🚀 What are the politics of progress?
Also: Don’t let pandemic fears undermine undermine advances in cutting-edge biology
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” - Ray Amara
In This Issue
Micro Reads: Coffee shops without cashiers, nuclear fusion, more nuclear fusion . . .
Best of the Pod: The techno-optimism of World’s Fairs: My Q&A with Charles Pappas
Short Read: What are the politics of progress?
Long Read: Don’t let pandemic fears undermine undermine progress in cutting-edge biology
Micro Reads
🤖 Starbucks and Amazon are opening cashierless coffee shop in Manhattan. Take a look inside - CNBC | A Starbucks exec calls the shop “a proof of concept that we’re both learning from.” During a time where there’s a near record number of open job positions, both companies might also be learning a lesson or two from the recent labor shortages. Certainly some productivity growth implications here as well. (Thanks for the pointer to @brothersjudd.)
⚛ It is time to bet big on fusion energy - John Thornhill, FT | This column includes comments from Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston-based start-up spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is certainly one of the companies generating enthusiasm about the sector. Some exciting stuff here (bold by me):
In September, [Commonwealth Fusion Systems] announced that demonstrations of its high temperature superconducting electromagnet had opened the way to net power output. The company has already broken ground on an experimental reactor, due for completion in 2025. And, if that proves successful, it plans to build a fully commercial power plant early in the next decade. Such reactors could be built on the same spot as existing power plants and plugged into the same grid. “It should be able to scale quickly. That is what the hope is for fusion,” says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of CFS. To power the entire US electricity grid, he estimates that 3,000 commercial fusion reactors would be needed, at a cost of more than $1tn.
⚛ The chase for fusion energy - Nature | A fantastic overview of the sector and the startups in it. The piece notes there are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington, DC.
🧪 Breakthrough science and the future of venture capital - Dakin Sloss, Fast Company | The venture capitalist highlights emerging opportunities to invest in companies innovating in the physical world: sectors including energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, and human augmentation.
🌐 Demographic Transitions Across Time and Space - Matthew J. Delventhal, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, and Nezih Guner, NBER | To study the shift of countries from a high fertility/high mortality to low fertility/low mortality regime, the researchers compiled a data set of birth and death rates for 186 countries spanning more than 250 years. Their findings: “(i) a demographic transition has been completed or is ongoing in nearly every country; (ii) the speed of transition has increased over time; and (iii) having more neighbors that have started the transition is associated with a higher probability of a country beginning its own transition.” Fun fact: “Since 1960, the growth rate of the world population has been falling, with current growth already below 1% per year. According to U.N. population projections, population growth will be just 0.1% by 2100.” (The tech progress implications are somewhat less fun.) And a fun chart:
⚙ Want More Affordable Housing and Health Care? Here’s a Fix - Samuel Hammond, Daniel Takash, and Steven Teles | From housing to healthcare to higher education, Democrats are keen to socialize rising costs without addressing the regulations that restrict supply and drive costs upward. In the end, subsidizing costs will only obscure underlying supply issues while lining the pockets of those who provide these goods and services.
📱 Tweet of the issue:
Best of the Pod
🎡 The techno-optimism of World’s Fairs: My Q&A with Charles Pappas
At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, more than 50 million visitors came to explore pavilions of Space Age optimism. General Motors’ Futurama ride gave a 15-minute tour of the near future, complete with underwater hotels and a Jetsonian city of tomorrow. Techno-optimism was characteristic of other World’s Fairs in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But what happened to the World’s Fairs and the vision of the future they presented? To answer that question, I recently chatted with Charles Pappas, a senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine, where he covers trade shows and World’s Fairs, and the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World. An insightful snippet from our conversation:
Pethokoukis: So what happened? Is it that our techno-optimism sort of disappeared and maybe we weren’t as receptive to those ideas? Or did the fairs themselves change and maybe they weren’t as optimistic about the future? Did they still present that joyous, “Let’s take one giant leap” kind of attitude?
Pappas: It’s a perfect storm of all of those. And what I mean by that is, at that time, the environmental movement was starting up in which in many cases, technology rightly seemed to produce more problems than it solved. So by 1974, you have the first real ecologically-minded expo in Spokane where the US pavilion took a 17,000 square foot space in front of it to talk about the average waste that a family of four leaves. GM took the occasion, not for Futurama, but to show a hybrid car of the future, the XP-833. So you’re now scaling down. You’re now looking at, “We are in a problematic period.” It was about products, then about progress, and then, if you will, about panic. So the expos are moving in a sense to approach that topic in that way to say, “We are now in a problematic period and we need to solve it.” Which in a sense can kind of fuel the idea that technology is the problem and that there’s not much fun in seeing it anymore.
