Prince William’s thoughtless case against the ‘billionaire space race’
Also: Does caring about nature mean rejecting economic growth?
“Space, the final frontier. Meet me there.” - the final line of Jeff Bezos’ high school valedictory speech
In This Issue
The Micro Reads: web3, the Great Filter, the state of AI, and more . . .
The Short Read: Prince William’s (and Elizabeth Warren’s) thoughtless case against the ‘billionaire space race’
The Long Read: Does caring about nature mean rejecting economic growth?
The Micro Reads
💻 How to Win the Future: An Agenda for the Third Generation of the Internet - Andreessen Horowitz | Anyone who has watched confused congressional hearings with tech executives will surely find this sentence resonant: “Regulating web3 platforms effectively requires its own set of literacy, training, and expertise.” And this chart suggests now would be a good time for Washington to boost its expertise:
From the report: “If you compare user growth of digital wallets against
the user growth of the internet, 2020 for web3 was the year 2000 in internet terms—
that is to say, two years after Google was founded and four years before
Facebook launched.”
🚀 Avoiding the "Great Filter": A Projected Timeframe for Human Expansion Off-World - Jonathan H. Jiang, Philip E. Rosen, Kristen A. Fahy (Jet Propulsion Lab) |
Beginning with the development and deployment of the first nuclear weapons near the end of World War II, humanity entered a 'Window of Peril' which will not be safely closed until robust off-world colonies become a reality. Our findings suggest the first human-crewed missions to land on Mars, selected Asteroid Belt objects, and selected moons of Jupiter and Saturn can occur before the end of the 21st century. Launches of human-crewed interstellar missions to exoplanet destinations within roughly 40 lightyears of the Solar System are seen as possible during the 23rd century and launch of intragalactic missions by the end of the 24th century. An aggressive and sustained space exploration program, which includes colonization, is thus seen as critical to the long-term survival of the human race.
🤖 State of AI Report 2021 - Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth | A slide deck full of great insights and explanations:
💨 Biden Administration Plans Wind Farms Along Nearly the Entire U.S. Coastline - The New York Times | I think I would’ve given the following information higher priority than the tenth paragraph:
Still, there is no guarantee that companies will lease space in the federal waters and build wind farms. Once the offshore areas are identified, they will be subject to lengthy federal, state and local reviews. If the potential sites could harm endangered species, conflict with military activity, damage underwater archaeological sites, or harm local industries such as tourism, the federal government could deem them unsuitable for leasing.
💲 What will be the first $3 trillion company? - Charlie Bilello | An interesting Twitter poll from a money manager, but the responses were even more so. Among the other names mentioned Tesla, SpaceX, Bitcoin, and Commonwealth Fusion.
📱 Tweetstorm of the Issue: This look by economist Jason Furman at the recent productivity upturn is both super informative and suggests why now is no time for policymakers to neglect the long-term downshift in productivity growth.
The Short Read
🚀 Prince William’s thoughtless case against the ‘billionaire space race’
I wasn’t surprised that Senator Elizabeth Warren had nothing good to say about William Shatner’s sub-orbital rocket ride, courtesy of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
Progressives, including Warren and Bernie Sanders, have been using these opening flights of the emerging space tourism industry to clumsily make their egalitarian political case. Indeed, there’s a long history in the US of leftists frowning on America venturing off planet. These folks — including those on the New York Times editorial board — were also no fans of the Apollo program. Back then, the issue was government spending vast sums of money on space. Turns out, however, many progressives don’t like citizens spending own their money, either.
But that history doesn’t explain these comments from Prince William: “We need some of the world's greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.”
Shatner’s response was as accurate as a close-range phaser blast:
"He's a lovely, gentle, educated man, but he's got the wrong idea," Shatner said during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. "The idea here is not to go, 'Yeah, look at me. I'm in space,'" Shatner added, claiming that trips such as his represent a "baby step" toward relocating polluting industries to space. The 90-year-old "Star Trek" actor said that a power generating base could be constructed 250 miles above the Earth and used to supply homes and businesses below. "The prince is missing the point," he added.
Shatner was being generous, almost to fault here. This entire anti-space argument is specious at best, whether coming from a politician or prince. It always has been. At the same moment that some 1960s liberals were complaining about Apollo, the country launched a War on Poverty and tackled civil rights for women and minorities. And the US is far richer today than it was back then.
More importantly, what’s happening today with the “billionaire space race” is a lot different than Apollo. As Charles Fishman, author of the marvelous One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon told me in a recent podcast chat:
Musk and Bezos are in business to change the business of space, to create a space economy. Just the way that Bezos created Amazon, their goal is very simple: They want to take something that has historically cost $100 million and bring the cost down to a $1 million. What used to cost $100 million to launch to space will now cost $1 million. And when you do that, as you know, you completely change what’s possible. . . . A million dollars to go to space completely changes the landscape. Those people may be in an ego race. They may think of each other as rivals in that way, but this isn’t philanthropy and it isn’t indulgence. . . . I’ve been to Blue Origin, and I’ve interviewed Bezos a bunch of times on this topic. He expects there to be a Thursday afternoon launch to orbit on a Blue Origin rocket before too long. If you miss this Thursday, they’re going to launch again next Thursday, just like the Southwest Airlines 3:00 flight from Dallas to LaGuardia.
