Thanks. I think humans are biologically wired to worry, so they will worry about the biggest risk currently available, which might be fairly small.
Also, small families are themselves a product of both lower mortality and wealth so the causation is complex. Without reliable savings or social security, children were the means to not end up destitute and starving in old age or through sickness. If you live in a poor place, you will actually see this happen and a culture will evolve around it. There are still great reasons to have kids, of course, but it's no longer driven by the need for insurance. A "barren" woman is not a visible failure in the affluent world - it may be a lifestyle choice.
See my last comment to resolve this. Much, probably most, of the tradeoff loss is NOT positive goods, it is mere economic activity which contributes nothing to human wellbeing but usually has high environmental costs.
The first step to solving this will be to delegitimise markets and success in (i.e. wealth gained from) markets.
On secularization, here is a crazy and only tangential anecdote I learned earlier this year about the connection between belief in the afterlife and risk aversion: in the Cold War one argument some conservatives made was that they (the West) should be less fearful about using nukes because they believe in god and the afterlife whereas communists don’t, so communists will be more reluctant to use nukes because if they die in a general conflagration or as a result of the side effects of significant strike, that’s it for them.
Life just being more fun seems the best explanation for me, back in the 1800s, if by some miracle you managed to survive through childbirth, the massive amounts of viruses and bacterial infections that wiped out half the kids (Slight exaggeration) and did manage to get to 60ish, you had no real pension and couldn't physically work on your manual labour type jobs then all you had left was a few years of survival not living, whereas now once we hit our 60s we are still relatively fit, have the aged pension or for many of us a pool of savings to draw down on and we get to actually live, not just survive, no wonder people want more of those years
are parents programming this risk aversion into the minds of their children ? do teens really avoid driving because it's risky, or because a less immersive alternative is available? is there an underlying issue of cognitive aversion? when I was in my developmental-behavioral block years ago, we learned that letting youth face "safe" cognitive and physical challenges helped develop their motor pathways and adaptive problem solving skills. this in mind is it logical to argue that our shift towards safety;(lower mortality risk tolerance) is a bad progression? engaging with risk preserves the true value of life? rambling thoughts .....
I think the advent of the Internet has made driving less appealing to today's youth than it was in, say, 1950-1970. You can do an awful lot without leaving the house these days thanks to the explosion in on-demand TV and downloadable video games, and you can even video chat with all your friends at once using your smartphones and tablets instead of having to share a single phone line with your entire family.
Also, I think that there are more parents today that will let you have sex at home than there used to be, so that's another thing you don't need to borrow the family car for...
Thanks for the compliment! Out of curiosity, how did you come across this article? :) My substack is very new so I’m still trying to figure out what audience to cultivate, etc.
Wide-ranging discussion of risk. Interesting throughout. There is little doubt that humans are becoming more risk averse. The US's value for a statistical life (now $11.4 million) has more than tripled since 1980, far outstripping life expectancy. Why do we prize safety more? Likely a combination of growing personal wealth, secularisation, smaller families, falling mortality rates, and psychological evolution (https://thebrowser.com/r/a60b3de1?m=4e5433be-85c2-4f76-87ac-eed278e99629)
Wide-ranging discussion of risk. Interesting throughout. There is little doubt that humans are becoming more risk averse. The US's value for a statistical life (now $11.4 million) has more than tripled since 1980, far outstripping life expectancy. Why do we prize safety more? Likely a combination of growing personal wealth, secularisation, smaller families, falling mortality rates, and psychological evolution
Imagine how even more risk averse we would become if, through advances in medical science, we extended the human life span from the currently allotted few decades to several centuries. An early death — from childhood cancer, teenage road accident, drug overdose, middle-age heart attack — would be so much more heartbreaking that we might go to ever greater and more extreme lengths to prevent it. The prospect of having to endure for hundreds of years the grief of losing a loved one, as well as the loss of everything that might have been, could very well leave many of us paralyzed with such fear that the excessive protectiveness of today’s parents would seem unconscionably callous in retrospect. Prosperity and longevity are great gifts, and it is right that we value them, but they are not without cost.
