I recently read The Great Stagnation (2011) by Tyler Cowen for the first time (it’s quite brief - 2 hours listening on audible - more like a pamphlet, but makes it’s point in that time) - followed by J Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car (2018). Hall's is not super brief but is a quick to read because it’s exciting and challenging the entire way.

I won’t try to summarize. Jason Crawford’s summary of Hall here is good and this TedX talk by Tyler in 2011 gives a general impression of his thinking at the time. The following will be my reactions. Both Cowen and Hall have written and a lot more since, and I’ve not (yet) read how their views or communications may have changed - this is simply my initial digestion of the original versions of the arguments.

In the context of the day, Cowen and Hall’s ideas look somewhat similar. Nobody would be surprised to find them on the same bookshelf. Both take up the  task of convincing the reader that we are (at time of publication at the least) living in stagnation, make thoughtful cases to explain it’s causes, and offer recommendations going forward. I think this is a more common view now & something that folks seem to still regularly debate in the likes of the Bay Area, but I think it was more provocative back when The Great Stagnation was published. Hall’s was published in 2018 (though newly edited and published in 2021), yet is somehow even more provocative, at least to me. Cowen’s tone is moderate, thoughtful, and both critical and constructive, even though the message is/was provocative. Hall’s tone, by contrast is winding, rigorous, mathematical, and saucy - sometimes playfully, sometimes with deeply biting realism. For a reader (me) who is already somewhat aligned with or receptive to the author’s messages, Hall’s writing is still eye-popping. Beyond the tone, his assessment of what we could have and should have done, and what we could yet do challenges the readers’ nerves and imagination, yet consistently rests in thoughtful and lucid reasoning.

So, while they both provoke in a similar direction, they read very differently, with Hall leveling a far more gutting cultural criticism and call to action. To be clear, they are very different authors and have different objectives, so I don’t think looking at them as contrasts is potentially not useful as looking at them as compliments, but after reading the two side-by-side, my mind focuses on their contrasts.

And their arguments regarding the causes of stagnation do differ significantly. Halls actively refutes Cowen’s ‘low hanging fruit’ view and instead emphasizing the role of mainstreamed counter culture + regulatory & legal suffocation as causes of what he re-dubs ‘The Great Strangulation’.

The differences in their arguments generated some spicy comments beneath the marginal revolution post recommending it. Cowen seems simply delighted by the book. I am curious how their views differ today and in what ways they’ve moved near or further apart. I’m especially interested in this question of the role of human capital that Cowen talks about here, as this seems much nearer to Hall’s assessment of the cause.

Hall’s view of counter culture’s opposition to technology consist of a few components. Firstly, he notes, referencing Maslow’s hierarchy, that by the advent of the counter-culture, the average American had shifted significantly, from needing to worry almost entirely about physiological needs or safety earlier in the century, to being able to concern with themselves with belonging, which something about counter culture afforded.

In the face of the culture shift of the 1960s and ’70s, it seems reasonable to suppose that Western culture had succeeded in supplying the needs of the lower levels of the hierarchy, including the security of a well-run society. And with these levels attained, the modern Eloi could be thought of as all those Americans who became able to take certain things—the Leave It to Beaver suburban life sort of things—for granted. This means that they began to be able to spend more of their energy, effort, and concern on the love, esteem, consciousness-raising, and self-actualization levels.

Halls clarifies / emphasizes, that this was, in itself, a very good thing. However, without the pressures of WWII….

The nuclear umbrella meant that the economic, political, and moral strength of a society was no longer at a premium. The processes of variation proceeded apace, but natural selection no longer operated, producing a Cambrian explosion of Eloi.

Instead, Halls notes, we waged a divisive war - Vietnam - that resulted in distrust of American technological capability.

I’ve some questions / skepticism about this explanation.

For one, why did people choose the various movements of the 60s and 70s in particular as sources of fulfillment ala Maslow? What made them so appealing? Why not religious communities or a pro-technology community movement or any other movement or form of community? In general, this leaves me with a lot of outstanding sociological questions.

