Faster, Please! — The Podcast

Over the past 15 years, the cost to launch a rocket into orbit has declined dramatically thanks to SpaceX. Today, we're witnessing the launch of a new Space Age — one built around billionaires like Elon Musk, but also a flowering of smaller private ventures. To discuss the state of play in the emerging orbital economy, I've brought Ashlee Vance on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast.Vance is the author of the new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. He previous wrote, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future in 2015.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In This Episode* How SpaceX launched a new Space Age (1:13)* The companies building a “computing shell” around the planet (8:37)* The proliferation of satellites (15:07)* The downsides of the emerging space economy (24:07)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationHow SpaceX launched a new Space AgeJames Pethokoukis: The book begins with a story of the first successful orbital launch of a SpaceX Falcon 1. There were three failed attempts, the whole thing is looking pretty dicey about the future of the company in this effort, and on the fourth attempt, September, 2008, they're able to get to orbit and release a payload. Before September, 2008, what does the space economy/space industry look like? Where are we starting?Ashlee Vance: The starting point: sort of sadly, it looked a lot the same for many, many decades. We had this nation-backed space program, [which was] dominant. There were just a handful of nations, really, that were the major players in all this. Some wealthy people at various stages had come along and tried to commercialize space and make their own rockets, and had varying degrees of success, but no staying power. It ended up that it always takes longer and costs more than you think. And NASA was always sitting there really as your main competitor and undermining your business. With the Falcon 1, it really was this watershed-type moment where finally somebody had succeeded. Yes, SpaceX had people from traditional aerospace, but Elon [Musk] certainly was not from the aerospace world. He had a lot of 20-somethings on his team who had never done this before. It just signaled this new era, or the possibility of a new era, because you had people just who hadn't been part of the old guard doing this thing.The goal here was to get a rocket into space and get it there way cheaper than what NASA was doing. What was the key breakthrough that allowed that decline in costs? And why didn't NASA just do this?NASA, and in particular the Department of Defense, had desired this type of thing for a long time: a low-cost rocket that could get to space quickly and often. It seems like this should be doable, but they had really struggled to make it happen. The DOD had funded various efforts. There's a couple things going on. SpaceX had this huge advantage, I think, of this clean slate to this. They came at this without the usual baggage. And in this case, the baggage means a lot of military government contractors who are pricing things quite expensively. They're doing things the way they've always done them, which means you probably don't want to see any sort of failure so you're building it in a ton of redundancy and spending all this extra money to make sure you look good when this thing goes.SpaceX comes in with this clean slate. The original pitch deck for SpaceX described it as like the Southwest for space. Cost was like at the top of [Elon Musk’s] mind and he wanted to make this cheap. They did have some breakthroughs. The physics around a rocket are the physics, and we've known this for decades. There's not much room for huge breakthroughs in engineering that nobody has thought of yet. But they did come in with this modern, Silicon Valley–style approach to software, particularly to electronics—although this kind of comes in later in SpaceX's history—where SpaceX was going to build a lot of the electronics themselves, often turning to consumer-grade electronics instead of what people call space-grade, which means it's built by a military contractor, it probably costs a thousand times what it should cost, but it's guaranteed to work in space. They had this clean slate. They did things as cheap as possible. The team was small. It wasn't this bloated contractor. That was their primary advantage at the beginning, I would argue. Over time, as they've gotten much bigger and much more money is coming in, there's a whole host of technological advantages. But on the Falcon 1, it really was that clean slate, this low-cost approach.Obviously if you're beginning your book, which is not a history of SpaceX, but you're beginning with SpaceX, then that must have marked an important inflection point where you could sort of imagine two paths. One path: the 2010s look a lot like the 2000s, which look a lot like the ‘90s. Versus this very different path.Why is SpaceX important in creating this new path, and what do things look like now?Yeah. I'm so glad you called that out and you phrased it the way you did with these two paths, because a lot of people—my editors were giving me grief for, “Why are you spending so much time talking about SpaceX in the prologue of this book that's not going to be about SpaceX?” But as you pointed out…By the way, having dealt with book editors, I can imagine that conversation quite easily.I wanted people to know how fragile this was, and where it did it come from? You mentioned it: Three of the previous rockets had failed, SpaceX was running out of money, they were running out of credibility, people had been on this island, Kwajalein, for six years, basically losing their minds. If this rocket does not go, I think we do end up in that scenario that you were just talking about, where the 2010s look pretty much like they always had. It was important to me just to give people this history, how hard this is. I see this as this inciting incident. It's funny, because you kind of go from governments and then there were like honest-to-God billionaires. When Elon started SpaceX, he was rich, but he wasn't rich like he is now. We're talking about like a hundred million dollars he put into SpaceX. So the bar had come down quite a bit. But in that moment when this rocket flies and then in the years that follow, when SpaceX really starts to hit its stride, this unlocks all of this.There was so much enthusiasm for space and young kids who wanted to get into this industry, and it had been slow and boring and the excitement had sort of come out of it. You had the generation of people who had grown up watching Apollo. Those people were getting older, and there wasn't something new to look at for a lot of people who were much younger. And here it is. Here's this company that's making commercial space real. And this guy, Elon, is quite eccentric and interesting, and some people sort of want to be like him. I write about it in the book: It was sort of like the four-minute mile to me. It's like, once somebody does it, then all of a sudden you see lots of people now are breaking the four-minute mile. This thing that seemed impossible, it turns out is possible. You have this unlocking in your head of what people can do. And so I just think across the world, it unlocked this passion, this latent engineering smarts and energy, and made this seem real. So you end up with startups all over the world chasing rockets and satellites.The companies building a “computing shell” around the planetIn the book, you write, “The future that all these space buffs have already started building is one in which many rockets blast off every day. These rockets will be carrying thousands of satellites that will be placed not all that far above our heads. The satellites will change the way communications work on Earth by, for one, making the internet an inescapable presence with all the good and bad that entails. The satellites will also watch and analyze the earth in previously unfathomable ways. The data centers that have reshaped life on our planet will be transported into orbit. We are, in effect, building a computing shell around the planet.” Other than SpaceX, who are the companies building that computer shell?The one that comes to mind is the next sort of central actor in the book, which is this company called Planet Labs, which is based in San Francisco. For people who don't know, they already surround the Earth with about 250 imaging satellites. They can take, and they do take, pictures of every spot on the Earth's landmass every day. Multiple pictures. Unlike even the world's biggest governments, China, Russia, the US, which have spice satellites obviously, but they only have a handful of spy satellites. And they tend to only look where interesting things might be happening. Planet sees everything that's happening all the time. And this is not some far-off concept. They had this full constellation up and running in 2018 and have just been adding to it ever since.At the time they launched, in low-Earth orbit there were about [2,000] satellites. And Planet had put up about 250. They were about 10 percent of all the satellites in space, just from this small private company in California that grew out of NASA Ames, the Silicon Valley center. And so they're indicative of, today, we have many, many, several companies trying to build these space internet constellations, each of which require on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 satellites. You've got more imaging satellites along the lines of Planet that do all kinds of different things. And then you got a ton of scientific satellites. The whole premise is that there are many more ideas yet to come.When you watch a spy movie, they're always talking about "retasking the satellite,” like there's only one satellite over all of Asia or something. But what we're talking about now is satellites everywhere, looking everywhere, any time you want.Yeah. That movie stuff is true. That's usually what had to happen. Just as like SpaceX brought the cost of rocket launches down and created this revolution in rocketry, I argue Planet had an attendant effect satellites. I didn't mention before: A traditional satellite is like the size of a school bus, costs $500 million to $2 billion to make. People sit there working on it for like six years. It's supposed to go into space and stay there for 20 years. You can imagine the electronics on a 20-year-old satellite that's trying to do its job…I can also imagine the tension of that launch going wrong.Like, that can't go wrong for many reasons. And once the satellite gets up in space, it also has to work, right? That's why you're spending $2 billion, because if that thing doesn't work, a lot of people are losing their jobs at a company or a military outfit is in dire straits. Planet rethought this whole thing. They're like, “Let's make them much smaller. Let's put them closer to Earth.” Almost like a disposable sort of thing. They're sending up dozens at a time. They've had rocket launches — a couple, they had bad luck at the beginning — that blew up and they lost all their satellites on those. But it wasn't a make-or-break moment for the company, because these satellites are relatively cheap: $100,000 each.They rethought the whole thing, and then they were able to surround the Earth. It basically like a line scanner, and the Earth just turns under these satellites, and it's just photographing all the time. It sounds a lot like what we were talking about before, espionage and spy stuff, and there are uses for that. Although the resolution on these, you can't see somebody's face or anything like that. You mostly look at something like the size of a car. These satellites are geared to what I call monitoring the real-time activity of humans on Earth. Where are we building stuff? Where is our oil being stored? Where is it going? How are our forests? How many trees are in the Amazon? Is somebody cutting them down? The sort of movement of economic activity and environmental activity on Earth.It reminds me of, if you're trying to determine like the GDP of a country that may not be particularly honest with its government statistics, you could either accept the statistics and try to figure it out, or you could just look at it from space. How many lights are going on? Is there more activity? And try to gauge it in a more visual way. Are there companies doing that for more private-sector reasons?This happens today. China will say, “We have this much oil in our reserves.” Well, it turns out these satellites can spot all your oil storage systems. Because of the way the oil storage systems work, where they have these floating lids that can go up and down depending on how much oil is in there, the satellites can actually measure the shadow that's being reflected on the side of this tanker. And you could calculate, people argue, very accurately how much oil is being stored. We do this with places like Saudi Arabia. China comes out with its official economic metrics, and now we have a version of the truth where people come back and say, “No, you have way more oil stored up than you've been letting on.” I think this is going to be a big deal. Not to go on a huge tangent, but China's economy appears to be slowing. I'm quite certain the government will put the best possible spin on things and how they're performing. You can look not only at oil, you can look at construction — how many buildings are going up, how many houses are going up — all kinds of economic indicators.We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The proliferation of satellitesWhat has the growth in the number of satellites looked like in recent years? And do you have a sense of how that growth will continue over the next decade?I can do that one. Easy. From like 1960 to 2020, in low-Earth orbit, we had managed to put up about 2,500 satellites. And it was not on an exponential curve. We kind of got a whole bunch up, and then every year you would add maybe 20 to 50 depending on what was going on. It was this very slow, steady march the last few years. So that's 2020: 2,500. Already, as we're sitting here today, there's now about 10,000. So that number has almost quadrupled. It's getting close to quadrupling by the end of this year. We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The astronomers can't be happy.No. I'm sort of baffled by some of this, because SpaceX and Starlink have been the major driver of this huge increase as they're trying to build out their space internet system. Spacex is now the world's largest satellite manufacturer by several orders of magnitude. And this was no secret. They had to apply for all these licenses to put these satellites up years in advance. There were other people trying to build a space internet. The astronomers never complained until the second SpaceX did its first launch and put the satellites up and everyone could see this kind of string of pearls flying above them as the satellites start to spread out. I was amused and sort of baffled, I guess, that they waited until this was already underway to really start kind of complaining about this. But the die is cast as far as I can tell. You could argue for the Earth-bound telescopes, this is not great. On the other hand, if rocket launches are coming way down, if we're finally putting Moore's Law in space, the opportunity to put scientific instruments above this low-Earth orbit field and do a whole bunch of interesting things increases quite dramatically. If you had to build up $300 million for a rocket launch in the past just to have a go at putting your scientific instrument up, and now you can do it for anywhere from call it like $6 million to $60 million, it's a new era where more people really should get a chance.Earlier, you talked about SpaceX as the Southwest Airlines of space. But that's really not what it is anymore. Today, it's the high-end company. And other entrepreneurs have filled that space below it. Is that right?Exactly. SpaceX built that Falcon 1, which was meant to cost just a few million dollars to launch, and then quickly abandoned it. The second it worked, it moved to the much larger Falcon 9, in part because we didn't quite yet have companies like Planet Labs. Planet Labs came around 2012, a few years after the Falcon 1 launch, and really was the first to start thinking about all sending up thousands or hundreds of satellites. And so SpaceX retired the Falcon 1, you had kind of this gap, and then all of a sudden — some of these companies are real, some of them aren't — there's about a hundred rocket startups trying to make a rocket. Even SpaceX today, the Falcon 9 runs about $60 to $70 million a launch. Now you have dozens of companies trying to do launches starting at, if you believe these numbers, like $2 million a launch. Probably like somewhere between $5 and $12 million is a realistic figure. The leader in this category is in the book, this company Rocket Lab founded by Peter Beck. And they have made a rocket called Electron, which has flown now dozens of times and is really sort of like a perfectly engineered small rocket.If we can have the internet everywhere for everybody, what does that enable? What do these satellites enable?I think starting with space internet is a good one. Even though we often feel like we're connected to the internet all the time and we have our cell phones, the truth of it is there are these huge gaps all around the planet. And it probably means more on an infrastructure sense than it does on an individual not being able to check their email for a few hours. What we are creating now is a blanket of internet that will have the Earth always connected. This part makes a lot of sense to me. It's very obvious. I just think this is the next step of our technology build out. Just like in the ‘90s, we had to put data centers and fiber everywhere to sort of get the internet going; now, you want this persistent internet that can connect people and all sorts of devices all the time. And that's what we're building in space: This internet heartbeat that's washing over. Everything you've ever heard about, like Internet of Things, sensors on container ships reporting back, or things out in the farm checking the soil moisture: None of this really has worked. And the reason why, is because we haven't had this sort of persistent internet connection. If you think about like a world full of drones and flying cars and self-driving cars — all these things that have to be talking in remote spots to have all this work. It's just this glue that needs to be there. That's like case number one that I think does check out.And then of course, you have three-and-a-half billion people that just cannot be reached by fiber optic cables today, and they're not allowed to participate in the modern economy. There’s such obvious evidence that the second high-speed internet arrives in a country, education levels go up, economic levels go up. This is just like a fairness thing in letting the whole world participate in what's going on.That's fantastic because sometimes I think people are unaware of what's going on. Maybe they're kind of aware of SpaceX, but that's pretty much it. And when they think of SpaceX, they're probably mostly thinking of, Elon Musk wants to take us to Mars. I don't think they understand very much about the satellites, unless they've heard astronomers complain about it. I don't think they understand the economic and business case and just that it's all happening.This is why everyone focuses on the Moon and Mars. And it's all cool and everything, and it is still just very far out. This is why I wrote the book. I was like, you people do not understand that we are building a legit economy right over our heads. And this thing is pretty well underway and I think it is going to change life here on Earth quite quickly.Are any of the companies that you're looking at involved with creating like new space stations? There's been a lot of talk about creating new space platforms. What they'll do up there, I'm not sure exactly. There's talk about creating different kinds of products and shooting movies and doing biotechnology research. Are any of the companies cover involved with those efforts?Yeah. In the book, I spend less time on things like space habitats and some of these other businesses. But yes, I do talk about them briefly. But more importantly, I suppose for this conversation, all this is happening. In the past, you've had the International Space Station, this multinational, huge, bureaucratic thing that actually works pretty well. But that’s who's driving it. And now we have a handful of startups making space habitats. We've got SpaceX leading the way with, I guess you could call it tourism: being able to send people to these things, private citizens. This is already happening. We've had private astronauts now going to space on SpaceX rockets. And so they'll go to those habitats. A fascinating startup called Varda launched just a couple months ago. They have put what you could argue is the first manufacturing system in space. It's making medicines. You can do things without gravity pushing on molecules in space that you can't do on Earth. They're trying to make a whole new class of pharmaceuticals and bring them back to Earth. I think that's just the earliest example. There are things like asteroid mining that I thought were total jokes and are still quite far off, but there's a startup, Astro Forge. Same thing: They set up their first test earlier this year. All this stuff is actually happening now. The business cases on these things, I think some will work and some won't, but we're going to find out.The downsides of the emerging space economyWhat's the unnerving aspect? I write about this a lot: We immediately jump to the downsides. What are the costs? So I didn't want to certainly lead with that, but are there things about this that people should be concerned about? Space junk, other things?I am optimistic on the whole. History would tell us that when humans find a new territory in which to conquer, usually mistakes are made. It doesn't always go really well. We have a reality setting up right now where you had this handful of governments moving very slowly, launching a rocket once a month. Now we're moving to like every day and thousands of satellites, and it really is a bit of ‘whoever gets their first wins’ sort of scenario. Once you start adding a race to these things, that often that doesn't go well.The thing that everybody is worried about is these satellites crashing into each other and creating a debris field in low-Earth orbit. And obviously none of these companies want that to happen. They're the ones spending hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to build these things. And we do have systems in place to track this stuff, but that becomes a nightmare. There is a scenario called the Kessler Syndrome, where one of these things breaks apart and it just starts ripping into everything else, and then low-Earth orbit becomes essentially unusable. That's not only bad for this new stuff that we're talking about, but there's things like GPS that make the modern world work that would no longer work if that happens. That's a huge issue I think we're going to have.If you think about, these were nation states that had a lot of control. The rockets are essentially ICBMs more or less. You had a select group of space-faring nations. I think that's all going to change quite soon. Whoever wants a rocket blasting off from their country can have one. Almost anywhere can afford a satellite. You're talking about like a hundred grand just to kind of get going. You're going to have nation states that no longer can really be controlled the way they were or that now have access to space. Are they going to follow all the same rules that everybody else has been following for decades? Probably not.And then I think the real wild card is Russia. This is a country whose space program was already flagging. SpaceX has eaten up a ton of their business. It's rife with corruption. The war in Ukraine has made them unusable for many, many countries as far as sending up satellites and people. And they are a wild card. Space is not just some flight of fancy for Russia. It's something that's baked deep into the national pride and is near and dear to their hearts. They have no commercial space companies, startups at all. Are they a rational actor in this new world as they see there being this dominant superpower that’s going to go away?I'm going to finish by asking you the Mars question about SpaceX: Is that going to happen? Do you think that is a serious goal for that company that you can see happening on some sort of timeline that Elon Musk has talked about?I'm pretty sure it will. I mean, for Elon, you’ve always got to take everything he says with a grain of salt on timelines and ambition and all that. He tends to set these goals. They usually don't happen anywhere close to what he said, but they usually do happen. And in this case, it's not just Elon, right? I know enough of the SpaceX top engineers. They are very convinced Starship is real, that it can get to Mars, I think for sure. You're going to see years of just sending industrial equipment and things like that to Mars long before you send a human. The human question is still…things have to get better. That's a long ride to Mars. And you better be sure you can come back if you want to. A lot of stuff has to happen between here and there. But will SpaceX start putting stuff on Mars in actually sort of the relatively near-ish future? Yes. I'm quite convinced of that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

On Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I've interviewed guests on exciting new technologies like artificial intelligence, fusion energy, and reusable rockets. But today's episode explores another Next Big Thing: biotechnology. To discuss recent advances in CRISPR gene editing and their applications for medicine, I'm sitting down with Kevin Davies.Kevin is executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of the excellent 2020 book, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.In This Episode* CRISPR advances over the past decade (1:13)* What CRISPR therapies will come next? (8:46)* Non-medical applications of gene editing (13:11)* Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPR (18:43)* Longevity and genetic enhancements (25:48)Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Below is an edited transcript of our conversationCRISPR advances over the past decadeWhen people talk about AI, for instance, they might be talking about different versions or applications of AI—machine learning being one. So when we talk about CRISPR, are we just talking about one technique, the one they figured out back in 2012? Are there different ones? Are there improvements? So it's really a different technique. So how has that progressed?You're right. CRISPR has become shorthand for genome editing. But the version of CRISPR that was recognized with the Nobel Prize three years ago in 2020 to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier was for one, we can call it the traditional form of CRISPR. And if I refer to it again, I'll call it CRISPR-Cas9. Cas9 is the shorthand name for the enzyme that actually does the cutting of the DNA. But we are seeing extraordinary progress in developing new and even more precise and more nuanced forms of genome editing. They still kind of have a CRISPR backbone. They still utilize some of the same molecular components as the Nobel Prize–winning form of CRISPR. But in particular, I'm thinking of techniques called base editing and prime editing, both of which have commercial, publicly funded biotech companies pushing these technologies into the clinic. And I think over the next five to 10 years, increasingly what we refer to as “CRISPR genome editing” will be in the form of these sort of CRISPR 2.0 technologies, because they give us a much broader portfolio of DNA substitutions and changes and edits, and give the investigators and the clinicians much more precision and much more subtlety and hopefully even more safety and more guarantees of clinical efficiency.Right. That's what I was going to ask. One advantage is the precision, because you don't want to do it wrong. You don't want mutations. Do no harm first. A big advantage is maybe limiting some of the potential downsides.In the ideal gene-editing scenario, you would have a patient with, say, a genetic disease that you can pinpoint to a single letter of the genetic code. And we want to fix that. We want to zero in on that one letter—A, C, T, or G is the four-letter alphabet of DNA, as I hope most of your listeners know—and we want to revert that back to whatever most normal, healthy people have in their genetic code at that specific position. CRISPR-Cas9, which won the Nobel Prize, is not the technology to do that sort of single base edit. It can do many other things, and the success in the clinic is unquestionable already in just a few years. But base editing and, in particular, prime editing are the two furthest developed technologies that allow investigators to pinpoint exactly where in the genome we want to make the edit. And then without completely cutting or slicing the double helix of DNA, we can lay up the section of DNA that we want to replace and go in and just perform chemistry on that one specific letter of DNA. Now, this hasn't been proven in the clinic just yet. But the early signs are very, very promising that this is going to be the breakthrough genome-editing technology over the next 10 to 20 years.Is CRISPR in the wild yet, or are we still in the lab?No, we're in the clinic. We are in human patients. There are at least 200 patients who have already been in or are currently enrolled in clinical trials. And so far, the early results—there are a few caveats and exceptions—but so far the overwhelming mood of the field is one of bullish enthusiasm. I don't want to complete this interview without singling out this one particular story, which is the clinical trial that has been sponsored by CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals for sickle cell disease. These are primarily African-American patients in this country because the sickle cell mutation arose in Africa some 7,000 years ago.We're talking about a pretty big share of the African-American population.This is about 100,000 patients just in America, in the US alone. And it's been a neglected disease for all kinds of reasons, probably beyond the scope of our discussion. But the early results in the first few dozen patients who have been enrolled in this clinical trial called the exa-cel clinical trial, they've all been cured. Pretty much all cured, meaning no more blood transfusions, no more pain crises, no more emergency hospitalizations. It is a pretty miraculous story. This therapy is now in the hands of the FDA and is speeding towards—barring some unforeseen complication or the FDA setting the bar so high that they need the investigators to go back and do some further checks—this should be approved before the end of this year.There's a catch, though. This will be a therapy that, in principle, will become—once approved by the FDA and the EMA in Europe, of course—will become available to any sickle cell patient. The catch will, of course, be the cost or the price that the companies set, because they're going to look for a return on their investment. It's a fascinating discussion and there's no easy answer. The companies need to reward their shareholders, their investors, their employees, their staff, and of course build a war chest to invest in the next wave, the next generation of CRISPR therapies. But the result of that means that probably we're going to be looking at a price tag of, I mean, I'm seeing figures like $1.9 million per patient. So how do you balance that? Is a lifetime cure for sickle cell disease worth $2, maybe $3 million? Will this patient population be able to afford that? In many cases, the answer to that will be simply, no. Do you have to remortgage your house and go bankrupt because you had a genetic quirk at birth? I don’t know quite how we get around this.Different countries will have different answers with different health systems. Do you have a sense of what that debate is going to be like in Washington, DC?It's already happening in other contexts. Other gene therapies have been approved over the last few years, and they come with eye-watering price tags. The highest therapy price that I've seen now is $3.5 million. Yes, there are discounts and waiver programs and all this sort of stuff. But it's still a little obscene. Now, when those companies come to negotiate, say, with the UK National Health Service, they'll probably come to an agreement that is much lower, because the Brits are not going to say that they're going to be able to afford that for their significant sickle cell population.Is it your best guess that this will be a treatment the government pays for?What's interesting and what may potentially shift the calculus here is that this particular therapy is the disease affects primarily African-Americans in the United States. That may change the political calculus, and it may indeed change the corporate calculus in the boardrooms of Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics, who may not want the backlash that they're going to get when they say, “Oh, by the way, guys, it's $2 million or you're out of luck.”There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease.What CRISPR therapies will come next?And after this CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease is available, what therapies will come next?Probably a bunch of diseases that most people, unless they are unfortunate enough to have it in their family, won't have heard of. There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease. It turns out the liver is an organ that is very amenable to taking up medicines that we can inject in the blood. The other big clinical success story has come from another company in the Boston area called Intellia Therapeutics. Also publicly traded. They've developed CRISPR therapies that you can inject literally into the body, rather than taking cells out and doing it in the lab and then putting those cells back in, as in the case of sickle cell.I’m not sure that was actually even clear: that you can do it more than one way.Yes.And obviously it sounds like it would be better if they could just inject you.Exactly. That's why people are really excited about this, because this now opens up the doors for treating a host of diseases. And I think over the next few years we will see a growing number of diseases, and it won't just be these rare sort of genetic diseases with often unpronounceable names. It may be things like heart disease. There's another company—they're all in Boston, it seems—Verve Therapeutics, which is taking one of these more recent gene-editing technologies that we talked about a minute ago, base editing, and saying that there's a gene that they're going to target that has been clearly linked with cholesterol levels. And if we can squash production of this gene, we can tap down cholesterol levels. That will be useful, in the first instance, for patients with genetic forms of high cholesterol. Fair enough. But if it works in them, then the plan is to roll this out for potentially thousands if not millions of adults in this country who maybe don't feel that they have a clearly defined genetic form of high cholesterol, but this method may still be an alternative that they will consider versus taking Atorvastatin for the rest of your life, for example.Where are the CRISPR cancer treatments?They're also making progress, too. Those are in clinical trials. A little more complicated. Of course, cancer is a whole slew of different diseases, so it's a little hard to say, “Yeah, we're making progress here, less so there.” But I think one of the most heartwarming stories—this is an n of one, so it's an anecdotal story—but there was a teenager in the UK treated at one of the premier London medical schools who had a base editing form of CAR T therapy. A lot of people have heard of CAR T therapy for various cancers. And she is now in remission. So again, early days, but we're seeing very positive signs in these early clinical tests.It sounds like we went from a period where it was all in the lab and that we might be in a period over the next five years where it sounds like a wave of potential treatments.I think so, yeah.And for as much as we've seen articles about “The Age of AI,” it really sounds like this could be the age of biotechnology and the age of CRISPR…I think CRISPR, as with most new technologies, you get these sort of hype cycles, right? Two and a half years ago, CRISPR, all the stocks were at peak valuations. And I went on a podcast to say, why are the CRISPR stocks so high? I wasn't really sure, but I was enjoying it at the time. And then, of course, we entered the pandemic. And the biotech sector, perversely, ironically, has really been hit hard by the economy and certainly by the market valuations. So all of the CRISPR gene-editing companies—and there are probably at least eight or 10 now that are publicly traded and many more poised to join them—their valuations are a fraction of what they were a couple of years ago. But I suspect as these first FDA approvals and more scientific peer review papers, of course, but more news of the clinical success to back up and extend what has already been clearly proven as a breakthrough technology in the lab with the Nobel Prize—doesn't get much better than that, does it?—then I think we're going to start to see that biotech sector soar once again.Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise.Non-medical applications of gene editingThere are also non-medical applications. Can you just give me a little state of play on how that’s looking?I think one of the—when CRISPR…And agriculture.Feeding the planet, you could say.That’s certainly a big application.It’s a human health application—arguably the biggest application.I think one of the fun ones is the work of George Church at Harvard Medical School, who's been on 60 Minutes and Stephen Colbert and many other primetime shows, talking about his work using CRISPR to potentially resurrect the woolly mammoth, which sort of sounds like, “That's Jurassic Park on steroids. That's crazy.” But his view is that, no, if we had herds—if that's the technical term—of woolly mammoths—roaming Siberia and the frozen tundra, they'll keep the ground, the surface packed down and stop the gigatons of methane from leaching out into the atmosphere. We have just seen a week, I've been reading on social media, of the hottest temperatures in the world since records began. And that's nothing compared to what we're potentially going to see if all these greenhouse gases that are just under the surface in places like Siberia further leach into the atmosphere. So that's the sort of environmental cause that Church is on. I think many people think this is a rather foolish notion, but he's launched a company to get this off the ground called Colossal Biosciences, and they're raising a lot of money, it appears. I'm curious to see how it goes. I wish him well.Also, speaking of climate change, making crops more resilient to the heat. That’s another I’ve heard…One of the journals I'm involved in, called GEN Biotechnology, just published a paper in which investigators in Korea have used CRISPR to modify a particular gene in the tomato genome to make it a higher source of vitamin D. And that may not seem to be the most urgent need, but the point is, we can now engineer the DNA of all kinds of plants and crops, many of which are under threat, whether it’s from drought or other types of climate change or pests, bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungi, you name it. And in my book Editing Humanity, which came out a couple of years ago, there was a whole chapter listing a whole variety of threats to our favorite glass of orange juice in the morning. That's not going to exist. If we want that all-natural Florida orange juice, we're not going to have that option. We've either got to embrace what technology will allow us to do to make these orange crops more resistant to the existential threat that they're facing, or we're going to have to go drink something else.I started out talking about AI and machine learning. Does that play a role in CRISPR, either helping the precision of the technology or in some way refining the technology?Yeah, hopefully you'll invite me back in a year and I'll be able to give you a more concrete answer. I think the short answer is, yes. Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise. When you do the targeting in a CRISPR experiment, the one thing you don't want to have happen is for the little stretch of DNA that you've synthesized to go after the gene in question, you don't want that to accidentally latch onto or identify another stretch of DNA that just by statistical chance has the same stretch of 20 As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. AI can help give us more confidence that we're only honing in on the specific gene that we want to edit, and we're not potentially going to see some unforeseen, off-target editing event.Do you think when we look back at this technology in 10 years, not only will we see a wider portfolio of potential treatments, but we'll look at the actual technique and think, “Boy, back in 2012, it was a butchery compared to what we're doing; we were using meat cleavers, and now we're using lasers”?I think, yeah. That's a slightly harsh analogy. With this original form of CRISPR, published in 2012, Nobel Prize in 2020, one of the potential caveats or downsides of the technology is that it involves a complete snip of the double helix, the two strands of DNA, in order to make the edit. Base editing and prime editing don't involve that double-stranded severance. It's just a nick of one strand or the other. So it's a much more genetically friendly form of gene editing, as well as other aspects of the chemistry. We look forward to seeing how base and prime editing perform in the clinic. Maybe they'll run into some unforeseen hurdles and people will say, “You know what? There was nothing wrong with CRISPR. Let's keep using the originally developed system.” But I'm pretty bullish on what base and prime editing can do based on all of the early results have been published in the last few years on mice and monkeys. And now we're on the brink of going into the clinic.One medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPRThis podcast is usually very optimistic. So we're going to leave all the negative stuff for this part of the podcast. We're going to rush through all the downsides very quickly.First question: Especially after the pandemic, a lot more conversation about bioweapons. Is this an issue that's discussed in this community, about using this technology to create a particularly lethal or virulent or targeted biological weapon?Not much. If a rogue actor or nation wanted to develop some sort of incredibly virulent bioweapon, there's a whole wealth of genetic techniques, and they could probably do it without involving CRISPR. CRISPR is, in a way, sort of the corollary of another field called synthetic biology or synthetic genomics that you may have talked about on your show. We've got now the facility, not just to edit DNA, but to synthesize custom bits of DNA with so much ease and affordability compared to five or 10 years ago. And we’ve just seen a global pandemic. When I get that question, I've had it before, I say, “Yeah, did we just not live through a global pandemic? Do we really need to be engineering organisms?” Whether you buy the lab leak hypothesis or the bioengineering hypothesis, or it was just a natural transfer from some other organism, nature can do a pretty good job of hurting human beings. I don't know that we need to really worry too much about bioweapons at this point.In 2018, there was a big controversy over a Chinese researcher who created some genome-edited babies. Yeah. Is there more to know about that story? Has that become a hotter topic of discussion as CRISPR has advanced?The Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, who performed those pretty abominable experiments was jailed for the better part of three years. He got early release in China and slowly but surely he's being rehabilitated. He's literally now moved his operation from Shenzhen to Beijing. He's got his own lab again, and he's doing genome editing experiments again. I saw again on social media recently, he's got a petition of muscular dystrophy families petitioning Jack Ma, the well-known Chinese billionaire, to fund his operation to devise a new gene editing therapy for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other forms of muscular dystrophy. I wouldn't want He Jiankui let within a thousand miles of my kids, because I just wouldn't trust him. And he's now more recently put out a manifesto stating he thinks we should start editing embryos again. So I don't know quite what is going on.It seems the Chinese threw the book at him. Three years is not a trivial prison sentence. He was fined about half a million dollars. But somebody in the government there seems to be okay with him back at the bench, back in the lab, and dabbling in CRISPR. And I don't know that he's been asked, does he have any regrets over the editing of Lulu and Nana. There was a third child born a few months later as well. All he will say is, “We moved too fast.” That is the only caveat that he has allowed himself to express publicly.We know nothing more about the children. They're close to five years old now. There's one particular gene that was being edited was pretty messed up. But we know it's not an essential gene in our bodies, because there are many people walking around who don't have a functional copy of this CCR5 receptor gene, and they're HIV resistant. That was the premise for He Jiankui’s experiment. But he has said, “No, they are off limits. The authorities are not going to reveal their identities. We are monitoring them, and we will take care of them if anything goes wrong.” But I think a lot of people in the West would really like to help, to study them, to offer any medical assistance. Obviously, we have to respect their privacy. The twin girls and the third child who was born a bit later, maybe they're being protected for their own good. How would you like it if you grew up through childhood and into your teenage years, to walk around knowing that you were this human experiment? That may be a very difficult thing to live with. So more to come on that.There’s no legitimate discussion about changing that in the West or anywhere else?Obviously, in the wake of what He Jiankui did, there were numerous blue ribbon panels, including one just organized by the National Academy of Sciences, just a stone's throw from where we're talking today. And I thought that report was very good. It did two things. This was published a couple of years ago. Two important things came out of it. One is this all-star group of geneticists and other scientists said, “We don't think that human embryo editing should be banned completely. There may be scenarios down the road where we actually would want to reserve this technology because nothing else would help bring about a particular medical outcome that we would like.” And the one medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?There are clinics around the country and around the world now doing something called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. If you have a family history of a genetic disease, you can encourage the couple to do IVF. We form an embryo or bunch of embryos in the test tube or on the Petri dish. And then we can do a little biopsy of each embryo, take a quick sneak peek at the DNA, look to see if it's got the bad gene or perhaps the healthy gene, and then sort of tag the embryos and only implant the embryos that we think are healthy. This is happening around the country as we speak for hundreds, if not thousands, of different genetic diseases. But it won't work if mom and dad have a recessive, meaning two copies of a bad gene, because there's no healthy gene that you can select in any of those embryos. It would be very rare, but in those scenarios, maybe embryo editing is a way we would want to go. But I don't see a big clamor for this right now. And the early results have been published using CRISPR on embryos in the wake of He Jiankui did have said, “It's a messy technique. It is not safe to use. We don't fully understand how DNA editing and DNA repair works in the human embryo, so we really need to do a whole lot more basic science, as we did in the original incarnation of CRISPR, before we even dare to revisit editing human embryos.” Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. Longevity and genetic enhancementsAnother area is using these treatments not to fix things, but to enhance people, whether it's for intelligence or some other trait. A lot of money pouring into longevity treatments from Silicon Valley. Do we know more about the potential of CRISPR for either extending lifespans or selecting for certain desirable traits in people?This sort of scenario is never going to go away. When it comes up, if I hear someone say, “Could we use CRISPR or any gene editing technology to boost intelligence or mathematical ability or music musical ability, or anything that we might want…”Or speed in the hundred meters.“…or speed in the hundred meters, to enhance our perfect newborn?” I would say, what gene are you going to enhance? Intelligence—are you kidding me? Half of the 10,000 genes are expressed in the human brain. You want to start meddling with those? You wouldn't have a prayer of having a positive outcome. I think we can pretty much rule that out. Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. That's going to be a long, multi-decade quest to go from that to potentially, “Oh, let's edit a little embryo, our newborn son or daughter so they have the gift of 120 years on this decaying, overheating planet…” Yes, there's a lot to wade through on that.And you have another book coming out. Can you give us a preview of that?I'm writing a book called Curved Air, which is about the story of sickle cell disease. It was first described in a paper from physicians in Chicago in 1910 who were studying the curious anemia of a dental student who walked into their hospital one day. That gentleman, Walter Noel, is now buried back in his homeland, the island of Grenada. But in the 1940s, it was described and characterized as the first molecular disease. We know more about sickle cell disease than almost any other genetic disease. And yet, as we touched on earlier, patients with this who have not had the wealth, the money, the influence, they've been discriminated against in many walks of life, including the medical arena.We're still seeing terribly, tragically, videos and stories and reports of sickle cell patients who are being turned away from hospital rooms, emergency rooms, because the medical establishment just looks at a person of color in absolute agony with one of these pain crises and just assumed, “Oh, they want another opioid hit. Sickle cell? What is that?” There's a lot of fascinating science. There's all this hope in the gene editing and now in the clinic. And there's all this socioeconomic and other history. So I'm going to try to weave all this together in a format that hopefully everyone will enjoy reading.Hopefully a book with a happy ending. Not every book about a disease has a wonderful…I think a positive note to end on is the first American patient treated in this CRISPR clinical trial for sickle cell disease four years ago,Victoria Gray, has become something of a poster child now. She's been featured on National Public Radio on awhole series of interviews and just took her first overseas flight earlier this year to London to speak at a CRISPR gene editing conference. She gave a lovely 15-minute personal talk, shaking with nerves, about her personal voyage, her faith in God, and what's brought her here now, pain-free, traveling the world, and got a standing ovation. You don't see many standing ovations at medical conferences or genetics conferences. And if ever anybody deserved it, somebody like Victoria Gray did. Early days, but a very positive journey that we're on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

