Rapacious corporations sometimes put out interesting infographics. I wonder what it takes to get a job like this in one of these corporations, where I assume most jobs are not like this. Anyway, this entry from Goldman Sachs has some interesting ones. I’ve screenshotted a few interesting graphics – this is fair use and I am steering people to your publicly posted info, please don’t sue me guys!
So basically, a bank or bank-like entity is allowed to take a dollar and issue you a digital currency that you can spend just like a dollar. Crucially, it appears that they have to keep your dollar as a dollar or invest it in U.S. Treasury bonds while they are holding it. So they can make interest on your dollar and you cannot, but they can’t actually create new money by issuing more stablecoins than people give them dollars.
U.S. government debt interest payments are historically high
We often hear “debt is X percent of GDP”. But this is comparing a stock and a flow, so there is no reason 100% has any meaning as a benchmark and it certainly does not mean the entire economy is being spent to service the debt. This measure is really a proxy for interest payments as a percent of GDP. This is really the “hangover” from past spending – what we are spending on interest can’t be spent on anything else, and we can’t really control it in the short term. What is really concerning here is that the high interest payments of the 1980s might be explained by high interest rates, but the debt payment level never came down as interest rates came down during the historically low interest rate period since then. Now interest rates are spiking, and this is directly sucking dollars away from real priorities. So clearly, we have to either “grow our way out”, reduce spending, and/or increase taxes (and/or tariffs) if we want to reduce this number. But reducing spending, increasing taxes, and putting up trade barriers all tend to decrease growth in the near term so this is the conundrum. The government can just create money of course, but this tends to be inflationary and at the moment, we appear to be in the midst of a spiral of inflationary expectations that is not going to go away soon. Thanks Biden…but really thanks Obama, Trump and Biden administrations for making the necessary hard choices to stimulate the economy and head off panic during the financial and Covid-19 crises. This has left less slack to deal with the next crisis though – the current number may be sustainable absent an external shock, but of course external shocks happen. The only good thing about external shocks is they sometimes tend to reduce interest rates. By the way, this section of the publication concludes by showing that government debt is not a uniquely U.S. problem.
Basically, it is just counting the number of newspaper articles mentioning geopolitical conflict in a specified number of “papers of record”. I suppose it provides a somewhat objective measure to ground discussions on interest rates for them. But it could be useful for the rest of us to gauge whether our impressions of geopolitical instability are matching the evidence.
This Silver Bulletin post is called “The 51 biggest American political moments of the 21st century”. I liked it because it made me think. I found that the non-chronological nature of it threw me off a little bit. So I decided to come up with a “top 10 (U.S.) political/geopolitical moments of the 21st century” of my own. I picked some events off Nate Silver’s list, thought of a few extra of my own, and then put them in chronological order. Limiting it to 10 forced me to really think about what was most important, although like Nate I occasionally cheated by putting things together. I leaned towards events that were true “watershed moments” in the sense that they could have gone differently and the outcome for the U.S. and possibly the world might have been very different. I also leaned towards events where I remember where I was or what I was doing at the time, because I suspect those are important. I included 2000 as Nate did.
December 12, 2000: Bush v. Gore. I remember literally falling on my knees when CNN “called Florida for Gore” (the floor of my rental apartment in New Jersey was carpeted). Where would we be if this had gone differently? In general, you may see a theme below that I see Democrats as basically protectors of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus in the U.S. George W. Bush was on the right edge of this consensus, while Gore likely would have been on the left edge. I suspect 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion would still have happened exactly as they did, but I don’t think the Iraq invasion would have happened. Who knows if other aspects of the 20-year “war on terror” would have unfolded as they did? We would have seen more action and progress on climate change and more standing up to fossil fuel industry propaganda for sure.
September 11, 2001. I was in my office building in Philadelphia. My mother called me on my desk phone (I didn’t yet have a cell phone) and told me what was happening. We turned on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears we had in our conference room at the time and watched the events unfold. The streets filled with panicky people and you couldn’t get on a train or highway for hours. There were rumors of additional planes in the air over Pennsylvania (which turned out to be true), but in the end nothing happened to us in Philadelphia directly. When I finally got back to my apartment in New Jersey, there were highway signs saying all roads to New York were closed.
