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From New Yorker

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The charred remains of a home destroyed by the Bootleg Fire just north of Bly, Oregon, on July 24.

But to a vocal slice of climate activists, that approach seems increasingly doomed. The degrowth movement, as it’s called, argues that humanity can’t keep growing without driving humanity into climate catastrophe. The only solution, the argument goes, is an extreme transformation of our way of life — a transition away from treating economic growth as a policy priority to an acceptance of shrinking GDP as a prerequisite to saving the planet.

At the core of degrowth is the climate crisis. Degrowth’s proponents argue that to save Earth, humans need to shrink global economic activity, because at our current levels of consumption, the world won’t hit the IPCC target of stabilizing global temperatures at no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. The degrowth movement argues that climate change should prompt a radical rethinking of economic growth, and policymakers serious about climate change should try to build a livable world without economic growth fueling it.

It’s a bold, even romantic vision. But there are two problems with it: It doesn’t add up — and it would be nearly impossible to implement.

Addressing climate change will take genuinely radical changes to how our society works. Stirring as it might be to some, though, degrowth’s radicalism won’t fix the climate. Degrowth is most compelling as a personal ethos, a lens on your consumption habits, a way of life. What it’s not is a serious policy program to solve climate change, especially in a world where billions still live in poverty.

The basics of degrowth

Pinning down what degrowth means can be tricky because degrowthers often differ on details. But there are some common threads to their thought.

In general, degrowthers believe that in the modern world, economic growth has become unmoored from improvements in the human condition.

Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and the author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, has emerged as one of the leading spokespeople for the movement. To Hickel, the case for degrowth goes like this: The world is producing too much greenhouse gases. It is also overfishing, is overpolluting, is unsustainable in a dozen ways, from deforestation to plastic accumulating in the oceans.

Scientists have made impressive progress on technologies that, he argues, should have been sufficient to address the climate crisis — think solar panels, meat alternatives, eco- friendly houses. But because wealthy societies are so focused on growing the economy, those gains have been immediately plowed back into the economy, producing more stuff for the same ecological footprint, yes, but not actually shrinking the ecological footprint.

Hickel argues that this problem is unsolvable within our current framework. “In a growth-oriented economy,” he writes in Less Is More, “efficiency improvements that could help us reduce our impact are harnessed instead to advance the objectives of growth — to pull ever-larger swaths of nature into circuits of extraction and production. It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.”

His solution? To abandon the lodestar of economic policy in nearly every country, which is to aim for economic growth over time, increasing wealth per person and expanding the ability of their citizens to purchase the things they want and need. Instead, Hickel argues, rich countries should focus on getting emissions to zero — even if the result is a much-contracted economy.

If that sounds unappealing, he devoted much of the book — and much of our interview — to arguing that it wouldn’t be. He points out that some countries, like the United States, are rich but get very little for their spending, in terms of national well-being; poorer countries like Spain have better health care systems. He argues that current levels of well-being could be maintained at a tenth of Finland’s current GDP — assuming that society also adopted wide-scale redistribution and socialist labor policies.

At the heart of Hickel’s argument is an idea that divides degrowthers and their critics: the concept of “decoupling” growth from environmental impact. Hickel and his fellow degrowthers are skeptical that economic growth as we know it can ever truly be achieved without accompanying growth in emissions.

But critics argue that not only is it possible — it’s already been happening. For the past decade, as many countries have transitioned to green energy, they have successfully seen their emissions shrink while their GDP has grown.

“There have been really big changes since 2005,” when people were debating whether decoupling was even possible, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. “Green energy has gotten cheap. Solar power is the cheapest energy at the margins in every country today. Global coal use has peaked.” His research finds evidence of “absolute decoupling” — emissions shrinking while GDP grows — in 32 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Degrowthers I spoke to don’t dispute that decoupling is possible. But they argue it won’t be enough to shrink emissions as rapidly as they need to. And there’s a compelling bit of evidence for that view: Even as some countries have decoupled, others have increased emissions, and overall atmospheric carbon is at its highest level ever recorded.

Where an optimist might see, in the decoupling of the past few decades, signs that growth and climate solutions can coexist, a pessimist might find the degrowth diagnosis more persuasive: that our growth-focused society clearly isn’t up to the task of solving climate change.

The pessimists have picked up momentum of late. It’s true, in one sense, that degrowth is a somewhat fringe idea: No politician has endorsed it, and no serious policy proposals based on it have been put forth. But degrowth has nonetheless drawn sympathy in some quarters — including among prominent climate thinkers.

Steven Chu, who served as secretary of energy under President Obama, has endorsed it, arguing, “You have to design an economy based on no growth or even shrinking growth.”

More than 11,000 scientists signed William Ripple’s 2019 letter “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” which argues “our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality.”

