Rob Cross: “Microstress is different than conventional forms of stress, where we think of large things that are hitting us, or antagonistic relationships. The reality is that microstress can actually come at us and often does through the people we love and care about. The fact that microstress is actually coming at us through people we care about, that magnifies it—the impact on us. It’s not just bad news out there on social media. It’s the fact that our child is struggling, or our parents are struggling, or a best friend had a health scare. The hard part that has shifted today, and especially through COVID, is the collaborative footprint of almost everything we do has shot up. That’s the biggest driver: that has ramped up 50 percent or more for most people these days. The problem is that we are hit with 20, 25, 30, sometimes more of these microstresses in small moments. We’re conditioned to kind of fight through. But our bodies absorb it. The stress actually even affects metabolically how we process foods. There was a great study done that showed that when you’re under this form of stress, you can eat a meal and the way your body metabolizes that meal, it adds 200-plus more calories with the stress than it would without the stress. So there’s a lot of negative consequences that are coming from these small moments of microstress. And the problem, again, is that we don’t register them. They sit beneath our level of awareness to say, “This is a really critical thing that I have to go do something about.””
WSJ: “The [American] Founders designed a constitutional system to prevent demagogues from sowing confusion and mob violence in precisely this way. The vast extent of the country, Madison said, would make it hard for local factions to coordinate any kind of mass mobilization. The horizontal separation of powers among the three branches of government would ensure that the House impeached and the Senate convicted corrupt presidents. The vertical division of powers between the states and the federal government would ensure that local officials ensured election integrity. And norms about the peaceful transfer of power, strengthened by George Washington’s towering example of voluntarily stepping down from office after two terms, would ensure that no elected president could convert himself, like Caesar, into an unelected dictator. “The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this Country,” Hamilton wrote, “is one of those visionary things, that none but madmen could meditate,” as long as the American people resisted “convulsions and disorders in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.””
Daren Acemoglu: “Why was the United States so attractive to low-skill workers? This is actually something that the economic historian, H.J. Habakkuk, first hypothesized and provided some qualitative evidence for. Because, skilled labor was in very short supply in the United States, the whole creative energy of American innovators and entrepreneurs was devoted to increase the productivity of unskilled labor. So, unskilled labor was centrally integrated into the production process. So, in the United Kingdom and the United States–and the United Kingdom again sent a lot of Parliamentary commissions and they said exactly the same thing. So, we have great qualitative, detailed description of this. So, in the United Kingdom, you had these artisans who were trying to work with a chisel with very good hand-eye coordination in order to make manufacturing processes work. Whereas the Americans said, ‘We’re not going to find these skilled artisans, and even if we do, they’re going to be very expensive. So, let’s introduce machinery in a way that can be used with unskilled labor.’ That was the beginning of the interchangeable parts system, the American system of manufacturing. And, once that got off the ground, unskilled labor was very central to the manufacturing, and its productivity was very high, and its wages were very high.”
Martin Wolf: “The one I found most useful is to think about where we are in terms of these three aspects of the global environment and focusing very much on the economy. So the first is shifts, by which I mean long-term structural processes that are occurring and are likely to continue to occur over a generation or more, things that most of the time we don’t think about, but they’re constantly changing the environment we’re in. And then the second, rather different set of things are shocks and events that were always conceivable. You couldn’t really forecast them because the probabilities and the processes weren’t known well enough, but they could happen. And it so happens a lot of them have very recently. We’ve been through a period of exceptional shocks in terms of their rapidity and their impact. And the final aspect of the world’s economic system, if you like, is the underlying fragilities, the things that make the shocks so powerful, and those are both economic and political. And the political also includes institutional processes. And I argue that the fragilities are extremely important in understanding why we find it so difficult to cope with both the underlying shifts and the shocks well.”