March 20, 2003: Iraq invasion. A weird thing I remember is Dan Rather updates on the invasion during halftime of NCAA basketball tournament games. We aren’t used to mixing sports and serious news like that.
September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers collapse. This is a stand-in for the larger financial crisis, surely one of the most important world events of my life time (I might pick the Berlin Wall as the single most important, but now we are going back to a previous century). The sub-prime mortgage derivative collapse might have been inevitable, but letting a major institution collapse was a key decision by the Bush administration that led to panic. It certainly played a large role in the Obama election. Obama understood that however distasteful, avoiding panic was the single most important thing he had to do, and he did it. I am an Obama fan, as I was a Bill Clinton fan and fan of the first 2-3 years of Joe Biden. He was just an effective keeper of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus. All these leaders pushed to accomplish the most incremental progress that was politically possible in their moments without blowing up the system.
January 21, 2010: Citizens United decision. No, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably wasn’t even aware of this in real time. But this was crucial and the U.S. and maybe the world could be different without it. Maybe a marginally less corrupt election system would have delivered different results in 2016, and climate change and health care among other issues could be on a very different track.
October 28, 2016: the “Comey letter”. I picked this to represent the catastrophe of the 2016 election (which took place on November 8, 2016). The situation was on a knife edge, and without this “October surprise”, which turned out to be a complete hoax, maybe history would have unfolded differently.
November 4, 2016: Paris climate change accord takes effect. Obama really pushed and deserves a share of credit for getting this one done. It could still be in effect if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 election, OR if the U.S. Congress ever did its job of considering and ratifying treaties. Because none of these things happened, the U.S. never gained any momentum on climate action, and generations of our descendants are going to suffer as a result.
Friday, March 13, 2020: Covid shutdown. I picked this date because it is the date the Philadelphia public school system, where my son was in first grade at the time, insisted it would not shut down, and then announced late morning that it would shut down for two weeks, which turned into about a year. It was also the day my employer told me I wouldn’t be coming back to the office on Monday. I picked this date to represent the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole, but I could also have picked the date the first vaccinations were approved by the FDA, which was December 11, 2020.
November 30, 2022: Chat-GPT goes public. Not on Nate Silver’s list, but seems important no?
June 27, 2024: Biden-Trump debate. Of course, the real watershed moment was whenever Biden and his team decided he would run for re-election. Had he announced sometime in 2023 that he would be walking off gracefully into the sunset and allowing a real primary process to play out in 2024, maybe history and our present moment would be very different.
At least since reading some early Singularity-adjacent publications by Vernor Vinge, RayKurzweil, and Bill Joy, I’ve been interested in learning curves. (And for the record, the topic and these authors were were not considered politically “right wing” or even political at all at the time.) Progress, at least in certain technologies, tends to be exponential over time. This clearly applies to computer technology, where there are short product cycles, the needed infrastructure is more or less in place and/or can adapt as the technology is scaled/commercialized, and legal and institutional barriers to change are relatively low. Technologies with “recipes”, like chemicals, drugs, seeds and other agricultural technologies, might be other examples. For these we have the patent system to actually try to slow down scaling and commercialization to the pace of innovation. With energy technology, learning curves seem to play out over much longer periods of time because while available technology changes rapidly, our system tends to be locked into long-lived infrastructure that can only change slowly. So new energy technology rolls out slowly as it is scaled up and commercialized over decades. There are also entities with enormous political and propaganda power that fight tooth and nail to keep us locked into obsolete technologies and infrastructure that fit into their historical (and profitable) business models. Now when you get to other technologies, like transportation and housing, public policy, legal and institutional barriers are dominant and tend to retard or even prevent progress. Rollout is so hard that while there are pockets of innovation, many don’t see the light of day or don’t spread from the local/pilot scale, even if they are successful at this scale. These also vary by location and jurisdiction, so that progress is very uneven geographically. These are my thoughts anyway. As for what’s new, here’s a journal article from Advances in Applied Energy.
