What Should We Be Worried About?

THE PARADOX OF MATERIAL PROGRESS

ROLF DOBELLI

Founder, Zurich.Minds; journalist; author, The Art of Thinking Clearly

I recently had dinner with a friend, a prominent IP lawyer, at his mansion in Switzerland, one of the few spots directly on Lake Zurich. As is customary with people who have mansions, he gave me the complete tour, not leaving out the sauna (how many different ways are there to decorate a sauna?). The mansion was a fireworks display of technological progress. My friend could regulate every aspect of every room by touching his iPad. “Material progress,” he said during his show, “will soon come to every home.” Stories of high-tech, high-touch houses have been around for decades, but it was still neat to see that it finally exists. Sensing my lack of amazement, he guided me to his “picture room.” Photographs on display showed him with his family, on sailboats, on ski slopes, golf courses, tennis courts, and horseback. One photo he seemed especially proud of showed him with Pope Benedict XVI. “A private audience,” he said.

So what do we learn from this that we didn’t learn from The Great Gatsby?

Material progress will continue to spread. Knowledge is cumulative. At times in our past, knowledge has diminished. The classic case is Tasmania, or—on a grander scale—the Middle Ages. But since Gutenberg it is difficult to imagine that humanity will ever again shed information. Through the accumulation of knowledge and global trade, the goods and services that my lawyer friend enjoys today soon will be available to the poorest farmer in Zimbabwe. But no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, no matter how cheap computation, communication, and information storage become, no matter how seamlessly trade flows, that farmer will never get any closer to a date with the Pope.

See the Pope allegorically as all the goods and services that are immune to technological creation and reproduction. You can vacation on only one St. Barts. Rauschenberg created just a few originals. Only so many mansions dot the lakeshore in Zurich. Bringing technology to bear won’t help create any more. A date with a virtual Pope will never do the trick.

As mammals, we are status seekers. Non–status-seeking animals don’t attract suitable mating partners, and they eventually exit the gene pool. Thus goods conveying high status remain extremely important, yet are out of reach for most of us. Nothing technology brings about will change that. Yes, one day we might reengineer our cognition to reduce or eliminate status competition. But until then, most people will have to live with the frustrations of technology’s broken promise: That is, goods and services will be available to everybody at virtually no cost, but at the same time status-conveying goods will inch even further out of reach. That’s a paradox of material progress.

Yes, luxury used to define things that made life easier: clean water, central heating, fridges, cars, TVs, smartphones. Today luxury tends to make your life harder. Displaying and safeguarding a Rauschenberg, learning to play polo and maintaining an adequate stable of horses, or obtaining access to the Pope are arduous undertakings. That doesn’t matter; their very unattainability, the fact that these things are almost impossible for most people, is what matters.

As global wealth increases, nonreproducible goods will appreciate exponentially. Too much status-seeking wealth and talent is eyeing too few status-delivering goods. The price of nonreproducible goods is even more dependent on the inequality of wealth than on the absolute level of wealth in a society—further contributing to this squeeze.

The promise of technological progress can by definition not be kept. I think we should worry about the consequences, including a conceivable backlash to the current economic ecosystem of technology, capitalism, and free trade.