The U-Shaped World

Jonathan Haidt and Tyler Cowen argue about the merits of social media

In early April, the influential economist and writer Tyler Cowen interviewed Jonathan Haidt, an author, social psychologist, and professor at New York University. The subject was the recent publication of Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, which examines the influence on childhood formation of smartphones, especially the extent to which interacting with a phone has replaced play. In the book and the interview, Haidt argues that a collective effort to restrict access to smartphones to children and young teens is warranted. Cowen is skeptical both of the evidence that smartphones have a negative impact on children, and as a libertarian, is allergic to the use of coercion to prevent children from having phones.

Listening to this interview was frustrating, between two people with obviously interesting and divergent viewpoints. Haidt did not seem to fully grasp the nature of Cowen's needling. And Cowen didn't seem to understand average people. Perhaps it was because the format was of an interview; perhaps it was because there were gaps in both Haidt's and Cowen's preparation. But something went very haywire until nearer the end, when things became clearer. I want to sharpen the sticks of their argument to clarify the debate, and then ask a few questions raised by their positions.

The last third of the interview was better. Haidt and Cowen started talking in hypotheticals about the future: about what future societies, exhausted with but enabled by social media and AI, might look like. It is here that their the limitations (and similarities) of their visions for the future and of the nature of humans became clear.

Cowen and Haidt's visions of the future

Let me summarize that vision. Cowen works with high-functioning young people through his Emergent Ventures initiative, a grant program that supports ambition in all its forms. He has seen both the blessing and curse of social media as exemplified in their behavior and performance: younger people seem to be performing better and better at easy-to-measure intellectual tasks like chess over time, even alongside the rise of social media. They are finding each other, learning quickly about diverse branches of science and engineering, and collaborating, all through the medium of social media. And yet, not all social media is created equal. They tend to "turn off" the algorithm on their Twitter feeds by choosing the "Following" tab, instead of the Wild West that is the "For you" algorithmic roulette wheel. Cowen even admits that Instagram may have a deleterious effect on 12-year-old girls!

These high-functioning young people tend to have an instrumental view of social media: if it is the place where things are happening, where learning and collaboration and networking is occurring, then they are all for it. If it distracts them or depresses them, they might opt to move on. Cowen imagines one possible future for these kids:

People can adjust to an amazing variety of circumstances, and they take tools and figure out how to use them for better rather than worse. More and more kids will secede from the bad parts of social media. They’ll just say, “I’m going to form like a little polycule but without sex, and my polycule will be based around not doing so much social media.”

Later, he imagines that youths will opt to catch up on social media via AI-powered digests, so that they can get on to the fun stuff, like meeting up in person:

That’s one scenario, but the more optimistic scenario is, you talk about this 5- to 10-hour flow of messages you need to manage. AI will do that for you, and you’ll have a lot more time again, and you’ll spend it meeting up with your friends. Like it is fun, right? The fact that it’s fun means it’s not just a public good. Kids will find ways of doing this.

I think it was at this point that it finally clicked for me: Cowen is talking about kids on the margins. it is probably not the origin name of the blog he co-writes, Marginal Revolution: Smaller steps toward a much better world, but it is true that the only children he really interacts with are those with executive function in the highest decile. And the world looks very different from that vantage point.

Technology for outliers

The future Cowen imagines is a partial one, at best: where the disruptive goods of technological development eventually settle, after some ferment, into negotiated places in relation to humans. Humans, as experts in the use and making of tools, will eventually find where in the tool chest to place social media and AI, developing a new and settled relationship with these disruptive tools in the same way that Europe made peace with the printing press after a couple hundred years of war, and how the Cold War ended as the nuclear weapon settled into the background of international relations. The social media détente Cowen imagines, once the dust settles, will certainly have winners. But it may also have losers. Haidt saw the other side:

I think I’m right that we’re going into a dip. It’s gigantic in terms of mental health impact, suicide rates, self-harm, hospitalizations, missed potential. But you might be right that this is early days, and in 30 to 50 years, the next generation or two generations from now could be so optimized that they’re like superhuman. Do we agree on that?

There will always be winners and losers from social change. Some people will thrive in the new environment, with the new rules. Others will struggle. We know this dynamic well from biology: changing environments create biological conditions that cause some organisms to thrive and reproduce, and others to struggle and die off. Cowen points out that some are thriving. Haidt counters that others are struggling. And both are right. We would be forgiven for filling in the details, as Haidt does. After all, maybe after a few generations, this will all shake out...right?

Cowen clearly thinks it will. He has written long and persuasively that economic growth should be our society's top priority. In his view, the best way to preserve and improve the human race is maximizing the rate of economic growth. All other human goods run downstream of this main goal. When Cowen sees social-media-enabled smartphones and AI in the hands of high-functioning teens, he sees the disruptive potential of many thousands of the brightest minds of a generation collaborating efficiently and effectively on solutions to problems. If their efforts can yield, in ten, fifty, or one hundred years, a greater total economic growth than if the government had taken their phones and their TikTok access away, then it is best that they stay online. And critically, it is best in the aggregate: even if 99% of children are worse off as a result, the impact of the 1% on the future may well outweigh the proximate harm. If the 99% do not adapt, some of their children at least will accommodate themselves to the technologies that ensnared their parents, and be successful themselves as a result.

