lots more on Trump and infrastructure

There is a lot being written about Trump’s infrastructure plans – here are two roundup articles from City Observatory and The Week. Between them, they cite a total of 16 newspaper, magazine, academic, and political articles by my count. About 5 seem positive on balance and 11 negative. You could argue that I don’t pick the most un-biased sources, but let’s be honest, even if the left-leaning press adds some political spin, they still cover basic scientific and economic facts much better than outlets like Fox News.

Anyone who flies, drives, uses water, electricity, or gas, or visits public buildings knows the country’s infrastructure needs investment. Especially if you travel internationally, the state of our infrastructure is one of the first shocks that hits you when you return home. Economists seem to be in near consensus that better infrastructure would help our private sector be more efficient and competitive, and that infrastructure can be a good way to stimulate employment and income growth during a recession.

The negative articles raise a few issues. Some are ideological – some people just hate the idea of private money being invested, while others hate the idea of public money being invested. We need to get over these ideological biases and look for solutions that work, which are likely to be a blend. A little market discipline can help investors make good decisions about which risks are worth taking on, while public investment can help get projects with high social and environmental value over the financial hump.

The concerns that seem most valid to me have to do with special interests and lobbyists capturing these government funds just like they do in other industries like health care, energy, and security. Another thing that happens is that when funds are distributed through the states, politicians from rural areas are often able to steer investments away from the population centers where they would do the most economic and social good. This happens with highways, and also with water and sewer infrastructure loans through state revolving funds, which are only loans (not grants) to begin with. None of this results in efficient, high economic return investments any more than straight-up public investment would.

Perhaps my biggest concern, which the articles don’t touch on much, is that the country has no plan for what smart, efficient infrastructure would look like. If we had such a plan, we could target any new funds to the right kinds of projects. Market discipline is not a substitute for planning.

So call me an infrastructure advocate, but a skeptic that the U.S. government is going to do it the right way. My prescription would be a constitutional amendment clarifying that free speech only applies to humans and getting the lobbyists and campaign contributions under control, a comprehensive planning approach to all kinds of infrastructure, how they tie together and what they should look like over the next 50 years, and an implementation plan that targets funding through planning organizations in major metropolitan areas, leveraging federal and local public and private funds for the most economic, social, and environmental good.

And I know I’m dreaming. Maybe Trump will get an infrastructure bank done, that would be something tangible and useful at least.

WWF’s Living Planet Report

WWF has released their 2016 Living Planet Report. It paints a pretty bleak picture using a number of statistics and indices, including the shocking statistic of a 58% reduction in Earth’s wild animals between 1970 and 2012, headed for 67% by 2020. So humans have simply displaced nature physically on an enormous scale. The ecological footprint index is reported at 1.6 Earths, unchanged from recent reporting at least within its rounding error. But remember this index is itself a rate of change, and anything greater than 1.0 is a path to collapse. It’s like saying you only spend 1.6 times your income last year, but that is okay because it is the same amount you spent the year before. It’s not okay because you will run out of money and you and your family will be sleeping on a park bench at some point.

They try to offer some upbeat solutions. Some days I feel more upbeat than others. Today I feel like our civilization has to be faced with a crisis before we are likely to act, like a severe famine, energy shortage, or loss of major cities. And when that happens, any response may be too little, too late to prevent human suffering on an enormous scale. Anyway, here is the report’s attempt to be semi-upbeat:

Transitioning toward a resilient planet entails a transformation in which human development is decoupled from environmental degradation and social exclusion. A number of significant changes would need to happen within the global economic system in order to promote the perspective that our planet has finite resources. Examples are changing the way we measure success, managing natural resources sustainably, and taking future generations and the value of nature into account in decision-making.

This transition requires fundamental changes in two global systems: energy and food. For the energy system, a rapid development of sustainable renewable energy sources and shifting demand toward renewable energy are key. For the food system, a dietary shift in high-income countries – through consuming less animal protein – and reducing waste along the food chain could contribute significantly to producing enough food within the boundaries of one planet. Furthermore, optimizing agricultural productivity within ecosystem boundaries, replacing chemical and fossil inputs by mimicking natural processes, and stimulating beneficial interactions between different agricultural systems, are key to strengthening the resilience of landscapes, natural systems and biodiversity – and the livelihoods of those who depend on them.

