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construction productivity

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Construction Physics has a deep dive on construction productivity around the world. We hear about the overall slowdown in productivity growth worldwide since the 1970s or so, but in the construction industry the trend is essentially stagnation even compared to other industries. The U.S. is a historical leader in absolute productivity but has actually managed a productivity decline compared to modest growth in most other countries studied. That said, there are no countries where the growth is particularly spectacular. Developing countries have managed to grow productivity faster, but that is essentially catching up. It talks a lot about the challenges of measuring productivity, suggesting that just focusing on cost might be the better way to go.

This article doesn’t go deep into potential solutions. Prefabrication of components in factories is talked about a lot, because manufacturing productivity gains have been much more dramatic than construction, which on its face is manufacturing in a much less controlled environment. But prefabrication and modularity have been worked on for a long time and delivered only modest gains. More competition and less corruption in procurement are certainly good things, but these too seem to deliver only modest improvement. Many developed countries in Asia and the Middle East use labor from developing countries, and this seems to work for them but doesn’t deliver large gains I suppose because the lower-wage workers are less skilled and less productive. Streamlining permitting and regulation is always talked about, and tends to fit certain political agendas, but there don’t seem to be enormous gains there. So governments and project teams seem to just pursue an all-of-the-above salad approach and the result is incremental gains or no gains at all. I’ve probably said this multiple times, but I think AI should be very good at construction scheduling. Add in real time inspection and comparison to the original plans using cameras and drones, and it should be possible to really reduce down time and waste in construction. I think there might be substantial potential gains on the horizon here. If I were in government, I might focus R&D funding, targeted procurement, and regulatory/financial incentives on this particular aspect.

Another thought though, is that low construction productivity is not a reason not to do construction. Both housing and infrastructure construction have long-lasting economic and quality of life benefits that go beyond just the immediate economic activity they generate in the construction sector itself. So maybe we should just pony up what they cost now, keep plugging away to try to make the modest gains, and stop worry so much about this.

industrial robots in the U.S. and China

This article has some facts and figures on the stocks and installation rates of industrial robots in the U.S. and China, although the units are all over the place making it hard to compare the two, and hard to tell which numbers are rates or trends vs. totals. A note to journalists reporting data: make a table please. AI can even do this for you, you just need to fact check it. Also just check your article to make sure numbers and units are consistent within the article itself. AI can probably do at least a first round of checks (checking itself, if it wrote the article) although a human should do the last round. Maybe a good practice would be to have a different AI peer review the work of the first AI.

United StatesChina
total industrial robots in operation (2024)not reported“over 2 million”
new industrial robots installed in 202434,200295,000
robots installed per 10,000 workers295 (? units unclear and inconsistent)470 (? units unclear and inconsistent)
share of global total of industrial robotsnot reported54%

The US has some ideas and strategies and plans for how it could maybe begin to keep up or at least prevent the gap from widening. But you have to forgive me for being skeptical about our idea to implement plans and ideas. We sometimes hear that US workers are “the most productive in the world”. I would like to see some facts and figures on this. I assume we are talking about the dollar value of goods and services sold per hour of (human) work. And that would seem to be good on the face of things given that our unemployment rate remains low for the time being. But even if it remains low, we know the wealth is being horded by the top 1% and not shared with most of those highly productive workers. And if it is still true that we have a lead in labor productivity, you wonder how long we can expect that to last when we are gutting the research and education foundations of our past human capital and technological development.

what government policies ACTUALLY increase economic growth?

Wishful thinking and “starve the beast” ideology do not increase the growth rate of a national economy. There are some things that do, according to people who study the evidence (known as economists, although to be fair, some of them are also influenced by ideology if not wishful thinking). According to this Planet Money episode, policies that have been shown by evidence to increase economic growth include:

