Thomas is smoking something. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
"Unwilling" is just a slimy word to use here. It's more like "reject after looking at the actual evidence". Let me try to rephrase it so that people can really appreciate how absurd a statement it is. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that California high-speed rail projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
Oh, gee, could it maybe be because the problem with something that's been developed for generations and that is built ten times more quickly, economically, and profitably in advanced serious countries is obviously NOT "the technology itself"? China - not exactly known for making a bunch of dumb bets on fundamentally bad energy tech -tripled- their nuclear output from 2014 to 2021, and brought another 2GW online just last year. South Korea did the same in 2022 and KEPCO can practically mass produce APR-1400 kits to be assembled in the US cheaply anytime America says ok (i.e., never) just like they did with the UAE (which, like Iran, obviously does not need nuclear for energy, but for, um, other reasons.)
This is an especially moronic line to get past the editors at -Regulation- which is constantly telling everybody about how stupid US regulations (but never, "the technologies themselves"!) are the heart of the de-facto anti-abundance-agenda because they make so many nice things an order of magnitude more expensive for Americans than they are elsewhere, whether it's shipping under the Jones Act or subway tunnels in New York or whatever.
Gell-Mann check. Naval nuclear propulsion lab that designed the core for Nautilus was stood up in 1949 and nautilus launched in 1954 . In 1958, the Westinghouse variant produced commercial electric power. This included the initial requirements and design cycle. Let’s not forget that Carter shud down the reprocessing tech in the US that is being exploited in France and China.
Cost disease is not fundamentally a technology problem.
Because the real reason is all the unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation that have been grafted onto a system (the true "America") in which they can't legitimately exist. Which includes regulation by administrative courts designed to obstruct.
The Econ blog commentariat really doesn’t like government subsidizing e.g. solar.
Which would be as nothing to the public funds required to “be like France”, which I’m pretty sure has never built a nuke with private capital, at least not with more than limited involvement.
Despite increasing its nuclear output as well as building lots of coal plants, China has also 'made a bunch of dumb bets' on dubious energy tech as well. I'm reading that China has huge overcapacity in solar panels and EVs, and it is probably a good bet that the same thing goes for wind turbines, given that overcapacity in sectors prioritized by the CCP is endemic to China's economic system. Apparently, most of this production is for domestic use, not just for export to suicidal Western countries. If all those EVs end up on China's roads, they are going to need those nuclear power plants to keep the EVs charged, especially since they don't seem to have significant domestic sources of oil and gas.
Other countries will be using Kepco, and other companies, to build very safe nukes. My Slovak son spent 4 months of PhD study in S. Korea funded by Kepco. They built the reactors in UAE in 5 years within the budget. Building is not the issue, tech is not the issue. Planning & permissions, 4 years worth of paper work before construction, is an issue. It's likely the Czechs will build some reactors. Slovakia is first or second in % of power generation using nukes (son says first at 60%, wiki says France first, SK second at 53%-grok)
Perfect Safety is the main reason for delay, the political issue. 1 accident in a million days is too risky, or a million years. My skimming of the Cato paper didn't mention that, without government liability limitations, nobody would fund nukes. (Maybe) But politically, leading to legal rules, & seemingly infinite lawsuits, means they can't be actually built in the USA. For now.
US safetyism might not be named, but it's the problem -- not just a desire for super low risk, but a regulation-based requirement for Risk Free. Which can't happen. But new laws on safety & new regs could make it possible, based on new politics.
I was working at EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute*) in the nuclear power division when 3 mile island happened in 1979, same year as The China Syndrome came out with a fiction story of a cover up of safety issue at a nuclear power plant. I understood soon after that construction of new nukes wasn't gonna happen, so moving more into IT was the right personal decision.
We should build more nukes, and do more to standardize on designs.
*"EPRI de Corps" was the Corporate Cup name for runners, and I was a back up runner for a two-man mile run, with my personal best of 4:56. Much better than my 4 hr marathon time. (EPRI was a funder of the Houseman paper Arnold referenced a few days ago, where he helped in research.)
At EPRI, I worked with a pre-SQL database language named Nomad, quite good for report writing with date handling. But not good enough to become a standard.
What is your opinion on Gordian Knot substack which goes into the nuclear cost problem as result of noble lies perpetrated by the nuclear establishment itself. The lies, radiation is unsafe at any dose, and we can build to rule out radiation leaks, they lead to ALARA and thus nuclear as noncompetitive with other energies--for if nuclear is competitive, it only leads demands for further safety.
It is also that the American nuclear establishment is living lavishly on just cleaning up old sites. It has plenty of govt dole and is totally sated.
Irony is that it is the nuclear establishment who has made people afraid. When you are always talking about how safe you are, people naturally think you must be especially unsafe.
I am a bit skeptical of all the arguments around literacy and long form reading etc. The core of Mir's thought implies that there was a time when people were reading a lot more and were better humans because of it. Seems possible, but it also seems possible that most people were always short sighted and lacking introspection and long abstract thought capabilities, and long form reading was popular with those who were not so lacking. It seems a bit like saying "People who drink more Gatorade are much more healthy and physically fit than other people, so people should drink more Gatorade;" the causality is backwards.
