Was there a Great Stagnation in technological development? Definitely maybe! Are we still in one? Definitely maybe not! Am I the correct person to adjudicate such things? Absolutely not.

When we talk about stagnation, we focus on the sort of innovation that is most pertinent to economic growth, which means technology as it relates to production. More than just important, with any small amount of reflection on the human condition and how far we have come as a species, in a certain light the technology underlying production is very nearly the only thing that matters.

Only, in a far more comfortable and modern way, it’s not. With all due respect to the protests of those who used to hike 10 miles to three jobs, uphill all 4 ways, every day through the snow, our lives are about consumption. And before you cast me into The Pit of a Thousand Shopping Malls, I mean consumption in a very broad sense. Consumption of time with family and friends; consumption of the 5 senses; of active introspection and passive entertainment; of every new Zelda game they can possibly create.

And all I’d really like to do today is cheer you with a delightful reminder that there will never be a great stagnation of consumption goods. There really won’t be! Not because human genius is unlimited (though maybe it is, if you include exponential AI learning). Rather, it is because our wants are infinite, and from those wants we can fabricate a cheery synthesis of Say’s Law and the unrelenting optimism of Endogenous Technical Change – that Demand Creates its Own Innovation.

That might be overly cute, but I’m not taking the “infinity” in play here lightly. That infinity of wants is not a product of our imagination or the broad dimensions in which we can consume. That infinity is born of our capacity for niche refinement, for variation. If you don’t believe me, go a farmers market. Go a Wegmans. Go to your local Asian grocery store. Google “heirloom tomatoes.”

Our consumptive lives will never stop improving because each new good brings with it the infinite possibilities of small changes, of bigger/narrower/weirder/quieter/redder/hotter/faster/easier/drowsier/friendlier/adjective/adjective… And with each new variation comes a roll of the dice that just might send us down forking paths of inspiration and radical departure from past convention, toward that new way of living our lives that no one had thought possible before.

There was a time when we didn’t have enough calories, so we innovated ways to make more calories. Once we had enough calories, we invented better calories. Then we invented foods. Then meals. Then experiences. Then stories. Then identities. Each stage of innovation brings with it not the disappearing of low-hanging fruit, but an expanding horizon of all the possible ways our life-sustaining caloric consumption goods might evolve, and the infinite stories they might help us tell through the lives we live. And we will never run out of stories to tell.

I am a tenured professor at an R1 research department who gets to work every day with scholars at universities all over the world. In 2002, when I applied to get my PhD at a local school, I did not know how grad school, academia, or research worked. More importantly, I didn’t know that I didn’t know, so I didn’t try to find out. I tell you this only to illustrate, via personal example, the depth of ignorance that is possible among exactly the people who, in theory, should be be the most informed, or at least trying the hardest to become informed. ¹

When you spend enough time with the same group of people, there is a tendency to treat shared in-group knowledge as universally common knowledge. I don’t think this tendency is unique, or even especially strong, among academics, but it is something I am acutely aware of when discussions turn to higher education. The paper linked to in the tweet below reports the results of a field experiment where subjects in the treatment group received a packet of information regarding the availability of financial support to attend the University of Michigan for qualified applicants. It was impeccably designed and well-funded, and included the composition of informational materials rivaling any educational marketing I have ever seen. Go read the paper yourself, but the punchline is that the exogenous shock of information mattered, significantly increasing applications and subsequent matriculation to the University by students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The results did not surprise me in the slightest (that is not a dig at the paper, which is tremendous). What surprised me when I saw the paper presented was the shock expressed by so many fellow members in the audience, who simply could not reconcile the implication that students (and their families) were unaware that college education was accessible to them. How did they not know? How could they not know? The information was everywhere.

