π Faster, Please! Week in Review #44
Dystopian sci-fi, self-driving cars vs. ChatGPT, America vs. the World, and more!
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
β 'Extrapolations' imagines a dystopian climate future leading to nowhere. Because humans suck.
β What self-driving cars should teach us about generative AI
β America is great, but it can be betterBest of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ urbanist Alain Bertaud on the future of citiesBest of the Pod
β A conversation with economic historian Alexander Field on the economic consequences of World War Two
Essay Highlights
β 'Extrapolations' imagines a dystopian climate future leading to nowhere. Because humans suck.
Full transparency: Iβll admit to being genuinely moved by a plotline inΒ Extrapolations, the new Apple TV+ anthology series about a future climate-change dystopia, where an animal DNA archivist converses with the last humpback whale. Unfortunately, show creator Scott Burns displays little growth in understanding the evolving climate issue since he produced An Inconvenient Truth, Al Goreβs 2006 documentary film about global warming. At the heart ofΒ ExtrapolationsΒ is the old-school, environmentalist notion that the planetβs big problem is rapacious, tech-capitalist humanity, a super-consumerist swarm thatβs not-so-slowly devouring the natural bounty of Mother Earth. We are a species of liars who will even lie to the last noble humpback whale. And thereβs no lie more destructive than the lie we tell ourselves: Humanity has the agency and smarts to fix the problems our prosperity causes even as we create even greater abundance. All of this is too bad because art has a key role in creating aspirational and inspirational images of the future. Extrapolations, however, only encourages humanity to either go down a dead-end path β scarcity and degrowth β or no path at all because itβs all utterly hopeless.
π€ What self-driving cars should teach us about generative AI
In a February statement Telsa Motors characterized its autonomous technology as a Level Two driving system (see the above chart). Of course, Tesla isnβt the only player here, but itβs still the early days despite predictions a few years ago that the autonomy revolution would be well underway by now. Our societal experience with self-driving technology reminds me of the saying, βMost people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.β Itβs a saying that everybody should keep squarely in mind when thinking and forecasting about generative AI, as well. Even with a fundamental technological breakthrough, there always needs to be further (and unpredictable) innovation in the technology itself, complementary innovations, regulatory responses, and efficient business adoption.
β America is great, but it can be better
, one could plausibly date the end of the postwar βgolden ageβ of economic growth to 1973, exactly 50 years ago. And whatever the ups and downs since then, I am convinced better public policy could have generated a better economic result. And a better result would have meant higher living standards and greater technological capabilities, broadly. Imagine an America where we invested more in science, regulated with an eye on impacts to innovation and the ability to build, let in more ambitious and talented immigrants, and attracted more teachers from among our best and brightest, among other policy differences.
Yet given all that, itβs important not to dismiss what we have achieved. This is a great point from that Economist piece:
The more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess up the next 30 years. Although Americaβs openness brought prosperity for its firms and its consumers, both Mr Trump and Mr Biden have turned to protectionism and the politics of immigration have become toxic. Subsidies could boost investment in deprived areas in the short term, but risk dulling market incentives to innovate. In the long run they will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying. The rise of China and the need to fight climate change both confront America with fresh challenges. All the more reason, then, to remember what has powered its long and successful run.
And what has powered the American economy in the long run? Whatβs the Deep Magic? Simple: Making America the best place in the world β both in terms of opportunities and rewards β for people who want to better themselves and do something great with their lives. When Washington legislates and regulates, it should keep firmly in mind how its action might affect that Deep Magic.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ urbanist Alain Bertaud on the future of cities
Note: This is a repost from March of 2022 β and one of my favorite Q&As since I started this newsletter. Just top-notch scholarship here. Alain Bertaud is a senior research scholar at the Marron Institute at NYU. He is the former principal urban planner for the World Bank, and he has worked as a resident urban planner in cities throughout the world, including New York, Paris, Bangkok, and Port au Prince. Most recently, he is the author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. He contends that a healthy respect for markets β for the tendency of human action to generate an βorder without designβ β is key to a well-managed city. ( The bookβs title comes from economist Friedrich Hayekβs The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.)
1/ The notion of the 15-minute, walkable city is a popular idea. Is it a good idea?
The 15-minute city is an absurd idea. For two reasons: first, dividing a large metropolis into many self-sufficient cities restricted to a 15-minute walk perimeter contradicts everything we know about the efficiency of large urban labor markets; second, the location of jobs, services, and commerces in a city depends on many complex factors specific to each economic sector that entirely escape the regulatory power of urban planners.
Planners and journalists promote the 15-minute city in Europe and North America despite its utopian nature. According to this new fad, planners could cleverly divide a large metropolitan area into tiny autarkic microcities limited to an area of about 350 acres (the extent that one can reach within 15 minutes walk). Within this restrained perimeter, a household should find everything expected to live well within a city: food, appliances, entertainment, education, and more important, jobs! Cities are primarily labor markets. The more jobs accessible in a less than one hour commute, the more productive and creative a city is. Constraining the jobs available to those that one could find within a 15-minute walk from a home contradicts everything we know about the economy of cities.Β
(More on the subject of the 15-minute city in the following paper: 15mincity-bertaud.pdf (urbanreforminstitute.org)
Best of the Pod
β A conversation with economic historian Alexander Field on the economic consequences of World War Two
Alexander Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business. Heβs also the author of the 2011 book, A Great Leap Forward, as well as last yearβsΒ The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War.
James Pethokoukis: You write in A Great Leap Forward, a book that I consult frequently and mention frequently in my writings: βThe years 1929-1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history. β¦ It was not principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad frontier of the American economy during the 1930s.β Your new book builds upon that argument, but could you, just for a moment, give a quick summary of A Great Leap Forward, and then how that moves into your new book?
Alexander Field: The basic argument of A Great Leap Forward was that behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment for at least a decade, potential output was growing by leaps and bounds during the Great Depression. It wasn't really recognized until Simon Kuznets had to try to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what the potential of the economy could be. But the contributors to that were, I think, several. Number one was the last third of the conversion of the internal transmission of power within American factories from the shafts and belts, which was a signature of the 19th-century factory, to fractional-horsepower electric motors and electric wiring. And the second part was just an enormous amount, surprisingly, of research and development spending. Just astounding, if you think of the Depression as being so disastrous macroeconomically, but in terms of the number of people employed growing by leaps and bounds, number of labs established. And then finally, although it's widely accepted that the New Deal spending was too small in a Keynesian sense to immediately bring the economy out of the Depression, nevertheless, that spending on streets and highways and bridges and hydropower and so on had very strong positive supply-side effects. I think it's the combination of those three factors that I see as responsible for making potential output so much larger in 1941 than people thought it was.