Here come the package delivery robots. I don’t know that this couldn’t work in a quieter urban residential neighborhood. This would work great on several narrow streets I have lived on in Philadelphia, where post office and UPS/FedEx trucks typically double park at the nearest intersection (often blocking crosswalks, fire hydrants, bike lanes, etc. because there aren’t other options) and then walk in. Urban areas can take a number of forms other than high rise towers and central business districts, which is what (most likely suburban living) authors of articles like this always seem to be picturing.
October 2015 in Review
What did I learn in October? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.
Negative stories (-15):
- Events leading to the current war and refugee disaster in Syria may have been set in motion by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (-2)
- Drone strikes are not as surgical as we have been led to believe. Also, post-2001 CIA torture was a thing. (-2)
- Herman Daly suggests that zero interest rates cause us to misprice (basically, ignore the costs of) environmental degradation. The only thing worse than zero interest rates is negative interest rates. I continue to puzzle over the links between the money supply, interest rates, natural capital and environmental degradation. I don’t have the puzzle figured out yet. I will let you know as soon as I do. (-1)
- When trees die it makes people sad. (-1)
- The Bank of England warns that ” once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.” (-3)
- The IMF is warning of more slow growth ahead, especially in developing countries. The reasons? “low productivity growth since the crisis, crisis legacies in some advanced economies (high public and private debt, financial sector weakness, low investment), demographic transitions, ongoing adjustment in many emerging markets following the post crisis credit and investment boom, a growth realignment in China—with important cross-border repercussions—and a downturn in commodity prices triggered by weaker demand as well as higher production capacity.” (-2)
- Stephen Hawking is worried about inequality and technological unemployment. Work sharing is one possible way to deal with it. (-1)
- Corrupt Russian officials appear to be selling nuclear materials in Moldova. (-3)
Positive stories (+9):
- Thanks to Pope Francis, Philadelphians got to experience a weekend with no cars, and it was awesome! Norway is a bit ahead of us on this. (+3)
- There is some evidence that Uber is modestly reducing rates of car ownership. (+1)
- Japan might have self-driving taxis as soon as next year. Self-driving shuttle buses are operating right now in a California office park (+1)
- I learned that Norbert Wiener was one of the fathers of modern automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He was concerned that his ideas could be misuses, and refused to take corporate or military money to advance them. (+1)
- Viktor Glushkov was a Soviet computer science who developed an idea for a cash-free, computer-controlled economic system. Seriously, it was an interesting idea even though in retrospect things didn’t work out so well for the USSR. There could be some elements we could consider today now that we actually have the computer technology he lacked back then. (+1)
- Elephants seem to have very low rates of cancer. Maybe we could learn their secrets. (+1)
- There may be some hope for a global carbon pricing agreement. (+1)
David Brooks ca. 2001
Here’s an enormously long 2001 rant by David Brooks on the ethics of college students he observed at the time.
There are a lot of things these future leaders no longer have time for. I was on campus at the height of the election season, and I saw not even one Bush or Gore poster. I asked around about this and was told that most students have no time to read newspapers, follow national politics, or get involved in crusades. One senior told me she had subscribed to The New York Times once, but the papers had just piled up unread in her dorm room. “It’s a basic question of hours in the day,” a student journalist told me. “People are too busy to get involved in larger issues. When I think of all that I have to keep up with, I’m relieved there are no bigger compelling causes.”
I find today’s new generation of young adults fascinating. On the one hand, they seem much more involved in community service than I or most people I know were at the same age. But they seem less interested in current affairs. They are extremely intelligent and well educated, and yet their intellectual engagement seems confined within fairly narrow boundaries. They seem to be about more than money and materialism, and yet they seem accepting of the existing order and willing to get ahead the best they can within the system, rather than interested in questioning the system itself. I don’t have them figured out yet. Not that I have myself completely figured out.
Most Dangerous
Here’s a new book on the Vietnam War…for kids ages 10 and up?
a trailer full of corpses, its floor “streaked with blood and brains.” Arms and legs were falling off the rotting trunks, which made it difficult to count how many bodies were in the trailer. The stench was unbearable. So the bodies were hosed down and the trailer tipped to its side, letting, as one witness put it, a “rivulet of blood-colored water” flow outside. A delegation of American military officers passed by, stepping over the blood “to avoid ruining the shine on their boots.”
Age 10, really? I think everyone at some point does need to know that this stuff happened. Not just know it intellectually, but internalize it, try to come to terms with it, and realize it can’t happen again. I remember being shown a movie of piles of Holocaust victims being moved by bulldozer around 7th grade. I don’t remember my emotions at the time but I remember the image vividly 25+ years later. Still, age 10? I’m not sure, maybe high school would be soon enough.
