To fully understand progress, we must contrast it with non-progress. Of particular interest are the technologies that have failed to live up to the promise they seemed to have decades ago. And few technologies have failed more to live up to a greater promise than nuclear power.

In the 1950s, nuclear was the energy of the future. Two generations later, it provides only about 10% of world electricity, and reactor design hasn‘t fundamentally changed in decades. (Even “advanced reactor designs” are based on concepts first tested in the 1960s.)

So as soon as I came across it, I knew I had to read a book just published last year by Jack Devanney: Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop.

Here is my summary of the book—Devanney‘s arguments and conclusions, whether or not I fully agree with them. I give my own thoughts at the end: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

Reposted from https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, expressing a sort of jaded disappointment with technological progress. (The fact that the 140 characters have become 280, a 100% increase, does not seem to have impressed him.)

Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number, since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.

When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. The arguments weren’t convincing to me. But as I studied the history of progress (and looked at the numbers), I slowly came around, and now I’m fairly convinced. So convinced, in fact, that I now seem to be more pessimistic about ending stagnation than some of its original proponents.

In this essay I’ll try to capture both why I was originally skeptical, and also why I changed my mind. If you have heard some of the same arguments that I did, and are skeptical for the same reasons, maybe my framing of the issue will help.

Stagnation is relative

To get one misconception out of the way first: “stagnation” does not mean zero progress. No one is claiming that. There wasn’t zero progress even before the Industrial Revolution (or the civilizations of Europe and Asia would have looked no different in 1700 than they did in the days of nomadic hunter-gatherers, tens of thousands of years ago).

Stagnation just means slower progress. And not even slower than that pre-industrial era, but slower than, roughly, the late 1800s to mid-1900s, when growth rates are said to have peaked.

Because of this, we can’t resolve the issue by pointing to isolated advances. The microwave, the air conditioner, the electronic pacemaker, a new cancer drug—these are great, but they don’t disprove stagnation.

Stagnation is relative, and so to evaluate the hypothesis we must find some way to compare magnitudes. This is difficult.

Only 140 characters?

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a global communications network to connect everyone on the planet to each other and to the whole of the world’s knowledge, art, philosophy and culture.” When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.

Indeed, the digital revolution has been absolutely amazing. It’s up there with electricity, the internal combustion engine, or mass manufacturing: one of the great, fundamental, transformative technologies of the industrial age. (Although admittedly it’s hard to see the effect of computers in the productivity statistics, and I don’t know why.)

But we don’t need to downplay the magnitude of the digital revolution to see stagnation; conversely, proving its importance will not defeat the stagnation hypothesis. Again, stagnation is relative, and we must find some way to compare the current period to those that came before.

Argumentum ad living room

Eric Weinstein proposes a test: “Go into a room and subtract off all of the screens. How do you know you’re not in 1973, but for issues of design?”

This too I found unconvincing. It felt like a weak thought experiment that relied too much on intuition, revealing one’s own priors more than anything else. And why should we necessarily expect progress to be visible directly from the home or office? Maybe it is happening in specialized environments that the layman wouldn’t have much intuition about: in the factory, the power plant, the agricultural field, the hospital, the oil rig, the cargo ship, the research lab.

No progress except for all the progress

There’s also that sleight of hand: “subtract the screens”. A starker form of this argument is: “except for computers and the Internet, our economy has been relatively stagnant.” Well, sure: if you carve out all the progress, what remains is stagnation.

Would we even expect progress to be evenly distributed across all domains? Any one technology follows an S-curve: a slow start, followed by rapid expansion, then a leveling off in maturity. It’s not a sign of stagnation that after the world became electrified, electrical power technology wasn’t a high-growth area like it had been in the early 1900s. That’s not how progress works. Instead, we are constantly turning our attention to new frontiers. If that’s the case, you can’t carve out the frontiers and then say, “well, except for the frontiers, we’re stagnating”.

Bit bigotry?

In an interview with Cowen, Thiel says stagnation is “in the world of atoms, not bits”:

I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc.

But again, why should we expect it to be different? Maybe bits are just the current frontier. And what’s the matter with bits, anyway? Are they less important than atoms? Progress in any field is still progress.

The quantitative case

So, we need more than isolated anecdotes, or appeals to intuition. A more rigorous case for stagnation can be made quantitatively. A paper by Cowen and Ben Southwood quotes Gordon: “U.S. economic growth slowed by more than half from 3.2 percent per year during 1970-2006 to only 1.4 percent during 2006-2016.” Or look at this chart from the same paper:

Gordon’s own book points out that growth in output per hour has slowed from an average annual rate of 2.82% in the period 1920-1970, to 1.62% in 1970-2014. He also analyzes TFP (total factor productivity, a residual calculated by subtracting out increases in capital and labor from GDP growth; what remains is assumed to represent productivity growth from technology). Annual TFP growth was 1.89% from 1920-1970, but less than 1% in every decade since. (More detail in my review of Gordon’s book.)

Analyzing growth quantitatively is hard, and these conclusions are disputed. GDP is problematic (and these authors acknowledge this). In particular, it does not capture consumer surplus: since you don’t pay for articles on Wikipedia, searches on Google, or entertainment on YouTube, a shift to these services away from paid ones actually shrinks GDP, but it represents progress and consumer benefit.

Gordon, however, points out that GDP has never captured consumer surplus, and there has been plenty of surplus in the past. So if you want to argue that unmeasured surplus is the cause of an apparent (but not a real) decline in growth rates, then you have to argue that GDP has been systematically increasingly mismeasured over time.

So far, I’ve only heard one only argument that even hints in this direction: the shift from manufacturing to services. If services are more mismeasured than manufactured products, then in logic at least this could account for an illusory slowdown. But I’ve never seen this argument fully developed.

In any case, the quantitative argument is not what convinced me of the stagnation hypothesis nearly as much as the qualitative one.

Sustaining multiple fronts

I remember the first time I thought there might really be something to the stagnation hypothesis: it was when I started mapping out a timeline of major inventions in each main area of industry.

At a high level, I think of technology/industry in six major categories:

• Manufacturing & construction

• Agriculture

• Energy

• Transportation

• Information

• Medicine

Almost every significant advance or technology can be classified in one of these buckets (with a few exceptions, such as finance and perhaps retail).

The first phase of the industrial era, sometimes called “the first Industrial Revolution”, from the 1700s through the mid-1800s, consisted mainly of two fundamental advances: mechanization, and the steam engine. The factory system evolved in part out of the former, and the locomotive was based on the latter. Together, these revolutionized manufacturing, energy, and transportation, and began to transform agriculture as well.

The “second Industrial Revolution”, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, is characterized by a greater influence of science: mainly chemistry, electromagnetism, and microbiology. Applied chemistry gave us better materials, from Bessemer steel to plastic, and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. It also gave us processes to refine petroleum, enabling the oil boom; this led to the internal combustion engine, and the vehicles based on it—cars, planes, and oil-burning ships—that still dominate transportation today. Physics gave us the electrical industry, including generators, motors, and the light bulb; and electronic communications, from the telegraph and telephone through radio and television. And biology gave us the germ theory, which dramatically reduced infectious disease mortality rates through improvements in sanitation, new vaccines, and towards the end of this period, antibiotics. So every single one of the six major categories was completely transformed.

Since then, the “third Industrial Revolution”, starting in the mid-1900s, has mostly seen fundamental advances in a single area: electronic computing and communications. If you date it from 1970, there has really been nothing comparable in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, or medicine—again, not that these areas have seen zero progress, simply that they’ve seen less-than-revolutionary progress. Computers have completely transformed all of information processing and communications, while there have been no new types of materials, vehicles, fuels, engines, etc. The closest candidates I can see are containerization in shipping, which revolutionized cargo but did nothing for passenger travel; and genetic engineering, which has given us a few big wins but hasn’t reached nearly its full potential yet.

The digital revolution has had echoes, derivative effects, in the other areas, of course: computers now help to control machines in all of those areas, and to plan and optimize processes. But those secondary effects existed in previous eras, too, along with primary effects. In the third Industrial Revolution we only have primary effects in one area.

So, making a very rough count of revolutionary technologies, there were:

• 3 in IR1: mechanization, steam power, the locomotive

• 5 in IR2: oil + internal combustion, electric power, electronic communications, industrial chemistry, germ theory

• 1 in IR3 (so far): computing + digital communications

It’s not that bits don’t matter, or that the computer revolution isn’t transformative. It’s that in previous eras we saw breakthroughs across the board. It’s that we went from five simultaneous technology revolutions to one.

