I have a long tradition on Election Day of writing about anything except the election. It’s too late to offer advice on how to vote, but too early to evaluate the results.

This year, I chose a topic that is in some ways the exact opposite of the election: progress.

In late October, I spent a weekend at a conference in Berkeley, California, sponsored by the Roots of Progress Institute. It was the first attempt that I know of to gather all in one place people who are connected to the new and growing field of “progress studies.”

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There are a few of us who have been touting the importance of human progress for a long time: the actual historical fact of technological, economic, moral, and political progress—but also the need to celebrate it and study it.

Five years ago, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen wrote an influential article in The Atlantic calling for a field of “progress studies.” Then Jason Crawford started Roots of Progress. Last year, the organization ran a fellowship program to train writers who can contribute to the field and give them advice and organizational support, and they brought me on to teach writing. I did it again this year, and part of my goal in going to the conference was to meet this year’s Roots of Progress Fellows—a very bright and interesting group of people—after months of interacting with them online. While we had a couple of days last year just for the fellows to get to know one another, this year’s conference was an attempt to broaden the scope and get as many people as possible in this field to come together for a weekend of presentations and conversation.

The March of Progress

Zachary Karabell of the Progress Networkwrote about the experience and noted how it stood out in the midst of this election season.

One of the more notable aspects of two days of progress studies was what wasn’t said. Twelve hours each day, countless side conversations and panels and discussions, and I didn’t hear the words “Trump, Harris, Israel, or Gaza.” Not one. Aside from how refreshing that was, it also spoke to a larger truth frequently forgotten in the haze of our dystopian media landscape. The US election is important, but it isn’t nearly as important as the attention it receives would suggest. There are things going on with nuclear energy or AI or land use or education that will shape our near future profoundly and have precious little to do with who occupies the oval office. 

As someone who covers politics and elections and thinks the stakes can actually be pretty high, I would like to push back on this a little. The amazing progress of the last two centuries is not inevitable. It is the result of many millions of individual decisions, and we can all choose to go the other way, decide that everything was better when we were kids, and make decisions that will push us backward or slow down progress.

And yet, part of my conversion on the importance of studying progress happened back in the early 2000s, when I began looking at graphs charting the rise of global wealth, prosperity, and well-being, the sort of information Steven Pinker would eventually cram into his book Enlightenment Now. The big breakthrough was when I noticed that World War II—a vast global catastrophe by any measure—hardly registered as a blip over the long term.

Let me be clear what I mean here. World War II was a calamity, especially if you were immediately caught up in it, and millions of people didn’t make it out alive—the ultimate measure of their well-being. So obviously, stopping immediate disasters like the spread of totalitarianism is imperative. But historically, progress and disaster have always been intermingled. We take two steps forward even while we’re taking one back. The forces that unleashed a torrent of progress at the end of the 18th Century are vast and deep and extend well beyond the things we decide in elections every four years. Progress springs from so many roots and has branched out in so many directions that it can persist through disasters and setbacks.

For example, Steven Pinker kicked off the conference with a follow-up to Enlightenment Now in which he asked whether the positive trends he documented six years ago have continued. Naturally, they have, even through the pandemic—another short-term disaster that can’t stop the larger impetus toward improvement.

At the Roots of Progress conference, there were interesting sessions on the political and philosophical causes of progress and on progress in many different areas: energy, housing, automation, manufacturing, longevity, and artificial intelligence.

Since the conference was near Silicon Valley, the enthusiasm about AI was quite clearly bubbling over. I am a bit of a skeptic, I’m afraid. During that weekend, I sometimes felt like I was smack dab at the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations. There have been some recent breakthroughs, and large language models have made exciting improvements—and now everyone is projecting that this progress will all go forward in the future at the same rate it has recently. Most importantly, they are assuming there won’t be much of an extra hill to climb, no unknown or unappreciated barrier, between ChatGPT and human-like intelligence (and beyond that to artificial super-intelligence). Well, we’ll see.

Worlds Are Colliding

But the big question of the weekend is the one raised by Karabell: “It is not yet clear if this even is a movement rather than the aspiration to be one.”

I think it is a movement now, and the reason is something you can see in this picture, which is also at the top of this newsletter. This was at one of the large sessions, but it didn’t quite capture the full size of the crowd, which was at least 200 people.

The man in the front with the wild mane of white hair is of course Steven Pinker. Behind him to your left, on the back side of the table—and purely by accident, right in the middle of things—is me. And it did really feel like I was in the middle of things, in one particular way.

Many different worlds that I am part of were colliding during the conference, often in unexpected ways. There was a contingent of Objectivists. Given the glorification of technological and productive achievement in Ayn Rand’s novels, it’s no surprise that her philosophy has been a source of talent in the progress movement. There was also a contingent of Montessori people, to whom I have connections by way of the Objectivists—it’s the official educational philosophy of the movement—but also independently by way of my kids’ school in Charlottesville, which is something of a hotbed for Montessori education. There were the libertarian think tank people from DC, who I know pretty well, with representatives there from the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, and of course Cato Institute’s HumanProgress.org, which has been an invaluable clearing house for data about progress. But it wasn’t just the libertarians. The guy next to me in that photo is Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism. Then there were people from the media world, like Virginia Postrel and Zachary Karabell and particularly fellow Substackers like Noah Smith and Scott Alexander. And I am sure there were many people there who are part of Silicon Valley and tech industry networks that I was not previously connected to.

That experience of multiple networks coming together is what made this seem like the birth of a movement. For me, some of these people were old friends, some were people I had connected to online or interviewed as faces on a screen but had never met in real life, some were people I had known of but never connected to, and some were entirely new. But it is that sense of many independent networks of people mingling and forming new contacts that makes me think something important happened that weekend.

What Went Right?

Why talk about progress, anyway?

It is not just because it is actually happening and reshaping the world we live in, though that is important. It is also because we want to recognize that it’s happening, to celebrate it, and to encourage more of it. We want to know what went right because we want to make it happen faster and more often.

Conversely, if we refuse to recognize progress, if we imagine we’re living in a hellscape where everything is going down the drain, then we are likely to impose irrational and draconian “solutions” that will break the things that are going right. But I said I wasn’t going to write about the election.

It wouldn’t be a really good conference without at least one action item, something I picked up that I’m going to put into practice.

At one of the smaller side-events, the blogger Noah Smith mentioned that he wished there was some kind of resource that kept track of everything being published on progress so it was easier to follow. Well, he’s talking about “news aggregation,” and I used to do exactly that back in my RealClearFuture days. So I’m going to make an effort to start that up again as a roundup of links posted on a weekly basis—but after the election.

If this is a movement now, and I think it is, then we need some kind of clearing house for its ideas. Look for that soon at The Free Market Futurist.

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I recently posted the next chapter of my book in progress: The Prophet of Causation, a guide to Ayn Rand’s philosophy from the perspective of the central role of the concept of causation. Chapter 3 is “A Causality Walk for Consciousness.” If you are familiar with the idea of a “causality walk,” you’ll have some idea where I’m going with this. If you aren’t, check out the chapter.

Check it out either way.

The Prophet of Causation

A Causality Walk for Consciousness

Author’s Note: Below is the third chapter of my book, where I examine how causation applies to consciousness. If you’re still catching up, here is the Preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2…

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3 months ago · Robert Tracinski

This chapter is primarily dedicated to understanding what consciousness is in the first place, and it identifies a wrong view of consciousness known as representationalism, which is lurking behind a bunch of disastrous philosophical errors from Descartes through Hume through Kant, up to the present day.

I cover a few recent examples, but there’s another one you’ll see everywhere right now: artificial intelligence.

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A lot of the fear (or excitement) about AI becoming sentient and “superintelligent” stems from a representationalist view of consciousness. If consciousness is just a stream of images or data manipulated on a kind of internal video screen—which is the key error of representationalism—then it seems plausible that an AI chatbot scraping digital text from the internet could be conscious and acquire an independent intelligence. If consciousness instead requires direct and independent contact with the world, then it’s not plausible. See my previous argument on that.

Discourse

Why the Robots Won’t Eat Us

Discussions about the future of artificial intelligence are often caught between competing utopian and dystopian visions. The usual assumption is that robots will replace us, which means either we will be freed from the necessity of work and we’ll all live like pampered aristocrats—that’s the utopian version—or the robot…

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2 years ago · Robert Tracinski

To get an idea of the extent to which people are going off the rails on this, check out a long overview of the strange rise and fall of an “AI doomer” cult.

According to the Effective Altruism movement, the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) exterminates humanity.

A thorough investigation of the EA movement’s public-facing discourse versus its inward-facing discourse found that it used “Bait-and-Switch” tactics to attract new members, who were led from global poverty to AI doomerism. The guidance was to promote the publicly facing cause (less controversial causes like “giving to the poor”) and keep quiet about the “core EA” causes (existential risk/AI safety). Influential Effective Altruists explicitly wrote that this was the best way to grow the movement.

This report focuses on one organization in particular:

Leverage Research ran “a psychology and human behavior research program.” An old version of its website (Wayback Machine, June 2013) indicates that the program involved “the simultaneous execution of a number of difficult projects pertaining to different facets of the human mind.”

It was understood among members that they were signing up to be guinea pigs for experiments in introspection, altering one's belief structure, and experimental group dynamics. According to various allegations, it led to dissociation and fragmentation, which they have found difficult to reverse.

In 2021, Zoe Curzi published a detailed post entitled “My Experience with Leverage Research.” “I was part of Leverage/Paradigm from 2017-2019,” she wrote, and experienced “narrative warfare, gaslighting, and reality distortion.” Each day included hours of “destabilizing mental/emotional work.” She went through many months of “near constant terror at being mentally invaded.” Her psychological distress and PTSD were due to Leverage’s “debugging sessions,” which aimed to “jailbreak” the members’ minds and (through confrontations) to “yield rational thoughts.”

We can pretty much stop right here, because no organization doing actual “psychological research” performs that research on its own members. It is an obviously invalid method because of course you will not get objective results from research performed on insiders who already know what outcome they’re looking for.

But you know what kind of organization likes to subject its members to intense psychological scrutiny and pressure, particular from those higher up in the organization? That’s right, cults. And that’s basically what this one became.

To be sure, movements based on apocalyptic beliefs—the robot apocalypse is nigh—tend to attract fanatics. But this one is interesting for two reasons.

First, it came out of a movement called “Effective Altruism,” which as far as I can tell is just retreaded utilitarianism, in which we will scientifically determine what is the greatest good for the greatest number. Altruism inherently makes people vulnerable to abuse, because it teaches them to subordinate their minds and well-being to demands imposed on them by others. As Ayn Rand put it in her own critique of altruism, “The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.” This is particularly true of utilitarianism, because it encourages the sacrifice of actual, individual human lives for the supposed “aggregate utility” of society as a whole—as judged by the self-appointed spokesmen for “society.”

Combine this with AI doomerism, and you get a trap to catch people who are predisposed to subordinate themselves to a social cause.

A post in the LessWrong Forum, “Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0,” claimed that the stated purpose of Leverage was to discover more theories of human behavior and civilization by “theorizing” while building power and then literally taking over US and/or global governance (the vibe was “take over the world”). The narrative within the group was that they were the only organization with a plan that could possibly work and the only real shot at saving the world; that there could be no possibility of success at one’s goal of saving the world outside the organization.

What is even more fascinating is that this spread among the so-called “Rationalist” community, which was formed with the stated goal of helping people arrive at more rational conclusions. But it is notoriously easy to substitute rationalization for rationality, and contemporary “Rationalists” often end up exemplifying the sense in which Objectivists use that term: to refer to the error of relying on a floating chain of deductions rather than grounding one’s views in reality.

This particular cult also involved, inevitably, a cryptocurrency scheme, which makes a good follow-up to my examination of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fraud.

Discourse

The Altruist Billionaire’s Philosophical Con

By Robert Tracinski…

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2 years ago · Robert Tracinski

It’s another example of how “Effective Altruism,” like more traditional forms of this moral philosophy, tends to end in fleecing the rubes.

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After Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, I noted that she was appealing to moderates only in style, but not in substance. Her big policy speech just before the Democratic convention partly confirms that.

The Failed Trial Balloon

The headline item from the speech is this proposal:

I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.

What does “price gouging” even mean, and what emergency are we currently in?

Harris talks about working to pass a federal price-gouging ban. The only one currently proposed, as far as I can tell, is sponsored by Elizabeth Warren. Its provisions apply under conditions “resulting from a natural disaster, failure or shortage of electric power or other source of energy, concerted labor action, lockout, civil disorder, war, military action, national or local emergency, public health emergency, or any other cause of an atypical disruption in such market.” None of these apply right now—unless one interprets “any other cause” so subjectively as to apply it at whim. Which presumably is the plan.

The actual effect of the law is summed up in this passage.

A person shall be presumed to be in violation [if]…regardless of the person’s position in a supply chain or distribution network, [he] sells or offers for sale a good or service at an excessive price compared to…the average price at which the good or service was sold or offered for sale by the person in the market during the 120-day period preceding such exceptional market shock.

Readers of Atlas Shrugged will find this reminiscent of the language of Directive 10-289, the fictional decree imposing economic dictatorship. What is similar is its invocation of a bogus national “emergency” and its frantic attempt to impose a stasis of prices (and all other economic activity) relative to a “base year.”

But this is not anywhere as sweeping in its scope, and crucially, it is not a directive. Don’t take that for granted. The last time she was trying to pander to her party’s left wing, back in 2020, Harris (along with Senator Warren) was very enamored with what she would do by executive order. Now she’s talking about working to pass legislation that will almost certainly not pass. (To do so would require a Democratic blowout in the Senate that is extremely unlikely to happen.) So this is political vaporware, like Donald Trump’s promise to build the wall. Its purpose is not to be implemented, but to pander to the left wing of the party.

To understand why this is happening, let’s go back to this idea of price gouging in the current “emergency.” The only emergency is that Democrats have discovered once again that inflation is apocalyptically unpopular with the American people. Inflation has receded to relatively normal levels, but two years ago, it spiked briefly to 9%—and voters still haven’t forgiven them for it. That is the only reason Democrats don’t have this election in the bag while the economy is otherwise doing so well.

We tried to warn them, but I guess Democrats will have to re-learn this lesson about inflation every couple of decades—then work hard to forget it in between.

This proposal from Harris is an attempt to forget even while it’s happening. It’s an appeal to the myth of “greedflation,” the notion that inflation is not the result of government policy but of the “greed” of businessmen, and it will end if we just crack down on it hard enough. This whole theory is an absurdity, of course. When inflation was low, did businesses not want to make a profit?

By the way, that link to the myth of “greedflation” is not necessarily to the best explanation of why this idea is wrong. It’s to an explanation from Matt Yglesias, who is solidly in the mainstream of the center left. Similarly, consider this response from another center-left columnist, the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat.

Everybody knows this is a bad idea. Probably Kamala Harris knows it is a bad idea. It is an exercise in pure pandering—populism for the left to match the populism of the right. But it has gone over with such a thud among the center-left intelligentsia that the Harris campaign is now trying to walk it back, claiming “that the idea is a targeted expansion of existing state powers rather than new government ‘price controls’ that would transform the US economy.”

I’m hoping that this was a trial balloon, and the campaign’s hasty retreat from the proposal indicates that the balloon crashed. Given the reception, I expect we’re not going to hear much about this between the convention and November—and probably not after that, either.

Then again, the Democrats’ urge to appease the far left is strong, and Harris has been more susceptible to it than Biden. So we’ll see what happens.

The Supply-Side Progressive Candidate

For me, though, the more interesting part of Harris’s policy speech was the section on housing—partly because it was not as bad, but was deficient in a different way. Pre-speech rumors had indicated that Harris would endorse national rent control. Like the “price-gouging” laws, this is the sort of thing that polls well with the general public and gets no more than 2% support from economists.

But she stopped short of that, only hinting that she might push for some kind of price-gouging style legislation. Here is the key passage, taken a bit at a time.

There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.

As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class, and we will do that together.

This is very good. It recognizes that the problem with housing is, to borrow a phrase, on the supply side. We are suffering from a housing famine. And it talks about taking down “barriers…at the state and local levels,” an almost-but-not-quite-explicit reference to zoning laws that limit construction. (As an example, see a recent New York Times report on a decades-long legal battle to limit local restrictions that had the effect—undoubtedly deliberate—of pricing low-income black residents out of their suburban homes.)

The problem is central planning on the local level, complete with literal five-year plans in which city and county governments decide exactly how much construction they will deign to allow. It is not clear what can be done on the federal level about these state and local laws. Harris’s proposal apparently includes “a $40 billion innovation fund” to “empower”—i.e., bribe—“local governments to fund and support local solutions to build housing.” Maybe it will work, and a Democratic president exerting pressure on the blue states might accomplish something.

But then Harris follows with this.

And we will make sure those homes actually go to working- and middle-class Americans, not just investors. Because, you know, some corporate landlords—some of them buy dozens, if not hundreds, of houses and apartments. Then they turn them around and rent them out at extremely high prices, and it can make it impossible, then, for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home.

Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it. It’s anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.

Rising rents and housing prices, like grocery prices, are an effect, not a cause. Rents are not going up because speculators are buying homes. Speculators are buying homes because rents are going up. This section of the speech is a relapse from the previous one. Harris briefly expressed a supply-side perspective—then lost sight of it.

