The dead bestow old wisdom on the new, and the living in turn bestow new life on the old.

Better internet access won’t pull people out of poverty by Naomi Schaefer Riley is a great example of Reynolds Law. It is also an example of what might be called Evidentiary Disintermediation.

Reynolds Law -

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

This law links to an observation made by Jacques Barzun in his The Culture We Deserve.

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within.

Enforced from within. That is the key and the link to Reynold's Law. If traditional middle-class values of diligence, hard-work, postponement of gratification, duty, tolerance, etc. are self-generated, there are, on average, good outcomes. Dissolution of those values and the provision of the outward signs of middle class values (home-ownership, college education, etc.) through the confiscatory and coercive power of the state is always the first manifestation of a state in decline. Witness Venezuela or any avowedly socialist state.

The cultivation of middle class values on the part of the state has a number of defects for those with a hunger for power. There is far less scope for grandiose gestures, there is far less opportunity for venality, and it is much harder to do. Better for everyone in the long term but much worse for the little Napoleons.

The example is from Better internet access won’t pull people out of poverty by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

The digital divide is back. But you may be surprised to find out who is on which side of it.

It used to be that we worried about lower-income, less educated people having insufficient Internet access. Educators, politicians and policy makers were concerned that in our great technological revolution, these folks were being left behind. Well, it turns out now that the digital haves may turn out to be the economic have-nots.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution looked at data from the American Time Use survey and concluded that less-educated Americans were spending more time on screens and less time on “active leisure” than their better-educated counterparts. Active leisure included things like socializing, reading, writing, art, sports and exercise. And while those things are associated with positive outcomes in health and general life satisfaction, screen time largely is not.

The authors run down a quick litany of the problems associated with screen time: “Prolonged time spent watching television is associated with poorer health, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Playing computer games, browsing the Internet and other forms of sedentary leisure may contribute to obesity. Such screen time is also associated with lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment among youth.”

The researchers acknowledge that “many of these impacts may not be due to the screen time itself, but to the lack of the activity that it displaces. More time spent in front of a screen inherently means less time doing other things.”

While many of the studies behind the effects of screen time are not long enough or large enough to draw definitive conclusions about their direct effects on our brains or our health, we often fail to consider the activities we have given up in order to become more engaged with screens.

Kids are spending less time outside, we are spending less time engaged face-to-face with family and friends. Whatever other activities we try to undertake — going to school, going to church, having dinner together — are often done in a state of perpetual distraction.

Wealthier, more educated parents are aware of the dangers of too much screen time and often try to restrict it, but lower income parents do not. The authors write that looking at these differences, there could be “implications for social mobility.”

But it’s not just time spent on screen that separates rich and poor. It’s also the content. A 2013 survey by Common Sense Media found that the percentage of kids whose parents had downloaded any educational app for them varied greatly by income. Only 35 percent of children in families making less than $30,000 a year had such apps, compared with 49 percent of kids in the $35,000 to $75,000 category and 75 percent of families making over $75,000 a year.

This ties together Reynold's Law, and Barzun's observation. It also relates to a different observation I have made elsewhere about the pace of change.

If you look at the mean time to market penetration for selective technologies, the cycle times have been getting shorter and shorter. In the first half of the twentieth century it took about 45 years from technology innovation to market saturation. Examples would include the telephone, refrigerators, TVs, etc. In the second half of the twentieth century, time to market saturation shrank to perhaps twenty-five years.

In the twenty-first century we are down to perhaps 15 years. Think of the smart phone, introduced in the mid 1990s and pervasive within a decade or so. Granted, we are talking about just technology here but it is the most visible manifestation of the quickening of the pace of change.

The consequence of this faster pace of change is that we have less of a window of opportunity to discern relative costs and benefits of a new circumstance and at the same time we have ever more emboldened and coercive ideological altruists who want to use the most recent technology (or other development) to fix the lives of others whom they wish to coerce.

The brighter, the wealthier, the more gifted and the more connected are the first canaries in the coal mine as described by Riley. They are the first adopters of just about everything because they have the latitude of risk-taking which others do not. But, being brighter and quicker, they are also the ones who earliest determine the relative costs and benefits.

Meanwhile, the coercive altruists, seeing that Latest Fad X is associated with the elite, glibly elide to the conclusion that the Latest Fad X is not only correlated with elite status but must be causative of elite status. Without waiting for actual evidence, they leap to implement policies which will provide the trappings of elite status (digital enrichment) without understanding the actual costs, benefits or required behaviors.

Digital access is certainly an important enhancement to capability. But we are still discovering all the issues attached to always on and always accessible. We already know that there are innumerable problems associated with our new technological ecosystem. The elite, having engaged the earliest, have already experienced those problems and are still navigating to find the best balance between access and all the other good goals in life. However, they are gifted with behavioral, social and financial resources which mitigate the consequences of that exploration.

I am not arguing that we should not assist the poor and the challenged, merely that we need to be cognizant of Reynold's Law and aware that shortening cycle times of change mean that it is ever more important to give time to discover causal reality rather than correlational relationships. Riley's evidence suggests that yet again, the poorer and less able in society have once again perhaps been done a destructive disservice by those so altruistically trying to help them by erasing the "digital divide."

We used to let new technologies play out for a couple of generations to understand all their pros and cons and the natural adaptations humans make to new things. The new was coddled, then indulged, then tested, then judged. Only when we developed a confidence that we understood did it become customary to adopt new norms, either socially, economically, or in terms of policy. Today we have Evidentiary Disintermediation. We go straight from availability to assumed value and coercive "altruistic" policies. The pity is that, by not waiting for evidence and understanding all the pros and cons, despite how good might have been the intentions, we end up imposing the possible detriments of the new onto others least able to accommodate those detriments.

There is a quote in Curmudgeon's Cocoon which is attributed to Aristides the Aristocrat but which I cannot source. Even without the sourcing, the idea stands on its own and knits together the theme of reality and tradition and change.

Education and tradition are crucially linked. Without tradition, education has no idea where it has come from and hence no idea where it is going. Without education, tradition remains a dead rather than a living abstraction capable of informing the soul, not with information, but with the love of learning. The dead bestow old wisdom on the new, and the living in turn bestow new life on the old.