Good article. I would advise less emphasis on traditional schooling (reading, writing, 'rithmetic) and more emphasis on relationship intelligence and embodied intelligence (making things with your hands).
To me the most important graph is the one that shows both mothers and fathers started spending much more time on child-care in the 90s. What the heck happened? Did children suddenly become that much more difficult to manage? If kids really consume that much time and effort, it's no wonder that people don't want to have kids - it's too much damn work!
The Japanese value stability much, much more than Americans. This harms their economy in various ways:
How much did the supposedly severe decline in Google's organizational health contribute to your decision to change jobs?
Defined benefit pension schemes like Social Security are grotesquely racist and sexist, because of life expectancy differences between demographic groups.
African American males have a life expectancy of about 73 years, while Asian American females can expect to live 89 years. The percentage difference between those numbers may not seem that large, but it means that the latter group gets 24 years of pension payouts (assuming a retirement age of 65), while the former gets only 8, a 3x difference. So if you look at a black man and an Asian woman who have the exact same career trajectory, SS pay-ins, and retirement date, the latter will receive a 3x greater benefit than the former.
Another way of seeing this fact is to imagine what would happen if SSA kept separate accounting buckets for each group. Since the life expectancy for black men is much lower, they will receive a significant benefit (either lower payments or higher payouts) from the creation of this barrier.
Defined-benefit schemes add insult to injury. The injury is that some groups have shorter lives. The insult is that the government forces them to subsidize the retirement of longer-lived groups.
In general, anytime you see a hardcoded age-of-retirement number in the tax system or entitlement system, the underlying ethics is questionable. Medicare kicks in at 65, which means that some groups get a much greater duration of government-supported healthcare.
Judging by the hammering that Meta's stock has taken over the last 5 years, the market really disagrees with you.
Here's an argument against radical VR transformation in the near term: some significant proportion of people have a strong anti-VR aversion. But the benefit of VR for meetings has strong network effects: if you have 6 friends you want to meet with, but 2 out of the 6 hates VR, that's going to derail the benefit of VR for the whole group.
The situation is not ‘handled.’ Elites have lost all credibility.
I think it's worth caveating this that not all elites have lost credibility. Elites in places like Singapore, Switzerland, and Finland have a lot of credibility.
Two possibilities:
I don't buy the housing cost / homelessness causation. There are many poor cities in the US that have both low housing costs and high homelessness. This page mentions Turlock, CA, Stockton, CA, and Springfield, MA as among the top 15 places with the highest homelessness rates; a quick Zillow search indicates they all have a fair bit of cheap housing.
The relationship between homelessness and state-wide housing costs is probably caused by a latent variable: degree of urbanization. Cities are both more expensive and have more homelessness, and states vary widely along the urban/rural dimension.
You also missed a strong countervailing factor which would tend to reduce SF's homelessness: demographics. SF is has fewer blacks than the nation as a whole, and blacks are more likely to be homeless. SF is also disproportionately Asian, and Asians are much less likely to be homeless.
I think SF's homelessness problem is caused by a very simple reason: SF is a relatively pleasant place to be a street person. This is partially because of the weather, as you mentioned, but also because the city is quite tolerant of the homeless population and has a lot of services for them.
The overwhelming priority for EAs should be to serve as peace emissaries and advocates in the culture war.
War is an ethical inversion: acts that are plainly evil in peacetime become heroic and praiseworthy in times of war. War destroys value at a double rate: the warrior's honor is to accept pain, suffering, and the risk of death in order to inflict those ills on his enemies. Further, in wartime the opposing parties cannot pause their hostilities to make side deals, even if those deals would be mutually beneficial (the Russians and Ukrainians are not going to pause the fighting to ink a trade deal or build a gas pipeline, even if those plans were beneficial to both sides).
If an EA could go back in time to the era of the European wars of religion, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to attempt to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics (it would be comically evil and irrational to pick a side and wage war against the other). Our current culture war of Woke vs MAGA is just another instance of this type of conflict and we must draw the same ethical conclusion.