Economist Bryan Caplan on 80,000 Hours: Thinking Through Your Real Reasons for Going to College

Caplan is an economist most famous for advancing the theory (held by many) that education in its current instantiation in the US is more about sigaling (in particular, credentialing) than learning. But that's not what I'm including in the large excerpt below - this is more advice for young people who are sacrificing their happiness worrying about/trying to get into college. 

I don't endorse his specific conclusions, but I strongly endorse his way of thinking about it, which broadly comes down to: ask yourself what you actually want out of life, look at the empirical reality of what your choices might get you, and don't just go along with the crowd. The full interview is here. (Previous posts on this here and here.)

Robert Wiblin: Yeah I’m thinking, so now we’re talking to the listeners, and we’re hoping to give them some advice on how they could actually do better in their lives.

Bryan Caplan: Right, right. But selfishly speaking?

Robert Wiblin: Selfishly speaking, yeah-

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So right, I mean honestly where I always start is gaming the system. I don’t start with learning, because the system doesn’t seem very interested in learning. I would just start with … Right, so what do you want to do and how can you do that with the least suffering to yourself. Basically sort of going through the inventory and finding out which things you can cut corners on and which things you can’t cut corners on. Some obvious things are, if it’s way outside your nature, if you’re just doing it for requirement than just find the easiest person. Most Americans will never use foreign language on the job, so find the easiest foreign language teachers that are around, go and do that.

Like for college actually for most people my advice is just be an econ major. Because I often tell my students economics is the highest paid of all the easy majors. And there’s a lot … Like these aren’t easy. Like come on people it’s not computer science, it’s not engineering. You know you can do really well in econ major and still have a great social life in college. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be like vitamin D deprived, like you would be if you were a CS major.

Economics is not the highest paid major, but it’s not that far from the winner. So winners are usually electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, finance, then econ. But it’s not that big of a difference. A lot of it, as I say, major in econ because it is the highest paid of all the easy majors, so do that. I say, whatever else you’re interested in you can do that to, but the econ major will just get you a better job and open more doors for you. So I advise people to do that.

In terms of other numbers. General result, this I not primarily me, I’m just reporting what the researchers find. Your majors more important than the selectivity of your school. Better to go to a state school and be an engineering major than go to Harvard and be a literature major. For most purposes, at least for your career purposes, maybe not for dating purposes, or for marriage purposes. But in least of terms of your career it seems like a hard major at a low cheap state school better deal than going to a private school.

Then I’ve also got stuff on is it worth going to an expensive private school. Like the marriage … Like improving your marital options, that seems like the best argument for. In terms of your career, what I’m saying is unless they’re giving you a lot of scholarship money, probably don’t go. Or, the only other reason I would consider going to a top school is if you have a special career that is even snobbier than other careers. Like say professor. If your career goal is to be a professor, then I encourage you to go to a top school because graduate schools are super snobby. And then schools hire professors who are super snobby. So even though it may not affect your earnings, it may affect whether you’re allowed to enter in to your desired occupation at all. So I think about that.

And the other big thing to think about, this probably won’t matter very much for your listeners specifically, but maybe for their kids, you should think about whether it’s worth going to college at all. I say there, the main underappreciated variable is just completion probability. There were got this classic saying of the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Best predictor of whether you’re gonna graduate college is whether you did well in high school. If you struggle to get through high school, or if you know someone who is struggling to get through high school. Those are the people it is not at all clear that it’s a good idea for them to go to college even selfishly speaking. Because they’re so unlikely to get that big bag of gold over the finish line.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. The reason this issue of people who are unlikely to finish, it seems like the very most low hanging fruit here is to convince people who are losing out personally because they go to college for a year or two and spend a bunch of money and time, but are very unlikely to ever actually graduate. Just to convince them to stop going to university, I mean that’s something you can maybe even get the government on. You don’t have to tell anyone to sacrifice for the greater good, you just have to tell them “Well you’re gonna lose yourself.”