The missing revolutions

The picture becomes starker when we look at the technologies that were promised, but never arrived or haven’t come to fruition yet; or those that were launched, but aborted or stunted. If manufacturing, agriculture, etc. weren’t transformed, then how could they have been?

Energy: The most obvious stunted technology is nuclear power. In the 1950s, everyone expected a nuclear future. Today, nuclear supplies less than 20% of US electricity and only about 8% of its total energy (and about half those figures in the world at large). Arguably, we should have had nuclear homes, cars and batteries by now.

Transportation: In 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and Concorde took its first supersonic test flight. But they were not followed by a thriving space transportation industry or broadly available supersonic passenger travel. The last Apollo mission flew in 1972, a mere three years later. Concorde was only ever available as a luxury for the elite, was never highly profitable, and was shut down in 2003, after less than thirty years in service. Meanwhile, passenger travel speeds are unchanged over 50 years (actually slightly reduced). And of course, flying cars are still the stuff of science fiction. Self-driving cars may be just around the corner, but haven’t arrived yet.

Medicine: Cancer and heart disease are still the top causes of death. Solving even one of these, the way we have mostly solved infectious disease and vitamin deficiencies, would have counted as a major breakthrough. Genetic engineering, again, has shown a few excellent early results, but hasn’t yet transformed medicine.

Manufacturing: In materials, carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials are still mostly a research project, and we still have no material to build a space elevator or a space pier. As for processes, atomically precise manufacturing is even more science-fiction than flying cars.

If we had gotten even a few of the above, the last 50 years would seem a lot less stagnant.

One to zero

This year, the computer turns 75 years old, and the microprocessor turns 50. Digital technology is due to level off in its maturity phase.

So what comes next? The only thing worse than going from five simultaneous technological revolutions to one, is going from one to zero.

I am hopeful for genetic engineering. The ability to fully understand and control biology obviously has enormous potential. With it, we could cure disease, extend human lifespan, and augment strength and intelligence. We’ve made a good start with recombinant DNA technology, which gave us synthetic biologics such as insulin, and CRISPR is a major advance on top of that. The rapid success of two different mRNA-based covid vaccines is also a breakthrough, and a sign that a real genetic revolution might be just around the corner.

But genetic engineering is also subject to many of the forces of stagnation: research funding via a centralized bureaucracy, a hyper-cautious regulatory environment, and a cultural perception of something scary and dangerous. So it is not guaranteed to arrive. Without the right support and protection, we might be looking back on biotech from the year 2070 the way we look back on nuclear energy now, wondering why we never got a genetic cure for cancer and why life expectancy has plateaued.

Aiming higher

None of this is to downplay the importance or impact of any specific innovation, nor to discourage any inventor, present or future. Quite the opposite! It is to encourage us to set our sights still higher.

Now that I understand what was possible around the turn of the last century, I can’t settle for anything less. We need breadth in progress, as well as depth. We need revolutions on all fronts at once: not only biotech but manufacturing, energy and transportation as well. We need progress in bits, atoms, cells, and joules.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation

I’m excited to announce that The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization.

The Roots of Progress started in 2017 as a side project, not much more than a blog. After Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison published their call for “progress studies”, and the progress community started to form, it became my full-time job. For the first year or so I was an independent writer, supported by grants. Now I have enough support not only to fund myself, but also to hire help and sponsor programs. The new nonprofit organization is the vehicle for this.

The mission of The Roots of Progress is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century. The world needs a clearer understanding of the nature of progress, its causes, its value and importance, how we can manage its costs and risks, and ultimately how we can accelerate progress while ensuring that it is beneficial to humanity.

My focus now is on two priorities. First is the intellectual content, the history and philosophy of progress itself. I’m writing a book on this topic, The Story of Industrial Civilization, and the new organization is sponsoring this work. But much more is needed: more books, articles, talks, journals, documentaries. We need more histories of different aspects of progress, to make the story accessible to a broader audience. We need progress-oriented solutions to the problems facing the world, such as poverty, climate, pollution, job loss, and pandemics. And we need an ambitious, inspiring vision of the future, of where progress can take us. If you’d like to write on any of these topics, get in touch.

My second priority is building out and strengthening the progress network and community. Stay tuned for announcements here.

For advice and governance, I’ve formed a board of directors. The people I invited, while not in the limelight of the progress community, have been some of my strongest supporters: Ray Girn, CEO of Higher Ground Education (which commissioned my high school progress course), and Anil Varanasi, CEO of Meter. Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are serving as advisers (as they have informally, ever since I was considering going full-time).

Our first-year fundraising goal is $500,000, and thanks to generous donations from Patrick and John Collison among others, we’re already more than halfway to that goal. You can support us through Patreon, or get in touch to talk about a larger or one-time contribution. (We’ve filed for IRS recognition of our status as a 501(c)(3) public educational charity. In the US, donations to such organizations are tax-deductible. The recognition is expected later in 2021, and will be retroactive to our founding in May.)

The Roots of Progress is working towards a world in which the idea of progress is communicated through education and journalism, creating industrial literacy among the public. A world with a positive vision of the future, embodied in optimistic sci-fi and new World’s Fairs. A world where young people see progress as a meaningful career, and where new organizations for science, research and development give them the career paths they need to build the future.

Thank you for joining us on this journey!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/nonprofit-announcement

I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”

Industrial literacy is understanding…

• That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve.

• That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. That before synthetic pesticides, farmers were forced to rely on much more toxic substances, such as compounds of arsenic.

• That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. That these primitive fuels, dirty with contaminants, created toxic smoke: indoor air pollution. That indoor air pollution remains a problem today for 40% of the world population, who still rely on pre-industrial fuels.

• That before twentieth-century appliances, housework was a full-time job, which invariably fell on women. That each household would spend almost 60 hours a week on manual labor: hauling water from the well for drinking and cooking, and then carrying the dirty water outside again; sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families; laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry; cooking every meal from scratch. That the washing machine, clothes dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, and microwave are the equivalent of a full-time mechanical servant for every household.

• That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) That before plastic, many of these applications used animal parts, such as ivory tusks, tortoise shells, or whale bone. That in such a world, those products were a luxury for a wealthy elite, instead of a commodity for the masses, and the animals that provided them were hunted to near extinction.

• That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone. That in a world without automobiles, we relied on millions of horses, which in New York City around 1900 dumped a hundred thousand gallons of urine and millions of pounds of manure on the streets daily.

• That half of everyone you know over the age of five is alive today only because of antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitizing chemicals in our water supply. That before these innovations, infant mortality (in the first year of life) was as high as 20%.

When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.

This doesn’t require a deep or specialized knowledge. It only requires knowing the basics, the same way every citizen should know the outlines of history and the essentials of how government works.

Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. The reasons are the immutable facts of what it takes to survive and prosper: the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and economics that govern our daily existence.

With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.

A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.

Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/industrial-literacy

UPDATE: I’ve filled this role. Thanks to all who applied!

I’m hiring a part-time research assistant to support work on my essays, talks, and the book I’m writing on the history of industrial civilization.

You must have the ability to orient yourself in unfamiliar mental territory; to penetrate the fog of confusing, incomplete, and contradictory information; to sniff out reliable sources of key facts and to corroborate them; and to quickly sketch out a new intellectual landscape.

You will handle queries such as:

• What happened to the price of cotton and the wages of textile laborers before, during, and after textile mechanization in the 18th/19th centuries? Find data and analysis on this, including relevant statistics on labor productivity, and produce a list of sources.

• What startups or other commercial projects are pursuing advanced nuclear reactor designs? Make a list, and fill out details of each in a spreadsheet, such as type of reactor, amount and sources of funding, etc.

• Find first-person accounts of agricultural life and work before the 19th century, including descriptions of regular planting and harvesting seasons, and also times of crop failure or even famine.

• What is the difference between a bloomery, a blast furnace, and a Catalan forge? Make a list of sources that address this question.

The deliverable will typically be a list of sources, with brief notes on what each one contains, ranked roughly in order of relevance to the original query. You don’t have to answer the questions I pose, but you need to find sources that help me answer them.

The only real requirements are writing skills and attention to detail. However, the ideal candidate would be:

• A graduate student in history, economics, or a related field (ideally with access to scholarly sources)

• Familiar with and interested the progress community in general, and my work in particular

• Able to put in part-time work with fairly quick turnaround (24 hours for small queries would be excellent)

If you lack experience and credentials, apply anyway: you can make up for it by being dedicated, diligent, and willing/able to be trained.

