Third, China. Just as the Cold War and Space Race helped drive federal R&D in the past, I figured that the rise of a powerful new geopolitical competitor, even threat, would create a strong bipartisan push to massively ramp-up funding. What’s more, China is an economic and technological power in a way the old Soviet Union never was. This from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: “For the first time since World War II, America’s technological predominance—the backbone of its economic and military power—is under threat. China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.”
Fourth and finally, there already seemed to be considerable bipartisan support for increased science and tech funding. Back in 2020, Sens. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, unveiled the “Endless Frontier Act,” which proposed to expand the National Science Foundation, while renaming it the National Science and Technology Foundation. In addition, the proposal would have created a Technology Directorate within the NTSF:
The newly-established Technology Directorate would receive $100 billion over five years to lead investment and research in artificial intelligence and machine learning; high performance computing; robotics, automation, and advanced manufacturing; and more. An additional $10 billion would be authorized to designate at least 10 regional technology hubs, awarding funds for comprehensive investment initiatives that position regions across the country to be global centers for the research, development, and manufacturing of key technologies.
So where are we now? Well, the original “Endless Frontier Act” has gone through several twists and turns. Right now there are two bills at play, the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, or USICA, and the House’s America COMPETES Act of 2022. Both would more than double National Science Foundation funding over five years, with the former more heavily funding a tech directorate. Oh, and did I mention the whole effort now seems dominated by $52 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturers? Anyway, the USICA and COMPETES legislative combo seems to be in perilous condition, according to the excellent policy analysis time at Piper Sandler Macro Research:
The USICA and COMPETES conference committee has failed to produce any breakthroughs as the House negotiators have been slow to accept that their package needs to look more like the bipartisan Senate bill that passed over a year ago. There had been some discussion of cutting everything from the bill except CHIPS funding (for domestic semiconductor manufacturing) and perhaps the R&D subsidies for the National Science Foundation, but now Sen. McConnell has threatened to torpedo any compromise unless Democrats give up on BBB. Some press reports indicate House Democrats are considering passing the Senate bill (which would go right to Biden for his signature) but that would hardly be a loss for McConnell as Democrats would pass the bill he voted for without revisions. Time is running out and it’s unlikely USICA will pass before the August recess given competition with BBB. If USICA doesn’t pass by then, it probably won’t be reconsidered until next year as Republicans will want to draft their own China competitiveness bill with control over the House and probably the Senate, too. It’s still possible the CHIPS funding and some smaller pieces like the generalized system of preferences (GSP) pass in the lame duck session.
So, not great. While I am skeptical of the “industrial policy” aspect of these funding increases, at least they get the ball rolling. Somewhat. They would maybe raise the total R&D share of GDP by about 0.1 percentage points. But what if we did more? A lot more. This from the 2021 study “Science and Innovation: The Under-Fueled Engine of Prosperity” by Northwestern University economist Benjamin F. Jones:
Looking purely at the social returns, the standard findings suggest that doubling the total investment in R&D would easily pay for itself. That is, the additional expansion in standards of living in terms of GDP per person would be much larger in present value than the additional investment cost. How much potential is the United States leaving on the table? … [A] sustained doubling of all forms of R&D expenditure in the U.S. economy could raise U.S. productivity and real per-capita income growth rates by an additional 0.5 percentage points per year over a long time horizon. This would lead to enormous increases in standards of living over time. It would greatly advance the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and workers and the overall position of the U.S. economy in the world.
“Science and Innovation: The Under-Fueled Engine of Prosperity”And that calculus doesn’t even count the health gains of longer and healthier lives, which are among the most valuable deliverables from the science and innovation system. Imagine the benefit from a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, the nation’s sixth-leading cause of death. Not having to spend $200 billion annually to treat it would be the least of the benefits. Or imagine the widespread health benefits from a more stable climate thanks to novel clean energy sources such as fusion and advanced geothermal.
To be clear, this isn’t just about federal spending. It also concerns tax policy and immigration. (There’s also needs to be reform in how we fund science research.) Scientific advance and technological progress need to be a whole-of-society effort. And that includes government viewing tech frontier-pushing policies as fundamental to its policymaking. Doing little to nothing despite the long-term macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges would be governing malpractice. But I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed.
5QQ💡 5 Quick Questions for … Jason Crawford on the philosophy of progressJason Crawford 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. If you missed my full podcast conversation with Jason, you’ll definitely want to check that out. Here are some additional 5QQ questions exclusively for paid subscribers to Faster, Please!
1/ What does a world of greater progress look like?
A bunch of things. Longevity: curing aging, as well as curing other diseases so that we can all have as many long and healthy years of life as we choose to have. Nanotech: I think there’s huge opportunity there for manufacturing and materials. Space exploration, and also faster travel here at home with things like supersonic airplanes. Developments in energy: getting nuclear fission more widely deployed and, ultimately, creating nuclear fusion as well. Those are just a few off the top of my head that I think would be really powerful.
2/ Progress for whom? Is this just progress for people who live in OECD countries? How expansive is this vision?
Ultimately I would love to see progress reach absolutely everyone on Earth. And in some at least small ways, it has. Of course, there are still huge disparities between the wealthiest countries and the poorest. A lot of that is really due to, for one reason or another, those poorest countries have a hard time implementing what I would think are by now fairly well-known best practices in terms of their institutions at home and how you enable an economy. So I hope eventually those countries can sort of learn from the example of the rest of the world.
