As I have remarked before, techno-hype seems to periodically go boom and bust--and we are living in a moment of bust as recent expectations surrounding carbon nanotube-base chips, self-driving vehicles, virtual reality, and much else come to naught. Yet looking at the expectations that proved exaggerated I also find myself noting the less publicized technologies that progressed rather more rapidly than the purveyors of hype expected, with renewable energy, and especially photovoltaic solar, the outstanding example--to the point that the fossil fuel and nuclear sectors may now have trillions of dollars in "stranded" investment on their hands.
Why did the press get solar so wrong? It seems to me there are three reasons.
1. Solar energy represents a solution to a major problem. The press trafficks in fear, not hope. This actually gives it a reason to belittle anything that would be a solution--and of course, believe and repeat any belittling thing that is said about them, of which there has been no shortage, and which has by no means all been a function of thoughtful analysis.
2. As a disruptive technology up against sustaining technologies (a lot of interests feared and hated the thought of an energy transition) solar faced a profound PR battle, compounded by the ecological, political, and even "culture war" implications of the associated choices. (Bluntly put, there was a lot of investment, far beyond Big Oil, in a fossil fuel-powered economy; a lot of hostility to any notion of government shifting its weight from subsidizing fossil fuels to trying to accelerate an energy transition, a prospect the more plausible if renewable energy looked promising; and in general a lot of enmity toward the idea that the prerogatives of business might have to be compromised for the environment's sake.) Naturally there were plenty of people who did everything they could for a very long time to persuade the public that solar power was just a flaky hippie fantasy, and tough-minded, practical people had better keep their minds on good old king coal instead--and never mind that global warming stuff they were hearing about. And they were the kind of people to which the press was inclined to listen. They treat Goldman Sachs with far more respect than Greenpeace, after all--but it was Goldman Sachs which turned out to be wrong.
3. Last, and perhaps least, is the fact that solar, hugely consequential as it is in technical, commercial and ecological terms, is simply not that exciting from the standpoint of the gadget-happy consumer. When it comes to personal, immediate experience, utility-scale solar (and it is this which has smashed the records--not the domestic kind that can mean never paying an electric bill again) still delivers electricity the same way as fossil fuels or nuclear or anything else. People flick the switch and the lights come on, with the actual cause of their coming on far away and unseen. There is thus not much for the purveyors of gadget hype to get all excited about the way they did over the Segway scooter (I still remember when they were telling us this would "change the world!") or virtual assistants. And so this could not and did not offset factors 1 and 2.
All the same, solar has arrived. And if you've been looking for good news about the climate crisis, well, here it is--the best hope yet that we can actually do something about the problem. Hopefully it won't be the last piece of such news.
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Why All the Hate for Self-Driving Cars? Seven Reasons Why the Self-Driving Car Bashing Has (Probably) Gone Overboard
Just a few years ago it was the conventional wisdom that self-driving cars were here, in a big way (almost), with people investing a lot of time and worry in how we would deal with the fact.
Today it seems the conventional wisdom that they are very far away at best, and perhaps never coming at all.
Putting it bluntly, the complacent, credulous optimism of 2015 has given way to smug, know-nothing sneering.
It is a swing from one extreme to the other--with a good deal of irrationality involved in the current, pessimistic appraisals, maybe as much as was to be seen in the past, more optimistic appraisals.
I suggest that there are at least seven reasons why the media is, for the time being, so relentlessly sneering in its attitude toward self-driving cars.
1. The Media Exaggerates Everything.
What we collectively call "the media" is, of course, an overwhelmingly commercial enterprise which makes its profits by fighting for and winning your attention in an exceedingly crowded and brutally competitive "attention economy." From this vantage point simple statements are preferable to long ones, which go right along with crude exaggeration being preferable to nuance--while surprising statements are preferable to what people expect.
The short, exaggerated, surprising statement is, of course, particularly commonplace in the area of technological reporting. Of course, my experience is that this tends to an exaggerated impression of how far some technology has come along, or will come along very soon--and this was indeed the case with the self-driving car a short time ago. Yet we also get the opposite, as with renewable energy, which the media was fairly relentless in dismissing . . . until photovoltaic solar became the cheapest energy source in the history of the world, with the price still dropping.
There were reasons why the media got that one so wrong, and just as in that case, numerous factors can seem to impel the media to treat self-driving cars in the same manner that it treated renewable energy--reasons currently more powerful than the earlier gee-whizzery.
2. Self-Driving Cars Scare a Lot of People in the Business.
Those who have followed technological R & D in the past may be familiar with the terms "sustaining innovation" and "disruptive innovation." Sustaining innovations are cases of improvement in the performance of existing products, according to the metrics by which it is already routine to judge them. Disruptive innovations are cases of qualitatively new products that might fundamentally change the market. New technologies aiding fossil fuel extraction (for example, new artificial lift technologies increasing the flow of oil and gas from wells) would be examples of sustaining innovation. By contrast renewable energy technologies like solar or wind are disruptive innovations, because they change the principal game from the ongoing one of "Who can deliver fossil fuels most efficiently?" to "Which energy source can give us electricity most efficiently?"--possibly driving fossil fuels out of this particular market (with coal already looking like a casualty).
Right now the car industry is looking at the prospection of such disruption, in multiple ways, with self-driving one of them, and the more worrisome because of the prospect it raises of "Transportation as a Service" (Taas). Taas would mean that rather than everyone who can afford it getting their own car, cars would be just something they would call up when they actually want one. This would mean a lot less cars out there (and those made by someone other than their company, should it fail to keep up in a competition they are by no means guaranteed to win). There would also be a lot less demand for everything that currently goes into cars, from the steel, rubber and glass supplied for the making of those cars (if less publicized than IT, do not underestimate the economic significance of the automotive-industrial complex), to service stations and car insurance (goodbye Flo?), to the oil companies which fill those cars' tanks (if they even run on gas anymore). Naturally a world where Taas replaces the current model of car ownership is something they would be inclined to dismiss or belittle. And the media being what it is, it tends to eat up, and mindlessly repeat, anything such people say. Still, it should be admitted that lately they are even more than usually open to the doubters.
3. The Romance of the Car.
On top of the reality that a great many powerful interests are massively invested in the current model of individual ownership of traditionally "manned" vehicles, there is the reality that many more have a less practical, but not necessarily slight, emotional investment in them.
Consider the place of driving in American culture. Getting one's driver's license is a "rite of passage," and getting an actual car to drive--in the eyes of most Americans a great step toward personal independence and recognition as an adult, the more in as so much that goes with being an adult (finding and holding down a job, dating) is very difficult to do without a car in the country's pedestrian-hating, transit-deprived metro areas (and still more outside those areas). Proving oneself as driver and car-owner means that one has truly taken that step successfully. The make of one's car is a significant indicator of socioeconomic gradation, two cars in the garage of one's own house bespeaks solid middle classness, and being able to buy one's child a car of their own when they turn sixteen an indicator that one has provided a genuinely comfortable upbringing, while in the fantasies of wealth that lend credence to the image of a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," possession of still more luxurious vehicles tends to be prominent. Indeed, the indulgence of a passion for cars--maintaining one's car oneself, collecting cars, restoring some favorite classic car if one has the time and money for such a hobby--has, like the viewing of spectator sports, long been one of the few leisure activities considered seemly for an adult male.
It is all such that the "new car smell," which is basically the smell of a bunch of health-endangering industrial chemicals that a great many people actually find repugnant, is a well-known object of fondness (unshared by their counterparts elsewhere).
Of course, not everyone, even in America, is equally invested in this romance. For many driving is a stressful experience, car ownership burdensome financially and in other ways, and the rewards of less tangible kinds few. (Perhaps their car make is a testament to poverty rather than wealth, and it stings; perhaps they find no pleasure in tinkering with the innards of their car.) But enough people, even people who should know better, are sufficiently invested in it for this to also be a factor here. And for those who think in such terms a world where people do not sit behind the wheel of their own car, and maybe do not even own a car, is unimaginable--or at the very least, depressing--and they accordingly dismissive of the prospect.
4. We Are in a Moment of Downturn in the Technological Hype Cycle.
The idea of a "cycle" of technological hype, where early inflated expectations are often disappointed, leading to disillusionment, followed by recovery, "green shoots"--and perhaps inflated expectations again--has been popularized by the Gartner firm's much-publicized "cycle." That cycle, of course, tracks attitudes toward individual products, but one may speak of such a cycle being evident in regard to technological change more generally.
The '90s was a period of high expectations regarding technologies like artificial intelligence--and the '00s a period of bust that soon had even the ever-ebullient Ray Kurzweil backing off from predictions that clearly did not come to pass. Of course, there was another resurgence by the mid-'10s regarding many of the same technologies, but now we find ourselves in another period of bust.
Of course, a particular technology may make headway even in a period of bust. (Were this not the case we would see no recovery.) Yet common expectations--and this is what we are talking about here--are colored by the general mood, especially to the extent that the unknowns involved in prediction leave observers relying on "judgment" rather than analysis grounded in hard fact. Their gut feeling would seem more likely to err on the side of "Won't happen" than "Will," with all this implies for the broader conversation at the moment.
5. Cynicism is a Good Cover for Ignorance.
Added to these reasons for pessimism (the bad-mouthing of self-driving cars by prominent figures, the old romance of cars and car ownership, the lower expectations of technological change), there is the fact that striking cynical poses helps a journalist who is actually far out of their depth look as if they are not out of their depth. They do not actually understand the technology sufficiently well to render a judgment about it one way or the other (even to the extent that a layperson could) but sneering at least makes them look like they are resistant to a sales pitch--and thus possess a sophistication they do not really have, and never earned.
Put simply, they are the "pseudomature" kids that dimwitted conformists think are "cool." ("I don't get excited by anything. I've seen it all. You can't impress me!")
Of course, part of the "cool kid" package is being a mean-spirited little bully making those who do not say and wear and do the "right" things feel bad about themselves, as publicly as possible, to affirm that they are indeed the cool kid. Right now self-driving cars seem like an easy target for their kind. ("Oh, you were hoping for a self-driving car? Ain't happening. Ha ha!" It does not seem unimportant that many of those who might have most hoped to see self-driving, and especially Taas, make their lives a little better are the old, the young, the disabled, the poor--people who happen to be marginalized in one way or another, and thus favorite prey for bullies.)
6. Elon Musk is Making Self-Driving Cars (and the People Optimistic About Them) Look Bad.
As if all this were not bad enough there are those who make the cynicism easier still, especially a certain "tech billionaire."
Of course, it was never the case that Elon Musk was the only figure from the car industry talking up self-driving vehicles. But he was always beat out the rest of the competition when it come to the sheer aggressiveness of his predictions--starting with his claim that his company Tesla would deliver a truly autonomous vehicle by 2017.
