Faster, Please! — The Podcast

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

What is progress and how do we get more of it? It's a core question here at Faster, Please! and something Jason Crawford thinks a lot about. Jason is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Jason explains how progress is about more than just economic growth, discusses where it comes from, and distinguishes progress from utopianism. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: You are part of a growing intellectual movement that aims to understand two big things: why human progress happens and how to speed it up. First of all, why is this of interest to you?Jason Crawford: Most of my career for almost 20 years was in the tech industry. I have a background in computer science. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup co-founder. And about five-plus years ago, I got really interested in progress. It began as an intellectual hobby, and I just came from the perspective that, like, the progress in material living standards over the last couple of hundred years—I mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in industrialized countries—is basically the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity, or at least way up there. You know, in the top three. And if you care about human wellbeing and you look at this fact of history, I think you have to be a little awestruck about it. And I think you have to ask three basic questions: First, how did this happen? Second, why did it take so long to really get going? And three, how can we continue it into the future?What do we mean by progress? Are you talking about spending power or are you talking about human lifespan? Leisure time? People could define it differently. When we use the word progress during this conversation, what are you talking about?Yeah, there's at least two basic and important meanings to progress. So one is progress in our capabilities, our ability to understand and control the world: science, technology, industry, infrastructure, wealth accumulation, and so forth. But then there's …I love that wealth accumulation part. Oh man, I love hearing about that.Surplus wealth is very important, and infrastructure is a form of wealth, right? But then there's an even deeper—I think the ultimate meaning of progress, the true progress of human progress is progress in human wellbeing: the ability to live longer, happier, healthier lives, lives of more freedom and choice and opportunity with more things open to us, more ability for self-actualization. Ultimately, it's that human progress that matters, and it’s why we care about this.I think a lot about choice and opportunity, the human freedom aspect. Sometimes when I talk about it, people will kind of condense it down to “stuff.” Like, “You just want more stuff. How much more stuff do we need?” But I think there is that deeper meaning, and I don't think most people who are interested in progress and these questions are interested in it just because they just think we want more stuff.First off, stuff is underrated. People like to dismiss it as if material comforts don't matter. They matter a lot. And I think people just take the current level of affluence for granted and they don't think about how life could be way better. You know, people in 1800 if you could ask them, they would probably say they were fairly satisfied with their lives as well. They had no idea what was possible. But you're right that it's not just about stuff. I mentioned choice and opportunity. Think about the ability that the average person has (at least the average person in a reasonably wealthy country) to live where they want, to have the kind of job that they want instead of having to be a farmer or just having to accept the trade that their father had, the ability to marry whom they want when they want, to have children or not and how many children to have and when to have them, the ability to go on vacation.There are a lot of these things that we take for granted now that people did not always have. So it's not just about a full belly and a roof over your head and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Those are great things. And, again, they're underrated. But it's also about romance and knowledge and exploration and excitement and adventure and self-actualization, and self-expression—all of those very human values, which are psychological values. Those are also supported and enabled by material progress.Do we still not know how progress happens, for the most part? We know institutions are important. Deirdre McCloskey talks about the Bourgeois Deal, in which innovators said, “Let me creatively destroy the old and bad ways of doing things, the scythes, ox carts, oil lamps, propeller planes, film cameras, and factory lacking high-tech robots, and I will make you all rich.” Do we need to know more than that?Those questions that I posed earlier, I'm obviously not the first person to ask any of them or even to deeply study them. So two things: First off, I think that while the knowledge is out there and is maybe well known to academic experts who study this stuff, I don't think it's ever been given really great popular treatment. And definitely not one that goes into … remember the very first question that I posed was literally, how did it happen? So when I started, I went into this study and I'm now writing a book because there was a book that I wanted to read five years ago and I couldn't find it. It didn't exist. I don't think it does exist. I wanted to learn in one volume, in one summary, what were the major discoveries and inventions that created the modern world, and that gave us this standard of living?And I wanted to really understand what were we doing wrong that made agricultural productivity so low? What were we doing wrong that made disease so rampant, right? What