🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #20
'The Limits to Growth,' again; the James Webb Space Telescope and Up Wing culture; 5QQ chats on the 'How the World Became Rich' and the philosophy of progress
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I hope everyone is enjoying the new F,P! podcast (with transcript). It won’t be every week. Probably more like three times a month, at least for now. And again, that’s for all subscribers (free and paid), as is the Wednesday issue (including essay, 5QQ, micro reads). By the way, I’m open to suggestions for 5QQ interviewees and podcast guests. If you an idea or two (or three), please send those along. And if there’s someone I’ve already interviewed, but you would like to hear from them again, let me know about that, too. I want this newsletter to provide as much interest and value to you folks as possible!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— What happens when you warn of civilizational collapse, but civilization doesn't collapse?
Best of 5QQ
— 5 Quick Questions for … economic historians Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin on how the world became rich
— 5 Quick Questions for … Jason Crawford on the philosophy of progress
Best of the Pod
Essay Highlights
⏳ What happens when you warn of civilizational collapse, but civilization doesn't collapse?
Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on From The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next? was published in May to mark the 50th anniversary of 1972’s The Limits to Growth, the influential and alarming Club of Rome report that told a depressing story of future scarcity, of a polluted and overpopulated world running out of everything — and then running down. “We are in worse trouble than anyone related to The Limits to Growth would have liked to see,” the new retrospective concludes. But far from the Club of Rome’s catastrophic predictions, the past half century has witnessed historic reductions in poverty, declining commodity prices, and a global population that didn’t grow anywhere near as fast as forecasted. Also still the same: The Limits authors reject out of hand the notion that technological advances can generate ample clean energy and potentially power carbon capture technologies. Why? Perhaps because it would undermine the use of climate change as a cudgel to bash consumerist, “neoliberal” capitalism in a way that concerns about resource depletion have failed to do.
Enhanced images released earlier this week from the James Webb Space Telescope showed us that America is still capable of great things. Just what kind of impact can a megaproject like the shiny new telescope have? Consider the cultural legacy of the Apollo missions, which helped make America a gadget-obsessed nation of first adopters. While megaprojects may well have huge economic and scientific benefits, they can also create a more aspirational and adventurous Up Wing culture, both in America and globally. Here are a few other space-related ones: A lunar observatory like NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program proposal to suspend a wire mesh dish over a far-side lunar crater; a permanent colony on Mars, which Elon Musk estimates at a price tag between $100 billion and $10 trillion; asteroid capture, setting the stage for more ambitious efforts like mining; and a full-scale, government-funded mission to send spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, our solar system’s nearest neighbor. Of course, there are big things we can do on Earth, too — assuming we can get the regulatory piece correct — everything from affordable high-speed rail to hyperloops to refilling the Great Salt Lake.
🧪 The US should dramatically ramp-up R&D. And it might not. |
I would have guessed that the one piece of non-pandemic-related legislation to certainly pass during President Joe Biden’s first term would be something that greatly increased federal science and technology funding. So where are we now? The legislative combo seems to be in perilous condition as the November midterm elections come ever closer. While I am skeptical of the “industrial policy” aspect of these funding increases, at least they get the ball rolling. Somewhat. They would maybe raise the total R&D share of GDP by about 0.1 percentage points. But what if we did more? A lot more. This from the 2021 study “Science and Innovation: The Under-Fueled Engine of Prosperity” by Northwestern University economist Benjamin F. Jones:
[A] sustained doubling of all forms of R&D expenditure in the U.S. economy could raise U.S. productivity and real per-capita income growth rates by an additional 0.5 percentage points per year over a long time horizon. This would lead to enormous increases in standards of living over time. It would greatly advance the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and workers and the overall position of the U.S. economy in the world.
Faster, please! More, please!
Best of 5QQ
▶ In their new book, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, economists Jared Rubin (Chapman University) and Mark Koyama (George Mason University) distill decades of research into the question of how, starting in western Europe just a few centuries ago, economic growth began to explode.
For a long time progress didn’t happen. And then the charts shoot almost straight up in the Industrial Revolution. Can we have a repeat of that kind of acceleration?
Rubin: I think in parts of the world that haven't taken off, yes. And I think we will see this in the 21st century in certain parts: Southeast Asia, hopefully Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Latin America. I do think that that's possible. In the parts of the world that are already developed, the low-hanging fruit has probably been taken, though.
