Thoughts On Longtermists In Interwar Britain
I lied, I have points
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Honestly, the thing that startled me most when reading The Twilight Years is how well the interwar British longtermists did. With the benefit of hindsight, there’s nothing other than factory farming that I really think they overlooked. Man, that Hitler guy really was bad news—and even though they didn’t do much to stop him, I’m not sure what I would do about it if I time-traveled back to the 1930s either.
It’s true that they overestimated the likely effects of World War II, but it seems plausible to me that the tail risks were quite high (even if they didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about tail risks yet). And World War II did directly lead to the development of the nuclear bomb, the first scientific discovery that allowed humanity to actually drive itself extinct. If the League of Nations had actually worked—if they managed to prevent World War II and the Cold War in some way that didn’t leave autocrats to commit crimes against humanity indefinitely—humanity would be on a far better path today.
Honestly, the interwar British longtermists might have some legitimate questions about our cause prioritization. Here we are fiddling around with biological weapons commissions and worrying about AI races, and yet we only talk about reducing the risk of great power war instead of ending it?
Similarly, we can roll our eyes at “overthrow capitalism.” But, during the interwar period, many people in even the richest countries interwar lived on less than a dollar a day (in today’s money adjusted for purchasing power parity). The programs that democratic socialists campaigned for—unionization, the welfare state, tax reform, regulation of corporations—played a major role in ending absolute poverty in the developed world. Democratic socialists were very plausibly working on one of the most important things they could be working on, even if they were mistaken about why.
Reading The Twilight Years made me more positive about longtermist work that involves concretely improving the world. Historically, I tended to be like “okay, well, what if your model of how bioengineered pandemics works is totally wrong? You’re going to waste all this effort that could have gone to helping children with malaria.” However, the example of the democratic socialists suggests that “identify a big problem, try to fix it” can work even if you are very wrong about the long-term effects of your actions.1 What I’d be looking for in a longtermist project is:
Goals that, even if they’re only the most important thing in one world model, are good in nearly all world models (e.g. no one is like “yes, we should let dangerous diseases leak from labs, that sounds like a great plan” or “I think that artificial intelligence companies should roll out everything they develop with no regulation or safety testing whatsoever”).
Concrete feedback loops in the real world, even if they don’t necessarily speak very well to your long-term theory of change (e.g. the rate of lab leaks or safety incidents related to AI, as well as near misses for both).
The ability to do something else if your current plan isn’t working very well (e.g. it is much easier to change regulation than it is to unoverthrow a country).
It also seems important to NOT VIOLATE COMMON-SENSE MORALITY. The desire for a peaceful, democratic transition to Communism separated the democratic socialists (with an excellent track record) from the Stalinists (crimes against humanity).
I also think a lot about the importance of unknown unknowns. Democratic socialists were obsessed with planning in part because Friedrich Hayek was busy writing the most frightful muddle Keynes had ever read. It would take decades for Hayek’s key insights to filter down to the average intellectual, with the cruft discarded. Could they have gotten it right anyway? Maybe—Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations certainly has cogent explanations of the value of markets—but it’s a hard problem to get right without subsequent decades of intellectual progress.
The Twilight Years talks about why interwar intellectuals were more anti-Hitler than anti-Stalin. A surprisingly important reason was that German intellectuals typically spoke English and Russian intellectuals didn’t. If you were British, you could get a letter from your friend in Germany that says “something is really, really wrong here.”2 But you don’t have any friends in Russia, because you don’t share a language, so all the information you get about Russia is carefully filtered by Stalin. Even if you visit Russia, you can’t ask questions of random unselected shop assistants or taxi drivers. Even anti-planning economic conservatives thought that Soviet planning worked better than capitalism and just thought that freedom was more important, because almost no one had friends on the ground who could go “the Soviet statistics are full of lies.”3
The Nazis also made the tactical error of expelling their intellectuals. Expelled intellectuals can give talks about how bad this Hitler guy is. The Stalinists disappeared their intellectuals into gulags, where they couldn’t give talks. And because Russian intellectuals rarely had friends outside of the Soviet sphere of influence, no one noticed that their correspondent had mysteriously stopped answering their letters.
The elephant in the room, of course, is eugenics. The biggest lesson is DO NOT VIOLATE COMMON-SENSE MORALITY. While British eugenicists publicly believed that eugenics should be voluntary, many believed privately in involuntary eugenics. Julian Huxley even praised the Nazis’ eugenics program.4 So if you’re like “I know this is a horrible thing to do, but the benefit is enormous”, consider not doing that.
Regardless of how you feel about people choosing not to have children so as not to pass on various genetic traits, the eugenicists’ program is, in retrospect, doomed to fail.5 The eugenicists assumed that poor health and intellectual disability were genetic. In reality, they were usually caused by inadequate food, poor medical care, and the other effects of poverty. In interwar Britain, a society with very little class mobility, many things were heritable that were not at all genetic. At the best of times, “unemployed people should not have children” is a crude way to improve the genes of the next generation. However, in a society where the son of a street-sweeper will never attend Oxford no matter how bright he is, it seems as likely to worsen the gene pool as to improve it.