were we doing wrong such that most people were stuck going not very far outside their village their entire lives? And I mean, doing wrong: I say that a little tongue in cheek. Obviously we were doing something wrong. We just didn't know how to do it better, but what did we have to learn? So I don't think that that has ever been put together in a very accessible summary for the general public in a single volume.You said a lot of this information is out there, but it's more academic so we need to popularize it. Though, for sure, we're not just talking about old papers that we're going to refer to. There's plenty of new research on the Industrial Revolution; on how you create today a modern, fast-growing economy; how you increase productivity growth. It's a well-researched topic on which the research is definitely ongoing.Yeah, absolutely. So that's the other part of it, which is that even within academia, even at the frontiers of knowledge among the experts, there are open questions and there's still, frankly, a fair bit of disagreement. If you want a good summary of the academic literature and where the state of the discussion is at this point, there's a new book that just came out, How the World Became Rich, by Koyama and Rubin. It does a good job of summarizing [of] the academic literature. I do think there's a fairly good consensus, or at least among most folks in the field, that institutions and culture somehow are at the root of a lot of both how the original Great Enrichment began and also why some nations have caught up and others haven't.I think there are still a good amount of open questions at a sort of fine-grained detail level: If it's institutions and culture, which institutions exactly? And which aspects of culture really make the difference? You can look at Britain and you can say they were able to create the Industrial Revolution, in part, because they had a great deal of economic freedom among other things. But then you can also look at various Asian countries that have caught up in a large part in terms of economic growth with some economic freedom, but certainly not the level that Britain had. And even Britain was sort of weirdly missing things. Like, for more than a century after the South Sea bubble in 1720 it was extremely difficult to create a corporation, let alone a limited liability corporation, right? So you could make a partnership like Boulton and Watt, but to do a corporation I believe required an act of Parliament for over a hundred years. Now, making it easy to create corporations is sort of a key institution and ultimately a key part of economic freedom. Britain was able to start the Industrial Revolution without that. So if you want to really understand what's going on here, you have to get to a pretty fine-grained level. And I think that is still an open area of research.I think that's an interesting point. You bring up corporations. It's not just technology; it's not just the steam engine or the combustion engine or Moore's law and the microchip. It's not just these bits of technology that somehow happen and thank goodness they did. And maybe in the future will get more. It's broad; it's really kind of a holistic, whole-society thing where you have culture, you have institutions, you certainly have innovators and entrepreneurship. So it's figuring out all these things. Why I find it so fascinating is that it provides a lens to examine all parts of human activity. In my newsletter on Substack, I write about movies and TV shows and books: the cultural aspect. I'll also talk to technologists and I'll talk to economists because all those pieces added together are what create progress.You can look at economic freedom as one thing that happened in Britain that helped create the Industrial Revolution. But I also think it is not at all a coincidence that Britain was the land of Locke and Bacon and Newton. There was something much deeper than just laws and politics going on, something at the level of philosophy and culture, I think, that enabled them to break out the way they did.Part of this is the belief that you can solve problems. Your solution may create some other problem, but we can solve that one, too. It's about a belief that we can make tomorrow better. But it's not about creating utopia, because some of those solutions are going to create new problems.I do like the term “solutionism,” and in fact, I adopted that term in an opinion piece I wrote for MIT Technology Review a little while ago, where I was talking about optimism versus pessimism—I tend not to use the term “optimist” because there are different types of optimism, and you can have complacent optimism, where you just assume that there aren't going to be any big problems or that everything will go fine, no matter what we do. And that is a big mistake. But you can also have more prescriptive optimism that says, “Look, we may or may not be facing large challenges. Maybe the world is even not heading in a good direction, but we have some agency. We have some ability to work and to fight if necessary and to create a better world. And so let's go about it.” Blind optimism is just complacency, but blind pessimism is just defeatism. And neither of those are good. In that editorial, I use the term “solutionism” to try to get at this mentality that both acknowledges the reality of problems, but then also acknowledges the possibility of solutions. I think that's the mindset we need.I'm not a big believer in utopia, as long as those utopias are populated by flawed humans. But I don't think this is the best of all possible worlds. It can be better without being utopian.I think the mistake in utopian visions is the notion that utopia is a sort of static end state and then we stop and we don't progress beyond. And I have a much more dynamic view of what even utopia is or could be and of