One way I think about this is "When was having a large shelf of books, nonfiction and literature types, seen as the basic norm and not a sign of unusual intellectual interests?" I am pretty sure the answer is "never" which implies that such a focus on books and long form reading was an activity with a specific enough target audience that it signaled something special about them.
I suspect what changed is less to do with people dropping a technology that makes them more intellectually functional, and more that we spend a lot of time pretending that people are more intellectually functional via sending them through many years of school in which they read and learn very little, and then tell them how educated and erudite they are. All the while we shame people who will honestly admit "I don't know anything about that, really, so I don't have an opinion" next to people who have a second hand opinion of everything and do not admit to knowing nothing.
Before Gutenberg, almost no one had any books of any kind, let alone even knew what a "bookshelf" was. Literacy rate was probably single digits just from having nothing to read. Personal bibles were contraband, and if there were village notices, the town crier probably memorized them from someone else reading it to him.
Or so I imagine. At any rate, long slow reads are not historically normal. China may have had higher literacy, but not long enough to matter evolution-wise.
Aye, that is my sense as well. People memorized poems, and some people were able to write things down, but lots of good thought happened as a result of talking and thinking. Being able to read and write helps support that, but I think it is secondary to the interest in doing it in the first place, much as a fully stocked gym helps people get in shape, but only if they want to apply themselves to it.
The editor of Regulation is Peter van Doren, a capable and highly credible public choice economist. He and his former colleague at Cato, David Kemp, have criticized the current fad for nuclear power. See Kemp’s Cato blog post https://www.cato.org/blog/subsidies-tech-deals-dont-change-economics-nuclear-power#:~:text=The%20Inflation%20Reduction%20Act%20applied,when%20accounting%20for%20climate%20damages. There is also a paper by Van Doren and Kemp at https://www.cato.org/working-paper/nuclear-power-context-climate-change. It is hardly surprising that these two Cato analysts or anyone at Cato would be skeptical of an industry dependent on massive subsidies determined by a political rather than market processes. Indeed such skepticism is what Cato was created to offer to DC and the US public. For the record, I have worked at Cato for 25 years and will soon retire so you can if you wish, put my views down to “my side” bias. However, I can testify that van Doren equals our host, Dr. Kling, is analytic ability and brainpower (that’s saying something). However, Peter is much more mainstream micro regulatiory economics than Arnold.
Looking at the two links the only thing that seems clear is that both Cato authors despise subsidies most of all.
They dislike regulation, too, but not as much as they dislike the subsidies.
Although it’s distinctly possible that what they despise most is the citation of “climate change” and the desirability of carbon emission reductions to justify subsidies to nuclear energy development.
Otherwise, they would not argue circularly that high construction costs - which they explicitly acknowledge are partly to do with regulation - are the reason that nuclear power should not be built and deployed. Because that argument is dishonest.
They should just be clear that they oppose the regulation and strongly oppose the subsidies and leave it at that.
Or at least be explicit with the seemingly implicit “look, in the real world the environmentalists with their lawsuits combined with existing regulations and regulators’ inherent bureaucratic risk-aversion make the projects bad investments compared to the alternatives” and THAT is why such projects should not be subsidized by government, as opposed to “it’s the technology”.
My perspective on nuclear energy dates back to the 1950s, when I worked on the reactor at UCLA in the basement of the engineering building while taking classes in nuclear engineering. By the 70s, after continuing in the UC system while avoiding the draft (my version of bone spurs), I ended up in the Nuclear/Environmental division of Bechtel Power, which was building reactors. My first project was a design for a radioactive waste handling system, and I was fresh out of Lawrence Livermore Labs (my thesis work), having gained knowledge of a more efficient way to achieve the objective, which resulted in approximately $10 million/reactor savings. The concept went up and down the management ladder, and everyone liked it, saying it would work; however, it would require too much money and time to get it approved by the regulators. I switched to environmental areas and never looked back.
The regulators drove up the costs with their slow and sloppy thinking, preventing the "learning while doing" evolution in a new industrial area. The combination of regulators dictating no changes and the activist mantra of zero risk killed the economic improvements, as stagflation destroyed long-term financing and doomed nuclear energy in the USA.
The human capital in the field has now retired with no replacement, as the more politically motivated have moved into regulatory positions with fat retirements and no innovation requirements.
It was the regulators who killed reactors in the US by preventing evolution. Watch the cost of China's reactors that are not being used to feed bureaucratic regulators. The US NRC spends nearly a billion dollars per year to support its paper bureaucracy.
The "regulatory state," where regulators and bureaucrats "OWN the means of production," is essentially modern-day Marxism, where stockholders pay taxes with no ownership control. The concept of ownership is essentially about control, not pieces of paper.
It certainly qualifies as reading, but let’s focus in on how reading Substacks is similar and different to reading books.
