Results for “water” 1132 found
Brian Potter on what he has learned writing Construction Physics
- Individual construction tasks have, on average, not gotten cheaper since at least the 1950s.
- Bricks haven’t gotten cheaper since the mid-19th century, despite massive improvements in brickmaking technology.
- Construction has a reputation for being slow to innovate, but innovations seem to spread in construction at roughly similar rates to other industries, like car manufacturing or agriculture.
- Single family homes use less energy per square foot than multifamily apartments, likely because certain “fixed” energy costs like refrigerators and water heaters are spread across more living space.
- Historically high US homebuilding rates were in large part driven by falling household size. If you control for this factor, the current low rates of US homebuilding looks less dire.
Noting that his numbering scheme has those as 9-13, though it will not let me edit to such. Here is the full link.
Subterranean sentences to ponder
But the fact that it’s commonplace is precisely why Earth’s subsurface biosphere is so compelling. Mud is everywhere, which means it is important. If you add up the total amount of mud underneath all the worlds’s oceans, you come up with a volume equivalent to about the entire Atlantic Ocean. And, per cubic meter, there are 100 to 100,000 times more microbial cells in mud than there are in seawater. That means that there’s so much intraterrestrial life in the subsurface that it’s hard to even fathom it. The total amount of microbial cells in the marine sediment subsurface is estimated to be 2.9 x 10 [to the 29th] cells. This is about 10,000 times more than the estimated number of stars in the universe. But that’s not the whole subsurface. You’d have to at least double this number to include the microbial cells living deep underneath the land. And some of these cells may have found pockets where the food is more abundant than the average location, so more cells can live there than our models predict. For these reasons, the actual number of microbial cells in the subsurface biosphere is certain to be much higher than our current estimates.
That is from the new and interesting IntraTerrestrtials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, by Karen G Lloyd.
Five insights from farm animal economics
By Martin Gould, here is one excerpt:
Halting plans for a large, polluting factory farm feels like a clear win — no ammonia-laden air burning residents’ lungs, no waste runoff contaminating local drinking water, and seemingly fewer animals suffering in industrial confinement. But that last assumption deserves scrutiny. What protects one community might actually condemn more animals to worse conditions elsewhere.
Consider the UK: Local groups celebrate blocking new chicken farms. But because UK chicken demand keeps growing — it rose 24% from 2012-2022 — the result of fewer new UK chicken farms is just that the UK imports more chicken: it almost doubled its chicken imports over the same time period. While most chicken imported into the UK comes from the EU, where conditions for chickens are similar, a growing share comes from Brazil and Thailand, where regulations are nonexistent. Blocking local farms may slightly reduce demand via higher prices, but it also risks sentencing animals to worse conditions abroad.
The same problem haunts government welfare reforms — stronger standards in one country can just shift production to places with worse standards. But advocates are getting smarter about this. They’re pushing for laws that tackle both production and imports at once. US states like California have done this — when it banned battery cages, it also banned selling eggs from hens caged anywhere. The EU is considering the same approach. It’s a crucial shift: without these import restrictions, both farm bans and welfare reforms risk exporting animal suffering to places with even worse conditions. And advocates have prioritized corporate policies, which avoid this problem, as companies pledge to stop selling products associated with the worst animal suffering (like caged eggs), regardless of where they are produced.
What Follows from Lab Leak?
Does it matter whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab in Wuhan or had natural zoonotic origins? I think on the margin it does matter.
First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic.* Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or high-tech. Modifying viruses such as coronaviruses (e.g., inserting spike proteins, adapting receptor-binding domains) is common practice in virology research and gain-of-function experiments with viruses have been widely conducted. Thus, manufacturing a virus capable of killing ~20 million human beings or more is well within the capability of say ~500-1000 labs worldwide. The number of such labs is growing in number and such research is becoming less costly and easier to conduct. Thus, lab-leak means the risks are larger than we thought and increasing.
A higher probability of a pandemic raises the value of many ideas that I and others have discussed such as worldwide wastewater surveillance, developing vaccine libraries and keeping vaccine production lines warm so that we could be ready to go with a new vaccine within 100 days. I want to focus, however, on what new ideas are suggested by lab-leak. Among these are the following.