Anyway, should we assume this stuff only happened in the past? In Afghanistan we are hearing about “military age males” and “enemy killed in action”. Maybe not on the enormous scale of the Vietnam era, but it is the same rhetoric nonetheless. And I don’t think most of us are internalizing it, struggling to come to terms with it, or asking what we should be doing to stop it from happening.
go anywhere on Earth in four hours
That’s right, four hours. According to BBC:
the technology would allow the launch of satellites into space at a fraction of the current cost and allow passengers to fly anywhere in the world in four hours…
According to Reaction, an aircraft using such engines could take off from a runway and accelerate to more than five times the speed of sound, before switching to a rocket mode which would propel the aircraft into orbit.
the best and the brightest
The U.S. is sending “advisors” into Syria. This reminds me of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, where he describes the gradual escalation of the Vietnam war. A small force is sent. Then more are sent to protect the perimeter of that force. Then more are sent to patrol out from the perimeter. And so on until you have a president (Kennedy started it, Nixon ended it, but this book takes aim squarely at Lyndon Johnson) with an enormous amount of blood on his hands. Johnson has been judged kindly by history for his domestic programs and civil rights, but anybody who has read The Best and the Brightest might question that. Obama must have read The Best and the Brightest.
time to worry about the national debt?
While the Republican candidates are obsessing over the national debt, economists are thinking the opposite, that Keynesianism is back and a lot of borrowing and spending is going to be necessary to keep the economy going. Your average person on the street can follow the first argument, because it seems similar to his household finances, and because it has an undertone of morality (debt=bad). But very few people understand the theories behind fiscal or monetary policy. Because our education system hasn’t given us the mental tools to understand the nested complex systems we are all embedded in. How are we supposed to elect the right people to make the right choices then?
Finally, there is a fourth view, championed most prominently by Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. They argue that there is little evidence that monetary policy will ever restore full prosperity. In this view, Milton Friedman’s dream of using strategic monetary interventions to offset economic shocks remains just that: a dream. It was only the unique circumstance in Europe and the US over the last half-century – most notably rapid demographic and productivity growth – that made his ideas seem plausible. “If nobody believes that inflation will rise, it won’t,” is how Krugman put it. “The only way to be at all sure of raising inflation is to accompany a changed monetary regime with a burst of fiscal stimulus.”
I do not claim to know which of these views is the correct one. But I do think that this discussion is the most important debate in the field of macroeconomics since John Maynard Keynes wrestled with similar questions in the 1930s. For Keynes, the answer was clear, and it was something close to what is being argued by Summers and Krugman; indeed, his conclusions are what transformed him from a monetarist into a Keynesian.
“It seems unlikely that the influence of [monetary] policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself,” Keynes wrote in 1936. “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.” Those are words worth considering the next time we find ourselves needing the courage to act.
Oh, even if monetary policy did work, the Republicans want to destroy the Federal Reserve.
Jimmy Carter on Syria
This Jimmy Carter op-ed in the New York Times is a bit eyebrow raising.
The Carter Center had been deeply involved in Syria since the early 1980s, and we shared our insights with top officials in Washington, seeking to preserve an opportunity for a political solution to the rapidly growing conflict. Despite our persistent but confidential protests, the early American position was that the first step in resolving the dispute had to be the removal of Mr. Assad from office. Those who knew him saw this as a fruitless demand, but it has been maintained for more than four years. In effect, our prerequisite for peace efforts has been an impossibility…
The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies.
Mr. Assad’s governing authority could then be ended in an orderly process, an acceptable government established in Syria, and a concerted effort could then be made to stamp out the threat of the Islamic State.
The needed concessions are not from the combatants in Syria, but from the proud nations that claim to want peace but refuse to cooperate with one another.
It’s eyebrow raising both because if it is right it makes U.S. foreign policy look pretty bumbling, and also because these statements are being made in public seemingly after many years of behind-the-scenes frustration.
I think back to the 1990 Gulf War. The Cold War was over and we still had faith in international institutions. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a clear violation across sovereign borders. A coalition was formed and backed by the U.N. Security Council. As imperfect as all of this was, at least it had the feel of the rule of law. 15 years later, we have sovereign nations invading other sovereign nations, shadowy commando activity and drone assassinations across national borders from Europe to Africa to Asia. That hope we all felt when the wall fell in 1989 (well, maybe Jimmy Carter should ask his good friend Gorbachev how he felt at the time) seems to be receding further into history. And on top of the geopolitical instability we have more people, more weapons, climate change, and a shaky global economy.