This insistence that we’re going to build new homes, but not if icky corporations profit from it, is reminiscent of the contradiction of the “Supply Side Progressives,” who want America to build and grow but prefer only Big Government initiatives as the way to do it.

That is reinforced in the next passage, where she goes all the way back to a demand-side perspective.

We also know that as the price of housing has gone up, the size of down payments have gone up as well. Even if aspiring homeowners save for years, it often still is not enough.

So, in addition, while we work on the housing shortage, my administration will provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to help with the down payment on a new home.

This assistance will apparently take the form of special tax credits.

In recent comments on rising food spending, Max Tabarrok provides the most succinct explanation I’ve ever come across for the current policy on most of these issue. He talks about “the near-universal ‘restrict supply and subsidize demand’ strategy that governments undertake when regulating an industry.” Restrict supply and subsidize demand—and then complain that prices go up.

At least Harris it talking about loosening restrictions on supply, a little. But if she can’t do that, she will only make the problem worse by subsidizing demand, fueling the spiral of the Paradox of Subsidies: “Why do you subsidize something? To make it cheaper. What is the actual effect? To make it more expensive.”

The odd thing is the way Harris introduces the whole speech:

I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape and encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers and creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road. 

She’s going to cut bureaucracy and protect consumers! We’re going to have vague price-gouging laws and a stable business environment with consistent rules! Harris is being a very typical politician and trying to have everything both ways.

So part of this speech is Harris flirting with the idea of quasi-communist price controls—but the other part is her trying to be the candidate of the Supply-Side Progressives, with a similar mixture of good and bad parts.

Economic Populism for the Right

For Harris’s price control trial balloon, we should blame Democrats, of course, and especially the party’s left wing. But we can also blame the voters, because this stuff is actually popular. Here’s a revealing passage from a Vox article on rent control.

From a campaign perspective, rent caps poll quite well. In one May survey published by Navigator, a Democratic-aligned research group, pollsters found most voters overwhelmingly support cracking down on rent-gouging by corporate landlords…. Measures to build more homes as a way to drive affordability were far less popular with voters, by contrast, than providing financial aid to renters and regulating rents.

But because this sort of thing polls well, it is also appealing to the populist right—which, I am sorry to say, has an equal disdain for the hard realities of economics.

For example, for all the Republican complaints about Harris’s anti-“gouging” measure being communist, Republicans imposed their own anti-gouging policy during the pandemic.

But there is a more direct parallel. Donald Trump’s version of economic populism for the right is tariffs. It fits the same pattern: a policy that polls well with his base but is rejected by virtually all economists.

Here’s a quick summary.

Donald Trump is campaigning for president on a vow to hike tariffs on foreign goods: 10 percent on all goods from all countries—or even 20 percent, as he has more recently suggested—topped by an extra-punitive rate of at least 60 percent on goods from China. 

The Cato Institute seems the best place to go for an analysis of this, including a flow chart refuting Trump’s ridiculous assertion that Americans won’t pay for tariffs.

Or you could consider this cogent description of tariffs as a new “national sales tax.”

Now compare what Donald Trump plans to do. He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries.

That will devastate Americans. It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs: a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication.

And, you know, economists have done the math. Donald Trump’s plan would cost a typical family $3,900 a year. At this moment when everyday prices are too high, he will make them even higher. 

Where is this from? It’s from Kamala Harris, in the very same policy speech I analyzed above.

It’s a curious situation. George Will refers to price controls and tariffs as “dueling Harris and Trump economic magic acts.” Yet at the same time, Republicans can accurately diagnose the economic idiocy of Democrats, and Democrats can accurately diagnose the economic idiocy of Republicans.

Combined with Trump’s plan for mass deportation, his proposed tariffs are an attempt to satisfy the xenophobic zeal of his nationalist base, at the price of crashing the entire economy.

Since today’s edition has been pretty grim reading, I thought you might need a bit of an antidote to pessimism. For that, I often turn to Pessimists Archive, so check out a recent post by Louis Anslow describing how the French initially freaked out over what is now their greatest icon: the Eiffel Tower.

Bad things tend to dominate commentary on the news, causing us to miss the continued reality of human progress. So I have promised to pause occasionally and put together a brief roundup of good news.

A lot of that good news is about science and technology—there is some mixed news from the “year of elections,” but that’s another roundup—but I can’t pass up mentioning one other big story: the US cricket team’s surprise win over Pakistan. I don’t know much about cricket, but I’ve read the British newspapers enough to know that Pakistan is one of the world’s top teams, so I have an idea how big this is.

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CNN tries to explain it to Americans by comparing it to the Miracle on Ice, the surprise American win over the Russians at the 1980 Olympics.

Call it the Miracle on Grass.

A national cricket team that most Americans didn’t even know they had beat one of the sport’s global powers Pakistan, for whom the game is a national obsession….

Cricket briefly flickered into US consciousness as the result popped up on news sites in a rare moment for a sport that lives in obscurity in the United States outside the South Asian and Caribbean communities.

“Beating Pakistan in the World Cup is going to open many doors for us,” said USA Cricket captain Monank Patel in Texas, where the game took place in a converted minor league baseball park.

Corey Anderson, who represented New Zealand internationally and now plays for the US team, told CNN he got hundreds of text messages after the win. “It’s probably shocked the cricketing world,” said the 33-year-old who has an American wife and kids.

This report includes a brief explainer of how the game of cricket works—and, well, it almost made sense. I’ll keep working at it.

I just wrote a draft on this for Discourse making the argument that if America can win at cricket, a game vanishingly few of us even understand, then we can win at anything. And the key to this, as the excerpt above indicates, is being willing to import talent—such as the Indian, Caribbean, and other Anglosphere immigrants who make up the US cricket team.

I’ll post that piece when it goes up.

Situation Normal: We Think It’s All Fouled Up

One of our biases toward disaster and apocalypse is that we tend to pay a lot of attention to problems when they are problems—but the moment something ceases to be a crisis, the moment it returns to normal, it drops out of the news and is forgotten. We remember it only as a problem and not as a solution.

You see this in politics when crime spikes briefly for a year or so and everyone becomes convinced that crime is spiraling out of control. They go on thinking this, even as crime falls back down to previous levels. A Pew overview sums it up: “Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.” You could say maybe the people know better, and their own personal experience is telling them something that is not captured in the statistics. But: “While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities.” In other words, everybody thinks crime is high somewhere else—probably New York City, or maybe San Francisco.

Meanwhile, crime is way down again.

The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the US population, that provided the FBI with data through December.

“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends.

The big picture here is that crime rates actually did increase precipitously from the 1960s through the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, they began a steady long-term decrease to the relatively safe levels of the last decade. There was a brief spike in 2020, as the pandemic hit, and there are various theories about why this happened. Yes, the George Floyd protests and the “defund the police” movement in 2020 probably had an effect. But for the most part, the police were never actually defunded, and the increase and subsequent decrease in crime also happened in places that were not directly affected by those trends.

The explanation offered in the NBC News report I linked to above seems more plausible.

Asher and other experts say the biggest factor behind the drop in crime may simply be the resumption of anti-crime initiatives by local governments and courts that had stopped during the pandemic.

“After a terrible period of underfunding and understaffing caused by the pandemic, local governments have, by most measures, returned to pre-pandemic levels,” wrote John Roman, a criminologist at the University of Chicago. In an interview, Roman said, “The courts were closed, a lot of cops got sick, a lot of police agencies told their officers not to interact with the public. Teachers were not in schools, not working with kids.”

The pandemic caused a lot of things to grind to a halt, including various anti-crime measures. Once they got going again, things returned to normal, as they did in most other areas. But due to our biases toward gloom and doom, it takes a long time for the public’s feelings about crime to readjust to the reality.

To borrow from the family friendly version I heard as a kid to explain the acronym SNAFU, the situation is normal—it’s not all fouled up, but we think it is.

Call Off the Beepocalypse

Something similar has happened in a rather different field. The Washington Postrecently reported that honeybees are back.

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

The Post report tries to return to its normal by focusing on the gloom-and-doom aspect of the story. (We don’t know very much about the population of non-domesticated bees.) But the Competitive Enterprise Institute has an overview of how the crisis disappeared.

Researchers were long been split on what was causing the bees to die. Some claimed that infestations of tiny mites were killing the bees and causing what biologists termed “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD. Other bee experts insisted that agricultural pesticides were to blame, and that farmers who were trying to kill off other insect pests were unintentionally destroying their own livelihood and future by damaging their most important pollinators, the honeybees.

My former Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Angela Logomasini wrote quite a bit about this debate when it was raging…. “Honeybees will not go extinct any time soon for the same reason we don’t fear the loss of cows or chickens,” she predicted. “All these species have important market value. Honeybees are largely a domesticated species, not completely different from cattle or even the family dog, and their very presence here in the United States has always been driven by the desire for honey or pollination services. In fact, when the colonists appeared in America, there were no honeybees. They had to be imported from Europe so that the settlers could have an affordable supply of honey.”

And that is basically the same reason reported by the Washington Post for why bee populations have improved…. That is the opposite of the criticism that we heard for years, which was that a greedy capitalist desire to maximize farm yields led large farm operators to overuse pesticides, which were supposedly pushing bees to the brink of extinction….

It’s certainly true that some hives in the mid-to-late 2000s were dying off, raising the cost of pollination services for farms. In response, though, people in the agriculture industry invested more time and money into the world of beekeeping, and now we have more bees than ever.

The folks at CEI are great fans of the economist Julian Simon, and this story is a good example of his argument that the “ultimate resource” is human ingenuity, which has proven capable of averting every claimed apocalypse.

Climate Resilience

Some improvements in human life come so gradually that we don’t notice them until someone finds a way to measure the difference. In this case, Our World in Data put together a review of long-term improvements in weather forecasting.

The Met Office says its four-day forecasts are now as accurate as its one-day forecasts were 30 years ago….

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) produces global numerical weather models. While national weather agencies use much higher-resolution processing to get local forecasts, these global models provide a crucial input into these systems. The ECMWF publishes analyses of its errors over time. This is shown in the chart below. It shows the difference between the forecast and the actual weather outcome for forecasts 3, 5, 7, and 10 days in advance….

Three-day forecasts—shown in blue—have been pretty accurate since the 1980s, and have still gotten a lot better over time. Today the accuracy is around 97%. The biggest improvements we’ve seen are for longer timeframes. By the early 2000s, 5-day forecasts were “highly accurate” and 7-day forecasts are reaching that threshold today. 10-day forecasts aren’t quite there yet but are getting better.

This report also graphs out the improving accuracy of prediction for the paths of hurricanes. “Meteorologists can now make pretty accurate predictions of where a hurricane will hit three or four days in advance, which lets cities and communities prepare while preventing unnecessary evacuations that might have been implemented in the past.”

That leads us to the significance of weather forecasting, which is about a lot more than whether the rain will ruin your picnic.

Accurate forecasts can save lives by giving early warnings of storms, heat waves, and disasters. Farmers use them for agricultural management, which can make the difference between a lost harvest or a harvest of plenty. Grid operators rely on accurate forecasts of temperatures for heating and cooling demand, and how much energy they’ll get from wind and solar farms. Pilots and sailors need them to carry people across oceans safely. Accurate information about future weather is often absolutely vital.

This report also indicates that there is still a gap between developed nations (particularly the US and Europe) versus less developed nations, both in the accuracy of their forecasts and in the networks to broadcast this information to the people who need it—which suggests a relatively inexpensive way to make further improvements in the lives of people in less developed nations.

The Paradox of mRNA

I’m going to have to write something in the near future about the big paradox of the pandemic years, which is that we produced a vaccine in record time that saved many millions of lives—the biggest demonstration in decades of the value of vaccines. Yet the result is that anti-vaccine sentiment has increased.

I think it’s a combination of three things. First, we are more culturally primed for anti-technology sentiment than we were when the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Second, thanks to vaccines, we are more culturally removed from the point at which infectious disease was a leading cause of death and a threat that continually loomed over human life, so we no longer appreciate what vaccines have saved us from. Third, a long period between major pandemics meant that nobody had to think about vaccines. They accepted them as a matter of course. But the pandemic suddenly required people to form an opinion about a new vaccine, and when people are required to think, a certain percentage of them will quite frankly be bad at it. Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is.

At any rate, misplaced skepticism about vaccines has centered especially around the new technology of mRNA vaccines. But again, the paradox is that this targets a new technology that works. Specifically, mRNA vaccines offer tremendous speed and flexibility in creating new vaccines that shows enormous promise for treating things that could never be treated before.

In this case, it’s a vaccine for brain cancer.

Researchers at the University of Florida report they have developed an mRNA cancer vaccine that quickly reprograms the immune system to attack glioblastoma in a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients….

The vaccine was personalized to each patient, with the aim of maximizing immune system response. To generate each vaccine RNA was first extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor, and then the messenger RNA was amplified and wrapped in the newly designed packaging of biocompatible lipid nanoparticles, to make tumor cells “look” like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream and prompt an immune-system response.

The result:

“In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’—immune cold, very few immune cells, very silenced immune response—to ‘hot,’ very active immune response. That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response.”

The irony is that one of the immune responses that is triggered is “cytokines,” the reaction that proved so deadly in covid infections. (In case you don’t recall, the body attempted to mobilize a cytokine response against covid, but the response required was so intense it damaged the patient’s own tissue, perforating his lungs.) Now, by way of mRNA vaccines, it will provide a way to save lives and shorten or eliminate much more devastating chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

The Era of Genetic Therapy

We are actually on the cusp of an era of breakthroughs in genetic therapy. Here is just one.

A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.

Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene.

But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums….

A harmless virus is used to carry the working gene into the patient. The trial is “just the beginning of gene therapies”, Bance said.

It is interesting to contemplate the extent to which genetic engineering specifically has been a focus of apocalyptic attitudes toward technology. Even the famously optimistic Star Trek franchise regarded it as taboo (though they have partly walked that back in one of the better episodes of the recent “Strange New Worlds” series). But contrast the fear to the reality.

Augmented Humans

Stuart Hayashi brought my attention to an article that explores the power of technology on a more philosophical level, including the speculation that the use of tools actually augments the human body in a very literal sense.

When a tool in your hand “becomes part of you,” it’s not just a metaphor. And it’s not just a statistical description of the motions of your body and the motions of the tool. It’s real. Your brain makes it real.

Remarkably, neurons that respond specifically to objects that are within reach of your hand will also respond to objects that are close to a tool that’s in your hand. Cognitive psychologists Jessica Witt and Dennis Proffitt found that when they asked people to use a reaching tool (a 15-inch orchestra conductor’s baton) to reach targets that were just out of range, the targets looked closer than when they intended to reach without the tool…..

Whether they are tools, toys, or mirror reflections, external objects temporarily become part of who we are all the time. When I put my eyeglasses on, I am a being with 20/20 vision, not because my body can do that—it can’t—but because my body-with-augmented-vision-hardware can. So that’s who I am when I wear my glasses: a hardware-enhanced human with 20/20 vision.

If you have thousands of hours of practice with a musical instrument, when you play music with that object, it feels like an extension of your body—because it is.

This explains to me why I enjoy performing on the piano and (to a lesser extent, since I have so many fewer hours of practice) the violin. It’s not just my love for the music. It’s the sensation of creating that music, in effect, out of my own person.

All modern humans are, in effect, augmented by our technology.

A Natural History of the Internet

The piece above goes on to speculate that smartphones and the Internet can even be experienced as extensions of our body. I think that’s taking it a bit far.

Then again, I was stuck by a certain amount of wistfulness in reading about the final end of Usenet, which has achieved my own personal goal in life: to survive so long that by the time you die, most people had no idea you were still around.

A combination of the Web and social media from an era before either existed, Usenet was the first encounter many of us had with the internet.

In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups.

Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads….

Much of the vocabulary we use today to talk about using the net springs from Usenet. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files, for example, started on Usenet as summaries of information about a newsgroup so the members wouldn't need to repeat the basics for newcomers.  

Other phrases aren't as much fun. Flame and flame war, for instance, also started on Usenet. We've always been, I'm sorry to say, mean to each other. At the same time, we've also tried to be kinder to each other. The concept is called netiquette. Then, as now, it's always been more honored in the breach than in practice.

That early experience is why I haven’t been too fazed by anything I’ve encountered on today’s social media. As this recollection puts it, “In many ways, Usenet is a warning about how social networks can go bad. All the same problems we see today on social networks appeared first on Usenet.”

As everyone has moved to other Internet platforms over the years, Usenet has been increasingly dominated by spam and other forms of noise, and it has just stopped being supported by Google. Sic transit gloria mundi.

There are some lessons here that the proprietors of our contemporary platforms ought to heed.

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If watching the news, with its usual parade of terrible new developments, may have you throwing up your hands and exclaiming, “O tempora, o mores!” Yet I just came across an absolutely brilliant bit of analysis in the Washington Post that warns against the dangers of false nostalgia.

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Pollsters from YouGov set out to find which era was “the good old days,” so they “asked 2,000 adults which decade had the best and worst music, movies, economy and so forth, across 20 measures.” They found no consensus.