For another, it sounds a bit too much like ‘hard times make hard men,’ which I always find a bit barbarous - there are plenty of wars that didn’t produce efflorescences and plenty of efflorescences (and individual geniuses) which / who emerged from periods or locales of comparative peacefulness & stability. If Hall proposed this less as a universality and as more specific to the post-2-wars-and-a-cold-war period in the US, I’d be more receptive (i.e. perhaps post cold war, technical culture was so acclimated to functioning in response to a military / geopolitical crisis, that it was just wildly unclear how to pursue generative work in any other condition).

As a forward looking antidote to this ease-facilitated-decay, Hall recommends opening frontiers (e.g. go to space) to encourage a meeting of mind with challenges that deter deleterious self-delusion or decay. I’m all for opening up frontiers of knowledge and creation, but this perspective seems very rooted in requiring an external stimulus to create a epistemically healthy culture, which seems very weirdly narrow to me.

A second piece of Hall’s view of the counter culture involves the idea of ‘risk homeostasis.’ He notes (citing some research by economist Sam Peltzman) that people tend to act to maintain the same perceived risk profile (e.g. driving faster when seat belts were introduced). One way of achieving this in a post-cold war world, Hall posits, is to more readily believe scare stories about technology. This is a fascinating explanation I’ve never heard anything like before, but am curious to learn more about and consider.

A third piece rests on a loss of industrial literacy. Hall points to the popularity of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the Chevrolet Corvair, explaining it as follows:

In the 1920s, when the big uptake in automobiles was getting underway, most people had a family member or a friend on a farm or in a factory who was familiar with machinery. Having a knowledgeable person accessible meant that you wouldn’t simply believe scare stories. But by the 1960s this was not nearly as often the case. More people were susceptible to scare stories because there were so many fewer ripstop threads in the fabric of society.

So, if you have all three of these, the theory goes, you get people who join together into movements that are strangely fulfilled by finding perceived risks of technology.

These seem like important dynamics, but another counter-narrative (perhaps really just complementary) might emphasize that the two world wars and a cold war were very real reasons for folks to develop suspicion and distrust of technological optimism, especially with increasingly specialized domains of knowledge. Yes, it seems like folks very readily could have been more thoughtful about evaluating Nader’s claims around the new Chevy, but nuclear energy or genetic engineering do genuinely seem like much harder industrial-literacy challenges. Perhaps part of the problem was also that science communication and industrial literacy efforts (education) didn’t keep up with the technology or didn’t realize they needed to given their unanimous prior wartime support (again, I’m very curious about this human capital question), and/or that we didn’t really have a great public philosophy for seriously evaluating benefits and drawbacks of new technologies, so the most aggressive idea-sets prevailed.

It does seem like, at the turn of the century, optimism was high around technology, just preceding two world wars. If, post wars, there was no available pro-technology narrative that proactively accounted for e.g. military risks was reaching the public (and this is a questions I do need to investigate), then is it entirely surprising that folks were divided between the moon landing and Woodstock?

(Actually, yes, I do think this is still a bizarre outcome and not entirely explained as a post-war suspicion of technology, but the narrative has some important counter-emphasis to Hall’s.)

In general, this is an area where I find Cowen is expressly more moderated than Hall:

Finally, be ready for when more low-hanging fruit actually arrives because sometimes low-hanging fruit is dangerous. The last time the world had a major dose of low-hanging fruit, a few countries didn’t handle it very well, including the Axis powers, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, among others.  …  Without the new technologies of the time, the totalitarian mistakes of the twentieth century would not have been possible.

To be clear, Hall notes all sorts of potential downsides of different technologies, and, in the end, makes a kind of political call to action alongside his call for building and applied research, so he’s not at all blind to this. Still, the emphasis feels different. Cowen seems more cautious.

Virgina Postrel also has an interesting take on 60s and 70s culture that’s still further distinct, something like (and I’ll surely butcher this imaginary paraphrase because I’ve not yet read her books, only several articles & presentations): ‘progress narratives were interwoven with coercive and inorganic tools like eminent domain and Corbusier-esque urban planning, which nudged those who might otherwise have opposed only those particular aspects to oppose progress wholesale’ + ‘progress narratives remained rooted in outdated generational yearnings and did not update to meet new needs / interests’ (e.g. perhaps Maslow’s belonging). In this WIP article, she writes:

Rising living standards undoubtedly led people to value a pristine environment more highly. But environmental concerns didn’t have to take an anti-Promethean turn. They might have led instead to the expansion of nuclear power or the building of solar energy satellites. Cleaning up smoggy skies and polluted rivers could have been a techno-optimist enterprise. It certainly didn’t require curtailing space exploration. Eco-pessimism itself needs a fuller explanation.