Bryan Caplan: Yes, I mean, funny thing, the government used to have a whole program to go do this. It was called guidance counselors. So back in the old days, the guidance counselor would bring you in, and they’d say “You are or you are not college material.” This was hard to hear … And of course sometimes they made mistakes. Sometimes there’s someone who is really good and they told them they’re not college material and they’re late bloomers. But you know better than to put too much weight on that scenario. There’s also a lot of people who were told not to go, they would fail, and so they didn’t go, so they didn’t fail.

There’s been a big change in the United States towards the college role model. Now I think one of the best ways to get fired as a high school guidance counselor is start using, throwing around that phrase “You’re not college material” and I think that will get big complaints from parents. Like, “Do you know what your guidance counselor told my kid, said he’s not college material.” So the government used to do this, now there’s more of, whether you tell them to go to community college or four-year college. It’s sort of the main division right now. And you say well of course college is for everyone, everyone’s college material but you should probably go to community college to get your grades up and then that kind of thing.

Then go and tell about how great community college is for those who do well in it. Without ever giving them any idea if they’re ever statistically likely to do well. But yeah, in terms of what I’m trying to I do actually try to give this advice. Honestly I don’t think the kids that are struggling in high school are going to be listening anything I say. So I do try to direct this to the parents. Who I think are the … They’re sort of the last line of defense of people who won’t get fired as parents if they level with their kid.

It’s really hard, especially parent’s pride is at stake. This is where my best appeal is look, what’s more important your kid’s future or your friend’s pity? Like “Oh my god, your kid isn’t going to college that’s so terrible. Oh my god.” Right, and I mean know parents, I think their pride is so strong they’d rather send their kid on this academic suicide mission rather than endure the pity of their friends, but I think there’s a lot of parents who have mixed motives, and I just like go and give them some moral support for advice to kids to go and try something else. I mean, I try to frame it more positively as can we find something else your kid likes and is good at, other than academics.

Like can you do that, have you tried? Why not try? You know if your kid just really doesn’t like school, why keep assuming they’re gonna turn over a new leaf and blossom in college rather than say here’s ten jobs that give you a good life and don’t require college.

Robert Wiblin: So as you say, most listeners on the show aren’t trying to decide whether to try to do an undergraduate degree or not. But many of them are trying to decide whether to go to grad school. So what do you have for advice for students who did well in undergrad and they’re considering doing an economics PhD or some other PhD? Who should do it and who shouldn’t and what courses should they consider and what courses shouldn’t they consider?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah that’s a great question. Just to preface data on graduate education is much mushier than data on high school or college. So here I’m just building on a much shakier ground, and I just think everyone should know that I’m doing that. The main thing to know is that grad school completion is even lower than regular college graduation. Remember that people go to grad to school are generally well above average for college, for undergraduate. So when you’re thinking about whether to go, again, the best predictor is how good were you as an undergraduate.

So if you were doing very well as an undergraduate, then probably you would be about average for grad school, and remember average doesn’t do that well. So were you stellar for an undergraduate, those are the people where they’re likely to actually gain from graduate education. Furthermore, you have to consider what you’re majoring in. I’m not sure that I found a single paper that measured the payoff for graduate programs as a function of major. It certainly seems that the pattern for undergraduate holds up for graduate as well with CS and engineering and economics paying well. History and philosophy and fine arts paying poorly.

So you gotta factor that in, and again as usual if you know what occupation you’re training for than just see what does the job market for that occupation actually look like. There are many graduate programs where almost the only thing you do with is to become a professor of that subject. Or you just don’t use it. So in that case, well you wanna be an English professor, well look at the jobs prospects for the people who are currently coming out with English PhDs and see how they’re doing.

Don’t ask yourself are you as good as those people. Ask what someone who didn’t know you, only knew what you were like on paper, would think whether you’re better than those people. Because the world doesn’t tell you … We don’t even need to go and get into overconfidence and self-centered bias. Let’s just say the world’s not fair and even if you’re awesome the world rewards being awesome on paper, not intrinsic awesomeness. Just accept this as a flaw in the world, and then consider that when you’re deciding whether or not you wanna try what you’re gonna do.