Ivory tower academics live in bubble, yeah yeah. Shrug. I don’t think this is an ivory tower phenomenon, to be honest. This is, instead, a story about information deserts. Food deserts, yeah they’re not real. But information deserts, in my carefully cultivated opinion very much are. Academics expressing shock that people don’t know how much financial aid is available, that Harvard of all places is entirely “need-blind” in their application process (and to be clear, every university with a multi-billion endowment should be ashamed to not be need-blind in their application process). It’s easy to forget that the majority of people don’t get an undergraduate degree. They don’t interact with the aid process, it’s not something that people discuss with their neighbors. I don’t buy a lot “economic class as causal mechanism” theorizing, but there is something to be said for the fact that, culturally, we don’t discuss money with our friends. We don’t talk about our salaries and loans, how we are paying for education or how your kid might be able to pay for theirs. It’s simply not the kind of information that fills the air, doubly so in communities where most of the parents never attended college. Compounded the with greater urgency of day-to-day living for poor families, there just aren’t a lot of channels through which students can get a first moment’s traction to start asking the question about how they can go to college, let alone arrive at answers.

When smart and good technocrats like me are looking for policies that can stand up to the rigors of cost-benefit analysis from skeptics, information campaigns manage to be some of the very worst and very best ideas out there. When they’re bad, they talk down to disadvantaged communities with condescending messages filled with information they already have (crack is bad!), common sense everyone has (guns are dangerous!), or the kind of avuncular suburban conservative wisdom that leaves no one an ounce more informed.

But, when they’re good, they’re great. Information campaigns scale, with manageable marginal costs and often zero downside risk. They provide a very specific kind of information– information you didn’t even know you were missing, often answers to questions you didn’t know you should be asking. Did you know there was a Hepatitis vaccine? Did you know that you can save for our kid’s college education tax free? Did you know you qualify for the EITC and if you file your taxes you’ll get a check for $4,600? Did you know the flagship university of the state, one of the very best in the world, guarantees sufficient financial support to allow 100% of admitted students to attend without being financially crippled for life?

Rather than focus on what you think people know and don’t know, just start from the basics. What is the information that you relied on when making the biggest decisions in your life? Do other people have that information?

Are you sure?

¹ I’ll abstain from telling the long version here, but I had absolutely no clue how graduate school and academia worked when I applied to a PhD program. I was a public high school teacher, I thought I’d work hard, write a dissertation, and make 50k a year teaching in a local community college. It’s funny in hindsight because what was then an ocean of unknowns is now the entirety of our academic working lives. Being told that families don’t know how college works is can feel like being told people don’t know the water we live in is wet.

I’m often wary of personal stories that illustrate an idea too perfectly, but here we go.

I was in a small local grocer purchasing tonic water, which elicited a comment from a White middle-aged man about the importance of never running out of tonic when there is gin to drink, followed quickly by an unsolicited story of his drinking and driving, only to get pulled over by a police officer and be told to “Go straight home, I don’t want to see this car on the road the rest of the night.” This prompted innocent confusion on the part of the young Black cashier, who asked

“Wait, were you drunk?”

“Oh yeah, I was completely hammered”

That’s it, that’s the whole story. The young woman was flabbergasted that an officer would pull over a clearly drunk driver and let them off the hook. I doubt she was unaware of the concept of White Privilege, but rather I suspect she was shocked to find it extended to something as socially stigmatized as drunk driving. She rang up my bill, her face frozen in a “Really?” that for all I know she is still wearing to this day.

The optimal balance of unbending rule adherence/enforcement versus pure discretion in judgement/enforcement will always be an open debate at the level of macro institutions and the day-to-day micro decisions of the agents presiding over our lives. Rather than further adjudicate how much discretion is optimal, I ask that you only grant me that the median voter in nearly every context demands that discretion remains > 0.

In the context of law enforcement, what I would like to contend is that we have chosen the wrong kind of discretion. Or, perhaps more precisely, the emphasized discretion in the wrong direction. With rare exception, our rules dictate overly-harsh punishments, and it is in the agents of enforcements that we have both imbued, and burdened, the power of discretionary lenience. The officer can let you off with a warning or record a speed below a key punishment threshold, the judge can sentence you to probation instead of jail time or suspend your sentence entirely. We are, many of us, comfortable with this construct because at some level we have faith in the humanity, the sympathy, of the enforcer.

