Faster, Please! — The Podcast

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 peo

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

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 i

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 scale

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 backw

Few economists think more creatively and also more rigorously about the future than Robin Hanson, my guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast. So when he says a future of radical scientific and economic progress is still possible, you should take the claim seriously. Robin is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.In This Episode:* Economic growth over the very long run (1:20)* The signs of an approaching acceleration (7:08)* Global governance and risk aversion (12:19)* Thinking about the future like an economist (17:32)* The stories we tell ourselves about the future (20:57)* Longtermism and innovation (23:20)Next week, I’ll feature part two of my conversation with Robin, where we discuss whether we are alone in the universe and what alien life means for humanity's long-term potential.Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Economic growth over the very long runJames Pethokoukis: Way back in 2000, you wrote a paper called “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.” You wrote, “If one takes seriously the model of economic growth as a series of exponential … [modes], then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the world economy will likely see a very dramatic change within the next century, to a new economic growth mode with a doubling time perhaps as short as two weeks.” Is that still your expectation for the 21st century?Robin Hanson: It's my expectation for the next couple of centuries. Whether it's the 21st isn’t quite so clear.Has anything happened in the intervening two decades to make you think that something might happen sooner rather than later … or rather, just later?Just later, I'm afraid. I mean, we have a lot of people hyping AI at the moment, right?Sure, I may be one of them on occasion.There are a lot of people expecting rapid progress soon. And so, I think I've had a long enough baseline there to think, "No, maybe not.” But let's go with the priors.Is it a technological mechanism that will cause this? Is it AI? Is it that we find the right general-purpose technology, and then that will launch us into very, very rapid growth?That would be my best guess. But just to be clear for our listeners, we just look at history, we seem to see these exponential modes. There are, say, four of them so far (if we go pre-human). And then the modes are relatively steady and then have pretty sharp transitions. That is, the transition to a growth rate of 50 or 200 times faster happens within less than a doubling time.So what was the last mode?We're in industry at the moment: doubles roughly every 15 years, started around 1800 or 1700. The previous mode was farming, doubled every thousand years. And so, in roughly less than a thousand years, we saw this rapid transition to our current thing, less than the doubling time. The previous mode before that was foraging, where humans doubled roughly every quarter million years. And in definitely less than a quarter million years, we saw a transition there. So then the prediction is that we will see another transition, and it will happen in less than 15 years, to a faster growth mode. And then if you look at the previous increases in growth rates, they were, again, a factor of 60 to 200. And so, that's what you'd be looking for in the next mode. Now, obviously, I want to say you're just looking at a low data set here. Four events. You can't be too confident. But, come on, you’ve got to guess that maybe a next one would happen.If you go back to that late ‘90s period, there was a lot of optimism. If you pick up Wired magazine back then, [there was] plenty of optimism that something was happening, that we were on the verge of something. One of my favorite examples — and a sort of non-technologist example, was a report from Lehman Brothers from December 1999. It was called “Beyond 2000.” And it was full of predictions, maybe not talking about exponential growth, but how we were in for a period of very fast growth, like 1960s-style growth. It was a very bullish prediction for the next two decades. Now Lehman did not make it another decade itself. These predictions don't seem to have panned out — maybe you think I'm being overly pessimistic on what's happened over the past 20 years — but do you think it was because we didn't understand the technology that was supposedly going to drive these changes? Did we do something wrong? Or is it just a lot of people who love tech love the idea of growth, and we all just got too excited?I think it's just a really hard problem. We're in this world. We're living with it. It's growing really fast. Again, doubling every 15 years. And we've long had this sense that it's possible for something much bigger. So automation, the possibility of robots, AI: It sat in the background for a long time. And people have been