The books I read are “slower”, more carefully written, more scholarly, more permanent, and thus higher in quality. I feel better after reading books than I do Substacks.
Substacks probably contain more novel and more wild ideas. They are probably more raw, personal, and newsworthy. I would like to be reading more overall, more books especially, but Substack retains enough importance that I can’t manage to extricate myself from it just yet.
A few things I like better about books: I enjoy annotating in them; I can quickly and easily flip to any page; they don’t contain distractions; they are quiet; I prefer how light scatters from their pages; my annotations are more permanent; my kids see what I’m reading and might be more likely to join in; they’ve gone through a longer editing and publication process which increases their likelihood for accuracy and author’s intent. More thoughts?
I too absolutely love annotating them. Every non-fiction book (I average about 2-3 a month) is filled with highlights, commentary and personal summaries of each chapter.
The benefits I see with Substack articles are that most are free, it’s easy to delete the bad ones, they are shorter and more concise than books, they are more timely, and they are delivered daily. They also allow me to cut and paste my favorite bits into my permanent notes, something I do religiously.
I only subscribe to two writers on Substack. I can afford a lot more, but I just feel that $80 a year is absurd for one person’s opinion. My magazine subscriptions contain substantially more material and diversity and are physical and cost about half this amount. I think Substack should try exploring an option where we can get 10 writers for $20 a month or so. That I would do.
Carney is wrong. Liberals don't celebrate Kirk or Thompson's murders because they see them as movie villains, they celebrate those murders because they want them dead. Political violence predates both the Internet and movies, and the current wave is nowhere near the 60s/70s in scale, let alone something like Russian terrorism in the late 19th century. His article wrongly blames Internet culture and so deflects from the fact that (1) conservatives are fascist and (2) fascists deserve death are both fully mainstream beliefs, operationalized by criminal gangs (antifa and similar orgs) around the country, and so carries with it the implicit argument that the correct target is some form of Internet censorship rather than these organizations.
At the risk of psychologizing (not a mind reader, take with a grain of salt), I'm tempted to say Carney's diagnosis is born of cowardice; he can't take the fact that a significant fraction of the country (especially under 50) really, truly, genuinely wants him and anyone vaguely associated with his political faction in the ground, so he writes off this bloodlust as them not understanding their enemies are actually human due to Internet brainrot. But they understand just fine.
Tim Carney seems to think that, naturally, we want all people to live and to peacefully solve our differences. But social media has corrupted us. That a ridiculous rose-colored view of human history.
A history with no Thirty Years War, where people with the wrong religion were locked in their church, which was then set on fire. A history without so many wars where troops often took their pay in rape and pillage. A history without something paleogeneticists often find, a group takes over an area and the native female DNA persists but the native male doesn't.
The fact is, we are not naturally moral universalists. We divide the world into "us" and "them" and will do things to "them" we would never do to "us".
David Corey's issue with Schmitt seems to be similar to the problem a lot of Mets fans have with the Mets. Mets fans want the Mets to win but the Mets perennially suck and lose too many games. So too do people who prefer political pluralism. "What if Team Pluralism had an incredible roster of pitchers and also a lot of home run derby champions. Then we would win more games." That is not deep thinking.
Corey's article linked within the linked article analyzing Schmitt's "Concept" is much better than this article because it underlines that Schmitt was trying to preserve Weimar Germany and not to destroy it. Schmitt's advice was basically that the liberal government had to use emergency powers to kill all the radicals, or it would be overthrown. The Weimar government instead dithered, the radicals destabilized it, and I forget what happened afterwards, maybe something to do with ancient aliens.
The problem with trying to cure, with dialogue and discussion, die-hard radicals who want to use as much force as possible to make civil life impossible is that eventually the radicals indeed wind up using so much force that civil life becomes impossible to maintain, so the infinite discourse of liberalism can no longer maintain itself. No matter how many frilly tea parties you invite young Lenin to, he is not going to just stop wanting to destroy everything that exists.
I wonder how federal subsidies of nuclear compare to subsidies of wind and solar. I'm guessing they are far less. Probably the same or similar to non-energy business investment.
You mean, last year? Or not including the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, the DOE …?
I’m pretty sure almost none of the R&D was conducted too privately.
Interestingly I read that the first nuke built with private capital in the US was the Dresden plant in Illinois in 1959:
“In August 2020, Exelon announced they would close the plant in November 2021 for economic reasons, despite the plant having licenses to operate for about another 10 years and the ability to renew the licenses for an additional 20 years beyond that. On September 13, 2021, the Illinois state senate passed a bill subsidizing the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants,[16] which Governor J. B. Pritzker signed into law on September 15,[17] and Exelon announced it would refuel the plants.[18]”
Yes, Illinois did something like that. And it kept those plants open. But that still leaves my basic question. What was the subsidy to those plants versus what solar and wind get? What about other plants that didn't get special funding from Illinois?
I mean, it’s easy to Google that the first nuke built in more than a generation, Vogtle, was only able to proceed with the federal government guaranteeing $12 billion in loans. It doesn’t happen without that. Maybe I don’t understand what you are getting at.
