How to Keep Up with the Pace of the World’s Progress

How to Keep Up with the Pace of the World’s Progress

What, exactly, has the progress of the world brought to humanity? It is a question worth serious reflection. On the one hand, technology has dramatically raised humanity’s material standard of living; on the other, it has relentlessly accelerated the pace of human society, making the world we live in feel unrecognizable every few years. This kind of transformation is unprecedented. The slow changes that human society underwent over several thousand years were far less intense than the changes of the roughly 300 years since the Industrial Revolution. And the upheavals of those 300 years have themselves been overturned within just a few decades since the invention of the computer.

People are accustomed to drawing lessons from history, but most of those lessons rest on the assumption that history repeats itself and that human circumstances remain broadly stable. Yet every day faced by people today is, in many ways, unlike anything in human history before. Under such conditions, the lessons history offers are more about human nature and culture than about the development of the real world around us. In this moment, Hegel’s famous remark feels more accurate than ever: “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it is pointed out that GDP growth throughout most of human history was extremely slow, or even stagnant and inconsistent. Just imagine: if human society’s GDP had increased at a rate of 1% per year, over 2,000 years GDP would have grown by 439 million times. That figure is astonishing. In this sense alone, the current rate of GDP growth in modern society is, on the one hand, unsustainable, and on the other, highly deceptive. In earlier times, inflation as we know it did not really exist. Whether in Shakespeare’s age or Jane Austen’s, the value of 100 pounds was essentially the same. But the vast increase in productivity brought about by the Industrial Revolution made both value and currency unstable.

The world is indeed developing rapidly, and the scarcity of the material world is quickly being replaced by abundance. But when the growth of abundance falls short of expectations—or exceeds them—money becomes detached from actual value. Ever since the central bank of the new world—the United States—declared that the dollar would no longer be pegged to gold, the global financial system has in effect become a runaway horse. Central banks can only barely steer it a little to the left or to the right, but no one can truly stop its march toward the abyss.

Most people still have not realized this. Even more people perceive the shift from scarcity to abundance only at a sensory level, without ever fully understanding it. China’s agricultural age is completely over. Virtues such as meticulous cultivation and frugality, which were formed out of the necessities of survival in an agrarian society, are in large part no longer suited to the pace of the industrial age—though they may become relevant again in a post-industrial era. Likewise, the agrarian belief that age itself equals experience is no longer appropriate. The elderly are no longer those who have lived through many seasons and therefore know farming best; instead, they are more likely to become those least able to adapt to rapid change.

Under the financial system, technological progress—especially in information technology—has advanced even more quickly. It is hard to imagine that the cost of storage has fallen by hundreds of thousands of times over just 20 years, while processor performance has continued to grow rapidly under Moore’s Law, at least for now. This has led to an explosive development of information technology, yet the relevant knowledge and skills remain concentrated in the hands of only a small portion of people. That is as alarming as it would have been in primitive times if only a few people knew how to hunt, in agrarian times if only a few knew how to farm, or in the industrial age if only a few understood machinery. What is even more frightening than in any previous era is that the gap between person and person, and between person and machine, is greater than ever before—and it is still widening, and will continue to widen.

This means that the knowledge and skills possessed by most people could become useless overnight, while most people remain completely unaware of this possibility.

So how should we respond? I think not everyone needs to outrun the world. But at the very least, when the bear comes, we need to outrun the person next to us. Therefore, keeping an open mind, continuing to learn and strive, and understanding changes in the world as much as possible are probably the only opportunities available to any of us.