Given the risks, a “Biological IAEA” with similar authority as the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct unannounced inspections at high-containment labs does not seem outlandish. (Indeed the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are about the only people to have begun to study the issue of pandemic lab risk.) Under the Biological Weapons Convention such authority already exists but it has never been used for inspections–mostly because of opposition by the United States–and because the meaning of biological weapon is unclear, as pretty much everything can be considered dual use. Notice, however, that nuclear weapons have killed ~200,000 people while accidental lab leak has probably killed tens of millions of people. (And COVID is not the only example of deadly lab leak.) Thus, we should consider revising the Biological Weapons Convention to something like a Biological Dangers Convention.
BSL3 and especially BSL4 safety procedures are very rigorous, thus the issue is not primarily that we need more regulation of these labs but rather to make sure that high-risk research isn’t conducted under weaker conditions. Gain of function research of viruses with pandemic potential (e.g. those with potential aerosol transmissibility) should be considered high-risk and only conducted when it passes a review and is done under BSL3 or BSL4 conditions. Making this credible may not be that difficult because most scientists want to publish. Thus, journals should require documentation of biosafety practices as part of manuscript submission and no journal should publish research that was done under inappropriate conditions. A coordinated approach among major journals (e.g., Nature, Science, Cell, Lancet) and funders (e.g. NIH, Wellcome Trust) can make this credible.
I’m more regulation-averse than most, and tradeoffs exist, but COVID-19’s global economic cost—estimated in the tens of trillions—so vastly outweighs the comparatively minor cost of upgrading global BSL-2 labs and improving monitoring that there is clear room for making everyone safer without compromising research. Incredibly, five years after the crisis and there has be no change in biosafety regulation, none. That seems crazy.
Many people convinced of lab leak instinctively gravitate toward blame and reparations, which is understandable but not necessarily productive. Blame provokes defensiveness, leading individuals and institutions to obscure evidence and reject accountability. Anesthesiologists and physicians have leaned towards a less-punitive, systems-oriented approach. Instead of assigning blame, they focus in Morbidity and Mortality Conferences on openly analyzing mistakes, sharing knowledge, and redesigning procedures to prevent future harm. This method encourages candid reporting and learning. At its best a systems approach transforms mistakes into opportunities for widespread improvement.
If we can move research up from BSL2 to BSL3 and BSL4 labs we can also do relatively simple things to decrease the risks coming from those labs. For example, let’s not put BSL4 labs in major population centers or in the middle of a hurricane prone regions. We can also, for example, investigate which biosafety procedures are most effective and increase research into safer alternatives—such as surrogate or simulation systems—to reduce reliance on replication-competent pathogens.
The good news is that improving biosafety is highly tractable. The number of labs, researchers, and institutions involved is relatively small, making targeted reforms feasible. Both the United States and China were deeply involved in research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suggesting at least the possibility of cooperation—however remote it may seem right now.
Shared risk could be the basis for shared responsibility.
Bayesian addendum *: A higher probability of a lab-leak should also reduce the probability of zoonotic origin but the latter is an already known risk and COVID doesn’t add much to our prior while the former is new and so the net probability is positive. In other words, the discovery of a relatively new source of risk increases our estimate of total risk.
Maui is Not Abundant
City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000.
Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were overcome only last month. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared the final lots on February 19, while the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that a $4 billion settlement for victims can begin to move forward.
The main challenge now is dealing with a crushing permitting regime that slows or outright bans construction. But local political dysfunction has discouraged state and local leaders from taking emergency action to cut through this red tape.
Many of the buildings are illegal to rebuild under the current zoning laws. CA at least exempted reconstruction from California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and Coastal Waters Act review.
My first trip to Haiti
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, rather the option simply was not part of my mental toolkit.
But somehow I started thinking about visiting Haiti. It seemed like it would be the most dangerous place I could possibly choose. I had this recurring mental image that I could not even set out on the street without someone coming along and cutting off one of my arms with a machete.
And so I bought my ticket. I suppose I viewed this as a kind of challenge. I also knew that if it went OK, I would end up going to a lot of other places as well.
Not long before the trip, I was on the phone with my friend Christopher Weber, the renowned investor, writer, and Offenbach scholar. I mentioned I was going and next thing you know Chris, being a “bounder of adventure,” was coming along with me.
I arrived in Haiti first. As I walked into the baggage and pick-up area of the airport (lovely live compa music), some men immediately grabbed my bags and took them from me. “Uh-oh.” In fact they brought them to the cab and wanted a tip, and they didn’t want anyone else carrying my bags first. High-trust oases in low-trust countries remains a very interesting topic to me, to this day.