  • Building housing in cities with numerous and increasing jobs. I always thought of housing as more of a quality of life issue and not something that actually constrains growth, but this makes logical sense. Urban areas (central cities and their suburbs) are where most of the national economy’s growth happens, because they are where most of the workers and innovative ideas are. Available jobs attract people who want jobs, and this can happen faster than the housing market can grow, pushing up prices. At some point, constraints on housing can actually become constraints on growth. People seem to be focusing mostly on the federal government tail trying to wag the municipal government dog in terms of zoning codes, but I have a couple more thoughts to add. First, excellent transportation infrastructure effectively enlarges the housing market that provides access to a given job market. If I could buy a fixer-upper row house in Baltimore and take a bullet train to Manhattan, I would effectively be part of the Manhattan housing market. Our country does not have this (although Baltimore and New York City are connected by some of the best rail our country has to offer, the time and expense of that commute would not be reasonable.) Excellent communication infrastructure also helps, since many professional jobs are now remote or hybrid. Finally, there are technological advances to be made in the construction industry, which has been dead in terms of productivity growth for decades. The big one being talked about is much more factory manufacturing of modular components. Get this figured out, and you can either move some U.S. construction workers to much more productive factory floors, or you can consider allowing immigrant workers in to do these jobs at lower wages, or you can invest in factories in Central and South American economies, thereby relieving some immigration pressure on our borders. Then move it all by electrified freight rail. These are different political choices, but all economic wins. Beyond this technology, I think there are huge gains to be made on construction sites in more efficient risk-based scheduling and logistics, technology-assisted inspections of progress (with drones and cameras), and project controls (AI watching videos of the progress and comparing exactly what is happening on the ground to exactly what was planned, then advising humans on real-time adjustments to the schedule and logistics to manage risk and keep the project on track).
  • Cutting taxes on corporations generally increases growth, because the corporations will invest at least some of the savings in capital goods, work force training, and research and development. But my thought is, why not give them the tax breaks ONLY if they invest the savings in these things, which are also investments in our national economy.
  • Similar to housing, I have always thought of health care as more of a quality of life service and basic human right a benevolent government overseeing a growing economy should be providing to its citizens. But the podcast points out hard evidence that health care investments, particularly for children and low income people, have an economic payoff in terms of reduced health care costs and increased earning (and tax-paying) potential later in life.
  • Allowing in highly skilled immigrants benefits the economy.
  • Investing in the electric grid yields a greater payout in terms of lower energy costs than whatever is invested.
  • Research and development, in things OTHER THAN weapons and war, yields a big return to the economy. Investing in weapons and war crowds out more productive investments the government could be making.
  • The particular webpage covering the podcast doesn’t talk about education, but I know I have seen elsewhere that investments in childcare and education yield big benefits, particularly early childhood education.

So: housing and construction productivity; health care; childcare and education; research and development; incentives for corporate R&D, capital investment, and work force development; transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Raise $1 in taxes, invest it in these areas, get back more than $1, and you could theoretically give the dividend back to the person who gave you the dollar, and everybody wins. Way too rational for our so-called political economy. And this doesn’t include rational risk management, like making sure those urban areas where most of the economic activity and housing are do not get destroyed by floods and fires.

Is AI speeding up computer programming efficiency?

Yes, by about 25% according to a serious look at the hard evidence by some heavy-weight academics (MIT, etc.)

The Effects of Generative AI on High-Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers

This study evaluates the impact of generative AI on software developer productivity via randomized controlled trials at Microsoft, Accenture, and an anonymous Fortune 100 company. These field experiments, run by the companies as part of their ordinary course of business, provided a random subset of developers with access to an AI-based coding assistant suggesting intelligent code completions. Though each experiment is noisy, when data is combined across three experiments and 4,867 developers, our analysis reveals a 26.08% increase (SE: 10.3%) in completed tasks among developers using the AI tool. Notably, less experienced developers had higher adoption rates and greater productivity gains.

“Intelligent code completions” kind of matches my own experience with how I have found AI most helpful so far – as software help. Whether it is helping with obscure code syntax or complicated nests of drop-down menus and check boxes, AI makes it much faster to find the exact thing you are looking for. This should in theory give workers a bit more time for planning and creative thinking, but predictably the market wants us not to do our jobs better, but to do them barely adequately as fast as possible. And what passes for “barely adequately” erodes over time while “as fast as possible” gets faster. Which I suppose is efficiency on paper.

One question is whether this is more like the automated loom, which sharply reduced the demand for textile workers, or the cotton gin, which sharply increased the demand for (involuntary, brutalized) workers by removing a bottleneck in the process. Early signs seem to point to the former, but all this will take time to play out.