"The promise of eternal life has conventionally been the dangled carrot of religion. It is now the holy grail of Silicon Valley," writes novelist Lionel Shriver in a recent National Review cover essay. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Lionel joins me to discuss why some tech billionaires are chasing after immortality and the serious challenges that would accompany extended human lifespans.Lionel is a columnist for Britain's Spectator magazine. Her books include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Should We Stay or Should We Go.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In This Episode* The promise and peril of immortality (1:11)* Storytelling and optimism (6:44)* Lifespan vs. healthspan (12:23)* Post-humanity (19:19)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe promise and peril of immortalityJames Pethokoukis: In the National Review essay, you make it clear you are not a medical expert, you're not a research scientist; you're a writer of fiction. Of all the things you could have written about, both as an essay and also in your book, Should We Stay or Should We Go, what originally created your interest in this topic of longevity?Lionel Shriver: I should also clarify that, for someone who's writing about life extension, I am not immortal either. So I have no qualifications for this aside from having applied myself to it imaginatively. The book you mentioned, Should We Stay or Should We Go, is a novel about a couple that has vowed to kill themselves once they both reach the age of 80 because they don't want to fall apart. They don't want to burden others with their own crumbling. It's a parallel universe book that explores any number of different futures for this couple. And one of those futures is why I suspect I was approached to write this essay for National Review, and it's one in which there's a cure for aging. Basically, my characters live forever. Everyone in the world looks 25 and they never look any older. I have addressed myself to what that future might look like and not just look like, but feel like. What would it feel like to address yourself to a future that was potentially infinite?In the novel, it starts out great. It was exhilarating to watch your spouse, rather than get older and older, get younger and younger and return to the age when you fell in love. And everyone is healthy. There are no limitations anymore. And all your choices are also potentially infinite. You can try out every profession. It's no longer a matter of, what are you going to be when you grow up? You can be whatever you want, and then you can change your mind. It'd be something else. You can move to any city. All your choices are just this kind of smorgasbord of what you might sample. And that seems fun to begin with.That sounds like a near-utopian scenario.Yeah. The trouble is that when you think about it, one of the things that gives our lives urgency is finitude, that our decisions matter because you can't undecide them. The way we choose to spend our time matters because there's a limited amount of it. There's no redo. And effectively with eternal life, there is a redo. There's infinite redo. You can just go back and do something else. You can just go in a different direction. If you marry the wrong person, you can just marry someone else and you won't have given them, say, 10 years of your precious life. I mean, yes, but there are so many years left that it doesn't matter. And the trouble is that once you remove that, then nothing seems to matter. And that is depressing. When you remove that urgency, you also potentially remove meaning. And everything becomes arbitrary.One of the things that happens to my characters is their characters start to decay. In some ways, they trade places in terms of what kind of person they are. The wife has always been the more optimistic and reflective and joyous, whereas her husband was more programmatic and more of an ideologue. And as the hundreds of years go by, he becomes much more himself reflective and philosophical and she becomes impatient and misanthropic. Because character itself becomes arbitrary. In the essay, I'm trying to look in a nonfiction sense at, what would it really be like both emotionally and practically to have a permanent human population? And that raises huge practical problems, too. Like, you don't have any children anymore. You can't.Storytelling and optimismIs it easier for you to come up with the more dystopian scenarios? Oftentimes, I'll criticize sci-fi writing, television, books as overly focused on the dystopian. It’s almost like a lack of effort. In this case, is that basically justified: that it's very hard to write a scenario where everything kind of turns out okay if people are living forever?It is hard to write. It's always hard to write positively. It's hard for me even to write characters that are purely lovable. Since I don't know any. And it's hard to write happy endings. I do write happy endings, but they're hard to get there. And I feel you have to earn them. You can't just have happily ever after and that's it. There is one chapter in Should We Stay or Should We Go which is purely positive. It’s called “Once Upon a Time in Lambeth,” which is the neighborhood in London where they live. And it's the perfect old age. It's what we would all want. They grow only more physically beautiful as they age until people are stopping on them on the street wanting to take their pictures or paint their portraits because they're so striking. They grow only more in love and they have only a better sex life. It gets more and more rich and imaginative and exciting. Young people admire them because they both started second careers and had become hugely successful. And young people flock around their dinner table and want to hear their wisdom. Meanwhile, outside in the rest of the world, the Israeli-Palestinian problem is solved at last, Africa is a thriving economic power, etc. The thing is that there's a point only a few pages into this particular chapter that you get it: This is a satire. This is the one scenario that won't happen.It’s almost so ridiculously…It's ridiculous. In fact, it's hilarious. Optimism can be funny. And in some ways, it's also an illustration of kind of a fictional problem. Because without bad things happening, there is no story. And what makes that particular chapter a story is your growing consciousness that this is not possible. That this is ridiculous. That you are being made fun of, basically, because this is what you want and, you know, give us a break. You're never going to get it. This is hilarity at your expense. I am sympathetic with your frustration with science fiction. And it's not just science fiction. Literary fiction has a lot of unhappy endings and tragedy and dysfunction in it. That's the nature of story. It's a requirement. No badness, no story. The genres vary in terms of what that scale of badness is going to be and whether or not it's eventually going to resolve into something more palatable. But fiction is by its nature about disaster.Would your critique be the same if instead of talking about living hundreds of years, our lifespan was doubled? Instead of everyone living to be at least, on average, 75, 80, 85, it was 150, 175.To a degree. Though I think that issue of urgency, of how you spend your time, once you bring it down to, for argument’s sake let's say 150 years, that's probably less of an issue. But the practical problems do become more intrusive. If we're all living to 150, then we are going to have a huge elderly population and hardly any young people. And that poses a lot of economic issues. One of the things that I posit in the essay is that living substantially longer means the end of retirement. You can't live to 150 and retire at 65. It's economically impossible. So that means working for a long time. And the irony of this whole discussion, of course, is that the real problem we are facing is people living too long. People living too long in terrible shape. That's the real economic crisis.Lifespan vs. healthspanIn that National Review essay, you write that you’re more interested in expanding the human healthspan than the human lifespan. Extending our healthy years but not necessarily delaying death seems like a very different project.Yes. And I try to make the distinction between different projects. A lot of the Silicon Valley people are looking at longevity from the perspective of, “Let's cure death. Let's basically try to live forever.” But a much more modest group of people, and more practical, are looking at not necessarily living any longer, but living well longer. And I'm very sympathetic with that project. I'm like anyone: I don't fancy falling apart, and I would rather keep my wits about me and still be able to totter out on the tennis court and then preferably drop dead on the baseline one day. And that would be that. That's a laudable goal. And if we can get closer to that, we'd save ourselves a fortune.When we talk about the Silicon Valley quest to cure death, does this really all come down to a fear of death by people who maybe don’t hold traditional religious views of the afterlife? Or do they want to live longer so they can, I don’t know, start more companies? What’s the motivation here?I drew that distinction in the essay. There are two different things that might motivate you to extend life as long as possible. And one of them is clearly fear of death. We don't know what happens. I have my suspicions — you're not there anymore. And it's possible that the actual experience of death is not that bad, although the lead-up can be pretty grim. But the other thing that might motivate you is appetite, is desire, is wanting more. And that is something I am sympathetic with. I admire people who generate enthusiasm for living, for everything that it offers, for relationships, for love, even for another good glass of red wine. That is a positive motivation for this kind of research, which is going on all over the place. There's a lot of money being thrown at it. And I admire that. I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself in this whole life extension thing is, how much appetite would I have for continuing to be here? How many years does it prospectively give me joy to get up in the morning? And what would I be looking forward to? Is there any point at which you've just had enough red wine? (A prospect I find almost unfathomable.)If we're looking at a civilization where people are living longer and it's richer, we're solving all these other problems and we're heading out to the stars, it seems to be like there would be a lot to be curious about. There would be a lot to see and do, and I'd hate to miss it. I'd hate to miss all this really great, cool stuff by only living to 90 years old.There's another chapter in which my couple, as in most of these chapters to keep the story going, do not kill themselves when they're 80 years old. They live to well beyond 100 in relatively decent shape. They're okay, but the rest of the world isn't. Basically they live to see the end of Western civilization. This takes place in Britain. Britain has become completely overwhelmed with migration from Africa and the Middle East, which by the way demographically is very likely and is already happening. Meanwhile, there's a homegrown anarchist movement, because young people see no future for themselves; the place is in a state of economic collapse. They burned down parliament and they've shredded all the pictures in the National Gallery, etc. Basically, Western civilization is over. And the question that chapter asks, as the house they live in is invaded by migrants and taken over and they're exiled to the attic and basically eating dog food, if they could roll back the clock, would they like to live to see this or not?And I think that's an interesting question, because the way you describe the future as you see it, which inspires your curiosity, is more inventions, space travel, all these wonderful, fascinating things happening. Well, you know what? More than wonderful, fascinating things happen; things fall apart. And I have great difficulty on my own behalf answering the question that chapter poses. And the couple disagree. One of them would have been happier to die earlier and not see this. And the other one is so interested in the story that they've been involved in. And of course, if you're a news reader especially, you're involved in all kinds of stories all the time. I certainly am. And one of the sacrifices of dying is not finding out how some of them end. But the other one is so interested in the story that even if the ending is dark, he's glad to see it because he wants that narrative appetite to be satisfied. To me, that's one of the biggest questions on longevity. Do you want to stick around if the world takes a serious turn south? Do you want to stick around for that?Post-humanityThe political scientist Francis Fukuyama has written about what he calls our "post-human future." If death is an important and intrinsic part of our humanity, then immortality or near immortality moves us to being something that is no longer human as we know it. And because liberal democracy is built on the idea of human equality and a connectivity among humans everywhere, through all time, he worries about life extension or other enhancements undermining that equality. Does that concern you?Well, to a tiny degree, we've already got that differentiation based on economic profile, which does partially determine your life expectancy. People in Western countries who are themselves well off are likely to live substantially longer than either people outside Western countries or people within Western countries who are poor and generally in worse health. So we are not quite the same already. We're not looking at the same lifespan. One of the other things I did address is the likelihood that should these longevity efforts be availing, the chances are extremely high that they would be expensive and therefore available to the elite and only the elite. And therefore, that kind of division that we're living with already would grow greater. And I posited that it was not impossible that the resentment on the part of the lower classes could become homicidal.I think if you're really talking about effectively evolving into a slightly different species, then you would be generating a huge amount of political tension. And also you'd create this sense — and this is the kind of thing that science fiction explores all the time — of an overclass and therefore a kind of overlord class that lives very much longer and is likely to be hoarding the wealth and living remotely from everyone else. And I think that's more likely than the elite uploads themselves to robots or a computer. When you were talking about the nature of humanity, what it's like to be a person: I find the disembodied versions of a human future unlikely. Were we ever to achieve it, that's where we would really part ways with the species as it has always been.We experience the world in bodies and therefore we have all these senses and vulnerability to physical injury and disease. We have a very complicated relationship to our bodies, which I've written about at length. It's of great interest to me. And therefore, if we were in robots that you whose injured arm, you could simply screw a new one on — much less if we were in some kind of jar, effectively, like those brains in a jar in 1950s sci-fi movies — that never seems enviable, does it? To no longer have the embodied experience. The embodied experience comes with a lot of pain, but it also comes with a lot of pleasure.Are you optimistic, meaning that you think this research is going to pay off in dramatically longer lives, whether or not it's immortal? People are taking this very seriously. Again, we have researchers who've said someone who might make it to 150 has already been born. Do you think, directionally, this is happening and we need to be talking about it seriously now and thinking about it seriously?There's never any harm in thinking about anything. And it's interesting, so yes. My main concern would be further progress in, strictly speaking, extending longevity but not making enough progress on that business about extending healthspan. And then you've just got a bigger problem on your hands. So that, great, you've got a bunch of people who are 125 and they're drooling and don't remember their own names. This is not a future that we should be looking forward to — not personally and not socially. It's that health span thing that I think that we should be focusing on. And that means concentrating especially on dementia research, continuing to improve joint replacement. (I keep waiting on replacing my own knees, which are a complete wreck, because I just want them to inject some stem cells in them and not carve them out.)We should be focusing on medical technology that will improve the experience of being older, rather than just make people technically able to get older. And I do think a certain amount of deliberateness here as to where you put your resources is merited. I wish that drug that the FDA just approved did better than delay dementia by five months, for example. That's a start, but it's kind of discouraging. It's so small. I personally am not planning on devoting the rest of my life to living as long as possible. There's a kind of circularity to that or an implicit pointlessness. I want to spend what time I've got doing something else rather than just trying to stick around a little bit longer. So while I get my exercise and I try to eat sensibly, I'm not going to be one of those people who is totally obsessed with diet and aA million dollars a year on this infusion, this transfusion…Right. Some of these people: This is what they spend all day doing. There’sone guy who gets regular transfusions from his own 17-year-old son. He obviously spends hours and hours every day at his exercise regime. He takes hundreds of supplements. (I foresee acid reflux.) I'm not going to do that. If that means that I take five years off my life expectancy and get to do something else and finally finish the last series of Succession, I'll take that. I'll take short and sweet.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Nuclear fusion holds the potential to provide the world with cheap, clean, virtually inexhaustible energy for the future. For decades, the technology was dismissed as sci-fi fantasy. But a series of recent technological breakthroughs — including a net-energy gain ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last December — and spate of startups have made both government and investors increasingly optimistic. To talk about the state of the fusion industry, I’ve brought on Andrew Holland, chief executive officer at the Fusion Industry Association.In This Episode* The importance of recent fusion breakthroughs (1:17)* What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion? (5:58)* Environmentalism and fusion energy (14:09)* Will fusion be the main energy source of the future? (18:57)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe importance of recent fusion breakthroughsJames Pethokoukis: Until recently, fusion energy was a government science project that you didn’t hear much about. But now we have dozens of startups involved and frequent media coverage of big breakthroughs. What happened?Andrew Holland: It's results. Results, results, results. Science is progressing. Things have happened on both sides of the science of fusion. Plasma physics has been around for 60 years. It's really hard. It's really challenging. And they had to create a whole new area of physics, plasma physics, to be able to understand how to do fusion. They did that for 60 years, and it was continued short progress here and there, two steps forward, one step back. Until we got to the point probably about five or 10 years ago where the scientists said, “We think we know how to make this work.” But then what's happened is that startups and new thinking came in and applied all of the other technological advances that were out there—things like material science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-speed computing—as well as new business practices, putting those in effect onto what had been this kind of staid field of government science.Putting those two together, and that's where the real developments and changes and things are happening. In fact, there are 38 members of the Fusion Industry Association now, with a few others around the world that are stragglers. And it's been just this almost Cambrian explosion of different technologies and ways forward and paths to get there. And everybody is competing to be the one to get there first and the one to get there best. So it is an exciting time. And we're seeing the effects of all of this other technology coming into plasma physics. Things have really changed.So how significant was that breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore last year, both for the technology and also for investor and public awareness? Yeah, it is significant in the kind of public awareness and public assessment of it. I can tell you that our website had its highest day ever in December when the announcement from the NIF happened. And I can tell you just kind of anecdotally a lot of that awareness came about. But the nature, I think, of an exponential curve, a Moore's law–type thing where it doubles every year, doubles every so often—is that when it's exponential, it's going straight up, but for a long time it looks pretty flat. So a long time below the level, it's been doubling and doubling and doubling over a number of years. It just started from a very low point. Those inside the field knew that something was happening, but it never broke out. It never got into the New York Times. It never got into Twitter discussions. It was all sort of inside baseball discussions.It's been a completely new thing for the fusion community to now have a lot of interest coming into it. That said, though, the investors were a little keyed in a little bit earlier. Since the NIF announcement, we've seen some new deal flow. We've got about $6 billion invested in private fusion. Of that, most of it came in before the NIF announcement. Investors were looking at this. Investors were aware of it. We are still seeing some of the deal flow that post-NIF takes some time. There's a lot of due diligence that investors do and stuff like that, so we haven't yet seen the real explosion from NIF of investment and running. But I think we're due to pretty soon.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion?What is the policymaker awareness and action on this technology?We're getting there. In March of 2022, the White House held an event calling for a “bold decadal vision on commercial fusion,” basically saying, can you get to commercial fusion in 10 years? It's an aggressive target. Our company said, yes, we can—with your help. The White House put in not an aggressive amount of budget in the scheme of billions and trillions even in the IRA and various other subsidy measures. Instead what they've started up is what's called a new milestone-based public-private partnership. The government gives pay-for-performance metrics on how to invest in fusion companies. Basically, the companies will say, “We think we can do this, this, and this.” And then the government says, “Okay, we'll pay you X amount for each of these milestones when you reach them.” Instead of the old way of doing a public-private partnership, which is you have to account for all the money you put in and we'll give you a fixed dollar amount and all this sort of stuff.This is actually the way that NASA invested in SpaceX. It's a way to promote innovation in the companies while also protecting the taxpayer, because it is still risky in a business sense to put money into fusion. It's a really innovative new model for getting there. The DOE just put out these awards a couple of weeks ago in late May. It's gone to eight companies fusion companies, all doing work here in the United States.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. The Brits have an aggressive program for a commercial fusion pilot plant. The Germans just put out a roadmap for how to get there. The Japanese have one. For a long time, the government science people have been cooperating together at ITER, which is the publicly funded science experiment in the south of France. It will get net energy when it turns on, and will be a significant experiment, but it's different than a commercial direction. And now we see all these countries and companies racing towards this. And honestly, we also see the Chinese making aggressive plans and moving forward on their own internal pathway as well. The NIF, in many ways, was kind of a starting gun for this process, and we're seeing it happen around the world.You have diversity: You have government, you have the private sector, and there's also a diversity of technological approaches as well. It’s not just one thing, right?Yes. There is a huge diversity in technological approaches. Of the 38 member companies you have of the FIA, none of them are taking the exact same technological pathway. It is, instead, a broad family tree of fusion with, at one end, laser-inertial fusion—which is like what the NIF did: taking lasers and firing them on a tiny pellet of fuel—and on the other end is magnetically confined fusion energy—which is using giant magnets to confine a plasma at extreme temperatures to get fusion out that way. And then in between, there are all sorts of other magneto-inertial types, which is a mix of one or the other. Some use electric pulses, some use giant pistons, some use plasma guns: all sorts of different ways of confining and controlling the plasma. And this is kind of what you'd expect in a new technology: We just don't quite know yet which is the one that will get there first—well, NIF got there first—but which is the one that will get there first in a commercially relevant manner. And then which one will then also show that it's the most commercially competitive as well. While you shouldn't probably expect 38 companies to all get there and all be the most successful there, there are multiple different ways forward. And they will probably all have different markets and different places that pick up each around the world. But exciting times in the technology.We have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. Whether it’s on the regulatory side or the funding side, what should government ideally be doing right now?Three key things. Number one is the regulation. Because fusion is a nuclear technology, it is going to be regulated in the United States by the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've been engaged in a process—I've spent a lot of time on this—with the NRC in public that we've been contending that because fusion is so different from nuclear fission—just physically different, like you cannot have a meltdown, there is no long-lived radioactive waste, the fuel is isotopes of hydrogen or other not-dangerous fuels—so because of the physical differences, fusion should not be regulated in the same way that nuclear fission power plants are. And over a multi-year process, we convinced them. And the commission, a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats, five members, voted unanimously in April to regulate fusion separately from nuclear fission. It will be regulated like a medical isotope facility, an accelerator. This is a really important thing because it allows a lot more innovation. It should keep costs down. It doesn't mean there's no regulation, it just means it's regulated in the appropriate manner. That's number one.Number two is the public-private partnerships that I talked about. I think it is important that our companies have access to the public programs, have access to the national labs. The researchers have been doing this for a long time, so to be able to work with them—ideally with government dollars, the government dollars would pay at least part of it.And then number three is, we have to make sure we're not asking for special subsidies, but we have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. We think we'll compete just as well as any other technology.Is that not the case right now?It's not clear that it's the case right now. The IRA subsidies, for example, don't mention fusion. You wouldn't expect it to; this has come so quickly that it doesn't mention fusion. We think it will be designated as a clean technology. There's no reason it won't be. But Treasury has to make that designation. There's going to be a couple of early application programs for the tax credits for manufacturing stuff, and we're going to test that and we'll see if they give any of those competitive tax credits to fusion.Environmentalism and fusion energyEnvironmental groups: Are they pro-fusion? Are they against fusion? Do they view it like nuclear fission? What is the reaction of that community? Because obviously it would be very helpful if those groups were very positive about your efforts.The groups at this point, I'd say most of them, are in a wait-and-see mode. It depends whether a group is a membership organization, which has kind of a grassroots membership and they have to see where their members are, or whether it's more of a “we can think of the best way forward.” We've had good interactions so far with a number of the bipartisan environmental groups. We haven't seen yet where places like Sierra Club or NRDC will come down. We think they should be positive about it. We've made some initial outreach. Some of our companies have worked directly with their local environmental groups as they do the outreach necessary to build new experiments and programs and stuff like that. It's, at this point, still uncertain. But maybe an example from Europe to see where we are: German Greens basically shut down the nuclear fission industry in Germany. On the other hand, the government of Germany now—SPD, so a left-wing government—has announced a pretty substantial investment into nuclear fusion. There is a good evidence that environmentalists won't be against it. Now, it's still mostly to be determined, and we're setting the groundwork to educate people, make them aware that this is not something they should be afraid of. Certainly we think there's no reason for them to oppose it, but it's not my choice.It just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. Environmentalism and fusion energyWhen people hear “nuclear,” lots of them think about radiation and meltdowns. How do you begin to educate people that fusion is different from fission and maybe shouldn’t carry that kind of baggage?It's some work. It's some work, and education in the broad general public is really challenging on any policy issue, much less complicated science. So this is not an easy thing. We have to go in with eyes wide open. We have to be clear and direct, and we can't hide from anything. It is nuclear fusion, right? It is a nuclear reaction in which there are neutrons produced, there is radiation. You don't want to stand next to an unshielded fusion power plant. That would not be good for your health. But we know how to shield it. We know how to protect it, and it will be safe when it's running. But we have to go out in there and demonstrate that. And we can't just tell people, “This will be safe.” We have to engage with them, we have to talk to them, we have to understand what their concerns are. All this sort of stuff.Because we're a new industry, we get to start from zero instead of, unfortunately our cousins in nuclear fission, they're starting from negative so they've got to build it back up. And many of our scientists are also in fission world, and our companies don't want to see them fail, certainly. But it just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. It's all about speed. When you talk about our energy problems—climate, clean energy, energy security—it's not about building one power plant. It's about building tens, hundreds, thousands of these. And for that, you need speed. That's why we think it's really important to get the regulation right. And regulation is downstream of public perception, so you’ve got to get people to want this. If they want it and you get the regulation right, there's no reason you can't build these things as fast as you can roll them off an assembly line.Will fusion be the main energy source of the future?Should it be part of the energy mix, like solar and wind are today? Or is this the technology that will power the future like fossil fuels power the present?If we get this right, if we get the deployment right, there is no reason that this can't be the thing that powers humanity for the rest of humanity's existence. There's a saying that once you build the first fusion power plant, the only thing you can build better is a better fusion power plant. We know that the energy system is really complicated. It's really competitive. So in the early days, fusion is going to have to compete. Fusion is going to have to get down to cost. It can't have the same problems as nuclear power or even that we're starting to see in solar or wind of deployment. You've got to be able to build these and deploy these. In the long term, once you have fusion, what you have is abundant power. And ideally abundant cheap power. When you have that, you can do all sorts of other stuff like desalinate salt water and get rid of water problems. If you've got abundant energy, you can create all sorts of energy-dense liquid fuels. That means you won't need oil anymore. You can just with feedstock do that. You can do a lot of cool stuff in space. It takes you from going to Mars in a year and a half to going to Mars in a month. And that just fundamentally changes us. You can have a shuttle going back and forth between the Earth and the Moon. Fusion power means that you have all sorts of new options for this. And it takes energy from something that you pull from out of the ground or you get from weather and turns it into something that is fundamentally a manufactured good. And that's really cool and really kind of changes our security paradigms, our environmental paradigms, and just makes it a real opportunity here to develop and move forward in a new way.Micro Reads▶ Big Tech’s Battle Royale Is Coming. The Winner? You. - Joanna Stern, WSJ | ▶ After Affirmative Action, We Can Still Fix the Education Pipeline - Jonathan Chait, New York | ▶ Billionaires and Bureaucrats Mobilize China for AI Race With US - Jane Zhang, Sarah Zheng, Bloomberg | ▶ The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook - CBO | ▶ European companies sound alarm over draft AI law - Javier Espinioza, FT | ▶ Big Tech Has a Troubling Stranglehold on Artificial Intelligence - Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg Opinion | ▶ Welcome to the big blimp boom - Rebecca Heilweil, MIT Tech Review | ▶ Genetic marker discovered for the severity of multiple sclerosis - Grace Wade, New Scientist | ▶ Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today - Editorial, Nature | ▶ The Path to Abundant Air Travel - Gary D. Leff, Discourse | ▶ Preserving Meaning in a Technology-Driven Society - Michael Westover, Profectus | This is a public episode. 