AI tells me that under 5 mortality in 1925 in Ireland as about 10%. Having 5 kids meant about a 40% of losing one under 5 so everyone either lost a kid or knew someone who did. So they were able to handle the concept of death. Also they had much larger families, with an excess having to emigrate so the impact of losing a child was less than if you only had one or two.
I'm surprised to find no mention of mass media and the effect it has on risk perception. Images of low probability tragedies are broadcast to billions of people. Smartphones and social media have accelerated this tendency.
Yeah it's a plausible hypothesis! I think it's wrong however. Here are some notes I wrote about in an unpublished draft:
"Information Salience
We know more about risks now. Maybe that knowledge, not changing values, drives behavioral changes.
Your grandmother didn't worry about BPA in plastics because she didn't know it existed. You don't let your kids roam the neighborhood because you've seen kidnapping statistics (actual rate: 0.00007% annually). Every plane crash makes global news; every car seat recall triggers panic. Perhaps we're not valuing life more. We're just more aware of threats.
But if salience were the main driver, we'd expect risk avoidance to be at best almost useless and at worst performative. And we do see some evidence of this: Terrorism kills ~10 Americans/year in a typical year, ~100-150/year in the last 25 years if we include 9/11. Yet we obsess much more about terrorism than traffic accidents (~40,000 deaths/year), or ladder falls (~300 deaths/year). We see more coverage of shark attacks than about air pollution, more about school shootings than gun suicides, etc. We see many forms of irrationality across all aspects of risk prevention.
But we’d also see much more: We’d expect risk avoidance to have minimal effect on real risk reduction, for safety measures to almost all be useless, for the relatively more safety-conscious to die at the same rates as everybody else, for common safety-focused behaviors to be useless, etc. We’d expect almost no change in death rates outside of major technological innovations (developed mostly by accident).
And we mostly don’t see that? The saliency story explains some irrationality in risk assessment but not the systematic shift toward safety-first thinking. And in general, I think it’s easy to laugh at and overstate the depth of human irrationality. On average over time and collectively, I think people mostly make mostly reasonable choices given their set of high-level preferences and the information available to them. Psych nerds and some academics like to tell a story of humans being infinitely malleable and infinitely foolish, but the data is broadly more consistent with humans being approximately rational most of the time, in real life."
It's true that increased risk salience will result in some specific irrationally excessive risk-reduction measures, and I agree that we do see examples of that kind of irrationality. But I think you are being too narrow by framing this risk-salience hypothesis as simply a hypothesis that people are all being irrational. Increased exposure to rare tragedies could change people's preferences, rather than just messing up their probability calculations.
Consider it in conjunction with the "Safety-Risk Aversion Feedback Loops" hypothesis. Risk salience makes us take on safety measures we previously thought were onerous (e.g., TSA). Our preferences then change in response to exposure to safety measures. We used to think they were onerous, but we got used to them, and view them more neutrally. This change in preference is not obviously irrational, but is kicked off by increased risk salience.
Janis Joplin sang that freedom exists only when you have nothing left to lose. Over time, as material assets grow, a desire for security transcends a desire for personal freedom. Political coups work only among the poor.
I think this is true…sort of. Empirically political coups in the past (Think French Revolution, American Revolution, various wars of independence) have come from the upper middle class and lower-upper class. That said, those people were still materially poorer than the current American middle class, by a significant margin.
Linch, thanks for the changes. I do try to be constructive, and yours is now a piece of interesting data and thoughts.
I must doubt the usefulness of your economic loss figures, they being GDP-based. Reductions in economic activity are not necessarily reductions in USEFUL goods or services. E.g. the FX market is 10 times the value of all international trade, travel and tourism, very little would be lost to ordinary people if 91% of that market disappeared. Similarly, half or more of the fashion industry could disappear without significant loss in human welfare as long as those who lost jobs had decent welfare to support them - UBI is very relevant. The Covid reduction in economic activity with its emphasis on travel was actually very green, air pollution in London improved greatly, as did CO2 emissions. Yes, some people experienced economic hardship, but that was the fault of the inadequacy of welfare states which rely on market economics instead of socialist planning.