Abundance

I suppose I need to take on the new book “Abundance” at some point. Perhaps I should read the book first? Well, I doubt most people talking about it have read the book. I’ve read at least half a dozen review of it, and not one of them was able to summarize it in a simple sentence or two that I am able to remember. And this would seem to be a problem politically. I personally had an impression of it as being about technological progress, because I remembered reading a 2012 book by Peter Diamandis called Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think. It is not about that. Then I thought it must be about inequality, because the U.S. is a rich country with a big and growing inequality problem, and that is why the cast masses of people do not have abundance. But it is definitely not about that, in fact it argues that the Democratic Party should mostly not be talking about inequality.

Okay, so without reading the book (yet), it seems to go back to this 2022 article in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson called A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. If it were truly simple, again, I should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two, but I can’t. But here goes in a few sentences:

  • Unnecessary complicated Federal bureaucracy slows down or stops implementation of many things we like, such as Covid tests (dated example), issuance of visas for skilled foreigners like nurses and teachers (hoo boy, dated example).
  • The public and private sectors together have failed to invest enough to keep up with critical technologies like semiconductor manufacturing and automated port operations (not mentioned here, but in the news a lot lately, is ship building).
  • We’re not solving our massive market failures in housing (local zoning laws are cited) and health care. In the case of the latter, the author cites the government and medical industry artificially limiting the supply of licensed doctors and nurses.
  • The clean energy rollout has been somewhat of a bust, or at least very slow.
  • He talks about colleges, but only cites the fact that “elite colleges” only enroll a small fraction of the nation’s students.
  • Infrastructure…er, he only talks about transportation, as the majority of discussions on infrastructure do. But yes, it is hard, slow, and expensive to implement.

And…I’m out of time, but I’d like to come back to each of these at some point. Each one has a complicated, messy set of origins and potential solutions. I am having trouble seeing a sound bite version of these solutions. But the idea of “Abundance” seems to be that if we solve these problems, we get abundance, so they are worth solving.

facts and figures on U.S. manufacturing, jobs, and trade with China

This blog post summarizes a famous paper from 2016 called The China Shock. The post points out that a number of things in paper were misunderstood by general audiences, in some cases because it was politically convenient to do so.

Now, before I get into it I will say that I have some personal perspective on this. I come from a former manufacturing town in Appalachia and many of my relatives were employed in the furniture and textile industry there at one time. By the 1990s, these factories were closing as jobs were moving to Asia, where labor costs were much lower. The economic pain and attendant social problems are very real, and I have seen them firsthand. So some communities were in fact hit very hard. The U.S. government had a “Trade Adjustment Assistance” program that was supposed to retrain people, but it was just too little, too late and not all effective. There has been major brain drain with the younger generations leaving town for better opportunities, and the people left behind are in a very destitute situation. So some groups of people, in some locations, were very badly hurt by free trade, even if there is an argument to make that the country as a whole benefitted from low-cost goods and moving to higher-value-added industries.

Anyway, the facts and figures based on this article:

  • The word “shock” in economics means something different than what it means it newspaper headlines. It means an unforeseen or outside event. It doesn’t necessarily have to be large or “shocking” in an emotional sense.
  • The original paper estimated a loss of about a million manufacturing jobs over about a decade after China joined the WTO in 2001. This should be put in the context that the number of U.S. “goods producing jobs” has held steady at about 20 million while service sector jobs have boomed by around 100 million over the past 50 years. Although another chart shows a loss of about 8 million “manufacturing jobs” over roughly this same time, so “goods producing” and “manufacturing” must have different definitions. Either way, manufacturing certainly declined in relative importance to the economy and in the absolute number of jobs represented. But outsourcing to China specifically is only part of this. (I would note however that Chinese businesses themselves are outsourcing to Southeast Asia, and I don’t know how that gets accounted for in these numbers.)
  • Despite the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, U.S. manufacturing output has not declined over this time period. It has stayed approximately constant since 2000, dipping during recessions and then bouncing back after each recession. The reason output can stay constant while jobs decrease is increased productivity due to automation.
  • Bottom line: The original paper concluded that competition from China explained about 12% of overall manufacturing job losses during the decade after 2001, and manufacturing job losses were about 1.5% of jobs in the overall economy. Overall job gains were greater than job losses during this period, although some individual workers, towns, and regions were more heavily impacted than others (like my relatives in Appalachia).