Short Read
🚀 What are the politics of progress?
Question: What is the politics of this chart of world GDP, inflation adjusted, over the past 2000 years?
It’s an intriguing query, one prompted by a viral tweet from Chris Freiman, an associate professor of philosophy at the College of William & Mary. He posted the above chart and added, “My politics are whatever this is.”
Me, too, Prof. Freiman. And when attempting to understand the politics of progress, you’re really trying to answer this question of political economy: Why are folks so much richer, astronomically richer, than they used to be? Indeed, if one didn’t know better, one might find plausible the explanation that sometime in the early 1800s we were given advanced technology by aliens.
Now don’t expect a definitive, ironclad, unassailable, monocausal answer from me. But I will briefly discuss a sensible way to think about that question: It really matters what people believe about the world around them, particularly about whether progress is possible in that world. For most of human history, of course, the notion of improving the human condition was not considered. Each day was pretty much like the one before. Season after season, lifetime after lifetime. And had humanity thought about progress, it knew so little about how the world worked that there was almost nothing it could have done to make substantial progress happen. We simply didn’t know enough.
But then some of us tried learning more about the world around us. Between Columbus traveling to the New World and the death of Isaac Newton, writes Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr in A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, there arose a pro-progress culture among the best brains of Europe — astronomers, chemists, clergymen, doctors, engineers, mathematicians — that communicated what they were learning to each other. And at the core of this Republic of Letters was the belief that observing, studying, and eventually testing the world around them could give them the power to radically improve the human condition.
Mokyr: “The fundamental belief that the human lot can be continuously improved by bettering our understanding of natural phenomena and regularities and the application of this understanding to production [was] the cultural breakthrough that made what came after possible.”
And what “came after,” eventually were the Industrial Revolutions and Great Acceleration, as illustrated in that amazing chart, first slowly and then rapidly. Humanity’s scientists, inventors, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs demonstrated that dramatically better living standards were possible and the pursuit of progress was the highest aim of society. And in such societies, people were free to take risks and profit from those risks if they had successful outcomes.
In short, there was a new social contract, described this way by economist Deirdre McCloskey: “Let me creatively destroy the old and bad ways of doing things, the scythes, ox carts, oil lamps, propeller planes, film cameras, and factory lacking high-tech robots, and I will make you all rich.” People were free to take risks and profit immensely even if the results disrupted the status quo.
So what are the politics of progress? Well, I just told you.
Long Read
🦠 Don’t let pandemic fears undermine undermine progress in cutting-edge biology
In a paper published Thursday in an academic journal, Michael Worobey, a scientist known for his virus detective work, concludes that “a wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China, where live mammals were sold is very likely to be the site of the origin of the pandemic,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which adds that “Dr. Worobey’s work adds to mounting evidence of a natural, or so-called zoonotic, origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. While many virologists and others who study epidemics say a laboratory accident in Wuhan can’t be ruled out, they believe it’s far more likely that the new virus’s origin occurred in nature.”
This is good news, even if it is unlikely to end the debate. But before, I explain why I think it’s good news, a brief story: In November 2013, a researcher at the high-security Influenza Research Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, accidentally pricked their finger with a needle full of potentially deadly flu virus, drawing blood. Then, according to a safety report reviewed by the Financial Times, the researcher sprayed disinfectant on the finger, ran it under water, tried to squeeze out any infected blood, and then self-quarantined at home for a week, their family relocating to a hotel.
Hardly an overreaction. That flu virus was a dangerous strain intentionally made even more dangerous through “gain of function” genetic tinkering. From the FT:
The contents of the syringe had been artificially created in the Wisconsin laboratory, by splicing together a mutated version of the H5N1 avian flu with a more regular human version. And it was not the first accident to occur in the laboratory. Just a week earlier, reports seen by the FT show a scientist had spilled liquid containing the H5N1 virus. H5N1 is known to be incredibly dangerous: 60 percent of humans who become infected with it, die. The only positive is that it is unable to spread easily between humans. Yet, the flu virus created in the Wisconsin laboratory replicated quickly enough to spread between ferrets via respiratory droplets in the air. If the same were true for humans, the research team warned, it could trigger a global pandemic.
