I’m pleased to advise and help unveil Project Innerspace, a new nonprofit focused on removing the technical obstacles to Geothermal Anywhere by 2030. Check out the site, and follow @innerspace2030.
Kwasi Kwarteng, UK Business & Energy Secretary and MP for Spelthorne:
We need more nuclear! Today I'm launching our £120m Future Nuclear Fund to entice more developers to invest £billions in new power stations. More nuclear developers = greater competition = lower costs. After 30 years of delay, we're cracking on!
Veil of Ignorance (Rawls) construction of social justice ignores technological change. Perhaps individual incentives, and consequent inequality, are necessary for economic growth and tech innovation.. an empirical question!
Consider the following simple exercise. An economist living in the year 1929 (who has miraculous access to historical per capita GDP data) fits a simple linear trend to the natural log of per capita GDP for the United States from 1880 to 1929 in an attempt to forecast per capita GDP today, say in 1987. How far off would the prediction be? We can use the prediction error from this constant growth rate path as a rough indicator of the importance of the positive permanent movements in growth rates.
Figure I displays the somewhat surprising result of this exercise in light of the discussion of endogenous growth theory in the Introduction: the prediction is off by only about 5 percent of GDP!
Go into the Royal Exchange in London, a building more respectable than most courts; there you will find deputies from every nation assembled simply to serve mankind. There, the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian negotiate with one another as if they were all of the same religion, and the only heretics are those who declare bankruptcy; there the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, the Anglican accepts the word of the Quaker. Leaving this peaceful and liberal assembly, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink; this one is baptized in a great font in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that one has his son circumcised while some Hebrew words that he does not understand are mumbled over him; still others go to their church with their hats on their heads to await the inspiration of God, and all are content.
Were there only one religion in England, despotism would be a threat; were there two, they would be at each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily and at peace with one another.
July 10 & 11 in SF: interested in driving progress on molecular machines using software tooling? Apply to join Foresight Institute Designing Molecular Machines Workshop, chaired by William Shih, Ben Reinhardt, and Adam Marblestone: https://foresight.org/molecular-workshop/
Recently it has become clear that many technologies follow a generalized version of Moore's law, i.e. costs tend to drop exponentially, at different rates that depend on the technology. Here we formulate Moore's law as a correlated geometric random walk with drift, and apply it to historical data on 53 technologies. We derive a closed form expression approximating the distribution of forecast errors as a function of time. Based on hind-casting experiments we show that this works well, making it possible to collapse the forecast errors for many different technologies at different time horizons onto the same universal distribution. This is valuable because it allows us to make forecasts for any given technology with a clear understanding of the quality of the forecasts. As a practical demonstration we make distributional forecasts at different time horizons for solar photovoltaic modules, and show how our method can be used to estimate the probability that a given technology will outperform another technology at a given point in the future.
At its core, YIMBY is about what de Tocqueville called “self interest, rightly understood.” It is about folks who have access to a resource deciding not to protect it and make it scarce, but instead opening it up to a broader community. It is about battling selfishness in our public policy, and believing in a positive-sum, abundant view of the future.
Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? How did the world become rich?
Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the US, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up?
Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society’s past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may – or may not – develop.
The Hypothesis Fund advances scientific knowledge by supporting early stage, innovative research that increases our adaptability against systemic risks to the health of people and the planet.
We make seed grants to fund research projects at their earliest stages, typically before there is any preliminary data. Our funding is intended to be catalytic — a fast path to enable a scientist to ‘turn over the card’ and see what’s there. And we focus on bold new ideas in basic research, not continuations of existing research.
The Hypothesis Fund approach is different. We empower a world-class and diverse network of scientist Scouts to identify the high-risk, high-reward ideas at the edge of the network that would otherwise be un-pursued or underfunded.
I have to say the this this notion of induced demand is one of the single dumbest notions I've ever heard in my entire life.… If adding roads just increases traffic, why don't we delete them and decrease traffic? I think you'd have an uproar if you did that.
I grew up in a small village in Turkey. Before commercial fertilizers became affordable enough, you would collect cow shit all year, let it dry out and use it as fertilizer. It was hard labor, didn’t work as well and smelled as you’d think it smells.
I just wanted to bring to your attention this recent release by the Health Physics Society on the entire history of the Linear Non-Threshold model, in the form of 22 episodes interview with Ed Calabrese.
A 1965 Harris poll showed 57 percent of Americans believed money would be better spent on a less literal moonshot: new water desalination systems. A few years later, in 1967, only 43 percent of the public supported landing a man on the moon, according to another Harris poll. It was popularly referred to as a “moondoggle.”
The document explaining Germany’s nuclear position reads as a long list of excuses of why it would be inconvenient to keep nuclear reactors open, forget about reopening old ones.
What is even more interesting is not what’s there, but what’s not there. This is not a cost-benefit analysis. It doesn’t explain the benefits of reopening the reactors, how much money would be saved, how much safer Germany would be, how much more it could defend its neighbors.
When you only pay attention to something’s costs, it means you simply don’t want to do it.
Eli Dourado:
https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1526642524231634945
Kwasi Kwarteng, UK Business & Energy Secretary and MP for Spelthorne:
https://twitter.com/KwasiKwarteng/status/1524993089861033986
Steve Hsu:
https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1524857225734504454
Chad Jones, “Time Series Tests of Endogenous Growth Models” (1995):
New podcast from Stripe Press:
https://twitter.com/stripepress/status/1520055702655492098
Voltaire on commerce and religious tolerance:
From Philosophical Letters: Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation
Sarah Constantin on her aims with her new blog: “In Search of Opportunity”
Nuclear going mainstream? https://twitter.com/CBSMornings/status/1516036558876553222
From Allison Duettmann:
Potentially interesting paper: How predictable is technological progress?
Abstract:
A new study out today finds that keeping Diablo Canyon open would:
Full report from the Brattle Group (PDF)
Twitter thread from me with highlights
Misha Chellam on YIMBYism broadly construed:
https://modernpower.substack.com/p/building-the-yimby-faction
Thread by me on the history of wheels and steering: https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1530698408566005760
I've heard good things about this book that came out recently (maybe today?)
How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin
Hypothesis Fund launches today:
Also: https://twitter.com/Hypothesisfund/status/1524434163465547776
Virginia Postrel:
https://twitter.com/vpostrel/status/1524442490052374529
Elon Musk:
https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1524089525424824320
New blog prize for “positive visions of the world 50 years from now”: https://twitter.com/effective_ideas/status/1521191531406761984
Eren Bali:
https://twitter.com/erenbali/status/1521136589451059200
From Dima Shamoun:
For context, see “Why has nuclear power been a flop?” and my interview with Dima on her podcast Flies in the Ointment.
Hmm:
From “Bernie Sanders Would Have Voted Against the Moon Landing”
Tomas Puyeo on “Why Germany Won’t Keep Its Nuclear Plants Open”:
This looks interesting: “Funding for long-term-oriented people and projects”
https://www.futurefundinglist.com