And about cliches, they may be inelegant but some are true. The one you rightly dropped was not.
I share your intuition on ~90% of FX being mostly useless; am less sure about fashion (feels like one of those female-oriented fields that men aren’t very good at assessing*). That said, I don’t think FX is counted in GDP, for good reason.
In general I think you’re underestimating the information value of pricing and markets, which central planning can’t reach. When socialist theorists tried to respond to these objections, historically they ended up having to come up with things like shadow prices, which tend to be a pretty clumsy workaround, or they become market socialists and advocate for a “democratic socialist*” schema that is in reality a hybrid economy, different from nominally capitalist societies like the US in degree rather than kind, and not by a lot.
I agree that COVID lockdowns had net positives like reduced CO2 emissions. However it clearly couldn’t last forever; the experience was miserable for most people.
*not saying men innately can’t assess them, just that I and most men I know haven’t learned enough to pass useful judgment.
*or authoritarian market socialists like China. There are also failed states like North Jorea but I don’t take anybody who advocate for them seriously.
FX turnover isn’t in GDP, but but FX salaries, bonuses and profits are.
Miserable?? Living in a hothouse Earth (and it will be in, underground, not on, in conventional housing for the survivor population, almost certainly no more than 1 bln if that) will be far more miserable. And the only way to avoid that (if that’s still possible) is by direct control and rationing, particularly of motor car ownership and use , and of travel (including commuting to work) if that.
There is no way markets can achieve energy use reductions needed to mitigate anthropogenic global heating. Only direct rationing and micromanaging consumption can do that.
First of all, what’s the evidence that socialist regimes are better at avoiding climate change than capitalist ones, as an empirical matter?
Secondly you’re vastly overstating the harm of climate change (which is nontrivially bad but expected harm in terms of life-years lost not as bad as say indoor+outdoor air pollution. Not the worst environmental problem and not in the top 5 of problems humanity will face this century), but that’s a more delicate matter. I recommend reading published literature from like IPCC reports and stuff from the Climate Impact Lab, stripping out the emotive language and normative claims, and tallying up the actual projections and numbers and compare it to other issues we have numbers on.
I’ve considered writing a Substack post about this but I probably won’t since I want to focus the Substack on things that are novel and interesting (for both me and readers), where I have greater confidence that readers can learn a lot from. Being a nuanced voice on hot-button issues is that something I empirically did a lot of on other social media platforms, but for the Substack I want to focus more on novelty.
FYI, my basis for global heating harm is Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth (which of course owes a lot to other scientists’ work). I spent my last 7 years before retiring in polar ocean physics, so I am familiar with the field.
Remove fallacious pairing of risk and reward. Obvious counterexample: the very valuable “rewards” of serenity and peace require removal or minimisation of risk.
Replace “cowardice” by “intelligent caution” or “risk avoidance”, make analogous replacement of “coward”.
There may be other edits which are desirable but they are not as obvious.
>“three main factors that might result in this change: wealth effects, safety-risk feedback loops, and secularization, and argue that this shift has had profound implications for how we organize society”
Agreed, but to me that is a great big positive. There may be other factors involved, too: the extra 10-30 years are mostly those of leisured retirement . As such they are far more valuable than years spent in wage slavery, subsistence agriculture or market or workplace competition.
I tried my best to present the observed phenomena in a way that is measured, and withhold judgment until future work. Do you think I should’ve been more clearly opinionated?
I appreciate the feedback. I removed the risk-reward line partially due to your feedback and partially because it’s a cliche and I try to write in ways that invoke less cliches.
The piece spends 4,000 words circling around a basic truth: life is valued more because people have more to give up. VSL rises with wealth — and wealth grows exponentially, unlike linear or stagnant per-capita GDP. It's an economic story, not a cultural one. Misses the point entirely.
Thank you for the intriguing hypothesis! Why do you think it grows proportionally with wealth? And do you want to make bets on that model being more predictive?