The speed at which we chart our course through the Anthropocene will be the key factor determining our future. Allowing and fostering important innovations, and enabling them to be rapidly adopted by governments, businesses and citizens, will accelerate a sustainable trajectory. So too will understanding the value and needs of our increasingly fragile Earth.

Obama on technological unemployment

In his New Yorker interview, Obama also had a few things to say about technological unemployment.

Trump had triumphed in rural America by appealing to a ferment of anti-urban, anti-coastal feeling. And yet Obama dismissed the notion that the Republicans had captured the issue of inequality. “The Republicans don’t care about that issue,” he said. “There’s no pretense that anything that they’re putting forward, any congressional proposals that are going to come forward, will reduce inequality. . . . What I do concern myself with, and the Democratic Party is going to have to concern itself with, is the fact that the confluence of globalization and technology is making the gap between rich and poor, the mismatch in power between capital and labor, greater all the time. And that’s true globally.

“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”

One thing I am going to really miss about Obama is the way he has the ability to really understand and articulate the issues facing our country and world so well. I don’t expect that from Trump or the people he is appointing. I would be perfectly happy to be proved wrong.

all opinions are now equal

David Remnick from the New Yorker interviewed Obama before, during, and after the election. I don’t want to write a lot of words rehashing the election for a couple reasons. First, everyone else is doing that. Second, I suspect we need to put some time and distance between us and the election before we can decide which combination of the many theories is correct (for example, Trump was a genius at connecting with the middle class, white Americans are a bunch of ignorant, paranoid racist assholes, Hillary was a uniquely weak candidate, Russia and/or the FBI stole the election, a majority of Americans actually preferred Hillary, Biden or Sanders would have won easily, it was essentially a tie and the electoral college is just quirky and outdated, etc.)

Obama offered a theory though that rang at least partly true to me, and I actually find it disturbing.

“Until recently, religious institutions, academia, and media set out the parameters of acceptable discourse, and it ranged from the unthinkable to the radical to the acceptable to policy,” Simas said. “The continuum has changed. Had Donald Trump said the things he said during the campaign eight years ago—about banning Muslims, about Mexicans, about the disabled, about women—his Republican opponents, faith leaders, academia would have denounced him and there would be no way around those voices. Now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them. There is social permission for this kind of discourse. Plus, through the same social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate these thoughts and opinions. This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable. This is a foundational change…”

The new media ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true,” Obama told me later. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he maintained. “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”

It’s disturbing to me because I really had the sense during the election that facts didn’t matter at all. I don’t think human nature is particularly good at analyzing and understanding the nature of complex problems, and our education system is not particularly good at helping us to overcome our innate tendency to oversimplify and misdiagnose these problems. But at least detecting and agreeing on the facts needs to be the common launching point for reasoned debate. If we are no longer even attempting to establish the facts, we can’t even get to that starting point for problem solving and we have actually taken a step back as a civilization.

I don’t want to blame the millennial generation for everything, but I do think the educational culture that generation grew up in and the new media culture are intertwined. I think this generation was encouraged to formulate and express opinions much more than I was at the tail end of generation X. This is not bad in itself. Young people need to be trained to establish the facts, understand the larger systems those facts are embedded in, define the problem, propose and discuss solutions. But that doesn’t mean all conclusions, opinions, and proposed solutions should be given equal weight. When young people express opinions, they need to get supportive but firm feedback from people with more experience and seasoned judgment, because that is how they gain their own experience, judgment and problem solving ability.

Now of course I want to offer some prescription for fixing this. Well, I am not feeling too optimistic at the moment. If we were rowing against the current before, now we seem to have turned the canoe around and we are enthusiastically rowing with the current toward the whirlpool. Like I said, I need some time and distance to think more objectively.

Structure Sensor

Structure Sensor is a gadget that can supposedly measure an entire room and make a 3D computer model of it in seconds.