This construct has consequences. Most obviously, it means the system will be harsher on groups of people with whom the enforcing agents have less sympathy, in whom they see less in of themselves (or their children). Showing how ticket speeds “bunch” on different sides of a punishment threshold for white and black drivers, Goncalves and Mello neatly show officer discrimination, not in the form of targeting black drivers with additional cruelty, but rather in excluding them from the relief afforded White drivers from a harsh system of rules.

This is an important distinction. In a system with gentle rules, the burden is placed upon the discretionary agent to ensure punishment is sufficient to the transgression. They have to bear the burden of what happens to the punished; they have to be the villain in that person’s story. When the rules are cruel and the system allows for sympathetic lenience, they get to be that person’s hero. Even for those humans with whom officers have less sympathy, it will still be easier for guilt averse officers to fail to be someone’s hero than opt to be their villain. Perhaps most importantly, it displaces accountability for punishment outcomes from the discretionary agent to the system as a whole. Few will ever be fired or shunned for failing to intervene on behalf of a transgressor, but those who opt to dispense additional punishment may be asked to defend their choice. If you want accountability, strictness has to be someone’s choice.

How did we end up with a variety of brutal punishments that we count on discretionary agents to protect us from? I can imagine a variety of origin stories. When Nixon sold White Southern voters on “Law and Order” it was by design a promise to lock away the Black men that White southerners were terrified of. White southerners had every reason to believe they, and more importantly their sons, would be protected from draconian drug laws by, what were then, almost exclusively White officers and judges. I also don’t think we should underestimate how the median American views the prospect of being arrested as something that happens to other people. Strict punishments are exactly what criminals deserve. In the unlikely event you interact with the system, the professionals in the system will quickly see their error or, at worse, will see you as someone who doesn’t deserve to be punished harshly. Discretion will save you.

Lastly, harsh punishments and discretionary lenience allows observers from the privileged group off the psychological hook with a simple bit of reasoning: “They broke the rules, that’s the punishment according to the rules. They made their choice.” But is that the line of reasoning you follow when you interact with an officer?

When you see red and blue flashing lights in your rearview, what runs through your mind? Do you plan your story– the job interview you’re rushing to, the bathroom emergency you’re in the midst of? Do you prime your system for the Stanislavskian production of tears? Or do you get out your license and registration, put them in your left hand, roll down your window, and place both hands squarely at the top of the steering wheel hoping desperately not to spook the officer you expect will unbutton their sidearm as soon as they see the color of your skin?

A post script

When racial discrimination and White privilege are levied as explanations of social phenomena, even though the two are, for all intents and purposes, outcome equivalent, I often can’t help but think that the wrong rhetorical option is chosen. If and when employers discriminate against Black job applicants, this privileges White applicants, but those White applicants don’t actually observe the discrimination first hand. To frame this as an example of White privilege is to tell them they don’t deserve the job they’ve worked hard to acquire– their resistance to the explanation maybe shouldn’t be so surprising. Discrimination, not privilege, is the easier rhetorical sell because you are telling them a story about something negative that happened to someone else that they had no direct part in– they don’t have to be the villain in the story, they simply have to accept the evidence put before them and sympathize with those being harmed.

Conversely, stories of positive discrimination, such as the criminal justice system extending greater lenience to White citizens, are precisely examples of privilege. No one should feel unjustly villainized simply because they are receiving additional benefits when they did in fact break the rules. Furthermore, the policy goal to be pursued here is not to eliminate the privilege of lenience enjoyed by one group, but to extend that lenience to everybody else.

When framed as such – that negative discrimination is something to be eliminated, while positive privilege is something to be expanded, it becomes easier to persuade people because you’re never asking them to give something up or confess to a transgression they don’t recall committing. You’re letting everyone remain a hero in the story they tell themselves everyday.

Unless, of course, they’re just racist and want to use the government and market institutions we live within to cause as much harm as possible to others. There’s no rhetorical fix for that; they’re going to fight the rest of us every step of the way no matter how much evidence is found or how it is presented. But then again, they don’t really matter in this story, do they? They’re just inframarginal obstacles in our quest to persuade the median voter to accept the evidence of positive and negative discrimination, and work together to make the world just a little better, one policy at a time.