Faster, Please! — The Podcast

I often write about the need for Up Wing thinking. Despite the political drama that unfolds on cable news and social media, the key divide in America is not Left versus Right but Up versus Down. Up Wingers are all about acceleration for solving big problems, effectively tackling new ones, and creating maximum opportunity for all Americans. Down Wingers, on the other hand, are soaked in nostalgia, scarcity, and risk minimization. In this episode, I'm joined by Steve Fuller to discuss the political implications of Up Wing and Down Wing thinking.Steve holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick's Department of Sociology. He's the author of several books, including 2014's The Proactionary Imperative.In This Episode* Up-Wing versus Down-Wing thinking (1:25)* America’s emerging Down-Wing coalition (9:45)* Towards an Up-Wing environmentalism (18:54)* Up-Wing politics and risk (25:31)* How Up Wingers should think of Elon Musk (31:30)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Up-Wing versus Down-Wing thinkingJames Pethokoukis: In 1973, almost 50 years ago, the futurist F.M. Esfandiary wrote the book Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto, where he posited a new political axis, where future-oriented Up Wingers and more traditionalist Down Wingers would replace the existing Left Wing-Right Wing axis. You've also framed this as Green — meaning traditional environmentalist — versus Black — the sky is the limit, perhaps space is the limit.I wonder if you could just speak for a moment or two about the tenets of being Up Wing or on the Black pole versus Down Wing, Green pole. What does that look like in the modern political environment?Steve Fuller: I think the first thing to say, given that you started with Esfandiary, who's known as FM-2030 to his fans in transhumanism, is that the book Up-Wingers actually only talked about Up Wingers but didn't talk about Down Wingers, because he was an incredibly optimistic guy, you might say. What he was really arguing in that book back in the ‘70s was that the Left-Right political axis would just be replaced by Up Wingers. There wouldn't be Down Wingers. That's an interesting aspect of what was going on back then in the ‘70s. And in fact, what he thought about as so-called “black sky thinking” — which is what you were alluding to in your question about Black being the kind of signal color for Up Wingers — he was actually talking about something rather close to the kind of internet that we have now, basically. Especially in terms of the personalized aspects of it: social media, the world-wide web, all of this kind of stuff. That was kind of what he was getting at. He wasn't really getting at some of the more profound things that I would say is now part of the political landscape in the contemporary world, which in a way makes the Up Winger or Down Winger distinction a much more visible distinction and much more salient than it was back 50 years ago.Now, I think there is an Up Wing or Down Wing distinction in a very clear kind of way. I'm the one who kind of brings in the Down Wing aspect of this. And so as you said in your introductory remarks, at least in the European political spectrum, Red means Left and Blue means Right. Whereas I understand the United States these days, with the way the states get mapped, it's the other way around. But the point is, in any case, that color scheme is gone. And what we instead have is Black versus Green. The idea of Black for the Up Wingers is that the sky is the limit. You're imagining sort of the “black sky” kind of thing. That's the stellar cosmos color. Whereas the Down Wingers are Green in the sense that they basically want human beings to be planted on Earth. It's a very Earth orientation. It is a sky versus Earth thing in a way, Up Wing or Down Wing, in the way I'm talking about it.The interesting thing about this distinction, as I think it plays out now, is that it shows a fundamental instability, you might say, in the concept of the human. Insofar as we've thought about social life and political life as revolving around humanity — how to organize humanity, what humanity is about, and so forth — we generally have had a kind of common understanding of what a human being is. And that's, roughly speaking, homo sapiens. Homo sapiens, in a way, provides a kind of outer limit to what we think about as a human. But now, with a lot of things going on — not just the stuff that has to do with information technology, where we can perhaps upload our consciousness or merge with machines in some way, even in some kind of Elon Musk-Neuralink fashion where we become cyborgs in a sense — it's not just that that's going on: There are all these potential biological transformations, biomedical transformations, which in a way could really destabilize even the biological nature of the human being. For example: human beings living indefinitely. All of that stuff would have incredible knock-on effects with regard to how we organize our social and political life, which to a large extent depends on the idea that human beings are more or less upright apes who live a finite period of time and then they succeed to another generation. Up Wingers are, in a sense, open to everything like this. It kind of explodes the category of the human, and that's why the term “transhumanism” is an appropriate term for those people, because they want to transcend the limits of the human.The Down Wingers take the exact opposite view and think the Up Wingers are completely dangerous. The [Down] Wingers think that, if anything, the problems that we have now on Earth — let's say the climate issues, but also even maybe the pandemic issue and so forth — have to do with the extent to which humans have overextended themselves on the planet. They don't know their limits. And in some sense, what human beings need to do is not to think that we're somehow above animals and nature, but rather to return, as it were, to our natural origins. And that homo sapiens may not be so special after all, and that our survival may depend on our having a more modest understanding of what our nature is. The Down Wingers basically want to get us down there. That's why these people like to talk about the precautionary principle, for example, which is to say that when you introduce any innovations or whatever, you minimize risk. You do no harm. It's like a Hippocratic Oath for the Earth. This is a view that has a lot of prominence these days. This view is even called “post-humanist,” because, in a sense, it wants to minimize the significance of the human in order to return to something that is a more stable, Earthly existence. So this is where the polarities are: some want to go into the skies and some want to really implant themselves on the Earth.In the book 50 years ago, Down Wing was not mentioned, yet it seems as though that view, broadly speaking — concerns about scarcity, about limits, thinking going to space would be a waste of money, also looking at technological stagnation over the past half century — it seems like even though Down Wing was not mentioned, Down Wing has been winning and has been the dominant ethos.I think there's a certain truth to that. I think the Silicon Valley people are very attuned to this point. Peter Thiel, I suppose, would be the main one who talks about the great technological stagnation that's been taking place over the past 50 years. I think he's basically right, and probably for the kinds of reasons you've just cited: that there has been this kind of latent Down Winger tendency. But I think, in a way, it has converged in very interesting ways with other kinds of movements in recent years to make it stronger so that it becomes a kind of social justice movement. It is no longer just purely about ecologists, environmentalists in the narrow sense; but rather, it has this much broader sense, because if one thinks about who would be most vulnerable to any kind of climate catastrophe or something like that, then one starts to bring in the developing world, the poor, the people who are already kind of unprotected. This gets then rolled into a very large social justice agenda, which then makes the Down Wing movement much more powerful, you might say, than it would've appeared 50 years ago.America’s emerging Down-Wing coalitionWhat led me to some of your writings was really the 2016 election here in the United States, when you had this weird phenomenon of people who supported Bernie Sanders, but when he did not win the Democratic nomination said, “Then maybe we'll support Donald Trump.” At first, that seems crazy. But if you start to look at things with an Up Wing versus Down Wing perspective, it begins to make a little bit of sense. Do you see this sort of merging of the populists of the left and right coming together and making this scenario maybe actually happen?Yes, actually, I do. This is where I think the Democratic Party is really in a very tight, difficult situation, to be perfectly honest. If we're talking about the establishment of the Democratic Party, it's still very much on the sort of Hillary Clinton, technocratic, broadly Up Winger, you might say, way. And Bernie Sanders was just seen as a throwback to the past. If you’re Hillary Clinton, you're basically planning for all of that rust belt stuff, all of that kind of traditional working-class thing, to disappear over time. I think that's the scenario. But of course, the point about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is in a way to keep the consciousness of the working class kind of alive. And this sort of populism isn't going to go away. To be honest with you, nowadays there's a lot of inflammatory talk, especially in the United States, about fascism. But fascism, of course, fed on this kind of connection between basically working-class disenfranchised people, who in the past would've been voting on the left of the party, but then seeing the left somehow taking off into space and not really addressing their bread-and-butter concerns. And then some leader that might be called fascist actually galvanizes and organizes this group of people. It could happen. There are a lot of different kinds of ways in which the Down Winger thing can play itself out, because I do think the environmental aspect of this is also there. But then environmentalism also has a kind of connection with fascism, too, in a certain way. It's a very complicated story, and it plays itself differently in different countries. If we're talking about the United States, it's a bit different than if we're talking about Europe.I see these Bernie Sanders-style populists on the left who are very skeptical of corporate power. And now we have conservative populists who also seem to be against big corporations. Both groups seem to hate Silicon Valley. There's also a lot of overlap on housing density. Yet on cultural issues like abortion, for example, these groups remain divided. Is that how you see it?I see that 100 percent. I don't know exactly what to do about it. It's a very strange situation. But I do think it does point to the fact that the conventional political parties are going to end up realigning at some point. In other words, they're both going to kind of break apart, not only in this country, but certainly in Britain, the same sort of thing is happening as well. There's an interesting thing about, what does politics look like under these circumstances? Because I think one of the things that contributes to the destabilization of people's finding a political home is the fact that the state — which typically was the thing that political parties were fighting over: control of the state and control over state power — the power that the state actually wields nowadays is diminishing.There are so many other players, as it were, that in a way have competing powers to the state and often can kind of prevent the state from doing various things, that then when people start thinking about political identity, this is why young people, for example, don't vote. Because they don't see anything in it for them, because they're not sure that getting one set of politicians or another set of politicians is going to actually mobilize enough power to actually get things done. And so I think that's also part of the background of this story; namely, that the state isn't something worth fighting for or fighting about anymore, in a certain way. It doesn't really anchor, as it were, the common political reality that people understand.This is also part of the world we live in, where we have so many different competing understandings of what's actually happening on the ground. And there is nothing terribly authoritative and establishment to sort of say, “No, actually this is happening. This is not happening.” So a lot of this kind of anchoring effect, this common ground stuff, that used to make actually being in one party or another party important is disappearing as well. And so this is why it all seems very blurry and people are just kind of moving around from place to place.A typical median voter in Great Britain or the United States, do you think they're fundamentally more of an Up Wing person or more of a Down Wing person?I think, generally speaking, they're Up Wing, actually. I think they're Up Wing if you ask them their attitudes towards stuff. But the problem is, when you put it all together as part of a political agenda, it often seems very threatening. And I think that's kind of the public relations problem that Up Wingers have. Because there are a lot of the actual things, like: Do you want to be able to live longer? Do you want innovative medicines that will be able to cure diseases that in the past, let's say, killed your parents or something? Everybody is for this. And everybody is for all kinds of technological solutions to solve all sorts of problems. People are actually for all this stuff. The problem is that when you add it all together, and then you look in a sense not simply at the economic cost — I don't think the economic cost is really the big deal here — but rather you think about what the implications would be for the kind of world we would live in if all of this wonderful stuff came together, and you see Up Wingers are very sensitive to the point that we would be in a different world. This wouldn't be a better version of the current world, but this would be a different kind of world. I think this is where it starts to seem scary to a lot of people when it's actually presented as a political package.I'll give you an example: There’s this thing called telemedicine, which basically enables people to send in their symptoms, to look up stuff, and then they can have access to this amazing biomedical information base that would then enable them to get customized medicine in just the way they want. It would be a maximum use of the internet for purposes of healthcare. But of course, this would involve an unprecedented level of surveillance and violation of privacy. Especially if we're monitoring the effects of people who voluntarily decide to take certain kinds of experimental drugs and stuff. Everything they do would have to be monitored and checked. When you flesh out the picture of what the Up Wing view involves, then the opposition gets traction because they say, “So you're going to sell your privacy? Is that what you're going to do? And what are you selling it for? What, to take some experimental drugs that might not work and you might not even know what the side effects are?” And so it's quite easy, once you flesh out and you present the Up Winger program — as a program, not just as a set of isolated things you might want, but as an entire political program — it then becomes easy to enumerate the various implicit costs that this is going to have. And that's when you start to raise the fear factor in the electorate. “My privacy is going to be gone. This might be risky. Blah, blah, blah.” That's where we are. It's very hard to win elections when you're operating in that space.As you’re suggesting, it's not an easy thing to poll with a public opinion survey. But I suppose if I was going to try to find a single question that might tell me where the public is, it might be nuclear energy. If you're for it, you’re probably inherently more Up Wing. If you're against it, probably more Down Wing.This is true.Which means the public is pretty split.That's a good litmus test. Yes. It's the same thing in Europe, too. It's the same thing in Europe.Towards an Up-Wing environmentalismI sense that over the past year or two — I think it's because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and energy shortages, and I think a growing realization that all these climate goals are going to be very difficult to meet without nuclear energy — that people are specifically rethinking nuclear, but then maybe people are going to start rethinking, “Why are we even in this situation? Why do we not already have abundant clean power? What is this bill of goods that the environmental movement has been selling us for 50 years, that we're sitting here having to think about radically changing our lifestyles to meet some climate goal, that we have energy shortages in Europe when it was all entirely avoidable?”This is where it gets kind of interesting, because of course, nuclear is not risk free. I think this has always been the problem, especially in Europe. One thing you need to realize, especially if we're talking about the European Union, is that the European Union actually has the precautionary principle baked into a lot of its legislation. In other words, this minimization of risk is one of the things that, for example, makes it very difficult for biomedical innovations to actually get on stream in Europe. Environmental protection in Europe is incredibly high. For example: This enormous opposition to genetically modified organisms to put in the food system. All of this is very much to do with the precautionary principle being in there. The precautionary principle says above all “do no harm,” even if it means you do less good. That's going to be a killer for nuclear. The point is, yes, we could have had clean energy via nuclear many decades ago, but it would've also been risky. It was probably a risk worth taking, I would think. And I still think that now.But nevertheless, part of what's going on between the Up Wingers and the Down Wingers is basically the attitude toward risk. Because we can do a lot of amazing things right now if we're willing to absorb just a little bit more risk. This is a tough one for politicians, because politicians, at the end of the day… One way to think about what a politician is, in terms of serving their constituency, is protecting them. So if you are in a constituency where you’ve got a lot of eco-activists raising the alarm bells — if we put a nuclear reactor here, then your water will be poisoned, you'll have three-legged cats, whatever — how's a politician going to deal with that? Because there is a small chance that might happen. So it's a very tough sell. I think we could have had a much cleaner world by now if we were willing to take a little bit more risk with regard to things like nuclear and more experimental kinds of technologies. Even genetic modification, actually, in terms of our ability to adapt to climate change and stuff like that. And risk is one of the things that often makes the difference in terms of political debate. It ends up defining the limits of plausibility for what you can put forward as a policy.For some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, to me the environmental movement has been a very Down-Wing, limits-based movement. Do you sense that's changing because of the reality of trying to hit climate goals without technology? If there's anything we've learned during the pandemic and maybe with some of these energy shortages in Europe, it’s that people do not like scarcity. They like abundance. They don't like shortages. And I'm wondering if that revelation is going to create a more Up-Wing aspect to the environmental movement.First of all, there are some Up-Wing environmental movements. One of them, I'm a fellow, is the Breakthrough Institute in California. And those guys have been on this ticket for a long time. But to be honest, their degree of success in getting the message across has been limited. And this has been true of other such movements — eco-modernist, as they're called, movements around the world. There is the issue of fear mongering. There's the fear element that is very difficult to deal with in political discourse. Once it gets unleashed, it's very hard to combat it. In the case of nuclear (and this is true, I would say, of a lot of