Capture dense 3D models with the push of a button

When used as a 3D scanner, Structure Sensor allows you to capture dense geometry in real-time. This enables you to simulate real world physics and create high-fidelity 3D models with high-resolution textures in seconds. The possibilities are incredible.

Measure entire rooms all at once

The magic of 3D depth sensing begins with the ability to capture fast, accurate, dimensions of objects and environments.

And Structure Sensor doesn’t just capture one dimension; it captures everything in view, all at once. Large-scale reconstruction tasks are easy with Structure Sensor & Structure SDK.

It’s $379. I don’t deal with interior design personally, but I know that surveying on engineering projects can be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. If there are technologies that could make it quick, cheap and easy, that would be a game changer.

climate change and agriculture

This section of the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risk Report explains in a fair amount of detail how climate change is likely to cause food shortages.

The risk to food security is especially great because agriculture is already straining to meet a rapidly growing demand from a finite resource base. The combined impact of a rising population and growth of the middle class – wealthier people eat more cereal-intensive meat – is set to drive a demand increase of 60% by 2050.3Yet the global average yield growth for cereals has slowed in recent years; it already lags behind demand growth. This gap cannot be covered by an expansion of cropland because of the need to protect forests and other areas of high value for conservation and carbon sequestration. Agriculture is increasingly competing with other uses for land – such as urbanization, transport, bioenergy, forestry and mining – and so crop production is pushed towards ever more marginal soils.4

Yet more worrying is the fierce competition for water, the lifeblood of agriculture. Water withdrawals have increased threefold over the last 50 years, and demand is anticipated to rise by a further 40% by 2030.5 With a shift in global production towards intensive systems that rely on groundwater resources for irrigation, along with the current growth in demand for water-intensive animal products, agriculture becomes even thirstier. At the same time, urbanization and industrialization in emerging and developing economies are also driving up demand for fresh water in energy production, mineral extraction, and domestic use, further stretching the already tight supply.6

Against this backdrop of tightening constraints, climate change seriously threatens food security in two ways. First, it will harm agricultural production: rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will slow yield gains, contributing to higher food prices and an increasingly precarious supply-demand balance that will make markets more prone to volatility. Second, it will increasingly disrupt food systems: more extreme weather will destabilize tighter markets and exacerbate volatility, imperil transport infrastructure and trigger local food crises. As a result, the risks of humanitarian emergencies, national or regional instability and mass migration will increase. In the words of a former Executive Director of the World Food Programme, “without food, people have only three options. They riot, they emigrate, or they die.”7 The security implications will be felt by developing and developed countries alike.

In other words, the world might be in trouble on food even if climate change were not a factor. The combination of heat and drought that will be brought on by climate change will add to the risk, potentially destabilizing many populous areas of the world. The world’s response to climate change has been too little, too late, but at least there have been steps in the right direction the last few years. Being willfully ignorant of the risk and reversing the small progress we are making would be an evil, immoral thing to do.

exit polls

I hate the election outcome, and yet you won’t find me out in the streets protesting just because I’m a sore loser. You might find me out in the streets if and when the new administration starts taking immoral actions, such as denying people access to health care, reversing progress on climate change, or endangering the stability of the international financial system.

I don’t doubt for a second that there are a lot of errors and inefficiencies in the U.S. election system. That is because it is so decentralized and disorganized. I doubt it is hackable on a broad scale though, just because it is so decentralized and disorganized. The fact that the results were so consistently surprising in so many states to me is further evidence that the polls and exit polls were just biased.

The exit polls are just weird though, as Jonathan Simon points out. The election result is different from the pre-election polls by several percentage points in Trump’s favor. One explanation that is consistent with the facts is that the way “likely voter” was defined by the pollsters was wrong. In other words, enough “unlikely voters” turned out to deliver the election to Trump.

This logic is a little harder to assign to exit polls though. Exit polls are supposed to be a random sample of people who actually voted. The exit polls in this election were very consistent with the pre-election polls, and very inconsistent with the vote count. What could explain that? Either the sample of people who actually voted has to be biased, or people have to have lied on a large scale, and in a very consistent and biased way.

