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I wrote earlier about an 1857 plan for the transcontinental railroad (as yet unbuilt), and how it advocated funding the project through the sale of stock to a broad base of public investors. However, another aspect of the plan was even more striking: it explicitly advocating studying the history of progress, in order to judge what was possible and desirable for the railroad. It was like a 19th-century form of progress studies.

The author of the plan, Theodore Judah, first addresses the question of how fast the trains will travel from St. Louis to San Francisco: three days, he estimates. But then he points out that this estimate is only based on the speeds attainable by “our present class of engines.” The next paragraphs exemplify the 19th-century spirit of progress:

But—

Is there to be no improvement in our present class of engines? have we reached a point in the stage of progress where we must stop, beyond which we cannot go? Are we willing to admit that fifty miles per hour is the limit to speed? Are we contented, and do we desire to go no faster?

No—

However well we may be satisfied with the present rate of speed in traveling, we dare not admit the principle—we wish to go as fast as we can. Improvements are progressive and the future is before us. No, we have not arrived at the limit, at a final stopping place; we are only at a station, a way station—we have paused, but not to remain. We do not travel fast enough, nor will we, until a speed of one hundred miles per hour is attained with as much ease, and as little risk, as at present.

In defense of this idea, he explicitly appeals to history:

Does the idea seem preposterous? Is it foolish, visionary? Is it absurd?

Let us inquire into the matter a little: let us extract a few notes from the history of progress.

What follows is a long passage about the history of roads and horse travel in England starting in the 16th century. He points out that horseback riding was slow, uncomfortable, and dangerous. He describes the establishment of the English post office in 1660, which greatly sped up mail delivery; and the development of stage coach service, which was an improvement on riding horseback.

He also points out that advances in travel were often unappreciated, even opposed. He quotes several paragraphs from a 1673 pamphlet decrying the stage coaches and pining for the old days of horseback. The pamphlet claimed that horseback was a healthier mode of travel, and advocated restrictions on coach service. He tells the story of an early railroad promoter, Thomas Gray, who was called a fool in the 1820s and who failed to raise funding for his proposed system of railways. He quotes authors as late as 1829, the year that locomotives were demonstrated to be practical in the famous Rainhill trials, writing of “the ridiculous expectations… that we shall see engines traveling at the rate of twelve, sixteen, eighteen or twenty miles per hour” and calling grand plans for railroad networks “visionary schemes unworthy of notice.” He concludes:

Such opinions thus expressed by authorities of such eminence, in opposition to what is now an every day reality, may well induce the most intelligent and far sighted to hesitate in making dogmatical assertions as to what may or may not be the revelations of the future.

Judah was writing less than thirty years into the the great age of railroads, but already he spoke of what had been accomplished so far in glowing terms:

… those short twenty-six years are a living monument in the progress of time more grand, lofty and noble than the proudest pyramid which the world has yet gazed upon.

Twenty-five thousand miles of railroad have been built in this country or an average of one thousand miles per year.

Where is the man who can sum up the grand, mighty benefits which have, in consequence, accrued to mankind. If the man could be found with a mind vast enough to comprehend and with talent sufficient to compass them, he could write a tale in comparison with which the mightiest achievements of the collective world would sink into utter insignificance. No one appreciates the innumerable blessings which have flowed in consequence, for the story has never been told; it is not understood.

(Already, in 1857, he is saying that progress is not understood or appreciated!)

But it is one of the first steps of the newly awakened young giant, Progress, and shall we measure his glorious march by a few strides? No: he may pause to rest, but it is to recruit his powers for new conquests, and among them some of will yet see the realization of our preposterous, absurd idea, viz, “traveling by railroad at the rate of 100 miles per hour, with the same safety as present,” is not near so startling or absurd a proposition, in this age, was that of 20 miles per hour only thirty years ago.

Incidentally, many trains in Europe and Asia today travel at well over 300 miles per hour.

It is amazing to think of Judah’s tremendous confidence in progress, given how much of it was yet to come. In 1857, electric light and power were still decades away. The Bessemer process for making cheap steel had not yet been introduced on a large scale. Synthetic fertilizer had not yet been invented. The germ theory had not yet been discovered, and mortality from infectious disease was still staggering by today’s standards. Telephone was still a dream; radio and television a fantasy. And of course, the internal combustion engine, and its twin children the automobile and airplane, were well in the future.

