π Faster, Please! Week in Review #31
The odds of nuclear war; the state of self-driving cars; offsetting pandemic-era learning loss; jobs and the technology sector
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
β How close are we to nuclear war?
β Aargh! Self-driving cars seem stuck in the slow lane.Best of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for ... economist Michael Strain on recovering from pandemic-era learning lossBest of the Pod
β Part one of my conversation with economist Michael Mandel about Silicon Valley and America's technology sector
Essay Highlights
β’ How close are we to nuclear war?
Escalation scenarios generally advance from peacetime to βshows of force, limited conventional conflict, full-blown conventional war, limited nuclear warfare, andβat the top of the ladderβan all-out strategic nuclear exchange,β notes the Rand Corporation in a 2008 analysis. But in Kahnβs 1965 book, On Escalation, he builds an escalation ladder of 44 rungs, half of which involve some use of nuclear weapons, including accidental. Hereβs Kahnβs ladder of the apocalypse:
And where are we on that ladder right now? Letβs look at the current state of play:
Russia has invaded aΒ country that borders NATO, the biggest war in Europe since World War II.
Russia expected easy victory, but the campaign has gone badly.
NATO has been unexpectedly aggressive in both arming Ukraine and applying economic sanctions.
Vladimir Putin has been hinting at the use of nuclear weapons, with pro-Putin public figures even suggesting attacks against NATO.
The Biden administration has warned Russia of βcatastrophic consequencesβ should it resort to using nuclear weapons.
High-profile, former US military figures have spelled out possible US responses to the use of nuclear weapons.
Putin seems to view this war as existential, at least to his own political position. Russia experts suggest a coup might bring in an even more hardline figure.
Put all these facts and observations together, and it looks like weβre at the stage that Kahn called βIntense Crises,β which he explained as follows:
I use the term "intense crisis" to mark a crisis in which a significant number of people actually envisage that nuclear war may really occur, yet nuclear weapons have not yet been employed. Of course, there are many who understand abstractly that nuclear weapons exist and may be used, but in this kind of intense crisis the nuclear incredulity that all of us share would be sharply decreased if not eliminated. The "unreal and hypothetical" nuclear stockpiles that exist would suddenly represent a real threat. This change probably would not come all at once, and it might be a limited development; but a part of the population and most of the decision-makers would acknowledge that a nuclear war might take placeβthat it was no longer either "unthinkable" or "impossible.β
π Aargh! Self-driving cars seem stuck in the slow lane.
In the Before Times, I was a person more concerned about the potential regulatory obstacles to self-driving vehicles than the technological ones. But today, the hype over a self-driving future has dissipated significantly because of the technology challenge. Peak AV Optimism might have been in 2017 when engineer and self-driving pioneer Anthony Levandowski moved from Uber to Google β and Google sued for nearly $2 billion in damages saying that Levandowski took a work laptop home, downloaded its proprietary AV tech contents, and gave the whole kit-and-kaboodle to Uber. Rather than transforming the $2 trillion global automotive industry, Levandowski and his company Pronto.ai are currently making rock quarries more efficient by retrofitting self-driving tech to dump trucks. Whatβs next? Levandowski plans to start selling Pronti.aiβs software to long-haul trucking companies next year. But a scenario where highways are packed with self-driving cars and trucks of all kinds will require, according to Levandowski and other AI experts, βa fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by rote.β Again, not a regulatory problem but a technological one. And maybe a case where government needs to do more β given the huge upside β in terms of R&D rather than less on the regulatory front.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ economist Michael Strain on recovering from pandemic-era learning loss
Michael Strain, my colleague and Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote a syndicated column about the huge learning loss from pandemic-era school closures. In that piece, he advocates longer school days, shorter summer breaks, and even opening the schoolhouse doors on Saturdays.
You advocate Saturday classes, longer school days, and shorter summers to make up the learning loss. How long should this persist? What would cue the return to normal schooling?
Longer school days and years should be permanent. Saturday classes could be kept for the rest of this year, and then students could be tested to see if test scores are returning to their pre-pandemic trend. The same goes with tutoring services for students in need of additional help.
Best of the Pod
Michael Mandel isΒ vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. He's also the author of "Investment Heroes 2022:Β Fighting Inflation withΒ Capital Investment," co-authored withΒ Jordan Shapiro.
If you've never been in one of those fulfillment centers, there was a wonderful movie Nomadland that starred Frances McDormand, and she would work during the busy season at an Amazon fulfillment center. It did not seem like a miserable job, but it seemed like a busy job.
It's a busy job. I think about these as the equivalent of manufacturing jobs for the technological age. They're mixed physical-cognitive jobs, just the way that assembly line jobs were mixed. They actually required some skill, and at the same time they required manual labor. They pay about the same as entry-level manufacturing jobs. In many areas of the country they are in fact becoming the substitute entry-level job that manufacturing once was. If you look at the data for occupational health, they're kind of where they should be. They're physical jobs, you can't deny that. Which actually kind of gives a lot of people problems because they think, βWell, what is an ideal job? Is an ideal job an office job?β It turns out for a lot of people, itβs not. Itβs something that involves some measure of physical labor, too. Let me give you a number here: Since July 2019, the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector has produced about 1.3 million jobs out of a total of 2.2 million for the economy as a whole. And that's pretty amazing. That's more than a majority and much more than healthcare and social assistance, which should be your next question: What's going to happen to healthcare jobs with automation?