the future. My view is one of continuous progress where we keep getting better. And then we get better after that. And then we get better after that. And, and by the way, David Deutsch points out in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, that every step of progress along the way will create new problems. And that is not an indictment of progress. It's simply the nature of progress, the same way that advancements in science open up new questions that we don't know how to answer. Advances in material progress or in technology will open up new problems that we don't yet know how to solve but can solve with the next iteration of progress.There was a nice BBC profile of this progress movement that you were featured in. And it said that among progress thinkers, "There is an entrepreneurial bias towards action. The prospective benefits of a new technology dominate considerations of what a bad actor might do with it. The fear of missing out overwhelms the fear of losing everything." Do you think that's a blind spot? Are we too dismissive of how things might go wrong?I think that could easily become a blind spot for the progress community. And that's part of why I don't like the term “optimist” or why I think it can be misleading. That's why I talk about complacent optimism as being not the mentality we want. We want to acknowledge and engage with many of these very real risks and concerns. If we don't, the future will go badly and that's not what we want, and there are good examples of this. Early in the development of genetic engineering, some people started to realize, "Hey, if we're not careful with this, we could be creating dangerous new diseases." And they actually put a moratorium on certain types of experiments. They called for this and got together about eight months later at a conference, the famous Asilomar Conference—1975, I think it was—to discuss safety procedures.And they came up with a set of danger levels or risk levels for different types of experiments. And they came up with a set of safety procedures, matching those levels: “If you're at bio risk level three, you should be doing safety procedures X, Y, and Z.” So at the simplest, maybe you don't even need a mask or gloves or whatever. And then at the absolute highest level, you're in an extremely controlled room. You've got a full suit on and the room has negative pressure so that if the door accidentally opens the air blows in, not out, etc. You've got all of these things, right? And so that was a pretty effective method—proactively, by the way. Very importantly, this was not in response to an outbreak.It wasn't like they created the disease first and killed a bunch of people and then said, “Whoops. Let's figure out how to not do that again.” They actually anticipated the potential risk, but they did so not on kind of like vague fears that were motivated by just some sort of anti-science or anti-technology sentiment. They did so by just very hard-headedly, rationally, logically looking at what could happen and, how do we prevent this? And how do we make progress and also have safety? So I think, ultimately, safety has to be a part of progress. In fact, historically, getting safer is one of the overall aspects of progress. If you set aside potential tail risk but just look at day-to-day safety, we are much safer today than we were in the past. That is an accomplishment. And really a world of progress ought to be a world in which we are getting continually safer, right? If we're not, we're missing some important aspect of it.Of course, then there's the other side who assume any more technological progress will just make the world worse. I wrote this piece about a movie and its sequel I love. I love Blade Runner. I love the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. But it occurred to me that there's a lot of amazing technological advances in that movie. You have human-level AI, fully sentient robots. We have space colonies. You have flying cars, yet it's a terrible world. It's a world where it seems like most people don't live particularly well. The climate is horrible. But there wasn't really a mechanism in the film to say why things are bad other than, well, it works for the film, because it creates drama. Do you feel like you're making the contrarian argument in this society or you're making the argument which maybe most people believe, but maybe they forgot that they believe it?I think it has become contrarian to think that continued scientific and technological and industrial progress will actually lead to human wellbeing. I think that was not contrarian, say, a little over 100 years ago. Certainly before World War I, that was pretty much assumed, and you could just sort of take it for granted. And then ever since then, the wars and the Depression, and everything—that was a major shock to the Western world. Everything seemed to be going really well. In fact, people were even optimistic that technology would lead to an end to war. They thought maybe technology and industry and this economic growth and everything and free trade was all leading to a new era of world peace. And then it absolutely did not. And so that was a very rude awakening, that it turns out moral progress and technological progress don't actually necessarily go hand-in-hand. We can have stagnation or even regress on moral issues at the same time as technology is racing ahead. And I think that was a shock to the Western psyche, and maybe in some sense we have not fully recovered.At the heart of progress, is it essentially a capitalist, democratic philosophy? Or is it not necessarily either of those things? I write that I'm not going to create a better world that I want to live in that is not fundamentally democratic-capitalist. Now it doesn't have to be capitalist exactly like the United States. Maybe it's going to be