Tech progress and Alzheimer's; the economics of the Green Revolution; flying cars and regulators; geoengineering; and more ...
'‘Giving people a sense of their stake in the future emphasizes the importance of developing a valid vision of the future. It is critical because people’s visions of the future, although often inarticulated, dominate their responses to current issues” - Herman Kahn
In this Issue:
🧠 What can tech progress do for humanity? Ask Alzheimer’s patients and their families
🌾 What if the Green Revolution had been delayed?
🛩 Regulators, not physics, are the biggest problem facing a future of flying cars
🌤 Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Kolbert talks about engineering our climate
🧠 What can tech progress do for humanity? Ask Alzheimer’s patients and their families
Sure, “they” may have promised us flying cars and we ended up with Twitter, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? It’s not like we’ve reached some end-state of human progress or the final limits of human wants and needs. (Sorry, socialist de-growthers.) I mean, it’s not hard to imagine some major technological advance that would greatly improve humanity’s existence. It really isn’t.
Case in point: The US Food and Drug Administration has given Biogen conditional — and controversial — approval to bring aducanumab, or Aduhelm, to market. It’s the first drug designed to treat “the underlying pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease,” according to the FDA. The rest of the story here is that this drug (a) is expensive with a list price of $56,000 a year and (b) might not actually work. And by “work,” regulators mean aducanumab reduces the amount of beta-amyloid in the brain and slows the progress of cognitive degeneration. That is, if the disease is detected early, before symptoms appear.
Indeed, early detection is so critical that the drug will require some infrastructure investment to flag suitable patients ASAP. “If this approval spurs preparatory investment in diagnostics such as brain scanners, and in ‘brain clinics’ where trained staff assess patients with very early signs of dementia, the FDA will have done the world a valuable service,” concludes the Financial Times. Of course, what would be extraordinarily valuable is an effective treatment. Let’s put numbers on that scenario via the 2020 paper “What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?” by Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile, and Corina Mommaerts. Some key facts about Alzheimer’s:
AD is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for 60-80% of dementia cases and affecting an estimated five million Americans aged 65 or older. By 2050, this number is expected to almost triple to 14 million.
As of 2020, AD is the sixth leading cause of death in America, though some estimates rank it just behind heart disease and cancer as the third leading cause of death for elderly people.
While death rates for heart disease and cancer have been falling, death rates due to AD have been rising. Research has also indicated that AD (among other dementias) may be under-reported on death certificates.
According to the Center for Disease Control, it cost an estimated $159-$215 billion to treat AD in 2010, with annual costs predicted to rise to between $379 and $500 billion by 2040. In comparison, treatment costs for heart disease and cancer were $102 billion and $77 billion, respectively.
Direct health care expenditures are only part of the total cost: an estimated 3.6 million to 18 million unpaid caregivers spent a total of 3.6 to 18.5 billion hours providing care in 2018, time valued at another $233 billion. In total, therefore, the US spends close to half a trillion dollars annually on AD-related care. AD is a critical public policy priority due to the immense resources devoted to AD care as well as the vast human cost of the disease in terms of the suffering of patients and the toll on caregivers.
And these are just numbers here in the US. Globally, it’s already more than a trillion-dollar issue. At the very least, let’s hope this FDA approval encourages more effort by government and business to treat a disease that has often seemed untreatable.
🌾 What if the Green Revolution had been delayed?
If a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease reminds us of what technological progress can provide tomorrow and beyond, the Green Revolution should help us appreciate all things it's given so far. These are explained in the Nobel presentation speech given in honor of agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug when he was awarded the 1970 Peace Prize:
The world has been oscillating between fears of two catastrophes – the population explosion and the atom bomb. Both pose a mortal threat.
In this intolerable situation, with the menace of doomsday hanging over us, Dr. Borlaug comes onto the stage and cuts the Gordian knot. He has given us a well-founded hope, an alternative of peace and of life – the green revolution.
Indeed, just as Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich was becoming a celebrity scientist thanks to his catastrophist best-seller The Population Bomb (he eventually appeared 18 times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson), the global famine predicted by the book was becoming an ever more remote possibility. And that reality was due in large part to Borlaug, the primary figure in research leading to high-yielding crop varieties and agronomic techniques that prevented maybe a billion starvation deaths. “To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem but the solution,” writes Charles C. Mann in The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet. “Only by getting richer, smarter, and more knowledgeable can humankind create the science that will resolve our environmental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!”