I don't know how to make it clearer other than to say it again a different way.
A loan guarantee lowers the cost to borrow by a few percent. What does that work out to per MW of installed capacity or lifetime MWHs? Solar gets a 30% federal tax credit. Some states, like Illinois, give tax credits and other funds too. What does that work out per MW or MWH? I'm guessing the solar incentives are quite a bit bigger on a per unit energy basis but the info you shared doesn't answer that question.
Maybe so. The solar incentives were probably unneeded. The nuke is apparently delivering the most expensive energy in the world - so perhaps it didn’t need that loan guarantee either. That will all play out in the future.
But would it play out different if nuclear got the same incentives as renewables??? It is a simple question. (Which I don't know the answer.)
Note this ignores that solar and wind are intermittent. Nukes serve a much more valuable base load. It's really apples and oranges to say nuclear costs more than solar.
Carney's ending is important: "We now have fewer institutions and fewer commitments in our lives. The spirit of the age that elevates autonomy above all else and in many circles rejects the unchosen — tradition, hometown, family. This leaves young people to concoct an identity from scratch."
Fewer commitments! Commitments restrict freedom, but also provide meaning. The total freedom Libertarians become uncommitted ... meaningless. Not exactly nihilistic, but somewhat empty, unless they fill their God shaped hole-in-their-heart with the crusade to Fight for Freedom. When I committed to this, it gave me more meaning then the cone-head motto: Consume Mass Quantities.
Maybe the nukes that the GOP is set on building, will have the unplanned and ironic effect of returning us to the idea of energy conservation, which was killed so long ago.
Regarding the nuclear power, Gordian Knot substack tells it in fascinating (and depressing) detail. The reason nuclear is expensive owes to certain noble lies perpetuated by the authorities in the nuclear field itself--that radiation leaks are deadly at any does, and secondly, we can built as to prevent any radiation leak, howsoever trivial.
Corey concludes "how might we better live out our commitments to freedom and political equality in a society where people differ radically and yet need each other for the many goods that our political association brings?"
He fails to explicitly address the partisan intolerance of Harvard & Ivy+ to Republicans. Because if he did, the How? could be easily answered:
require quotas of Reps (& Dems) to qualify as non-partisan, like 30%. For decades they have been falsely claiming to be non-partisan so as to get the govt tax exemption benefit.
Yeah, this isn't perfect and won't solve all problems, but compared to the fuzzy 4 solutions Corey describes, who would really say 30% quotas would work less well than his goals? Of course, his goals should also be followed, but his #1 "stop being the dupe", he doesn't even convince himself that his program will work.
I'm sure 30% Rep quota for professors, Trustees, & admin staff, would work far better at his #1 & #2 (sociological pluralism not an existential threat), and more quickly than the decades he hopes for, implicitly by creating better institutions, yet with no program to reform the current ones.
Arnold seems to be a brokenist, too damaged to be reformed ... thus no policy changes needed, tho fewer subsidies would be good -- while I fully support ending govt support, realize this is political suicide for any Party to advocate. (Zombie Libertarians are already undead)
Where are the ideas for reform that are better than 30% quotas? Corey doesn't have'em.
Harvard, against prior SCOTUS decisions, was able to successfully use quotas to get more Blacks to go there. It’s clear they can work.
The Congress status quo will continue to be faction groups for Dems & faction groups for Reps, and the law on non-partisanship should allow some representation for any party represented in Congress, but this is wonky details, tho I like them.
As is usual, a dismissive critique with no better reform idea—as Corey also doesn’t have.
What is your point? You wanted ideas that are better than 30% quotas. I said quotas are too easy to get around, implying that quotas are too worthless to be a good baseline. You complain that a dismissive critique with no better reform idea is worthless.
Where the hell is your reform idea which is better than useless quotas? You think setting a baseline of 0 makes quotas better than 0?
2 points. 1-as yet another nearly worthless comment shows, questions about one alternative are intellectually flabby, verging on trolling, without offering a better alternative. You imply that no quotas are better than quotas. That’s definitely false.
2-quotas too easy to get around, quotas are useless. Harvard used quotas and did get more Blacks into Harvard. Quotas work.
A 30% quota on getting Republicans would work to get far more professors claiming to be Republican.
Some, maybe most, would be like Romney, McCain, Bush, or Liz Cheney, highly critical of some or even most Republican policies. Unlikely all would be so, especially if registered R before the last prior election was the objective criteria.
Your dismissal of quotas is an assertion that Harvard falsified. Flabby.
Thomas is smoking something. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
"Unwilling" is just a slimy word to use here. It's more like "reject after looking at the actual evidence". Let me try to rephrase it so that people can really appreciate how absurd a statement it is. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that California high-speed rail projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
Oh, gee, could it maybe be because the problem with something that's been developed for generations and that is built ten times more quickly, economically, and profitably in advanced serious countries is obviously NOT "the technology itself"? China - not exactly known for making a bunch of dumb bets on fundamentally bad energy tech -tripled- their nuclear output from 2014 to 2021, and brought another 2GW online just last year. South Korea did the same in 2022 and KEPCO can practically mass produce APR-1400 kits to be assembled in the US cheaply anytime America says ok (i.e., never) just like they did with the UAE (which, like Iran, obviously does not need nuclear for energy, but for, um, other reasons.)
