Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brooks write,
Peer culture is a key factor associated with fertility. Having very helpful versus relatively unsupportive friends can increase desired family size for young Americans by nearly an entire child per family and can increase couple intentions to have another child by about 10 percentage points (an increase of about a third).
My wife grew up on a cul de sac. I grew up on a cul de sac. When we had our first child, we moved to a cul de sac. The thing about cul de sacs is that they are kiddie communes. They make it much easier to have children.
The big apartment buildings in cities just do not do that. I’ll bet that South Korea does not have many cul de sacs.
The “Beat generation,” whose members became known as “beatniks,” was a highly influential cultural current that emerged in the US during the late 1940s and 1950s. Among other interests, it focused on transgressive and bohemian lifestyles, drug use, the rejection of bourgeois American mores, and enjoyment of jazz music. In many ways, the Beat generation paved the way for the hippie phenomenon that would replace it in the late 1960s.
…The poet Charles Bukowski once referred to the Beat generation by the names of four of its major authors: “Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso.” All four struggled with mental illness. David S. Wills has published well-researched and enlightening essays on the Beat generation through his website Beatdom. In one article, he notes that it was common for members of the Beat generation to be institutionalised for mental illness: “many of those who fell under the Beat label ended up in the ‘nuthouse.’”
Something to consider when my lecture series on 20th century American history moves to the 1950s.
if before, status games might be variously won or lost at the county, town, or church-level (i.e. the local maxima), then now, the high watermark of status is determined by the Pareto-distributed hierarchy of influencers and other rich n’ famous who bare their “day to day” lives for everyone to see (i.e. decidedly not-local, even if not quite global, maxima).
The result is that the Joneses to keep up with aren’t next door—they’re the top 1% of “creators” on tiktok or whatever who are “here, in social media land, with the rest of us,” but are, in reality, nothing like the rest of us.
(This isn't the list of books that I think one ought to read -- it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here.)
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
Seeing Like a State
The Dream Machine
The Sovereign Individual
The Beginning of Infinity
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman
Softwar
Ashlee Vance's Elon biography
The Mythical Man-Month…
I have read The Mythical Man-Month, plus a couple of other books later down on the list. I probably have absorbed some other ideas by osmosis. But I doubt that anyone other than Patrick has absorbed all of them.
Pointer from Tanner Greer, who writes,
The upshot of all this is that books have an inordinate impact on the Silicon Valley mindspace. Often these books are stilted academic titles, works which at first glance have no obvious connection to software. “It’s interesting how Seeing Like A State has made it into the vague tech canon,” Jasmine Sun comments, “despite being from a random anarchist anthropologist who specialized in Southeast Asian agrarian societies.”
“Vague tech canon” is a clever phrase. Siloed off on so many little mountains, I could not speak of a common DC canon, vague or otherwise. But for Silicon Valley the term is just—there are no formal canonizers in Silicon Valley, and thus no formal canon. But a “vague” canon, the sort that ties together any historical community of requisite intelligence and literacy, certainly exists.
substacks referenced above: @https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/
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