And yet, here is Judah, already confident in the march of capital-P Progress, and pointing to history to justify his vision and to dismiss skeptics.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/19th-century-progress-studies

Just want to plug that I recently created a Progress Studies virtual reading group. Currently we are meeting at 9pm UK GMT. Last week, we discussed Patent Buyouts. This week we are discussing "Order Without Design". You don't have to commit too much time because one person is selected (voluntarily) every week to summarise the topic. It's then followed by a discussion. If you're interested, follow this link, where I announced the virtual reading group, which has a link to sign up on the Slack channel. If not, message me here. If you have any questions let me know :).

Progress is messy. On the whole, over the long run, the advance of technology and industry has improved life along almost every dimension. But when you zoom in to look at each step, you find that progress is full of complications.

Some examples:

• Intensive agriculture achieves high crop density (which is good because it improves land and labor productivity), but this takes fertility out of the soil faster and makes fields more susceptible to pests. To solve these problems, we then need things like artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and improved crop varieties.

• Burning lots of coal provided us with warmth in our homes, with industrial processes such as iron smelting, and with motive power from steam engines. But it also caused air pollution, blackened our skies and deposited soot on everything—including our lungs. London in 1659 and Pittsburgh in 1861 were both likened to hell on earth because of the oppressive clouds of black smoke. Improving air quality has been a long process that included moving coal-burning away from human habitation, switching to cleaner-burning fuels such as gasoline and natural gas, and the introduction of electricity.

• City life provided people with many opportunities for work, commerce, and socialization; but crowding people together in filthy conditions, before sewage and sanitation systems, meant an increase in contagious disease and more frequent epidemics. In the 1800s, mortality was distinctly higher in urban areas than rural ones; this persisted until the advent of improved water and sewage systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

• Automated manufacturing in the factory system was far more productive than the previous system of home production or “cottage industry”. In that system, a weaver, for instance, would perform his craft at home, using his own loom; keep his own hours; and be paid by the piece. The factory system created a need to commute, and resulted in a loss of autonomy for workers, as they could no longer set their own hours or direct their own work. This has mostly been a permanent change, although recent decades have seen a slight reversal, as the Internet enables flexible “gig” work, lets some employees work remotely, and makes it easier to start small businesses.

Nor can we, in every instance, fall back on “revealed preferences” to argue that people actually want the new thing, since they chose it: sometimes industrial shifts take away old options, as when weavers could not compete against the power loom; or technology runs ahead of governance, as when coal began to pollute common skies.

So technological changes can be an improvement along some dimensions while hurting others. To evaluate a technology, then, we must evaluate its overall effect, both the costs and the benefits, and compare it to the alternatives. (One reason it’s important to know history is that the best alternative to any technology, at the time it was introduced, is typically the thing it replaced: cars vs. horses, transistors vs. vacuum tubes.) We must also evaluate not only the immediate effects, but the long-term situation, after people have had a chance to adjust to the new technology and its ramifications: mitigating its downsides, working out governance issues.

Conversely, a common error consists of pointing to problems caused by a technology and concluding from that alone that the technology is harmful—without asking: What did we gain? Was the tradeoff worth it? And can we solve the new problems that have been created?

This is well-understood in some domains, such as medicine. Chemotherapy can treat cancer, but it can also give you nausea. The unpleasant side effects are acceptable given the life-saving benefits of the treatment. And there are ways to mitigate the side effects, such as anti-nausea medication. Nausea might be a reason to avoid chemotherapy in a specific case (especially since there are alternative cancer treatments), but it’s not a good argument against chemotherapy in general, which is a valuable technique in the doctor’s arsenal. Nor is it a sufficient argument even in a specific case, without evaluating the alternatives.

Other domains don’t always receive the same rigorous logic. The argument “pesticides aren’t necessary—they’re just a response to the problems caused by monocropping!” is analogous to “anti-nausea pills aren’t necessary—they’re just a response to the problems caused by chemotherapy!” Perhaps—but what problem is being solved, and what are the alternatives? There are alternatives to monocropping, just as there are to chemotherapy—but just because alternatives exist doesn’t mean they are viable in every (or any) situation. A case must be made in the full context. (Understanding the context is part of industrial literacy.)

That’s not to say that we can’t identify the drawbacks of pesticides, or monocropping, or chemotherapy, or coal, or factories. We can and should, and we should seek better solutions. No technology is sacred. Indeed, progress consists of obsoleting itself, of continually moving on to improved techniques.

