What a beautiful essay. I read The Master and the Emissary a few years back and I remember - now vaguely - the period during and after: you can fit so many phenomena out there in the world in the ways and, really, perceptions of how the hemispheres see the world. Studying psychology at that point, I saw how the left hemisphere imperative of "measure everything" permeated and completely took over a field that was never supposed to be quantified at all (or, to be more in line with the book's argument, the quantification should have been in the service of understanding the psyche but sadly, it became a thing unto itself). Your parallels with business, science, and effective altruism are also spot on. What I find the most challenging about it all is that once a critical mass of left-hemispheric dominance is achieved, it's very difficult to get out of the "event horizon" - the left hemisphere has, quite literally, built the structures and the systems each of us has to operate in. I'm curious whether your bet that AI will be the last nudge before the collective consciousness tilts back into some sort of equilibrium will pan out, or whether we're - by now - firmly set on tech-bros (utopian or dystopian, depending on how you see it) vision of the future.
Great question! I think AI could go either way - either wakeup call or all-in on the left direction. Your point on left-brain building the system we operate in is good, I think that's what's appealing to me about people with resources expressing their personal views through Magnificenza. It's outside of the system and doesn't have to fit into it.
Packy you’ve done it again. It’s special when you have lots of thoughts about something and then someone comes along and puts all those thoughts into a beautiful essay that organizes and nails those thoughts in a way that elevates it. 2 weeks ago we hired our first apprentice at Levver - he’s crushing. BRB gonna go find a few more.
Epic cheers that Paul Krugman took any notice of Ada Palmer although not worthy of executing a faint as when Krugman actually quoted John Cole in a printed column.
What a fantastic article. We have endless tools but are so focused on the “next step” that we miss fulfillment. The Renaissance was a high water mark in humanity and we absolutely should understand what went right then. We are building a platform to facilitate fundraising for causes and brands through creative output. We gladly want to facilitate a second renaissance. Bravo!
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation touches on similar themes to this article and also happens to be one of the greatest television programs ever produced. I encourage anyone interested in this to watch it, or at least the first 10 minutes of Part 1 (which you can find on YouTube)
It's telling that there isn't a single quote from an actual unemployed college graduate in this article - just VCs, founders, and kids in prestigious billionaire-funded programs. Luke Farritor and Thiel Fellows were never at risk of AI displacement in the first place.
I should say upfront: I like a lot of the programs mentioned in the article. They're genuinely good for the people who get into them. But that's exactly the problem: anyone capable of getting into these programs was never going to be unemployed in the first place.
The idea that billionaire patronage can meaningfully address youth unemployment doesn't hold up to basic math (Left brained logic, I know, but sometimes that's what you need). The US produces 3 million college graduates annually. There are around 900 billionaires in the country. Optimistically, if each billionaire funded projects employing 10 people who each hire 10 more, that's only 90,000 jobs total. I understand the article doesn't claim this is a comprehensive solution, but at this scale, it's not even a partial solution. The youth unemployment rate is hovering at 5.8% and the underemployment rate is at 41%. That 90,000 figure is extremely optimistic to begin with (it would be like every billionaire hiring enough people to staff a series B startup, *every year*) and even then it would only account for 3% of graduates.
While we're talking about scale, we should remember that Renaissance Florence had 60,000 people. That is less than the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (150,000 people). You can't scale patron-client relationships from a small Renaissance city to a modern nation of 330 million people. They are qualitatively and quantitatively different places.
I say this as a right brained person who was never good at math: the unfortunate truth is that you need left-brain logic to solve big societal problems. You cannot "right-brain" your way through youth unemployment by vibing about beauty and Medicis.
Particularly telling is the claim that startups are the "driving force" of the economy when tech represents just 8.9% of GDP. That's not analysis, that's someone who's spent too much time in Silicon Valley thinking his social circle is representative of the broader economy. The core thesis about society being "too left-brained" is backwards too - look at US politics and tell me we need less rationality and more emotional decision-making.
The cliched take that college graduates should just go into the trades is boring and tired, but at least it's actually feasible.
Agreed, and on top of your point about demographics, I think a right-brained approach would be to study how society today is qualitatively unrecognizable from the 1500s.