We did spot some peaks: When asked which decade had the most moral society, the happiest families, or the closest-knit communities, white people and Republicans were about twice as likely as black people and Democrats to point to the 1950s. The difference probably depends on whether you remember that particular decade for “Leave it to Beaver,” drive-in theaters, and 12 Angry Men—or the Red Scare, the murder of Emmett Till, and massive resistance to school integration.

As one expert puts it, “nostalgia is colored by political preferences. Surprise, surprise.”

But any political, racial or gender divides were dwarfed by what happened when we charted the data by generation. Age, more than anything, determines when you think America peaked.

So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics, or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

This is not a big surprise. This article mentions another study a few years ago indicating that nostalgia for music tends to center around whatever was popular when you were 17. After that, you gradually become convinced that our music was so much better than that noise the kids are listening to these days.

It’s revealing how much nostalgia about economics and politics, not to mention the tempora and the mores, is formed at a very young age, often under the age of 10. This implies that everything looked better when we were surrounded by protective adults who shielded us from everything bad in the world—and when we weren’t responsible for anything.

The flipside of this is that for everyone, things are the worst in the present.

[A]lmost without exception, if you ask an American when times were worst, the most common response will be “right now!”

This holds true even when “now” is clearly not the right answer. For example, when we ask which decade had the worst economy, the most common answer is today. The Great Depression—when, for much of a decade, unemployment exceeded what we saw in the worst month of pandemic shutdowns—comes in a grudging second.

What follows is a discussion of “declinism” and the tendency of the past to always look better in retrospect than it felt at the time. We remember the good parts and tend to forget the bad parts. Their conclusion? Wait long enough and “the 2020s will be the good old days.”

The Good Old Days

I am fascinated by the idea that when we feel nostalgia, we are not feeling nostalgia for the way things were back then. We are feeling nostalgia for the way we were back then.

Similarly, I suspect that when we feel dissatisfaction with our current time, we are actually expressing dissatisfaction with our current stage of life (which we will later look back on with hazy nostalgia). So the Boomer conservatives who think the culture has gone down the tubes are to some extent just expressing the frustration of old age and the sense that they are no longer the ones shaping events in a world that is passing them by. Similarly, young conservative men who flirt with the alt-right and complain that feminism has ruined everything are often just complaining that they can’t get a date. It has become a cliché for them to report on moderating their views after they begin to get their lives together.

Among young people on the left, the version of this you hear most often is that the older generations have ruined the world for young people, who are unable to afford anything or live a decent life because everything is outside their reach. What they are actually complaining about is that they are in their 20s, an age at which they are no longer supported by the higher level of wealth accumulated by their parents, and they are still in relatively low-paying entry level jobs. They have entered an adult world where they see all sorts of enticing things they would like to own or enjoy, but they can’t afford very much of it yet.

This is not an economic condition caused by capitalism or even by any particular outside event or economic upheaval. It is merely one of the conditions of youth.

And this is why we need to rely on data rather than vibes to understand what is going on in the world. It turns out that even as every generation complains that the world was ruined by the generations before it, every generation is actually better off and wealthier at each stage of life than their forerunners. And that includes the latest generation to whine about their fate, Generation Z, according to an article in The Economist with the delightful title, “Gen Z Is Unprecedentedly Rich.”

In America hourly pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13% year on year, compared with 6% for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest ‘young person premium’ since reliable data began (see chart 3). In Britain, where youth pay is measured differently, the average hourly pay of people aged 18-21 rose by an astonishing 15% last year, outstripping pay rises among other age groups by an unusually wide margin. In New Zealand the average hourly pay of people aged 20-24 increased by 10%, compared with an average of 6%.

Strong wage growth boosts family incomes. A new paper by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and inflation. Millennials were somewhat better off than Gen X—those born between 1965 and 1980—when they were the same age. Zoomers, however, are much better off than millennials were at the same age. The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age.

None of this is a surprise, because that is exactly what we should expect in a functioning, dynamic economy—constant growth that ensures every generation will be better off than the one before.

As I pointed out a while back, we are becoming an upper-middle-class country. But we will get there while constantly complaining.

For related ideas, see my comments about sense of life, the blue dots of outrage, and the message of Groundhog Day. I have a feeling I am going to have to integrate all of these observations into a wider theory at some point.

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I have a new piece up at Discourse asking, “What Replaces the Biblical Cinematic Universe?”

This is part of a series of articles I’ve written in the past few years responding to the precipitous decline in religious belief and trying to figure out what a secular culture—which is where we are clearly headed—can and should look like. Except that in this piece, I am trying to describe what it already looks like.

Specifically, I look at the role of “shared spirituality,” that is, “a set of common experiences and references that help us talk about these issues and find a sense of community and fellowship.”

The answer to that need is already here, and chances are you are already a fan. Secular art and literature deal with the same spiritual issues as religion, and this includes mass popular culture with its franchises and fandoms, to which we are already transferring some of the sense of loyalty and personal identity that used to be the hallmarks of religion.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Hollywood produced a series of grand-scale Biblical epics that you might think of as the Biblical Cinematic Universe. These days, we are replacing that with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its various rivals and copycats.

A lot of this is based on an article I wrote eight years ago about the proliferation of fictional “universes,” which holds up really well. For the present purpose, I zero in on one aspect of this phenomenon.

Each of these sci-fi and fantasy series is not just a franchise but a literary universe, not only in the sense of a shared setting with distinctive terminology, but also in a more esthetic and even spiritual sense.

All works of art create their own “universe” in the sense of a distinctive view of the universe, of human beings and what we ought to expect from the world. Taking what is probably the most universally known example, consider the values you might draw out of the Star Wars films and stories. There is a longing for adventure, the importance of loyalty to friends, a certain amount of irreverence toward authority, and of course resistance against tyranny; but also an injunction to trust your feelings and intuitions (if we don’t take all that stuff about the Force too literally), and a warning against letting fear, anger and hatred control your life.

Or consider my own favored denomination: Star Trek. Its advantage over other franchises is its projection of an ideal future in which we have risen above war, tyranny, and poverty, and achieved a utopia of peace, prosperity, and technological advancement. Anyone who has watched some of the shows has a sense of the “Federation values” that make this utopia possible and what is expected of a Starfleet officer: rationality, professionalism, respect for the individual, tolerance, and intellectual curiosity….

So in addition to matching the scope of religious mythology, these fictional universes also serve the same spiritual function as religion.

Yes, a lot of this is just me justifying the fact that I occasionally like to write about the latest Star Trek series. It’s not just my personal interest—it says something about the values of our culture! And while “I would personally prefer if people were spending more time reading long, highbrow philosophical novels”—there is not, as yet, an Ayn Rand Cinematic Universe—I point out that a widely shared cultural touchstone needs to draw from popular culture, which is less intellectually demanding.

This outlook helps explain a lot of things that otherwise make no sense, such as “the recent tribulations of J.K. Rowling, who has been attacked for relatively minor deviations from the ‘progressive’ orthodoxy held by some of the fans who grew up on her Harry Potter stories.”

If you describe their complaint in ordinary terms—“an author I like expressed a political opinion I disagree with”—the intensity of this controversy makes no sense. But if you realize that the “wizarding world” of Harry Potter is one of our new stand-ins for religion, it makes more sense. To this breakaway sect, Rowling is like a prophet-turned-apostate who has betrayed the true religion.

But note that this controversy is really a clash between two approaches to a shared public spirituality. Our fictional universes and their fandoms tend to express their creed in general terms that leave room for interpretation. By contrast, the overtly political creeds that offer themselves as new outlets for the old religious fervor tend to require adherence to very specific dogmas and the repetition of exact formulas. You tell me which is healthier.

And the biggest advantage of these literary alternatives to religion is that this time around, we know it’s all fiction.

We might roll our eyes at some of Gene Roddenberry’s woozy utopianism, or we might not like the direction some of the Star Trek stories take. Or if George Lucas re-edits a film so that Han doesn’t shoot first, we can hoard the original version, a bit like traditional Catholics protesting Vatican II by clinging to the Latin mass. But we know that none of these opinions is the “true” faith because it was all made up to begin with.

The result: “Our participation in these fictional universes satisfies our spiritual need for a coherent view of the world and a way to express our values, and it helps us share our enthusiasm with like-minded people. But it does so in a way that leaves each of us, individually, as the arbiter of what we think is true and right.”

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

What Replaces the Biblical Cinematic Universe?

Americans are becoming increasingly secular. Those whose religious convictions are “nothing in particular” have become effectively the largest denomination in the country, and at the rate things are changing, Christians may no longer be a majority by the middle of this century…

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9 months ago · Robert Tracinski

I have not been the type to focus on atheism as an issue, but as I watch religious faith falling apart with an unexpected rapidity, I will have to focus more energy on what comes next. By coincidence, I have a piece on a related topic that is about to be posted any day now at a different publication, so stay tuned.

Update: Here it is.

The UnPopulist

The Faithless Are the More Reliable Liberals

The UnPopulist has published a series of articles on how political liberalism is compatible with and supported by the world’s major religious traditions: Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists. With such solid support from every major faith, you would think liberalism ought to be winning hands-down…

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9 months ago · 53 likes · 47 comments · Robert Tracinski

In the meantime, check out one of my own favorite pieces I’ve written about the cultural messages of popular culture, exploring individualist themes in Star Trek:

The Tracinski Letter

Trekonomics

Reason's Nick Gillespie recently posted a list of the five most anti-libertarian television shows ever, and there's a serious error. Actually, there are two serious errors. The first, larger error is that Reason put together a list of the five best libertarian TV shows, and…

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10 years ago · 4 likes · Robert Tracinski

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I have a new piece up at Discourse inspired by a gem of a book that I found thanks to a recommendation by Jason Crawford.

I recently tracked down a copy of a fascinating old book, Our World in Space, by Isaac Asimov with illustrations by Robert McCall. Published in 1974, five years after the moon landing, it wonderfully captures a moment of exuberant excitement about the achievements of space exploration….

Asimov was a writer of classic science fiction (his Foundation series was recently brought to the screen) and a prolific popularizer of science. McCall was an artist known for his portrayals of space exploration—real NASA missions as well as imagined future technology—and for the giant mural, “The Prologue and the Promise,” that he created for Disney’s Horizons pavilion at EPCOT, which set a standard for optimistic portrayals of the future. You can see his visual influence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the Star Trek franchise. And his 1974 illustration of a spherical space station just might have had an influence on another big science fiction franchise.

I have used “The Prologue and the Promise” as an illustration several times before to sum up the attitude of techno-optimism. McCall died in 2010, but there is a magnificent website with high-quality images of his work. Go ahead, poke around there for a bit. I’ll be waiting here.

Oh, and did McCall influence Star Wars? I haven’t been able to find direct evidence, but the timeline works out, and, well, you tell me what this McCall illustration might have inspired.

But all of this is not primarily what my article is about. My article was touched off by a passage from Asimov’s text that I found jarringly incongruous.

In one respect, a Moon colony, or any colony or combination of colonies outside the Earth, cannot help us. No one of them, nor all of them together, can help us solve our population dilemma. If anyone thinks that the important reason for exploring space is to find outlets for our expanding population, let him think again....

We must, of our own determination, and here on Earth, halt the population increase by balancing the birth and death rates.... That leaves us with the necessity of decreasing the birth rate....

Remember that, above all.

The thing that jumps out most is that this was completely wrong, and fifty years later, we’re worrying that we have too little population growth. But the overpopulation hysteria was so completely dominant in 1974 that Asimov felt compelled to stick this bit of Malthusian pessimism right in the middle of a book that is in all other respects wildly optimistic.

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I go on to ask what other idea we’re getting similarly wrong today. My answer is global warming, which even pro-progress, techno-optimist writers will almost universally append with a similar warning: “Remember that, above all.” I go on to examine why overpopulation turned out to be a bust and to apply those lessons to global warming. The central lesson is this:

Asimov—who had just predicted that abundant energy from fusion reactors (always 30 years in the future) would enable us to provide all the resources for hundreds of millions of people to live on the moon—could not imagine humans being able to support another four billion people in the much more favorable conditions on Earth….

The 20th-century economist Julian Simon famously argued that the human mind is the “ultimate resource.” Ingenuity and innovation allow us to tap into far more new resources than humans can use up—so long as people are free to put these innovations into action. The bursting of the overpopulation hysteria proved him right, but those looking for a new reason for pessimism, and a new justification for restrictive policies, simply fell back onto global warming. Many of them still reject the possibility that the same ultimate resource that allowed us to prosper with a growing population could also allow us to thrive even if the climate is changing.

All of this is distracting us from building the hyper-technological future Asimov and McCall envisioned.

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

What Big Thing Are We Getting Wrong About the Future?

I recently tracked down a copy of a fascinating old book, “Our World in Space,” by Isaac Asimov with illustrations by Robert McCall. Published in 1974, five years after the moon landing, it wonderfully captu…

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8 months ago · Robert Tracinski

Speaking of techno-optimism, there are a few links I’ve been holding onto about some recent progress. Let’s start with the kind that would have inspired Asimov and McCall.

Last September, a space probe I’ve been following with great interest completed its mission. OSIRIS-REx returned a sample of an asteroid to Earth.

The capsule, released four hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery teams in four helicopters raced to the landing site in a carefully rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule quickly to lower the risk of contamination.

They found the capsule on the desert floor, intact and sitting perfectly upright, as if it had taken pains to be presentable. A helicopter hauled the capsule on a 100-foot line to a specially prepared “clean room” in a military hangar. It will be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for scientific study.

And here’s the even cooler part of the story.

The parent spacecraft then fired thrusters to ensure that it would not wind up in Utah, but would instead move on to another target, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.

Apophis? Man, some of these asteroid names are pretty heavy.

There are a couple of reasons for studying the asteroids. One is “planetary defense.” The asteroid targeted in this mission, Bennu, has an orbit that crosses that of the Earth.

NASA’s DART mission last year demonstrated that it is possible to fly a spacecraft into an asteroid and change its motion. The space agency would still like to know more about the composition of these dangerous near-Earth objects and how they might potentially be diverted, which is part of what scientists will study using the sample from Bennu.

The other is asteroid mining. In theory, certain rare elements that are difficult to find on Earth may be present in larger quantities in asteroids. This idea led to a wave of asteroid mining startups about ten years ago, which subsequently went bust. But people are trying again.

“The space infrastructure on Earth is pretty mature and we can buy a fairly high-energy launch for a fairly low cost,” says Jose Acain, AstroForge’s cofounder and Chief Technology Officer. He adds that there are also now a lot of satellite manufacturers to choose from; for its CubeSat tests launching this year, AstroForge has chosen Orb Astro in Oxford in the U.K.

“A lot of capital expenses that we would have had if we had started this company 10 or 15 years ago, we don't have now,” Acain adds, “so we can really focus on the actual mining tech that we need to actually extract these platinum-group metals from these asteroids.”

The platinum-group metals (PGMs)—iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium—which are among the rarest mineral commodities in Earth’s crust. Just 30 tonnes of rhodium, used in catalytic converters, are mined every year, and only three tonnes of iridium. Mostly these minerals come from mines in South Africa, Siberia, with some mines in the US and Canada.

But Acain coauthored a paper published in the January Planetary and Space Sciencesuggesting PGMs are abundant in meteorites. “From studying the meteorite database, we found that in general there is a higher concentration of PGMs regardless of what asteroid type you go after, but it’s significantly higher if you go after metallic M-types,” says Acain.

As another asteroid mining startup put it: “Nobody wants to think about a future in which humans don’t thrive. So it’s time for us to go into space.”

This is not happening perhaps in the form McCall had in mind, which is to say that the current round of space exploration is being done by robots, not humans. Then again, I don’t think that would have been as much of a surprise for Asimov.

Asteroid mining is still somewhat speculative, but human thriving does not depend on us having to go into space—not quite yet. There is great deal of abundance still untapped on Earth.

I linked recently to a discussion about environmental objections to mining new deposits of lithium—which is ironic, since lithium is a key material for the batteries in electric cars, which we supposedly need for environmental reasons.

But it’s worth exulting in the sheer size of these new discoveries.

Straddling the border of Oregon and Nevada rests McDermitt Caldera. Barren and desolate, the crater-like depression pockmarked with crags and scars might seem bland and lifeless to the layperson’s eye, but the real treasure is what lies just below ground. The 616-square-mile region could be home to the world’s largest known lithium deposit….

Reporting new readings in the journal Science Advances from mineral samples taken at Thacker Pass, home to a future lithium mine in the southern part of McDermitt, geologists say that unique clays composed of a mineral called illite hold nearly unprecedented lithium concentrations. While most claystone lithium concentrations average around 0.4% by weight, the illite clays contain 1.3% to 2.4%.

The finding reinforces estimates made by the authors’ colleagues back in 2020 — that sediments within McDermitt Caldera hold 20 to 40 million metric tons of extractable lithium, and perhaps far more. That’s at least twice the amount held within the brines beneath the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the former largest known lithium deposit on Earth.

See another report on a big lithium find in Maine, and the political obstacles to mining it. Perhaps this is the reason we have to go into space: to get far enough away from regulators and NIMBYs.

The prospects for development on Earth are not just mineralogical.

I mention the Green Revolution in my article on the overpopulation hysteria. By way of Jason Crawford, I recently came across a journal article quantifying the gain for just one food item: the strawberry.

Incidentally, what I didn’t know is that modern strawberries are all derived from a spontaneous hybrid found in the gardens of Versailles 300 years ago. But they have been developed a great deal since then.

