đ Faster, Please!: Week in Review+ #1
The myth of American decadence, Facebook info overload, the state of nuclear fusion, artificial wombs, the growth impact of geopolitical uncertainty, and more ...
This was my first week with a paywall, so mega thanks to my new paid subscribers to Faster, Please! Your generosity is most appreciated.
But I havenât forgotten about my free subscribers! I hope all of you will eventually cross the river to paid status. But every subscriber, free and paid, will be getting a weekly âbest ofâ issue, typically on Saturdays. This is the first and includes brief summaries of my twice-weekly essays, my favorite answers from Five Quick Questions Q&As, and selected âmicro reads.â (There will also be the occasional special surprise.)
Going forward, I may also publish mini-issues as events warrant. Everyone will get those, too. Beyond that, who knows? More regular issues? Podcasts? Videos? Livesteams? A cross-country tour? A Springsteen-like one-man Broadway show?
Faster, Please! is always evolving. Letâs go!
Melior Mundus
Best of the Essays
đ Is this really America's age of 'anti-ambition' and decadence? (249 words) | I find little factual basis to the recent NYT Magazine piece âAge of Anti-Ambition," in which journalist Noreen Malone argues Americans (at least among her friends) all hate their jobs. But the notion does fit a broader indictment of modern America, one made by NYT columnist Ross Douthat in his 2019 book The Decadent Society. Douthat quotes Jacques Barzun for a "decadence" definition: âWhen people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.â Example: America has accepted a half-century of economic stagnation.
But have we really? Even without a full understanding of the slowdown, Washington has acted. President after president has highlighted anemic productivity growth as a pressing national concern. For example: Bill Clinton in his first nationwide address pointed out how âtwo decades of low productivity growthâ meant America risked âcondemning our children and our children's children to a lesser life than we enjoy.â
Well-intentioned responses, however, were hindered by the surprise start of the slowdown, ignorance of its causes, and an underestimation of its severity. Their policies simply failed to meet the scope of the challenge, whether they involved cutting taxes, increasing spending on new research programs from time to time, or announcing big ideas â like George W. Bush and his initiatives for hydrogen fuel and nanotechnology.
But you canât say America hasnât tried. And itâs important that we learn from our failures, keep trying, and avoid becoming a permanent âzero-riskâ society. Much of what this newsletter is about is highlighting pro-growth ideas that might be effective.
đ„ Future Shock as Facebook Shock: Is social media driving us crazy? (223 words) | In his SOTU address Tuesday evening, President Biden mentioned the supposed ill-effects of social media on kidsâ mental health. That reminded me of the 1970 best-seller Future Shock by âsociologist of the futureâ Alvin Toffler. (A trippy Future Shock documentary about the book, starring Orson Welles, had its 50th anniversary earlier this month.) Toffler predicted rapid technological acceleration would cause âinformation overload,â driving us all bonkers.
The facts have perhaps finally caught up to Toffler's insight. We seem a society drowning in misformation and conspiracy theories. And Biden promised to hold social media platforms "accountable for the national experiment theyâre conducting on our children for profit." Sitting with FLOTUS Jill Biden at the SOTU was the Facebook whistleblower who leaked internal Facebook documents that suggested exposure to Meta-FBâs Instagram harms teenage girlsâ psychological well-being. Time to regulate?
While open to the notion that government action is needed, I'm currently skeptical. First, the Meta-FB research was no controlled experiment and is being overinterpreted. Second, the supposed negative impacts of social media for adults seem even less certain. For example: A 2021 study âfinds no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations." Third, rushed and sloppy regulation of algorithmic content promotion risks undermining the ability to personalize oneâs feed and easily find the content. Social media would no longer be very social.
Best of Five Quick Questions
â Arthur Turrell is deputy director at the Data Science Campus of the Office for National Statistics in the UK and author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet. I asked him about the key steps remaining to achieve a commercial fusion reactor. Turrellâs answer:
There are five steps, but itâs essential the first one is cracked to unblock the rest:
Demonstrating reliable and repeatable net energy gain at scale, with a yield of at least thirty times energy out for energy in. For magnetic fusion, this means running for time periods of at least hours continuously. For laser fusion, it means running 5 or 10 âshotsâ per second.
Developing a method of âbreedingâ one of the key ingredients for fusion, tritium (a special type of hydrogen), from lithium by placing lithium close to the fusion reactions.
Mastering the materials science needed to ensure that reactor components can withstand the highest temperatures in the solar system through many years of use.
Turning the energy released by fusion reactions into electricity.
Rolling fusion reactors out on an industrial scale at reasonable cost.
If society can do those, we will have delivered ourselves a clean, CO2-free source of energy that could last for millions and perhaps billions of years.
đ¶ Aria Babu is a senior researcher at UK think tank The Entrepreneurs Network. She recently wrote an intriguing piece on artificial womb technology, âWomb for improvement,â for the Works in Progress newsletter. I noted to her that the human birth process is the result of millions of years of evolution, then asked if it isnât hubris to suggest we know enough about it to attempt duplication. Babuâs response:
I think it would be if the birthing process were particularly good but we appear to be particularly poorly adapted for it. 1 in 1000 babies have heads larger than the birth canal, our children are born much younger and more defenceless than the young of other mammals, and the hormones that are meant to bond mother and baby often do the opposite and cause postnatal depression.
Best of the Micro Reads
đŁ Quantifying the US Growth and Inflation Risks from the War in Ukraine - Goldman Sachs | Rising geopolitical risk can dampen economic growth, especially business investment. In a 2016 paper, âMeasuring Economic Policy Uncertainty,â economists Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis used a similar index to conclude that economic policy uncertainty âis associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, healthcare, finance and infrastructure construction.â Looking at the economy in macro, the researchers found that âinnovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment.â
So this is a worrisome chart:
â© Slavery Was Never an American Economic Engine - Trevon Logan, Bloomberg | Yes, the Ohio State University economist concedes, slavery was profitable practice for slave owners, with annual expected returns of 7 percent to 10 percent year. Also: â[The] market value of enslaved people [was] estimated to have been $4 billion as of 1860 â more than every bank and railroad combined at the time.â But coercion led to productivity that was a third of northern counterparts. And emancipation created a huge productivity shock:
In work with Richard Hornbeck, I have sought to quantify the value of freedom to those who were freed â the wealth created by reallocating 13% of the population from slave labor to using their time as they saw fit. We found that the benefit to the formerly enslaved far exceeded the associated declines in output of cotton and other relevant goods. So instead of destroying wealth, emancipation actually delivered the largest positive productivity shock in U.S. history. Under conservative assumptions about the value of non-working time to enslaved people, we estimate that the productivity gain was roughly 10 percent to 20 percent of gross domestic product.
đ€ The world should welcome the rise of the robots - The Economist | Pessimists warn of a coming robot revolution's effects on employment, but robots are entering an economy that's short on workers. And while the spread of automation into new sectors is sure to bring disruption, there's evidence that robots will actually be good for labor markets. Just as the globalization of the economy left some behind, the robot revolution will have losers as well as winners. But this time we can begin retraining workers for the new economy â before the political backlash begins. From the piece:
The evidence suggests robots will be disruptive but ultimately beneficial for labour markets. Japan and South Korea have the highest robot penetration but very strong workforces. A Yale University study that looked at Japanese manufacturing between 1978 and 2017 found that an increase of one robot unit per 1,000 workers boosted a companyâs employment by 2.2%. Research from the Bank of Korea found that robotisation moved jobs away from manufacturing into other sectors, but that there was no decrease in overall vacancies. Another study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues elsewhere, looked at Finnish firms and concluded that their use of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.