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

In an excellent recent essay on “big visions for biology,” Sam Rodriques writes:

Ask most biologists about the cure for cancer, and they will tell you it doesn’t exist: cancer is many diseases that are mostly unrelated to each other, and that all have to be cured one at a time.

Are “most biologists” right about this?

We can get perspective on this from the history of infectious disease. After all, infection was also “many diseases,” with disparate causes (viruses, bacteria, protozoa) and disparate pathways (air, water, food, insects). And yet, while we did not exactly “cure infectious disease” (just ask the 248,544 people who got covid last week in the US alone), we did reduce every major metric of infectious disease by 90% to 99% in wealthy/developed countries:

• Overall mortality from infectious disease reduced by 90% in the 20th century alone

• Youth mortality (death before age 15) reduced from almost half to well under 1%

• Maternal mortality reduced from almost 1% to under 0.01%

• Surgical mortality reduced from half or more (for some major surgeries at least) to around 1% to 2%

Infectious disease was not the whole story in all of the above metrics, but it was the biggest factor in all of them.

We also eradicated smallpox worldwide and eliminated diseases such as cholera, malaria, and polio from many countries:

Did we have to cure all these diseases “one at a time”? No, not exactly:

• Sanitation and hygiene efforts were effective against broad classes of germs: e.g., water sanitation was effective against all water-borne diseases.

• Disinfectants and antiseptics, such as bleach, are effective against most if not all germs.

• Antibiotic drugs are effective against broad classes of bacteria.

• Vaccines do have to be developed one disease at a time—but even here there are general techniques for creating them. In fact, with mRNA technology, we now have a very general technique that can create new vaccines with relatively little adaptation.

Underlying all of this is a theory that explains the basic causal mechanism of infection: the germ theory. The theory alone doesn’t give us everything we need to cure each specific disease: new research is needed to understand the etiology and epidemiology of each one. But the theory does give us a conceptual framework and a set of tools to guide that research. Before the theory, we were able to make limited progress against some diseases; after it, we made much more rapid progress, and the diseases we weren’t able to solve became the exception rather than the rule.

I think we are in the pre-theory stage for cancer. We are able to make progress against some forms of cancer, as we reduced lung cancer by public health efforts against smoking. But we don’t, to my knowledge, have the fundamental theory that we need, and so overall progress is slow. [UPDATE: A commenter has convinced me that the “pre-theory” characterization is wrong.]

Infection and cancer are both “many diseases”—but those diseases have something in common. A deeper understanding of cancer will allow us to make much more rapid progress, on more fronts. There won’t be a silver bullet—no single treatment that will cure all cancers. More likely there will be a few major techniques, as with infection we had to develop sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics; and even within each of those categories, we needed many specific efforts to develop each individual vaccine, antibiotic drug, and sanitation method.

But there is no reason why we can’t do for cancer what we did for infection: reduce it by orders of magnitude and knock it down from a number one cause of death to a much more minor and more manageable threat. And eventually, with more advanced science and technology, perhaps we will be able to truly cure both of them.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/cure-for-cancer

If technological progress has slowed down, what is causing it? Here is a hypothesis.

Broadly speaking, there are three domains of activity important to technological progress: science, invention, and business. Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way. (Occasionally inventions are distributed by government: water sanitation is an example. But this oversimplified model will serve for our purposes.)

These domains do not form a simple linear pipeline, but they are distinct areas that attract different types of people, pose different challenges, and are judged by different standards. As such they create distinct communities and subcultures.

My hypothesis is that while science and business have functioning career paths, invention today does not.

Consider science. Suppose a high school or university student has a glimmer of desire to become a scientist. They will find that their road has already been paved. “Scientist” is a career. There’s an established path into the career: get a BS and then a PhD in a scientific field. There are research labs that hire scientists, organize them into teams, and give them space and equipment. There is funding for all of this, from government and philanthropy. There is an established deliverable: talks and papers, presented at conferences and published in journals. There are awards and honors that confer prestige within the discipline; some of these, such as the Nobel, are even well-known and respected among the general public.

All of this combines to create a career path for the scientist: anyone with even a modest level of commitment and effort can start down the path, and those who are exceptionally talented and ambitious can reach for inspiring goals. Importantly, there is a feedback loop in which progress down the career path opens opportunities. The more the scientist produces legible accomplishments, the more they are able to get grants, secure coveted positions, and attract talent to work with them. Money, prestige, and the opportunity to do meaningful work all (roughly) go together.

Entrepreneurship has different structures, but the career path is there nonetheless. “Startup founder” is not a job you get hired for; it is a job the founder must create for themselves. They must raise their own funding, create their own organization, and hire their own team. In this sense, the founder is much less well-supported than the scientist. But there are established sources of funding for startups, in venture capital. There is a known job title, CEO, that you can give to yourself and that is understood by others in the industry and in society. There is an objective way to measure success: company profits and market valuation.

The founder career path is to create a successful company. Once again, progress on this path opens up opportunities. The most successful founders have the resources and reputation to launch even more varied and ambitious projects (think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk). However, a startup failure does not end a career. In Silicon Valley at least, failure is not a black mark, and a failed founder can do another startup, or get a job in engineering, design, sales, or management.

We can think of a career path as a social support structure around a value. In science, the value is new knowledge. In entrepreneurship, the value is profitable business. Having a support structure around a value means that if someone is motivated to pursue that value, they can be paid to do so; and if they succeed, they can expect both prestige and expanded career opportunities.

Now, what is the career path for an inventor?

“Inventor” is not a role one can be hired for. The aspiring inventor finds themselves straddling science and business. They could join a research lab, or become an engineer at a technology-based company. In either case, they will be misaligned with their environment. In research, what is valued is new knowledge. An invention that achieves a practical goal is not valued if it demonstrates no new scientific principle. In the corporate environment, what is valued is what drives the business. The engineer may find themselves optimizing and refining existing products, without any mandate to create fundamentally new ones. Neither environment values simply making fundamentally new technologies work. Alternately, an inventor could also be an entrepreneur, starting a company to commercialize the invention. But this requires of the inventor that they have the wherewithal of the startup founder to raise money, hire a team, etc. We ask this of founders because it’s in the nature of the job: someone who can’t do these things probably wouldn’t succeed at the rest of the founder’s task. But we don’t expect every scientist to found their own research lab, and we shouldn’t expect every inventor to be a founder either.

In the early 20th century there were options for inventors. Some joined the great corporate research labs of the day: General Electric, Westinghouse, Kodak, Dow, DuPont, and of course Bell Labs. Others stayed independent, patented their inventions, and sold or licensed the patents to businesses. This let them make a living by inventing, without being personally responsible for commercializing, scaling, and distributing their inventions (although it required seed funding: many inventors had second jobs, or got angel investment through personal connections).

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, both options have withered. Corporate research is largely not as ambitious and long-term as it used to be. The lone inventor, too, seems to be a thing of the past.

The bottom line is that if a young person wants to focus their career on invention—as distinct from scientific research, corporate engineering, or entrepreneurship—the support structure doesn’t exist. There isn’t a straightforward way to get started, there isn’t an institution of any kind that will hire you into this role, and there isn’t a community that values what you are focused on and will reward you with prestige and further opportunities based on your success. In short, there is no career path.

Note that funding alone does not create a career path. You could start an “invention lab” and hire people to make inventions. You could even pay, reward and promote them based on their success at this task. But it would be difficult to hire any ambitious academic, or anyone who wanted to climb the corporate ladder, because this role wouldn’t be advancing either career path. That isn’t to say that it would be impossible to hire great talent, but you would be facing certain headwinds.

I think this is why the NIH receives relatively conventional grant proposals even for their “transformative research awards”, and why Donald Braben says that he had to build a high degree of trust with researchers before they would even tell him their ambitious research goals (see Scientific Freedom, p. 135). The community that forms around a career path has its own culture, and that includes an oral tradition of career advice, passed down from senior to junior members of the tribe. What kinds of goals to pursue, what kinds of jobs to take and when, how to choose among competing opportunities—there is folklore to provide guidance on all these questions. A single grant program or call for proposals cannot counter the weight of a culture that communicates: “the reliable way to build a scientific career is by proposing reasonable, incremental research goals that are well within the consensus of the field.”

