The tree ring model of culture and politics
2025 Mar 29
See all posts
The tree ring model of culture and politics
When I was growing up, one of the things that often puzzled me was
the often-repeated claim that we live in a "deeply neoliberal society"
that highly valued "deregulation". I was confused because while I could
see a fair share of people arguing for neoliberalism and deregulation,
it seemed clear that on the whole, the actual state of government
regulation was very very different from anything that could remotely be
construed as reflecting such values. The total number of federal
regulations has kept
continuously going up. KYC, copyright, airport security and all
kinds of other rules were continuously tightening. US federal tax
receipts as a percentage of GDP have been roughly
constant since WW2.
If you told someone in 2020 that in five years, either the USA or
China would be leading in open-source AI and the other would be leading
in closed-source AI, and asked which would be leading where, they would
have probably stared at you as though you were asking a trick question.
The USA is the country that values openness, China is the country that
values closure and control, USA tech in general leans much more toward
open source than Chinese tech, come on, it's obvious! And yet, they
would have been completely wrong.
What's going on here? In this post, I will propose a simple
explanation, which I call the tree ring model of politics and
culture:
The model is as follows:
- How a culture treats new things is a product of the
attitudes and incentives prevalent in that culture at that particular
time.
- How a culture treats old things is primarily driven
by status quo bias.
Each period of time adds a new ring to the tree, and while that new
ring is forming there are new attitudes around new things being formed.
Soon, however, the lines are frozen in place and become much more
difficult to change, and a new ring starts growing overtop, shaping
attitudes about the next wave of topics.
We can analyze the above situations, and others, through this
lens:
- There really was a deregulatory trend in the USA, but it was
strongest in the 1990s (if you look carefully you can actually see this
in the charts!). By the 2000s, the tone was already shifting toward more
regulation and control. However, if you look at specific things that
"came of age" in the 1990s (eg. the internet), they ended up being
regulated based on principles that had the upper hand in the 1990s,
giving the USA (and, due to imitation, much of the world) decades of
relative internet freedom.
- Taxes are constrained by budget needs, which are largely set by the
needs of healthcare and welfare programs. The "red lines" in this regard
were already set 50 years ago.
- All kinds of moderately dangerous activities involving modern
technology are viewed more suspiciously, both by law and by culture,
than eg. risky forms of mountain climbing, which can have very high
mortality rates. This is explainable by the fact that risky forms of
mountain climbing is something that people have done for centuries, and
attitudes solidified when general risk tolerance was much higher.
- Social media came of age in the 2010s, and has been treated by
culture and by politics in part as a part of the internet, but also in
part as a distinct thing. Hence, restrictive attitudes toward social
media generally do not also carry over to the early internet - despite
growing internet authoritarianism generally, we have not seen
particularly stronger attempts to crack down on unauthorized file
sharing, for example.
- AI came of age in the 2020s, and at this point in time the USA is
the leading power and China is the following power, hence it is in
China's interest to play a "commoditize the complement"
strategy on AI. This intersects with a favorable mood among many
developers toward open-source in general. The result is a favorable
environment for open-source AI that is very genuine, but is also fairly
specific to AI; older spheres of technology remain closed and
walled-garden-like.
More generally, the implication here is that it is difficult to
change how a culture treats things that already exist and where
attitudes have already solidified. What is easier is to invent new
patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the
chance that we get good norms around those. This could be done in
multiple ways: developing new technologies is one, using (physical or
digital) communities on the internet to experiment with new social norms
is another. This is also to me one of the attractions of the crypto
space: it presents an independent technological and cultural ground to
do new things without being overly burdened by existing status quo bias.
Rather than growing the same old trees, we can also bring life to the
forest by planting and growing new trees.
The tree ring model of culture and politics
2025 Mar 29 See all postsWhen I was growing up, one of the things that often puzzled me was the often-repeated claim that we live in a "deeply neoliberal society" that highly valued "deregulation". I was confused because while I could see a fair share of people arguing for neoliberalism and deregulation, it seemed clear that on the whole, the actual state of government regulation was very very different from anything that could remotely be construed as reflecting such values. The total number of federal regulations has kept continuously going up. KYC, copyright, airport security and all kinds of other rules were continuously tightening. US federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP have been roughly constant since WW2.
If you told someone in 2020 that in five years, either the USA or China would be leading in open-source AI and the other would be leading in closed-source AI, and asked which would be leading where, they would have probably stared at you as though you were asking a trick question. The USA is the country that values openness, China is the country that values closure and control, USA tech in general leans much more toward open source than Chinese tech, come on, it's obvious! And yet, they would have been completely wrong.
What's going on here? In this post, I will propose a simple explanation, which I call the tree ring model of politics and culture:
The model is as follows:
Each period of time adds a new ring to the tree, and while that new ring is forming there are new attitudes around new things being formed. Soon, however, the lines are frozen in place and become much more difficult to change, and a new ring starts growing overtop, shaping attitudes about the next wave of topics.
We can analyze the above situations, and others, through this lens:
More generally, the implication here is that it is difficult to change how a culture treats things that already exist and where attitudes have already solidified. What is easier is to invent new patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the chance that we get good norms around those. This could be done in multiple ways: developing new technologies is one, using (physical or digital) communities on the internet to experiment with new social norms is another. This is also to me one of the attractions of the crypto space: it presents an independent technological and cultural ground to do new things without being overly burdened by existing status quo bias. Rather than growing the same old trees, we can also bring life to the forest by planting and growing new trees.