Abundance, Dislocation, & the Fight to Focus Our Attention in the 21st Century
Dropping next Monday 2025-12-15, I think, is me on Sean Illing’s “Grey Area” podcast...
Growth keeps delivering but agency keeps slipping. The question is no longer how to get richer as fast as possible, but how to use our riches to live wisely and well as technological change creatively enriches and destructively dislocates. In the forthcoming Attention Info‑Bio Tech society, the fight will be for us to focus our attention so that it serves our purpose rather than the purposes of those who wish us ill, so that we can use wealth to create and enhance freedom rather than find technological power used to create techno attention-serfdom.
Sean has a preview:
Sean Illing: The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?<https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>: ‘Technological progress and economic growth are preconditions for human happiness, not a guarantee…. We live longer, healthier, safer lives than almost any generation that came before us. And yet, the experience of modern life often feels unsettled. People are anxious, politics are brittle, and the promise of progress feels shakier than ever. Few thinkers have grappled with these contradictions more deeply than Brad DeLong. He’s an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia, a sweeping account of the “long twentieth century” when technological progress reshaped every aspect of human life. I invited DeLong onto The Gray Area to talk about the purpose of progress, the tension between getting richer and living well, and whether our politics are capable of stewarding another era of transformation….
Key takeaways:
Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.
Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.
The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.
The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it…
Some more bite-sized pieces of the conversation:
Progress conquers scarcity but not meaning: Material abundance has largely ended the Malthusian world of pervasive hunger, disease, and early death, yet it hasn’t answered what progress is for: “Progress begins with escaping the Malthusian condition… But no longer living under the pressure of absolute scarcity, how much of our time and energy should still be devoted to producing more? And what kind of more?”
Means vs. ends confusion: Increasing GDP and consumption is not 100% aligned with living wisely and well: “The question then becomes: how do we use absolute abundance to create the conditions in which human beings can flourish?”
Agency deficit amid abundance: Wealth does not deliver meaningful freedom from impersonal systems—ideologies, bureaucracies, markets, algorithms—that control our lives without our ever remembering giving them permission to do so: “Material wealth does not automatically produce a sense of agency—indeed, it can produce a strong sense that one cannot afford to grasp one’s agency for fear of falling off a hedonic treadmill.”
Attention as the scarce resource: After the social-democratic mass-production New Deal Order society and the globalized value-chain Neoliberal Order society, there will come the Attention Info-Bio Tech Society. The key to living wisely and well may hinge on the ability to recapture attention and focus from the Zuckerbergs and the Murdochs who want to glue your eyeballs to screens they own so they can make a few more pennies by selling ads: “Directing your attention toward what matters in your becoming your best self is a defining challenge.”
Uneven technological change drives dislocation: Each generation since 1870 about 4/5 of the economy has seen a rough 1/4 increase in productivity, while about 1/5—a different albeit overlapping 1/5 each generation—has seen a doubling at the price of an utter transformation that upends life-patterns in a radical-change way: “This repeated experience of radical dislocation for some is one of the central political and economic challenges of the modern world.”
We’re handling this wave of disruption ‘moderately badly’: “Current politics and institutions manage transformation better than early 20th century, worse than postwar decades.“It’s better than the first half of the twentieth century. But, really, that is not saying much.”
Growth’s global center is shifting: The 21st century’s increasing prosperity is real, but its most powerful effects are increasingly centered in the developing world, especially China and India: “1980 is the moment when first China, then India, and later much of the rest of the poorer world managed to move onto the escalator of industrial and post-industrial growth, shifting the balance of the global story.”
Material gains enable purpose-seeking: Hundreds of millions now have reliable food, medicine, and education—freeing attention from survival to meaning: “They now have the chance to think about what it means to live well, not just how to survive. This is one of the great achievements of humanity.”
AI’s dual nature—cognitive leverage and capture risk: AI improves research and reasoning but will intensify attention-targeting and screen addiction: “Many people will gain access to tools that make complex reasoning and analysis easier. But Zuckerbergs and Murdochs and their ilk will use these same tools to target our attention even more aggressively for harvesting, in their financial interest and definitely not in our human interest.”
Speculative overinvestment with real advances: Hype drives misallocated capital (e.g., excess data centers), yet durable capability gains emerge: “We will end up with large amount of misallocated capital but also real advances that genuinely expand human capabilities—capabilities we can then use to live wisely and well, or to persuade other people not to.”
Crisis of representation in the info age: Shared reality is harder to sustain; constitutional designs assumed information environments that no longer exist: “Our information environment is now so vast and so open to manipulation that it’s harder than ever to sustain a shared sense of reality. Figuring out how to rebuild trust in both the representation of reality to us and the representation of us to the decision-making nexuses of the political system—those are both essential.”
Freedom as conditions for living well: The task is building institutions that expand real freedom—capabilities, dignity, agency—not just consumption.: A political and economic system should create the basic conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled. But we are not doing a great job of that.”
Two watchwords for the 21st century—growth and attention: Continued advancing prosperity, centered in the developing world, and the human struggle to control our attention to be mindful of what is good for us: “Whether we learn to navigate this environment successfully may be the most important story of the century.”
References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/?lens=basic-books>.
Illing, Sean. 2025. “The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?” The Grey Area. Forthcoming. <https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>.