I stayed in Pétion-Ville, the wealthier “suburb” of Port-au-Prince, known for its restaurants and nightlife, and I loved the place. The food, music, and art were all amazing, and they were everywhere. You could find interesting artwork on many of the street corners and for very low prices. A known artist might be selling a work for $200. I bought a political satire piece by Maxan Jean-Louis entitled “Aristide’s Wedding,” showing his semi-forced alliance with the United States military. I also bought “Soccer Angels” by the great Jean-Baptiste Jean, and a Claude d’Ambreville painting of women with basket on their heads, now a Haitian standard. That set me off buying art.
The architecture was amazing — think a more elaborate New Orleans style — but very badly ailing, you could even say collapsing.
My favorite dishes were the “combie hash,” the Dinde (a small turkey, best I have had), and the seafood mixing French and Caribbean influences. The tender conch (lambi) is arguably the Haitian national dish. The rice and beans cooked in mushroom juice was another delight, totally new to me. At the time it was obviously the best food in the Caribbean.
My arms remained intact, and walking around Petitionville required some basic caution but did not feel dangerous. Furthermore, the population at that time was hopeful for the future, so it felt very good to be there. The storytellers communicated an appropriate sense of drama.
After a day of walking around, Chris and I rented a car, which was in retrospect an unsound thing to do. We drove to Moulin Sur Mer, a “resort” on the ocean, originally an 18th century sugar plantation. Only a few other people were staying there and one of them appeared to be a Dominican drug lord family. Inside one of the buildings was a list of all the Haitian presidents, and at times the rate is about one leader per year — “model this.” I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.
The water was lovely, but the drive to and from Moulin Sur Mer was not uneventful. On the way back, at a service station, a man pulled a submachine gun on Chris and asked for a rather favorable exchange rate on our gasoline purchase. Another man ran at the car and tried to jump on the roof as we drove past. I still am not sure whether he wanted to commandeer the vehicle or simply was looking for a free bus ride (Haitians frequently ride on the tops of their buses).
In any case we pressed on, and it didn’t all seem that dangerous after all. I went away vowing to return, and indeed over the years I was to make four more trips to Haiti, as it became one of my favorite countries. The next time I went I met Selden and Carole Rodman in the line boarding the flight from Miami, and that was to change my life yet again…
Visiting the New Jersey shore
Did you know that the rest of the country (world?) calls it “the beach”? New Jerseyans call it “the shore.” (Why?)
While growing up, my mother would take my sister and me to the New Jersey shore for a week, each summer. My father would drive down and visit, but he was too much of a workaholic and too antsy to stay for long.
One of the first things you learn, living in The Great NJ, is that each and every town has its own identity. It feels quite different from the next town over, and has an individualized history and often a quite different ethnic mix. Before I knew any other social science, I learned that place really matters. And hovering at the horizon is the NYC skyline, a regular reminder that things can change rather quickly once you cross a line, in this case taking a bus across a river. I started thinking about “invisible borders” seriously and at a young age. Later, in high school, the kids were from either Hillsdale (my town), or from River Vale, one town over. We thought of them as the “wuss kids.”
So just about everyone is a regional thinker, and in New Jersey your “region” refers to your town or maybe county, not to the state.
This importance of place is true of shore towns as well. We spent time in various locales:
Asbury Park: This was early on, and I barely have memories of it. We decided it was “a dump,” and had seen better days. It had once been a glamour spot of sorts, with dance halls and gazebos. Later in life I would go back there for some of the older architecture, Bruce Springsteen landmarks, and Puerto Rican food.
Ocean Grove: The place we went when we were young. This town has fantastic Victorian homes, and an unusual role in the American history of religious revival camps. Holly and called it an “old people’s town.” Plus there was no boardwalk and everything was closed on Sundays. The ocean was wonderful and the walks were easy, but we always wanted to be somewhere else.
Point Pleasant: I haven’t been in so long, but I think of this as one of the most typical and representative of New Jersey shore towns. Holly and I were OK with this place.
Seaside Heights: This for us was the best, especially for my sister. It had lots of other young people, an active, retro-flavored boardwalk (I loved that game where you throw the ball up and try to have it land in the right slots for points), and the ocean water seemed rougher in a fun way. Eventually we settled on going here each year. Later the setting for Jersey Shore, the TV show.
