A Conservative Futurist and a Supply-Side Liberal Walk Into a Podcast …
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- čas přidán 20. 05. 2024
- “The Jetsons” premiered in 1962. And based on the internal math of the show, George Jetson, the dad, was born in 2022. He’d be a toddler right now. And we are so far away from the world that show imagined. There were a lot of future-trippers in the 1960s, and most of them would be pretty disappointed by how that future turned out.
So what happened? Why didn’t we build that future?
The answer, I think, lies in the 1970s. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that decade in my work, trying to understand why America is so bad at building today. And James Pethokoukis has also spent a lot of time looking at the 1970s, in his work trying to understand why America is less innovative today than it was in the postwar decades. So Pethokoukis and I are asking similar questions, and circling the same time period, but from very different ideological vantages.
Pethokoukis is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the book “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised (www.hachettebookgroup.com/tit...) .” He also writes a newsletter called Faster, Please! (fasterplease.substack.com/) “The two screamingly obvious things that we stopped doing is we stopped spending on science, research and development the way we did in the 1960s,” he tells me, “and we began to regulate our economy as if regulation would have no impact on innovation.”
In this conversation, we debate why the ’70s were such an inflection point; whether this slowdown phenomenon is just something that happens as countries get wealthier; and what the government’s role should be in supporting and regulating emerging technologies like A.I.
Mentioned:
“U.S. Infrastructure: 1929-2017 (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...) ” by Ray C. Fair
Book Recommendations
Why Information Grows (www.hachettebookgroup.com/tit...) by Cesar Hidalgo
The Expanse series (www.jamessacorey.com/) by James S.A. Corey
The American Dream Is Not Dead (www.rutgersuniversitypress.or...) by Michael R. Strain
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-....
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
Also private business quit spending on science and technology due to a huge shift in mentality. They decided shareholders were the most important thing and huge tax cuts let them keep money instead of forcing them to spend it. Add in cultural issues and the whole world was changing. Such a complex issue.
@@XXmtdna That is mostly true now but post WW2 Bell, GE, and others spent a ton on research. Only a handful of ideas worked but it was worth it. Now quarterly profits are the only things that matter so there is no long term vision and no stomach for all the failures that lead to new technologies.
@@XXmtdna Totally agree. In my state they want to privatize everything that is a service or benefit to society so a handful of people can make stupid amounts of money. And the worst part is it’s poor people who suffer the worst are the ones voting them in!
This is exactly the kind of discussion we need. And that by definition means it’ll never have sway in the halls of governance. Sadly.
Sadly, by 2035, billions of us will be dead without much hope for the then survivors.
Why should the tax payers underwrite the funding of technological innovation just to hand it off to a for-profit company? At the least, government should take royalties in the way of subsidizing consumers' use of these technologies.
Prior to the first Earth day, we , in the South, were drowning in trash. Silent Spring was finally being recognized. However, the WAR, and Civil Rights had to push down environmentalism
Nixon was never truly interested in bridging the groups on various issues like environmentalism.
It's a sad commentary on America that it is 50 years later and Nixon just looks better and better compared to what we have now.
nice photo Ezra!
brilliant interview as usual
I find it interesting that no one is commenting on military spending. (Granted, it has also driven innovation.) After the fall of the wall, there is the peace dividend. We have reached the end of that gravey train.
Ezra, I'm super proud of you and excited for your future right now. I went through a mid-life crisis and have opted for challenging my bises. I came from a rural beef farm but we are wholly educated activists. I'm an urban nurse working to deliver integrated single payor healthcare that anyone can afford out of an average paycheck. I realized that the democrats and their corporate and government marriage was in my way! I'm now working with Republicans believe it or not. Things change! I'm right behind you, go ahead, step off that cliff. You are not wrong. I had to vhallenge myself in saying, "if white men are voicing distress, why are they not also my concern?" So I joined MAGA as its urban sunrise is just upon us. I can shape it from the inside. Stay fluid, challenge even your highest self.