And a recent paper in Nature explored how a “degrowth” of 0.5 percent of GDP per year might interact with climate and emissions targets, arguing that while “substantial challenges remain regarding political feasibility,” such approaches should be “thoroughly considered.”

The tension at the heart of degrowth: Can we fix global poverty without economic growth?

One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes.

Even if emissions in rich countries go to zero very soon, climate change is set to worsen as poorer countries increase their own emissions.

That will, of course, have deeply negative climate impacts. But the alternative is a nonstarter — should the world really prioritize curbing emissions and economic growth if it meant suppressing the growth of those countries?

Degrowthers see no dilemma here. What Hickel envisions is global movement in two directions: Poor countries could develop up to a certain level of prosperity and then stop; rich countries could develop down to that level and then stop. Thus, climate catastrophe could be averted, all while making the world’s poor more prosperous.

“Rich countries urgently need to reduce their excess energy and resource use to sustainable levels so our sisters and brothers in the global South can live well too,” Hickel put it. “We live on an abundant planet and we can all flourish on it together, but to do so we have to share it more fairly, and build economies that are designed around meeting human needs rather than around perpetual growth.”

From a climate change perspective, though, there’s a problem. First, it means that degrowth would do nothing about the bulk of emissions, which are occurring in developing countries. 

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Thick smog envelops Mumbai, India, on January 8.

Second, the global economy is more interconnected than Hickel implies. When Covid-19 hit, poor countries were devastated not just by the virus but by the aftershocks of virus-induced slowdowns in consumption in rich countries.

There’s some genuine appeal to the idea of an end to “consumerism,” but the pandemic offered a taste of how a sudden drop in rich-world consumption would actually affect the developing world. Covid-19 dramatically curtailed Western imports and tourism for a time. The consequences in poor countries were devastating. Hunger rose, and child mortality followed.

Covid-19, of course, wreaked direct economic havoc at the same time, with lockdowns having an especially negative impact on some poor countries; the effects of the pandemic and international demand shock were combined, and in some cases they’re hard to separate. But the United Nations, the World Bank, and expert analyses point to the decline in global consumption as a significant part of the picture.

Degrowthers reject this concern on two fronts: First, they argue that a sustained, deliberate reduction in consumption wouldn’t be anything like a recession. Recessions, they agree, are really bad, but that’s because consumption falls in affected sectors, instead of being targeted at things that don’t improve well-being. Degrowth, they say, would be different.

Second, they contend that there is some path to economic growth in poor countries that doesn’t rely on trade with rich ones — certainly some countries managed economic growth when the whole world was poor, after all.

Hickel’s perspective is that most trade between rich and poor countries is extractive, not mutually beneficial — and that maybe when that dynamic ceases, poor countries will have the chance for the catch-up growth they merit. That’s one take. But it means that degrowth’s case for not crushing the poor world is predicated on a speculative take on how those countries can grow — one that democratically elected leaders in those countries largely doesn’t share.

What GDP doesn’t capture — and what it can tell us

In a way, the debate over degrowth is a debate over the meaning of one economic indicator: gross domestic product (GDP).

GDP measures the transactions within an economy — all the occasions when money changes hands in exchange for goods and services. It’s not wealth, but it’s one of the primary ways we measure wealth.

It certainly doesn’t capture everything of value. When parents spend a quiet weekend at home teaching their children to read, for example, nothing GDP-generating has happened — but value has certainly been created.

Degrowth articles burst with such examples. GDP, they love to point out, includes the production of things like nerve gas, even though that has no social value. And it doesn’t include storytelling, singing, gardening, and other simple human pleasures.

“If our washing machines, fridges, and phones lasted twice as long, we would consume half as many (thus the output of those industries would decline), but with zero reduction in our access to those goods,” Hickel told me. If everyone worked half the hours they currently do, and made half the income, they might mostly be better off — at least, assuming that their basic needs were still met.

“We propose policies like a living wage, a maximum income ratio, wealth taxes, etc. to accomplish this,” Hickel told me. “Given all of this, the language of poverty really gets it wrong: longer-lasting products, living wages, shorter working weeks, better access to public services and affordable housing — we are calling for the opposite of poverty. Yes, industries like SUVs and fast fashion would decline, but that doesn’t mean poverty. We can replace them with public transportation and longer-lasting fashion, thus meeting everyone’s needs.”

There’s a lot of speculation here, and a lot of what degrowth’s critics would call hand-waving. Degrowth is fundamentally premised on the claim that we can cease to focus on growth while getting better than ever at addressing human needs. If that’s true, then that would certainly be great news.

But in many ways, it’s a vision more wildly optimistic — disconnected from actual policy results — than any of the more standard “sustainable development” models degrowthers criticize for being out of touch.

First, in the world today, there’s an extremely strong association between growth and welfare outcomes of every kind. GDP, while imperfect, is a better predictor of a country’s welfare state, outcomes for poor citizens in that country, and well-being measures like leisure time and life expectancy than any other measure.