Nightmare fuel, to say the least. And learning about that 2013 accident while still experiencing a global pandemic — one whose man-made origins cannot yet be ruled out — makes the event seem not only more ominous, but also like a dark harbinger of plagues to come. Nor does it help that Hollywood has given us plenty of assistance in visualizing the chaos such an outbreak would create.
Maybe too much help. This is my concern: Our immersion in dystopian science fiction + social media conspiracy theories + the occasional lab accident (when we find out about them) + an all-too-real global pandemic could create a level of societal risk-aversion to genetic editing and advanced biology that’s as dangerous over the long run as any nasty bug. Not that such technologies would be banned. That sort of wholesale relinquishment is a whole other kind of science fiction.
My concern is more that the inevitable progress in such emerging technologies is slowed due to caution, a hesitancy expressed via less research funding and more regulation. I mean, it’s great that a half century after the Atomic and Space Ages seemed to fizzle out, they’re back again with good reason to think they’re here to stay. But think of all the missed benefits from that delay, not to mention how much further along humanity’s nuclear and space efforts would be without a long pause.
Here’s the thing: One could tell a story where post-pandemic America embraces tech progress in a way it hasn’t for some time due to the success of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, how tech has enabled new work arrangements, and our geopolitical competition with China, in which tech is playing a big role.
Of course, one could tell another story, one of greater risk aversion due to the pandemic and accompanying economic shock. Indeed, a 2020 St. Louis Fed paper explores how the COVID-induced shock could create a “scarring effect,” or “a persistent change in beliefs about the probability of an extreme, negative shock to the economy.”
And while that paper is focused on business investment and consumer spending patterns, I wonder about the pandemic’s scarring effect on our views toward tech progress, especially in the fields of genetics and synthetic biology. Americans already show some hesitation. Looking at polls, one finds plenty of support for genetic tweaks to cure disease and reduce suffering, less so when those tweaks qualify as enhancement, such as boosting intelligence, or the changes can be passed on. People are squeamish about “designer babies.”
But what about designer environments? For example: There’s been plenty of controversy about the safety of altering malaria-spreading mosquitoes with a DNA sequence that could rapidly transmit a harmful (to the bugs) mutation. But some scientists want to do a lot more with synthetic biology, a field that combines computer science with genomic analysis and gene editing to engineer organisms’ genomes directly. In a recent essay for the Washington Post, Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and author of the new book Life As We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined — and Redefined — Nature, explains how synthetic biology could help maintain Earth’s biodiversity.
This biodiversity crisis is our fault, driven by the combined tragedies of overfishing, deforestation, pollution and the climate emergency. And the irony is that, if we hope to go on thriving, we may need to intervene even more dramatically. Indeed, our survival — and that of the world that sustains us — may depend on our willingness to make nature a lot less natural. . . . Synthetic biology also allows us to tackle a given problem — the collapse of oceanic ecosystems, for example — from multiple angles at once. Thus, while some synthetic biologists are developing approaches to help corals and fish survive in warmer water, other groups are working to create microbes that break down the plastics polluting our oceans, or to engineer plants that produce healthy oils like omega-3 and thereby reduce our reliance on oceanic fish for these substances. Together, these engineered organisms promise to maintain and even improve the quality of our planet’s habitats, benefiting us and the other species that share these spaces.
As it happens, I recently did a podcast with Shapiro where I asked about this issue of public risk aversion, using the anti-GMO movement as an example where people misinterpret the natural scientistic caution as a sign the technology is dangerous. Even the brainiacs are worried! Shapiro:
It was appropriate hesitancy, I think, that has been mischaracterized and misconstrued. And now it's very hard to find truth in conversations about genetic engineering and gene editing technologies online because there's such a loud voice of a minority of people who are deliberately spreading misinformation to keep people scared. And I worry about that. I think that this is really to our global detriment as a society. I don't really know how to get beyond this other than having louder voices that are trying to have conversations with all of the stakeholders to make people really understand what's going on.
But I mean, look at the mess that we're in with vaccines. And I don't know how to do this with our global community right now. One of the ways might be to think about the past and the present, and really think more about how this isn't a sudden shift into people controlling nature. We've been controlling nature for a really long time. Yes, it's the new suite of technologies that allows us to do things at a more rapid pace, but this is also a pace that might be the only thing that lets us keep up with the pace of the crises that the world is going through.
Given existing public concerns, I don’t want synthetic biology and genetic editing techniques like CRISPR to be hindered by some high-profile accident that exacerbates those worries, much like nuclear and Three Mile Island. So for that reason, better a natural origin for COVID-19 than a lab mistake.