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total factor productivity

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This is mostly a review for yours truly, partly as I am pondering whether there is any economic theory or strategy that could justify the Trump federal budget cuts and tariffs. My verdict: no, I don’t think so, I think they are based on simplistic ideas: linear, short-term, misguided thinking about the national debt and trade deficits. Anyway, here are a few quotes from the IMF:

It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs—to do more with less. The inputs in question are the economy’s factors of production, primarily the labor supplied by its people (“labor” for short) and its land, machinery, and infrastructure (“capital”). If an economy increases its total income without using more inputs, or if the economy maintains its income level while using fewer inputs, it is said to enjoy higher TFP…

Recent IMF research shows that TFP growth has slowed around the world since the global financial crisis. In low-income developing countries, it has come to a virtual standstill in recent years…

TFP is higher in countries where the average worker has more years of schooling, the quality of education and training is better, and the workforce is healthier. These advantages enable the average hour of work to generate more economic value added—in addition to improving the quality of life more broadly…

So what can advanced economies do? First, they should “do no harm,” by avoiding policy mistakes, such as permitting a decline in market competition, with powerful firms using their monopoly positions to stifle entry and innovation, or reverting to costly trade protectionism. Beyond this, policymakers should craft regulations that tap the possible productivity benefits of recent innovations in green technology, information and communications technology, and artificial intelligence. They should also tackle remaining barriers restricting the opportunity for women and minorities to bring their talents and innovative potential to all sectors of the economy.    

So, a long-term strategy to boost productivity and national wealth could be to invest in childcare and education (the people who will come up with tomorrow’s innovations, and also their parents who can’t come up with today’s innovations because they are too busy), research and development. The current U.S. administration is cutting all these things. Investing in infrastructure and physical capital also helps if you have underinvested in it in the past – there is a diminishing return to these investments, but the U.S. can’t be anywhere near the diminishing return. It also makes sense to invest in a counter-cyclical strategy – more when private sector unemployment is higher and less when it is lower.

 

2024 in Review

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Intro

What I do here is list all the posts I picked each month as most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting. Then I attempt some kind of synthesis and analysis of this information. You can drill down to my “month in review” posts, from there to individual posts, and from there to source articles if you have the time and inclination.

Post Roundup

Most frightening and/or depressing stories

  • JANUARY: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.
  • FEBRUARY: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.
  • MARCH: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.
  • APRIL: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in a dangerous world. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.
  • MAY: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.
  • JUNE: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
  • JULY: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.
  • AUGUST: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?
  • SEPTEMBER: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.
  • OCTOBER: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)
  • NOVEMBER: Ugh, the U.S. election. I don’t really want to talk or think too much more about it. What’s really frightening to me is the celebration of irrationality. With incompetent, irrational clowns and fools now in charge of everything, any crises or emergencies that arise are not going to be dealt with rationally, competently, or at all. And this is how an emergency can turn into a system failure. Let’s hope we can muddle through four years without a major acute crisis of some kind, but that is hard to do.
  • DECEMBER: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful stories

  • JANUARY: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.
  • FEBRUARY: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.
  • MARCH: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.
  • APRIL: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.
  • MAY: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.
  • JUNE: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
  • JULY: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.
  • AUGUST: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.
  • SEPTEMBER: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.
  • OCTOBER: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.
  • NOVEMBER: In a nation of 350 million odd people, there have to be some talented potential leaders for us to choose between in future elections, right? Or is it clowns and fools all the way down? Sorry folks, this is how I feel.
  • DECEMBER: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

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

  • JANUARY: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.
  • FEBRUARY: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.
  • MARCH: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.
  • APRIL: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.
  • MAY: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.
  • JUNE: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
  • JULY: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.
  • AUGUST: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.
  • SEPTEMBER: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.
  • OCTOBER: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.
  • NOVEMBER: You can charge moving electric vehicles using charging coils embedded in roads.
  • DECEMBER: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

Synthesis

Nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. The massive silver lining here is that, as I write this, there has been no use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Let’s hope it stays that way, forever and ever. But the expansion of nuclear arsenals among the existing powers, the open discussion of proliferation to new state actors, and the erosion of treaties and taboos on use of nuclear weapons are all deeply concerning. I find the hypersonic missiles particularly disturbing. These are being used in active, hot wars between nuclear powers – between Russia and NATO’s proxy Ukraine, and between Israel and Iran. We also hear that China has developed these weapons. Missiles are scary to begin with, but what is very, very scary is that these seem to be nuclear capable missiles and they are being actively used in hot wars between nuclear powers right now. If there are only a few minutes of warning when they are incoming, and they effectively can’t be pre-empted or intercepted, how does anyone know for sure that they are not nuclear armed before they hit their targets? So far, it seems like all sides are waiting for missiles to hit before we confirm they are not nuclear missiles. What if a state actor decides they can’t afford to wait and see and considers a pre-emptive strike? China and Iran have no-first-strike policies. The United States does not, and here is a fun fact – the SOVIET UNION had a no-first-strike policy, but modern Russia does not. Just to heap a little more sunshine on this topic, the rapid collapse of Syria, an aspiring nuclear power at one point, made me wonder if something similar could happen in Pakistan. And there is always the prospect of nuclear terrorism, particularly frightening when combined with extremist ideologies that glorify suicide and mass killing of civilians. It is easy to imagine horrible scenarios for all mankind on this one – but again, it is a risk that hasn’t materialized and can be managed. And it actually seems like a simpler, more tractable problem to me than complicated scenarios like climate change. Nuclear weapons are in the hands of relatively few leaders, and there is plenty of precedent for what arms control treaties and risk reduction measures can look like. Courageous leaders can step up on this issue – where are you guys?

