⚠️ Justice Stephen Breyer, singer Neil Young, and the 'Zero Risk Society'

Also: 5 Quick Questions for . . . economist Noah Smith

“You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.” - Neo, The Matrix

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In This Issue:

Long Read: Justice Stephen Breyer, singer Neil Young, and the “Zero Risk Society”

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for . . . economist Noah Smith

Micro Reads: 2022 US economy, Tesla, Marc Andreessen, and more …

Nano Reads

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Long Read

⚠ Justice Stephen Breyer, singer Neil Young, and the “Zero Risk Society”

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and singer-songwriter Neil Young might seem to have little in common — well, other than both being old guys. And both being in the news this week. Breyer is retiring from the bench — always a media bomb blast — and Young told streaming service Spotify to choose between his music and podcaster Joe Rogan, whom the rock star accused of spreading vaccine misinformation.

But there’s one other thing Breyer and Young share: Strong opinions about risk. When President Bill Clinton nominated Breyer to the Supreme Court back in 1994, some Democrats attacked Breyer for his views about risk and environmental regulation. (Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden told Breyer that he appeared “presumptuous and elitist.”)

Breyer was among a group of “counter-environmentalist” academics who thought government had an illogical approach to evaluating environmental risk. In his 1993 book, Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effect Risk Regulation, Breyer writes about the “tunnel vision” of regulators who ignore the costs of their actions. One way this obsession manifests is with the “last 10 percent” problem, as Breyer calls it. One example from the book: An extra $9.3 million was spent to clean up the last tiny bit of a toxic waste dump in southern a New Hampshire swamp such that “nonexistent dirt-eating children” could play there for 245 consecutive days instead of the current 70 and suffer no ill-effects.

Young has also thought a lot about risk, and not just about the risk to those Americans who believe what he calls “fake information” about vaccines. As an excellent Daily Beast story by Louis Anslow reminds us, Young is a long-time critic of genetically modified organisms such as plants engineered to withstand certain herbicides or insecticides. In 2015, Young pretty much devoted an entire album, The Monsanto Years, to exposing the supposed dangers of GMO agriculture.

Of course, Young’s anti-GMO hysteria represents exactly the sort of bad reasoning Breyer wrote about and lamented, both in its evaluation of science and its inability to judge trade-offs. Anslow really lays into Young and many similar critics on the left — especially in the way the anti-GMO movement paved the way for the anti-vaccine movement:

Young’s anti-GMO rhetoric helped fuel a narrative that made it easy to spread fear and distrust about COVID vaccines, most of which used novel biotechnology methods and some of which use genetic engineering. . . . A collective amnesia has set in amongst progressives regarding the left’s past pandering to the anti-biotechnology movement. Reactionary luddism — especially around biotechnology — was both politically correct and convenient for progressive celebrity activists. But that was in the “before times.” . . . In fact, not only were GMOs not a threat to human health, they’ve been a boon to it, much like the insulin that has kept Neil Young alive for most of his life. Vitamin A-enriched golden rice, for example, could have saved millions of lives and help prevent child blindness, were it not stymied by anti-GMO activists.

There’s plenty of illogic and fuzzy thinking about risk across the political spectrum (though at some moments one side’s thinking may be fuzzier than the other’s). But America needs a lot less of that sort of thing overall. Science-free emotionalism — along with a nebulous, knee-jerk notion about not interfering with Nature — can also be found in the current opposition to nuclear power and, I would imagine, in opposition to future advances in numerous emerging technologies: nuclear fusion (Creating a star on Earth sounds dangerous! What if a reactor goes supernova?), advanced geothermal (Digging deep into the Earth sounds dangerous! What if it spawns mega-quakes?), space-based solar power (Giant solar panels in space sounds dangerous! What if they incinerate the Earth?), human augmentation (Bettering ourselves sounds dangerous! What if we create a race of superpeople who want to enslave the Earth?), and on and on. The film Interstellar, where humanity just kind of gave up on progress, gives a good feel for what that world would be like.

And it’s not just a matter of an inability to grasp the inevitability of trade-offs as highlighted by Breyer, and then judging those trade-offs as rationally as possible without violating your values. (Young fails on both counts.) As it is, failures along those lines have undermined American productivity and growth for a half century. Going forward, we need a more sophisticated approach to thinking about risk so we can create maximum opportunity, as well as deal with all manner of challenges, foreseen and unforeseen .