Because the predictions were so startling, and because of his high personal profile (higher than that of any CEO of the established car companies), it was those and not the more cautious predictions that others made that monopolized public attention.
Of course, those predictions, which were as near term as they were dramatic, were not forgotten when the day came, and Musk proved very, very wrong--none of which stopped him from making similarly aggressive predictions again and again. (2017 saw Musk simply say 2019, and then when 2019 came along all he really had to offer were more promises that likewise failed to come to pass.) Soon he was even making claims that the cars had already arrived on the market in the form of his Teslas' Full Self Driving when what had been delivered was actually very far from that. To put it mildly, those dismissive of self-driving cars have been having a field day with this track record.
7. Commentators Are Overcompensating for their Earlier Gullibility.
Even beyond the exaggeration built into the business, the cynical poses, and the rest, there is the reality that the media was--as noted previously--telling a very different story a short while ago. Our remembering that makes them look very foolish. And now they are anxious to shore up what credibility they think they have in the public's eyes on this matter. "I knew it!" they want to say about the way self-driving cars failed to materialize by 2019, 2020, early 2021--but this is practically an invitation to check up on what they said before, a thing doable with a few clicks, which would give away the lie. And so instead they thunder on about the impossibility of the machines so loudly and so passionately and so lengthily that recollection that there had ever been anything different would soon slip from the feeble memories of most.
So far as I can tell, this has already happened for most.
Today it seems the conventional wisdom that they are very far away at best, and perhaps never coming at all.
Putting it bluntly, the complacent, credulous optimism of 2015 has given way to smug, know-nothing sneering.
It is a swing from one extreme to the other--with a good deal of irrationality involved in the current, pessimistic appraisals, maybe as much as was to be seen in the past, more optimistic appraisals.
I suggest that there are at least seven reasons why the media is, for the time being, so relentlessly sneering in its attitude toward self-driving cars.
1. The Media Exaggerates Everything.
What we collectively call "the media" is, of course, an overwhelmingly commercial enterprise which makes its profits by fighting for and winning your attention in an exceedingly crowded and brutally competitive "attention economy." From this vantage point simple statements are preferable to long ones, which go right along with crude exaggeration being preferable to nuance--while surprising statements are preferable to what people expect.
The short, exaggerated, surprising statement is, of course, particularly commonplace in the area of technological reporting. Of course, my experience is that this tends to an exaggerated impression of how far some technology has come along, or will come along very soon--and this was indeed the case with the self-driving car a short time ago. Yet we also get the opposite, as with renewable energy, which the media was fairly relentless in dismissing . . . until photovoltaic solar became the cheapest energy source in the history of the world, with the price still dropping.
There were reasons why the media got that one so wrong, and just as in that case, numerous factors can seem to impel the media to treat self-driving cars in the same manner that it treated renewable energy--reasons currently more powerful than the earlier gee-whizzery.
2. Self-Driving Cars Scare a Lot of People in the Business.
Those who have followed technological R & D in the past may be familiar with the terms "sustaining innovation" and "disruptive innovation." Sustaining innovations are cases of improvement in the performance of existing products, according to the metrics by which it is already routine to judge them. Disruptive innovations are cases of qualitatively new products that might fundamentally change the market. New technologies aiding fossil fuel extraction (for example, new artificial lift technologies increasing the flow of oil and gas from wells) would be examples of sustaining innovation. By contrast renewable energy technologies like solar or wind are disruptive innovations, because they change the principal game from the ongoing one of "Who can deliver fossil fuels most efficiently?" to "Which energy source can give us electricity most efficiently?"--possibly driving fossil fuels out of this particular market (with coal already looking like a casualty).
Right now the car industry is looking at the prospection of such disruption, in multiple ways, with self-driving one of them, and the more worrisome because of the prospect it raises of "Transportation as a Service" (Taas). Taas would mean that rather than everyone who can afford it getting their own car, cars would be just something they would call up when they actually want one. This would mean a lot less cars out there (and those made by someone other than their company, should it fail to keep up in a competition they are by no means guaranteed to win). There would also be a lot less demand for everything that currently goes into cars, from the steel, rubber and glass supplied for the making of those cars (if less publicized than IT, do not underestimate the economic significance of the automotive-industrial complex), to service stations and car insurance (goodbye Flo?), to the oil companies which fill those cars' tanks (if they even run on gas anymore). Naturally a world where Taas replaces the current model of car ownership is something they would be inclined to dismiss or belittle. And the media being what it is, it tends to eat up, and mindlessly repeat, anything such people say. Still, it should be admitted that lately they are even more than usually open to the doubters.
3. The Romance of the Car.
On top of the reality that a great many powerful interests are massively invested in the current model of individual ownership of traditionally "manned" vehicles, there is the reality that many more have a less practical, but not necessarily slight, emotional investment in them.
Consider the place of driving in American culture. Getting one's driver's license is a "rite of passage," and getting an actual car to drive--in the eyes of most Americans a great step toward personal independence and recognition as an adult, the more in as so much that goes with being an adult (finding and holding down a job, dating) is very difficult to do without a car in the country's pedestrian-hating, transit-deprived metro areas (and still more outside those areas). Proving oneself as driver and car-owner means that one has truly taken that step successfully. The make of one's car is a significant indicator of socioeconomic gradation, two cars in the garage of one's own house bespeaks solid middle classness, and being able to buy one's child a car of their own when they turn sixteen an indicator that one has provided a genuinely comfortable upbringing, while in the fantasies of wealth that lend credence to the image of a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," possession of still more luxurious vehicles tends to be prominent. Indeed, the indulgence of a passion for cars--maintaining one's car oneself, collecting cars, restoring some favorite classic car if one has the time and money for such a hobby--has, like the viewing of spectator sports, long been one of the few leisure activities considered seemly for an adult male.
It is all such that the "new car smell," which is basically the smell of a bunch of health-endangering industrial chemicals that a great many people actually find repugnant, is a well-known object of fondness (unshared by their counterparts elsewhere).
Of course, not everyone, even in America, is equally invested in this romance. For many driving is a stressful experience, car ownership burdensome financially and in other ways, and the rewards of less tangible kinds few. (Perhaps their car make is a testament to poverty rather than wealth, and it stings; perhaps they find no pleasure in tinkering with the innards of their car.) But enough people, even people who should know better, are sufficiently invested in it for this to also be a factor here. And for those who think in such terms a world where people do not sit behind the wheel of their own car, and maybe do not even own a car, is unimaginable--or at the very least, depressing--and they accordingly dismissive of the prospect.
4. We Are in a Moment of Downturn in the Technological Hype Cycle.
The idea of a "cycle" of technological hype, where early inflated expectations are often disappointed, leading to disillusionment, followed by recovery, "green shoots"--and perhaps inflated expectations again--has been popularized by the Gartner firm's much-publicized "cycle." That cycle, of course, tracks attitudes toward individual products, but one may speak of such a cycle being evident in regard to technological change more generally.
The '90s was a period of high expectations regarding technologies like artificial intelligence--and the '00s a period of bust that soon had even the ever-ebullient Ray Kurzweil backing off from predictions that clearly did not come to pass. Of course, there was another resurgence by the mid-'10s regarding many of the same technologies, but now we find ourselves in another period of bust.
Of course, a particular technology may make headway even in a period of bust. (Were this not the case we would see no recovery.) Yet common expectations--and this is what we are talking about here--are colored by the general mood, especially to the extent that the unknowns involved in prediction leave observers relying on "judgment" rather than analysis grounded in hard fact. Their gut feeling would seem more likely to err on the side of "Won't happen" than "Will," with all this implies for the broader conversation at the moment.
5. Cynicism is a Good Cover for Ignorance.
Added to these reasons for pessimism (the bad-mouthing of self-driving cars by prominent figures, the old romance of cars and car ownership, the lower expectations of technological change), there is the fact that striking cynical poses helps a journalist who is actually far out of their depth look as if they are not out of their depth. They do not actually understand the technology sufficiently well to render a judgment about it one way or the other (even to the extent that a layperson could) but sneering at least makes them look like they are resistant to a sales pitch--and thus possess a sophistication they do not really have, and never earned.
Put simply, they are the "pseudomature" kids that dimwitted conformists think are "cool." ("I don't get excited by anything. I've seen it all. You can't impress me!")
Of course, part of the "cool kid" package is being a mean-spirited little bully making those who do not say and wear and do the "right" things feel bad about themselves, as publicly as possible, to affirm that they are indeed the cool kid. Right now self-driving cars seem like an easy target for their kind. ("Oh, you were hoping for a self-driving car? Ain't happening. Ha ha!" It does not seem unimportant that many of those who might have most hoped to see self-driving, and especially Taas, make their lives a little better are the old, the young, the disabled, the poor--people who happen to be marginalized in one way or another, and thus favorite prey for bullies.)
6. Elon Musk is Making Self-Driving Cars (and the People Optimistic About Them) Look Bad.
As if all this were not bad enough there are those who make the cynicism easier still, especially a certain "tech billionaire."
Of course, it was never the case that Elon Musk was the only figure from the car industry talking up self-driving vehicles. But he was always beat out the rest of the competition when it come to the sheer aggressiveness of his predictions--starting with his claim that his company Tesla would deliver a truly autonomous vehicle by 2017.
Because the predictions were so startling, and because of his high personal profile (higher than that of any CEO of the established car companies), it was those and not the more cautious predictions that others made that monopolized public attention.
Of course, those predictions, which were as near term as they were dramatic, were not forgotten when the day came, and Musk proved very, very wrong--none of which stopped him from making similarly aggressive predictions again and again. (2017 saw Musk simply say 2019, and then when 2019 came along all he really had to offer were more promises that likewise failed to come to pass.) Soon he was even making claims that the cars had already arrived on the market in the form of his Teslas' Full Self Driving when what had been delivered was actually very far from that. To put it mildly, those dismissive of self-driving cars have been having a field day with this track record.
7. Commentators Are Overcompensating for their Earlier Gullibility.
Even beyond the exaggeration built into the business, the cynical poses, and the rest, there is the reality that the media was--as noted previously--telling a very different story a short while ago. Our remembering that makes them look very foolish. And now they are anxious to shore up what credibility they think they have in the public's eyes on this matter. "I knew it!" they want to say about the way self-driving cars failed to materialize by 2019, 2020, early 2021--but this is practically an invitation to check up on what they said before, a thing doable with a few clicks, which would give away the lie. And so instead they thunder on about the impossibility of the machines so loudly and so passionately and so lengthily that recollection that there had ever been anything different would soon slip from the feeble memories of most.
So far as I can tell, this has already happened for most.
