San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

For this session we'll read John Maynard Keynes's 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" alongside Scott Alexander's 2014 essay "Meditations on Moloch." Writing in the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes asks his readers to look a century ahead and imagine a world transformed by technological progress and capital accumulation. Eventually, he predicts, humanity may finally solve its "economic problem": satisfying our material needs will cease to occupy most of our lives, leaving us with the unfamiliar problem of deciding what to do with our newfound freedom.

Alexander offers a darker possibility. "Moloch" is his name for the competitive dynamics that can leave individuals, firms, and societies pursuing outcomes none of them actually want. A company that sacrifices profit for humane values may lose to one that doesn't; a nation that refuses an arms race may be dominated by one that participates. Read together, the essays ask whether technological progress can ever deliver the liberation Keynes imagined. If we become vastly richer, do we eventually get to stop optimizing and decide what our prosperity is for—or will competition simply absorb our newfound abundance and force us to keep running?

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."

Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulacra and Simulation in 1981, before the internet, before social media, before generative AI. His claim is not the familiar one that media distort reality, or that we are surrounded by fakes. It is stranger and more radical: that signs and images no longer refer to any reality at all. The map now precedes the territory. Copies circulate without originals. Disneyland exists, he argues, to convince us that the rest of America is real — when in fact the "real" America is already hyperreal.