Youth As Abundance

Many technologies and business practice details have changed greatly over the last few centuries. And looking at the specifics of who did what when, much of this change looks like selection and learning. That is, people tried lots of things, some of these worked, and then others copied the winning practices. The whole pattern looks much like a hard to predict random walk.

Many cultural attitudes and values have also changed greatly over those same few centuries. However, the rate, consistency, and predictability of much of this change makes it hard to tell a similar story of selection and learning. This change instead looks more like how many of our individual human behaviors change over our lifespans – the execution of a previously developed strategy. We need not as individuals learn to explore more when young, and exploit more when old, if our genetic and cultural heritage can just tell us to make these changes.

The idea is that some key context, like wealth, has been changing steadily over the last few centuries, and our attitudes have changed steadily in response to that changing context. Just as individuals naturally change their behaviors as they age, cultures may naturally change their attitudes as they get rich. In addition to wealth, other plausibly triggering context factors include increasing health, peace, complexity, work structure, social group size, and alienation from nature.

Even if wealth isn’t the only cause, it seems a big cause, and it likely causes and it caused by other key causes. It also seems quite plausible for humanity to have learned to change our behavior in good times relative to bad times. Note that good time behavior overlaps with, but isn’t quite the same as, how individual behavior changes as individuals get rich, but their society doesn’t. The correlation between individual behavior and wealth is probably influenced a lot by selection: some behaviors tend more to produce individual wealth. Selection has less to do with how a society’s behaviors change as it gets rich.

I’ve written before on a forager vs. farmer account of attitude changes over the last few centuries. Briefly, the social pressures that turned foragers into farmers depended a lot on fear, conformity, and religion, which are complemented by poverty. As we get rich those pressures feel less compelling to us, and we less create such pressures on others. I think this forager-farmer story is helpful, but in this post I want to outline another complementary story: neoteny. One of the main ways that humans are different from other animals is our neoteny; we retrain youthful features and behaviors longer into life. This helps us to be more flexible and also learn more.

Being young is in many ways like living in a rich society. Young people have more physical energy, face less risk of physical damage, and have fewer responsibilities. Which is a lot like being rich. In a rich society you tend live longer, making you effectively younger at any given calendar age. And when young, it makes more sense to be more playful, to learn and explore new possibilities rather than just exploit old skills and possibilities, and to invest more in social connections and in showing off, such as via art, music, stories, or sport. All these also make more sense in good times, when resources are plentiful.

If living in a rich society is a lot like being young, then in makes sense to act more youthful during good times. And so humanity might have acquired the heuristic of thinking and acting more youthful in good times. And that right there can help explain a lot of changes in attitudes and behaviors over the last few centuries. I don’t think it explains quite as many as the back-to-foragers story, but it is very a priori plausible. Not that the forager story is that implausible, but still, priors matter.

From 2006 to 2009, Bruce Charlton wrote a series of articles exploring the idea that people are acting more youthful today:

A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. (more)

Yes, the world changes more quickly in the industrial era than it did in the farming era, but that rate of change hasn’t increased much in the last century. So this one-time long-ago change in the social rate of change seems a poor explanation for the slow steady trend toward more youthful behavior we’ve seen over the last century. More neoteny as a response to increasing wealth makes more sense to me.