Being fearless is one of the core values of the business I started with my partner. It is it a good business strategy, and it is also a good way to live. It comes with bumps and bruises, but our lives are expanded and richer. The opposite - living in fear - causes us to recoil and live a diminished life.
Actually, I’d like to clarify. We grow and evolve when we stretch ourselves past our boundaries. This always involves some risk, from walking into unfamiliar terrain. The reward can be a more meaningful, richer life - we learn a new skill, a new language, with a window to a new culture; or we learn insights about ourselves and gain command over our destiny.
Without such growth, our lives become diminished, monotonous, and we become fearful of any change. However, a life of unending challenges can be chaotic and stressful. We still need to catch our breath and regain our energies.
The life well lived, or the business well managed, learns to navigate between comfort and challenge: when to take risks and when to regroup, when to be bold and when to keep a steady course. We gain wisdom and strength by learning to successfully navigate that tension.
It is a matter of taste. I find a life full of financial, to me extremely boring, risk diminishes my life no end. What is disgusting is the way capitalism and its foul, intrinsically exploitative, ante-galitarian and unfair markets try to force tedious financial risk on people. It’s a crap way to live.
Thanks. I think humans are biologically wired to worry, so they will worry about the biggest risk currently available, which might be fairly small.
Also, small families are themselves a product of both lower mortality and wealth so the causation is complex. Without reliable savings or social security, children were the means to not end up destitute and starving in old age or through sickness. If you live in a poor place, you will actually see this happen and a culture will evolve around it. There are still great reasons to have kids, of course, but it's no longer driven by the need for insurance. A "barren" woman is not a visible failure in the affluent world - it may be a lifestyle choice.
Thanks! It’s not obvious why we are more willing to trade off other positive goods for greater life-years now than we used to, however.
See my last comment to resolve this. Much, probably most, of the tradeoff loss is NOT positive goods, it is mere economic activity which contributes nothing to human wellbeing but usually has high environmental costs.
The first step to solving this will be to delegitimise markets and success in (i.e. wealth gained from) markets.
Lovey article.
On secularization, here is a crazy and only tangential anecdote I learned earlier this year about the connection between belief in the afterlife and risk aversion: in the Cold War one argument some conservatives made was that they (the West) should be less fearful about using nukes because they believe in god and the afterlife whereas communists don’t, so communists will be more reluctant to use nukes because if they die in a general conflagration or as a result of the side effects of significant strike, that’s it for them.
Life just being more fun seems the best explanation for me, back in the 1800s, if by some miracle you managed to survive through childbirth, the massive amounts of viruses and bacterial infections that wiped out half the kids (Slight exaggeration) and did manage to get to 60ish, you had no real pension and couldn't physically work on your manual labour type jobs then all you had left was a few years of survival not living, whereas now once we hit our 60s we are still relatively fit, have the aged pension or for many of us a pool of savings to draw down on and we get to actually live, not just survive, no wonder people want more of those years
Good point!
are parents programming this risk aversion into the minds of their children ? do teens really avoid driving because it's risky, or because a less immersive alternative is available? is there an underlying issue of cognitive aversion? when I was in my developmental-behavioral block years ago, we learned that letting youth face "safe" cognitive and physical challenges helped develop their motor pathways and adaptive problem solving skills. this in mind is it logical to argue that our shift towards safety;(lower mortality risk tolerance) is a bad progression? engaging with risk preserves the true value of life? rambling thoughts .....
I think the advent of the Internet has made driving less appealing to today's youth than it was in, say, 1950-1970. You can do an awful lot without leaving the house these days thanks to the explosion in on-demand TV and downloadable video games, and you can even video chat with all your friends at once using your smartphones and tablets instead of having to share a single phone line with your entire family.
Also, I think that there are more parents today that will let you have sex at home than there used to be, so that's another thing you don't need to borrow the family car for...
Excellent article. Here in the UK anti-drug messages are still aimed at teenagers when most people with drug problems are in their 50's.
Thanks for the compliment! Out of curiosity, how did you come across this article? :) My substack is very new so I’m still trying to figure out what audience to cultivate, etc.
https://thebrowser.com/
You're featured on The Browser newsletter.
