions of the good life — but I really don’t know.
So, yeah — since I believe we already pretty much live in utopia, at least materially, yet most people aren’t very ecstatic with their lives, it seems like our direction should be more focused on making people actually feel like they live in utopia, rather than a blind devotion to increasing GDP.
I think you’re a little too optimistic on our material progress and a little too pessimistic on our social progress. And while I will concede that they don’t logically need to go hand in hand, I think there’s something important to the historical relationship between social and material progress.
But before I get into that I will explain roughly what I mean by utopia. This won’t be a philosophically precise definition, but it goes something like: everyone spends the large majority of their time during the large majority of their life doing something that they find enjoyable or meaningful. Call this universal autonomy, or universal opportunity, or whatever.
Now I don’t think this describes modern society, even in the wealthiest developed countries. My sense, which is not grounded in any empirical evidence, is that this describes something like a sixth to a quarter of the population in developed nations. And while there are significant social aspects to this, I think a major impediment to achieving what I’ve described as utopia is that we would need much more material advancement to make employment more autonomous/fulfilling/etc for the majority of people.
I do also want to push back a bit of your characterization that material progress since the 1960s (or equivalent GDP for later developing countries) is no longer correlated with human flourishing. There are more and less quantitative ways of looking at this. Life expectancy in developed countries is up about 10 years since the 1960s. Child mortality is down 70-80%. As you might expect, I’m relying on our world in data for that.
Less quantitatively, advances in medicine since then are significant. Cancer survival rates are way up, heart disease survival rates are up, vaccination for many diseases are now routine in ways they weren’t in the 60s. Even within my lifetime, those numbers have still been going up. There’s no more chickenpox. And we’re on the threshold of a new era of rapid biomedical progress in vaccines and gene therapy.
Improvements to the local environment are considerable (air and water pollution) compared to the 60s, though things are improving seemingly more slowly than during the transition from the 50s to say the 80s.
Lastly on the material front, I think you were too quick to dismiss the widespread availability of art and entertainment. I personally think it’s fair that if you are an art or music or theatre or literature enthusiast that we are living in a better world. Not only in terms of what’s being produced and what you can see in person today, but in terms of access to all that’s come before. I think if you asked an art lover whether you’d trade their position for some recent decade, that unless they were trying to meet an individual artist, they would say no.
On the social/personal front, I do agree that it’s odd that people’s self reported happiness has not improved with the objective improvements in material well being I described above. I am sure there’s a research literature on this, but I don’t know it. My synthesis of the information I have is that people are indeed happier than in the past, but by not as much as you would expect based solely in material progress.
So I take your point that as we get richer we should focus more and more on social and psychological wellbeing. But I think that roughly describes what we have been doing. I think compared to recent decades, mental health awareness and treatment is improving, and my subjective perspective is that improvement is accelerating. I don’t think anyone would prefer mental health treatment from, say, the 80s to today.
The last few decades have had a very noticeable focus on improving the social and psychological wellbeing of previously marginalized or low status groups. But you’ve read that before, I won’t belabour the point.
To some topics you’ve mentioned before, I think it has never been easier to find like minded communities and romantic partners, avoid playing status games, or leave communities where your status is low or threatened (or leave violent situations). Now it is also easier to play status games if you want to, but to me that comes hand in hand with the benefits above. And I’m happier with the current balance than what existed in the more small town past.
Now more speculatively, I want to posit that the social improvements I mentioned above (assuming you agree they are improvements) are indirectly the result of material improvement. That people are spending more of their time thinking about social and psychological improvement because their material situation continues to improve. And I would expect that to continue as we get wealthier.
I want to make it clear I am not a GDP maximalist, but it seems to me like we’re close to 20% to material utopia than 99%, and I expect that getting to material utopia would go a long way towards social and psychological wellbeing as well.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response, Damien.
First, I think it’s important to state that I agree with nearly all of what you wrote. I think the big distinction is how we create a narrative around these facts, which influences what type of path forward we want for the future.
I guess the crux of my point is that, in my view, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit in aiming future policy more towards flourishing-enhancing metrics than GDP-enhancing metrics, on the margin. I believe this is severely underrated in our circles.
A paradoxical component of this is that I actually believe by focusing more on welfare-enhancing policy, it will make people more inclined to support markets and efficient policy, because the gains of good policy are more clear. Whereas now, I think one of the primary reasons people support such dumb and inefficient policy outcomes is because people do not believe they will experience any meaningful benefit from having better/more efficient policy.
In terms of specifics, I think there is this central dynamic to highlight:
We have much more choice, but worse defaults. If you are an optimizer, you can do much better than you ever could do in the past. One of the challenges with the modern dynamic is that embedded within any activity we do are all these illegible components which are often lost when we abstract them.
Let’s imagine Fred who lives in Owen Sound, and everyone in his community is going to see the Owen Sound Attack play all their home games, and it’s a big social outing. But Fred actually prefers watching basketball over hockey, and in fact, his favourite team is the New York Knicks. Now instead of watching the OS Attack games in person with his community, he is watching all the Knicks games, home alone, while engaging with a fan forum. While it’s literally true he prefers watching the Knicks to the Attack, he is actually losing out a lot in making this choice (this also harms his local community as well) because the lost socialization/shared context is almost certainly greater than the marginal benefit of consuming NYKnicks over bad hockey.
In my opinion, Toronto is the best food city in the world — you can buy EVERYTHING here at a high quality. But it’s also the case that huge amounts of young people in Toronto don’t know how to cook anything!!! (And the median quality food at a store/restaurant is garbage compared to most places in the world.) I believe this is partially because most people don’t grow up in a culture where everyone at least learns to eat/appreciate/make one set of food.
So ya, many eaters are better off in Toronto, but by harming the defaults, a lot of people are even worse off (even though on paper, things are superior).
So to break this down more simply: infinite choice/more consumptive power is often better when that’s viewed in isolation. However, most people are not optimizers and don’t really have the desire to benefit from all the choice. And when there is so much choice, the local default deteriorates, causing those who are less agentic to experience even worse outcomes.