capitalist like Scandinavia, but I think something that would be recognizable as capitalist and be recognizable as a democracy. In my image of the future, that's at its very heart. Is that part of progress studies or is that a different issue? Is that what you think?Look, I love the notion of a capitalist future, personally, but that doesn't mean that everybody shares that view. So historically certainly …Are there pro-progress socialists?Yeah. Well, so historically, I mean the early Marxists and in the early Soviet era, so we're very …Yeah, utopian. It's inherently utopian. I love retweeting images from the Soviet space program. You know, Soviet lunar bases. So that was part of it. But I wonder if it is still the same?It wasn't just space. I mean, they wanted to industrialize the farms. They wanted to have huge power plants. There was this ethos that technology was going to bring us into the future. Unfortunately, it was a collectivist future. And it didn't turn out so well. But, today, there are still a few folks who believe in progress and want some sort of full socialism or communism. There's this notion of fully-automated luxury communism.But mostly I would say the proponents of progress are more general proponents of, broadly speaking, the liberal order or liberal democracy or whatever you want to call it. Within that, there's definitely a broad range of political ideologies. On the one hand, you've got libertarians who say, "Look, the way to make progress is to get the government out of the way." On the other hand, you have a spectrum from that to the progressives who say "The way to make progress is to have massive government investment in progress." But what I like about the progress movement is that the very notion of progress gives us a shared goal and a value and some common ground to actually have these discussions about. And we can now actually debate all of our preferred policies on the basis of what's actually going to cause progress. And let's bring history and data and evidence and logic to the discussion. And I think that would be a healthy discussion to have.What's the biggest reason that you think you are not utterly wasting your time here? Some people would say, “Listen, we have a half century where progress seems to have slowed down.” There are a lot of theories that all the easy gains have been made. Yes, things will get better, but it's going to be very, very slow. People who are talking about leaps and acceleration forward, that is the world of science fiction. Why do you think that things could not just be better in the future, but that pace of improvement could be such that people notice it? What I'm imagining is a pace of material progress, of health, where it is noticeable. Where people would say, "Yeah, I think something's happening here." Do you think that's possible? And why are you confident, if so, that that is possible?The pace of progress is already such that people see lots of progress in their lifetime, if they are able to notice it. What are we doing right now? Recording a podcast. That's not a thing that existed 20 years ago. Wikipedia didn't exist or barely existed. The entire explosion of the internet has happened within living memory, right? Not to mention, we didn't have mRNA vaccines. Soon hopefully we'll have supersonic airplanes again and rockets to the Moon and Mars. And I think there's plenty of progress to find if you look for it.One reason why I started the newsletter was I really felt for the first time really since the ‘90s like something was happening. Even with the pandemic, I felt something was happening. It seemed like AI wasn't just about better search algorithms or something. But AI was going to be used in healthcare to create better drugs. You have what's going on with SpaceX. And then the vaccines, which seemed to come really, really fast. And I sort of felt like some things seemed to be coming together, where the progress seems to be palpable. Whatever was ever happening with the GDP numbers or productivity numbers, there seemed to be things happening in the larger world that said to me that something's taking off here. And I want it to continue again. If we're in an age of progress, I think that feeling is palpable and noticeable to people.Yeah, I hope so. But facts don't interpret themselves, and people can look at the same facts and come to very different conclusions. So ultimately, I think we need not only the continued progress to show people that continued progress is possible, but we also need the voices who are pointing this out and explaining it. Because the fact is that even in the greatest possible era, there will be some curmudgeon who says that, "This is the end. And none of the stuff is very good anyway." And even in eras where not very much progress was happening at all, like the age of Francis Bacon, Bacon and some of his contemporaries could look around at just a few scattered examples of inventions and discovery—like the new continents that were being discovered, and gunpowder, and the compass, and the printing press—and they could extrapolate from that to essentially the Industrial Revolution, which is an amazing act of vision. So in any era, no matter how well or badly things are going, there will be some people who see it or don't see it. And so, ultimately, that's why we need more popular treatment of this stuff. We need to tell the story of progress and make it accessible to the general public. That's what I'm working on.If we're talking in 10 years and things really don't seem to have gotten a lot better, what do you think probably went wrong?You said 10 years. At a very deep level, I think this is a generational project. I think changing people's attitudes at this fundamental of a level is the sort of thing that really you speak to the young. And you get through to people when they're still open