One of the largest groups that opposed eugenics was Catholics, because if a single sperm is wasted God gets quite irate.6 I am inclined to dismiss this as one of those stopped-clock deals. But the other was, frankly, social justice warriors?7 Many socialists objected to eugenics on the grounds that it was insulting to poor people to think that their genes were bad, when poor people’s genes were just as good as anyone else’s. I can easily imagine an effective altruist going “ugh, woke people, we have actual problems to solve here, we can’t be obsessed with making sure marginalized groups feel good.” I think it makes sense to listen with charity to people who can’t speak Effective Altruist to see if they’re trying to convey an actually really important insight that we don’t have. Maybe especially if they’re wokesters. As a woke person, the conclusion in this paragraph is a bit self-serving, so discount it as you will.
One thing that leaves me optimistic about effective altruism is that people (in public communications and, in my experience, in private conversation) tend to emphasize the importance of following common-sense morality. Not doing evil things even if they seem like a good idea is what keeps you advocating for birth control or the welfare state, instead of becoming an authoritarian dictator who imprisons people in concentration camps. The ruthless utilitarian is fun to read about in fiction, but is a poor model for real life.
The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between The Wars, by Richard Overy. Published 2010. 544 pages. $7.
I am still very negative on longtermist work that involves thinking a lot about analytic philosophy.
Apparently the Nazis asked the Quakers to tour a Potemkin concentration camp they set up to show off how humane they were, and were astonished to discover that the Quakers instead issued a report about how the Nazis were detaining people without trial in concentration camps and the Quakers disapprove of that.
An unfortunate fact for me, a person who loves statistics and hates talking to people.
Brave New World hits different when you realize that it’s specifically about that shit Aldous Huxley’s brother keeps doing.
Friends, we should stop trying to rehabilitate “eugenics” and just let it be a word for “the attempt to improve the gene pool through changing people’s reproductive behavior based on indicators that don’t really track the thing we care about and aren’t necessarily genetic in the first place.” Come up with some other word for Orthodox Jewish people pairing off in such a way that they don’t have children with Tay-Sachs.
One Catholic writer argued against sterilization on the grounds that "sterilized defectives" would be free to "live depraved lives, spreading disease, mostly venereal, still impulsive sexually and a danger to women and children" like the damned in Dante's Inferno.
Of course, there were also geneticists who objected to eugenics: the “Mendelian” school didn’t want to identify things as genetic unless a gene was found, unlike the “Galtonian” school which tended to assume that all heritable things were genetic.
Something that we should bear in mind when reading anything written about capitalism or socialism from before the last few decades is that an economy of a combination of state-run businesses with private market ones wasn't even named until the 1950s (as the "mixed economy") and there still isn't a widely-understood good theoretical understanding of highly-regulated sectors in an otherwise market economy ("regulatory capture" is a buzzword, but what does an uncaptured regulator look like, how do you get one and what is public choice theory anyway?)
Real-world economies in that era were mixed and regulated - that's what the New Deal was - but there was a serious lack of theoretical understanding; socialists thought it was a transition to "full socialism"; capitalists feared that it was. The idea that a balance could be permanent was what Keynes and Tawney were trying to bring into being. But political activists hadn't thought of that, or if they had, it was a new idea that wasn't yet a core of a philosophy.
The idea of what we'd now call "New Deal Liberalism" or "social democracy" or "democratic socialism" or whatever - basically, the blandest possible old-fashioned centre-left economics - as being something that was a brand-new idea that was still in the process of being invented is very strange to us. But that's why these people were socialists: they could see that their society was wrong and weren't aware of any other way to fix it. Twenty years later in the 1950s, the same people would be "Butskellists"*, part of the national consensus for a mixed economy.
* A portmanteau of the names of Hugh Gaitskell and R. A. B. Butler, leading figures in the two major parties who were seen as being centrists within their parties and therefore supporters of an economic compromise between socialism and capitalism.
Like Ben Cosman in another comment, I also worry that common-sense morality is a dubious guide. It means different things to different people, people can usually twist it to fit whatever they want, and it's often wrong.
While thinking about how to put this, I remembered a quote of yours that I liked so much that I put it in my quotes collection file:
"If your moral reasoning doesn’t produce conclusions that seem absurd on the face of it… why are you bothering? I want to be the sort of person who would have come up with the absurd conclusion that slavery is wrong, or the absurd conclusion that women should have rights, or the absurd conclusion that sodomy shouldn’t be illegal; therefore, right now, I am the sort of person who comes up with the absurd conclusions that eating meat is wrong, malaria net donations are morally mandatory, and global warming is really important." (Source: https://www.tumblr.com/theunitofcaring/113528122106/the-problem-with-unifying-your-circles-of-concern)