Why you can enjoy Star Trek, even with its (kind of) communist economics
Also: Can Washington create mini-Silicon Valleys across America?
“It isn't all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.” - Gene Roddenberry
In This Issue
The Micro Reads: Healthcare IT, Space Force, 4 amazing charts, and more . . .
The Short Read: Why you can enjoy Star Trek, even with its (kinda-sorta) communist economics
The Long Read: Can Washington create mini-Silicon Valleys across America?
The Micro Reads
Infinite progress, Techno-Optimism and the Near Future - Infiniti Ventures | “Making progress does not guarantee the survival of civilization. But not making progress fast enough is the surest way that civilization comes to an end.”
The Impact of Healthcare IT on Clinical Quality, Productivity and Workers - NBER, Ari Bronsoler, Joseph J. Doyle Jr. & John Van Reenen | This study reminds me of those studies about AI that suggest great potential but there’s a lag both in terms of diffusion and efficient use. Complementary investments in equipment and training need to be made. From the paper: “We have surveyed the evidence of the impact of [health information and communication technologies] on clinical quality, productivity, and on the healthcare workforce. The literature points in a broadly optimistic direction in that the more recent cohort of studies suggests a positive effect on patient outcomes, but a more modest impact on productivity.”
The Space Force is starting to lean into innovative launch concepts - Ars Technica | The impact from the steep decline in launch costs is only beginning to play out. From the piece: “Additionally, the military has expressed an interest in SpaceX's Starship program that seeks to develop a fully reusable, super-heavy lift rocket. As part of a new Rocket Cargo program, the Air Force seeks to leverage emerging commercial rocket capabilities to launch cargo from one location and land elsewhere on Earth.”
China’s Industrial Planning Evolves, Stirring U.S. Concerns - WSJ | “Political thinkers in Beijing are preparing their defense by dusting off ‘Entrepreneurial State,’ a 2013 book by Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato. It argued U.S. government-led innovation has been the key change agent for American private industry; for instance how GPS helped make Apple’s iPhone a truly smart device. ‘That’s not communism. That’s exactly what the U.S. did,’ she said in an interview.”
Tweet of the Week:
The Short Read
🌌 Why you can enjoy Star Trek, even with its communist economics
I often point to the Star Trek franchise as a good example of art that embodies the pro-growth, pro-tech, pro-progress ethos of the Faster, Please! newsletter. It depicts a future in which one might want to live — a humane future of abundance, collaboration, and freedom. That contrasts with much of modern science fiction, which settles for the cheap drama of the dystopia, whether in the form of climate change, zombies, or robopocalypse. So, yes, it’s worth acknowledging the annual Star Trek Day this week as fans, including myself, celebrate the 55th anniversary of the original 1960s Star Trek television program.
But maybe I shouldn’t celebrate too much, given my love of the wonder-working power economic freedom. In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel notes how his team at PayPal, which he co-founded, “all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”
It’s an understandable characterization. According to Jean-Luc Picard, “Money doesn’t exist in the 24th century,” and “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” The Star Trek Universe is also a post-scarcity society, thanks in part to those replicators that zap up Picard’s Earl Grey tea. So, yeah, it does look a lot like what has been called “fully automated luxury communism.” Then again, Earth in the Star Trek universe still has private property, among other elements of a non-communist economy.
In 2020, I podcast chatted with screenwriter and television producer Ronald D. Moore about his great Apple TV+ show, For All Mankind, about a never-ending US-Soviet Space Race. But since Moore started out writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Deep Space Nine, and Voyager (before reimagining Battlestar: Galactica), I asked him about the communism question:
The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s a science fiction fan, has said, “I’m a capitalist. Star Wars is the capitalist show. Star Trek is the communist one. There’s no money in Star Trek because you have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo having his debt that he owed, so the plot of Star Wars is driven by money.” Do you agree with this characterization — that Star Trek is the communist show?
Moore: He’s … not wrong. But I can tell you that those of us who worked at Star Trek completely dismissed that aspect of the show. Even those of us in the writer’s room would go, “What does this mean, there’s no money? How does this work? How does any of this function without money?” In the original series, Kirk would say things like, “Scotty, I’m docking your pay for the next month,” and they had credits and they had bar tabs. There was some currency. There was some way that people were compensated for things, and “mining rights” meant something. It was only in the later incarnations when Gene [Roddenbery], who I only worked with briefly when I came aboard . . . Gene had kind of bought into his own press release that he was a visionary, and he just decided that in the 24th century, there was no money and people “work to better ourselves,” I think Picard says at one point.
All of us on the show just went, “I don’t know what that means, so let’s just ignore it as best we can.” In fact, we even made fun of it once. In Deep Space Nine, there was an episode called “In the Cards.” There’s a conversation between Jake and Nog. Jake says, “You need to get some latinum because we humans don’t have any money.” Nog’s like, “Yeah, how does that work?” “We work to better ourselves,” says Jake. And Nog says, “Yeah, what does that mean exactly?” Jake pauses and he just looks at him, he says, “It means we don’t have money.” It’s the only explanation.
So I take the Moore position. I ignore the dodgy economics and instead focus on the tech-solutionist, uplifting message at its core: Humanity can solve big problems and create a better world for everybody. Worlds, actually, I guess.
The Long Read
👨🍳 Can Washington create mini-Silicon Valleys across America?
At times, it seems like Silicon Valley has zero friends in Washington. But while Big Tech and its CEOs seem under constant (and bipartisan) criticism from politicians and pundits, Silicon Valley itself remains highly popular. So much so, in fact, that Washington would love to duplicate its success by planting new technology hubs across America. The US Senate recently passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which — among many other R&D spending plans — would spend $10 billion over the next five years to create a “regional technology hub program” that would “carry out workforce development activities, business and entrepreneur development activities, technology maturation activities, and infrastructure activities related to the technology development.”
Let’s be clear: The goal of this effort is less about boosting national innovativeness than creating “good jobs” between the tech corridors on the East and West Coasts — especially in “left behind” areas of the Midwest if possible. I recently had a great podcast chat on this subject with Stanford University economist Nick Bloom, where he talked about his recent working paper “The Diffusion of Disruptive Technologies,” co-authored with Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner, and Ahmed Tahoun.
In that study, Bloom and his fellow economists looked at 29 technologies — including flash memory, driverless cars, electric vehicles, solar power, fracking, and RFID — and how those technologies affected the regions where they emerged. And the results suggest that if politicians are able to create successful tech hubs, it’s worth the effort. At least over the subsequent decade, Bloom said in our chat, “the large majority of high-skilled jobs and many of the low-skilled jobs are concentrated in the county, or city, or region it comes out of. So in the short run, absolutely. You’re going to get big bursts of jobs, and money, and investment, and firms.”
And as with so many tech-related topics, the Apple iPhone provides a great example. Bloom:
So let’s think of the cellphone. I think Steve Jobs first held [the iPhone] up or announced it in, what, 2006? Thereabout. Both low and high-skilled hiring for cellphones was pretty much concentrated in Silicon Valley. The engineers were there, but also the low-skilled jobs (making them, selling them) initially were concentrated there. What you see is these jobs spread out, particularly the low-skilled jobs. So within about 20 years, on average for technologies, low-skilled jobs are completely spread out across the country. So if you think of cellphones, within 10 or 15 years, jobs in AT&T stores, repair guys — it was pretty much spread out across the country. High-skilled jobs tend to stick more in the place the technology was born, and it takes them about 40 years to spread out. So you can think that even after 20 years, there are still going to be more cellphone engineers out in Silicon Valley than other parts of the country.
OK, if a “left behind” region can cook up a successful tech hub with the help of government, it’s probably worth it. Which leads us the second question: Can government, whether national or local, intentionally actually create a tech hub? Again, Bloom:
Can you create that? I mean, probably, yes. California put a lot of money into the University of California system. That generated, amongst other things, Berkeley, which, along with Stanford, really birthed Silicon Valley. So, yes, if you really wanted to have a technological renaissance in your area — at least from a reading of our paper — I wouldn’t say the evidence is super strong, but my reading of it would be putting money into developing strong universities for training local grads, undergrads, and also a research base seems to probably be the most obvious way to go about it. . . . I think Pittsburgh has been held up as a successful model for industrial rebirth. Obviously they have strong universities. They have Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. They’ve also put a lot of money into revitalizing downtown. So coming back to the concept: If you want a lot of grads and post-grads in your city, you want to make the center of town safe but fun, enjoyable to live in, good schools, etc. So I’m no expert on the exact cookbook. I can just say in the data, basically a lot of research universities, a lot of graduates are very predictive of these technologies.
Bloom’s answer sheds a lot of light on why directed and intentional efforts to create a Silicon Valley here, a Silicon Valley there, are always unsuccessful. They require building upon an existing foundation, such as research universities, and then being patient. That’s not exactly a policy one can slip in a big congressional bill.
Also, getting lucky helps, such when when Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved Microsoft to Seattle from Albuquerque because that’s where they grew up. “That serendipitous seedling was the starting point of an economic miracle that eventually brought millions to the region,” says economist Enrico Moretti, who specializes in the geography of economic growth.
But it’s also tough to legislate serendipity. And there was plenty of that with the growth of Silicon Valley. Although government played a big role, there wasn’t some Washington-directed master plan to create a tech hub in the fruit-growing region near Stanford. As University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me back in 2019:
This is not just a story of big government coming in with giant research labs and command-and-control, right? Look, it’s the ‘50s! Eisenhower is president. Is Eisenhower a fan of big government? No, he is not. Is the whole point of the Cold War for free enterprise and American capitalist democracy to triumph over socialism? Yes!
So [Silicon Valley] grows indirectly — the money flows to private defense contractors like Lockheed, which opens its Missiles and Space Division in Sunnyvale in 1954. It becomes the biggest employer in the Valley until the late ‘80s. There’s a whole defense industry, but because pretty much everything they were doing was top secret, they couldn’t go on the cover of Fortune magazine and say “Look at the cool stuff we’re making.” . . . It also flows to universities like Stanford and Berkeley. So this indirect flow of money is creating a foundation not only for research on blue-sky technologies that had no commercial market, but also creating a customer for those technologies. This goes into overdrive into the ‘60s with the Space Race. . . . You need very light, very powerful electronic devices — you need transistorized technology. And that is what Northern California and the Santa Clara Valley is specializing in: really small, light, powerful devices. Transistors, microchips, integrated circuits, and later microprocessors, and communications devices.
So, yeah, the Space Race not only helped give us Silicon Valley, but also our modern digital economy. One wonders what creating, finally, a space economy would give us here back on Earth — both in terms of innovations and new industrial centers. I have no idea, and neither does Washington. That’s why we need to be open to surprise, even if it doesn’t match our policy plans.