Climate and energy policy analysts and researchers often forecast the cost of low-carbon energy technologies using Wright’s model of technological innovation. The learning rate, i.e., the percentage cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production, is assumed constant in this model. Here, we analyze the relationship between cost and scale of production for 87 technologies in the Performance Curve Database spanning multiple sectors. We find that stepwise changes in learning rates provide a better fit for 58 of these technologies and produce forecasts with equal or significantly lower errors compared to constant learning rates for 36 and 30 technologies, respectively. While costs generally decrease with increasing production, past learning rates are not good predictors of future learning rates. We show that these results affect technological change projections in the short and long term, focusing on three key mitigation technologies: solar photovoltaics, wind power, and lithium-ion batteries. We suggest that investment in early-stage technologies nearing cost-competitiveness, combined with techno-economic analysis and decision-making under uncertainty methods, can help mitigate the impact of uncertainty in projections of future technology cost.
This blog in Construction Physics has a deeper dive across more industries, and discusses at least one large data set that is available for analysis. If you could accurately predict learning rates (and successful scaling/commercialization rates) for specific technologies based on known factors, then theoretically you could fine-tune policies and incentives to increase the rate of progress in the technologies you want. So this is an area of research that could boost all other areas of research and progress.
Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.
2025 Post Roundup
Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:
JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed forrecession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competentadvice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
Brilliant(?) Synthesis
The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.
But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?
Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.
While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.
It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.
Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.
This 2024 report from the Dallas Fed provides very clear evidence of the positive returns from past U.S. government research and development funding.
Total factor productivity is a noisy but generally accepted measure of the amount of GDP/productivity growth that is due to innovation rather than increases in inputs. Summary: The return CAUSED BY non-defense R&D spending is 140-210% over 8-12 years, which is higher than investments in infrastructure (which still provide a positive return) and defense R&D (NO CAUSAL EFFECT IDENTIFIED).
Since it’s noisy, maybe I would smooth it in the graph above, but nonetheless there is a very clear relationship between falling R&D spending and falling economic growth. Conversely, if you wanted to intentionally reduce growth and innovation in our economy, a good way to do that would be to reduce R&D spending. Another implication is that if R&D spending on weapons and war does NOT provide as great benefits, there is an opportunity cost to spending your R&D money on weapons and war rather than peaceful or at least dual-use technologies. So it’s pretty clear the actions of the current US administration (drastically cutting R&D spending and shifting it from civilian to military applications) do not match their stated intentions to boost economic growth.
Bloomberg has an article on progress in U.S. transportation policy and technology in 2025. My thoughts in brackets.
New bus lanes in a number of U.S. cities. [This is really a big win, when modern cities around the world are expanding subway and light rail networks? This “win” represents tiny, incremental progress or holding the line in our current reactionary cultural and political climate. Calling this a win is a pretty good indicator of where this climate stands.]
New York City congestion pricing. [This is an evidence-supported, objectively very good policy that probably all major cities should be following. The fact that one major city is able to do it against massive external opposition is an indication of our current reactionary cultural and political climate. One thing that makes this work in NYC, I believe, is that they have one municipal transit agency in charge of roads/streets/bridges, public transportation, and parking, and they also have a successful and powerful interstate transportation commission that coordinates well with that agency. I’d like to see some journalism on what the legislative and institutional barriers are to achieving this in other major cities, even if we were to eventually emerge from the current reactionary cultural and political climate. For example, in Philadelphia we have a state-chartered regional public transportation authority that operates buses, subways and trains; another interstate commission that operates bridges and some trains; a neighboring state-chartered authority that operates some buses and trains; a municipal authority (which has been state-controlled in the past) that regulates street parking and parking garages, and a municipal transportation department that designs/constructs/maintains most streets, although some streets are designed/constructed/maintained by the state transportation department. All these entities are mostly uncoordinated and certainly do not share revenue. So it would be virtually impossible to use parking and bridge toll revenue to cover public transportation costs, even though this would make total sense if the objective were to move people from point A to point B efficiently, safely, and cheaply. (Would this not be the objective of any rational transportation policy?) Could all these agencies be reorganized to look more like the NYC system? Planning and implementing something like that would be a heavy lift, but again I would like to know if it would even be legally possible or if legislation at the state level in multiple states would be required. State-level legislation in Pennsylvania to rationalize policies in the major metropolitan areas is virtually impossible in the current reactionary cultural and political climate…]
Automatic speed controls in cars. There are some minor wins allowing judges to impose this on people who have speeding tickets. This makes sense to me, but seems fairly small and incremental. I might be the only one looking forward to automating as much vehicle operation as possible. Let violations of speed limits and intersection signals be matters for your vehicle warranty or insurance company, not decisions of human drivers to take reckless risks or not.]