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Many countries around the world have below-replacement fertility rates. And today’s today's guest says it's happening faster than we think, with world population on track to peak around 2060. That’s decades before the well-known UN model projection. What does that mean for the American and global economies, and what can we do about it — if anything? My AEI colleague Jesús Fernández-Villaverde joins this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss those questions and more.Jesús is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets. He’s also the John H. Makin Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.In This Episode* The speed of demographic transition (1:19)* World population prospects (5:57)* The geopolitics of declining fertility (9:51)* Can public policy reverse demographic trends? (15:09)* Immigration and demographics (23:28)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe speed of demographic transitionJames Pethokoukis: A lot of our discussion is going to be based on a paper that you co-authored, “Demographic Transitions Across Time and Space.” When you talk about a demographic transition, you're talking about a shift that countries undergo as they get richer and develop, from a high-fertility/ high-mortality demographic to low-fertility and low-mortality. Is that what you mean by demographic transition?Why is that something economists study?Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Two reasons. First, because we believe that demographics are intimately linked with economic growth. Go back to the beginning of our science: [Thomas] Robert Malthus, one of the very earliest economists, already wrote very coherently about it. And second, because it helps us to think about a long list of policy questions that depend in a crucial way on demographics. When I think about the future of Medicare, when I think about the future of Social Security, those depend crucially on demographics. Understanding demographics is key to having good economic policies.The key findings of that paper have to do with the speed and the depth of that transition? What are you saying that is different from what people previously believed about the demographic transition?You're absolutely right: It's about the speed. If you stop any economist or demographer and you ask them what is happening with fertility on the planet, they will tell you it's falling. That's well known. What we add is a twist; we say it's falling much faster than anyone had realized before. And it's falling at a speed that is going to fundamentally transform many of our societies and the planet as a whole in ways that most policymakers are not really taking into consideration. So it's the speed. It's not that it's falling; it is falling immensely fast.I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s. … What I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.People and policymakers may have a general knowledge, but what you're saying is that they're dramatically underestimating how fast that is happening across the world.Exactly. Let me give you a couple of numbers which personally I think are mind-blowing. Usually, we talk about the replacement rate. The replacement rate is how many children does a woman need to have on average to keep population constant in the long run? And many listeners may have heard the number 2.1. Why 2.1? Because under natural circumstances, without any type of selective abortion, there are around 105 boys born per 100 girls. And a few of the girls that are born are not going to complete their fertility age. So that's why you need a little bit more than two.In fact, 2.1 is a very good number for the United States. It’s not a good number for the planet. Why is it not a good number for the planet? Because of two reasons. Reason one: selective abortions. You go to China, you go to India — and these are huge countries, demographically speaking — there is a lot of selective abortions. In India or China, you have around 110 kids per 100 girls. Second, because in Africa, another big part of the demographic future of humanity, infant mortalities is still sufficiently high that it makes a little bit of a difference. For the planet as a whole, the replacement rate is not 2.1. It's more like 2.2, 2.25. It’s kind of hard to know the exact number.So I go to the planet and I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I'm not talking about the United States, I'm not talking about North America, I'm not talking about the advanced economies, I'm talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.World population prospectsThat doesn't mean the population's going down now, right? That means the population will be going down a generation from now.Yes.My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I'm pushing this to 2060, let's say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.What does that mean for the long-term estimate of peak population? Usually, you hear about the UN forecast and the forecast is usually about nine or 10 billion. So are you saying we will not reach those levels?Exactly. First of all, let me tell you the United Nations’ population prospects, so everyone knows where I am. The most recent version is 2022. The United Nations forecasts that the peak of humanity will be 2084, and that it'll be around 9.7 billion. My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I'm pushing this to 2060, let's say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.And we’ll start declining faster than what the UN thinks?Yes. Definitely faster. Let me give you a very simple example. The number of births that actually did happen in China in 2022 is what the United Nations forecasted to happen around 2040. So China is running 18 years ahead of the United Nations forecast. And China is a big chunk of humanity. For India, they are also five or six years ahead of the forecast. And if you go country by country, you realize that the United Nations is always behind. If you want, I can tell you why the United Nations is doing this. Basically, their model is running hot. It's forecasting way too many births for what we are actually seeing. And that's why I'm pushing the United Nations [from] 2084 to 2060.It's a big difference. You're talking about a difference of at least half a billion people, right?Yes.That’s a lot. Tell me about the “Rule of 85,” because that's very fascinating. It's kind of a back-of-the-envelope way of looking at how to figure out some of these numbers.This is something I came up with when I was trying to explain this to undergrads, and I figured out that it’s very easy to remember. Take the United States, take Canada, take Japan: the richest, most advanced economies, so the life expectancy is around 85 years. Imagine that you have a society where you have 1000 people being born every year. Since they are going to be living on average 85 years, in the long run, that's a society that is going to have 85,000 people. If you want to forecast what the level of population of a society will be, just look at the number of births that you have in any given year, multiply by 85, and that will give you kind of a middle-run assessment. It's such a simple rule of thumb. If you want to forecast China: China is slightly below 10 million births; 10 million times 85 — most of us can that in our head — it's 850 million. Well, their population now is 1.4 billion. So there you have a 60 percent reduction. South Korea, they had 240,000 births — I'm quoting from memory, a few thousand up or down — multiply by 85, you have slightly over 20 million. Current population of South Korea: 51 million.And that’s 20 million when?It will be 20 million in 85 more years. But in some sense, this is a very optimistic scenario because it's assuming that births are not going to continue falling down, which are probably going to continue falling down because the new cohorts will be smaller. There will be less women having fewer children. In that sense, the Rule of 85, when fertility is going down, kind of gives you an upper bound.China is looking at a demographic abyss, and unless the Communist Party is able to change that, China is going to be a way less important economy in the middle run. The geopolitics of declining fertilityIt helps to have a lot of people in your country from a geopolitical standpoint. So you're talking about a different world of probably a much smaller China than people are expecting. Maybe relatively, then, a bigger India. And also what does, then, the United States look like? I do realize you don't have all these numbers in front of you either.I remember many of them. China is looking at a demographic abyss, and unless the Communist Party is able to change that, China is going to be a way less important economy in the middle run. In fact, I'm just finishing a paper with a couple of co-authors where we forecast the economic growth of China. And our main statement using demographics is that the US will grow more than China by the year 2034, because China is going to have such a big falling population. In comparison with India, India has now around 24 million births a year. I told you China is below 10, India is 25 million. So it's 2.5x as many kids per year as China. So in 50 years, the geopolitics of Asia are going to look totally different from what they are now. A lot of people in Washington are very worried about China. I think that they are right to be worried about China until the year 2030, 2035. After 2035, the future doesn't look very bright for China.Putting aside things that can change, like immigration, what would be your US population forecast?As you say, the absolute key is immigration. But let's suppose that we go — and it's not that I'm advocating that policy, but as a mental experiment, a thought experiment — let's suppose that we have perfectly closed immigration, zero immigration from now on. The US right now is 335 million, so we will probably peak at 340 million and then start falling. In fact, the US population that has both parents born in the US is already falling.What might change this forecast, either up or down? One thing you mentioned in another piece that you wrote is people's religious affiliation. Whether they become more religious, less religious, that seems to have an impact on their fertility rate and birth rates.Yes, exactly.And that can change.That can change. For instance, let me give you a very simple example that a lot of people may relate to. When Ireland was partitioned and the 26 counties in the south of Ireland became the free state of Ireland, and the six counties in the north stayed as Ulster or Northern Ireland, Protestants were around 65 percent of the population and Catholics were around 35 percent. That's why they didn't want to join the free state of Ireland. In Northern Ireland, probably Catholics are going to become a majority. Why? Because Catholics in Ireland for the last 80 years have had a little bit higher fertility.Why is this going to become so much more important? Let me give you a very simple example. Let's go back to 1950 and let me, in a very crude way, separate families between secular and religious. A secular family, let's say, has 2.5 kids. And a religious family, on average, has three kids. The difference is 0.5, but the base, 2.5, is sufficiently high that it doesn't make much of a difference. Now fast forward to 2023. The secular family is having one kid; the religious family is having two. First of all, the religious families have also reduced their size, but they have reduced their fertility less than seculars. And because the secular base now is so small, now we are talking about huge differences.The question, of course, over time is going to be, how much of this religiosity will be transmitted intergenerationally? It's the case that the sons and the daughters of religious families are also going to be religious or not. But let's assume there is some persistence. That basically will tell you that in 200 years, the composition of the US population will be extremely different. And in fact, this is not a crazy point. Most historians of what is known as late antiquity — late antiquity goes from around 300 in the current era to around 700 in the current era — argue that conversions to Christianity stop around the year 370, 380. I'm talking about Western Europe. Basically what happens over the next 300 years is that Christians have a higher fertility than non-Christians. And by the early 700s, there are just not that many non-Christians left in Europe, and Europe has become a totally Christian continent. So these things happen. Small differences in fertility, you run them for 200 years and it has a huge difference. And again, going back to my point, Northern Ireland is a very different place today than 100 years ago just because Catholics have a little bit more kids than Protestants.Aggressive policies like child subsidies, making it easier to reconcile family and work, maternity leaves, etc. can push you back to 1.7, 1.8. You are never coming back to three. You are never coming back to four. Can public policy reverse demographic trends?Something else that could change is public policy. In countries which are already experiencing these drops, they’re giving bonuses to get people to have more kids. And there's a variety of sort of subsidies to encourage… Do those policies work? My baseline is that they probably really don't work. Maybe people have kids sooner than they would otherwise. Do we know of policies that actually have any kind of significant change on the number of kids people have at least in the rich countries?First of all, let me be absolutely open that the jury is still a little bit out because, as you say, maybe what is happening is that people are just changing the moment where the kids are born. My reading of the evidence is that you make a little bit of an impact. Right now, think about countries like Spain or Italy where fertility rates are around 1.2, which is absolutely horrible. It's like a reduction of half of the size of the population in each generation. Aggressive policies like child subsidies, making it easier to reconcile family and work, maternity leaves, etc. can push you back to 1.7, 1.8. You are never coming back to three. You are never coming back to four. The point I have argued to policymakers is if you are in a society where the fertility rate is 1.8, you can handle a gently decreasing population. What you don't want to be is in front of a demographic abyss. So policies, in my reading of the evidence, help you to go from disaster into gentle decline. And I think the evidence supports that that can be achieved.What do we know about societies that undergo a demographic decline? I imagine the past when that's happened, it's been because of war and disease, not because of choices people make voluntarily. There's been some sort of shock. Do we really have a good feel for what that looks like, when a country undergoes demographic decline, not because of disaster but because of just the choices people make, whether because of religious reasons or the cost of childcare or whatever?We don't. We have never been there. I have written a piece with what I think are educated conjectures. What type of educated conjectures [do] I have? First of all, it's going to be a society that is way less dynamic. I'm a little bit older than I used to be, and I already realize that for me to adopt new technologies now is much harder than when I was 10 years younger. As the average person in society becomes older and older, you are just going to have societies that adopt fewer new technologies, you have fewer new entrepreneurs, etc.For instance, there has been a lot of discussion that in the US there are now way less new businesses than 10, 15, 20 years ago. And there is a great economist at the University of California at LA, Hugo Hopenhayn, who has I think very convincingly demonstrated that this is completely driven by the fact that we have less 25-year-olds. Most new firms are created by people in their 20s, late 20s. We have now fewer people in their late 20s. And what he actually shows is that the percentage of people in their late 20s that create firms is the same as before. But there are less of them, so you are going to have fewer new firms.We are going to be also societies that somehow lose a little bit of the sense of the future, because everyone tends to be very old. And then the third point that I conjecture — and this is something that we really, really want to keep in mind — is that drops in population are not going to be uniform across space. What I mean by that is, let's suppose that as I was mentioning before, things continue in the way they continue now in South Korea for another 50 years. So South Korea is going to lose 30 million people. Those people are not going to disappear from Seoul, from the capital; they're going to disappear from rural areas. And then what do we do with those rural areas? There is going to be a moment, and you already see that even in the US, but in a lot of places in Western Europe, population in a county starts to fall down, fall down, fall down.And you know what the real problem is? One day they close the supermarket. And it's not because supermarket owner is evil. It's just because to run a supermarket, you need enough people. And suddenly there is not enough people in the county to have a large supermarket. And once you don't have a large supermarket in the county, life becomes very hard, because the only thing you have is a convenience store. So people move out. Even people who want to live in the small rural counties move out of the rural county because there are no services in the rural county anymore. I think about, who is going to keep the universities in a small rural areas open? There is just not going to be enough people to go to these colleges. And how do you go to your community and tell them that you are closing the local campus of your biggest state university just because there are not enough kids?At least a few of the listeners are already thinking of the film Children of Men. Are you familiar with it?I actually am not.The premise is that for some reason 18 years ago, 18 years previous, women over the course of like a year just stopped having kids. And the movie begins where the youngest person alive ends up being murdered. He's an 18-year-old. It's a world where nobody's having kids and society's beginning to fall apart. It's like people have nothing to live for. They're already trying to gather up great works of art and preserve them. They don't know for who. It just seems like a society that's winding down.Let's get back. Mortality could change, of course.Yes.CRISPR, all kinds of genetic editing — you can't really predict where technology will go, but that is something that could potentially change. Or even artificial wombs, maybe that will change people's choices as well.Fair enough. Let me just tackle the issue of mortality. Remember the Rule of 85? You can change it to 90, to 95, 100. You know, 100 will be very easy because you just put two zeros. Let me go back to China. I told you 10 million births a year; now apply a rule of 100, that will be 1 billion. They are still losing 400 million. And do we really think that increases in medical technology can push mortality much later than 100? I'm not an expert, but from when I talk with people who are a little bit more knowledgeable that I am, they tend to be skeptical. In fact, I have been talking with economists who have been looking at mortality and the changes in mortality in the US and other advanced economies. Most of what modern medicine does for you is increasing the quality of life over the last years. It used to be the case that you would see someone in his 70s and he will be old and in very bad shape. Now, you're in pretty good shape until three days before you die. So I think that a lot of what medicine is going to do is not increase our life expectancy that much; it’s just about making our quality of life better. As a piece of a personal anecdote, if I may, both my wife and I are economists, which means that we have long sessions at home discussing investment portfolios and retirement accounts. And we include equations — I know that most of you probably don't have discussions with whiteboards at home and covariances of investment — but the age that I use for my own forecast of my own life is 90. I don't use more than 90, so at a personal level, I don't forecast myself living on expectation over 90 years old.Immigration and demographicsOne solution that's not a technological solution is immigration. But I would think there is a limit — even for the most pro-immigration country — to how many immigrants. It seems like it's not really a plausible policy for most countries, maybe for the United States more than others, but even here there's limits.Yes, of course. First of all, every time I talk about immigration, I remind people I'm an immigrant myself, as you can probably tell from my funny accent. So it's not that I'm against immigrants. What I tried to point out in something that I wrote is, look, I was mentioning that South Korea is about to lose 60 percent of their population. That will mean that if you want to keep population constant, you will need that 60 percent of people living in South Korea who are not of Korean heritage. Have we ever seen societies that undertake such a deep demographic change in a couple of generations? Can a political system digest that change? I'm quite skeptical. One thing is to bring 10 percent of your population, 20 percent of immigrants. A very different thing is to have 60 percent.Second point: I mentioned before that the planet as a whole is going to start losing people. And as far as we know, the net immigration to the planet is still zero. Maybe like in Men in Black there are some people coming from outside. But let's say the US in 2040 is still bringing immigrants from some developing economies, it means that demographic problem of these developing economies is going to become even more serious.So let me give you a concrete example. If I were the minister of finance of Brazil, I would not be able to sleep at night. Brazil will probably start losing population around 2030, 2032, if not earlier. Who's going to migrate to Brazil? Brazil is still losing population. The best and the brightest of Brazilians move to the US or to Europe. You go to any good US university, and there's a lot of top Brazilian students and researchers. Brazil starts losing population, which immigrants do you bring? Who's going to move to Brazil?Another country that, believe it or not, will probably start losing population maybe in another 20, 25 years are all Central American republics. Who's going to migrate to Guatemala? So what do you do then?More likely that even more so people who have possibilities, who could get a job in an advanced economy, they will leave.Exactly. So you're going to really, really be in a very tight spot. The immigration to me sounds really like I'm a US person, or I'm a German person, I'm thinking about this from a European or a North American perspective. I want the listeners to understand this is for the planet as a whole. And by the year 2055, every immigrant I'm gaining is someone else that is losing an immigrant.But let's suppose that immigration stays at a historical level, a historical average. The US is not going to be in a very tight spot, demographically speaking, in 2040. China is going to be on a very tight spot, and that's going to really be a game changer. Which goes back to my point before about why I'm not worried about China taking over the world in the year 2050.If you are a country who is able and has a history of accepting immigrants, it sounds like on a comparative level, that is really to your advantage. And if you think not only the size of your country, but the quality of your workforce is important, to me, you're making a case that this would be a big plus for the United States overall from a geopolitical, geo-economic position — relatively.Sure. Coming back to our discussion about China versus the US, I think the US is still going to attract immigrants. How many immigrants we want to attract — and I say “we” now because I'm naturalized, so I can say we — how many immigrants we want to attract is a discussion we can have. But let's suppose that immigration stays at a historical level, a historical average. The US is not going to be in a very tight spot, demographically speaking, in 2040. China is going to be on a very tight spot, and that's going to really be a game changer. Which goes back to my point before about why I'm not worried about China taking over the world in the year 2050.As I was mentioning in a previous answer, if somehow we avoid a conflict with China by the year 2030, in some sense, the war is won. It’s just an issue of waiting 10 years, handling this situation. Because China will really, really need to do something serious with their economy and their political system. Now, something that can happen is that China, you know, starts forcing people to have a lot of kids. What I will [remind] listeners is some very basic facts of nature: Even if the Chinese government starts forcing everyone to have kids, it will take nine months — and one night, I guess — and then once the kid is born, it takes, what, 22 or 23 years before this person completes college. And if we want these people to be top researchers, etc., they need to go to graduate school. It’s 20 years. Think about it in this way: If we are thinking about the top researchers among the cohort that is being born today in 2023, these people are not going to be researchers until 2051. Demographics has this enormous momentum; things that we decide today do not really show up until 30 years later. And by the way, that's one of the reasons I think that a lot of the demographic policies and a lot of economists are not very good, because most politicians do not think 30 years ahead. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Does technological progress automatically translate into higher wages, better standards of living, and widely shared prosperity? Or is it necessary to steer the development of technological improvement to ensure the benefits don't accrue only to the few? In a new book, two well-known economists argue the latter. I'm joined in this episode by one of the authors, Simon Johnson.Simon is the Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT. He and Daron Acemoglu are authors of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Simon is also co-author with Jonathan Gruber of 2019's Jump-Starting America, now out in a new paperback.In This Episode* Is America too optimistic about technology? (1:24)* Ensuring progress is widely shared (11:10)* What about Big Tech? (15:22)* Can we really nudge transformational technology? (19:54)* Evaluating the Biden administration’s science policy (24:14)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationIs America too optimistic about technology? James Pethokoukis: Let me start with a sentence or two from the prologue: “People understand that not everything promised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Steve Jobs will likely come to pass. But, as a world, we have become infused by their techno-optimism. Everyone everywhere should innovate as much as they can, figure out what works, and iron out the rough edges later.” Later, you write that that we are living in a “blindly optimistic” age.But rather, I see a lot of pessimism about AI. A very high percentage of people want an AI pause. People are very down on the concept of autonomous driving. They're very worried that these new technologies will only make climate change worse. We don't seem techno-optimistic to me. we certainly don't see it in our media. First of all, let me start out with, why do you think we're techno-optimistic right now, outside of Silicon Valley?Simon Johnson: Well, Silicon Valley is a very influential culture, as you know, nationally and internationally. So I think there's a deep-running techno-optimistic trend, Jim. But I also think you put your finger on something very important, which is since we finished the book and turned in the final version in November, I think the advance of ChatGPT and some of our increased awareness that this is not science fiction — this is actual, this is real, and the people who are developing this stuff have no idea how it works, for example—I wouldn't call it pessimism, but I think there's a moment of hesitation and concern. So good, let's have the discussion now about what we're inventing, and why, and could we put it on a better path?When I think about the past periods where it seemed like there was a lot of tech progress that was reflected in our economic statistics, whether it's productivity growth or economic growth more broadly, those were also periods where we saw very rapid wage growth people think very fondly about. I would love to have a repeat of 1995-2000. If we had technologies that could manage that kind of impact on the economy, what would be the downside? It seems like that would be great.I would love a repeat of the Henry Ford experience, actually, Jim. Henry Ford, as you know, automated the manufacturing of cars. We went from producing tens of thousands of cars in the US to, 30 years later, producing millions of cars because of Ford's automation. But at the same time Ford and all the people around him — a lot of entrepreneurs, of course, working with Ford and rivals to Ford — they created a lot of new jobs, new tasks. And that's the key balance. When you automate, when you have a big phase of automation, and we did have another one during World War II and after World War II. We also created a lot of new tasks, new jobs. Demand for labor was very strong. And I think that it's that balance we need. A lot of the concerns, the justified concerns about AI you were mentioning a moment ago, are about losing jobs very quickly and faster than we can create other tasks, jobs, demand for labor in other, non-automating parts of the economy.Your book is a book of deep economic history. It's the kind of book I absolutely love. I wonder if you could just give us a bit of a flavor of the history of what's interesting in this book about those two subjects and how they interact.We tried to go back as far as possible in economic and human history, recorded history, to understand technological transformations. Big ones. And it turns out you can go back about 1000 years with quite reliable information. There are some things you can say about earlier periods, a little bit more speculative to be honest. But 1000 years is a very interesting time period, Jim, because as you know, that's pretty much the rise of Europe timeframe. A thousand years ago, Europe was a nothing place on the edge of a not very important part of one continent. And through a series of technological transformations, which took a long time to get going — and that's part of the medieval story that we explore — [there was] a huge amount of innovativeness in those societies. But it did not translate into shared prosperity, and it was a very stop-start. I'm talking about over the period of centuries.Then, eventually, we get this Industrial Revolution, which is initially in Britain, in England, but it's also shared fairly quickly around northwest Europe: individual entrepreneurship, private capital, private ownership, markets as a dominating part of how you organize that economy. And eventually, not immediately, but eventually that becomes the basis for shared prosperity. And of course, that becomes the basis for American society. And the Americans by the 1850s to 1880s, depending how you want to cut it, have actually figured out industrial technology and boosted the demand for labor more than the Europeans ever imagined. Then the Americans are in the lead, and we had a very good 20th century combining private capital, private innovation with some (I would say) selective public interventions where a private initiative didn't work. And this actually carried a lot of countries, including countries in that European tradition, through to around 1980. Since 1980, it's become much more bumpy. We've had a widening of income inequality and much more questioning of the economic and political model.Going back into the history: Oftentimes people treat the period before the steam engine and the loom as periods of no innovation. But there was. It just didn't have the impact, and it wasn't sustained. But we were doing things as a society before the Industrial Revolution. There was progress.There was technological progress, technological change. Absolutely.The compass, the printing press, gunpowder — these are advances.Right. The Europeans, of course, were sort of the magpies of the world at that point. A lot of those innovations began in China. Some of them began in the Arab world. But the Europeans got their hands on them and used them, sometimes for military purposes. They figured out civilian uses as well. But they were very innovative. Some people got rich in those societies, but only a very few people, mostly the kings and their hangers-on and the church. Broad-shared prosperity did not come through because it was mostly forced labor. People did not own their labor. There was some private property, but there wasn't individual rights of the kind that we regard as absolutely central to prosperity in the United States, because they are central to prosperity and because they're in the Constitution for a reason, because it was coming out of feudalism and the remains of that feudal system that our ancestors in the United States were escaping from. So they said, “Let's enumerate those rights and make sure we don't lose them.” That's coming out of 800 years of hard-learned history, I would say, at that point. And that's one reason why, not at the moment of independence but within 50 to 70 years, the American economy was really clicking and innovating and breaking through on multiple technologies and sharing prosperity in a way that nobody had ever seen before in the world.Before that period in the 1800s, the problem was not the occasional good idea that changed something or made somebody rich; it was having sustained progress, sustained prosperity that eventually spread out wide among the people.Absolutely. And I think it was a question of who benefited and who was empowered and who could go on and invent the next things. Joel Mokyr, who's an economic historian at Northwestern, one of our favorite authors, has written about the sort of revolution of tinkerers. And that's actually my family history. My family, as far back as we can go, was carpenters out of Chesterfield in the north of England. They made screws for a hundred years starting in the mid-19th century in Sheffield. They would employ a couple of people at any one time. Maybe no more than eight, maybe as few as two. They probably initially polished blades of knives and eventually ended up making specialized screws. But very, very small scale. There was not a lot of formal education in the family or among the workforce, but it was all kind of relationships with other manufacturers. It was being plugged into that community. Alfred Marshall talked about these clusters and cities of regional entrepreneurship. That's exactly where I'm from. So, yes, I think that was a really key breakthrough: having the institutions, the politics, and the social pressure that could sustain that kind of economic initiative.In the middle of the Industrial Revolution, late 1800s, what were the changes that we saw that made sure the gains from this economic progress were widely shared?If we're talking about the United States, of course, the key moment is the mechanization of agriculture, particularly across the West. So people left their farms in Nebraska or somewhere and moved to Chicago to work for McCormick, making the reapers that allowed more people to leave their farms. So you needed a couple of things in that. One was, of course, better sanitation and basic infrastructure in the big cities. Chicago grew from nothing to be one of the largest cities in the world in period of about a decade and a half. That requires infrastructure that comes from local government. And then there's the key piece, Jim, which is education. There was what's known as a “high school movement.” Again, very local. I don't think the national government knew much about it until it was upon them. [It was] pushing to educate more people in basic literacy and numeracy and to be better workers. At the same time, we did have from the national government, of course particularly in the context of the Civil War, the land grant universities, of which MIT is very proudly one of by the way — one of the only two that became private for various reasons. But we were initially founded to support the manufacturing arts in Massachusetts. That was a state initiative, but it was made possible by a funding arrangement, a land swap, actually, with the federal government.Ensuring progress is widely sharedThe kind of interventions which you've already mentioned — education and infrastructure — these seem like very non-controversial, public-good kinds of things. How do those kinds of interventions translate into the 2020s and 2030s in advanced countries, including the United States? Do we have need to do something different than those?Well, I think we should do those, particularly education, better and more and update it really quickly. I think people are going to agree on that in principle; there may be argument about how exactly you do that. I do think there are three things that should be on the table for potential serious discussion and even potential bipartisan agreement. The first is what Jaron Lanier calls “data dignity,” which is basically [that] you and I should own the data that we produce. This is an extension of private property rights from the right of the political spectrum. The left would probably have other terminology for it. But what's basically happening, and the value that's being created in these large language models, is those models are taking data that they find for free — actually, it's not really free, but it's not well protected on the internet, digital data — and they're using that to train these very large models. And it's that training process that's generating, already and will train even more, huge value and potential monopoly power for incumbents there. So Jaron’s point is, that's not right. Let's have a proper organization and recognition of proper rights, and you can pay for it. And then it also gives consumers the ability to bargain potentially with these large monopolies to get developers some technologies rather than other technologies.The second thing is surveillance. I think everyone on the right and the left should be very uncomfortable with where we are on surveillance, Jim, where we've slipped into already on surveillance, and also where AI is going to take us. Shoshana Zuboff has a great book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism on exactly this, going through where we are in the workplace and where we are in in our society. And then of course there's China and what they're doing in terms of surveillance, which I'm sure we're not going to do. In fact, I think the next division of the world may be between the low-surveillance or safeguarded-surveillance places, which I hope will include the US, and the high-surveillance places, which will be pretty much authoritarian places, I would suggest. That's a really different approach to the technology of how you interact with workers, citizens, everybody in all their various roles in life.The third one we're probably not going to agree on right away, but I do want us to have some serious discussion about it, is corporate taxation. Kim Clausing from UCLA, a former senior Treasury person, points out that we do have a graduated corporate tax system in the US but bigger companies pay less. Smaller companies’ effective tax rate is higher than bigger companies because they move their profits around the globe. That's not fair and that's not right. And she proposes that we tax mega profits above $10 billion, for example, at a higher rate than we tax smaller profits to give the big companies that are very successful, very profitable an incentive to make themselves smaller. The reason I like Kim's proposal is I want competition, not just between companies directly in terms of what they're offering, but also between business models and mental models. And I think what we're getting too much from Microsoft and Google and the others who are likely to become the big players is machine intelligence, as they call it, which basically means replacing people as much as possible. We argue for machine usefulness, which is also, by the way, a strong tradition in computer science — it's not the ascendant tradition or ascendant idea right now — that is, focusing technology on making humans more effective. Like this Zoom call is making us more effective. We didn't have to get ourselves in the same room. We are able to leverage our time. We're able to organize our lives differently.Find those kinds of opportunities, particularly for lower-income workers. We are not getting that right now because we lack competition, I think, in the development of these models. Jim, too much. You joked at the beginning that the Silicon Valley is the only optimist. Maybe that's true, but they're the optimists that matter because they're the ones who control the development of the technology. Almost all those strings are in their hands right now, and you need to give them an incentive to give up some of that. I'm sure we can agree on the fact that having the government break things up, or the courts, is going to be a big mess and not where we want to go.What about Big Tech?Does it suggest caution, as far as worrying about corporate size or breaking up these companies, that these big advances, which could revolutionize the economy, are coming from the very companies you're worried about and are interested in breaking up? Doesn't it argue that they're kind of doing something right, if that's the source of this great innovation, which may be one of the biggest innovations of our life?Yes, potentially. We're trying to be modest and we're trying to be careful here, Jim. We're saying if you make these really big profits, you pay the higher tax rate. And then you have a conversation with your shareholders about, do we really need to be so big? When Standard Oil was broken up before World War I, it was broken into 25 or 26 pieces, Rockefeller became richer. That created value for shareholders. More competition was also good, I think we can say safely at this distance, it was good for consumers. Competition for consumers is something I think we should always attempt to pursue, but competition in mental models, competition for ideas, getting more plurality of ideas out there in the tech sphere. I think that's really important, Jim. While I believe this can be — and we wrote the book in part because we believe it is — a very big moment in sort of technological choices that we humans have made and will continue to make. This is a big one. But if it's all in the hands of a few people, we're less likely to get better outcomes than if it's in the hands of hundreds of people or thousands of people. More competition for ideas, more competition to develop ways to make machines and algorithms useful to people. That's our focus.You have OpenAI, a company which was invested in by Microsoft, and Google/Alphabet is working on their version. And I think now you have Facebook and Amazon devoting more resources. Elon Musk is talking about creating his own version. Plus you have a lot of companies taking those models and doing things with them. It seems like there's a lot of things going on a lot of ferment. It doesn't to me seem like this kind of staid business environment where you have one or two companies doing something. It seems like a fairly vibrant innovation ecology right now.Of course, if you're right, Jim, then nobody is going to make mega excess profits, and then we don't have to worry about the tax rate proposal that I made. My proposal, or Kim's proposal, would have bite only if there are a couple of very big winners that make hundreds of billions of dollars. I'm not a computer scientist, I’m an economist, but it seems…Right, but it seems like those mega profits might be competed away, so I'd be careful about right now breaking up Google into eight Googlettes.Fine. I'm not trying to break them up. I'm saying give them a tax system so they confront that incentive and they can discuss it with their shareholders. The people who follow this closely, my computer science colleagues at MIT, for example, feel that Microsoft and OpenAI are in the lead by some distance. Google, which is working very closely with Anthropic, which broke away from OpenAI, is probably a either a close second or a slightly distant second. It's sort of like Manchester City versus the rest of the Premier League right now. But the others you mentioned, Facebook, Amazon, are some years behind. And years are a big deal here. Elon Musk, of course, proposed a pause in AI development and then suggested he get to launch his own AI business — I suppose to take advantage of the pause.That’s a little suspicious.There's not going to be a pause. And there's not going to be a pause in part because we know that China is developing AI capabilities. While I am not arguing for confrontation with China over this or other things necessarily, we do have to be cognizant that there's a major national security dimension to this technology. And it is not in the interest of the United States to fall behind anyone. And I'm sure the Chinese are having the same discussion. That's going to keep us going pretty much full speed. And I think is also the case that many corporate executives can see this is a potential winner-take-all. And on the applications, the thinking there is that we're going to be talking very soon about a sort of supply chain where you have these fundamental large language model, the [General-Purpose Technology] type at the bottom, and then people can build applications on top of them. Which would make a lot of sense, right? You can focus on healthcare, you can focus on finance, but you'll be choosing between, right now it looks like, one or two of the large language models. Which does suggest really big upstream profits for those fundamental suppliers, just like how Microsoft has been making money since the mid-1980s, really.Can we really nudge transformational technology?With an important technology which will evolve in directions we can't predict, can we really nudge it with a little bit of tax policy, equalizing capital labor rates? Can we really nudge it in the kind of direction that we might want? If generative AI or machine learning more broadly is as significant as some people say, including folks at MIT and Stanford, I just wonder if we're really operating at the margins here. That the technology is going to be what the technology is. And maybe you make sure we can retrain people, and we can change education, and maybe we need to worry a bit about taxing this profit away if you're worried about corporate power. But as far as how the technology interacts with the workplace and the tasks people do, can we really influence it that much?I think that's the big question of the day, Jim. Absolutely. This is a book, not a policy memo, because we feel that the bigger issue is to have the discussion. To confront the question, as you pose it, and to discuss, what do we as a society want? How do we develop the technology that we need? Are we solving the problems that we really want to solve? Historically, of course, we didn't have many of those conversations. But we weren't as rich then as we are now. Hopefully we're more aware of our history now and more aware of the impact of these choice points. And so it's exactly to have that discussion and to say, if this is as big as people say, how are we going to move it in various directions?I like, as you know, to propose specific policy. I do think, particularly in Washington, it's the specifics that people want to seize. “What do we mean by surveillance? What do we mean by s safeguards over surveillance? How could you operationalize protections against excessive surveillance? By whom? By employers, by the police, by companies from whom you buy stuff? From your local government?” That conversation still needs to be had. And it's a very big, broad conversation. So let's have it quickly, because the technology is moving very quickly.What does the more recent history of concerns about technology, what lessons should we draw? I think of, I think of nuclear technology, which there are lots of concerns and we pass lots of rules. We basically paused that technology. And now we're sitting here in the, you know, in the 2020s worried about climate change. That, to me, is a recent powerful example of the dangers of trying to slow a technology, delay a technology that may evolve in ways you don't understand, but also can solve problems that we don't understand. It's, to me, are the history of least in the United States of technology over the past half century has been one of being overly cautious, not pedal to the metal gungho, you know, you know, let's, let's just keep going as fast as possible.As I think you may remember, Jim, I'm a big advocate for more science spending and more innovation in some fundamental sense across the whole economy because I think that generates prosperity and jobs. In my previous book, Jump-Starting America, we went through the nuclear history, as you flag. And I think the key thing there is at the beginning of that industry, right after World War II, there was over-optimism on the part of the engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission chair famously promised free electricity, and there was very little discussion about safety. And people who raised the issues of safety were kind of shunted to one side with the result that Three Mile Island a little bit and Chernobyl a lot was a big shock to public consciousness about the technology. I'm in favor of more innovation…I wonder if we've overlearned that lesson, you know? I think we may have overlearned it.Yes. I think that's quite possibly right. And we are not calling for an end to innovation on AI just because somebody made a movie in which AI takes over the world. Not at all. What we're saying is there are choices and you can either go more towards replacing people, that's automation, and more towards new task creation, that's machine usefulness. And that's not a new thing. That's a very old, thousand-year or maybe longer tension we've had in the history of innovations and how we manage them. And we have an opportunity now, because we're a more conscious, aware, and richer society, to try and pull ourselves through various means — and it might not be tax policy, I'll grant you that, but through various means — towards what we want. And I think what we want is more good jobs. We always want more good jobs, Jim. And we always want to produce useful things. We don't want just to replace people for the sake of replacement.Evaluating the Biden administration’s science policySince you brought it up, I'm going to take the opportunity to ask you a final question about some of your other work about trying to create technology hubs across America. It seems like those ideas have to some degree made their way into policy during the Biden administration. What do you think of its efforts on trying to spend more on R&D and trying to spread that spending across America and trying to make sure it's not just Austin and Boston and New York and San Francisco and LA as areas of great innovation?In the Chips and Science Act, there's two parts: chips and science. The part that we are really advocating for is the science part. And it's exactly what you said, Jim, which is you spend more on science, spread it around the country. There are a lot of people in this country who are innovative, want to be innovative. There are some really good resources, private sector, but also public sector, public-sector universities, for example, in almost every state where you could have more innovation in some basic knowledge-creation sense. And that can become commercialized, that can become private initiative, that can generate jobs. That's what we are supporting. And I think the Science Act absolutely did internalize that. In part, because people learned some hard lessons during COVID, for example.The CHIPS Act is not what we were advocating for. And that's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. That's more, I would say, conventional, somewhat old-fashioned industrial policy: Pick a sector, back a sector, invest in the sector from the public sector perspective. Chips are of course a really important sector, and the discussion of AI is absolutely part about that. And of course we're also worried, in part because of COVID but also because of the rise of China, about the security of supply chains, including chips that are produced in, let's say, parts of Asia. I think there are some grounds for that. There's also some issues, how much does it cost to build a state-of-the-art fab and operate it in the US versus Taiwan or South Korea, or even China for that matter? Those issues need to be confronted and measured. I think it's good that we're having a go. I'm a big believer in more science, more science spending, more responsible deployment of it and more discussion of how to do that. The chips industrial policy, we'll see. I hope something like this works. It would be quite interesting to pursue further, but we have had some bumps in those roads before. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

