Abundance Links

• When someone picks up low-hanging fruit, someone else will come along and ask: if it was so obvious, why wasn’t anyone already doing it? The answer to this is not always that actions are only obvious in hindsight, because often enough, people genuinely do see what to do long before it’s actually done. The history of the discovery of various drugs is a testament to this: so many advances, from RNA vaccines to GLP-1s, languished in obscurity for a long time. Sometimes drugs were dismissed on the basis of poor negative evidence, and other times, the possibilities for various drugs weren’t ever going to be reached with a given indication, but another one was sitting there waiting to be used. (The Roivant business model is all about that.) There really is a lot of low-hanging fruit. [Cremieux Recueil] 
• As I write in the book, one of the great wonders of the modern world is that the more time we spend making things, the better we get at it - this is Wright’s Law. So batteries and solar panels get cheaper and cheaper - even as they get better and better. But sometimes the definition of what that “better” is can change. Once upon a time the main standard against which computer chips - or superconducting magnets - were measured was their power. But today “better” can just as easily mean something else: lower power or helium consumption. I think examples like this are rather handy to have in the back of your mind when pondering the world today. When economists fret about a sudden collapse in productivity, it’s quite possible that the metric we’re all focused on is simply the one we used to be fixated with. If you judged the performance of the superconducting magnet sector based purely on how many Teslas each unit could pump out, the chances are you would look at the sector in the coming years and despair. It might look like it’s going backwards! In actual fact, enormous progress is being made here - as it is elsewhere throughout the Material World. [Ed Conway]
• The quest for a useful alternative for GDP has been going on pretty much since GDP was invented, and will continue long into the future. But may I mention one very useful comparative statistics which Sarah doesn’t - and which isn’t, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the mainstream dashboards of development and progress. That metric is steel per capita. My contention - and yes to some extent I’m talking my book here but hear me out - is that looking at the amount of steel that exists in a given society gives you just as good (in some cases even better) an insight into that country’s level of progress. And happily, using this metric is far more intuitive (and less prone to things like purchasing power parity adjustments) than things like GDP per head. [Ed Conway]
• MAGA folk reassure themselves that the stock market plunge doesn’t matter and the “real” economy is doing just fine, undisturbed by the looming trade war. Then when some new gloomy data on the “real” economy is released, they double down and explain we need to accept short-term pain for long-term gain. Trump actually used that ominous phrase. Both propositions are dangerous nonsense. The stock market is the heart of the real economy. More than a barometer of economic health, it is an essential mechanism for economic growth. [Richard Vigilante]
• Federal tax revenue has historically hovered within 1 or 2 percentage points of 17.4 percent of GDP since World War II, no matter what the tax rates have been and what is taxed.... nothing the government has tried over the past eight decades has ever been able to change that. It is possible to increase tax revenues over the long term only by increasing the tax base. The only way to expand the nation’s tax base is through economic growth. Below is the crucial graph, from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Income tax rates varied wildly over these 80+ years, but receipts never get much past that magic line of 17.4% of GDP. [Richard Vigilante]
• I have been making my living as a writer ever since (barely) escaping college in 1978. Since 1980 every word I have written has been bespoke. When, a few years ago, I decided I wanted engage topics beyond money and technology—my bread and butter for decades—I realized I had not pitched an article to an editor since 1979. I had forgotten how. Irresistibly tempting, then, was a forum from which I could publish without needing any other person’s consent. I could write about anything and say whatever, whenever and not be denied. Fool! A writer has no better ally than a skeptical editor on a tight budget. How else is he to know whether his latest thought should be unleashed on the world. [Richard Vigilante]
• Every year the IEA predicts that coal consumption will plateau or drop. And each year it turns out to be wrong. In fact, China burns ever more coal. This is a big deal, a really big deal - and yet it’s often glossed over by policymakers. Since every year the IEA can predict that coal output will soon peak, politicians can continue to claim that the transition is happening - that coal is being consigned to history. Yet while some countries, most notably the UK, are ending their reliance on coal for power, those changes are little more than a rounding error in the face of the global picture - that coal is still powering much of the world. [Ed Conway]
• Perhaps if there’s a bit of wisdom to be extracted from this whole wild goose chase it’s that while we like to tell ourselves humankind has exhausted this or that resource, we are much better at talking about it than actually, well, exhausting said resource. Perhaps I ought to have known this sooner. After all, I gave over quite a large chunk of the copper section of Material World to documenting why, contrary to a lot of doom-laden articles and analyses at various points in history, we never actually ran out of copper. We didn’t even do all that much substitution (we use aluminium a fair bit for things like high voltage power lines, but in part that’s because aluminium is light). We mostly just got a lot better at mining copper. [Ed Conway]
• What’s exciting about these new batteries (and actually it turns out the ones you find in smartphones are only the tip of the iceberg) is that the anode is made not just of graphite (which is to say, carbon) but of a composite of graphite and silicon. That matters when you think about what the anode is there to do - to provide a place for those lithium ions to nest when the battery is charged. The more hospitable you can make that nest, the better the battery will work. And silicon has properties that make it particularly attractive. For one thing, silicon is much better at accommodating lithium ions than carbon. While it takes six carbon atoms to hold one lithium ion, a single silicon atom can hold four lithium ions. [Ed Conway]
• For decades, I bought into the software-first dream—the idea that code could solve anything, that problems existed in abstraction, that real progress came from elegant algorithms and clever cloud architectures. My peers and I were sold the fantasy of a world that didn’t need factories, turbines, or steel foundries—just cloud computing, VC-backed disruption, and ever-expanding digital platforms. The Instagram Nirvana. But when I looked around, I saw that the infrastructure holding everything together was crumbling. If you’ve ever driven the freeways winding their way through the heart of the Los Angeles Megalopolis, you’ve felt it. [Terraform Industries]
• I study the overstatement of GDP growth in autocratic regimes by comparing the self-reported GDP figures to the night time lights (NTL) recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the NTL elasticity of GDP is systematically larger in more authoritarian regimes. This autocracy gradient in the elasticity is robust to multiple changes in data sources, econometric specification or sample composition and is not explained by potential differences in a large set of country characteristics. The gradient is larger when the incentive to exaggerate economic growth is stronger or when the constraints on such exaggeration are weaker. The results suggest that autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by as much as 35%. Adjusting the GDP data for the manipulation taking place in autocracies leads to a more nuanced view on the economic success of non-democracies in recent decades and affects our understanding of the effect of changes to foreign aid inflows on income per capita. [Luis R. Martinez]
• First, in nearly all places and for nearly all load types, solar+batteries are cheaper than any other potential power source, replacing the concept of an expensive, undesirable “green premium” with a “green dividend,” a rare win-win for using advanced new power technologies. We have always believed that the revealed preference of the market is that less polluting technology is enthusiastically adopted, if and only if it also saves the customer money! The second is that power costs do increase as we drive to a large number of “9s” of reliability towards the right edge of the graph, but even for loads as expensive as AI training centers, the optimal utilization is probably closer to 99.9% in terms of weights updated per dollar spent. In practice, rather than the datacenter going dark for 8 hours a year, 99.9% utilization means some partial throttling in winter over longer time periods. Third, there is a clear bifurcation between battery supported loads over $2000/kW that run at utilization greater than 75%, and diurnal, battery-free solar loads under $400/kW that run at utilizations below 30%. [Terraform Industries]