Trending
Victory in World War II filled some economists with foreboding. Today, many people on the left, including some who insist that they are on the right, proclaim an urgent need for government to supplant markets in allocating capital to rescue the economy from doldrums. So, remember the postwar calamity that did not happen.
Anticipating the dismantling of the government's encompassing direction of the wartime economy, and restoration of a market-driven economy, Cassandras thought that vast reductions of military spending, coinciding with millions of demobilized soldiers flooding the job market, might mean a 1940s depression worse than that of the 1930s. Instead, there was the postwar boom.
James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute relishes reminding us of this in his new book "The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised." The year now ending is, he notes, the 50th anniversary of 1973, when slowing rates of growth of the population, the economy and labor productivity signaled the end of the boom, and the beginning of rational pessimism. The pessimists underestimated what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called (in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail") Americans' "bottomless vitality."
Two years after King's celebration of Americans' national vitality, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, propounded Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a microchip would double every year (later changed to every two years). Pethokoukis notes that by 2019 a typical Intel chip contained 5 billion transistors at a cost of a penny per 100,000. Moore once wrote that if cars improved at the pace of computers, "they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it."
A threat to national vitality is what Pethokoukis calls "the precautionary principle." It holds that significant undertakings should not begin until threats of damage from them are fully understood. Due caution is, of course, wise, but much of the exhilaration of life comes from not knowing -- not being able to know -- what is over the horizon.
Many of today's anticipatory anxieties about artificial intelligence might be well-founded, but not its threat to cause enormous joblessness. Until the middle of the last century, many women were telephone operators. Displaced by mechanical switching technology, they moved on to other jobs. Pethokoukis says ATMs led to increased bank teller jobs as it became cheaper to open bank branches.
He imagines finding ways to employ the energy around us. The Earth's molten core is about as hot as the sun's surface, and will generate heat for billions of years as radioactive elements decay. "The continuous energy flow is roughly 30 terawatts" -- trillions of watts -- "almost double all current human energy consumption."
Vitality that translates into economic growth can be transformative. "The difference between an economy growing at 2 percent for the next 50 years and growing at 4 percent over that span is," Pethokoukis notes, "massive -- a $60 trillion economy in 2076 versus $160 trillion."
A prudent society does not assume that such things are achievable. However, a dynamic society does not allow anxieties about the future to constrict is horizons, or to seek security in the embrace of the state.