π Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #27
Best wishes to NASA's uber expensive rocket; the link between ideas and productivity; stream-of-consciousness insights from yours truly; and much more
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Aack! Another no-go for Artemis I (with the launch sequence not getting even as far as the first attempt).
I was hoping to use this issue to briefly discuss. Oh, well. Check out the Essay Highlights below for my thoughts on the scrubbed launch from earlier in the week. Letβs light that candle next week!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
β NASA scrubs Artemis I launch today. Economics will scrub the rocket tomorrow.
β The flying cars we never got: Are we wrong about what caused the Great Stagnation?
β The one where I offer numerous insights and opinionsBest of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for ... physicist CΓ©sar Hidalgo on economic complexity
β 5+ Quick Questions for ... innovation scholar Adam Thierer on why optimistic sci-fi matters
Essay Highlights
π NASA scrubs Artemis I launch today. Economics will scrub the rocket tomorrow.
Minor (maybe) rocket engine issues and approaching bad weather meant NASA ran out of time for its scheduled Artemis I launch earlier this week, a mission that would carry three test mannequins on a journey around the Moon and back. (Artemis II would carry four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth, with Artemis III landing astronauts via a SpaceX lander near the Moonβs south pole.) Of course, the scrub was hardly disappointing for some pro-space Artemis critics who prefer to scrub the project altogether and kill NASA's Space Launch System rocket. And they have a point. With all due respect to the engineers of Boeing/United Launch Alliance and NASA, the SLS is already an obsolete rocket that existed initially to keep funding and jobs flowing to certain districts and states. Bottom line: Letβs light this candle. Godspeed to Artemis (eventually) and Americaβs return to the Moon this decade Then we can thank the SLS for its service, end this Apollo-style nostalgia trip, and take a giant leap into the New Space Age.
π€ The flying cars we never got: Are we wrong about what caused the Great Stagnation?
What caused the Great Stagnation, the slowing of measured US productivity and economic growth since the early 1970s? One thesis seems to have particularly strong explanatory power: We squeezed all the juice from the great technological ideas of the past and finding new ones is getting harder and harder. Good ideas are not enough, though. They must be entrepreneurially processed into new products and techniques. A new paper, "Ideas, Idea Processing, and TFP Growth in the US: 1899 to 2019," encourages thinking about total factor productivity as a product of both idea generation and idea processing. It takes into account the key role of the entrepreneur and firm, as well as the difference between scientific discovery, technological invention, and commercial innovation. And as the authors write, βIf idea supply isnβt the problem, then increasing idea supply by rounding up the usual suspects of higher R&D spending and easing immigration restrictions for STEM workers (etc.) isnβt the solution.β But there's a silver lining: Fixing our faulty idea process might be a lot cheaper than fixing our idea generation.
β‘ The one where I offer numerous insights and opinions
With a long Labor Day weekend here in the US, I thought I would try something different. The late radio host Larry King used to write a kind of stream-of-consciousness column for USA Today newspaper. I thought I would try to emulate it for this special issue of Faster, Please! Some highlights:
Back to August jobs, I place great stock in this analysis by the much-respectedΒ JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli: βTodayβs report offers some hints that the imbalance between supply and demand in the labor market is moving in the right direction, though the process of achieving a more sustainable balance still has a very long way to go. Overall, the report keeps alive the hope that a soft landing is still a possibility.β β¦ How could anyone downplay Americaβs building problem when they see that the newΒ GatewayΒ tunnel connecting New Jersey to Midtown Manhattan will, the NYTΒ reports, βnot be completed until 2035, three years later than expected β¦ [and costing] $16.1 billion, up from a previous estimate of $14.1 billionβ? So many stories like this. β¦ NewΒ US Education DepartmentΒ dataΒ show reading and math scores fell sharply during the pandemic, a result that should surprise no one. One of the strongest and most persistentΒ findingsΒ of modern economics is that schooling really does help kids become high-functioning adults, including as workers in an advanced, globalized economy. β¦
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for ... physicist CΓ©sar Hidalgo on economic complexity
CΓ©sar Hidalgo is the director of theΒ Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute of the University of Toulouse. Hidalgo known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. He is the author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity,Β Why Information Grows, and How Humans Judge Machines.
You find that geographic proximity to a location of economic complexity is advantageous. What policy implications might this have within the US, where we have high-productivity (and high-complexity?) cities like San Francisco and Boston but also lots of less-productive localities?
An economy like that of San Francisco should be able to support a city of the size of Shenzhen, with 23 million people. But the Bay Area today is barely able to house 7 to 8 million people. The same is true across the country. The US is not at spatial equilibrium because the movement toward large cities has become impossible due to a lack of proper infrastructure and a severe housing shortage. Compared to middle-income countries, the US really has no public transportation nor an abundance of high-quality and high-density urban spaces. The question is not how we make Leominster, MA more vibrant. It is how we accommodate more people into the places that have a vibrant economy and how we make those places more liveable.
π₯ 5+ Quick Questions for ... innovation scholar Adam Thierer on why optimistic sci-fi matters
Is the future depicted in todayβs science fiction one youβd actually want to live in? Adam Thierer shares my worry that sci-fi has become too dark, too pessimistic, and too dystopian. And it matters. He laid out his case in a recent article, βHow Science Fiction Dystopianism Shapes the Debate over AI & Robotics.β
Adam is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His books include Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom and Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments.
The 1960s was full of optimistic sci-fi, most notably The Jetsons and Star Trek. Does the fact that the '60s were followed by the pessimistic 1970s show sci-fi simply doesn't matter?
Perhaps we were destined to experience an age of techno-pessimistic fiction after seeing some notable positive portrayals of technology from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. And because several other social, political, and economic shocks unfolded in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, the cultural zeitgeist was likely ripe for more dour directions in sci-fi.
But that age of dystopian sci-fi now seems to be a never-ending one. As Neal Stephenson has argued, weβre stuck in a rut: βThe techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.β And he offers an interesting hypothesis as to why: βBelieving we have all the technology weβll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects.β
If heβs right, it means that techno-dystopian punditsβin pop culture, academic, and policy circles alikeβare essentially asking us to settle for the status quo without thinking through the costs of fear-driven technological stasis. This suggests an extraordinarily impoverished imagination exists about our possible futures. To many, imagining a better future now seems passΓ© or outlandish. For many of that ilk, itβs only a question of how pessimistic to make their plots and policy pronouncements.
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 interviews:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanityβs precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret OβMara 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
Where is George Low when NASA needs him?