Friday, June 11, 2021
NASA's "Technology Readiness Levels": A System Worth Learning
Back in the 1970s NASA developed a nine-level system of "Technology Readiness Levels" (since widely adopted by other American and foreign agencies) as a way of measuring just how far a technology has progressed from concept to reality.
Level 1, the lowest, indicates that the "basic principles" of the technology have been "observed and reported"--that, at the risk of putting it crudely, someone is telling us that a technology is feasible "in theory." This is, of course, very, very far from such a technology actually becoming "a thing," as reflected in NASA's definitions' document having the exit criteria from Level 1 "[p]eer reviewed publication of research underlying the proposed concept/application."
By contrast a technology at Level 9 is one which has already proceeded through the "validation" of key elements in a "laboratory environment" (Level 4), demonstrations of a "prototype in an operational environment" (Level 6), and even the completion and "flight qualifi[cation]" of an actual system "through test and demonstration" (Level 8), to the system's being "proven through successful mission operations" (Level 9), proper documentation of which means that the system has fully "graduated" from development.
When you read a great deal about technological research and development you quickly find that a very great deal of journalism talks about technologies that are on Level 8, or 6, or 4, or 2 (or even 1) as if they were on Level 9. Consider, for instance, the media reports about a paper in the Journal of Plasma Physics last year discussing a concept for a plasmoid-based thruster that might deliver an exhaust velocity of over a million miles an hour. (When Mars is at its closest this would get us to the red planet in under two days--less time than it took the Apollo missions to make the far shorter trip to our moon, while it would get us to the moon in less time than it probably takes you to get to work in the morning.)
Exciting stuff for those of us who follow space technology? Absolutely. But the wording of the mainstream media reports, which used the word "invented" in reference to the thruster (a term associated with the actual physical existence of a thing) gave the false impression that a technology that would seem to be at Level 2 (published paper) is on Level 4 (key elements being validated), or even higher (some pieces giving the impression that the thing is on its way to the launch pad for its first flight). Perhaps it will be, someday, but the point is that it is not there now, or even a sure thing in the near term. (The design uses a tokamak fusion reactor to generate those plasmoids, after all. They've been working on those since 1958, and have yet to reach "fusion breakeven"--a fact unacknowledged in the pieces I have read.)
The strong contrary impression the writing on the matter offers is just one (if particularly blatant) example of the illiterate and irresponsible tech journalism in which we are awash. There is no excusing it, especially in this age where R & D so often entails such massive investment, and so many of the major problems we face require, as at least part of the solution, our investing in the right technologies.
It seems to me that the popularization of the Technology Readiness Levels system, or at least something like it, could be helpful in clearing these things up because of its admirably clear benchmarks. (Either the paper has been published, or it hasn't; either the prototype has been completed, and tested, or it hasn't.) Perhaps it could become something like the use of the famed star system when critics talk about movies--the Level a technology is on, maybe even the Level it might be on at such and such a date, given as a matter of course. In the absence of such a courtesy on the part of the author we can consider what they have to say in terms of that system--judging for ourselves whether they are presenting something of substance, or subjecting us to the simple-minded gee-whizzery of which there is always too much about, eternally distorting a very important conversation.
Level 1, the lowest, indicates that the "basic principles" of the technology have been "observed and reported"--that, at the risk of putting it crudely, someone is telling us that a technology is feasible "in theory." This is, of course, very, very far from such a technology actually becoming "a thing," as reflected in NASA's definitions' document having the exit criteria from Level 1 "[p]eer reviewed publication of research underlying the proposed concept/application."
By contrast a technology at Level 9 is one which has already proceeded through the "validation" of key elements in a "laboratory environment" (Level 4), demonstrations of a "prototype in an operational environment" (Level 6), and even the completion and "flight qualifi[cation]" of an actual system "through test and demonstration" (Level 8), to the system's being "proven through successful mission operations" (Level 9), proper documentation of which means that the system has fully "graduated" from development.
When you read a great deal about technological research and development you quickly find that a very great deal of journalism talks about technologies that are on Level 8, or 6, or 4, or 2 (or even 1) as if they were on Level 9. Consider, for instance, the media reports about a paper in the Journal of Plasma Physics last year discussing a concept for a plasmoid-based thruster that might deliver an exhaust velocity of over a million miles an hour. (When Mars is at its closest this would get us to the red planet in under two days--less time than it took the Apollo missions to make the far shorter trip to our moon, while it would get us to the moon in less time than it probably takes you to get to work in the morning.)
Exciting stuff for those of us who follow space technology? Absolutely. But the wording of the mainstream media reports, which used the word "invented" in reference to the thruster (a term associated with the actual physical existence of a thing) gave the false impression that a technology that would seem to be at Level 2 (published paper) is on Level 4 (key elements being validated), or even higher (some pieces giving the impression that the thing is on its way to the launch pad for its first flight). Perhaps it will be, someday, but the point is that it is not there now, or even a sure thing in the near term. (The design uses a tokamak fusion reactor to generate those plasmoids, after all. They've been working on those since 1958, and have yet to reach "fusion breakeven"--a fact unacknowledged in the pieces I have read.)
The strong contrary impression the writing on the matter offers is just one (if particularly blatant) example of the illiterate and irresponsible tech journalism in which we are awash. There is no excusing it, especially in this age where R & D so often entails such massive investment, and so many of the major problems we face require, as at least part of the solution, our investing in the right technologies.
It seems to me that the popularization of the Technology Readiness Levels system, or at least something like it, could be helpful in clearing these things up because of its admirably clear benchmarks. (Either the paper has been published, or it hasn't; either the prototype has been completed, and tested, or it hasn't.) Perhaps it could become something like the use of the famed star system when critics talk about movies--the Level a technology is on, maybe even the Level it might be on at such and such a date, given as a matter of course. In the absence of such a courtesy on the part of the author we can consider what they have to say in terms of that system--judging for ourselves whether they are presenting something of substance, or subjecting us to the simple-minded gee-whizzery of which there is always too much about, eternally distorting a very important conversation.
Thursday, June 10, 2021
What Keir Starmer's Rhetoric Tells Us About 2021
However, while writing about Blair I could not totally ignore the crisis in the party caused by austerity, Brexit and General Election defeat after General Election defeat, all as opponents of neoliberalism endeavored to retake the party from the Blairites. This endeavor seemed to have been defeated by Jeremy Corbyn's fall and Keir Starmer's election as leader, widely read as a Blairite restoration.
But was it?
I decided to check two of Starmer's more significant statements, namely the ten pledges he made during the February 2020 leadership contest, and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech of a year later.
After looking at them I have to admit that Starmer departed a good deal from the Blairite script. Much as Blair's defenders deny that he was a neoliberal, the fact remains that not only was Blair a neoliberal policy, but he was that too in his rhetoric, and indeed, reading the Labour Party's 1997 General Election Manifesto I was struck by his eagerness to persuade his audience that he was a neoliberal--as might be expected at that high water mark for the ideology, with its New Economy boom peaking and its hosannas to globalization.
By contrast in 2020, almost a generation away from that peak, and association with this never-really-popular-and-often-subject-to-backlash ideology thoroughly discreditable in the eyes of the broader public, Starmer went to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was not a neoliberal. This was not only the case in his rhetoric (Starmer was unafraid of the word "Socialism," and saluted Old Labour where Blair had only sneered at it and everything it ever claimed to stand for), but in his declared policies (which promise higher taxes on the rich and corporations, the end of Universal Credit, the return of free college, the renationalization of key services, and a Green New Deal, among much else).
Of course, Blair quickly justified the confidence that anyone who voted for him wanting a neoliberal government placed in him by delivering a decade of such policy (in fiscal and monetary policy; in maintaining and advancing the Thatcherite line on privatization, unions, the social safety net; in his commitment to high finance; etc.). Starmer is not in a comparable position (never mind the prime ministership, even a General Election is still quite some way off), but has not inspired much confidence that he could do the same (indeed, he was already toning down such leftishness as he displayed in the leadership contest, and sounding more like Blair in the February 2021 speech), and not unsurprisingly.
The simple truth is that if neoliberalism is more unpopular than ever the climate remains such that mainstream politicians have yet to challenge it in ways other than ill-considered and disruptive gestures like Brexit, or emergency patches like the stimulus seen in the wake of the pandemic (which pale in comparison with the extreme lengths to which governments and central bankers have gone to prop up the neoliberal growth model--the ultra-loose monetary policy, the quantitative easing, the bailout money, dwarfing the already vast efforts of the Long Recession).
All this would seem to bespeak a situation in which anyone near the center of politics remains a neoliberal, simply refuse to admit it, and hope no one notices--a policy which works entirely well with the mainstream media. But then the mainstream media remains squarely for neoliberalism. The general public, however, is quite another matter--while, one might add, its confidence in that media is ever-plummeting, a fact going for the left as well as the right. Naturally it would be complacent to assume that its reaction would be the same.
The Increasing Allure of the Virtual
Recently I found myself revisiting those ideas current a decade ago about the possibility of an "exodus to the virtual world" in which, finding playing MMORPGs far more satisfying than our daily offline existences, millions of people forsake this world for some other.
I have to admit that I found such arguments implausible, simply because economic necessity forces us to stay stuck in this world.
Still, considering the history of science fiction it does seem to me that attitudes have changed over time, and particularly after we had our first contacts with "virtuality." Conventionally the response we were conventionally "supposed" to have to the thought of a life online as an "alternative" to reality was suspicion and revulsion, in line with the old sci-fi trope of a virtual world as something used by an oppressive system to obscure reality for its own selfish ends--a tradition going back at least to Olaf Stapledon's classic Star Maker (1937).
However, in Ready Player One (2011)--published years after online, virtual life became a common experience--while the narrator piously acknowledges the "real," offline, world as our proper focus, the only place where, as Anorak tells our hero at the end, we can really find happiness, the fact remains that the adventure was really all about saving the virtual one which was the only thing that made bearable existence in this broken and oppressive real world that the book's hero and his generation inherited. (And the sequel, 2020's Ready Player Two, in spite of the twists and turns the story took, ultimately doubled down on that line, escalating the escapism with high-tech neural interfaces treated as, in the end, a positive development.)
It seemed to me that the shift in attitude implicit here attracted little comment at the time, or since--and that in the decade since its appearance, in which immersion in virtuality has only become deeper and more widespread, I have noticed nothing giving the impression of our moving in any direction but the one I discuss here.