this more progressive technology), if you look at the agencies that would be promoting it, obviously we would be talking about state, corporate, we would be talking pretty heavy players that would enable this kind of new technology to go on stream in a big way. And to a large extent, some of this technology is already available, but it's been prevented from actually coming on stream. The look of that to people who are already distrustful of all kinds of establishments and all kinds of authorities is not good. It’s not a good look. If nuclear energy was something that could be promoted from a mom-and-pop store, it would probably be much more palatable. This is a basic kind of problem, the kind of general distrust. As you know, one of the things that has come about as a result of the pandemic is this efflorescence of conspiracy theories. And who's involved in the conspiracy theories? Well, big business, the state: all the kinds of big players who would, in fact, probably be among the supporters of nuclear among many other of these innovative technologies. The look of the sponsors does not create an aura of trust in a populace that is increasingly distrustful of authority. I think that's a real basic kind of public relations problem that this whole issue has to overcome. I'm not sure how you do it, but I think that's a much bigger issue than, let's say, making people aware of what the benefits of nuclear energy are.Up-Wing politics and riskDuring the pandemic we've learned something about the issue of trust in society. What do you think we've learned about the issue of risk tolerance in society? More people than I would've guessed are very risk averse.Yes, I think that's exactly right. It's an interesting picture. I think at some point, once the air has cleared on this matter, there needs to be a thorough cross-national comparison of the response to the pandemic. Nations of the world were all over the map on this in terms of the amount of social control they put on their citizenry and so forth. In that respect, it was a very interesting living experiment, the pandemic, because of the ways in which the different political systems responded to it. The state does have a lot of power in certain kinds of arenas like health. In a sense, the state shot itself in the foot by making people too risk averse. We have been living in a world where we've been promised that the risks are going to go away and that people are going to live longer, healthier lives forever. We've been expecting this kind of uninterrupted, upward trajectory, certainly since the end of the Second World War. Anything that might threaten that then becomes a source of fear. And if we lived in a world where we realized it's going to be a kind of bumpy ride up — death rates will vary; it’s not that we're going to continue to minimize death rates, but they will vary, but in the appropriate direction over time — then people would be more tolerant of situations like pandemics, where eventually people do die more than normally die. Because the pandemic was so publicized, on a 24/7 basis you could compare the death rates of all the countries of the world simultaneously as if this was some kind of sporting league where you say, “Hey, these guys are on the top of the league. They got the fewest per capita dying today.” This is a nonsense way of managing a pandemic. It does make it look like, if you avoid death, if you avoid contamination, then you're winning. That then undermines the kind of mindset that is required for any kind of technological progress, which is much more risk seeking than that.I think that if we end up being able to cure or significantly reduce the incidence of some big key diseases, that would send a powerful message to people that technology is good. We can radically change our lives. And I wonder if something like that might really tip the scale.I think so, actually. The public relations side of all this should never be underestimated. I think you need a big win. The polio vaccine, right? You need something like that. It's not just that it works well, but that the coverage of it, the relevance of it, to large numbers of people is immediate. It's obvious. People could see it. They don't need to know how the polio vaccine works. If they know someone with polio, they understand immediately. This is the point: You need something that has that kind of level of public salience. I think people who think about this, think that is what's got to happen. How it's going to happen, where it's going to happen — it's not obvious. But clearly, from a public relations standpoint, if you want something that's going to make this kind of a gestalt switch so that people go from being risk averse to being risk seeking, you need a big win on something that a couple of years ago you wouldn't think was possible.If over the next 25 years, 50 years, we saw the precautionary principle replaced with a more risk-taking principle, what does that world look like?We could have a whole half hour on this topic. One of the things I think would be necessary is that people would be allowed, at the very least, to be able to volunteer for quite risky kinds of experiments through private contracts with scientists and others, where there is some mutual understanding that one understands the terms of agreement and so forth. And so there would probably have to be a kind of insurance agency around this for compensation when things go wrong. But what that would replace is the current system, the research ethics codes that apply universally and in a blanket fashion across research establishments, especially in academia, which ends up preventing effectively a priori any kind of risky research from happening because of the possibility of harm to the subjects, even if the subject would voluntarily enter into the research.And so that, I think, is a minimum requirement: that you would have to change the legal structure that at the moment prevents the risky stuff from being done. Because the problem is, the risky stuff does get done anyway. It gets done in China, these ethics-free zones. It gets done underground. Black market, all kinds of crazy stuff I'm sure is going on around the world at the moment, and we might even be able to learn from it. But as long as there is this kind of very prohibitionist mentality in the legal system, it is the great inhibitor. We really need to turn this into a much more contract system, not a kind of blanket ban on certain kinds of research. That would be the first step.How Up Wingers should think of Elon MuskHow should up wingers think about Elon Musk?If you're an Up Winger, and you're someone who in a way is all about taking risks and encouraging others to take risks, what better person to take a risk than a billionaire? In a sense, he’s a very appropriate person to be an Up Winger. He can afford to lose. He’s doing a lot of stuff. Some of it people might regard as crazy, but nevertheless, if public agencies were doing it, it would be a nightmare. But in some sense, a lot of the stuff that he's doing, you sort of believe someone ought to be doing it. And it's his money.When we talk about all these rich people, “What do they do with their money?” I think the idea of risking the money, or at least amounts of it, in these kinds of projects is not so bad, actually. There are a lot of worse things Elon Musk could be doing. This man could be causing an enormous amount of damage in the world. He might not be saving the world's poor. He might not be vaccinating them to death. But what he's doing is he's trying various kinds of experimental, innovative things that would be beyond the financial range of most states and individuals around the world. So I'm willing to tolerate him. This is the kind of guy who is in a position to really take risks. That's what I see him doing. Is it guaranteed he's going to succeed in any of this stuff? Most of his income comes from PayPal still! And he's using that to bankroll all the other stuff. 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

This month, December 2022, marks the 50-year anniversary of when man last stood on the Moon. NASA's Apollo missions were an awe-inspiring triumph of human achievement, but do people really care about space anymore? To discuss the wonder of space exploration, the virtues involved, and why robotic missions just aren't enough, I'm joined by Charles T. Rubin.Charles is a contributing editor at The New Atlantis, where he has published several excellent essays on space exploration, his latest being "Middle Seat to the Moon" in the fall 2022 issue. He's also a professor emeritus of political science at Duquesne University and the author of several books, including 2014's Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress.In This Episode* Will space become mundane? (1:29)* The case for astronauts (10:10)* Billionaires in space (14:29)* Sci-fi and the future of space (19:41)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Will space become mundane?James Pethokoukis: In your New Atlantis essay, you write that “to make something routine is precisely to suck the wonder out of it, to make it uninteresting.” In regards to space exploration, is it important that people have a sense of wonder to it? Is it important to maintain public support for government efforts? And is it important in a higher spiritual sense, that we have a sense of wonder about the vastness of the universe outside our own little pale blue dot of it?Charles Rubin: I think both of those are true, actually. It applies not just to government space program efforts, but also now to private space program efforts. The private ones obviously will operate in a market environment. Someday, I think it is hoped that such trips will not just be for immensely wealthy people, but will be for normally wealthy people. And they're going to have to have a reason to want to go into space. I think, as is true in many, many circumstances of tourism, it will be because there's something very cool and wondrous to be seen out there. That is certainly part of any justification — an important part, it seems to me, for both private space efforts and, of course, public space efforts. There are going to be many different reasons why people will support or be against a government-funded space program. But here also, I think that wonder plays an important role in attracting some kinds of people to those efforts who would otherwise not be attracted. The science of it, the technology of it — those are crucial things, but they're not going to appeal to everybody. But exploration and going where no human being has gone before: These are things that are going to have a broader appeal, I think.I wonder, even if we get to the point where it's maybe not common that people take a quick trip into almost space or even at the point where they can have a vacation in orbit, even if you know people who have done that, I think there will still be a sense of wonder. I've done some traveling, probably a lot less traveling than some other people. But I'm pretty sure that when I go to Italy and see the Colosseum, or if I went to Australia and saw Mount Uluru, even though I am not the first person to do that and I know people have done that, I would still probably think those are pretty awesome.I certainly hope that's true. It may be useful if I say something more about my concerns about routinization: I think that there are problems that will be faced as space travel gets more common and is available to more people. That will be a wonderful thing in terms of the success of the technology, but we will potentially find ourselves in a situation where it's going to be like flying in an airplane to Australia or flying in an airplane to Italy: I don't know how many people look out the window under those circumstances. And yet here you are flying at an immense height with extraordinary vistas to be seen around you, and we simply take it for granted.I began to think about some of this in the way I do when I was going occasionally into New York City from New Jersey. I don't think this is a train ride that is known — well, I can know for sure — it's not known for its natural beauty, and I could look around me and see that people were doing almost anything other than looking out the window. But it's kind of an extraordinary ride. You're passing through suburban America, you're passing through decaying industrial areas. There's just a lot to be seen there. But of course, it's just a train ride so who really is going to be looking too carefully at what's going on around them? I'd like to see that in our space efforts we maintain that level of interest at all levels of the journey. And again, I think that's going to be an important part of both commercial and governmental success.Is that possible? Is that an unavoidable downside? Some things are going to become common and there's always going to be a certain amount of people like yourself — I'm probably more like you in this; I always think it's cool the first time I see a New York skyline or taking a train and just seeing how one little town might be different; I enjoy that — and some people don’t, they will get lost in their phones or naps, and that's just the way we are. Different people have different preferences.Yes, and that's fine. In fact, that's wonderful. But I don't think it's impossible to open a door that might otherwise be left shut. In other words, I think these are outlooks that can be cultivated. They're outlooks that can be encouraged. I think I was fortunate growing up: My folks took us on wonderful driving vacations, and when we started out was an era of auto suspensions where car sickness was still a major concern. We were actively discouraged from reading in the car, so we learned to pay attention to the landscape. And my mother was a great one for pointing things out, and she was never afraid to hide her own enthusiasm. And I didn't do such a good job with my kids, who became readers in the car. I kind of wish that were otherwise, but I probably could have done better. Again, I think there are attitudes that can be cultivated, there are expectations that can be created, that will perhaps allow more people rather than fewer to appreciate the wonders of space flight.That reminded me of a book by the Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps called Mass Flourishing. And toward the end of the book, he talks a little bit about schools. And he's worried that we're not creating entrepreneurial — in the broadest sense of the word — risk-taking, adventurous children.Are we creating with our current education system, do you think, the kind of people who can have a real sense of awe, a sense of wonder at what they see out of a window on a spacecraft or a space hotel?That sounds like a last chapter I very much need to read. I agree. I think there are multiple tendencies in contemporary American culture that readily point us in directions that are not healthy. My hope would be something like this: that a serious, active, adventurous, risk-taking space program could serve something of the same function going forward in our time as that extraordinary, less than a decade served in the 1960s when the United States was on its way to the Moon. That really was inspiring. I look back on it and I think it's amazing. It took so short a time from the Kennedy speech to having people on the Moon. And people responded to that, it seems to me.The case for astronautsFrequent listeners will know that I love the TV show For All Mankind. And for those who have not watched it, it's an alt-history show where the space race never ends. The US and the USSR just keep racing, and it has all kinds of interesting side effects. And I remember, I think it was the end of season three, it flash-forwards — spoilers — to the early ‘90s. And what you see is this Martian vista, then you see an astronaut's boot take a step on that Martian vista. But some people don't get a thrill out of that. They think, “Fine. Build your space factories and space hotels and space stations, but anything beyond that, just send robots. Send robots to the Moon, send robots to Mars — do your exploration that way.” Certainly, you could do some exploration more cheaply if it was just robots. Is it worth the risk to be sending people beyond the Moon?I want to acknowledge your point and say, yes, there are people who simply aren't going to find any kind of appeal in this. And that's okay. I just would like to see a situation where those whose heartstrings can be plucked by this sort of thing can express it that way and can understand themselves that way. An for example, NASA perhaps be a little more forthright in stressing the adventurous and the risk-taking part of its program rather than, as it has been in the past, tending to downplay the risk. I'm not talking about making things more risky. I'm talking about admitting the risks that are actually there.We mentioned a current essay, but you had another one which was great, “The Case Against the Case Against Space.” I'm quickly going to read a few sentences from that:“We should want heroes, but heroism requires danger. That many professed shock when the idea was floated that early Mars explorers might have to accept that they would die on Mars is a sign of how far we miss the real value of our space enterprise as falling within the realm of the ‘noble and beautiful.’ It would be better to return in triumph, to age and pass away gracefully surrounded by loved ones, and admired by a respectful public! But to die on Mars — to say on Mars what Titus Oates said in the wastes of Antarctica, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ — would be in its own way a noble end, a death worth commemorating beyond the private griefs that all of us will experience and cause.”That seems to me a countercultural notion right now: that it's worth it. There are worse things than to die in that pursuit.It is a countercultural notion, but I think it's worth trying to… And by the way, thank you for that.I've quoted that passage in various things. I just love it.But we can work towards creating a world where it is at least not as unusual as it might be today. I think there is to some extent a kind of natural appeal of heroism, a natural admiration of risk taking. And we can work to bring that out with respect to the space program. And yes, of course, we should pride ourselves on the fact that we are not expending lives lightly and that we do everything we can to bring our astronauts back. But there also has to be a recognition that it isn't always going to work that way. And just because lives will be lost, that does not in any way diminish the value or the meaning of the enterprise.Billionaires in spaceWe have this “Billionaire Space Race.” Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson: They all seem to have very different goals. Musk and Bezos, particularly, have a far more expansive vision of what they're trying to do than somebody like Richard Branson. But they're certainly describing what they're doing differently. Elon Musk has talked about how we're going to be a multi-planetary civilization, have colonies on Mars. And Bezos has not tended to talk like that. He talks about creating an orbital economy, moving heavy industry into orbit: a much more grounded description. I wonder if Bezos does that because he just wonders how much interest people really have in space exploration. I'm not sure what my question is, but certainly it seems like they've taken different stances. And I'm wondering if there's an underlying concern that even though we love science-fiction films, there's just not that kind of interest in space?In a way, I think that the fact that interest in space is limited is actually something which Elon Musk's vision accommodates better than Jeff Bezos' vision. Jeff Bezos does imagine vast numbers of people moving up into those orbital colonies such that the Earth is significantly depopulated largely for the sake of ecological integrity. That presumes a huge interest in people moving into space. And to my mind, frankly, it’s quite unrealistic.But what is Musk talking about? Musk is talking about something that we know well. I understand from that book I criticized that there are problems in analogizing Earthly exploration to space exploration, but there are still similarities. We're talking about sending a small number of people on our behalf for the sake of exploration, for the sake of adventure, for the sake of the expansion of knowledge. That can be done with a relatively smaller constituency than a vision like Bezos’, which requires just about everybody somehow to buy into it. Even when we start talking about colonization of Mars, as Musk likes to talk about, even that can be a minority taste and yet still lay the groundwork for extraordinary possibilities of a human future.William Shatner recently did a quick jump into space and back with Jeff Bezos, and there was a lot of attention paid to his reaction. William Shatner said after his trip to space: “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. … My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” What do you make of that reaction?I think that his unstudied reaction immediately following the flight — I think what you're quoting is a later reflection on his experience — was more telling. Whether or not there was an element of sadness, he was moved to an extraordinary extent by his experience. And I think that's appropriate. Of course, people are going to be moved in different ways and he is certainly entitled to reflect back on his experience and put a much darker tone on it subsequently than he put on it at the time. There was some of that in what he said at the time, but I think his vision has gotten darker over the course of the last months. People aren't all going to be moved to the same…I love the idea of space exploration and that did not bother me at all. It made me appreciate Earth. It made me think we have to make sure Earth works right now because there's no place for us to go. I can understand that, thinking about Earth and are we taking care of it enough? That's totally fine. I don't think it means that we shouldn't explore space and try to go out there. But to me that's a totally reasonable reaction, and maybe also a reaction I might have if I was in my ‘90s and probably thinking more about having probably far fewer days ahead than behind.Yes. That's a nice point.Sci-fi and the future of spaceAre there books, TV shows, movies, and science fiction that you think present thoughtful visions about space or even about the future of space exploration or the future in general?Let me mention two things. I haven't gotten nearly as deeply into For All Mankind as you have, but I'm enjoying it tremendously. The show that I love so much that I haven't been able to bring myself to watch yet the last few episodes is The Expanse. I think it is actually a very thoughtful and compelling vision of a future. Lord knows, in some ways it's a terrible future. I don't want to do a lot of spoilers, but nonetheless, I think it has the root of the matter in it, that this is what a human future in space looks like. And there are going to be heights and there are going to be depths. But the opportunities for new venues in which to experience those kinds of heights and depths, there's going to be something extraordinary about it.The other thing is, there's this wonderful coffee table book. It's called Apollo Remastered by a photographer named Andy Saunders. And he has taken some familiar and some hitherto-unseen NASA footage and processed it using modern techniques. And so the pictures are beautiful in themselves, but he also has done interviewing of some of the surviving astronauts. He has, I think, a wonderful eye and ear for the adventurism aspect of space exploration. And he gets some astronauts talking and commenting on things which I was a little surprised to hear. It made me think differently about some of those Apollo astronauts than I had up to that time. It's a lovely book visually and also just quite stimulating in terms of its vision of what was actually going on among the astronauts of that period.Since you mentioned The Expanse and it's a show I really like: I've written a little bit about it, and I got into a little bit of a back-and-forth with people because I described it as a “future-optimistic” show. And people are like, “How could you say that? There's still conflict and war, and there's inequality?” Yes, because we're human beings, and whether we have fusion drives, that's going to be there. My idea of a better future isn't about creating a race of perfect near gods. It’s that we keep going on.When I think about how much conversation is about the ecological destruction of the Earth and that we're not going to have a future, to have a show that says, “A lot of things went wrong, but we're still here.” In The Expanse, it’s clear there has been climate change. I think there's a giant sea wall protecting New York. There are problems, and we solve problems. And maybe our solutions cause more problems, but then we'll solve those and we just keep moving forward. Humanity keeps expanding and we keep surviving. And that's pretty good to me. That’s my kind of future-optimism. As much as I love Star Trek, I don't require an optimistic future to be one where there's absolute abundance, no poverty, we all get along all the time.I think that's beautifully observed. I agree 100 percent. I don't think I would like to live on the Mars of The Expanse. I don't think it's my kind of place.A lot of tunnels. You're living in a lot of tunnels.But Bobbie is just an extraordinary person. She's very Martian, but she isn't entirely limited by her Martianness. She's so competent and capable and just admirable in all these ways which a future person, one hopes, could turn out to be admirable. That's very beautiful. And yes, there are terrible traitors on Mars, traitors to humanity on Mars, too. But just as you say, it allows us to continue to lead human lives in these new and extraordinary settings and stretches. If that were to be the future, it stretches our capacities, it stretches our minds, it challenges us in ways which I think are good for us. 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

➡ Reminder: I will be writing much less frequently and much shorter in November — and November only. So for this month, I have paused payment from paid subscribers.Also, I’m making all new content free without a paywall. In December, however, everything will be back to normal: typically three meaty essays and two enlightening Q&As a week, along with a pro-progress podcast like this one 👇 several times a month (including transcript). And, of course, a weekly recap over the weekends.Melior MundusHere at Faster, Please!, I write a lot about the need for optimistic, inspiring science fiction. As I’ve put it before:It’s important that our culture create aspirational and inspirational visions of the future. Underlying the rapid advance of human progress over the past quarter-millennium has been a powerful optimism about tomorrow combined with what sociologist Elise Boulding has described as a “utopian sense of human empowerment.” We have to believe that the inevitable disruption caused by progress will be worth it — if we make the right decisions.We also need to believe that we can invent, broadly, the future we want. Right now, however, it seems we think that we’ve carelessly created a future that our kids and grandkids won’t want — a future of rising temperatures and rising inequality. And since the early 1970s, Hollywood has both reflected and encouraged that gloomy belief. But sci-fi could again be pro-progress and future-optimistic (what I call “Up Wing”). It could have plenty of dramatic tension while also showing a path toward a better, although still imperfect, world.I'll often ask my podcast or 5 Quick Questions guests/interviewees to point to an example of that kind of science fiction. And perhaps no film, book, or TV show gets held up as the standard for sci-fi more than Star Trek. To learn more about the history of the franchise and to discuss its future-optimism and cultural importance, I'm speaking with Ryan Britt.Ryan is the author of the tremendous new book Phasers on Stun! How the Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World, out earlier this year. Previously, he wrote Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths. Ryan is also an editor at Fatherly and a contributing writer for Inverse; both BDG brands. In addition, he also writes regularly for Esquire, Den of Geek! and Star Trek.com.In This Episode* The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fi (1:19)* The mainstream appeal of Star Trek (5:44)* Star Trek’s future-optimism (12:06)* The essence of Trek (21:24)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fiJames Pethokoukis: When originally broadcast, Star Trek did not have great ratings. Obviously it has become an institution since then. Why didn't it do better when it was first on regular television back in the ‘60s?Ryan Britt: It's a little bit of a matter of debate. One of the people that I interviewed for my book, Marc Cushman, did these deep dives into the ratings for his books, which were these very, very in-depth books called These Are The Voyages. And his contention is that if you look at it by today's standards, five or 10 million people is a lot. Now we have all these streaming services that target these niche audiences and stuff like that. It would no longer be considered a failure. But at the time, you only had three networks. You had NBC, CBS, and ABC. And Star Trek was on NBC, and it didn't compete in the way that NBC wanted it to long term.That said, it had a very strong start. And Lucille Ball who ran Desilu Studios that produced Star Trek sent a note of congratulations to Gene Rodenberry when it started, saying they were off to a great start. But the flip side of that is we forget that Star Trek introduced mainstream American television audiences to all this stuff in science fiction that they had no exposure to before. On the one hand, five, 10 million people, 20 million people, might not seem like a lot compared to today's viewership, but back then it was a huge explosion.When talking about the original series, people often will say it was really a piece of its time with a “New Frontier” spirit. You had the Cold War analogies between the Federation and the Klingons; you could even look at Captain Kirk as a John F. Kennedy kind of character. But those are really things of the early ‘60s. And granted, it's the same decade, late ‘60s. But there was a big difference between the America of 1960–62, then getting into the heart of the Vietnam era, civil rights, the late 1960s by the time the show aired. I wonder if you think that had a role, that already by that time it seemed maybe out of step with the America of that era?It's funny because science fiction in general—this is true of all science fiction, whether it's print or film—it always is oddly a little behind. Star Trek was taking this imagery that you would see on the covers of pulp science-fiction magazines from two decades prior. The way in which it kind of looks reminds you of old issues of Astounding or Amazing Stories and things like that. But its sensibilities were coming from these ‘60s writers who were part of what was called the New Wave. People like Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad. And they were people that were pushing back against those more conservative science-fiction print traditions. So you've got this collision.In the book, I talk about how the oldest person that wrote for the original Star Trek was born in like the 1900s because of the time it was made. But then the youngest person was like born in the ‘40s, David Gerrold who was writing for the original series. So I think you have a lot of collision of generational viewpoints in the original series. You have really young writers and really old writers. And Roddenberry is somewhere in between. He's in his 40s when this is all happening, and he had a big television career before that. I think that Star Trek is a lot of different generational styles and sensibilities happening at once. I think that's also true of the later shows. Like the cliche goes, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Maybe that's why it's good: because there are these different competing ideologies. But I do think that it may mean that the original series has a little bit of a muddled message sometimes for a contemporary viewer.The mainstream appeal of Star TrekI started doing kind of a rewatch not so long ago. So, of course, I started with the original pilot, which did not have William Shatner. And that original pilot was criticized by the network as too cerebral. It was a little chilly. It kind of reminded me more of late-‘60s science fiction, something like 2001, which was also kind of chilly, very cerebral. The Star Trek we know was different. They added William Shatner, they had a captain who would hit something. (I think that was one of the notes from the studio: We want there to be fistfights.) If we had stuck with that original feeling from the very first pilot episode, I wonder if that would've made a difference, if the show would have been more popular, less popular…I think there are a lot of things going on in there, and you're right about everything you just said. Roddenberry also wanted fistfights. That's the thing that people forget. Roddenberry sort of cast himself as this person who was a pacifist and didn't want a lot of conflict by the time The Next Generation happened in ‘87. But in the original series, Rodenberry came from writing westerns. He wrote Have Gun—Will Travel. He came from writing those fisticuffs. He wanted his morality tales in an action-adventure show. The way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the fans is not the way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the writers and the producers. He sold it as an action-adventure show. There is nothing in the series bible that says anything about it being a progressive, politically peace-making show. There is nothing. And many of the writers who I spoke to who are still alive, like Judy Burns who wrote “The Tholian Web.” She was like, “There's nothing in the writer's bible that is the Star Trek that we know today. It was an action-adventure show. It was a western in space.”To your direct question, had “The Cage” with Jeffrey Hunter and the mind experiments with the Telosians and all that kind of philosophy: No, that show would not have worked. It's great that we have Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijin doing this kind of rebooted version now on Strange New Worlds of Captain Pike and those characters. That episode is great as a thought experiment. But it's not very diverse, for one thing. There's no Sulu, there's no Uhura, there's no Scotty. Those characters aren't that fun. Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Pike is depressed. He's talking about quitting in the first episode. And to your point, it does feel a little bit closer to the kind of late-‘60s sci-fi movies. But it's also closer in tone to what was in print science fiction, like a sort of cranky white guy hero who sort of has to fix something. Whereas when they got Kirk… They needed Kirk, they needed Shatner. The show needed that. The show needed the diversity. It needed Uhura and Sulu, it needed Scotty, it needed Bones. Boyce, who's the doctor in “The Cage,” is funny. But he's not Bones. When you watch “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which was the first episode they filmed of the original series with the regular cast after “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the first scene Bones is saying, “What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?” and he's hilarious. And Kirk's got his shirt off and he's working out, and Spock's saying something is “fascinating.” It's great. You don't have that in “The Cage.” So no, I don't think it would've connected with people, because the characters weren't as, for lack of a better word, romantic and fun as they became.Let me read something my friend, the journalist Virginia Postrel, recently wrote about Star Trek: “Star Trek’s fundamental appeal was not about the future or technology per se. The show portrays a setting in which smart people have new experiences and learn new things, solve important problems, and forge deep friendships. Nobody worries about money or office politics. The show’s values are humane. Everyone’s job is important and the boss deserves respect. … [F]or many of its fans, Star Trek represents an ideal workplace. Star Trek’s vision of a nerd-friendly universe made the future glamorous, but only to the select few for whom that vision resonated.”I believe her point was, and also to your point, that that kind of nerd-friendly universe may not have resonated enough when there were only three channels. But it certainly would resonate if we had today's streaming services. Her general point [is] that it's not about the future or technology; it's about something else, that gets to its enduring popularity.Something that also gets left out a little bit, which is a little bit more fundamental and perhaps sounds kind of boring when you say it, but there had never been a science-fiction program for adults with recurring characters. Ever. Doctor Who debuted in 1963, but it was a family show. Lost in Space debuted in 1965, but it was a family show. The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone: These were anthology shows, and they were also off the air by the time it was 1964. Just the idea that if you were interested in, as you say, this kind of setting—or as Virginia says, a science-fiction setting that allows for all this—there were just no characters to latch onto for a TV audience. I think that that is part of it: It’s just that it was novel. This is something people forget, because now there are a million science-fiction shows and they’re a dime a dozen. But that was novel at the time.Norman Spinrad, who wrote “The Doomsday Machine,” who I interviewed for the book, was like, “This was like for science fiction when Dylan went electric.” It brought these things out to a bunch of people. And science fiction before that is kind of like folk music. I think it was geek friendly or nerd friendly or whatever, but I think what people forget is that relative to the rest of science fiction, Star Trek is ridiculously mainstream. It only was in the ‘70s where Star Trek suddenly became niche relative to Star Wars. And that's only because George Lucas actually said, and he's quoted in the book saying this, Star Trek made that possible. It proved that you could do big, mainstream, science fiction for adults and for everybody if you had the right sort of zip to it—and he wasn't talking about philosophy or science. I think that's the impact, too. It’s just the idea that science fiction became mainstream, is because of Star Trek.Star Trek’s future-optimismI would like to think that the enduring popularity and the various other incarnations and spinoffs have something in common, which is, I guess superficially you could say, optimism. But more really, the idea that the future is not going to be perfect. This is not a show about a utopia, though maybe it seems like utopia compared to where we are right now. It's a world where there are still problems, but we can solve those problems. And maybe how we solve those problems could create more problems, then we'll solve those. But again, I like to think that the popularity is really about not just that, yes, tomorrow will be better, but it'll be better because we can fix it and just keep solving one problem after another until things get better.I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Animated Series with my five-and-a-half-year-old, this 1973 animated series, which is really interesting because I did watch a bunch of it while I was writing the book in 2020 and 2021. But now she's even older and we have a Star Trek night and we watch the animated series together. And my daughter is already hip to how this works: When the conflicts are introduced in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series or a few of the episodes of the original series that we've watched, she always knows. She'll turn to me and be like, “But they're going to become friends with it in the end.” There's a giant cloud that's going to envelop this planet in this animated series episode called “One of Our Planets Is Missing”—sounds exactly like the plot of the motion picture because it is. My wife was overhearing the dialogue. She's like, “Oh my God, this sounds terrible. All these people on this planet are going to die.” And my daughter calls to my wife from the kitchen. She goes, “Spock's going to talk to it and make it nice.” And I think that's the thing: There's always an understanding. Even a five-year-old can pick up on the pattern of Star Trek: This looks like a monster; it's not a monster. This looks like a bad person; they can come to an understanding with it.And there's not a lot of action-adventure shows from the ‘60s or now, really, that are like that in general. I was making a joke that in 2020 you had a debut of The Mandalorian (which I love) season two and Star Trek: Discovery (season three) within a week of each other, two weeks of each other, something like that. Both episodes had characters fighting against what was kind of a giant space worm creature. And in The Mandalorian they just blow it up. They just kill it. They put bombs in it, they blow it up from the inside. And in the Discovery episode, the character Cleveland Booker, played by David Ajala, literally empathizes with it and calms it down. And that's the difference. That's the difference between Star Trek and almost everything else except for maybe Doctor Who.I think it's important that we have optimistic, problem-solving science fiction. I’ll ask some guests, “Can you give me an example of something that you watch that you think meets those criteria?” And then I finally had to say, “other than Star Trek,” because I kept getting Star Trek as the same answer.Doctor Who.Doctor Who would also be an excellent answer. Why isn’t there more? You mentioned Doctor Who and Star Trek, two long-running, successful franchises. Why are there so few examples of that, while there's a lot more apocalyptic, zombies, “we're doomed in the end,” that aren't problem solving and, you could say, optimistic?I don't know. It's a good question. That's an interesting question. I think that sometimes I actually am surprised that even we have Star Trek and Doctor Who! Sometimes I go in the opposite direction where I'm like, we're so lucky to even have these things. I just did a big essay on early Sherlock Holmes stories a couple weeks back for Esquire. And something that I always like pointing out to people that might not read Sherlock Holmes is that most of them aren't murders. Most of the good stories are not murder mysteries, they're kind of something else. And Sherlock Holmes is another kind of interesting example of a sort of really ethical but flawed person who's always trying to see like, “Oh, maybe this person's not the villain. Maybe it's the other way around.” And of course Sherlock Holmes has influences on Star Trek because of Nicholas Meyer who directed The Wrath of Khan and because of Michael Chabon, who is creator of Star Trek: Picard—and many other Sherlock Holmes connections to Star Trek, Spock in particular.But why are there not more? I suppose it's just because it's easier to write conflict… You have to have conflict in fiction, and it is easier to have just James Bond or something, which is something I know a lot about. I know a lot about Bond. Even those books though, he doesn't have a gun as often as you might think, not as much as he does in the movies. When it comes to adventure fiction, violence is embedded into that, whether it's a western or whether it's a detective story or something like that. When you don't do that—like with Star Trek, they make a choice: The phasers have a stun setting. With Doctor Who, they made a choice: He doesn't have a gun. And when the Doctor does have a gun, it's a big deal. And the same thing with Star Trek. Kirk in “A Taste of Armageddon”: “I will not kill today.” They have to make it part of the storytelling to almost subvert the rest of adventure fiction in a way.I'm a fan of The Expanse, and there's a great scene—I forget if it's also in the book, I know it's for sure in the TV series—where it looks like there's going to be a war and fighting is going to break out. And the main character, Holden, says, “Let's try something else.” To me, Star Trek is everybody constantly thinking, “Can we try something else other than blowing something up?”The Expanse is great. Of course, the showrunner of The Expanse is Naren Shankar, who worked on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and was Ronald Moore's friend. And then you've got Ron Moore doing For All Mankind, the Apple TV series. And For All Mankind is another example where in the season two finale—that's a couple years ago now, season two of For All Mankind, I'll spoil it—where Ed has the choice of whether or not he's going to blow up these Russian ships that are going to the Moon. And Sally Ride has got a gun on him, and he decides not to. And then Danielle can abort the handshake in space with the Russians, and she quotes Captain Kirk and then she does the handshake. And that's Ron Moore's Star Trek optimism coming through this alternate-history sci-fi show. I think For All Mankind is a good example of those Star Trek-ish ideals working out in what's basically a prestige drama, which is basically Mad Men with NASA. And that's hard to do, to make that upbeat. That's a dark show, but it has a lot of optimism in it.The essence of TrekOne of my little ideas here is that it's important that at least some slice or sliver of our science fiction be optimistic and problem solving. You can point to Silicon Valley people who say they were inspired by Star Trek. But do you think, more broadly, that it's important to have that kind of science fiction, showing a future worth making and a future worth living in? Or is it just science fiction?I think that it's also like important that the stories are contemplative in a very specific way. I love Star Wars, but there's not a lot of different kinds of Star Wars stories. It's generally a hero's journey, good versus evil, which is fine and not negative. They're kind of unpacking that a bit with the Andor show and trying to be like, if you were a member of the rebellion, would you kind of be a terrorist? And that's an interesting sort of moral experiment, which is subversive. But it's only subversive for Star Wars, right? Because Star Wars has always been very black and white for the most part. And the morality plays don't have a lot of variety. I'm working on a book about Dune right now, and Dune is very moral and ethical in its considerations. It's just kind of like things didn't go well. The purpose of that storytelling is like, here's when it doesn't go well and here are the various intricacies of why, and then how that's connected to politics and ecology. It's not dark for the sake of being dark. I would say that something like Westworld, to me, is kind of dark for the sake of being dark. (I don't hate Westworld or anything like that. I always end up on podcasts being like Westworld!) But I do think that there tends to be a little bit of a one-note-ism is there, and even aspects of the Battlestar [Galactica] reboot would sometimes go that direction of like, wow, aren't people messed up? And then you'd kind of be like, “Yeah, but where's the hope in there?” I think something that kind of strikes that balance of it is the new Foundation show. I think that's another Apple show. I think that strikes a little bit of an interesting balance. I just think that the ideas have to be unpacked in a way, because I think you can go too sugar coated. Star Trek at maybe its worst moments, or maybe its less potent moments, would be a little too on the nose. That's about what I would say.Of the more recent Star Trek, for some reason the new one Strange New Worlds—which is a riff on the original “The Cage,” as you mentioned earlier—people seem to have connected with that. I keep seeing versions of, “Well, that's finally real Trek. Do you know what people mean by that? Is that your impression? I don't if they mean that it's optimistic or what it is, exactly.Part of it. It definitely is a little bit more upbeat, but Strange in the Worlds is also still significantly darker than The Next Generation. Everything is kind of relative. I think that I'm a pretty big supporter of all the new shows—Discovery, Picard, I'm talking to the Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan in about an hour today. I love him. That show is actually very upbeat and funny and talks about the workplace aspect of it that you were talking about. But I think that what people are responding to—and Strange New Worlds objectively has better reviews; it had like 100 percent or 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes for a while; you can't argue with the reviews, they exist; and the reviews were more mixed for some of the other shows—I think it's about the format, frankly. I think that the serialization of Discovery and Picard was emulating the prestige style of other shows: The Expanse, Breaking Bad, Battlestar, Sopranos, whatever. And I don't know if that's the best way to do Star Trek. Deep Space Nine had a lot of serialization, and that was very risky at the time, particularly in the ‘90s. But it's not like you want to randomly watch one episode of that arc in Deep Space Nine of the Dominion War. You suddenly have to watch like two seasons. If you're going to watch one episode of Deep Space Nine, it will be a standalone episode. If you're going to watch one episode of The Next Generation, it will be a standalone episode or a two-parter. The original series, the same. Enterprise, even Voyager. Serialization, I think, tends to not age as well.But even Battlestar, which is brilliant, I couldn’t watch just one episode of the 2004 Battlestar. I have to watch all of it. Strange New Worlds are standalone episodes for the most part. And I think that is what's connecting with people. I just watched “Spock Amok,” which is the fifth episode, again for like the fourth time the other day. And it's great. It's this great body-switch episode with Spock and T’Pring. Ethan Peck is hilarious in it. It’s great.It's excellent.To me, that is the main thing about it. If you want to knock Discovery and Picard for being dark, if you actually watch those and you actually see what those shows are about, it's not really true. Those shows are about optimism, about hope. The conflicts are just a little rowdier. But those shows are not about that. Those shows are about those redemptions, they just take longer. Whereas in Strange New Worlds, it's kind of a given. Some of that optimism was kind of a given in a way that was also true of The Next Generation. So I think that's the difference.I did also ask Ronald D. Moore this question. It's the Peter Thiel question: Star Trek is the communist show; Star Wars is the capitalist show. I want to get your opinion on that. What do you think of that characterization? Is that actually an insight?I don't know. I think it's a little reductive. I think it's a bit reductive. You could also flip it. You could just flip it around and you could easily just make the other argument. I'm not saying I agree with either viewpoint, but you could easily be like, “No, Star Wars is the communist show because the rebels want to dismantle capitalism, and the empire is capitalistic. So that's the communist show. And Star Trek is capitalistic because the Federation has a monopoly, and they just don't have money within their own government, but they screw over these other planets economically” (which we know is true). Star Trek has criticized itself, like in Discovery season three the Orions are like, “You guys still have capitalism. You just don't have it in your own space.” And then in Strange New Worlds season one, Pike goes to this planet where they're like, “Hey, you guys still trade with us.” It sounds like a dorm room argument to me. It doesn't seem that deep to me. I know there are a lot of folks who are like progressive socialists that are like, “Star Trek has got all these great examples of like how communism could work in the future.” And it's not really my deal. I'm like a pop culture critic who thinks about how Star Trek affects art and culture now. People have written books about the economy and Star Trek and stuff like that. It's not really my bag is what I'll say.Sometimes I like to guess if the title of the book was the one the author really wanted, or if the book publisher suggested it. I'm wondering if the title of your book, in your heart, should've been Live Long and Prosper! rather than Phasers on Stun! Or was this your preference?I had a lot of different titles. The subtitle was mine always: “How The Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World.” That was the subtitle. That was completely mine, and my agent was like, “That's a winner. That's the subtitle.” We always knew, because I really liked the idea of saying that it wasn't just the making of Star Trek, but the remaking, that the book was about metamorphosis. We wanted, then, a catchphrase. I had pushed for “Spock Lives,” or “Spock Rocks” for a long time. And then we ended up having Spock on the cover, so I got that. But I was on the fence about  Phasers on Stun! But then I interviewed Walter Koenig, who played Chekov of course, for a long time, not long after the January 6th thing. And Walter was so nice and thoughtful about everything, and conflicts in society and how to think and unpack all of them from all sides of the political spectrum and wasn't reductive and just a smart guy. And I mentioned to him the working title at that time. He goes, “I love that, because it means we don't have to kill each other.” And so after that, I was like, “Well, if it's good enough for Chekov, it's good enough for 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

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

We’ve all heard the stories and statistics about the supposed death of American manufacturing. But America's industrial sector never truly went away. Many, many companies are thriving, and today's guest argues we're experiencing an outright renaissance. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m joined by Gaurav Batra, who previously co-led McKinsey & Company’s Advanced Electronics Practice in the Americas. Along with Asutosh Padhi and Nick Santhanam, he's the author of the new book, The Titanium Economy: How Industrial Technology Can Create a Better, Faster, Stronger America. This from the book:The Titanium Economy is the secret weapon of American industrial revival—the key to ensuring the country’s economic vitality as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses and we face steep competition from global rivals. The next few years will be critical, as the future growth of the Titanium Economy sector in the United States is far from assured. Investors, policy makers, and the public at large must appreciate the importance of providing more robust investment in these companies, as well as how their growth brings so many positive ripple effects for individuals and communities, providing more high-quality jobs and boosting the economic prosperity of communities and whole regions.So what is the Titanium Economy? Listen in to find out!In This Episode:* The US industrial renaissance (1:14)* The businesses of the Titanium Economy (7:48)* American industry and technology (12:29)* Workers in the US manufacturing sector (16:20)* Finding America’s next-generation industrial workers (21:26)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The US industrial renaissanceJames Pethokoukis: I think there's a caricature or perhaps a misperception about the US economy—I think you see it in the media—that the US economy is basically Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big box stores. And that's basically your American economy, and it's certainly an economy that doesn't really make stuff in the physical world—with atoms—anymore. And the book, I think, is a corrective to that view. Why is that view wrong and, as you state, that the US is in the middle of an industrial renaissance?Gaurav Batra: Jim, you very accurately represented the perception of what's happened in the US economy over the last couple of decades. I think the story, whenever anybody tells it, is mostly about technology companies. It's mostly about financial services, mostly about Wall Street. As we started digging in, not just with the book but our work in the industrial sector, we realized that the reality is actually very disconnected with this perception. The reason we say that is, if you look at just pure numbers, still 20 percent of the US economy is completely dependent on US manufacturing. That number has not gone down. It may not have increased, but that number has sustained pretty well. If you look at employment, this sector still employs the bulk of the US economy's workers today. In terms of pure numbers, in terms of relevance, the sector never went away. It definitely slowed down because other sectors started growing, but manufacturing as a sector in the US still remained pretty staunch. That is at the sector level.As you unveil that a little bit and go under the hood, you realize that whenever we talk about Wall Street, we talk about the Facebooks, the Alphabets, the Apples of the world delivering incredible stock market growth. Everybody talks about how much of that you own in your portfolio. But the moment you start unraveling the industrial landscape, you actually see several—and the number is actually north of 20, 30—companies who have done actually fairly well over a much longer time period in terms of even delivering value to their shareholders. And these companies have done it not necessarily leveraging outsourcing, but they've done it by just strong, sensible business practices: how they run their companies internally, how they work with their customers, how they potentially create a niche for themselves in particular markets. For us, at least as we started (and I spent about a decade in this particular industry), as I looked at that perception, which was exactly what my idea was coming into the sector, versus what I took away from it after being a practitioner in the segment for about 10, 12 years: the perception and the reality don't match. I think the perception, as you rightly said, is all about Wall Street, all about technology, all about financial services. But the reality tells us that manufacturing has never gone away. Given what's happened over the last two years with the pandemic and the geopolitics of the globe around us, it is only telling us a flashing red [light] that this is actually going to get even more critical for all of us here in the US in the next couple of years.These are industrial companies. While they may not be classified as technology companies, they use technology. Consultants like talking about 5G and AI and cloud computing. But they're more than buzzwords. Those technologies are diffusing into the economy, and not just at places like Google or Amazon or Apple. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think what we're seeing in this industrial sector is these technologies are part of how they do what they do.Absolutely right. We think it's an essential ingredient to success going forward. To give you one example, there's a company called Bulk Handling Systems. It's based in Eugene, Oregon. They basically are recycling cardboard, cans, and plastic. Essentially stuff which has food in them. I think if you looked at them a decade earlier, they would tell you about all the manual processes, which is fairly unhygienic, about how somebody would have to pull that piece of food out of a cardboard can or a plastic can, and then put it in the recycling. Today, if you look at that company, it's using artificial intelligence, it's using latest-version technologies, it's using robots to find where these sediments are, getting them off the cardboard can and the plastics, and then essentially putting them through recycling. That's a very tangible example of how technology and the progress we've made there is really impacting the industrial landscape—and for the good. I think while this one might be on a production line—there are several others about how people are using similar techniques to ensure quality and efficiency on the production line—technology actually is also making these companies go to the next level of performance on pure, I would say, business processes.To give you another example, a place where I've seen technology help a lot of such companies is pricing. A lot of these companies create a lot of complicated engineering equipment. Equipment could be a boiler or a heat exchanger or a mixer for a food processing plant. It's not a standard thing you can buy off of Amazon. There's a lot of specifications going into it: temperature controls, material composition, process tolerances. People used to do all that work manually, in terms of negotiating with the customers, letting them design those kind of products. Today, they can go to a website. There's an electronic configurator, you can click and choose what kind of parameters it wants and it gives you a right outcome. And then similarly, it quickly tells you how much it's going to cost. A process which would have taken multiple weeks, in some cases months as well, is now getting compressed to a matter of days. I think technology will get pervasive. And the good part is, I think there's a very good fusion between what our industrial landscape does and what technology can provide to them to really make them go to the next level of performance, both in terms of meeting customer needs and satisfaction, and then, candidly, being much more robust [financially].The businesses of the Titanium EconomyIn those two examples, you've given two very different kinds of businesses. And in the book, you really give a sense of the span of the kinds of companies we're talking about. I wonder if you could give me a sense of the span of sectors that we're talking about.I think that's very relevant to discuss because I think a lot of times industrial is discussed as a monolith. It's very much discussed as a singular segment. But it's probably the worst articulation or the most inaccurate articulation of the segment we probably can come up with. Everybody has their own way of looking at it, the way we looked at it there are close to 90-plus what we call “micro-verticals.” And they essentially, as you rightly said, cover the whole spectrum.We wake up in the morning, we have a cup of tea or cup of coffee. The beans, which are being sent to us, have come from a food processing plant, which is either utilizing equipment or products which are being manufactured by companies, many of them here in the US. We pick up the phone in the morning to check our text messages, check our emails. The chips behind those phones—this has been obviously in the news of late quite a bit—come from semiconductor manufacturers. And the whole semiconductor industry, which is $400, 500 billion in size today, relies on innovations in precision manufacturing, which have been gaining over the last multiple decades. We get in our cars to go to work, automotive industries are now playing a big hand in it. We come to the office and we start writing on a piece of paper. The paper industry is there. Lunch is delivered to the office. It's packaged in specific packaging that's coming from companies like Sealed Air, where they're working on top-of-the-line packaging to keep the quality and the hygiene of the food high. And similarly, they're looking at packaging pallets of machinery and equipment, which is getting transported from one part of the country to the other part of the country.Anything I literally can touch is influenced by manufacturing in a meaningful way. So the spectrum is wide, and I think it's very important for us as members of society, as investors, as executives, to understand how complicated and how heterogeneous this segment is. Because once we start realizing that, not only do we see the importance of it in our daily lives, but then we also as executives, as colleagues, as workers, as investors in the segment, we are able to then understand the true value of these companies. A great example which always comes to my mind is a company called Graco. It’s based out of Minneapolis. What they specialize in is high propulsion of fluids. So they get spray painting fluids in a can. They figured out how to get peanut butter in a jar. If you look at their segment, I can call them industrials, but it’s nowhere related to tapping the automotive space or tapping the aerospace space, but they're looking at a particular niche in the market, and then having that change in mindset, having that change in how they view or how we view them then helps us appreciate that they're a market leader and they're a market leader in a need, which is not going to go away. We will be spray painting cars or spray painting something else. We will be eating peanut butter for a while.I think that's a great example because I don't think people think about flow control and fluid management very often. It's not a strict consumer name that people understand, nor is it manufacturing where you think of some sort of big factory, necessarily. But that is modern manufacturing that is essential to the modern American economy.Absolutely. I think there are countless examples like this, where companies are serving a very critical need. They're just not consumer brands, so we don't know their names. We can look them up if we wanted to. I think that's where they start suffering a little bit, in terms of both our mindset and our perception of these, and to the first question you asked: I think that's what then perpetuates at least our feeling that the whole economy is about the Facebook and Alphabet and Apples of the world, when actually there's a lot more innovation and value coming from the manufacturing sector as well.American industry and technologyTalking about technology and how these companies are using it. Again, I think there's a stereotype that this technology is employed by companies just to replace workers with some machine. I don't think that's probably the whole story.I think that's definitely not the full story, at least as well as my experience is concerned. Because I think there's definitely displacement. I think if anybody says that there is no displacement, then I think they're wrong. There is displacement in terms of what people are doing today. When technology comes in and makes it more efficient, then obviously as a responsible financial operator of a company, you would think about, “Hey, there is capacity opening up, so what should I do with it?” I think in the long term, there are definitely much more benefits, in my opinion. One is that the companies become much more healthier-going concerns, that they're able to invest in their own growth. And they can grow through investing in their own company’s expanding markets, they can go acquire somebody else. So there is, in the end, a greater good coming out of the fact that the company has not become healthier concerns.Then number two is, I think it does create a new job category. How many people would've been thinking about hiring data analysts or digital product managers in industrial companies 10 years earlier? Probably not many. But today, if you go on any job board, there are so many of these employment opportunities existing out there, which will create a new set of workers, a new set of employment opportunities for the economy. So my sense is, at least given what I've seen from my vantage point, there will be short-term displacement, which I think, again, with the companies getting to be more healthier concerns, we'll probably minimize the short-term displacement aspect of it. But in the longer term, there is a lot of value to be driven out of this. It will improve our productivity. It will make everything better. And then as that happens, what we have seen also, and we catalog in the book through what we call the Great Amplification Cycle, as companies become healthier concerns, the communities and the workers which work there become more prosperous. And with the workers becoming more prosperous, the local economies benefit. And we genuinely believe, just given how manufacturing is—it's not localized, it has to be dispersed, it has to be all over the country—that's one very effective level we have to bring down the inequality we are seeing today in our country. So going to the Midwest, going to some of the “rust belt” and re-invigorating manufacturing here, will really have great-second order effects to the communities there.That's a good point. So where are these companies? Where are they located?They are everywhere. Funny enough, when we started compiling the research for the book, our impression was they were in the “middle coast.” Not the east coast, not the west coast, mostly in the middle coast. But interestingly enough, they're actually on the east coast and the west coast as well. Tesla is a very good example of a manufacturing company running in Fremont, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. But these companies are everywhere. I think HEICO, if you look at it, based out of Florida, their businesses are in 80 cities across the country. Simpsonville we've cataloged in the book as a great example on the east coast where it's benefited from the tire industry and Sealed Air being in that particular region. Obviously the Midwest has a bunch of these around Milwaukee, and a lot of clusters are coming up around the Texas area. So they literally are everywhere, and that's why I think they are actually a great vehicle for ensuring the economic prosperity of the country, because just the reach is so vast.Workers in the US manufacturing sectorDo we have a sense of sort of the employment numbers? How many companies are we talking about, and do we have a sense of the employment?If you look at the industrial structure itself, I think it employs, at least from my last count, close to 18 to 20 percent of our overall labor base. I think if you look at it purely from a perspective of the number of companies, there are nearly 4,000 companies in the US which are industrial or manufacturing something or the other. Now, the cool part about all this is, in my opinion, most of them—I think three out of four of those 4,000 companies—are actually private companies. So you'll not find them on the NASDAQ or the Dow Jones. They're not traded publicly. They're held by private and mostly are family-owned companies which gives them a sense of resoluteness, which is very unique.And then number two is, close to 80 percent of these folks are actually fairly small in size. So south of $5 billion of revenue. These are, in the end, in numbers, tremendous. We hear about all of the big ones, but more than 75 to 90 percent, depending on what metric you look at, are companies which are not being publicly traded, are much smaller companies, and they are all over the country. That gives them the reach and the numbers. As I mentioned, they are close to about 18, 20 percent of the employment base. I think the coolest part about these guys, as we think about their impact on employment, is the two factors about this industry, which are pretty different and unique. Number one: You don't necessarily need a college degree to be a participant in this industry. People with vocational training, welding, fabrication training, can go join this industry that has really healthy careers. That's one. The labor market they cater to is much broader than other sectors, like if you take service or technology for that matter. And then number two: Compared to several other sectors, the pay in this sector, given that it's a fairly stable sector, is, depending on what analysis, anywhere between 40 to 100 percent higher than the average. More people get the chance to get employed. Over time, they all learn more than what their potential alternatives might be, and their reach is pretty high. All these factors have contributed to a huge engine for employment. And then, in turn, economic growth.How big a challenge is finding all those workers for these companies? That seems to be a big one.That's a huge one. And I think as we looked at least for the book and looking down [at] the things we need to change, the things which executives need to change about how they talk about their companies, how they run their companies. But I think the biggest change we need is in the labor supply area. And I think this is where the government and the public agencies have to come in and play a more active role. We're seeing some of that happen now with the CHIPS Act recently where obviously the government is putting a lot more emphasis on the local manufacturing industry. But I think this is the biggest challenge. Even if you compare the US with some of the other countries like Germany or China for that matter, that's where I think there is a big scope of improvement for us to essentially enable some of these public agencies, through funding, through programs with community colleges, through programs with vocational institutes, to essentially get more and more of that supply up. I think if you look at COVID times certainly when demand for a lot of these products like PPE or some of the home equipment went up because everybody started staying at home, the biggest challenge actually was to get workers to get to the factory, to be able to run these factories on more than one shift, to be able to cater to the increased demand. So far what we've seen, the government is headed in the right direction. I'm assuming more will come, which I think will be really fantastic.In the meantime, what we've seen is just companies doing things by themselves. I think one [thing] I really enjoy and I feel is encouraging is if you look at a company called IDEAL Industries, they have what they call an IDEAL Olympics. That's the place where they basically bring in talent, which is like welding talent, which is like machinist talent, and really attract people to that job category and job family and try to increase supply locally for them, for labor. So you’re absolutely right, it’s a huge problem. I think a lot more needs to be done urgently, because this is not something which gets solved overnight. So any move we make today will give benefits in a few years’ time. But just given the importance of the sector and the fact that this is among the biggest bottlenecks today, I think requires immediate attention on fixing this problem.Finding America’s next-generation industrial workersHow much of that talent problem is just a cultural problem where kids think, “Boy, I'd love to work for Google,” or, “I'd like to be a social media manager. I don't want to be a welder,” even though that might be a more satisfying job over the long term than being a social media manager. And that's where the jobs are; those aren't just 1950s jobs. Those aren't just middle-20th-century jobs. Those are 21st-century jobs still.You're right. I think that mindset from our side, what we teach our kids and how we inform them about what their options and career trajectories might be, I think is critical. And I think that comes back to our homes and comes back to our societies. I remember, we were interviewing a CEO for the book, and the quote that stuck with me was, “I have a harder time getting people in my factories because they much rather would be baristas at a Starbucks than actually come work in my factory when they would literally earn at least two times that amount within a few months already.” I think that really points to the fact that there is an element of training people, but I think the first step starts at home and first step starts in our minds: how we can get to our kids and our families the value and the purpose a manufacturing job can provide them. I think this is where we should get ahead of it as industry executives to talk about how prosperous lives can be in this particular segment, and then also change the image of the segment. Even before I started working in the segment intensely, my picture of a factory was, you are greased up, you are dirty, it's high temperatures, it's not exciting.Loud. Very loud and hot.Very loud. In some specific areas that might be true, but if you go through, I would venture 90 percent of the factories, they are spick and span. There is automation everywhere. There is safety. Working conditions are much different than what our perceptions are. So I think there has to be an element of that teaching, which the executive needs to do, about what kind of careers would manufacturing be able to afford folks. And then there's teaching at home also, I think, which we need to at least give to our kids, that there are multiple options: social media and retail and whatever, but we should also then be making sure we are talking about manufacturing as a real alternative given what it can afford.We talked a little bit about training. Is there anything else you’d like to see the federal government do?I think one thing which has always been an interesting topic for me is, I think if you bring focus and we bring transparency and accountability to what we do, we typically make good progress. So I would love to see—I don't know how best you put it… We have the surgeon general for the US. Why is there no chief manufacturing officer for the US? Somebody whose job is to ensure that the sector is being done in as healthy a state as possible, somebody whose job is to make sure we're not surprised, for example, with what we saw at COVID. Suddenly we had shortages of critical things at home. Obviously dollars will help, funding will help, policy will help. But I think to make sure that we don't play catch up all the time, one thing I would love to see, and this is my personal opinion, is something like a CMO for the United States. It's his or her job to make sure that they are thinking about the sector, what the sector needs not just today and five years down the line, 10 years down the line, and to make sure we don't kind of fall back. We always are proactively ahead of the curve on that. So that's one idea at least as we were doing our research that kind of stuck with me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

When Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down, resulting in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. In response, the Japanese government shut down all of its nuclear reactors. But subsequent economic research reveals that the unintended consequences of abandoning nuclear energy have been worse than the accident itself.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Matthew Neidell, an economist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. In 2021, Matt coauthored a paper on those unintended consequences called “The unintended effects from halting nuclear power production: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi accident.” From that paper: This paper provides novel evidence of the unintended health effects stemming from the halt in nuclear power production after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. After the accident, nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an increase in electricity prices. We find that this increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures, given the protective role that climate control plays against the elements. Our results contribute to the debate surrounding the use of nuclear as a source of energy by documenting a yet unexplored health benefit from using nuclear power, and more broadly to regulatory policy approaches implemented during periods of scientific uncertainty about potential adverse effects.In This Episode:* The Fukushima meltdown (1:30)* The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclear (7:30)* Japan’s nuclear reversal (17:15)* Public perceptions of nuclear risks (20:43)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The Fukushima meltdownJames Pethokoukis: The title of the [working] paper is "Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident." Let's start with a quick explanation. What is the precautionary principle?Matthew Neidell: One thing I should clarify first: The title of the paper ended up changing. We do talk about the precautionary principle, but it ended up not being the title in the published version. We got a lot of pushback on the use of “precautionary principle” in the title. That said, I'm happy to talk about it, because I think everything in here is relevant to the precautionary principle.You could teach a whole intro to econ class from this paper. Two things that pop out to me are the precautionary principle and also the idea of trade-offs, because this paper is very much about trade-offs. Starting with that, in what way do you think those principles are illustrated by the Fukushima accident?I think what's really important here is that—this is almost anytime we think about nuclear but especially when big accidents happen, like Fukushima—we tend to focus on the one thing that happened and we don't think about the alternatives. That's the important thing. We think about nuclear as “nuclear carries risk.” And it does carry risk. There are dangers associated with nuclear. Just about anyone should know that who is following this. But it's “How do the dangers compare to something else, to the alternatives that we can use?” One of the problems is that we tend to think of nuclear in isolation. Like people are just saying, “Nuclear is bad, therefore we shouldn't do it.” And that's the kind of precautionary principle aspect of things. It says, “Unless we are fully informed about the risks associated with something, there's no uncertainty associated with the risks with something, we shouldn't do it.” And that's hampering because there are so many opportunities that are out there that carry risk. And if we just say, “Let's not engage in these opportunities because there's a chance of risk,” we end up cutting back on so many things that we might otherwise do.There's a scale of nuclear accident severity. It's a seven-point scale, and so far there have only been two level-seven—the worst—accidents: One was Chernobyl, and the other was Fukushima. In our experience in the nuclear age, Fukushima was one of the absolute two worst accidents that we've had. If you're looking for an example, this would seem to be a fantastic test case about just how dangerous it is, and also just how dangerous the counterfactual is.Yeah, I think that's right. They are the two most dangerous, the third one being Three Mile Island.That's actually down the list. I think that’s a five. We'll start with the actual accident: What do we know about the fatalities and the damage from the accident itself?The biggest thing that people focus on are the radiation deaths. We have the meltdown, there's radiation that's getting out in the environment that's not contained, and how many people are being exposed to that and dying from cancer as a result? That is, I think, the biggest fear to most people. So far we only have estimates of that. We don't know that precisely because people are dying from cancer, unfortunately, all the time. So how we trace those back to this particular accident is hard to know precisely. But we have ways of estimating that, and the estimates out there—and these are not just estimates of how many radiation deaths we've seen so far, but also how many we expect to see over the next 10 or 20 years because of this accident. And the kind of leading number out there that we reference in the paper is 130. That's the number of estimated radiation deaths because of the Fukushima accident.You're right, that's what people would mostly focus on. What was the impact of just evacuating because of the meltdown?With the evacuation, interestingly, that's where more deaths were. Some of the exact numbers are kind of fuzzy what exactly they are, but estimates put it around probably 1000, 1200 deaths or so because of the evacuation process. What's interesting about that is, like you said, that's not the first line of effects that we're expecting to see. Certainly, when it came to the evacuation, there was mayhem when this is happening, but maybe a little bit too much mayhem that led to extra accidents from the evacuation that we shouldn't have seen.Is that because you're moving sick people from hospitals or there are auto accidents? Why do so many people die during evacuations?That's a good question, because I think it was a little bit mysterious why the numbers were so high. I think it's the kind of things that you could imagine. We're shuffling people away who maybe weren't the most mobile people to begin with, and were moving them away and that's wreaking havoc as a result. Or you have this mass evacuation and there are accidents along the way. All of that could be contributing to it.The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclearThose are the deaths that we can calculate from radiation, from the evacuation. But then the Japanese government responded. It responded with a change in energy policy and that had consequences. What did the Japanese government do? And then what did you find about the consequences of their actions?What the government did—I'd say it was in response to a lot of protests that were happening at the time, at least that was one important contributing factor—was they halted the use of nuclear power as a source of energy in the country of Japan. Until Fukushima happened, about 35 to 40 percent of their energy was coming from nuclear power. And then after Fukushima, it went to zero percent. They weren't using nuclear power for any of their energy. And a couple of other countries that weren't directly involved took similar paths. Germany started phasing out nuclear power, is one big example as well.Talk about unintended consequences from Germany.Yes. And that leads to another can of worms that opens up with GermanyYour paper is not even about geopolitics. We could go into that, too. In Japan, no nuclear, which I assume was the cheap energy source for Japan at the time—and the cleanest.It was. The important thing is that it was a cheap, reliable, and clean source of energy. We don't focus so much on the clean aspect of it in this paper, but I think that's important too. What we really focus on was that it was a relatively inexpensive source of energy. There are all kinds of questions about providing nuclear power. It's very expensive to build these plants, but once they're up and running, they provide energy at pretty low costs. They had a really reliable source of low-cost energy, and all of a sudden they said, “We're going to get rid of 40 percent of our country's energy supply.”They’ve still got the energy demands that they need to meet. People still need to heat their homes. They need to cool their homes in the summer. Not to mention all of the other basic functions in your home—keeping the lights on and the fridge running. So they had to figure out how to meet those energy demands, and what they did in meeting those energy demands was they started importing fossil fuels. Mainly from mainland China is where they started importing those fuels.I assume that's coal, mostly.Coal, gas — those were the two main things that were coming in. And when they were coming in, they were now providing the energy to fill that gap in demand. But they were now more expensive than using nuclear. People's energy bills were going up. Depending on the area of Japan, we're talking about some places were seeing energy bills going up 30 to 40 percent. If you think about during times of the year when you're using energy the most, the middle of winter when you're heating your home to try to keep a nice comfortable environment at home. And now your bill has gone up by 30 to 40 percent—a lot of people ended up cutting back on their energy use.And this is another economics 101 principle: As the price of a good goes up, people are going to consume less of it. So we saw people cutting back on their energy use, and they're cutting back on their energy use during the coldest time of the year. What's important about that is that's when energy use is really important for your health. One of the things that a climate-controlled environment is doing is it's protecting you from the elements. It's protecting you from freezing temperatures that, most people can relate to, don’t feel good on a regular basis. But also if you have people who might be experiencing heart disease or other kinds of more frail states to begin with, if they're now experiencing colder temperatures for a prolonged period of time, this could be pretty harmful to their health.And what you did is you looked at a section of large cities to try to figure out those health consequences?That's what we did. After we found the areas where we saw the decrease in energy usage, we also asked, “Did we see increases in mortality in those areas as well?” And that's precisely what we found. We found that when it was cold out, in the winter—temperatures hovering around 30, 40 degrees, think zero degrees Celsius, right around freezing—when temperatures were falling into that range and energy prices were higher, we saw increases in mortality compared to times where we had similar temperatures but before the increases in energy prices.You looked at about the 20 or so largest cities over the early 2010s, from 2011 to 2014, and you calculate about 1300 additional deaths.Because of the higher energy prices, we estimate there are an extra 1300 deaths in the cities where we were able to estimate the effects here.(1) I assume there would be more if you looked at the entire country; (2) to what extent do you believe this has been an issue beyond 2014?Both of those are reasons that we think the number is even higher than the 1300. Our study only focused on about 30 percent of the Japanese population, just because that's where the data was available to do the analysis. But if we project our estimates onto other areas, we have every reason to think that there are effects there as well. We think those numbers can be even larger than the 1300. And then also our analysis ended in 2014. There's always a lag on when you can get data and it takes some time to do the analysis. But those effects very likely persisted beyond 2014 as well. So we think the number of deaths is certainly greater than the 1300. It’s hard to put exactly what the number is on it, but we'd say easily it should be several thousand more.I don't know if you examined this, but do you know if that potential consequence was part of the shutdown debate? Or was the debate just about “This is too dangerous of a technology, we need to shut it down”?Unfortunately, I think the debate is mostly around just the risks. This is getting back to what we were talking about earlier with the precautionary principle and just focusing on one aspect and losing sight of the whole picture. It was really just saying “This is the risk that we face from using nuclear, so we shouldn't do it,” instead of thinking “These are also the benefits that nuclear brings.” And we haven't even touched on some of the other benefits that nuclear brings. We've just talked about the price benefits right now, that it brings lower energy costs. And we talked a little bit about the potential air quality and greenhouse gas impacts as well. But that's mostly lost at least in the protests that are against it. They're really focusing on the risks and not thinking about the benefits from it.Matt, I don't know how much time you spend on Twitter. I spend too much. Sometimes I get the impression that there's a certain segment on Twitter who thinks economists are too involved in public policy. But this seems like an absolutely perfect example of where you actually need somebody talking about economics, about trade-offs, about other potential consequences and counterfactuals.Yeah, I think that's right. Obviously as an economist I'm going to promote what I do as being useful. But it gets back to, I think it was Truman who said, “Give me a one-handed economist,” because all the economists say, “On one hand this, but on the other hand that.” And that's really thinking about the trade-offs here. But it's hard to imagine any situation where there isn't a trade-off, where any decision we're making, there's not also an alternative decision that we can make that has impacts as well. I know that is maybe a bit self-serving and that's what economists do. That's how we approach every problem. We think about not any one thing in isolation, but try to think about the whole problem and everything that's happening in the problem, the costs and the benefits.Japan’s nuclear reversalJust to stick with Japan for another moment, they have now reversed course. Japan is now re-embracing nuclear. To what extent have you followed that policy reversal? Part of it seems to be about climate change. I don't know how much also has to do with the kind of findings that you have in the paper.I don't know the details behind what's driving them to make that decision. But yes, they're planning on bringing back—what is it, seven or nine plants that they're going bring back online? I think a lot of that has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think that's a big thing because right now we see gas prices going up everywhere. Whether you're directly relying on Russian gas or not, it's still world markets that are determining prices there. And we see energy prices are going up, and we're especially fearing this winter. The Russian invasion started at the tail end of the winter last year so we had some time to prepare. The hope was things wouldn't go on as long as they are. But they are going on as long as they are, and now we have to think about this winter ahead where we're going have to think about higher energy prices for a lot of people, and how are we going to deal with those higher energy prices?One way to deal with those higher energy prices is to increase the supply of energy, and that will hopefully bring down the price of energy. I think that's a big part of bringing the nuclear plants back. I think the same thing is happening in Germany as well. They were slowly decommissioning all of their nuclear plants. They hadn't fully phased them out. I think it was actually supposed to happen this year, 2022. And I think maybe now they're putting the breaks on that and saying “We need to keep some of those plants alive,” especially because Germany in particular is very dependent on Russian natural gas.There was a somewhat similar study done looking at excess deaths in Germany from switching from nuclear to more coal-fired plants, looking at air pollution, dirtier air causes deaths. That is not something you looked at, though I imagine it would be a factor.That's not something we looked at directly, but it's absolutely another factor. And this is one that we just looked at the price differential between nuclear versus coal or gas. Another super important benefit from nuclear is that when it's actually producing the energy for people to use, it's not emitting any pollutants locally. So it doesn't have an effect on air quality. When the alternative is coal or gas, that's leading to emissions that contributes to particulate matter, which is this really small fine pollutant that gets deep in our lungs, gets into our circulatory system and causes significant number of deaths. I believe particulate matter is the leading environmental cause of mortality around the globe.Public perceptions of nuclear risksDo you have a sense that people overestimate the fatalities from nuclear accidents? I don't know if you watched the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. It would be very easy for someone kind of watching that and maybe half on their phone to think that hundreds of thousands of people died. And I recently watched a documentary, I think it was on Netflix, about Three Mile Island. They also tried to give the sense that many, many people died, even though the evidence seems pretty anecdotal, what they did give. They didn't bring a lot of experts and economists talking about deaths. In political decision-making, it's easy for politicians to focus on highly visible costs and highly visible benefits. But it seems like with nuclear, they're also looking at costs that perhaps don't even exist, that there's just the sense that it's a lot more dangerous than what it is.I think that's right. Part of it is about salience. When we think about a nuclear meltdown, it's a shot heard around the world. Everyone knows about Fukushima and everybody knows about Chernobyl. Even if we have the opportunity to forget about Chernobyl—not that we should forget about Chernobyl, we should still remember and learn from Chernobyl—we still have reminders about Chernobyl and the miniseries coming out and telling us how bad it was. If we had a Chernobyl-like incident every five years, we'd be having a different conversation. Then we could say, “Maybe nuclear should be off the table. Maybe it's not worth it.”But we have very different calculations. We've had one Chernobyl, the worst incident we've had. And then the second-worst incident we've had is Fukushima, where we have 1200 or so deaths. It's orders of magnitude better, and that's only the second-biggest accident that we've had. And if that's what things are like going forward, that's much safer, clearly much safer than Chernobyl. I think the interesting thing embedded in the question you're asking me is about the salience, that we hear about the deaths from these accidents. But the deaths from coal and the deaths from gas, you don't hear about them. They're just in the background. Every day there are people dying from particulate matter, but we're not saying, “It's because of the burning of coal we now have this person dying from particulate matter.” It's just that we know there are some people that are dying and we can later statistically attribute it to the burning of fossil fuels. But it's not reaching salience the same way that a nuclear accident is reaching salience.An analogy that comes to mind is thinking about flying versus driving. Flying, statistically speaking, is so much safer than driving. The amount of airplane-related deaths in a given year is very small, but the amount of deaths from car accidents is, again, orders of magnitude higher. Car accidents are happening every day, and the only way you really hear about car accidents, other than if it's a really famous person who's involved, is your local news. They're not making national news. But when a plane crash happens, it's national news—it's international news. But when was the last big plane crash that happened? I don't know. I couldn't tell you. It has to have been at least several years away. I know COVID put a lot of pause on a lot of travel, but it has to be years away from when that last accident happened. Yet I think a lot of people are more scared of flying than they are of driving, even though the risks of death from driving are much higher than the risks of death from flying.Where did the precautionary principle come from? Are there philosophers or economists that have been pushing this idea since the 1970s? Or is this a much old idea that has found new salience?I don't know enough of the history of it going back in time. It definitely gained prominence in the last 50 years. With a lot of the environmental movement that was growing out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the precautionary principle took more kind of formal definitions and became, in some cases, an official part of policy. That said, the definition of it has changed over time, the precise way that the precautionary principal is defined. Before then, I'm sure it's been used at least unofficially. This is where the precautionary principle gains traction. You can almost think of it as “better safe than sorry.” This is how it gets pushed: “Let's be safe first rather than learn we made a mistake and be sorry later.” It's probably a good way to think about your daily life as an individual, thinking about “better safe than sorry” when you make decisions. But it's not clear that suddenly becomes a good tool for making decisions for millions of people. It now starts to take a different flavor to it, because as an individual, when you're making this better-safe-than-sorry decision, you're thinking about one thing, one step at a time. In front of you, you have a cup of water, and you say, “I don't know what's in this cup of water. I don't know how long it's been sitting there. Maybe it has some bacteria because it's been sitting there for too long and I could get sick.” So then you say, “Better safe than sorry. I'm not going to drink this cup of water and later I'm going to do something else that's going to quench my thirst.” That's fine, that's perfectly reasonable. I make decisions like that for myself and for my family. But when you're sitting there making that decision when you have lots of choices in front of you, it becomes different, because then it gets back to like what we talked about before. You have to think about the trade-offs associated with any decision that you make, that if you're not choosing this, you're now choosing something else. And we’ve got to think about the benefits and risks with all the alternatives that we face. And the precautionary principle just gets us away from thinking about those alternatives.If you were to rank the papers I've mentioned in my writings over the past five years, this paper probably ranks pretty high. It embodies these principles. It provides, I think, a very easy way for people to understand some important principles and concerns a pretty important topic: energy. How much publicity have you gotten from mainstream media about your paper? What kind of response have you gotten, either from environmentalists or economists? I think it is a pretty important piece of research.Thanks for the kind words. I'd say we've gotten some media exposure from this, but not a tremendous amount. I'm doing this podcast and I did another podcast recently and it's gotten written up in a couple of places, but I'd say it hasn't really hit mainstream media. Some of that, to be fair, is I don't do much self-promotion of my work. You said you spend too much time on Twitter. I spend probably too little time on Twitter. More promotion might have helped with that, so some of that is a result of our choices too.It seems like, at least as applied to energy because of climate change and more immediately because of the Russian invasion, people are thinking a lot about past decisions and about trade-offs. Do you think views about nuclear energy are changing, as far as the riskiness and more importantly the riskiness compared to other decisions like becoming dependent on a potential enemy for your energy?I do think it's changing a little bit. And it's interesting how other factors make you change your viewpoint on this. The risk from nuclear hasn't really changed at all, but it's the risk from the other thing has changed. We have to be thinking about the alternative options. We talked about Japan and Germany now changing their tune on nuclear, we also see in the Inflation Reduction Act that was signed recently that now nuclear is being promoted in that as well, encouraging the development of nuclear power. We see Diablo Canyon, the nuclear plant in California, which they were going to decommission. It now looks like they're reversing course on that. I think there is a change.The question always becomes: How long does this last? If there's another nuclear accident, that could quickly change things. There's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to nuclear and that uncertainty is different than the uncertainty when it comes to other energy sources. If another accident happens, it could be that all of a sudden we change course on nuclear. I hope that doesn't happen, because I feel like we learn from the mistakes. We know with Chernobyl there were just a lot of missteps that happened that led to that accident. And I just heard something recently that they actually had a safety inspection the night before the actual meltdown happened, which is kind of amazing that that could happen. A lot of the information there is behind lock and key with the Russian government, so we don't know a lot of the details. But we've learned over time how to make it safer and safer. Our ability to detect problems is just greater and greater. Hopefully what's happening is that we're learning how low the risk is from nuclear. And what's important is for everyone to think of it in context to the alternative. That is where we're at a hard point with—we probably don't want to go too far down this path of information and misinformation—what do people know about the risks and how big they are? I don't know that number offhand, what people think about nuclear. But a lot of people think that the risks are worse than they are, and that doesn't help public discourse if people are misinformed about the dangers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