This is an especially moronic line to get past the editors at -Regulation- which is constantly telling everybody about how stupid US regulations (but never, "the technologies themselves"!) are the heart of the de-facto anti-abundance-agenda because they make so many nice things an order of magnitude more expensive for Americans than they are elsewhere, whether it's shipping under the Jones Act or subway tunnels in New York or whatever.
Gell-Mann check. Naval nuclear propulsion lab that designed the core for Nautilus was stood up in 1949 and nautilus launched in 1954 . In 1958, the Westinghouse variant produced commercial electric power. This included the initial requirements and design cycle. Let’s not forget that Carter shud down the reprocessing tech in the US that is being exploited in France and China.
Cost disease is not fundamentally a technology problem.
I believe the French also generate a significant amount of their electric power from nukes, and have for quite a while.
Why are people unwilling to consider the reason America fails so often is America itself?
Because the real reason is all the unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation that have been grafted onto a system (the true "America") in which they can't legitimately exist. Which includes regulation by administrative courts designed to obstruct.
This is a very general answer and doesn't get into nitty-gritty of what went wrong in this particular field of nuclear power.
Bureaucracy is as American as it can get today. "True" non-bureaucratic America died after the Civil War.
The Econ blog commentariat really doesn’t like government subsidizing e.g. solar.
Which would be as nothing to the public funds required to “be like France”, which I’m pretty sure has never built a nuke with private capital, at least not with more than limited involvement.
Despite increasing its nuclear output as well as building lots of coal plants, China has also 'made a bunch of dumb bets' on dubious energy tech as well. I'm reading that China has huge overcapacity in solar panels and EVs, and it is probably a good bet that the same thing goes for wind turbines, given that overcapacity in sectors prioritized by the CCP is endemic to China's economic system. Apparently, most of this production is for domestic use, not just for export to suicidal Western countries. If all those EVs end up on China's roads, they are going to need those nuclear power plants to keep the EVs charged, especially since they don't seem to have significant domestic sources of oil and gas.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-05-29/business/industry/Kepco-in-talks-with-Vietnam-Saudi-Arabia-Turkey-for-potential-power-plant-deals/2318315
Other countries will be using Kepco, and other companies, to build very safe nukes. My Slovak son spent 4 months of PhD study in S. Korea funded by Kepco. They built the reactors in UAE in 5 years within the budget. Building is not the issue, tech is not the issue. Planning & permissions, 4 years worth of paper work before construction, is an issue. It's likely the Czechs will build some reactors. Slovakia is first or second in % of power generation using nukes (son says first at 60%, wiki says France first, SK second at 53%-grok)
Perfect Safety is the main reason for delay, the political issue. 1 accident in a million days is too risky, or a million years. My skimming of the Cato paper didn't mention that, without government liability limitations, nobody would fund nukes. (Maybe) But politically, leading to legal rules, & seemingly infinite lawsuits, means they can't be actually built in the USA. For now.
US safetyism might not be named, but it's the problem -- not just a desire for super low risk, but a regulation-based requirement for Risk Free. Which can't happen. But new laws on safety & new regs could make it possible, based on new politics.
I was working at EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute*) in the nuclear power division when 3 mile island happened in 1979, same year as The China Syndrome came out with a fiction story of a cover up of safety issue at a nuclear power plant. I understood soon after that construction of new nukes wasn't gonna happen, so moving more into IT was the right personal decision.
We should build more nukes, and do more to standardize on designs.
*"EPRI de Corps" was the Corporate Cup name for runners, and I was a back up runner for a two-man mile run, with my personal best of 4:56. Much better than my 4 hr marathon time. (EPRI was a funder of the Houseman paper Arnold referenced a few days ago, where he helped in research.)
At EPRI, I worked with a pre-SQL database language named Nomad, quite good for report writing with date handling. But not good enough to become a standard.
What is your opinion on Gordian Knot substack which goes into the nuclear cost problem as result of noble lies perpetrated by the nuclear establishment itself. The lies, radiation is unsafe at any dose, and we can build to rule out radiation leaks, they lead to ALARA and thus nuclear as noncompetitive with other energies--for if nuclear is competitive, it only leads demands for further safety.
It is also that the American nuclear establishment is living lavishly on just cleaning up old sites. It has plenty of govt dole and is totally sated.
Right. Thanks. I think the problem is people have been made afraid of nuclear, and so will find any excuse for not embracing it.
Irony is that it is the nuclear establishment who has made people afraid. When you are always talking about how safe you are, people naturally think you must be especially unsafe.