This is idea is something like my reaction to Hall’s view that the ease of the post-war world led folks to anti-technology movements. It seems like a change in needs (belonging, self-actualization, enjoyment of pristine environments) could have been fulfilled in a myriad of ways. I’m uncertain / skeptical / curious if risk homeostasis, Nader-esque fear mongering, and the Vietnam war are sufficient to explain the kind of broad technology-distrust that Halls describes as mainstreamed in the 60s and 70s. I’m definitely more partial to a longer term intellectual trend that met the moment in an odd and particular way.

That said, it seems easy to imagine varied agglomerations of these views (e.g. such as the combination of bullets below).

• post-war suspicion of techno-optimism (disdain for any continuation seeming pre-war naivety)
• some generational gap - experiential (subsistence farming vs suburbs), educational (? unclear ?), and philosophical (ala Postrel’s point), that becomes apparent in the 60s and 70s
• increasingly specialized knowledge increases the importance of and difficulty developing scientific and industrial literacy requisite for being informed on science and technology policy
• longer standing intellectual threads / trends (e.g. Vogtian environmentalism and precursors) which flourished in the environment created by the above^

It’s easy to read Hall’s writing and think ‘ah, that might make some mechanistic sense’ - but part of what is provocative about Hall’s take and likely doesn’t come across in my words here, is his emphasis: progress didn’t just ‘slow down’ or ‘peter out’ - it was strangled (see the story of Harold Pitcairn).

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A few other points / areas form Hall’s book that I found interesting and would like to look further into:

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| Technium

Near closing, Hall uses Kevin Kelly’s idea of ‘Technium’ to describe a metaphorical landscape of technical and economic development. Technium is the water level, representing our overall capabilities. The valleys and plateaus are what is possible in the bounding architecture of physics and economics. When we develop new capabilities, our water rises filling pools, then overflowing into rivers or plains, which connect us to still other pools.

The default Stagnation explanation has it that the technium has been rising since the 1970s, but the landscape has been a barren high desert, with no lowlands or valleys. The only exception was the Computer Sea, and all of the rising waters have poured into that … But I have concluded that it is wrong. There are valleys galore, waiting to be made fertile by the waters of the technium.

Hall also emphasizes that we’ve developed an unusual ‘scientific overhang’

But what has happened is that cultural reaction and regulatory ossification have combined to dam up the normal flow of experimentation in high-power technology. Where the technium would have spilled into the fertile valleys, we have instead built up a theoretical, scientific overhang

and sites this as a kind of unusual opportunity going forward - that it would be “as if we had gone into the Industrial Revolution already knowing thermodynamics and high-temperature metallurgy.”

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| Hall notes that one possible explanation for the computing revolution’s development, in contrast to other areas, was that it was the only area of technological development after 1970 that didn’t require more energy - it’s an interesting idea: how might one evaluate this further?

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| Hall has a very negative view of public funding for science vs private R&D. Below he discusses the macro case in favor of laissez-faire. Separately, he goes into several example stories in the development of flight, nuclear physics, and nanotech to illustrate his criticism.

It was not just the opinion of a few futurists such as Robert Prehoda, but the firm consensus of the entire economic and scientific establishment, that more federal money for scientific research could only help economic growth. Yet the evidence simply does not support the conclusion. England, where the Industrial Revolution began and which had experienced the most dramatic rise in individual well-being in history, had negligible public support for research throughout the 19th century, while France and Germany, which did have strong public scientific enterprises, never caught up. The United States did catch up, with our GDP per capita exceeding Britain’s by the 20th century, but during that time we too were squarely in laissez-faire mode, perhaps even more so than Britain. If all the pundits are to be believed, at the very least, public funding of R&D shouldn’t have hurt. And yet it coincided with the Great Stagnation, when observers agree that life-changing technological innovations slowed to a crawl.

Hall also cites this 2003 OECD report, which noted that private R&D and had a positive correlation with economic growth while government funded R&D had a negative correlation (the authors emphasize that this doesn’t necessarily account for the longer term value of basic research, but still, that’s very not great and what’s the point of running the regression analysis if you’re not going to be curious about surprising results).