to changing their minds and are still thinking deeply about the world. And hopefully in the next generation you know you can have a shift.You’ve said that every high school in America should have a curriculum of progress. What are the stories that would be in that curriculum? What would people be learning? Would it be a class or would it just be kind of in everything—it would be in science class, it would be in history class?I think it could be certainly be integrated into some of those classes. I think it falls most squarely in history. I think it certainly could be a class on its own or incorporated into the general curriculum. Now, I actually created a high school-level progress course, a course in the history of technology, essentially. It was commissioned by a private high school and is still being taught by them, I believe.That's outstanding.There's a virtual option, so even if you're not enrolled, you can take it online. And we cover a number of major topics. The major topics are agriculture, materials and manufacturing, energy, transportation, information, medicine, and safety. And then we do a little bit about looking forward to the future. But we cover what were the major developments in each of those.So in agriculture, we'll go into things like mechanization of agriculture and the invention of the reaper and the combine harvester. We'll take a look at soil fertility and how fertilizer was understood and developed. We'll look at things like food preservation and refrigeration and freezing and so forth. And so we just kind of dive into some of the major developments that took us from, in agriculture, a world where half the workforce had to be farmers and yet we still had periodic famines and also people had not very varied diets and not very fresh food. And then today we have this world where a small percent of the workforce can provide everybody with a robust, reliable food supply of fresh, varied food. That complete transformation of the food world. And we look at what created that. And then we do the same thing in transportation and energy and manufacturing and so forth. And when you're done with all those modules, all of that adds up to a really dramatic picture of how the entire world was transformed and life was transformed in every dimension.Jason, thanks for coming on the podcast.Yes, it's been great. 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

Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is also co-director of the Space Solar Power Project, which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth. Hajimiri and colleagues are designing solar arrays composed of hundreds of small photovoltaic tiles that would be linked together to form larger modules, and then those modules — flying together in formation like a school of fish — would form a hexagonal power station in space. These flexible arrays would be rolled up when launched and unfurl at their orbital destination.In this inaugural episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Ali tells me about how space-based solar works, what problem it solves, and how long we’ll have to wait before we see orbiting power stations in the sky. For more, check out my recent 5QQ chat with Ali. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: Space-based solar — putting solar panels in space and beaming the energy to Earth — seems like a beautiful, elegant solution. Why is it a good idea? What problem is it solving?Hajimiri: So the primary problem that it solves is being able to get around the days and nights, the cycles of the weather, the cloudy days, and all those things — and having dispatchable power where you need it, when you need it, and as much as you need.An advantage over ground-based solar?Correct. And the other benefit of it is that essentially you can have these systems in space for a long time, and you can route it the way you want. You can actually distribute the power; you can break it up into smaller pieces. You can say, “I want to send 20 percent to New York, 30 percent to LA, and 40 percent to, I don't know, Seattle.”Wouldn’t these panels sometimes be in the darkness, on the night side of the Earth? So how would they work?It depends on which orbit you put it in. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit (or something near geosynchronous) you are basically in the sun for most of the time, except for 20 minutes on the equinoxes. Most of the time you're not eclipsed, because you're so far away that the shadow of Earth is so small. And because of the inclination of the Earth, because it's at an angle, you would get eclipsed for 20 minutes on each one of those.And as it’s transferring power down, it doesn't have to be directly over the collection station, right? It can be at an angle?It doesn't. That's the beauty of it. Because it's a very large array, it redirects the energy. You can electronically steer it. It does not even need mechanical steering. So you can actually create a focal point of energy where you need, where your recovery of energy occurs. And you can move that very rapidly — on the scales of nanoseconds, extremely fast — from one place to another.Does it require new technology to distribute that power? Or is that basically using current technology?On the ground, we have what we call “rectennas,” which is basically rectifying antennas. These are another array of antennas that are very plain, very flat. I mean, if this were not radio, I would've had demonstrations of these things to show you how they look. But these are like thin sheets of material, like printed circuit boards that go in your computers and things of that sort, that sit on the ground. They collect the energy, they convert it to DC power, and then that's converted to AC. And then at that point, you can plug it in to connect to your network — essentially to your distribution line, the same