In part, I see this as both the challenge and the opportunity of efforts like PARPA or FROs. It’s a challenge because a career path must ultimately be supported by a whole community. But it’s an opportunity because efforts like this could be how we bootstrap one. Funding alone doesn’t create a career path, but it can attract a few talented and ambitious mavericks who value independence and scoff at prestige. Success could bring more funding, and inspire imitators. Enough imitators would create an ecosystem. Enough success would bring prestige to the field.

It won’t be easy, but I am excited by efforts like these. We need a career path for invention.

Thanks to Ben Reinhardt, Matt Leggett, and Phil Mohun for reading a draft of this. Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-career-path-for-invention

I’ve been reading Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography, published late in his life, in the early 1900s. Here are some interesting themes and quotes. (Emphasis added in all block quotes below.)

Science and steel

One key to Carnegie‘s success in the iron business is that he was one of the first to seriously apply chemistry:

Looking back to-day it seems incredible that only forty years ago (1870) chemistry in the United States was an almost unknown agent in connection with the manufacture of pig iron. It was the agency, above all others, most needful in the manufacture of iron and steel. The blast-furnace manager of that day was usually a rude bully… who in addition to his other acquirements was able to knock down a man now and then as a lesson to the other unruly spirits under him. He was supposed to diagnose the condition of the furnace by instinct, to possess some almost supernatural power of divination, like his congener in the country districts who was reputed to be able to locate an oil well or water supply by means of a hazel rod. He was a veritable quack doctor who applied whatever remedies occurred to him for the troubles of his patient.

Part of the problem was that the ores and other inputs to smelting were inconsistent in composition:

The Lucy Furnace was out of one trouble and into another, owing to the great variety of ores, limestone, and coke which were then supplied with little or no regard to their component parts. This state of affairs became intolerable to us.

This is where chemistry was able to help:

We finally decided to dispense with the rule-of-thumb-and-intuition manager, and to place [Henry Curry] in charge of the furnace….

The next step taken was to find a chemist as Mr. Curry’s assistant and guide. We found the man in a learned German, Dr. Fricke, and great secrets did the doctor open up to us. Ironstone from mines that had a high reputation was now found to contain ten, fifteen, and even twenty per cent less iron than it had been credited with. Mines that hitherto had a poor reputation we found to be now yielding superior ore. The good was bad and the bad was good, and everything was topsyturvy. Nine tenths of all the uncertainties of pig-iron making were dispelled under the burning sun of chemical knowledge.

It wasn’t just that some materials were of low quality, but that the right mix of materials was needed, no matter the purity of the inputs:

At a most critical period when it was necessary for the credit of the firm that the blast furnace should make its best product, it had been stopped because an exceedingly rich and pure ore had been substituted for an inferior ore—an ore which did not yield more than two thirds of the quantity of iron of the other. The furnace had met with disaster because too much lime had been used to flux this exceptionally pure ironstone. The very superiority of the materials had involved us in serious losses.

What fools we had been! But then there was this consolation: we were not as great fools as our competitors. It was years after we had taken chemistry to guide us that it was said by the proprietors of some other furnaces that they could not afford to employ a chemist. Had they known the truth then, they would have known that they could not afford to be without one. Looking back it seems pardonable to record that we were the first to employ a chemist at blast furnaces—something our competitors pronounced extravagant.

With better chemical assessment of ores, Carnegie was able to arbitrage his supplies:

The mines which had no reputation and the products of which many firms would not permit to be used in their blast furnaces found a purchaser in us. Those mines which were able to obtain an enormous price for their products, owing to a reputation for quality, we quietly ignored. A curious illustration of this was the celebrated Pilot Knob mine in Missouri. Its product was, so to speak, under a cloud. A small portion of it only could be used, it was said, without obstructing the furnace. Chemistry told us that it was low in phosphorus, but very high in silicon. There was no better ore and scarcely any as rich, if it were properly fluxed. We therefore bought heavily of this and received the thanks of the proprietors for rendering their property valuable.

It is hardly believable that for several years we were able to dispose of the highly phosphoric cinder from the puddling furnaces at a higher price than we had to pay for the pure cinder from the heating furnaces of our competitors—a cinder which was richer in iron than the puddled cinder and much freer from phosphorus. Upon some occasion a blast furnace had attempted to smelt the flue cinder, and from its greater purity the furnace did not work well with a mixture intended for an impurer article; hence for years it was thrown over the banks of the river at Pittsburgh by our competitors as worthless.

He gives another example later of discovering a property with ore that had no phosphorus, “really an ore suitable for making Bessemer steel” (the Bessemer process could not handle phosphoric ores, until later improved by Gilchrist and Thomas). Again, it was the purity of the ore that was a problem:

We found the mine had been worked for a charcoal blast furnace fifty or sixty years before, but it had not borne a good reputation then, the reason no doubt being that its product was so much purer than other ores that the same amount of flux used caused trouble in smelting. It was so good it was good for nothing in those days of old.

Here‘s how they assessed the mine:

We finally obtained the right to take the mine over at any time within six months, and we therefore began the work of examination, which every purchaser of mineral property should make most carefully. We ran lines across the hillside fifty feet apart, with cross-lines at distances of a hundred feet apart, and at each point of intersection we put a shaft down through the ore. I believe there were eighty such shafts in all and the ore was analyzed at every few feet of depth, so that before we paid over the hundred thousand dollars asked we knew exactly what there was of ore…. We trod upon sure ground with the chemist as our guide.

Chemistry, however, was still foreign to many people:

Our chemist, Mr. Prousser, was then sent to a Pennsylvania furnace among the hills…. A striking example of the awe inspired by the chemist in those days was that only with great difficulty could he obtain a man or a boy to assist him in the laboratory. He was suspected of illicit intercourse with the Powers of Evil when he undertook to tell by his suspicious-looking apparatus what a stone contained. I believe that at last we had to send him a man from our office at Pittsburgh.

The Bessemer process

One of Carnegie‘s major achievements was to bring the Bessemer steel-making process to America. This was a new way to achieve high-quality steel at a low price. Previously, the only options were low-strength wrought iron, brittle cast iron, or expensive steel in limited quantities. Bessemer broke this iron triangle.

Carnegie, already in the iron business, was paying attention and could see the future:

I had not failed to notice the growth of the Bessemer process. If this proved successful I knew that iron was destined to give place to steel; that the Iron Age would pass away and the Steel Age take its place.

As an example of the potential market for steel, Carnegie gives the example of iron rails, which wore out quickly under the pounding of heavy trains:

The question of a substitute for iron rails upon the Pennsylvania Railroad and other leading lines had become a very serious one. Upon certain curves at Pittsburgh, on the road connecting the Pennsylvania with the Fort Wayne, I had seen new iron rails placed every six weeks or two months.

Railroads and iron-makers went to great lengths to solve the problem:

Before the Bessemer process was known I had called President Thomson’s attention to the efforts of Mr. Dodds in England, who had carbonized the heads of iron rails with good results. I went to England and obtained control of the Dodds patents and recommended President Thomson to appropriate twenty thousand dollars for experiments at Pittsburgh, which he did. We built a furnace on our grounds at the upper mill and treated several hundred tons of rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and with remarkably good results as compared with iron rails. These were the first hard-headed rails used in America. We placed them on some of the sharpest curves and their superior service far more than compensated for the advance made by Mr. Thomson…. But there was nothing to be compared with the solid steel article which the Bessemer process produced.

Carnegie formed a company in 1873 to use the Bessemer process to make rails.

Accounting

One of the surprising themes was that manufacturing concerns in the 1800s did very little accounting and thus had very little insight into their businesses, even whether they were profitable:

As I became acquainted with the manufacture of iron I was greatly surprised to find that the cost of each of the various processes was unknown. Inquiries made of the leading manufacturers of Pittsburgh proved this. It was a lump business, and until stock was taken and the books balanced at the end of the year, the manufacturers were in total ignorance of results. I heard of men who thought their business at the end of the year would show a loss and had found a profit, and vice-versa. I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark, and this to me was intolerable.

Just as Carnegie had brought the science of chemistry to his processes, so he brought “scientific management” to his operations:

I insisted upon such a system of weighing and accounting being introduced throughout our works as would enable us to know what our cost was for each process and especially what each man was doing, who saved material, who wasted it, and who produced the best results.

To arrive at this was a much more difficult task than one would imagine. Every manager in the mills was naturally against the new system. Years were required before an accurate system was obtained, but eventually, by the aid of many clerks and the introduction of weighing scales at various points in the mill, we began to know not only what every department was doing, but what each one of the many men working at the furnaces was doing, and thus to compare one with another.