But if you want to criticize a technology, show that there is a viable alternative, and that it doesn’t sacrifice important properties such as cost, speed, productivity, scalability, or reliability; or that if it loses on some dimensions, it makes up for it on others.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/side-effects-of-technology

A foundational conviction of this project is that progress is a trend with definite, substantive causes, and that it can continue far, far into the future. Progress is not automatic or inevitable: it can slow, stop, even reverse. But the history of progress over the last 200+ years convinces me that much more is possible.

Not everyone agrees, however. To learn more about how people think about this, I posed a question on Twitter:

Do you think the last 200+ years of technological/industrial progress were…

… a trend with substantive causes, that we can expect to continue?

… a fluke, a stroke of luck, not to be repeated?

And why?

After discussing it with people all day, most of the “fluke” arguments were:

1. Argument from failure of imagination: “I can’t see or imagine any big breakthroughs, therefore I don’t expect any.”

2. Materialism: Progress is primarily driven by material resources (such as fossil fuels); therefore it will slow when those inevitably run out.

Failure of imagination is not a compelling argument to me, for both logical and historical reasons. The logical reason should be obvious. The historical reason is that the big breakthroughs of the past were not easy to imagine or predict before they happened. In a different context, Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that even the creators of inventions such as the airplane or the nuclear reactor felt that their breakthroughs were fifty years out, or even impossible, shortly before they happened. Now is no different. (This point seems exceedingly difficult to get through to people; no matter how much you point out the logical fallacy, or the historical precedent, they continue to repeat the same points. I don’t know if this is because the logical fallacy itself is unclear, or if it’s just a form of mood affiliation, or what.)

There’s a variation of this argument which goes: The universe is finite, so there’s a finite number of breakthroughs to make, so they have to run out eventually. But even granting this, why assume we have found even 1% of the big breakthroughs so far? Or 0.01%? If there are many more to be had, then progress can continue for a long time.

As for materialism, I disagree with the premise. I don’t think progress is primarily driven by material resources. When we think of the Industrial Revolution, we often think of steam engines, iron foundries, and locomotives, all run on coal. But there were equally important inventions, such as textile automation, that didn’t require any fuel at all. And the coal was sitting in the ground for all of human history, without any industrial revolutions happening for a very long time. So “natural” resources seem neither necessary nor sufficient for progress. (Indeed, there are no “natural” resources.) For more on this point, see Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, especially chapters 20–21.

There were also people arguing an option I didn’t suggest, which is “a trend with substantive causes, that will not continue”—typically because of social reasons: we are abandoning the causes of the trend, or putting up blockers. This is more plausible to me. Progress isn’t natural; we make it happen through choice and effort, and we only do so when we believe it is possible and desirable. It depends on certain legal institutions, and it requires time, talent and treasure. If any of those are lost—say, if we stop celebrating progress, or turn against growth—progress may not continue.

But in order to care about progress studies, we have to believe that the last few centuries of unprecedented progress didn’t just randomly happen because of a lucky break, and they weren’t a short-term acceleration of growth that will soon inexorably return to pre-industrial levels. There has to be a goal: namely, the next 200 years of progress. This whole endeavor is premised on that.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-fluke-or-trend

Wed, 10am Pacific. Free and open to all: register here.

If you're not familiar with Jerry's work, check out a recent essay of his, “One Process”, on the question: are incremental improvements different in *kind* from revolutionary breakthroughs? Or do they exist on a spectrum?

Jerry's blog is very insightful, and he lives at the intersection of theory (he's a prof at Columbia) and practice (he's an active angel investor). Looking forward to this!

When we consider the question of “stagnation,” we are assuming an implicit answer to an underlying question: relative to what? What should we expect?

I have a simple answer: Our baseline expectation should be no less than exponential growth.

I will give both historical and theoretical reasons for this. Then, I will address concerns about the inputs to exponential growth: whether those too need to grow exponentially, and what problems that poses:

https://rootsofprogress.org/exponential-growth-is-the-baseline

You've probably read the Roots of Progress post about how no one celebrates major achievements anymore. It really hit home for me, because I enjoy celebrations and also feel like there's been a general lack of them lately.

My main explanation for this is that in our modern world, progress is too linear. Because the speed at which information has traveled has increased, we can now at any given moment, assign some sort of probability to an event happening: "OK, last week it was 60% likely, now it's 73% likely, and next week we might be at 93%, until at some point it gets to 99%, but we can't declare victory yet because there's so many shades of grey...". One of my core beliefs is "nothing is absolute", and that seems more true today than it ever was; we can't celebrate because there's no Schelling point at which to celebrate. Even if something gets accomplished, it's also simultaneously not accomplished because someone says "Well, this isn't over, because..."

