Tag Archives: innovation

the Gartner hype cycle

The Gartner hype cycle plots technologies on curve from emergence to “peak of inflated expectations” to the “trough of disillusionment” and finally arriving at the “plateau of productivity”. For example, in 2014, they had quantum computing in early emergence, the “internet of things” arriving at the peak of expectations, big data crashing into the trough, virtual reality beginning its assent to the plateau, and speech recognition arriving on the plateau.

Canada’s Eco-Fiscal Commission

Canada has something called an eco-fiscal commission, and it has a blog.

Technological change has transformed the quality of our lives. It has removed terrible diseases that maimed, crippled, and killed — plague, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and leprosy, to mention only the most common. In 1900, death from botulism and ptomaine poisoning from contaminated food was common. Chemical additives virtually eliminated these killers and allow us to live long enough to worry about the long run cancer causing effects of some of these additives. Now they are being replaced by safer preservatives.

Technological change has also transformed how we make both existing and new commodities. Most new technologies useless of all inputs per unit of output than do the older technologies that they replace thus moving us towards an increasingly economical use of the world’s resources. Furthermore, many newer technologies are much less polluting than many older technologies.

In summary, economic growth driven by new technologies not only increases our incomes; it transforms our lives through the invention of new, hitherto undreamed of products that are made in new, hitherto undreamed of and more economical ways. We can indeed be thankful that no anti-growth advocate persuaded governments in 1950, let alone in 1900, to stop all growth on the grounds that resources were limited and that we did not need more of what we already had too much of, thereby denying us of all the products and processes just mentioned and the new resource saving and less polluting production methods ̶ and others too many to list here.

This thinking is logical on its face. But of course, the logical flaw is when it is not paired with the idea that the absolute physical footprint can’t grow forever. Put another way, you can’t just keep producing each unit of output more efficiently, and producing ever more output, unless the growth in efficiency is faster than the growth in output. It could theoretically be done, but we’re not close to turning that corner.

“rebooting” cars

Here’s a long article on some projects to integrate smart phone-like technology into cars. Basically, either you plug in an actual smart phone, or your car itself gets software updates. The former makes more sense to me, because why would you want to invest in technology that is trapped inside a car, when you don’t want to be trapped inside a car any more than absolutely necessary?

I’ve also been thinking for a long time about the contrast between innovative, nimble companies in Silicon Valley vs. the old-guard Detroit auto companies. I’ve wondered if the auto companies would evolve to be more like the tech companies, find ways to team with them effectively, or just fade away and be replaced by them. I see the third option looking closest to reality. I don’t believe cars are the technology of the future (at least, not one of the dominant technologies), but even when we do see car companies integrating technology effectively, it is not the old-guard Detroit companies doing it. I wonder if they will fade away or go out with a bang. Remember, during the financial crisis they survived only with a government bailout, and that happened because they made a decent case of their importance to the larger economy. Will they be able to make that case next time if our transportation system has evolved to use a wider range of technologies produced by a wider range of companies?

artery-drilling robot

Happy July 4 to the Americans reading this. As we eat our cheeseburgers and hot dogs, here’s a robot designed to drill through your blocked arteries, modeled after…the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The article says it’s about 5 years out, so given my age and health I should be able to start eating all the junk food I want right now, and this technology should be available well before my arteries start to get into serious trouble.

Mckinsey

McKinsey lists “four powerful forces [that] are disrupting the global economy”.

“shift of economic activity to emerging-market cities
“acceleration of technological change. While technology has always been transformative, its impact is now ubiquitous, with digital and mobile technologies being adopted at an unprecedented rate. It took more than 50 years after the telephone was invented for half of American homes to have one, but only 20 years for cellphones to spread from less than 3% of the world’s population to more than two-thirds. Facebook had six million users in 2006; today, it has 1.4 billion… The mobile Internet offers the promise of economic progress for billions of emerging-economy citizens at a speed that would otherwise be unimaginable. And it gives entrepreneurial upstarts a greater chance of competing with established firms. But technological change also carries risks, especially for workers who lose their jobs to automation or lack the skills to work in higher-tech fields.
demographics – the possibility that world population could plateau or actually start to fall
globalization

There are a few more things out there that could disrupt the economy for better or worse – renewable energy? biotechnology? climate change? risks to food and water supplies? ocean collapse? nuclear or biological war?