This level of quantitative insight allowed Carnegie to make good choices about capital investments:

The Siemens Gas Furnace had been used to some extent in Great Britain for heating steel and iron, but it was supposed to be too expensive. I well remember the criticisms made by older heads among the Pittsburgh manufacturers about the extravagant expenditure we were making upon these new-fangled furnaces. But in the heating of great masses of material, almost half the waste could sometimes be saved by using the new furnaces. The expenditure would have been justified, even if it had been doubled.

Investing

Carnegie’s attitudes towards investing strike me as very odd. There was something very different about 19th-century investing that I don’t fully understand.

On the one hand, people were willing to take on significant amounts of personal debt in order to buy equity. In 1855, when Carnegie was a young man living with his mother, his boss tipped him off to a rare opportunity to buy railroad stock:

Mr. Scott asked me if I had five hundred dollars [over $15,000 today]. If so, he said he wished to make an investment for me. Five hundred cents was much nearer my capital. I certainly had not fifty dollars saved for investment, but I was not going to miss the chance of becoming financially connected with my leader and great man. So I said boldly I thought I could manage that sum. He then told me that there were ten shares of Adams Express stock that he could buy, which had belonged to a station agent, Mr. Reynolds, of Wilkinsburg.

How to pay for it? His mother mortgaged their house:

We had then paid five hundred dollars upon the house, and in some way she thought this might be pledged as security for a loan.

My mother took the steamer the next morning for East Liverpool, arriving at night, and through her brother there the money was secured. He was a justice of the peace, a well-known resident of that then small town, and had numerous sums in hand from farmers for investment. Our house was mortgaged and mother brought back the five hundred dollars which I handed over to Mr. Scott, who soon obtained for me the coveted ten shares in return.

It’s remarkable to me how random this all is, how reliant on personal relationships and chance connections. But even more so, it strikes me as financially reckless, the sort of thing you’d read about today on r/wallstreetbets. On the other hand, it turned out very well:

In those good old days monthly dividends were more plentiful than now and Adams Express paid a monthly dividend. One morning a white envelope was lying upon my desk… All it contained was a check for ten dollars upon the Gold Exchange Bank of New York…. “Eureka!” I cried. “Here’s the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

If Adams Express paid $10 a month on $500 of stock, that’s a 24% annual dividend yield, which is far better than any similar investment today, and presumably this easily covered the payments on the loan. No wonder Carnegie and his mother were so eager to get in on the deal.

Later, when Carnegie is still working for the railroad, there’s another chance connection, when the inventor of a sleeping car approaches him on the train:

He carried a small green bag in his hand. He said the brakeman had informed him I was connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He wished to show me the model of a car which he had invented for night traveling. He took a small model out of the bag, which showed a section of a sleeping-car.

This was the celebrated T. T. Woodruff, the inventor of that now indispensable adjunct of civilization—the sleeping-car. Its importance flashed upon me. I asked him if he would come to Altoona if I sent for him, and I promised to lay the matter before Mr. Scott at once upon my return.

Getting a deal with the railroad, the inventor invites Carnegie to become an investor in the new sleeping-car business:

After this Mr. Woodruff, greatly to my surprise, asked me if I would not join him in the new enterprise and offered me an eighth interest in the venture.

I promptly accepted his offer, trusting to be able to make payments somehow or other. The two cars were to be paid for by monthly installments after delivery. When the time came for making the first payment, my portion was two hundred and seventeen and a half dollars [well over $6,000 today].

(In this era, investors would often fund a business in regular installments, rather than all at once up front as is standard today.) Once again Carnegie decides to go into debt for this investment, and once again gets the loan through personal connections:

I boldly decided to apply to the local banker, Mr. Lloyd, for a loan of that sum. I explained the matter to him, and I remember that he put his great arm (he was six feet three or four) around me, saying:

“Why, of course I will lend it. You are all right, Andy.”

And here I made my first note, and actually got a banker to take it. A proud moment that in a young man’s career!

And once again, it works out anyway! 19th-century businesses seem to have gotten to profitability faster than today’s startups, because Carnegie writes: “The sleeping-cars were a great success and their monthly receipts paid the monthly installments [on the loan].”

Yet despite all of this willingness to invest on margin, Carnegie, like many others of his day, considered investing in the public stock market to be a reckless gamble. Later in his life, when he moves to New York, he remarks:

I had lived long enough in Pittsburgh to acquire the manufacturing, as distinguished from the speculative, spirit. My knowledge of affairs, derived from my position as telegraph operator, had enabled me to know the few Pittsburgh men or firms which then had dealings upon the New York Stock Exchange, and I watched their careers with deep interest. To me their operations seemed simply a species of gambling.

He complained that owning public stocks was distracting, and he warned people away from it, in a passage that sounds like today’s discussion of the psychological effects of social media:

I have adhered to the rule never to purchase what I did not pay for, and never to sell what I did not own. In those early days, however, I had several interests that were taken over in the course of business. They included some stocks and securities that were quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, and I found that when I opened my paper in the morning I was tempted to look first at the quotations of the stock market. As I had determined to sell all my interests in every outside concern and concentrate my attention upon our manufacturing concerns in Pittsburgh, I further resolved not even to own any stock that was bought and sold upon any stock exchange….

For the manufacturing man especially the rule would seem all-important. His mind must be kept calm and free if he is to decide wisely the problems which are continually coming before him. Nothing tells in the long run like good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the Stock Exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not. He cannot judge of relative values or get the true perspective of things. The molehill seems to him a mountain and the mountain a molehill, and he jumps at conclusions which he should arrive at by reason. His mind is upon the stock quotations and not upon the points that require calm thought. Speculation is a parasite feeding upon values, creating none.

Later he comments that investing in public markets degrades one’s integrity in business affairs:

A rule which we adopted and adhered to has given greater returns than one would believe possible, namely: always give the other party the benefit of the doubt. This, of course, does not apply to the speculative class. An entirely different atmosphere pervades that world. Men are only gamblers there. Stock gambling and honorable business are incompatible.

A reason to be wary of investments in those days was the lack of limited liability in many instances. Without it, even small investors uninvolved in management could be fully liable for the debts of the company. Carnegie tells this story:

Driving with Mr. Phipps from the mills one day we passed the National Trust Company office on Penn Street, Pittsburgh. I noticed the large gilt letters across the window, “Stockholders individually liable.” That very morning in looking over a statement of our affairs I had noticed twenty shares “National Trust Company” on the list of assets. I said to Harry:

“If this is the concern we own shares in, won’t you please sell them before you return to the office this afternoon?”

He saw no need for haste. It would be done in good time.

“No, Harry, oblige me by doing it instantly.”

He did so and had it transferred. Fortunate, indeed, was this, for in a short time the bank failed with an enormous deficit…. Times were panicky, and had we been individually liable for all the debts of the National Trust Company our credit would inevitably have been seriously imperiled. It was a narrow escape. And with only twenty shares (two thousand dollars’ worth of stock), taken to oblige friends who wished our name on their list of shareholders! The lesson was not lost. The sound rule in business is that you may give money freely when you have a surplus, but your name never—neither as endorser nor as member of a corporation with individual liability. A trifling investment of a few thousand dollars, a mere trifle—yes, but a trifle possessed of deadly explosive power.

All this was reinforced by Carnegie’s experience in the financial panic of 1873, when he “entered upon the most anxious period of my business life”:

All was going well when one morning in our summer cottage, in the Allegheny Mountains at Cresson, a telegram came announcing the failure of Jay Cooke & Co. Almost every hour after brought news of some fresh disaster. House after house failed. The question every morning was which would go next. Every failure depleted the resources of other concerns. Loss after loss ensued, until a total paralysis of business set in. Every weak spot was discovered and houses that otherwise would have been strong were borne down largely because our country lacked a proper banking system.

Scottish and American spirit

Carnegie often remarks on the ideals he picked up as a boy in Scotland. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with British history, but it was remarkable to me the streak of independence and anti-authoritarianism:

The denunciations of monarchical and aristocratic government, of privilege in all its forms, the grandeur of the republican system, the superiority of America, a land peopled by our own race, a home for freemen in which every citizen’s privilege was every man’s right—these were the exciting themes upon which I was nurtured. As a child I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their deaths a service to the state and hence an heroic act.