Climate change. Let’s continue my little happy pep talk on existential threats. The climate change crisis is biting our civilization right now, and not only that, we are in the middle of it, not the beginning, and it is accelerating every day. This is the physical and socioeconomic reality, while our human civilization’s perception of reality let alone willingness and ability to act lag far behind. This is starting to feel like a story that will not and cannot end well. It is starting to bite our cities in the form of floods and fires, and this is well before relentless sea level rise really starts to bite in a significant way. Another place it will gradually start to bite harder, if it has not already, is food prices and eventually the physical food supply. As much as we have whined about food prices here in the U.S., the rise has been much worse in developing countries. And everything I just said is about the slow, steady, but relentless changes in the climate we have been experiencing and have to expect we will keep experiencing, at a minimum. The small piece of good news here is that if we took action immediately, we would start to see improvement in the trends immediately, rather than having to wait for some lag period to pass. My understanding of this has changed in the past year, and this is something positive. BUT what if rapid, sudden changes are in store? Some of the most terrifying articles I highlighted in 2024 have to do with tipping points, also known as runaway trains. We know about the accelerating melting glaciers and ice sheets, and how a sudden collapse of ice could lead to catastrophic and sudden sea level rise. We are seeing sudden rises in atmospheric methane concentrations – there seems to be some chance that this is the beginning of a feedback loop where frozen soil and seafloor sediments release methane bubbles as they thaw, which leads to more warming, which leads to more thawing, which leads to more warming and so on in a catastrophic exponential feedback loop that can’t be stopped on any time scale meaningful to humans. I hope we are not looking back a few years from now and concluding 2024 was the year that kicked this off. Now for some very small positive words – no matter how long our human political leaders dither and delay and fail, it is never too late to take actions that will make the outcome less bad than it could have been. Think about the reverse – if you were going to purposely try to make the situation as bad a possible, you could do things that would make it worse (like take all energy production back to coal). So past failure is never an excuse to stop trying, it is truly never too late to do better, even if our lack of effective action to date has closed off certain positive outcomes forever.

Bird flu. Continuing the doom and gloom theme, a major pandemic with a high mortality rate is clearly another existential threat we face. It could come from a natural source, a laboratory accident, or an intentional act. The risk of the latter will grow as biotechnology continues to progress and, unlike nuclear weapons, becomes more accessible to the masses. It’s like a major flood or earthquake. It will happen sooner or later. There are things we can do to limit the damage and to recover more quickly when it does happen, and we are probably not doing enough. The current strain of bird flu is concerning as it continues to devastate wild and domestic birds around the world, has spread extensively to domestic cows, there are some reports it has spread to pigs, and it has spread to some humans supposedly through direct contact with animals. Now having said all that, 2025 is probably not the year we get a devastating pandemic flu. Every year is probably not the year, because this is a low probability event in any given year that becomes highly probable over a long period of time. So the thing to do is stay calm and prepare. I actually have some hope that the vaccine technology that was rapidly scaled up and commercialized during Covid-19 will help us when the pandemic flu does hit. Let’s hope it’s not this year or any time during the next four years when we cannot expect to have competent leadership in the United States.

Artificial Intelligence. I suppose I have to say something about it. Well, I can’t recall in my lifetime any technology exploding exponentially into widespread commercial and public use in just over a year from its first announcement. You could almost describe it as…a singularity? Well not quite, but an ongoing exponential growth with no end in site, which is how a singularity would begin. Now, the downside is the sudden, massive, and completely unexpected energy demand this is causing, to the point that recently retired nuclear plants are being turned back on. I joked that AI might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox, where every civilization in the cosmos advanced enough to develop this technology wipes itself out by fouling its own nest when it tries to generate the energy required. I don’t believe this though – given that it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where nuclear fission based energy was scaled up in a serious way, and/or space based solar energy was scaled up in a serious way, and fusion based energy looking at least somewhat plausible, it does not seem like a foregone conclusion that we humans here on Earth had to foul our nest. This does not mean there is hope for us, it just means that there might be hope in a galaxy far, far away or in a billion of them too far away for us to see.

AI Agents. Now, as we foul our nest over the next few decades, there is the question of where AI goes in the next few months and years. And one big thing, I think, that is going to change our lives pretty quick is AI agents. We don’t really have AI going out and actively engaging in communications and transactions on our behalf on a large scale yet. But this has to be happening behind the scenes, and it has to happen in an obvious public way pretty soon. Imagine if I asked an AI to keep track of what one of my elected representatives is doing each day, read and summarize legislation they vote for or against, and just explain it to me in an easily digestible way for five minutes a day. Now imagine my AI is talking to my representative’s AI, and everyone else’s AIs are doing that, and giving the AI a summary of what all these AIs are thinking. That sounds pretty democratic right? But now imagine AIs from companies and governments are trying to manipulate all of us to buy things and believe things and do things they want us to do. Now imagine ALL THESE AIs ARE TALKING AND TRANSACTING WITH EACH OTHER, ALL THE TIME, AND THEY NEVER GET TIRED OR NEED A BREAK. It gets dizzying pretty quick.