I also went to some chess tournaments in Atlantic City (pre-gambling, quite run down), where I did very well, and when we were all grown we would meet up in Spring Lake, which is perhaps the actual nice shore town. Belmar and Cape May also received earlier visits, and we would stop for root beer in Toms River.
Even in the early days it was exciting to drive from one town to the next, like in Europe crossing from Germany into Luxembourg.
I did a lot of reading on the beach, for instance tackling both LOTR and Karl Popper’s Open Society books. In later years, Holly would be off with friends, and my mother and I would drive around, listening to Beatle songs on a weird 8-track tape that split up the songs when it changed tracks.
So early on I learned the idea of “local travel,” namely that a nearby trip can be no less fascinating. I consider that one of the most important practical ideas you can imbibe, along with “regional thinker.” I got them both quite young, and in a very convincing fashion.
The political economy of Manus AI
Early reports are pretty consistent, and they indicate that Manus agentic AI is for real, and ahead of its American counterparts. I also hear it is still glitchy Still, it is easy to imagine Chinese agentic AI “getting there” before the American product does. If so, what does that world look like?
The cruder way of putting the question is: “are we going to let Chinese agentic bots crawl all over American computers?”
The next step question is: “do we in fact have a plausible way to stop this from happening?”
Many Chinese use VPNs to get around their own Great Firewall and access OpenAI products. China could toughen its firewall and shut down VPNs, but that is very costly for them. America doesn’t have a Great Firewall at all, and the First Amendment would seem to prevent very tough restrictions on accessing the outside world. Plus there can always be a version of the new models not directly connected to China.
We did (sort of) pass a TikTok ban, but even that applied only to the app. Had the ban gone through, you still could have accessed TikTok through its website. And so, one way or another, Americans will be able to access Manus.
Manus will crawl your computer and do all sorts of useful tasks for you. If not right now, probably within a year or not much more. An American alternative might leapfrog them, but again maybe not.
It is easy to imagine government banning Manus from its computers, just as the state of Virginia banned DeepSeek from its computers. I’m just not sure that matters much. Plenty of people will use it on their private computers, and it could become an integral part of many systems, including systems that interact with the U.S. public sector.
It is not obvious that the CCP will be able to pull strings to manipulate every aspect of Manus operations. I am not worried that you might order a cheeseburger on-line, and end up getting Kung Pao chicken. Still, the data collected by the parent company will in principle be CCP- accessible. Remember that advanced AI can be used to search through that information with relative ease. And over time, though probably not initially, you can imagine a Manus-like entity designed to monitor your computer for information relevant to China and the CCP. Even if it is not easy for a Manus-like entity to manipulate your computer in a “body snatchers-like” way, you can see the points of concern here.
Financial firms might be vulnerable to information capture attacks. Will relatives of U.S. military personnel be forbidden from having agentic Chinese AI on their computers? That does not seem enforceable.
Maybe you’re all worried now!
But should you be?
Whatever problems American computer owners might face, Chinese computer owners will face too. And the most important Chinese computer owner is the CCP and its affiliates, including the military.
More likely, Manus will roam CCP computers too. No, I don’t think that puts “the aliens” in charge, but who exactly is in charge? Is it Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, and its few dozen employees? In the short run, yes, more or less. But they too over time are using more and more agentic AIs, perhaps different brands from other companies too.
Think of some new system of checks and balances as being created, much as an economy is itself a spontaneous order. And in this new spontaneous order, a lot of the cognitive capital is coming outside the CCP.
In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China? Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”? To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?
What exactly is the CCP any more?
Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?
I am not talking doomsday scenarios here. Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply. But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions. Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training. But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does? I doubt it. If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.
(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI. A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.” Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing? …But is it always a good thing?)
Does the CCP see this erosion of its authority and essence coming? If so, will they do anything to try to preempt it? Or maybe a few of them, in Straussian fashion, allow it or even accelerate it?
Let’s say China can indeed “beat” America at AI, but at the cost of giving up control over China, at least as that notion is currently understood. How does that change the world?
Solve for the equilibrium!
Who exactly should be most afraid of Manus and related advances to come?
Who loses the most status in the new, resulting checks and balances equilibrium?
Who gains?
Friday assorted links
1. Insightful Bob McGrew tweet on GPT 4.5. And Andrej. My remark from a group chat: “I am more positive on 4.5 than almost anyone else I have read. I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only. As we know from Kant’s third Critique, that is about the hardest achievement possible. I think once combined with “reasoning” it will be amazing. Think of this as just one input in a nearly fixed proportions production function.”