Legalizing small cars and golf carts on public streets. [I’m mostly for this. Vehicles designed for highway travel are the wrong way to get around inside cities. The problem is that you put these lighter vehicles on the public streets, and human beings in them are going to be hurt and killed by other human beings choosing to irresponsibly operate highway vehicles inside cities. They will also hurt and kill pedestrians on occasion. You need to either have separate infrastructure for the light vehicles, or have vehicles regulated or controlled by computers or passive means (see above). Advances in street design, construction and maintenance in the U.S. are so slow I find it hard to hold out hope that there will be big changes in the course of a single generation of humans. But technology is moving much faster so I am going to put more of my hopes for near-term progress in the technology basket.]
So there it is. I don’t have much hope for seeing widespread progress in subway, light rail, and modern street design and construction (with separate infrastructure and signals for pedestrians, light vehicles, and highway vehicles) in U.S. cities in the next few years. We can hope for slow, incremental progress on congestion pricing, parking pricing and policy, and passive speed controls for some vehicles. The rollout of automated, electric vehicles has been slower than I might have predicted 5-10 years ago, but it is happening. It is uneven because the barriers seem to be more legal/institutional/cultural/political than technological and this varies by location. And it’s not a straight-up red/blue divide because pro-big-business forces on the right are favoring automated vehicles at the same time reactionary cultural/political forces on the right and pro-labor forces on the left are opposing them. So this tension will just play out state-by-state and city-by-city for some time to come. Very slowly, we may realize that the demand to devote so much of our urban space to parking and maneuvering inefficient vehicles has decreased. This feels like it might take a decade or more and be obvious to most people only in retrospect. Overall, when Americans travel I think we will increasingly get the sense that urban conditions in our country are continuing to stagnate while European and Asian cities march into the future. Those of us Americans who don’t travel will be cocooned in reactionary cultural/political propaganda and will not realize life is improving elsewhere while transportation in our cities is stuck at a 1970s technology and safety level.
May the streets of our cities be soaked with less blood in 2026 and beyond!
The two things in my title are only loosely related, and here’s how. The Guardian has a gleeful article about toilet rats in the (US) state of Washington. Indeed, this does seem like a pretty good indicator of US decline. Nonetheless, I have one personal experience with a toilet rat, and it was in Singapore. Older-style public restrooms (confusingly for American tourists, called “toilets” as they are throughout most of the world) sometimes have squat toilets flush with the floor rather than western toilets that you sit on. This is a traditional Asian style of toilet, only the modern squat toilet is collected to a modern sewer system rather than just a hole in the ground. Anyway, I was in the restroom/bathroom/toilet when a rat came out of a little hole in the floor, either not noticing or not caring that I was there. I stamped my foot just to let the rat know that I was by far the larger and dominant mammal in the room, and the rat reacted by diving directly into the toilet and down the drain. And it was gone. So I assume it just swam for a bit until it got somewhere with air, and returned to whatever it was doing after I left. Anyway, the advice in Washington State is if you see a rat in your toilet you are supposed to flush the toilet or close the toilet lid. I would not do either of these things because rats are FAST, they are afraid of people, and they have sharp teeth. I think I would calmly close the bathroom door and just peak in after an hour or two to see if it chose to go back where it came from. And I might keep the toilet lid closed after that.
