Astral Codex Ten

First World

11 min read

First World

Article

First World is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 09, 2021 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “no consistent trend toward more polarization in the First World”; “what if First World textile mills are some sort of amazing robotic wonderland now”; “Life in the First World will continue”. It most often appears alongside US, Africa, California.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: February 09, 2021
  • Last seen: July 30, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
So although polarization is definitely rising in the US, it’s stable in other countries, and falling in still others. There is no consistent trend toward more polarization in the First World! As Klein points out, this is a strong challenge to any story relying on digital media or social media or the changing media landscape.
Book Review: Global Economic History
April 21, 2021 · Original source
By the early 20th century, a clear gap had emerged between Europe, North America, and Japan (on one side), and everyone else (on the other). After World War II, the former colonies declared independence from Europe, hoping to try the Standard Development Model at long last and get the same easy successes the West had. But this no longer worked; they had missed the boat entirely. GEH:VSI invokes the increasing gap between developed and less developed countries; when the gap was still small, the Standard Model prongs were enough to overcome it. By the 20th century, developed countries were so far ahead that the model made less sense. If you're 1820s France trying to catch up to Britain, you can probably find some craftsmen somewhere in your economy who can make something like a textile mill, train them a bit, get them to make textile mills, use some clever investment policy to create whatever prerequisites to textile mills you don't already have, and eventually end up with textile mills without too much trouble. If you're 2000s Bangladesh trying to catch up to the West, you want semiconductor factories. Scrounging around a mostly-agrarian economy and eventually cobbling together enough expertise and capital to make a textile mill is one thing. Making a semiconductor factory is a lot harder. And if you decide to just make the textile mill instead, what if First World textile mills are some sort of amazing robotic wonderland now and nobody wants your crappy 1800s-technology textiles? Development needs a lot more slack now before it can become profitable.
Inline links: slack
And how does globalization fit into this picture? New parts of existing countries are able to develop relatively quickly - for example, when the US took California from Mexico, it eventually converged to US (not Mexican) standards of living. If a New California were to rise out of the Pacific Ocean just west of the regular one, and Americans were to colonize it, I would expect it to also converge to normal US standards of living eventually. Why? In 2021, New California has nothing, and (eg) India has much more than nothing. How come we are more certain that New California will soon get First World living standards than that India will? If the answer is something like “because American companies can expand to New California and trade with other Americans without tariffs”, doesn’t that mean that if India invites US companies in, lowers tariffs, and has good institutions - then they too can quickly converge to US standards of living? But isn’t that the opposite of GED:VSI’s thesis? I’m not saying they’re wrong - I assume development economists know what they’re talking about - but it confuses me and this book didn’t give me a great answer.
Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
October 11, 2021 · Original source
Climate change will cause worse hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. It will lead to increased spread of invasive species and diseases. It will hit subsistence farmers in poor agricultural countries very hard, and some of them will starve or become refugees. But it won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone. Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always. The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies.
This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts. It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe thousands? Maybe tens of thousands? Probably trillions of dollars have already been lost to disasters and agricultural problems. But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the First World, probably including your child, still won’t notice much of a change to their daily lives.
I want to focus on sea level rise because it’s easy to quantify and display. Sea levels have already risen about a quarter of a meter since 1880. This has flooded some low-lying islands, damaged some coastal cities, and devastated some wetlands and other habitats. But the average person in the First World hasn’t noticed. The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100, so maybe 2-4x as much as they’ve risen already. This also won’t be very noticeable to average people. Here’s San Francisco now (top picture), after 1m of sea level rise ie the IPCC’s worst-case scenario for 2100 (middle picture) and after 3m of sea level rise ie the worst-case scenario for 2200 (bottom picture):
Inline links: have already risen, half a meter to a meter by 2100
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.
Inline links: degrowth, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Ttz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7589c5dc-2f84-4f82-a6b8-c132ce4a0fc8_697x628.png, this podcast