“GDP does leave out non-commercialized activities that are welfare-enhancing,” economist Branko Milanovic writes in a rebuttal of degrowth:

It is, like every other measure, imperfect and one-dimensional. But … it is imperfect at the edges while fairly accurate overall. Richer countries are countries that are generally better-off in almost all metrics, from education, life expectancy, child mortality to women’s employment etc. Not only that: richer people are also on average healthier, better educated, and happier. Income indeed buys you health and happiness. (It does not guarantee that you are a better person; but that’s a different topic.) The metric of income or GDP is strongly associated with positive outcomes, whether we compare countries to each other, or people (within a country) to each other.

The things degrowthers care about — leisure time, health care, life expectancy — are strongly correlated with societal wealth. The generosity of a welfare state and the availability of transfers to a state’s poorest people are also strongly correlated with societal wealth. Innovation, discovery, invention, and medical technology improvements are also strongly correlated with societal wealth.

Our World in Data

The strong correlation between child mortality and GDP per capita is apparent on the above graph. There are some outliers — some countries outperform or underperform their GDP somewhat, in terms of preventing child deaths — but in general, wealth strongly predicts child survival. No single, simple medical intervention causes the difference. Wealthier societies on average get better health outcomes across the board.

This graph looks at child mortality not just by comparing rich countries to poor ones but also by comparing countries over time, as they get richer: Getting richer improves outcomes for children.

Leisure time, too, has increased — and hours worked have declined — as the world has gotten wealthier.

It might be possible in principle to do better — to decouple, if you will, health and well-being from access to material resources, so that everyone is well-off with many fewer resources.

But the examples degrowthers point to remain speculative ones; if we ought to be skeptical, as degrowthers argue we should be, about the decoupling of wealth from ecological impact, we ought to be at least as skeptical about the prospects of decoupling wealth from living standards.

“In the end, economic growth is about the production of stuff that people need and then the consumption of those things by the people who need it,” Max Roser at Our World in Data, a research institute focused on finding, visualizing, and communicating historical economic and health data, told me. He added:

The money aspect, and the abstract concept of GDP, distract us and make it less obvious what it’s actually about. People want to have enough food, they need to go to the doctor, they need childcare, they want a good education. People need lots of stuff, and one thing that people care about are goods and services, and they need to be produced, and economic growth is about an increase in the quality and quantity of the goods and services that people need.

There’s also the knotty problem of who gets to decide which goods and services people choose to spend their money on. Many of the climate scientists I spoke to shared Hickel’s impatience for many specific carbon-intensive modern industries. “I’m not going to defend bitcoin,” the Breakthrough Institute’s Hausfather told me. (The cryptocurrency has attracted intense criticism for being astoundingly carbon-intensive.)

But there is a lot in between bitcoin and basic subsistence needs. And “enough for everyone who needs it” inherently requires value judgments about what people really need, and what things they value that are frivolous luxuries. That’s why so many anti-poverty programs have moved away from giving people “what they need” toward just giving them cash — that is, giving them wealth, which they can choose to spend however they please.

“Even poor people have so many needs for goods and services that you can’t possibly put them on a list and say, ‘Now we’re done here,’” Roser told me. “That’s the beauty of money, that you can just go out there and get what you need rather than what some researcher determines are your needs.”

Degrowth is unrealistic — and gaining traction

As a policy program, degrowth suffers from being both too radical and not radical enough.

There’s a lot of broad-brush policy prescriptions in the degrowth lit, but those details never really add up.

While it’s not a short book, Less Is More feels surprisingly sparse when it comes to envisioning how the changes it recommends could be brought about. The chapter on solutions recommends cutting the workweek and changing tax policy — two solid proposals — but then rounds that out by recommending ending technological obsolescence, advertising, food waste, and student debt.

I’m not particularly opposed to those policies. But they seem laughably inadequate for the magnitude of the task at hand: confronting the climate crisis. Degrowth successfully persuades that guiding humanity and our planet through the 21st century will be really, really hard — but not in a way degrowth particularly solves.

Where degrowth literature is relentlessly pessimistic about the prospect of our problems being solved under our current economic system, it turns oddly optimistic about the prospect that they’ll be solved once we embrace a different way of viewing wealth and progress. If cutting carbon emissions fast enough to matter requires shrinking the global economy by 0.5 percent a year indefinitely, starting right now, as the Nature paper estimates, that’ll take policy measures much larger and more ambitious than any proposed in Less Is More.

“If we are to avert catastrophic warming, we have to lower carbon emissions by a factor of two within the next 10 years. I find it highly implausible that capitalism/market economics will be abandoned by the world on that time frame,” Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann told me. “That means we have to act on the climate crisis within the framework of the current system.”

Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images
Military personnel survey a flood-damaged in Laach, western Germany, on July 23.

In that sense, there’s actually something anti-radical about any climate plan so radical that it can’t be concretely brought about in the next decade.

And yet, implausible as it is, degrowth is gaining a foothold in intellectual and policy circles. What accounts for its seemingly growing popularity? This was a question that puzzled me until I heard the same answer from one degrowth advocate and one opponent: that it’s not, really, exactly about climate.

“It started in the 1990s in France, picking up on radical European politics in the 1970s,” Giorgos Kallis, a researcher studying degrowth at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, told me. “There was an in-between political space there — radical greens, putting much more emphasis on localized production, emphasis on conviviality and autonomy. This is a discourse that comes from them. It wasn’t just about avoiding a particular environmental problem. It was a holistic proposal.”

That was also the diagnosis of Zion Lights, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, who has become one of the climate movement’s internal critics, arguing that the movement focuses too much on environmentalist-friendly proposals that have nothing to do with climate.

“It has become difficult to talk about making energy policies for combating climate change, for example, without being told that such thinking is actually irrelevant because it doesn’t involve system change,” she recently argued. “We need cheap, clean energy at scale and we need it now.”

In that sense, a good analogy for degrowth might actually be locavorism — the movement that focuses on eating food grown locally. It’s popular with environmentalists, both those whose convictions are about climate change and those who long for a return to the land. Its actual climate impacts are limited or even negative — for some products, it’s better for them to be grown in their optimal environment even with carbon-intensive shipping — and it definitely does less for the climate than, for example, going vegan. But it retains its allure.

How to fight climate change while building good human societies

Degrowth’s radicalism isn’t where I part ways with it: The future will almost certainly require us to eat much less meat, dramatically change land use, and potentially invest a significant chunk of society’s resources in mitigation indefinitely.

But I don’t tend to see such efforts as fundamentally futile. Degrowthers do — even when there have been significant successes.

Climate scientists have spent a long time warning the world about climate change, but they nonetheless tend to sound a more optimistic note than degrowthers like Hickel. “It’s undoubtedly a monumental challenge,” Mann told me. “We have the technology to solve the problem — renewable energy, smart grid technology, and existing energy storage. We just need the political will to act.”

Take solar panels. Two decades ago, cheap solar panels were just a dream. Now they’re everywhere and have become a crucial tool in the fight against climate change.

Not only that, solar panels have democratized electricity. Just one small-scale instance: In rural Kenya, you can see donkeys saddled with solar panels so that farmers can charge their phones. And there are many such examples that count as a win for both human progress and our fight against climate change.

It should go without saying that since rich governments got us into this climate mess, they should be at the forefront of getting us out of it. We need massive investments in carbon capture, green energy, plant-based meat, mitigation, and straight-up cash transfers to poor countries disproportionately affected by the climate crisis.

Many of the researchers I spoke to were open to the idea that in the long run, humanity would need to rethink many of our cherished assumptions about how economies work, in order to build a civilization that can flourish for thousands or millions of years. They didn’t reject degrowth as a philosophical contribution to the question of what future human civilizations should care about.

But such articulations of different philosophies of human flourishing should not be mistaken for public policy.

We don’t have very long, and we need to decarbonize quickly. We have technologies that have made a big difference already, and they must be made available on an unprecedented scale. We have more speculative solutions, technological and societal, and we should be prepared to try those, too. The scale of the problem is such that we need to act now — and we need to be clear-eyed about which ideas truly move the needle.

Later philosophers, like Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, picked up and developed Weil’s ideas. They garbed them in the language of Western philosophy; Murdoch, for example, appeals to Plato as she writes about the need for “unselfing.” But this central idea of “unselfing” or “decreation” is perhaps most reminiscent of Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which has long emphasized the importance of relinquishing our ego and training our attention so we can perceive and respond to others’ needs. It offers tools like mindfulness meditation for doing just that.

The idea that you should practice emptying out your self to become receptive to someone else is antithetical to today’s digital technology, says Beverley McGuire, a historian of religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who researches moral attention.

“Decreating the self — that’s the opposite of social media,” she says, adding that Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms are all about identity construction. Users build up an aspirational version of themselves, forever adding more words, images, and videos, thickening the self into a “brand.”

What’s more, over the past decade a bevy of psychologists have conducted multiple studies exploring how (and how often) people use social media and the way it impacts their psychological health. They’ve found that social media encourages users to compare themselves to others. This social comparison is baked into the platforms’ design. Because the Facebook algorithms bump posts up in our newsfeed that have gotten plenty of “Likes” and congratulatory comments, we end up seeing a highlight reel of our friends’ lives. They seem to be always succeeding; we feel like failures by contrast. We typically then either spend more time scrolling on Facebook in the hope that we’ll find someone worse off so we feel better, or we post our own status update emphasizing how great our lives are going. Both responses perpetuate the vicious cycle.

