Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Ghettoside

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I’m reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, a book about homicide in Los Angeles between the late 1980s and early 2000s. The word “ghetto”, by the way, might seem loaded but it is how residents and police referred to the neighborhood that is the focus of the book. It’s a very interesting and also disturbing book. It tells a little bit different story than what I have been reading in books and the media elsewhere. In the view of this book, a central factor in high homicide rates, at least in Los Angeles at the time covered in the book, is that police departments don’t solve murders of black men and boys at the same high rates that they solve murders of other groups. This leads to a situation of lawlessness where a sort of “law of the street” develops. In this view, people would actually like more help from the authorities if they felt it was fair and professional, but they don’t believe they can get it so they take matters into their own hands.

The book talks about disputes and arguments among men and boys getting out of hand and leading to cycles of revenge and retaliation. Homicide detectives do their best, but even the best homicide detectives have limited capacity, and training new ones is difficult. When there is a spike in homicides, the supply of good homicide detectives does not increase in kind. Cases get rushed and a smaller fraction of the total get solved. People correctly learn that they are likely to get away with murder, and that contributes to the feedback loop. In Los Angeles at the time, the situation escalated to the point that total strangers were murdering each other simply for being in the wrong neighborhood or wearing the wrong color clothing.

The book argues that Los Angeles at the time was diverting resources from investigating and solving homicides to “violence prevention” and “predictive policing” programs, which were politically popular but less effective than simply solving more cases would have been. It also argues that people can feel harassed and overpoliced at the same time they might support more investigation and solving of violent crime cases if they felt it was fair and effective. I hear echoes of this in the media during the current homicide wave we are experiencing in many U.S. cities. Maybe the violence prevention approaches have improved and have more evidence behind them, but we do hear both that homicide is way up and that the clearance rate is down. And we perpetually hear about the idea of a lack of trust and respect between police and residents of primarily black neighborhoods.

It’s interesting that the crimes discussed in the book are almost all gun crimes, but this is not a book that focuses on guns. Nor does it focus on the drug trade. It focuses on the people involved and their motivations on all sides, from victims to perpetrators to police. It mentions a few police shootings of suspects in passing, but this is also not a focus of the book.

LED lighting vs. windows

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Treehugger asks if LED lighting is more efficient than daylight. It seems like a dumb question at first because isn’t daylight free? But the problem inside buildings is that windows allow heat to come and go in addition to light, and LEDs have gotten so efficient that it is not an easy question to answer whether bricking up a window and replacing the light with LEDs would be more or less energy efficient. They conclude that windows should be designed with human comfort and happiness in mind.

Is the Pope the king of Italy?

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Just kidding, I’m not that ignorant. That headline was just to get your attention. But then again, I don’t think about the political system in Italy often, so you could say I am ignorant of it. The politics of Italy obviously matters to Italians, but does it matter to the rest of us? Well, there was a guy named Mussolini, but that was quite awhile ago… There’s also a guy called the Pope, who’s not part of the Italian government but has some political power and sway on a global scale. As far as the actual modern government, it’s just a typical European parliamentary democracy, we assume? Well, there is no Italian king, but…

On January 24, when Sergio Mattarella’s seven-year term comes to an end, the Italian parliament and its regional representatives will hold a secret ballot to elect the country’s new president and official head of state…

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

Unherd.com

So Italy is at least a Republic of sorts if its head of state is elected by its legislature, which is in turn elected by the people. But the actual powers of the president almost sound like…an ayatollah? In practice, the head of government (i.e. prime minister) may not defer to the President, but it sounds like that balance of power could potentially change with time. And if the President has the ability to dissolve parliament and delay elections during an emergency, the conditions for a potential loss of democracy would seem to be there, at least according to this article.

What’s new with “decoupling”?

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Decoupling is the idea that environmental impact per unit of economic growth is declining. If it were to decline fast enough, in theory, it would be possible for growth the continue indefinitely at the same time absolute impact is declining. This article tries to measure the rate this may or may not be happening, and concludes the long term trend is not even close to being on a path where we could turn the corner and see absolute impact stabilize, let alone decline.

While globally, CO2 emissions per unit of GDP are declining, the decoupling rate from 1995 to 2018 was only -1.8 percent annually. To achieve net zero by 2050, the rate would have to accelerate to -8.7 percent, assuming population and GDP growth projections as given, or by a factor of almost five.

Bruegel.org

This seems about right to me. The idea that we need to choose between “growth” and sustainability in the long term, of course, is logically flawed. If impacts continue to grow, there will come a point where the system breaks and human welfare is no longer able to increase.