Naturally, this vision of the future raises some questions.

Question 1: Is this technology just a tool?

We all have experienced this social media technology, too. Some of have grown up with it all around us. Is that all technology is? Do these platforms continue to resemble the tools that humans have made for all of history to help us accomplish tasks? Or are they something entirely different?

For all of the differences that Cowen and Haidt have in their approach to technology, neither of them really discuss the nature of the technology in question. Both assume that the technology itself is something value-neutral. Cowen referred to social media technology as a tool, and implied that a kid might 'secede' from the bad parts of the tool once the effects of it were clear. Haidt is more critical of technology, but he takes pains only to criticize social media. He emphasizes that the problem is not necessarily social media per se, but that social media and the screen are substitutionary for the ordinary and historic activities of childhood: playing, outside, with friends.

Both men do not draw any distinction between the the historical trajectory of the development of tools, and whether calling social media a 'tool' obscures more than it clarifies. It is an important question, too, because tools are a fundamental part of human society. Media theorists have variously argued that social media is a virtual commons, an external mind, a civil society, an addictive substance, an escapist fantasy, a marketplace of attention, or an anonymous meetup.

All of these descriptions and more may be true, and none of them function the same way a simple tool does. We cannot persist in talking about social media like it was a soldering iron (dangerous in some hands no doubt, parental guidance suggested, but kids can get together and build cool stuff with it). The debate over social media would be clearer and richer for identifying this technology more clearly.

Question 2: Does social media kneecap its own winners?

Both Haidt and Cowen seem to buy the argument that humans can evolve and adapt to a settled relationship with technology. Sure, some kids will struggle. There will be some churn. But each successive generation should adapt better to their technological environs. Those traits which confer advantages in this new environment will make new winners and losers, just as we have hierarchies of competence and success now which are not absolute, but are often relative to the technological and social conditions around us.

I say "often relative." We know some traits that are useful no matter the milieu: problem-solving ability, internal locus of control, grit, creativity. These skills will help make someone more 'successful' as a user of social media—and successful in other areas of life. But how did they acquire those skills in the first place? Social media and the habits that attend it can be corrosive all of these traits by its very nature. Especially because we are discussing the impact of social media on children, we must ask whether social media itself might have the effect of draining the pool of Cowen's Emergent Ventures prospects, by inundating young minds with the kinds of easy and fleeting sensations that are inimical to the development of patience, determination, and delayed gratification.

It also makes me wonder, if there are certain high-functioning kids who will do well using social media to accomplish great things, is the social media critical to their success? What tools or technologies would actually maximize their efforts? Would it look like Twitter or TikTok? Or are these kids merely accommodating themselves to their low-equilibrium surroundings?

Question 3: How fast is too fast?

You could think of evolution as no more than a series of very small extinction events. The mechanism works slowly and patiently to confer reproductive advantage to some and hardship to others. Over time, this yields results. True mass extinction events take the exact same set of pressures and mechanisms, and compress the timeline dramatically. Without enough time to adapt, a single generation can be decimated.

This is one of the reasons it is dangerous to use arguments about adaptation in the context of technology. There is a limit to how quickly we—the species—can adapt. But the rate of technological change has been increasing ever since rock smashed nut. We are in danger of technology slipping its bonds and advancing beyond our capacity to cope with it as a species.

The U-shaped world

The dynamics of evolution do not port completely to this topic. But in the era of online dating, it is completely reasonable to expect that a facility with social media confers some kind of reproductive advantage. Nevertheless, what is likelier is instead that gaps will widen. A number of markers of success have been going U-shaped: fewer people occupy the average. The boons of technology have made ‘success’ by some measures more graspable than ever. At the same time, technology has eroded the stable base of culture, work, and family that diffused the shock of catastrophic events or bad circumstances, crowding more people into the ranks of the modern day 'losers'.

Need an example? Try amphetamines. For a person with the disposable income, thick social structure, a healthy understanding of risks and tradeoffs, and a dose of long-range-thinking, amphetamines can make a person wildly more efficient, productive, and focused. Amphetamines also grind up and spit out countless poor souls unable to keep from being utterly overcome by them. There was a time when they were less available, and when accessible, in far less targeted form. There were more 'average' people then—neither wrapped in a paranoid psychosis on the floor of a park bathroom, nor entering a hypervigilant euphoria as they walked into a corporate board meeting. Amphetamines, and social media, and AI, and global trade, erode the middle—the average Joe—and deposit them on either extreme, and with greater rapidity as technology advances.

Anyone who builds the technology of the future must consider the revolution at the margins—both margins.