Competing Feedback Loops. AI has definitely increased my personal productivity in writing computer programs and communicating the results in the past year. This must be happening on a large scale, at least it certain types of jobs. On the other hand, the IMF tells us worldwide productivity has slowed down since the 2009 financial crisis and was made worse by the Covid-19 crisis. There are also continuing headwinds like aging populations and falling fertility rates in many developed countries. How can both these things be true, an acceleration of productivity and a slowdown of productivity? The way I think about it, they are competing feedback loops, kind of like the faucet in your bathtub being on while at the same time there is no drain plug. Whether your tub is filling up or draining down depends on the relative strength of the positive and negative feedback loops. And unlike your bathtub, both are changing in time and subject to random shocks. So it could go either way – civilization could be going down the drain, the technological singularity might be imminent, or the two could be close to balance so it seems like nothing is happening for a long time, until one of them gets the upper hand. These are not the only feedback loops of course – the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises are also in the mix and since these are negative, we have to really hope that AI faucet is wide open, or find a stopper for the drain, or some combination of the two. We don’t have many world leaders working on the stopper thing right now, many are trying to drill baby drill an even bigger hole.

Biotechnology. AI seems likely to accelerate the progress of biotechnology, leading toward both medical breakthroughs (universal vaccines, cures for cancer and diabetes) and increasing risks of accidents and terrorism. Its hard to predict when these things will hit the news – progress is slow and steady for a long time, and then a technology will seem to burst onto the public scene all at once. Sometimes there is a big hype bubble that reaches a peak and seems to explode, and then while the public assumes the technology is dead, the slow and steady progress toward widespread commercialization resumes and eventually takes hold of the entire system. And then we shrug, forget the past, and assume we knew it was coming all along.

Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles. The U.S. government might be throwing up some headwinds to technological progress (i.e., doing their best to usher in a dark age not a “golden age”), but the global socioeconomic and scientific systems that drive technological progress are much too big to be constrained by the U.S. government. While many in the U.S. may have the impression that the electric vehicle revolution has stalled, it is forging ahead in Asia and around the world. China is building cars for $10,000, and nobody else (Japan, Korea, or Tesla let alone Detroit) can figure out how to compete with this. I suspect one driver of the protectionist impulse in the U.S. is fear that we have no chance of competing, so our government is willing to imprison us in a bubble of outdated technology at uncompetitive prices, and if they can’t outright restrict information about the outside world from getting in, they will use propaganda to distort that information so we don’t understand what we are missing. It’s like the Soviet Union, or worse, North Korea. We are certainly not as far behind as the Soviet Union or North Korea relative to our peers yet, but this is the path we are headed down. Similarly to electric vehicles, we are hearing from our media that autonomous vehicle technology has stalled or under-delivered or is risky (it’s not, by any rational measure compared to the massive death and suffering caused by human-driven vehicles). But this technology has in fact arrived, just arrived unevenly in certain cities in the U.S. and around the world, and our government policy is slowing its spread for example with policies that do not allow autonomous vehicles on highways. These two technologies – electric and autonomous vehicles – have to combine and reinforce each other sooner or later, and this will change a lot of things about how our cities and infrastructure are configured in the future. It’s hard to give a timetable, but I bet if you go to a leading edge city in China, Korea, or Japan a decade from now these technologies will be everywhere and it will seem like science fiction to a U.S. traveler who has been kept in the dark about the state of the outside world as our once world-leading country has stagnated.

Inequality and the Wealth Pump. I hadn’t heard the term “wealth pump” before reading Peter Turchin in 2024, but it rings true. Wealth and income inequality is just the elephant in the room behind the 2024 U.S. election and many other geopolitical trends around the world. It is getting worse in the U.S., and it is not going to get better as long as the wealthy and powerful are able to continue rigging the rules of the system more and more in their favor. The pain of the masses is very real. And Donald Trump may have found rhetoric that taps into this pain, but his administration is certainly not going to make the situation better. But nor has the Democratic Party shown any signs of making the situation better. They may tinker with some marginal policy changes that slow the trend (for example, the short-lived increase in tax credits to offset childcare expenses, some steps to slow the rise of prescription drug prices) but do not reverse it (for example, creating real childcare, education, and health care benefits that reach the vast majority of working citizens). Bernie Sanders is the only U.S. politician who has spoken authentically to the people about these issues in recent memory, and he reached a lot of people although not quite enough when the established Democratic Party did everything they could to sabotage him. There is also the problem of half a century of very effective anti-tax propaganda that is very hard to overcome. But still, I believe Bernie showed us the way. The Democrats need to embrace the man and his policies, and find him a true protege or several to choose from who are able to speak with his authenticity and maybe a bit more youth and charisma. Trump is all but guaranteed to fuck up massively over the next four years, so the question is will the Democrats let his propaganda machine convince us to blame scapegoats or will they be ready?

