Dear Friends,
I have a piece out in The New Statesman on workplace polyamory and a piece in Persuasion on standing up to Trump.
Best,
Sam
A MODEST PROPOSAL
Since, at this point in the history of the world, we have fully cracked the question of human nature and human motivation — and have sufficient understanding that what humans like is scrolling, swiping, and buying — we can at long last develop a fully rational education system and one that accords with society as we know it to exist.
It has become completely clear that there are about five companies that are responsible for the entirety of the nation’s economic growth — Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, maybe Microsoft, and then whatever Elon Musk’s companies are collectively called. These companies will be entrusted with designing a curriculum and educational program of study to run from birth to the time of employment. They will be able to execute ten or even twenty-year plans for superintelligence, the metaverse, etc, secure in the knowledge that there are young people being trained nearly from conception in the quantitative and programming skills needed to advance their companies. Nothing about this really will change from how the technical schools and colleges prepare their students with this key difference: there will be a regular draft for talent, much in the way the NBA does its draft. The draft can be carried out with different cohorts at different times — giving each of the major tech companies equal access to middle school age hacking prodigies and then to the stars of high school gaming teams and then to the best techies as they come out of college. It may be objected that under the draft system the techies won’t have freedom of action to choose who they are working for, but they will be paid well and in practice no one will mind.
It will be noted that the tech companies need capital infusions and attention will be paid to the banks. The Ivy schools in particular will be given over entirely to developing talent for the banks and consulting firms. The tech companies in their drafts will be able to take some picks from the Ivies just as the banks will be able to take some from the tech schools. For the Ivies the only critical change would be that the schools can entirely get rid of their liberal arts courses — no English, history, etc. The future I-bankers will begin to do their apprentice training immediately upon admission to their universities, studying finance and management, and won’t have to catch up to the real world in quite the same way that they currently do after they graduate. It’s possible that a few ‘softer’ classes could be offered in persuasive techniques and advertising, etc, for those Ivy League-graduates who end up as ‘chief storytelling officer,’ at the tech companies.
The state schools would be able to give themselves entirely over to their sports programs and to Greek life without academic requirements.
It will be objected that very little in this scheme is different from the educational and professional system as it’s currently constructed, apart from the draft and a few course requirements, but there will be a departure in this way. Since the tech companies are, in economic terms, about the size of the entire US economy, they are exempt from its laws. They will no longer need to waste swathes of time and money in trying to skirt the legal system; they will have carte blanche to act in any way they wish. That change will free up the educational pipeline, with the Ivies in particular no longer having to produce lawyers and with all of those unscrupulous young people redirected towards more directly maximizing profitability. That complete exemption from legality will encourage the tech companies to have more of their operations in US soil, and they will pay back what they have made in flouting all laws of god and man by subsidizing a universal basic income for all those who have not been drafted into the tech companies and, accordingly, have nothing productive to do. All those others will, however, have easy lives. Their time will be dedicated to their hobbies — which are mostly scrolling — and to consumerist spending. If it is objected that the tech companies are not charity workers and have no particular obligation to subsidize a UBI, it will be noted that most of that money will be spent back on the tech companies in any case.
Meanwhile, the state still has its core functions, but those are mostly fulfilled by a skeleton crew drawn from vocational training programs — people to watch over nuclear power plants and keep old infrastructure maintained, that sort of thing. The companies that supply basic needs — the Walmarts, etc — are mostly family businesses and may be passed down from generation to generation without necessitating any fresh blood from the educational system. A council of leaders from the major tech companies — possibly including Nvidia to provide an odd number and a better basis for voting — may meet from time to time to handle any questions involving the state or the economy as a whole, without disturbing the consumerist pastimes of the mass of the citizenry, who will, by the time these reforms are implemented, be interested almost exclusively in asking questions to their chatbot programs that the chatbots answer back to them.
These reforms are simple and comprehensive. Gone is the extensive training of insufferable doctors, whom no one ever gets to see anyway and whose decisions are made in any case by the diktat of hospital administrators. Gone are lawyers finding byzantine loopholes around laws that, in any case, simply not need be enforced. Gone are the whinging English majors complaining about how they can’t make it in a capitalist economy — there simply will be no English majors. Netflix may have a spot in the draft for a few screenwriters and executives who can bring their ‘storytelling’ skills to mass entertainment, and, otherwise, ‘creative types’ may pursue their writing and their art and their plays without any expectation whatsoever of financial reward but boosted by the universal basic income.
It may be objected that nothing in these proposals in these proposals will effect any change in the world as it is, and we are in agreement there. The purpose is simply to clear out the inefficiencies — all the waste in democratic elections and democratic showmanship, all the tossing and turning that people spend their teens and twenties doing wondering ‘who they’re going to be’ and how they’re going to be ‘fulfilled,’ all the jobs that serve no purpose that the job-holders can’t fully explain to anyone they meet. If everything itemized here is already reality, maybe it is just time to put it all on a rational basis and to call it by its name.
I eagerly await your take on food insecurity in Ireland.
This reminds me that around 2010-11, I began seeing in various corners of the Internet proposals of this type that I assumed were serious. A frequent argument was that college was a waste of time and money, the courses being taught were useless if not actively harmful, and that corporations and tech tycoons should open their own colleges to teach kids what they needed for success in business and nothing else. Among other things, it was supposed to give the students a secure future.
It wouldn't surprise me if more people started taking such ideas seriously. As for me, I'm writing my third novel now, and this type of scenario plays a part in it.