There are a few flaws in the decoupling argument. “Growth”, as usually measured by GDP, is a measure of gross economic activity, which includes both benefits and costs to humanity. So in comparing impacts (costs) to GDP (sum of benefits and costs), you have an equation with too many unknowns, unless you can come up with some agreed-upon reasonable measure of costs. If you can do that, you would simply subtract costs from benefits to get net benefits, and figure out whether those are growing or not. They may or may not be growing right now. Even if they are, you need to consider whether they can continue to grow in the future, or whether the underlying system is eventually going to break and no longer be able to support further growth. You also need to consider risks of really bad things happening, as well as the odds of really good things like major technological breakthroughs happening. I would also point out that at the moment we are using carbon emissions as a proxy for sustainability more generally, but there is a lot more that should be considered in a holistic view of a sustainable long-term human-planet system.

Philadelphia homicides in 2021

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The Philadelphia Inquirer has a decent piece of data journalism on the shocking number of homicides in our city in 2021. Here are some numbers:

  • 557 homicides as of Wednesday, December 29, so we will probably add a few more by midnight on New Year’s Eve.
  • This eclipses the previous record of 500 in 1990. The period 1989-1997 consistently had over 400 homicides per year. We have now had two years in a row in the 500+ range (499 in 2020). During the 2009-2019 decade, the range was 246-356.
  • Guns were the cause of death in 89% of homicides. Nationwide, this number is around 75%.
  • Of the 557, 111 (20%) were considered retaliatory, 166 (30%) were drug related, and 42 (8%) were domestic violence related. It is not entirely clear to me if these percentages overlap or not – hence my giving this article a grade of only “decent”.
  • 8 of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. recorded more homicides as of December 29, 2021 than they did in 2019. New York City has had 479 murders this year and Chicago “nearly 800”. The article doesn’t normalize these by population for us but I can do that.
    • Philadelphia: 557 homicides / 1.579 million people = 352 per million
    • New York City: 479 homicides / 8.419 million people = 57 per million
    • Chicago: ~800 / 2.71 million people = 295 per million

Philadelphia Inquirer, to go from decent to good, just put these numbers in a nice table or bullet list for us and normalize by population. Bonus points for some kind of bar chart of “tree map” that makes it crystal clear what the categories are and whether any overlap. “Communities of color” are mentioned but there are no numbers on the breakdown of victims or perpetrators by race or by age (they do mention that the number of female victims has increased, although victims remain overwhelmingly male).

So despite the eye-popping numbers in Chicago, Philadelphia is a bit worse although the two are similar. New York is doing much better.

There is a lot of hand wringing over the causes of violence. It is crystal clear though that plentiful guns make disputes and arguments much more deadly than they otherwise might be. Beyond that, we know the pandemic resulted in a large population of teenage boys out of school for a year and a half. We know the pandemic led to an increase in the unemployment rate.

Those are some facts. Now to speculate. The unemployment rate measures the formal economy, but we know that people who are unemployed in the formal economy are not necessarily economically idle. We can speculate that more people, particularly young men, became involved in the drug economy during the pandemic. Mix together young men, drugs, cash, guns, and a culture that leads to cycles of retaliation and revenge, and it is easy to picture a feedback loop that could get out of control.

It’s interesting that many categories of crime are down. This is at least partly because the police are not pursuing nonviolent crimes as much, particularly drug use and drug possession. Many people are drawing a link between decreased enforcement and increased homicides. “Homicide” and “crime” are often used interchangeably in the media, but this is wrong. Homicides are a tiny fraction of crime as a whole, and crime as a whole is down. Reduced enforcement could easily be a reason that crime as a whole is down.

How would you break the homicide loop? Media coverage focuses on guns, and reducing the number of guns might help, but that is very hard to do in our “exceptional” country. Legalizing drugs would take away the profits and economic incentive to traffic drugs and deal drugs, reduce the amount of cash changing hands, and very likely reduce the level of violence caused by drug dealers defending themselves from each other. Assuming this is what touches off many of the retaliation cycles, those should also decrease. Drug addiction might or might not increase, I am not sure, but that could be treated as the medical/behavioral problem it is. The violence on our city streets (not to mention horrific violence to get drugs across our international borders) is just not an acceptable price to pay to reduce the social problems caused by drug use, if the prohibition and law enforcement strategy was even working, which it is clearly not.

So longer term, after legalizing drugs, logical strategies would be an actual public health care system able to help people with addiction, and education and training of young men so they have economic opportunities in the formal economy. Our political system has repeatedly failed to provide these things, partly because rural politicians and voters have disproportionate political power and like to believe poverty, drugs, and violence affect only the mythical “inner city”.