I suppose that actual, lived experience of virtuality has done something to erode the old prejudices. This includes, of course, experience of the technology. That experience, it might be admitted, has not been wholly positive. But at the very least it has offered enough people enough pleasure, enough comfort, to make them rethink their prejudice--while I can't help thinking that this has been the more pronounced because of how the century actually did go. Every era has its share of misery, disappointment, fear--and for some, catastrophe. This is all the more obviously the case when we look away from the pampered upper strata by, of and for whom history generally is written, and to whom the media is so hopelessly devoted. In the United States, at least the twenty-first century has, by modern standards, been especially painful and discouraging in ways that are statistically measurable--from economic disaster that game-playing young people have felt particularly keenly, to incessant war, to climate catastrophe, and now pandemic, with worse expected on just about every score, and the media complex blasting the bad tidings at us with ever-greater intensity 24/7 despair for all it is worth under the pretense of "informing the public."
People are hurt, frightened, and made to feel helpless all the time (ironically, while often being made to feel guilty in spite of their powerlessness, which is of course making it still worse), and amid it all going somewhere else does not look so bad as it might have, perhaps the more in as the conveniences our gadgetry affords us--substantially a matter of easy distraction or escape during unpleasant commutes, dull classes, the tedium of working when the boss has his back turned, and so much else we find onerous--can seem like just about the only good thing this century has brought into the lives of non-billionaires. And in the process it becomes harder to resist a pleasant virtual world over the real one--and harder for even those who do not make the same choice to judge those who choose this form of escape as harshly as they might otherwise have been inclined to do.
I have to admit that I found such arguments implausible, simply because economic necessity forces us to stay stuck in this world.
Still, considering the history of science fiction it does seem to me that attitudes have changed over time, and particularly after we had our first contacts with "virtuality." Conventionally the response we were conventionally "supposed" to have to the thought of a life online as an "alternative" to reality was suspicion and revulsion, in line with the old sci-fi trope of a virtual world as something used by an oppressive system to obscure reality for its own selfish ends--a tradition going back at least to Olaf Stapledon's classic Star Maker (1937).
However, in Ready Player One (2011)--published years after online, virtual life became a common experience--while the narrator piously acknowledges the "real," offline, world as our proper focus, the only place where, as Anorak tells our hero at the end, we can really find happiness, the fact remains that the adventure was really all about saving the virtual one which was the only thing that made bearable existence in this broken and oppressive real world that the book's hero and his generation inherited. (And the sequel, 2020's Ready Player Two, in spite of the twists and turns the story took, ultimately doubled down on that line, escalating the escapism with high-tech neural interfaces treated as, in the end, a positive development.)
It seemed to me that the shift in attitude implicit here attracted little comment at the time, or since--and that in the decade since its appearance, in which immersion in virtuality has only become deeper and more widespread, I have noticed nothing giving the impression of our moving in any direction but the one I discuss here.
I suppose that actual, lived experience of virtuality has done something to erode the old prejudices. This includes, of course, experience of the technology. That experience, it might be admitted, has not been wholly positive. But at the very least it has offered enough people enough pleasure, enough comfort, to make them rethink their prejudice--while I can't help thinking that this has been the more pronounced because of how the century actually did go. Every era has its share of misery, disappointment, fear--and for some, catastrophe. This is all the more obviously the case when we look away from the pampered upper strata by, of and for whom history generally is written, and to whom the media is so hopelessly devoted. In the United States, at least the twenty-first century has, by modern standards, been especially painful and discouraging in ways that are statistically measurable--from economic disaster that game-playing young people have felt particularly keenly, to incessant war, to climate catastrophe, and now pandemic, with worse expected on just about every score, and the media complex blasting the bad tidings at us with ever-greater intensity 24/7 despair for all it is worth under the pretense of "informing the public."
People are hurt, frightened, and made to feel helpless all the time (ironically, while often being made to feel guilty in spite of their powerlessness, which is of course making it still worse), and amid it all going somewhere else does not look so bad as it might have, perhaps the more in as the conveniences our gadgetry affords us--substantially a matter of easy distraction or escape during unpleasant commutes, dull classes, the tedium of working when the boss has his back turned, and so much else we find onerous--can seem like just about the only good thing this century has brought into the lives of non-billionaires. And in the process it becomes harder to resist a pleasant virtual world over the real one--and harder for even those who do not make the same choice to judge those who choose this form of escape as harshly as they might otherwise have been inclined to do.
Rethinking the Virtual Reality Bust
About a decade ago I was coming around to the conclusion that, certainly as judged by the expectations of the '90s and the unceasing hype inflicted on us by the press, the actual rate of technological change has been wildly overhyped.
I have, of course, found that not only is this not a popular opinion, but that people tend to jump right down your throat when you express it. And sure enough, right after expressing exactly that opinion on a radio show I received an e-mail contesting it. As I had pointed to virtual reality as an example of how technological developments were falling far short of commonly held expectations, they did not fail to dispute that particular point, insisting that all the popular video games "these days" were based on "virtual reality."
Equating virtual reality as I did with what we were promised back in the '90s--full bodily immersion in a more or less convincing virtual reality with which we can interact haptically--I thought this was an extreme lowering of the bar on every count, so much so as to leave us not talking about the subject at all. Later, however, I encountered the arguments of economist Edward Castronova, who in books like Synthetic Worlds distinguished between the "hardware" and the "software" of virtual reality. The hardware is the equipment by way of which we experience a virtual reality, like the gear that would enable that bodily, haptic immersion in a convincing reality; the software what renders the world that we would be so persuasively immersed in. Castronova admitted that the hardware had been oversold--but argued that the software, the creation of artificial worlds which people experience, had most certainly arrived in such forms as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). As he acknowledged, people experienced them through a small two-dimensional audiovisual display, but already millions happily spent tens of hours a week there, and in the process became quite deeply involved in their avatars and their doings.
As of early 2021 it seems we have had another boom and bust where the hardware is concerned. The technology has certainly become more developed and more accessible. And certainly it has been making a bigger splash in gaming than its '90s-era equivalents ever did. Yet it seems to be falling short of the everyone-will-own-several-of-them ubiquity supposed to be imminent for the last five, six, seven years. And it is not hard to see why. Inadequate technical performance in areas like resolution and frame rate, "clunky" hardware, and the high cost of the requisite gear, make for a prohibitive combination indeed. And so at the very least the technology's affording the kind of physical immersion a standard part of the vision a generation ago, certainly in a way that would make it appealing and accessible to a really wide audience, seems some years off--awaiting, among other things, still lighter, faster, cheaper computers.
Yet there is no question that the software of virtual reality has only gone from strength to strength. When Castronova wrote Synthetic Realities single MMORPGs had been used by hundreds of thousands. Now single games of the type have had hundreds of millions of accounts opened (Runescape the record-holder here, with a quarter of a billion), and many have millions of active users at once. It might be added to this that much of what was once unique to MMORPGs--customizable characters interacting in a shared online world--has expanded far beyond the mostly high fantasy-oriented role-playing game to become a standard feature of gaming from first-person shooters to puzzlers, considerably lengthening the list of users in the process. (It has also helped that the hardware needed to access them in the more modest fashion we take for granted has gotten cheaper and more convenient. Back when Castronova was writing MMORPGs were still something people accessed primarily via desktops. Now they take the 2-D experience of those worlds wherever they go, on the laptops, tablets, smart phones they consider bare necessities, through cityscapes where everyplace anyone goes is expected to afford satisfactory Wi-fi.)
Indeed, it does not seem for nothing that, realizing early on just how consequential virtual reality software running even on primitive hardware could be, Castronova warned that we would see an "exodus" to the virtual world from this one, driving those concerned with the welfare of this world to make reality more palatable. This is not to say that I think such an exodus--or even the fear of such an exodus--prompting reform to make this world a better place, has ever been very plausible. So long as humans have bodies out here in the offline world, with their requirements for food, protection from the elements (e.g. shelter, clothing) and the rest, and the necessity of paying for the gadgets, electricity, Internet connections and the rest without which they cannot have online fun at all, there can be no exodus, really. Instead people have to submit to the demands of this world, regardless of its terms, something of which may be said of the way one "Worst since the '30s" economic catastrophe has piled atop another, the price of everything but one's own labor seems to go up endlessly, and the word "millennial" is equated with a revolution of falling expectations--with, indeed, life expectancy in America falling for years, even before the pandemic.
Consequently, rather than an exodus to wonderful worlds online, or a happier reality offline, what we have got is a rising tension between the allure of the online and the unavoidability of an ever-less rewarding offline existence. Economic necessity prevails in the end--and will so long as the bills have to be paid. But as anyone who gets out much knows only too well, a good many people steal every moment they can from the onerous duties of offline life for online experience--relying on their devices to make their commutes tolerable, and looking at their screens in class, or even on the job, whenever they can get away with it.
I have, of course, found that not only is this not a popular opinion, but that people tend to jump right down your throat when you express it. And sure enough, right after expressing exactly that opinion on a radio show I received an e-mail contesting it. As I had pointed to virtual reality as an example of how technological developments were falling far short of commonly held expectations, they did not fail to dispute that particular point, insisting that all the popular video games "these days" were based on "virtual reality."
Equating virtual reality as I did with what we were promised back in the '90s--full bodily immersion in a more or less convincing virtual reality with which we can interact haptically--I thought this was an extreme lowering of the bar on every count, so much so as to leave us not talking about the subject at all. Later, however, I encountered the arguments of economist Edward Castronova, who in books like Synthetic Worlds distinguished between the "hardware" and the "software" of virtual reality. The hardware is the equipment by way of which we experience a virtual reality, like the gear that would enable that bodily, haptic immersion in a convincing reality; the software what renders the world that we would be so persuasively immersed in. Castronova admitted that the hardware had been oversold--but argued that the software, the creation of artificial worlds which people experience, had most certainly arrived in such forms as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). As he acknowledged, people experienced them through a small two-dimensional audiovisual display, but already millions happily spent tens of hours a week there, and in the process became quite deeply involved in their avatars and their doings.
As of early 2021 it seems we have had another boom and bust where the hardware is concerned. The technology has certainly become more developed and more accessible. And certainly it has been making a bigger splash in gaming than its '90s-era equivalents ever did. Yet it seems to be falling short of the everyone-will-own-several-of-them ubiquity supposed to be imminent for the last five, six, seven years. And it is not hard to see why. Inadequate technical performance in areas like resolution and frame rate, "clunky" hardware, and the high cost of the requisite gear, make for a prohibitive combination indeed. And so at the very least the technology's affording the kind of physical immersion a standard part of the vision a generation ago, certainly in a way that would make it appealing and accessible to a really wide audience, seems some years off--awaiting, among other things, still lighter, faster, cheaper computers.