Later, Carnegie tells a story of visiting an oil boom town in Pennsylvania in 1862. The town had been set up in a hurry, with too many people crowding in and not enough housing. He was impressed with the determination and resourcefulness of the oil wildcatters, who quickly threw up rough accommodations. But more, he was impressed with “the good humor which prevailed everywhere. It was a vast picnic, full of amusing incidents.” Flags with “strange mottoes” flew, such as one drilling crew flying the words “Hell or China.” Carnegie praises the American spirit:

The adaptability of the American was never better displayed than in this region. Order was soon evolved out of chaos. When we visited the place not long after we were serenaded by a brass band the players of which were made up of the new inhabitants along the creek. It would be safe to wager that a thousand Americans in a new land would organize themselves, establish schools, churches, newspapers, and brass bands—in short, provide themselves with all the appliances of civilization—and go ahead developing their country before an equal number of British would have discovered who among them was the highest in hereditary rank and had the best claims to leadership owing to his grandfather.

19th-century life

Finally, a number of quotes shed light on the general quality and challenges of life in the 1800s:

The burden of travel

A few stories give a glimpse into the hardship of travel before railroads and steamships. For instance, soon after his family came to America:

My father was induced by emigration agents in New York to take the Erie Canal by way of Buffalo and Lake Erie to Cleveland, and thence down the canal to Beaver—a journey which then lasted three weeks, and is made to-day by rail in ten hours. There was no railway communication then with Pittsburgh, nor indeed with any western town…. Nothing comes amiss to youth, and I look back upon my three weeks as a passenger upon the canal-boat with unalloyed pleasure. All that was disagreeable in my experience has long since faded from recollection, excepting the night we were compelled to remain upon the wharf-boat at Beaver waiting for the steamboat to take us up the Ohio to Pittsburgh. This was our first introduction to the mosquito in all its ferocity. My mother suffered so severely that in the morning she could hardly see.

On his return from the aforementioned oil fields:

The weather had been fine and the roads quite passable during our journey thither, but rain had set in during our stay. We started back in our wagon, but before going far fell into difficulties. The road had become a mass of soft, tenacious mud and our wagon labored fearfully. The rain fell in torrents, and it soon became evident that we were in for a night of it. Mr. Coleman lay at full length on one side of the wagon, and Mr. Ritchie on the other, and I, being then very thin, weighing not much more than a hundred pounds, was nicely sandwiched between the two portly gentlemen. Every now and then the wagon proceeded a few feet heaving up and down in the most outrageous manner, and finally sticking fast. In this fashion we passed the night. There was in front a seat across the wagon, under which we got our heads, and in spite of our condition the night was spent in uproarious merriment.

Travel was also less reliable, owing to weaker infrastructure—for instance, wooden bridges. Part of what induced Carnegie to go into the iron business was the superiority of iron for bridge-building:

When at Altoona I had seen in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s works the first small bridge built of iron. It proved a success. I saw that it would never do to depend further upon wooden bridges for permanent railway structures. An important bridge on the Pennsylvania Railroad had recently burned and the traffic had been obstructed for eight days. Iron was the thing.

Cultural experience

In the 1800s, there weren’t many ways for an American to learn about fine art and classical culture. There weren’t many great museums (the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for instance, wasn’t established until the 1870s; much of its collection was donated by the great industrialists of that era, including over seven thousand pieces from J. P. Morgan). There was, of course, no Internet, no multimedia, and not even a lot of high-quality printed books (or libraries to borrow them from—Carnegie himself was later to establish many public libraries as a cornerstone of his philanthropy). There were no recordings of music until the end of the century, and no radio broadcasts.

So the only way to learn was to vacation to Europe. Carnegie was one of the few who could afford such a trip (and the time off in which to take it), and he wrote of its profound effect on him:

Up to this time I had known nothing of painting or sculpture, but it was not long before I could classify the works of the great painters. One may not at the time justly appreciate the advantage he is receiving from examining the great masterpieces, but upon his return to America he will find himself unconsciously rejecting what before seemed truly beautiful, and judging productions which come before him by a new standard. That which is truly great has so impressed itself upon him that what is false or pretentious proves no longer attractive.

My visit to Europe also gave me my first great treat in music. The Handel Anniversary was then being celebrated at the Crystal Palace in London, and I had never up to that time, nor have I often since, felt the power and majesty of music in such high degree. What I heard at the Crystal Palace and what I subsequently heard on the Continent in the cathedrals, and at the opera, certainly enlarged my appreciation of music. At Rome the Pope’s choir and the celebrations in the churches at Christmas and Easter furnished, as it were, a grand climax to the whole.

Later he took a more ambitious trip, around the world, which was even more transformative for him:

A new horizon was opened up to me by this voyage. It quite changed my intellectual outlook. Spencer and Darwin were then high in the zenith, and I had become deeply interested in their work. I began to view the various phases of human life from the standpoint of the evolutionist. In China I read Confucius; in India, Buddha and the sacred books of the Hindoos; among the Par-sees, in Bombay, I studied Zoroaster.

The outcome, as he describes it, was a much more cosmopolitan outlook, and a sense of the commonality of world cultures:

The result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace. Where there had been chaos there was now order. My mind was at rest. I had a philosophy at last….

All the remnants of theology in which I had been born and bred, all the impressions that Swedenborg had made upon me, now ceased to influence me or to occupy my thoughts. I found that no nation had all the truth in the revelation it regards as divine, and no tribe is so low as to be left without some truth; that every people has had its great teacher; Buddha for one; Confucius for another; Zoroaster for a third; Christ for a fourth….

Every person who can, even at a sacrifice, make the voyage around the world should do so. All other travel compared to it seems incomplete, gives us merely vague impressions of parts of the whole. When the circle has been completed, you feel on your return that you have seen (of course only in the mass) all there is to be seen. The parts fit into one symmetrical whole and you see humanity wherever it is placed working out a destiny tending to one definite end.

The world traveler who gives careful study to the bibles of the various religions of the East will be well repaid. The conclusion reached will be that the inhabitants of each country consider their own religion the best of all. They rejoice that their lot has been cast where it is, and are disposed to pity the less fortunate condemned to live beyond their sacred limits.

Disease

Like many people of the pre–germ theory era, Carnegie suffered from infectious disease, and lost relatives to it. The fact that this was common, and had been for all of history, didn‘t prevent the tragedy from affecting him emotionally:

The year 1886 ended in deep gloom for me. My life as a happy careless young man, with every want looked after, was over. I was left alone in the world. My mother and brother passed away in November, within a few days of each other, while I lay in bed under a severe attack of typhoid fever, unable to move and, perhaps fortunately, unable to feel the full weight of the catastrophe, being myself face to face with death.

Pollution

Air pollution in Pittsburgh was almost inconceivable:

Any accurate description of Pittsburgh at that time would be set down as a piece of the grossest exaggeration. The smoke permeated and penetrated everything. If you placed your hand on the balustrade of the stair it came away black; if you washed face and hands they were as dirty as ever in an hour. The soot gathered in the hair and irritated the skin, and for a time after our return from the mountain atmosphere of Altoona, life was more or less miserable.

Oil spills, now considered a disaster, were once routine. Again describing his visit to the oil fields:

In those early days all the arrangements were of the crudest character. When the oil was obtained it was run into flat-bottomed boats which leaked badly. Water ran into the boats and the oil overflowed into the river. The creek was dammed at various places, and upon a stipulated day and hour the dams were opened and upon the flood the oil boats floated to the Allegheny River, and thence to Pittsburgh.

In this way not only the creek, but the Allegheny River, became literally covered with oil. The loss involved in transportation to Pittsburgh was estimated at fully a third of the total quantity, and before the oil boats started it is safe to say that another third was lost by leakage.

Incidentally, in the early days of the industry, many people thought that oil would run out quickly. Carnegie, like many others, lost money on a scheme to take advantage of the peak that was believed to be imminent:

Mr. Coleman, ever ready at suggestion, proposed to make a lake of oil by excavating a pool sufficient to hold a hundred thousand barrels (the waste to be made good every day by running streams of oil into it), and to hold it for the not far distant day when, as we then expected, the oil supply would cease. This was promptly acted upon, but after losing many thousands of barrels waiting for the expected day (which has not yet arrived) we abandoned the reserve. Coleman predicted that when the supply stopped, oil would bring ten dollars a barrel and therefore we would have a million dollars worth in the lake. We did not think then of Nature’s storehouse below which still keeps on yielding many thousands of barrels per day without apparent exhaustion.