As Douglas Gollin, Casper Worm Hansen, and Asger Wingender note in their 2021 working paper “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” the “increase in food production was massive and nearly immediate in the irrigated rice-growing areas of Asia and the wheat-growing heartlands of Asia and Latin America.” The Green Revolution clearly makes the case for the value of technological progress. The researchers estimate production levels in developing countries would have been half of what they were in 2010 had the Green Revolution never happened: “They would still have been higher than in 1964, but the Green Revolution has accounted for as much as three-quarters of yield growth since then. We find similarly large effects for GDP per capita, which would have been 51 percent lower in the counterfactual scenario.”
But the Green Revolution also makes the case for acceleration. This result from the paper is almost as stunning as the “no Green Revolution” baseline case: “A ten-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17 percent of GDP/capita and added 223 million people to the developing world population. The cumulative GDP loss would have been US$83 trillion, corresponding to one year of current global GDP.” Why would the delay have added population? Likely the result is from the eventual income effect on fertility choices. Richer countries have lower fertility rates than poor ones, just as high-income families have fewer kids than low-income ones.
Of course for the techno-pessimists and the de-growthers, all of this is just postponing the inevitable. Ehrlich was just early. (Then again, being really early is a lot like being wrong.) Futurist Herman Kahn nailed this Malthusian attitude pretty well in The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America and the World from 1976:
The basic solution is to increasingly limit demands, not to encourage a desperate search for new inventions that might suffice temporarily but would exacerbate long-run problems by increasing environmental damage and depletion of resources, while encouraging current growth and deferring hard decisions. Although technological solutions may buy some time, it has become increasingly important to use this time constructively and avoid the undue economic expansion that new discoveries encourage.
Interestingly, the Gollin-Hansen-Wingender paper also undercuts the notion — expressed in the above quote — that progress is superficial and merely exacerbates the underlying deterioration of our environment:
Our paper also sheds light on a concern, often expressed in the literature, that agricultural productivity improvements would pull additional land into agriculture at the expense of forests and other environmentally valuable land uses. We find evidence to the contrary: in keeping with the “Borlaug hypothesis”, the Green Revolution tended to reduce the amount of land devoted to agriculture.
🛩 Regulators, not physics, are the biggest problem facing a future of flying cars
The future of flying cars is the subject of a longish piece in The New York Times by reporters Cade Metz and Erin Griffith. I urge you to click over to it, if only to watch video of a takeoff by BlackFly, an electric-powered, single-person VTOL aircraft from Palo Alto-based Opener. Although it doesn’t look much like the flying cars in The Jetsons or Blade Runner, the takeoff itself did immediately remind me a bit of how the vehicles in the latter, known as spinners, ascended into the air. The biggest difference, of course, between BlackFly and those fictional flying cars is the underlying technology.
While BlackFly and its competitors represent impressive technical advances, they are not dependent on a new understanding of physics. That is not typically the case with the flying cars of film, television, and literature. The Blade Runner spinners are propelled, at least in part, by anti-gravity, a technology that does not yet exist. But during the age when The Jetsons helped imprint flying cars in our image of the future, many techno-optimists assumed new propulsive technologies would make flying cars — as well as starships like Star Trek’s Enterprise — possible. As author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote back in 1994:
Science-fiction writers have long dreamed of a mythical space drive that would allow us to go racing round the universe, or at least the solar system, without the rocket’s noise, danger and horrendous expense. Until now, this has been pure fantasy. However, recent theoretical studies — based on some ideas of [Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident] Andrei Sakharov’s — hint that some control may indeed be possible over gravity and inertia, hitherto a complete mystery.
Anti-gravity remains a scientific mystery, but entrepreneurs are not letting that stop them. Indeed, it seems technology is not the barrier to creating fleets of electric, autonomous vehicles zipping across our skies. First, the business model needs to work. The most likely candidate is an “Uber meets Tesla” air taxi service rather than personal ownership. Also, not all companies in this game think full autonomy needs to be available right away, which leads us to the second outstanding issue: regulators.
The Federal Aviation Administration has never approved electric aircraft, much less taxis that fly themselves. Companies say they are discussing new methods of certification with regulators, but it is unclear how quickly this will progress. … No one is flying in an electric taxi this year, or even next. But some cities are making early preparations. And one company has 2024 in its sights.