Almost 50 years ago, in December 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, marking the end of the Apollo program. In the half-century since, no crewed mission — not Americans nor anyone else — has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Despite a series of presidential promises, NASA has yet to return to the Moon, let alone venture to Mars. And despite recent declines in launch costs, thanks in large part to SpaceX, NASA remains in many ways committed to the old, Apollo-style way of doing things. To learn more about why NASA's manned missions always seem to run over budget and behind schedule — and to get a sense of the way forward with commercial space companies — I'm speaking with Lori Garver.Garver was previously Deputy Administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013. Previously, she worked at NASA from 1996 to 2001 as a senior policy analyst. Garver is the founder of Earthrise Alliance, an initiative to better use space data to address climate change. She also appears in the 2022 Netflix documentary Return to Space. Her fascinating memoir, published in June, is Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: In December of this year, it will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 splashdown and the end of the Apollo program. Humanity has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since. And for a while, the United States couldn't even get to low Earth orbit on its own. What happened to all the dreams that people had in the ‘60s that just sort of disappeared in 1972?Lori Garver: I think the dreamers are still out there. Many of them work on the space program. Many of them have contributed to the programs that we had post-Apollo. The human space flight program ended and took that hiatus. [But] we’ve been having, in the United States a very robust and leading space program ever since Apollo. For human space flight, I think we got off track, as I outline in my book, by really trying to relive Apollo. And trying to fulfill the institutions and congressional mandates that were created for Apollo, which were too expensive to continue with more limited goals. The Nixon administration actually had the right idea with the Space Shuttle. They said the goal was to reduce the cost of getting to and from space.Money was no object for a while.When you have your program tied to a national goal, like we did in Apollo of beating the Russians and showing that a democratic system was a better way to advance society and technology and science, we built to a standard that tripled the budget every couple years in the early days. We [NASA] then had to survive on a budget about half the size of the peak during Apollo and have never been able to really readjust the infrastructure and the cost to sustain it. So I'd say our buying power was greatly reduced.We'll talk about government later in the interview, but to some degree, isn't this a failure of society? If politicians had sensed a yearning desire from the American public to continue moving out further in space, would we have done it?It's hard to know how we measure public support for something like that because there's no voting on it per se. And there are so few congressional districts whose members are really focused on it. So the bills that come up in Congress are funding bills. NASA is buried among many other agencies. And so I think the yearning on the part of the public is a little more diffuse. What we want to see is the United States being a leader. We want to see us doing things that return to our economy, and we want to see things that help our national security. Those are the ways space contributes to society. And I think what we got off track in doing is delivering hardware that was built in certain people's districts instead of being a purpose-driven program as it was in Apollo.Even though the Space Shuttle wasn't going to fly to the Moon, people were really pretty excited by it. I'm not sure polls always capture how interested people are in space.We don't really gauge based on people who are attending launches. As someone who's been to a lot of launches, there are lots of people enthused. But that's not 300 million people in the country. I think that polls tend to show, as compared to what? And NASA tends to be at the bottom of a list of national priorities. But, of course, its budget isn't very large. So these are all things that we try to evaluate. I think if you believe that network news was able to track public interest, by the time of the Challenger accident — which was only the 25th shuttle launch — they weren't showing them live anymore. So that's the kind of thing that you can look into. We really like things the first time. And those first couple missions were very exciting. Or if we did something unique, like fix the Hubble Space Telescope, that was interesting. But we had 134 missions, and not every one of those got a l

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee’s quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist’s resource curse. And s

What is progress and how do we get more of it? It's a core question here at Faster, Please! and something Jason Crawford thinks a lot about. Jason is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Jason explains how progress is about more than just economic growth, discusses where it comes from, and distinguishes progress from utopianism. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: You are part of a growing intellectual movement that aims to understand two big things: why human progress happens and how to speed it up. First of all, why is this of interest to you?Jason Crawford: Most of my career for almost 20 years was in the tech industry. I have a background in computer science. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup co-founder. And about five-plus years ago, I got really interested in progress. It began as an intellectual hobby, and I just came from the perspective that, like, the progress in material living standards over the last couple of hundred years—I mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in industrialized countries—is basically the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity, or at least way up there. You know, in the top three. And if you care about human wellbeing and you look at this fact of history, I think you have to be a little awestruck about it. And I think you have to ask three basic questions: First, how did this happen? Second, why did it take so long to really get going? And three, how can we continue it into the future?What do we mean by progress? Are you talking about spending power or are you talking about human lifespan? Leisure time? People could define it differently. When we use the word progress during this conversation, what are you talking about?Yeah, there's at least two basic and important meanings to progress. So one is progress in our capabilities, our ability to understand and control the world: science, technology, industry, infrastructure, wealth accumulation, and so forth. But then there's …I love that wealth accumulation part. Oh man, I love hearing about that.Surplus wealth is very important, and infrastructure is a form of wealth, right? But then there's an even deeper—I think the ultimate meaning of progress, the true progress of human progress is progress in human wellbeing: the ability to live longer, happier, healthier lives, lives of more freedom and choice and opportunity with more things open to us, more ability for self-actualization. Ultimately, it's that human progress that matters, and it’s why we care about this.I think a lot about choice and opportunity, the human freedom aspect. Sometimes when I talk about it, people will kind of condense it down to “stuff.” Like, “You just want more stuff. How much more stuff do we need?” But I think there is that deeper meaning, and I don't think most people who are interested in progress and these questions are interested in it just because they just think we want more stuff.First off, stuff is underrated. People like to dismiss it as if material comforts don't matter. They matter a lot. And I think people just take the current level of affluence for granted and they don't think about how life could be way better. You know, people in 1800 if you could ask them, they would probably say they were fairly satisfied with their lives as well. They had no idea what was possible. But you're right that it's not just about stuff. I mentioned choice and opportunity. Think about the ability that the average person has (at least the average person in a reasonably wealthy country) to live where they want, to have the kind of job that they want instead of having to be a farmer or just having to accept the trade that their father had, the ability to marry whom they want when they want, to have children or not and how many children to have and when to have them, the ability to go on vacation.There are a lot of these things that we take for granted now that people did not always have. So it's not just about a full belly and a roof over your head and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Those are great things. And, again, they're underrated. But it's also about romance and knowledge and exploration and excitement and adventure and self-actualization, and self-expression—all of those very human values, which are psychological values. Those are also supported and enabled by material progress.Do we still not know how progress happens, for the most part? We know institutions are important. Deirdre McCloskey talks about the Bourgeois Deal, in which innovators said, “Let me creatively destroy the old and bad ways of doing things, the scythes, ox carts, oil lamps, propeller planes, film cameras, and factory lacking high-tech robots, and I will make you all rich.” Do we nee

Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is also co-director of the Space Solar Power Project, which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth. Hajimiri and colleagues are designing solar arrays composed of hundreds of small photovoltaic tiles that would be linked together to form larger modules, and then those modules — flying together in formation like a school of fish — would form a hexagonal power station in space. These flexible arrays would be rolled up when launched and unfurl at their orbital destination.In this inaugural episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Ali tells me about how space-based solar works, what problem it solves, and how long we’ll have to wait before we see orbiting power stations in the sky. For more, check out my recent 5QQ chat with Ali. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: Space-based solar — putting solar panels in space and beaming the energy to Earth — seems like a beautiful, elegant solution. Why is it a good idea? What problem is it solving?Hajimiri: So the primary problem that it solves is being able to get around the days and nights, the cycles of the weather, the cloudy days, and all those things — and having dispatchable power where you need it, when you need it, and as much as you need.An advantage over ground-based solar?Correct. And the other benefit of it is that essentially you can have these systems in space for a long time, and you can route it the way you want. You can actually distribute the power; you can break it up into smaller pieces. You can say, “I want to send 20 percent to New York, 30 percent to LA, and 40 percent to, I don't know, Seattle.”Wouldn’t these panels sometimes be in the darkness, on the night side of the Earth? So how would they work?It depends on which orbit you put it in. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit (or something near geosynchronous) you are basically in the sun for most of the time, except for 20 minutes on the equinoxes. Most of the time you're not eclipsed, because you're so far away that the shadow of Earth is so small. And because of the inclination of the Earth, because it's at an angle, you would get eclipsed for 20 minutes on each one of those.And as it’s transferring power down, it doesn't have to be directly over the collection station, right? It can be at an angle?It doesn't. That's the beauty of it. Because it's a very large array, it redirects the energy. You can electronically steer it. It does not even need mechanical steering. So you can actually create a focal point of energy where you need, where your recovery of energy occurs. And you can move that very rapidly — on the scales of nanoseconds, extremely fast — from one place to another.Does it require new technology to distribute that power? Or is that basically using current technology?On the ground, we have what we call “rectennas,” which is basically rectifying antennas. These are another array of antennas that are very plain, very flat. I mean, if this were not radio, I would've had demonstrations of these things to show you how they look. But these are like thin sheets of material, like printed circuit boards that go in your computers and things of that sort, that sit on the ground. They collect the energy, they convert it to DC power, and then that's converted to AC. And then at that point, you can plug it in to connect to your network — essentially to your distribution line, the same power distribution line that you use. You can even envision putting this next to photovoltaic solar [panels] that are out there, or any other kind of power plant. It could be any kind of power plant, and you just connect to it and add and augment the power that you generate with these.So you can basically bolt this onto the existing power system?Yes. I mean, once you are on the ground station, once you go get past the rectenna and the conversion to AC, then that's basically compatible with all the other AC network.Solar power is becoming cheaper, and the land area we would need to cover with solar panels to power the whole Earth is smaller than you'd think. But traditional solar relies on storage at night when the sun isn't shining. But what you're suggesting wouldn't be reliant on batteries. Is that right?What we do allows you to send the power where you need at the time you need — and you can even break it up into different proportions. But the other thing that it does is that, since you have it 24/7, pretty much you don't need the storage, which is a big challenge.The other thing is that there are places that don't have the power infrastructure. A good analogy to this is cell phones versus landlines. Thirty years ago, there were places in Africa that didn't have landlines. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, there are these same places that still don’t have landlines, but there they have leapfrogg