I have been in actual sewers in the United States, and I have seen rats. Sewer rats are plentiful. They don’t want anything to do with us humans, they just scurry away if they see us coming. I have never seen or heard of one coming into a person’s house through the plumbing. So the article seems a bit alarmist to me. Mice are another story. I just wiped some suspected mouse poop off my kitchen counter this morning, which is gross and a disease risk. Anyway…
The connection between Singapore and rats is that Singapore, which has a reputation as possibly the world’s most sparkling clean very dense city, is not perfect. There is trash and there are rats, like any other city. Singapore, and its experts, have a certain self-endowed swagger. Now Singapore really is pretty clean, and its experts really are pretty smart, which brings me to my point that Singapore is pretty good but not perfect. So anyway, here is what a Singaporean expert, George Yeo, with a lot of credentials says is going on in Asia at the end of 2025. It is one person’s opinion but also a uniquely Asian perspective and different from what we hear from the US government/media/nonprofit “blob”. The article is from Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post by way of Yahoo, so also keep in mind the possibility of censorship and/or self-censorship (as you also certainly should with the US blob).
If it ever becomes clear that the US will not continue to support Taiwan, China will take over Taiwan. Taiwan will not fight a war it will obviously lose leading to its own destruction and loss of a generation of its young people. Right now the US and China are sort of avoiding talking about this and trying to actively suppress others (like politicians in Taiwan and Japan) from talking about it, and this is essentially a continuation of the long-term status quo.
When we hear about large weapons sales from the US to Taiwan, there is an unspoken arrangement that these weapons are considered defensive and do not cross a certain line. The US is seen to be supporting Taiwan, China is seen to be outraged, and both sides get their propaganda win without serious escalation. Again, it’s the long-term status quo.
Another reason weapons will not cross a certain line is that the US will not provide weapons where it has a technological lead. “Knowing that many Taiwanese are blue, the US cannot be sure that advanced technology supplied to Taiwan will not quickly leak into China. The military technology supplied to Taiwan is technology the US can afford to lose to China.” [Wikipedia: “The Pan-Blue Coalition, Pan-Blue force, or Pan-Blue group is a political coalition in the Republic of China (Taiwan) consisting of the Kuomintang (KMT), the People First Party (PFP), the New Party (CNP), the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union (NPSU), and the Young China Party (YCP). The name comes from the party color of the Kuomintang. Regarding the political status of Taiwan, the coalition primarily maintains that the Republic of China instead of the People’s Republic of China is the legitimate government of China. It also favors a Chinese and Taiwanese dual identity over an exclusive Taiwanese identity and backs greater friendly exchange with mainland China, as opposed to the Pan-Green Coalition which opposes Chinese identity in Taiwan.” This also, if I am not mistaken, is the status quo position going back many decades.]
“There is growing realisation that the road to independence is a dead end…If the young people of Taiwan build their hopes on an illusion – as the young people in Hong Kong once did – it will only lead to tragedy…Taiwan can enjoy more autonomy by negotiating now rather than waiting another 10 years.”
Taiwan has economic and industrial strengths that China would like to maintain and benefit from after a hypothetical reunification [which to me, would seem to discourage any full-out military onslaught on a major urban and industrial city]. This is similar to the situation with Hong Kong, where there is some degree of autonomy and the situation is short of full integration [but in my words – obviously much more limited in terms of political freedom than it was in the past].
“How can they ever forget that it was Japan’s aggression which separated Taiwan from the mainland in the first place?” [Interestingly, Taiwanese I know tend to have relatively warm feelings towards Japan. I had to refresh on the history again thanks to Wikipedia – Taiwan was occupied/colonized/ruled by Japan from 1895 to 1945. So it was not invaded and dominated in the 1930s and 40s like much of the rest of China and Southeast Asia, and people there were not mistreated as badly.]
On “rare earths” we may hear about the US and its allies developing other sources of rare earths, but there are certain “heavy rare earths” which only China produces, and which are critical to industries around the world. Yeo says China could have played this card at any time in the past, and did so only reluctantly as a bargaining chip in response to the recent round of trade disruptions initiated by the Orange Baboon-Ass God [my words, although he does go into a tangent about the Monkey King which is a Chinese/Buddhist legendary epic. Maybe this is actually a very subtle swipe at his dipshit highness.] Yeo sees this situation as a form of mutually assured destruction where it would be irrational for either side to escalate further.