The annual production of strawberry has increased by one million tonnes in the US and 8.4 million tonnes worldwide since 1960. Here we show that the US expansion was driven by genetic gains from Green Revolution breeding and production advances that increased yields by 2,755%.

We’re about to experience a similar explosion of benefits from mRNA vaccines.

Moderna has already filed for regulatory approval of an mRNA vaccine for the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a cold-like illness that can be severe in infants and older adults. The company also has an mRNA flu vaccine in late-stage clinical trials….

[R]esearchers can add in mRNA for many different flu strains to create a vaccine that might provide broader protection. Last year, a team at the University of Pennsylvania tested an mRNA vaccine containing antigens from all 20 known influenza subtypes that infect humans….

Flu is just the beginning. The list of diseases for which mRNA vaccines are being developed goes on (and on and on): malaria, HIV, Zika virus, Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, herpes, norovirus, Lyme disease, Nipah virus, C. difficile, hepatitis C, leptospirosis, tuberculosis, shingles, acne, chlamydia, and many others. 

And the report goes on to list potential mRNA therapies for cancer and cystic fibrosis. But I should warn you that there is already a new wave of technophobe hysteria over mRNA technology.

Here’s an anecdote I found very revealing.

When Karikó and Weissman made their breakthrough discovery in 2005, “I told Kati our phones are going to ring off the hook,” Weissman said in an interview with Boston University’s alumni magazine in 2021. “But nothing happened. We didn’t get a single call.”

There’s a lesson here about the unpredictability of scientific advances, which often develop in obscurity, and perhaps also about the perverse human preference for bad news over good news.

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I have a new piece up at Discourse asking, “What Would a Pro-Free-Market 'Industrial Policy' Look Like?”

A strong US manufacturing base is certainly important for national security. American dominance in the aerospace industry has obvious strategic benefits, and the pandemic reminded us that other kinds of manufacturing can be important, too. When we suddenly had to produce millions of KN95 masks to guard against an airborne infection, we regretted having to rely on China for their supply. Moreover, we should encourage growth in manufacturing for the same reason we encourage growth in general—to enjoy even greater wealth and progress and enjoy it sooner.

Yet advice for how to encourage manufacturing usually comes from advocates of “industrial policy”—a euphemism for “central planning”—whose main instruments are tariffs and subsidies that cost far more money per job than they create. Or it is the domain of grandstanding politicians who boast about illusory deals that produce more photo ops than finished goods. If we actually want more manufacturing, we have to look at the conditions required for it to grow from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Read the article to get the whole run-down.

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Here’s my favorite point. The same people who talk about how they want more domestic manufacturing also want to restrict immigration. But “who do you think was working in all those old factories from the heyday of American manufacturing?”

They included a big cohort of first- and second-generation immigrants. My grandfather, who worked a manufacturing job in the 1940s and ’50s—the classic era of American manufacturing dominance—was also the first in his Polish immigrant family to be born in the United States. His counterpart today is most likely in a family from Latin America or Asia instead of Eastern Europe.

Similarly, I make a counter-intuitive argument about how trade, instead of destroying domestic manufacturing, is necessary for it.

At the height of its dominance, [US manufacturing] was always connected to a global web of suppliers and parts-makers. Leonard Read’s classic primer on economics, “I, Pencil”—written in 1958—describes how the production of a humble pencil depended on parts and materials gathered from Italy to Indonesia. If that’s what made American industry great the first time around, why not embrace it now?

As the image at the top of this post indicates, I did not neglect to mention the Jones Act, a perfect cautionary tale about the destructive effects of protectionism.

Among the other issues I discuss, there’s one more I want to single out: the importance of energy.

Where I live in Central Virginia, Amazon recently announced plans to build two massive data centers. One of them will be built right next door to the North Anna Nuclear Power Station. You get the idea: The electrons will come fresh and piping hot out of the reactor and straight into the data center. Like the servers for a data center, most manufacturing operations are hungry for energy. But North Anna’s Units 1 and 2 went online in 1978 and 1980—more than four decades ago. Units 3 and 4 were planned but never built. In the entire United States, only two new nuclear power plants have come online in the last 30 years. How many factories might have been built next door to the nuclear power plants that were killed in their planning stages by regulators and activists?

As a writer, I am particularly proud of that image of electrons coming “fresh and piping hot out of the reactor.” And yes, Mr. Wakeland, I know this is not literally how it works.

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

What Would a Pro-Free-Market 'Industrial Policy' Look Like?

This is the second of two essays from Robert Tracinski on the American manufacturing. Rob’s first piece took issue with the notion that manufacturing in the U.S. is in decline. In my most recent essay for Discourse, I debunked the myth that American manufacturing is “declining” or that “we don’t make things anymore.” But is there a reason other than pur…

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9 months ago · Robert Tracinski

One of the issues I mention in the article is how regulations and environmental activism prevent us from accessing not just energy but natural resources that are available in the US. I link in passing to controversies over vast new lithium deposits discovered in the US, providing us with a key material for modern high-capacity batteries.

I didn’t have space to go into this in more detail, but it’s worth checking out a well-written article at a Nevada news site that will give you a real flavor for why we can’t get things done in the US.

A new study published in Science Advances hypothesizes that the McDermitt Caldera—which sits on the border between Nevada and Oregon—contains more than double the concentration of lithium than any other bed of clay globally, around 20 to 40 million metric tons in total. If the hypothesis is accurate, the caldera contains nearly double the lithium deposits found in Bolivia’s salt flats, which holds the record for the world’s largest deposit.

Lithium Americas, which owns mining rights in the southern end of the McDermitt Caldera, saw its stock price surge about 10% over two days after the study was published earlier this month. The company operates the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, one of the largest mines to receive approval in the U.S. The company has even secured $650 million in funding from General Motors.

And here is the predictable reaction.

Several Native American tribes consider Thacker Pass sacred and have taken legal action to block development of the mine, arguing that the government failed to provide reasonable outreach to all tribes in the region that attach spiritual and cultural value to the site….

Conservation groups have also rallied against the mine, citing environmental reviews highlighting the habitat degradation the mine could cause. An environmental review by the Bureau of Land Management noted that valuable wildlife habitat would be damaged were the mine to move forward, including pronghorn antelope, and winter range and brood-rearing range for the greater sage-grouse, an imperiled ground-nesting bird.

All of this leads me back to a passage I cut from the end of my article but which may need to be explored more fully in a future one.

We tend to talk about “de-industrialization” as if it is a phenomenon imposed purely from without. But for at least 50 years, America has been dominated by an openly anti-industrial ideology. A recent review of centuries of public discussion in the English language finds that in the past 50 years, there has been a decrease in the use of words related to “progress and the future” in favor of words related to “caution, worry, and risk.” This is reflected in movements ranging from the “back to nature” hippies to the current apostles of what they call “de-growth.” And the American people have long been denounced by our intellectual leaders for being shallow and “materialistic” because we like having stuff.

This is not just on the left. For all its recent pro-industrial nostalgia, the right tends to value the nostalgia over the industrialism. They want manufacturing, but only if it’s the right kind (heavy industry), done by the right people (only native-born men), at the right level of pay (enough for a single earner to raise a large family in the middle class). And then they complain if economic reality doesn’t line up with all of those goals. They want manufacturing only if it can be part of a wider re-enactment of the 1950s—as it was idealized on television.

So the first step is just to decide that we actually want to unleash industrial prowess. If we do, no extraordinary effort is required—just clearing out of the way the various barriers politicians of both parties have put in place over the years.

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Consider Krugman’s review of why Europe is growing more slowly than the United States. One thing he points out is that labor productivity is about as high there as here (particularly in Northern Europe), but Americans choose to work longer hours, while Europeans prioritize leisure time.

But the bigger picture is more than just a lifestyle choice.

It’s essentially all about demography.

Here’s a chart comparing growth in the United States and the euro area from 1999, the year the euro came into existence, until 2019, the eve of the pandemic….

In real terms, the US economy grew a lot more over those two decades—53 percent versus 31 percent. But almost all of that difference is explained by the fact that the US working-age population (conventionally, if somewhat unfortunately, defined as adults 15 to 64) grew a lot, while Europe’s hardly grew at all (and has been declining in recent years). Real GDP per working-age adult rose 31 percent in the United States and 29 percent—basically inside the margin of error—in the euro area.

I would point out that prioritizing leisure time over working hours is probably also tied to demographics. Young people are more likely to burn the midnight oil, while an older population will tend to be less ambitious, less risk-taking in its economic decisions, and more oriented around having free time and basically sliding gracefully into retirement.

In the rest of this particular column, Krugman reverts back to usual form by claiming that the stronger American recovery from the pandemic flows from our willingness to do more government stimulus spending. That’s the dogmatic Keynesian we all know.

But in another column—well, heck, it’s almost like he’s channeling Bastiat.

A big part of the reason the US has a growing population, and therefore a faster-growing economy, is because we have not yet stamped out immigration, despite furious efforts to do so. Krugman takes on the economic arguments against immigration and identifies them as flowing from the “lump of labor fallacy.”

This is the view that there is a fixed amount of work to be done and that if someone or something—some group of workers or some kind of machine—is doing some of that work, that means fewer jobs for everyone else….

[W]hile there’s limited demand for pink flamingos or wheat, there’s no evidence that there’s limited demand for stuff in general. When incomes rise, people will find something to spend their money on, creating jobs for workers displaced by technology or newcomers to the work force. Machines do, in fact, perform many tasks that used to require people; output per worker is more than four times what it was when Vonnegut wrote, so we could produce 1952’s level of output with only a quarter as many workers. In fact, however, employment has tripled.

In effect, when machines became able to replace workers, the workers found productive new things to do. We didn’t just make all the same old stuff with fewer workers. We went on to make more and better and different stuff and provide new services. It’s the same for immigrants as it is for machines.

What about competition from new workers? If you’re worried about immigrants taking jobs away from native-born Americans, consider the effect of a truly huge influx to the labor market: the mass movement of American women into paid work from the mid-1960s to around 2000. Did working women take jobs away from men? I’m sure many men thought they would. But they didn’t. 

Krugman’s conclusion: “No, AI and automation, for all the changes they may bring, won’t ultimately take away jobs, and neither will immigrants.” Like I said, sometimes this guy remembers that he’s supposed to be an economist.

As a bonus, Krugman also links to a fascinating article on how an influx of Bosnian refugees revitalized the declining city of Utica in upstate New York.

Decline Is a Narrative

Decline is the issue here, isn’t it? We’re all afraid of decline and trying to figure out how to avoid it—and some people are causing or accelerating decline in the process.

There is probably no better example of this than the overpopulation hysteria, which was supposed to save us from disaster but for which we have just begun paying the price—from China to Europe, and soon in the US.

I introduced you recently to the work of Maarten Boudry, one of the fellows in the Roots of Progress program. I also connected him to my editors at Discourse, and Maarten recently published a piece there that takes on the population issue along with declinism in general, proclaiming today to be the best time to be born.

[W]hich year looks like the most auspicious and hopeful one in which to draw your first breath: 1924, 1974 or 2024?

If you were to ask the tens of thousands of activists that are protesting on the streets, gluing themselves to highways, blocking roads and staging die-ins, I doubt that 2024 would be the most frequently picked answer. According to the founder of environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, climate change will lead to the “slaughter, death, and starvation of 6 billion people this century.”… Four in 10 Americans believe that global warming will likely lead to human extinction. Not surprisingly, a quarter of childless adults cite climate change as part of their motivation for not having children…. As one young woman put it: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

He then takes on doomerism specifically with regard to global warming.

But here’s a fact that you may never glean from reading climate doomer literature, even though it is also solidly based on the scientific consensus as documented in the successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: A temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius—slightly more than we expect right now—will most likely reduce global GDP by only a couple of percentage points. That is not an absolute reduction compared to today, mind you, but compared to a hypothetical future without climate change: In all likelihood, our prosperity will keep growing and child mortality will keep falling, just by a bit less than in a counterfactual world without global warming.

What is more interesting, from my perspective, is how he ties this in to a “status quo bias” that leads us to discount future adaptation and growth.

The enormous benefits of economic growth have been on full display for two centuries, but because human ingenuity and technological innovation are inherently unpredictable, the climate debate suffers from a persistent status quo bias—the tacit or explicit assumption that human societies will just passively suffer rising sea levels, intensifying heat waves, and extreme droughts, stuck at our current level of wealth and technology. But consider that even today, millions of people are living in regions that would be “uninhabitable” without modern technologies like air-conditioning, irrigation, and dikes. Much of California, for example, was “arid beyond habitability” before visionary engineers turned all that inhospitable wasteland into “one of the world’s most vibrant economies.” When the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was asked what enabled the economic miracle of the tropical city-state (its GDP per capita is 65% higher than the US’s), his answer was simple: modern air-conditioning. Even in the US, cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas would be virtually uninhabitable without artificial cooling.

Chock up another win for Willis Carrier. Maarten concludes, “now that we have finally escaped from thousands of years of drudgery and suffering and entered an age of abundance, it would be bizarrely self-indulgent to imagine that today, of all times, is the wrong moment to be born.”

He follows up with a later article looking at the “Seven Laws of Declinism,” a list of other biases that prevent us from recognizing and embracing progress.

Some of the points (for example, the blue dots of outrage) may sound familiar. Here’s one that I found to be new: the “ugly problem fallacy.”

All problems are soluble, the physicist David Deutsch explains in his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity, but every solution will give rise to novel problems. If these are less severe than the original problem, we will rightly call this “progress”—but only if we remember just how bad the original problem was. Many ugly problems give rise to solutions that are far less ugly, but still not exactly ideal. Chemotherapy is a terrible ordeal: it ravages your body, it makes your hair fall out, it makes you vomit. It is literally toxic because its very purpose is to destroy (cancerous) cells in your body. But no matter how bad chemotherapy is, it’s vastly better than having untreated and metastasized cancer.

Since progress tends to cover its own tracks, people often forget the ugliness of the original problem and focus on the residual ugliness of the solution. The “ugly problem fallacy,” as Étienne Fortier-Dubois has called it, is a good way to make sense of calls to “defund the police.” The police can be violent, and some people understandably want to reduce that violence by removing their funding. But, as Fortier-Dubois writes: “The obvious problem with this proposal is that the police are there precisely to reduce violence. Their presence is meant to discourage any non-police person or organization from using violence to achieve their ends.”

The failure to recognize progress can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, slowing down the pursuit of innovation by discouraging people from even looking for new solutions.

John Burn-Murdoch in The Financial Times has a very interesting article on whether we’re talking ourselves into decline. It has since unfortunately disappeared behind a paywall, but you can see the key data here, graphing the long-term decline in the media of words relating to “progress and the future” and the corresponding growth of words related to “caution, worry, and risk.”

The article is largely based on this study, which is not paywalled. Here is its description of the premise behind the study.

There are many aspects of cultural change that may have impacted Britain’s industrialization, any of which may be detectable in the corpus of works written in English. In order to narrow the scope of our study, we build on an insightful recent argument put forth by Joel Mokyr linking a progress-oriented view of science promoted by great Enlightenment thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, with what would become the “Industrial Enlightenment,” and ultimately Britain’s Industrial Revolution. This progress-oriented view centered around the idea that science and our understanding of the natural world could be used to improve the lot of humankind. Mokyr argues that such a progress-oriented view of science gave birth to a pan-European “culture of growth.” This culture was, in turn, sustained and supported by the social norms of elite intellectuals that fostered the free flow, dissemination, and discussion of new ideas across Europe. Accordingly, it was these cultural values in combination with Britain’s abundance of skilled craftsmen and artisans that made its industrialization possible.

We talked ourselves into progress, and we can talk ourselves out of it. That’s the contest of our era.

The Housing Famine

One of the great recent examples of talking ourselves out of growth is housing, where the NIMBYs have induced a massive shortage. But it’s not just a shortage; it’s a widespread misallocation. Here’s an example:

Buying a family-sized home with three or more bedrooms used to be manageable for young people with children. But with home prices climbingfaster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. And Gen Z adults with kids? Even harder.

Meanwhile, Baby Boomers are staying in their larger homes for longer, preferring to age in place and stay active in a neighborhood that’s familiar to them. And even if they sold, where would they go? There is a shortage of smaller homes in those neighborhoods.

As a result, empty-nest Baby Boomers own 28% of large homes—and Milliennials with kids own just 14%, according to a Redfin analysis released Tuesday. Gen Z families own just 0.3% of homes with three bedrooms or more.

Addison Del Mastro finally came up with the right words to express the problem: We are suffering from a “housing famine.”

We use the term “housing crisis” a lot. Sometimes “housing shortage” or “housing crunch” or just “housing problem.” With the exception of “shortage,” all of these terms are somewhat vague….

So what do you call an artificial, policy-driven, to some extent politically driven, acute shortage of a basic necessity?

A famine. Zoning has induced the housing equivalent of a famine.

Famine conditions do not mean that everybody starves to death. But they mean that everything surrounding food, and by extension most or all of life, is impacted to some degree or another. The housing famine doesn’t mean everybody is homeless, of course. But it means that what should be a pretty unselfconscious necessity becomes a choke point in people’s lives, a source of stress and friction far beyond what it should naturally be….