The political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, another counter-environmentalist, outlines two strategies for dealing with risk. One is anticipation: developing models, plans, and policy agendas so a society can prevent potential dangers The other more flexible, capability-driven model — what Wildavsky called a “resilience” model — insists a society push forward the technological frontier and value the wealth created by such progress.

“One way to deal with the possibility of unexpected dangers, moreover, is to generate economic growth and technical progress, in the expectation, based on experience, that the accrued benefits will make society less vulnerable to whatever unanticipated risk may crop up,” he writes in Searching for Safety.

I also like how researchers Peter Cauwels and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich describe the “resilience” approach in their 2020 paper “Are ‘Flows of Ideas and ‘Research Productivity in secular decline?”: “Paradoxically, in order to make our society more resilient, we contend that we need to be open for exploration, and be willing, but also create opportunities for people, to take unknown risks. As a matter of fact, this is also the only way to get out of the trap of diminishing returns and escape from the ‘equilibrium’ of economic and technological stagnation.”

Being a risk-embracing society is something we’re going to have to work at, as the pandemic reminds us on a daily basis. In a recent podcast chat, I asked Didier about some deeper factors that he believes has turned American into cautious, incrementalist “zero-risk society,” especially into areas scientific discovery and technological invention, but also more broadly. Among them: the aging of American society and social media, “which raises any small event into a worldwide phenomenon.”

Of course, I would also toss in the anti-progress development of the regulatory state. It’s with good reason that Breyer trots out this John Milton quote to describe the American system: “Chaos umpire sits, and by decision more embroils the fray by which he reigns.”

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5QQ

❓❓❓❓❓ 5 Quick Questions for . . . economist Noah Smith

Noah Smith writes the excellent Noahpinion newsletter here on Substack. Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was also an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University.

1/ Looking back at the 2020s from the year 2030, do you think economic/productivity growth will show a marked acceleration from the 2000s and 2010s, the same, or slower?

Population aging and the topping out of educational attainment will slow the growth of potential output. Reorganizing China-centric supply chains will prove costly. And the 2010s were a decade of recovery from the Great Recession, meaning the economy had more room for rapid growth. So I wouldn't expect a marked acceleration. That said, I think TFP will grow faster this decade than last, so that will provide a tailwind to help counteract some of those headwinds. I'm most optimistic about the possibility that remote work will yield large and immediate economic dividends, as well as potential bonanza of cheap energy from suddenly affordable solar power, wind power, and short-term energy storage.

2/ What is a pro-progress economic policy that deserves more attention?

Policies to help people move. Reduced mobility in the U.S. is contributing to stagnation, and new research shows that lots of people would benefit economically from moving to more affordable cities. In addition, mobility is essential if we're going to take advantage of the productivity benefits of remote work. Remote work offers us the opportunity to transform service jobs and realize the full productive potential of the internet, the way distributing workstations around factories allowed manufacturers to realize the full productive potential of electrification a century ago. So we need to help jump-start this process by helping people move to opportunity in cheaper cities.

3/ Which emerging technologies are being overhyped, which underhyped — and why?

Virtual reality is being overhyped; the benefits of a 3D environment over a 2D screen, without the ability to touch virtual objects, are simply overstated. VR will be great for games, slightly better than screens for some meetings, but mostly not that big of a game-changer.

Batteries are being underhyped. People mostly think of these in terms of electric vehicles and short-term electric power storage, which is all fine and good. But because batteries are small and light, they enable portability of energy in a way bulky combustion engines never have. That's going to transform our physical environment in ways we've only begun to think about — for example, ubiquitous long-ranged drones will be a very interesting and potentially scary technology.

4/ How might advances in biotech affect economic growth?

Biotech is unusual because most of its applications are through the (incredibly heavily regulated) medical system. So biotech innovators are going to have to focus a lot of their efforts on finding ways to market biotechnologies that don't go through the medical system — agriculture, cosmetic enhancement, pet technology, and so on. Unfortunately warfare is going to be one of those non-medical areas of biological innovation; the Covid pandemic has taught us how devastating even small disruptions to our biological-social equilibrium can be. In the meantime, the pandemic should be causing the U.S. to think long and hard about whether our medical system, and the innovation within that system, is severely over-regulated.

5/ Is there a killer economic app for the space economy?

