Intuitively I would expect persistence effects to be weaker now than e.g. 300 years ago. This is mostly because today society changes much more rapidly than back then. I would guess that it’s more common now to live hundreds of kilometres from where you grew up, that the internet allows people to “choose” their culture more freely (my parents like EA less than I do), that the same goes for bigger cities
etc. Generally advice from my parents and grandparents sometimes feels outdated, which makes me less likely to listen to it — this may always have been true of young generations, but I feel the advice really is more outdated today than it would have been 300 years ago. In short, I would expect to be much more influenced by my grandparents if I were running their farm with basically the same methods.
This is all super speculative of course and I don’t have any hard evidence (other than economic growth rates being higher). But do you agree that there may be reasons to expect this effect to have decreased by a nontrivial amount?
Thanks for writing this up, super interesting!
Intuitively I would expect persistence effects to be weaker now than e.g. 300 years ago. This is mostly because today society changes much more rapidly than back then. I would guess that it’s more common now to live hundreds of kilometres from where you grew up, that the internet allows people to “choose” their culture more freely (my parents like EA less than I do), that the same goes for bigger cities etc. Generally advice from my parents and grandparents sometimes feels outdated, which makes me less likely to listen to it — this may always have been true of young generations, but I feel the advice really is more outdated today than it would have been 300 years ago. In short, I would expect to be much more influenced by my grandparents if I were running their farm with basically the same methods.
This is all super speculative of course and I don’t have any hard evidence (other than economic growth rates being higher). But do you agree that there may be reasons to expect this effect to have decreased by a nontrivial amount?
I do think so!
It’s hard to contest that change across many dimensions has been accelerating.
And it would make sense that this accelerating change makes parental advice less applicable, and thus parents less influential overall.