Joe Biden's wild prediction about the future
Also: finding the Lost Einsteins; turning the space sector into the space economy; Space: 1999, the anti-Star Trek of the 1970s
"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." - Ray Bradbury
In This Issue:
😲 I think Joe Biden just predicted Future Shock (438 words)
🧠 Finding the Lost Einsteins (479 words)
🚀 Will the space sector ever become the space economy? (397 words)
📺 Space: 1999, the anti-Star Trek of the 1970s (467 words)
😲 I think Joe Biden just predicted Future Shock
I don’t recall many great lines or phrases from presidential addresses to Congress. Bill Clinton’s "the era of big government is over” in 1996 and George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002 are a couple that immediately come to mind. I think I’ll also remember this one from President Biden’s speech last week: “We will see more technological change in the next 10 years than we saw in the last 50 years.”
Even discounting for typical politician puffery, that’s quite a prediction. As economist Robin Hanson points out, 50 years of change in ten years would generate 50 years of economic growth in ten years. Talk about slamming your foot on the gas pedal. And that gas pedal almost certainly ends up located inside an autonomous flying car.
And let’s take it out of GDP terms. Imagine the potential impact of another trillion-fold increase in computing power. Or a ten-year increase in the lifespan of the average American, something not currently expected until 2060. Or lots of things predicted to happen 50 years from now instead happening early. The fun Future Timeline website suggests the 2060s would bring us things like handheld MRI scanners, longevity treatments able to halt aging, self-assembling buildings made 100% from nanotech, nanofabricators as mainstream consumer products, and the emergence of the first generation of antimatter-powered spacecraft.
If all that were to happen, it would be a real “future shock” situation. As famed futurist Alvin Toffler wrote in his 1970 best seller of that name, a book predicated on rapid growth between then and the year 2000 (a failed prediction): “In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.”
But maybe this would be a good problem to have, on net. Unfortunately, the official CBO forecast for the annual growth rate of total factor productivity — a statistical stand-in for tech progress — is just 1.1 percent over the next decade, about half the pace of the 1950-1973 “golden age” of US economic performance. Of course, that forecast could be wrong — and I kind of think it will be wrong. So maybe what Biden meant was that passage of his economic agenda would be the catalyst for warp-speed acceleration of some sort. (Doubtful, as I noted last week.) Or maybe it was just politician puffery. (Probably, I guess.) Even so, I like that sort of thinking. Faster, please!
🧠 Finding the Lost Einsteins
“Innovation is the only way for the most developed countries to secure sustainable long-run productivity growth,” explains John Van Reenen, an economist at the London School of Economics, in the new working paper “Innovation and Human Capital Policy.”
But who, exactly, is going to be doing all that innovation being encouraged by fiddling with the tax code and creating new government spending programs? Maybe demand will create its own supply here. But Van Reenen thinks government has a key role to play: “Innovation is at the heart of growth, and increasing the supply of potential inventors would seem the natural place to start to think about innovation policy.”
In the paper, he runs through the research on a variety of policies such as increasing the number of people with STEM training by providing greater subsidies for advanced education and careers in these areas. University expansion is another idea. Van Reenen notes the correlation between areas with strong science-based universities and private-sector innovation — regions such as Silicon Valley in California, Route 128 in Massachusetts, and the Research Triangle in North Carolina. There’s also some research documenting that individuals growing up around a technical university are more likely to become engineers. Then there’s the option of recruiting talent. In the short run, “liberalizing high-skilled immigration is likely to yield a high return.”
Van Reenen is particularly intrigued by the notion that an important cause of the lower invention rate of disadvantaged groups is because kids have less exposure to inventors. Van Reenen:
The relationship between place and outcomes appears to be causal. For example, it is not simply the fact that kids who grow up in Silicon Valley are more likely to be inventors; they are more likely to invent in the detailed technology classes (relative to other classes) that the valley specializes in (say, software compared to medical devices). Girls who grow up in places where there is a disproportionate fraction of women compared to men inventors are more likely (than boys) to grow up to become inventors. Furthermore, kids who move to high-innovation areas at an earlier age are more likely to become inventors than kids who move at a later age, again suggesting a causal impact of place.
What are the policy implications? Van Reenen points to research that finds substantial gains in STEM subjects to students in minority high-schools when assigned to gifted/high achiever classrooms. And while there’s also research that finds little effect from gifted and talented programs, Van Reenen notes the very-same research finds an effect on science outcomes, which may be the critical element for inventors. There might also be value in “inventor education” programs run by nonprofits. But many such programs are not evaluated for effectiveness. His overall conclusion is that “targeting high ability but disadvantaged potential inventors at an early age is likely to have the largest long-run effects on growth.”
🚀 Will the space sector ever become the space economy?
The analysts of Morgan Stanley’s Space Team estimate that the roughly $350 billion global space industry could surge to over $1 trillion by 2040. A couple of observations: First, it’s pretty cool that the sector has enough juice that a big investment company feels the need to assemble a Space Team. Let’s just get that out there right now.
Second, it’s not unimpressive that a sector could get as big as US health insurance without a true “killer app” such that we can really talk about the “space economy.” Not that important things aren’t happening. MS estimates that satellite broadband “will represent 50 percent of the projected growth of the global space economy by 2040—and as much as 70 percent in the most bullish scenario.”