Another sort of general piece of advice that I offer people is if you wanna do almost anything in social science, and a lot of humanities, and you are dismayed but the crummy job prospects of people that major in the subjects. Then, my question … Can you do math? If so, why not just go and get an econ PhD and call what you’re doing economics X. I’m not even being flippant here. So I am baffled by people who like history and can do math, who do a history PhD. Why not just do econ and become a economic historian?

It is literally true that you will probably have tenure as an economist, before you would have your first assistant professor job as a historian. That’s how the world works. And then, once you have that tenure, you can work on anything you want. You never get another raise in your whole career, you probably have a better income stream than a historian would. So this is of course selfishly speaking. This is the kind of strategy that if everybody did it, it wouldn’t work anymore. But everybody’s not gonna do it are they Rob. So why don’t you go and do it?

Robert Wiblin: Well we’ve got the special tricks for you there. Just not too many of you do it-

Bryan Caplan: Economic philosophy of course. You can either go and try to become a philosophy PhD and try to be a philosophy professor, or you can go in economics and then do economic philosophy. Probably get tenure before you get your first job as a philosophy prof. And then, yes you’ll have to go and do some stuff you don’t like to get tenure probably, but then afterwards it’s clear sailing. So why not?

Robert Wiblin: It’s a shame that the evidence on postgraduate courses isn’t better. I recall one thing you said was that Master’s degrees don’t tend to do very well. Is that right?

Bryan Caplan: Yes. So we … Of course they still do have higher earnings, but basically when you combine the low completion probability with the modest gain and the high opportunity cost, because you know … The opportunity costs of high school is really low. Basically it’s like a high school dropouts wage. The further along you go, the bigger your opportunity cost is. And also, you’re starting to cut off some of your peak earning years too. And this it what winds up giving the bad result. But I’m not gonna say the master’s degree data is any good either, it’s very sparse.

In a way, the good news is the people are studying are putting more into studying decisions that more people face. So I suppose that’s good. But at the same time, given the sheer volume, you think there would be 20 good papers on it, and it’s very hard to find anything that I really thought was compelling

Reflections from Fire Country: Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability (the SICA Doctrine)

 

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.

- Ernest Rutherford

I've noticed, recently with some urgency, that the more local the media content*, the more actionable and concrete it is.

For the last week I've been hiding from the smoke in my house in Sonoma County California, deciding hour-to-hour whether it's time to go. (I got my things ready weeks back instead of waiting for this year's fire.)

Rather than just waiting for an emergency alert to come through from an agency, I scroll through Twitter. Those agencies are on there, along with people on the ground, linking to the agencies and to recently updated maps (within hours.)

The #LNULightningcomplex is now about 500 square miles. A fire that big (#LNULightningComplex) has multiple parts (like the #WalbridgeFire and #HennesseyFire.) What I care about is how the fire closest to my house (the #Walbridgefire) is acting, where the local winds are pushing it, whether there is air support available to try to hold them back. I recognize now more than ever that, regarding (for example) the parts of the fire south and east of Lake Berryessa which have all merged with the #HennesseyFire, my interest is an idle one. There is no immediate life-and-property decision I have to make based on that information.

So it was with interest that I noticed that when I searched on the #Walbridgefire, the mix of Tweets included more actionable, concrete (though often dry) facts-and-figures - as opposed to the gigantic #LNULightningComplex in its totality, which has a much higher proportion of news stations (both national and local), people making political statements or otherwise connecting the existence of the fire to their own interest, or people making emotional statements (granted, often supportive ones.)

But more than that, it shows that the more concrete, immediate, and specific something is, the more likely statements about it are going to be useful ones, that we can actually employ to help us make decisions. Likewise, the broader, the more general, the more abstract something is, the more likely statements about it will be vague, not actionable, more about the nervous system that's making the statements, than about the external world the nervous system is trying to model. In fact this is something of a tautology, since the more abstract something is, the more it exists in the nervous system rather than as an external empirical entity.

