🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #13
Our 1970s energy mistake, Congress' UFO hearing, 'Asianomics' in America, 5 Quick Questions for human progress chronicler Marian Tupy and venture capitalist Scott Kupor
In This Issue
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. No paywall! Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)
So much fantastic Substack content this week, as you will see below. I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Friday, as well as a paywall-free issue on Wednesday. Enjoy the Saturday summaries, recaps, as well as a bit of new content (usually)!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— Hey, America, let's not repeat our 1970s energy mistake (May 16, 2022)
— Why Congress' big UFO hearing made me more positive about faster human progress. (May 18, 2022)
— The amazing success of 'Asianomics' in America (May 20, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions:
— Chronicler of human progress Marian Tupy
— Venture capitalist Scott Kupor
⭐ Bonus: A few extra questions for Marian Tupy
⚡ Hey, America, let's not repeat our 1970s energy mistake | In the spirit of the 1972 eco-pessimist report The Limits of Growth comes a new Stanford University study that suggests Americans would be quite satisfied with their lives even using a lot less energy. How much less? About 75 gigajoules of annual per-person energy consumption. To put that number in context: The 2018 world average for energy use is 79 gigajoules per person versus a US average of nearly 300 gigajoules per person, producing a per person GDP of $76,000. And what countries currently consume energy at around the 75-gigajoule level? There are currently five with an average per capita GDP of about $14,000.
Energy drives growth, which drives incomes. A 2021 analysis by Matthew A. Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, found “no evidence of an income threshold at which experienced and evaluative well-being diverged, suggesting that higher incomes are associated with both feeling better day-to-day and being more satisfied with life overall.” And think what else we could do with clean, abundant energy: desalinate seawater, pull carbon from the sky, rocket around the globe cheaply. Yes, we could be more efficient with our energy use. But that shouldn’t distract from the long-term need to finally focus on the sort of technological progress that can produce a lot more of it.
👽 Why Congress' big UFO hearing made me more positive about faster human progress | Last week’s House hearing on “unexplained aerial phenomena” — the first such hearing in more than a half-century — was a far less cinematic and shocking event in Washington than when a flying saucer landed on the National Mall in the 1951 science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Pentagon officials didn’t produce high-def, close-up video of UAPs buzzing around US Navy ships in broad daylight or present materials from captured or crashed alien spacecraft. After watching the hearing, Avi Loeb, former chair of the Harvard University astronomy department, wrote that there were two possible interpretations of the objects seen in various Pentagon videos. “Either they were made by humans or they were made by extraterrestrial civilizations.”
The sci-fi enthusiast in me — the one who loves the scene in Star Trek: First Contact showing the first meeting between humans and Vulcans — would prefer it to be aliens. Perhaps first contact would bring us all manner of superior technologies. But maybe it’s not aliens, maybe it’s just us. And if that’s the case, I feel a lot better about my techno-optimist, Up Wing worldview. Imagine if America really possesses vehicles that can travel multiples of the fastest hypersonic missile or SpaceX rocket — and do so in ways that seem physics defying. Now, I’m not counting on any of this as part of my hopeful take for a New Roaring Twenties and Thrilling Thirties. For that, I’m relying on known advances in AI, biotech, energy, and space. But I wouldn’t mind if there were a new space drive being installed in a Tic-Tac UAP at Area 51 right now.
🌐 The amazing success of 'Asianomics' in America — and what we should learn from it | You’re probably already aware that immigrants generally and their children have helped start some 60 percent of the most valuable American tech companies.
And the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 played a massive role in creating the above chart. Here’s historian Margaret O’Mara in her 2019 book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, describing the legislation’s impact on the growth of the tech sector in Silicon Valley and elsewhere:
Immigration from India was three times what the Johnson Administration had predicted. Nearly six million new immigrants came to the U.S. from Asia between 1966 and 1993 alone. Few places in America were more transformed—and economically and intellectually invigorated—by these new arrivals than the hubs of the technology industry: Boston, Texas, Seattle, and, especially, Silicon Valley. Skills requirements were not “sanctimonious propaganda” in the world of high tech; immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong, then China, India, and the former Soviet Union became the engineering backbone of hundreds of start-ups and large tech companies. Many of them ended up founding companies themselves.
What I find really super-interesting about the Goldman Sachs report is the more granular analysis of the economic contribution of Asian American immigrants and their children. For example: To the extent patenting is a good proxy for innovation, GS estimates that each percentage point increase in the Asian American population share “increases state-level patenting per capita by 5.9 percent. For college-educated Asian Americans, it’s an 18.5 percent increase in state-level patenting per capita.” What’s more, the total increases in patenting seen in the previous numbers exceed those implied by survey data on Asian American patenting. GS:
This suggests that Asian Americans generate significant positive spillovers to innovation in the private sector, beyond their direct contributions. For instance, Asian American entrepreneurs who do not patent themselves may still increase patenting by complementing inventors in their organizations. Additionally, skilled Asian Americans patent more and generate larger spillovers than their skilled immigrant counterparts.
I hope this presentation suggests that another big wave of Asian immigration, especially as the Chinese Communist Party makes that country increasingly inhospitable to the entrepreneurially spirited, would be a good thing. America should be liberalizing immigration from China (and lots of other places), not reducing it in fear these newcomers would become a fifth column in the service of Beijing. This would be a terrible opportunity for America to miss.