Elon Musk is inspired by the Jetsons
Back when corporate taxes were high, corporations would take advantage of the tax breaks carved out for reinvestment in the company. When that went away, so did the incentive to do research, capital improvement, updating business related products, so that money got diverted to ridiculously high top management salaries and share holder dividends. Since most upper tier management is paid in stock options the incentive is to maximize stock value not company value. This is where the libertarian school of economics has it exactly backwards and up side down.
great discussion as usual
“What’s your evidence?” *provides anecdotes* 😒
It's obvious what happened - we picked all the low hanging fruits of science. The big innovations were indoor plumbing and sewage systems, motors and engines to lift heavy things, electricity for all the things it does, and telecommunications. And sanitation and nitrogen fertilizer and antibiotics. The increment to productivity and quality of life from anything we invent now will almost certainly be smaller than the increment we got from those things. I love computers, but economists struggled for a decade or three to see any productivity impact of widespread adoption. From here on, almost every new idea will matter less than the ones we already had. Plus in areas where innovation really would help, the science is really hard - we're probably not going to accidentally stumble onto a mold that's a broad spectrum cancer cure, and fusion has been a long hard slog. As far as homebuilding is concerned, the fundamental problem is that our economies are concentrated in a few supermetros, and its always hard to build lots of new housing where a lot of people already live, they don't want their quality of life degraded so they resist, plus they own most of the land already. To get more housing where ppl need to live to get decent jobs, we'll probably need planning to spread economic growth to more areas where construction is easier.
We are sitting on a bonanza of renewable energy wealth, wind, solar, geothermal, batteries. The Clean Air Act didn’t get in the way of this. Oil companies did.
What has been the effect of moving manufacturing offshore and quarterly profit focus on R&D?
I am, still, a child of the 70s. here in Japan, classic rock in coffeeshops and restaurants, is still very popular. The only point I would add from being here, is an appreciation of the Carpenters, who are still massively popular
So yes obviously regulations raise business costs. Seatbelts and litigation raise prices. However, As an economist I strongly reject the outdated model of a zero-sum dichotomy between economic growth and investment in natural capital (air and water quality, ect). It is simply not supported by the data.
Raising GDP per capita is vital to improving living standards, BUT environmental goods have tremendous value. For example, air pollution contributes millions of human deaths every year (see WHO). Difficulty in valuing non-market goods, diffuse environmental benefits, and concentrated benefits for polluters have contributed to an irksome (and well-lobbied) myth that economic and environmental improvements are necessarily at odds.
In practice they are often complements. Productivity gains can produce more leisure time to visit Americas lakes and forests. For a converse example, wetlands can reduce the risk of floods meaning lower home insurance rates, or buffer nutrient runoff to improve downstream fishery yields. Another example: limiting carbon dioxide emissions COULD have defrayed the $trillions of USD that will be required for global climate adaptation im the coming decades. Non-market goods have material value, and ignoring them is unlikely to produce optimal real growth.
Showin off that tatt.
I think one big premise of this discussion is 'society' or country as a monolith. Strikingly missing from the analysis is the fact that the benefits accrue to someone else and the costs to someone else. Just like in the first industrial revolution and the second. Internet has been different due to the idealism of its leaders, but again private firms got involved and the social networking has the same old story. Why would AI be different?
Yes beauty is relative but aesthetics is not simply of representation. I think a lot of folks both professional and other have forgotten that aesthetics is something more than representation. Instead it is Aesthetic Growth, in other words, the way we are actually situated in the world or environment occurs before we start figuring it out or dividing it up into various other bits of understanding.
Again, how something is merely represented comes after but what occurs before is aesthetic growth on the level of embodiment and the ability to change which is also the desire to affect change etc.
Alfred North Whitehead said a lot on this subject as well as John Dewey which both dovetail nicely with some of the audio quotes in this podcast.
But in general if we are not able to appreciate the depth that surrounds aesthetic experience as something other than representation, then, surely the issue of style or method is going to get lost to analysis as opposed to being fleshed out in more creative experimental ways!
If AI advancement looks like a Hockey Stick on yield curve shouldn't prosperity follow the same curve
But we didn't trust Nixon.
Major carp! The drive to what is now Trumpism became a central goal ass the ,dark side reaction to the Nixon mess starting with the Houston Plan, said to have gone nowhere but I think Plan 2024 is a linear result. In any case the laws sent the money to the top and the share if the economy for 90% of Americans has gone down hill ever since. Things that were illegal before Nixon became legal or unenforced. That led to environmental nightmares, and more rules with more paperwork, but Trump has displayed how that has been treated.
GDP is Grossly Distorted Propaganda
NDP is WHAT? When do you ever hear economists talk about Net Domestic Product? Try finding data on the annual depreciation of automobiles purchased by American consumers since Sputnik.
Why hasn't accounting/finance been mandatory in high schools since Sputnik?
Tell you what, that new thumbnail is futuristic (is that a tat?! I thought you people… nvrmnd;) and it looks well. Amazing work, per the usual.
Wow, Mr. Pethokoukis was simultaneously evasive, combative, and incoherent. Perhaps he was having an off day, but this was a disappointing performance.