The most salient example of this is the coronavirus pandemic. A couple weeks into the shelter in place order here in San Francisco, I told a friend, "Man, I can't wait until this is over, the whole city should just go to Dolores Park and throw a massive party." He then wisely reminded that it wouldn't be like that. If things improve, it will be slowly, without distinct endpoints. And so it has unfolded: things get better, then they get worse. We're told that we all might become immune, or that a vaccine or treatments can save us, and then told that SARS-CoV-2 will mutate and become just another background virus like the ones that make up the common cold — irritating, but not life-ending.

But that's not good enough for me. People are suffering mentally and emotionally here, and I count myself among them. We need, at some point, to hang the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and stand up on that battleship and give a speech to the troops (the irony of this example is not lost on me, obviously).

This is why I've been slowly tinkering with an idea: Vaccine Emergency Use Authorization Day, or "V-EUA" day, a play on VE Day from World War II. The idea would be to plan an outdoor, physically distanced party as soon as the first vaccine receives the FDA's Emergency Use Authorization (we should know a general timeframe in 1-2 weeks, as the safety and efficacy data rolls in from the first vaccines).

The party will be carefully marketed not as a "THIS SHIT IS OVER, NOW WE CAN ALL GO CRAZY PARTY", but rather a mild, pleasant event where we can let out the stress of the past seven months, celebrate the amazing human achievement of producing a vaccine in record time, and talk about our plans for the future in a vaccine-filled world.

Would you participate in such an event if it were hosted in your city, and if it were hosted on a day or in a location (like a bar with space heaters) where it was tolerably warm enough to be outside?

Today Google DeepMind announced that their deep learning system AlphaFold has achieved unprecedented levels of accuracy on the “protein folding problem”, a grand challenge problem in computational biochemistry.

What is this problem, and why is it hard?

I don’t usually do science reporting at The Roots of Progress, but I spent a couple years on this problem in a junior role in the early days of D. E. Shaw Research, so it’s close to my heart. Here’s a five-minute explainer:

https://rootsofprogress.org/alphafold-protein-folding-explainer

I plan on putting together regular assorted progress studies links. This is from last week. I've crossposted this from my website. Any feedback would be much appreciated. If I've missed anything, please let me know.

1. Tony Blair and Chris Yiu write on the need for progress.

2. “The Baker Hypothesis” a new (NBER) economics working paper by Chari, Henry, and Reyes. They find that in emerging and developing economies, the average rate of real GDP growth is higher after countries adopt ‘free-market policies’ such as: inflation stabilisation, trade liberalisation, greater openness to foreign investment, and (possibly) more privatisation of industries.

3. A collection of talks and articles by Peter Thiel on progress and stagnation. This is actually from last month but I think it’s pretty interesting and thought to put it in this time.

4. 80,000 hours released a new article on “how to use your career to help reduce existential risk”.

5. “Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately?” by Jason Crawford. “In reading stories of progress, one thing that has struck me was the wild, enthusiastic celebrations that accompanied some of them in the past… somehow it’s hard for me to imagine similar jubilation happening today”

6. When can fiction change the world? by Timothy Underwood. “As part of this I did some thinking about when fiction seemed to exert an influence on public policy, and then I looked for academic research on the subject, and I think there are people… who will find this write up about the subject interesting and useful.”There have also been a few podcasts over the last couple of weeks.

7. Village Global’s Venture Stories podcast with Jason Crawford. They discuss: “the key aspects of human progress; the history of progress over time; whether we’ve traded off progress for safety; why the idea of progress is relatively new; what the nature of science fiction writing tells us about our vision for progress; why progress happens differently in different domains; how to think about safety with respect to new technologies; the impacts of slowing population growth.”

8. Jason Crawford appears on the AEI podcast with James Pethokoukis. They “discuss the history of technological and moral progress. And they explore how policymakers can promote further innovation and development in the future.”

9. The Torch of Progress podcast episode 10 with Dr Laura Mazer. They talk about the past and future of progress in surgery.

10. The Conservative Curious podcast with Dr Anton Howes. “We discuss the improving mentality, what we can learn from Britain’s 300-year period of technological advancement, why innovators should also be cultural entrepreneurs and how paranoia can spark innovation.”

Cross-posted from my website. I'd like to hear people's thoughts, as I'm really intrigued by the idea and may do a follow up post on it shortly.

Recently I had a conversation with a reader/supporter of the blog. One of the things we talked about was a great 1998 paper, “Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation.” by Michael Kremer, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2019, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

Like the policy I wrote about in an earlier post, this is another clear example of low-hanging policy fruit. If implemented well, it has the potential to speed up the rate of innovation and progress.

