Faster, Please! — The Podcast

➡ Reminder: I will be writing much less frequently and much shorter in November — and November only. So for this month, I have paused payment from paid subscribers.Also, I’m making all new content free without a paywall. In December, however, everything will be back to normal: typically three meaty essays and two enlightening Q&As a week, along with a pro-progress podcast like this one several times a month (including transcript). And, of course, a weekly recap over the weekends.Melior Mundus“Generations of people throughout the world have been taught to believe that there is an inverse relationship between population growth and the availability of resources, which is to say that as the population grows, resources become more scarce.” That’s how Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley open their new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. It’s also the central premise of much of today’s Down Wing, zero-sum thinking. And it happens to be wrong. Tupy and Pooley:It is free people, not machines or deities, who generate new ideas, and it is free people who test those new ideas against other people’s ideas in the marketplace. The process of knowledge and value creation is at the heart of humanity’s moral and material progress. It is what enables our civilization to bend towards goodness and superabundance.What is superabundance? The authors again: “[A]bundance occurs when the nominal hourly income increases faster than the nominal price of a resource,” meaning resources become cheaper (more abundant!) in real terms. Superabundance occurs “when the abundance of resources grows at a faster rate than population increases.” And that’s exactly what we see in the world today.Cato Institute senior fellow and HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy joins me in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss superabundance, Hollywood’s Malthusianism, and more.In This Episode* Will we ever run out of Earth? (1:33)* Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans? (5:13)* The burden of proof is on the doomsayers (12:12)* The more people, the better (18:04)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Will we ever run out of Earth?James Pethokoukis: There's only so much Earth, so eventually, aren't we going to run out of Earth and its bounty?Marian Tupy: It's certainly true that the Earth has a finite number of atoms, but the amount of value that we can get from those atoms is basically infinite. Look at something as simple as sand that has been on Earth for billions of years. At some point thousands of years ago, people realize that they could turn sand into glass jars and later into windows. And now we are using sand in order to create fiber optic cables, which are carrying information around the world at very high speeds and a lot of volume in order to power our civilization's communication networks. So from something as simple as a grain of sand, you can get ever more value.If you are somebody who thinks economic growth is a good thing, who wants the global economy to keep growing—and, gee, it'd be great if it grew even faster—at some point it's going to hit a limit. Aren't we already seeing that with lithium shortages? I hear that lithium shortages are going to slow the green transition. So aren't people who are pro-growth, pro-progress, or pro-abundance—even pro-superabundance—isn't that just kind of a temporary state and eventually, I don't know, 50 years, 100, that's not a tenable position over the really long, long run?No, because knowledge continues to expand. As long as we have more people on Earth, and hopefully one day in cooperation with AI or advanced computing, we'll be able to create evermore knowledge. And it is that knowledge which allows us to get around problems of scarcity. Lithium is a perfect example. Lithium-ion batteries are a massive advance in terms of storage of electricity. But who is to say whether batteries in the future will be powered by lithium? Maybe we'll come up with a different compound, which will allow us to store energy at a much cheaper price. In fact, people are already working on basically creating batteries out of, not lithium-ion, but sodium-ion, which apparently is going to last even longer and will be massively cheaper. So it's not only a question of efficiency gains—instead of using three ounces of tin or aluminum for a can of Coke, you are now using only half an ounce—and it's not just about technological breakthroughs like, for example, GMO foods so that you can increase the yield of plants for an acre of land; it's also about substitution. This is very important. It's about substitution. You are using something in order to get to a certain goal, but you may realize 10 years, 100 years from now that you don't actually need it, that you need something completely different. And humanity has been through this very often. Two-hundred years ago, the great discovery was of course coal and steam. And people immediately started wondering, what is going to happen by the year 1900 or 1950 when we are all going to run out of coal? And then oil and gas came on board and displaced coal to a great extent. So substitution will play its role, and lithium is not going to be a problem.Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans?There was certainly a time where people were—and some people still are—worried very much about overpopulation. This really became a thing in the early 1970s, where we worried that we had too many people. We were worried about natural resource constraints. We were going to be running out of oil and just about everything else. How much is your thesis is based on the idea that global population will continue to grow to maybe 10 or 11 billion and then it stops? Would you still have this thesis if we were going to have a population of 30 billion people, all of whom would like to live like Americans do today, if not better? Is the idea of a constrained population key to this forecast?You started by pointing to the 1970s, and whilst it is true that many academics have departed from the basic Malthusian premise that more people will lead to an exhaustion of resources, what we found writing this book was very disturbing, which is that Malthusian ideas are much more widespread than we originally thought amongst the common public, amongst the ordinary people. In fact, as far as we can tell, a disproportionate number of mass shooters in America and also around the world, especially in developed countries, have been people driven by Malthusian ideas. This goes back to Anders Breivik in Norway, then the guy called Tarrant in New Zealand, all the way to the mass shooters in the United States, the guy who killed 22 people in El Paso in Walmart a couple of years ago—all of these people have been driven by the notion that there are far too many people in the world using far too many resources. The Malthusian notions are still very much present. You can also get them from multi-national organizations like the United Nations. You have these websites like the Overshoot Day and things like that still. So people still buy into it, and that's deeply worrying because obviously we think that population growth is…Overshoot, meaning that we're overshooting the capacity of our resources and that for everyone to live like Americans, we would need 10 Earths—and obviously we don't have 10 Earths.The current calculations say that we are already using 1.7 planets in order to maintain our standards of living, which is ridiculous because we still only have one planet. How can we already be using 1.7 planets? It doesn't make any sense.Wouldn’t they say this isn't sustainable? People who are very worried about running out of everything, when they talk about growth, it's never just growth, it’s “sustainable growth.” What they mean is sustainable environmentally.And when it comes to that, then of course we have to ask, how would this unsustainability present itself in the real world? People are living longer. People are living richer lives. The very fact that longevity had been expanding until COVID suggests that we are also living healthier lives. We are better fed. And not just that: As countries become richer, they have much more money to spend on environmental protection. The extraordinary lengths that Western societies go through in order to protect their oceans and their land and their biomass and biodiversity—nothing like this has been done by humans before. Where is this apocalypse going to come from? Another way of looking at it is the question of existential threat. Well, existential threat to whom? Existential threat to humanity? But how are we going to measure it? The only way we can measure it is by looking at how many people a year are dying due to extreme weather. And that particular statistic has been reduced by 99.8 percent over the last 100 years. So even though the language of the extreme environmentalist movement is getting more and more apocalyptic, the number of people who are dying due to extreme weather is continuing to collapse.Let me ask that question in a simpler way: Do we have the ability, do we have the resources, for everyone on this planet to have at least the standard of living as Americans and Western Europeans do today? Can we do that? That's the response I often get on social media: They’ll say that we cannot afford to have eight billion people living the way 300 million Americans do. Is that possible?If the basic premise of the book is correct, then yes, not just for eight billion, but potentially substantially more for the following reason: Ideas are not constrained by the laws of physics. Yes, the planets, atoms are constrained by the laws of physics, but not the ideas produced by the human brain. So long as you have more people living in freedom, communicating together, exchanging ideas—in the words of Matt Ridley, “ideas having sex”—then you can always come up with a solution to shortages, which would be, in that case, temporary, driving up prices, therefore incentivizing people to look for solutions. The essence of the book is, there are no physical limits to abundance; and therefore, it should be possible for the world to have the living standards of Americans.Is this a faith-based premise, based on a fairly short period in human existence? That you're assuming that we can still do it, that humanity is ingenious enough that we can continue to be more efficient and come up with new ways of doing things infinitely?Is it faith-based? Thomas Sowell has that great quote that the caveman had exactly the same amount of resources that we have in the world today. And the difference between their standard of living and our standard of living is the knowledge that we bring to bear onto the resources that we have. In fact, you might argue that the only reason why any resources are valuable is because of the ability of human beings to interact with them and produce value out of them. If you think about the immense difference between our standards of living and those of people in the Stone Age—again, the resources haven't gone anywhere, they're still with us; except for a few tons of metal that we have shot into space, everything else is still here: the same amount of copper, the same amount of iron—there is no reason to think that people 200 years from now who are much richer than us couldn't utilize those resources in a similarly beneficial fashion.The burden of proof is on the doomsayersLet me ask you this: Who should the burden of proof be on? People who are worried about the sustainability of growth, who think there's no way this Earth can tolerate eight or 10 billion people living like Western Europeans: Should the burden of proof be on them, or should the burden of proof be on you to say that, yes, we've done it in the past and we can continue to do it in the future?I think the burden should be on them in the following sense: This is not the first time that this particular concept has been proposed. The famous wager between Simon and Ehrlich was essentially…Explain that wager just very briefly for people. What is that wager?Paul Ehrlich is the famous biologist from Stanford University. He wrote the 1968 Population Bomb book, which became an international bestseller. He was on Johnny Carson's show like 20 times, scared and scarred generations of Americans into believing that the world was going to end because of lack of natural resources. In fact, it was based on his work that you've got Soylent Green, the famous 1973 movie with Charlton Heston. And that movie basically culminates in 2022—it's this year that the movie is supposed to happen. And of course, we never got anything like that. On the East Coast, Julian Simon at the University of Maryland basically challenged him to a bet. He said, “Look, Ehrlich, you pick any commodities you want and a time period of more than a year. We are going to put $1000 on it, and if the prices go up whilst the population expands, I'm going to pay you. If the prices go down, then you pay me.” And in fact, Ehrlich lost that bet and had to write Simon a check for $576. These believers in the apocalypse have been at this for so long that I feel that it's time for them to start convincing us that the apocalypse is coming, rather than us trying to remind them of all the previous predictions of apocalypse which didn't come true. I'm willing to go and do a bet like that.The other thing that you ask is, is this possible? Is it feasible for us to continue like that? I believe that it is feasible so long as we have at least part of the world that is still free economically and politically. I don't think that we can expect cutting-edge research from China, which is increasingly restrained politically and economically where people are not free to speak, interact with ideas. But so long as we are free in Western countries, be it the United States or some other country if freedom of speech comes to an end here, then we can still produce research, we can still produce progress. But of course, my belief, part of the book, is that the more people who are free, the better. It's not just about population, it's population times freedom. Freedom is incredibly important. China has been the most populous country for a very long time, but they were dirt poor until they started liberalizing. So the freedom component is very important.Why is this belief so persistent? I still hear people who still think that we are headed toward a population of 30 billion, who think that's a big issue, who are very surprised to learn that there are countries where if the population isn't already shrinking, it's very close. Do we naturally want to believe these kinds of stories? Was Julian Simon ever on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson?No, of course not. He never got any professional award in his entire life. And you are right to say that there was always an opposition to these Malthusian thoughts. Shortly after Malthus died, there was a big debate in Britain over who was right. Then they revisited the whole concept of shortage of natural resources in the late 19th century. So it goes through ups and downs.But there's something in that story. Have we identified what that is?There’s something in that story, and the big question is what it is. I think that this particular problem could have many fathers, so to speak. One of them is that people have been traditionally not numerate. And we have a problem with the notion of exponential growth and compounding. Paul Romer put his finger on it, and that is that ideas do not add up; they multiply. And so he's got that famous example of the periodic table. Once you start interacting with compounds consisting of 10 elements on the periodic table, which has 100 elements in it, you're talking about more possible combinations, more possible calculations, more possible recipes for future progress, than there are number of seconds since the beginning of the Big Bang, 14.5 billion years ago. There's just so much knowledge which can still be discovered. We have only scratched the surface of knowledge. I think that's part of the reason why people are so pessimistic: They do not understand the potential for creation of new knowledge. The other reason, probably, is that the world really is finite. That is absolutely true. It's also irrelevant, because it's what you do with those resources that matters. As I’ve mentioned with the example of sand and fibers, you can use resources in evermore valuable ways.The more people, the betterI know this isn't key to your thesis, but we do live in a universe. So if you say, “Maybe you're right today, but in 1000 years you'll be wrong.” Well, a lot can happen in 1000 years. If I'm betting on 1000 years, I would also guess that if we somehow hit some constraint here on Earth, we have a whole universe of stuff that we could draw upon.Well, absolutely. Can you imagine, if wealth continues to expand at the current rate, what sort of species we would encounter in 1000 years and their technological abilities?A lot of asteroids out there!What worries me is actually that there won't be enough people to explore all those possible avenues for creation of new knowledge. You mentioned population growth: Population is below replacement level in 170 countries out of 190. We are going to peak in 2060 and then start declining. Instead of worrying about 30 billion people, we are going to have to worry about a population that is going to be basically as big in 2100 as it is today. And that really constrains the knowledge horizon and how fast we get there. And that brings with it all sorts of other problems. When people say—and I was actually speaking to somebody yesterday about this—that perhaps we have enough wealth, I cannot help but think, imagine all the possible problems that we could encounter in the future, all the other existential threats: be it asteroids, or a new pathogen, or something like that. I want our society to be super rich so that if we need to shut down the economy for another year, we can afford to do so rather than do it with that. Or if we do encounter an asteroid that's hurling towards Earth, we have a super powerful laser powered by mega fusion power stations that can blast it out of the sky. We never know what the future is going to hold, but I would much rather have a wealthier society deal with it than a poorer and more technologically primitive society dealing with it.Despite the fact that these predictions that were made a half century ago have not panned out, that these bets have been lost, if there’s any example of the continued power of this idea, it’s really the movie Avengers and the Infinity War series. The key villain, Thanos—and this is a multi-billion-dollar franchise—and his entire plot is to kill half of all life everywhere in the universe because we're running out of space. Apparently plenty of people signed off on the idea and said, “Yes, the audience will accept that.” And the audience did accept that.In the book we talk about that movie, and I think that one in five Americans saw it. But it was just one of the movies made based on Malthusian principles. There was Kingsman and there was also Inferno, and they were all based on Malthusian ideas.I believe that one of the James Bond films was based on the peak oil theory, too. I would doubt that there was anyone at a Hollywood studio who said “This is an absurd idea.”I don't know whether you would call it genetic or cultural, but this notion of limits must be deeply embedded in our psyche. And the key to breaking with that thinking has to be the embrace of knowledge, understanding that knowledge can solve all of our problems. Just about everything that you see around you in the world today that you bemoan is due to lack of knowledge. People are dying of cancer because of lack of knowledge. Babies are dying in Africa from malaria because of lack of knowledge, although that's being fixed already by vaccines. The more knowledge, the better. Currently it's only the human mind that is capable of producing new knowledge, so we still need people. Maybe at some point in the future we are going to have a super smart AI that is going to produce its own new knowledge. But right now that's not a realistic option. I think that there is something to be said for population growth. Now, what we are certainly not suggesting is that people should be forced to have more babies. The book’s goal…Are there people who suggested that's what you're saying?I hope not. That’s certainly not something. The goal of the book is much less ambitious. The goal of the book is to say to all those parents around the world who are worried about bringing a new child into the world because it'll be a drag on resources, because it'll be a cancer on the planet: You don't have to worry about that. Your child has the potential of contributing to the scope and stock of human knowledge. We are basically just tackling one aspect of this anti-nativist, anti-natalist, and anti-humanist worldview, which is the issue with resources. If we can convince people that it's still okay to have children, the question famously posed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, then we will have done something good. 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

We’ve all heard the stories and statistics about the supposed death of American manufacturing. But America's industrial sector never truly went away. Many, many companies are thriving, and today's guest argues we're experiencing an outright renaissance. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m joined by Gaurav Batra, who previously co-led McKinsey & Company’s Advanced Electronics Practice in the Americas. Along with Asutosh Padhi and Nick Santhanam, he's the author of the new book, The Titanium Economy: How Industrial Technology Can Create a Better, Faster, Stronger America. This from the book:The Titanium Economy is the secret weapon of American industrial revival—the key to ensuring the country’s economic vitality as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses and we face steep competition from global rivals. The next few years will be critical, as the future growth of the Titanium Economy sector in the United States is far from assured. Investors, policy makers, and the public at large must appreciate the importance of providing more robust investment in these companies, as well as how their growth brings so many positive ripple effects for individuals and communities, providing more high-quality jobs and boosting the economic prosperity of communities and whole regions.So what is the Titanium Economy? Listen in to find out!In This Episode:* The US industrial renaissance (1:14)* The businesses of the Titanium Economy (7:48)* American industry and technology (12:29)* Workers in the US manufacturing sector (16:20)* Finding America’s next-generation industrial workers (21:26)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The US industrial renaissanceJames Pethokoukis: I think there's a caricature or perhaps a misperception about the US economy—I think you see it in the media—that the US economy is basically Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big box stores. And that's basically your American economy, and it's certainly an economy that doesn't really make stuff in the physical world—with atoms—anymore. And the book, I think, is a corrective to that view. Why is that view wrong and, as you state, that the US is in the middle of an industrial renaissance?Gaurav Batra: Jim, you very accurately represented the perception of what's happened in the US economy over the last couple of decades. I think the story, whenever anybody tells it, is mostly about technology companies. It's mostly about financial services, mostly about Wall Street. As we started digging in, not just with the book but our work in the industrial sector, we realized that the reality is actually very disconnected with this perception. The reason we say that is, if you look at just pure numbers, still 20 percent of the US economy is completely dependent on US manufacturing. That number has not gone down. It may not have increased, but that number has sustained pretty well. If you look at employment, this sector still employs the bulk of the US economy's workers today. In terms of pure numbers, in terms of relevance, the sector never went away. It definitely slowed down because other sectors started growing, but manufacturing as a sector in the US still remained pretty staunch. That is at the sector level.As you unveil that a little bit and go under the hood, you realize that whenever we talk about Wall Street, we talk about the Facebooks, the Alphabets, the Apples of the world delivering incredible stock market growth. Everybody talks about how much of that you own in your portfolio. But the moment you start unraveling the industrial landscape, you actually see several—and the number is actually north of 20, 30—companies who have done actually fairly well over a much longer time period in terms of even delivering value to their shareholders. And these companies have done it not necessarily leveraging outsourcing, but they've done it by just strong, sensible business practices: how they run their companies internally, how they work with their customers, how they potentially create a niche for themselves in particular markets. For us, at least as we started (and I spent about a decade in this particular industry), as I looked at that perception, which was exactly what my idea was coming into the sector, versus what I took away from it after being a practitioner in the segment for about 10, 12 years: the perception and the reality don't match. I think the perception, as you rightly said, is all about Wall Street, all about technology, all about financial services. But the reality tells us that manufacturing has never gone away. Given what's happened over the last two years with the pandemic and the geopolitics of the globe around us, it is only telling us a flashing red [light] that this is actually going to get even more critical for all of us here in the US in the next couple of years.These are industrial companies. While they may not be classified as technology companies, they use technology. Consultants like talking about 5G and AI and cloud computing. But they're more than buzzwords. Those technologies are diffusing into the economy, and not just at places like Google or Amazon or Apple. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think what we're seeing in this industrial sector is these technologies are part of how they do what they do.Absolutely right. We think it's an essential ingredient to success going forward. To give you one example, there's a company called Bulk Handling Systems. It's based in Eugene, Oregon. They basically are recycling cardboard, cans, and plastic. Essentially stuff which has food in them. I think if you looked at them a decade earlier, they would tell you about all the manual processes, which is fairly unhygienic, about how somebody would have to pull that piece of food out of a cardboard can or a plastic can, and then put it in the recycling. Today, if you look at that company, it's using artificial intelligence, it's using latest-version technologies, it's using robots to find where these sediments are, getting them off the cardboard can and the plastics, and then essentially putting them through recycling. That's a very tangible example of how technology and the progress we've made there is really impacting the industrial landscape—and for the good. I think while this one might be on a production line—there are several others about how people are using similar techniques to ensure quality and efficiency on the production line—technology actually is also making these companies go to the next level of performance on pure, I would say, business processes.To give you another example, a place where I've seen technology help a lot of such companies is pricing. A lot of these companies create a lot of complicated engineering equipment. Equipment could be a boiler or a heat exchanger or a mixer for a food processing plant. It's not a standard thing you can buy off of Amazon. There's a lot of specifications going into it: temperature controls, material composition, process tolerances. People used to do all that work manually, in terms of negotiating with the customers, letting them design those kind of products. Today, they can go to a website. There's an electronic configurator, you can click and choose what kind of parameters it wants and it gives you a right outcome. And then similarly, it quickly tells you how much it's going to cost. A process which would have taken multiple weeks, in some cases months as well, is now getting compressed to a matter of days. I think technology will get pervasive. And the good part is, I think there's a very good fusion between what our industrial landscape does and what technology can provide to them to really make them go to the next level of performance, both in terms of meeting customer needs and satisfaction, and then, candidly, being much more robust [financially].The businesses of the Titanium EconomyIn those two examples, you've given two very different kinds of businesses. And in the book, you really give a sense of the span of the kinds of companies we're talking about. I wonder if you could give me a sense of the span of sectors that we're talking about.I think that's very relevant to discuss because I think a lot of times industrial is discussed as a monolith. It's very much discussed as a singular segment. But it's probably the worst articulation or the most inaccurate articulation of the segment we probably can come up with. Everybody has their own way of looking at it, the way we looked at it there are close to 90-plus what we call “micro-verticals.” And they essentially, as you rightly said, cover the whole spectrum.We wake up in the morning, we have a cup of tea or cup of coffee. The beans, which are being sent to us, have come from a food processing plant, which is either utilizing equipment or products which are being manufactured by companies, many of them here in the US. We pick up the phone in the morning to check our text messages, check our emails. The chips behind those phones—this has been obviously in the news of late quite a bit—come from semiconductor manufacturers. And the whole semiconductor industry, which is $400, 500 billion in size today, relies on innovations in precision manufacturing, which have been gaining over the last multiple decades. We get in our cars to go to work, automotive industries are now playing a big hand in it. We come to the office and we start writing on a piece of paper. The paper industry is there. Lunch is delivered to the office. It's packaged in specific packaging that's coming from companies like Sealed Air, where they're working on top-of-the-line packaging to keep the quality and the hygiene of the food high. And similarly, they're looking at packaging pallets of machinery and equipment, which is getting transported from one part of the country to the other part of the country.Anything I literally can touch is influenced by manufacturing in a meaningful way. So the spectrum is wide, and I think it's very important for us as members of society, as investors, as executives, to understand how complicated and how heterogeneous this segment is. Because once we start realizing that, not only do we see the importance of it in our daily lives, but then we also as executives, as colleagues, as workers, as investors in the segment, we are able to then understand the true value of these companies. A great example which always comes to my mind is a company called Graco. It’s based out of Minneapolis. What they specialize in is high propulsion of fluids. So they get spray painting fluids in a can. They figured out how to get peanut butter in a jar. If you look at their segment, I can call them industrials, but it’s nowhere related to tapping the automotive space or tapping the aerospace space, but they're looking at a particular niche in the market, and then having that change in mindset, having that change in how they view or how we view them then helps us appreciate that they're a market leader and they're a market leader in a need, which is not going to go away. We will be spray painting cars or spray painting something else. We will be eating peanut butter for a while.I think that's a great example because I don't think people think about flow control and fluid management very often. It's not a strict consumer name that people understand, nor is it manufacturing where you think of some sort of big factory, necessarily. But that is modern manufacturing that is essential to the modern American economy.Absolutely. I think there are countless examples like this, where companies are serving a very critical need. They're just not consumer brands, so we don't know their names. We can look them up if we wanted to. I think that's where they start suffering a little bit, in terms of both our mindset and our perception of these, and to the first question you asked: I think that's what then perpetuates at least our feeling that the whole economy is about the Facebook and Alphabet and Apples of the world, when actually there's a lot more innovation and value coming from the manufacturing sector as well.American industry and technologyTalking about technology and how these companies are using it. Again, I think there's a stereotype that this technology is employed by companies just to replace workers with some machine. I don't think that's probably the whole story.I think that's definitely not the full story, at least as well as my experience is concerned. Because I think there's definitely displacement. I think if anybody says that there is no displacement, then I think they're wrong. There is displacement in terms of what people are doing today. When technology comes in and makes it more efficient, then obviously as a responsible financial operator of a company, you would think about, “Hey, there is capacity opening up, so what should I do with it?” I think in the long term, there are definitely much more benefits, in my opinion. One is that the companies become much more healthier-going concerns, that they're able to invest in their own growth. And they can grow through investing in their own company’s expanding markets, they can go acquire somebody else. So there is, in the end, a greater good coming out of the fact that the company has not become healthier concerns.Then number two is, I think it does create a new job category. How many people would've been thinking about hiring data analysts or digital product managers in industrial companies 10 years earlier? Probably not many. But today, if you go on any job board, there are so many of these employment opportunities existing out there, which will create a new set of workers, a new set of employment opportunities for the economy. So my sense is, at least given what I've seen from my vantage point, there will be short-term displacement, which I think, again, with the companies getting to be more healthier concerns, we'll probably minimize the short-term displacement aspect of it. But in the longer term, there is a lot of value to be driven out of this. It will improve our productivity. It will make everything better. And then as that happens, what we have seen also, and we catalog in the book through what we call the Great Amplification Cycle, as companies become healthier concerns, the communities and the workers which work there become more prosperous. And with the workers becoming more prosperous, the local economies benefit. And we genuinely believe, just given how manufacturing is—it's not localized, it has to be dispersed, it has to be all over the country—that's one very effective level we have to bring down the inequality we are seeing today in our country. So going to the Midwest, going to some of the “rust belt” and re-invigorating manufacturing here, will really have great-second order effects to the communities there.That's a good point. So where are these companies? Where are they located?They are everywhere. Funny enough, when we started compiling the research for the book, our impression was they were in the “middle coast.” Not the east coast, not the west coast, mostly in the middle coast. But interestingly enough, they're actually on the east coast and the west coast as well. Tesla is a very good example of a manufacturing company running in Fremont, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. But these companies are everywhere. I think HEICO, if you look at it, based out of Florida, their businesses are in 80 cities across the country. Simpsonville we've cataloged in the book as a great example on the east coast where it's benefited from the tire industry and Sealed Air being in that particular region. Obviously the Midwest has a bunch of these around Milwaukee, and a lot of clusters are coming up around the Texas area. So they literally are everywhere, and that's why I think they are actually a great vehicle for ensuring the economic prosperity of the country, because just the reach is so vast.Workers in the US manufacturing sectorDo we have a sense of sort of the employment numbers? How many companies are we talking about, and do we have a sense of the employment?If you look at the industrial structure itself, I think it employs, at least from my last count, close to 18 to 20 percent of our overall labor base. I think if you look at it purely from a perspective of the number of companies, there are nearly 4,000 companies in the US which are industrial or manufacturing something or the other. Now, the cool part about all this is, in my opinion, most of them—I think three out of four of those 4,000 companies—are actually private companies. So you'll not find them on the NASDAQ or the Dow Jones. They're not traded publicly. They're held by private and mostly are family-owned companies which gives them a sense of resoluteness, which is very unique.And then number two is, close to 80 percent of these folks are actually fairly small in size. So south of $5 billion of revenue. These are, in the end, in numbers, tremendous. We hear about all of the big ones, but more than 75 to 90 percent, depending on what metric you look at, are companies which are not being publicly traded, are much smaller companies, and they are all over the country. That gives them the reach and the numbers. As I mentioned, they are close to about 18, 20 percent of the employment base. I think the coolest part about these guys, as we think about their impact on employment, is the two factors about this industry, which are pretty different and unique. Number one: You don't necessarily need a college degree to be a participant in this industry. People with vocational training, welding, fabrication training, can go join this industry that has really healthy careers. That's one. The labor market they cater to is much broader than other sectors, like if you take service or technology for that matter. And then number two: Compared to several other sectors, the pay in this sector, given that it's a fairly stable sector, is, depending on what analysis, anywhere between 40 to 100 percent higher than the average. More people get the chance to get employed. Over time, they all learn more than what their potential alternatives might be, and their reach is pretty high. All these factors have contributed to a huge engine for employment. And then, in turn, economic growth.How big a challenge is finding all those workers for these companies? That seems to be a big one.That's a huge one. And I think as we looked at least for the book and looking down [at] the things we need to change, the things which executives need to change about how they talk about their companies, how they run their companies. But I think the biggest change we need is in the labor supply area. And I think this is where the government and the public agencies have to come in and play a more active role. We're seeing some of that happen now with the CHIPS Act recently where obviously the government is putting a lot more emphasis on the local manufacturing industry. But I think this is the biggest challenge. Even if you compare the US with some of the other countries like Germany or China for that matter, that's where I think there is a big scope of improvement for us to essentially enable some of these public agencies, through funding, through programs with community colleges, through programs with vocational institutes, to essentially get more and more of that supply up. I think if you look at COVID times certainly when demand for a lot of these products like PPE or some of the home equipment went up because everybody started staying at home, the biggest challenge actually was to get workers to get to the factory, to be able to run these factories on more than one shift, to be able to cater to the increased demand. So far what we've seen, the government is headed in the right direction. I'm assuming more will come, which I think will be really fantastic.In the meantime, what we've seen is just companies doing things by themselves. I think one [thing] I really enjoy and I feel is encouraging is if you look at a company called IDEAL Industries, they have what they call an IDEAL Olympics. That's the place where they basically bring in talent, which is like welding talent, which is like machinist talent, and really attract people to that job category and job family and try to increase supply locally for them, for labor. So you’re absolutely right, it’s a huge problem. I think a lot more needs to be done urgently, because this is not something which gets solved overnight. So any move we make today will give benefits in a few years’ time. But just given the importance of the sector and the fact that this is among the biggest bottlenecks today, I think requires immediate attention on fixing this problem.Finding America’s next-generation industrial workersHow much of that talent problem is just a cultural problem where kids think, “Boy, I'd love to work for Google,” or, “I'd like to be a social media manager. I don't want to be a welder,” even though that might be a more satisfying job over the long term than being a social media manager. And that's where the jobs are; those aren't just 1950s jobs. Those aren't just middle-20th-century jobs. Those are 21st-century jobs still.You're right. I think that mindset from our side, what we teach our kids and how we inform them about what their options and career trajectories might be, I think is critical. And I think that comes back to our homes and comes back to our societies. I remember, we were interviewing a CEO for the book, and the quote that stuck with me was, “I have a harder time getting people in my factories because they much rather would be baristas at a Starbucks than actually come work in my factory when they would literally earn at least two times that amount within a few months already.” I think that really points to the fact that there is an element of training people, but I think the first step starts at home and first step starts in our minds: how we can get to our kids and our families the value and the purpose a manufacturing job can provide them. I think this is where we should get ahead of it as industry executives to talk about how prosperous lives can be in this particular segment, and then also change the image of the segment. Even before I started working in the segment intensely, my picture of a factory was, you are greased up, you are dirty, it's high temperatures, it's not exciting.Loud. Very loud and hot.Very loud. In some specific areas that might be true, but if you go through, I would venture 90 percent of the factories, they are spick and span. There is automation everywhere. There is safety. Working conditions are much different than what our perceptions are. So I think there has to be an element of that teaching, which the executive needs to do, about what kind of careers would manufacturing be able to afford folks. And then there's teaching at home also, I think, which we need to at least give to our kids, that there are multiple options: social media and retail and whatever, but we should also then be making sure we are talking about manufacturing as a real alternative given what it can afford.We talked a little bit about training. Is there anything else you’d like to see the federal government do?I think one thing which has always been an interesting topic for me is, I think if you bring focus and we bring transparency and accountability to what we do, we typically make good progress. So I would love to see—I don't know how best you put it… We have the surgeon general for the US. Why is there no chief manufacturing officer for the US? Somebody whose job is to ensure that the sector is being done in as healthy a state as possible, somebody whose job is to make sure we're not surprised, for example, with what we saw at COVID. Suddenly we had shortages of critical things at home. Obviously dollars will help, funding will help, policy will help. But I think to make sure that we don't play catch up all the time, one thing I would love to see, and this is my personal opinion, is something like a CMO for the United States. It's his or her job to make sure that they are thinking about the sector, what the sector needs not just today and five years down the line, 10 years down the line, and to make sure we don't kind of fall back. We always are proactively ahead of the curve on that. So that's one idea at least as we were doing our research that kind of stuck with me. 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 Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down, resulting in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. In response, the Japanese government shut down all of its nuclear reactors. But subsequent economic research reveals that the unintended consequences of abandoning nuclear energy have been worse than the accident itself.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Matthew Neidell, an economist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. In 2021, Matt coauthored a paper on those unintended consequences called “The unintended effects from halting nuclear power production: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi accident.” From that paper: This paper provides novel evidence of the unintended health effects stemming from the halt in nuclear power production after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. After the accident, nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an increase in electricity prices. We find that this increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures, given the protective role that climate control plays against the elements. Our results contribute to the debate surrounding the use of nuclear as a source of energy by documenting a yet unexplored health benefit from using nuclear power, and more broadly to regulatory policy approaches implemented during periods of scientific uncertainty about potential adverse effects.In This Episode:* The Fukushima meltdown (1:30)* The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclear (7:30)* Japan’s nuclear reversal (17:15)* Public perceptions of nuclear risks (20:43)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The Fukushima meltdownJames Pethokoukis: The title of the [working] paper is "Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident." Let's start with a quick explanation. What is the precautionary principle?Matthew Neidell: One thing I should clarify first: The title of the paper ended up changing. We do talk about the precautionary principle, but it ended up not being the title in the published version. We got a lot of pushback on the use of “precautionary principle” in the title. That said, I'm happy to talk about it, because I think everything in here is relevant to the precautionary principle.You could teach a whole intro to econ class from this paper. Two things that pop out to me are the precautionary principle and also the idea of trade-offs, because this paper is very much about trade-offs. Starting with that, in what way do you think those principles are illustrated by the Fukushima accident?I think what's really important here is that—this is almost anytime we think about nuclear but especially when big accidents happen, like Fukushima—we tend to focus on the one thing that happened and we don't think about the alternatives. That's the important thing. We think about nuclear as “nuclear carries risk.” And it does carry risk. There are dangers associated with nuclear. Just about anyone should know that who is following this. But it's “How do the dangers compare to something else, to the alternatives that we can use?” One of the problems is that we tend to think of nuclear in isolation. Like people are just saying, “Nuclear is bad, therefore we shouldn't do it.” And that's the kind of precautionary principle aspect of things. It says, “Unless we are fully informed about the risks associated with something, there's no uncertainty associated with the risks with something, we shouldn't do it.” And that's hampering because there are so many opportunities that are out there that carry risk. And if we just say, “Let's not engage in these opportunities because there's a chance of risk,” we end up cutting back on so many things that we might otherwise do.There's a scale of nuclear accident severity. It's a seven-point scale, and so far there have only been two level-seven—the worst—accidents: One was Chernobyl, and the other was Fukushima. In our experience in the nuclear age, Fukushima was one of the absolute two worst accidents that we've had. If you're looking for an example, this would seem to be a fantastic test case about just how dangerous it is, and also just how dangerous the counterfactual is.Yeah, I think that's right. They are the two most dangerous, the third one being Three Mile Island.That's actually down the list. I think that’s a five. We'll start with the actual accident: What do we know about the fatalities and the damage from the accident itself?The biggest thing that people focus on are the radiation deaths. We have the meltdown, there's radiation that's getting out in the environment that's not contained, and how many people are being exposed to that and dying from cancer as a result? That is, I think, the biggest fear to most people. So far we only have estimates of that. We don't know that precisely because people are dying from cancer, unfortunately, all the time. So how we trace those back to this particular accident is hard to know precisely. But we have ways of estimating that, and the estimates out there—and these are not just estimates of how many radiation deaths we've seen so far, but also how many we expect to see over the next 10 or 20 years because of this accident. And the kind of leading number out there that we reference in the paper is 130. That's the number of estimated radiation deaths because of the Fukushima accident.You're right, that's what people would mostly focus on. What was the impact of just evacuating because of the meltdown?With the evacuation, interestingly, that's where more deaths were. Some of the exact numbers are kind of fuzzy what exactly they are, but estimates put it around probably 1000, 1200 deaths or so because of the evacuation process. What's interesting about that is, like you said, that's not the first line of effects that we're expecting to see. Certainly, when it came to the evacuation, there was mayhem when this is happening, but maybe a little bit too much mayhem that led to extra accidents from the evacuation that we shouldn't have seen.Is that because you're moving sick people from hospitals or there are auto accidents? Why do so many people die during evacuations?That's a good question, because I think it was a little bit mysterious why the numbers were so high. I think it's the kind of things that you could imagine. We're shuffling people away who maybe weren't the most mobile people to begin with, and were moving them away and that's wreaking havoc as a result. Or you have this mass evacuation and there are accidents along the way. All of that could be contributing to it.The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclearThose are the deaths that we can calculate from radiation, from the evacuation. But then the Japanese government responded. It responded with a change in energy policy and that had consequences. What did the Japanese government do? And then what did you find about the consequences of their actions?What the government did—I'd say it was in response to a lot of protests that were happening at the time, at least that was one important contributing factor—was they halted the use of nuclear power as a source of energy in the country of Japan. Until Fukushima happened, about 35 to 40 percent of their energy was coming from nuclear power. And then after Fukushima, it went to zero percent. They weren't using nuclear power for any of their energy. And a couple of other countries that weren't directly involved took similar paths. Germany started phasing out nuclear power, is one big example as well.Talk about unintended consequences from Germany.Yes. And that leads to another can of worms that opens up with GermanyYour paper is not even about geopolitics. We could go into that, too. In Japan, no nuclear, which I assume was the cheap energy source for Japan at the time—and the cleanest.It was. The important thing is that it was a cheap, reliable, and clean source of energy. We don't focus so much on the clean aspect of it in this paper, but I think that's important too. What we really focus on was that it was a relatively inexpensive source of energy. There are all kinds of questions about providing nuclear power. It's very expensive to build these plants, but once they're up and running, they provide energy at pretty low costs. They had a really reliable source of low-cost energy, and all of a sudden they said, “We're going to get rid of 40 percent of our country's energy supply.”They’ve still got the energy demands that they need to meet. People still need to heat their homes. They need to cool their homes in the summer. Not to mention all of the other basic functions in your home—keeping the lights on and the fridge running. So they had to figure out how to meet those energy demands, and what they did in meeting those energy demands was they started importing fossil fuels. Mainly from mainland China is where they started importing those fuels.I assume that's coal, mostly.Coal, gas — those were the two main things that were coming in. And when they were coming in, they were now providing the energy to fill that gap in demand. But they were now more expensive than using nuclear. People's energy bills were going up. Depending on the area of Japan, we're talking about some places were seeing energy bills going up 30 to 40 percent. If you think about during times of the year when you're using energy the most, the middle of winter when you're heating your home to try to keep a nice comfortable environment at home. And now your bill has gone up by 30 to 40 percent—a lot of people ended up cutting back on their energy use.And this is another economics 101 principle: As the price of a good goes up, people are going to consume less of it. So we saw people cutting back on their energy use, and they're cutting back on their energy use during the coldest time of the year. What's important about that is that's when energy use is really important for your health. One of the things that a climate-controlled environment is doing is it's protecting you from the elements. It's protecting you from freezing temperatures that, most people can relate to, don’t feel good on a regular basis. But also if you have people who might be experiencing heart disease or other kinds of more frail states to begin with, if they're now experiencing colder temperatures for a prolonged period of time, this could be pretty harmful to their health.And what you did is you looked at a section of large cities to try to figure out those health consequences?That's what we did. After we found the areas where we saw the decrease in energy usage, we also asked, “Did we see increases in mortality in those areas as well?” And that's precisely what we found. We found that when it was cold out, in the winter—temperatures hovering around 30, 40 degrees, think zero degrees Celsius, right around freezing—when temperatures were falling into that range and energy prices were higher, we saw increases in mortality compared to times where we had similar temperatures but before the increases in energy prices.You looked at about the 20 or so largest cities over the early 2010s, from 2011 to 2014, and you calculate about 1300 additional deaths.Because of the higher energy prices, we estimate there are an extra 1300 deaths in the cities where we were able to estimate the effects here.