I am a bit skeptical of all the arguments around literacy and long form reading etc. The core of Mir's thought implies that there was a time when people were reading a lot more and were better humans because of it. Seems possible, but it also seems possible that most people were always short sighted and lacking introspection and long abstract thought capabilities, and long form reading was popular with those who were not so lacking. It seems a bit like saying "People who drink more Gatorade are much more healthy and physically fit than other people, so people should drink more Gatorade;" the causality is backwards.
One way I think about this is "When was having a large shelf of books, nonfiction and literature types, seen as the basic norm and not a sign of unusual intellectual interests?" I am pretty sure the answer is "never" which implies that such a focus on books and long form reading was an activity with a specific enough target audience that it signaled something special about them.
I suspect what changed is less to do with people dropping a technology that makes them more intellectually functional, and more that we spend a lot of time pretending that people are more intellectually functional via sending them through many years of school in which they read and learn very little, and then tell them how educated and erudite they are. All the while we shame people who will honestly admit "I don't know anything about that, really, so I don't have an opinion" next to people who have a second hand opinion of everything and do not admit to knowing nothing.
Before Gutenberg, almost no one had any books of any kind, let alone even knew what a "bookshelf" was. Literacy rate was probably single digits just from having nothing to read. Personal bibles were contraband, and if there were village notices, the town crier probably memorized them from someone else reading it to him.
Or so I imagine. At any rate, long slow reads are not historically normal. China may have had higher literacy, but not long enough to matter evolution-wise.
Aye, that is my sense as well. People memorized poems, and some people were able to write things down, but lots of good thought happened as a result of talking and thinking. Being able to read and write helps support that, but I think it is secondary to the interest in doing it in the first place, much as a fully stocked gym helps people get in shape, but only if they want to apply themselves to it.
The editor of Regulation is Peter van Doren, a capable and highly credible public choice economist. He and his former colleague at Cato, David Kemp, have criticized the current fad for nuclear power. See Kemp’s Cato blog post https://www.cato.org/blog/subsidies-tech-deals-dont-change-economics-nuclear-power#:~:text=The%20Inflation%20Reduction%20Act%20applied,when%20accounting%20for%20climate%20damages. There is also a paper by Van Doren and Kemp at https://www.cato.org/working-paper/nuclear-power-context-climate-change. It is hardly surprising that these two Cato analysts or anyone at Cato would be skeptical of an industry dependent on massive subsidies determined by a political rather than market processes. Indeed such skepticism is what Cato was created to offer to DC and the US public. For the record, I have worked at Cato for 25 years and will soon retire so you can if you wish, put my views down to “my side” bias. However, I can testify that van Doren equals our host, Dr. Kling, is analytic ability and brainpower (that’s saying something). However, Peter is much more mainstream micro regulatiory economics than Arnold.
Thanks for this.
Looking at the two links the only thing that seems clear is that both Cato authors despise subsidies most of all.
They dislike regulation, too, but not as much as they dislike the subsidies.
Although it’s distinctly possible that what they despise most is the citation of “climate change” and the desirability of carbon emission reductions to justify subsidies to nuclear energy development.
Otherwise, they would not argue circularly that high construction costs - which they explicitly acknowledge are partly to do with regulation - are the reason that nuclear power should not be built and deployed. Because that argument is dishonest.
They should just be clear that they oppose the regulation and strongly oppose the subsidies and leave it at that.
Or at least be explicit with the seemingly implicit “look, in the real world the environmentalists with their lawsuits combined with existing regulations and regulators’ inherent bureaucratic risk-aversion make the projects bad investments compared to the alternatives” and THAT is why such projects should not be subsidized by government, as opposed to “it’s the technology”.
My perspective on nuclear energy dates back to the 1950s, when I worked on the reactor at UCLA in the basement of the engineering building while taking classes in nuclear engineering. By the 70s, after continuing in the UC system while avoiding the draft (my version of bone spurs), I ended up in the Nuclear/Environmental division of Bechtel Power, which was building reactors. My first project was a design for a radioactive waste handling system, and I was fresh out of Lawrence Livermore Labs (my thesis work), having gained knowledge of a more efficient way to achieve the objective, which resulted in approximately $10 million/reactor savings. The concept went up and down the management ladder, and everyone liked it, saying it would work; however, it would require too much money and time to get it approved by the regulators. I switched to environmental areas and never looked back.
The regulators drove up the costs with their slow and sloppy thinking, preventing the "learning while doing" evolution in a new industrial area. The combination of regulators dictating no changes and the activist mantra of zero risk killed the economic improvements, as stagflation destroyed long-term financing and doomed nuclear energy in the USA.
The human capital in the field has now retired with no replacement, as the more politically motivated have moved into regulatory positions with fat retirements and no innovation requirements.
It was the regulators who killed reactors in the US by preventing evolution. Watch the cost of China's reactors that are not being used to feed bureaucratic regulators. The US NRC spends nearly a billion dollars per year to support its paper bureaucracy.
The "regulatory state," where regulators and bureaucrats "OWN the means of production," is essentially modern-day Marxism, where stockholders pay taxes with no ownership control. The concept of ownership is essentially about control, not pieces of paper.
Does reading a dozen or so Substack articles a day qualify as reading? Or is this just consuming social media? Thoughts?
It certainly qualifies as reading, but let’s focus in on how reading Substacks is similar and different to reading books.
The books I read are “slower”, more carefully written, more scholarly, more permanent, and thus higher in quality. I feel better after reading books than I do Substacks.
Substacks probably contain more novel and more wild ideas. They are probably more raw, personal, and newsworthy. I would like to be reading more overall, more books especially, but Substack retains enough importance that I can’t manage to extricate myself from it just yet.
A few things I like better about books: I enjoy annotating in them; I can quickly and easily flip to any page; they don’t contain distractions; they are quiet; I prefer how light scatters from their pages; my annotations are more permanent; my kids see what I’m reading and might be more likely to join in; they’ve gone through a longer editing and publication process which increases their likelihood for accuracy and author’s intent. More thoughts?
I too absolutely love annotating them. Every non-fiction book (I average about 2-3 a month) is filled with highlights, commentary and personal summaries of each chapter.
The benefits I see with Substack articles are that most are free, it’s easy to delete the bad ones, they are shorter and more concise than books, they are more timely, and they are delivered daily. They also allow me to cut and paste my favorite bits into my permanent notes, something I do religiously.
I only subscribe to two writers on Substack. I can afford a lot more, but I just feel that $80 a year is absurd for one person’s opinion. My magazine subscriptions contain substantially more material and diversity and are physical and cost about half this amount. I think Substack should try exploring an option where we can get 10 writers for $20 a month or so. That I would do.
Carney is wrong. Liberals don't celebrate Kirk or Thompson's murders because they see them as movie villains, they celebrate those murders because they want them dead. Political violence predates both the Internet and movies, and the current wave is nowhere near the 60s/70s in scale, let alone something like Russian terrorism in the late 19th century. His article wrongly blames Internet culture and so deflects from the fact that (1) conservatives are fascist and (2) fascists deserve death are both fully mainstream beliefs, operationalized by criminal gangs (antifa and similar orgs) around the country, and so carries with it the implicit argument that the correct target is some form of Internet censorship rather than these organizations.
At the risk of psychologizing (not a mind reader, take with a grain of salt), I'm tempted to say Carney's diagnosis is born of cowardice; he can't take the fact that a significant fraction of the country (especially under 50) really, truly, genuinely wants him and anyone vaguely associated with his political faction in the ground, so he writes off this bloodlust as them not understanding their enemies are actually human due to Internet brainrot. But they understand just fine.
Tim Carney seems to think that, naturally, we want all people to live and to peacefully solve our differences. But social media has corrupted us. That a ridiculous rose-colored view of human history.
A history with no Thirty Years War, where people with the wrong religion were locked in their church, which was then set on fire. A history without so many wars where troops often took their pay in rape and pillage. A history without something paleogeneticists often find, a group takes over an area and the native female DNA persists but the native male doesn't.
The fact is, we are not naturally moral universalists. We divide the world into "us" and "them" and will do things to "them" we would never do to "us".
David Corey's issue with Schmitt seems to be similar to the problem a lot of Mets fans have with the Mets. Mets fans want the Mets to win but the Mets perennially suck and lose too many games. So too do people who prefer political pluralism. "What if Team Pluralism had an incredible roster of pitchers and also a lot of home run derby champions. Then we would win more games." That is not deep thinking.
Corey's article linked within the linked article analyzing Schmitt's "Concept" is much better than this article because it underlines that Schmitt was trying to preserve Weimar Germany and not to destroy it. Schmitt's advice was basically that the liberal government had to use emergency powers to kill all the radicals, or it would be overthrown. The Weimar government instead dithered, the radicals destabilized it, and I forget what happened afterwards, maybe something to do with ancient aliens.
The problem with trying to cure, with dialogue and discussion, die-hard radicals who want to use as much force as possible to make civil life impossible is that eventually the radicals indeed wind up using so much force that civil life becomes impossible to maintain, so the infinite discourse of liberalism can no longer maintain itself. No matter how many frilly tea parties you invite young Lenin to, he is not going to just stop wanting to destroy everything that exists.
I wonder how federal subsidies of nuclear compare to subsidies of wind and solar. I'm guessing they are far less. Probably the same or similar to non-energy business investment.
You mean, last year? Or not including the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, the DOE …?
I’m pretty sure almost none of the R&D was conducted too privately.
Interestingly I read that the first nuke built with private capital in the US was the Dresden plant in Illinois in 1959:
“In August 2020, Exelon announced they would close the plant in November 2021 for economic reasons, despite the plant having licenses to operate for about another 10 years and the ability to renew the licenses for an additional 20 years beyond that. On September 13, 2021, the Illinois state senate passed a bill subsidizing the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants,[16] which Governor J. B. Pritzker signed into law on September 15,[17] and Exelon announced it would refuel the plants.[18]”
Yes, Illinois did something like that. And it kept those plants open. But that still leaves my basic question. What was the subsidy to those plants versus what solar and wind get? What about other plants that didn't get special funding from Illinois?
I mean, it’s easy to Google that the first nuke built in more than a generation, Vogtle, was only able to proceed with the federal government guaranteeing $12 billion in loans. It doesn’t happen without that. Maybe I don’t understand what you are getting at.
I don't know how to make it clearer other than to say it again a different way.
A loan guarantee lowers the cost to borrow by a few percent. What does that work out to per MW of installed capacity or lifetime MWHs? Solar gets a 30% federal tax credit. Some states, like Illinois, give tax credits and other funds too. What does that work out per MW or MWH? I'm guessing the solar incentives are quite a bit bigger on a per unit energy basis but the info you shared doesn't answer that question.
Maybe so. The solar incentives were probably unneeded. The nuke is apparently delivering the most expensive energy in the world - so perhaps it didn’t need that loan guarantee either. That will all play out in the future.
But would it play out different if nuclear got the same incentives as renewables??? It is a simple question. (Which I don't know the answer.)
Note this ignores that solar and wind are intermittent. Nukes serve a much more valuable base load. It's really apples and oranges to say nuclear costs more than solar.
Carney's ending is important: "We now have fewer institutions and fewer commitments in our lives. The spirit of the age that elevates autonomy above all else and in many circles rejects the unchosen — tradition, hometown, family. This leaves young people to concoct an identity from scratch."
Fewer commitments! Commitments restrict freedom, but also provide meaning. The total freedom Libertarians become uncommitted ... meaningless. Not exactly nihilistic, but somewhat empty, unless they fill their God shaped hole-in-their-heart with the crusade to Fight for Freedom. When I committed to this, it gave me more meaning then the cone-head motto: Consume Mass Quantities.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson, "Me and Bobby McGee", shamelessly stolen from Dostoevsky
Maybe the nukes that the GOP is set on building, will have the unplanned and ironic effect of returning us to the idea of energy conservation, which was killed so long ago.
Lol. Possible silver lining.
Regarding the nuclear power, Gordian Knot substack tells it in fascinating (and depressing) detail. The reason nuclear is expensive owes to certain noble lies perpetuated by the authorities in the nuclear field itself--that radiation leaks are deadly at any does, and secondly, we can built as to prevent any radiation leak, howsoever trivial.
Corey #3 and #4
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Corey concludes "how might we better live out our commitments to freedom and political equality in a society where people differ radically and yet need each other for the many goods that our political association brings?"
He fails to explicitly address the partisan intolerance of Harvard & Ivy+ to Republicans. Because if he did, the How? could be easily answered:
require quotas of Reps (& Dems) to qualify as non-partisan, like 30%. For decades they have been falsely claiming to be non-partisan so as to get the govt tax exemption benefit.
Yeah, this isn't perfect and won't solve all problems, but compared to the fuzzy 4 solutions Corey describes, who would really say 30% quotas would work less well than his goals? Of course, his goals should also be followed, but his #1 "stop being the dupe", he doesn't even convince himself that his program will work.
I'm sure 30% Rep quota for professors, Trustees, & admin staff, would work far better at his #1 & #2 (sociological pluralism not an existential threat), and more quickly than the decades he hopes for, implicitly by creating better institutions, yet with no program to reform the current ones.
Arnold seems to be a brokenist, too damaged to be reformed ... thus no policy changes needed, tho fewer subsidies would be good -- while I fully support ending govt support, realize this is political suicide for any Party to advocate. (Zombie Libertarians are already undead)
Where are the ideas for reform that are better than 30% quotas? Corey doesn't have'em.
Quotas are far too easy to get around, and all they do is lock in the status quo and block the future quo.
Harvard, against prior SCOTUS decisions, was able to successfully use quotas to get more Blacks to go there. It’s clear they can work.
The Congress status quo will continue to be faction groups for Dems & faction groups for Reps, and the law on non-partisanship should allow some representation for any party represented in Congress, but this is wonky details, tho I like them.
As is usual, a dismissive critique with no better reform idea—as Corey also doesn’t have.
What is your point? You wanted ideas that are better than 30% quotas. I said quotas are too easy to get around, implying that quotas are too worthless to be a good baseline. You complain that a dismissive critique with no better reform idea is worthless.
Where the hell is your reform idea which is better than useless quotas? You think setting a baseline of 0 makes quotas better than 0?
2 points. 1-as yet another nearly worthless comment shows, questions about one alternative are intellectually flabby, verging on trolling, without offering a better alternative. You imply that no quotas are better than quotas. That’s definitely false.
2-quotas too easy to get around, quotas are useless. Harvard used quotas and did get more Blacks into Harvard. Quotas work.
A 30% quota on getting Republicans would work to get far more professors claiming to be Republican.
Some, maybe most, would be like Romney, McCain, Bush, or Liz Cheney, highly critical of some or even most Republican policies. Unlikely all would be so, especially if registered R before the last prior election was the objective criteria.
Your dismissal of quotas is an assertion that Harvard falsified. Flabby.