In other words, rather than helping us get our own selves out of the way so we can truly attend to others, these platforms encourage us to create thicker selves and to shore them up — defensively, competitively — against other selves we perceive as better off.

A collection of mousetraps capturing different social media logos placed on a table. Efi Chalikopoulou for Vox

And what about email? What was really happening the day I got distracted from my sick friend’s Facebook post and went to look at my Gmail instead? I asked Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. He now leads the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to realign tech with humanity’s best interests, and he was part of the popular Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

“We’ve all been there,” he assures me. “I worked on Gmail myself, and I know how the tab changes the number in parentheses. When you see the number [go up], it’s tapping into novelty seeking — same as a slot machine. It’s making you aware of a gap in your knowledge and now you want to close it. It’s a curiosity gap.”

Plus, human beings naturally avert their attention from uncomfortable or painful stimuli like a health crisis, Harris adds. And now, with notifications coming at us from all sides, “It’s never been easier to have an excuse to attenuate or leave an uncomfortable stimulus.”

By fragmenting my attention and dangling before it the possibility of something newer and happier, Gmail’s design had exploited my innate psychological vulnerabilities and had made me more likely to turn away from my sick friend’s post, degrading my moral attention.

The problem isn’t just Gmail. Silicon Valley designers have studied a whole suite of “persuasive technology” tricks and used them in everything from Amazon’s one-click shopping to Facebook’s News Feed to YouTube’s video recommender algorithm. Sometimes the goal of persuasive technology is to get us to spend money, as with Amazon. But often it’s just to keep us looking and scrolling and clicking on a platform for as long as possible. That’s because the platform makes its money not by selling something to us, but by selling us — that is, our attention — to advertisers.

Think of how Snapchat rewards you with badges when you’re on the app more, how Instagram sends you notifications to come check out the latest image, how Twitter purposely makes you wait a few seconds to see notifications, or how Facebook’s infinite scroll feature invites you to engage in just one … more … scroll.

A lot of these tricks can be traced back to BJ Fogg, a social scientist who in 1998 founded the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab to teach budding entrepreneurs how to modify human behavior through tech. A lot of designers who went on to hold leadership positions at companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google (including Harris) passed through Fogg’s famous classes. More recently, technologists have codified these lessons in books like Hooked by Nir Eyal, which offers instructions on how to make a product addictive.

The result of all this is what Harris calls “human downgrading”: A decade of evidence now suggests that digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy.

In 2010, psychologists at the University of Michigan analyzed the findings of 72 studies of American college students’ empathy levels conducted over three decades. They discovered something startling: There had been a more than 40 percent drop in empathy among students. Most of that decline happened after 2000 — the decade that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube took off — leading to the hypothesis that digital tech was largely to blame.

In 2014, a team of psychologists in California authored a study exploring technology’s impact from a different direction: They studied kids at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without their phones, the kids were accurately reading people’s facial expressions and emotions much better than a control group of kids. Talking to one another face to face, it seemed, had enhanced their attentional and emotional capacities.

In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 89 percent of American respondents admitted that they whipped out their phone during their last social interaction. What’s more, 82 percent said it deteriorated the conversation and decreased the empathic connection they felt toward the other people they were with.

But what’s even more disconcerting is that our devices disconnect us even when we’re not using them. As the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who researches technology’s adverse effects on social behavior, has noted.

Studies of conversation, both in the laboratory and in natural settings, show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other.

We’re living in Simone Weil’s nightmare.

Digital tech doesn’t only erode our attention. It also divides and redirects our attention into separate information ecosystems, so that the news you see is different from, say, the news your grandmother sees. And that has profound effects on what each of us ends up viewing as morally salient.

To make this concrete, think about the recent US election. As former President Donald Trump racked up millions of votes, many liberals wondered incredulously how nearly half of the electorate could possibly vote for a man who had put kids in cages, enabled a pandemic that had killed many thousands of Americans, and so much more. How was all this not a dealbreaker?

“You look over at the other side and you say, ‘Oh, my god, how can they be so stupid? Aren’t they seeing the same information I’m seeing?’” Harris said. “And the answer is, they’re not.”

Trump voters saw a very different version of reality than others over the past four years. Their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other accounts fed them countless stories about how the Democrats are “crooked,” “crazy,” or straight-up “Satanic” (see under: QAnon). These platforms helped ensure that a user who clicked on one such story would be led down a rabbit hole where they’d be met by more and more similar stories.

Say you could choose between two types of Facebook feeds: one that constantly gives you a more complex and more challenging view of reality, and one that constantly gives you more reasons why you’re right and the other side is wrong. Which would you prefer?