Elon Musk is five years ahead of Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk and SpaceX and that crew are doing something as a company that only three nations in the world have done: send human beings successfully to space, flawlessly fly rockets to orbit, to the Space Station and back. So I think, and I sometimes sound a little too enthusiastic, that we are absolutely creating a space economy. We’re creating a new kind of economic platform. And we don’t know, just like in 1998 it wasn’t clear what the internet was going to unleash. But it has literally reached into everything from real estate to now we see these rocket launches from the perspective of the rocket as they’re going up. Everything is touched by it. I think 10 years from now, there will be dozens of people living and working in space and they will be creating economic value. Some will be paying their own bills. And I think 20 and 30 years from now, this moment that we’re living in now will look like the beginning of this remarkable transformation in which space becomes a much more tangible economy.
The delayed dreams of a half century ago finally seem to turning into reality. It’s a shame critics are blinded by moldy arguments and short-term political posturing. (Addendum: The image accompanying this essay and this issue of Faster, Please! — you can also see it in social media posts — comes from the graphic novel Ministry of Space by Warren Ellis, Chris Weston, and Laura Martin. It’s an alt-history look at a British space program that never ended.)
The Long Read
🌼 Does caring about nature mean rejecting economic growth?
One of my favorite economics papers contains one of my favorite caveats. In “Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth,” economists John W. Dawson and John J. Seater investigate the relationship between federal regulation and macroeconomic performance. And their main finding is of great interest for those of us curious as to why US productivity growth downshifted in the early 1970s through today (with the exception of the fleeting Information Technology boom). From the paper:
Regulation’s overall effect on output’s growth rate is negative and substantial. Federal regulations added over the past fifty years have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average over the period 1949–2005. That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011. That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulation had remained at its 1949 level. One channel through which regulation has reduced output is [total factor productivity growth]. We find that federal regulation can explain much of the famous and famously puzzling productivity slowdown of the 1970s.
Imagine having the economy of 2071 today. Imagine having the per capita GDP of 2071 today. Imagine having the technological wonders of 2071 today: medical marvels, a full-fledged space economy, flying cars, an edit button on Twitter. All of it.
Now here’s the caveat: The above calculation looks only at the direct impact of regulation on production — but not any non-production benefits of regulation. For example: Regulation that reduced the growth rate of air pollution has created “a growing benefit that is not included in measured output. . . . Consequently, we emphasize that our results offer no conclusion on whether regulation is a net social benefit.”
So what do we know about the economic benefits of environmental regulation? (Something worth exploring since I have been highlighting the economic costs of late.) What do economic growth rates look like if you subtract for pollution damage? This topic is explored in a new NBER analysis “Augmenting National Income Statistics to Include Environmental Services” by Nicholas Z. Muller. Basically, if pollution damage rises more rapidly than GDP, then pollution-adjusted GDP will grow more slowly. And if pollution damage slows down (because of new environmental rules, for instance), pollution-adjusted GDP will grow more rapidly than the standard measure. Muller:
I have presented estimates of these effects in the US economy between 1957 and 2016. This period featured the passage of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in 1970 and its subsequent implementation through the 1970s, as well as several business cycles. This research suggests that pollution damage began to decrease just after the CAA was enacted, and the orientation between GDP growth and that of the adjusted measure, or environmentally adjusted value added (EVA), switched.
As you can see in the below chart, environmental externalities shifted from subtracting 0.7 percentage points from traditional GDP to adding 0.7 percentage points to growth.
In this light, US economic performance look better, or at least more sustainable, over the past half century. Yet I would note that even accounting for air pollution impact , Dawson-Seater research would still suggests a sizable net GDP benefit of 1.3 percentage points annually from a no regulation scenario.
But I am not arguing for zero regulation, environmental or otherwise. What am I arguing then? First, as Dawson and Seater point out, “the cost of regulation is substantial and must be taken seriously in any evaluation of regulation’s net social benefit.” That basic trade-off seems missing or hand-waved away from many regulatory proposals, especially those pushed by hardcore issue activists.
Second, once you start thinking about costs, then you might see specific regulations in a different light. What is the climate cost of having a moribund nuclear industry? — not to mention the innovation cost from focusing for decades on energy efficiency rather than creating abundant clean energy. Or how about the post-Fukushima nuclear shutdowns in Japan and Germany, which have proved more deadly than the meltdown itself? To what degree have we benefited from “citizen voice” regulations that have tripled the cost of highways construction? Are we even allowed to ask such questions without being accused of wanting dirty air or lead in the water or a chaotic climate?
Good luck trying to fully calculate the benefits from the innovations we never got because of the tech progress slowdown, partially caused by an environmental regulation overcorrection (which also helped create a less pro-progress culture). Maybe the advances we’re currently seeing in nuclear fusion would have happened decades ago. Or imagine a half century of advances in supersonic airline technology. Maybe nanobots would be cleaning up are air and water. The Dawson-Seater estimate of lost growth might actually be conservative.