The operating principle of our housing status quo is a kind of Malthusianism, but even worse. Malthus believed that food production couldn’t keep up with population growth, and that famine was inevitable. We have nothing but our own choices to blame. In a time of unparalleled affluence, we have imposed a famine on ourselves, and wonder why people are starving.

We can also talk ourselves out of this artificial famine, and one of the biggest stories right now—big, but diffused in a series of small reforms across the country—is that we are starting to do something about it. Here’s a recent report by NPR.

To ramp up supply, cities are taking a fresh look at their zoning rules that spell out what can be built where and what can't. And many are finding that their old rules are too rigid, making it too hard and too expensive to build many new homes.

So these cities, as well as some states, are undertaking a process called zoning reform. They're crafting new rules that do things like allow multifamily homes in more neighborhoods, encourage more density near transit and streamline permitting processes for those trying to build.

Minneapolis has been at the forefront.

Researchers at The Pew Charitable Trusts examined the effects of the changes between 2017 and 2022, as many of the city's most significant zoning reforms came into effect.

They found what they call a "blueprint for housing affordability."

“We saw Minneapolis add 12% to its housing stock in just that five-year period, far more than other cities,” Alex Horowitz, director of housing policy initiatives at Pew, told NPR….

That supply increase appears to have helped keep rents down too. Rents in Minneapolis rose just 1% during this time, while they increased 14% in the rest of Minnesota.

Amazing, isn’t it, that the Law of Supply and Demand still works?

The report goes on to mention examples in Houston and Northern Virginia, but notes that this is a nationwide trend.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley built a zoning reform tracker and identified zoning reform efforts in more than 100 municipal jurisdictions in the U.S. in recent years.

Milwaukee, New York City and Columbus, Ohio, are all undertaking reform of their codes. Smaller cities are winning accolades for their zoning changes too, including Walla Walla, Wash., and South Bend, Indiana.

But of course the old forces opposed to growth aren’t going down without a fight. So the recent zoning reform movement is creating a split within the environmental left—also with Minneapolis at its center. Jerusalem Demsas talks about a lawsuit that has temporarily blocked some of the city’s zoning reforms on environmental grounds. But notice the nature of the arguments used by the pro-development environmentalists.

Writing in the local-news outlet MinnPost, the University of Minnesota urban geographer Bill Lindeke argues that promoting dense urban housing is “by far the most effective carbon reduction policy.” Focusing development in the urban environment, he writes, is fundamentally conservationist. “If regional newcomers can’t live in Minneapolis, they’ll live in Carver, Dakota and Anoka counties”—suburban areas with limited access to transit. “The direct result,” Lindeke continues, “will be habitat loss and the erasure of agricultural land in the exurbs, creating impervious surface and heat island intensification at a much larger scale.”

This argument can be counterintuitive if you’re used to thinking of new construction as inherently anti-environment. Nevertheless, one recent paper found that the “skyscraper revolution” since 1975 has been responsible for the “preservation of surrounding rural land, over 80% of which is covered in tree canopy or short vegetation.” A popular Crisis Green internet meme depicts two potential development scenarios for a fictional island: In one, all of the land is cleared for 100 single-family homes, each with its own lawn; in the other, a 100-apartment building perches along the shore, and the forest covering the remaining 96 percent of the island is intact. The moral at the bottom: “Density saves nature.”

It is an indication of our wider problem that advocates still have to sell growth as a form of reduction.

USS Enterprise

And yet growth is still happening, despite the most frenetic efforts to stop it.

In this day of obsession with fossil fuels and global warming, I am happy to report that we have reach an auspicious milestone: “The United States Is Producing More Oil than Any Country in History.”

As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.

The United States is set to produce a global record of 13.3 million barrels per day of crude and condensate during the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report published Tuesday by S&P Global Commodity Insights….

US output—led by shale oil drillers in Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin—is so strong that it’s sending supplies overseas. America is exporting the same amount of crude oil, refined products, and natural gas liquids as Saudi Arabia or Russia produces, S&P said.

As for the role of the Biden administration, our Man in the Middle initially tried to appease the greens. But: “’President Biden has been dragged kicking and screaming from his initial keep-it-in-the-ground strategy towards a more pragmatic policy,’ McNally said, noting the administration was ‘mugged by the reality of high gas prices and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.’”

Meanwhile, America has gone back to the moon—remotely—for the first time in decades. And better yet, it was done by a private enterprise.

A US company has gone to the moon–and into the history books.

Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission reached the moon’s surface on Thursday evening, in the first American lunar landing since the Apollo era.

The company’s Nova-C cargo lander, named “Odysseus” after the mythological Greek hero, is the first US spacecraft to land on the lunar surface since 1972. Adding to the feat, Intuitive Machines is the first company to pull off a moon landing—government agencies have carried out all previously successful missions….

“Today, for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon. Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company and an American company launched and led the voyage up there,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on the livestream.

The mission was also launched on a SpaceX rocket. This follows the recent launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, which will compete with SpaceX and with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin in the increasingly crowded private space launch market.

This reflects a big change in NASA policy over the last few decades, which is to rely increasingly on private companies and private enterprise for the exploration of space. The article on the Oddyseus lander notes that “IM-1 marks the second mission under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver science projects and cargo to the moon with increasing regularity in support of the agency’s Artemis crew program.” That’s the plan to land Americans on the moon again some time in the next few years.

Chant it with me: U-S-A, U-S-A! Who says the great and inspiring achievements we associate with America in the middle of the 20th Century are all in the past?

“Culinary Luddism”

Here are couple of last links, just for fun.

In recent decades, dissatisfaction with the modern world—on both the left and the right—has taken the form of glamorizing “traditional” foods. So check out an interesting article from 2010 on this “culinary Luddism,” which discusses the way in which many traditional foods are not so traditional.

The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.

Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back 2,000 years, a dozen have been invented in the last 200. The French baguette? A 20th-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. Greek moussaka?  Created in the early 20th century in an attempt to Frenchify Greek food. Tequila?  Promoted as the national drink of Mexico during the 1930s by the Mexican film industry….

In the first half of the 20th century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second half, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep a little longer instead of getting up to make rice. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe, people rejoiced at the convenience of ready-made goods. For all, culinary modernism had proved what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, people grew taller and stronger and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor; women had choices other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day….

Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

In following up on this point, I came across a very amusing article from all the way back in 1949 in The Atlantic explaining to Americans a new and very exotic dish called…pizza.

It’s a dish that today is considered so basically, elementally American that it is astonishing to discover that there was once a time when it had to be painstakingly explained to the public for the very first time.

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We discuss this with reference to historical cases where new technology has raised copyright questions, from Betamax all the way back to piano rolls. Listen to the conversation above, or check it out on video here:

For the article we mention on compulsory licensing and how piano rolls shaped modern copyrights, see here:

Slow Boring

Copyright law is living in the past

Today we have a guest post from Chris Dalla Riva, who writes the Substack newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher about the intersection of music and data. The regular Friday mailbag will instead run on Saturday this week…

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a year ago · 164 likes · 207 comments · Chris Dalla Riva

See also a fascinating piece on the surprisingly long history of debates over AI and copyright.

NEWART

1960s Debate: Copyrighting AI Art

Can AI art be copyrighted? The debate has been raging following the new wave of generative AI since August 2022. Copyright was granted and then removed from pieces like Zarya of the Dawn. Epic online wars were fought. Recent guidelines from the U.S. Copyright Office reaffirms that purely generated images are in the public domain and have just been confi…

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10 months ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Pierre-Carl Langlais

And check out a rather odd sidelight on this issue: the use of AI dopplegangers by online “creators”—in one case, an “adult-content creator,” i.e., an aging camgirl who wants to use AI to extend her career and make it easier to provide quasi-personalized engagement with lonely men who want fake female companionship. It sounds pretty primitive so far, not to mention a little sad, but this is the sort of thing that helped build the modern internet, so don’t discount it.

As you can see in our discussion, Jess and I lay out the issues but are still unsure exactly what the right solution is. I expect the answers will flow, as they did with piano rolls and Betamax, out of the particulars of the cases that are moving through the courts. And they are definitely moving, with lawsuits against AI platforms filed by big media companies like the New York Times and Getty Images.

You can see the dilemma. In order to train programs on good-quality text and images, AI platforms rely on an abundance of human-generated material from existing media, and not just amateur bloggers or social media, but well-funded, carefully edited publications. If AI-generated text and images were to completely flood the internet—as they may soon do—then an AI that goes out to “scrape” the material it is designed to emulate would be working off of text and images generated by other AI. This raises the prospect of a doom loop where AI is copying AI and getting farther and farther away from anything that is useful or meaningful to humans.

This implies to me that AI platforms will eventually find some kind of modus vivendi with the existing media industry. AI can offer a lot of value. But it is an imitation of human thinking, not a substitute for it. AI depends on human-generated material, and even if it not legally required to do so, it will have to find a way to direct a portion of its revenues to renew the basic resource it depends on: human writers, artists, and other creators.

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We discuss this with reference to historical cases where new technology has raised copyright questions, from Betamax all the way back to piano rolls. Listen to the conversation above, or check it out as an audio-only podcast here:

For the article we mention on compulsory licensing and how piano rolls shaped modern copyrights, see here:

Slow Boring

Copyright law is living in the past

Today we have a guest post from Chris Dalla Riva, who writes the Substack newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher about the intersection of music and data. The regular Friday mailbag will instead run on Saturday this week…

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a year ago · 164 likes · 207 comments · Chris Dalla Riva

See also a fascinating piece on the surprisingly long history of debates over AI and copyright.

NEWART

1960s Debate: Copyrighting AI Art

Can AI art be copyrighted? The debate has been raging following the new wave of generative AI since August 2022. Copyright was granted and then removed from pieces like Zarya of the Dawn. Epic online wars were fought. Recent guidelines from the U.S. Copyright Office reaffirms that purely generated images are in the public domain and have just been confi…

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a year ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Pierre-Carl Langlais

And see also a rather odd sidelight on this issue: the use of AI dopplegangers by online “creators”—in one case, an “adult-content creator,” i.e., an aging camgirl who wants to use AI to extend her career and make it easier to provide quasi-personalized engagement with lonely men who want fake female companionship. It sounds pretty primitive so far, not to mention a little sad, but this is the sort of thing that helped build the modern internet, so don’t discount it.

As you can see in our discussion, Jess and I lay out the issues but are still unsure exactly what the right solution is. I expect the answers will flow, as they did with piano rolls and Betamax, out of the particulars of the cases that are moving through the courts. And they are definitely moving, with lawsuits against AI platforms filed by big media companies like the New York Times and Getty Images.

You can see the dilemma. In order to train programs on good-quality text and images, AI platforms rely on an abundance of human-generated material from existing media—and not just amateur bloggers or social media, but well-funded, carefully edited publications. If AI-generated text and images were to completely flood the internet—as they may soon do—then an AI that goes out to “scrape” the material it is designed to emulate would be working off of text and images generated by other AI. This raises the prospect of a doom loop where AI is copying AI and getting farther and farther away from anything that is useful or meaningful to humans.

This implies to me that AI platforms will eventually find some kind of modus vivendi with the existing media industry. AI can offer a lot of value. But it is an imitation of human thinking, not a substitute for it. AI depends on human-generated material, and even if it not legally required to do, it will have to find a way to direct a portion of its revenues to renew the basic resource it depends on: human writers, artists, and other creators.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been sending you excerpts from the work of my writing students from the fellowship program at Roots of Progress.

Below are selections from a fourth batch of fellows.

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Jennifer Morales

Jennifer’s beginning contribution is to compile a “Commonplace Book of Progress”—a set of quotations about the history and nature of progress.

Here is my favorite, because I hadn’t heard it before.

“My mother explained the magic of the washing machine the very first day. It was a miracle for my mother and me too. She said, “We have loaded the laundry. And now we can go to the library.” In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel-mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.” - Hans Rosling

The Financial Times just posted an interesting piece about the theory that we are “talking ourselves out of progress.” (More on that some other time.) If this is true, then we’re going to need to start promoting inspirational ideas that celebrate progress.

More recently, her blog has a good guest post by Josh Smith on the crying need for permitting reform.

We have set up rules around environmental reviews, housing, and too many other topics, so that a tiny minority can stop nearly everything from moving forward….

Vetoes against new housing means fewer places for people to live. Housing costs price out low-income people and make living in successful places harder. Being locked out of these successful places also usually means being locked out of the best educational and job opportunities. So it’s a struggle for people to break out of poor situations.

In energy policy and environmental policy, endless reviews kill projects before they start. The key issue is that projects need to document every potential harm, or face a challenge. So they write longer and longer reports to justify their choices. If anything is left out, then almost anyone can bring a suit against the project.

This pairs well with a recent report in the New York Times about the crisis of construction in Britain.

Laws that give local planning authorities considerable power are blamed for Britain’s shortage of housing and blocking the construction of pylons needed to carry electricity from offshore wind farms. Residents’ objections to noisy construction and changes to the landscapes have been a stumbling block.

Planning and grid connections are the very basics on which everything else builds, Mr. Ruparel said. A functioning grid that delivers reliable low-cost energy and a planning system that allows all types of infrastructure to be built are “fundamental to having a productive economy and having a more efficient economy,” he added.

The United States is not far behind.

This connects to the work of another Progress fellow.

Ryan Puzycki

Ryan’s newsletter is called City of Yes, which kind of sums it all up.

Ryan writes beautifully and clearly about zoning and housing issues, particularly in Austin, Texas, and the need for cities to say “yes.” But he writes particularly well about why we should care about these local issues and give them more attention than we do now in this era of hyper-nationalized politics.

Against a backdrop of foreign wars, a border crisis, persistent inflation, and the never-ending how-is-this-not-satire government-shutdown circus in Congress, local elections can seem like small beer. But as important as all those issues are, if you take a step back, how many of them have a direct impact on your day-to-day life?

President Biden has the power to launch a nuclear warhead, but he can’t find you childcare, or dispatch an ambulance, or cut your property taxes, or make it easier to build more housing. He can’t pick up the trash on your street or lower your utility bill. He can’t solve your city’s homelessness problem or make the buses run on time.

Joe Biden can’t pave your potholes.

Perhaps these issues seem trivial in the face of global catastrophes, but when you’re faced with real life-and-death emergencies—well, suddenly what’s important seems a little closer to home. Shouldn’t more people care about who we put in charge of the vital city functions that impact our everyday lives? Yet most of us focus more on elections where our vote is a rounding error and ignore the local races where, as Austin’s example shows, every vote counts. 

Ryan makes a great case for localism, and it has inspired me to track down more information about the local politics in my home county, which is particularly difficult because it is a rural area with a low population and not much in the way of media to cover it. But that’s all the more reason to try, because if your vote counts for more in Austin elections than it does in national elections, it sure as heck counts for more when you are one of only a few thousand people—literally, this is the total number of votes in many races—who decide local elections in rural Central Virginia.

Elle Griffin

The issue of localism leads me to a piece by Elle Griffin, who takes this idea perhaps a bit too far, calling for us to entertain the idea of splitting the US into city-states.

For a long time, the city-state was our best and only form of government—Rome, Athens, Florence, and Venice became beacons of art and philosophy, of intellectual study and scientific progress….

We’ve talked about the benefits of self-governing US states, and that is perhaps the more practical entity, but if we narrow to the city we can see communities that could clearly decide for themselves how to live. And are there any who would rather the finer details of their lives be decided by a much larger (and more conflicted) government?...

There are many benefits to the larger polity, and we’ll talk about those in a future essay, but we have left the smaller polity behind in pursuit of it. The EU was perhaps the rare political entity that managed to unite smaller countries even as it maintained their sovereignty, but that balance strains beneath the weight of each new treaty it signs, taking ever more power from its countries as it consolidates them into a larger one.

I see no reason why both couldn’t exist—could we continue to unite for matters of war, currency, and economic trade, even as we separate for matters of life?

That’s what I would do. If I could re-imagine the United States I would divide it into “metropolitan areas,” rather than states. That’s already where our economies take place (90% of our GDP comes from metropolitan areas) and where our population lives (86% of our population lives in metropolitan areas), and I see no reason why the remaining rural populations couldn’t form their own much smaller metropolitan areas and govern themselves as they see fit. 

Elle’s blog The Elysian is devoted to trying reclaim “utopianism” and to entertaining ideas for how the future could be radically better. I like the spirit of that, and she asks some very interesting questions, even though I often disagree with her answers—mostly because I find them a littletooutopian, in the bad sense of being impractical.

There are some narrowly practical problems with this particular idea of radical localism. She suggests elsewhere, for example, that states could be responsible for their own immigration policy. But so long as we have freedom of internal movement within the United States, immigration to one city or state is immigration to all the states. And freedom of internal movement and trade was a basic goal of our constitutional order, in an attempt to keep the states united and at peace with one another. The Founders knew that all of the examples Elle cites as successful city-states—Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice—had one other thing in common: They were constantly at war with their neighbors.

More deeply, the appeal of the small city-state is that it allows a greater degree of “unity” in values and lifestyle. But is that actually such a good thing? Unity seems appealing if you think all your neighbors want exactly the same thing you do. Not so much if they don’t.

My impression is that Elle wants to use this as an answer to current tensions between urban and rural voters and between left-leaning and right-leaning voters (which tends to track with urban versus rural). But I think she’s underestimating what is helpful about the way the current system counter-balances the values of interests of a diverse population.