3. Hot hand in Jeopardy betting?
4. “We’re seeing an AI boom on Stripe.”
5. The pandemic drove a dating recession.
How the System Works
Charles Mann is worried that so few of us have any notion of the giant, interconnected systems that keep us alive and thriving. His new series, How the System Works at the The New Atlantis, is a primer to civilization. As you might expect from Mann, it’s beautifully written with arresting facts and images:
The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.
…Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.
Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives. Schools should be, but are not, teaching students why it is imperative to join this effort. Imagine a course devoted to how our country functions at its most basic level. I am a journalist who has been lucky enough to have learned something about the extraordinary mechanisms we have built since Jefferson’s day. In this series of four articles, I want to share some of the highlights of that imaginary course, which I have taken to calling “How the System Works.”
We begin with our species’ greatest need and biggest system — food.
and here’s one telling fact from the first essay:
Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
Addendum: Tom Meadowcroft from the comments: I teach chemical engineers, who are expert at understanding, designing and managing processes, and will be running many of these civilizational processes after they graduate. Even amongst that group of very bright thinkers, there is remarkably little knowledge as to how we achieve clean water, reliable electricity, fuel for transport and industry, dispose of sewage, and grow and distribute food. These same young adults can all tell you about colonial mindsets, how the world is going to burn, and how various groups are victimized. Our K-12 education system has very warped priorities and remarkably ignorant people at the front of the classroom.
Lift the Ban on Supersonics: No Boom
Boom, the supersonic startup, has announced that their new jet reaches supersonic speeds but without creating much of an audible boom. How so? According to CEO Blake Scholl:
It’s actually well-known physics called Mach cutoff. When an aircraft breaks the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude, the boom refracts in the atmosphere and curls upward without reaching the ground. It makes a U-turn before anyone can hear it. Mach cutoff physics is a theoretical capability on some military supersonic aircraft; now XB-1 has proven it with airliner-ready technology. Just as a light ray bends as it goes through a glass of water, sound rays bend as they go through media with varying speeds of sound. Speed of sound varies with temperature… and temperature varies with altitude. With colder temperatures aloft, sonic booms bend upward. This means that sonic booms can make a U-turn in the atmosphere without ever touching the ground. The height of the U varies—with the aircraft speed, with atmospheric temperature gradient, and with winds.
….Boomless Cruise requires engines powerful enough to break the sound barrier at an altitude high enough that the boom has enough altitude to U- turn. And realtime weather and powerful algorithms to predict the boom propagation precisely.
Here is the crazy part. Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonic aircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.
If you ban supersonic aircraft, the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft won’t exist. A ban will make technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
When we ban a new technology we have to think not just about the costs and benefits of a ban today but about the costs and benefits on the entire glide path of the technology.
In short, we must build to build better. We stopped building and so it has taken more than 50 years to get better. Not learning, by not doing.
In 2018 Congress directed the FAA:
..to exercise leadership in the creation of Federal and international policies, regulations, and standards relating to the certification and safe and efficient operation of civil supersonic aircraft.
But, aside from tidying up some regulations related to testing, the FAA hasn’t done much to speed up progress. I’d like to see the new administration move forthwith to lift the ban on supersonic aircraft. We have been moving too slow.
Addendum: Elon says it will happen.
New York City fact and poetic passage of the day
If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas, of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
That is from the new and fun book by Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America.
Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean winners, sixth cohort
Maya Chouikrat, Algeria, to support training for an international olympiad of informatics team.
Mercy Muwanguzi and Kwesiga Pather, Uganda, for sanitation robotics to be used in medical centers.
Johan Fourie, South Africa, Professor of Economics at Stellenbosch University, to write a graphics novel on classical liberalism in a South African context.
Ken Opalo, Associate Professor, Georgetown University, for blogging on African economic development.
Katharine Patterson, Botswana, to support graduate internship in robotics research at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Cyril Narh, Ghana, for general career development.
Jon Ortega, travel grant to Silicon Valley.
Alex Kyabarongo, Uganda, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Makerere University, to pursue graduate school in the USA for biosecurity.
Joshua Regrello, Trinidad and Tobago, first Steelpannist to perform on the Great Wall of China, Guinness Record Holder for longest steelpan performance, for general career development.