(1) I assume there would be more if you looked at the entire country; (2) to what extent do you believe this has been an issue beyond 2014?Both of those are reasons that we think the number is even higher than the 1300. Our study only focused on about 30 percent of the Japanese population, just because that's where the data was available to do the analysis. But if we project our estimates onto other areas, we have every reason to think that there are effects there as well. We think those numbers can be even larger than the 1300. And then also our analysis ended in 2014. There's always a lag on when you can get data and it takes some time to do the analysis. But those effects very likely persisted beyond 2014 as well. So we think the number of deaths is certainly greater than the 1300. It’s hard to put exactly what the number is on it, but we'd say easily it should be several thousand more.I don't know if you examined this, but do you know if that potential consequence was part of the shutdown debate? Or was the debate just about “This is too dangerous of a technology, we need to shut it down”?Unfortunately, I think the debate is mostly around just the risks. This is getting back to what we were talking about earlier with the precautionary principle and just focusing on one aspect and losing sight of the whole picture. It was really just saying “This is the risk that we face from using nuclear, so we shouldn't do it,” instead of thinking “These are also the benefits that nuclear brings.” And we haven't even touched on some of the other benefits that nuclear brings. We've just talked about the price benefits right now, that it brings lower energy costs. And we talked a little bit about the potential air quality and greenhouse gas impacts as well. But that's mostly lost at least in the protests that are against it. They're really focusing on the risks and not thinking about the benefits from it.Matt, I don't know how much time you spend on Twitter. I spend too much. Sometimes I get the impression that there's a certain segment on Twitter who thinks economists are too involved in public policy. But this seems like an absolutely perfect example of where you actually need somebody talking about economics, about trade-offs, about other potential consequences and counterfactuals.Yeah, I think that's right. Obviously as an economist I'm going to promote what I do as being useful. But it gets back to, I think it was Truman who said, “Give me a one-handed economist,” because all the economists say, “On one hand this, but on the other hand that.” And that's really thinking about the trade-offs here. But it's hard to imagine any situation where there isn't a trade-off, where any decision we're making, there's not also an alternative decision that we can make that has impacts as well. I know that is maybe a bit self-serving and that's what economists do. That's how we approach every problem. We think about not any one thing in isolation, but try to think about the whole problem and everything that's happening in the problem, the costs and the benefits.Japan’s nuclear reversalJust to stick with Japan for another moment, they have now reversed course. Japan is now re-embracing nuclear. To what extent have you followed that policy reversal? Part of it seems to be about climate change. I don't know how much also has to do with the kind of findings that you have in the paper.I don't know the details behind what's driving them to make that decision. But yes, they're planning on bringing back—what is it, seven or nine plants that they're going bring back online? I think a lot of that has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think that's a big thing because right now we see gas prices going up everywhere. Whether you're directly relying on Russian gas or not, it's still world markets that are determining prices there. And we see energy prices are going up, and we're especially fearing this winter. The Russian invasion started at the tail end of the winter last year so we had some time to prepare. The hope was things wouldn't go on as long as they are. But they are going on as long as they are, and now we have to think about this winter ahead where we're going have to think about higher energy prices for a lot of people, and how are we going to deal with those higher energy prices?One way to deal with those higher energy prices is to increase the supply of energy, and that will hopefully bring down the price of energy. I think that's a big part of bringing the nuclear plants back. I think the same thing is happening in Germany as well. They were slowly decommissioning all of their nuclear plants. They hadn't fully phased them out. I think it was actually supposed to happen this year, 2022. And I think maybe now they're putting the breaks on that and saying “We need to keep some of those plants alive,” especially because Germany in particular is very dependent on Russian natural gas.There was a somewhat similar study done looking at excess deaths in Germany from switching from nuclear to more coal-fired plants, looking at air pollution, dirtier air causes deaths. That is not something you looked at, though I imagine it would be a factor.That's not something we looked at directly, but it's absolutely another factor. And this is one that we just looked at the price differential between nuclear versus coal or gas. Another super important benefit from nuclear is that when it's actually producing the energy for people to use, it's not emitting any pollutants locally. So it doesn't have an effect on air quality. When the alternative is coal or gas, that's leading to emissions that contributes to particulate matter, which is this really small fine pollutant that gets deep in our lungs, gets into our circulatory system and causes significant number of deaths. I believe particulate matter is the leading environmental cause of mortality around the globe.Public perceptions of nuclear risksDo you have a sense that people overestimate the fatalities from nuclear accidents? I don't know if you watched the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. It would be very easy for someone kind of watching that and maybe half on their phone to think that hundreds of thousands of people died. And I recently watched a documentary, I think it was on Netflix, about Three Mile Island. They also tried to give the sense that many, many people died, even though the evidence seems pretty anecdotal, what they did give. They didn't bring a lot of experts and economists talking about deaths. In political decision-making, it's easy for politicians to focus on highly visible costs and highly visible benefits. But it seems like with nuclear, they're also looking at costs that perhaps don't even exist, that there's just the sense that it's a lot more dangerous than what it is.I think that's right. Part of it is about salience. When we think about a nuclear meltdown, it's a shot heard around the world. Everyone knows about Fukushima and everybody knows about Chernobyl. Even if we have the opportunity to forget about Chernobyl—not that we should forget about Chernobyl, we should still remember and learn from Chernobyl—we still have reminders about Chernobyl and the miniseries coming out and telling us how bad it was. If we had a Chernobyl-like incident every five years, we'd be having a different conversation. Then we could say, “Maybe nuclear should be off the table. Maybe it's not worth it.”But we have very different calculations. We've had one Chernobyl, the worst incident we've had. And then the second-worst incident we've had is Fukushima, where we have 1200 or so deaths. It's orders of magnitude better, and that's only the second-biggest accident that we've had. And if that's what things are like going forward, that's much safer, clearly much safer than Chernobyl. I think the interesting thing embedded in the question you're asking me is about the salience, that we hear about the deaths from these accidents. But the deaths from coal and the deaths from gas, you don't hear about them. They're just in the background. Every day there are people dying from particulate matter, but we're not saying, “It's because of the burning of coal we now have this person dying from particulate matter.” It's just that we know there are some people that are dying and we can later statistically attribute it to the burning of fossil fuels. But it's not reaching salience the same way that a nuclear accident is reaching salience.An analogy that comes to mind is thinking about flying versus driving. Flying, statistically speaking, is so much safer than driving. The amount of airplane-related deaths in a given year is very small, but the amount of deaths from car accidents is, again, orders of magnitude higher. Car accidents are happening every day, and the only way you really hear about car accidents, other than if it's a really famous person who's involved, is your local news. They're not making national news. But when a plane crash happens, it's national news—it's international news. But when was the last big plane crash that happened? I don't know. I couldn't tell you. It has to have been at least several years away. I know COVID put a lot of pause on a lot of travel, but it has to be years away from when that last accident happened. Yet I think a lot of people are more scared of flying than they are of driving, even though the risks of death from driving are much higher than the risks of death from flying.Where did the precautionary principle come from? Are there philosophers or economists that have been pushing this idea since the 1970s? Or is this a much old idea that has found new salience?I don't know enough of the history of it going back in time. It definitely gained prominence in the last 50 years. With a lot of the environmental movement that was growing out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the precautionary principle took more kind of formal definitions and became, in some cases, an official part of policy. That said, the definition of it has changed over time, the precise way that the precautionary principal is defined. Before then, I'm sure it's been used at least unofficially. This is where the precautionary principle gains traction. You can almost think of it as “better safe than sorry.” This is how it gets pushed: “Let's be safe first rather than learn we made a mistake and be sorry later.” It's probably a good way to think about your daily life as an individual, thinking about “better safe than sorry” when you make decisions. But it's not clear that suddenly becomes a good tool for making decisions for millions of people. It now starts to take a different flavor to it, because as an individual, when you're making this better-safe-than-sorry decision, you're thinking about one thing, one step at a time. In front of you, you have a cup of water, and you say, “I don't know what's in this cup of water. I don't know how long it's been sitting there. Maybe it has some bacteria because it's been sitting there for too long and I could get sick.” So then you say, “Better safe than sorry. I'm not going to drink this cup of water and later I'm going to do something else that's going to quench my thirst.” That's fine, that's perfectly reasonable. I make decisions like that for myself and for my family. But when you're sitting there making that decision when you have lots of choices in front of you, it becomes different, because then it gets back to like what we talked about before. You have to think about the trade-offs associated with any decision that you make, that if you're not choosing this, you're now choosing something else. And we’ve got to think about the benefits and risks with all the alternatives that we face. And the precautionary principle just gets us away from thinking about those alternatives.If you were to rank the papers I've mentioned in my writings over the past five years, this paper probably ranks pretty high. It embodies these principles. It provides, I think, a very easy way for people to understand some important principles and concerns a pretty important topic: energy. How much publicity have you gotten from mainstream media about your paper? What kind of response have you gotten, either from environmentalists or economists? I think it is a pretty important piece of research.Thanks for the kind words. I'd say we've gotten some media exposure from this, but not a tremendous amount. I'm doing this podcast and I did another podcast recently and it's gotten written up in a couple of places, but I'd say it hasn't really hit mainstream media. Some of that, to be fair, is I don't do much self-promotion of my work. You said you spend too much time on Twitter. I spend probably too little time on Twitter. More promotion might have helped with that, so some of that is a result of our choices too.It seems like, at least as applied to energy because of climate change and more immediately because of the Russian invasion, people are thinking a lot about past decisions and about trade-offs. Do you think views about nuclear energy are changing, as far as the riskiness and more importantly the riskiness compared to other decisions like becoming dependent on a potential enemy for your energy?I do think it's changing a little bit. And it's interesting how other factors make you change your viewpoint on this. The risk from nuclear hasn't really changed at all, but it's the risk from the other thing has changed. We have to be thinking about the alternative options. We talked about Japan and Germany now changing their tune on nuclear, we also see in the Inflation Reduction Act that was signed recently that now nuclear is being promoted in that as well, encouraging the development of nuclear power. We see Diablo Canyon, the nuclear plant in California, which they were going to decommission. It now looks like they're reversing course on that. I think there is a change.The question always becomes: How long does this last? If there's another nuclear accident, that could quickly change things. There's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to nuclear and that uncertainty is different than the uncertainty when it comes to other energy sources. If another accident happens, it could be that all of a sudden we change course on nuclear. I hope that doesn't happen, because I feel like we learn from the mistakes. We know with Chernobyl there were just a lot of missteps that happened that led to that accident. And I just heard something recently that they actually had a safety inspection the night before the actual meltdown happened, which is kind of amazing that that could happen. A lot of the information there is behind lock and key with the Russian government, so we don't know a lot of the details. But we've learned over time how to make it safer and safer. Our ability to detect problems is just greater and greater. Hopefully what's happening is that we're learning how low the risk is from nuclear. And what's important is for everyone to think of it in context to the alternative. That is where we're at a hard point with—we probably don't want to go too far down this path of information and misinformation—what do people know about the risks and how big they are? I don't know that number offhand, what people think about nuclear. But a lot of people think that the risks are worse than they are, and that doesn't help public discourse if people are misinformed about the dangers. 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

Welcome to part two of my conversation with Michael Mandel, vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. In the last episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, we considered the capital investments and job-creating power of America's major tech companies. In this episode, we discuss the Biden administration's CHIPS and Science Act, industrial policy, and whether we should expect an uptick in US productivity growth.In This Episode:* Innovation and industrial policy (1:14)* Looking at productivity numbers (4:14)* How technology affects jobs (7:19)* The future of productivity (12:38)* Investing in bioscience and materials science (15:00)* Policy for societal resilience (19:29)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Innovation and industrial policyWhat do you make of this recent CHIPS and Science Act and perhaps a move in the United States toward what some people call industrial policy—a phrase that can mean a lot of things. I think in this case it means subsidizing sectors that government thinks are important, especially in competition with some other countries.I have to say, quite honestly, that I took my eye off the semiconductor industry for a couple of years because I assumed we were in good shape. And then when I looked over, I said, “Wait a second, something happened here. All of a sudden, we're not in good shape anymore.” I support investment in this sector. I don't consider this to be classic industrial policy at this point. I just consider this to be doing what we've done in the past. We did this with memory chips: There was government intervention with SEMATECH. You sort of say, “Here's a sector, we need to fix it. Let's just go ahead and spend some money here.” We haven't gotten to the point of being strategic yet. This was not really a strategic investment. We're just saying, “Let's throw money at this problem.” We know that at the margin, throwing money at this problem is going to get us further along than we need to be.Do I think that more of this is needed? The country you didn’t mention, of course, was China. I do think China's innovation policy is a really interesting question because we haven't had an experience with authoritarian countries that were successfully innovative. For a lot of reasons, because it seems that capitalism works better to produce good innovation. If it turns out that authoritarian innovation works, many countries around the world will want to imitate that model because it's much more comfortable for governments to run innovation from the top. The only reason why they allow innovation to bubble up from the bottom is because doing it the other way doesn't work.What I would expect to see in the US is a combination of the two, a lot that is bubble up from the bottom. We will be faced with technological and social and environmental challenges that we can't imagine. And we have to have invested the money in the new technologies before we get there. We don't know what the problems are going to be. We don't know what the technologies are going to be. We discovered this in the pandemic, where it turned out that mRNA technology, which was sitting on the shelf for 20 years, was a solution to a problem that we didn't even know it was a solution to. But if we hadn't been investing in it so it wasn’t there, it wouldn't have been available as quickly as it was.Looking at productivity numbersStatistically, we had this productivity boom during the pandemic, at least in 2020, 2021. And people read about a lot of technologies happening: maybe AI spreading, mRNA, CRISPR, rockets. The first half of this year, statistically, was not so good with productivity. These numbers tend to jump around a lot. What's the reality going forward?As you know, productivity numbers, especially total factor productivity numbers, are useless over any period less than 10 years. We mentioned earlier the shift of hours from the household sector to the market sector as part of e-commerce. Remember: Hours in the household sector are not measured as part of the productivity basis. If you actually include them, it significantly adds to the productivity growth in this period. Because what's happened is, if we take the total amount of hours being put into consumer distribution, which is both the market hours and the non-market hours, market hours has gone up, which is what shows up in the official productivity numbers. If you look at retailing, you don't actually see very much productivity gain because, in fact, the hours have gone up a lot. But they're not counting the fallen hours in the household sector. What has happened is when you count the fall of hours in the household sector, productivity growth—I haven't done these calculations recently, but it goes up a lot: quarter percentage point a year, half a percentage point a year. It’s actually a significant increase.In the sector or economy-wide?Economy-wide. Because it's a lot of hours. The degree to which telehealth, for example, removes the necessity of people to drive to the doctor's office, if we are not including those hours in our calculation of productivity growth, we're missing the big effect. And you can go through the economy like that: places where there were movements outside of the hours in the market, in the household sector, just not being counted. That even leaves out increases in output in the info sector that's not being measured. I need to go back to something else that you said, which was the productivity boom that we saw in the past: My belief is that a lot of that was mismeasured, too. But over-measured.When? What period?I'm talking about the early 2000s. There was the apparent boom from 2000-2007, increase in productivity.How technology affects jobsWe had the ‘90s boom, and then we had the pop of the internet stock bubble. But, statistically, we still saw a lot of productivity growth after that.My belief, looking at the numbers, is that a lot of that is mismeasurement of a shift in purchasing from US manufacturing firms to, say, overseas manufacturing firms, which were being picked up as a productivity gain rather than a price drop. Now we're getting to really abstruse stuff, but it doesn't really matter.That doesn't make me feel good, because I like seeing years of high productivity growth and we haven’t seen as many as I would like since 1973.I understand, but that actually explains why it is that people are so pissed.Because in the ‘90s we had high productivity growth driving high wage growth.That’s right. And then you did not have high wage growth after that … Retailing was in some sense a bellwether industry. Originally McKinsey was writing reports about retailing being a high-productivity industry. And then they realized it was a low-productivity industry. And in fact, real wages stayed low for many years and did not start increasing until Amazon and the other e-commerce companies came in and started taking away the really low-wage jobs which were moving out of retail, into e-commerce and fulfillment as much higher-wage jobs. What I look for is wage growth. If I'm not seeing real wage growth, I assume that I'm not seeing productivity gains, because I'm seeing real wage growth in the areas that I think real productivity gains are happening—whether or not they're being measured or not.Do I think it's going to spread to the rest of the economy? I do. We know what it looks like. The question is, are we ready for this? Are we ready for telehealth? Let’s just stick with telehealth for a second. You could eliminate big chunks of healthcare workers and costs on the consumer side by shifting as much as you could to telehealth. That becomes a byproduct of the money that's invested in broadband and 5G. And then the question is, are you measuring this correctly? And are you doing what you need to do to make this work? And the case of telehealth, of course, is a licensing problem: being able to get healthcare connections in a state that's different than yours isn't always the easiest thing.Some people who listen to this will say, “That economist is being flippant about job loss. This is another job-killing technology.”I think what you want to think about is that we have not seen any evidence of job killing at all. Let’s go to the autonomous vehicle and the truck drivers. Your autonomous truck is going to have to be kept in really good repair. It’s going to have to be kept highly tuned, because it's out there by itself. If you want to do this, you want to run it all night. You’re either going to have somebody sleeping in the cab or you actually have to have something that is kept in as good repair as the average airplane is. Which is really a lot. And so you're talking about having a very large repair force, and you're shifting truck drivers from a dangerous job to a less dangerous job that is better paid.You also might need more road maintenance people. If you imagine a future where you’ll have cars driving 80 miles an hour, six inches apart from each other, you better not have too many potholes.That's exactly right.Some people don't want to switch jobs, though.I think that's important for us to respect. But I also think people like their lifestyles and they don't want to necessarily switch from a job that is partly physical to a job that's all nonphysical. What the e-commerce example tells us is that we can actually produce a lot of jobs that are of varying types, that are technologically enabled. What the telehealth tells us is that we have a lot of telehealth maintenance people that we didn't have before that are very practical. I think that if we stay on the track that we are, I'm not scared of [inflation]. I find it really weird when people say, “We produced too many jobs this month in the job report, because we’re scared of inflation.” You shouldn't be scared of inflation. You should be scared of low productivity. Jobs are good. Productivity is good.The future of productivityI like both. When we look back on this decade from 2030 or maybe 2035, will we say, “That was a high-productivity gain where we sort of stepped up,” or we still be having this conversation of “What do we need to do to boost productivity growth?”I'm going to take a step back here. I think we're going to discover that a lot more people are being kept out of the labor force by long COVID than we think right now, and that we're going to be running into labor shortages. And as we run into labor shortages, there is going to be incentive for companies to invest in technology in a way that they didn't do before. We are going to start seeing real growth and productivity as investments in technology spread from the digital sector and in a few other sectors into the rest of the economy. And we'll circle back around to healthcare. What we want from healthcare…Look at those capital investment numbers.If you look at capital investment over the last 10 years, it's been running at about half the rate as it was in the previous 10 years. Not just in the US, but in Europe—not in China, though. That's really what the big distinction is. China did not have the capital investment slowdown that the developed world had. We need investment in technology. We need a willingness to change. We need investment, not just in information technology, but in the biosciences. And that we need a regulatory structure that is flexible enough to adjust to this.What’s your best guess? I've brought this up several times in this podcast: Erik Brynjolfsson and Robert Gordon, the economists, have a public bet about productivity growth.In the end, I've got to go with Erik. Erik has been excessively sanguine up to this point. I think the numbers have, up to this point, leaned in favor of overestimating productivity growth. But I do think that coming out of this pandemic the combination of information technology and biosciences and whatever more investment we do in materials sciences, is going to be extremely important.Investing in bioscience and materials scienceI understand how IT might affect productivity growth. How would the biosciences? Because we would be healthier and work longer?That is one thing. Another thing has to do with agriculture. And related to that, energy.I know [CRISPR pioneer] Jennifer Doudna has an agricultural startup.The agricultural stuff is really important at this point, because if we're moving into a period of changing climate and we're moving into a period where food and water supplies are really important, then anything we can do to increase the productivity of the agriculture sector and also