Much as I like the idea of focusing more of our political energy on local politics, I think we also have to guard against what you might call “dark localism”: cases in which state and local governments are unified enough to enforce narrow prejudices and protect “peculiar institutions.” See an article I linked to a while back about Christian activists trying to use small towns located next to Texas highways to impose an interstate travel ban on women who might be seeking abortions. Is it good that these small towns can enact their own values—or would it be better if they were counterbalanced by the value and interests of people in the rest of the state, and the nation as a whole?

OK, I’ll get off my soap box now and just tell everyone, once again, to go read Federalist No. 10, where James Madison addresses this issue of a large republic versus a small one.

But like I said, this is an interesting question because it directs us to think about what should be dealt with on the national level versus the local level—and how the current system came to be how it is. In fact, my wider answer to this piece is that what Elle describes is to a large extent how things already work, including states and localities as the “laboratories of democracy,” and it’s certainly how they were supposed to work.

Grant Dever

Another interesting angle on this debate comes from Grant Dever at his blog Seeking Tribe, where he makes a point I would like to see more often.

Grant calls for “Techno-Optimism for Townies.”

My best friends do not aspire to found billion dollar companies or perfect the application of a new technology and forever change the course of history. They have only ever thought about laws and regulations when confronted by a harsh reality in their personal lives. Red and blue lights dancing in their rear-view mirror. A letter from a busybody telling them that the new shed they built in their backyard is illegal. A vision of progress which describes a future of artificial general intelligence, cyborg immortality, and asteroid mining is alien to them. 

And alienating.

Techno-optimists tend to talk in terms which inspire an existing and relatively small, yet powerful, base. But progress is not only for transhumanists who live in cities and spend their days and nights planning to colonize Mars. A better world is one where humans with a diverse set of preferences have greater opportunity to meet their needs and realize their dreams….

The future we should imagine and share is not all interplanetary spaceships, robots, and chaotic dynamism. That’s a part of it but it’s not the whole story. It will also be a world of broader prosperity and opportunity that's fueled by positive advancements in technology and policy. A world where there are many more ways for people to afford to live and to thrive. True progress will not only allow people to live in big cities and build spaceships but make it easier for people to buy a house in their home town and build a dynasty.

A lot of the discussion of futurism and “techno-optimism” tends to come from people who live in cities and work in high-tech fields. But for a pro-progress view to spread and prosper, it has to have something to offer that reaches across these rural versus urban, tech worker versus blue collar divides.

That’s most of the Progress fellows. I may have a few more to add, and I’ll be keeping track of what all of them write in the future—and I hope you will, too.

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I recently sent you some excerpts from the work of my writing students from the fellowship program at Roots of Progress.

Below are selections from a few more of the fellows. I’ll take three more of them today and link you to their newsletters (mostly on Substack), so please give them a follow.

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Jeremy Côté

Jeremy has a blog that is partly devoted to getting us to notice infrastructure, the “concealed wiring of our civilization.”

Here's a list of questions I don’t worry about: Where will I get my food? Do I have clean fuel to cook? Can I store food for later in a refrigerator or freezer? Where can I get clean water? Will my shower serve me hot water? Can I read at night with an electric light? How can I talk to my faraway friends who I haven’t seen in years? Infrastructure is a big part of why I don’t worry about these questions.

But his newsletter is called Charting Progress, and a lot of his focus is on the use of data to understand the world and how to make it better. He looks at the importance of data but also at the “friction” thatprevents us from getting at it.

Statistics correct the distortion of our personal experience to give us a clear view of our world. [Max] Roser’s point is that we should therefore value statistics just as much as our personal experience to inform our worldview.

Roser’s essay focuses on the value of statistics, which I agree is important. I value statistics a lot, and I think others should too! But Roser only briefly touches on the current challenges in obtaining and understanding statistics as an end user: “These statistics exist, but they are often neither accessible nor understandable. They are buried in spreadsheets, hidden behind paywalls, and presented in academic jargon.” I think these challenges are critical to valuing statistics and worth honing in on….

Roser’s framing is about increasing the demand for statistics, raising its value relative to news media and personal experience. Though I agree demand is important, I’m arguing for the supply side: I find it difficult to imagine people valuing statistics if accessing them is an exercise in frustration. We need to remove the friction of finding, accessing, and interpreting data. Once we do, I think more people will be able to appreciate how statistics is the spell that expands our horizon of personal experience into a more representative worldview.

Follow Jeremy at Charting Progress.

Connor O’Brien

One of the more promising areas of research in progress is looking at the methods by which we pursue knowledge and innovation, and figuring out what is blocking us from being more successful.

In one post, Connor O’Brien looks at one of one of the paradoxes of bureaucracy: “the quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority,” because then it becomes subject to all the pettifogging rules and restrictions of a government project.

In a later post, he considers the necessity for a diversity, not just of ideas, but of training and qualification, so as a society we can “hedge our bets” rather than devoting all of our resources to a single narrow consensus. He presents two interesting cautionary tales.

One is Katalin Kariko, who recently won the Nobel Prize for the mRNA research that led to the rapid development of covid vaccines.

For three decades, she bounced from one lab to another with little job stability and meager pay. Today we have the mRNA vaccines that saved so many lives mostly because of her dogged refusal to take “no” for an answer. The National Institutes of Health, the body that dominates biomedical research grantmaking, simply did not take her ideas seriously for many years. The issue was not inadequate funding to go around, but insufficiently diverse perspectives in the grantmaking ecosystem.

The other tale is the Keju system of civil service exams in imperial China. The system’s scrupulous meritocracy turned out, in the wider context, to be a disadvantage, since it made absorption into the bureaucracy by far the easiest and most certain path to advancement for talented young people.

As the sponge that soaked up the vast majority of highly intelligent and motivated young people, the Keju-powered bureaucracy would direct the energies of the nation’s top talent toward the preservation of state power. Religious, commercial, or research institutions that could have been the source of economic or intellectual flourishing were instead starved of talent. The merit-based nature of selection added a hefty layer of legitimacy to an expansive and stifling bureaucracy….

The material exam candidates were required to learn deeply enforced attitudes deferential to hierarchy, tradition, and state authority, all of which characterize China’s feeble civil society to this day.

There are some very clear lessons to be drawn for today’s meritocracy.

We have no Keju exam system in the United States today, of course. Yet there seem to be many echoes of Keju in the status and signaling games that dominate the time and attention of talented young people today, particularly higher education. No, universities are hardly explicit tools of political control. But just as Keju monopolized nearly all of China’s top talent, most bright young Americans pass through traditional academia at some point during their formative years.

Read the whole thing, and follow Connor’s work at Regions.

Madeline Zimmerman

Taking up a similar theme, Madeline Zimmerman looks at the US military’s “banished heroes,” including one of my favorites, Air Force Colonel John Boyd.

Perhaps even more of a rabble-rouser than Mitchell, Boyd managed to escape a court martial but drew the ire of huge swaths of the DoD and its contractors. He started his career as an Air Force fighter pilot (a group hardly known for its subservience) and earned the nickname “Forty Second Boyd” for his ability to defeat any opposing pilot in less than forty seconds. His signature move can be spotted in an adrenaline-fueled sequence in the original Top Gun: Maverick lets the opposing MiG fighter get close up on his tail, ready to fire, then he pitches his own plane up at an angle, catching the air to slow him down so that the other guy flies right past him. When Maverick pitches the plane back down, he has the MiG directly in his sights. 

Boyd’s fighter tactics are emblematic of how he approached life: Understand and anticipate your opponent’s decision-making process and find ways to use superior maneuverability to get one step ahead of him. All of his accomplishments used this framework, from his design of the F-16 fighter and invention of the OODA Loop to his invasion strategy for Operation Desert Storm and (my personal favorite) his bureaucratic wars with the Pentagon via the Reform Movement. 

I’ve been a fan of Boyd ever since my friend Jack Wakeland became so insistent that I read about him that he sent me Boyd’s most well-known biography.

Madeline’s work focuses on military affairs and the Pentagon, where as you can imagine, the necessity of encouraging independent thought faces a lot of challenges. But she makes an argument for its necessity.

It’s difficult for any large bureaucracy to make room for independent thinkers, but the stakes are uniquely high for national security. The DoD is not leaning into its competitive advantage against any of our authoritarian foes when it crushes dissent by ensuring irreverent minds do not hold top leadership positions. There is too much focus on protecting downside and not enough emphasis on maximizing upside. Ironically, this “risk averse” attitude becomes exponentially riskier as we erode our ability to credibly deter conflict.

There are a lot of lessons here for everyone.

Follow Madeline at Kinetic Reviews, and check out the terrific graphic for its opening screen.

I’ll be sharing more from the other fellows in the next few weeks.

Please leave a comment or share this article.

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I recently sent you some excerpts from the work of my writing students from the fellowship program at Roots of Progress.

Below are selections from a few more of the fellows.

I’ll take them three at a time and link you to their newsletters (mostly on Substack), so please give them a follow.

Paige Lambermont

Paige Lambermont usually writes about energy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and check her out there as she points out the absurd regulations we keep putting on energy production. But the most charming piece Paige wrote was a personal observation about the pleasures of keeping physical books in this digital age.

Whenever I’m in an Airbnb, or a house staged for sale, or any liminal space that bookshelves have been inserted into as a decorative flair, I find myself scanning the spines, looking for favorites, and guessing if it’s a lovingly curated collection, or books sold by the foot for decor purposes based on nothing but cover color.

Looking at bookshelves in all of these spaces is entertaining, but there’s nowhere I enjoy it more than at a friend’s house. I’ve long joked with some of my friends that I would have known we’d be friends by looking at their bookshelves alone.

One of my oldest friends gave me a perfect glimpse into this recently. We were at her house. She had recently moved and hadn’t arranged her new bookshelves yet. We were drinking coffee in her kitchen—one of those far between aimless days with a friend that you get fewer and fewer of as adult life piles up. She knows how I am about books, so she asked if I’d like to help her arrange her new bookshelves. Instant yes. We moved the stacks of books from one room to another, chatting and picking up our coffees at intervals as we carried stacks between the rooms, shelving, categorizing, and deciding what belonged where.

We’ve been friends since junior high, and many of the books we’ve read have been things we came into together. That whole day we chatted about the books as we shelved them. The ones that we’d both read and could remember passing back and forth. The same golden and silver age science fiction picked up in early college, the Phillip K. Dick and Haruki Murakami books we picked up in high school. The books read for classes we’d taken together, or told each other about on the phone later when we were away at separate colleges. The philosophy books, and the classics we had in common. As we got older we’d send each other our own favorites as birthday presents, as if to say “read this piece of me you don’t yet know.” I sent her Brandon Sanderson, Douglas Adams, my favorite Agatha Christie. She sent me Frederik Pohl and Kim Stanley Robinson. Our taste in books is inextricably linked. We learned to love these things together. I knew all of this, but going through her shelves that day really reminded me just how deep that connection was. Reading the same books, and at the same unique stages of life will connect people in ways that few things can.

And yes, books sold by the color are a real thing.

Also, please be advised that if I ever visit your house, I will be judging you on your book collection.

Malcolm Cochran

Malcolm Cochran wrote a very interesting pair of pieces on land-use statistics. No, really.

He arrives at a very counter-intuitive conclusion, which is that industrialization and fossil fuels actually free up more land and more natural spaces, because they are far less extensive than agricultural uses. In his first piece, he describes how the automobile saved the forests of New England. In a follow-up, he concludes, with apologies to Joni Mitchell, that “We Didn't Pave Paradise, We Plowed It.”

[A]griculture takes up huge tracts of land—the equivalent of the Americas plus a large part of Asia—while our cities, towns, and roads (and anything else classified as an “artificial surface” by the FAO) have a footprint the size of Libya—just one percent of global land area.

These figures surprised me when I first saw them since I, like most people in wealthy industrial nations, spend almost all my time within that small purple zone. Living most of our lives within built-up areas screws up our perception of the environment. Since we’re rarely ever more than a few feet from a road or parking lot, we might assume, for example, that “we paved paradise” is an apt metaphor for what’s happened to the planet over the last few centuries. The reality is closer to “we plowed paradise.”

While our total energy consumption has massively increased since the Industrial Revolution, almost all of that growth was supplied by fossil fuels, which, since they are highly energy-dense and come from underground, don’t take up much land. Agriculture creates a different form of energy: food, which is very land-intensive (recall that we use over a third of the Earth’s land for farming). Humans need food. And historically, we needed horses and other beasts of burden, which also need food. Now we approach a general principle: when we replace things that eat with things that don’t, we save land. That is also why one of the best things you can do for the environment is to eat less meat.

So, Toby, we should have a blinkered focus on energy production because the vast majority of humanity’s land footprint comes from producing energy in the form of food.

Things don’t always turn out the way you expect. Some Modernist architects assumed that the rise of the industrial era meant that we would all be sitting on mass-produced plastic furniture in glass and steel apartment towers—mass-produced industrial materials for an age of industrial mass-production. What has mostly happened is that we place more value than ever on items that are hand-crafted out of natural materials. (Go browse the Thomas Moser catalogue some time.) As we become wealthier, we are able to afford that which is not industrial and mass-produced.

One of the counter-intuitive conclusions I draw from Malcolm’s piece is that a wealthy, hyper-technological, energy-abundant future will be one with more natural space, not less. I write this from my dentist’s office, with a magnificently bucolic view overlooking the Western slope of Monticello and part of Charlottesville, a heavily wooded town nestled in among the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This is representative of what the future of human civilization will look like.

Follow Malcolm at .

Florian Metzler

Some of the most interesting pieces written by the progress fellows were about how to achieve progress, and particularly about the methods of scientific discover and technological innovation. MIT physicist Florian Metzler co-wrote a very interesting piece on “intellectual dark matter,” ideas that exist in a kind of limbo between the crackpot theory and the proven breakthrough. His main example is the invention of the transistor.

Typically associated with two “magic months” in late 1947 and three “brilliant inventors” the commonly taught history of the transistor has been greatly simplified and romanticized. A closer look reveals that solid-state amplification effects—the basis for transistor operation—were already reported in published articles as early as the 1920s. However, replication attempts frequently failed and even those who claimed to see amplification effects could obtain them only erratically.

There were vastly different responses to such reports. Some, like Radio News editor Hugo Gernback, proclaimed already in 1925 a coming new age of miniaturized solid-state switches. Others, like the luminary physicist Wolfgang Pauli, discouraged his mentees to work in this area for its lack of credibility and reproducibility. In a letter to his junior team member Rudolf Peierls, Pauli called semiconductor research “Schmutzphysik”—the physics of dirt—and warned: “one shouldn’t work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether semiconductors even exist.”

Yet the most constructive response came from those who were able to neither entirely accept nor preemptively dismiss these early anomaly reports: people like Mervin Kelly, research director at Bell Labs, who in the mid 1930s started to assemble a team of physicists, materials scientists, and tinkerers to carefully look into the claims that had been circulating in various technical communities he had tapped into.

Kelly struck a balance between going all in on an idea whose validity was not established and letting it lay by the wayside. Instead, he and his colleagues gradually built up a repository of expertise across knowledge areas that included surface physics, electron band theory, and high- quality single-crystal growth, the importance of which was initially dismissed by members of Kelly’s team like the physicist William Shockley.

Florian concludes that we need to devote more effort to chasing down uncertain and anomalous early results.

What lessons can we learn from such historical examples? Rather than watching out for Eureka moments, it would be wise to embrace those earlier more enigmatic leads that indicate that something interesting might be happening in a particular experimental configuration. Bardeen and Brattain’s polished 1948 Physical Reviewpaper on transistor action as well as Hahn and Strassmann’s polished 1938Naturwissenschaften paper on fission depended on these earlier phases and represented the culmination of many insights gained previously. At the same time these papers are effectively stripped and sanitized of the messy prehistories that enabled them in the first place. Rather than looking out for the next Bardeen and Brattain transistor paper or the next Hahn and Strassmann fission paper, scientific institutions today would do well to seek out the equivalents of those 1925 anomalous amplification reports and of those 1934 early hypotheses about fission.

He ends up making the most convincing case I’ve ever heard for investigating “cold fusion”—now referred to as LENR, Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, in an attempt to exorcise the field’s association with earlier failures.

Alex Telford

Alex Telford offers another interesting look at methodology, but this time in biology—well, biology following an example from video games.

[Super Mario] Speedrunners contest world records by having either the best execution of the fastest known route, or by discovering and exploiting newer, faster, routes. In September, the world record 120-star run stood at 1 hour, 37 minutes, and 35 seconds — compared to the 20 or so hours it takes your average player. In his world record run, the speedrunner Weegee plays with sustained machine-like precision; it’s hard to believe that anyone could shave off the extra 36 seconds needed to break through the 1:37 barrier. By now, the standard 120-star route is so thoroughly optimised that the time advantage from most new routes is measured in fractions of a second. It seemed there was little left to discover in this 27-year-old-game.

That is, until September, when a new ‘holy grail’ trick was discovered that cuts about a minute off the 120 star run time. What I found fascinating about this discovery is not the specifics of the trick per se, but the process by which it was found…..

Orthogonal Jones was found by an algorithm called “scattershot.”