Society today is much more cosmopolitan and distributed - instead of a few powerful familities there are thousands of billionaires with millions of hobbies. Unlike the Medicis and how they reshaped Bologna most billionaires can reach a very wide audience and "cement their legacy" without doing anything of cultural significance. They can show up with models at the Monaco Grand Prix on their superyacht and hobnob with peers, spend energy and funds on bringing their scifi dreams of AI or VR to life, hoard paintings and display them at their office, home or store them in a Freeport or they can own a Hawaiian island all to themselves. The Medicis were far less insulated, rather than being like billionaires who can hide in private jets, have PR companies help them communicate to online audiences and constantly shift contexts and reinvent themselves, they're basically like a local landlord of today, the ones who run everything in town. All this is to say that for most billionaires the compulsion to contribute to so-called magnificence isn't at all the same.
And if billionaires were thinking about legacy and cultural impact, they have way more ways of doing so, like investing in science (germs and cancer wasn't a thing in the 1500s), being the first to land on Mars, producing a LoTR TV show, and a whole lot of other activities that are cultural but not magnificent, like tweeting incessantly and getting into politics. We live after all, in an age of far shorter attention spans, greater comfort and also an age where there isn't at all agreement society-wide on what's magnificent, especially in the realm of art, music, literature, theatre, movies, games etc.
No doubt billionaires will fund things that interest them, but to borrow the quantitative argument above it just doesn't make sense. Unlike the 1500s we have a sophisticated financial system that allows distinguished chefs to start their own restaurants, by raising their own funds and serving the general public. You can repeat this analogy for just about every industry - some artists might want to work for just one patron, but one can easily see how being subject to the whim of one person (or one person at any time) can be insufferable. If you're a filmmaker you might be making a movie for a wide audience and get really annoyed at your patron - just think about all the stories about the tension between production companies and directors, or coaches and management.
I think instead of a top down approach from billionaires and patrons who have hoarded the wealth of an industrial revolution it makes far more sense to have a bottoms up approach, where millions and billions of people decide for themselves what's cool and great to work on, unencumbered by a lack of funds and other hurdles, and therein give their lives meaning. In such a scenario we don't even need billionaires to start this movement or anything, ordinary influencers doing cool things should suffice and motivate people to want to do cool things, so long as the system provided ordinary people sufficient free time and resources.
In the 1500s when standardized schooling didn't exist, almost everyone was illiterate and struggling to literally put food on the table it made sense that the few wealthy and literate got to write the story of their time, but in our time where most people work 40 hours a week and potentially less, and everyone at least went to school for 8-12 years, it would be a shame if somehow 1000 billionaires and their 10000 clients were the ones primarily making anything of cultural value, with the remaining 8 billion of us just scrolling and scrounging.
In WWII, the Allies firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now ask why Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities didn’t receive the same treatment Magnificenza, Medici, whatever you want to call it, the Allies avoided bombing those areas that housed great Renaissance art because they didn’t want to be portrayed as barbarian. Then think of all the art stolen by the Nazis. This is the “measure” of the power of great art over centuries.
As for the worry of AI and other new tools/technology causing unemployment, there exists a decades-long trend of countries creating more opportunities and income for women. In tandem with this trend, women decide to have fewer children on no children. And U.S. policies in re women’s health care are going in the opposite direction of reality. Good luck encouraging women to have children given the antagonism toward them. We’d better be creating superior technologies, tools, materials, and education systems, otherwise the touted “abundance economy” is beyond reach. Scarcity is value. And if there are going to be significantly fewer workers in the coming decades, we’d best find ways to make workers more valuable.
I think a great deal of what is called wokeism explicitly casts itself as the revenge of the right brain so any program like the one that is described here has to be about the right brain accepting discipline from the left brain to obtain goals that the left brain cannot obtain or value by itself. It cannot be about the right brain forcing the left brain to submit because of all the past oppression done in the left brain's name.
Left brain thinking got us MAGA with hatred of immigrants, defunding the future (R&D, antivax Health Dept. rolling out tariffs without considering their consequences.
Good piece. One thing I struggle with, though, is that it the real demographic shock is actually excess supply (old people who are retiring), and AI makes that 100x worse. So on one hand I can imagine it making it possible to build stuff 10x cheaper than before, but that really depends on the kinds of personalities who like to build things. I’m not convinced it will be good for the median worker.
And I really doubt the billionaires who build new libraries of Alexandria will be interested in building nursing homes in Missouri unless a financial return is likely. That friction will be 10x higher for social insurance schemes like UBI.