College Football? There’s an API for that

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I’ve always wondered if there is a public source of college football stats to play with, and there is (at least one) called the College Football Database. There’s also an R package that taps it.

Of course, don’t think for a second that you can crunch these numbers and make money through gambling. Only large “professional gamblers” can consistently make money through gambling, by (legally, as I understand it, at least in certain states) cornering the market by manipulating betting spreads. The idea there is that you can bet a large amount of money on the underdog in a contest that is not getting a lot of attention, which will move the spread in favor of the underdog. You can then bet an even larger amount of money on the favorite. If you are able to manipulate the odds in your favor, you will lose this bet less than half the time, and over time you will make money off the backs of us poor schmucks who take bets with expected values less than what we put in. Don’t try this – there are smarter, richer people than you doing it and you can’t beat them. Also, don’t take my word for it that it would be legal. Finally, think of making small, occasional, close-to-even-money bets as a source of cheap entertainment and you’ll be okay, and then only if you do not have a tendency to become addicted.

An API, by the way, is an Application Programming Interface.

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them.

Wikipedia

the 30-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union

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A big milestone of 2021 was the 30-year anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991. I was born in 1975, so I was 16 when this occurred. I didn’t have a good understanding of it at the time, and I am not sure the average person has a good understanding of it today. As I read about it now, Russia, somewhat oddly, essentially declared independence from itself (aka, the Russian empire, aka the Soviet Union), and Mikhail Gorbachev found himself in charge of a political entity that no longer existed. I have vague memories of Boris Yeltsin and tanks in the streets of Moscow. I have no memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This suggests to me my parents and teachers did not spend much time talking to me about current events, or talking to each other about current events within ear shot. Maybe I can do a bit better with my children, while trying not to make the world seem too depressing.

Is the cold war over? Not really. There are many, many ways its legacy affects us today. The most obvious ones are all the nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia have pointed at each other, nuclear proliferation around the world, and the tensions at the Russia-Ukraine border. Less obvious but crucially important is the extreme free market propaganda that constrains possibilities for the U.S. and economic and political systems around the world to this day. First, I think globalization had a lot to do with cold war propaganda. The U.S. invested heavily in industrializing and trading with Japan and South Korea after World War II at least in part to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. At first, the exports the U.S. was buying were a tiny trickle compared to the economy. The policies were so successful though, that those economies grew to rival and out-compete U.S. industry. The propaganda suited U.S. multinational corporations just fine because it provided access to cheap labor and lax environmental regulations abroad, while keeping the U.S. market wide open. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore copied the model with spectacular success, and then China copied it on a massive scale, and the system the U.S. had created swallowed it (the tail wagged the dog, the pig swallowed the python? I struggled to come up with the right animal-based metaphor here). Certainly, this economic growth lifted a lot of people out of poverty in Asia. It is somewhat ironic though that the biggest beneficiary turned out to be a (nominally, at least) Communist empire.

Back to those U.S. corporations and the propaganda that suits them. To this day, they are able to use that Cold War anti-tax, anti-regulation propaganda to scare the public into voting against “socialist” policies that would benefit the vast majority of citizens and even the economy as a whole, but would trim the profits of a tiny minority running mega-corporations. Commie red policies like having health care, education, and child care systems that are not failures and that would allow the U.S. to stop falling toward the bottom and eventually getting shit out of its peer group of advanced nations (I think I got that metaphor about right!) The mega-corporations can then invest a small fraction of their profits to ensure election of politicians who will continue to spew the propaganda and in some cases even actively work to undermine voting itself. This is a cycle that is going to be very hard to break, if it can be broken.

the midterm curse

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2022 will be a midterm election year in the U.S. The incumbent political party usually loses seats in the midterm election, and since the Democrats have a majority of 1 in the Senate, losing any seats will mean losing what little control they have. Here are the historical facts according to Alternet:

  • The party that controls the White House has lost seats in 19 of the 22 midterm elections since 1932.
  • The first exception was 1934, when FDR was in office. His New Deal was popular and seemed to offer hope during the pain of the Great Depression.
  • The second exception was 1998, when Bill Clinton was in office. The economy was growing quickly and the Clinton impeachment had just happened.
  • The third exception was 2002, when George W. Bush was in office. 9/11 had happened about a year earlier, and the response to 9/11 including the Afghanistan invasion was popular.

So what will probably happen is the Democrats will lose seats in 2022, because that happens 86% of the time. The Republicans will say the Democrats did everything wrong and that explains the result. The Democrats will say they did everything right and it still just happens 86% of the time. The media will more or less side with the Republicans because they like to give explanations, like when they give an “explanation” every day for why the stock market went up or down when it is clearly much more than 86% random.

