Of my current illustrious record of three posts, I might have accidentally tripped and learned something. This will be a meta-review of my past posts, to see what we can find in common, and hopefully change our beliefs based on what we have learned. Specifically, we will look at Red Plenty, Stubborn Attachments, and Scientific Freedom.
As a brief recap, Red Plenty was a semi-fictional account of the USSR, with intrepid mathematicians, economists, and scientists attempting to solve the problem of how to manage the Soviet economy so well that a state of material paradise was reached. For those who paid attention in history, this really, really, did not happen, and most people just starved or were otherwise killed instead. Stubborn Attachments stated the case for economic growth as a high moral good, showing that most moral problems were solved and more good was achieved if the economy simply grew faster. The author goes through various examples, both real and in thought experiments, of how high growth societies are much better than low growth societies. Finally, Scientific Freedom discusses the importance of novel scientific research in making the world a better place, and the high importance that research has played in much of the world that we now know. This book warns against the traditional blocks against precisely this kind of research which we would value so highly.
Novelty and Censors
Red Plenty and Scientific Freedom have much interplay, with both showing the importance of being able to come up with novel ideas. The great promise of Red Plenty was that mathematics could be applied to a planned economy, with the end of starvation as the result. Scientific Freedom celebrates the ‘Planck Club’, a series of maverick scientists who doggedly pushed forward the boundaries of science. In both of these books, there is a primary enemy in bureaucracy and group consensus. It is difficult to say which situation ends up as more absurd. In Red Plenty, bureaucracy guarantees that lower-level managers will lie to their bosses, and their bosses will pass unreachable goals. This process iteratively makes life worse for everyone, with deadly consequences. With the threat of death looming overhead, workers in the USSR had little reason to do anything but obey. In Scientific Freedom, our own society looks much worse. We do not have a ruthless dictatorship that will kill you if they do not like what you are doing. Instead, we choose to abandon scientific progress simply because we seem to have found a system that sort of works. This situation leaves me at a loss. The USSR had high levels of control, and subsequently shunted the ideas which might actually work into the trash can. The USA started with low levels of control, so we created our own control system, which also discards novel approaches. In the USSR, the smartest ideas could have been rapidly implemented in the entire economy, resulting in a competition to see who could come up with the best improvements the fastest. In the United States, scientists seem to have the freedom to work on novel approaches, but due to strong norms and budget requirements, actually doing so in practice seems to be exceedingly rare.
The Flying Car Conundrum
Okay…but what if you want scientific progress to be rapidly implemented in a command economy? Where are the immortality pills and flying cars anyway? In the USSR, this would have led to weird requirements. First, you take someone who is violent enough to take over an entire country in armed rebellion, then you convince that person to listen to a pencil-pushing scientist who DIDN’T EVEN SHOOT ANYONE IN THE FACE. I guess that person could exist, but you would have to get an odd mix of crazy willingness to kill someone for their beliefs and commitment to science. That is too bad because, in the best-case scenario, a planned economy would lead to much better results than a capitalist economy. Maybe that is why socialism was so alluring for so long. Academics thought that they could just fix everything if only the government would listen.
Okay…but what if you want scientific progress to be rapidly implemented in a market economy? In the United States, this seems much more possible, mostly because you will not be shot if the dictator does not like your idea. The scary part of the United States is that we enter into a multi-polar coordination problem which seems very difficult to solve in our current condition. The benefits of scientific progress disseminate to the whole society in a way that is unlikely to be captured by the scientist in question. However, in the short term, everyone benefits more from non-revolutionary, incremental growth. Most scientists are beholden to posting new results every few months in order to keep their funding or continue to get new customers. Therefore, very good research seems like an unsafe bet, and most people are going to depend on others to do the research for them.
So which model is better? Given the actual nature of dictators and their stooges, command economies seem very unlikely to produce radical free thought in any domain, let alone science. Market economies have solved the problem of scientific progress in the past, so they are much more likely to do so again, even if the current norm is to optimize against scientific progress. Still, recent developments of even this year (written in January 2021), seem to show remarkable scientific progress in areas which we really value. Despite the violent hellscape which is often portrayed, many scientifically led businesses seem to be planting and watering Cowen’s Crusonia plants, which may lead to dramatic increases in economic growth. I am optimistic that we will look back on even these advances as fairly slow. We cannot take progress as a given, but there seems to be some way forward.