3/ Is there a good recent example of what an optimistic vision of the future looks like?
One of my favorite books on this recently was a book called Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It’s out in a new edition from Stripe Press. I reviewed it on my blog, and he does a pretty good job of painting a vision of an ambitious technological future that we can get excited about.
4/ Our World in Data is a great site with lots of great charts showing progress, whether it’s less poverty, less malnutrition, longer lifespans, higher per capita GDP. Yet many people think life is getting worse. How do you explain why society seems to be kind of impervious to good news?
I think it’s fundamentally this anti-progress mindset that arose in the mid-20th century, probably peaked around the early ‘70s, but is still largely with us today. I think it’s just hard for people to hear the good news because they sort of bought into this fundamental narrative. There are some other explanations. Hans Rosling wrote a whole book about this, where he had a bunch of ideas. Steven Pinker has some ideas that tend to come down to things like, well, people have a psychological negativity bias, or the news has a negativity bias because that’s what gets clicks or TV ratings or whatever. Max Roser from Our World in Data had this point about how you could write a headline—and I forget the exact number—but it’s, “50,000 people pulled out of poverty today.” And you could just write that every single day for years and years. Yeah, it’s true, those headlines don’t get as much. But I think there’s just some sort of fundamental narrative there that people have bought into about how technology is dangerous and it’s making our lives worse and so forth. And so it’s just very hard for facts to get through those narrative blinders.
5/ I wonder if something like American or Western competition with China will do far more to make the case for progress than we can. Just as the Cold War drove the Space Race, could China be the big thing that really focuses people?
It could sometimes be a negative threat, whether it’s a human threat or some external threat. Those types of things can certainly focus people’s efforts and even get them to work harder and perhaps set aside petty differences and so forth. But they don’t force you to do that. A society always has to interpret the challenge that faces it and come up with an explanation and a diagnosis and a prescription. And I think many times, people get that wrong. I would hope that if we perceived some external threat we would respond by rising to the challenge and perhaps getting back to progress. But I also think that there are other ways that we could go. We could respond to the threat of China just by getting more insular and trying to close off: close borders, close trade, put our fingers in our ears, and so forth. We could respond by becoming more nationalistic, right? There are a lot of ways that we could respond that I think would not be healthy. And they wouldn’t succeed, but the fact that they weren’t going to succeed doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t do them. So I think it’s up to us to correctly interpret the threat and figure out what to do and to rise to that occasion.
Bonus: Is there one public policy idea that you would love for us to be talking a lot more about in this country?
Yeah, I would maybe refer you to my friends at the Institute for Progress who focus more on policy. But a couple of things off the top of my head: one that they focus on is immigration, and I think more open immigration would help. Another is just that it’s become extremely difficult to build anything in this country, whether it’s housing, infrastructure, transit, energy, and so forth. And I think reforming the laws that have enabled obstructionism in all of those things and have created cost overruns and delays, I think would be pretty fundamental.
Micro Reads▶ Japan wants up to 9 nuclear reactors running this winter – Nikkei Asia | “With five reactors currently running, the additions would boost combined capacity from nuclear power to around 10% of the country’s electricity needs amid concerns of a power crunch this winter. … Japanese utilities have applied to restart 25 nuclear reactors since they were halted following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. Ten have met the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s safety standards and resumed operations, though only five are currently active as others undergo inspections and safety updates.”
▶ How close are we to creating artificial intelligence? – David Deutsch, Aeon | “Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.”
▶ Communication costs, science, and innovation – Walker Hanlon, Stephan Heblich, Ferdinando Monte, Martin B. Schmitz, VoxEU | “It seems obvious that lowering the cost of communication among innovators would facilitate scientific and technological progress. Yet, few studies examine this relationship. This column explores the introduction of the first modern postal system in Britain in 1840 and its effect on the number of citations between pairs of scientists and on patenting. The gradient with which citations declined with distance-based postage costs fell and patenting increased in locations that experienced more significant improvements in letter market access due to the reform.”
▶ House Passes Crew Mandate Called ‘Gut Punch’ to Offshore Wind – Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg | “The measure, folded into a defense authorization bill, would impose new nationality requirements for crew members working on offshore energy projects, from oil rigs to wind installations. Crews would have to be citizens or permanent residents of the US, or be from the same country under which their vessel is flagged. … Right now, [companies say], there aren’t enough trained American mariners to do the specialized work needed to connect hundreds of offshore turbines to the grid. Significant disruptions could undercut President Joe Biden’s bid to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.”
▶ A needed nuclear option for climate change – Bryan Walsh, Vox | “To argue, as the climate activist Greta Thunberg did in a tweet earlier this month, that nuclear power can never be considered “green” is to implicitly reveal that your fear of nuclear energy trumps your fear of climate change. And if that becomes the norm, the climate will pay the price. Fortunately, that fear is losing some traction in the rest of Europe and around the world. Thunberg’s tweet was a response to the EU parliament’s decision to label investments in nuclear power plants, as well as lower-carbon natural gas, as “climate-friendly.” Belgium, unlike Germany, has decided to keep open two reactors that had been slated for closure, while France has announced plans to build as many as 14 new reactors. Even in Japan, home to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, support is growing for restarting and expanding nuclear power.”
Learn more: “My God, It’s Full of Stars!” | What Happens When You Warn of Civilizational Collapse, but Civilization Doesn’t Collapse? | The Strong June Jobs Report Doesn’t End the Risk of an Impending Recession. And That’s OK.