Most people would prefer the second feed (which technologists call an “affirmation feed”), making that option more successful for the company’s business model than the first (the “confronting feed”), Harris explained. Social media companies give users more of what they’ve already indicated they like, so as to keep their attention for longer. The longer they can keep users’ eyes glued to the platform, the more they get paid by their advertisers. That means the companies profit by putting each of us into our own ideological bubble.

Think about how this plays out when a platform has 2.7 billion users, as Facebook does. The business model shifts our collective attention onto certain stories to the exclusion of others. As a result, we become increasingly convinced that we’re good and the other side is evil. We become less empathetic for what the other side might have experienced.

In other words, by narrowing our attention, the business model also ends up narrowing our moral attention — our ability to see that there may be other perspectives that matter morally.

The consequences can be catastrophic.

Myanmar offers a tragic example. A few years ago, Facebook users there used the platform to incite violence against the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group in the Buddhist-majority country. The memes, messages, and “news” that Facebook allowed to be posted and shared on its platform vilified the Rohingya, casting them as illegal immigrants who harmed local Buddhists. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm, these emotion-arousing posts were shared countless times, directing users’ attention to an ever narrower and darker view of the Rohingya. The platform, by its own admission, did not do enough to redirect users’ attention to sources that would call this view into question. Empathy dwindled; hate grew.

In 2017, thousands of Rohingya were killed, hundreds of villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee. It was, the United Nations said, “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Myanmar’s democracy was long known to be fragile, while the United States has been considered a democracy par excellence. But Obama wasn’t exaggerating when he said that democracy itself is at stake, including on American soil. The past few years have seen mounting concern over the way social media gives authoritarian politicians a leg up: By offering them a vast platform where they can demonize a minority group or other “threat,” social media enables them to fuel a population’s negative emotions — like anger and fear — so it will rally to them for protection.

“Negative emotions last longer, are stickier, and spread faster,” explained Harris. “So that’s why the negative tends to outcompete the positive” — unless social media companies take concerted action to stop the spread of hate speech or misinformation. But even when it came to the consequential 2020 US election, which they had ample time to prepare for, their action still came too little, too late, analysts noted. The way that attention, and by extension moral attention, was shaped online ended up breeding a tragic moral outcome offline: Five people died in the Capitol riot.

A woman stares into a large eyeball as the reflection of another man looks back at her from inside the eye. Efi Chalikopoulou for Vox

People who point out the dangers of digital tech are often met with a couple of common critiques. The first one goes like this: It’s not the tech companies’ fault. It’s users’ responsibility to manage their own intake. We need to stop being so paternalistic!

This would be a fair critique if there were symmetrical power between users and tech companies. But as the documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates, the companies understand us better than we understand them — or ourselves. They’ve got supercomputers testing precisely which colors, sounds, and other design elements are best at exploiting our psychological weaknesses (many of which we’re not even conscious of) in the name of holding our attention. Compared to their artificial intelligence, we’re all children, Harris says in the documentary. And children need protection.

Another critique suggests: Technology may have caused some problems — but it can also fix them. Why don’t we build tech that enhances moral attention?

“Thus far, much of the intervention in the digital sphere to enhance that has not worked out so well,” says Tenzin Priyadarshi, the director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

It’s not for lack of trying. Priyadarshi and designers affiliated with the center have tried creating an app, 20 Day Stranger, that gives continuous updates on what another person is doing and feeling. You get to know where they are, but never find out who they are. The idea is that this anonymous yet intimate connection might make you more curious or empathetic toward the strangers you pass every day.

They also designed an app called Mitra. Inspired by Buddhist notions of a “virtuous friend” (kalyāṇa-mitra), it prompts you to identify your core values and track how much you acted in line with them each day. The goal is to heighten your self-awareness, transforming your mind into “a better friend and ally.”

I tried out this app, choosing family, kindness, and creativity as the three values I wanted to track. For a few days, it worked great. Being primed with a reminder that I value family gave me the extra nudge I needed to call my grandmother more often. But despite my initial excitement, I soon forgot all about the app. It didn’t send me push notifications reminding me to log in each day. It didn’t congratulate me when I achieved a streak of several consecutive days. It didn’t “gamify” my successes by rewarding me with points, badges, stickers, or animal gifs — standard fare in behavior modification apps these days.

I hated to admit that the absence of these tricks led me to abandon the app. But when I confessed this to McGuire, the University of North Carolina Wilmington professor, she told me her students reacted the same way. In 2019, she conducted a formal study on students who were asked to use Mitra. She found that although the app increased their moral attention to some extent, none of them said they’d continue using it beyond the study.

“They’ve become so accustomed to apps manipulating their attention and enticing them in certain ways that when they use apps that are intentionally designed not to do that, they find them boring,” McGuire said.

Priyadarshi told me he now believes that the “lack of addictive features” is part of why new social networks meant as more ethical alternatives to Facebook and Twitter — like Ello, Diaspora, or App.net — never manage to peel very many people off the big platforms.