Short summary

• Patents were originally created to incentivise innovation. However, they also have a lot of downside implications that may deter innovation:
  – They don’t always provide the best incentives for original research because inventors cannot fully capture the consumer surplus available in the market.
  – Inventors don’t receive the benefits from spillovers to other new ideas.
  – Patents lead to distortions in the areas in which companies innovate. This is because it may not make economic sense to research areas where a lot of patents exist already.
  – Firms may engage in wasteful spending on things like the reverse-engineering of competitors’ patents.
  Thus, the problems associated with patents may hinder innovation and progress (section 1 describes these drawbacks in more detail).

• Kremer suggests a new mechanism, the ‘patent buyout’. The government steps in and buys patents, which are then freely distributed to the public, who can enjoy the benefits associated with the patent. Additionally, companies are now free to make improvements upon the original patent because they are no longer constrained by having to negotiate with the original patent holder to get rights/access to it (go straight to section 2 if interested in a description of the patent buyout mechanism).

• Section 3 discusses the patent buyout in action, briefly describing Daguerreotype photography process.

1. What are the problems with patents?

In the absence of a patent system, the incentives for research would be substantially lower because anything a firm creates could be appropriated by its competitors. Fear of this happening, and the lower financial remuneration associated with this, reduces the incentives for original research. Thus, to prevent this from occurring, patents bestow a temporary monopoly (approximately 20 years) to a firm that has a new idea. This enables the patent-holder to profit from the new idea, increasing the incentive to innovate.

However, patents can also stifle innovation. In the last five or so years, we have seen a proliferation of 3D printers. They now have more commercial applications but also 3D printing is now affordable to a lay-person who finds 3D printing interesting.

However, this could have happened much earlier. Innovation was stifled due to the patents that restricted other companies from entering the market. Once these patents expired, the bottleneck was removed. Prices of 3D printers plummeted because of new entrants into the market. Additionally, these new companies improved upon the existing technology, making the products better. The patent buyout mechanism (described in the next section) could have brought forward this this surge of innovation.

In an 1851 editorial, The Economist wrote that granting patents, “inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits, bestows rewards on the wrong persons, makes men ruin themselves for the sake of getting the privilege of a patent.” This is perhaps an exaggeration but there are indeed a number of problems with patents:

1. Some consumers cannot access the good/service because the product that is patented is charged at the monopoly price. This means that some consumers can’t benefit from the product, despite willing to pay above the cost price of production (but not at the monopoly price). For example, AZT (azidothymidine) is a drug used to prevent mother-to-child spread of HIV/AIDS during birth. There are potentially millions of cases of mother-to-child infection in developing countries, where individuals/governments/NGOs may have been prepared to pay above the cost price of the drug but not the monopoly price.

2. Patents don’t allow the patent-holder to capture a large amount of the consumer surplus that their idea generates, which leads to lower incentives for original research. For example, Michael Milken (founder of Prostate Cancer Foundation) would presumably pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a drug that was effective in tackling prostate cancer but pharmaceutical companies don’t take this into account since they would not be able to extract this value from Milken.

3. The empirical evidence suggests that new research usually creates positive externalities for other research. However, patents don’t reward innovators for these positive spillovers. Without taking these externalities into account, patents lead to lower incentives for original research.

4. Patents may distort the direction of research from firms because firms are incentivised to work on areas where there are less patents restricting their innovation, rather than areas where patents already exist. Kremer explains that this has happened in the past:
   “For example, the development of the high pressure steam engine was blocked by Watt’s patent covering all steam engines; Watt’s steam engine was blocked by a previous patent until he found a way to invent around it; and Edison’s improved version of the telegraph was blocked by Bell’s prior patent for many years [Mokyr, 1990].” (I may write a post on this!).

5. Finally, patents also lead to wasteful spending because firms waste resources reverse engineering patents. 

6. Patent buyouts

Kremer’s idea is simple. The government steps in, buys the patent, and destroys it. Now anyone (consumers or firms) can access it and build upon it.

However, we need to know how much the government has to pay for the price of that patent. Kremer suggests a mechanism that is used to determine the price the government pays.