I have many times written about the importance of the story we tell ourselves about the future, especially in big-budget science fiction films. But does all the doom and gloom from Hollywood even matter? And is it driven from creatives at the top or by audience demand? To discuss those questions and more, I'm talking with Sonny Bunch.Sonny is the culture editor for The Bulwark, where he hosts The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood newsletter and podcast.In This Episode* Netflix’s upcoming $200 million techno-pocalyptic movie (1:06)* Why is Hollywood obsessed with dystopia? (6:17)* The solutionism of The Martian (8:48)* Do sci-fi visions of the future even matter? (15:03)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationNetflix’s upcoming $200 million techno-pocalyptic movieJames Pethokoukis: I write a lot about negative future-pessimistic media. Netflix has a big new movie in the works, a $200 million film directed by the Russo brothers, who you may know from the Marvel movies. They’ve got Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt. Big production. It's called The Electric State. And this is a summary of this film: “A runaway teenager and her … robot travel west through a strange USA, where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline.” And then it goes on about our “hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.”This might be a fantastic film, and I have a lot of confidence in the Russo Brothers and that budget. Here we are, we have a lot of interesting things cooking in the world from the Musk rockets and AI and huge breakthroughs in biotechnology, and that's the movie they're giving us for $200 million, about the decline of consumerist society. You've been writing a bit about this topic. When does it end?Sonny Bunch: It's interesting because I was thinking about this the other day: Really, what is the only truly utopian vision of the future? It's Star Trek. That's about it. In terms of mass popular entertainment, the only really, truly utopian ideal of the future is Star Trek. Now, there's still conflict in Star Trek. But it is at least a kind of post-scarcity society where folks are interested in exploring the world and bettering everyone. Look, part of this is it is easier to create tension and drama out of things that are bad. And what's the easiest way to look at how things might be bad? Look at what basically works about right now and say, “Well, what if this doesn't work? What if it's actually bad for us?” The idea of Netflix producing a stirring condemnation of consumerist society is kind of funny in and of itself. Netflix is the absolute peak of consumerism.Literally, the mission statement of Netflix is to sit on your couch and consume; consume so much you don't fall asleep. The initial argument for Netflix one of the creators the company made was, “We are trying to win the war against sleep.” They're not winning the war against sleep by encouraging people to create wonderful new advancements of society. It’s just to sit there and passively consume. So it's kind of funny. I like a good dystopian action movie. I can watch those all day long, so I'm probably as much of the problem as anything else. But it's definitely a thing.And it just doesn't seem that hard to me to have some sort of positive message, even if it's overall kind of dystopian or apocalyptic. I just don't see that there's any attempt. It's just full-throated doom.Remember when Interstellar came out? I love Interstellar. Great movie. It is hopeful in a certain way. It's about trying to find new places for Earth to live; it's on the edge of collapse. When Matthew McConaughey's character comes back about a hundred years later because of all the time dilation, humanity has moved up to the space stations that are orbiting and people have been saved. As far as these things go, it's actually a fairly positive message. Except there was an undercurrent from some critics who were like, “You know, this means that like billions of people died, right? They didn't save more than a handful of folks up on those space stations. Most of humanity is dead or dying.” And I was like, yeah, but they didn't focus on that. It's still pretty positive.I would counter argue that one of the themes of that movie is at some point we turned our back on progress. It's like society be has become anti-technology. To me, that movie says if we had not abandoned technological progress, maybe this huge disaster which has befallen the Earth, maybe we could have fixed it. But now it's too late. Now we have no other choice but to head to the stars, which is something we probably should have been thinking about anyways. I think a superficial viewing of that movie is that it is pessimistic. And I think you're right. I think, fundamentally, that is a future pro-progress film.Why is Hollywood obsessed with dystopia?But you mentioned Star Trek at the beginning. Why do you think Hollywood's sci-fi, at least, has become almost completely obsessed with the dystopian and apocalyptic? Is it just that it's easy to make that kind of film? Or is it reflecting something in our society?I don’t know. What do we like to say? Everybody likes to think they're living in the end times. Everybody likes to think that they are important enough to see the end of the world. This is a constant through human civilization. Everybody thinks that the end is just around the corner, and they're the last generation that will see the world. And now we have the technology and the filmmaking ability to actually realize that world we have; we have the ability to destroy the world on film. (In real life, too, if somebody really wanted to get crazy, but it's much easier and safer to do on film.) And it is easier. It's an easier story to tell. It's an easier story to portray because if you live in a post-apocalyptic society, there are a lot fewer of? Extras. You don't have to fill stadiums full of people. You don't have to have crowded streets with everybody walking around. You just have somebody, oh,You have empty streets and a little bit of trash, and you have a set.You’ve got empty streets. This is the Russo brothers. They're doing it all on green and blue screens. You’ve just got Millie Bobby Brown walking around, kicking over a trashcan every now and again, and it's fine. I do think that there's an inherent narcissism to all of this: We have achieved the peak of civilization. What's the line in The Matrix when Agent Smith is talking about how they designed the Matrix?We took the peak of civilization.We took the peak of human civilization, but really once we started thinking for you, it became our civilization. And what did they pick? They picked 1999, when that movie came out. That is the constant refrain in all of this stuff: We are the peak, things are to go precipitously downhill, enjoy it while it lasts. It is inherently dramatic, in a certain way, to imagine having to come back from a fall of a sort. But the fact that it is so constant just leads me to believe that it really is quite silly.The solutionism of The MartianYou mentioned Star Trek, but I would also say a movie like The Martian, which I also view as positive, pro-technology, pro-solutions — we can solve problems. And to me, that's what's wrong with a lot of these other films: we end up not being able to solve any problems. Probably our attempts to solve the problems only make things worse. And that is, to me, a rare example of a problem-solving movie that's plenty dramatic. There's no obvious villain, other than perhaps the planet Mars itself and space. To me, it's just a fundamental lack of effort. And again, I don't know if it's easy, it's cheaper in some ways, it also kind of reflects the views of the people who make the movies. But it's just shocking that there's not more made, because we do have a few examples of being able to do it properly.It is interesting. I wrote a piece for the Washington Post a few years back about how environmentalists make good movie villains. And the reason that they make good movie villains is because these are the people who the writers can really identify with. The whole idea of creating a realistic villain, if you want a realistic villain, is it's somebody you can identify with, somebody whose goals you sympathize with. And many of these villains — for instance Thanos in the first run of MCU movies, his whole thing is, “I lived through environmental collapse, many people died, it drove me insane, and I'm going to eliminate half of the universe so to avoid this problem again.” Which seems to defeat the purpose, but whatever. The reason he is sympathetic to the people who are writing these movies is that they look around and they see, “Global warming. It’s happening. It's here. We're all going die. There's going to be crop collapses. The population bomb is going off. We're never going to make it.” And nevermind that none of this has come to pass in the 50 to 100 to 1,000 years that we've been talking about it. It is still an ever-present terror. And if you're a person of a certain worldview, I can see why it would be appealing to try and work through it. The Martian is interesting, too, because The Martian is kind of techno-utopian in the sense that it posits a world in which all of the world's powers can work together. There's a very specific subplot with China—which at the time was doing more space shuttle, rocket exploration-type stuff than we were—working hand-in-hand with China to kind of make it all work out. I'm curious to see how that specific subplot would play today, if that is a thing that would be in the novel or the movie, or if it would not be.The relationship between the nations might have been portrayed a bit testier. That movie came out — the novel came out a bit earlier, but certainly the film came out just as things were starting to turn.Also, just in terms of the business of Hollywood, it's an interesting movie. Because that's a movie that came out right when Hollywood was really trying to make inroads into China, was working hand-in-hand with the Chinese government to get script approval and make sure that their films got a release there. And of course, it is impossible — this is the one thing I say over and over again to people — it is impossible to understand the artistry of Hollywood without understanding the business of Hollywood. You cannot understand why movies get made or how they get made or how they're received by Hollywood without understanding what is actually happening in the business of Hollywood. And at that moment in time, China was a market ripe for the plucking. Again, things have changed a bit in the last few years. I would be curious to see how that played now.If I were writing a script and I wanted it to have some sort of internal logic and I wrote that the driving force from my villain is that he needs to kill half of every living being in the universe so all of life doesn't consume all the resources, that idea would die immediately. If I brainstormed that idea, it wouldn't last 30 seconds. To me, it sort of gets at the ethos in Hollywood in which someone didn’t say, “We need to come up with a better motivation for the film, because that's ridiculous.”Two things here. One, it's very funny, the original comic book motivation — I'm going to put on my nerd hat here for a second — the original comic book motivation for Thanos actually weirdly makes more sense: He just wants to kill half the universe to please his girlfriend, death, the manifestation of death. That's what he wants to do. I actually find that to be much more sensible than what they wound up with. But the second thing is that this is my broad case for [why] Hollywood should hire more conservative screenwriters. Because if you really want your villains to be a villainous and for the industry to kind of reflect your own beliefs, you need like oil barons who aren't cartoonishly mustache-twirling. You need people who are out there like, “Yes, we're going to frack because that's what's going to power the hospital for the children. We're going to build nuclear power plants and we're going to dump the waste in this nature preserve because that's the only way to keep the bread factory running for the orphans.” Things like that.Do sci-fi visions of the future even matter?Does any of this matter? Does it matter how we portray the future? Does it matter how we portray—or perhaps in this case we don't really portray—innovators or explorers? Is this something that's just confined to our media consumption habits? Or does it have a bigger impact on the world? Obviously I think it does, but I'm open to someone arguing that it doesn't.I go back and forth on this question, honestly. I really go back and forth on this, because I do think there's a chicken and an egg issue here. I think that the art of a time reflects the sensibility of the time. I think that is mostly how the cause and effect works, but I also do think that a society chooses how to live by the stories they tell themselves in a very real way. I think this is why myth is important. This is why the stories we tell children matter. I do think that the art that we consume does help shape how we choose to live. I don't want to mush-mouth weasel my way out of this, but I do think it's a very open and interesting question. Depending on the day of the week, I can argue either side of it.I did an interview early on in my Substack with Ronald D. Moore, who has this great series For All Mankind. It shows a space race that never ends. It creates a really interesting alt-reality, that while there are still problems, we're better off for continuing to head into space. It doesn't seem that hard. I asked him some of the exact same questions I'm asking you. He was like, “It's economics. People think that makes money and until it stops making money, we're going to keep getting more of it.” I would like to think that there'd be something more to it than that, that film studios, if they have the opportunity to make something that can make money, but also doesn't completely reflect some sort of cultural exhaustion, that they would do it. But maybe I'm just too optimistic.This very much is my point with China: Everything that Hollywood makes is based on the last thing before that made money until none of that stuff is making money. And then they have to find something else. This is why you had a bunch of…You're still getting more zombie movies with The Last of Us. I thought that had just about died out.No, The Last of Us, huge hit. 30 million people watching on HBO across its various platforms. We're going to get more of The Last of Us, more zombies: The Walking Dead, 17 more spinoffs of that. We’ll see. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

The conventional narrative about the economic history of World War II says that new learning from wartime mobilization jumpstarted a postwar golden age of fast economic growth. But, economist Alexander Field writes in his 2011 book, A Great Leap Forward, "It was not principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad frontier of the American economy during the 1930s." Field develops that argument in his new book, The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War, released last fall. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Alex to discuss his argument.Alex is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.In This Episode* Depression-era technological progress* Economic detective work (8:04)* What about the scientific advances of WWII? (13:23)* The US economy if WWII never happened (17:39)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationDepression-era technological progressJames Pethokoukis: You write in A Great Leap Forward, a book that I consult frequently and mention frequently in my writings: “The years 1929-1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history. … It was not principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad frontier of the American economy during the 1930s.” Your new book builds upon that argument, but could you, just for a moment, give a quick summary of A Great Leap Forward, and then how that moves into your new book?Alexander Field: The basic argument of A Great Leap Forward was that behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment for at least a decade, potential output was growing by leaps and bounds during the Great Depression. It wasn't really recognized until Simon Kuznets had to try to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what the potential of the economy could be. But the contributors to that were, I think, several. Number one was the last third of the conversion of the internal transmission of power within American factories from the shafts and belts, which was a signature of the 19th-century factory, to fractional-horsepower electric motors and electric wiring. And the second part was just an enormous amount, surprisingly, of research and development spending. Just astounding, if you think of the Depression as being so disastrous macroeconomically, but in terms of the number of people employed growing by leaps and bounds, number of labs established. And then finally, although it's widely accepted that the New Deal spending was too small in a Keynesian sense to immediately bring the economy out of the Depression, nevertheless, that spending on streets and highways and bridges and hydropower and so on had very strong positive supply-side effects. I think it's the combination of those three factors that I see as responsible for making potential output so much larger in 1941 than people thought it was.For the layman, your finding in that book, your thesis, is extraordinarily counterintuitive. You would never expect that underneath that sky-high unemployment number and the failing banks and the breadlines, there was this sort of innovative ferment happening and foundations laid for future progress. Similarly, to the extent that people would have an economic opinion about World War II, I would guess: 1) that it brought us out of the Great Depression, and 2) that it was a period of key advances, key technologies and the fact maybe we learned how to do things more efficiently during the war, whether it's build boats or what have you. Those two things are what played a huge role in postwar prosperity—I think that might be sort of the everyman way they would conceive of it. That is not exactly what you found.I think you've done a very good job characterizing what I see as the two key themes in the conventional wisdom about the Second World War. Basically, the argument that fiscal and monetary stimulus rapidly closed the output gap, the unemployment rate went from under 10 percent in ‘41 to unimaginably low, below 2 percent, in ‘43 and ’44. That's accepted and I'm not challenging that. But the second part of the conventional wisdom is what the economists call learning by doing: the emphasis on the decline in unit costs with accumulated output as a result of producing military durables. And the argument is exactly as you stated it. The argument is that learning spilled over into the postwar period and kind of underlined the supply side foundations for the golden age, which is ‘48 to ‘73. Now, my argument is different.I see the Second World War from a productivity history perspective as a detour. My argument is that the progress, the growth of potential output up through 1941, that's essentially most of the reason why the US stands astride the world economy in ’48, not what happened between ‘41 and ’48. It might have been different if the US had persisted in producing a hundred thousand piston-driven aircraft a year. But we didn't. We didn't produce piston-driven aircraft. Most of the products that we got very good at making, we stopped making them fairly soon after Victory over Japan Day. And I view most of that specific human capital as not really having a great deal of relevance after the war.As you mentioned, the things we got good at making were not just the instruments of war, but the instruments of war at a particular period. They were not going to be applicable to future conflicts, but they're also not applicable to a civilian economy that, once the war was over, began to expand very quickly. You mentioned the airplanes. I would also assume the kind of ship building that was done in the war was also not particularly applicable to the post-war era.That's right. That's exactly right. I see basically, the success of US industry under government leadership in producing the military ordinance that supplied our armies, as well as those of Britain and the Soviet Union, our allies, and so on — I see that basically as the application of technologies that had been honed in the ‘20s and particularly in the 1930s, producing automobiles and refrigerators, and applying that management experience to mass producing military durables, rather than the view that it was experience producing military durables that laid the foundations for the postwar period in terms of the supply side.Economic detective workI think people would think that we didn't need to look anymore at the Great Depression or World War II, that this is, they would say, settled science. We know exactly what happened and why it happened. Apparently the role of the World War II, what happened there, is not settled science. So what were people missing previously? What did you find that presents a different perspective?I think, as you say, it began with the findings about the Great Depression. I think what we're doing in the business of research, particularly academic research, is we're researching things: We're trying to find something new to say. But finding something new to say is only part of it; it also has to be something that actually might be true. And so it really it came out of really deep immersion in a variety of sources, both statistical and documentary: reading the minutes of the War Production Board, reading the minutes of the planning committee. And as this happened, a lot of preconceptions that I had about the war began to fall away. For example, the central empirical finding, surprising finding, in this book, or the argument, is that the productivity of American manufacturing—and it is within manufacturing that we would expect to see the effects of learning by doing—actually dropped dramatically between 1941 and 1945.And one of the things that I kind of picked up from this immersion in the sources was, rather than a view of American industry during the war as 24/7, 365 days a year, I get a picture of really profound production intermittency. In other words, essentially the need to shut down production lines, because it's a shortage economy. You've moved from a surplus economy to a shortage economy; sub-assemblies and raw materials and ultimately labor are being rationed. And if you can't get the heat exchanger you need, then the whole line is going to sit there. It's a very different view. And then you see this being said. In [War Production Board chairman Donald] Nelson's biography he talks about destroyer escorts: “Well, they were sitting there for six months because they couldn't get the part that they needed to complete it.” And those are kind of throwaway lines. They're there, but they’re not part of the kind of standard narrative; they're kind of overlooked as anomalies. And I don't want to get too Thomas Kuhn-ian about that, but if you start kind of pulling those anomalies together and assembling them and so on, then you get a different picture. And that's what I've tried to articulate in the book.I love your role as a kind of economic detective. It's not just about going to the BLS website and pulling up the data and then off you go. There's some real detective work as a historian, as much as an economist, going on here. It's really interesting thinking about the narrative because I think you're right that I picture December 7th, 1941, we head off to war and then it's all hands on deck, the production lines are never quiet, the steel mills are never cool, and it's all that way until August 1945. But perhaps now having gone through this pandemic, we're a little more aware of what happens when you have a shortage economy, which is what you found.Yeah, it's absolutely the case. I mean, ‘42 was absolutely a chaotic, terrible year. I would say there was no consensus in Washington that the United States was going to win the war, and it wasn't just the problems of suddenly having to produce a radically different set of products and making all this transition. The Japanese and the Germans weren't making it any easier for us, and I talk about that in the book as well. I think also vastly overlooked: I had absolutely no idea of the severity of what I call the rubber famine in the United States. When the Japanese overran Singapore in February ’42 and then rapidly shut off all of the exports, they cut off over 95 percent of the one strategic material in which the United States had effectively no domestic sourcing. And they were panicked, absolutely panicked about this, the Rubber Survey Committee. So that was another negative supply shock. And then the Germans were enormously successful in torpedoing what I call the tanker pipeline that was bringing petroleum and petroleum products from east Texas and Louisiana to the eastern seaboard. That's how it was moved and so forth. And between January and June of ‘42, they torpedoed 400 ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean and just completely shut that down. And there were also serious consequences about that.What about the scientific advances of WWII?Was the war a time of great science productivity? Or is that also a detour toward science that was not as applicable to the postwar period, and we were not able to build on the gains and science of the ‘20s and ‘30s and so forth?The evidence is pretty clear, and I would cite James Conant, former president of Harvard and also a member of the Rubber Survey Committee, basically saying, “During the war, basic scientific research was shut down.” This was an all-hands-on-deck, we're going to essentially exploit our existing larder of scientific knowledge to fight the war. Now, sure, obviously there were developments in terms of technology and science