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

Technology and e-commerce companies have a reputation for being drivers of creative destruction, sometimes at great cost to local communities. Economic nostalgia tells us to lament those jobs and fear the changes that come with technological progress. But it's worth remembering that tech companies are also a major source of high-wage job growth in the US economy. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Michael Mandel to consider the role of tech companies in the American economy.Michael is vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. He's also the author of "Investment Heroes 2022: Fighting Inflation with Capital Investment," co-authored with Jordan Shapiro.In This Episode:* Tech sector job growth (1:23)* How technology affects the labor market (6:08)* Job-replacing tech vs. job-creating tech (10:46)* Encouraging the digitization of US manufacturing (15:00)* America’s tech firms: investment heroes (18:34)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Tech sector job growthJames Pethokoukis: Last year you said, “We’ve seen in recent years [that] the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector has been the main source of job growth in the economy.” Do you think this is a widely understood fact either among the public or among policymakers here in Washington?Michael Mandel: That's such an excellent question. No, it's not a widely understood fact. I've just calculated the latest numbers, and if you look at full-time equivalents, all of the job growth since the pandemic started has been in what I call now the “tech/e-commerce” sector. And the rest of the economy and job growth has been much, much weaker.Is this purely a pandemic-era phenomenon, or do you expect it to continue to happen?It was happening before the pandemic. It is going to continue after the pandemic, too. I think what we've learned in the past is that whichever sectors grow during a recession tend to lead the next recovery as well. The fact that we've had all this growth in the tech/broadbrand/e-commerce sector during the pandemic suggests that's going to be the job leader going forward as well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released its occupational projections for the next 10 years. I haven't had a chance to look through them yet. I suspect that they will understate the future job impact of the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector as they have in the past.Is that an accurate forecast that they put out?It is about as accurate as just extending long-term trends. In terms of looking forward [at] telecom-related jobs or app-economy jobs or computer-related jobs, it has consistently under projected. They actually make no real claims. They don't say it's a forecast. They say it's a projection. Probably, if you ask them privately, they would tell you they really don't want to do it. But it's really widely read.The part of that sector I think people might be surprised by is e-commerce. I'm guessing that a lot of people view e-commerce as a jobs killer: It's replacing all the people who work at in-person stores with kiosks. Is that your perception? That is wrong, though.That is my perception, and that is wrong. The way that I think about e-commerce is it doesn't pull jobs out of brick-and-mortar retail. It actually pulls hours out of the household sector. So what happened is that people used to put an enormous amount of hours into driving to stores, parking, walking around, and standing on line, and so forth. And if you look at the data that comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the American Time Use Survey, you see a really sharp drop in the number of hours that people spend shopping for goods. It's gone down by about 20 percent over the last 15 years. And it dropped about 10 percent just over the course of the pandemic. All of these hours, which is an enormous number of unpaid household hours, are being moved into the paid market sector. Instead of you going into a store and picking out the stuff yourself, somebody else is doing this using robots in an e-commerce fulfillment center. And instead of you driving to the store by yourself and spending all that time parking, somebody else is putting the stuff in a big truck and delivering it to you, using more capital, doing it more efficiently. There's been a very sharp drop in the number of hours that households are spending on shopping, which (A) creates a lot of jobs in the market sector, (B) really distorts the productivity numbers, and (C) leads us to misunderstand the sources of growth in the economy: what the effect of productivity is, what the effect of technology is.I know you and I have talked about this in the past, for many years we used to wonder, when was technology going to start generating jobs for the ordinary person? And that's what e-commerce has done: generate tech-enabled jobs in e-commerce fulfillment centers, in the entire supply chain, that pay better than the old retailing jobs, that pay a lot better than the non-paid jobs in the household sector where people used to spend this. You're creating a lot of income that wasn't in the economy before.How technology affects the labor marketPeople don’t think about those warehouse fulfillment center jobs. If they do, they probably think they pay worse than they actually do. And they probably underestimate how many there are and figure it's just all robots or something.I think we've managed to break the “all robot” canard, because what we've seen here is that the ability to put robots into the fulfillment centers has lowered the cost of doing e-commerce so much that it's actually made it open to all consumers for everything, basically. There are no restrictions on it. You're producing enough surplus that you can actually do returns correctly. There's a big economic surplus being generated by the automation of the fulfillment centers that enables us to hire a lot more workers.That's a classic case of technology affecting the labor market, right?If you look back historically, this is very much the same sort of thing that happened with Henry Ford and the assembly line, which is that you think that when you have an assembly line, your adding productivity that’s going to reduce the number of jobs. But it lowered the cost of cars so much that all of the sudden the ordinary person was able to buy them. That created a lot more demand for workers. And if you think about, why were people buying cars as opposed to just using horses? It's a time thing. The thing that's in most scarcity for households is time, because they can't create more of it. Anything that saves people time, they're going to be willing to pay a lot for. In that one case, this was the automobile creating jobs. In this case, it's less shopping time creating jobs in e-commerce fulfillment and delivery.If you've never been in one of those fulfillment centers, there was a wonderful movie Nomadland that starred Frances McDorman, and she would work during the busy season at an Amazon fulfillment center. It did not seem like a miserable job, but it seemed like a busy job.It's a busy job. I think about these as the equivalent of manufacturing jobs for the technological age. They're mixed physical-cognitive jobs, just the way that assembly line jobs were mixed. They actually required some skill, and at the same time they required manual labor. They pay about the same as entry-level manufacturing jobs. In many areas of the country they are in fact becoming the substitute entry-level job that manufacturing once was. If you look at the data for occupational health, they're kind of where they should be. They're physical jobs, you can't deny that. Which actually kind of gives a lot of people problems because they think, “Well, what is an ideal job? Is an ideal job an office job?” It turns out for a lot of people, it’s not. It’s something that involves some measure of physical labor, too. Let me give you a number here: Since July 2019, the tech/broadband/e-commerce sector has produced about 1.3 million jobs out of a total of 2.2 million for the economy as a whole. And that's pretty amazing. That's more than a majority and much more than healthcare and social assistance, which should be your next question: What's going to happen to healthcare jobs with automation?What's going to happen to healthcare jobs?If you think about the shift to telehealth during the pandemic, people are realizing that there are less expensive ways of doing what they were doing before. Better ways of communication. One of the biggest phenomena I think we're going to see going forward is that the long healthcare job boom may be over. We may actually end up with a surplus of healthcare workers. Rather than retraining manufacturing workers to go into healthcare, we may be retraining healthcare workers to go into technology.Job-replacing tech vs. job-creating techOn that issue, I know there's been some research by Daron Acemoğlu about how technology is affecting the modern job market. Are we producing the kind of innovation and automation that replaces jobs? Are we producing the kind that creates new things for people to do? Are we creating the kind that helps people do their jobs better?I think there's some concern that we've produced too much of the job replacing rather than the job creating/enabling.We're going to have both types. We haven't actually had any of the job replacing yet—at least not in the measure that people were worried about. Remember, we were worried about all the losses of jobs for truck drivers from autonomous trucks. Instead, we have shortages of truck drivers.I was told there'd be riots.If you look back historically, you see that some technologies generate jobs and some technologies replace jobs. I think what we've seen, which we hadn't seen before in the e-commerce sphere, is we know this is a case where we've created new jobs. If you actually add together e-commerce jobs and the brick-and-mortar retail jobs, what you see is that there has been a 650,000 job increase since the beginning of the pandemic in the combined retail/e-commerce sector. There's a net job increase from technology here. And there's a wage increase because the e-commerce jobs pay about 30 percent more than brick-and-mortar retail.And they are more diverse, which is really interesting. Diverse racially and diverse ethnically. People usually think of retailing being poor people of color. But in fact, you look see that there's a lot of discrimination in brick-and-mortar retail. I think, in the end, the retail sector broadly extended, including e-commerce, is going to be a net job gainer from technology. The real interesting question is going to be, what's happening to manufacturing? I'm watching this very closely. Of course, we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs.We still make a lot of things, though.We make a lot of things, but the non-high tech manufacturing capacity peaked in 2000 and has been coming down since then. The actual size, however you want to measure the manufacturing sector in the US, has actually been shrinking. What we need to be able to do is adopt more advanced manufacturing techniques, more automation, more digitization: drive down the cost of making goods, drive it down in a way that starts increasing the ability of people to buy them, increasing the capacity, and increasing the jobs associated with them. This kind of goes to your question about, is it job replacing or job creating? What happened was that people got scared. We’ve been replacing manufacturing jobs with technology up to now, but there's nothing that says that has to keep going that way.I actually think that's really a crucial question for the US economy going forward: Are we going to actually invest in manufacturing digitization, not just on large scale but on a small scale as well, on entrepreneurs? One of the things that I watch really closely is this new census data on business formations. You don't see the business formation growth. You see a lot of business formation growth across the economy, but not manufacturing yet. That's going to be a crucial turning point for the economy.Encouraging the digitization of US manufacturingHow do we make that happen, that will have manufacturing here in the US using the latest technology, robotics or what have you?One of the things we have to realize is that our small businesses are still cash poor and credit poor. And they also don't have access to the latest technology. The way that I think about this is if you go back to the auto industry and auto dealer franchises, which created a lot of wealth on the local level. We have to think about manufacturing franchises on the local level where the technology is prepackaged, where people start small businesses and do a lot of creation and production on the local level, in a lot of different places. There may be some signs that could be happening; there may be some signs that it isn't. But this would be one of the big turning points for the US economy in terms of moving towards a really strong, sustainable future.You're not just talking about big companies with big factories, you're talking about far smaller companies able to use the latest technology: an off-the-shelf robot or something who could do things. Is the technology almost there? Is there a role for government? Do we just need the technology to keep progressing? What's the key?We need the technology to keep progressing, but it's almost there. The real question is financing for small entrepreneurs and exposure to the technology.They're just unaware that this is out there?They're just unaware. They have to be able to experiment with it. Right now the small manufacturers are scared.Who is a small manufacturer? What do small manufacturers manufacture in this country?There are far more small job shops out there than you might think, and there’s potential for far more than you might think to grow up. For example, suppose you had an old appliance that was missing a part. In theory, there's no problem producing that part with 3D manufacturing or some other technology, if you had the plans for it. And if you had that set up. What you have right now is manufacturing networks so you could contact a manufacturing network company and give them your plan and they would find a job shop around the country that could do that. You could set up a manufacturing operation tomorrow. A lot of this is not difficult. There are some areas that are more difficult. The art of automating a lot of apparel manufacture is still not all there. It's getting there, too. You've got apparel manufacturing, small tools, small objects. You should be able to have the ability to make customized furniture much cheaper than you do. You go through the different lists of things. It becomes harder the more complicated that things get, but things that are really simple should be able to be manufactured with these new technologies in ways that are less costly and more customized.America’s tech firms: investment heroesEvery year, you folks at PPI put out an Investment Heroes report showing who are the companies really investing. A lot of very well-known tech companies. Not just tech companies on that list, but there are a lot of tech companies. If technology companies are creating a lot of jobs, if they're investing a lot, why do they seem to be so wildly unpopular here in Washington?Let's actually say some more of the good things they do as well. They also pay their workers well. They did not participate in the inflationary surge. Inflation in the digital sector was accelerated a little bit, but much less than the rest of the economy, which is what you would expect if you had high productivity growth. I think that when push comes to shove, people just don’t like “big.” Big worries them. If you compare these companies to the big manufacturing companies in the past, if you compare them size-wise to the global economy, they're about the same size, relatively speaking. They're not out of scale. But what happens is that there's a regulatory push. And that's only natural.When you're regulating, you want to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water. As you know, at PPI we believe in light-touch regulation. We think that regulation is an important part of a market economy, but you really want to make sure you don't go overboard with it. In this case, I think about regulating large tech companies as the big bear theory: If you're sleeping in a bed with a big bear and it rolls over, it's going to crush you, whether it wants to or not. So you have to distract the big bear with a stick every once in a while to keep it alert and say, “No, don't roll over.” What is true if you look historically at the way productivity growth spreads, productivity growth doesn't spread from technology moving from big companies to small companies, or from highly productive companies to less productive companies. It comes because the highly productive companies expand their share of the market. They are good at doing productivity and they expand. That's kind of where we are in this process. The highly productive companies look around and they see other areas of the economy that they think they know how to fix. They see a market opportunity and historically that's what usually happens. What we're seeing now from my perspective, as long as it doesn't go overboard… which some of the bills in Congress did. Some of the bills in Congress made no sense whatsoever. You want to have a kind of push and pull, which is that these companies are highly productive, great for workers, great for consumers, great for suppliers. And so you want to see them expand and you want to see them take cognizance of some of the side effects of what they're doing.Thanks for listening to part one of my two-part interview with Michael Mandel. Next time, we'll discuss US productivity growth, industrial policy, and more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

