(2021-01-17) Torenberg Markets And Communities

Erik Torenberg: Markets and Communities. One thing I’m curious to explore is why, on the one hand, we are richer and healthier than ever — thanks to markets & economic growth — while we also seem to be suffering from increased anxiety, loneliness, and the deterioration of community.

Markets reinforced self-interest, and as a result, we got so rich we didn’t have to depend on others as much for survival. The irony, of course, is that as a result of becoming more specialized, we’re actually more reliant on each other than ever.

In Nonzero (which I discussed in another post here), Robert Wright says our individual fates are becoming increasingly intertwined, which means we’ll have to encourage social bonds, and design them in new ways. That’s the great irony — we actually depend on each other more than we used to, it’s just harder to see.

Today no one's self sufficient; we're all specialized and depend on many other people worldwide in a nonzero-sum way. Everything you consume you could never produce on your own — your daily life depends on the cooperation of millions of others.

Markets & technology have abstracted away the need for virtually all human contact, let alone humans depending on each other. Neighbors used to help deliver babies, now people just check into hospitals. The hospital will give you service, but they won’t care about you like your neighbor will. And that’s the tradeoff: better service with less care.

Another angle is that, not only do we depend on each other less and less, but we also live in different realities, and have less in common to connect over as a result.

While it didn’t force people to agree, centralized mass media forced us to at least share the same coordinates around which we could agree (or disagree). The narrative was the same, even if our opinions on its relevance or importance were not.

Zooming out: great communities, in the traditional sense, required limited options so people would remain dependent: no specialists or external trade (to ensure we all collectively worked together), and no diversity or weird ideas (to ensure a homogenous group with a focus on tradition).

We want to feel more rooted and less alone, but we just don’t want to sacrifice our quality of life to do that.

It’s the shared struggle, he claims, that brings us together. But it's unclear if we’re less happy as a result of all this, or how much to trust happiness studies in general.

In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger writes about how he lost more friends after his army service due to suicide than during the war itself.

Junger argues that we should go back to how we lived in local communities. I think we should “upgrade” our software — get over our need for revenge and manichaean thinking.

In a sense, the internet killed communities, but it’s also rebuilding them, for the people perfect for you.

Technology gives us the means to create even more identities in the market, while giving us new ways of binding the community together. We just need to build better community toolkits and use the market for doing so. We should go deep on which parts of traditional communities we want to keep and which we want to discard, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

connection? That goes back to purpose. The more you believe increasing economic growth increases the collective good, the more you believe your job is actually serving other people — the more you’ll find meaning in your work and connection to others.

I’ll dive into solutions and more frameworks around community building in a future post.