“Change”
October 12th, 2025
“Change” in ecology is always bad and “change” in politics is always good.
Or so it seems from what I read online.
Re ecology, if “climate change” makes the poles warmer and the equator cooler, isn’t that good for humans? More arable land for farming, more human-friendly temperatures.
Re politics, the status quo reflects thousands of years of human experience. Our default should be to assume political change – however wonderful it may sound – is actually bad (and the burden should be on the proposer to convince us otherwise).
The single most surprising thing about the human world is how perfected it is. Almost everything is tuned to be easy, safe, and convenient. Stores are full of goods, roads conveniently go where most people want to travel, police exist to deter crime, cinemas exist to entertain us in comfort, hospitals exist to heal us, courts exist to settle our differences fairly and peacefully, hotels exist to house us away from home, pens come in shapes and sizes perfectly fitted to the human hand. We notice the few exceptions where imperfection occurs only because they’re so rare and unexpected.
The human world is full of optimizations everywhere. Very very few things are broken. This is something we should be celebrating. Instead many people think human society sucks.
And sucks compared to what? Residents of first-world countries live in the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, most fair societies that have ever existed in the history of the Earth. Every other type of society that ever actually existed was vastly worse.
People think political change for the better is easy, but if such changes were both easy and possible, they’d have been accomplished long ago.
Beware of proposals for “change”. Assume they are either not for the better, or not possible to implement.
At least for large and rapid changes (climactic, political, and otherwise). We need small gradual changes to stay adapted and to optimize what isn’t already optimized. And to be ready to reverse them if they don’t work out.
Perhaps it would be good if most of the small gradual changes (that we have a say about) are ones that seem likely to be improvements. But then we are not perfect at prediction – some small level of random change (even change we think bad) would let us stumble on improvements we might never have thought of.
(I think Hayek said this. The more I think about it, a lot this blog is rephrasing Hayek.)
October 12th, 2025 at 10:04 pm
Just as we’ve spent thousands of years perfecting human society, we’ve spent thousands of years structuring it around the current climate. We’ve located our national borders, cities, and farms based on it.
Climate change won’t wipe out the human race, but it could severely degrade or destroy many of human civilization’s investments. This is why migration is often mentioned: if livable areas become unlivable, people are going to want to move. And of course, there will be armed resistance to that.
We can debate whether melted poles are so good, that it’s worth losing our coastal cities, making the tropics hellish, and causing who-knows-what other effects. But either way, a transition like that would be massively expensive.
As for political change: if someone is talking about throwing everything out and starting over, that’s definitely risky. But if political change means repealing a few laws here and passing a few there, that’s not discarding thousands of years of human experience.
To put it in perspective, even the way-out extremists, from communists to fascists, or extreme Luddites like the Unabomber, are not arguing to upend our thousands of years of experience. In fact, many of them would claim that they are applying the lessons of that experience, and that mainstream thinkers are overlooking the lessons.
October 13th, 2025 at 3:04 am
Agreed.
At least for large and rapid changes. We need small gradual changes to stay adapted and to optimize what isn’t already optimized. And to be ready to reverse them if they don’t work out. (I think Hayek said this.)
In fact, I’m editing the post to say that.
October 13th, 2025 at 4:24 pm
Are there any specific calls for large and rapid changes that prompted this?
October 13th, 2025 at 5:57 pm
Not really. Just saw another of the countless hand-wringing posts about some (seemingly trivial and tiny) eco “change” that seems (a) if anything beneficial but more importantly (b) so small, gradual, and within the historical range of natural variation that adaptation seems trivial and panic completely unjustified.
And then I thought about Obama’s “Hope and Change”.
October 13th, 2025 at 6:20 pm
Hmm…
Is it change caused by humans?
Is it an unintentional side effect of some other activity?
Is it indisputably beneficial, or could reasonable people see aspects of it that are undesirable?
If it’s human-caused, are the people who are reaping benefits from the activity different from the people who are paying the costs of the side effects?