We need partial state ownership of companies like PBR Brazilian oil company. With this model the government will get a cut of next tax payer funded development in a new innovation
Why is all of the talk about environmentalism here centered on aesthetics? When I listened to those quotes from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, I thought: these guys understood that polluted air, water, and food are dangerous to people’s HEALTH. Isn’t that what people were really worried about? Am I missing something, here?
From a marketing perspective selling environmentalism as an aesthetic vision makes sense.
@@geraldfreibrun3041 I get it-market environmental quality like Miller Lite: “Looks/Smells/Tastes great!” “Less cancer!”
The guest keeps pointing out the failure of technology to bring out the glimpse outlook on innovations while bringing out unfounded idea about finding some materials for solar materials. If he was paying attention, they are on the way with the discovery of the ionic compound with perovskite.
NYC has groups that start out in the lower East Side of Manhattan. They buy in Queens and aspire to LI. Daly City ticky tacky houses are a million each and probably have chrome fences instead of white picket fences. NYC had Levittown out on the Island. The Detroit developer of similar housing stock helped put the LA art scene on the map. The GI bill financed WWII vets in Levittown, north of eight mile and probaly Daly City are mostly long gone. The new Americans in these places want their little patch of green. Big Pharma , not Trump, gave us quickly produced vaccines. Thank god most of the deaths were not an historically oppressed minority or we would probably still be discussing the effectiveness of injecting bleach. There is definitely a role for NIH and others to help the pharma industry direct their research and perhaps a little less profit motive would be helpful but prioritizing reasonable costs for poor diabetes patient needs is something shareholders will just have to swallow or perhaps we can talk about fifty percent capital gains tax instead. Great thinking and discussions but human calculators are cute CA rehashing but IBM and Microsoft as well as Google and even Facebook have left OPEC and stagflation way in the past and ticky tacky houses no doubt have multi generational occupants.
Excellent work as usual Ezra....you are quickly becoming the Izzy Stone of our current situation. Please keep going!
"No country is ahead of America". Maybe it depends how you measure. I'm thinking of access to healthcare.
we saw dimly the threats of class distinctions, and inequality and we couldn't do anything about it. It absorbed alot of our energy and the needle didn't move. You have to show progress on social justice before you can present technological exploration as a solution.
The reason the economic inequality keeps growing is economic policy. social injustice is largely a symptom of a system that keeps the poor poor, and makes more of them. Printing cheap money (that mostly ends up in the hands of the very rich) is a huuuuuge part of this. If we stop deflating away peoples money, the growth from tech actually benefits everyone. I think we'd agree that lifting people out of poverty would improve social justice more than any law or protest ever could?
💙
The peoplle I knew reacted strongly to that song. But it was only one song. You need more than oe song to capture the imagination. The race to the moon employed alot of people and captured the education systme for those whose potential was not blocked.
Ive never heard a more clueless guest in my life. Pretending SpaceX didn't innovate, and "stood on the shoulders of giants" is the death nell of a boomer facing irrelevance.
The Expanse Universe as a example optimistic future?? Really???
It is a pitty that this evaluation came only at the end of the episode and not at the beginning, since it could have been the whole discussion of the interview.
But this recommendation allows a good frame for his other opinions about the subject of technological innovation vis a vis the betterment of society. To say that "The Expanse" is a example os a optimistic future is to say that our society is a good as it gets. Because the kind of society that the series shows is basically our own, buta in space. War, rampant inequality, whole human groups converted at fodder for the enrichment of others. Once again, the mere reiteration of our own society.
Let's be just: he is a conservative. So, by definition, he thinks our society is "as good as it gets", no profound change needed.
But the, he should not be surprised that people are not invested in the future anymore: the future he is "promising" is one where the same people who benefits from economic growth now will keep benefiting in this future he envisions. And the people who gets screwed right now will keep being screwed.
But in space!!
Lamentable...
But social justice is still sitting, waiting, we haven't done much. This is our first priority.
Maybe the high growth/productivity period was just an anomaly that we should never go back to because of the damage rendered and really, why can't we be happy with moderate growth? Maybe we don't build rampantly anymore because we learned that bad things happen when you rush into things.
Its an interesting point, but but real growth (instead of just printing money so it looks like growth. Which is a big part of the 'growth' in the last few decades) "would benefit everyone, the problem is that the established systems (like big oil for example) amass wealth and influence and prevent new disruptive tech that would help everyone but them. High productivity is good, if ita based on real improvment not just flooding the market with cheap money
Ezra Klein - do you really think the world of the Jetsons, a cartoon from 50 years ago or more, as you put it is any more relevant today than the Flintstones? Are you capable of writing anything useful or relevant today or just more of these eye-catching, click-getting silly waste of time articles?
Again team red and team blue swapping sides. Housing problems are tied to gentrification