What a beautiful essay. I read The Master and the Emissary a few years back and I remember - now vaguely - the period during and after: you can fit so many phenomena out there in the world in the ways and, really, perceptions of how the hemispheres see the world. Studying psychology at that point, I saw how the left hemisphere imperative of "measure everything" permeated and completely took over a field that was never supposed to be quantified at all (or, to be more in line with the book's argument, the quantification should have been in the service of understanding the psyche but sadly, it became a thing unto itself). Your parallels with business, science, and effective altruism are also spot on. What I find the most challenging about it all is that once a critical mass of left-hemispheric dominance is achieved, it's very difficult to get out of the "event horizon" - the left hemisphere has, quite literally, built the structures and the systems each of us has to operate in. I'm curious whether your bet that AI will be the last nudge before the collective consciousness tilts back into some sort of equilibrium will pan out, or whether we're - by now - firmly set on tech-bros (utopian or dystopian, depending on how you see it) vision of the future.
Great question! I think AI could go either way - either wakeup call or all-in on the left direction. Your point on left-brain building the system we operate in is good, I think that's what's appealing to me about people with resources expressing their personal views through Magnificenza. It's outside of the system and doesn't have to fit into it.
I hope you are right 🤞. Cause right now, it’s Palio without the elegance.
Love this one.
Packy you’ve done it again. It’s special when you have lots of thoughts about something and then someone comes along and puts all those thoughts into a beautiful essay that organizes and nails those thoughts in a way that elevates it. 2 weeks ago we hired our first apprentice at Levver - he’s crushing. BRB gonna go find a few more.
Apprentice Maxxxxing
Paul Krugman
Inventing the Renaissance: Ada Palmer
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/inventing-the-renaissance-ada-palmer?r=dvwlc&utm_medium=ios
Epic cheers that Paul Krugman took any notice of Ada Palmer although not worthy of executing a faint as when Krugman actually quoted John Cole in a printed column.
(In fairness that may have been one of John's best posts of all time)
Congrats to your family! A very inspiring essay for me at the moment.
What a fantastic article. We have endless tools but are so focused on the “next step” that we miss fulfillment. The Renaissance was a high water mark in humanity and we absolutely should understand what went right then. We are building a platform to facilitate fundraising for causes and brands through creative output. We gladly want to facilitate a second renaissance. Bravo!
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation touches on similar themes to this article and also happens to be one of the greatest television programs ever produced. I encourage anyone interested in this to watch it, or at least the first 10 minutes of Part 1 (which you can find on YouTube)
Not betraying Ukraine would be a good start. F your billionaire paradise
It's telling that there isn't a single quote from an actual unemployed college graduate in this article - just VCs, founders, and kids in prestigious billionaire-funded programs. Luke Farritor and Thiel Fellows were never at risk of AI displacement in the first place.
I should say upfront: I like a lot of the programs mentioned in the article. They're genuinely good for the people who get into them. But that's exactly the problem: anyone capable of getting into these programs was never going to be unemployed in the first place.
The idea that billionaire patronage can meaningfully address youth unemployment doesn't hold up to basic math (Left brained logic, I know, but sometimes that's what you need). The US produces 3 million college graduates annually. There are around 900 billionaires in the country. Optimistically, if each billionaire funded projects employing 10 people who each hire 10 more, that's only 90,000 jobs total. I understand the article doesn't claim this is a comprehensive solution, but at this scale, it's not even a partial solution. The youth unemployment rate is hovering at 5.8% and the underemployment rate is at 41%. That 90,000 figure is extremely optimistic to begin with (it would be like every billionaire hiring enough people to staff a series B startup, *every year*) and even then it would only account for 3% of graduates.
While we're talking about scale, we should remember that Renaissance Florence had 60,000 people. That is less than the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (150,000 people). You can't scale patron-client relationships from a small Renaissance city to a modern nation of 330 million people. They are qualitatively and quantitatively different places.
I say this as a right brained person who was never good at math: the unfortunate truth is that you need left-brain logic to solve big societal problems. You cannot "right-brain" your way through youth unemployment by vibing about beauty and Medicis.
Particularly telling is the claim that startups are the "driving force" of the economy when tech represents just 8.9% of GDP. That's not analysis, that's someone who's spent too much time in Silicon Valley thinking his social circle is representative of the broader economy. The core thesis about society being "too left-brained" is backwards too - look at US politics and tell me we need less rationality and more emotional decision-making.
The cliched take that college graduates should just go into the trades is boring and tired, but at least it's actually feasible.
Agreed, and on top of your point about demographics, I think a right-brained approach would be to study how society today is qualitatively unrecognizable from the 1500s.