power distribution line that you use. You can even envision putting this next to photovoltaic solar [panels] that are out there, or any other kind of power plant. It could be any kind of power plant, and you just connect to it and add and augment the power that you generate with these.So you can basically bolt this onto the existing power system?Yes. I mean, once you are on the ground station, once you go get past the rectenna and the conversion to AC, then that's basically compatible with all the other AC network.Solar power is becoming cheaper, and the land area we would need to cover with solar panels to power the whole Earth is smaller than you'd think. But traditional solar relies on storage at night when the sun isn't shining. But what you're suggesting wouldn't be reliant on batteries. Is that right?What we do allows you to send the power where you need at the time you need — and you can even break it up into different proportions. But the other thing that it does is that, since you have it 24/7, pretty much you don't need the storage, which is a big challenge.The other thing is that there are places that don't have the power infrastructure. A good analogy to this is cell phones versus landlines. Thirty years ago, there were places in Africa that didn't have landlines. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, there are these same places that still don’t have landlines, but there they have leapfrogged to cell phones.So this way, you can actually get to places that don't have power. You can think about the Arctic Circle — you can think about a lot of places, remote islands and things of that sort — that may not have power infrastructure. And this way you can enable it when you need to have the power over there.This is not a new idea. It's an idea from about 80 years ago that you're attempting to turn into reality. I wonder if you could spend a minute or two talking about what you're doing.It is an idea that I think the earliest rendition, that I know of, is in a short story by Asimov, as many ideas are. But you know, what’s different is that the technology didn't exist for doing these kinds of things in space. I mean, it sounds like a good idea, but it's also a very challenging idea in many different ways. One is that, when you put things in space, things are expensive — you pay dollars per gram. That's extremely expensive for things that you put in orbit. So one of the key parts of making this happen is to make it lightweight.The other thing is that these array elements, making it with large arrays, were not very practical up until the point where we are in integrated circuits — the same chips that go into our computers and phones. The same technology is now what we are using to make these incredibly large arrays that are very lightweight, because these are very small and lightweight.And then now, on top of it, we are making them flexible, because the way to deploy something that's of that magnitude is to roll it, then deploy it, and then unroll it. You can think about this like a sheet. These are like sails that you open up in space. Now, the technology to enable that integrated circuit, the packaging and all those things, did not really exist until recently. And that's why we came up with a new architecture for doing it, and that allows us to do the original renditions of this idea.The thinking was that we have the solar panels, and we aggregate all of the power. We have this giant antenna that points to Earth and then sends it. And in that case, you would be pointing to one direction, and you couldn't move it around because it was mechanically pointed. And if you wanted to reorient it, you have to mechanically reorient that antenna and point it in a different direction. We are doing it all electronically. So we have this very thin, very flat sheet that transmits the energy. Because of the coherent addition of all these billions and billions of sources — it's like an army of ants.So a swarm? A solar swarm?Exactly, exactly. So we've gone from the old mindset, which was what I describe as a big elephant, as opposed to an army of ants. I mean, each one of them is capable of doing different things, but because of the swarm nature, you can actually make it very lightweight and spread out.How old is the project that you're working on at Caltech?We've been working on this for close to eight years now — seven or eight years actively. We've been working on the power transfer part of it — the part that I'd been working on even before this project, which is what led to this project — for like 10 or 12 years. Wireless power transfer for both terrestrial, as well as space-based applications.And the powerless transfer is converted from sunlight into lasers? Microwaves? What?It’s microwaves. It’s radio frequencies, essentially microwaves. Then you transmit it, and then you recover that on the ground.Whenever I hear about any space project, I always think, “Well, was this possible before SpaceX? And is the reason we're talking about it because of that decline in launch costs?” Does your project depend on that, or is it just a fantastic enabler of it?I would say it's one of the four or five enablers that converged to make this closer to something that can actually be done. Definitely, SpaceX is a catalyst in lowering the barrier for space enterprises — anything that you want to do, non-governmental stuff, smaller projects — SpaceX and alike. I mean, there are other places like Blue Origin, things like that.So people are trying to do that. They are trying to level the playing field so that more entrepreneurs can get into it. Now it can be in academia, industry, or anywhere else. And that plays a role. And again, there are all these other technologies and architectural changes that also enable us. So I would say that's definitely one of the four or five catalysts that had to come together to make this happen.I've seen a video of you describing how there are small wafers that add up into bigger panels which are arranged into this giant array. Each one would be like a power plant in space. How big would each of those be?Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Each one of these power plants, you can think about them on the order of a kilometer by kilometer, or about a mile by a mile. So that is like a square mile or square kilometer. Something in that range. It depends on the orbit you choose and the size of the ground station. There's a little bit of a tradeoff. You can make it larger in space and smaller on the ground, or smaller in space and larger on the ground. So there's that trade off you can play with. But yeah, it's about a square kilometer or square mile in space, each one of them.And how much power could that theoretically generate back on Earth?So somewhere between like several hundred megawatts to a gigawatt, depending on the angles and things like that. It's a substantial amount of power.How would that compare to a nuclear reactor?It would be comparable. And it can be even higher than that in some cases, depending. The other interesting thing I should say about comparing to these other kinds of generators is that, since it's a modular system — this is actually a formation flying of satellites; each one of the modules is about 20 to 60 meters, depending on different designs for different orbits; they are formation flying in close proximity to each other — and this means that if one of them fails, you can actually replace it without having to replace the whole thing. So it's very modular. You can actually have robustness because of that.I think when they had to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, it was a pretty big deal.Yes.And I'd hate to think it would be as involved with fixing each of these panels. All we’d be doing is space walks.Exactly. That's an excellent point because the way we've designed them, one of the key elements is the cost structure of these modules. It has to be economical at the end of the day, because we are using the same silicon technology that's used for all these electronics — and all the other stuff we're making at low cost. So the idea here is: For that component, we just decommission it, let it burn in the atmosphere and just put a new one in there. We don't have to replace components. It's just like a new satellite that’s put in the orbit, and the other one is just decommissioned. And the cost structure allows for that.Would you envision this as just one arrow in the quiver? Or do you view this as something where we could get substantially all our power from space? What are sort of the potential and limitations?I think, like any other technology, if it's successful, it'll be phased in. You can't really do it all at once. Now, as more and more of these stations are going to be put in space, then you can see how this will respond to the system. But my anticipation is that it would definitely be filling in the gaps in the baseline.So, for example, if you look at the load line that the power generation has today on the Earth, it has changed because of the photovoltaics, quite interestingly. They had this duck — they call it the duck curve — because in the middle of the day, there's lower demand. The way it changes in the early afternoon, it goes up, peaks, and then comes back down and kind of looks like a duck.But the interesting thing is, now photovoltaics have kind of brought up the middle of the duck. So they've brought up this middle gap that they had. And then now it's gotten to a point that, at some points, the bulk price of power is actually negative during the day. And what this does is it allows you to fill in the gaps where you need it. So for example, you could have most of your power being transmitted to New York in the afternoon, but three hours later, you can shift that power to LA, for example.I think one thing people might say is, “We're already worried about too many Starlink satellites in orbit. These are much, much bigger! I mean, you would be able to see these from the Earth.” What do you make of that concern?So, there are different aspects to this. Is it mostly a concern about, for example, space junk and getting crowded and all those things?There’s the space junk concern. There are also just these sort of astronomical concerns, that it would be hard to do astronomy. And more sort of aesthetic concerns.The aesthetic aspect, I can't talk to. I guess the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But the astronomy aspects: Again, there are obviously going to be windows, and there are going to be the times that this system passes overhead. But just to think about things, the area that is out there at 36,000 kilometers, which is the geosync, is actually 36 times larger than the area of the entire surface of the planet, including all of the water and all the oceans and everything. If you take that area, it's a much bigger sphere. So there's a lot more room, if anything, out there compared to other things that we make. So I'm not too concerned about that.There are also people who think about, “Is it going to cause interference?” and all those things. And those are the kinds of things that we've learned how to deal with in radio systems. We have many different radio systems working concurrently and seamlessly, and we don't seem to have problems with that — like Wi-Fi and 5G and this and that. And you have Bluetooth, and all of these things seem to be working together. And the main reason is that we've learned how to do it in that respect.There's also another set of concerns some people raise. “It's a health concern. Is it going to fry birds flying overhead?” And the answer to that is actually interesting, because the answer is that the energy density that