Koyama: So this is Dietrich Vollrath versus Robin Hanson's idea of a singularity. The singularity is this idea that you get some breakthroughs in AI or some other technology [and] we start growing very rapidly again. Whereas the Dietrich Vollrath view is that the economy is fully grown. I'm not enough of an expert to know which one is right, but I think that growth is not linear historically. We think it's linear because we see these figures from our textbooks which suggest the US economy was always growing at a certain rate from the 19th century onwards. But if you think in a longer historical timeframe, there are periods which are more innovative than other periods. [Robert] Gordon talks about the era 1870-1940 being particularly productive. But I think it's possible to conceive of another set of innovations which generate a step change in innovation and economic growth. It’s possible.
▶ Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress. If you missed my full podcast conversation with Jason, you’ll definitely want to check that out. But I also asked some additional 5QQ questions exclusively for paid subscribers to Faster, Please!
Our World in Data is a great site with lots of great charts showing progress, whether it's less poverty, less malnutrition, longer lifespans, higher per capita GDP. Yet many people think life is getting worse. How do you explain why society seems to be kind of impervious to good news?
I think it's fundamentally this anti-progress mindset that arose in the mid-20th century, probably peaked around the early ‘70s, but is still largely with us today. I think it's just hard for people to hear the good news because they sort of bought into this fundamental narrative. There are some other explanations. Hans Rosling wrote a whole book about this, where he had a bunch of ideas. Steven Pinker has some ideas that tend to come down to things like, well, people have a psychological negativity bias, or the news has a negativity bias because that's what gets clicks or TV ratings or whatever. Max Roser from Our World in Data had this point about how you could write a headline—and I forget the exact number—but it's, “50,000 people pulled out of poverty today.” And you could just write that every single day for years and years. Yeah, it's true, those headlines don't get as much. But I think there's just some sort of fundamental narrative there that people have bought into about how technology is dangerous and it's making our lives worse and so forth. And so it's just very hard for facts to get through those narrative blinders.
Best of the Pod
Pethokoukis: There was a nice BBC profile of this progress movement that you were featured in. And it said that among progress thinkers, "There is an entrepreneurial bias towards action. The prospective benefits of a new technology dominate considerations of what a bad actor might do with it. The fear of missing out overwhelms the fear of losing everything." Do you think that's a blind spot? Are we too dismissive of how things might go wrong?
Crawford: I think that could easily become a blind spot for the progress community. And that's part of why I don't like the term “optimist” or why I think it can be misleading. That's why I talk about complacent optimism as being not the mentality we want. We want to acknowledge and engage with many of these very real risks and concerns. If we don't, the future will go badly and that's not what we want, and there are good examples of this. Early in the development of genetic engineering, some people started to realize, "Hey, if we're not careful with this, we could be creating dangerous new diseases." And they actually put a moratorium on certain types of experiments. They called for this and got together about eight months later at a conference, the famous Asilomar Conference—1975, I think it was—to discuss safety procedures.
And they came up with a set of danger levels or risk levels for different types of experiments. And they came up with a set of safety procedures, matching those levels: “If you're at bio risk level three, you should be doing safety procedures X, Y, and Z.” So at the simplest, maybe you don't even need a mask or gloves or whatever. And then at the absolute highest level, you're in an extremely controlled room. You've got a full suit on and the room has negative pressure so that if the door accidentally opens the air blows in, not out, etc. You've got all of these things, right? And so that was a pretty effective method—proactively, by the way. Very importantly, this was not in response to an outbreak.
It wasn't like they created the disease first and killed a bunch of people and then said, “Whoops. Let's figure out how to not do that again.” They actually anticipated the potential risk, but they did so not on kind of like vague fears that were motivated by just some sort of anti-science or anti-technology sentiment. They did so by just very hard-headedly, rationally, logically looking at what could happen and, how do we prevent this? And how do we make progress and also have safety? So I think, ultimately, safety has to be a part of progress. In fact, historically, getting safer is one of the overall aspects of progress. If you set aside potential tail risk but just look at day-to-day safety, we are much safer today than we were in the past. That is an accomplishment. And really a world of progress ought to be a world in which we are getting continually safer, right? If we're not, we're missing some important aspect of it.
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