So he’s working to design tech that enhances people’s moral attention on the platforms where they already spend time. Inspired by pop-up ads on browsers, he wants users to be able to integrate a plug-in that periodically peppers their feeds with good behavioral nudges, like, “Have you said a kind word to a colleague today?” or, “Did you call someone who’s elderly or sick?”

Sounds nice, but implicit in this is a surrender to a depressing fact: Companies such as Facebook have found a winning strategy for monopolizing our attention. Technologists can’t convert people away unless they’re willing to use the same harmful tricks as Facebook, which some thinkers feel defeats the purpose.

That brings up a fundamental question. Since hooking our attention manipulatively is part of what makes Facebook so successful, if we’re asking it to hook our attention less, does that require it to give up some of its profit?

“Yes, they very much would have to,” Harris said. “This is where it gets uncomfortable, because we realize that our whole economy is entangled with this. More time on these platforms equals more money, so if the healthy thing for society was less use of Facebook and a very different kind of Facebook, that’s not in line with the business model and they’re not going to be for it.”

Indeed, they are not for it. Facebook ran experiments in 2020 to see if posts deemed “bad for the world” — like political misinformation — could be demoted in the News Feed. They could, but at a cost: The number of times people opened Facebook decreased. The company abandoned the approach.

So, what can we do? We have two main options: regulation and self-regulation. We need both.

On a societal level, we have to start by recognizing that Big Tech is probably not going to change unless the law forces it to, or it becomes too costly (financially or reputationally) not to change.

So one thing we can do as citizens is demand tech reform, putting public pressure on tech leaders and calling them out if they fail to respond. Meanwhile, tech policy experts can push for new regulations. These regulations will have to change Big Tech’s incentives by punishing unwanted behavior — for example, by forcing platforms to pay for the harms they inflict on society — and rewarding humane behavior. Changed incentives would increase the chances that if up-and-coming technologists design non- manipulative tech, and investors move funding toward them, their better technologies can actually take off in the marketplace.

Regulatory changes are already in the offing: Just look at the recent antitrust charges against Google in the US, and President Joe Biden’s decisions to appoint Big Tech critic Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and to sign a sweeping executive order taking aim at anti- competitive practices in tech.

As the historian Tim Wu has chronicled in his book The Attention Merchants, we’ve got reason to be hopeful about a regulatory approach: In the past, when people felt a new invention was getting particularly distracting, they launched countermovements that successfully curtailed it. When colorful lithographic posters came on the scene in 19th-century France, suddenly filling the urban environment, Parisians grew disgusted with the ads. They enacted laws to limit where posters can go. Those regulations are still in place today.

Changing the regulatory landscape is crucial because the onus cannot be all on the individual to resist machinery designed to be incredibly irresistible. However, we can’t just wait for the laws to save us. Priyadarshi said digital tech moves too fast for that. “By the time policymakers and lawmakers come up with mechanisms to regulate, technology has gone 10 years ahead,” he told me. “They’re always playing catch-up.”

So even as we seek regulation of Big Tech, we individuals need to learn to self-regulate — to train our attention as best we can.

That’s the upshot of Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. It’s not an anti-technology screed urging us to simply flee Facebook and Twitter. Instead, she urges us to try “resistance-in- place.”

“A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind,” she writes. “What is needed, then, is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”

Odell describes how she’s trained her attention by studying nature, especially birds and plants. There are many other ways to do it, from meditating (as the Buddhists recommend) to reading literature (as Martha Nussbaum recommends).

As for me, I’ve been doing all three. In the year since my sick friend’s Facebook post, I’ve become more intentional about birding, meditating, and reading fiction in order to train my attention. I am building attentional muscles in the hope that, next time someone needs me, I will be there for them, fully present, rapt.

Reporting for this article was supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Sigal Samuel is a Senior Reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect and co- Host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, climate change, and the intersection of technology with ethics and religion.

A chart showing what economic issues voters say they’re most worried about.

Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at Data for Progress, said it’s difficult to separate out what is sensitivity to inflation — meaning a general rise in prices of a basket of items as measured by something like the Consumer Price Index — and just a hyper-awareness of prices overall. “Poorer people are just more concerned about prices, and you have to separate what’s a general concern about how much things cost versus what’s a concern about you actually perceiving things getting more expensive,” he said.

The Vox-Data for Progress poll, fielded from July 23 to July 26 among 1,245 likely voters, shows that people with incomes of under $50,000 reported they are much likelier to be worried about the cost of food and housing than people making over $100,000. Thirty percent of lower- income voters said housing costs were their top price concern, while only 15 percent of higher-income people said the same. Meanwhile, higher-income people are likelier to be worried about the cost of medical care and higher education or student loans, which are often bigger-ticket items than groceries or rent.