anything, even in that beam spot, will get is comparable to what you get from standing out in the sun — except for the fact that it's what we call non-ionizing radiation as opposed to the sun, because it has UV and all those things that can actually change the molecules and the chemistry. So they can cause cancer (UV does), but radio frequencies don't. All they can do is generate heat. The benefit of this thing is that with that power level, you'd recover probably close to three times, three to three-and-a-half times, more than what you recover from photovoltaics. And you can have it during the day or night.I was recently reading a big report from Citigroup about the space economy, and they went into some detail about space-based solar. That's the first time I remember reading Wall Street research about that technology. At this point, is it still so early that you're not getting much private sector interest?First of all, I can tell you that there has been a tremendous amount of interest. I mean, especially recently, over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot more. And partly I think it’s because of the fact that the technology … I mean, 10-20 years ago, it was not really realistic because of the cost structure, the complexity of tech technologies, and all those things. But now people are starting to see the pathway. So we've had a lot of interest from various places. And it's kind of growing exponentially in a way, recently.So I'm anticipating seeing a lot more of that investment. In fact, we've been approached by several investors in this regard, too. But it'll take time. It's not a short-term project. It's not an app that we can start today and have a first prototype working in a few weeks or months. We've been working on this for quite a while, and it has to continue on. We, in fact, are going to have a launch sometime soon, to have a first demonstration of some of the key components of the technologies that we are launching.The Chinese seem pretty interested in this technology.They are. And it's interesting. A lot of this thing has happened in part because of these new technologies that have been developed at Caltech and at other places that made it possible. So people are taking another look at it. There was this old kind of mindset about it, and this new mindset has renewed interest in it, because of these things. Yeah, the Chinese are interested. The United Kingdom is very interested in this. The Japanese are very interested in this. There are a lot of other efforts in other places — India is actually even interested in it. So we've actually seen a lot of interest all over the world, in this area.Is there something you need government to do or to stop doing at this stage in the development of the technology?A great question. One is, in terms of investment, definitely. These are the kind of things that, to get started, you need a big entity like government to put investment in it — in terms of research and development — because the barrier to entry is pretty large, regarding the amount of initial investment. Of course, the return eventually is going to be large, too.That's important also from a regulatory perspective. It's important for government in general — about the technologies related to wireless power transfer, both terrestrial and space — I think the government needs to be more proactive in terms of allowing it to flourish and not getting in the way. With everything new that comes in, there of course needs to be a thoughtful discourse about it. But if it gets to a point of becoming too much of an impediment to innovation and progress, then that would not be a good thing.So I think allowing these technologies to flourish — in terms of spectral allocations and other things of that sort — would be a good thing to continue to do.Are there key, deal-breaking technological challenges that you still need to solve? There are. I mean, it is fair to say that not all the technical challenges have been solved, but the pathway has become more clear over the last several years in terms of at least how we go about solving them. It's sometimes the unknown unknowns that get you at the end of the day. But we have more of the things that we know that we need to figure out. And I think we have a clear pathway.But in general, nobody has built a coherent structure of this magnitude anywhere — not even on Earth, let alone in space. So for example, that analogy that I used earlier: If you have an army of ants, you want the ants, that are like a mile apart, to be synchronized within a few picoseconds (and a picosecond is one-trillionth of a second).So the timing accuracy of that — that kind of thing … We have solutions; we are working on things. It's a combination of various advanced technologies that allows us to get this kind of timing synchronization. But those are the kind of challenges that we're trying to overcome and solve when you go to this scale. And it is something that has emerged because we've solved the other problems. Now we are at the point to say, “Okay, well, now we are scaling it up. How do we do these things?” And we need to solve these problems.How long until space-based solar arrives? Are we talking the 2030s? The 2040s?I'm more on the optimistic side, I guess. I think probably by the end of the 2020s, you will have some demonstration, some power transfer demo. We are going to have to show it soon. We are going to have some technology demonstrations.But if you want to have a substantial amount of power transferred, probably before the end of this decade. It would probably not provide a whole lot of our power at that point. That takes another decade or two to get to that point — if this pathway turns out to be the right pathway to go down.Ali, thanks for coming on the podcast.No problem. It's my pleasure. 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