To boil it down, Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability, or SICA (pronounced "seek-uh"). Here, "scale" doesn't just mean physical dimension as with the fires, but rather broadness of definition. And actionability doesn't mean whether you are able to do it right now; it means whether you can come up with a clear plan of action afterward. As an example: "they should fix the houses in my state so they can withstand an earthquake." As opposed to, "my brother should fix his house so it can withstand an earthquake." One of those is more obviously broad, and less clearly actionable. In fact, in this sense, "actionable" implies that a claim is both falsifiable and meaningful

SICA is quite closely related to the old saw in American local politics, that "there is only one way to pave a road, not a Republican way or a Democratic way." A country is an abstract enough place that you can spend a lot of time arguing about "things" which seem to be important, but in a city, at some point someone has to move dirt, in a specific way, from one place to another to build something. This is why it's a good idea to, as much as possible, keep discussions on the object- vs meta-level. Human skills and problem-solving are not nearly as generalizeable as we would like to think. (This is why for example I stopped trying to improve at chess.)

It's also related to the idea of operationalizing definitions. You don't need to operationalize concrete entities that can be simultaneously directly experienced on the scale of one meter and one second. The more abstract, the more rigorous the definition must be. Our built-in sense of "folk physics" is good enough to meaningfully make predictions about the behavior of fist-sized rocks. But E=mc^2 is one of the most general statements ever made, and in order to be actionable, it must be in a rigorous formalism. Because "broader" entities do trend away from actionability, it's exactly these statements about broad entities ("matter", "energy") that need to be formalized and defined operationally the most. Otherwise, when we talk about such things we're probably just barking at each other.

more concrete	more abstract, broader
actionable	idle speculation
specific	general
clear	vague
true or false	"not even wrong"
falsifiable	not testable
meaningful	pointless
effortlessly rule-bound (event itself follows obvious logic)	Must be grounded in rigid formalism to have a chance of being meaningful

*As a side observation, news organizations are in the business of keeping you watching so you see commercials, than public service agencies and individuals motivated by their missions. It's probably for this reason that I c an't think of a single instance of media reporting that I have used for decision-making during this time. I make this observation even as someone not particularly predisposed to dislike media institutions.

**The astute reader will note that I've made a big jump from concrete to abstract right here, starting from the very humble "news about my fire is more actionable the more local it is" to a conclusion about the nature of belief statements and psychology in general. All non-imitative learning involves generalization; the key is knowing when you're more likely to be doing it to try to scrutinize it better.

The Roots of Universal Moral Authority in Medieval European Christendom - Benefits to States and Individuals

Reading about many conflicts in medieval European history - especially bitter protracted ones - you're often struck by the appeal to legal proceedings. Take this example about Joan of Arc's experience after being captured during the Hundred Years War:

The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The tribunal was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clerics, and overseen by English commanders including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. In the words of the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the trial was meant by the English Crown to be "a ploy to get rid of a bizarre prisoner of war with maximum embarrassment to their enemies". Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was suspect on a number of points, which would later provoke criticism of the tribunal by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.

Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case. Cauchon owed his appointment to his partisan support of the English Crown, which financed the trial. The low standard of evidence used in the trial also violated inquisitorial rules. Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, who was commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without such evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. Opening a trial anyway, the court also violated ecclesiastical law by denying Joan the right to a legal adviser. In addition, stacking the tribunal entirely with pro-English clergy violated the medieval Church's requirement that heresy trials be judged by an impartial or balanced group of clerics.

From this excerpt you can clearly see that her trial was hardly a model of justice and impartiality. But the very idea of a trial, and an appeal to fairness and an authority beyond the people with the most swords, is what is remarkable. Yes, the English bent rules, but there were rules to follow and they had to give at least a minimal appearance of following them. They didn't just immediately and gleefully execute her with no explanation beyond "she frustrated our goals and we don't like her."