Yet there is no question that the software of virtual reality has only gone from strength to strength. When Castronova wrote Synthetic Realities single MMORPGs had been used by hundreds of thousands. Now single games of the type have had hundreds of millions of accounts opened (Runescape the record-holder here, with a quarter of a billion), and many have millions of active users at once. It might be added to this that much of what was once unique to MMORPGs--customizable characters interacting in a shared online world--has expanded far beyond the mostly high fantasy-oriented role-playing game to become a standard feature of gaming from first-person shooters to puzzlers, considerably lengthening the list of users in the process. (It has also helped that the hardware needed to access them in the more modest fashion we take for granted has gotten cheaper and more convenient. Back when Castronova was writing MMORPGs were still something people accessed primarily via desktops. Now they take the 2-D experience of those worlds wherever they go, on the laptops, tablets, smart phones they consider bare necessities, through cityscapes where everyplace anyone goes is expected to afford satisfactory Wi-fi.)
Indeed, it does not seem for nothing that, realizing early on just how consequential virtual reality software running even on primitive hardware could be, Castronova warned that we would see an "exodus" to the virtual world from this one, driving those concerned with the welfare of this world to make reality more palatable. This is not to say that I think such an exodus--or even the fear of such an exodus--prompting reform to make this world a better place, has ever been very plausible. So long as humans have bodies out here in the offline world, with their requirements for food, protection from the elements (e.g. shelter, clothing) and the rest, and the necessity of paying for the gadgets, electricity, Internet connections and the rest without which they cannot have online fun at all, there can be no exodus, really. Instead people have to submit to the demands of this world, regardless of its terms, something of which may be said of the way one "Worst since the '30s" economic catastrophe has piled atop another, the price of everything but one's own labor seems to go up endlessly, and the word "millennial" is equated with a revolution of falling expectations--with, indeed, life expectancy in America falling for years, even before the pandemic.
Consequently, rather than an exodus to wonderful worlds online, or a happier reality offline, what we have got is a rising tension between the allure of the online and the unavoidability of an ever-less rewarding offline existence. Economic necessity prevails in the end--and will so long as the bills have to be paid. But as anyone who gets out much knows only too well, a good many people steal every moment they can from the onerous duties of offline life for online experience--relying on their devices to make their commutes tolerable, and looking at their screens in class, or even on the job, whenever they can get away with it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
RethinkX on Energy: An overview of the Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 Disruption Report
A favorite argument of the detractors of renewable energy-based electricity production is the intermittency of the sources--the fact that the sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. They also point to the impracticality of storage of solar and wind-generated electricity on any significant scale, given sheer cost. And they hold on the basis of these facts that any attempt to meet a significant portion of need from those sources results in there either being a surplus of electricity when it may be unwanted, or a scarcity of electrity when it is needed. The latter problem, more obvious than the former, means that really large-scale use, and certainly the 100 percent reliance the optimists talk about, requires really massive redundancy in generating capacity. That is to say that to produce enough to meet 100 percent of our need, we must produce much more than 100 percent, just to meet our requirement, with the excess going to waste. Driving down efficiency and driving up costs, this makes any such scheme so profligate and so costly that only eco-besotted fools would waste a moment's time on it, the detractors tell us, while also assuring us that this is virtually certain to remain the case throughout the foreseeable future.
Of course, this argument (like just about all the detractors' old standards) has been crumbling for a good, long while. The falling cost of renewable-generated electricity, its becoming competitive with and then increasingly cheaper than such longtime electricity-production mainstays as coal and nuclear, and even natural gas, and all that on a purely "market" basis (which is to say, even without taking into account the subsidies of and externalities caused by them), make the economics look less forbidding than before. Helping, too, is the quite obvious approach of compensating for the intermittency of renewables with strategic combination. (The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow--but not always at the same time, so that having solar and wind working together is at least a partial solution.) And on top of that, battery storage prices have been falling at rates comparable to those of the production of the electricity itself, lowering the cost of storing electricity not immediately used, so that there is less need for redundnacy.
The result has been that at the very least a considerable enlargement of our renewables use looks increasingly practical in the immediate term (as the shift of investment toward it reflects), and the path to the 100 percent renewables-based electricity goal, if not perfectly clear, at least considerably less fantasmic.
The RethinkX think tank, however, has gone not a step, but a giant leap, beyond that, in Adam Dorr and Tony Seba's Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 report, looking at what has for so long been dismissed as a deal-breaking liability--the fact that to meet 100 percent of our electricity needs with renewables we would need a level of capacity generating a great surplus above that level--as instead an epoch-making opportunity. Simply put, in pursuing the 100 percent renewables goal we would not only have the energy we need at far less cost to the physical environment, but in producing the "excess" of energy generate not "waste," but rather an abundance they term "Clean Energy Super Power." In this they see a basis for accomplishing with energy--and clean energy at that--what the digital age has accomplished with information storage and transmission, dropping its marginal cost to nearly zero.
How will this work? The claim warrants some unpacking, the more in as Dorr and Seba spend relatively little of their report discussing it (and in fact relegate their answer to one of what seemed to me the most important possible objections to an endnote rather than treating it in the main text). Simply put, not only is it the case that meeting our energy needs will require the capacity to produce more than a multiple of those energy needs, but that the multiple will grow with the scale of the system. (As they crunch the numbers, a renewables-based system meeting 100 percent of our electricity would generate the equivalent in Super Power, and merely expanding the capacity another twenty percent would double or even triple the quantity of Super Power.) The result is that the margin between the consumption the system is designed to meet, and what it makes available, is always widening, not shrinking.
Of course, more than a difference of perspective is involved in anything like this becoming practical in the next decade. It has to be economically feasible to build all that capacity--and indeed, even when counting in the investment that would produce all the extra, cheaper than the alternatives. By way of a number of case studies subject to deliberately pessimistic assumptions, Dorr and Seba argue precisely that. They specifically consider the feasibility of a 100 percent photovoltaic Solar, onshore Wind and lithium-ion Battery (SWB)-based grid in three diverse localities (sun- and wind-rich Texas, sun-rich but less windy California, and sun- and wind-deprived New England), in a context of no electricity imports, no conventional operating reserves, no distributed generation or storage, no assists from electric vehicles, no peak demand-lowering mechanisms (demand response, load shifting, energy arbitrage and peak shaving), and no financial innovations or government supports (subsidies, carbon taxes). They also assume that there are no breakthroughs in energy production, storage or transmission of any kind other than the mere continuation of the long-observed price drop in the technologies on which they concentrate (SWB) for just a few more years, even allowing for a slowing of progress here (for the lot, a 75 percent price drop over the next decade, versus 85 percent in the past decade). This portion of their argument, comprising about half the length of the report's main text, demonstrates the adequacy of such a system in even the most pessimistic (New England) case, as well as the swiftness with which capacity expansion yields more Supwer Power.
As the think tank's prior report made clear, they anticipate that along with information, and also energy, the resource-intensiveness and price of food, transport and materials will drop by an order of magnitude or more in the coming decade, more produced with less in all these other areas. (The aforementioned footnote, in fact, refers to the way technological advances in other areas will ephemeralize production, preventing any Jevons Paradox-type rebound from soaking up all the extra energy produced, frequently not in spite of but because of the electrification of road transport and industrial processes like metal smelting that they anticipate, and the energy needs of new projects like carbon removal.)
Indeed, with the relevant technologies already almost all the way to the end point they describe (solar's capital costs have dropped 99.9 percent since the 1970s, and the projected drop Dorr and Seba talk about would merely lower the price of this already cheapest source of power to 99.97 percent of the old price), and any really large-scale program launched even now bound to run for years and thus quite easily reap substantial benefits from the projected price drops, the authors argue for the building of 100 percent renewable-based electric capacity not as some theoretical, long-term one, but an endeavor to be mounted immediately. They also hold that there is not only little to be gained from delaying, but much to be lost from doing so, besides the obvious ecological benefits. As noted previously, the cheapening of renewable-produced electricity has already made investment in fossil fuels and nuclear unattractive--and the continuation of the trend they anticipate would mean that not only would building new fossil fuel or nuclear capacity be a money-loser, but that soon merely operating existing plant would be costlier than shutting it down and replacing it with SWB. (Dorr and Seba, in fact, anticipate the oil and gas sectors suffering the same kind of disruption that coal has already suffered by the mid-2020s.) As they also note, any locality that achieves Clean Energy Super Power will have a vast advantage over any locality that does not as a place to do business, given lower production costs that will come quite organically, in contrast with the subsidies states and cities presently hand to big business. (Offering the example of the Volkswagen Golf, the authors point out that building such a car would be $2,000 cheaper per vehicle in an area where Super Power is available.)
I have to admit that after reading all this I found myself left with a good many questions. Where per-kilowatt-hour prices are concerned the authors have been very persuasive, but they say less about other issues, like the required land use. My own readings on the subject have given me the impression that renewables-bashers exaggerate the problem. Still, some address of the issue would have been welcome, the more in as it is one thing to picture vast, sun- and wind-rich Texas meeting its needs on the basis they describe, another to visualize far more densely peopled and less sun- and wind-rich New England doing the same on that purely local basis. (I also saw no case made regarding the availability of the needed material inputs. Again, my experience is that renewables-bashers seize on alleged limitations in order to "debunk" visions of larger-scale renewable energy use, but the report would have been stronger if it addressed this matter, not least because the issue is not simply whether one or another part of the U.S. alone could do this, but whether everyone could do this, given the global market in such materials, and the fact that, were this course as desirable as they say, everyone would be following in it.)
Getting away from the basic issue of the feasibility of 100 percent SWB-based electricity to the still more transformative vision of Clean Energy Super Power, I find myself skeptical of the analogy between electrical power production and the Internet, and the way the logic of its development shifted Internet Service Providers to the current pricing model--such that it seems, at the least, an area for further exploration. Where possible doubts are concerned the strongest that I can verbalize is the question of ephemeralization they raise, which is asserted rather than argued. One may counter that by pointing to RethinkX's prior publications on food and transport (which show how those sectors might achieve a good deal in this respect by themselves), but that, too, shows an important limitation. The hugely important remaining area of materials which supplies our housing, clothing, infrastructure, vehicles and all the machinery enabling all that cheaper information, energy, food and the rest is one about which RethinkX, to my knowledge, has preivously said little, and they make no addition to that here.
Still, if the report falls short of finally settling every last one of its more radical claims, that does not in the slightest detract from those claims it grounds in quite robust, even formidable, fashion. Indeed, its analysis of the history of pricing, local electricity demand, and SWB-based electricity generation potential in a variety of environments lends great credence to the argument that if only on a pure economic cost basis there are ample grounds for a far, far more ambitious effort in this area than has been seriously discussed by any presiding government--up to the "100 percent SWB electricity" goal. Accordingly, anyone concerned with energy markets, and economic developments--to say nothing of climate change and Green New Deals--would do well to attend carefully to the argument Dorr and Seba make. Meanwhile, I will be looking forward eagerly to they and their colleagues' continuation of what is easily one of the most intriguing (and we may yet find, important) lines of thought on the futurological scene today.