But the true bullish scenario would go beyond the satellite sector. And MS is certainly willing to discuss such possibilities. As Adam Jonas, the head of the Space Team said back in February:
So, we look at space as increasingly existential … If you want your flying car in a few years, then you'll be relying on a constellation of thousands of low Earth orbit satellites to safely guide you to your destination. If you want to go to New Zealand in 45 minutes, then you'll need to leave the Earth's atmosphere to achieve speeds of Mach 10 or higher for most of that journey. And if we really want to tackle climate change, then we'll need to leverage a host of sophisticated space-based, Earth observation technologies to measure nature empirically.
MS also cites lunar landing, space tourism, deep space exploration, and asteroid mining as potential growth drivers. And while that last one, in particular, may sound too futuristic to some, let me remind you of this quote by MIT astronomer Sara Seager in an earlier edition of the newsletter: “We know how to get to an asteroid. We know how to land on asteroids. … Now, we don’t know how to drill on the asteroid. We don’t know how to chemically sort the material we need to bring back to Earth.”
Asteroid mining isn’t going to happen tomorrow. One thing needed is patient capital. Government could provide it. But also ultra-billionaires who would view such an undertaking contributing to their long-term legacy and the sustainability, even survivability, of humanity. As it turns out, we seem to have a few of those. Helpful!
📺 Space: 1999, the anti-Star Trek of the 1970s
The original Star Trek exemplifies postwar optimism about where the Atomic Age and Space Age could lead — not just to the stars, but also to a more humane world of infinite material abundance. Yet that broader techno-optimism was already starting to wane during the show’s 1966-1969 run. The emerging environmental movement began to criticize nuclear energy as too costly and too dangerous. Other activists argued the Apollo space program distracted society from myriad problems here on Earth, such as poverty, racial injustice, and the ongoing Vietnam War.
By the 1970s, a more downbeat futurism had fully taken hold. Tomorrow would likely bring economic stagnation and environmental degradation. No wonder a Star Trek television sequel was unable to get off the ground. Instead, sci-fi fans got the ambitious-but-dreary Space: 1999, the most expensive series produced for British television up to that time. It was broadcast in Britain (ITV) and the United States (independent stations such as WGN) in the fall of 1975 and ran for two seasons.
The show’s premise, briefly: A nuclear waste explosion on the Moon sends it — and Moonbase Alpha, a manned lunar station — hurtling out of Earth orbit into 48 episodes of galaxy-spanning space adventure, courtesy of a black hole and a “space warp” or two. I recently rewatched the first episode for the first time since I was probably 10 or 11. And the show struck me today in much the same way as it did back then: These people are not having much fun — even before the explosion and all that hurtling — and this is not a world in which I would want to live. It’s a universe where the Apollo program led not to an exciting new Age of Discovery, but, rather, to turning the moon into a radioactive garbage dump for Earth.
In the second season, the Alphans — who are also speeding through time, by the way — establish contact with 22nd Century Earth. And things aren’t going well. Wikipedia sums up “Journey to Where” thusly: “As Earth's environment was devastated by runaway pollution in the 21st century, humanity now resides exclusively in enormous, domed 'metro-complexes.' With the outside atmosphere rendered unbreathable, 'nature' is now simulacra produced by a personal tele-sensual system.”
Not a scenario at all unusual for 1970s sci-fi. Logan’s Run, another ambitious show, also featured a dystopian future where people lived in domes. And, of course, the theme of environmental degradation runs through much of sci-fi from that decade until today.
Star Trek could have been a gloomier show, by the way. Before getting to the era of faster-than-light starships, Earth in the Trek universe saw tremendous upheaval, including nuclear conflict and the Eugenics Wars. But creator Gene Roddenberry offered an aspirational image of the future that reflected its upbeat moment, just as Space: 1999 reflects its own downbeat one.
Productivity in the post-pandemic economy - Goldman Sachs | The Wall Street bank thinks the aftermath of the COVID-19 could boost U.S. productivity growth. From GS: “Specifically, we expect three drivers of lasting productivity gains in the wake of the pandemic recession: 1) an accelerated demand shift to ecommerce and other higher-productivity segments; 2) the digitization of the workplace (cost- and time-savings from remote computing and virtual meetings); and 3) a boost from creative destruction, with some unprofitable firms shrinking or closing down.
To Reshape Federal Science Funding, Lawmakers Should Look to the Past - Mark Mills, Real Clear Science | After World War II, there was general agreement that Washington should have a big science research role going forward. But there were differences on what that effort should look like. As Mills explains, FDR science advisor Vannevar Bush wanted a new agency that would fund basic science at the most deserving institutions. Sen. Harley Kilgore wanted to fund applied R&D, with the money spread around the country. Mill thinks that debate sets the stage for policy compromise today:
The meritocratic system championed by Bush has resulted in federal funds remaining concentrated in a few regions of the country with prominent research institutions and a disparate share of high-paying jobs. This has bad economic and political consequences. But it may well be bad for science, too. Science tends to flourish in a pluralistic environment, not one dominated by entrenched institutions.
What about prioritizing applied research and development over basic science? This is not a new idea. We’ve been trying it for as long as the federal government has been funding research. If we really want to change course on U.S. R&D policy, we should follow Kilgore on geography, but Bush on basic science. That is, we should diversify federal funds geographically, while also prioritizing basic science. NSF would be a natural place to start.
Voters already love technology. They don’t need anti-China messaging to get there. - Vox | Here’s how the questions for the poll were worded: “Technology is generally a force for good. Large tech companies have provided innovations like vaccines, electric vehicles, bringing down the cost of batteries that store green energy, vegetarian meat options, and other ways that have improved our quality of life. … Technology is generally a force for bad. Large tech companies are bad for workers, inequality, and democracy. The technological innovations they produce are not worth the cost.”