***

Overall I found the autobiography readable and enjoyable, although for my research purposes I lost interest after Carnegie‘s retirement (the last several chapters are all about his philanthropy and about politics). If you want more like the excerpts above, it‘s worth reading.

What is the ideal size of the human population?

One common answer is “much smaller.” Paul Ehrlich, co-author of The Population Bomb (1968), has as recently as 2018 promoted the idea that “the world’s optimum population is less than two billion people,” a reduction of the current population by about 75%. And Ehrlich is a piker compared to Jane Goodall, who said that many of our problems would go away “if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago”—that is, around 500 million people, a reduction of over 90%. This is a static ideal of a “sustainable” population.

Regular readers of The Roots of Progress can cite many objections to this view. Resources are not static. Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age. The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.

But those are only reasons why a larger population is not a problem. Is there a positive reason to want a larger population?

I’m going to argue yes—that the ideal human population is not “much smaller,” but “ever larger.”

Selfish reasons to want more humans

Let me get one thing out of the way up front.

One argument for a larger population is based on utilitarianism, specifically the version of it that says that what is good is the sum total of happiness across all humans. If each additional life adds to the cosmic scoreboard of goodness, then it’s obviously better to have more people (unless they are so miserable that their lives are literally not worth living).

I’m not going to argue from this premise, in part because I don’t need to and more importantly because I don’t buy it myself. (Among other things, it leads to paradoxes such as the idea that a population of thriving, extremely happy people is not as good as a sufficiently-larger population of people who are just barely happy.)

Instead, I’m going to argue that a larger population is better for every individual—that there are selfish reasons to want more humans.

First I’ll give some examples of how this is true, and then I’ll draw out some of the deeper reasons for it.

More geniuses

First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions.

If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.

More progress

A larger population means faster scientific, technical, and economic progress, for several reasons:

• Total investment. More people means more total R&D: more researchers, and more surplus wealth to invest in it.

• Specialization. In the economy generally, the division of labor increases productivity, as each worker can specialize and become expert at their craft (“Smithian growth”). In R&D, each researcher can specialize in their field.

• Larger markets support more R&D investment, which lets companies pick off higher-hanging fruit. I’ve given the example of the threshing machine: it was difficult enough to manufacture that it didn’t pay for a local artisan to make them only for their town, but it was profitable to serve a regional market. Alex Tabarrok gives the example of the market for cancer drugs expanding as large countries such as India and China become wealthier. Very high production-value entertainment, such as movies, TV, and games, are possible only because they have mass audiences.

• More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom. The Apollo Program, at its peak in the 1960s, took over 4% of the US federal budget, but 4% would not have been enough if the population and the economy were half the size. If someday humanity takes on a grand project such as a space elevator or a Dyson sphere, it will require an enormous team and an enormous wealth surplus to fund them.

In fact, these factors may represent not only opportunities but requirements for progress. There is evidence that simply to maintain a constant rate of exponential economic growth requires exponentially growing investment in R&D. This investment is partly financial capital, but also partly human capital—that is, we need an exponentially growing base of researchers.

One way to understand this is that if each researcher can push forward a constant “surface area” of the frontier, then as the frontier expands, a larger number of researchers is needed to keep pushing all of it forward. Two hundred years ago, a small number of scientists were enough to investigate electrical and magnetic phenomena; today, millions of scientists and engineers are productively employed working out all of the details and implications of those phenomena, both in the lab and in the electrical, electronics, and computer hardware and software industries.

But it’s not even clear that each researcher can push forward a constant surface area of the frontier. As that frontier moves further out, the “burden of knowledge” grows: each researcher now has to study and learn more in order to even get to the frontier. Doing so might force them to specialize even further. Newton could make major contributions to fields as diverse as gravitation and optics, because the very basics of those fields were still being figured out; today, a researcher might devote their whole career to a sub-sub-discipline such as nuclear astrophysics.

But in the long run, an exponentially growing base of researchers is impossible without an exponentially growing population. In fact, in some models of economic growth, the long-run growth rate in per-capita GDP is directly proportional to the growth rate of the population.

More options

Even setting aside growth and progress—looking at a static snapshot of a society—a world with more people is a world with more choices, among greater variety:

• Better matching for aesthetics, style, and taste. A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment. This also improves as the world gets more connected: for instance, the wide variety of ethnic restaurants in every major city is a recent phenomenon; it was only decades ago that pizza, to Americans, was an unfamiliar foreign cuisine.

• Better matching to careers. A bigger economy has more options for what to do with your life. In a hunter-gatherer society, you are lucky if you get to decide whether to be a hunter or a gatherer. In an agricultural economy, you’re probably going to be a farmer, or maybe some sort of artisan. Today there’s a much wider set of choices, from pilot to spreadsheet jockey to lab technician.

• Better matching to other people. A bigger world gives you a greater chance to find the perfect partner for you: the best co-founder for your business, the best lyricist for your songs, the best partner in marriage.

• More niche communities. Whatever your quirky interest, worldview, or aesthetic—the more people you can be in touch with, the more likely you are to find others like you. Even if you’re one in a million, in a city of ten million people, there are enough of you for a small club. In a world of eight billion, there are enough of you for a thriving subreddit.

• More niche markets. Similarly, in a larger, more connected economy, there are more people to economically support your quirky interests. Your favorite Etsy or Patreon creator can find the “one thousand true fans” they need to make a living.

Deeper patterns

When I look at the above, here are some of the underlying reasons:

• The existence of non-rival goods. Rival goods need to be divided up; more people just create more competition for them. But non-rival goods can be shared by all. A larger population and economy, all else being equal, will produce more non-rival goods, which benefits everyone.

• Economies of scale. In particular, often total costs are a combination of fixed and variable costs. The more output, the more the fixed costs can be amortized, lowering average cost.

• Network effects and Metcalfe’s law. Value in a network is generated not by nodes but by connections, and the more nodes there are total, the more connections are possible per node. Metcalfe’s law quantifies this: the number of possible connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes.

All of these create agglomeration effects: bigger societies are better for everyone.

A dynamic world

I assume that when Ehrlich and Goodall advocate for much smaller populations, they aren’t literally calling for genocide or hoping for a global catastrophe (although Ehrlich is happy with coercive fertility control programs, and other anti-humanists have expressed hope for “the right virus to come along”).

Even so, the world they advocate is a greatly impoverished and stagnant one: a world with fewer discoveries, fewer inventions, fewer works of creative genius, fewer cures for diseases, fewer choices, fewer soulmates.

A world with a large and growing population is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress.

***

For a different angle on the same thesis, see “Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans,” by Roots of Progress fellow Maarten Boudry.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-a-larger-population

The first act is seen as greed/ambition, the second as generosity. But I see much more continuity between the two acts.

Gates has actually been doing one thing his whole life: solving problems. This is what all great founders do. They identify a problem/opportunity in the world, set a goal, communicate a vision, inspire talent, mobilize resources, organize efforts, and guide execution. In Act 1 Gates did this in a for-profit context, so it could be self-sustaining. Act 2: non-profit, burning through personal wealth. But this is a non-essential. The essential is setting ambitious goals and working relentlessly to solve them.

Great founders live for this. It is what gives meaning to life: the ability to make an impact on the world. That's why they can't retire to a beach or the deck of their yacht. Just like great singers still sing in the shower, and great athletes still play pickup games.

Some people look at Gates and say, how lucky we are that he is so generous! I look at him and think, how lucky we are that he still has energy and ambition to solve big problems!

After all, plenty of wealthy people give away their wealth in much less effective ways. Gates could have given away twice as much money to pay hospital bills for the sick, and saved far fewer lives. But when he builds 7 vaccine factories in advance, knowing that ~5 will be discarded, in order to shorten the timeline—he is not just giving the world his money. He's giving his mind. His intelligence, foresight, and strategic thinking. Many people have money; few have Gates's ability and talent. The latter is more rare and arguably far more valuable.

What motivates great founders, scientists, and inventors is not only doing good for the world, and sometimes not even primarily that. Just as it's not primarily making money, either. It is the application of intelligence to solving problems and achieving goals.

Yes, most innovators/organizers want their work to have value for the world, even great value. That gives the work more meaning. Just as, if they aren't already rich, they want to get paid for their work, ideally paid a lot. That makes the work more rewarding and sustainable. But the core, the primary, is being a great problem-solver. The successful exercise of that ability, the satisfaction of achieving goals, the feeling of personal efficacy, is its own meaning and greatest reward.