Of course, this argument (like just about all the detractors' old standards) has been crumbling for a good, long while. The falling cost of renewable-generated electricity, its becoming competitive with and then increasingly cheaper than such longtime electricity-production mainstays as coal and nuclear, and even natural gas, and all that on a purely "market" basis (which is to say, even without taking into account the subsidies of and externalities caused by them), make the economics look less forbidding than before. Helping, too, is the quite obvious approach of compensating for the intermittency of renewables with strategic combination. (The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow--but not always at the same time, so that having solar and wind working together is at least a partial solution.) And on top of that, battery storage prices have been falling at rates comparable to those of the production of the electricity itself, lowering the cost of storing electricity not immediately used, so that there is less need for redundnacy.
The result has been that at the very least a considerable enlargement of our renewables use looks increasingly practical in the immediate term (as the shift of investment toward it reflects), and the path to the 100 percent renewables-based electricity goal, if not perfectly clear, at least considerably less fantasmic.
The RethinkX think tank, however, has gone not a step, but a giant leap, beyond that, in Adam Dorr and Tony Seba's Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 report, looking at what has for so long been dismissed as a deal-breaking liability--the fact that to meet 100 percent of our electricity needs with renewables we would need a level of capacity generating a great surplus above that level--as instead an epoch-making opportunity. Simply put, in pursuing the 100 percent renewables goal we would not only have the energy we need at far less cost to the physical environment, but in producing the "excess" of energy generate not "waste," but rather an abundance they term "Clean Energy Super Power." In this they see a basis for accomplishing with energy--and clean energy at that--what the digital age has accomplished with information storage and transmission, dropping its marginal cost to nearly zero.
How will this work? The claim warrants some unpacking, the more in as Dorr and Seba spend relatively little of their report discussing it (and in fact relegate their answer to one of what seemed to me the most important possible objections to an endnote rather than treating it in the main text). Simply put, not only is it the case that meeting our energy needs will require the capacity to produce more than a multiple of those energy needs, but that the multiple will grow with the scale of the system. (As they crunch the numbers, a renewables-based system meeting 100 percent of our electricity would generate the equivalent in Super Power, and merely expanding the capacity another twenty percent would double or even triple the quantity of Super Power.) The result is that the margin between the consumption the system is designed to meet, and what it makes available, is always widening, not shrinking.
Of course, more than a difference of perspective is involved in anything like this becoming practical in the next decade. It has to be economically feasible to build all that capacity--and indeed, even when counting in the investment that would produce all the extra, cheaper than the alternatives. By way of a number of case studies subject to deliberately pessimistic assumptions, Dorr and Seba argue precisely that. They specifically consider the feasibility of a 100 percent photovoltaic Solar, onshore Wind and lithium-ion Battery (SWB)-based grid in three diverse localities (sun- and wind-rich Texas, sun-rich but less windy California, and sun- and wind-deprived New England), in a context of no electricity imports, no conventional operating reserves, no distributed generation or storage, no assists from electric vehicles, no peak demand-lowering mechanisms (demand response, load shifting, energy arbitrage and peak shaving), and no financial innovations or government supports (subsidies, carbon taxes). They also assume that there are no breakthroughs in energy production, storage or transmission of any kind other than the mere continuation of the long-observed price drop in the technologies on which they concentrate (SWB) for just a few more years, even allowing for a slowing of progress here (for the lot, a 75 percent price drop over the next decade, versus 85 percent in the past decade). This portion of their argument, comprising about half the length of the report's main text, demonstrates the adequacy of such a system in even the most pessimistic (New England) case, as well as the swiftness with which capacity expansion yields more Supwer Power.
As the think tank's prior report made clear, they anticipate that along with information, and also energy, the resource-intensiveness and price of food, transport and materials will drop by an order of magnitude or more in the coming decade, more produced with less in all these other areas. (The aforementioned footnote, in fact, refers to the way technological advances in other areas will ephemeralize production, preventing any Jevons Paradox-type rebound from soaking up all the extra energy produced, frequently not in spite of but because of the electrification of road transport and industrial processes like metal smelting that they anticipate, and the energy needs of new projects like carbon removal.)
Indeed, with the relevant technologies already almost all the way to the end point they describe (solar's capital costs have dropped 99.9 percent since the 1970s, and the projected drop Dorr and Seba talk about would merely lower the price of this already cheapest source of power to 99.97 percent of the old price), and any really large-scale program launched even now bound to run for years and thus quite easily reap substantial benefits from the projected price drops, the authors argue for the building of 100 percent renewable-based electric capacity not as some theoretical, long-term one, but an endeavor to be mounted immediately. They also hold that there is not only little to be gained from delaying, but much to be lost from doing so, besides the obvious ecological benefits. As noted previously, the cheapening of renewable-produced electricity has already made investment in fossil fuels and nuclear unattractive--and the continuation of the trend they anticipate would mean that not only would building new fossil fuel or nuclear capacity be a money-loser, but that soon merely operating existing plant would be costlier than shutting it down and replacing it with SWB. (Dorr and Seba, in fact, anticipate the oil and gas sectors suffering the same kind of disruption that coal has already suffered by the mid-2020s.) As they also note, any locality that achieves Clean Energy Super Power will have a vast advantage over any locality that does not as a place to do business, given lower production costs that will come quite organically, in contrast with the subsidies states and cities presently hand to big business. (Offering the example of the Volkswagen Golf, the authors point out that building such a car would be $2,000 cheaper per vehicle in an area where Super Power is available.)
I have to admit that after reading all this I found myself left with a good many questions. Where per-kilowatt-hour prices are concerned the authors have been very persuasive, but they say less about other issues, like the required land use. My own readings on the subject have given me the impression that renewables-bashers exaggerate the problem. Still, some address of the issue would have been welcome, the more in as it is one thing to picture vast, sun- and wind-rich Texas meeting its needs on the basis they describe, another to visualize far more densely peopled and less sun- and wind-rich New England doing the same on that purely local basis. (I also saw no case made regarding the availability of the needed material inputs. Again, my experience is that renewables-bashers seize on alleged limitations in order to "debunk" visions of larger-scale renewable energy use, but the report would have been stronger if it addressed this matter, not least because the issue is not simply whether one or another part of the U.S. alone could do this, but whether everyone could do this, given the global market in such materials, and the fact that, were this course as desirable as they say, everyone would be following in it.)
Getting away from the basic issue of the feasibility of 100 percent SWB-based electricity to the still more transformative vision of Clean Energy Super Power, I find myself skeptical of the analogy between electrical power production and the Internet, and the way the logic of its development shifted Internet Service Providers to the current pricing model--such that it seems, at the least, an area for further exploration. Where possible doubts are concerned the strongest that I can verbalize is the question of ephemeralization they raise, which is asserted rather than argued. One may counter that by pointing to RethinkX's prior publications on food and transport (which show how those sectors might achieve a good deal in this respect by themselves), but that, too, shows an important limitation. The hugely important remaining area of materials which supplies our housing, clothing, infrastructure, vehicles and all the machinery enabling all that cheaper information, energy, food and the rest is one about which RethinkX, to my knowledge, has preivously said little, and they make no addition to that here.
Still, if the report falls short of finally settling every last one of its more radical claims, that does not in the slightest detract from those claims it grounds in quite robust, even formidable, fashion. Indeed, its analysis of the history of pricing, local electricity demand, and SWB-based electricity generation potential in a variety of environments lends great credence to the argument that if only on a pure economic cost basis there are ample grounds for a far, far more ambitious effort in this area than has been seriously discussed by any presiding government--up to the "100 percent SWB electricity" goal. Accordingly, anyone concerned with energy markets, and economic developments--to say nothing of climate change and Green New Deals--would do well to attend carefully to the argument Dorr and Seba make. Meanwhile, I will be looking forward eagerly to they and their colleagues' continuation of what is easily one of the most intriguing (and we may yet find, important) lines of thought on the futurological scene today.
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
THE NEOLIBERAL AGE IN AMERICA: FROM CARTER TO TRUMP
As we enter 2020 it seems as if the country's politics are undergoing nothing less than a tectonic shift—one result of which is that the word "neoliberalism" has passed out of the usage of academics, into general parlance. Those trying to make sense of it all find that the market is flooded with public affairs books—but most are longer on political hacks' rants than substance, or too busy telling colorful stories, to offer answers to such obvious and essential questions as
•Just what is neoliberalism anyway? (And why is there so much confusion about this anyway?)
•What did the Reagan administration actually do, and what were the results?
•What was the policy of the Clinton administration, and did it justify its characterization by critics as neoliberal? (Ditto Obama.)
•What was the country's economic record before and after "the neoliberal turn?"
However, THE NEOLIBERAL AGE IN AMERICA: FROM CARTER systematically examines Federal policy from the 1970s through the Presidencies of Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama, emphasizing specifics and hard data to offer a picture of just what happened in these years as a matter of practical policy, and its consequences—answering these questions and more as we confront this era of crisis, and what may be a historic election this upcoming November.
Available in ebook and paperback formats at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today!
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•Just what is neoliberalism anyway? (And why is there so much confusion about this anyway?)
•What did the Reagan administration actually do, and what were the results?
•What was the policy of the Clinton administration, and did it justify its characterization by critics as neoliberal? (Ditto Obama.)
•What was the country's economic record before and after "the neoliberal turn?"
However, THE NEOLIBERAL AGE IN AMERICA: FROM CARTER systematically examines Federal policy from the 1970s through the Presidencies of Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama, emphasizing specifics and hard data to offer a picture of just what happened in these years as a matter of practical policy, and its consequences—answering these questions and more as we confront this era of crisis, and what may be a historic election this upcoming November.
Available in ebook and paperback formats at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today!
Tweet
Imagining the Twenty-First Century: A Glance Back at the Expectations of the Neoliberal Heyday
In recent years I have devoted more attention to the subject of neoliberalism--defining the concept, examining its practical enactment (particularly in the U.S. and Britain), and considering the resulting economic record from such standpoints as world and national economic growth, and industrialization.
By and large what we see in the world today is profound disappointment in the idea and its application--sufficiently so that any candidate standing for election publicly owns to neoliberal sympathies and intentions at their peril, with the right turning more nationalist, and the center-left taking the other approach of denying it has ever had anything to do with such (even as both right and center-left overwhelmingly remain adherents of neoliberal practice).
In the course of considering the policy record, and the track record with respect to economic growth, I find myself reminded time and again that the late 1990s were the moment when, at least in the Western world and especially in the English-speaking world, neoliberals were most confident in their promises actually coming true, and the societal mainstream most ready to believe them, amid a period of economic boom that at least appeared to be based on a surge of technological innovation consumers experienced in their own lives supposed to be some wonderful new normal.