I generally support more or less 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. We could refer to these as “common sense” policies.

2024 in Review

Intro

What I do here is list all the posts I picked each month as most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting. Then I attempt some kind of synthesis and analysis of this information. You can drill down to my “month in review” posts, from there to individual posts, and from there to source articles if you have the time and inclination.

Post Roundup

Most frightening and/or depressing stories

  • JANUARY: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.
  • FEBRUARY: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.
  • MARCH: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.
  • APRIL: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in a dangerous world. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.
  • MAY: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.
  • JUNE: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
  • JULY: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.
  • AUGUST: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?
  • SEPTEMBER: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.
  • OCTOBER: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)
  • NOVEMBER: Ugh, the U.S. election. I don’t really want to talk or think too much more about it. What’s really frightening to me is the celebration of irrationality. With incompetent, irrational clowns and fools now in charge of everything, any crises or emergencies that arise are not going to be dealt with rationally, competently, or at all. And this is how an emergency can turn into a system failure. Let’s hope we can muddle through four years without a major acute crisis of some kind, but that is hard to do.
  • DECEMBER: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful stories

  • JANUARY: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.
  • FEBRUARY: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.
  • MARCH: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.
  • APRIL: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.
  • MAY: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.
  • JUNE: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
  • JULY: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.
  • AUGUST: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.
  • SEPTEMBER: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.
  • OCTOBER: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.
  • NOVEMBER: In a nation of 350 million odd people, there have to be some talented potential leaders for us to choose between in future elections, right? Or is it clowns and fools all the way down? Sorry folks, this is how I feel.
  • DECEMBER: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both

  • JANUARY: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.
  • FEBRUARY: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.
  • MARCH: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.
  • APRIL: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.
  • MAY: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.
  • JUNE: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
  • JULY: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.
  • AUGUST: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.
  • SEPTEMBER: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.
  • OCTOBER: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.
  • NOVEMBER: You can charge moving electric vehicles using charging coils embedded in roads.
  • DECEMBER: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

Synthesis

Nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. The massive silver lining here is that, as I write this, there has been no use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Let’s hope it stays that way, forever and ever. But the expansion of nuclear arsenals among the existing powers, the open discussion of proliferation to new state actors, and the erosion of treaties and taboos on use of nuclear weapons are all deeply concerning. I find the hypersonic missiles particularly disturbing. These are being used in active, hot wars between nuclear powers – between Russia and NATO’s proxy Ukraine, and between Israel and Iran. We also hear that China has developed these weapons. Missiles are scary to begin with, but what is very, very scary is that these seem to be nuclear capable missiles and they are being actively used in hot wars between nuclear powers right now. If there are only a few minutes of warning when they are incoming, and they effectively can’t be pre-empted or intercepted, how does anyone know for sure that they are not nuclear armed before they hit their targets? So far, it seems like all sides are waiting for missiles to hit before we confirm they are not nuclear missiles. What if a state actor decides they can’t afford to wait and see and considers a pre-emptive strike? China and Iran have no-first-strike policies. The United States does not, and here is a fun fact – the SOVIET UNION had a no-first-strike policy, but modern Russia does not. Just to heap a little more sunshine on this topic, the rapid collapse of Syria, an aspiring nuclear power at one point, made me wonder if something similar could happen in Pakistan. And there is always the prospect of nuclear terrorism, particularly frightening when combined with extremist ideologies that glorify suicide and mass killing of civilians. It is easy to imagine horrible scenarios for all mankind on this one – but again, it is a risk that hasn’t materialized and can be managed. And it actually seems like a simpler, more tractable problem to me than complicated scenarios like climate change. Nuclear weapons are in the hands of relatively few leaders, and there is plenty of precedent for what arms control treaties and risk reduction measures can look like. Courageous leaders can step up on this issue – where are you guys?