Compare: confronted with the victorious army of Kublai Khan, the last Song emperor jumped to his death along with other high-ranking officials, rightly fearing their fates should they fall into the Mongols' hands. Was there a court they could appeal to for release or at least better treatment? An argument they could make to Kublai from universal moral authority, about what was the right and fair principle to obey? How could these concepts even make sense? For China and the Mongols, there could be no appeal, indeed no idea of an appeal beyond either's physical authority as it stemmed from each mans' desires - that is to say, force.

The benefit of an organization whose authority was mostly moral is something that those of us who are secular-minded may ignore, as it stemmed from supernatural claims. We are often tempted to write off medieval Europe as a thousand-year failure mode, an Iron Age Orwellianism, or a Mad Max dystopia from the standpoint of ancient Roman citizens. While it was all those things, the seeds of Europe's positive divergence were being sown, and having a superimposed moral authority, separate and acknowledged by all as above Earthly concerns, was a unique arrangement and seems likely to have been part of it. There are many ways to think about this - two might be that warring parties both respecting the Church's authority created an in-theory neutral arbiter; another is just that more players makes a richer political ecosystem that is less zero-sum. This ultimately made possible rule of law and not of men, the possibility of service to principle rather than person. The destructiveness of rational warfare in eg East Asia was possibly part of why Europe was able to pull ahead.

It may have been quite fortunate that the church was based in one city that fell to barbarians (Rome) and another that saw its territory shrink until it was overwhelmed by infidels. The Western Church then was a kind of virtual state that could coexist with the others fighting for survival in Western Europe. It was a fortunate accident of timing, with Europe's isolating geography (mountains near the coast and indented coastlines) favoring continued separation. In an alternate history where Belisarius succeeded in reuniting the Roman Empire, European religious history might look much more similar to that of the Middle East, where religious and political authority were inseparable (or Chinese history where it was clearly peripheral) and there was no chance for mediation to calm wars and allow the concept of rule of law to emerge.

This 2018 paper by Hill, recently covered on MR argues in more detail about why the concept of the rule of law emerged when it did, though I disagree that it's the ideology itself that was more disposed to resulting in such a concept, rather than the geographical, political and military context of each. That is to say, if we re-ran history with the holy books switched, eg Mohammed in a cave writing the Bible, and the Qu'ran getting vetted and adopted at the Council of Nicea, I think the result would have been largely the same.

In the twentieth century, the U.N. has clearly appealed to a sense of universal rights much more than previous international forums did - the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe before it were both practical negotiation venues, but the U.N. makes claims to mediating universal morality. I can't help but wonder to what extent that has been intentional, and can't help but worry even as an atheist that it's easy to for states and peoples to reject non-supernatural moral claims as being made up by human beings, only and always for pragmatic self-interest.

"What Do We Want?" "Not That" "When Do We Want It" "Now"

An as-ever prescient Orwell, on modern protest movements both left and right:

"[Nationalism] can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty."

- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

Trust and Progress

Tyler Cowen talks with Paul Romer about social norms that encourage scientific advancement, or don't. Romer refers to the actually very puzzling question about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China and (embellishing) it was one of this cacophony of squabbling medieval kingdoms that eventually did it. Romer says,

One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.

I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.

For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?

There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (the best alternate history book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.

He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out all of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, qi for electricity.)

That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.


*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's Conquistador, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.

The Beginnings of a Voluntary State Free From the Tyranny of Territory

States are inefficient, with governments subject to severe free-riding (at the best of times) and exploitation by violent psychopaths (at the worst.) They are involuntary - you are in a state, usually, because of an accident of your birth. As animals that take up space and as modern humans dependent on agriculture, we occupy a territory that belongs to us, as does our state. The central job of the state is to maintain a monopoly on violence, in order to protect us from violence. (This is why the Somali "government" is a joke, because they can only protect you if you're within about four blocks of their office. You can emigrate, but at a massive price (learning a new language, new customs, new social network, etc. - ask people who are trained as physicians and leave their home country due to a civil war or persecution of their ethnic group, and end up driving a cab or running a shop somewhere safer.)