There were, of course, different ways of thinking about these matters, not all of them totally unfounded. Consider, for instance, the theory of Kondratiev waves, or K- waves for short, which posit a 40 to 60 year cycle of upswing and downswing in the world economy. K-wave theorists commonly see a K-wave beginning some time in the 1940s, with the economy booming for a generation, and clearly slowing down no later than the early 1970s. Afterward, in line with the theory, was a long period of slow growth, quite in evidence amid worldwide recession in the early 1990s, as much of the Third World struggled with post-debt crisis austerity, Japan slipped into a "lost decade," the "reform" of the Soviet bloc actually produced the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and deindustrialization and stagnation characterized the Western performance. With growth proceeding at a faster clip in the later part of the decade, it seemed quite plausible that the downswing was over, that the upswing due by then had arrived. If one took 1995, say, as the start of the next wave, and the next half decade as representative of it, then an adherent of the theory had grounds for expecting twenty to thirty years of rapid growth, boom times continuing, maybe even getting better still, until 2015, 2020, 2025 even.
All this may have seemed more plausible because this was (more or less) what happened in the prior, post-war World War II boom--the 4 percent a year growth clocked in the latter half of the '90s the norm through the '50s and '60s and early '70s. To give one example of what this would have been like, had the U.S. sustained its late '90s-era GDP growth, the country's GDP would be in the vicinity of $33 trillion, or $100,000 per capita (in today's dollars) circa 2020.
Moreover, there was some expectation of fairly wide sharing of such gains with little need for public intervention, not least via the personal asset portfolios that many middle-class people were quitting perfectly good day jobs to manage full-time. Representative of the sensibility was the cover of the July 5, 1999 issue of Newsweek, which featured an old-fashioned comic strip-style drawing of a man with a distressed facial expression alarmed that "Everyone's getting rich but me!"--a thought the cover patronizingly blew off as "the Whine of '99." Inside the magazine Adam Bryant's tauntingly titled article "They're Rich (And You're Not)" proceeded to, at greater length, continue taunting the unfortunates among its readership suffering from what it assured them was the "reality" of "everyone else getting rich."
Of course, contrary to what the idiots who published this mean-spirited garbage would have had their credulous readers believe, the reality was that not everyone was getting rich. Very, very far from it. Still, while the '70s and '80s and early '90s were not great for working people, and even the late '90s were rather less good to them than they were to billionaires, that period saw workers, going by official U.S. Census data on median income, at least, recover the ground they lost in the recessions of those earlier eras. Assuming the growth continued it was quite plausible they would have seen the first real increases in personal income since the end of the post-war boom a generation earlier. And if the gains of the '90s were far from equally distributed round the world, it seemed plausible that other parts of the planet would enjoy similarly accelerated gains, with other industrialized nations following America's lead, and developing nations similarly striving to catch up.
Meanwhile there were those who saw the prospects as even brighter than that, on the basis of the technological possibilities at hand being more fundamentally epochal. Here it seems worth revisiting the prognostications of Ray Kurzweil. In 1999, at the boom's height, he published his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, one chapter in which presents a long list of rather precise technological forecasts, a major theme of which was bullishness about the progress being made with neural networks and the pattern-recognition software based on them, and the pace of improvement in computer hardware, particularly 3-D computer chips. The result was to be a much more rapid advance in areas like artificial intelligence, and new processes and products like virtual reality and (substantially) self-driving cars, with commensurately dazzling macroeconomic consequences--starting with "the ten years leading up to 2009" being a period of "continuous economic expansion and prosperity," the more amazing for its going hand in hand with price deflation as the cost of making things fell. (In contrast with the stagflation of the '70s, this bizarre, unprecedented combination of boom times and falling prices would be, for most, a rather happy perfect opposite.) And things would only go onward and upward from there as technological progress accelerated on the way to a "technological Singularity" that before century's end rendered our old frame of reference meaningless.
It may seem that this outcome would not have been a wholly positive vision. For example, a world where countries have a GDP two-thirds or more higher may seem daunting to the ecologically conscious. However, the increased productivity would, arguably, have not only seen the substitution of "information" for labor, but information replacing natural resource consumption as well. Indeed, many of the technologies Kurzweil specifically discussed, like carbon nanotubes and self-driving cars, could have been powerful contributors to a more sustainable world economy, while higher incomes would have meant more scope for action to save the environment, whether one thinks in terms of the research and development of new energy technologies, or even public action on the more urgent problems as the swift growth translated to budget surpluses and falling debt-to-GDP ratios without painful budget cuts or tax rises. It even seems far from inconceivable that all of this could have translated to a more tolerant society, with social stresses assuaged by an experience of plenty. (It is certainly worth remembering that the civil rights movement won its victories in the boom years of the '60s, that what the right derides as "political correctness" had its heyday in the boom years of the '90s.)
Of course, things did not go as the optimists seem to have hoped. Looking at Kurzweil especially it seems worth noting that much of the technological advance he predicted for 2009 remained unachieved not only in 2009 but in 2019--at which point , and the things Kurzweil talked about once again deferred indefinitely into the future (the neural nets and 3-D chips and virtual reality and self-driving cars and the rest). Indeed, analysts increasingly conceded that the burst of productivity growth improvement evident in the late '90s petered out after a few years, without ever matching the swift gains of the Fordism-dominated mid-century period, and gave way to even slower growth than before.
One can hardly picture much economic growth in a period of feeble technological progress, and indeed, the results that way were all too predictable. The tech boom proved tech bubble mere months after the paperback edition of Kurzweil's book hit the stores, amid an exposure of corporate fraud and accounting scandals, Wall Street's great bull run (1982-2000) clearly over. Price deflation? Quite the contrary, rising energy prices translated to a renewal of inflation, severe enough to cause food riots in the Third World well before oil hit a $150 a barrel. And those surging prices were broken only by another, bigger, financial crisis, the worst since the '30s--from which it seems safe to say, neoliberalism, globalization and the prevailing political culture did not recover, stagnation, unemployment, anger only worsening on the way to the next, still worse, "worst since the '30s" in 2020. Indeed, by the latter date U.S. GDP was about forty percent lower than it would have been had tech boom-style growth continued for those two first decades of the century. (Taken as a drop from where the country would have been in the alternative scenario, a distance in output equivalent to the fall between 1929 and the Depression's rock bottom in 1932.)
Meanwhile the slight gains were concentrated at the top, and the costs went the opposite way, swelling the largest fortunes to heights of which the Gilded Age robber barons could only have dreamed as far, far more people saw themselves fall further and further behind, not least because the public sector was so badly squeezed. Instead of budget surpluses and a falling Federal debt-to-GDP ratio such as might have been hoped for, what the era saw instead was trillion-dollar deficits, and a doubling of the debt-to-GDP ratio, taking it back up to World War II-era levels. The ecological stress we have experienced and its resulting anxiety hardly need enlargement here--while the same goes for the decay of such gains in civility and tolerance as the past two generations had seen.
In short, the neoliberal utopia we were promised was an illusion--in which, it must be admitted, many never believed. To the left, the genuine, economics-minded left, at least, what happened instead was not really a surprise--simply confirmation of what they had been arguing all along. Even many old-style liberals, unconvinced by the neoliberal arguments, and quick to point to its failures from the very beginning, could not be surprised. At the same time the nationalist right was never on board, either, and likewise unsurprised. It might be added that the broader public was, at the very least, less persuaded by the talk than the more genuinely privileged groups. But of course what was mainstream did not include very much input from them, the media, for example, seeming to speak here with only one voice, so long and so loud, and so little perturbed by the lie being given to their promises that they just went on and on with the same line. Naturally the illusions lingered for a long, long while, and looking about even today it seems it has not totally gone away (the way things are these days, wherever one sees techno-hype, there they are apt to find the essentials), the consequences enduring.
By and large what we see in the world today is profound disappointment in the idea and its application--sufficiently so that any candidate standing for election publicly owns to neoliberal sympathies and intentions at their peril, with the right turning more nationalist, and the center-left taking the other approach of denying it has ever had anything to do with such (even as both right and center-left overwhelmingly remain adherents of neoliberal practice).
In the course of considering the policy record, and the track record with respect to economic growth, I find myself reminded time and again that the late 1990s were the moment when, at least in the Western world and especially in the English-speaking world, neoliberals were most confident in their promises actually coming true, and the societal mainstream most ready to believe them, amid a period of economic boom that at least appeared to be based on a surge of technological innovation consumers experienced in their own lives supposed to be some wonderful new normal.
There were, of course, different ways of thinking about these matters, not all of them totally unfounded. Consider, for instance, the theory of Kondratiev waves, or K- waves for short, which posit a 40 to 60 year cycle of upswing and downswing in the world economy. K-wave theorists commonly see a K-wave beginning some time in the 1940s, with the economy booming for a generation, and clearly slowing down no later than the early 1970s. Afterward, in line with the theory, was a long period of slow growth, quite in evidence amid worldwide recession in the early 1990s, as much of the Third World struggled with post-debt crisis austerity, Japan slipped into a "lost decade," the "reform" of the Soviet bloc actually produced the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and deindustrialization and stagnation characterized the Western performance. With growth proceeding at a faster clip in the later part of the decade, it seemed quite plausible that the downswing was over, that the upswing due by then had arrived. If one took 1995, say, as the start of the next wave, and the next half decade as representative of it, then an adherent of the theory had grounds for expecting twenty to thirty years of rapid growth, boom times continuing, maybe even getting better still, until 2015, 2020, 2025 even.
All this may have seemed more plausible because this was (more or less) what happened in the prior, post-war World War II boom--the 4 percent a year growth clocked in the latter half of the '90s the norm through the '50s and '60s and early '70s. To give one example of what this would have been like, had the U.S. sustained its late '90s-era GDP growth, the country's GDP would be in the vicinity of $33 trillion, or $100,000 per capita (in today's dollars) circa 2020.
Moreover, there was some expectation of fairly wide sharing of such gains with little need for public intervention, not least via the personal asset portfolios that many middle-class people were quitting perfectly good day jobs to manage full-time. Representative of the sensibility was the cover of the July 5, 1999 issue of Newsweek, which featured an old-fashioned comic strip-style drawing of a man with a distressed facial expression alarmed that "Everyone's getting rich but me!"--a thought the cover patronizingly blew off as "the Whine of '99." Inside the magazine Adam Bryant's tauntingly titled article "They're Rich (And You're Not)" proceeded to, at greater length, continue taunting the unfortunates among its readership suffering from what it assured them was the "reality" of "everyone else getting rich."