When does economic policy become industrial policy, and has the Biden administration crossed that line? In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm talking with industrial policy skeptic Scott Lincicome about the CHIPS and Science Act, how competition with China complicates the argument for free markets, and more.Scott is the director of general economics and the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of numerous reports on industrial policy and international free trade, including "The (Updated) Case for Free Trade" with Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and “Questioning Industrial Policy” with Huan Zhu. He’s also the author of Capitolism, a Dispatch newsletter.In This Episode:* Is Bidenomics really about boosting productivity? (1:19)* We’re all industrial policy enthusiasts now (3:37)* The climate change exception (9:34)* Thinking about China (17:29)* Can the US play the semiconductor game and win? (21:35)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Is Bidenomics really about boosting productivity?James Pethokoukis: The Biden administration has been doing quite a bit: this infrastructure bill, we've had a chips and R&D bill, now we have the Inflation Reduction Act. The president has said that one thing he's trying to do is boost the productive capacity of the economy. Do you view that as the main thrust of these bills?Scott Lincicome: No. I think it's actually much more about picking and choosing specific sectors. You can maybe argue for infrastructure: to the extent that roads and bridges are going to actually lead to the expansion of the national productive capacity, okay. But particularly with semiconductors and the IRA, this is just classic industrial policy. “The market has failed. We don't like the sectoral composition of the United States economy. In particular, we are not making enough semiconductors. We are not making enough solar panels and wind turbines and electric vehicles, and government needs to get involved. We need to not only encourage the consumption of these goods, but we need to actually forcibly, or through a lot of subsidies and sweeteners, incentivize onshoring of these critical industries.” I know that there are some attenuated ideas that this will then boost the overall productive capacity after several years. This is the whole idea that the Inflation Reduction Act will actually reduce inflation by spending all this money. But let's be clear: the immediate effects, the ones that don't require stretching the economic imagination beyond all recognizable length, are about a sectoral composition. It's about changing the shape of the US economy.We’re all industrial policy enthusiasts nowA more market-oriented approach would focus on things like creating a favorable tax code that's neutral to sectoral composition and funding basic research. But with industrial policy, you care about sectoral composition. You care about what the economy looks like, rather than just GDP growth. Is America now doing full-throated industrial policy?No, but we definitely have pushed the envelope. That actually gets to one of the big myths that is pushed by industrial policy advocates here in the United States: this idea that we lived through this grand or terrible — depending on your viewpoint — era of free market fundamentalism in which Milton Friedman got a hold of the economy and ran it like a textbook. That's absolute nonsense. We have experimented with industrial policy for ages, going back to the ‘60s, the ‘70s, then into the ‘80s. We really liked it in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We backed off a little bit in the ‘90s and 2000s but still had tons of industrial policy initiatives to encourage certain types of manufacturing, certain types of jobs, to protect certain sectors. And some of this was new; some of it was longstanding stuff like the Jones Act. So the idea that we weren't engaging in industrial policy is pretty silly. But we certainly have pushed the accelerator down a little bit in the last few months, starting with the infrastructure bill which has local content provisions: “Buy American” this, “Use these American workers,” “Produce these types of charging stations,” that kind of stuff. Specific things, not just infrastructure as we normally consider it. But then really ramping up with the CHIPS Act, which certainly has some basic research stuff in it. But throws $80 billion — potentially more, depending on how these tax credits shake out — to domestic semiconductor manufacturers to actually put more fabs in the United StatesIt's a subsidy to build these plants in the United States.Correct, and with several strings attached even further. But the idea, generally, is (so the argument goes) the United States has experienced a dramatic collapse in semiconductor productive capacity over the last 30 years — thanks, again, to the Milton Friedmanites, us at Cato, we libertarians always run Washington so it's all our fault. And we need to tilt the scales. We need to do industrial policy like the Koreans and the Taiwanese and the Chinese are doing, and we need to get more fabs, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, here in the United States. That’s the idea. And then the IRA basically turned the knob to 11. The IRA went and did very much the same thing with tens of billions of extra dollars — hundreds of billions, really — looking into renewable energy: all sorts of programs, advanced manufacturing, tax credits, grants, you name it. Again, this is not new. Most of the stuff that the IRA did was expand Obama-era programs that went on during the 2009 stimulus bill, essentially revitalizing some of these programs, for example at the Department of Energy, that had been in place for more than a decade.Industrial policy can refer to a lot of things: protecting industries from foreign trade, cutting checks to businesses or sectors deemed "important," or offering strategic tax breaks and the like. Is what we're doing now closer to classic industrial policy?This is classic industrial policy. And in a sense, I'm relieved. Because for the last two years, before the CHIPS bill and the IRA and a little bit on infrastructure, we had this very painful debate that we wonks have to have about definitions. If you listen to some industrial policy advocates out there, like Mariana Mazzucato, the Italian economist who's all the rage in Europe with industrial policy, to them — and there are some folks here in the United States who do this too — industrial policy is anything and everything. WTO reform was industrial policy, basic research gets thrown in, military spending … You get these ridiculous statements like, “Everything that goes into an iPhone was the result of government industrial policy.” That's a lot of nonsense. There’s plenty of free-market, market-oriented, libertarian, whatever you want to call it, stuff that just does not meet the traditional definition of industrial policy, meaning targeted and directed government action — tariffs, subsidies, whatever — to achieve a specific microeconomic advantage over what the market could produce within national borders. And always pursuant to some strategic plan. This is not the NIH just giving out some grants. No, you have a big plan, a strategic plan, and you're going to go out and determine winners and losers. That is very much what we're doing in the CHIPS Act and the IRA. It's nice in the sense that we're getting back to a discussion of traditional industrial policy.The climate change exceptionCertainly some would argue, even if they're generally skeptical of industrial policy, they would say, “Well, sometimes we have to do it. Maybe for defense-related reasons we need to do it. Maybe there's some other emergency. People think climate change is that kind of thing: We can't wait for the market to figure it out. It’s a pressing emergency, as much as a geopolitical conflict would be. It's that kind of thing. Therefore, we must act.Even zany libertarians like me acknowledge a national defense exception to all of this stuff. There's actually a lot of literature I've written about, about how national defense is quite different from socially related industrial policy. And for those reasons, and for very legitimate national security reasons, you tend to push defense-related stuff over the side. Even I am not going to say we should be outsourcing our nuclear weapons technologies to China. That kind of stuff is obvious. Just as importantly, or almost as importantly, there are pretty huge differences between defense procurement and commercial industrial policy. One is, there's no other buyer for defense-related stuff. The market is the government's market. That makes the government uniquely positioned and attuned as the consumer to care about how it's spending its money, to actually have sophisticated, detailed information about the sector. The government knows a lot more about tanks than basically anybody else, because the government is in the tank consumption business. Finally, the public tends to give the government a lot more of benefit of the doubt about failures, about dollar figures and the rest. It's kind of the government's unique, constitutional responsibility. National defense works. Climate change, though, I think is a problem. Because climate change is very much a consumption issue as much as it is a production issue. And it's very little of a domestic production issue. Of course we care about coal-fired electricity plants and the rest. But at the end of the day, all we really care is that we want to increase domestic consumption of renewable energy. With respect to all of these products, there's no need that solar panels be made in America. Quite frankly, there's a very strong argument that by raising the prices of our renewable energy goods — by slapping tariffs on them, by localization mandates like Buy American policies — we're actually raising the prices of these goods and then discouraging consumption of renewable energy. So there's a really tough tension between classic economic nationalist industrial policy and environmental goals. You don't have to take it from me. A big initiative of the Obama administration was to liberalize trade in environmental goods. The Obama administration quite rightly observed that production of these things is not nearly as important as consumption of these things. And what helps maximize consumption? Free trade. That deal never got finished. It's been shelved because, of course, everybody hates trade these days. But I think that it's a lot tougher argument on the climate change side that we need industrial policy, because it just doesn't have the same dynamic as something like national defense.Let me frame it somewhat differently. What if the policy was, “Here’s how we’re going to deal with climate change: We need to pull carbon from the air”? Carbon removal technology is something that doesn't really exist right now, other than in some very experimental forms. “We're going to fund it, just like Apollo, just like the Manhattan project.” Would you favor something like that, assuming you thought there was the actual need to pull carbon from the sky?This is a great example of where you have the industrial policy approach and the more market-oriented approach. The industrial policy approach is that we need that carbon capture technology to be made by Americans in America. And not just deployed by Americans; we need it made in America. Whereas the more free-market approach would be a prize: We don't care how it's made. We don't care who makes it, with a few security-related exceptions. If tomorrow the Korean government or Samsung or whatever comes up with the most amazing carbon capture technology in the world — it's like Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future, you just slap it on a power plant and suddenly we're zero emitters — you win the prize. We don't care that it was made by a Korean company. We don't care that they are going to be Korean jobs and not American jobs. No, the industrial policy side says, “We care a lot about who makes this stuff and that it's made in America, using American materials.” The pandemic, for all of its terribleness, provided us a pretty good example of the industrial policy approach to pandemic stuff and the market approach. And that's in the vaccines. The more free-market approach, essentially a prize but a procurement contract, was we went to Pfizer and BioNTech, and if you look at the contract for those vaccines, it said we have nothing to do with your supply chain. “We don't care how you do it. We don't care what you do. Just get an FDA-approved vaccine and we are all in, we're going to pay.” That's it. There are clauses in that contract that literally say we will have no control over how you make this whatever. A ton of global collaboration, of course. BioNTech is a German company, blah, blah, blah. Totally different approach: There's another company in Maryland called Emergent BioSolutions. Emergent BioSolutions is a heavily government-connected contract manufacturer that has been essentially put here for pandemic preparedness. Lots of government involvement over the years. Emergent was the kind of all-American government contractor model. It is very much similar to a lot of the stuff we hear today about what we need, not just for pandemics, but for other stuff as well: We need to put this factory in America; we need to put it right outside of Washington. Well, Emergent hasn't made a handful of finished doses, and in fact has had a ton of problems with sanitation issues. They've had to destroy a bunch of doses. It's a nice contrast between a more market-oriented approach and a very domestic-oriented approach, one being much more industrial policy than the other. We can argue on the margins about how we funded mRNA research back in the day… But look, comparatively, there are two very different approaches to economic policymaking.Thinking about ChinaIt was kind of easy to defend free markets during the Cold War, but have things become more complicated with China given the interdependence of our economies? How easy is it for you to maintain your pro-market views on industrial policy questions with China?China certainly makes it a little bit harder, and the nature of technology makes it a little bit harder. But we have existing laws and processes for a lot of that. You used a word there that sets off my libertarian Spidey senses. You said “important.” The issue there is, who decides what's important? The idea is not that we allow mass proliferation of dual-use technologies, we rely on China for weapons systems or critical inputs to weapon systems. But it's also that we have to have a lot of skepticism about what is and isn't important. I have very little problem allowing the Office of Foreign Assets Control and all the guys that commerce and whatever to apply the export control regime. We have US laws that require the Department of Defense to look at defense procurement and look at weak links in the chain. In fact, the Defense Production Act, before it was used to make baby formula, used to be used correctly. DOD used to look at its defense supply chain and say, “We don't have a stable producer of widgets that are important for our weapon systems. We need to subsidize that. We're going to give them $20 million.” You know what? No problem. The problem is that now the word “important” has become so distorted from its original meaning that steel rebar is being restricted on national security grounds. Not to mention all of the other areas. Certainly there is a need to consider China, to consider the natures of technologies and all that. But we've gone way, way beyond what is in any way a rational policy. And you have to be very concerned about politics. One of the little-known secrets about the global chip shortage is how American export control policy contributed to the global chip shortage. The Trump administration started restricting pretty basic semiconductor technologies to China and Huawei and the rest. That reduced the global supply of bulk semiconductors. I'm not talking about the fancy three nanometer or whatever stuff. I’m talking about the junky stuff that we put 100 of them in a car for not a great reason, but we do. Not only did that reduce global capacity, but it also caused all these Chinese companies to start hoarding chips because they were scared to death of being cut off from these chip supplies.Believe it or not, China remains very dependent on the United States for a lot of semiconductor stuff. That, of course, made things worse. The Biden administration quietly rolled some of that back in response to shortages. But that's the type of stuff we need to be really worried about. We also need to be concerned about, if we restrict these exports, is that just going to harm American tech champions like Qualcomm or whatever while bolstering French competitors, European competitors, Korean competitors, that are still going to sell to China anyway? There needs to be a very rational, skeptical approach to all this stuff. You can't just scream “China!” and then suddenly protect, subsidize, and do the rest. Of course, there are going to be exceptions. The goal is to get back to a saner approach to those exceptions.Can the US play the semiconductor game and win?How do you see this experiment with semiconductor subsidies playing out? When we look back at it in 10 years, will we say, “We learned that we can do that; we learned the United States can play that game and win,” or are we going to say, “It didn't really quite work out the way we'd hoped”?It's always hard, because any time there's a new industrial policy announcement, you're going to get companies that are beneficiaries making all these investment announcements. The goal and the hard part is then tracking and determining whether those announcements were made because of the subsidy or whether they were already going to do it and they're just trying to get government cash or curry favor with the administration and the rest. The other problem is determining what would've happened in the absence of the program. One of the things I was yelling about before the CHIPS Act was implemented was that semiconductor companies and big consumers, like Apple and Ford and GM, had realized years ago that they needed to rebalance a little bit. That, because of the pandemic, geopolitical stuff, and just other reasons, they were a little top heavy in Taiwan or in Asia. They started planning to invest back in the United States. Apple was saying, “We're willing to pay more to have Samsung right next to our big facility in Austin,” for example. All these investments were already planned before the CHIPS Act ever became a thing. Of course, the government is going to take credit for all of this. “We did all of this. Feast upon our works.” That's a challenge. I'm pretty confident, quite frankly, that they're going to run into a lot of problems. One problem is, like I said, they've attached strings to this stuff. There are prevailing wage requirements and other rules and regulations about favoring disadvantaged communities and all the usual stuff. These things always tend to gum up the works a little bit. The other big issue is that we run into preexisting policies that didn't fix: immigration bottlenecks, other labor supply problems. There was a big story in the AP last week that Intel in Ohio can't find construction workers. That's because we didn't liberalize immigration along with all this industrial policy money we just threw at the economy. We have, of course, plenty of tariffs on stuff that you need to build factories. We have tax policy with respect to expensing that discourages long-term investments in capital-intensive manufacturing. I can go down the list. We didn't fix any of that. At the end of the day, will we move the needle a little bit? Maybe. Government is very powerful; we're throwing a lot of money at this. But will there be a great global rebalancing? Color me quite skeptical. The other thing we have to consider are the risks. If we are successful and there is suddenly a glut in global semiconductors — reading the news right now, the semiconductor industry is actually kind of in some trouble globally right now. Gluts are popping up, people stockpiled, like I mentioned. And now they realize that actually Americans' consumption or the world’s consumption of chips isn't insatiable. There are concerns there. If we have a chips-related glut, because the United States and Europe and Korea and others all threw subsidies at this, what are we going to do with all those extra chips? If you look back at the ‘80s and ‘90s, we had trade wars. We slapped tariffs on Japanese semiconductors and then Korean semiconductors, which caused all sorts of ripple effects throughout the US economy. It pushed the computer industry offshore, for example. Being a libertarian ideologue, but also a student of history and industrial policy, I remain pretty confident that we're going to look back on this and go: “Eh, that was not the greatest idea.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

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