Government of the Fools, By the Fools, For the Fools, and Where’s Waldo? Before January 20, 2025 it was clear to me that the U.S. will be governed by fools and amateurs for the next four years. And this alone is sad because it will lead to our continued stagnation and at least relative decline while peer countries are moving into the future. It is also dangerous because the nation might be able to muddle through while there is nothing unusual going on, but fools, amateurs and clowns are not going to prepare or respond effectively to emergencies, disasters, and unexpected events. Four years is a long enough time that some unexpected events should be expected. We can only hope they are not too far out in the tails. But as I write this on January 23, 2025, it seems even worse. Trump is a fool, but a very powerful and dangerous fool, and at least some of the people whispering in his ear are evil cruel-hearted psychopaths, sadists, and outright devils. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, because Hitler believed in things (evil, twisted things) whereas I think Trump is a pure psychopath who believes in nothing and is willing to say or do anything he thinks will increase his own power. But who are the Heydrichs, Himmlers, and Goebbels among his supporters? I am not sure, but whoever they are they are hiding in plain site in a crowd of clowns and fools where they are hard to pick out. It’s time to play a little Where’s Waldo.

Welcome to 2025!

And that is all the sunshine and light I have to offer you here in this January 2025. If you are a human being reading this in close to real time, happy 2025 and may it be better than expected, which is not a high bar at all! If you are an alien archaeologist reading this in the far future, I hope it helps you make sense of the rubble of our civilization. If you are a transhuman reading it after the singularity in the near future (I heard October 2029 according to Ray Kurzweil’s latest prediction?), I hope you are laughing that the problems that seemed so dire to me in January 2025 had solutions just around the corner!

What would a real “conservative” agenda look like?

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I consider myself a “liberal” to the extent that I think we need major expansion of the social safety net to minimize human suffering and support working families in our country. But let’s say I took a purely rational, “conservative” view. What might that entail?

  1. A level playing field. High inheritance taxes followed by redistribution using baby bonds or something similar. A public education system that spends the same amount and provides the same opportunities per student, regardless of location or background of the students. It would entail making it much easier for a second spouse to work or start a business, which would mean guaranteed childcare and health care benefits for all.
  2. A relentless focus on job skills, innovation and productivity growth. This would mean major and equitable investments in education from preschool through college. It would mean big government investments in basic research, not favoring those with military applications. It would also mean subsidies for companies to invest in research and development and skills development for the workforce. It would mean a rational immigration policy focused on letting in those with job skills that add value to our national economy.
  3. A relentless focus on competition. This would mean vigorous anti-trust enforcement and punishment of price fixing attempts.

a new superconductor?

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Update 8/17/23: Unfortunately, Nature has debunked the idea below that this was a superconductor. The discussion of why a room temperature superconductor would be nice to have is still relevant.

We have a new superconductor…according to the scientists who believe they created it. Or not…compared to other scientists who haven’t been able to fully replicate it yet. Why are superconductors important?

Superconductors that can operate at room temperature and ambient pressure hold promise for quantum computing, a more efficient energy grid, producing energy from fusion and more innovation… Superconducting materials can conduct electricity without losing energy in the form of heat, which happens as electrons move through a material and interact with atoms.

Axios

This seems to me like something computers/robots could work on. Simulate a jagillion materials to see which could be room-temperature superconductors. Then synthesize the most promising ones, test them, determine the most promising of the most promising, tweak them randomly in a gajillion permutations, simulate them again, synthesize them again, test them again, and so on. You could introduce a little bit of random-ness into the process to avoid going down a path-dependent rabbit hole that ends in a dead end (sorry, way too many metaphors there).

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst

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Bill Gates has an idea for how to accelerate research, innovation, and adoption of new technologies.

Through BE Catalyst, the airline will be able to invest in a large refinery that produces a high volume of sustainable fuel. As the refinery gets going, the airline can start buying fuel there. Even better, once the plant’s design is proven to work, the cost of building subsequent plants will drop. With more refineries in operation, the volume of available fuel will go up and the price will come down, which will make it more attractive to buyers, which will draw more innovative companies into the market. The virtuous cycle will accelerate.

Gates Notes

So if I understand correctly, once you have a promising technology, this is a way to try to accelerate the learning curve. Often promising technologies don’t catch on because the initial unit cost is to be commercially viable. Bringing the technology to market at scale will drive down the price both because the up front investment is spread over a large number of units, and because manufacturers and users will learn by doing and the technology will improve. But there is a chicken and egg problem where somebody has to stick their neck out and make that up-front investment to get the process started, then be patient while it plays out possibly over many decades, and be willing to take at least some risk that it may not work out. So the idea behind this non-profit group seems to be to share enough of that risk so commercial entities are willing to invest.

Four specific technologies are mentioned for this process: long-duration energy storage, sustainable aviation fuels, direct air capture (of greenhouse gases), and green hydrogen.

This sounds good to me. Maybe a model like this could work in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, where technological progress is painfully slow and the payoff of technology is likely to be over multiple decades at least.

it slices, it dices, it 3-D prints famous sculptures in the comfort of your home!

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Now you can 3-D print famous works of art in the comfort of your own living room. Or garage, or basement, maybe. I don’t know exactly how it works but I am intrigued.