Nice! Impressive that they found my substack given that I started the substack 10 days ago and this is the second post!
What did they say about the post? Did they mention anything else about the substack?
You got The Browser’s lead paragraph:
—————————————————————————————-
https://thebrowser.com/r/e197d617?m=4e5433be-85c2-4f76-87ac-eed278e99629
By Caroline Crampton • 12 Jul 2025 https://thebrowser.com/r/6f543371?m=4e5433be-85c2-4f76-87ac-eed278e99629
https://thebrowser.com/r/562692e4?m=4e5433be-85c2-4f76-87ac-eed278e99629
Linch | 10th July 2025
Wide-ranging discussion of risk. Interesting throughout. There is little doubt that humans are becoming more risk averse. The US's value for a statistical life (now $11.4 million) has more than tripled since 1980, far outstripping life expectancy. Why do we prize safety more? Likely a combination of growing personal wealth, secularisation, smaller families, falling mortality rates, and psychological evolution (https://thebrowser.com/r/a60b3de1?m=4e5433be-85c2-4f76-87ac-eed278e99629)
————————————————————————————————
That’s what led me to your piece. Well done !
surprised pikachu
Wide-ranging discussion of risk. Interesting throughout. There is little doubt that humans are becoming more risk averse. The US's value for a statistical life (now $11.4 million) has more than tripled since 1980, far outstripping life expectancy. Why do we prize safety more? Likely a combination of growing personal wealth, secularisation, smaller families, falling mortality rates, and psychological evolution
Probably because people tend to start drugs early in life, but then be stuck with drug problems for their entire life.
Good point, it might be more useful to compare cohort-for-cohort.
Imagine how even more risk averse we would become if, through advances in medical science, we extended the human life span from the currently allotted few decades to several centuries. An early death — from childhood cancer, teenage road accident, drug overdose, middle-age heart attack — would be so much more heartbreaking that we might go to ever greater and more extreme lengths to prevent it. The prospect of having to endure for hundreds of years the grief of losing a loved one, as well as the loss of everything that might have been, could very well leave many of us paralyzed with such fear that the excessive protectiveness of today’s parents would seem unconscionably callous in retrospect. Prosperity and longevity are great gifts, and it is right that we value them, but they are not without cost.
AI tells me that under 5 mortality in 1925 in Ireland as about 10%. Having 5 kids meant about a 40% of losing one under 5 so everyone either lost a kid or knew someone who did. So they were able to handle the concept of death. Also they had much larger families, with an excess having to emigrate so the impact of losing a child was less than if you only had one or two.
I'm surprised to find no mention of mass media and the effect it has on risk perception. Images of low probability tragedies are broadcast to billions of people. Smartphones and social media have accelerated this tendency.
Yeah it's a plausible hypothesis! I think it's wrong however. Here are some notes I wrote about in an unpublished draft:
"Information Salience
We know more about risks now. Maybe that knowledge, not changing values, drives behavioral changes.
Your grandmother didn't worry about BPA in plastics because she didn't know it existed. You don't let your kids roam the neighborhood because you've seen kidnapping statistics (actual rate: 0.00007% annually). Every plane crash makes global news; every car seat recall triggers panic. Perhaps we're not valuing life more. We're just more aware of threats.
But if salience were the main driver, we'd expect risk avoidance to be at best almost useless and at worst performative. And we do see some evidence of this: Terrorism kills ~10 Americans/year in a typical year, ~100-150/year in the last 25 years if we include 9/11. Yet we obsess much more about terrorism than traffic accidents (~40,000 deaths/year), or ladder falls (~300 deaths/year). We see more coverage of shark attacks than about air pollution, more about school shootings than gun suicides, etc. We see many forms of irrationality across all aspects of risk prevention.
But we’d also see much more: We’d expect risk avoidance to have minimal effect on real risk reduction, for safety measures to almost all be useless, for the relatively more safety-conscious to die at the same rates as everybody else, for common safety-focused behaviors to be useless, etc. We’d expect almost no change in death rates outside of major technological innovations (developed mostly by accident).
