๐ Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #15
The new SpaceX documentary, the new immigration book 'Streets of Gold,' embracing emerging tech, and 5 Quick Questions for experts in Moore's Law, US immigration, and American slavery
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Once again, lots sumptuous Substack content this week (IMHO), 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 the 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
โ What we should learn about Elon Musk and SpaceX from the new documentary Return to Space (June 6, 2022)
โ The new book Streets of Gold shatters myths as it makes the case for a nation of immigrants (June 8, 2022)
โ From Web3 to the space economy, we should avoid knee-jerk skepticism about emerging tech (June 10, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions
โ MIT innovation scholar Neil Thompson on the end of Mooreโs Law (June 6, 2022)
โ Princeton economist Leah Boustan on her ground-breaking immigration research (June 8, 2022)
โ Ohio State economist Trevon Logan on the economics of American slavery (June 10, 2022)
Essay Highlights
๐ What we should learn about Elon Musk and SpaceX from the new documentary 'Return to Space' | For nearly a decade after the final Space Shuttle flew in 2011, America couldnโt get itself into orbit around the Earth. Then on May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched toward the International Space Station in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, propelled to the heavens by a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster rocket. Not only does this 2022 Netflix documentary tell the SpaceX story, it makes an important point: Right now it looks like weโre entering a New Space Age โ but no guarantees on the duration. SpaceX founder and boss Elon Musk: โThe window of opportunity is open right now to make life multiplanetary. But we cannot count it being open for a long time. We need to take advantage of that window while it is open.โ
๐ The new book 'Streets of Gold' shatters myths as it makes the case for a nation of immigrants | This is cool. By automating searches on Ancestry.com, authors and economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan were able to digitally follow millions of immigrants through time as they climbed the economic ladder and integrated into American society. Among their findings:
Immigrants today climb that ladder at the same pace as European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Children of immigrants from nearly every country are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents raised in families with a similar income level.
Whether you look at learning English, marrying US-born spouses, leaving immigrant neighborhoods, or adopting American-sounding names, โimmigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans.โ
โคด From Web3 to the space economy, we should avoid knee-jerk skepticism about emerging tech | The skepticism and lack of imagination that sometimes surrounded the rise of the internet and web โ apart from 1990s stock market performance โ should make us cautious about dismissing ambitious tech speculation. That, whether itโs about Web3 or the emerging space economy. Indeed, too often such speculation over focuses on potential costs rather than benefits. This plays into what I call the Down Wing Doom Loop: Bad ideas and bad stories lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas and encourages more bad stories. Rinse, repeat, and retreat.
Best of 5QQ
โถ Neil Thompson is an innovation scholar at MITโs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Youโve written about the end of Mooreโs Law and the decline of computers as a general-purpose technology. Do we need a Manhattan Project or Apollo program to figure out the next great technological advance in chipmaking?
We absolutely need a moonshot in this area. We are investing money to figure out what these new generations of chips are. And DARPA, for example, has recently spent $600 million over 10 years to try and reinvigorate this. But if you actually look at the benefits to society of chips getting better, this idea of our quality of life improves, those benefits are vastly bigger, hundreds of thousands of times bigger than that. And so there's a huge gain to be had if we can figure out what that next generation of chips is. And even just moving that ahead a couple of years is worth a ton of money. And so we are really underinvesting in that now, and we should absolutely invest much more.
โถ Leah Boustanย is a professor of economics at Princeton University and co-author, with economist Ran Abramitzky, of Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success.
How do immigrants benefit from being โfootlooseโ shall we say?
Immigrants are defined by having moved from home. I mean, thatโs how we know that theyโre immigrants: they left their home country and moved to the US. And thereโs something special about a person thatโs interested in doing that. A lot of people want to live close to family. If youโre foot-loose to chase economic opportunity, then it doesnโt necessarily stop when you get to the country. It also means that youโre more likely to move to a city that offers good jobs or a suburb that offers good schools for your kids. Immigrants are more likely to do that than the US-born. The US-born are born into a state and theyโre born into a town, and many people stay home.
โถ Trevon Logan is an Ohio State University economist who recently wrote a fascinating Bloomberg essay, โSlavery Was Never an American Economic Engine.โ
You writeย that "emancipation actually delivered the largest positive productivity shock in U.S. history," constituting 10โ20 percent of GDP. How did you go about determining that?
Aggregate productivity increased after emancipation because the economic value produced through the institution of slavery came at immensely large costs imposed upon enslaved people that reduced aggregate productivity (or the total value of output minus total costs incurred).ย Given that there were 4 million enslaved people in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, or 13 percent of the total population, the aggregate productivity gains from emancipation were likely substantial. While output declined substantially in the South after emancipation, total input costs declined so substantially that emancipation represents by far the largest annual increase in aggregate productivity in American history.
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 interviewees:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanityโs precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret OโMara 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