To have a shot at bucking the trend, the Democrats would need (1) a big, popular, perceived to be successful policy agenda, (2) a war or other major acute crisis perceived to be handled well, and/or (3) fast economic growth.

On (1), I just don’t buy the idea that policy success is going to get Biden very far. He has done objectively well on pandemic rescue and direct payments to taxpayers, and he seems to be getting little or no credit for it. I don’t think people are even aware of these successes. The pandemic is grinding on and people are in a generally sour mood. They do not judge politicians on how much worse things could be if actions hadn’t been taken, or how much less sour the mood could be. It is just the sour mood that counts. I do think there was one mis-step, which was giving people enormous amounts of money without making sure they appreciated it. Doing this as electronic tax refunds, even on a monthly basis, does not seem to have worked well politically. I saw one poll where many people said they had not received the payments, even though most of them demonstrably, factually had! This is the flip side of the phenomenon companies are well aware of, where charges that show up in our bank accounts or credit card statements after the fact and with minimal fanfare “feel” less painful than when we open our wallets and fork over cash or write a check. Payroll deductions also take advantage of this psychology. So I think the optimal political strategy would have been for the Democrats to mail people paper checks, even if that would have been less efficient economically than the way it was done. Some sort of debit card, as is typically done for food stamps, could also have worked. Imagine if it had Biden’s face on it, like a Roman emperor stamping their face on a gold coin. And the big infrastructure and social “spending bills”, even if they pass, do not seem to be scoring the Democrats any points. People don’t understand the long-term benefits of these critical investments and the Republicans are just winning the narrative by screaming incoherently about debt and inflation and socialism. It’s a meme, not a rational argument, and it’s resonating with where our heads are as a society right now.

On (2), it seems like Covid has become too much of a long-term, grinding, slow-burn crisis for Biden to get much credit for managing it reasonably well. Like I said, things are going moderately badly, and there is no credit given because things could be going much more badly. That said, it seems entirely plausible that Covid could largely burn itself out in 2022, as almost every (surviving) human on Earth will have some immunity from vaccination, infection, or both. This is in the absence of a major new killer variant, of course. Things could also improve to near-normal over the summer, and then a new fall wave could hit just at the wrong time (politically speaking, for the party in power.) A major terrorist attack or a war over Taiwan, Ukraine, or Iran could be good timing for the mid-term elections, and disastrous for life on Earth. I’m not sure anyone knows what a major meltdown of the communication, financial, and/or electrical systems would mean politically. Please no on all of these.

On (3) it seems entirely plausible that the economy could pick up and inflation could moderate throughout 2022. Things are definitely getting off to a rocky start, and if they steadily improve and seem to be going really well in the late summer and fall, the public will give the party in power credit for that whether they deserve it or not. If inflation seems to be spiraling out of control, it will be the political kiss of death and could lead to a landslide against the party in power.

I’ll go out on a limb and give a prediction of what I think is most likely: Economic growth will pick up, inflation will moderate, and Covid will recede into the background by late summer into fall. The world will avoid major geopolitical turmoil and nuclear war. The public will be in a pretty good mood and the President’s approval ratings will be relatively high. The Democrats will still lose a handful of seats in the Congress because that just happens 86% of the time. This will be the end of Biden’s big, bold legislative policy agenda. In the second half of his term, he will focus on unglamorous administrative policy and foreign policy because those will be the options left to him. The Republicans will say their gaining a handful of seats spells certain doom for Biden in 2024, and they will be wrong, because Presidential elections seem to be tossups lately no matter what else is happening.

2021: Year in Review

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As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

the Simon-Ehrlich bet

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Paul Ehrlich has probably won his 1980 bet with Julian Simon in a number of parallel universes, according to this analysis:

Better lucky than good: The Simon-Ehrlich bet through the lens of financial economics

In 1980, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich bet on the future of natural resource prices as a vehicle for their public debate about mankind’s future. Simon ultimately won, and his victory has been used as evidence that innovation can offset material scarcity induced by human economic activity. But does the outcome of the bet truly suggest this? We recast the bet as a short-sale by Simon of Ehrlich’s portfolio of assets, allowing us to carefully analyze the choices made in the bet, including the resources chosen and their amounts and the period of the bet, conditioned on the information available to each man in 1980. We also investigate the role of randomness in the outcome of the bet. We find that, with careful portfolio construction, Ehrlich should win this bet more often than not, validating the age-old adage that it’s better to be lucky than good.

Ecological Economics

Does this mean that humanity as a whole is better off than we maybe “should be” on average? Hard to say.