Liam O’Dea, London/Argentina, data science research into parliamentary records of the Caribbean for the last 200 years.
Joshua Payne, undergrad at University of Chicago, for research into mRNA vaccine optimisation, and career development.
Abdoulaye Faye, Senegal, developing Catyu, a firm that designs remotely operated robots.
Devaron Bruce, Barbados, PhD candidate at UWI, to support research in political reform in the Caribbean.
Tony Odhiambo, Kenya, undergrad at MIT, for enhanced training of top performers in mathematics olympiads in Kenya.
Sebastian Naranjo, Panama, PhD candidate at Renmin University of China, to support research on the diplomatic relations of China in Central America.
Ivoine Strachan, Bahamas, for research into designing and developing a VR bodysuit
Phumiani Majozi, South Africa, to establish a think tank promoting classical liberalism in South Africa
Pearl Karungi, Rwanda, for research into redesigning menstrual products.
Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigeria, Microbiologist, to support visiting research at the University of Waterloo in phage therapies.
Youhana Nassif, Egypt, to support an animation and arts showcase in Cairo.
Frida Andalu, Tanzania, to support visiting research in petroleum engineering at the University of Aberdeen.
Rupert Tawiah-Quashie, Ghana, to support his research internship at Harvard University concerning symbolic reasoning in AI models.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for his excellent work on this, and again Nabeel has created excellent software to help organize the list of winners, using AI.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV African and the Caribbean announcement is here and you can see previous cohorts here. If you are interested in supporting this tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Rasheed.
Why northern England is poor
In at least six Conversations with Tyler, Tyler Cowen asks his interviewee why they think North England is poor. I don’t think he gets good enough answers, which is why I guess he keeps asking.
So here is a better explanation of why North England is poor with a bonus explanation of why so many Britons think much less of Margaret Thatcher’s Premiership than he and his guests do. It is a heavily simplified and selective story, but I think it tells the key parts of how North England fell from being the birthplace of the industrial revolution and among the richest places in the world two centuries ago to being an economy substantially lagging everywhere else in Northern Europe today.
The North’s economic decline is made even clearer when it is compared to two near neighbours and far more prosperous counterfactuals. Scotland and Ireland, who have achieved greater independence within and from the United Kingdom, and whose success is awkwardly ignored and denied by the people responsible for the North’s decline, are today far stronger economies than North England.
I will publish my expansion of these points in detail as soon as I can, but for now I offer this summary,
1. The Norman conquest.
Since at least 1066, England has been ruled from the South East for the benefit of those who rule it and the places where they live and work.
2. Ban on Northern universities.
In the 1600’s, and for two centuries after, England and then Britain’s overwhelmingly and disproportionately Southern Parliament in Westminster rejected North English requests to establish universities in the North. The outsized influence of members representing Oxford and Cambridge and graduates of their universities played a big role in this. The Parliamentarian victory in the English civil war was working on the problem but the Monarchy was restored before Northern universities were established.
3. The industrial revolution.
The lack of universities in North England meant that the industrial revolution was heavily powered by Scottish science and largely occurred at a distance, both geographically and culturally, from London and Westminster. It was this distance that allowed North England to prosper through industry, despite constant effort by British national institutions in South East England to constrain their success. And it was the competition of ideas across that distance that led to great Northern social ideas such as Manchester Liberalism, an end to the Corn Laws and more free trade, professional sports, and a fairer democracy eventually triumphing nationally.
4. Universities were allowed too late.
North English universities, although quickly successful once they existed, were permitted too late (1880 for Manchester). They could not quickly enough achieve a critical mass of high-skill and elite institutions in North England that would help the economy to retain a technological advantage or transition to higher productivity service activities when Britain’s industrial advantage started to decline.
5. Grouping, nationalisation, and privatisation destroyed the North’s institutions.
North England’s strongest local institutions were born of the industrial revolution and included the railways and the municipal corporations. Alongside wealthy local industrialists municipal corporations built and municipalised gas, electricity, and water networks, healthcare, education, and social housing systems and much more. These service and assets were taken out of local control and run overwhelmingly from Westminster as they were grouped, nationalised, and privatised by UK governments of both left and right from the 1920s onward.