Society today is much more cosmopolitan and distributed - instead of a few powerful familities there are thousands of billionaires with millions of hobbies. Unlike the Medicis and how they reshaped Bologna most billionaires can reach a very wide audience and "cement their legacy" without doing anything of cultural significance. They can show up with models at the Monaco Grand Prix on their superyacht and hobnob with peers, spend energy and funds on bringing their scifi dreams of AI or VR to life, hoard paintings and display them at their office, home or store them in a Freeport or they can own a Hawaiian island all to themselves. The Medicis were far less insulated, rather than being like billionaires who can hide in private jets, have PR companies help them communicate to online audiences and constantly shift contexts and reinvent themselves, they're basically like a local landlord of today, the ones who run everything in town. All this is to say that for most billionaires the compulsion to contribute to so-called magnificence isn't at all the same.
And if billionaires were thinking about legacy and cultural impact, they have way more ways of doing so, like investing in science (germs and cancer wasn't a thing in the 1500s), being the first to land on Mars, producing a LoTR TV show, and a whole lot of other activities that are cultural but not magnificent, like tweeting incessantly and getting into politics. We live after all, in an age of far shorter attention spans, greater comfort and also an age where there isn't at all agreement society-wide on what's magnificent, especially in the realm of art, music, literature, theatre, movies, games etc.
No doubt billionaires will fund things that interest them, but to borrow the quantitative argument above it just doesn't make sense. Unlike the 1500s we have a sophisticated financial system that allows distinguished chefs to start their own restaurants, by raising their own funds and serving the general public. You can repeat this analogy for just about every industry - some artists might want to work for just one patron, but one can easily see how being subject to the whim of one person (or one person at any time) can be insufferable. If you're a filmmaker you might be making a movie for a wide audience and get really annoyed at your patron - just think about all the stories about the tension between production companies and directors, or coaches and management.
I think instead of a top down approach from billionaires and patrons who have hoarded the wealth of an industrial revolution it makes far more sense to have a bottoms up approach, where millions and billions of people decide for themselves what's cool and great to work on, unencumbered by a lack of funds and other hurdles, and therein give their lives meaning. In such a scenario we don't even need billionaires to start this movement or anything, ordinary influencers doing cool things should suffice and motivate people to want to do cool things, so long as the system provided ordinary people sufficient free time and resources.
In the 1500s when standardized schooling didn't exist, almost everyone was illiterate and struggling to literally put food on the table it made sense that the few wealthy and literate got to write the story of their time, but in our time where most people work 40 hours a week and potentially less, and everyone at least went to school for 8-12 years, it would be a shame if somehow 1000 billionaires and their 10000 clients were the ones primarily making anything of cultural value, with the remaining 8 billion of us just scrolling and scrounging.
Excellent essay.
A few thoughts:
In WWII, the Allies firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now ask why Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities didn’t receive the same treatment Magnificenza, Medici, whatever you want to call it, the Allies avoided bombing those areas that housed great Renaissance art because they didn’t want to be portrayed as barbarian. Then think of all the art stolen by the Nazis. This is the “measure” of the power of great art over centuries.
As for the worry of AI and other new tools/technology causing unemployment, there exists a decades-long trend of countries creating more opportunities and income for women. In tandem with this trend, women decide to have fewer children on no children. And U.S. policies in re women’s health care are going in the opposite direction of reality. Good luck encouraging women to have children given the antagonism toward them. We’d better be creating superior technologies, tools, materials, and education systems, otherwise the touted “abundance economy” is beyond reach. Scarcity is value. And if there are going to be significantly fewer workers in the coming decades, we’d best find ways to make workers more valuable.
I think a great deal of what is called wokeism explicitly casts itself as the revenge of the right brain so any program like the one that is described here has to be about the right brain accepting discipline from the left brain to obtain goals that the left brain cannot obtain or value by itself. It cannot be about the right brain forcing the left brain to submit because of all the past oppression done in the left brain's name.
Yes the billionaires are saving us.
Left brain thinking got us MAGA with hatred of immigrants, defunding the future (R&D, antivax Health Dept. rolling out tariffs without considering their consequences.
Good piece. One thing I struggle with, though, is that it the real demographic shock is actually excess supply (old people who are retiring), and AI makes that 100x worse. So on one hand I can imagine it making it possible to build stuff 10x cheaper than before, but that really depends on the kinds of personalities who like to build things. I’m not convinced it will be good for the median worker.
And I really doubt the billionaires who build new libraries of Alexandria will be interested in building nursing homes in Missouri unless a financial return is likely. That friction will be 10x higher for social insurance schemes like UBI.