A chart showing which costs people are worried about.

Perceptions of costs and inflation also have quite a partisan slant. Republicans are likelier to say that’s their main economic concern than Democrats (31 percent to 19 percent). Television viewing habits make the division even starker: 34 percent of Fox News viewers say costs and prices are the most pressing economic issue, compared to 22 percent of non-Fox News viewers.

“There are a lot of partisan signals in the air,” Winter said. “Republicans are being told by partisan outlets that inflation is a cause for concern and are responding to that, while we see much lower rates of concern with Democrats — even though real economic conditions are the same.”

As Jim Tankersley at the New York Times notes, Republicans are using concerns about price increases to attack President Joe Biden’s economic plans and try to undercut his push for more infrastructure spending. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) said in a recent appearance on CNN’s State of the Union that the United States has “serious inflation” right now. “There is a question about how long it lasts. And I’m just worried that the risk is high that this is going to be with us for a while.”

Many Democrats in Congress hope to pass a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan in addition to a smaller, bipartisan proposal. The Vox-Data for Progress poll found that 55 percent of likely voters support a “broad infrastructure package” as an investment in America’s future, while 36 percent oppose a broad package and believe it will lead to a dramatic price increase. Nine percent are unsure. And again, there’s a stark partisan divide.

A chart showing a majority of voters support spending on infrastructure and social programs.

Chatter about rising prices and inflation has certainly picked up in recent months. And it is true that a lot of everyday items feel more expensive right now than they used to — especially compared to a year ago, when the prices of some items, like gas, had fallen at the start of the pandemic. (Your summer vacation may have been cheaper a year ago than now, but then again, a year ago, you might not have gone on vacation.)

But many Democrats, economists, and members of the Federal Reserve hold that the current levels of inflation are temporary and will slow. There are a lot of supply-demand imbalances and bottlenecks in the economy right now due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s just going to take a while for things to work themselves out.

In an interview with CNBC in July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she expects to see “several months of rapid inflation” but expects the situation to smooth out. “I’m not saying that this is a one-month phenomenon. But I think over the medium term, we’ll see inflation decline back toward normal levels. But, of course, we have to keep a careful eye on it.”

Per the Vox-Data for Progress poll, Americans appear to generally agree inflation will slow down. Fifty-eight percent of likely voters said they believe that price increases are mainly due to temporary bottlenecks and shortages caused by the pandemic. However, there’s a stark partisan divide: 76 percent of Democrats believe that to be true, compared to 56 percent of independents and 39 percent of Republicans.

On inflation, voters are willing to keep calm and carry on

There is some handwringing about today’s inflation becoming like the runaway case of the 1970s, but the comparison appears overblown. Still, it’s hard to dismiss people’s anxieties about prices and the economy altogether. Especially for lower-income people, even a modest increase in costs can be a big deal.

And yet, voters don’t appear to be jonesing for the federal government to tap the brakes yet. Nearly two-thirds of likely voters say they think policymakers need to stay calm about inflation as the economy improves — including a majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans — over slowing economic growth.

A chart showing most voters think policymakers should stay calm.

The Federal Reserve, which has a number of tools in its monetary policy toolkit to try to influence the economy, thus far is following this calm approach to economic developments. In July, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to keep interest rates at near-zero (if it starts to worry about inflation, it will start to hike them) and signaled that while the economy is improving, there’s more progress to be made. “The effects of the pandemic on the economy have continued to diminish, but risks to the economic outlook remain,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference on July 28.

Overall, likely voters are likelier to say that jobs and wages are more important than prices.

If the Federal Reserve starts to take its foot off of the gas, by raising interest rates (which still appears to be somewhat in the distance) or slowing the purchase of bonds (effectively slowing the printing of money), that will likely serve to cool down the economy. Deciding when to do that can be tricky. The Fed’s mandate is to balance modest inflation (generally about 2 percent over the long term) with unemployment, ideally driving the economy as close to full employment as possible.

But it matters which unemployment rate the Fed, or, for that matter, anyone is looking at. Historically, unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers in the US has run much higher than unemployment for white workers, and that continues to be the case as jobs return. In June, the overall unemployment rate was 5.9 percent. But when broken down by race, unemployment was at 5.2 percent for white workers, 7.4 percent for Hispanic workers, and 9.2 percent for Black workers.

William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times stressing the importance of paying attention to the Black unemployment rate in making policy decisions. “Ignoring the Black unemployment rate isn’t just a moral issue; it ignores potential growth for the economy,” he wrote.

A majority of people appear to agree that the racial divide in the workforce matters. The Vox-Data for Progress poll found that 52 percent of likely voters — including 75 percent of Democrats, 50 percent of independents, and 30 percent of Republicans — believe the federal government should try to close the racial gap in unemployment.

A chart about the racial unemployment gap.

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