And we mostly don’t see that? The saliency story explains some irrationality in risk assessment but not the systematic shift toward safety-first thinking. And in general, I think it’s easy to laugh at and overstate the depth of human irrationality. On average over time and collectively, I think people mostly make mostly reasonable choices given their set of high-level preferences and the information available to them. Psych nerds and some academics like to tell a story of humans being infinitely malleable and infinitely foolish, but the data is broadly more consistent with humans being approximately rational most of the time, in real life."
It's true that increased risk salience will result in some specific irrationally excessive risk-reduction measures, and I agree that we do see examples of that kind of irrationality. But I think you are being too narrow by framing this risk-salience hypothesis as simply a hypothesis that people are all being irrational. Increased exposure to rare tragedies could change people's preferences, rather than just messing up their probability calculations.
Consider it in conjunction with the "Safety-Risk Aversion Feedback Loops" hypothesis. Risk salience makes us take on safety measures we previously thought were onerous (e.g., TSA). Our preferences then change in response to exposure to safety measures. We used to think they were onerous, but we got used to them, and view them more neutrally. This change in preference is not obviously irrational, but is kicked off by increased risk salience.
Thank you, this is a good point!
Wonderful, thank you.
Janis Joplin sang that freedom exists only when you have nothing left to lose. Over time, as material assets grow, a desire for security transcends a desire for personal freedom. Political coups work only among the poor.
I think this is true…sort of. Empirically political coups in the past (Think French Revolution, American Revolution, various wars of independence) have come from the upper middle class and lower-upper class. That said, those people were still materially poorer than the current American middle class, by a significant margin.
Linch, thanks for the changes. I do try to be constructive, and yours is now a piece of interesting data and thoughts.
I must doubt the usefulness of your economic loss figures, they being GDP-based. Reductions in economic activity are not necessarily reductions in USEFUL goods or services. E.g. the FX market is 10 times the value of all international trade, travel and tourism, very little would be lost to ordinary people if 91% of that market disappeared. Similarly, half or more of the fashion industry could disappear without significant loss in human welfare as long as those who lost jobs had decent welfare to support them - UBI is very relevant. The Covid reduction in economic activity with its emphasis on travel was actually very green, air pollution in London improved greatly, as did CO2 emissions. Yes, some people experienced economic hardship, but that was the fault of the inadequacy of welfare states which rely on market economics instead of socialist planning.
And about cliches, they may be inelegant but some are true. The one you rightly dropped was not.
Thanks again.
I share your intuition on ~90% of FX being mostly useless; am less sure about fashion (feels like one of those female-oriented fields that men aren’t very good at assessing*). That said, I don’t think FX is counted in GDP, for good reason.
In general I think you’re underestimating the information value of pricing and markets, which central planning can’t reach. When socialist theorists tried to respond to these objections, historically they ended up having to come up with things like shadow prices, which tend to be a pretty clumsy workaround, or they become market socialists and advocate for a “democratic socialist*” schema that is in reality a hybrid economy, different from nominally capitalist societies like the US in degree rather than kind, and not by a lot.
I agree that COVID lockdowns had net positives like reduced CO2 emissions. However it clearly couldn’t last forever; the experience was miserable for most people.
*not saying men innately can’t assess them, just that I and most men I know haven’t learned enough to pass useful judgment.
*or authoritarian market socialists like China. There are also failed states like North Jorea but I don’t take anybody who advocate for them seriously.
FX turnover isn’t in GDP, but but FX salaries, bonuses and profits are.
Miserable?? Living in a hothouse Earth (and it will be in, underground, not on, in conventional housing for the survivor population, almost certainly no more than 1 bln if that) will be far more miserable. And the only way to avoid that (if that’s still possible) is by direct control and rationing, particularly of motor car ownership and use , and of travel (including commuting to work) if that.
There is no way markets can achieve energy use reductions needed to mitigate anthropogenic global heating. Only direct rationing and micromanaging consumption can do that.
First of all, what’s the evidence that socialist regimes are better at avoiding climate change than capitalist ones, as an empirical matter?