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| And a very positive view of the profit motive:

As a technologist, I have in this book tended to concentrate on physical invention. But value, the gap between how well off we are and how much better we might be, is the pull to invention’s push.

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Turning a Level 4 world into a Level 5 world (bringing along with the change flying cars) could be worth very roughly another 50 times the current total output of the human race. That should be a fair incentive. And remember, the original Industrial Revolution didn’t stop after just one level.

I appreciate this provocation to think seriously about the kind of value that can be created through invention, though it’s a very different style of ambition from that of e.g. Norman Borlaug (who, as I understand it, was motivated by witnessing the raw effects of hunger and clearly understanding the potential upside of his work). I think they are complimentary. It seems worthwhile to have a clear mental visualization and visceral sense of the gap between how life is and how life could be, as well as some understanding of how working to close the gap could lead to a personally fulfilling life (including sense of achievement, learning, relationships, and financial benefit alike). In other words, clarity of purpose and motivation might be a good reason to both spend time in the least livable places on earth, as well as to do intentional visualization of how life could be improved those who live in, by comparison, extreme comfort.

Hall is not simply interested in raising global living standards to the current high, but raising the bar far beyond that in turn. It would be a remarkable thing to experience either.

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In terms of new ideas and creative briefs:

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| Scientists as rockstars?

Cowen suggests (in the 2011 TedX talk) that we should treat scientists like rock stars. So… T shirts? Fan pages? You can’t party to scientific lectures in the way you do to rock music (more salon-style events? or maybe more nuclear raves?), but perhaps there is a different medium of enjoyment, appreciation, or celebration. One approach might be to create dining wear (plates, cups, utensils, place mats, napkins etc) that lists the names of different food & agricultural scientists or processes (underneath the plate or around the rim)? Sink and faucet heads with the names of impactful individuals or process in infrastructure and water cleanliness? Power socket covers inscribed with the names of energy pioneers and discoveries? The same for various tools, vehicles (runner-board?), appliances, clothing (e.g. interior lining), etc + a website with historical content on each name or contribution?

The goal could be to create objects which encourage industrial literacy through their use, but also offer a moment to celebrate and appreciate folks who achieved things. An MVP might simply be a single plate with a name or process on the bottom and a QR code to a blurb with links and a reading list on them. A concept sketch would be just that - a series of sketches or renderings. A more ‘rockstar’ direction would focus on a really nice plate with a focus on names (some ceramics designer collab), while a more educational focus might involve plates for kids (colorful, affordable, not brittle, easy to read, etc. etc). Perhaps new achievements and new scientists could be added to the collection (new editions or releases) as a way of recognizing them and their work, as well as bringing attention to it.

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| Nuclear, Nanotech (incl. molecular biology), and AI

Hall focuses on these as areas of significant near future development, with a particular emphasis on the ‘scientific overhang’ of nuclear and nanotech. They’re all areas where I (and presumably many others) could stand to be more knowledgeable. While there’s ample material on AI (historical, technical, fictional, etc), nuclear and nanotech might benefit from some aggregated reading or link lists (e.g. 1 technical text, 1 historical, 1 speculative fiction, a series of educational videos - perhaps simply khan-academy or the like - and perhaps some complementary DIY project that illustrates or simulates some phenomenon).

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| Science Fiction Plots and World-building

Hall’s book offers tons of ‘easy pickings’ in terms of science fiction scenery, themes, and plots. A prestige-style intrigue story for control of the weather machine? A short story of a day in the life of a child who lives in a tall tower above a forest, yet is minutes from a vast range of friends and exploratory options via a flying car (which he hacks to listen to him despite being under-age to go out alone)? A political struggle between architects of an orbital elevator or launcher with different visions? The discovery of new nano-tech powered frontiers in the depths of the oceans, with the characters returning only intermittently to the changes at home in their floating central-pacific research tower? A future economic struggle for energy supply contracts between early nanotech-constructed tools and well-honed, well-entrenched prior solutions? Some deeply immersive, complex, and totally bizarre many-character, multi-decade story set on a 10 mile wide permanently flying wing-city? The text is full of provocative inspiration. It’s difficult to sit still after reading.

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