In another central California field not far from where Kitty Hawk and Opener are testing their prototypes, Joby Aviation recently tested its own. … And it flew without passengers, remotely guided from a command center trailer stuffed with screens and engineers on the ground. But Joby says that by 2024, this vehicle will be a taxi flying over a city like Los Angeles or Miami. It too is planning an Uber for the skies, though its aircraft will have a licensed pilot.
Joby believes that regulators are unlikely to approve autonomous flight anytime soon. “Our approach is more like Tesla than Waymo,” said the executive chairman, Paul Sciarra, using this burgeoning industry’s favorite analogy. “We want to get something out there on the way to full autonomy.”
🌤 Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Kolbert talks about engineering our climate
Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at The New Yorker, has written a lovely and thought-provoking book about humanity’s many deliberate environmental interventions — past, present, and possible future: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. I recently chatted with her for my podcast, including a discussion of climate engineering (a technology that gave the book its name — it references a side effect of spraying calcite in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth and cool the planet).
Pethokoukis: I love technology. I think technology creates problems, and then it helps us solve those problems and probably creates more problems in the solution. But I’m also a child of the post-Silent Spring 1970s. I’ve watched a million scary, dystopian movies and documentaries. So even though I love technology, when I hear about geoengineering and its many forms, my first impulse is always, “This is going to go wrong, right?”
Kolbert: That’s probably a pretty healthy response, yeah.
Pethokoukis: So for the people who really think, “This sounds like a terrible idea,” what is their argument? And what is their alternative scenario? What do they want to do if not engineer our climate?
Kolbert: Well, there are people who really oppose geoengineering or even any discussion or research of geoengineering — and that’s what we’re really talking about right now. We’re not talking about doing geoengineering. We have no really good idea, to be honest, if it would even work. It’s pretty theoretical at this point.
And people who say we shouldn’t even do research into this would say it really distracts from the major issue at hand, which is changing our energy systems so that we no longer burn fossil fuels and no longer emit vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Now, the people who work on geoengineering — the scientists who say, “Well, we really ought to research it” — they would also say, “We really, really need to reduce our emissions.” Because if you just continue to let emissions grow, then the amount of geoengineering you have to do — the amount of sunlight you have to block — also continues to grow. And I think pretty much everyone would agree that’s not a tenable situation. So people who say we should be researching geoengineering say, “It’s something that we could use potentially to buy some more time to reduce emissions.” But the ultimate goal — I think both groups would agree — has to be reducing emissions.
Why do we need to know about progress if we are concerned about the world’s large problems? - Max Roser, Our World in Data | Simple answer: The world has a lot of problems that more economic growth and tech progress would help alleviate. So rather than focus on the problems, let’s see how they’ve gotten better thanks to economic growth and the application of knowledge:
Behind Your Long Wait for Packages - Peter Tirschwell, op-ed in The Wall Street Journal | “U.S. ports are severely stressed, a problem that won’t disappear with the pandemic. Not one U.S. port was represented in the top 50 container ports globally in productivity performance, according to the new Container Port Performance Index by the World Bank and IHS Markit, released last month.”
Technology Fills the Gap as Jobs Lag GDP - Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal | Some economists expected this sort of thing would happen, and Ip does a great job finding some real-world examples:
One of the beneficiaries is CardFree Inc., which designs and operates online and mobile ordering systems for food-service operators. CardFree’s apps enabled restaurants to better anticipate and regulate incoming orders to better match staffing and capacity, said Chief Executive Jon Squire.
Monty’s Good Burger first adopted CardFree’s platform to protect the health of customers and staff. … Some 40% of the company’s revenue comes through the app, which has enabled staff to spend much less time on customer service and more on food preparation. As a result, employees per store are level with before the pandemic but sales are up 10%. Without the app, “our sales would have gone down.”
Why hasn’t Waymo expanded its driverless service? - Timothy Lee, Ars Technica | “It's not that Waymo's software can't drive safely in Gilbert, Mesa, or Tempe. It's that Waymo ran the numbers and found that an expanded service would be unprofitable even if it could get its operating costs below those of an Uber or Lyft driver. And if Waymo has to master complex, chaotic environments to make its ride-hailing service profitable, then why not tackle the most chaotic, complex, and potentially profitable environments of all?”