Consequently this lack of competition means there is a high barrier to emigration, and states often drag in perpetual suboptimality until invasion, civil war, or economic disaster brings about a fundamental transformation. (More on this here.) Much potential human flourishing is left on the table, so to speak. Charter cities are a partial attempt to free us from the tyranny of territories - if you can go across a bridge and be subject to the courts and business laws of a more sensible successful country than the one that governs your home, that minimizes emigration cost (you don't even have to, you just commute.) The end-goal of such arrangements would be that, if (for example) the DMV sucks in your state, you could announce you were subject to the DMV rules of another state. Of course this sounds absurd, and the tyranny of physical territory overrules this. The political scientist that could solve this problem would go down in history.

Of course there are supranational cultural entities that serve some of these functions somewhat - religions and corporations immediately come to mind - but there's a new attempt to get past this: Safetywing, which aims to become no less than a virtual country. It is starting as a safety net (of the sort that wealthy welfare states already provide.) Read more about this idea here. Of course this will cost money, and if you're already paying into your own country's safety net based on the tyranny of territory, you might not have money for a second one. This is why wealthy (or at least upper middle class) people from developed countries should buy into this early, both to make it sustainable, and also to give it prestige value.

I expect that should this actually take off, there will be massive resistance to it from the mutual-recognition cartel of the legacy states; see here for an example of the kind of reaction one might expect if you have physical territory to attack. The virtualness of the project may protect it in this regard, but I hope that Safetywing has anticipated that. Note that nation states are often openly hostile to supranational entities (see: Islamic states and other religions; China and any religion.) It could be that this virtual state could be the next supranational level of social organization, like religions and corporations, but it should expect to be identified as a threat in the same way that China sees Falun Gong.

I will be joining this, and I strongly encourage you to consider it.

Addiction Has Three Types: To Pleasure, Flow, or Meaning

Positive psychology research models happiness as reducing to three components: pleasure (chocolate, sunsets and orgasm), flow (losing yourself in an activity; "action meditation") and meaning - feelings of value and connection and identity within a community. My fellow Americans and I have a tendency to reduce the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is important, but it's not the whole game, and modern consumer society may have specialized in that component and lost the other two.

We commonly think of addiction as a problem of pleasure and pain: pleasure when you consume the addictive substance (or perform the addictive activity), and suffering when you do not, after you're hooked. It's not hard to see how it's not just meth, but sex or food, that could be the subject of addictive behavior. Humans have continued to get better at creating goods and services that cause repetitive behavior in their targets - think brand loyalty, processed drugs (think coca leaves to cocaine; increasing the sugar in everything.) We have probably become better at identifying avoiding these addictive goods and services. Still, I'd bet good money that over time, they're becoming more addictive faster than we're getting better at resisting them.

Through the lens of positive psychology, this starts to look too narrow. It's not just the pleasure component of happiness that has been exploited. Addiction to flow and meaning exist too.

Probably the best example of addiction to flow is video games. They are designed for this purpose, and there is evidence that they are damaging the productivity of young people, particularly young males.

Then there is community addiction. The most harmless form is what Facebook exploits to get you to keep checking whether your friends have liked your post. The more concerning form is that of religious cults, or small ingroup-vs-outgroup communities (often based on unearned, non-opt-outable qualities like race or religion.) This is actually the one that has the most potential for harm. Postwar Japan and late 60s America both featured a shock to the automatic meaning-generating aspect of national community. This is happening in a second wave in the West. It pains me as a staunch atheist to say this, but it's becoming clearer that the disappearance of religion as a community-builder has not been a boon for everyone. If you're also an atheist and that sentence made you squirm, then here's a thought: a substantial part, maybe even the majority, of young American males who support Donald Trump are not religious.

I have enough confidence that these three types are legitimate subtypes that I think it would be appropriate to have them DSM as specifiers. Indeed, the discussion over video game addiction has been ongoing for some time.