its ability to adjust quickly is just really important. The fact is that we collectively as a global economy have survived the worst pandemic in 100 years, basically without touching the growth rate of the economy. I mean, it touched it, whatever it did, but mainly we kept going. And the reason why we kept going is that we had invested so much in biosciences, especially in the US. We had the technology on the shelf that we needed fully operational. We could say, “Well, it doesn't do exactly what we wanted to do.” That's not important. It was there, it was ready to the degree that people were willing to roll it out.I think what we're going to find is that we're going to have a lot of other challenges that come up for which having a strong biosciences capacity is absolutely essential. Information technology is great, but it doesn't cover the full range of innovations. The place where we're missing is materials sciences. Other countries have spent more on materials sciences than we have. If you go back to your question about industrial policy, I would say that the main thing that we have to do is actually with semiconductors because semiconductors is basically about materials sciences, is more investment in materials sciences.The old nanotechnology initiative, despite that people had thought this was going to create tiny machines that built things, it was basically materials sciences.It was basically materials science. Once again, that's something that we spent some money on, then we stopped spending money on it. It’s still lurking out there as a possibility we may have. There may be stuff on the shelf right now that we can reach out for when we need it. The glass on smartphones was originally a Corning glass that they had made.They didn’t know what they could do with it.It was not good. They had designed it to be shatter-proof auto windows. And it was just bad for that. But it was in their drawer. And the thing about Corning, of course, is that they had such continuity in their research capabilities they actually remembered it. I'm on the plus side of this. I think that I'm of the school of, the future happens slowly then all at once.It's also how we go bankrupt.Let me tell you a little bit about my theory about innovation, both positive and negative black swans. We have very little ability to predict technology. We have very little ability to predict what the problems we're going to face are. What we do have is the ability that when we have something bad happen, can we ameliorate the negative consequences? And when we come up with a positive, good surprise, can we take advantage of that? We had a big negative happen with the pandemic and we managed to deal with it. The question is, can we take advantage of new technologies to push things forward, or are they going to languish on the shelf? And that's really the answer to your question: chop off the bottoms of the down rungs, boost the top rungs and the overall growth is higher.Policy for societal resilienceWhat you've also described there is kind of a societal resilience, the ability to do that. Since I work at a think tank, you work at a think tank, what is the five-point policy plan there?Let's actually just go back to manufacturing, because that's the one that I've thought about the most. In the broader sense, in terms of regulating technology, don't destroy the goose that is laying the golden egg. You can regulate it and you should regulate it. If you see the things that are wrong, if you have definitive things that you think are wrong and you can say, “Don't do that. We can punish you.” And then you can sort of judge for yourself whether or not people have followed that or not. If companies are doing well, encourage them to expand. Encourage them to expand because that's the best way to make sure that the higher productivity is in more places of the economy rather than fewer. In terms of manufacturing, which is so crucial, make sure that the technology is available at a local level for anybody to use so that they have a chance to experiment with it. The problem is we don't have enough experimentation going on.How does government do that?On the state level, you can imagine setting up centers that anybody could come into and use the latest—not a consumer model 3D printer, but the latest production model one, or have access to the latest-model robot, not an older one—and be able to say, “What could you do with this that is different?” Because you want to be able to throw smart people at the technology. One of the great things about information technology, the personal computer, is that it was available to everybody.What you've described almost reminds me of a World's Fair, where technology can be presented to people and they can interact with it.We haven't had a World's Fair in a long time, have we?We've covered this topic in the newsletter. What you're describing is maybe kind of World's Fair, but for small business.You can imagine that, with spinoffs for it. I'm not talking about industrial policy in the classic sense. There are a lot of technologies that are out there that don't have enough people working with them, that don't have enough financing available at the entrepreneurial level that we want to be able to make sure that they have available to them because then we'll have the creativity that we need to move to the next stage. But having said that, I'm feeling more positive going forward. In the next 10 years, I'm not going to put a number on productivity growth because I'm really getting more and more doubtful of our ability to measure it…If you did, remember: a number and a date, but not both. That's the classic stock market strategist.As you know, Jim, I’ve been at this a long time. What I usually forecast is big ups and downs, with the ups being bigger than the downs. How could that be wrong? 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

Technology and e-commerce companies have a reputation for being drivers of creative destruction, sometimes at great cost to local communities. Economic nostalgia tells us to lament those jobs and fear the changes that come with technological progress. But it's worth remembering that tech companies are also a major source of high-wage job growth in the US economy. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Michael Mandel to consider the role of tech companies in the American economy.Michael is vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. He's also the author of "Investment Heroes 2022: Fighting Inflation with Capital Investment," co-authored with Jordan Shapiro.In This Episode:* Tech sector job growth (1:23)* How technology affects the labor market (6:08)* Job-replacing tech vs. job-creating tech (10:46)* Encouraging the digitization of US manufacturing (15:00)* America’s tech firms: investment heroes (18:34)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Tech sector job growthJames Pethokoukis: Last year you said, “We’ve seen in recent years [that] the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector has been the main source of job growth in the economy.” Do you think this is a widely understood fact either among the public or among policymakers here in Washington?Michael Mandel: That's such an excellent question. No, it's not a widely understood fact. I've just calculated the latest numbers, and if you look at full-time equivalents, all of the job growth since the pandemic started has been in what I call now the “tech/e-commerce” sector. And the rest of the economy and job growth has been much, much weaker.Is this purely a pandemic-era phenomenon, or do you expect it to continue to happen?It was happening before the pandemic. It is going to continue after the pandemic, too. I think what we've learned in the past is that whichever sectors grow during a recession tend to lead the next recovery as well. The fact that we've had all this growth in the tech/broadbrand/e-commerce sector during the pandemic suggests that's going to be the job leader going forward as well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released its occupational projections for the next 10 years. I haven't had a chance to look through them yet. I suspect that they will understate the future job impact of the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector as they have in the past.Is that an accurate forecast that they put out?It is about as accurate as just extending long-term trends. In terms of looking forward [at] telecom-related jobs or app-economy jobs or computer-related jobs, it has consistently under projected. They actually make no real claims. They don't say it's a forecast. They say it's a projection. Probably, if you ask them privately, they would tell you they really don't want to do it. But it's really widely read.The part of that sector I think people might be surprised by is e-commerce. I'm guessing that a lot of people view e-commerce as a jobs killer: It's replacing all the people who work at in-person stores with kiosks. Is that your perception? That is wrong, though.That is my perception, and that is wrong. The way that I think about e-commerce is it doesn't pull jobs out of brick-and-mortar retail. It actually pulls hours out of the household sector. So what happened is that people used to put an enormous amount of hours into driving to stores, parking, walking around, and standing on line, and so forth. And if you look at the data that comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the American Time Use Survey, you see a really sharp drop in the number of hours that people spend shopping for goods. It's gone down by about 20 percent over the last 15 years. And it dropped about 10 percent just over the course of the pandemic. All of these hours, which is an enormous number of unpaid household hours, are being moved into the paid market sector. Instead of you going into a store and picking out the stuff yourself, somebody else is doing this using robots in an e-commerce fulfillment center. And instead of you driving to the store by yourself and spending all that time parking, somebody else is putting the stuff in a big truck and delivering it to you, using more capital, doing it more efficiently. There's been a very sharp drop in the number of hours that households are spending on shopping, which (A) creates a lot of jobs in the market sector, (B) really distorts the productivity numbers, and (C) leads us to misunderstand the sources of growth in the economy: what the effect of productivity is, what the effect of technology is.I know you and I have talked about this in the past, for many years we used to wonder, when was technology going to start generating jobs for the ordinary person? And that's what e-commerce has done: generate tech-enabled jobs in e-commerce fulfillment centers, in the entire supply chain, that pay better than the old retailing jobs, that pay a lot better than the non-paid jobs in the household sector where people used to spend this. You're creating a lot of income that wasn't in the economy before.How technology affects the labor marketPeople don’t think about those warehouse fulfillment center jobs. If they do, they probably think they pay worse than they actually do. And they probably underestimate how many there are and figure it's just all robots or something.I think we've managed to break the “all robot” canard, because what we've seen here is that the ability to put robots into the fulfillment centers has lowered the cost of doing e-commerce so much that it's actually made it open to all consumers for everything, basically. There are no restrictions on it. You're producing enough surplus that you can actually do returns correctly. There's a big economic surplus being generated by the automation of the fulfillment centers that enables us to hire a lot more workers.That's a classic case of technology affecting the labor market, right?If you look back historically, this is very much the same sort of thing that happened with Henry Ford and the assembly line, which is that you think that when you have an assembly line, your adding productivity that’s going to reduce the number of jobs. But it lowered the cost of cars so much that all of the sudden the ordinary person was able to buy them. That created a lot more demand for workers. And if you think about, why were people buying cars as opposed to just using horses? It's a time thing. The thing that's in most scarcity for households is time, because they can't create more of it. Anything that saves people time, they're going to be willing to pay a lot for. In that one case, this was the automobile creating jobs. In this case, it's less shopping time creating jobs in e-commerce fulfillment and delivery.If you've never been in one of those fulfillment centers, there was a wonderful movie Nomadland that starred Frances McDorman, and she would work during the busy season at an Amazon fulfillment center. It did not seem like a miserable job, but it seemed like a busy job.It's a busy job. I think about these as the equivalent of manufacturing jobs for the technological age. They're mixed physical-cognitive jobs, just the way that assembly line jobs were mixed. They actually required some skill, and at the same time they required manual labor. They pay about the same as entry-level manufacturing jobs. In many areas of the country they are in fact becoming the substitute entry-level job that manufacturing once was. If you look at the data for occupational health, they're kind of where they should be. They're physical jobs, you can't deny that. Which actually kind of gives a lot of people problems because they think, “Well, what is an ideal job? Is an ideal job an office job?” It turns out for a lot of people, it’s not. It’s something that involves some measure of physical labor, too. Let me give you a number here: Since July 2019, the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector has produced about 1.3 million jobs out of a total of 2.2 million for the economy as a whole. And that's pretty amazing. That's more than a majority and much more than healthcare and social assistance, which should be your next question: What's going to happen to healthcare jobs with automation?What's going to happen to healthcare jobs?If you think about the shift to telehealth during the pandemic, people are realizing that there are less expensive ways of doing what they were doing before. Better ways of communication. One of the biggest phenomena I think we're going to see going forward is that the long healthcare job boom may be over. We may actually end up with a surplus of healthcare workers. Rather than retraining manufacturing workers to go into healthcare, we may be retraining healthcare workers to go into technology.Job-replacing tech vs. job-creating techOn that issue, I know there's been some research by Daron Acemoğlu about how technology is affecting the modern job market. Are we producing the kind of innovation and automation that replaces jobs? Are we producing the kind that creates new things for people to do? Are we creating the kind that helps people do their jobs better?I think there's some concern that we've produced too much of the job replacing rather than the job creating/enabling.We're going to have both types. We haven't actually had any of the job replacing yet—at least not in the measure that people were worried about. Remember, we were worried about all the losses of jobs for truck drivers from autonomous trucks. Instead, we have shortages of truck drivers.I was told there'd be riots.If you look back historically, you see that some technologies generate jobs and some technologies replace jobs. I think what we've seen, which we hadn't seen before in the e-commerce sphere, is we know this is a case where we've created new jobs. If you actually add together e-commerce jobs and the brick-and-mortar retail jobs, what you see is that there has been a 650,000 job increase since the beginning of the pandemic in the combined retail/e-commerce sector. There's a net job increase from technology here. And there's a wage increase because the e-commerce jobs pay about 30 percent more than brick-and-mortar retail.And they are more diverse, which is really interesting. Diverse racially and diverse ethnically. People usually think of retailing being poor people of color. But in fact, you look see that there's a lot of discrimination in brick-and-mortar retail. I think, in the end, the retail sector broadly extended, including e-commerce, is going to be a net job gainer from technology. The real interesting question is going to be, what's happening to manufacturing? I'm watching this very closely. Of course, we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs.We still make a lot of things, though.We make a lot of things, but the non-high tech manufacturing capacity peaked in 2000 and has been coming down since then. The actual size, however you want to measure the manufacturing sector in the US, has actually been shrinking. What we need to be able to do is adopt more advanced manufacturing techniques, more automation, more digitization: drive down the cost of making goods, drive it down in a way that starts increasing the ability of people to buy them, increasing the capacity, and increasing the jobs associated with them. This kind of goes to your question about, is it job replacing or job creating? What happened was that people got scared. We’ve been replacing manufacturing jobs with technology up to now, but there's nothing that says that has to keep going that way.I actually think that's really a crucial question for the US economy going forward: Are we going to actually invest in manufacturing digitization, not just on large scale but on a small scale as well, on entrepreneurs? One of the things that I watch really closely is this new census data on business formations. You don't see the business formation growth. You see a lot of business formation growth across the economy, but not manufacturing yet. That's going to be a crucial turning point for the economy.Encouraging the digitization of US manufacturingHow do we make that happen, that will have manufacturing here in the US using the latest technology, robotics or what have you?One of the things we have to realize is that our small businesses are still cash poor and credit poor. And they also don't have access to the latest technology. The way that I think about this is if you go back to the auto industry and auto dealer franchises, which created a lot of wealth on the local level. We have to think about manufacturing franchises on the local level where the technology is prepackaged, where people start small businesses and do a lot of creation and production on the local level, in a lot of different places. There may be some signs that could be happening; there may be some signs that it isn't. But this would be one of the big turning points for the US economy in terms of moving towards a really strong, sustainable future.You're not just talking about big companies with big factories, you're talking about far smaller companies able to use the latest technology: an off-the-shelf robot or something who could do things. Is the technology almost there? Is there a role for government? Do we just need the technology to keep progressing? What's the key?We need the technology to keep progressing, but it's almost there. The real question is financing for small entrepreneurs and exposure to the technology.They're just unaware that this is out there?They're just unaware. They have to be able to experiment with it. Right now the small manufacturers are scared.Who is a small manufacturer? What do small manufacturers manufacture in this country?There are far more small job shops out there than you might think, and there’s potential for far more than you might think to grow up. For example, suppose you had an old appliance that was missing a part. In theory, there's no problem producing that part with 3D manufacturing or some other technology, if you had the plans for it. And if you had that set up. What you have right now is manufacturing networks so you could contact a manufacturing network company and give them your plan and they would find a job shop around the country that could do that. You could set up a manufacturing operation tomorrow. A lot of this is not difficult. There are some areas that are more difficult. The art of automating a lot of apparel manufacture is still not all there. It's getting there, too. You've got apparel manufacturing, small tools, small objects. You should be able to have the ability to make customized furniture much cheaper than you do. You go through the different lists of things. It becomes harder the more complicated that things get, but things that are really simple should be able to be manufactured with these new technologies in ways that are less costly and more customized.America’s tech firms: investment heroesEvery year, you folks at PPI put out an Investment Heroes report showing who are the companies really investing. A lot of very well-known tech companies. Not just tech companies on that list, but there are a lot of tech companies. If technology companies are creating a lot of jobs, if they're investing a lot, why do they seem to be so wildly unpopular here in Washington?Let's actually say some more of the good things they do as well. They also pay their workers well. They did not participate in the inflationary surge. Inflation in the digital sector was accelerated a little bit, but much less than the rest of the economy, which is what you would expect if you had high productivity growth. I think that when push comes to shove, people just don’t like “big.” Big worries them. If you compare these companies to the big manufacturing companies in the past, if you compare them size-wise to the global economy, they're about the same size, relatively speaking. They're not out of scale. But what happens is that there's a regulatory push. And that's only natural.When you're regulating, you want to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water. As you know, at PPI we believe in light-touch regulation. We think that regulation is an important part of a market economy, but you really want to make sure you don't go overboard with it. In this case, I think about regulating large tech companies as the big bear theory: If you're sleeping in a bed with a big bear and it rolls over, it's going to crush you, whether it wants to or not. So you have to distract the big bear with a stick every once in a while to keep it alert and say, “No, don't roll over.” What is true if you look historically at the way productivity growth spreads, productivity growth doesn't spread from technology moving from big companies to small companies, or from highly productive companies to less productive companies. It comes because the highly productive companies expand their share of the market. They are good at doing productivity and they expand. That's kind of where we are in this process. The highly productive companies look around and they see other areas of the economy that they think they know how to fix. They see a market opportunity and historically that's what usually happens. What we're seeing now from my perspective, as long as it doesn't go overboard… which some of the bills in Congress did. Some of the bills in Congress made no sense whatsoever. You want to have a kind of push and pull, which is that these companies are highly productive, great for workers, great for consumers, great for suppliers. And so you want to see them expand and you want to see them take cognizance of some of the side effects of what they're doing.Thanks for listening to part one of my two-part interview with Michael Mandel. Next time, we'll discuss US productivity growth, industrial policy, and more. 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 does economic policy become industrial policy, and has the Biden administration crossed that line? In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm talking with industrial policy skeptic Scott Lincicome about the CHIPS and Science Act, how competition with China complicates the argument for free markets, and more.Scott is the director of general economics and the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of numerous reports on industrial policy and international free trade, including "The (Updated) Case for Free Trade" with Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and “Questioning Industrial Policy” with Huan Zhu. He’s also the author of Capitolism, a Dispatch newsletter.In This Episode:* Is Bidenomics really about boosting productivity? (1:19)* We’re all industrial policy enthusiasts now (3:37)* The climate change exception (9:34)* Thinking about China (17:29)* Can the US play the semiconductor game and win? (21:35)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Is Bidenomics really about boosting productivity?James Pethokoukis: The Biden administration has been doing quite a bit: this infrastructure bill, we've had a chips and R&D bill, now we have the Inflation Reduction Act. The president has said that one thing he's trying to do is boost the productive capacity of the economy. Do you view that as the main thrust of these bills?Scott Lincicome: No. I think it's actually much more about picking and choosing specific sectors. You can maybe argue for infrastructure: to the extent that roads and bridges are going to actually lead to the expansion of the national productive capacity, okay. But particularly with semiconductors and the IRA, this is just classic industrial policy. “The market has failed. We don't like the sectoral composition of the United States economy. In particular, we are not making enough semiconductors. We are not making enough solar panels and wind turbines and electric vehicles, and government needs to get involved. We need to not only encourage the consumption of these goods, but we need to actually forcibly, or through a lot of subsidies and sweeteners, incentivize onshoring of these critical industries.” I know that there are some attenuated ideas that this will then boost the overall productive capacity after several years. This is the whole idea that the Inflation Reduction Act will actually reduce inflation by spending all this money. But let's be clear: the immediate effects, the ones that don't require stretching the economic imagination beyond all recognizable length, are about a sectoral composition. It's about changing the shape of the US economy.We’re all industrial policy enthusiasts nowA more market-oriented approach would focus on things like creating a favorable tax code that's neutral to sectoral composition and funding basic research. But with industrial policy, you care about sectoral composition. You care about what the economy looks like, rather than just GDP growth. Is America now doing full-throated industrial policy?No, but we definitely have pushed the envelope. That actually gets to one of the big myths that is pushed by industrial policy advocates here in the United States: this idea that we lived through this grand or terrible — depending on your viewpoint — era of free market fundamentalism in which Milton Friedman got a hold of the economy and ran it like a textbook. That's absolute nonsense. We have experimented with industrial policy for ages, going back to the ‘60s, the ‘70s, then into the ‘80s. We really liked it in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We backed off a little bit in the ‘90s and 2000s but still had tons of industrial policy initiatives to encourage certain types of manufacturing, certain types of jobs, to protect certain sectors. And some of this was new; some of it was longstanding stuff like the Jones Act. So the idea that we weren't engaging in industrial policy is pretty silly. But we certainly have pushed the accelerator down a little bit in the last few months, starting with the infrastructure bill which has local content provisions: “Buy American” this, “Use these American workers,” “Produce these types of charging stations,” that kind of stuff. Specific things, not just infrastructure as we normally consider it. But then really ramping up with the CHIPS Act, which certainly has some basic research stuff in it. But throws $80 billion — potentially more, depending on how these tax credits shake out — to domestic semiconductor manufacturers