This reminds me of one of my guaranteed-successful innovative startup business ideas, which is a chain of 3D printed frozen yogurt shops. Imagine you walk in and there is a securely bolted down Ipad where you can choose from thousands of famous works of art, cartoon characters (some of whom are famous works of art?), etc. Within minutes, your selection is delivered to your table with your choice of sprinkles. Drop me a line if you want to invest.

2020 in Review

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2020 has been quite a year for the U.S. and the world, but you don’t need me to tell you that! My work and family life was disrupted, but I have been lucky enough not to lose any family members or close friends to Covid-19 so far. If anyone reading this has lost someone, I want to express my condolences.

Now I’ll get right down to some highlights of my 2020 posts.

Monthly Highlights from 2020

Most frightening or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Open cyberwarfare became a thing in the 2010s. We read the individual headlines but didn’t connect the dots. When you do connect the dots, it’s a little shocking what’s going on.
  • FEBRUARY: The Amazon rain forest may reach a tipping point and turn into a dry savanna ecosystem, and some scientists think this point could be reached in years rather than decades. Meanwhile, Africa is dealing with a biblical locust plague. Also, bumble bees are just disappearing because it is too hot.
  • MARCH: Hmm…could it be…THE CORONAVIRUS??? The way the CDC dropped the ball on testing and tracking, after preparing for this for years, might be the single most maddening thing of all. There are big mistakes, there are enormously unfathomable mistakes, and then there are mistakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people (at least) and cost tens of trillions of dollars. I got over-excited about Coronavirus dashboards and simulations towards the beginning of month, and kind of tired of looking at them by the end of the month.
  • APRIL: The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?
  • MAY: Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!
  • JUNE: The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
  • JULY: Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.
  • AUGUST: We just had the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a major regional crisis that federal, state, and local governments failed to competently prepare for or respond to. People died, and decades later the recovery is incomplete. Coronavirus proves we learned nothing, as it is unfolding in a similar way on a much larger and longer scale. There are many potential crises ahead that we need to prepare for today, not least the inundation of major cities. I had a look at the Democratic and (absence of a) Republican platforms, and there is not enough substance in either when it comes to identifying and preparing for the risks ahead.
  • SEPTEMBER: The Covid recession in the U.S. is pretty bad and may be settling in for the long term. Demand for the capital goods we normally export (airplanes, weapons, airplanes that unleash weapons, etc.) is down, demand for oil and cars is down, and the service industry is on life support. Unpaid bills and debts are mounting, and eventually creditors will have to come to terms with this (nobody feels sorry for “creditors”, but what this could mean is we get a full-blown financial panic to go along with the recession in the real economy.
  • OCTOBER: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.
  • NOVEMBER:  It seems likely the Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump U.S. foreign wars may just grind on endlessly under Biden. Prove us wrong, Joe! (I give Trump a few points for trying to bring troops home over the objections of the military-industrial complex. But in terms of war and peace, this is completely negated and then some by slippage on nuclear proliferation and weapons on his watch.)
  • DECEMBER: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Democratic socialism actually does produce a high quality of life for citizens in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the hard evidence shows that the United States is slipping behind its peer group in many measures of economic vibrancy and quality of life. The response of our leaders is to tell us we are great again because that is what we want to hear, but not do anything that would help us to actually be great again or even keep up with the middle of the pack. This is in the hopeful category because solutions exist and we can choose to pursue them.
  • FEBRUARY: A proven technology exists called high speed rail.
  • MARCH: Some diabetics are hacking their own insulin pumps. Okay, I don’t know if this is a good thing. But if medical device companies are not meeting their patient/customers’ needs, and some of those customers are savvy enough to write software that meets their needs, maybe the medical device companies could learn something.
  • APRIL: Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.
  • MAY: E.O. Wilson is alive and kicking somewhere in Massachusetts. He says if we want to save our fellow species and ourselves, we should just let half the Earth revert to a natural state. Somewhat related to this, and not implying my intellect or accomplishments are on par with E.O. Wilson, I have been giving some thought to “supporting” ecosystem services in cities. When I need a break from intellectual anything, I have been gardening in Pennsylvania with native plants.
  • JUNE: Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
  • JULY: In the U.S. every week since schools and businesses shut down in March, about 85 children lived who would otherwise have died. Most of these would have died in and around motor vehicles.
  • AUGUST: Automatic stabilizers might be boring but they could have helped the economy in the coronavirus crisis. Congress, you failed us again but you can get this done before the next crisis.
  • SEPTEMBER: The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis had the courage to take aim at campaign finance corruption as a central reason for why the world is in its current mess. I hate to be partisan, folks, but right now our government is divided into responsible adults and children. The responsible adults who authored this report are the potential leaders who can lead us forward.
  • OCTOBER: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.
  • NOVEMBER: The massive investment in Covid-19 vaccine development may have major spillover effects to cures for other diseases. This could even be the big acceleration in biotechnology that seems to have been on the horizon for awhile. These technologies also have potential negative and frivolous applications, of course.
  • DECEMBER: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

