🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #19
Existential risk; a podcast on space solar power; the June jobs report; and Best of 5 Quick Questions
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?)
And the good stuff just keeps on coming! I again covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Friday, as well as the inaugural Faster, Please! podcast on Thursday (free, no-paywall). Enjoy the summaries, recaps, as well as a bit of new content (usually)!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— Is Washington getting more serious about existential risk?
— Faster, Please — The Podcast #1: A conversation about space-based solar power with Ali Hajimiri, co-director of the Space Solar Power Project (includes transcript)
— The strong June jobs report doesn't end the risk of an impending recession. And that's OK.
Best of 5QQ
Essay Highlights
☄ Is Washington getting more serious about existential risk? | The White House is developing a research plan that would guide and set standards for how scientists study one of the more controversial ways of counteracting climate change: solar geoengineering. Meanwhile, NASA’s DART, or Double Asteroid Redirection Test, mission is on track for autumn collision with the 170-meter-wide asteroid Dimorphos. The goal is to test the feasibility of asteroid deflection. These two data points perhaps suggest Washington is getting more serious about using technology to counter some serious civilizational threats.
☀ Faster, Please — The Podcast #1: A conversation about space-based solar power with Ali Hajimiri, CalTech engineering professor and co-director of the Space Solar Power Project | “I mean, it is fair to say that not all the technical challenges have been solved, but the pathway has become more clear over the last several years in terms of at least how we go about solving them. It's sometimes the unknown unknowns that get you at the end of the day. But we have more of the things that we know that we need to figure out. “
💥 The strong June jobs report doesn't end the risk of an impending recession. And that's OK. | I would love to tell you that the surprisingly strong June jobs report means concerns about an impending recession have proven unfounded. I really would. But I doubt you’ll find many bearish economists who’ve suddenly turned bullish on the employment news. Yet as much as I hope for the actualization of the Powell Fed’s “Immaculate Disinflation” scenario, it’s not critical for my optimistic Up Wing scenario for the 2020s. While faster tech progress — followed by its commercialization and diffusion — should eventually drive faster productivity growth and economic growth, that sequencing might be more elongated than I would prefer. That said, there’s lots of good news out there. Such as this in The New York Times: “Nuclear Power Gets New Push in U.S., Winning Converts” (which focuses quite a bit on the potential of small modular reactors).
Best of 5QQ
Anna Stansbury is an assistant professor in Work and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. One paper I refer to frequently is “Productivity and Pay: Is the link broken?” by Stansbury and Lawrence Summers. It helps inform this Q&A.
What would the economy look like today if productivity hadn't slowed down starting in the 1970s?
I think we would see that most people in the economy are much better off than they would have been otherwise. It's hard to predict the exact distribution because it depends [on] exactly why productivity took off. Productivity taking off is usually, to some extent, a result of some technological change. And there are usually losers from those technological changes as well as winners. But on net, I think for most people we would see much higher standards of living if productivity had been much higher.
Anton Howes is a historian of innovation who studies the innovators and inventors that drove the Industrial Revolution. He is the author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, the subject of my 2020 podcast chat with Howes, and writes the Age of Invention newsletter. Earlier this year, he published “Why innovation prizes fail” for Works in Progress, which occasioned this short/sharp Q&A.
You write that innovation prizes "may work best when used to promote refinements, not revolutions." How so, especially since today we think of them as ways to take big leaps?
There is little to no evidence at all that prizes promote great leaps, and certainly not when it comes to the most famous historical prizes like the reward for finding longitude at sea. Prizes should certainly be agnostic when it comes to the methods that they reward, as you never know for sure, but I think the idea of them promoting big leaps has essentially just been PR gloss for those who found and market them. I've even discovered cases of historical prizes never having actually happened — Napoleon never advertised a prize for food preservation, for example — but which still get brought up all the time as examples. Because the idea of financial incentives working is so immediately and intuitively compelling, people rarely stop to consider whether or how prizes actually work. There's a deeper story here about the nature of innovation too, however, which is that there are rarely ever "big leaps" at all. Certain marginal improvements can in retrospect appear to be big leaps, or have especially disruptive effects, but they're really more like the straw that breaks the camel's back.
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 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