to actually put more fabs in the United StatesIt's a subsidy to build these plants in the United States.Correct, and with several strings attached even further. But the idea, generally, is (so the argument goes) the United States has experienced a dramatic collapse in semiconductor productive capacity over the last 30 years — thanks, again, to the Milton Friedmanites, us at Cato, we libertarians always run Washington so it's all our fault. And we need to tilt the scales. We need to do industrial policy like the Koreans and the Taiwanese and the Chinese are doing, and we need to get more fabs, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, here in the United States. That’s the idea. And then the IRA basically turned the knob to 11. The IRA went and did very much the same thing with tens of billions of extra dollars — hundreds of billions, really — looking into renewable energy: all sorts of programs, advanced manufacturing, tax credits, grants, you name it. Again, this is not new. Most of the stuff that the IRA did was expand Obama-era programs that went on during the 2009 stimulus bill, essentially revitalizing some of these programs, for example at the Department of Energy, that had been in place for more than a decade.Industrial policy can refer to a lot of things: protecting industries from foreign trade, cutting checks to businesses or sectors deemed "important," or offering strategic tax breaks and the like. Is what we're doing now closer to classic industrial policy?This is classic industrial policy. And in a sense, I'm relieved. Because for the last two years, before the CHIPS bill and the IRA and a little bit on infrastructure, we had this very painful debate that we wonks have to have about definitions. If you listen to some industrial policy advocates out there, like Mariana Mazzucato, the Italian economist who's all the rage in Europe with industrial policy, to them — and there are some folks here in the United States who do this too — industrial policy is anything and everything. WTO reform was industrial policy, basic research gets thrown in, military spending … You get these ridiculous statements like, “Everything that goes into an iPhone was the result of government industrial policy.” That's a lot of nonsense. There’s plenty of free-market, market-oriented, libertarian, whatever you want to call it, stuff that just does not meet the traditional definition of industrial policy, meaning targeted and directed government action — tariffs, subsidies, whatever — to achieve a specific microeconomic advantage over what the market could produce within national borders. And always pursuant to some strategic plan. This is not the NIH just giving out some grants. No, you have a big plan, a strategic plan, and you're going to go out and determine winners and losers. That is very much what we're doing in the CHIPS Act and the IRA. It's nice in the sense that we're getting back to a discussion of traditional industrial policy.The climate change exceptionCertainly some would argue, even if they're generally skeptical of industrial policy, they would say, “Well, sometimes we have to do it. Maybe for defense-related reasons we need to do it. Maybe there's some other emergency. People think climate change is that kind of thing: We can't wait for the market to figure it out. It’s a pressing emergency, as much as a geopolitical conflict would be. It's that kind of thing. Therefore, we must act.Even zany libertarians like me acknowledge a national defense exception to all of this stuff. There's actually a lot of literature I've written about, about how national defense is quite different from socially related industrial policy. And for those reasons, and for very legitimate national security reasons, you tend to push defense-related stuff over the side. Even I am not going to say we should be outsourcing our nuclear weapons technologies to China. That kind of stuff is obvious. Just as importantly, or almost as importantly, there are pretty huge differences between defense procurement and commercial industrial policy. One is, there's no other buyer for defense-related stuff. The market is the government's market. That makes the government uniquely positioned and attuned as the consumer to care about how it's spending its money, to actually have sophisticated, detailed information about the sector. The government knows a lot more about tanks than basically anybody else, because the government is in the tank consumption business. Finally, the public tends to give the government a lot more of benefit of the doubt about failures, about dollar figures and the rest. It's kind of the government's unique, constitutional responsibility. National defense works. Climate change, though, I think is a problem. Because climate change is very much a consumption issue as much as it is a production issue. And it's very little of a domestic production issue. Of course we care about coal-fired electricity plants and the rest. But at the end of the day, all we really care is that we want to increase domestic consumption of renewable energy. With respect to all of these products, there's no need that solar panels be made in America. Quite frankly, there's a very strong argument that by raising the prices of our renewable energy goods — by slapping tariffs on them, by localization mandates like Buy American policies — we're actually raising the prices of these goods and then discouraging consumption of renewable energy. So there's a really tough tension between classic economic nationalist industrial policy and environmental goals. You don't have to take it from me. A big initiative of the Obama administration was to liberalize trade in environmental goods. The Obama administration quite rightly observed that production of these things is not nearly as important as consumption of these things. And what helps maximize consumption? Free trade. That deal never got finished. It's been shelved because, of course, everybody hates trade these days. But I think that it's a lot tougher argument on the climate change side that we need industrial policy, because it just doesn't have the same dynamic as something like national defense.Let me frame it somewhat differently. What if the policy was, “Here’s how we’re going to deal with climate change: We need to pull carbon from the air”? Carbon removal technology is something that doesn't really exist right now, other than in some very experimental forms. “We're going to fund it, just like Apollo, just like the Manhattan project.” Would you favor something like that, assuming you thought there was the actual need to pull carbon from the sky?This is a great example of where you have the industrial policy approach and the more market-oriented approach. The industrial policy approach is that we need that carbon capture technology to be made by Americans in America. And not just deployed by Americans; we need it made in America. Whereas the more free-market approach would be a prize: We don't care how it's made. We don't care who makes it, with a few security-related exceptions. If tomorrow the Korean government or Samsung or whatever comes up with the most amazing carbon capture technology in the world — it's like Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future, you just slap it on a power plant and suddenly we're zero emitters — you win the prize. We don't care that it was made by a Korean company. We don't care that they are going to be Korean jobs and not American jobs. No, the industrial policy side says, “We care a lot about who makes this stuff and that it's made in America, using American materials.” The pandemic, for all of its terribleness, provided us a pretty good example of the industrial policy approach to pandemic stuff and the market approach. And that's in the vaccines. The more free-market approach, essentially a prize but a procurement contract, was we went to Pfizer and BioNTech, and if you look at the contract for those vaccines, it said we have nothing to do with your supply chain. “We don't care how you do it. We don't care what you do. Just get an FDA-approved vaccine and we are all in, we're going to pay.” That's it. There are clauses in that contract that literally say we will have no control over how you make this whatever. A ton of global collaboration, of course. BioNTech is a German company, blah, blah, blah. Totally different approach: There's another company in Maryland called Emergent BioSolutions. Emergent BioSolutions is a heavily government-connected contract manufacturer that has been essentially put here for pandemic preparedness. Lots of government involvement over the years. Emergent was the kind of all-American government contractor model. It is very much similar to a lot of the stuff we hear today about what we need, not just for pandemics, but for other stuff as well: We need to put this factory in America; we need to put it right outside of Washington. Well, Emergent hasn't made a handful of finished doses, and in fact has had a ton of problems with sanitation issues. They've had to destroy a bunch of doses. It's a nice contrast between a more market-oriented approach and a very domestic-oriented approach, one being much more industrial policy than the other. We can argue on the margins about how we funded mRNA research back in the day… But look, comparatively, there are two very different approaches to economic policymaking.Thinking about ChinaIt was kind of easy to defend free markets during the Cold War, but have things become more complicated with China given the interdependence of our economies? How easy is it for you to maintain your pro-market views on industrial policy questions with China?China certainly makes it a little bit harder, and the nature of technology makes it a little bit harder. But we have existing laws and processes for a lot of that. You used a word there that sets off my libertarian Spidey senses. You said “important.” The issue there is, who decides what's important? The idea is not that we allow mass proliferation of dual-use technologies, we rely on China for weapons systems or critical inputs to weapon systems. But it's also that we have to have a lot of skepticism about what is and isn't important. I have very little problem allowing the Office of Foreign Assets Control and all the guys that commerce and whatever to apply the export control regime. We have US laws that require the Department of Defense to look at defense procurement and look at weak links in the chain. In fact, the Defense Production Act, before it was used to make baby formula, used to be used correctly. DOD used to look at its defense supply chain and say, “We don't have a stable producer of widgets that are important for our weapon systems. We need to subsidize that. We're going to give them $20 million.” You know what? No problem. The problem is that now the word “important” has become so distorted from its original meaning that steel rebar is being restricted on national security grounds. Not to mention all of the other areas. Certainly there is a need to consider China, to consider the natures of technologies and all that. But we've gone way, way beyond what is in any way a rational policy. And you have to be very concerned about politics. One of the little-known secrets about the global chip shortage is how American export control policy contributed to the global chip shortage. The Trump administration started restricting pretty basic semiconductor technologies to China and Huawei and the rest. That reduced the global supply of bulk semiconductors. I'm not talking about the fancy three nanometer or whatever stuff. I’m talking about the junky stuff that we put 100 of them in a car for not a great reason, but we do. Not only did that reduce global capacity, but it also caused all these Chinese companies to start hoarding chips because they were scared to death of being cut off from these chip supplies.Believe it or not, China remains very dependent on the United States for a lot of semiconductor stuff. That, of course, made things worse. The Biden administration quietly rolled some of that back in response to shortages. But that's the type of stuff we need to be really worried about. We also need to be concerned about, if we restrict these exports, is that just going to harm American tech champions like Qualcomm or whatever while bolstering French competitors, European competitors, Korean competitors, that are still going to sell to China anyway? There needs to be a very rational, skeptical approach to all this stuff. You can't just scream “China!” and then suddenly protect, subsidize, and do the rest. Of course, there are going to be exceptions. The goal is to get back to a saner approach to those exceptions.Can the US play the semiconductor game and win?How do you see this experiment with semiconductor subsidies playing out? When we look back at it in 10 years, will we say, “We learned that we can do that; we learned the United States can play that game and win,” or are we going to say, “It didn't really quite work out the way we'd hoped”?It's always hard, because any time there's a new industrial policy announcement, you're going to get companies that are beneficiaries making all these investment announcements. The goal and the hard part is then tracking and determining whether those announcements were made because of the subsidy or whether they were already going to do it and they're just trying to get government cash or curry favor with the administration and the rest. The other problem is determining what would've happened in the absence of the program. One of the things I was yelling about before the CHIPS Act was implemented was that semiconductor companies and big consumers, like Apple and Ford and GM, had realized years ago that they needed to rebalance a little bit. That, because of the pandemic, geopolitical stuff, and just other reasons, they were a little top heavy in Taiwan or in Asia. They started planning to invest back in the United States. Apple was saying, “We're willing to pay more to have Samsung right next to our big facility in Austin,” for example. All these investments were already planned before the CHIPS Act ever became a thing. Of course, the government is going to take credit for all of this. “We did all of this. Feast upon our works.” That's a challenge. I'm pretty confident, quite frankly, that they're going to run into a lot of problems. One problem is, like I said, they've attached strings to this stuff. There are prevailing wage requirements and other rules and regulations about favoring disadvantaged communities and all the usual stuff. These things always tend to gum up the works a little bit. The other big issue is that we run into preexisting policies that didn't fix: immigration bottlenecks, other labor supply problems. There was a big story in the AP last week that Intel in Ohio can't find construction workers. That's because we didn't liberalize immigration along with all this industrial policy money we just threw at the economy. We have, of course, plenty of tariffs on stuff that you need to build factories. We have tax policy with respect to expensing that discourages long-term investments in capital-intensive manufacturing. I can go down the list. We didn't fix any of that. At the end of the day, will we move the needle a little bit? Maybe. Government is very powerful; we're throwing a lot of money at this. But will there be a great global rebalancing? Color me quite skeptical. The other thing we have to consider are the risks. If we are successful and there is suddenly a glut in global semiconductors — reading the news right now, the semiconductor industry is actually kind of in some trouble globally right now. Gluts are popping up, people stockpiled, like I mentioned. And now they realize that actually Americans' consumption or the world’s consumption of chips isn't insatiable. There are concerns there. If we have a chips-related glut, because the United States and Europe and Korea and others all threw subsidies at this, what are we going to do with all those extra chips? If you look back at the ‘80s and ‘90s, we had trade wars. We slapped tariffs on Japanese semiconductors and then Korean semiconductors, which caused all sorts of ripple effects throughout the US economy. It pushed the computer industry offshore, for example. Being a libertarian ideologue, but also a student of history and industrial policy, I remain pretty confident that we're going to look back on this and go: “Eh, that was not the greatest idea.” 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

In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm continuing last week's discussion with Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.(Be sure to check out last week’s episode for the first part of my conversation with Robin. We discussed futurism, innovation, and economic growth over the very long run, among other topics. Definitely worth the listen!)In part two, Robin and I talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives held a hearing on what Washington now calls "unexplained aerial phenomena." While the hearing didn't unveil high-def, close-up footage of little green men or flying saucers, it did signal that Washington is taking UAPs more seriously. But what if we really are being visited by extraterrestrials? What would contact with an advanced alien civilization mean for humanity? It's exactly the kind of out-there question Robin considers seriously and then applies rigorous, economic thinking. In This Episode:* The case for extraterrestrial life (1:34)* A model to explain UFOs (6:49)* Could aliens be domesticating us right now? (13:23)* Would advanced alien civilization renew our interest in progress? (17:01)* Is America on the verge of a pro-progress renaissance? (18:49)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The case for extraterrestrial lifeJames Pethokoukis: In the past few years there have been a lot of interesting developments on the UFO — now UAP — front. The government seems to be taking these sightings far more seriously. Navy pilots are testifying. What is your take on all this?Robin Hanson: There are two very different discussions and topics here. One topic is, “There are these weird sightings. What's with that? And could those be aliens?” Another more standard, conservative topic is just, “Here's this vast empty universe. Are there aliens out there? If so, where?” So that second topic is where I've recently done some work and where I feel most authoritative, although I'm happy to also talk about the other subject as well. But I think we should talk first about the more conservative subject.The more conservative subject, I think, is — and I probably have this maybe 50 percent correct — once civilizations progress far enough, they expand. When they expand, they change things. If there were a lot of these civilizations out there, we should be able to, at this point, detect the changes they've made. Either we've come so early that there aren't a lot of these kinds of civilizations out there … let me stop there and then you can begin to correct me.The key question is: it looks like we soon could go out expanding and we don't see limits to how far we could go. We could fill the universe. Yet, we look out and it's an empty universe. So there seems to be a conflict there.Where are the giant Dyson spheres?One explanation is, we are so rare that in the entire observable universe, we're the only ones. And therefore, that's why there's nobody else out there. That's not a crazy position, except for the fact that we're early. The median star will last five trillion years. We're here on our star after only five billion years, a factor of 1000. Our standard best theory of when advanced life like us should appear, if the universe would stay empty and wait for it, would be near the end of a long-lived planet. That's when it would be most likely to appear.There's this power of the number of hard steps, which we could go into, but basically, the chance of appearing should go as the power of this time. If there are, say, six hard steps, which is a middle estimate, then the chance of appearing 1000 times later would go as 1000 to the power of six. Which would be 10 to the 18th. We are just crazy early with respect to that analysis. There is a key assumption of the analysis, which is the universe would sit and wait empty until we showed up. The simplest way to resolve this is to deny that assumption is to say, “The universe is not sitting and waiting empty. In fact, it's filling up right now. And in a billion years or two, it'll be all full. And we had to show up before that deadline.” And then you might say, “If the universe is filling up right now, if right now the universe is half full of aliens, why don't we see any?”We should be detecting signals, seeing things. We have this brand new telescope out there sitting a million miles away.If we were sitting at a random place in the universe, that would be true. But we are the subject of a selection effect. Here's the key story: We have to be at a place where the aliens haven't gotten to yet. Because otherwise, they would be here instead of us. That's the key problem. If aliens expand at almost the speed of light, then you won’t see them until they’re almost here. And that means if you look backwards in our light cone — from our point, all the way backwards — almost all that light cone is excluded. Aliens couldn’t be there because, again, if they had arisen there, they would be here now instead of us. The only places aliens could appear that we could see now would have to be just at the edge of that cone.Therefore, the key explanation is aliens are out there, but everywhere the aliens are not, we can't see them because the aliens are moving so fast we don't see them until they're almost there. So the day on the clock is the thing telling you aliens are out there right now. That might seem counterintuitive. “How's the clock supposed to tell me about aliens? Shouldn't I see pictures of weird guys with antennae?” Something, right? I'm saying, “No, it's the clock. The clock is telling you that they're out there.” Because the clock is saying you're crazy early, and the best explanation for why you're crazy early is that they're out there right now.But if we take a simple model of, they’re arising in random places and random times, and we fit it to three key datums we know, we can actually get estimates for this basic model of aliens out there. It has the following key parameter estimates: They're expanding at, say, half the speed of light or faster; they appear roughly once per million galaxies, so pretty rare; and if we expanded out soon and meet them, we'd meet them in a billion years or so. The observable universe has a trillion galaxies in it. So once per million galaxies means there are a lot of them that will appear in our observable universe. But it's not like a few stars over. This is really rare. Once per million galaxies. We're not going to meet them soon. Again, in a billion years. So there's a long time to wait here.A model to explain UFOsBased on this answer, I don't think your answer to my first question is “We are making contact with alien intelligence.”This simple model predicts strongly that there's just no way that UFOs are aliens. If this were the only possible model, that would be my answer. But I have to pause and ask, “Can I change the model to make it more plausible?” I tried to do this exercise; I tried to say, “How could I most plausibly make a set of assumptions that would have as their implication UFOs are aliens and they’re really here?”Is this a different model or are you just changing something key in that model?I’m going to change some things in this model, I'll have to change several things. I'm going to make some assumptions so that I get the implication that some UFOs are aliens and they're doing the weird things we see. And the key question is going to be, “How many assumptions do you have to make, and how unlikely are they?” This is the argument about the prior on this theory. Think of a murder trial. In a murder trial, somebody says A killed B. You know that the prior probability of that is like one in a million: One in 1000 people are killed in a murder and they each know 1000 people. The idea that any one of those people killed them would be one in a million. So you might say, “Let's just dismiss this murder trial, because the prior is so low.” But we don't do that. Why? Because it's actually possible in a typical murder trial to get concrete, physical evidence that overcomes a one-in-a-million prior. So the analogy for UFOs would be, people say they see weird stuff. They say you should maybe think that's aliens. The first question you have to ask is, how a priori unlikely is that? If it was one in 10 to the 20 unlikely, you'd say, “There's nothing you could tell me to make me believe this. I'm just not going to look, because it's just so crazy.”There are a lot of pretty crazy explanations that aren't as crazy as that.Exactly. But my guess is the prior is roughly one in a thousand. And with a one-in-thousand prior, you’ve got to look at the evidence. You don't just draw the conclusion on one in a thousand, because that's still low. But you’ve got to be willing to look at the evidence if it’s one in a thousand. That’s where I’d say we are.Then the question is, how do I get one in a thousand [odds]? I'm going to try to generate a scenario that is as plausible as possible and consistent with the key datums we have about UFOs. Here are the key datums. One is, the universe looks empty. Two is, they're here now. Three is, they didn't kill us. We’re still alive. And four is, they didn’t do the two obvious things they could do. They could have come right out and been really obvious and just slapped us on the face and said, “Here we are.” That would’ve been easy. Or they could have been completely invisible. And they didn’t do either of those. What they do is hang out at the edge of visibility. What’s with that? Why do that weird intermediate thing? We have to come up with a hypothesis that explains these things, because those are the things that are weird here.The first thing I need to do is correlate aliens and us in space-time. Because if it was once randomly per million galaxies, that doesn’t work. The way to do that is panspermia. Panspermia siblings, in fact. That is, Earth life didn't start on Earth. It started somewhere else. And that somewhere else seeded our stellar nursery. Our star was born with a thousand other stars, all in one place at the same time, with lots of rocks flying back and forth. If life was seeded in that stellar nursery, it would've seeded not just our Earth, but seeded life on many of those other thousand stars. And then they would've drifted apart over the last four billion years. And now they're in a ring around the galaxy. The scenario would be one of those other planets developed advanced life before us.The way we get it is we assume panspermia happened. We assume there are siblings, and that one of them came to our level before us. If that happened, the average time duration would be maybe 100 million years. It wouldn't have happened in the last thousand years or even million years. It would be a long time. Given this, we have to say, “Okay, they reached our level of advancement a hundred million years ago. And they're in the same galaxy as us; they're not too far away. We know that they could find us. We can all find the rest of the stellar siblings by just the spectra. We all were in the same gas with the same mixture of chemicals. We just find the same mixture of chemicals, and we’ve found the siblings. They could look out and find our siblings.We have this next piece of data: The universe is empty. The galaxy is empty. They've been around for 100 million years, if they wanted to take over the galaxy, they could have. Easy, in 100 million years. But they didn't. To explain that, I think we have to postulate that they have some rule against expansion. They decided that they did not want to lose their community and central governance and allow their descendants to change and be strange and compete with them. They chose to keep their civilization local and, therefore, to ban or prohibit, effectively, any colonists from leaving. And we have to assume not only that