Anticipating the dismantling of the government’s encompassing direction of the wartime economy, and restoration of a market-driven economy, Cassandras thought that vast reductions of military spending, coinciding with millions of demobilized soldiers flooding the job market, might mean a 1940s depression worse than that of the 1930s.
MIT’s Paul Samuelson, who in 1970 would become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, and whose textbook educated several generations of college students, worried that there could be “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Instead, there was the postwar boom.
James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute relishes reminding us of this in his new book “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.” The year now ending is, he notes, the 50th anniversary of 1973, when slowing rates of growth of the population, the economy and labor productivity signaled the end of the boom, and the beginning of rational pessimism. The pessimists underestimated what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called (in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) Americans’ “bottomless vitality.”
King coined this phrase eight years after the Salk polio vaccine was announced on the 10th anniversary (April 12, 1955) of the death of the nation’s most famous polio patient, Franklin D. Roosevelt. King cited national vitality five years after Pan American World Airways (remember that casualty of others’ superior vitality?) began regular service to Europe. Until 1958, more people crossed the Atlantic by ships than by airplanes. (Interestingly, it is estimated that 80 percent of the world’s population today still has never taken a flight.) Also in 1958, the integrated circuit, a.k.a. the computer microchip, arrived.
Two years after King’s celebration of Americans’ national vitality, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, propounded Moore’s Law: The number of transistors on a microchip would double every year (later changed to every two years). Pethokoukis notes that by 2019 a typical Intel chip contained 5 billion transistors at a cost of a penny per 100,000. Moore once wrote that if cars improved at the pace of computers, “they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it.”
A threat to national vitality is what Pethokoukis calls “the precautionary principle.” It holds that significant undertakings should not begin until threats of damage from them are fully understood. Due caution is, of course, wise, but much of the exhilaration of life comes from not knowing — not being able to know — what is over the horizon. Undue anxiety about possible consequences of innovations breeds what Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center calls “the anti-Promethean backlash.” Technology — e.g., the internet — can be injurious and abused, but it is, on balance, mightily beneficial, and not to be blamed for human abuses of it.
Many of today’s anticipatory anxieties about artificial intelligence might be well-founded, but not its threat to cause enormous joblessness. Until the middle of the last century, many women were telephone operators. Displaced by mechanical switching technology, they moved on to other jobs. Pethokoukis says ATMs led to increased bank teller jobs as it became cheaper to open bank branches.
He imagines finding ways to employ the energy around and beneath us. The Earth’s molten core is about as hot as the sun’s surface (11,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and will generate heat for billions of years as radioactive elements decay. “The continuous energy flow is roughly thirty terawatts” — trillions of watts — “almost double all current human energy consumption.” And: “There are no theoretical obstacles to placing tech in low-Earth orbit that would convert some of the 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously striking Earth, an amount ten thousand times annual global energy consumption.”
Vitality that translates into economic growth can be transformative. “The difference between an economy growing at 2 percent for the next fifty years and growing at 4 percent over that span is,” Pethokoukis notes, “massive — a $60 trillion economy in 2076 versus $160 trillion.”
A prudent society does not assume that such things are achievable. However, a dynamic society does not allow anxieties about the future to constrict is horizons, or to seek security in the embrace of the state.
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