6. Thatcher and the end of competition of power.
The process of transferring assets and power from local government to central government or to the private sector (regulated by central government) was substantially completed under Thatcher. Major changes included the abolition of metropolitan county councils in the North’s great cities, the removal of most remaining local taxation powers, the removal from local control of the Mechanics’ Institutes and Polytechnics (the North’s locally-created alternative to the Universities they were denied during the early industrial revolution), the privatisation and deregulation of local bus services, and the introduction of right-to-buy forcing local governments to sell their largest asset base and source of income at well below market rates and give a portion of the proceeds to the central government.
Absent any of the protections against it that exist in the US constitution, Thatcher moved the British state past the French state into being the most centralised in the developed world. “You can just do things” is an emerging meme in the pro-growth community, but since Thatcher that has been largely untrue in North Engalnd. Most of the time, someone from central government will block you, if you succeed they will try and stop you, and if you continue succeeding they will subsidise your competitors.
7. Ultra-centralisation of the state.
Since Thatcher there has been no effective local counterbalance within England to the UK government’s power held in Westminster, no right for cities or regions within England to raise taxes to fund investment in growth, and no limit on the power of the UK central government to constrain growth in the North. The UK central government, backed by Britain’s national institutions, has intensified its preference for South East England. Britain’s government and institutions have moved Britain’s science and innovation from the rest of the country to the South East, focused on London, Oxford and Cambridge.
The central government, holding the monopoly power on such investment, has invested heavily in transport infrastructure in, around, and to London and almost nowhere else in England. The development of a competitive agglomeration to London in North England has been deliberately constrained almost continually. These patterns have deepened even while central governments claim to be focusing on regional investment. In the last fifteen years, while the UK government has claimed to be moving power out of Westminster it has centralised its civil service, centralised its investments in R&D and transport infrastructure, and moved an extra million employees from local government control to central government control.
8. A new generation of policy thinkers.
A new generation of British national policy thinkers, policy advisors, politicians, and custodians of Britain’s national institutions now live almost none of their lives outside of South East England. They rarely have a memory of, or interest in, an England that is not ruled overwhelmingly from the centre.
While arguing for growth today these people and their organisations repeat the mistakes that Thatcher cemented in British political economy thinking that a well-managed central monopoly on power is better than a competitive dispersal of power. They celebrate new scientific institutions in London such as ARIA that repeat — against strong evidence that it will not deliver greater returns in doing so — the centralisation in the South East of England of our national research capacity.
We are repeating today previous disasters for the North’s economy such as the relocation of Britain’s synchrotron to Oxford, the relocation of AstraZeneca to Cambridge and London, and the centralisation of biomedical research in South East England with the construction of The Crick Institute. Our institutions celebrate the creation of new organisations such as The Open Data Institute, Nesta, GDS, Tech City, and the AI Safety Institute that employ large numbers of well-paid people in the capital. At best these organisations allocate their money with preference to South East England and represent local interests as national objectives. At worst they actively oppose and shut down success elsewhere in the country.
This all happens largely without malice, though prejudice against people from “the regions”, while greatly reduced, remains rife within British high society. It is the result of England having forgotten, and — embarrassed by the comparative success of Ireland and Scotland having rejected this centralisation — not having taken the opportunity to remind themselves of the power of competition and markets in government.
There you go. Agree? No mention of behavioral factors? How would social indicators compare to the much poorer Kerala or Sri Lanka? And is Scotland, especially without subsidies, such an economic success?
Travis Fisher on electricity privatization (from my email)
I’m a long-time reader and first-time emailer. I just read your blog post from earlier this month about privatizing public services like water and electric utilities.
My colleague Glen Lyons and I are developing a way to introduce more competition into the electricity sector, which some believe to be hopelessly uncompetitive. The idea is to allow new, large electricity customers to form new electricity networks. The change to state statute would officially introduce contestability into many markets, and we think actual rival networks would be built to satisfy new load. They would probably have to be large, electrically, meaning they would likely need to serve multiple large customers (today you can go off-grid, but only to supply yourself).
We aren’t necessarily trying to revolutionize the existing grid or change the way a typical residential customer receives electric service, although there may be beneficial spillover effects for all customers. And the idea is not brand new (I find myself agreeing with many of Wayne Crews’ views from the late 1990s), but the concept’s technological feasibility is at an all-time high, and the flood of new demand from data centers and new manufacturers is creating the right political environment to enact new policies.
Here is my description of the policy: https://www.cato.org/blog/what-would-consumer-regulated-electricity-look
Plus an interview we did recently: https://secondpower.substack.com/p/wacc
Here is the Cato bio of Travis Fisher.