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

  • JANUARY: Custom-grown human organs and gene editing and micro-satellites, oh my!
  • FEBRUARY: Corporate jargon really is funny. I still don’t know what “dropping a pin” in something means, but I think it might be like sticking a fork in it.
  • MARCH: I studied up a little on the emergency powers available to local, state, and the U.S. federal government in a health crisis. Local jurisdictions are generally subordinate to the state, and that is more or less the way it has played out in Pennsylvania. For the most part, the state governor made the policy decisions and Philadelphia added a few details and implemented them. The article I read said that states could choose to put their personnel under CDC direction, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, the CDC seems somewhat absent in all this other than as a provider of public service announcements. The federal government officials we see on TV are from the “Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases”, which most people never heard of, and to a certain extent the surgeon general. I suppose my expectations on this were created mostly by Hollywood, and if this were a movie the CDC would be swooping in with white suits and saving us, or possibly incinerating the few to save the many. If this were a movie, the coronavirus would also be mutating into a fog that would seep into my living room and turn me inside out, so at least there’s that.
  • APRIL: There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month. [Update: It wasn’t. Thanks, 2020.]
  • MAY: There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.
  • JUNE: Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost.
  • JULY: The world seems to be experiencing a major drop in the fertility rate. This will lead to a decrease in the rate of population growth, changes to the size of the work force relative to the population, and eventually a decrease in the population itself.
  • AUGUST: Vehicle miles traveled have crashed during the coronavirus crisis. Vehicle-related deaths have decreased, but deaths per mile driven have increased, most likely because people drive faster when there is less traffic, absent safe street designs which we don’t do in the U.S. Vehicle miles will rebound, but an interesting question is whether they will rebound short of where they were. One study predicts about 10% lower. This accounts for all the commuting and shopping trips that won’t be taken, but also the increase in deliveries and truck traffic you might expect as a result. It makes sense – people worry about delivery vehicles, but if each parcel in the vehicle is a car trip to the store not taken, overall traffic should decrease. Even if every 5 parcels are a trip not taken, traffic should decrease. I don’t know the correct number, but you get the idea. Now, how long until people realize it is not worth paying and sacrificing space to have a car sitting there that they seldom use. How long before U.S. planners and engineers adopt best practices on street design that are proven to save lives elsewhere in the world?
  • SEPTEMBER: If the universe is a simulation, and you wanted to crash it on purpose, you could try to create a lot of nested simulations of universes within universes until your overload whatever the operating system is. Just hope it’s backed up.
  • OCTOBER: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.
  • NOVEMBER: States representing 196 electoral votes have agreed to support the National Popular Vote Compact, in which they would always award their state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Colorado has now voted to do this twice. Unfortunately, the movement has a tough road to get to 270 votes, because of a few big states that would be giving up a lot of power if they agreed to it.
  • DECEMBER: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

That’s a lot to unpack, and I’m not sure I can offer a truly brilliant synthesis, but below are a few things that are on my mind as I think through all this.

We Americans affirmed that we care about our parents and grandparents (then failed to fully protect them).

One thing I think we learned is that we still value human lives more than a cold, purely economic calculation might suggest, including the lives of our elderly parents and grandparents. (Though we had significant failures of execution when it came to actually protecting people – more on that later.) We have had this debate before in the U.S., for example when thinking about how much to invest in environmental and safety regulations as I was reminded of by this Planet Money podcast. At one point, politicians (can you guess from which party) proposed valuing the lives of senior citizens at lower rates than everyone else. The backlash was fierce and instant, and the proposal was withdrawn. This year, we did not really have that debate – it was simply accepted, for the most part, that we would be willing to endure significant economy-wide pain to try to protect our parents and grandparents.

I kind of liked how Mr. Money Mustache put it back in April. He gave a “worst case scenario” with 3 million deaths and a “best case scenario” with 200,000 deaths, and the reality is on track to be somewhere in between.

In the worst case, our public officials would all downplay the risk of COVID-19, and we’d keep working and traveling and spreading it freely. We’d maximize our economic activity and let the disease run its course…

In the more compassionate case which we are currently following, we drastically reduce the amount of contact we have with each other for a few months, which cuts the number of deaths in the US down from 3-6 million, down to perhaps 200,000. In exchange, our economy shrinks by several trillion dollars (it was about 21 trillion in 2019) for a year or more.

Assuming we are preventing 3 million early deaths, this means our society is foregoing about one million dollars of economic activity for each person’s life that we extend and frankly, it makes me happy to know we are capable of that.

Mr. Money Mustache

The leaders of some countries like Russia, Brazil, and even Sweden seem to have chosen to accept the consequences of business as usual. Most other countries have chosen to try to save human lives at the expense of short-term economic activity, and some executed this strategy much more effectively than others. In the U.S. and UK, we seem to be bumbling idiots who feel some compassion for one another.

The United States has been slipping for awhile, and in 2020 we faltered.

The U.S. continues to slip below average among its developed country peers in many statistical categories like life expectancy, violence, incarceration, suicide, poverty, and public infrastructure. I picture us like a horse that used to be leading the race, then slipped into the middle of the leading pack, and has now drifted toward the back of the leading pack and is continuing to lose ground. Keep slipping and we would no longer be part of the leading pack.

But then came Covid-19, our horse faltered, and all the other horses went thundering past, leaving us in last place. With the possible exception of the UK, we had the least effective response in the world. Like I said, I think a few countries like Russia, Brazil, and Sweden basically chose to accept the consequences of a limited response, and that is different than a failed response (though not to the people who died or whose loved ones died). We tried to respond, and it turned out our government was unprepared and incompetent even compared to developing countries.