was their plan, they succeeded … for 100 million years. That's really hard.They didn't allow their generation ships to come floating through our solar system.No, they did not allow any substantial colonization away from their home world for a hundred million years. That's quite a capability. They may have stagnated in many ways, but they have maintained order in this thing. Then they realize that they have siblings. They look out and they can see them. And now they have to realize we are at risk of breaking the rule. If they just let us evolve without any constraints, then we might well expand out. Their rule they maintain for a hundred million years to try to maintain their precious coherence, it would be for naught. Because we would violate it. We would become the competitors they didn't want.That creates an obvious motive for them to be here. A motive to allow an exception. Again, they haven't allowed pretty much any expansion. But they're going to travel thousands of light-years from there to here to allow an expedition here, which risks their rule. If this expedition goes rogue, the whole game is over. So we are important enough that they're going to allow this expedition here to come here to try to convince us not to break the rule. But not just to kill us, because they could have just killed us. Clearly, they feel enough of an affiliation or a sibling connection of some sort that they didn't just kill us. They want us to follow their rule, and that's why they're here. So that all makes sense.Could aliens be sort of “domesticating” us right now?But then we still have the last part to explain. How, exactly, do they expect to convince us? And how does hanging out at the edge of our visibility do that? You have to realize whoever from home sent out this expedition, they didn't trust this expedition very much. They had to keep them pretty constrained. So they had to prove some strategy early on that they thought would be pretty robust, that could plausibly work, that isn't going to allow these travelers to have much freedom to go break their rules. Very simple, clean strategy. What's that strategy? The idea is, pretty much all social animals we know have a status hierarchy. The way we humans domesticate other animals is … what we usually do is swap in and sit at the top of their status hierarchy. We are the top dog, the top horse, whatever it is. That's how we do it. That's a very robust way that animals have domesticated other animals. So that's their plan. They're going to be at the top of the status hierarchy. How do they do that? They just show up and be the most impressive. They just fly around and say, “Look at me. I’m better.”You don’t need to land on the National Mall. You just need to go 20 times faster than our fastest jet. That says something right there.Once we're convinced they exist, we're damn impressed. In order to be at the top of our status hierarchy, they need to be impressive. But they also need to be here and relatively peaceful. If they were doing it from light-years away, then we'd be scared and threatened. They need to be here at the top of our status hierarchy, being very impressive. Now it would be very impressive, of course, if they landed on the White House lawn and started talking to us, too. But that's going to risk us not liking something. As you know, we humans have often disliked other humans for pretty minor things: just because they don't eat the kind of foods we do or marry the way we do or things like that.If they landed on the White House lawn, someone would say, “We need to plan for an invasion.”The risk is that if they told if they showed up and they told a lot about them, they gave us their whole history and videos of their home world and everything else, we're going to find something we hate. We might like nine things out of 10. But that one thing we hate, we're going to hate a lot. And unfortunately, humans are not very forgiving of that, right? Or most creatures. This is their fear scenario. If they showed too much, then game over. We're not going to defer to them as the top of our status hierarchy, because they're just going to be these weird aliens. They need to be here, but not show very much to us. The main thing they need to show is how impressive they are and that they're peaceful. And their agenda — but we can figure out the agenda. Just right now, we can see why they're here: because the universe is empty, so they didn't fill it; they must have a rule against that, and we'd be violating the rule. Ta-da. They can be patient. They’re in no particular rush. They can wait for us to figure out what we believe or not. Because they just have to hang around and be there until we decide we believe it. And then everything else follows from that.As you were describing that, it reminded me of the television show, The Young Pope. We have a young Pope, and he starts off by not appearing because he thinks part of his power comes from an air of mystery and this mystique. In a way, what you're saying is that’s what these aliens would be doing.Think of an ancient emperor. The ancient emperor was pretty weird. Typically, an emperor came from a whole different place and was a different ethnicity or something from the local people. How does an emperor in the ancient world get the local people to obey them? They don't show them a lot of personal details, of course. They just have a really impressive palace and impressive parades and an army. And then everybody goes, “I guess they're the top dog.” Right. And that's worked consistently through history.I like “top dog” better than apex predator, by the way.Would advanced alien civilization renew our interest in progress?I wrote about this, and the scenario I came up with is kind of what you just described: We know they're here, and we know they have advanced technology. But that’s it. We don't meet them. I would like to think that we would find it really aspirational. That we would think, “Wow. We are nowhere near the end. We haven't figured it all out. We haven't solved all we need to know about physics or anything else.” What do you think of that idea? And what do you think would be the impact of that kind of scenario where they didn't give us their gadgets, we just know they're there and advanced. What does that do to us?All through history, humans haven't quite dared to think that they could rule their fate. They had gods above them who were more in control. It's only in the last few centuries where we've taken on ourselves this sense that we're in charge of ourselves and we get to decide our future. If real aliens show up and they really are much more powerful, then we have to revise that back to the older stance of, “Okay, there are gods. They have opinions, and I guess we should pay attention.” But if these are gods who once were us, that's a different kind of god. And that wasn't the ancient god. That's a different kind of god that we could then aspire to. We can say “These gods were once like us. We could become like them. And look how possible it is.”Now, of course, we will be suspicious of whether we can trust them and whether we should admire them. And that's where not saying very much will help. They just show up and they are just really powerful. They just don't tell us much. And they say, “We're going to let you guys work that out. You get the basics.” I think we would be inspired, but also deflated a bit that we aren't in charge of ourselves. If they have an agenda and it's contradicting ours, they're going to win. We lose. It's going to be pretty hard.Is America on the verge of a pro-progress renaissance?We've had this stagnation relative to what our expectations were in the immediate postwar decades. I would like to think I'm seeing some signs that maybe that's changing. Maybe our attitude is changing. Maybe we're getting to more of a pro-progress, progress-embracing phase of our existence. Maybe 50 years of this after 50 years of that.There are two distinctions here that are importantly different. One is the distinction between caution and risk. The other is between fear and hope. Unfortunately, it just seems that fear and hate are just much stronger motives for most humans than hope. We've had this caution, due to fear. I think the best hope for aggression or risk is also fear or hate. That is, if we can find a reason, say, “We don't want those Russians to win the war, and therefore we're going to do more innovation.” Or those people tell us we can't do it, and therefore you can. Many people recently have entered the labor force and then been motivated by, “Those people don't think we're good enough, and we're going to show we're good enough and what we can do.”If you're frightened enough about climate change, then at some point you'll think, “We need all of the above. If that’s nuclear, that’s fine. If it’s digging super deep into the Earth…”If you could make strong enough fear. I fear that's just actually showing that people aren't really that afraid yet. If they were more afraid, they would be willing to go more for nuclear. But they're not actually very afraid. Back in 2003, I was part of this media scandal about the policy analysis market. Basically, we had these prediction markets that were going to make estimates about Middle Eastern geopolitical events. And people thought that was a terrible sort of thing to do. It didn't fit their ideals of how foreign policy estimates should be produced. And one of the things I concluded from that event was that they just weren't actually very scared of bad things happening in the Middle East. Because if so, they wouldn’t have minded this, if this was really going to help them make those things go better.And we actually saw that in the pandemic. I don't think we ever got so scared in the pandemic that we did what we did in World War II. As you may know, in the beginning of World War II we were losing. We were losing badly, and we consistently were losing. And we got scared and we fired people and fired contractors and changed things until we stopped losing. And then we eventually won. We never fired anybody in the pandemic. Nobody lost their job. We never reorganized anything and said, “You guys are doing crap, and we're going to hand the job to this group.” We were never scared enough to do that. That's part of why it didn't go so well. The one thing that went well is when we said, “Let's set aside the usual rules and let you guys go for something.”We got scared of Sputnik and 10 years later there’s an American flag on the Moon.Right. And that was quite an impressive spurt, initially driven by fear.Perhaps if we're scared enough of shortages or scared enough of climate change or scared enough that the Chinese are going to come up with a super weapon, then that would be a catalyst for a more dynamic, innovative America, maybe.I'm sorry for this to be a negative sign, but I think the best you can hope for optimism is that some sort of negative emotion would drive for more openness and more risk taking.Innovation is a fantastic free lunch, it seems like. And we don't seem to value it enough until we have to.For each one of us, it risks these changes. And we'd rather play it safe. You might know about development in the US. We have far too little housing in the US. The main reason we have far too little housing is we've empowered a lot of local individual critics to complain about various proposals. They basically pick just all sorts of little tiny things that could go wrong. And they say, “You have to fix this and fix that.” And that's what takes years. And that's why we don't have enough housing and building, because we empower those sorts of very safety-oriented, tiny, “if any little things go wrong, then you’ve got to deal with it” sort of thinking. We have to be scared enough of something else. Otherwise those fears dominate. 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

Few economists think more creatively and also more rigorously about the future than Robin Hanson, my guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast. So when he says a future of radical scientific and economic progress is still possible, you should take the claim seriously. Robin is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.In This Episode:* Economic growth over the very long run (1:20)* The signs of an approaching acceleration (7:08)* Global governance and risk aversion (12:19)* Thinking about the future like an economist (17:32)* The stories we tell ourselves about the future (20:57)* Longtermism and innovation (23:20)Next week, I’ll feature part two of my conversation with Robin, where we discuss whether we are alone in the universe and what alien life means for humanity's long-term potential.Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Economic growth over the very long runJames Pethokoukis: Way back in 2000, you wrote a paper called “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.” You wrote, “If one takes seriously the model of economic growth as a series of exponential … [modes], then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the world economy will likely see a very dramatic change within the next century, to a new economic growth mode with a doubling time perhaps as short as two weeks.” Is that still your expectation for the 21st century?Robin Hanson: It's my expectation for the next couple of centuries. Whether it's the 21st isn’t quite so clear.Has anything happened in the intervening two decades to make you think that something might happen sooner rather than later … or rather, just later?Just later, I'm afraid. I mean, we have a lot of people hyping AI at the moment, right?Sure, I may be one of them on occasion.There are a lot of people expecting rapid progress soon. And so, I think I've had a long enough baseline there to think, "No, maybe not.” But let's go with the priors.Is it a technological mechanism that will cause this? Is it AI? Is it that we find the right general-purpose technology, and then that will launch us into very, very rapid growth?That would be my best guess. But just to be clear for our listeners, we just look at history, we seem to see these exponential modes. There are, say, four of them so far (if we go pre-human). And then the modes are relatively steady and then have pretty sharp transitions. That is, the transition to a growth rate of 50 or 200 times faster happens within less than a doubling time.So what was the last mode?We're in industry at the moment: doubles roughly every 15 years, started around 1800 or 1700. The previous mode was farming, doubled every thousand years. And so, in roughly less than a thousand years, we saw this rapid transition to our current thing, less than the doubling time. The previous mode before that was foraging, where humans doubled roughly every quarter million years. And in definitely less than a quarter million years, we saw a transition there. So then the prediction is that we will see another transition, and it will happen in less than 15 years, to a faster growth mode. And then if you look at the previous increases in growth rates, they were, again, a factor of 60 to 200. And so, that's what you'd be looking for in the next mode. Now, obviously, I want to say you're just looking at a low data set here. Four events. You can't be too confident. But, come on, you’ve got to guess that maybe a next one would happen.If you go back to that late ‘90s period, there was a lot of optimism. If you pick up Wired magazine back then, [there was] plenty of optimism that something was happening, that we were on the verge of something. One of my favorite examples — and a sort of non-technologist example, was a report from Lehman Brothers from December 1999. It was called “Beyond 2000.” And it was full of predictions, maybe not talking about exponential growth, but how we were in for a period of very fast growth, like 1960s-style growth. It was a very bullish prediction for the next two decades. Now Lehman did not make it another decade itself. These predictions don't seem to have panned out — maybe you think I'm being overly pessimistic on what's happened over the past 20 years — but do you think it was because we didn't understand the technology that was supposedly going to drive these changes? Did we do something wrong? Or is it just a lot of people who love tech love the idea of growth, and we all just got too excited?I think it's just a really hard problem. We're in this world. We're living with it. It's growing really fast. Again, doubling every 15 years. And we've long had this sense that it's possible for something much bigger. So automation, the possibility of robots, AI: It sat in the background for a long time. And people have been wondering, “Is that coming? And if it's coming, it looks like a really big deal.” And roughly every 30 years, I'd say, we've seen these bursts of interest in AI and public concern, like media articles, you know…We had the ‘60s. Now we have the ‘90s…The ‘60s, ‘90s, and now again, 2020. Every 30 years, a burst of interest and concern about something that's not crazy. Like, it might well happen. And if it was going to happen, then the kind of precursor you might expect to see is investors realizing it's about to happen and bidding up assets that were going to be important for that to really high levels. And that's what you did see around ‘99. A lot of people thought, “Well, this might be it.”Right. The market test for the singularity seemed to be passing.A test that is not actually being passed quite so much at the moment.Right.So, in some sense, you had a better story then in terms of, look, the investors seem to believe in this.You could also look at harder economic numbers, productivity numbers, and so on.Right. And we've had a steady increase in automation over, you know, centuries. But people keep wondering, “We're about to have a new kind of automation. And if we are, will we see that in new kinds of demos or new kinds of jobs?” And people have been looking out for these signs of, “Are we about to enter a new era?” And that's been the big issue. It's like, “Will this time be different?” And so, I’ve got to say this time, at the moment, doesn't look different. But eventually, there will be a “this time” that'll be different. And then it'll be really different. So it's not crazy to be watching out for this and maybe taking some chances betting on it.The signs of an approaching accelerationIf we were approaching a kind of acceleration, a leap forward, what would be the signs? Would it just be kind of what we saw in the ‘90s?So the scenario is, within a 15-year period, maybe a five-year period, we go from a current 4 percent growth rate, doubling every 15 years, to maybe doubling every month. A crazy-high doubling rate. And that would have to be on the basis of some new technology, and therefore, investment. So you'd have to see a new promising technology that a lot of people think could potentially be big. And then a lot of investment going into that, a lot of investors saying, “Yeah, there's a pretty big chance this will be it.” And not just financial investors. You would expect to see people — like college students deciding to major in that, people moving to wherever it is. That would be the big sign: investment moving toward anything. And the key thing is, you would see actual big, fast productivity increases. There'd be some companies in cities who were just booming. You were talking about stagnation recently: The ‘60s were faster than now, but that's within a factor of two. Well, we're talking about a factor of 60 to 200.So we don't need to spend a lot of time on the data measurement issues. Like, “Is productivity up 1.7 percent, 2.1?”If you're a greedy investor and you want to be really in on this early so you buy it cheap before everybody else, then you’ve got to be looking at those early indicators. But if you’re like the rest of us wondering, “Do I change my job? Do I change my career?” then you might as well wait and wait till you see something really big. So even at the moment, we’ve got a lot of exciting demos: DALL-E, GPT-3, things like that. But if you ask for commercial impact and ask them, “How much money are people making?” they shrug their shoulders and they say “Soon, maybe.” But that's what I would be looking for in those things. When people are generating a lot of revenue — so it’s a lot of customers making a lot of money — then that's the sort of thing to maybe consider.Something I've written about, probably too often, is the Long Bets website. And two economists, Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson, have made a long bet. Gordon takes the role of techno-pessimist, Brynjolfsson techno-optimist. Let me just briefly read the bet in case you don't happen to have it memorized: “Private Nonfarm business productivity growth will average over 1.8 percent per year from the first quarter of 2020 to the last quarter of 2029.” Now, if it does that, that's an acceleration. Brynjolfsson says yes. Gordon says no…But you want to pick a bigger cutoff. Productivity growth in the last decade is maybe half that, right? So they're looking at a doubling. And a doubling is news, right? But, honestly, a doubling is within the usual fluctuation. If you look over, say, the last 200 years, and we say sometimes some cities grow faster, some industries grow faster. You know, we have this steady growth rate, but it contains fluctuations. I think the key thing, as always, when you're looking for a regime change, is you're looking at — there's an average and a fluctuation — when is a new fluctuation out of the range of the previous ones? And that's when I would start to really pay attention, when it's not just the typical magnitude. So honestly, that's within the range of the typical magnitudes you might expect if we just had an unusually productive new technology, even if we stay in the same mode for another century.When you look at the enthusiasm we had at the turn of this century, do you think we did the things that would encourage rapid growth? Did we create a better ecosystem of growth over the past 20 years or a worse one?I don’t think the past 20 years have been especially a deviation. But I think slowly since around 1970, we have seen a decline in our support for innovation. I think increasing regulations, increasing size of organizations in response to regulation, and just a lot of barriers. And even more disturbingly, I think it’s worth noting, we’ve seen a convergence of regulation around the world. If there were 150 countries, each of which had different independent regulatory regimes, I would be less concerned. Because if one nation messes it up and doesn’t allow things, some other nation might pick up the slack. But we’ve actually seen pretty strong convergence, even in this global pandemic. So, for example, challenge trials were an idea early voiced, but no nation allowed them. Anywhere. And even now, hardly they’ve been tried. And if you look at nuclear energy, electric magnetic spectrum, organ sales, medical experimentation — just look at a lot of different regulatory areas, even airplanes — you just see an enormous convergence worldwide. And that's a problem because it means we're blocking innovation the same everywhere. And so there's just no place to go to try something new.Global governance and risk aversionThere's always concern in Europe about their own productivity, about their technological growth. And they’re always putting out white papers in Europe about what [they] can do. And I remember reading that somebody decided that Europe's comparative advantage was in regulation. Like that was Europe’s superpower: regulation.Yeah, sure.And speaking of convergence, a lot of people who want to regulate the tech industry here have been looking to what Europe is doing. But Europe has not shown a lot of tech progress. They don't generate the big technology companies. So that, to me, is unsettling. Not only are we converging, but we're converging sometimes toward the least productive areas of the advanced world.In a lot of people's minds, the key thing is the unsafe dangers that tech might provide. And they look to Europe and they say, “Look how they're providing security there. Look at all the protections they're offering against the various kinds of insecurity we could have. Surely, we want to copy them for that.”I don't want to copy them for that. I’m willing to take a few risks.But many people want that level of security. So I'm actually concerned about this over the coming centuries. I think this trend is actually a trend toward not just stronger global governance, but stronger global community or even mobs, if we call it that. That is the reason why nuclear energy is regulated the same everywhere: the regulators in each place are part of a world community, and they each want to be respected in that community. And in order to be respected, they need to conform to what the rest of the community thinks. And that's going to just keep happening more over the coming centuries, I fear.One of my favorite shows, more realistic science-fiction shows and book series, is The Expanse, which takes place a couple hundred years in the future where there's a global government — which seems to be a democratic global government. I’m not sure how efficient it is. I’m not sure how entrepreneurial it is. Certainly the evidence seems to be that global governance does not lead to a vibrant, trial-and-error, experimenting kind of ecology. But just the opposite: one that focuses on safety and caution and risk aversion.And it’s going to get a lot worse. I have a book called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and it’s about very radical changes in technology. And most people who read about that, they go, “Oh, that's terrible. We need more regulations to stop that.” I think if you just look toward the longer run of changes, most people, when they start to imagine the large changes that will be possible, they want to stop that and put limits and control it somehow. And that's going to give even more of an impetus to global governance. That is, once you realize how our children might become radically different from us, then that scares people. And they really, then, want global governance to limit that.I fear this is going to be the biggest choice humanity ever makes, which is, in the next few centuries we will probably have stronger global governance, stronger global community, and we will credit it for solving many problems, including war and global warming and inequality and things like that. We will like the sense that we've all come together and we get to decide what changes are allowed and what aren't. And we limit how strange our children can be. And even though we will have given up on some things, we will just enjoy … because that's a very ancient human sense, to want to be part of a community and decide together. And then a few centuries from now, there will come this day when it's possible for a colony ship to leave the solar system to go elsewhere. And we will know by then that if we allow that to happen, that's the end of the era of shared governance. From that point on, competition reaffirms itself, war reaffirms itself. The descendants who come out there will then compete with each other and come back here and impose their will here, probably. And that scares the hell out of people.Indeed, that’s the point of [The Expanse]. It's kind of a mixed bag with how successful Earth’s been. They didn't kill themselves in nuclear war, at least. But the geopolitics just continues and that doesn't change. We're still human beings, even if we happen to be living on Mars or Europa. All that conflict will just reemerge.Although, I think it gets the scale wrong there. I think as long as we stay in the solar system, a central government will be able to impose its rule on outlying colonies. The solar system is pretty transparent. Anywhere in the solar system you are, if you're doing something somebody doesn't like, they can see you and they can throw something at you and hit you. And so I think a central government will be feasible within the solar system for quite some time. But once you get to other star systems, that ends. It's not feasible to punish colonies 20 light-years away when you don't get the message of what they did [until] 20 years later. That just becomes infeasible then. I would think The Expanse is telling a more human story because it's happening within this solar system. But I think, in fact, this world government becomes a solar system government, and it allows expansion to the solar system on its terms. But it would then be even stronger as a centralized governance community which prevents change.Thinking about the future like an economistIn a recent blog post, you wrote that when you think about the future, you try to think about it as an economist. You use economic analysis “to predict the social consequences of a particular envisioned future technology.” Have futurists not done that? Futurism has changed. I've written a lot about the classic 1960s futurists who were these very big, imaginative thinkers. They tended to be pretty optimistic. And then they tended to get pessimistic. And then futurism became kind of like marketing, like these were brand awareness people, not really big thinkers. When they approached it, did they approach it as technologists? Did they approach it as sociologists? Are economists just not interested in this subject?Good question. So I'd say there are three standard kinds of futurists. One kind of futurist is a short-term marketing consultant who's basically telling you which way the colors will go or the market demand will go in the short term.Is neon green in or lime green in, or something.And that's economically valuable. Those people should definitely exist. Then there's a more aspirational, inspirational kind of futurist. And that's changed over the decades, depending on what people want to be inspired by or afraid of. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, it might be about America going out and becoming powerful. Or later it's about the environment, and then it's about inequality and gender relations. In some sense, science fiction is another kind of futurism. And these two tend to be related in the sense that science fiction mainly focuses on an indirect way to tell metaphorical stories about us. Because we're not so interested in the future, really, we're interested in us. Those are futures serving various kinds of communities, but neither of them are that realistically oriented. They're not focused on what's likely to actually happen. They're focused on what will inspire people or entertain people or make people afraid or tell a morality tale.But if you're interested in what's actually going to happen, then my claim is you want to just take our standard best theories and just straightforwardly apply them in a thoughtful way. So many people, when they talk about the future, they say, “It's just impossible to say anything about the future. No one could possibly know; therefore, science fiction speculations are the best we can possibly do. You might as well go with that.” And I think that's just wrong. My demonstration in The Age of Em is to say, if you take a very specific technology scenario, you can just turn the crank with Econ 101, Sociology 101, Electrical Engineering 101, all the standard things, and just apply it to that scenario. And you can just say a lot. But what you will find out is that it's weird. It's not very inspiring, and it doesn't tell the perfect horror story of what you should avoid. It's just a complicated mess. And that's what you should expect, because that's what we would seem to our ancestors. [For] somebody 200 or 2000 years ago, our world doesn't make a good morality tale for them. First of all, they would just have trouble getting their head around it. Why did that happen? And [what] does that even mean? And then they're not so sure what to like or dislike about it, because it's just too weird. If you're trying to tell a nice morality tale [you have] simple heroes and villains, right? And this is too messy. The real futures you should just predict are going to be too messy to be a simple morality tale. They're going to be weird, and that's going to make them hard to deal with.The stories we tell ourselves about the futureDo you think it matters, the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what the future could hold? My bias is, I think it does. I think it matters if all we paint for people is a really gloomy one, then not only is it depressing, then it's like, “What are we even doing here?” Because if we're going to move forward, if we're going to take risks with technology, there needs to be some sort of payoff. But yet, it seems like a lot of the culture continues. We mentioned The Expanse, which by the modern standard of a lot of science fiction, I find to be pretty optimistic. Some people say, "Well, it's not optimistic because half the population is on a basic income and there's war.” But, hey, there are people. Global warming didn't kill everybody. Nuclear war didn't kill everybody. We continued. We advanced. Not perfect, but society seems to be progressing. Has that mattered, do you think, the fact that we've been telling ourselves such terrible stories about the future? We used to tell much better ones.The first-order theory about change is that change doesn't really happen because people anticipated or planned for it or voted on it. Mostly this world has been changing as a side effect of lots of local economic interests and technological interests and pursuits. The world is just on this train with nobody driving, and that's scary and should be scary, I guess. So to the first order, it doesn't really matter what stories we tell or how we think about the future, because we haven't actually been planning for the future. We haven't actually been choosing the future.It kind of happens while we're doing something else.The side effect of other things. But that's the first order, that's the zeroth-order effect. The next-order effect might be … look, places in the world will vary in to what extent they win or lose over the long run. And there are things that can radically influence that. So being too cautious and playing it safe too much and being comfortable, predictably, will probably lead you to not win the future. If you're interested in having us — whoever us is — win the future or have a bright, dynamic future, then you’d like “us” to be a little more ambitious about such things. I would think it is a complement: The more we are excited about the future, and the future requires changes, the more we are telling ourselves, “Well, yeah, this change is painful, but that's the kind of thing you have to do if you want to get where we're going.”Long-term thinking and innovationIf you've been reading the New York Times lately or the New Yorker, the average is related to something called “effective altruism,” is the idea that there are big, existential problems facing the world, and we should be thinking a lot harder about them because people in the future matter too, not just us. And we should be spending money on these problems. We should be doing more research on these problems. What do you think about this movement? It sounds logical.Well, if you just compare it to all the other movements out there and their priorities, I’ve got to give this one credit. Obviously, the future is important.They are thinking directly about it. And they have ideas.They are trying to be conscious about that and proactive and altruistic about that. And that's certainly great compared to the vast majority of other activity. Now, I have some complaints, but overall, I'm happy to praise this sort of thing. The risk is, as with most futurism, that even though we're not conscious of it, what we're really doing is sort of projecting our issues now into the future and sort of arguing about future stuff by talking about our stuff. So you might say people seem to be really concerned about the future of global warming in two centuries, but all the other stuff that might happen in two centuries, they're not at all interested. It's like, what's the difference there? They might say global warming lets them tell this anti-materialist story that they'd want to tell anyway, tell why it's bad to be materialist and so to cut back on material stuff is good. And it's sort of a pro-environment story. I fear that that's also happening to some degree in effective altruism. But that's just what you should expect for humans in general. Effective altruists, in terms of their focus on the future, are overwhelmingly focused as far as I can tell on artificial intelligence risk. And I think that's a bit misdirected. In a big world I don’t mind it …My concern is that we'll be super cautious and before we have developed anything that could really create existential risk … we will never get to the point where it's so powerful because, like the Luddites, we'll have quashed it early on out of fear.A friend of mine is Eric Drexler, who years ago was known as talking about nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is still a technology in the future. And he experienced something that made him a little unsure whether he should have said all these things, he said, which is that once you can describe a vivid future, the first thing everybody focuses on is almost all the things that can go wrong. Then they set up policy to try to focus on preventing the things that can go wrong. That's where the whole conversation goes. And then people are distancing themselves from it. He found that many people distanced themselves from nanotechnology until they could take over the word, because in their minds it reflected these terrible risks. So people wanted to not even talk about that. But you could ask, if he had just inspired people to make the technology but not talked about the larger policy risks, maybe that would be better? It might be in fact true that the world today is broken so much that if ordinary people and policymakers don't know about a future risk, the world's better off, because at least they won't mess it up by trying to limit it and control it too early and too crudely.Then the challenge is, maybe you want the technologists who might make it to hear about it and get inspired, but you don't want everybody else to be inspired to control it and correct it and channel it and prepare for it. Because honestly, that seems to go pretty bad. I guess the question is, what technology that people did see well ahead of time, did they not come up with terrible scenarios to worry about? For example, television: People didn't think about television very much ahead of time. And when it came, a lot of people watched it. And a lot of people complained about that. But if you could imagine ahead of time that in 20 years people are going to spend five hours a day watching this thing. If that's an accurate prediction, people would've freaked out.Or cars: As you may know, in the late 1800s, people just did not envision the future of cars. When they envisioned the future of transportation, they saw dirigibles and trains and submarines, even, but not cars. Because cars were these individual things. And if they had envisioned the actual future of cars — automobile accidents, individual people controlling a thing going down the street at 80 miles an hour — they might have thought, “That's terrible. We can't allow that.” And you have to wonder… It was only in the United States, really, that cars took off. There's a sense in which the world had rapid technological progress around 1900 or so because the US was an exception worldwide. A lot of technologies were only really tried in the US, like even radio, and then the rest of the world copied and followed because the US had so much success with them.I think if you want to pick a point where that optimistic ‘90s came to an end, it might have been, speaking of Wired magazine, the Bill Joy article … “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” Talking about nanotech and gray goo… Since you brought up nanotech and Eric Drexler, do you know what the state of that technology is? We had this nanotechnology initiative, but I don't think it was working on that kind of nanotech.No, it wasn’t.It was more like a materials science. But as far as creating these replicating tiny machines…The federal government had a nanotechnology initiative, where they basically took all the stuff they were doing that was dealing with small stuff and they relabeled it. They didn't really add more money. They just put it under a new initiative. And then they made sure nobody was doing anything like this sort of dangerous stuff that could cause what Eric was talking about.Stuff you’d put in sunscreen…Exactly. So there was still never much funding there. There's a sense in which, in many kinds of technology areas, somebody can envision ahead of time a new technology that was possible if a concentrated effort goes into a certain area in a certain way. And they're trying to inspire that. But absent that focused effort, you might not see it for a long time. That would be the simplest story about nanotech: We haven't seen the focused effort and resources that he had proposed. Now, that doesn't mean had we had those efforts he would've succeeded. He could just be wrong about what was feasible and how soon. But nevertheless, that still seemed to be an exciting, promising technology that would've been worth the investment to try. And still is, I would say.One concern I have about the notion of longtermism, is that it seems to place a lot of emphasis on our ability to rally people, get them thinking long term, taking preparatory steps. And we've just gone through a pandemic which showed that we don't do that very well. And the way we dealt with it was not through preparation, but by being a rich, technologically advanced society that could come up with a vaccine. That's my kind of longtermism, in a way: being rich and technologically capable so you can react to the unexpected.And that's because we allowed an exception in how vaccines were developed in that case. Had we gone with the usual way vaccines had been developed before, it would've taken a lot longer. So the problem is that when we make too many structures that restrain things, then we aren't able to quickly react to new circumstances. You probably know that most companies, they might have a forecasting department, but they don't fund it very much. They don't actually care that much. Almost everything they do is reactive in most organizations. That's just the fact of how most organizations work. Because, in fact, it is hard to prepare. It’s hard to anticipate things.I'm not saying we shouldn't try to figure out ways to deflect asteroids. We should. To have this notion of longtermism over a broad scope of issues … that's fine. But I hope we don't forget the other part, which is making sure that we do the right things to create those innovative ecosystems where we do increase wealth, we do increase our technological capabilities to not be totally dependent on our best guesses right now.Here's a scary example of how this thinking can go wrong, in my mind. In the longtermism community, there's this serious proposal that many people like, which is called the Long Reflection.The Long Reflection, which is, we’ve solved all the problems and then we take a time out.We stop allowing change for a while. And for a good long time, maybe a thousand years or even longer, we’re in this period where no change substantially happens. Then we talk a lot about what we could do to deal with things when things are allowed to change again. And we work it all out, and then we turn it back on and allow change. That's giving a lot of credit to this system of talking.Who's talking? Are these post-humans talking? Or is it people like us?It would be before the change, remember. So it would be people like us. I actually think this is this ancient human intuition from the forger world, before the farming era, where in the small band the way we made most important decisions was to sit down around the campfire and discuss it and then decide together and then do something. And that's, in some sense, how everybody wants to make all the big decisions. That's why they like a world government and a world community, because it goes back to that. But I honestly think we have to admit that just doesn't go very well lately. We're not actually very capable of having a discussion together and feeling all the options and making choices and then deciding together to do it. That's how we want to be able to work. And that's how we maybe should, but it's not how we are. I feel, with the Long Reflection, once we institutionalize a world where change isn't allowed, we would get pretty used to that world.It seems very comfortable, and we'd start voting for security.And then we wouldn’t really allow the Great Reflection to end, because that would be this risky, into the strange world. We would like the stable world we were in. And that would be the end of that.I should say that I very much like Toby Ord's book, The Precipice. He's also one of my all-time favorite guests. He's really been a fantastic guest. Though, the Long Reflection, I do have concerns about.Come back next Thursday for part two of my conversation with Robin Hanson. 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Almost 50 years ago, in December 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, marking the end of the Apollo program. In the half-century since, no crewed mission — not Americans nor anyone else — has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Despite a series of presidential promises, NASA has yet to return to the Moon, let alone venture to Mars. And despite recent declines in launch costs, thanks in large part to SpaceX, NASA remains in many ways committed to the old, Apollo-style way of doing things. To learn more about why NASA's manned missions always seem to run over budget and behind schedule — and to get a sense of the way forward with commercial space companies — I'm speaking with Lori Garver.Garver was previously Deputy Administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013. Previously, she worked at NASA from 1996 to 2001 as a senior policy analyst. Garver is the founder of Earthrise Alliance, an initiative to better use space data to address climate change. She also appears in the 2022 Netflix documentary Return to Space. Her fascinating memoir, published in June, is Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: In December of this year, it will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 splashdown and the end of the Apollo program. Humanity has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since. And for a while, the United States couldn't even get to low Earth orbit on its own. What happened to all the dreams that people had in the ‘60s that just sort of disappeared in 1972?Lori Garver: I think the dreamers are still out there. Many of them work on the space program. Many of them have contributed to the programs that we had post-Apollo. The human space flight program ended and took that hiatus. [But] we’ve been having, in the United States a very robust and leading space program ever since Apollo. For human space flight, I think we got off track, as I outline in my book, by really trying to relive Apollo. And trying to fulfill the institutions and congressional mandates that were created for Apollo, which were too expensive to continue with more limited goals. The Nixon administration actually had the right idea with the Space Shuttle. They said the goal was to reduce the cost of getting to and from space.Money was no object for a while.When you have your program tied to a national goal, like we did in Apollo of beating the Russians and showing that a democratic system was a better way to advance society and technology and science, we built to a standard that tripled the budget every couple years in the early days. We [NASA] then had to survive on a budget about half the size of the peak during Apollo and have never been able to really readjust the infrastructure and the cost to sustain it. So I'd say our buying power was greatly reduced.We'll talk about government later in the interview, but to some degree, isn't this a failure of society? If politicians had sensed a yearning desire from the American public to continue moving out further in space, would we have done it?It's hard to know how we measure public support for something like that because there's no voting on it per se. And there are so few congressional districts whose members are really focused on it. So the bills that come up in Congress are funding bills. NASA is buried among many other agencies. And so I think the yearning on the part of the public is a little more diffuse. What we want to see is the United States being a leader. We want to see us doing things that return to our economy, and we want to see things that help our national security. Those are the ways space contributes to society. And I think what we got off track in doing is delivering hardware that was built in certain people's districts instead of being a purpose-driven program as it was in Apollo.Even though the Space Shuttle wasn't going to fly to the Moon, people were really pretty excited by it. I'm not sure polls always capture how interested people are in space.We don't really gauge based on people who are attending launches. As someone who's been to a lot of launches, there are lots of people enthused. But that's not 300 million people in the country. I think that polls tend to show, as compared to what? And NASA tends to be at the bottom of a list of national priorities. But, of course, its budget isn't very large. So these are all things that we try to evaluate. I think if you believe that network news was able to track public interest, by the time of the Challenger accident — which was only the 25th shuttle launch — they weren't showing them live anymore. So that's the kind of thing that you can look into. We really like things the first time. And those first couple missions were very exciting. Or if we did something unique, like fix the Hubble Space Telescope, that was interesting. But we had 134 missions, and not every one of those got a lot of publicity.I saw you in the fantastic Return to Space documentary, and you had a great statistic saying that basically it cost about a billion dollars for every astronaut that we sent to space. Was there just fundamentally not an interest in reducing that cost? Did we not know how to do it? Was it just how government contracts [worked]? Why did it stay so expensive for so long?A combination of all those things plays into it. It's about the incentives. These were government cost-plus contracts that incentivize you to take longer and spend more, because you get more money the longer it takes. If you’ve worked in any private sector, they want to expand their own profits. And that's understandable. The government wasn't a smart buyer. And we also really like to focus on maybe doing something exquisite or a new technology instead of reducing the cost. [It’s a] really interesting comparison to the Russian program where they just kept doing the same thing and it costs a little less. The Space Shuttle, we wanted it to be reusable. But it cost as much to refurbish it as it would have to rebuild. It wasn't until recently that we've had these incentives reversed and said, “We will buy launches from the private sector, and therefore they have the incentive to go and reduce the cost.” That's really what's working.If you look at what presidents were saying, they certainly still seem to be interested. We had the George H.W. Bush administration: He announced a big plan to return us to the Moon and Mars. I think it was like about a $500 billion plan. What happened to that? That was the Space Exploration Initiative?SEI, yes. I go into this in the book because, to me, it is really important that we not forget how many times presidents have given us similar goals. Because you come in, and I was the lead on the Obama transition for NASA. I was outgoing in the Clinton administration for NASA, leading the policy office, and supported lots of those Republican presidents in between in their space proposals. Never met a president who didn't love NASA and the human space flight program. They have various levels of success in getting what they want achieved. I think the first President Bush tried very hard to reduce the cost and to be more innovative. But the NASA bureaucracy fought him on that quite vociferously.Why would they? Wouldn’t they see that it would be in NASA's long-term interest for these missions to be cheaper, more affordable?It was not dissimilar to my time at NASA in that the administrator was a former astronaut. And they didn't really come there with a mandate to do much other than support the existing program and people at the agency. When you're at NASA and you just want to do the same thing, you don't want to take a risk to change what you're doing. You want to keep flying your friends, and you have really come to this position because other people did the same thing as well. I call it, in the book, the “giant, self-licking ice-cream cone,” because it's this sugar high that everyone in it has. But it doesn't allow for as much progress.So no one anywhere really had an incentive to focus on efficiency and cost control. The people in Congress who were super interested, I imagine, were mostly people who had facilities in their districts and they viewed it as a jobs program.Yes. And they want contracts going to those jobs. Really, the administration, the president, is the one who tends to want a more valuable, efficient, effective space program. And within this, throughout the last decades, they've had a bit of tension with their own heads of NASA to get them to be more efficient Because Congress wants more of these cost-plus contracts in their district, the industry likes making the money, and the people at NASA tend to say, “Well, I might be going to work in one of those industry jobs down the road. So why do I want to make them mad?”It's really a fairly familiar story, despite sort of the interesting, exotic nature of space. It could be … banking and financial regulation, where you have the sort of a revolving door…That's what's difficult. And for me, I think writing the book was challenging for some of the people within the program to have this out there, because NASA is seen as above all that. And we should be above all that. What’s a little ironic is to the extent that we're above all that, it's because we've now finally gotten to a point where there are some private-sector initiatives and there's more of a business case to be made for human space flight. Whereas previously, it was just the government so the only reason was this self-licking ice-cream cone.So we had the first Bush administration, they had this big, expansive idea. Then … canceled— right? —by President Clinton?Really by Congress. Congress did not fund president H.W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative. But the tension was between what his space council wanted to do — which was led by Vice President Quayle — and what NASA wanted to do. A couple years in, he fired his head of NASA, brought in someone new, Dan Goldin. Dan Goldin was the head of NASA then for 10 years. The Clinton administration kept him, and the second Bush administration kept him for the first year. He drove a lot of this change. And as I talk about in the book, I worked there under him and eventually was his head of policy. And really, he was trying to infuse these incentives well before we were successful in doing this with SpaceX.So then we had the second Bush presidency, and we had another big idea for space. What was that idea, and what happened to that?We had the Columbia accident, which caused the second President Bush to have to look at human space flight again and say, "You know, we need to retire the shuttle and set our sights, again, farther." And this was the Moon-Mars initiative, it was referred to as the Vision for Space Exploration. Again, we had a change of NASA administrator under him. And I truly believe if you look, the changes aren't as much driven by presidents as they are heads of NASA. So it's who do you appoint and how long do they last? Because President Bush, it changed with his second administrator to be this program called Constellation, which was a big rocket to take us back to the Moon. Government owned and operated.So we were talking about how the legacy of Apollo has just loomed large over the program for decades. And this is another good example of that?This was referred to as “Apollo on steroids.” That is what the head of NASA wanted to do, and for a lot of good reasons, including because he knew he could get the congressional support for the districts, for the contracts that were typical for the time. You could use the NASA centers that already existed. This was never going to be efficient. But this was going to get a budget passed.Was there a real expectation that this would work? Or was this fundamentally a way of propping up this sort of industrial jobs complex infrastructure?I struggle with this question because I believe that the people creating these programs are very smart and are aware that when they say they're going to be able to do something for this amount of money and so forth, they know they can't. But they clearly feel it's the right thing to do anyway, because if they can get the camel's nose under the tent, they can continue to spend more money and do it.