1/ @DouthatNYT book "The Decadent Society" is one of the most interestingly researched books on our current state of society

takes many disparate ideas and welds them together in a surprising way

mega on some of his key takeaways (h/t to @bkavoussi for the rec!)

2/ the core idea is how the West has become stagnant, complacent, at the end of a cultural and technological cul de sac, circling around and around without any clear direction of how to escape

3/ We can't answer the question "what comes next"?

This is important because progress allows people to live better lives

it allows them to feel optimistic about the future and participate in something larger than themselves.

4/ you might recognize a lot of these themes

He brings many ideas from Thiel, Tyler Cowen, Eric Weinstein

especially about the inability of our institutions to function and how we have to find a productive way forward and stop our "falling off"

5/ to finish setting the stage:

The fundamental idea here is that growth=change. And the core, most FUNDAMENTAL principle of the universe and of nature and Evolution is that if you aren't changing, you're dying

the West has not figured out how to "change" since Apollo

6/ So to explain the economic stagnation:

Big changes, like what happened with the New Deal in the 30's, are hard to come by

You can only create social security once

And entire ecosystems are built on top of these policies making them near impossible to revamp

7/ we're also stuck in a regulatory capture quagmire

"everything from land-use rules, to exclusionary zoning, to occupational licensing, to ever-expanding intellectual-property protections....

8/ "to corporate subsidies and tax breaks all converge to create an system that’s basically the worst of socialism and the worst of capitalism conjoined."

This goes back to the above point: big transformative changes are HARD and can only happen once

On education

9/ We're now stuck in a system that thrives on rent-seeking and propping up existing structures

this creates negative feedback loops --> lower growth, lower innovation, less money for research, etc.

not to mention it's hard to refit existing infrastructure with new ideas

10/ Next idea: the West is old

older populations take less risks

we're not as dynamic as we used to be. less younger people taking risks (less entrepreneurs), older people expecting entitlements and coasting on an older paradigm

11/ rapidly declining birthrates below replacement level and this idea of "postfamilialism" doesn't help either

12/ we're losing our old, traditional familial and communal bonds

we're embracing lives of non-commitment and losing a big piece of what of what it means to be human, which of course makes sticking to hard, important projects (like the Apollo program) near impossible

12a) potentially one of the most important ideas in the book, and how this decaying of family and community affects American's sense of the future

13/ The Cultural Crisis

There's this idea of the "end of history"

There's no clear, better ideology that's being tried to topple liberalism in the West. Nothing has been able to compete with it

History can't be rewritten since there's nothing to change

14/ Because of this, we've sort of been in a cultural despair

We're replaying the successful countercultures of the 60's again and again

We're pretending to change things when we're just play-acting since there's nothing really on the line

15/ We long for a different world, a new culture to replace the old

but we literally are incapable of imaging that world so we play-act instead of imaging a reality further from our own

16/ Last big idea: political stagnation

Crony capitalism is killing us

The existing system cant really be untangled. We've built such a sprawling and complex government that keep making these hacky, patchwork bug fixes that are only backwards looking

17/ the sheer amount of stakeholders now in politics and the government makes it so that almost nothing new or important can get done

18/ he makes it clear that you can see why people complain about the size of the government

too many stakeholders, too many interest, too hard to get forward looking, complex solutions that create lasting change

19/ you can see how intertwined everything is

economic stagnation, political + cultural issues all have conspired to make implementing and executing on truly new and important ideas INSANELY hard

Okay thats a lot of doom & gloom, what can we do?

20/ The good news is that we can still tinker and try to renew ourselves in a society "circling the drain"

This can't necessarily happen during a revolution or times of actual instability

We still have incredibly people out there doing everything they can to improve our future

21/ Being able to balance seeming contradictions at every level of society could potentially sow the seeds for a New World Order post Western liberalism

He points to Africa and the growing dynamism there

22/ We could work to restore vitality and growth by strengthening our ties to our communities

Bringing back associations, becoming self-reliant, remembering how to build

Not too long ago, Americans were on the Frontier fending for themselves, fighting to build better lives

23/ He mentions a few other ideas that could cascade and take advantage of the interconnectedness of everything

- rise of China
- tech breakthroughs that make us re-examine morality
- Africa changing shape of global religion
- mass migration into Western countries

24/ Overall, there's no clear answer. He suggests "building that warp drive"

imo the biggest opportunity is figuring out how to get our institutions to change and look forward without destroying them

that's both a major technological + cultural challenge

25/ that just scratches the surface and doesn't even get into other ideas of:

- mingling of religion + science
- simulation
- history of culture

definitely worth a look if you have any interest in understanding what's actually been going on in the world the past 40-50 years