Scattershot is a sort of empirical machine gun; it uses brute force search with random inputs to find the shortest path to collect a star from a given starting point. By simulating the potential paths of thousands, or millions, of Marios, scattershot can discover new optimal routes through levels….

The problem with random search methods is that the longer a sequence needs to be, the greater the processing power and time required to explore all the options; random search is inefficient for long input sequences. Krithalith got around this by incorporating learning into the algorithm, and saving shorter optimal move sequences that can be used as staging points for random exploration. These short sequences can then be chained together to find the best overall long sequence.

This, Alex suggests, “demonstrates that brute empiricism may be the only feasible route to discovering the possibilities present in even simple systems.” He then applies this to scientific discovery.

In practice, this means that a way to approach automating science could be to collect voluminous statistics on system states (deeply characterizing both healthy and unhealthy model systems, say) then using scattershot-like guided randomness to find interventions that lead to the shortest path between those states. This approach creates its own function that can then be optimized. If you’re trying to understand a disease, finding the quickest path to reversing that disease and restoring a healthy state tells you a great deal about which factors are most important in the disease process.

It’s an intriguing suggestion for how computing power and artificial intelligence might be able to amplify human rationality.

Follow Alex at Liveware for similar discussions, including some high-level exploration of the meaning of the concept “health.”

I’ll be sharing more from the other fellows in the next few weeks.

My friends at Roots of Progress, the leading organization trying to accelerate the field of “progress studies,” hosted a series of training sessions for a group of “progress fellows,” talented young people interested in adding to our understanding of progress in a variety of different fields. See a list of the fellows here.

As part of the program, they brought me in to do some teaching on writing, and it was a great opportunity to get to know a really bright and interesting group of people. So I thought I would take a couple of editions to share with my readers a few highlights of what the fellows ended up publishing by the end of the program.

I’ll take them three at a time and link you to their newsletters (mostly on Substack), so please give them a follow.

Maarten Boudry

I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Maarten Boudry, a European academic with an interesting history, and one of his first pieces for this program got published recently at Quillette.

“Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans.”

For the past few years, I have been the holder of a Chair at Ghent University dedicated in honour of Etienne Vermeersch, a Belgian philosopher renowned for many things but perhaps most notably for his early warnings about overpopulation and his advocacy for birth control. A few years before his untimely death in 2019, he expressed his “despair” at his failure to convince our political leaders to take overpopulation seriously.

Etienne was an intellectual hero of mine for whom I have huge respect, but this is the only thing about which he was dead wrong. Because there is no problem of overpopulation. In fact, before long, we will have to start worrying about underpopulation, caused by rapidly falling birth rates. It turns out that this is bad news not only for humanity but also for the planet, because more humans means more available resources and less destructive impact on nature.

I don’t think these two claims—that global population is at risk of falling rather than growing out of control, and that humans are creators of resources and wealth and not just consumers of them—will be new to my longtime readers, because I’ve been banging these drums for a long time. But this is still news to just about everyone else.

Maarten also offers a lot of interesting new details about the effect of a shrinking and especially an aging population on growth.

Older societies are less dynamic, more resistant to change, and less creative. Most scientists and inventors achieve their breakthroughs in their twenties and thirties, so fewer young people means fewer good ideas (and more older and infirm people to be supported by those fewer ideas). Until we design AI systems that can completely take over our scientific labours, the only genuine engine of progress on this planet is the kilogram of grey matter inside our skull. And with fewer and fewer fresh brains to produce and exchange ideas, the engine of human progress could soon be grinding to a halt (although the world still has huge reserves of underutilised brainpower in poor countries today). As Josh Smith and Jennifer Morales from the Center for Growth and Opportunity put it: “People are not just bellies to fill or a carbon footprint to minimize. People create solutions.” A 2022 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares US states and shows that ageing is already a persistent drag on economic growth and productivity; when the proportion of the population over 60 years old increases by 10 percent, economic growth (GDP per capita) decreases by 5.5 percent and productivity by almost 4 percent.

Maarten has some other very interesting pieces in the works, and I’ll link to them as they become available. In the meantime, follow him at Maarten Boudry’s Substack.

Max Tabarrok

The idea that humans are able to create new resources and use our brains to grow beyond Malthusian limits is an idea I was already very familiar with, but Max Tabarrok offers a highly original observation about how evolution itself—long before it produced the human brain—was already finding ways to escape the limits to growth.

The logistic model we developed above assumes that the carrying capacity of an environment is a function of the resources flowing in: one slice of peach a day supports 100 flies, and if you don’t change your ration then the long run maximum population of flies stays at 100. 

But there are exceptions to this rule. Organisms can sustainably increase their long run maximum population without accessing any new resource flows. A good example of this is a plant enzyme called Rubisco. Here’s how Charles C. Mann describes it:

Rubisco is the essential catalyst for photosynthesis. Like military recruiters who induct volunteers into the army and then return to their work, rubisco molecules take carbon dioxide from the air, insert it into the maelstrom of photosynthesis, then go back for more.

But Rubisco has a huge problem: it can’t tell CO2 from O2…. This problem gets worse with higher temperatures so plants around the equator have evolved a workaround, called C4 photosynthesis….

Once plants evolve C4 photosynthesis they can increase their biomass, population, and energy use sustainably and permanently without collecting any more resources than before, just because C4 makes more output for the same input.

The impact of C4 is evident to anyone who has looked at a recently mowed lawn. Within a few days of mowing, the crabgrass in the lawn springs up, towering over the rest of the lawn (typically bluegrass or fescue in cool areas). Fast-growing crabgrass is C4; lawn grass is ordinary photosynthesis. In addition to growing faster, C4 plants also need less water and fertilizer, because they don’t waste water on reactions that lead to excess oxygen, and because they don’t have to make as much rubisco.

This episode in evolutionary history shows that there is more to population dynamics than the usual story told by ecologists. They model carrying capacity as a function of the resource flows into an environment, but you can keep everything about your lawn the same: sunlight, water, fertilizer, soil, and the evolution of C4 photosynthesis will still increase the output. So the ecological output of an environment is not just a function of the resources flowing in, it also depends on how efficiently those resources are used. 

There’s more detail, so read the whole thing. Elsewhere, he also described the evolution of lignin, the chemical that adds structure to plants and gives the woody stem of a plant its stiffness, as another such biological adaptation to access more resources and overcome the limits to growth.

Man and the power of his brain is, once again, proved to be the most natural thing in the world.

Also see Max’s case for geo-engineering as a cheap and simple solution to global warming—a few billions (less than the GDP of Bhutan) spent to spray sun-blocking chemicals in the upper atmosphere. Or as he puts it, Chemtrails, But in a Good Way. I am, as you know, skeptical about the threat of global warming, but if it is a problem, this is the way to deal with it.

[S]olar geoengineering on the scale required to completely offset anthropogenic warming is easily within the technical and economic feasibility of any developed nation and is often far cheaper than the current climate mitigation strategies employed by these nations.

It is astonishing when you think about it.

Follow Max at Maximum Progress.

Tina Marsh Dalton

The work of the Roots of Progress fellows covers a very wide range, and I’ll be directing you only to a few of them at a time to make it easier for you to check them out and digest these ideas.

One of more delightful pieces is from Tina Marsh Dalton, who uses art as a window into the history of medical progress by contrasting two 19^th Century paintings of eminent surgeons at work. I was particularly struck by this detail.

The lone female in Eakins’s second clinical painting presents a revolutionary counterpoint to the anguished mother in the first painting.  Stoic and calm, dressed in sterile surgical garb, the assisting nurse is attentive and at the ready. Women contributed to professionalization of medicine via an explosion in the number of nursing schools, increasing from merely 15 in 1880 to 432 by 1900. The number of nurses grew 10-fold in the ten-year period from the 1880 census to the 1900 census.

The assisting nurse in the painting has been identified as Mary V. Clymer. Her placement in the painting as a competent and dispassionate professional showcases the rational focus of medicine as science, as well as the growing authority of women as nurses in medical practice. She left two volumes of dairies detailing her instruction and practices during this period, in which she wrote, “We must always be dignified & grave [when assisting a surgery] never forgetting that all we are trying to do is for the good of the patient.” Far from the helpless mother on the edge of the action, Clymer describes her actions as member to a professional medical class.

Among science and policy wonks, art tends to be underrated as a source of vital information about the past, so I am hoping Tina will make this part of a series. Follow her at Words to the WHYs on Healthcare.

I’ll be sharing more from the other fellows in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

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I ended my examination of Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto by noting the generally hostile reception it has received on the left.

Partly this is because of Andreessen’s insistence that “centralized planning is doomed to fail,” a clear repudiation of the advocates of “industrial policy” and their proposals for a pro-growth agenda managed and directed by government. But that’s not really what got him into trouble.

What got him into trouble is his long list of the “enemies” of growth.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades—against technology and against life—under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “Sustainable Development Goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “Precautionary Principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “de-growth,” “the limits of growth.”…

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

As I pointed out before, this is a little too scattershot. There are good arguments for unmasking the anti-progress mindset behind slogans like “existential risk,” which inflates every potential risk up to an apocalypse, or “stakeholder capitalism,” which in practice is a heckler’s veto on innovation. “Risk management” and “trust and safety” (which refers to content moderation on social media) are more complex issues. What is rational risk-management, and how much moderation is needed to make a private forum usable? That’s all too much to try to discuss in such an offhand way.

Andreessen does lock on more effectively to one of those ideas: the “precautionary principle,” which holds that we should stop new technology if we can even imagine any negative effect.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

So he really is taking aim at core ideas of big government and the welfare and regulatory state, and he got some of the defensive reactions you might expect.

provides a roundup of the least sophisticated version: leftists who attacked the manifesto for emphasizing productivity growth at the expense of redistribution of wealth and basically helping the poor by, er, dismantling the entire economy. Here is Pethokoukis:

At the core of the collective critique is a profound misunderstanding of the way the world works—specifically why everyone everywhere used to be really poor and why that’s no longer the case. This quote from Gizmodo’s Ropek (bold by me) is telling:

In general, the most distressing thing about the techno-optimist’s manifesto is that it’s basically just a big apology for unrestrained capitalism. Andreessen’s document is a hodgepodge of bad libertarian economics that aren’t based on anything resembling social or fiscal realities but are, more or less, an excuse for bad corporate behavior…. For example, here is one snapshot of Andreessen’s thinking: “Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past.”

That “snapshot of Andreessen’s thinking” isn’t “libertarian economics” or “trickle-down economics” or “neoliberal economics,” it’s economics. Like, total Econ 101 stuff, really.

He goes on to quote, in support of this claim, such wild-eyed radical libertarians as Paul Krugman.

The most compelling criticism of Andreessen is that he does not practice his exhortation that “it’s time to build”—that his venture capital fund has backed scammy cryptocurrencies and NFTs, or that it funded Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which has destroyed a lot more value than it has created. Fair enough. But this doesn’t take on the ideas, just their messenger.

The more interesting reaction comes from those we would expect to be sympathetic to Andreessen’s message: the so-called “Supply Side Progressives,” center-left commentators who have cautiously begun to embrace the idea that excessive regulation and sclerotic government are getting in the way of growth and future prosperity.

For those writers, however, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto poses a particularly dangerous dilemma: a challenge to their precarious perch on the fence. I have described Supply Side Progressivism as a halfway house for those who are trying to be more open to the power of markets and individual initiative but who still want to maintain their “progressive” credentials. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto is a challenge to them because it so forcefully argues that a pro-progress agenda is not “progressive”—or rather, the other way around: that what is called “progressivism” today is profoundly anti-progress.

This, I think, explains some of the ambivalence of the reactions from people like Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias.

Noah Smith

is far more sympathetic, but he tries tocarve out a rolefor “statism and central planning.”

[A]nyone who thinks that technology is pushed forward solely by scrappy inventors in their garages, while government and big business merely parasitizes off of their labors, is deeply wrong. And anyone who thinks that technology is pushed forward solely by government planners, while the private sector merely parasitizes off of government’s efforts, is also deeply wrong. 

In effect, Smith argues that it is not either-or but both-and, and he argues for an “all hands on deck” approach toward progress in which government and private enterprise will work together. I regard this as the triumph of hope over experience, but it is the most reasonable response to Andreessen.

Matt Yglesias does not cope as well. He creates a straw man version of Andreessen’s manifesto (while specifically denying that he is doing so), with such gems as this one:

[W]hile the anti-nuclear activists drastically overstated the safety issues with nuclear plants and the difficulty of dealing with nuclear waste storage, it is true that these are real issues. Like if you just didn’t store the waste and flushed it down the toilet instead, that would be really bad. And while we should not regulate reactor designs so strictly that we are left using more dangerous sources of energy instead, this is obviously not a space where you want an everything-goes free-for-all….

And that’s to say nothing on the weapons front. You can’t go down to Walmart and buy a tactical nuclear weapon. They don’t sell ICBMs over the internet.

Yep, that’s not a straw man at all. Marc Andreessen complains that we stopped building nuclear power plants, so that means he’s in favor of flushing nuclear waste down the toilet and selling ICBMs on the Internet. It’s kind of embarrassing, frankly. I suspect that Yglesias’s previous endorsements of ideas similar to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto prompted him to make such a strenuous—and strained—effort to differentiate himself from those icky free-marketers.

But the most revealing argument is from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, the most prominent champion of Supply-Side Progressivism. Klein complains that Andreessen’s enemy “is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures, who would erect guardrails or impose limits on the John Galts of tomorrow.”

But hasn’t Klein flirted with exactly those arguments? Here is his explanation:

There is a special pain in seeing ideas you believe in deformed for such purposes. Andreessen and I are not that far apart on some of the basics. For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society to pull possibilities from the far future into the near present.

So where exactly is the difference? Klein’s answer is revealing.

I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit, or even see when technologies or policies go awry. The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable. All the manifestoes in the world count for little against the burn of smog in the lungs and the trapping of heat in the atmosphere.

In effect, if people have turned against industry, technology, and capitalism, it is all the fault of the “recklessness” of the advocates of growth, who provoked a necessary and understandable reaction.

But nuclear power, where Klein grudgingly admits “regulation has been too heavy-handed”—quite the understatement—is the giveaway about what this argument really means. What has nuclear power ever done to justify the suspicion and hatred directed at it? Over a track record of many decades, it has proven to be the safest, cleanest, and most abundant form of power known to man. How did it deserve the deeply entrenched campaign to expunge it completely, as Germany is doing, even when it is the only large-scale practical answer to what environmentalists claim is the most important issue of the day?

But taking on this fear-mongering directly would scare the horses. Or as Klein puts it, “Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.”

In effect, Klein’s complaint is that Andreessen’s pro-progress arguments are disreputable. They are too combative and confrontational. He challenges “progressive” opponents of progress by taking them bluntly head-on. Instead, Klein’s approach is, in effect, moral appeasement. Soothe the progressive left’s fears and suspicions by loudly declaring your fealty to every one of their pet causes, your sympathy to every one of their prejudices—and then maybe they might allow you to build something.

The result he’s looking for is a “synthesis” that attempts to make technological and capitalist achievement tame and respectable enough to be tolerated.

Andreessen is not entirely wide of the mark here. There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan. But what’s needed is a synthesis Andreessen doesn’t even attempt.

This makes a certain kind sense, I suppose, for someone coming from a “progressive” background, where even small challenges to the orthodox agenda must make him feel like he has already made a courageous and radical departure and dares go no further. There is no more entrenched aspect of this progressive orthodoxy than a hatred and suspicion of business, of capitalists, and of industrialism. So it must seem that the only option is to gently soothe these fears and jealously guard his credentials as one of the good guys who is not an apologist for those evil capitalists.

This is what I think is most revealing about the reaction to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I am not a catastrophist—the American economy is growing vigorously, life in developed countries has never been better, and it is on a path to becoming better still. This isn’t about how the West is going to collapse and we’re all gonna die. It’s about how we could be doing better.

We are not achieving the speed of progress and explosive growth that is really possible to us and to the world. The kind of reaction we see from Klein explains why.

I long ago concluded that the most important factor for achieving growth and progress is that we have to want it. Like Andreessen, we have to see it as so centrally important to personal fulfillment and human flourishing that we place it as a top priority, above other things that might get in the way. Yet for all their aspirations to be pro-growth, this is precisely what the Supply Side Progressives won’t do. They want progress but only if—and “but only if” means: only if they can preserve all of their existing political loyalties. Sure, let's have progress, but don't scale back any regulations, don't cut any taxes, basically don't change the status quo in any significant way. So when someone like Andreessen comes along calling for those changes, they have to shoot him down.

This is the basic dilemma of the "supply side progressives." They want the self-image of being in favor of growth and progress and prosperity—but without losing the respectability of being left-wing “progressives” in good standing. They would like to see things built, so long as they are the right kind of things (solar farms and housing for the homeless), and it’s done by the right people (government officials and non-profit do-gooders), and in the right way (with soothing apologies to all the right activist groups), and above all, so long as nobody makes much of a profit from it. And then they will wonder why reform efforts stall and not much gets built.

Klein talks about how Andreessen “yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology.” But what he doesn’t see is that his outlook is defined by a fear of that sort of person.

The sort of people who build and innovate can be, like Andreessen, rough-hewn and combative. Maybe they will quote Nietzsche, and I hope they make references to Ayn Rand. They may not be eager to explain themselves to grandstanding politician or sooth the prejudices of political activists. They will be disreputable.