So what happened? Some particular failing of the Anglo-American countries doesn’t explain it, because Canada and Australia both did pretty well. Our lack of a public health system (or even universal access to private care) doesn’t explain it, because the UK, Canada, and Australia all have similar systems to each other and divergent outcomes.

The difference between the extraordinary low rates in Asia, and the higher rates in Europe and the Americas is particularly stark. There are a couple things that I think may explain it. First is good airport screening. I traveled in Asia during the swine flu pandemic, and the screening is robust. The U.S. obviously has to beef up its health infrastructure at international airports and other border crossings (yes, there is a certain irony here that is lost on anti-immigrant types.) Part of this is also beefing up the data systems that track who is coming in from where, where they are going and what their status is. It became obvious within weeks that the CDC’s databases were a complete failure.

I think beyond border screening and data management, the other big difference between East and West is that Asian countries were willing to restrict physical movement and enforce quarantine, whereas western countries mostly were not. Had I exhibited symptoms while I was traveling in Singapore or Thailand during the swine flu, either country would have detained me in a government facility (with three meals a day and wi-fi, one would hope) for 14 days. Asian countries have also been willing to shut down domestic airports, train systems, and highways at times. Most western countries are simply not willing to do this. In the U.S., I think it is partly a matter of law and politics, but also a stupid idea that it would be “too expensive” when quite obviously it would have saved trillions of dollars in the long run. We simply don’t have the political will, the institutional mechanisms, or the basic competence. Covid-19 was a borderline crisis – a lot of people will lose cherished parents and grandparents but it is not an existential threat to our country’s survival. The U.S. needs to plan now to quarantine effectively in an even worse pandemic or god forbid, an incident involving biological weapons.

A few words on government agencies. Hurricane Katrina came up a few times in the monthly picks above. That was a major failure of federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. to plan, respond, and rebuild after a disaster. Before that, I would have assumed FEMA was up to the task, as they seem to have been in the past. Most people’s faith in the CDC was similar or even greater, and they turned out to be bumbling fools. The U.S. will need to fund its public agencies, stock them with competent, well-trained technocrats, and appoint talented political leaders to integrate them with the rest of society if they are going to function competently in the future.

In a hurricane, FEMA basically rolls into your city and takes charge, for better or worse. Early on, there was speculation that the CDC might try to do something similar in a disease outbreak. That didn’t happen. We will also need to adequately fund and train state and local agencies, if we are going to continue to put the lion’s share of the burden on them in a decentralized disaster like this. We could just get rid of the states and have the federal government work directly with metro areas, but this seems like a pretty pie in the sky idea politically.

What other government agencies do we have faith in that might have turned into rotten hollow logs while we weren’t paying attention? The Treasury and Federal Reserve do in fact seem to know what they are doing, which has saved us a couple times now in the last couple decades. We assume the military can fight a war if they need to. We assume the Department of Agriculture can feed us. Are we sure?

The democratization of propaganda.

Governments in general, and the U.S. government in particular, are having trouble getting messages out to their citizens. We used to worry about governments and big business controlling the media to put out purely ideological or purely profit-driven messages. Now anyone in the world can pretty much say anything anytime. People have trouble telling which messages are truthful and which are more reliable than others. In the U.S., this is combined with low trust in government and low trust in experts, and the result is that people either didn’t receive important messages about public health, or received a variety of conflicting information and noise and didn’t reach reasonable conclusions reading to reasonable decisions.

We hear a lot about “following the science” and “listening to scientists”, but this is really about policy communication not science communication. Scientists are trained to communicate uncertainty to each other. Often though, the uncertainty is low enough that it is clear one course of action has better odds of a good outcome than others. Media do not communicate this well – they tend to focus on the uncertainty statements scientists make, even when uncertainty is low and the best course of action is clear. The public is not prepared to process this information in a way that will lead to reasonable conclusions and decisions.

So we need to try to educate children to evaluate the source of information and think critically about whether it makes sense in the context of what they know. We need to educate them about uncertainty and decision making. We need to train journalists better to communicate scientific information but especially policy choices. Regulating social media companies might play some small role in this, but in the U.S. at least we don’t want to see a move toward censorship.

Back to the CDC. When Covid-19 hit, I was expecting the CDC to step in and dominate communications from the beginning on the issue. They needed to use all the tools modern advertising has to get messages across. I would have trusted what they said, and I think a lot of people would. If they had seized the initiative, it would have been hard for other voices to compete, and we might be in a better place now. Unfortunately, they have probably suffered a permanent loss of credibility both through poor communication and inadequate action, but better communication would definitely have helped. Make this one more U.S. institution that has lost credibility in my eyes as I have gotten older – Congress, the State Department, and the New York Times after weapons of mass destruction (I never trusted intelligence agencies), the military after the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq (I’m not saying I trusted them per se, but I thought they were good at fighting wars), FEMA after Hurricane Katrina (and more recently the horrific non-response in Puerto Rico), and now the CDC and federal public health establishment.

I have come to respect local public health authorities more through all of this. I actually work in the same building as my local public health agency, and know some people who work there, but I never really saw the connection to the larger health care system or my daily life before this. Part of the federal government’s communication strategy should be to package crystal clear messages for delivery by trusted local individuals like public health workers, family doctors, and school nurses.

