🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #22
The great US environmental overcorrection; the man who designed tomorrow; the 'productivity recession'; 5QQ chats on the Russian economy/global capitalism and generating better science research
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?)
Last week, Faster, Please! delivered optimistic, pro-progress content on each and every day of the five-day business week! In addition to two essays, accompanying micro reads, and 5QQ interviews for paying subscribers, Wednesday saw the release of another free, no-paywall issue. Now you may have noticed that I separated the essays from the 5QQ Q&As into separate issues. I just thought the combo was too much for a single newsletter. (If you have a preference, please let me know.) By the way, expect a new podcast episode next week — with better audio quality from me!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— America's Great Environmental Overcorrection
— The man who designed a tomorrow that never was. (At least not yet.)
Best of 5QQ
— Branko Milanovic on the Russian economy, global capitalism, and more
Essay Highlights
🌈 America's Great Environmental Overcorrection
When countries get richer, they start caring a lot more about clearer skies and cleaner water. So, too, postwar America. And if you adjust economic growth for the benefits of a healthier environment, as Carnegie Mellon University economist Nicholas Z. Muller does in the 2019 working paper “Long-Run Environmental Accounting in the U.S. Economy,” you’ll find growth actually accelerated after the passage of numerous environmental regulations. But that doesn’t mean we regulate anywhere close to optimally. Those regulations, while undoubtedly providing value, came at a cost. A 2013 study, “Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth,” estimates that the past 50 years of federal regulations have reduced real GDP by roughly two percentage points a year. If we want to build — whether new transportation infrastructure or deploy new clean energy sources — we need to think hard about the regulatory obstacles in the way. Look: Not everyone who opposed the Biden administration's reversal of NEPA reforms made by the Trump administration is against a healthy environment. As David R. Hill of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy wrote last year, “These reforms, finalized in 2020, revise rules put in place more than 40 years ago and could prove very useful — indeed essential — to developing renewable energy projects and upgrading other kinds of infrastructure, as well as creating jobs the country needs.”
🔮 The man who designed a tomorrow that never was. (At least not yet.)
The 1982 film Blade Runner depicts a bleak, “future noir” Los Angeles of “constant drizzling, no doubt polluted rain, bleak light, the dissonant hum of machines, men, and hawkers, and layer upon layer of cables and abandoned structures.” That’s in the words of artist and industrial designer Syd Mead, who designed the film’s dystopian aesthetic. Mead is perhaps best remembered for his dark Blade Runner work, but he was an optimistic techno-futurist at his core. Mead’s pre-Hollywood work portrayed lush, imaginative images of a postwar Golden Age of rapid economic growth and tech progress. Unfortunately, Hollywood never chose to build upon Mead’s optimistic vision. Instead, we got Blade Runner (which is not to detract from its greatness as a film), which has played a huge role in our societal imagining of a technologically advanced tomorrow that helped ruin the world rather than fix it. Why does this all matter? Because technological progress, as well as pro-progress politics, is downstream from culture — both in terms of what we value today and how we imagine tomorrow. And that stream has been polluted with caution and pessimism for a half century, thanks in part to Hollywood.
📉 We're thinking too much about the wrong 'recession'
The release of the advanced second-quarter GDP report has exacerbated a definitional debate that is more political than economic: Are we in a recession or not? The laymen’s definition — consecutive quarters of shrinkage — has been met. But, given that the GDP numbers are still preliminary, we’re not going to know if the first half of 2022 really was recessionary for some time yet. So what do we know? About all one probably can say for sure is what JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli told clients on Thursday: “[T]he economy is clearly losing momentum.” But this is more important long term: With two consecutive quarters of productivity contraction, Feroli concludes, “if there were such a thing as a ‘productivity recession’ there would be no debate that we are in one.” Let’s remember what the game is here, why you are probably reading this newsletter. The Faster, Please! thesis: The US economy has for decades been massively underperforming its potential — and we can do way better in the future. Perhaps, then, pro-progress folks should define a “recession” as whenever the economy falls short of what it could be doing with better policy.
Best of 5QQ
▶ Branko Milanovic is a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality at the City University of New York. He previously served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years. Milanovic is also the author of several books, including Worlds Apart, Global Inequality, and Capitalism, Alone, the subject of our 2020 podcast chat. He also has a great Substack, Global Inequality and More.
1/ Russia is a nation with vast natural resources, a well-educated population, and a deep scientific base. Yet on a per person basis, Russia is only the 67th richest nation in the world. Why?
The problem with Russia is what I called her “circular economic history.” To get rich, nations need internal and external peace, not chaos. One might remember Adam Smith’s famous statement that “peace, easy taxes and tolerable administration of justice” are sufficient for countries to transit from very low to very high income. Russia has not had that experience for a whole century. The period of fast economic growth after the elimination of serfdom in 1861 — that is, before the end of slavery in the United States — ended with World War I and then with the Bolshevik revolution and the civil war. Another acceleration of growth in the 1930s through Stalinist industrialization was stopped by World War II. The growth rebound of the 1950s–60s slowed down under Brezhnev — but at least there was no decline then. The decline came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism. Russian GDP decreased by more than 40 percent (more than the American GDP declined during the Great Depression). In the final episode of the “growth-to-war-and-back” dynamic, the relatively good performance of Putin’s Russia up to about 2012, has now definitely ended with the war.
One can discuss other, perhaps more fundamental, reasons for the lack of technological advance of Russia, but I wanted to highlight a very simple fact which is often overlooked: to become developed and rich, countries need stability and constant growth over long periods of time. For every reasonable person (but Russia’s president), this simply translated into the fact that Russia needed at least fifty years of peace, stability and tolerable administration of justice to reach advanced countries. It never got that chance.
▶ Stuart Buck is executive director of the Good Science Project and a senior advisor to the Social Science Research Council. Formerly, he was vice president of research at Arnold Ventures, where he was involved with many efforts to improve scientific reproducibility. In addition, Buck has a Substack, The Good Science Project Newsletter.
My sense is that there seems to be more interest by policymakers these days in goal-directed science, science geared toward sectors thought to be promising — next-generation semiconductors, AI, quantum computing — than basic science. Why is basic, curiosity-driven science important?
Whether it’s a War on Cancer, a Human Genome Project, a BRAIN Initiative, or a Cancer Moonshot, you’ve pointed to a perennial phenomenon. It’s understandable: both politicians and the public like to see real progress being made from all the tens of billions they are asked to spend every year. But it’s important to keep in mind that many scientific breakthroughs come from serendipitous places that could never be fully planned. Indeed, many of the most important discoveries can be traced to basic science that at the time seemed frivolous or unfundable.
Just one of many possible examples: CRISPR (the gene-editing technique) can be traced in part to a 1993 publication by Francisco Mojica, who was just finishing up his doctorate at the University of Alicante in Spain. He was studying archaebacteria that thrive in salty environments, and noticed some patterns in their genome that he later named CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats).
As he told an interviewer in 2019, “It was absolutely impossible to anticipate the huge revolution that we are enjoying nowadays.” Not only that, he had a lot of trouble getting funding: “When we didn't have any idea about the role these systems played, we applied for financial support from the Spanish government for our research. The government received complaints about the application and, subsequently, I was unable to get any financial support for many years.”
Paradoxically, while it’s important to fund some research that has an immediate path to impact, focusing too much on impact would actually lead to less impact in the long run. We need to make sure that a significant part of any broad science funding portfolio includes space for truly fundamental research, even if it strikes some people as useless or trivial at the time.
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