“Let’s just keep it going, keep the momentum going.”Yes.When did we decide that just kind of redoing Apollo wasn't going to work and we need to do something different and we need to try to bring in the commercial [sector]?I take it back to the 1990s under Dan Goldin. As head of NASA, he started a program that was a partnership with industry. It was going to be a demonstration of a single-stage reusable launch system. Lockheed Martin happened to win it. It was called the X-33. They planned to develop a fully reusable vehicle that would be called VentureStar, but it ran into technical problems. They were trying to push doing more. And the Space Shuttle was still flying, so there weren't these incentives to keep it going. They canceled the program. Lockheed wasn't going to pick it up. The dot-com bubble burst. The whole satellite market that was going to be where they got most of their money — because the premise is “NASA just wants to be one customer, not pay for the whole system.” So really, the second Bush administration in the same post-Shuttle Columbia accident policy initiative said, “We are going to …” — again, very consistent with previous presidents, but again said — “… use the private sector to help commercialize and lower costs.” And the first Bush administration did that with a program — not for people, but for cargo — to the International Space Station. SpaceX won one of those contracts in 2006. So when I came back in 2008, and then 2009 with our first budget request, we asked for money for the crew element, meaning taking astronauts to the space station to also be done privately. Most people hated that idea at first.I've seen a video of a hearing, and a lot of senators did not like this idea. Apollo astronauts did not like this idea. Why did people not like this idea?Well, let's see: There were tens of billions of dollars of contracts already let to Constellation contractors. And this meant canceling Constellation. Because the first part of that, although it was designed (at least in theory) to go back to the Moon, it was going to take us to and from the space station. But the program in the first four years, had slipped [to] five years. It was costing a couple billion dollars a year. And again, we're still sort of doing that program. And maybe we'll get to that.I don't think it ever really goes away.The Commercial Crew Program, we were able to carve out enough dollars to get it started. And this was not something that was easy. It was not something I think most people in the Senate, or the former Apollo astronauts who testified against us, thought was possible. I think there was just this sense — and again, Elon and SpaceX was very, very likely to be the winners of these competitions. People just didn't believe he could do it.They thought only government could do something this spectacular. Elon Musk encountered a lot of skepticism from astronauts. And he found this personally and emotionally really hurtful, to see these astronauts be skeptical. To be charitable, they were skeptical.I did too. I knew them, and I knew that they thought the policies I was driving were wrongheaded. Gene Cernan said it would lead to the end of America as we know it, the future of his grandchildren were at stake. So these were not easy things to hear. And I'm often asked, why did I even believe it would work? Well, let's face it, nothing else had worked. It had been 50 years since Apollo! And we hadn't done it, as you said in the opening of the program. We also know that in every other aspect of transportation or large initiatives that the government takes on, the idea isn't to have the government own and operate them. We didn't do that with the airlines. So this was inevitable, and the private sector was launching to space. They had been since the ’90s. We had turned over management of the rocket systems. So I didn't necessarily know SpaceX was going to make it, but I knew that was the way to drive innovation, to get the cost down, and to get us to a place where we could break out of this giant, self licking ice-cream cone.But now we have a system that's sort of betwixt and between. The next sort of big thing is this moon mission, Artemis, that is a little bit of the old way and a little bit of the new way. We're going to be using a traditional Apollo-style developed rocket, the SLS. I think a SpaceX lander. Why aren't we going to launch this on a very big SpaceX rocket? Why are we still doing it a little bit of the old way?Because I failed, basically. This grand bargain that we made with Congress, where we got just enough money to start a commercial crew program, kept the contracts for Constellation.SLS is Constellation, for the listeners.It is. It’s the same. They protected the contracts and the rocket changed a little bit, but the parts — again, the money; follow the money — all are still flowing to Lockheed, Boeing, Aerojet. The Space Launch System is often called the “Senate Launch System.” I don't happen to agree, because it wasn't just the Senate that did this. The call, as I say, was coming from inside the house: NASA people wanted to build and operate a big rocket. That's why they came to NASA. They grew up seeing Apollo. They wanted to launch their version of the Saturn V. And they ultimately were willing to give up low Earth orbit to the private sector, if they could have their big rocket. So that's back in 2011 that this is established, this bifurcated system. They were supposed to launch by 2016. It's now 2022. They haven't even launched a first test flight. This first test flight, now at $20 billion-plus — the capsule on top, called Orion, is exactly from Constellation, so it's been being funded at more than a billion a year since 2006. This is not a program that should be going forward, and we are about to do a big test of it, whether it works or not. We'll have a bigger decision, I think, when it's over if it's successful than if it's not. I think if it's not successful, we ought to just call it.Even if it's successful, is this the last gasp of this kind of manned space exploration? I mean, even if we get to the Moon by … when? I'm not sure when the current moving target is.Well, I believe we're continuing to say now, 2025, the current NASA administrator.Any program that expensive is not going be sustainable, even if it should work technically.This is my view. This is the whole premise of Escaping Gravity, is we have to get out of not just our gravity well of Earth, but the system that has been holding us back. And I'd love to say it's the last gasp, but I thought that about Constellation. And it should have been true about the shuttle.Can you give me a sense of the cost difference we’re talking about?The Space Launch System with Orion, which is the rocket and capsule, together have cost us over $40 billion to develop. Each launch will also cost an additional $4 billion, and we can only launch it once every two years. So in Apollo, we launched I think 12 times in five years, once we started the program. If we start now with the program, in next five years the most we can launch is three times. This is not progress. And those amounts of money, compared to the private sector… It hasn't launched something bigger than SLS yet, but let's just take the Falcon Heavy, which launches about 80 percent of the size of payload that the SLS can. SpaceX developed that without any public money. And the per launch costs are in the $100-150 million range. It's just not comparable.Does the current head of NASA understand these cost calculations?Well, he recently said — Administrator Bill Nelson, former Florida senator — that he thinks that this cost-plus system that NASA has been using is a “plague” on the agency. So this is fascinating, because he's basically patient zero. He required us to do the SLS. He's very proud of that to this day. So he can brag about the monster rocket, he calls it that, and yet still say the way we are doing it is a plague. So you'd think he doesn't want to do things this way anymore. And as you said, SpaceX is developing the lander for the Moon program. So it's really hard to know what the outcome will be because, like you, I don't believe it's sustainable to spend so much for something we did 50 years ago that isn't going to be reusable, the costs aren't coming down, we aren't going to be able to do it more often. All the things that mean “sustainable.” But yet, that is the government's plan.It just seems hard to believe that that plan is not just sustainable to go to the Moon and develop a permanent moon facility … and then to Mars, which obviously is going to cost even more. It seems like, if as a country we decide this is something we want to do, that inevitably it's going to be a private-sector effort.You know, it's really related to, as a country deciding what we're going to do. Because if there was some compelling reason, as there was in the ‘60s, the nation's leaders felt to go to the Moon for the first time. If that came together for Mars, maybe the public would be willing to spend trillions. But if you can reduce the cost through the private-sector use of vehicles, you can still advance US goals. I try to make the case. This isn't an either/or. This can be a NASA-led and industry-developed program, just as we have done with so much of our economy. And to me, that is inevitable. It's just, how much are we going to waste in the meantime?Is the threat of China enough of a catalyst to give more momentum toward American efforts in space?China is certainly a threat to the United States in many ways — economically, politically, and so forth — and therefore, I think, seen as a big reason for us to return to the Moon. (We say it's a race with China. I'm like, “Okay, for the 13th person. Because don't forget, we won.”) But doing that in a way that drives technology and leaves behind a better nation, that's how you win in these geopolitical races. And so to me, yes, we are making the case (I think NASA, in particular) that we need to beat China, in our case, back to the Moon. It's about leadership. And I don't think we lead or help our nation by protecting industries that then aren't competitive. I still see the need to evolve from the system, and I fully believe we will be back on the Moon before the Chinese. But they are someone we have our eye on. They are really the only other nation right now with an advanced human space flight program.One of my favorite TV shows, which I probably write too often about, is the Ronald D. Moore show For All Mankind. And for listeners who don't know, the premise is that the space race never ends because the Soviets get there first. They beat us to the Moon, and then we decide that we’re going to keep going. And the race just keeps going through the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and the ‘80s. I'm sure somewhere in NASA there were great plans that after Apollo we were going to be on the Moon. … Can you imagine a scenario where all those plans came true? Was it inevitable that we were going to pull back? Or could we at this point already have Mars colonies or Moon colonies? That the wildest dreams of the people in the ‘60s, that we actually could have done it, there was a path forward?Of course. I could be on a much longer show about For All Mankind, because I, too, am really invested in it.We did a great podcast with Ronald D. Moore.Oh good. I know of the astronauts who advise. And of course, I find it hilarious what they take out of it. And the astronauts' perspective about how things are actually run in Washington is just hilarious. And one of the reasons I wrote Escaping Gravity, all astronauts should understand that presidents don't sit there at their desk, wondering what NASA's doing today.If I was president, I would be wondering that.And they have, of course, a former astronaut becoming the president. They want it to go well. Like I said, all presidents love it. But of course NASA's plan, and really from von Braun, was Moon on the way to Mars and beyond. Science fiction really wrote this story. And I think people who were drawn to NASA are all about trying to make that a reality. And in many ways we're doing it.What would things look like right now without SpaceX? I’m sure you know that SpaceX, as well as Blue Origin, there's a certain criticism that this is some sort of vanity effort by billionaires to take us to space. But I'm assuming that you don't view this whole effort as a vanity effort.Yes. My book is called Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. And I'm very clear in it that there wouldn't be much transformation going on without SpaceX. So yes, they are absolutely critical to this story. It would've taken longer without them. We don't even have Boeing, their second competitor, taking astronauts yet to the station. But we would've had competitors. There were people before Elon. I think Bezos, and Blue Origin, is making progress and will do so. There are other companies now online, the Dream Chaser, to take cargo to the space station, private sector. But make no mistake, without them, without Elon and his vision and his billions, Artemis wouldn't be even more than a great name for a human space flight program. Because we didn't have the money for a lunar lander that anyone else bid, except for SpaceX. They have overachieved. They have set the bar and then cleared it. And every time they compete, they end up getting less money than the competition and then they beat them. So it's impossible, really, to overstate their value. But I still believe that the policies are the right ones to incentivize others in addition to SpaceX. And if they weren't here, we would not be as far along for sure.I am now going to ask you to overstate something. Give me your expansive view of what a new space age looks like. Is it just humans going out into deep space? Is it a vibrant orbital space economy? What does that new space age look like?To me, it is a purpose-driven space age so we are utilizing fully that sphere beyond our atmosphere. So that's in lower Earth orbit, using that to help society today, we can measure greenhouse gases in real time, the emissions. We can, as we look forward, go beyond certainly Mars, to places where humanity must go if we want to be sustained as a species. I think the purpose of space is like saying, “What was the purpose of first going into the oceans?” It's for science. It's for economic gain. It's for national security. Similar to the atmosphere and now space. It's a new venue where we all can only just imagine what is possible today, and it we will be there. I personally like that Jetsons future of living in a world where I have a flying car on another planet.Lori, thanks for coming on the podcast.Thank you for having me. 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

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee’s quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist’s resource curse. And so certainly in terms of a popular writer, he was the one that I read and thought, “If I can do this as well as him, I will be very pleased.”I probably didn't read as much science fiction as most people would in high school, unless it was a literary author like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. I just find bad writing rebarbative, and a lot of science fiction struggles with bad writing. So this is the problem, of course, that Douglas Adams famously identified. And one of the reasons why he wrote the Hitchhiker’s books was to show that you could combine science fiction with good writing.In all good works of speculative fiction of the alt-history variant, there's an interesting jumping-off point. I would imagine you had a real “Eureka!” moment when you figured out what your jumping-off point would be to make this all plausible. Tell me about that.Well, yes. I did. Once I realized that points of departure hugely mattered, I then went and read people like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The point of departure for him is the assassination of Roosevelt. I went and read SS-GB [by] Len Deighton, a great British spycraft writer but also a writer of speculative fiction. And in that case, Britain loses the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the putative land invasion of the UK, is successful. And I really started to think about this and I'm going, "Okay, how are you going to do this point of departure? And how are you going to deal with certain economic issues?"I'm not an economist, but I used to practice in corporate finance so I've got the sort of numerical appreciation for economics. I can read an economics paper that's very math heavy because that's my skill based on working in corporate finance. And I knew, from corporate finance and from corporate law, that there are certain things that you just can't do, you can't achieve in terms of economic progress, unless you abolish slavery, basically. Very, very basic stuff like human labor power never loses its comparative advantage if you have just a market flooded with slaves. So you can have lots of good science technology, and an excellent legal system like the Romans did. And they reached that point economists talk about of takeoff, and it just never happens. Just, they miss. It doesn't quite happen.And in a number of civilizations, this has happened. It's happened with the Song dynasty in China. Steve Davies has written a lot about the Song dynasty, and they went through the same thing. They just get to that takeoff point and then just … fizzled out. And in China, it was to do with serfdom, basically. These are things that are very destructive to economic progress. So you have to come up with a society that decides that slavery is really shitty. And the only way to do that is for them to get hooked on the idea of using a substitute for human labor power. And that means I have to push technological innovation back to the middle republic.So what I've done for my point of departure is at the Siege of Syracuse [in 213-212 B.C.]. I have Archimedes surviving instead of being killed. He was actually doing mathematical doodles outside his classroom, according to the various records of Roman writers, and he was killed by some rampaging Roman soldier. And basically Marcellus, the general, had been told to capture Archimedes and all his students and all their kids. So you can see Operation Paperclip in the Roman mind. You can see the thinking: “Oh no, we want this fellow to be our DARPA guy.” That's just a brilliant leap. I love that.And that is the beginning of the point of departure. So you have the Romans hauling all these clever Greek scientists and their families off and taking them to Rome and basically doing a Roman version of DARPA. You know, Operation Paperclip, DARPA. You know, “Do all the science, and have complete freedom to do all the…” — because the Romans would've let them do it. I mean, this is the thing. The Romans are your classic “cashed up bogans,” as Australians call it. They had lots of money. They were willing to throw money at things like this and then really run with it.You really needed both. As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn’t use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There’s just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn’t work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that’s a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country’s wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don’t get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset’s case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a s**t.And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it’s uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done. The topic of the Industrial Revolution has been a frequent one in my writings and podcasts. And one big difference between our Industrial Revolution and the one you posit in the book is that there was a lot of competition in Europe. You had a lot of countries, and there was an incentive to permit disruptive innovation — where in the past, the proponents of the status quo had the advantage. But at some point countries realized, “Oh, both for commerce and military reasons, we need to become more technologically advanced. So we're going to allow inventors and entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, even if it does alter that status quo.” But that's not the case with Rome. It was a powerful empire that I don't think really had any competitors, both in the real world and in your book.That and the chattel slavery is probably why it didn't finish up having an industrial revolution. And it's one of the reasons why I had to locate the innovation, it had to be in the military first, because the military was so intensely respected in Roman society. If you'd have got the Roman military leadership coming up with, say, gunpowder or explosives or that kind of thing, the response from everybody else would've been, “Good. We win. This is a good thing.” It had to come from the military, which is why you get that slightly Soviet look to it. There is a reason for that. The society is more prosperous because it's a free-market society. The Romans were a free-market society. All their laws were all sort of trade oriented, like English law. So that's one of those things where the two societies were just really similar. But in terms of technological innovation, I had to locate it in the army. It had to be the armed forces first.In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate’s, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”And I actually based Linnaeus's dad — the angel as he's referred to, Angelus, in the Kingdom of the Wicked books, and his personality is brought out very strongly — I actually based him on John Rylands. Manchester's John Rylands, the man who gave his name to the Rylands Library in Manchester. He was meant to be the portrait of the entrepreneurial, Manchester industrialist. And to this day, authors always have regrets, you don't always get to win the argument with your publisher or your editor, I am sorry that that background, that world-building was taken out of Kingdom of the Wicked and finished up having to be published elsewhere in an anthology. Because it provided that entrepreneurial story that you’re talking about: the factory owner who is the self-made man, who endows libraries and technical schools, and trains apprentices, and has that sort of innovative quality that is described so beautifully in Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is full of people like that. And this book as well, I've just bought: I've just bought Arts and Minds, which is about the Royal Society of Arts. So this is one of those authorial regrets: that the entrepreneur character wasn't properly fleshed out in the two published books, Kingdom of the Wicked book one and book two. And you have to get Shapers of Worlds if you want to find out about Linnaeus's industrialist dad.Is this a world you'd want to live in?Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don’t write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal. But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.And as you mentioned, industry: how those values also might influence which areas technology might focus on, which I think is a great point.I did that quite deliberately. There is a scene in the first book in Kingdom of the Wicked where Linnaeus — who's the Whig, the nice Whig, the lovely Whig who believes in civil rights and justice and starts sounding awfully Martin Luther King-ish at various points, and that kind of thing; he’s the most likable form of progressive, Stoic Roman ideas — and when he encounters a child that the parents have kept alive, a disabled child, which in his society would just be put down at birth like Peter Singer, they have Peter Singer laws, he's horrified. And he doesn't even know if it's human.I actually wrote a piece about this couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, for Liberty Fund. I did find that people wanted to live in this sort of society. And I just sort of thought, “Hmm, there are a lot more people out there who clearly agree with things like eugenics, Peter Singer laws, a society that has absolutely no welfare state. None.” There are people who clearly find that kind of society attractive. And also the authoritarianism, the Soviet-style veneration of the military. A lot of people clearly quite like that. And clearly like that it’s a very orderly society where there are lots of rules and everybody knows where they stand. But even when the state is really, really very powerful.I deliberately put a scene in there, for example, where Pilate’s expectorating about compulsory vaccinations — because he's a Roman and he thinks compulsory vaccinations save lives and he doesn't give a s**t about your bodily integrity. I did try to leave lots of Easter eggs, to use a gaming expression, in there to make it clear that this is a society that's a bit Gattaca-ish. I did that for a reason.I don't know if there's a sequel in mind, but do you think that this world eventually sort of Christianizes? And if this is what the world looks like 2000 years ago, what would that world look like today?I haven't thought of the answer to the first one. I must admit. I don't really know the answer to that. But in the second one, I did discuss this in quite a bit of detail with my then partner. And she said, “I honestly think that with that sort of aggressiveness and militarism, they will finish up conquering the planet. And then it'll start looking like a not-nice version of Star Trek. It won't be the Federation. It will be much more likely to be Khan and the Klingons and they'll start looking really, really Klingon basically.” That was her comment at the time.Like a more militaristic version of Star Trek.Yeah. But sort of very militarized and not the Prime Directive or any of that. Obviously Star Trek is very much an American conception of Americans in space. My Romans in space would look much more like the Centauri out of Babylon 5 or the Klingons in Star Trek. They would be much more aggressive and they’d be a lot more ambiguous…I don't know how much of a Star Trek fan you are, but of course there's the mirror universe, which kind of looks like that. We have the evil Kirk and the evil Spock. There's still advance, but there's like a Praetorian Guard for the captain and…All of that. Yes. I hadn't really thought about the first question, but the second question I thought, “Yeah, if this persists into the future, imagining a hypothetical future, then I think you are going to be dealing with people who are really, really quite scary.”Apparently you're not working on a sequel to this book, but what are you working on? Another book?Yes. I'm actually being pursued at the moment by a British publisher, who I won't drop into it because otherwise, if I say the name, then I will never, never be forgiven. And then they will insist on me writing a book. I'm never going to be the world's most super productive novelist. I think that I may finish up in my life writing maybe another two. I look at Stephen King. That man writes a door stopper of a book every time he sits down to have a hot meal. Incredible. How does he do it? I'm not that person.Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Thank you very much for having me. 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