Best of 5QQ
▶ Marian Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Abundance Index. Tupy is the coauthor of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022) and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (2020).
You and Ron Bailey co-authored Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Was there a trend that readers have told you they found particularly surprising?
The massive expansion of tree coverage is beautiful (e.g., the forests grew by 35 percent in the United States and Europe, and 15 percent in China, between 1982 and 2016). I like nature and, it turns out, that when high-efficiency agriculture is combined with urbanization, nature rebounds very quickly. By 2100, 85 percent of humanity will live in the cities, and flora and fauna will once again rule the roost. Another positive environmental trend that we do not discuss in the book is the “greening of the planet.” According to NASA, between 1982 and 2016, additional CO2 in the atmosphere has led to an “increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area equivalent to two times the continental United States.” Almost no one knows these trends and I think that they are being hidden from the public for a reason.
▶ Scott Kupor is an investing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he is also responsible for all operational aspects of running the firm. In addition, Kupor is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestselling book Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. (First published earlier this year.)
If there is no New Roaring Twenties of faster growth, what probably went wrong?
We have every opportunity in front of us to enjoy the fruits of economic growth; this game is ours to lose. If we in fact lose, it will be of our own doing — because we failed to maintain our supremacy as the most attractive place for smart, innovative, risk-taking individuals who want to better themselves and others by creating important, lasting and high-growth enterprises. That could be through a combination of restrictive immigration policies that limit our ability to attract and retain innovators globally and through the imposition of other regulatory policies that entrench incumbents and make it harder for startups to challenge the status quo.
⭐ Bonus: A few extra questions for Marian Tupy
How do you respond to critics who say that despite economic progress we've seen regression across other (arguably more important) domains over the last few centuries?
Like what? Women in ancient Greece (and today’s Afghanistan) were the property of men. Today, women run many countries and have a vote pretty much everywhere. That started in the late 1890s in New Zealand. Men’s likelihood of dying, while performing a dangerous job or fighting in a foreign war, is much lower than before. Likewise, slavery was probably around since the birth of agriculture. Yet, no culture developed a systematic and sustained anti-slavery movement until Great Britain in the 18th century. Child labor and corporal punishment were common. Homosexuality was punished. Cruelty to animals was ubiquitous. And don’t forget witch-hunts, cannibalism, exposure of new-born but unwanted children to the elements, and human sacrifice.
Is the problem of pessimism and doomsaying getting better or worse? Why?
I don’t think it is getting worse over the long run. Just about every major religion or civilization I can think of, including the Hindu, Buddhist, Graeco-Roman, Muslim, and Christian, developed some sort of eschatology or “end-of-days” scenarios, which the religiously inclined embraced and, even, looked forward to. In the short run, we have seen the emergence of apocalyptic environmentalism, which has a purchase on public imagination partly because it is relatively new and, therefore, seemingly plausible. As more and more of the hysterical predictions fail to materialize, people will lose interest and move on to some other source of the apocalypse. That’s not to say that everything must work out in the long run. Not at all! We have, for example, nuclear weapons and deadly pathogens to contend with. Those should be our priority.
Has the pandemic changed your thinking about long-run economic growth and human progress?
I am concerned about governments’ fiscal and monetary policies, potentially changing attitudes to work, the revelation of government incompetence (which turned out to be significantly greater than even a jaded libertarian like me suspected), the relative ease with which my fellow citizens accepted immensely harmful society-wide lockdowns, a significant breakdown of global trade (just think how marvelous it is that we can import safe baby formula from Europe), and the rise of extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. So, overall, I would say that the pandemic made me more worried about the future than I was before. But, just to be clear, I think that we can solve these problems, if we derive the right lessons from the past and find the leaders with the backbone to implement wise and time-tested policies that have worked before.
How should climate change be dealt with? Should we just ignore it in the blind hope that technology will offer us a Get Out of Jail Free card?
We already have the technology we need to deal with excessive CO2 emissions. Fission reactors are (Chernobyl and communist mismanagement notwithstanding) safe and have been around for some 70 years. I am all in favor of getting away from fossil fuels in the long run, if it can be done intelligently and without harming the least fortunate among us, who can’t afford to pay high energy bills. It is shocking that the same people who claim to care about the planet and the poor continue to reject the one technology that could help both. I also think that — if the government must get involved — more money for R&D in fusion technology is wiser and more economical than subsidizing solar and wind power.
Thanks for reading this far! Just a quick note for first-time visitors and free subscribers. In my twice-weekly issues for paid subscribers, I typically also include a short, sharp Q&A with an interesting thinker, in addition to a long-read essay. Here are some recent examples of those interviews:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara on the rise of Silicon Valley
Innovation expert Matt Ridley on rational optimism and how innovation works
More From Less author Andrew McAfee on economic growth and the environment
A Culture of Growth author and economic historian Joel Mokyr on the origins of economic growth
Physicist and The Star Builders author Arthur Turrell on the state of nuclear fusion
Economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of the China trade shock
AI expert Avi Goldfarb on machine learning as a general purpose technology
Researcher Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy