In the absence of something better to do, people will erect toll booths both actual and metaphorical because it is easier than matching supply to demand. One of the chief purposes of government is to manage this process, to limit the number of toll booth builders. Our government promises the ever shrinking trickle of young people that they can Build Their Own Tollbooth and to continuously petition the government for more opportunities to erect tollbooths.
This perhaps becomes more complicated when we consider international relations. The US in my view is happy with European overregulation and some elements of the spastic Chinese method of government because it limits competition. It creates a big sucking effect for capital; to the extent that other places are poor destinations for investment, the US is happy to be the marginal winner. This also helps to explain why deregulation in the US has run into limits of motivation.
Why would you care about going to war with an army of tollbooth operators to build high speed rail in the US when China can build another one in a more high productivity industrial region for significantly less money? The counter-argument to that is that in the US, you can at least in theory will own the railway, whereas in China the government will always reserve the right to expropriate you.
Ignoring actual human progress (improved mental health, social cohesion, reduction of violence & corruption, etc) will always contribute to hindering technological progress. We get in our own way through our many flaws. I find it interesting that progress discussions almost always default to technological advancement.
Scott Alexander shows the issues that he and the "rationalists" are weak in with his first line on taxis. He just assumes that it must have an advantage over owned vehicle's without showing the work. The same can be said for Taxis now, they can be used 24-7 as opposed to your own car. Yet most people still own cars and don't use taxis if they can afford it. Please explain the different use case and show your work. Economics will win out for whichever is most cost-effective. An analogy is male Formal wear. If you are only going to one prom/wedding it makes sense to rent. Once you have a need for formal wear at least 1-2/year you soon buy. Male tuxedos can be used for 40 years with minimal care. Just claiming rental is best isn't enough. As I heard some economist say "The question is always do you rent or buy" cf marriage vs dating. Also, all life is sales and marketing, see prior.
Reading Scott Alexander's first line on taxis reminds me of the WEF slogan "you will own nothing and be happy." The idea that shifting to self-driving taxis will allow parking lots to be converted to green space and homes reflects a top-down, technocratic, central planning mentality that the history of Soviet central planning has shown is a dead end, and yet he clings to it. Everything he says about solar and wind, and especially the assertion that "you get a Moore's law like growth curve" from mass manufacturing of solar panels, has been convincingly challenged by Mark Mills, who is a physicist and engineer rather than a shrink like Alexander. If Alexander concluded from the Progress Studies conference that solar and wind are superior to nuclear, they should rename the field "Regress Studies" in honor of the quaint windmills I remember from my short layover (shorter than Caplan's layover in Abu Dhabi) in the Netherlands.
As regards the energy claims, Vaclav Smil has been pouring some much-needed cold water on a lot of the overconfident optimism and explaining why many of those "going hyperbolic and getting cheaper all the time!" charts are prepared in misleading ways (e.g., low published costs that don't account for massive subsidies.)
In particular it really helps to understand the underlying mechanisms of what has or can drive progress in a particular sector. With Moore's Law, the mechanism was primarily "improvements in miniaturization", and as Feynman explained, the sector started with enough "room at the bottom" for decades of progress.
The situation with photovoltaics is totally different, it's all about surface area exposed to sunlight, there is nothing to shrink. Economies of scale for things made of atoms eventually hit diminishing marginal returns as the marginal cost can't get lower that the cost of inputs (e.g., pure silicon), and it's not like anyone has been leaving exploitable manufacturing scale gains on the table.
On the other hand, nuclear power in the US is FAR more expensive than it needs to be. You could use "deep fission" (a new company, not remotely a new idea) to drill a "well" a mile down into bedrock, put a "default failsafe control-rods-in" HPWR on crane cables and lower it to the bottom, fill the thing with water letting gravity do the pressurization work for free without moving parts, and if you made a whole grid of a dozens or hundreds of the reactor-wells, or even did some breeding and had a reprocessing facility on site, well, you could probably power the whole East Coast with zero emissions from a few square miles and for a fraction of current costs and whether the sun shines or wind blows or not, and arguably safer than any plant currently in operation.
In this and many other areas, "The main mechanism that can drive progress is simply stopping the people who are stopping the progress."
I think the biggest thing left out of the hype about lost cost of solar power is the large extra costs because of the variability. If you only want electricity when the sun is shining, it's pretty cheap. But if you also want electricity at night, it requires a lot of additional expense, and solar power is no longer cheap. The places that have gone most in on alternative energy, such as California and Germany, have very expensive electricity.
Not disagreeing, but... The part about converting parking spaces to green space is an attractive idea. In America, we have more parking spaces for cars than housing units for humans. In general parking is vastly over promoted.
Parking spaces would not get converted to green spaces. Someone owns that real estate. The parking slots are mandated by law in all US states for office/shopping/apartment complexes. As a developer/owner if I do not need those spaces for the tenants I am building on the space. More office/apartments/shopping pays better than green spaces. To even think that green spaces would replace parking spaces takes a certain kind of naivety.
Bingo. Likewise all those single lane residential roads with street parking aren't magically going to get unwidened, they will simply become two lanes roads or left vacant as zero chance the government is going to just give the adjoining landowner the aforementioned street parking area free property.
Sure, converting parking spaces to green space is an attractive idea, but the question is whether enough people are willing to give up self-owned vehicles for self-driving taxis on a voluntary basis, and if not, is forcing people to do so the only way Alexander's utopian vision can be realized? On paper, I'm the ideal candidate for self-driving taxis. I'm retired, and I use my car about once a week on average, mainly for grocery shopping and hair/medical appointments. It would be cheaper for me to rely on taxis or Uber/Lyft. Also, I don't enjoy driving, and I purchased a car after many years of living without a car because I moved to a place where not having a car is inconvenient. Still, having a car in my garage gives me a feeling of independence, driving presumably helps me maintain my hand-eye coordination, and I get a sense of accomplishment every time I get to and from my destination safely by driving my own car. I get the feeling that in Alexander's utopian world, we would all live like babies, being cared for and having our diapers changed by AI-driven robots and taxis. Is that really a self-fulfilling life for human beings? And Alexander's expertise is human psychology!
Call me a luddite if you will, but I think the problem of deepfakes crafted with AI is real, as is what you might call the Robert Reich problem (ie, social media gives a big platform to demagogues who play on the worst impulses of the Too Online set). I mean...not that I want to turn the tech industry's prospects over to Gavin Newsome and his pals, but at the same time, I think some of the shine has worn off of 90's era techno-optimism.
While I appreciate McCormick's argument, I think he is somewhat ignoring the fact that petroleum got vastly more expensive in the 1970s, and not just because of regulation, which I would suspect wound up driving a lot of research and engineering work into finding substitutes for it rather than driving productivity related work.
"I predict that there will be a tipping point at which driving your own car will be considered a scary thing to do relative to riding in a driverless car."
I don't think that will honestly be the tipping point that drives this shift though sure it would naturally happen eventually. The tipping point is cost, i.e. what everyone likes to ignore, including economists, is taxis (or equiv like Uber or even hourly car rents) still cost more both in money and time than car ownership . Until cars are a luxury item (ignoring mass transit which they aren't competing against) in the transportation convenience market, like personal helicopters, people are going to continue to own them.
My brother lives in a rural area and risks a DUI daily because he has zero interest in $100 Uber roundtrip to the bar on top of a two hours of waiting each time. His twenty year old Honda Civic doesn't run him $500 a month, much less $3000. I live in a dense urban area and make three to four trips a day which would run me $190 a day minimum total, my annualized car TCO cost is $45, tell me again why I would rent/taxi?
“What holds up progress are people who can raise their status by holding up progress.” And thus what holds up progress is a public that accords high status to officials who hold up progress.
Robot taxis are a great choice in any large city, providing 1) they're safer than the average driver (which isn't hard, considering that the "average driver" seems to be well below average), 2) arrive in a timely fashion to pick you up, and 3) are overall fairly far below the costs of owning a car.
However, I usually had the devil's own tme convincing college students that roundabouts were better for traffic than 4-way intersections. Robot taxis seem to be one of those innivations that some people don't like for visceral, but unexplainable reasons.
The EU is very old. The median age in the EU is about 45. Only 60% of EU residents are in the 'prime working years' of 18-65. In the USA, this proportion is about 80%. This means that the proportion of working-age adults in the EU is 3/4 what it is in the USA. This alone explains a 25% difference in GDP per capita.
One suspects that Cochrane is already defeated when he uses phrases like “over regulation.” The vocabulary wars in this regard have been fought and the words and phrases that lost include “deregulation,” “pro-growth,” “regulatory reform,” and “markets.” One suspects that these are a sure-fire way to get one’s ideas dismissed out of hand. From a marketing perspective, one suspects that “smart regulation” or “progress initiatives” are the labels with potential appeal.
Helpfully, Cochrane’s piece did identify specific changes that could be made, for example, changing the ban on supersonic speed travel to a ban on sonic booms. One also suspects getting specific might not be the worst strategy in the world. In that regard, one might point to an excellent example of a finely crafted compendium of specific progress initiatives in the housing arena put out by Mercatus entitled “Boosting Housing Affordability: Practical Suggestions for Congress and the White House” by Salim Furth and Charles Gardner (file:///C:/Users/DONJ4/OneDrive/Desktop/5012_furth_gardner_housing_crisis_federal_solutions_pb_v1_1.pdf ) which, as the name states, is chock full of specific practical suggestions. For example:
“An anachronism of the HUD Code is that it requires each home to remain on a steel chassis even after being permanently placed. The chassis requirement, which adds a hefty $5,000 to $10,000 per home and limits architectural flexibility, is ‘the only engineering detail that Congress has not delegated to rulemaking.’ Removing this requirement is among the most straightforward ways for Congress to reduce the cost of housing.”
) but one suspects that even if such measures were marginally efficacious they would not be sufficient to surmount the terrible damage done by top-down imposition of so-called “energy transition” measures. Only a major populist-led reversal of the EU’s enviro-agenda would have the potential to slow the continent’s slide into irrelevance.
In the absence of something better to do, people will erect toll booths both actual and metaphorical because it is easier than matching supply to demand. One of the chief purposes of government is to manage this process, to limit the number of toll booth builders. Our government promises the ever shrinking trickle of young people that they can Build Their Own Tollbooth and to continuously petition the government for more opportunities to erect tollbooths.
This perhaps becomes more complicated when we consider international relations. The US in my view is happy with European overregulation and some elements of the spastic Chinese method of government because it limits competition. It creates a big sucking effect for capital; to the extent that other places are poor destinations for investment, the US is happy to be the marginal winner. This also helps to explain why deregulation in the US has run into limits of motivation.
Why would you care about going to war with an army of tollbooth operators to build high speed rail in the US when China can build another one in a more high productivity industrial region for significantly less money? The counter-argument to that is that in the US, you can at least in theory will own the railway, whereas in China the government will always reserve the right to expropriate you.
"What holds up progress are people who can raise their status by holding up progress."
That is key. That is what must change if our societies are to reach their potential.
Ignoring actual human progress (improved mental health, social cohesion, reduction of violence & corruption, etc) will always contribute to hindering technological progress. We get in our own way through our many flaws. I find it interesting that progress discussions almost always default to technological advancement.
Scott Alexander shows the issues that he and the "rationalists" are weak in with his first line on taxis. He just assumes that it must have an advantage over owned vehicle's without showing the work. The same can be said for Taxis now, they can be used 24-7 as opposed to your own car. Yet most people still own cars and don't use taxis if they can afford it. Please explain the different use case and show your work. Economics will win out for whichever is most cost-effective. An analogy is male Formal wear. If you are only going to one prom/wedding it makes sense to rent. Once you have a need for formal wear at least 1-2/year you soon buy. Male tuxedos can be used for 40 years with minimal care. Just claiming rental is best isn't enough. As I heard some economist say "The question is always do you rent or buy" cf marriage vs dating. Also, all life is sales and marketing, see prior.
Reading Scott Alexander's first line on taxis reminds me of the WEF slogan "you will own nothing and be happy." The idea that shifting to self-driving taxis will allow parking lots to be converted to green space and homes reflects a top-down, technocratic, central planning mentality that the history of Soviet central planning has shown is a dead end, and yet he clings to it. Everything he says about solar and wind, and especially the assertion that "you get a Moore's law like growth curve" from mass manufacturing of solar panels, has been convincingly challenged by Mark Mills, who is a physicist and engineer rather than a shrink like Alexander. If Alexander concluded from the Progress Studies conference that solar and wind are superior to nuclear, they should rename the field "Regress Studies" in honor of the quaint windmills I remember from my short layover (shorter than Caplan's layover in Abu Dhabi) in the Netherlands.
As regards the energy claims, Vaclav Smil has been pouring some much-needed cold water on a lot of the overconfident optimism and explaining why many of those "going hyperbolic and getting cheaper all the time!" charts are prepared in misleading ways (e.g., low published costs that don't account for massive subsidies.)
In particular it really helps to understand the underlying mechanisms of what has or can drive progress in a particular sector. With Moore's Law, the mechanism was primarily "improvements in miniaturization", and as Feynman explained, the sector started with enough "room at the bottom" for decades of progress.
The situation with photovoltaics is totally different, it's all about surface area exposed to sunlight, there is nothing to shrink. Economies of scale for things made of atoms eventually hit diminishing marginal returns as the marginal cost can't get lower that the cost of inputs (e.g., pure silicon), and it's not like anyone has been leaving exploitable manufacturing scale gains on the table.
On the other hand, nuclear power in the US is FAR more expensive than it needs to be. You could use "deep fission" (a new company, not remotely a new idea) to drill a "well" a mile down into bedrock, put a "default failsafe control-rods-in" HPWR on crane cables and lower it to the bottom, fill the thing with water letting gravity do the pressurization work for free without moving parts, and if you made a whole grid of a dozens or hundreds of the reactor-wells, or even did some breeding and had a reprocessing facility on site, well, you could probably power the whole East Coast with zero emissions from a few square miles and for a fraction of current costs and whether the sun shines or wind blows or not, and arguably safer than any plant currently in operation.
In this and many other areas, "The main mechanism that can drive progress is simply stopping the people who are stopping the progress."
I think the biggest thing left out of the hype about lost cost of solar power is the large extra costs because of the variability. If you only want electricity when the sun is shining, it's pretty cheap. But if you also want electricity at night, it requires a lot of additional expense, and solar power is no longer cheap. The places that have gone most in on alternative energy, such as California and Germany, have very expensive electricity.
Not disagreeing, but... The part about converting parking spaces to green space is an attractive idea. In America, we have more parking spaces for cars than housing units for humans. In general parking is vastly over promoted.
Parking spaces would not get converted to green spaces. Someone owns that real estate. The parking slots are mandated by law in all US states for office/shopping/apartment complexes. As a developer/owner if I do not need those spaces for the tenants I am building on the space. More office/apartments/shopping pays better than green spaces. To even think that green spaces would replace parking spaces takes a certain kind of naivety.
Bingo. Likewise all those single lane residential roads with street parking aren't magically going to get unwidened, they will simply become two lanes roads or left vacant as zero chance the government is going to just give the adjoining landowner the aforementioned street parking area free property.
Sure, converting parking spaces to green space is an attractive idea, but the question is whether enough people are willing to give up self-owned vehicles for self-driving taxis on a voluntary basis, and if not, is forcing people to do so the only way Alexander's utopian vision can be realized? On paper, I'm the ideal candidate for self-driving taxis. I'm retired, and I use my car about once a week on average, mainly for grocery shopping and hair/medical appointments. It would be cheaper for me to rely on taxis or Uber/Lyft. Also, I don't enjoy driving, and I purchased a car after many years of living without a car because I moved to a place where not having a car is inconvenient. Still, having a car in my garage gives me a feeling of independence, driving presumably helps me maintain my hand-eye coordination, and I get a sense of accomplishment every time I get to and from my destination safely by driving my own car. I get the feeling that in Alexander's utopian world, we would all live like babies, being cared for and having our diapers changed by AI-driven robots and taxis. Is that really a self-fulfilling life for human beings? And Alexander's expertise is human psychology!
What’s holding up character progress? “Broken record: Take all public money out of university funding. Then take it out of all education.”
We want more role models like Michael Strong and fewer like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. That would be progress.
Back to reading Albion’s Seed. Learning about the Puritans is more interesting than discussing technology progress.
Not much progress from Progressives... They need a new name.
Call me a luddite if you will, but I think the problem of deepfakes crafted with AI is real, as is what you might call the Robert Reich problem (ie, social media gives a big platform to demagogues who play on the worst impulses of the Too Online set). I mean...not that I want to turn the tech industry's prospects over to Gavin Newsome and his pals, but at the same time, I think some of the shine has worn off of 90's era techno-optimism.
> ideas from the 1950s and 1960s
Oh! Can we go back to building lighter weight cars then?
When looking back at history and around in the current world, it seems to me that if progress and change can be stopped, they will be stopped.
While I appreciate McCormick's argument, I think he is somewhat ignoring the fact that petroleum got vastly more expensive in the 1970s, and not just because of regulation, which I would suspect wound up driving a lot of research and engineering work into finding substitutes for it rather than driving productivity related work.
"I predict that there will be a tipping point at which driving your own car will be considered a scary thing to do relative to riding in a driverless car."
I can imagine this. But not very soon.
I don't think that will honestly be the tipping point that drives this shift though sure it would naturally happen eventually. The tipping point is cost, i.e. what everyone likes to ignore, including economists, is taxis (or equiv like Uber or even hourly car rents) still cost more both in money and time than car ownership . Until cars are a luxury item (ignoring mass transit which they aren't competing against) in the transportation convenience market, like personal helicopters, people are going to continue to own them.
My brother lives in a rural area and risks a DUI daily because he has zero interest in $100 Uber roundtrip to the bar on top of a two hours of waiting each time. His twenty year old Honda Civic doesn't run him $500 a month, much less $3000. I live in a dense urban area and make three to four trips a day which would run me $190 a day minimum total, my annualized car TCO cost is $45, tell me again why I would rent/taxi?
“What holds up progress are people who can raise their status by holding up progress.” And thus what holds up progress is a public that accords high status to officials who hold up progress.
Robot taxis are a great choice in any large city, providing 1) they're safer than the average driver (which isn't hard, considering that the "average driver" seems to be well below average), 2) arrive in a timely fashion to pick you up, and 3) are overall fairly far below the costs of owning a car.
However, I usually had the devil's own tme convincing college students that roundabouts were better for traffic than 4-way intersections. Robot taxis seem to be one of those innivations that some people don't like for visceral, but unexplainable reasons.
The EU is very old. The median age in the EU is about 45. Only 60% of EU residents are in the 'prime working years' of 18-65. In the USA, this proportion is about 80%. This means that the proportion of working-age adults in the EU is 3/4 what it is in the USA. This alone explains a 25% difference in GDP per capita.
One suspects that Cochrane is already defeated when he uses phrases like “over regulation.” The vocabulary wars in this regard have been fought and the words and phrases that lost include “deregulation,” “pro-growth,” “regulatory reform,” and “markets.” One suspects that these are a sure-fire way to get one’s ideas dismissed out of hand. From a marketing perspective, one suspects that “smart regulation” or “progress initiatives” are the labels with potential appeal.
Helpfully, Cochrane’s piece did identify specific changes that could be made, for example, changing the ban on supersonic speed travel to a ban on sonic booms. One also suspects getting specific might not be the worst strategy in the world. In that regard, one might point to an excellent example of a finely crafted compendium of specific progress initiatives in the housing arena put out by Mercatus entitled “Boosting Housing Affordability: Practical Suggestions for Congress and the White House” by Salim Furth and Charles Gardner (file:///C:/Users/DONJ4/OneDrive/Desktop/5012_furth_gardner_housing_crisis_federal_solutions_pb_v1_1.pdf ) which, as the name states, is chock full of specific practical suggestions. For example:
“An anachronism of the HUD Code is that it requires each home to remain on a steel chassis even after being permanently placed. The chassis requirement, which adds a hefty $5,000 to $10,000 per home and limits architectural flexibility, is ‘the only engineering detail that Congress has not delegated to rulemaking.’ Removing this requirement is among the most straightforward ways for Congress to reduce the cost of housing.”
One wonders why legislators have not felt the incentive to take care of this already? Maybe we ought celebrate and recognize Rep. John Rose (TN) for introducing legislation to advance this progress initiative. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/21/affordable-mobile-homes-law/ ).
With respect to the EU, there is no shortage of review processes and bureaucracies dedicated to regulatory improvements and burden reductions (https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/planning-and-proposing-law/better-regulation_en#whatthecommissionisdoing
) but one suspects that even if such measures were marginally efficacious they would not be sufficient to surmount the terrible damage done by top-down imposition of so-called “energy transition” measures. Only a major populist-led reversal of the EU’s enviro-agenda would have the potential to slow the continent’s slide into irrelevance.