ashley hodgson
she's a behavioral economics professor and creator of the youtube channel "The New Enlightenment with Ashley".
highlights from her work
in her video "What is the Metacrisis? Why is it Hopeful?" she frames the metacrisis as:
(transcript of the first 1:30 of the video)
basically the issue is: if you look at all of these societal issues, where each issue has a community of people that are looking at that issue, looking at the evidence and shouting from the rooftops about that issue, if you zoom back and look at the entire landscape of issues we're facing as a society right now, there are connections between all of them. and there are common patterns between all of them, even though these different communities looking at different issues are essentially at odds with each other, fighting with each other and dismissing each other's evidence.
and here when i'm talking about issues, i mean things like:
military & geopolitical risks, decline in mental health, decline in friendship and community, breakdown in family structure, social media manipulation, corruption of various sorts, environmental degradation, surveillance risk, fragilities in the global financial system, escalating inequality, issues with the education system and the justice system, oil depletion.and all of these issues have sub-categories, for example, under environmental degradation we have:
so, the questions that she further explores in the video are:
- why is this hopeful?
- how exactly are these things connected?
- is there a zero-sum battle between these? or should there be a zero-sum battle?
(perhaps it's not as zero-sum as it seems)
i find this an amazing introduction to the subject. if we want to further dive into the landscape of issues/challenges we have, joshua williams' an introduction to the metacrisis also provides a great overview of global existential and catastrophic risks.
she advocates for a major shift in: economic systems, governance systems and knowledge systems (akin to the enlightenment).