Preparing for the big (and small) risks

Covid-19 has caused me to think even more about risk management. A major pandemic was something we knew was virtually certain to happen at some point, and we knew the consequences could be severe. And yet we still failed to adequately plan, prepare, and respond. There are a few other things in this category, like (obviously) another pandemic, a major earthquake, and sea level rise. Then there are risks where we are not sure of the probability, but the consequences could be catastrophic, like nuclear and biological war, ecological collapse, and major food shortages. (Alien invasion? No, I’m not really taking this seriously, but along with things like “gray goo” it should be on the list and discussed, providing a rational basis for taking action or not.) Then there are things that are certain to happen but are geographically limited (storms, fires, floods) or steadily kill a few people here and there adding up to a lot over time (car crashes, air pollution, poor nutrition). I am not sure where some risks fit in, for example cyberattacks or antibiotic resistance – but this is the point of gathering the information and having the discussions in a rational framework. In a rational world, a risk management framework provides a way to allocate finite resources (money, effort, expertise, research) to planning, preparing, mitigating, or simply choosing to accept each of these.

The state of scientific and technological progress (is the Singularity near yet?)

I had a decent technology list under “most interesting post” for December, so I won’t repeat it here.

Above, I find myself referring to the Covid vaccine as a “moon shot”. It is clearly an example of how a big government push can get a new technology over the finish line and bring it into widespread use quickly. I am wondering though if it is a true example of accelerating a scientific breakthrough, an example of accelerating application of a scientific breakthrough to new technology, or simple a case of government correcting a market failure. We had been hearing about mRNA vaccine technology for awhile, and we know a vaccine was developed for SARS but not widely deployed. We have also been hearing for awhile that drug companies were still growing basic childhood vaccines in chicken eggs, and not investing heavily in the mRNA technology, because the market demand and profit potential was not there in the rich countries to make it worth their while. So this was at least partially a case of the U.S. and other governments making that market failure go away by simply paying for everything and simply transferring the profits to those companies. I am not saying this is bad – we do it for arms manufacturers all the time, so why not vaccines?

Vaccines for HIV, dengue fever and other similar mosquito-borne diseases would be nice. One solution to antibiotic resistance might be bacteriophages – viruses tailored specifically to infect and kill specific bacteria. It seems like this technology could be applied to this. If antibiotic resistance is really the medium- to long-term emergency some say it is, maybe this should be a top priority.

This technology is also scary. It is the ability to create a custom organism that can go into a person’s body and have a specific desired effect. Vaccines are obviously a benign application, but somebody, somewhere, sometime will use this technology for evil. This seems like a near-existential risk on the horizon that needs to be dealt with.

I am going to say no, the Singularity is not imminent in 2021. Then again, the idea is that if at some point we hit the knee of the curve on technology and productivity, it will seem to accelerate all at once, because that is the nature of exponential change. If that happens, we will shrug and say we knew it all along. The trick is to find ways to drive innovation and progress while managing the risks that could temporarily but repeatedly set back or permanently derail that path, and without destroying our planetary ecosystem in the process. I am not ready to put odds on what outcome we are headed for, but I am hoping 2021 will at least bring a gradual return to the pre-Covid status quo, and allow us to set the stage for the future.

If anyone has actually read my ramblings all the way to this point, or just skipped to the end, Happy New Year!

October 2020 in Review

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In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.

Ralph Nader on R&D

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I’m still thinking about innovation – Ralph Nader says the U.S. government invests plenty in research and development, but only wealthy and powerful interests reap the benefits.

We send our tax dollars to Washington, D.C., and the federal government gives trillions of these dollars to companies in the form of subsidies and bailouts.

Trillions of dollars are devoted to government research and development (R&D), which has built or expanded private companies. These include such industries as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, military weapons, computers, internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and containerization.

Our taxpayer-funded R&D is essentially given away free to these for-profit businesses. We the People receive no royalties nor profit-sharing returns on these public investments. Worse, we pay gouging prices for drugs and other products developed with our tax dollars.

Counterpunch

Maybe, but if this means an obsession with patents and copyrights and other forms of “intellectual property rights” designed to capture value for investors, I think it can go too far and actually limit innovation. It might make more sense for the government to make the investments, institute a value added tax to recoup the benefits of increased progress economy-wide, and return some combination of benefits and services to the people. This would be a pretty obvious win to the private sector and the public at large. Of course, the illogical pro-business, anti-tax ideology U.S. corporations have spent decades manufacturing and imposing on the population makes this combination of policies politically almost impossible.

“innovation driven industrial policy”

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I’m still on the topic of innovation. Slate has an article on what an “innovation driven industrial policy” would look like.

It is not—and has never been—that the U.S. does not have a de facto industrial policy. Through regulation, foreign investment rules, trade barriers, and even subsidies (think ethanol), the federal government has found ways to support U.S. industry. And even the most ideological appropriators have not succeeded in removing millions of dollars of research funding channeled through the long-standing research agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or through programs established to support development of that research, such as the Small Business Research Innovation program (now branded as “America’s Seed Fund”).

Slate

So the idea is that an industrial policy would take all this and put it under some kind of central management intended to spur progress in key areas. Then it would pump out more funding and encourage private industry to do the same.