But we have to decide that growth and innovation are important enough to override these prejudices, that we don’t want people to be able to come up with new ideas and put them into practice only if they make it through a long approval process, don’t pose any risk, and don’t ruffle anyone’s feathers.

By reminding us of the overriding importance of growth to human life and prosperity, and by poking at some of the delicate sensitivities that would get in the way of growth, the Techno-Capitalist Manifesto has helped remind us of this.

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Are we ready to embrace and pursue progress—and what is holding us back?

A lot of answers to that have just been provided by Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and, long ago, co-author of the first Web browser. Some of the answers are in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”—and a lot of them are in the response he got.

Andreessen’s manifesto proclaims, “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential”—and he goes on to call for a lot more of it.

The whole thing is terrific. I had a few reservations here and there about an idea, a formulation, or a style of expression. But the manifesto’s only real problem is that it is too long and seems to be trying to cram in every thought Andreessen has ever had about technology and the human condition. He needed an editor, someone to tell him that fifteen hundred words of tightly focused prose is more effective than a scattershot of 5,000 words.

But that’s a small quibble, because I found myself nodding in agreement with Andreessen at nearly every point. Or rather, I found Andreessen to be in agreement with things I have long argued for. I’m not alone in arguing for these things, mind you. (Jim Pethokoukis takes the manifesto as vindication for his new book.) Andreessen gives credit along the way to a number of thinkers, living and dead, from whom he has drawn these ideas.

So anyone who wants to dismiss this as the vanity project of an out-of-touch billionaire will be missing out on the fact that Andreessen is expressing a growing school of thought about progress and technology. It is a manifesto speaking for a movement, or to the makings of a movement.

For example, Andreessen complains that “the myth of Prometheus—in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.” How could I not agree? My only complaint is that I was not one of the living writers who got a shout-out, since I’ve been banging the drum on the Curse of Frankenstein for a long time, as well as developing the metaphor of Prometheus.

As I concluded in my own article in favor of Prometheanism:

[A]ll we need to do is accept who we are. The power of human reason is our distinctive natural endowment, and from the beginning we have used it to gain knowledge of the world and to harness this knowledge to improve human life. This is the true divine fire, the transformative power that brings us innovation, prosperity, and the explosive growth we have enjoyed, particularly in the past few centuries.

Here is Andreessen: “We are told to denounce our birthright—our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.”

I’m not saying he reads my work, though it’s quite possible. But at the very least, we are drawing from many of the same inspirations.

Andreessen begins by describing the central role in our society of technological progress and growth.

We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

We believe everything good is downstream of growth.

We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.

He takes on many common arguments against technological progress.

We believe technological change, far from reducing the need for human work, increases it, by broadening the scope of what humans can productively do.

We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.

Again, an argument I have frequently made. And here is his take on the Basic Income.

We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.

That also sounds familiar. There is not a section in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto where I couldn’t link you to at least one article I have written over the years.

Andreessen argues that free markets are the engine of progress, presenting an intriguing formulation: “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.” This in itself is a whole new article I ought to write.

Here is the central idea of Andreessen’s argument: “We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-capital upward spiral are intelligence and energy—ideas, and the power to make them real.”

By “intelligence,” he means human intelligence, citing Julian Simon and his argument that the human mind is “the ultimate resource.” But he also hails the potential of artificial intelligence—“we are literally making sand think”—and he anticipates a combination of the two: augmented intelligence. “Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.” Again, this sounds familiar.

On energy, he joins a growing chorus in favor, not of reducing or “conserving” our civilization’s energy usage, but expanding it.

Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well….

We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.

I thought on this issue he might be cribbing, not from me, but from Alex Epstein. But instead of embracing fossil fuels, he mostly focuses on calling for an end to our absurd and dogmatic de facto ban on nuclear power.

At other points, he seems to be deliberately echoing Ayn Rand. One passage sounds a bit like a speech from Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.

We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.

Then there is this passage: “We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.”

The “romance of industry” and the “eros of the train and the skyscraper”? If we didn’t already know it from his Twitter feed—where he has posted excerpts from Ayn Rand—I think we can all guess what book he’s been reading. (He is strangely coy about it, though. The end of the manifesto has a long list of authors to read, one of whom is “John Galt,” an indirect way of referring to Rand.)

Like I said, there are a few things I could quibble with. The Ayn Rand influence is leavened by a little Nietzsche, as well as a very oblique reference to the crazy Italian Futurists. (“Beauty exists only in struggle.”) This is reflected in some formulations that seem shaped by the pseudo-masculinity of certain modern pundits: “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness—strength.” There is a difference between ambition and aggression, and the two should not be conflated.

But if there’s a bit of a right-wing tinge to this part of the manifesto, other passages swing more to the center-left, including a bit of a compromise with the welfare state.

We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned—the production of markets creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else we want as a society.

And there are passages that liberals of any variety can endorse.

We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof.

If you’ve seen a photo of Andreessen, you get the joke. And also:

Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.

And:

Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.

And yep, I’ve written that article, too.

This is a manifesto that gathers together many different intellectual strains and starts a discussion that may help those ideas coalesce into a well-defined pro-progress movement. It begins the process by performing the integrative function of putting all of those ideas together in one place.

As you may have already guessed, though, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto was not well received on the mainstream left. If such a strong exposition of the importance of growth and innovation meets with a strong current of hostility, there are some important lessons to be drawn about what holds back progress—which we will examine in part two of this article.

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I have been writing on these issues off and on for many years, but in the past few months, it seems like everyone else is now jumping into the discussion, particularly after the release of the latest versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

But you may have noticed two trends in the response. First is AI doomerism, the fear that more powerful artificial intelligence will lead us to the robot apocalypse envisioned for decades in science fiction. Second, and closely related, is the idea that the first thing emerging new technology requires is government regulation.

I noted this trend in one of my earliest forays into this kind of “futurism,” in which I responded to a pitch for the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment as a kind of central planner for new technology. I argued that individual planning in the marketplace is likely to be more effective than central planning—as it always has been. “The best and most effective plans for dealing with radical new technology and its impact on our lives are going to be made by individuals. That should be the target audience for a new generation of futurists.”

See that piece here:

I’ll be posting new articles here and also aggregating interesting articles from other writers. Plus, I am gathering together my backlog of articles from the past 12 years or so, many of which have held up extremely well. Check out this one about why we can’t yet have the flying cars we envisioned in science fiction—not without some very radical new technology.

Part of my goal here is to offer a realistic assessment of emerging technology and sort out the realistic prospects from the irrational hopes and fears. I’ve done that recently with some very philosophical examination of the fundamental limits of artificial intelligence.

See also my review of the basic economics of artificial intelligence, and the fundamental reason why robots won’t take our jobs.

But the title of this newsletter is The Free Market Futurist, so I will be focusing most on why we should be skeptical of claims to predict and centrally plan future innovation and its adoption.

And I will be arguing against some of the most common big-government “solutions” proposed for adapting to new technology.

Again, please subscribe, which will help to grow this newsletter and also give you access to participation in the comments section.

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The Moratorium on Digital Brains

AI and automation will certainly cause some disruption to the economy. Some jobs will change and some may begin to fade away. But if you want to make is easier for people to adjust, the best approach is not to get in the way of new innovation, but to encourage it to happen as quickly as possible. The faster a new technology is implemented, the greater the growth it produces—and, thanks to Say’s Law, the greater the demand it creates for other labor, making it easier for displaced workers to find new jobs and train themselves with the skills needed to perform them.

What is most striking about the reaction to recent progress on artificial intelligence is that the reaction is the opposite.

The media is dominated right now by the “AI doomers.” Techdirt provides an overview.

When a British tabloid headline screams, “Attack of the psycho chatbot,” it’s funny. When it’s followed by another front-page headline, “Psycho killer chatbots are befuddled by Wordle,” it’s even funnier. If this type of coverage stayed in the tabloids, which are known to be sensationalized, that was fine. 

But recently, prestige news outlets have decided to promote the same level of populist scaremongering: The New York Times published “If we don’t master AI, it will master us” (by Harari, Harris & Raskin), and TIME magazine published “Be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike” (by Yudkowsky).

In just a few days, we went from “governments should force a 6-month pause” (the petition from the Future of Life Institute) to “wait, it’s not enough, so data centers should be bombed.” Sadly, this is the narrative that gets media attention and shapes our already hyperbolic AI discourse. 

Yes, they really are planning a moratorium on digital brains, with some proposing a 6-month pause in AI research and some taking it to its logical conclusion—does anyone think a mere six months would satisfy the doomers?—and proposing a longer one. I am sure China will agree to abide by this limitation on its research.

Doomers Versus Zoomers

This is a long-standing trend in media reporting on emerging technology. The pattern for every new article is: “Here’s this innovative and fast-growing new technology—but nobody’s regulating it!” The authors rarely pause to consider that perhaps the reason the technology is innovative and fast-growing is because nobody is regulating it or imposing a moratorium on new research. But much of the media coverage seems to be trying to wish such a regulatory moratorium into existence.

It strikes me that we need a more consistent effort in defense of technological progress in general and AI innovation in particular. To counter the AI doomers we need more AI zoomers—people advocating for advancing this new technology as fast as possible.

We need to recapture a mindset where we view innovation and a high-tech future as exciting and desirable, rather than as an object onto which to project a personal sense of existential dread.

We need more zoomers instead of doomers—more people who want technological progress to be celebrated and liberated. That is exactly what I will be encouraging here.

Please consider subscribing to support this effort.

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I sort of missed out on the Great Socialist Banana War and had to catch up on it by way of a few of the newsletters I read (there are some good comments here). The upshot is that one group of socialists declared that, come the revolution, there will be no bananas in the supermarket, because we wealthy Westerners will just have to tighten our belts to stop the exploitation of the global proletariat, i.e., farm workers in Ecuador—who will somehow be helped if no one is consuming one of their largest exports.

See an overview that takes this debate way more seriously than it deserves. Here’s the upshot.

Some leftists believe that economic justice will require an end to economic growth as we’ve known it. More concretely, they think that workers in the United States (and other wealthy countries) will need to consume material resources at a much lower rate in order to accommodate both (1) higher rates of consumption in the Global South and (2) the imperatives of ecological sustainability. In theory, the American people will still end up better off in this utopia, since they will gain a great deal of leisure time and economic security in a socialist system, even as they forfeit, say, the freedom to get around in a personal automobile, purchase vast quantities of consumer goods, or eat tropical fruits on a daily basis (privileges that, in these socialists’ estimation, do not contribute all that much to the average American’s well-being).

Other socialists reject this perspective. They argue that the “de-growth” left’s austere vision is antithetical to both Marxist theory and political practicality. In their account, socialism is a fundamentally modernist ideology: Marx celebrated capitalism’s extraordinary productive capacity but argued that socialism could generate even greater abundance for ordinary workers. The aim of leftist politics isn’t to deny the western working class its decadent treats so much as to universalize and expand material abundance.

The reason I say this takes the issue way too seriously is that this ship already sailed for the far horizons a long time ago. The socialists did, in fact, claim that they were trying to “expand material abundance” and “generate abundance for ordinary workers”—and they failed, every time. So the “de-growth” left is a necessary and inevitable reaction. Pushed to choose between socialism and economic growth, the left long ago chose socialism and rejected growth.

The fallback for the left, going back to Lenin, is that developed capitalist countries use “imperialism” to export poverty to other parts of the globe. This seems to be the idea behind the Banana War. Those tricky capitalists are bribing us with bananas so we won’t notice the exploitation of peasants in Ecuador. But we are long past the point when this claim is no longer plausible, because so many of the “colonial” countries that trade heavily with the developed West have used that trade to become relatively wealthy themselves. Anti-imperialist Marxism has proved just as much of a bust as the original edition.

This particular debate is mostly a bit of Twitter ephemera for a slow news week, but there is one entry in the discussion that indicates a wider issue. This is from a leftist seeking to dismiss our desire for bananas.

No one, absolutely no one—not even the most dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freak—buys a banana at Trader Joe’s in Calgary in December and marvels in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism. They dully cross it off their list and move on, barely conscious of it.

Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I do occasionally take time to marvel in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism. More to the point, it is interesting to note that socialists are now forced to acknowledge that capitalism produces widespread opulence. Since socialism failed to deliver abundance, the socialists have write it off as "decadent."

“Opulence” really is the right word, and that is the big story I want to end with. Capitalism hasn’t merely lifted us out of poverty and delivered us from the threat of chronic starvation. It hasn’t just made us comfortable and prosperous. It is making everyone rich.

The Decadent Opulence of Modern Capitalism

We are now fifteen years out from the financial crisis of 2008, and that helps us put the Great Recession into a wider perspective.

In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.

This has gained some attention recently with new figures showing the widening gap in wealth between the US and Europe. Jim Pethokoukis describes it as a Doom Loop of Decline and attributes it partly to the impact of heavy European regulation. The basic driver is this: “Europe has an aging population that values its free time and social benefits over work and productivity. (This reduces labor force participation, innovation potential, and the economic growth of the continent.)” The numbers (quoted by Pethokoukis from a paywalled article in the Wall Street Journal) are stark.

The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said.

Noah Smith adds a caveat to those figures, arguing that Europe’s problem is primarily driven by Southern Europe, which has recovered slowly (or in the case of Greece, not at all) from the 2008 crisis. But even in Smith’s figures, there is no Northern European economy that outperforms the US.

But I would like to focus on the positive side of this story: The US economy has grown 82% in fifteen years! Barring anything more than a mild recession, that means that we can expect the US economy to more than double by the time we hit 20 years from 2008. Isn’t that wonderful?

It’s not just a case of doubling the overall size of the economy. The increase in wealth has been widely distributed.

I was struck by a calculation by George Washington University’s Stephen Rose that he describes at a center-left newsletter called The Liberal Patriot. Deciding what is “middle class” versus “lower middle class” versus “upper middle class” is difficult, and every analysis sets up different cutoffs between these categories. But Rose sets a reasonable level, describing “upper middle class” as an income between $100,000 and $350,000. Rose does not account for regional differences in cost of living but argues that these will tend to even themselves out. For every person wrongly counted as “upper middle class” in Manhattan or San Francisco, there will be people who are undercounted in Wichita or Central Virginia. But $100,000 is five times the official poverty level, so you can live on it pretty comfortably just about anywhere.

What this analysis finds is extraordinary.

Using this measure, there was real growth in every rung of the economic ladder over the period from 1979 to 2019, with each ascending step having slightly higher percentage gain….

In brief, economic growth from 1979 to 2019 led more of the population to move up to higher social classes. As Table 1 shows, the bottom two categories—poor and near-poor plus lower middle class—went from a combined 49 percent to 29 percent…. The size of the [core middle class] also declined, down from 39 percent to 31 percent over these years. These declines manifest themselves in a massive—and massively under-covered—growth of the [upper middle class], spiking from 13 percent in 1979 to 37 percent in 2019.

America has always thought of itself as a middle-class country. But we are rapidly becoming an upper-middle-class country. This is now the largest category, and at the rate we’re going, it will soon be an outright majority.

I don’t think this has ever happened before for a nation of any significant size. Liechtenstein, maybe, but not a vast country with 330 million people.

Diseases of the Rich

Kyle Smith points out a consequence of our becoming an upper-middle-class country, linking to Jim Geraghty’s article on the increase in ticket prices at Disney theme parks. In an upper-middle-class country, Disney may well be able to transform its resorts into a luxury product.

Geraghty spins this as an explanation for why Disney has been getting invested in the culture wars—the idea that it sees an interest in appealing to the values of the college-educated upper-middle-class, who are now its customer base. But I have used this as an explanation for why both left and right are focusing on the culture wars.

I would like to think that an upper-middle-class country would definitively move on from leftism. How do you sell a narrative about the oppressed proletariat to a nation of bourgeoisie? Then again, upper-middle-class people can afford more welfare-state spending, and they also have more access to education and, frankly, the luxury of agonizing over something other than our pocketbooks. It has been a long time since most Americans were concerned about how to put a roof over our heads, so we have moved on from “kitchen table” issues to concerns about values and status and self-image.

Yet I would note that in this context, the old left welfare-state programs look, not merely unnecessary, but callous and cruel. See a good overview by Cato’s Michael Tanner on how the incentives created by welfare programs discourage work for the poor. But in a growing and thriving upper-middle-class country, this looks like a way to create a permanent underclass who are kept in poverty so we can congratulate ourselves on our compassion and generosity—rather than encouraging them to embark on the upward trajectory that will allow them to rise into the middle class, then into the upper middle class.

Come to think of it, some of this may also explain the right’s belligerent opposition to immigration. If we are becoming an upper-middle-class country, perhaps we are taking on some of the attitudes of a gated community that wants to keep out the riff-raff. We wrinkle our noses at the prospect of taking in new immigrants who would be as poor, dirty, and ignorant as our grandparents and great-grandparents were when they came to this country.

But all of this seems like complaining, like trying to find the cloud in the silver lining.

Instead, let’s just take a few moments to eat a banana and marvel in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism—and at the fact that America is leading the way.

I’ve already addressed the idea that the robots are going to kill us, a fear drummed into us by decades of science fiction, but not well grounded in science fact. I was delighted to see that piece linked to in Jim Pethokoukis’s pro-progress newsletter, “Fa…

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