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SilasBarta comments on Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm reluctant to give much credence to Cowen's TCS, given that it woefully underestimates (I would say "ignores") the effect of the internet on well-being. The other points are reasonable though.
Everyone brings up the Internet. But the internet has not changed people's lives as significantly as railroads, telegraphs, plumbing, electricity, radio, automobiles, central heating, air conditioning, telephone, or television did. I don't mean it hasn't changed it as much as those things combined; I mean each one of those had more impact on daily life than did the internet.
Here's the test I use: look at fictional stories set and written in the time before the technologies. How many of the plot elements have become quaint and obsolete due to the technology?
By my reckoning, for the other technologies you listed, my metric only turns up a few inconveniences here and there which are still present on some level today. In contrast, many stories (even as recently as the early 90s) become laughably quaint given the introduction of a well-organized many-to-many communication/information network.
Knowledge is power, and the internet provides it to people in droves. (cheesy, I know, but fair)
That metric's likely to be biased in favour of information & communication technologies, because fiction disproportionately relies on characters having limited information. I doubt there are many 19th century stories hinging on the humble electric washing machine not existing, but it's freed up billions of hours for everyday people regardless.
It relies on them having many deficiencies. If information deficiency is a common trope of fiction, that slant also indicates that a technology with solves it is that much more significant.
It's certainly evidence, but it's evidence based on fiction, which favours the sensational, dramatic, and unusual. One way for a TV drama or action film to advance its plot is to have a character get shot. This is far more popular than advancing the plot by having a character spend too long manually washing clothes with a scrub board. But I don't infer that bulletproof vests are a more significant technology than the washing machine! Just that shooting someone's more cinematic than scrubbing clothes.
"Fictional evidence" is, indeed, not evidence of the dangers presented in the fiction. But, in the aggregate, it is evidence of the common fears of the population -- of getting shot, of living a life of drudgery (by presenting a hero who doesn't), and of being hindered by information cut-off.
I would say, then, that the proper way to interpret the washing machine by my heuristic is to look at it as something that takes people slightly closer to living the heroic/fun lives of the protagonist. The internet, by contrast, obviates the entire problem class of information deficiency.
So you're right that there are no books whose plot elements revolve around "washing clothes time-sucks", but most stories casually assume away the slings and arrows of everyday drudgery (home upkeep, childcare). The extent to which a technology makes these dreams a reality is a measure of the relative significance (or, for an inversion, evidence of dystopia as in Brave New World.)
Yes, and I reckon it's biased evidence of those fears (and the fears in turn are biased indicators of real world importance).
Putting aside my quibbles with the heuristic itself, I think this still overrates the Internet, which fails to fill in information gaps as modest as "where did I put my keys?", and underrates the washing machine, which allows us to assume away an entire afternoon of drudgery each week or so. (In fact, household appliances in general can account for most of the 20th century rise in American married women who work, a truly massive social change.)
Cowen argues that studies on what people are wiling to pay for the internet (if they had to) show that it can't be helping that much. It's true that the overall effect is hard to measure though.
I've seen those studies and his discussion of them. They all show that people would have to be paid a lot to stop using the internet (and they'd still be benefiting from its side effects), and they'd pay a lot if that were the only option. That indicates a huge consumer surplus, since you don't have to pay a lot for a base level of internet access.
Cowen's only response to any of that is to look at measures that gauge the marginal value of the last unit of internet usage (which of course nets out to zero) is low, when we really care about the consumer surplus it generates, which is completely different from (and reflected in different measures than) marginal value.
Do these studies take into account the collective action problem? It's clearly extremely costly to forsake the internet now that everyone expects you to use it, both privately and professionally, so that it would render you an antisocial weirdo and likely unemployable. I certainly wouldn't accept it for anything less than a fortune, but on the other hand, I could definitely see some serious upsides if the state of communication technology were magically reverted twenty years back -- so much that I would have to think carefully about the answer if I were given this offer by some supernatural force.
Also, of course, preferences that are stated rather than revealed should always be taken with extreme skepticism, since they're likely to be heavy on signaling.
... which only reinforces the point that the study doesn't fully measure how much it's changed our lives for the better, doesn't it?
Yes, this is the point Robin Hanson made in a blog post on the matter. Still, one can reasonably expect that the results would be unchanged if you permitted e.g. direct communication with friends through the internet but prohibited informational lookups. That would not entail taking on weirdness, and yet people would still have to be paid a lot for it.
I'd say it would still entail weirdness, unless the exemption is made broad enough to cover anything that would risk weirdness or unemployability -- however then we're back to something resembling the regular internet usage of people who aren't in the habit of wasting time on the web.