Unfortunately yes, in the literal sense. The TV show The Expanse showed exactly what it was: asteroid diversion as a weapon of mass destruction. The race for the technological capacity to harness and direct asteroids, and to detect and deflect incoming asteroids, will drive a new space race similarly to the way the potential for ICBMs and spy satellites drove the first space race. I don't expect armageddon, since I think countries are too sane to lob space rocks at each other, just as we ended up being too sane to lob ICBMs at each other, and I think this space race will throw off plenty of beneficial spillover technologies. But unfortunately it will probably take a military angle to really drive concerted government efforts toward space innovation and development. 

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Micro Reads

📈 U.S. Economy Grows as Fourth-Quarter GDP Shows Strongest Year in Decades | Reade Pickert, Bloomberg | The U.S. economy grew at 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter, with output expanding 5.5 percent for all of 2021. But this doesn’t mean a New Roaring Twenties has begun. This year will likely be one of sharp deceleration, especially given the tightening of both fiscal and monetary policy. The easy part is over, and I don’t hear enough from Washington policymakers about their next pro-growth, pro-productivity steps. Immigration seems like an obvious one.

🚗 Tesla Q4 2021 Earnings Call - The Motley Fool | Even if you don’t own any Tesla shares, it’s a really interesting experience to hear (or in this case, read a transcript of ) Elon Musk’s thoughts on a variety of topics, not all directly related to the car company. Here’s Musk on autonomous driving:

We can get rid of a lot of parking lots if you have a car that is operating all the time. But there will be a challenge with traffic. So, you know, we like this little tiny baby company, The Boring Company, which I initially started as a joke, but now I think it actually could be quite essential to alleviating the insane traffic that will happen when cars are autonomous because you reduce the pain of travel and you reduce the cost of travel so dramatically that there will be a crazy number of cars on the road. … It's not like some little feature, select the most profound software upgrade, maybe in history. Millions of cars suddenly have about four or five times utility in the U.S. overnight. I don't actually know how to quantify that financially except that it's some big number.

🌎 Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explains the world with Sturgeon’s law - Andy Kessler, WSJ | Sturgeon's law says 90 percent of everything is crap, and Andreessen thinks that's true of art, music, and even research. "In these domains, we have a very small number of people who know what to do. And we have a much larger number of people typically laboring under some set of delusions — generating crap," says Andreessen. And the "super-talented" 10 percent who leave the mediocrity of academia and corporate America are the folks who created Silicon Valley and the sorts of people VC firms bet on.

🐸 Frogs Regrow Missing Limbs in Lab Study, Advancing Key Effort of Regenerative Medicine - Aylin Woodward, WSJ | After amputating frogs' legs and sewing a silicone cap containing a cocktail of drugs onto the stumps, researchers were able to promote limb regrowth in the subjects: "Ultimately, the treated frogs grew appendages with new knee joints and several boneless toes—not fully formed legs but good enough for the frogs to swim with," writes Woodward. While the long-term aim of regenerative medicine is to enable humans to regrow missing limbs, the frog study could lead to the development of treatments for human amputees to improve the functionality of prosthetic limbs.

⏸ Why Is Silicon Valley Still Waiting for the Next Big Thing? - Cade Metz, NYT | Tech entrepreneurs have a reputation for hyping up technologies that won't make it to mass market for some time. Self-driving cars, augmented reality glasses, and quantum computing have been on the cusp for years and likely will be for more years to come. But despite a penchant for overpromising and under-delivering, Bay Area tech companies are still pushing technology forward. And perhaps all the hype serves a purpose: "Many in Silicon Valley believe that hand-waving is an important part of pushing technologies into the mainstream. The hype helps attract the money and the talent and the belief needed to build the technology."

📱 Tweetstorm of the issue:

Science Is Strategic @scienceisstrat1

What oil was to the 20th Century, semiconductors are to the 21st Century, and this makes Taiwan the Saudi Arabia of chips. Below is a 🧵 on TSMC, arguably the most important company in the world, and a company that most people have never heard of (1/8) @gilbert @djrosent

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Nano Reads

⚛ Physicists report first creation of self-heating plasma for nuclear fusion - Alison Snyder, Axios |

🤖 Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs - The Economist |

🚀 NASA’s ‘Nuclear Option’ May Be Crucial for Getting Humans to Mars - David W. Brown, Scientific American |

☀ Will Solar Geoengineering Bring Nations Together? Or Drive Them Apart? - Holly Jean Buck, NY Mag |