Of course, contrary to what the idiots who published this mean-spirited garbage would have had their credulous readers believe, the reality was that not everyone was getting rich. Very, very far from it. Still, while the '70s and '80s and early '90s were not great for working people, and even the late '90s were rather less good to them than they were to billionaires, that period saw workers, going by official U.S. Census data on median income, at least, recover the ground they lost in the recessions of those earlier eras. Assuming the growth continued it was quite plausible they would have seen the first real increases in personal income since the end of the post-war boom a generation earlier. And if the gains of the '90s were far from equally distributed round the world, it seemed plausible that other parts of the planet would enjoy similarly accelerated gains, with other industrialized nations following America's lead, and developing nations similarly striving to catch up.
Meanwhile there were those who saw the prospects as even brighter than that, on the basis of the technological possibilities at hand being more fundamentally epochal. Here it seems worth revisiting the prognostications of Ray Kurzweil. In 1999, at the boom's height, he published his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, one chapter in which presents a long list of rather precise technological forecasts, a major theme of which was bullishness about the progress being made with neural networks and the pattern-recognition software based on them, and the pace of improvement in computer hardware, particularly 3-D computer chips. The result was to be a much more rapid advance in areas like artificial intelligence, and new processes and products like virtual reality and (substantially) self-driving cars, with commensurately dazzling macroeconomic consequences--starting with "the ten years leading up to 2009" being a period of "continuous economic expansion and prosperity," the more amazing for its going hand in hand with price deflation as the cost of making things fell. (In contrast with the stagflation of the '70s, this bizarre, unprecedented combination of boom times and falling prices would be, for most, a rather happy perfect opposite.) And things would only go onward and upward from there as technological progress accelerated on the way to a "technological Singularity" that before century's end rendered our old frame of reference meaningless.
It may seem that this outcome would not have been a wholly positive vision. For example, a world where countries have a GDP two-thirds or more higher may seem daunting to the ecologically conscious. However, the increased productivity would, arguably, have not only seen the substitution of "information" for labor, but information replacing natural resource consumption as well. Indeed, many of the technologies Kurzweil specifically discussed, like carbon nanotubes and self-driving cars, could have been powerful contributors to a more sustainable world economy, while higher incomes would have meant more scope for action to save the environment, whether one thinks in terms of the research and development of new energy technologies, or even public action on the more urgent problems as the swift growth translated to budget surpluses and falling debt-to-GDP ratios without painful budget cuts or tax rises. It even seems far from inconceivable that all of this could have translated to a more tolerant society, with social stresses assuaged by an experience of plenty. (It is certainly worth remembering that the civil rights movement won its victories in the boom years of the '60s, that what the right derides as "political correctness" had its heyday in the boom years of the '90s.)
Of course, things did not go as the optimists seem to have hoped. Looking at Kurzweil especially it seems worth noting that much of the technological advance he predicted for 2009 remained unachieved not only in 2009 but in 2019--at which point , and the things Kurzweil talked about once again deferred indefinitely into the future (the neural nets and 3-D chips and virtual reality and self-driving cars and the rest). Indeed, analysts increasingly conceded that the burst of productivity growth improvement evident in the late '90s petered out after a few years, without ever matching the swift gains of the Fordism-dominated mid-century period, and gave way to even slower growth than before.
One can hardly picture much economic growth in a period of feeble technological progress, and indeed, the results that way were all too predictable. The tech boom proved tech bubble mere months after the paperback edition of Kurzweil's book hit the stores, amid an exposure of corporate fraud and accounting scandals, Wall Street's great bull run (1982-2000) clearly over. Price deflation? Quite the contrary, rising energy prices translated to a renewal of inflation, severe enough to cause food riots in the Third World well before oil hit a $150 a barrel. And those surging prices were broken only by another, bigger, financial crisis, the worst since the '30s--from which it seems safe to say, neoliberalism, globalization and the prevailing political culture did not recover, stagnation, unemployment, anger only worsening on the way to the next, still worse, "worst since the '30s" in 2020. Indeed, by the latter date U.S. GDP was about forty percent lower than it would have been had tech boom-style growth continued for those two first decades of the century. (Taken as a drop from where the country would have been in the alternative scenario, a distance in output equivalent to the fall between 1929 and the Depression's rock bottom in 1932.)
Meanwhile the slight gains were concentrated at the top, and the costs went the opposite way, swelling the largest fortunes to heights of which the Gilded Age robber barons could only have dreamed as far, far more people saw themselves fall further and further behind, not least because the public sector was so badly squeezed. Instead of budget surpluses and a falling Federal debt-to-GDP ratio such as might have been hoped for, what the era saw instead was trillion-dollar deficits, and a doubling of the debt-to-GDP ratio, taking it back up to World War II-era levels. The ecological stress we have experienced and its resulting anxiety hardly need enlargement here--while the same goes for the decay of such gains in civility and tolerance as the past two generations had seen.
In short, the neoliberal utopia we were promised was an illusion--in which, it must be admitted, many never believed. To the left, the genuine, economics-minded left, at least, what happened instead was not really a surprise--simply confirmation of what they had been arguing all along. Even many old-style liberals, unconvinced by the neoliberal arguments, and quick to point to its failures from the very beginning, could not be surprised. At the same time the nationalist right was never on board, either, and likewise unsurprised. It might be added that the broader public was, at the very least, less persuaded by the talk than the more genuinely privileged groups. But of course what was mainstream did not include very much input from them, the media, for example, seeming to speak here with only one voice, so long and so loud, and so little perturbed by the lie being given to their promises that they just went on and on with the same line. Naturally the illusions lingered for a long, long while, and looking about even today it seems it has not totally gone away (the way things are these days, wherever one sees techno-hype, there they are apt to find the essentials), the consequences enduring.
Defining Neoliberalism
The recent pseudo-debate over whether "neoliberalism" is a meaningful concept in economics and politics, especially in relation to center-left political parties like the Democratic Party of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, or the "New" Labour Party of Tony Blair, has been every bit as cynically manufactured as the debates over whether or not tobacco is a carcinogen, or whether the climate is changing and the change is due to human action, with the mainstream media displaying every bit of the same ignorance, incompetence, venality and cowardice in facilitating it that it has in those other situations.
Still, I must admit that in considering the claims, and answering them, I had to study the issue more closely than before, examining anew the specifics of the policy record, while working out as rigorous a definition of neoliberalism as possible. It seems to me that
Still, I must admit that in considering the claims, and answering them, I had to study the issue more closely than before, examining anew the specifics of the policy record, while working out as rigorous a definition of neoliberalism as possible. It seems to me that
Neoliberalism can be defined as a political reaction against the shift of society away from its approximation of the "classic liberal" (libertarian) model in the nineteenth century, and the associated growth of the state since that time. Liberalism’s response to that trend of state growth is most commonly identified with a variety of specific prescriptions including but not limited to fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, deunionization and free trade, especially as ways of redressing the compromises of earlier liberalism on behalf of maximizing industrial development, macroeconomic stability, employment, social welfare and equity. Increasingly important as a political project from the 1970s on, it is particularly identified with the policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S., and associated with an economy which is not simply a more liberalized version of what came before, but unprecedentedly financialized and globally integrated.A longer, more comprehensive and, I hope, clearer, explanation reads as follows:
Neoliberalism refers to a body of political economic theory; its associated thinkers, political movement and policies; and their application and consequences in actual life. It is, above all, a reaction against the shift of society away from what neoliberals see as its natural and optimal centering on individual, private exchange under a minimalist "night watchman" state devoted to the defense of private property, which neoliberals regard as having been best approximated in the nineteenth century West; in favor of a large and highly interventionist state devoted in particular to industrial development, social welfare and macroeconomic stewardship (in particular the combination of full employment-generating economic growth with low inflation), and disposing of as much as half the national Gross Domestic Product in the process.I admit that the second, longer version of the definition is less punchy than the first. But I think that facing it the political hacks who pretend neoliberalism is "not a thing" would have a much harder time playing their inane word games.
While clearly underway with the emergence of the Austrian School of economics in the early twentieth century, this movement came to encompass a loose collection of schools of economic thought broadly sympathetic to this agenda (monetarism, public choice, etc.), and increasingly consolidated into a recognizable intellectual and political movement in the post-World War II period (an important moment in which was the 1947 founding of the Mont Pelerin Society). In developing their theoretical arguments, and promoting their ideas among intellectuals and the general public, neoliberals developed a particular package of prescriptions for dismantling the offending apparatus of the industrial-welfare-macroeconomic state, and recreating, at a higher level, the desired economic order, stressing but not necessarily limited to
Government tax and spending cuts, more stringent and often explicitly legislated fiscal discipline, and "austerity." A related shift away from progressive taxation, social spending and redistribution of income. The deregulation of business activity, and particularly the elimination of regulation which imposed costs or limitations on business, as with regulation to protect workers, consumers and the environment; and legislation limiting forms of financial activity which could be disruptive to the larger economy, as with financial speculation. The privatization of state assets and functions in ways ranging from outright sell-off, to outsourcing, to the shutdown of programs leaving activity to the private sector, with individuals buying the desired good as consumers or not at all. A deemphasis of full employment as a public goal, especially of fiscal and monetary policy. The withdrawal of state protection, and even tolerance, for organized labor. The reduction or elimination of controls on the international flow of goods, capital and investment.
A significant force in practical policymaking by the 1970s, these theories were significantly applied in the critical early "laboratory" of Chile under the dictatorship of President Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), with the industrialized, Western, world seeing Britain and the United States lead the way, a development most closely identified with the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, respectively (1981-1989).
In considering the application of these ideas it is essential to acknowledge that their interaction with a dynamic economic reality has produced a distinctly different economic model from what came before, emphasizing the resourcing and incentivizing of investors over the other goods previously pursued, and their operation in a different manner than was previously the case. Usefully termed "Neoliberal Financialization," it sees an "unleashed" financial sector emphasizing the speculative buying and selling of assets across the worldwide field of activity not only created by the ever-more developed free trade regime, but intensified by loose monetary policy, and the substantially digital technologies enabling whole new productive practices (like "labor cost arbitrage"), and turbo-charged speculation (like the electronic trading of stocks and currencies). Putting it another way, "globalization," "creditism," "digitalism" are all key parts of the package (in contrast with the prior national orientations, gold standard-backed dollar, employment-oriented monetary policy, and treatment of Fordist production methods and goods as the cutting edge of the system).
Key elements of this package were not only unanticipated by the neoliberal vision, but in conflict with it (loose monetary policy and government's "picking winners" with its support for the financial sector contradict the classical liberal principles neoliberals profess). However, proponents of neoliberal thinking, which is today the orthodoxy of academic teaching of economics and predominant in mainstream comment and policy, generally embrace and defend this model in its essentials.
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