Climate change. Let’s continue my little happy pep talk on existential threats. The climate change crisis is biting our civilization right now, and not only that, we are in the middle of it, not the beginning, and it is accelerating every day. This is the physical and socioeconomic reality, while our human civilization’s perception of reality let alone willingness and ability to act lag far behind. This is starting to feel like a story that will not and cannot end well. It is starting to bite our cities in the form of floods and fires, and this is well before relentless sea level rise really starts to bite in a significant way. Another place it will gradually start to bite harder, if it has not already, is food prices and eventually the physical food supply. As much as we have whined about food prices here in the U.S., the rise has been much worse in developing countries. And everything I just said is about the slow, steady, but relentless changes in the climate we have been experiencing and have to expect we will keep experiencing, at a minimum. The small piece of good news here is that if we took action immediately, we would start to see improvement in the trends immediately, rather than having to wait for some lag period to pass. My understanding of this has changed in the past year, and this is something positive. BUT what if rapid, sudden changes are in store? Some of the most terrifying articles I highlighted in 2024 have to do with tipping points, also known as runaway trains. We know about the accelerating melting glaciers and ice sheets, and how a sudden collapse of ice could lead to catastrophic and sudden sea level rise. We are seeing sudden rises in atmospheric methane concentrations – there seems to be some chance that this is the beginning of a feedback loop where frozen soil and seafloor sediments release methane bubbles as they thaw, which leads to more warming, which leads to more thawing, which leads to more warming and so on in a catastrophic exponential feedback loop that can’t be stopped on any time scale meaningful to humans. I hope we are not looking back a few years from now and concluding 2024 was the year that kicked this off. Now for some very small positive words – no matter how long our human political leaders dither and delay and fail, it is never too late to take actions that will make the outcome less bad than it could have been. Think about the reverse – if you were going to purposely try to make the situation as bad a possible, you could do things that would make it worse (like take all energy production back to coal). So past failure is never an excuse to stop trying, it is truly never too late to do better, even if our lack of effective action to date has closed off certain positive outcomes forever.

Bird flu. Continuing the doom and gloom theme, a major pandemic with a high mortality rate is clearly another existential threat we face. It could come from a natural source, a laboratory accident, or an intentional act. The risk of the latter will grow as biotechnology continues to progress and, unlike nuclear weapons, becomes more accessible to the masses. It’s like a major flood or earthquake. It will happen sooner or later. There are things we can do to limit the damage and to recover more quickly when it does happen, and we are probably not doing enough. The current strain of bird flu is concerning as it continues to devastate wild and domestic birds around the world, has spread extensively to domestic cows, there are some reports it has spread to pigs, and it has spread to some humans supposedly through direct contact with animals. Now having said all that, 2025 is probably not the year we get a devastating pandemic flu. Every year is probably not the year, because this is a low probability event in any given year that becomes highly probable over a long period of time. So the thing to do is stay calm and prepare. I actually have some hope that the vaccine technology that was rapidly scaled up and commercialized during Covid-19 will help us when the pandemic flu does hit. Let’s hope it’s not this year or any time during the next four years when we cannot expect to have competent leadership in the United States.

Artificial Intelligence. I suppose I have to say something about it. Well, I can’t recall in my lifetime any technology exploding exponentially into widespread commercial and public use in just over a year from its first announcement. You could almost describe it as…a singularity? Well not quite, but an ongoing exponential growth with no end in site, which is how a singularity would begin. Now, the downside is the sudden, massive, and completely unexpected energy demand this is causing, to the point that recently retired nuclear plants are being turned back on. I joked that AI might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox, where every civilization in the cosmos advanced enough to develop this technology wipes itself out by fouling its own nest when it tries to generate the energy required. I don’t believe this though – given that it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where nuclear fission based energy was scaled up in a serious way, and/or space based solar energy was scaled up in a serious way, and fusion based energy looking at least somewhat plausible, it does not seem like a foregone conclusion that we humans here on Earth had to foul our nest. This does not mean there is hope for us, it just means that there might be hope in a galaxy far, far away or in a billion of them too far away for us to see.