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
Painless vaccines may be on the way.
The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
The UK may have hit “peak car“.
Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

social network theory and research

Here is a long paper with a lot of references on social network theory and empirical evidence, including learning and diffusion of innovations. For example,

A nice example of this using field data is a study of social learning by Conley and Udry (2001, 2004). They examine the use of fertilizer by pineapple farmers. In particular, they show that changes in the amount of fertilizer used by a given farmer are related to the success or failure of similar past changes in fertilizer use by other farmers. Having controlled experiments can substantially narrow down the range of explanations for observed peer correlations. For example, Hesselius, Johansson, and Nilsson (2009) examine absences in the workplace based on a randomized rule affecting about 3000 workplaces in G oteborg Sweden. Randomly
assigned agents were allowed to have longer spells of absence from work (14 days) without having to produce a doctor’s certificate than was the rule for the general population (8 days). This resulted not only in an increase in absences for the treated individuals (those allowed the extra time before producing a doctor’s certificate), but also for non-treated individuals conditional on being in a workplace with many treated individuals. Interestingly, the affect of how many other treated individuals there were in the workplace did not significantly influence treated individuals’ behavior. This allows them to distinguish between various ways in which the peer effects might work, ruling out things like enjoying time together and being more consistent with a fairness effect or related peer effect on preferences. This sort of study shows the power of (field) experiments in identifying peer effects…
The list of settings where peer effects, or network effects more generally, have been found to be important is a long and varied one. It includes a range of things from criminal behavior (Reiss (1980), Glaeser, Sacerdote and Scheinkman (1996), Kling, Ludwig and Katz (2005), Patacchini and Zenou (2008)), to education (e.g., Calvo-Armengol, Patacchini and Zenou (2008)), to risk-sharing and loan behavior (Fafchamps and Lund (2003), De Weerdt (2004), Karlan, Mobius, Rosenblatt, Szeidl (2009)), to obesity (Christakis and Fowler (2008), Fowler and Christakis (2008), and Halladay and Kwak (2009)). (See Fafchamps (This volume), Ioannides (This volume), Jackson and Yariv (This volume), Munshi (This volume), Sacerdote (This volume), and Topa (This volume), for more examples and background on empirical evidence.)

Paul Romer and “mathiness”

Paul Romer has attacked a number of fellow economists for relying on what he calls “mathiness” rather than mathematical theory. He believes the study of economic growth and its practical applications have suffered because of this.

Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it. The style that I am calling mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content.

Solow’s (1956) mathematical theory of growth mapped the word “capital” onto a variable in his mathematical equations, and onto both data from national income accounts and objects like machines or structures that someone could observe directly. The tight connection between the word and the equations gave the word a precise meaning that facilitated equally tight connections between theoretical and empirical claims. Gary Becker’s (1962) mathematical theory of wages gave the words “human capital” the same precision and established the same two types of tight connection—between words and math and between theory and evidence. In this case as well, the relevant evidence ranged from aggregate data to formal microeconomic data to direct observation…

The market for mathematical theory can survive a few lemon articles filled with mathiness. Readers will put a small discount on any article with mathematical symbols, but will still find it worth their while to work through and verify that the formal arguments are correct, that the connection between the symbols and the words is tight, and that the theoretical concepts have implications for measurement and observation. But after readers have been disappointed too often by mathiness that wastes their time, they will stop taking seriously any paper that contains mathematical symbols. In response, authors will stop doing the hard work that it takes to supply real mathematical theory. If no one is putting in the work to distinguish between mathiness and mathematical theory, why not cut a few corners and take advantage of the slippage that mathiness allows? The market for mathematical theory will collapse. Only mathiness will be left. It will be worth little, but cheap to produce, so it might survive as entertainment.

vaccines without needles

New technology may deliver vaccines without needles. Actually, there are needles but they are so small and short you can’t feel them.

But with if a vaccine could be delivered by simply applying a patch? That’s Mark Prausnitz’s goal: creating a nickel-sized bandage-like device covered with 100 microscopic needles that would puncture the skin, then dissolve to get the vaccine into the body.

Maybe that sounds scary — 100 needles instead of one. But Prausnitz says you can’t really feel the needles. “It wouldn’t be like sandpaper or scratching,” he says. “You would have a hard time feeling a difference between the needles being there or not being there.”

April 2015 in Review