Raspberry Pi
Here are a bunch of resources for learning Raspberry Pi:
To make it easier to find the kind of resource you want, we’ve grouped our resources under the headings of Teach, Learn and Make. In our Teach resources you’ll find individual lesson plans, complete schemes of work and teachers’ guides, including a teachers’ guide to using Raspberry Pi in the classroom to give educators who are new to the device the information they need to get started.
Our Learn resources guide learners through independent activities. One of the newest is Gravity Simulator, in which students learn about the effects of gravity and how to simulate them in Scratch with Mooncake, the official Raspberry Pi Foundation Cat. It’s one of a number of resources that support activities linked to British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake’s upcoming mission aboard the International Space Station.
Our Make resources support physical computing projects. They range from “getting started” activities for beginners and more in-depth standalone projects to fairly substantial, satisfying builds that you might complete over several sessions. One of these resources is a guide to making a Raspberry Pi marble maze using aSense HAT. A Sense HAT is at the heart of each of the two Astro Pi flight units that will soon be flying to the International Space Station; on board the ISS its gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer will be able to detect how the station is moving, and this activity uses the same sensors to work out which way a virtual marble will roll.
Costanza!
Last year Robert Costanza published an update to his seminal 1997 paper The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital. Here’s what I had to say about that in 2014:
The paradox is that because nature has so far provided many services in abundance, they are not “scarce” in an economic sense and our human markets place little or no monetary value on them. This would change in the event our human civilization caused the services to be reduced or interrupted in any way. While it may seem strange to value ecosystem services in monetary terms, it can be instructive to ask what we would be willing to pay if we had no choice but to pay for these services. There are many conceptual and practical challenges with this sort of monetary valuation, but there have been some brave attempts to do it, such as those led by Robert Costanza at the Australian National University.[9] By comparing the magnitude of what we would be willing to pay for these services to the magnitude of the human economy, we can get a sense of the importance of ecosystem services in underpinning our human economy. Costanza’s estimate of the annual value of global ecosystem services ($33 trillion in 1997 U.S. dollars) is the same order of magnitude as the world output of goods and services in that year (approximately $29 trillion[10])! While the estimated value of ecosystem services is certainly less precisely measured than the monetary value of goods and services produced, the order of magnitude suggests that humanity could not afford to substitute its own technology and efforts in place of the services provided by ecosystems, at least not with the wealth and knowledge available to us now.
The new paper is called Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services. Here’s the abstract:
In 1997, the global value of ecosystem services was estimated to average $33 trillion/yr in 1995 $US ($46 trillion/yr in 2007 $US). In this paper, we provide an updated estimate based on updated unit ecosystem service values and land use change estimates between 1997 and 2011. We also address some of the critiques of the 1997 paper. Using the same methods as in the 1997 paper but with updated data, the estimate for the total global ecosystem services in 2011 is $125 trillion/yr (assuming updated unit values and changes to biome areas) and $145 trillion/yr (assuming only unit values changed), both in 2007 $US. From this we estimated the loss of eco-services from 1997 to 2011 due to land use change at $4.3–20.2 trillion/yr, depending on which unit values are used. Global estimates expressed in monetary accounting units, such as this, are useful to highlight the magnitude of eco-services, but have no specific decision-making context. However, the underlying data and models can be applied at multiple scales to assess changes resulting from various scenarios and policies. We emphasize that valuation of ecoservices (in whatever units) is not the same as commodification or privatization. Many eco-services are best considered public goods or common pool resources, so conventional markets are often not the best institutional frameworks to manage them. However, these services must be (and are being) valued, and we need new, common asset institutions to better take these values into account.
So $125 trillion dollars per year in value, and last year the IMF says the world economy was about $77 trillion. This is important for a few reasons. First, it strengthens the argument even further that ecosystem services are not just something happening on the fringe of our economy that give us a helping hand. They are absolutely essential and we could not afford to do without them. Second, if I understand correctly, the annual value we can derive is lower per unit area of land because of degradation of the land since 1997. Every year we are using up $4-20 trillion that the Earth is not able to replenish. That value is hard to put in context, because we don’t know what the total stock is, or how low that stock could fall before it would start to constrain our economy.
There’s another implication – if we could develop a precise accounting of the natural capital being used up each year, we could orient our economy to shift more of those costs to the people, governments, and business entities choosing to impose those costs on the rest of us. Carbon taxes are a fairly obvious first step.