AI Agents. Now, as we foul our nest over the next few decades, there is the question of where AI goes in the next few months and years. And one big thing, I think, that is going to change our lives pretty quick is AI agents. We don’t really have AI going out and actively engaging in communications and transactions on our behalf on a large scale yet. But this has to be happening behind the scenes, and it has to happen in an obvious public way pretty soon. Imagine if I asked an AI to keep track of what one of my elected representatives is doing each day, read and summarize legislation they vote for or against, and just explain it to me in an easily digestible way for five minutes a day. Now imagine my AI is talking to my representative’s AI, and everyone else’s AIs are doing that, and giving the AI a summary of what all these AIs are thinking. That sounds pretty democratic right? But now imagine AIs from companies and governments are trying to manipulate all of us to buy things and believe things and do things they want us to do. Now imagine ALL THESE AIs ARE TALKING AND TRANSACTING WITH EACH OTHER, ALL THE TIME, AND THEY NEVER GET TIRED OR NEED A BREAK. It gets dizzying pretty quick.

Competing Feedback Loops. AI has definitely increased my personal productivity in writing computer programs and communicating the results in the past year. This must be happening on a large scale, at least it certain types of jobs. On the other hand, the IMF tells us worldwide productivity has slowed down since the 2009 financial crisis and was made worse by the Covid-19 crisis. There are also continuing headwinds like aging populations and falling fertility rates in many developed countries. How can both these things be true, an acceleration of productivity and a slowdown of productivity? The way I think about it, they are competing feedback loops, kind of like the faucet in your bathtub being on while at the same time there is no drain plug. Whether your tub is filling up or draining down depends on the relative strength of the positive and negative feedback loops. And unlike your bathtub, both are changing in time and subject to random shocks. So it could go either way – civilization could be going down the drain, the technological singularity might be imminent, or the two could be close to balance so it seems like nothing is happening for a long time, until one of them gets the upper hand. These are not the only feedback loops of course – the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises are also in the mix and since these are negative, we have to really hope that AI faucet is wide open, or find a stopper for the drain, or some combination of the two. We don’t have many world leaders working on the stopper thing right now, many are trying to drill baby drill an even bigger hole.

Biotechnology. AI seems likely to accelerate the progress of biotechnology, leading toward both medical breakthroughs (universal vaccines, cures for cancer and diabetes) and increasing risks of accidents and terrorism. Its hard to predict when these things will hit the news – progress is slow and steady for a long time, and then a technology will seem to burst onto the public scene all at once. Sometimes there is a big hype bubble that reaches a peak and seems to explode, and then while the public assumes the technology is dead, the slow and steady progress toward widespread commercialization resumes and eventually takes hold of the entire system. And then we shrug, forget the past, and assume we knew it was coming all along.

Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles. The U.S. government might be throwing up some headwinds to technological progress (i.e., doing their best to usher in a dark age not a “golden age”), but the global socioeconomic and scientific systems that drive technological progress are much too big to be constrained by the U.S. government. While many in the U.S. may have the impression that the electric vehicle revolution has stalled, it is forging ahead in Asia and around the world. China is building cars for $10,000, and nobody else (Japan, Korea, or Tesla let alone Detroit) can figure out how to compete with this. I suspect one driver of the protectionist impulse in the U.S. is fear that we have no chance of competing, so our government is willing to imprison us in a bubble of outdated technology at uncompetitive prices, and if they can’t outright restrict information about the outside world from getting in, they will use propaganda to distort that information so we don’t understand what we are missing. It’s like the Soviet Union, or worse, North Korea. We are certainly not as far behind as the Soviet Union or North Korea relative to our peers yet, but this is the path we are headed down. Similarly to electric vehicles, we are hearing from our media that autonomous vehicle technology has stalled or under-delivered or is risky (it’s not, by any rational measure compared to the massive death and suffering caused by human-driven vehicles). But this technology has in fact arrived, just arrived unevenly in certain cities in the U.S. and around the world, and our government policy is slowing its spread for example with policies that do not allow autonomous vehicles on highways. These two technologies – electric and autonomous vehicles – have to combine and reinforce each other sooner or later, and this will change a lot of things about how our cities and infrastructure are configured in the future. It’s hard to give a timetable, but I bet if you go to a leading edge city in China, Korea, or Japan a decade from now these technologies will be everywhere and it will seem like science fiction to a U.S. traveler who has been kept in the dark about the state of the outside world as our once world-leading country has stagnated.