Stubborn Attachments scratched a particular itch for me, of rationally arguing for doing a lot of good in the world. I wish it could have been more specific in what to do in order to create economic growth, but even having a coherent framework is excellent. Many of our problems are solved trivially if the future was valued much more highly. Political questions orient more towards “How can we provide for the future?”, and businesses de-emphasize quarterly results. This is an idealized scenario, and reality can be much less pretty, but demonstrating philosophical reasons for growth is a good basis for how to make career choices in a more informed way. For me, this book did more than much of the generic “Follow your passion” that I normally see. The strongest argument against the ideas in Stubborn Attachments is to slam the book shut, loudly shout “NERD”, and walk away. Sometimes invincible ignorance can be overpowered.
Lingering Questions and Irresponsible Speculation
I still have questions about the concepts in each of these books which I find difficult to answer, so the following is speculation. If I do manage to solve the major problems of growth in society, I think I will just go out and do that instead of posting this.
How much is growth good for, anyway? I fully understand that going from a no-toilet to a lots-of-toilets society is a very good thing. Likewise with clean water and medicine. Internet technology is interesting, but as recent events have shown, the outcomes are more of a mixed bag. There are several breakthroughs that I could imagine which would be extremely good for society, but I am worried that much of growth is not necessarily doing any good. What if video games or social media were 50x as entertaining, and therefore addictive, as they currently are? What if automation gets so good that a good chunk of our society is unemployable? Each of those would cause growth on paper, and suffering in reality. On the other hand, cheaper medicine to improve the quality and quantity of your years on Earth would be a very good thing, with few downsides. The downsides of technology seem to be existential risks. A really cheap, powerful battery sounds cool until someone makes a bomb out of it. Hopefully human nature is usually good enough to prevent cheap weapons from being used all the time, but I do not have good evidence in favor of that.
How hard is productionizing scientific research? If a scientist comes up with a breakthrough idea, what blocks that idea from permeating our whole society, and making life much better for everyone? Microsoft used to have a mission statement of “a computer on every desk and in every home”, but the gap between their founding and the date they declared victory was measured in decades. I do not know what could have sped up computer adoption, and have much fewer ideas on technology more generally. When a research paper gets written, the idea might never see the light of day, even if it beats the current technology.
Why do the kinds of people who end up running companies or countries usually not listen to scientists, and why are they usually not scientists or engineers themselves? There are a few notable exceptions to this rule, but many more companies are run by MBA / CPA / JDs or other people with illustrious letters after their names. Maybe engineers simply do not want to deal with accounting or find regulatory compliance to be soul-crushing in a way that the other group does not. Personally, I have spent a lot of time engineering things that never earned me any money, so if I grossly overgeneralize, engineers spend their time not optimizing for control over large organizations. Perhaps that, in itself, is just a common misconception and The Way We Do Things is very limiting.
What are the consequences of lower growth? The counterfactual would be a high growth society where we all have better, cheaper stuff. Does anything else bad happen if we do not grow quickly? Is society less stable if there is less growth? I am not sure about this. Counterfactuals involving millions of people are difficult to say with any certainty. On the other hand, I think Tyler Cowen had a really good point here with solving aggregation problems. If there is a limited resource with competing interests, there will almost certainly be conflict over that resource. At worst, that conflict will be violent. In a high growth society, conflict will be less likely because there will be more resources over time, so that type of conflict will be less of a problem.
How hard is starting a business really? There is a veritable waterfall of advice, anecdotes, warnings, praise, and general rants about entrepreneurship. Many businesses are doomed to fail, and even successful businesses seem very difficult to run. This might come down to the specific business in question, but there seems to be a large unknown in the outcome. Most of the business advice that we receive is given by people who are so successful that they are invited to give talks on stages about how smart they are. There is a clear survivorship bias here, so we do not know how often someone follows the traditional advice, starts a business, and ends in a fireball.
Conclusion
These books all thread through the idea of how society should act towards the economy, and the results that might occur. They uniformly value hard work, thinking about the future in concrete ways, and the spillover effects of good ideas. In the most positive outcomes, the entire planet becomes fabulously wealthy, and we are all left to do whatever we like, whenever we like. In reality, this rarely occurs because a million tiny decisions lead us to and fro around growth without ever really making sure to make a much better future. For our own lives, there are a few main benefits from these books which seem like good takeaways.
Work much harder to achieve your goals. In Scientific Freedom, some of the most important scientists took 20 years to make a breakthrough. Get cracking!
Value the future much more highly than you would normally. You don’t know how good your life will get if you can consistently make the right decisions, so do not do things which you know are short term.
Be a part of, or try to start, good organizations. Starting an organization can be bad, since you might end up taking perfectly good raw materials and turn them into something no one wants. Caring much more about the general outcomes of the work that you do matters a lot in terms of the small impacts that you can have on yourself and others.
PS
These are fun to write, and hopefully you enjoy them as well. If you think I should review any book in particular, you can reach out to me on Twitter, or here on substack.