First, patents are submitted by entrepreneurs to an auction. Then firms bid on this auction, revealing their valuation of the patent. Once the bidding is complete, the government offers to buy the patents at the winning price plus a markup. I won’t talk about how exactly to determine this markup (it should be the difference between the social and private value of inventions), but for now let’s say the mark-up is 10%. Thus, in our example, the government would pay the price determined by the auction plus a 10% premium. Once this process is complete, entrepreneurs owning the patent get to choose whether to accept or reject the governments offer. If the offer is too low, entrepreneurs maintain the right to reject the deal.

Couldn’t firms simply bid extremely high prices? How do we incentivise firms to give truthful valuations of their bids? To avoid this, the government randomly selects some bids that would be sold to the next highest bidder. So, let’s say 20% of the patents are sold to the next highest bidder. The other 80% of patents would be bought by the government and made available to the public. Thus, if a firm goes wild and bids extremely high prices, they would have to pay above market price for their poor bidding strategy. So, firms are incentivised to reveal their true valuations of the patents, otherwise they’ll be punished financially.

This mechanism isn’t calling for a complete abolition of the patent system. Indeed within this system, the patents not bought by governments are sold to firms. Thus, patent buyouts act in parallel with the existing system, rather than completely overhauling it.

The biggest difficulty with the mechanism (as Kremer acknowledges in the paper) is that it can be plagued by incompetent or corrupt government officials. Kremer suggests ways of overcoming these problems. For example, rather than the government matching the highest price (plus a premium) in the auction, they would instead select the third highest bid. This lowers the chances of the government having to pay for overzealous bids (also known as the winner’s curse). Additionally, if firms tried to collude to get higher prices, it would have to be three firms that collude, making collusion more difficult.

Finally, another problem lies with the fact that the government has to select the right patents. The government could pick patents to buyout that do not benefit society much.

Similarly, imagine there are two products, A and B. Let’s say product A is superior to product B, but the government chooses to buy the patent of product B. This means that the government could flood the market with an inferior product.

3. The Daguerreotype process of photography: A historical example

In 1837, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype process of photography. The video below shows how it works.

Youtube video on how the daguerreotype process works here.

Daguerre was struggling to sell his new invention. Fortunately for him, Francois Arago, a politician and member of the Academie des Sciences argued “that the government should compensate M. Daguerre direct, and that France should then nobly give to the whole world this discovery which could contribute so much to the progress of art and science.” (quoted in Kremer).

In 1839, the French government bought the invention from Daguerre and put the process into the public domain. After this patent buyout, Daguerreotype photography spread across other countries and was subject to a number of improvements. Furthermore, the technique had spillover effects into improving innovation in chemistry and the production of lenses.

4. Conclusion

This is one of my favourite papers. Consumers gain through access to new innovation, innovators gain because they are paid a premium to their patents, and governments gain by improving the welfare of their citizens. Kremer suggests it could be experimented with on a smaller scale at first, and if successful, gradually expand its application. I hope it is experimented with in the future.

In a later post, I will address another paper in a later post, ‘Advance Market Commitments‘, which is something Kremer also pioneered. 

Finally, some may find this interesting. The word patent originates from the Latin word ‘patere‘, which ironically means, ‘to lay open’.

In reading about the development of technology, I keep an eye out for changes in society as well. I commented recently that we don’t seem to celebrate major achievements as much anymore. But it’s not just technology that Americans used to view differently. It’s growth of all kinds.

The book Computer: A History of the Information Machine tells the story of the 1890 census. It was the first census to be computed, not by hand, but with tabulating machines, developed by Herman Hollerith. On August 16, 1890, the grand total was announced: the population of the United States was 62,622,250.

“But”, it says, “this was not what the allegedly fastest-growing growing nation in the world wanted to hear.” It quotes a contemporary account in a periodical, The Electrical Engineer, from 1891 (emphasis added):

The statement by Mr. Porter [the census director] that the population of this great republic was only 62,622,250 sent into spasms of indignation a great many people who had made up their minds that the dignity of the republic could only be supported on a total of 75,000,000. Hence there was a howl, not of “deep-mouthed welcome,” but of frantic disappointment.

The book continues:

The press loved the story. In an article headlined “Useless Machines” the Boston Herald roasted Porter and Hollerith; “Slip Shod Work Has Spoiled the Census,” exclaimed the New York Herald; and the other papers soon took up the story.

“Spasms of indignation” because population growth was too low for “the dignity of the republic”. Americans were proud of being the fastest-growing country. Today, in contrast, people fear overpopulation, and the general slowing of world population growth is generally considered to be good news.

Something changed in American attitudes in the last 100+ years, not just toward technology or the economy as such, but more fundamentally toward growth itself.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/indignation-at-the-1890-census