The reality of the US government debt is that if there is a severe contraction or reduction in the growth rate, it would at some point have to print money to service its debt. Central banks around the world are buying gold and diversifying away from the US dollar because of this risk.
“He [His Orange-Ass Highness] recognises that the US cannot dominate the world the way it used to in the past. The US hasn’t got the financial power or the manufacturing capability. So it has to retreat some and consolidate around its own core and concentrate on healing itself.” The US knows it is overextended globally, and this is what the bluster over exerting itself in the Western Hemisphere is about. It won’t be able to continue exerting itself globally by sheer power and force, so it is retreating particularly from Asia while still trying to look tough. [Maybe, but aren’t there still the 800+ military bases around the world? And why would we antagonize allies if we are in a position of weakness? I am just saying this is irrational, but I admit that ideology can Trump rationality.]
He doesn’t see disputes between China and Vietnam or China and the Philippines in the South China Sea “boiling over”.
thegreatestbooks.org aggregates 41 “best of” lists. Here are the first 5 that catch my eye:
#7: Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor. “After losing her job and facing family pressure, Zelu writes an experimental science-fiction novel about androids and AI in a post‑human world. As her book takes on a life of its own, the boundaries between her fiction and her reality begin to blur, forcing her to reckon with love, loss, and the power of stories.”
#10: King Of Ashes by S. A. Cosby. “Roman Carruthers returns to his Virginia hometown after his father is badly injured and discovers his family is in deeper trouble than he expected: a brother owing dangerous money to criminals and a sister determined to uncover the mystery of their mother’s disappearance years earlier. Using his financial skills and ruthless determination, Roman must confront old secrets and new threats to protect his family before everything unravels.” [I suppose just because I have a Virginia hometown. One assumes we are not talking about suburban DC here.]
#11: Abundance by Ezra Klein. “Abundance argues that many modern shortages—from housing and workers to clean energy and chips—stem not from conspiracies but from a failure to build and adapt: past rules and fixes have become obstacles to new solutions. Klein and Thompson examine political, regulatory, and cultural barriers across sectors and call for a mindset and institutions that prioritize construction, scaling, and practical problem-solving over preservation and restraint.” Well, that is not really how I summarized the (reviews and summaries I have read of) the book. But looking back after some time, many of the themes ring true to me. As a political agenda, it does not. The Democrats’ recent harping on the word “affordability” seems much more likely to hit the political mark.
#13: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. “In a near-future world where dreams are monitored, Sara is detained by a government agency after an algorithm predicts she will harm the person she loves. Held in a retention center with other women whose dreams are used as evidence, she faces shifting rules and prolonged confinement. A new arrival unsettles the facility’s order and sets Sara on a path that forces her to confront the surveillance systems controlling her life.” Some obvious similarities to The Minority Report by Phillip K. Dick. Which was a neat story so why shouldn’t talented sci-fi authors continue riffing on the general idea.
#15: Tilt by Emma Pattee. “Annie, nine months pregnant, is at IKEA when a major earthquake devastates Portland. Cut off from her husband and without phone or money, she must cross the chaotic city on foot. Along the way she encounters danger, compassion, and an unlikely ally, while confronting fears about her marriage, career, and impending motherhood as she tries to reach safety.” Sure, the author is using the disaster as a back drop for character development, I am sure. But a Pacific Northwest earthquake/volcano/tsunami disaster is a scenario we hope won’t happen anytime soon, but could happen anytime.
2025 is in the books! I covered a number of “best of” posts by others in December so I will highlight a few of those below. I still have some “best of” posts queued up so they will continue to roll out in January.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global progress on poverty reduction stalled around 2020. Gains in Asia are offset by losses in Africa. Meanwhile, gains in crop yields may have plateaued and are expected to decline as climate change drives increasingly extreme weather.
Most hopeful story: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these and adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
This is a unique way to share a reading list. Essentially, this book “prescribes” other books for a range of moods and perplexities. I haven’t read it but it would be fun to go through and see how many I have read, how many are on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-I-die (I am middle aged but not yet terminal that I know of), and how many I do not think would be worth reading as I budget the hours of earthly reading time remaining to me.
The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more.