Inequality and the Wealth Pump. I hadn’t heard the term “wealth pump” before reading Peter Turchin in 2024, but it rings true. Wealth and income inequality is just the elephant in the room behind the 2024 U.S. election and many other geopolitical trends around the world. It is getting worse in the U.S., and it is not going to get better as long as the wealthy and powerful are able to continue rigging the rules of the system more and more in their favor. The pain of the masses is very real. And Donald Trump may have found rhetoric that taps into this pain, but his administration is certainly not going to make the situation better. But nor has the Democratic Party shown any signs of making the situation better. They may tinker with some marginal policy changes that slow the trend (for example, the short-lived increase in tax credits to offset childcare expenses, some steps to slow the rise of prescription drug prices) but do not reverse it (for example, creating real childcare, education, and health care benefits that reach the vast majority of working citizens). Bernie Sanders is the only U.S. politician who has spoken authentically to the people about these issues in recent memory, and he reached a lot of people although not quite enough when the established Democratic Party did everything they could to sabotage him. There is also the problem of half a century of very effective anti-tax propaganda that is very hard to overcome. But still, I believe Bernie showed us the way. The Democrats need to embrace the man and his policies, and find him a true protege or several to choose from who are able to speak with his authenticity and maybe a bit more youth and charisma. Trump is all but guaranteed to fuck up massively over the next four years, so the question is will the Democrats let his propaganda machine convince us to blame scapegoats or will they be ready?

Government of the Fools, By the Fools, For the Fools, and Where’s Waldo? Before January 20, 2025 it was clear to me that the U.S. will be governed by fools and amateurs for the next four years. And this alone is sad because it will lead to our continued stagnation and at least relative decline while peer countries are moving into the future. It is also dangerous because the nation might be able to muddle through while there is nothing unusual going on, but fools, amateurs and clowns are not going to prepare or respond effectively to emergencies, disasters, and unexpected events. Four years is a long enough time that some unexpected events should be expected. We can only hope they are not too far out in the tails. But as I write this on January 23, 2025, it seems even worse. Trump is a fool, but a very powerful and dangerous fool, and at least some of the people whispering in his ear are evil cruel-hearted psychopaths, sadists, and outright devils. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, because Hitler believed in things (evil, twisted things) whereas I think Trump is a pure psychopath who believes in nothing and is willing to say or do anything he thinks will increase his own power. But who are the Heydrichs, Himmlers, and Goebbels among his supporters? I am not sure, but whoever they are they are hiding in plain site in a crowd of clowns and fools where they are hard to pick out. It’s time to play a little Where’s Waldo.

Welcome to 2025!

And that is all the sunshine and light I have to offer you here in this January 2025. If you are a human being reading this in close to real time, happy 2025 and may it be better than expected, which is not a high bar at all! If you are an alien archaeologist reading this in the far future, I hope it helps you make sense of the rubble of our civilization. If you are a transhuman reading it after the singularity in the near future (I heard October 2029 according to Ray Kurzweil’s latest prediction?), I hope you are laughing that the problems that seemed so dire to me in January 2025 had solutions just around the corner!

high, high, highway construction costs

U.S. infrastructure construction cost woes stem largely from lack of competition in the construction industry and diseconomies of scale among public agencies procuring the work. I think I am using the latter term right. Very large agencies and projects are going to get better deals than smaller ones. This is somewhat of an iron law of economics, but you might be able to get around it somewhat by bundling smaller projects into larger packages and by getting larger agencies (like the federal government) more directly involved.

The former (lack of competition) is tricky. Architecture, engineering, and construction is generally not a high-profit industry, and it is a pretty high-risk industry. This all pushes towards a few large firms bidding on large projects where they can make a few pennies on a large volume. The construction industry just hasn’t made much in the way of productivity gains in the last half century either, while labor costs have been rising.

You could help solve the competition problem by allowing foreign firms in, and you could help solve the labor cost problem (from the contractors’ point of view) by letting foreign workers in. Both of these things are politically tough in the U.S.