I don’t have the answer. I think we need to accept these election results and move on. But a thorough review of the process to make sure it is as transparent and verifiable as possible in the future would be a great idea.

70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “megadrought”

According to USA Today,

A group of researchers estimated in a new study published Wednesday that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, the odds of a monster drought ravaging the region for 35 years or longer this century would be between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on a range of precipitation scenarios.

On the flipside, the scientists found that if steps are taken to aggressively reduce greenhouse gases, the risks of a decades-long drought could be cut nearly in half…

The researchers found that under a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, the risk of a decades-long drought would be 90 percent in the southwestern U.S. if precipitation is unchanged. If there’s a modest increase in precipitation, the region would still face a 70 percent risk of a megadrought by the end of the 21 century. And if precipitation decreases under that warming scenario, the scientists estimated the risk at 99 percent.

Nice job, states like Utah and Arizona, voting to go back to “business as usual” just when, after 40 years of inertia when we already should have known better, we were taking some modest steps in the right direction. Perhaps your neighbors in Colorado, New Mexico (not to mention Old Mexico), and California have reasons to be less than happy with you.

technological unemployment

This New York Times Magazine article about an American returning home after living abroad is mostly fluff, but it did contain these few interesting paragraphs on technological unemployment.

One day, I drove down Highway 101 to Silicon Valley to meet Reid Hoffman, a partner at the venture-capital firm Greylock and the chairman of LinkedIn, the professional-social-networking company, which was then in the process of being sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion. Hoffman founded LinkedIn the same year I left for Beijing; now he was a billionaire. He is politically active, having supported and advised Obama and raised money for and donated money to Hillary Clinton. I mentioned how the election had become a referendum of sorts on globalization and trade, yet there had been little discussion about the next big earthquake — artificial intelligence, or the approaching world of self-driving cars, smartphones that can diagnose a melanoma and much more. Globalization may have ravaged blue-collar America, but artificial intelligence could cut through the white-collar professions in much the same way.

Hoffman said the reactions to artificial intelligence range from utopian to dystopian. The utopians predict huge productivity gains and rapid advances in medicine, genetic sequencing, fighting climate change and other areas. The dystopians predict a “Robocalypse” in which machines supplant people and, possibly, threaten humanity itself. “My point of view,” he said, “is that it is a massive transformation and does really impact the future of humanity, but that we can steer it more toward utopia rather than dystopia with intelligence and diligence.”

Either way, another major economic shift is coming, perhaps sooner than people realize. Hoffman said that many of the jobs in today’s economy will change fundamentally during the next 20 years. On the same day I met with Hoffman, Uber announced a pilot program to test self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. It also bought a company developing self-driving trucks. “We have to make sure that we don’t have a massive imbalance of society by which you have a small number of people that own the robots and everyone else is scrambling,” he said.

If the current political upheaval in the U.S. and elsewhere is caused by the onset of technological unemployment, we could truly be in trouble, because not only is it going to get worse, it is being completely misdiagnosed. When an illness is misdiagnosed, it can be treated in ineffective or even completely counterproductive ways. If underemployment caused by technological progress is the root of our current problems, the solutions have to lie in providing people with the skills they need to work with the new technology, helping people to build an ownership stake in the technology, lowering barriers to startups and innovators, and providing a safety net for those still left behind through no fault of their own. Instead, we are talking about subsidizing outdated technologies and industries, blaming mythical internal and external enemies for our problems, and removing the limited safety net we have fought so hard to build up until now.

inflation

The Economist says inflation could be on the verge of a comeback.

Some economists reckon a sustained rise in inflation is overdue. Most of the rich world is out of recession, emerging markets seem to have put the worst of their commodity bust behind them, and in a few places, like America, low unemployment has at last given way to accelerating wage growth. It is possible, some suppose, that the weak growth and sustained disinflation of the past half-decade has blinded markets and policy-makers to the potential for a sharp swing in the other direction, toward uncomfortably high inflation.

The rest of the article goes on to poo-poo the idea that inflation may be on the verge of a comeback. But we’ll see.