during the war. I can talk about some of them. We could talk about jet engines. It's clear that jet-engine technology did advance during the war. But look, aircraft and aircraft-engine technology was advancing very rapidly in the 1930s. And you have to ask the counterfactual: What would've happened without that? As far as the United States, we never flew any jet engines in the Second World War.Nuclear power: We spent $2 billion on the Manhattan project and so on. And I think the first nuclear power plant was in England in ‘56, I think. And we obviously have relied to some degree on nuclear power. I think the jury is kind of still out on the extent to which that was a big plus. And it's operated only with enormous subsidies in terms of government accepting the liability limits and so on. So we could talk about other factors. There were some significant institutional consequences of the Second World War, but from a technological perspective, I do see it as a detour. And as far as basic science, I think this is one of those areas in which there is not a lot of dispute. It was shut down as was R&D development in terms of consumer durables.What sort of response have you gotten from other economists, other economic historians?There have been sort of people nibbling at the edges. They're not happy with one little thing, one or the other. But I think the reality is that World War II is not something that economic historians have given that much attention to. The time series, econometricians will typically drop the observations from World War II: “Ah, it was a controlled economy. Everything was messed up. We can't run our [models].” And so on. The basic thesis I have not gotten a lot of pushback on.When I saw that your book had come out, the first thing that popped in my head, since I write a lot about productivity growth, was a passage in Robert Gordon's book in which he very specifically writes about labor productivity in World War II and how the improved production techniques and so forth were not forgotten after the war. What you're describing is a very different view of productivity.What Bob Gordon did in chapter 16. . .Obviously you're familiar with it.I read all of the manuscript in chapters, so yes, I am quite familiar with the book. And what he did in chapter 16 was, I think, absolutely crystallized and state very clearly the second key theme, in terms of the conventional wisdom, about the war. He went beyond that. He then kind of advertised it as novel. But in the book, if you read the book carefully, I have considerable documentation because whenever you're trying to say something novel, you have to persuade people that we didn't already know this and so on. And what I think Bob is doing, basically, there is just absorbing and very clearly stating what is the received wisdom by many historians and economic historians. And I just think it's wrong.The US economy if WWII never happenedI think one of the more intriguing economic counterfactuals is what the American economy looks like in the ‘40s and in the postwar era if there was no postwar era—if all else equal, there was no need for a war. If we had not had this diversion, what does the economy of the United States in the second half of the 20th century look like?It is a counterfactual. One thing I would say is that the war did interrupt a very strong trajectory of productivity growth, both labor productivity and total factor productivity, as the output gap closed between ‘39 and ‘41. And what you're seeing there in terms of my interpretation is, number one, just a continuation of that trend during the Depression of very strong productivity growth, secular trend, combined with a boost also from closing the output gap because of the pro-cyclicality of TFP. Now, if you just were to statistically extrapolate that through the ‘41 to ‘48 period, things look pretty good. It's a questionable kind of exercise in terms of how accurate that would be.If you look the world in 1948, people, historians, everybody else is looking at that and they're seeing the United States is standing like an economic colossus astride the world. The Soviet Union has lost 20 million people. Germany: Dresden, Hamburg, they've been fire bombed. England has had to basically liquidate its overseas economic empire to pay for the war. Japan has had two atomic bombs and virtually all of the other major cities have been fire bombed with incendiaries and so on. And I think it's natural, particularly because the US was victorious and so on, and particularly because it was so successful in production—but of course, productivity is not the same as production; it's production per unit input—because it was so successful in that to say that was attributable to the war years. And again, I come back to my thesis, which is: No, I see essentially in ‘48, the US had a major productivity lead over Western Europe and Japan, and the next 30 years, what the French call “les trente glorieuses” and so forth, essentially saw living standards converging among the developed world as that productivity gap is closed. But my argument is that that productivity gap is already quite evident in 1941. It's not a function of the war. It's there in spite of the war.So even without the destruction to our competitors in World War II and our lack of destruction, the US in 1950 would still be standing astride the world as an economic colossus on the technological frontier, even without the war.Right. It's interesting to think about American industry prewar, say in the ‘30s, and postwar. Let's talk about the American automobile industry, because that was central in terms of the prosecution of the war, in terms of the conversion of those factories and the contractors operating, the automobile industry firms operating these big defense plants and so on. Economic historians basically agree that the 1930s was probably the most dynamic period in terms of innovation in American automobiles, in terms of the development of industry. Do you really want to look at the 1950s and say that those were the glory years of American US manufacturing? I mean, the tail fins and so on, and the cars lasted three years, and we essentially owned the marketplace. We weren't threatened by foreign imports yet. But I don't see a major upward progression in that direction. I do want to say, though, in terms of the legacy of the war, that there were clearly some important things that were different because of the war and maybe it wouldn't have been if we hadn't had it. Number one, we had a compression of wages. So there was essentially 30 years of reduced inequality in income and wealth in the United States. Number two, little things like, for example, the incredibly peculiar system whereby Americans provide healthcare tied to your employer. It's just an artifact of what Henry Kaiser did when, because of caps on wages, he wasn't able to raise wages, so we'll have benefits, we'll have hospitals and so on. The introduction of tax withholding, because of the high tax rates, gave the federal government greater fiscal capacity. Blacks did very well. Many American blacks essentially had the opportunity to move from unskilled to semi-skilled positions. So yes, there were some consequences. I don't want to suggest that everything was exactly the same or worse. I wanted to get that on the record. But in terms of the general trajectory of the growth of productivity and potential output, I would argue that the war was a detour.Then to what extent was the immediate postwar boom — the ‘50s, ‘60s, heading into the early ‘70s — how much of that was based on tech progress and innovation that emerged in those decades, and how much was really building substantially on the foundations from the ‘20s and ‘30s?There's a couple of things. First of all, the ‘50s and ‘60s did benefit from relatively high levels of aggregate demand, partly because of military Keynesianism and the Cold War. So that problem was not so great. As far as the technology overlap, I think if there was learning during the war, and in chapter nine of my book I talk about this—and it's somewhat speculative there—I don't think it was within manufacturing. It's not the traditional emphasis on learning by doing. It was on logistics. It was on essentially the efforts, particularly in the military, in terms of the enormous knowledge, the use of linear programming, the gradual diffusion of those techniques to the private sector, the development of containerization, multimodal transit and so on. So if I were to kind of say in the post-war period, “what's the productivity legacy?” I think maybe we've been barking up the wrong tree and maybe more emphasis needs to be placed there.I read various comments from economists at the end of World War II and maybe right at the beginning of the postwar period, and there seemed to be a lot of pessimism about what would happen. Are we going to go back into a Great Depression? What's going to happen when all of these soldiers come back? Am I overstating that, that the postwar boom seemed to have been kind of a surprise to those economists?If you're thinking about actual output, a couple of things matter. Number one, potential matters, but also the output gap matters. And the big concern among economists at the end of the Second World War was aggregate demand. In other words, they say, “Once all of this military spending stops, essentially, it's going to be back to the 1930s” and so forth. And that didn't happen. I think the conventional wisdom is probably right. It is that the balance sheets of American households were just in great shape, they couldn't buy certain stuff, they were being well fully employed. They had a large lot of deferred demand for cars and washing machines. I think you're absolutely right. There was a lot of pessimism, but it was mostly focused on aggregate demand. I mean, in one sense, who cares about potential if you're way below potential? And that was, I think, what was driving that pessimism.My last question is about your previous book. I just want to mention again the name of your current book, which is The Economic Consequences of US Mobilization for the Second World War. A book I was delighted to see land on my desk. And as I said earlier, your previous book, A Great Leap Forward, one which is well thumbed-through by me. I have one final question about that book. The cover image is the famous Futurama ride from the World's Fair of 1939, New York City. Why did you choose that image?I think because it captured the kind of technological optimism and just sort of unalloyed and uncritical confidence in the ability of science and technology to push the economy forward, which had been absorbed by the population in spite of the double-digit unemployment. And of course, that is consistent with my thesis of what was actually happening in spite of the unemployment. I think that's the reason why I put that there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

When it comes to Up Wing thinking, there's no better litmus test than nuclear power. Setting aside the regulatory barriers we've imposed on ourselves, the United States can tap a source of clean, reliable energy that overcomes the carbon emissions and geopolitical challenges of fossil fuels. Here to make the case for nuclear in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, is Robert Zubrin.Robert is a nuclear engineer and the author of the new book, The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future.In This Episode* Is the case for nukes contingent on climate change? (1:14)* How the Atomic Age ended (6:39)* A 75-percent nuclear America (15:03)* Is a nuclear renaissance coming? (23:00)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationIs the case for nukes contingent on climate change?James Pethokoukis: Were it not for climate concerns, would there still be a case for nukes, or would you be writing The Case for Carbon instead?Robert Zubrin: No, there still would be a case for nukes. The primary case for nukes is to expand humanity’s energy resources. Regardless of climate change, we have an imperative to make energy more cheap and available. The primary problem in the world today is poverty. We have poverty in America, but in America, the average per capita income is $50,000 a year. Globally, the average is $10,000 a year. And half of the world is below average. So the existence of poverty in the world is quite prevalent. And that stifles people's lives. It kills people — people die of diseases that could easily be cured. They don't get educations. They suffer from malnutrition. They suffer from lack of opportunity. This is the thing that needs to be answered. We need to increase the availability of energy to put the whole world on an American standard of living. Once again, we still even have poverty here. We'd have to increase world energy five times. And fossil fuels cannot support that. So regardless of the issue of climate change or carbon enrichment of the atmosphere, we need more energy.And secondly, we need the energy to come from freedom, not from possession. It needs to come from the power of creation. A major problem with fossil fuels is it puts a lot of global power in the hands of people who just simply have it by force of possession, not through creativity. It gives wealth to those who take it rather than those who make it. For example the OPEC oil cartel could, as it did in 2008, constrict the world's energy supply below what it needs and send the price of oil up to $150 a barrel and cause a massive worldwide economic dislocation as a result. That's even a potential threat right now. Whereas nuclear power fundamentally comes from mind. That is, it’s the result of technological creativity: turning something that is not a resource into a resource — an incredibly abundant resource. So it moves power where it needs to be, into the hands of the creative, which is to say in the hands of the free.Let me continue on the theme from that first question: Why isn't it The Case for Solar? I know that solar prices seem to have come way down in recent years. Why not that as the thrust of your book?The problem is this, that solar energy, and in this I would also add wind as well, are intermittent energy sources. They are not reliable sources of power with which to power an industrial civilization. They are useful boutique energy sources. Wind power has had a major role in the development of human civilization by powering ships. Worldwide commerce was enabled by putting wind to work as a classic example of off-grid power. Solar energy is predominant in space, once again, way off-grid. But if we're talking about the production of energy at scale in a reliable way to power industrial society, they simply do not cut it.Does solar still not cut it, even if we figure out new ways and better ways of storing that energy? That sounds like it's doable. We just need better batteries or ways of storing that solar energy for when it's cloudy out.There are a couple of problems there. First of all, the amount of solar energy to power Manhattan would cover most of Long Island — and try buying Long Island to put the solar energy capacity there. And then you have the problem with storage. First of all, the problem with storage on a planned basis, that is just storing for a night, is bad enough. And it basically increases the cost of a solar installation by like a factor of five just to do that. But what if it's cloudy for three days going? What if there's this thing called winter that happens? Which it does. Solar energy can be inadequate for months on end. Having the capacity to deal with that is simply not possible. So, in fact, solar energy power systems have to be 100 percent backed up by reliable sources of power, which to say either fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydroelectric.How the Atomic Age endedWhy did the Atomic Age end? Do we understand the culprits? Do we understand who the murderer was?I think I do. First of all, nuclear power in the ‘60s was so much cheaper than fossil fuel power that in the early ‘70s, we were getting orders in the United States for two new nuclear power plants per month. That's how fast it was coming online. And in fact, it caused alarm in the oil interests, who very early on tried to stop [Admiral Hyman] Rickover from introducing the nuclear submarine. Exxon and Atlantic Richfield both gave very large grants to the Sierra Club to go after nuclear power. And in fact, part of their fear was justified because after the oil price went up in ‘73, ’74, nuclear power actually cleaned the lunch of oil-fired electricity in the United States. In 1972, 3 percent of American electricity was nuclear, 20 percent was oil. Now it's 3 percent oil, 20 percent nuclear. Oil, of course, maintained its premier position as transportation fuel. There, it couldn't be dislodged. It has unique advantages in that realm.But what happened was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was an ideological offensive launched by Malthusians. You may remember two very important books from that period. One was called The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. And another was called The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. That's ‘68 to ‘72. And then there were many less popular works. But they all said, “Look, we're running out of everything. We have to stop economic growth and population growth.” This was a very powerful ideological offensive, except for you may remember Julian Simon, who was an economist who said the Club of Rome was absolute nonsense. We weren't going to run out of everything, or anything, by the year 2000. But he was regarded by mainstream media as some Neanderthal from the Chamber Commerce. And if you look at the Sierra Club's statement, when they finally came out definitively against nuclear power, which was in 1974, what they said was, “We need to oppose nuclear power because it could encourage unnecessary economic growth.”And then they went on to say, “We can do this. We can stop them by stopping the establishment of any way for them to dispose of the waste.” And so they targeted nuclear waste disposal as a key weakness of nuclear power. And at that time, there were proposals in the works to just dispose of it by subsea disposal, which is easy to do. And when they got that block, and Jimmy Carter blocked that, they then opted instead for a much more elaborate program of storing the waste under a mountain in Nevada. They then campaigned against that. It baffles the mind how someone who claims to care about health and the environment can say it's better to store nuclear waste in nuclear power plants in the suburbs of major cities than under a mountain in Nevada. And yet they did. When they say there's no solution to nuclear waste disposal, there certainly is a technical solution. And the Nuclear Navy stores nuclear waste in salt domes in New Mexico. They just don't have to put up with any of this stuff. But they managed to stop the commercial nuclear waste from safely disposing of its waste and then say, “Hey, there's no way to dispose of the waste.” And they have collaborators in the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the FAA was run like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we would have no airplanes. If you have a totally hostile regulatory structure, you can destroy any industry.Can you think of particular regulations, perhaps, that you think played a key role? Or is it just broader than that?If I was asked to name one thing that is the big problem and which needs to be corrected if we're going to have a nuclear renaissance, it's the regulatory structure, what was put in place by the Carter administration — which by the way, was in infested massively with members of the US Committee for the Club of Rome. They established this regulatory structure. In the book, The Case for Nukes, I show the flow chart of what you have to do to get a nuclear power plant license in the United States. And it looks like a map of the New York subway system with a million stops and intersections this way and that way. And guess what? Each of those subway stops themselves involves another subway map inside of it. And some of these are really ridiculous. One of the subway stops, just one, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which among many other things demands to know, and have proof to its satisfaction, that the utility should build a nuclear power plant as opposed to a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired plant, or no plant at all. Imagine if you had some land and you wanted to build a log cabin on it. And so you go to the municipal authorities and say, “I want to build a log cabin on this.” And they ask you not just for your plans to show that it's going to be a safe building, but to prove that it shouldn't be a chalet, or a cape cod, or a brick house, or a gas station, or a pet cemetery, or a zoo, or anything else.And then imagine that you actually do show that to the satisfaction of the authorities involved. But then there's now an opportunity for people who hate you to intervene in court to contest that approval. And now you have to go to court and prove to a judge and a jury that this in fact was the correct decision by the mayor. And if that court approves you, they can then appeal. That's what this is like. [Recently], we had a nuclear power plant go online in Georgia. It took 14 years to build it. Our first nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, took three years to build. That is, the amount of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has increased by a factor of five. And this is not because they've become more complicated. It's because the legal process become vastly more complicated.And if you look at the data, as the time it has taken to build a nuclear power plant has increased, the cost has increased as the time squared. And once again, I show this in the book. It actually follows this curve. It's not even just linear, where you have to pay people for longer periods of time, you're paying all these workers to hang around doing nothing, instead of putting things together. You're paying more expensive kinds of people. Lawyers cost a lot more than plumbers, and you're paying for more and more lawyers as this thing drags on and becomes a bigger and bigger and more complex deal. So this is what has stopped nuclear power in the United States. The time to construct nuclear plants should have gone down with experience, not been quintupled.Currently, and this is a number that's sort of holding steady, we get about 20 percent of our power generation from nuclear. What is the counterfactual? What is the right number? If the ideological war had not happened, and all those nuclear plants, those two nuclear plants a year, that kept happening. What does our energy mix look like today, do you think?In France today, it is 75 percent nuclear and 10 percent hydroelectric. So it’s only 15 percent fossil fuels. Here you have France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. He put together kind of a labor-industry alliance for growth that included both de Gaulle-ists and even the communists, who had a trade union. This is jobs, this is what we want. And they did it. And it's 75 percent nuclear. Meantime, here's Germany, with this massive green party, as well as green ideology infecting the social democrats and even the Christian democrats and the rest, shutting down their nuclear power plants. Germany's carbon emissions per unit power is five times that of France. Five times. There is the green Germany. And it's even worse than that, because a lot of Germany's power comes from biomass. And you have this romanticism of “We're getting our power from the forest.” Yeah, you're getting your power by killing trees and the animals that live in the trees. So how's that being a friend of nature? The way to be a friend of nature is to get your power from things that aren't involved with the natural biosphere. The person who saved the whales was Rockefeller, by switching us from whale oil to petroleum, because petroleum has much less involvement with the biosphere than the whales do. And you'll have even less involvement with the biosphere if you switch from fossil fuels to nuclear.A 75-percent nuclear AmericaHow do we get that 20 percent up to 75 percent?There needs to be, fundamentally, a societal decision. Now, one thing that very oddly works in our favor here, is that the Malthusians have oversold the case on global warming. Global warming is real. World temperatures have gone up one degree centigrade since 1870. And that's true; I don't dispute that for a minute. I dispute the fact that that is a great cause for alarm. But it's true. They have nevertheless managed to alarm people greatly, because they're trying to use global warming as a rationale for rigging up energy prices. Which is basically an extremely regressive tax. (Carbon taxes are just about the most aggressive sales tax you can have, because they don't even tax on the basis of price. They tax on the basis of mass, and a cheap cut of meat involves the same amount of carbon emissions as an expensive one. And a cheap dress involves the same amount of carbon as an expensive dress, even though one might be priced 10 times above the other.) They've oversold this. They actually got a lot of people [saying], “Oh my God, this is an existential problem. We have to stop carbon emissions.” If their primary concern actually is carbon emissions, a lot of them are saying, “Well, then why not nuclear?”So you actually have, at this point, a significant faction in the Democratic Party, and they have an organization called the Third Way, Cory Booker is a member of this faction, who say we should have nuclear power because there's an existential problem of climate change. They actually believe this. So this is the solution. The hardcore, they hate nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need to have. But these other people actually want to solve the problem. So there's some leverage there. The Biden administration, though, has responded to this faction in only limited ways. They have allocated some money to develop more advanced types of nuclear reactors. That's good.The nuclear reactors we have now are essentially the same thing that Rickover invented in the 1950s to power the Nautilus and the Shippingport plant. I don't think that that's a fundamental design flaw. Pressurized-water reactors, which is the Rickover reactor, is like 90 percent of all reactors, if you include the mild variations of it that are out there. It's a very good design. It is inherently safe. It cannot have a runaway nuclear reaction because the water that is the coolant is also necessary to sustain the nuclear reactor. And in the book, I explain the physics of that. So it's impossible. And there's been over a thousand pressurized-water reactors on land or sea over the past 60 years, and not a single person has ever been hurt from a radiological release from one of them. But that said, it's possible to have more advanced designs that would be cheaper, that would be more efficient.I hear a lot about these small modular reactors.Yeah, that's a good one. The small modular reactors are pressurized-water reactors, but it's a different kind of design where they design them to be built small so they can be built in modules in factories and literally just assembled on site. So it's not really a construction problem, it's more like a “bring a bunch of things to a place and hook them together” kind of project. That offers the chance to make them cheaper, faster to build and also to address markets not just of big cities, but maybe of towns of 100,000, 200,000, this kind of thing all over the world. That's one. There's also greener reactors, which have the capability of getting, you know, 90 percent of the energy out of nuclear fuel instead of 1 percent, which is all a pressurized-water reactor does. Thorium reactors, which [have] cheaper fuel, other things like this. I'm all for these things.But we can't have that conversation if fundamentally there's this huge division about whether we should do it at all.Correct. And in fact, if this regulatory structure remains in place, we won't have them because it's going to be even harder to get a new kind of reactor licensed than to get another reactor of a kind that people are very familiar with. There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the entire regulatory structure. Whether you conduct your business should, number one, be between you and the authorities. Interveners from hostile interests should not be allowed to take part in that process at all. And the regulatory structure itself has to be greatly streamlined and made to operate within the law. By law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to approve plants within two years of the application. They regularly take five years, and then there's a whole bunch of agencies that take more time. Once again, this argument that nuclear power is too expensive is a fiction. Any industry can be made too expensive if there are regulators making it too expensive.Is a nuclear renaissance coming?There seem to be some things coming together which would make one optimistic about the future of nuclear. Are you an optimist or not so much?I'm fundamentally an optimist. Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” We're getting there. We're exhausting the alternatives. We fell for this bunk about, you don't really need energy, or you can get it from windmills. And that this somehow would be a much better way to do it, or anything of this sort. So this is clearly the best answer. Let me give you an idea of how much energy we're actually talking about here. The nuclear reactors, we get the fuel from uranium ore, which is several percent uranium. But if you aren't interested in just getting it from ore and you're just looking around for the uranium, granite — ordinary granite that you see, buildings are built out of it, mountains are built out of — is two parts per million uranium and eight parts per million thorium. And if you converted that to energy, a block of granite would have a hundred times the energy of an equal mass of oil. So you go through New Hampshire somewhere and you see these huge granite mountains, you're looking at mountains of energy. You're talking about more energy in one of those mountains than all the oil of Saudi Arabia. That's how much energy.And then if we talk about going the next step, which is to fusion, then one gallon of water has as much energy in fusion as 350 gallons of gasoline. We're talking about completely un-limiting the human future and the waste from it. In other words, the ironic thing about making an issue of nuclear waste is that it's the only energy source in which you actually can dispose of the waste. In other words, the waste from coal-fired power plants would be impossible to sequester it because it's literally millions of times greater in volume for a given amount of energy than nuclear power. We could easily sequester the waste. And of course, with more efficient reactors, we could actually use a lot of that waste. So there's that. It's simply the right answer, and it's being blocked by people who want there to be a limit to resources.It's a preference of sorts. It's an ideological preference.It's a problem for people who want to assert that human activities, numbers, and liberties must be fundamentally constrained because there isn't enough to go around.Let me build off that by asking you a final question, which is you dedicate the book to “the Prometheans.” Who are the Prometheans?The Prometheans are the problem solvers. There's a lot of history in this book. I talk about how we got to nuclear power, and there's a human story here that goes from Einstein and Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Rickover, and what they had to overcome to make this happen. Now, by the way, we do have a new generation of entrepreneurial people. There's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial startups in both the fission and fusion area right now who are attempting to continue this revolution by introducing even superior types of nuclear reactors. And these people have guts. I mean, it takes a lot of guts to go into the nuclear business right now. You're going to have a fight on your hands. But I think it's the right answer and I think reason carries a stick. And so I think, ultimately, the rational will prevail. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

As space enthusiasts and entrepreneurs look to expand human civilization to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, few stop to examine the geopolitical risks of space colonization or the opportunity costs of not fixing problems on Earth. While most Faster, Please! guests advocate further expansion into space, Daniel Deudney offers a different perspective. Deudney is a professor of political science, international relations, and political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of several books, including Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, released in March of 2020.This interview was first released in June 2021 for my AEI podcast, Political Economy, and now I’m sharing it with subscribers to Faster, Please! (Unfortunately, our chat preceded my viewing and reading of The Expanse, which does a great job suggesting Deudney’s concerns.)In This Episode* Space expansionism and its dangers (1:24)* Space infrastructure (13:57)* Hedging existential risk (18:13)* Principles for space policy (30:40)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Space expansionism and its dangersJames Pethokoukis: My listeners love when I read during these podcasts. I’m going to start by reading two quotes. The first quote is from Elon Musk:“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”Quote two is from the Blue Origin website:“Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space.”Now, I think you would probably call both those visions “space expansionist”. But that is not your vision, right? So what don’t you like about those visions?Daniel Deudney: Well, Musk and Bezos articulate a vision of space expansionism that was first articulated early in the 20th century and has been subsequently developed. Bezos was actually a student of Gerard O’Neill, who was one of the main visionaries of space colonization in the United States during the 1970s. So they’re articulating a central set of ideas that is held by a large number of people, both in the United States and globally. And my book, Dark Skies, is really a systematic evaluation of the actual impact of space activities to date and a critical assessment of the likely impacts of many of these yet unrealized projects.So to start with the historical record, this is not a simple task because space is just a place. And so there’s a heterogeneity of activities that have gone on there. So it’s like summing up apples, light bulbs, and grenades. But the standard narrative of space activities to date, I argue, is woefully inaccurate. It leaves out one of our major space programs — and, depending on how you count, perhaps our major space program and arguably our most consequential space program — which is the use of ballistic missiles to deliver thermonuclear weapons at global distances in very short periods of time.The standard definition of space weapons is that they are weapons used against objects in orbit or placed in orbit. That’s completely insufficient because it leaves out the use of the frictionless environment of space as a corridor for rapid bombardment at distance. And so I say that we have this major space program that we don’t acknowledge as a space program. It’s what would be called an “unknown known.” Everyone knows that these exist, but they get misplaced or miscategorized. And if we put ballistic missiles back into the ledger sheet for an assessment of space activities to date, I have to conclude that the impact has been to increase the probability of nuclear war, which would obviously be a civilizational, perhaps existential, catastrophe for humanity. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis. The fact that these weapons move so rapidly — are so difficult to intercept — has created this unprecedented situation of vulnerability.And this really points to a more general fallacy of this very optimistic thinking about space, which is to simply neglect the violence potential and the tendencies for this violence potential to be harnessed. It’s like they think that space is good, and if something is not good, then it can’t be involved in space. The reality is that this major space program (that we don’t acknowledge as such) has been a major negative in terms of the survival of our civilization. And so the first step for the space expansionist, I think, is really to be a bit more realistic and accurate about what they’ve actually done and the inherently enormous violence potential involved in this domain.Is that your primary critique then? I mean, those are two very attractive visions. And is your main critique that they are just utterly ignoring how it could all go wrong? That they’re only viewing this as creating a space economy, creating space hotels, creating lunar or Mars colonies, or deflecting asteroids — but they’re ignoring how all these technologies could be used for ill?Yeah, that’s a general summation. The first key point is the ballistic missiles and space weapons. And then, looking at the larger future set of agendas that they advocate, colonization sits really at the center of it — millions, billions, or trillions of people living in space to make humanity a multi-planetary species. And their seemingly ace-in-the-hole argument is that the Earth is fragile — it’s vulnerable, it’s subject to all sorts of disasters. And therefore, we need to get all of our eggs out of this one frail basket.Seems like a good argument.At its surface, it does. And as they say, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didn’t have a space program.So let’s look at what would be entailed in humanity becoming a multi-planetary species: colonization of Mars, colonization of asteroids, and so forth. This would almost certainly produce an interstate anarchy. The assumption that the advocates make, and I think it’s well-founded, is that any colony which is big enough to provide existential risk insurance will be big enough to become politically independent. And once it becomes politically independent, we have to expect the same types of dynamics that have been characteristic of Earth history and interstate anarchy.Then we read the terrain, and we see immediately that it’s got this inherently enormous violence potential. And that’s because these objects — asteroids, even space debris — are moving so rapidly. The reason these asteroids are so destructive when they strike the Earth is not because of their mass, but because of their mass combined with their velocity. And so this is an environment that is inherently far more violent than any environment that we have dealt with on the Earth.So I asked the question: What is going to be the likelihood that we’ll have — as we have on Earth — wars and violent rivalries in what I call the Solar Archipelago? One factor, of course, would be the issues of mutual vulnerability, which I argue would be extremely high. The ratio of destructive capacity, like on Earth with nuclear weapons, is going to greatly exceed the territorial, habited locations. So saturation of violence capacity will mark solar-orbital space. Even though, of course, there will be a recovery of distance — it won’t all be quick because Mars is tens of millions of miles away, at least.Then you asked the question about rivalries over frontier resources. The historical record on Earth is that frontiers are very violent places. Rivalries for making claims will be very likely. So we have a war-prone argument there.Another factor: To what degree are the units like one another? On Earth, we think that units that are like one another — particularly if they are democracies — are less war-prone towards one another, and I think that colonies in space are likely to become very different than places on Earth. The advocates all say this. It seems intuitively obvious. And the most important difference that will invariably emerge will be a very fundamental one: biological species radiation. This is to say that the human species will start branching. This will occur inevitably, slowly, through processes of Darwinian evolution. But many of the advocates insist that we will do this more quickly with genetic engineering.And so it’s not only that we’re going to have multiple bodies in the solar system inhabited, they will be inhabited over time, almost inevitably, by intelligent species — at least as intelligent as us, with at least our levels of technology. But they will be radically different in their biological character than humans on the Earth.Look at all of the violence which has been sparked and justified by minor cosmetic skin-color differences on Earth, and think about what would happen if we have really different species. Let your imagination go here. The biological potentials for variation are enormous. It might well be that insectoid body forms will prove more appealing in space environments.And so we will have eventually a solar system that will be inhabited by aliens, but they will be descendants of Earthlings. And that to me is a very unappealing future. And I think that it’s almost an inevitable one once we cross over that crucial threshold to have a colony that is politically independent.Would that be your worst-case scenario? Look, I’d like a space economy. I would like there to be some space hotels. Maybe we do some manufacturing, see what happens.Space infrastructureSo I’m assuming that was your worst-case scenario. Do you have a positive space story? One that concerns you far less, at least?Tourism, within the larger scheme of things, is really kind of a trivial pursuit.In terms of space resources, we’re talking here primarily about the extraction of valuable metals from asteroids. That’s a civil technology that would require the ability to alter the orbits of masses of asteroidal material and asteroids in the solar system. Presumably, you’re going to insert these bodies into Earth orbit. So you’ll have to have highly precise capabilities to alter their orbits. And of course, we would also want to develop technologies to alter their orbits so that we can avoid them colliding with the Earth (although that’s not really a short-term problem).And so I look at this as a civil technology and I say, “How distinctive is this from the military technology?” And the answer is, it’s almost none. It’s a question of the trajectory. Once you have the technologies to alter the trajectories of asteroid-size bodies in the solar system, you’re going to have to tap into a violence capacity that will be millions of times greater than all nuclear weapons combined. So I say that allowing private enterprise to develop asteroidal mining, as seems to be the preferred American scenario, is kind of like allowing private enterprise to develop and have hydrogen bombs. It’s just not a good idea because of the enormous destructive potential.Many of the scenarios for near-Earth envision giant infrastructures in orbit. A favorite is collecting solar energy from orbit — we have this problem of immense importance with regard to the carbon loading of the atmosphere, and there’s lots of energy that can be collected in space and beamed down to the Earth.But thinking about that as an economic proposition, or even an ecological proposition, is insufficient. We have to also think about it as a political and military proposition. My view is that it’s not going to be possible to develop infrastructures in near-Earth space until we have overcome interstate rivalry. Think about the Chunnel between France and Britain. It’s unthinkable in a situation of interstate rivalry.So it could be that the creation of this apparatus — I call this Orbita — would require the pacification of interstate relations. That’s potentially good news. But the potentially bad news is that whoever controls Orbita would be able to control the Earth because these enormous quantities of energy could be readily weaponized to shoot down anything coming up from the Earth. So it’s like we have a village and we’re going to build a big castle next to it. We’re going to have to expect that the village will get dominated by the castle.Hedging existential riskRegarding inter-solar system conflicts, why would you be more worried about war with evolved insectoid humans than about an asteroid hitting the Earth? How do you begin to figure out which is riskier?I’m worried about the asteroid-hitting-the-Earth scenario. I’m not sure how to figure out which of those scenarios is more likely. But I know the one has happened before, and they keep telling us that it’s only a matter of time before it’ll happen again.That’s right, it is just a matter of time. It might be a long time before a significantly large one strikes. But you make a very good point, and you’ve asked me if I have a positive vision of space. I lay out what I call an Earth-oriented space program, which does include the development of techniques to deflect asteroids. But it should only be done by a consortium of states and should not be coupled with the development of economic exploitation.And look, if we do have asteroidal mining, then I think it’s very unlikely that actors of magnitude on the Earth would support colonization. If this is the great bonanza of mineral resources, the last thing we would want to do is to create a rival — Mars, in particular — that would be in a much more proximate location to exploit these. So I think that as the prospect of Martian colonization starts to become a real possibility, these types of concerns are going to be increasingly evident to people. This is what I refer to as the second great debate about solar-orbital space: What should we do? And I think that as it becomes real, these objections will become increasingly compelling to large numbers of actors on the Earth.What you’re ideally recommending is, I suppose, you would have us wait to go into space almost completely until we have a much different geopolitical situation here on Earth. And it seems like we’re going in just the opposite direction — it seems like we’re actually having intensive competition. So I would assume you would find that worrying.Yeah. I think that the directions that we’re headed in are largely disaster-prone. And of course, one of the directions that we’re going in that never gets talked about is continuing to modernize, replace, and improve the nuclear weapon delivery system. That is, as I said earlier, this major space program that we don’t acknowledge as such. And the United States has, during the Trump era, declared the objective of dominating space. And this is something that has long been talked about by various military visionaries. But this was an important threshold that we have crossed.The SpaceX Corporation, as I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast knows, has lowered significantly the cost of accessing near-Earth orbit — by a kind of order of magnitude, perhaps. And they have these plans to build even larger rockets that they make claims about even further reducing the cost of accessing near-Earth orbit. And this is widely hailed as a great advance.I look at this, and I say, “Well, it’s going to lower the cost of doing stuff in space.” And the question then is: Which of this stuff is going to get done? And of course, immediately the military is interested. The idea that we can dominate space is going to depend upon having the capacity to put significant mass into orbital space.So I think that we have been misperceiving the overall character of this environment. We’ve been misrepresenting the actual effects to date. And when we get rid of this “Oh it’s going to all be so wonderful” mentality and critically examine what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen, we have a very different picture.And I want to emphasize that I am not a Luddite. I am not opposed to technology generally, but humanity over the course of the 20th century has started to develop technologies that are extremely potent, double-edged swords. And the question that we have to confront is whether we have the ability to steer the use of these technologies so that we get the benefits without getting the downsides. And our record so far is not very promising.But we haven’t used nuclear weapons. In fact, the United States reached agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear weapons. And you could say we’ve even over-corrected because our fear of radiation has led us to abandon nuclear power. So hasn’t the record shown that we have been able to handle these weapons and that, if anything, we’ve been overly cautious when it comes to dealing with new technologies that could have a great benefit?Well, that would be a long conversation. And with regard to nuclear weapons, we have a fundamental epistemological problem here: What is the probability of nuclear war?During the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Kennedy said he thought it was between one-in-three and one-in-two. And knowing what we now know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was clearly more likely than that. So do we look at the Cuban Missile Crisis and say, “Hey, no problem here”? Or do we look at it and say, “We were really lucky”? There’s a fundamental disagreement about nuclear weapons that we really can’t resolve by appealing to the empirical evidence. And that fact alone should be very sobering to us.But I think that if you looked at this without any sort of theoretical presumptions and said, “Is it really a good idea to have thousands of high-yield thermonuclear weapons prepared for nearly instant use?” That strikes me as a bad idea. And, you know, some people say, “Well, that’s what saves us.” But look at this as a case study: The only way we can deal with nuclear weapons is by building large numbers of them and have them posed for immediate use? That strikes me as a very limited adjustment.So do you think that ultimately we’re going to have to get lucky again? There seems to be a lot more interest in space. And that interest is obviously among countries who have major disagreements and who view space as both an economic opportunity and as a military necessity. So it seems like the scenario going forward is a multipolar space race with an uncertain conclusion.That’s right. That’s clearly where we’re headed now.One of the important things to remember about space is the basic geography. We think that we’ve left the planet when we have gone beyond the atmosphere, but I argue that this is a geographic error — the area around the terrestrial Earth that is dominated by the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields is really part of the planet. I call that the “astrosphere.” We have the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and also the astrosphere.We tend to think of the astrosphere as being incredibly large. And of course space generally, even solar space, is mind-bogglingly large. But the astrosphere, and particularly the lower parts of it where almost all activities have occurred, is in practical terms actually smaller than the atmosphere. And that’s because, while the volume has gone up, the velocities that are necessary to operate there have gone up by even greater amounts. And so effective distance within the astrosphere is much lower than it is within the atmosphere. So people have fundamentally misperceived this environment — it actually is small.And then you go back into the earlier predictions about space: No one thought about space debris. No one said, “Oh yeah, this is going to become quickly polluted in ways that will be very problematic.” It’s part of this tendency to use bad analogies. People say, “Oh well, the ocean. The Europeans went out onto the ocean, centuries of expansion occurred and great wealth and prosperity and so forth resulted.” But this is a very misleading analogy.To start with, the ships that have existed since oceanic transportation developed are not shuttling around the ocean at high velocities. Half the satellites that have been put into orbit are still there — dead, hurtling around at very high velocities, over time breaking up and colliding with things. So if you want an ocean analogy, it’s more like the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, or maybe even the Aral Sea. For a frontier that has barely been opened, we already have this level of degradation that greatly exceeds what we have with the ocean. So there’s been this basic misperception of this domain.Principles for space policyTo wrap up, what would you advise? You view this as the beginning stage of something that could prove very dangerous. Better to figure out now what we need to do and talk with other countries so we can figure this out sooner rather than later. So then what would you advise the United States to do as far as space policy?Well, I lay out an Earth-oriented space program. And the first step would be to continue undoing the ballistic-missile-ization of the nuclear delivery system. One of the implications of that argument is that we have another space program that we don’t recognize as a space program: what we call nuclear arms control. It has never been primarily about nuclear weapons, per se. It’s been about delivery vehicles, most of which have been ballistic missiles. And as you say, at the drawdown at the end of the Cold War, we made important steps in this direction. What we call nuclear arms control is to a first approximation space weapons arms control. It’s our most successful space program in the sense of its benefit to avoid catastrophic and existential disasters. So the first step would be to continue that, to complete that revolution.Then we should use space for Earth habitability studies. We should do space science on a larger scale in virtually every dimension. If we want to have humans in space, that’s built on our other important historical accomplishment, the International Space Station. Instead of a free-for-all for lunar resources, let’s build an international science cooperative base on the moon with the Russians and the Chinese involved as well.And insofar as asteroids striking the Earth are a potential problem, we need to do better surveys. And if we want to have demonstrations, this should only be done on a cooperative basis. We do not want this technology to get weaponized. That’s something very important.As for the colonization scenario, we should relinquish that. We should draw a red line. No colonies. We do not want to pursue them. And the reason is that we have got the story backward. The dinosaurs, they tell us, were wiped out because they didn’t have a space program. I say the dinosaurs lasted 200 million years because they didn’t have a space program. And you say, “Ah, the Earth — all of our eggs are in one fragile basket.” I say, if we have multiple space colonies, we’ll have dispersed eggs, which will be subject to rock smashing, which will be easy and likely.So we’ve got to get the narrative right. We have to stop thinking about this in this sort of a wonder-struck manner. There’s this famous quote that the advocates are always using from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the great Russian visionary: “Humanity is in its cradle, and humanity cannot stay in its cradle forever.” The implication being, we have to leave the cradle of the Earth and expand into the cosmos. I look at that little quote and I say, “Well, we also recognized that the ideas that infants have in their cradle, that children have, are not good guides for adult behavior.” It’s essentially an infantile vision, and we need a much more sober vision. This is a public episode. 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