This article in the blog Boondoggle does a pretty good job of summarizing the report in an understandable way, but it also attacks “high price consultants”. Being part of the engineering consultant industry for many years, I feel a need to push back on this a bit. Labor costs at these firms are high too, profit margins are also pretty slim, and there actually is a lot a competition in this industry. When public agencies hire a consulting firm, the price they see includes everything – the actual product of course and the employees’ salaries, but also all the employee benefits, project management, administrative, financial, and legal costs the firm has to bear, plus the taxes it has to pay. Finally, yes, a few pennies of profit on top of all that, and some money spent on marketing to the next batch of customers. When portions of a project are subcontracted, all those administrative costs get repeated at each level of the food chain. So yes, this adds of to a lot of administrative costs, and it would be great to trim them (maybe some hope for AI on this one longer term?), but the fact is that if the public agency tries to do the work with their own staff, they have almost all of these same costs, and they are typically going to be significantly higher. But people often compare only the labor and construction cost borne by the public agency to the entire cost of business borne by the private firm, which is not a fair comparison. And especially at smaller public agencies, they just aren’t going to have the capacity or expertise to do all the work in-house, which is exactly the gap the consulting industry has sprung up to fill.

So to summarize, here are some ideas:

  • Allow foreign firms and foreign workers to participate, especially in industries where it is clear competition is limited and skilled labor supply is tight. You could also try to train and equip more Americans with the skills needed and encourage formation of more firms, in theory.
  • Aggregate smaller projects and public agencies into larger ones to make them more attractive for firms to bid on. Get larger state and federal agencies involved in the procurement process where possible.
  • Turn on the research and development funding fire hose to make progress on the construction productivity problem. AI, materials science, and prefabrication of more components are all ideas being bandied about. This also gets money into the academic and research institutions which creates skills and capacity for our society.
  • Do I even need to say this? Have government provide health care and other benefits other countries are providing their citizens, and relieve this burden on our private firms so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do.

those f-ed up spreadsheets

I’ve seen a lot of fucked up spreadsheets in my time. In fact, you could probably say most spreadsheets contain errors, and this article confirms it. Nonetheless, quality control procedures that apply to other types of software (and spreadsheets are a very useful kind of software because they are very powerful and have an easy learning curve, which is also their downfall) can and should be adapted to spreadsheets. One of the most important ones (which really applies to any program or project) is to begin the quality control process in the planning and concept development phase.

Spreadsheet quality assurance: a literature review

Spreadsheets are very common for information processing to support decision making by both professional developers and non-technical end users. Moreover, business intelligence and artificial intelligence are increasingly popular in the industry nowadays, where spreadsheets have been used as, or integrated into, intelligent or expert systems in various application domains. However, it has been repeatedly reported that faults often exist in operational spreadsheets, which could severely compromise the quality of conclusions and decisions based on the spreadsheets. With a view to systematically examining this problem via survey of existing work, we have conducted a comprehensive literature review on the quality issues and related techniques of spreadsheets over a 35.5-year period (from January 1987 to June 2022) for target journals and a 10.5-year period (from January 2012 to June 2022) for target conferences. Among other findings, two major ones are: (a) Spreadsheet quality is best addressed throughout the whole spreadsheet life cycle, rather than just focusing on a few specific stages of the life cycle. (b) Relatively more studies focus on spreadsheet testing and debugging (related to fault detection and removal) when compared with spreadsheet specification, modeling, and design (related to development). As prevention is better than cure, more research should be performed on the early stages of the spreadsheet life cycle. Enlightened by our comprehensive review, we have identified the major research gaps as well as highlighted key research directions for future work in the area.

What would a real “conservative” agenda look like?

I consider myself a “liberal” to the extent that I think we need major expansion of the social safety net to minimize human suffering and support working families in our country. But let’s say I took a purely rational, “conservative” view. What might that entail?

  1. A level playing field. High inheritance taxes followed by redistribution using baby bonds or something similar. A public education system that spends the same amount and provides the same opportunities per student, regardless of location or background of the students. It would entail making it much easier for a second spouse to work or start a business, which would mean guaranteed childcare and health care benefits for all.
  2. A relentless focus on job skills, innovation and productivity growth. This would mean major and equitable investments in education from preschool through college. It would mean big government investments in basic research, not favoring those with military applications. It would also mean subsidies for companies to invest in research and development and skills development for the workforce. It would mean a rational immigration policy focused on letting in those with job skills that add value to our national economy.
  3. A relentless focus on competition. This would mean vigorous anti-trust enforcement and punishment of price fixing attempts.