Secondly you’re vastly overstating the harm of climate change (which is nontrivially bad but expected harm in terms of life-years lost not as bad as say indoor+outdoor air pollution. Not the worst environmental problem and not in the top 5 of problems humanity will face this century), but that’s a more delicate matter. I recommend reading published literature from like IPCC reports and stuff from the Climate Impact Lab, stripping out the emotive language and normative claims, and tallying up the actual projections and numbers and compare it to other issues we have numbers on.
I’ve considered writing a Substack post about this but I probably won’t since I want to focus the Substack on things that are novel and interesting (for both me and readers), where I have greater confidence that readers can learn a lot from. Being a nuanced voice on hot-button issues is that something I empirically did a lot of on other social media platforms, but for the Substack I want to focus more on novelty.
FYI, my basis for global heating harm is Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth (which of course owes a lot to other scientists’ work). I spent my last 7 years before retiring in polar ocean physics, so I am familiar with the field.
Thanks, I might take a look!
“risk and reward are coupled.”
Completely, utterly false in general, just like the absurd pairing of rights and responsibilities.
Both are fallacies used by capitalist exploiters and masculinist/religious traditionalists to try to maintain “social conservatism”.
Unfortunately for the author, this fallacy taints the whole piece, which does present interesting data.
How would you re-write or re-present this article, based on your understanding of reality? Would be interesting to read.
Easy edit:
Remove fallacious pairing of risk and reward. Obvious counterexample: the very valuable “rewards” of serenity and peace require removal or minimisation of risk.
Replace “cowardice” by “intelligent caution” or “risk avoidance”, make analogous replacement of “coward”.
There may be other edits which are desirable but they are not as obvious.
Feels like a clickbait title, but the piece is interesting.
>“three main factors that might result in this change: wealth effects, safety-risk feedback loops, and secularization, and argue that this shift has had profound implications for how we organize society”
Agreed, but to me that is a great big positive. There may be other factors involved, too: the extra 10-30 years are mostly those of leisured retirement . As such they are far more valuable than years spent in wage slavery, subsistence agriculture or market or workplace competition.
I tried my best to present the observed phenomena in a way that is measured, and withhold judgment until future work. Do you think I should’ve been more clearly opinionated?
I appreciate the feedback. I removed the risk-reward line partially due to your feedback and partially because it’s a cliche and I try to write in ways that invoke less cliches.
pretend I didn’t say that sentence lol. I don’t think the intro framing changes the article at all.
The piece spends 4,000 words circling around a basic truth: life is valued more because people have more to give up. VSL rises with wealth — and wealth grows exponentially, unlike linear or stagnant per-capita GDP. It's an economic story, not a cultural one. Misses the point entirely.
Thank you for the intriguing hypothesis! Why do you think it grows proportionally with wealth? And do you want to make bets on that model being more predictive?
Being fearless is one of the core values of the business I started with my partner. It is it a good business strategy, and it is also a good way to live. It comes with bumps and bruises, but our lives are expanded and richer. The opposite - living in fear - causes us to recoil and live a diminished life.
Actually, I’d like to clarify. We grow and evolve when we stretch ourselves past our boundaries. This always involves some risk, from walking into unfamiliar terrain. The reward can be a more meaningful, richer life - we learn a new skill, a new language, with a window to a new culture; or we learn insights about ourselves and gain command over our destiny.
Without such growth, our lives become diminished, monotonous, and we become fearful of any change. However, a life of unending challenges can be chaotic and stressful. We still need to catch our breath and regain our energies.
The life well lived, or the business well managed, learns to navigate between comfort and challenge: when to take risks and when to regroup, when to be bold and when to keep a steady course. We gain wisdom and strength by learning to successfully navigate that tension.
It is a matter of taste. I find a life full of financial, to me extremely boring, risk diminishes my life no end. What is disgusting is the way capitalism and its foul, intrinsically exploitative, ante-galitarian and unfair markets try to force tedious financial risk on people. It’s a crap way to live.
Impose socialism to solve this.