Cultivating Agency

The world doesn’t happen  to  us; it is shaped by us. More people now have access to simple tools that allow them to “program,” or modify, the world around them. Teaching kids that the world is programmable – whether it’s through actual coding, games like Roblox and Minecraft, encouraging them to ask for what they want, or even white-hat

" Younger generations didn’t become “more technical”, per se – if anything, they’re probably less technically literate overall. It’s  programming  itself that became easier, because there are now so many tools and layers of abstraction available that make coding a much more trivial practice than before."

If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful.

If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not. 

The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

" I want to highlight how the value of coding isn’t really about teaching programming skills. It’s about teaching agency."

If our social attitudes towards agency are as important as they seem, we should measure its prevalence in the general population, then find ways to track it over time. I grew up in the heady halcyon days of globalism, where celebrities sang “We Are the World” [ 3 ] and Whitney Houston proclaimed that  “I believe the children are our future.”

If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.

My sense is that those with a strong sense of personal agency don’t always realize that not everyone shares this position.