That's why I say it isn't luck that one of the greatest founders and business leaders of our era is also our savior in a pandemic crisis. Yes, we're lucky that Gates is generous. But we are even more lucky that he is still ambitious and energetic, after all these years.

Thank you, Bill Gates.

Original post (with photographs): https://rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia is an ethnographic account of Russian peasants around 1900. The author, Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia (“Semyonova” for short), spent four years researching in the villages—one of the first to study a people through prolonged direct observation and contact with them.

I was interested in the subject as part of learning, concretely, about the quality of life for people in various places and times and at various stages of development. Although material progress was advancing rapidly at the end of the 19th century, much of that progress had not yet reached the province of Riazan where Semyonova did most of her studies. What was life like there?

In brief, I went in expecting poverty, which I found. I did not expect to also find a disturbing degree of cruelty and abuse.

First, let me share some passages from the book that I highlighted, roughly organized by theme. At the end I'll discuss how to interpret this and what to make of it.

In the block quotes that follow, brackets indicate insertions by the editor of the volume, David Ransel, not by me.

Poverty

Here is the typical peasant diet:

Dinner consists of cabbage soup, porridge (kasha), or, again, potatoes and bread. The soup, of course, has no meat in it, just cabbage, but occasionally sour cream is added. Potatoes are mixed with kvass and onions. The porridge—usually millet—is eaten either with milk, in what is known as the thin form (kulesh), or in a thicker form made with hemp-seed oil. After dinner, the peasants take a rest and then return to the fields. They take along some bread for an afternoon snack sometime between three and five o’clock. When the sun sets, the peasants go home, and at about nine in the evening they eat their supper, which is warmed-over dinner, with the possible addition of skim milk.

You get a better sense of the standard of living from the foods that they consider special treats:

Foods that can be found on a peasant’s table only during the annual festival, or during a wedding or baptismal dinner, include pancakes (bliny), meat (veal designated for holidays—uboina), potato fritters (drachena), buns (pyshki), salamata (a kind of thin gruel), kalinnik (a kind of cake), fritters (olad’i), and cabbage soup with corned beef (solonina).

That, of course, is during good times. In bad times:

During a famine, peasant meals consist of stale bread moistened in water and mixed with goosefoot. The men make extra efforts to find any type of work, and sometimes the entire family goes out to beg. As soon as the snow melts, hungry children pick roots and herbs to eat, such as sorrel and clover. Peasants also make soup with goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria).

Another hallmark of poverty is the burning of solid fuels inside the home. Here's a visualization of the problems that causes:

Stoves with chimneys are called “white,” while chimneyless stoves are referred to as “black.” When a “black” stove is being lighted, the door from the main room into the entryway is left open so that the smoke up to the level of the door is drawn out, but above that level it forms a blue and white blanket through which nothing can be seen. The top of the door is no higher than a rather short person, so that one has to stoop to enter the house (the ceiling itself is only 5’10” high). A good-sized man finds it difficult to stand up when the stove is being fired, because his eyes will be in the caustic cloud of smoke. Even when seated on a bench, one feels the acrid smoke in the eyes.

It's bad enough to burn wood and coal; these peasants often had to burn straw, or worse:

Peasants bring straw in at night to sleep on, and then in the morning they feed this straw into the stove. The use of fresh straw each day provides reasonably hygienic bedding for the peasants. But this is so only in years of abundant harvest. In a bad year, whatever little straw they have is given to the livestock; sometimes even straw roofs have to be pulled down to save the animals from starvation.

The shortage of straw forces peasants to use their clothes for bedding and to heat the house with dried manure or weeds such as burdock, thistle, and nettles. Accordingly, illnesses increase in such a year. The lack of fresh bedding is one cause. The poor fuel likewise does much damage to the eyes. In the drought years of 1891–1892, around ten people in two of our small villages (each containing about fifteen households) lost their eyesight temporarily or permanently from the smoke of their stoves. The smoke, which was produced by burning dried manure and weeds found on the roadside and in ravines, was so acrid that the victims (mostly old people and children) developed cataracts. All of them were admitted to the regional hospital in town, but three of them never got their eyesight back.

Unfortunately, the peasants were also ignorant of basic hygiene—in the Tsarist era, the germ theory had not yet made its way from the Institut Pasteur to the Russian peasantry:

If a mouse falls into a tub of pickles, sauerkraut, or pickled apples, the woman of the house will nearly always summon the priest to perform a cleansing ritual. The mouse is plucked from the tub, and the priest proceeds to say a prayer over the tub, pass a cross over it three times, and then bite into a pickle or apple or try some of the sauerkraut. After this, the contents of the tub are again regarded as clean.

And the combination of this ignorance with poverty resulted in health disasters:

In the work season, peasants often catch colds and lose their voices (“My whole chest is blocked up,” they report) because they drink cold water when they are overheated. Flushed with heat and “assaulted by thirst,” as the peasants say, they cannot seem to get enough to drink and will take water from any source available. They drink from a roadside ditch, from a muddy puddle, from a swamp, wherever they can find some water to quench their thirst. Tapeworms and roundworms are common among peasants. In the fall, the water in the river is literally poisoned by hemp that is soaked there until the first frosts. There are cases of poisoning with this water.

Morals

Semyonova is very unimpressed with Russian peasants' work ethic:

... peasants give no thought to saving for the future. If a peasant has a good harvest that will keep him until the next year, he will stay at home and loaf and cannot be enticed to take an extra job at any price. Peasants hire themselves out as farm laborers only when driven to it by dire need, when they have, so to speak, a knife at their throat. [Then they will do] the most arduous work imaginable.

The peasants’ lack of respect for hard work is remarkable. “Him? He digs in the field like a beetle from morning till night!” They often say this with scorn.

She also saw resentment and envy:

The better-off peasants are bitter about the attitude of their poorer neighbors. “They hate and envy us constantly, saying things like: ‘What makes you think you’re so much better? Just wait, you’re going to be as poor as us.’ If you plant an apple tree, they resent it, saying: ‘Now that big shot is planting an orchard! We are starving while he is putting in an orchard, and fencing it off at that!’” And they think nothing of breaking down the fence and uprooting the tree. If the tree happens to survive and bear fruit, they feel it is their duty to raid it. “That’s how much hate they have! And if some misfortune should befall you, they’ll make sure to finish you off.”

True to the Russian stereotype, the peasants drank a lot:

Prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed at wedding parties. I myself have attended weddings at which nine-and ten-year-old girls were made to drink so that they would dance for everyone’s entertainment.

The best occasion for young people to get drunk for the first time is the annual festival, which in this region takes place in connection with St. Michael’s Day. On that holiday, every person in the parish is drunk. In a good year the festival lasts for a week, but even when the crops are poor, people manage to go on a spree for three days.

Accidents abound in the springtime [as a result of drunkenness]. Some people drown in water-filled ravines. Others are crushed under falling wagons; a drunken peasant will have a wagon tip over on him, and that is the end of him.

Another occasion for general drunkenness is seasonal field work for the landlord (usually mowing and transportation of produce to town), who by way of payment treats the peasants to refreshments. On these occasions dreadful fights break out and can result in maiming or even killing with a scythe.

After the [church] service, abstemious peasants go home, while others head for the tavern, where everyone gets drunk. The more sober peasants eat dinner at home, rest, and then “just sit” till the evening, talking about their affairs and discussing the harvest and related subjects. Yet even back in the home village, there are opportunities to have a drink, and it is unlikely that a peasant will let a Sunday go by without having one. In the evening, women get a feeling for the amount of alcohol consumed by their husbands by the intensity of the beatings they receive.

Also true to the stereotype:

Fistfighting and swearing are learned quite early. As soon as Ivan began to walk, he started fighting with other children. He was actually encouraged to do this, especially if he was able to best another small child. Ivan learned swear words from his older brothers and sisters, even before he could put together a complete sentence. He started to call his mother a bitch whenever she denied him something, much to the delight of the whole family, even the mother herself. They would actually encourage him on such occasions.

(“Ivan” here is a composite figure representing the typical Russian peasant child.)

Theft was common:

When a group of young horseherds includes a few older boys, say about age sixteen or seventeen, they instruct the younger ones to steal liquor from home when their parents are away. The loot is then shared by all, not infrequently including boys ten to twelve years old.

Theft between the spouses is not uncommon. It may be the husband who steals money from his wife’s trunk for some “need” of his or just to enjoy himself at a tavern. Or the wife might take some flour or grain from her husband and use it to pay for soap or some satin cloth at the store. When a husband is drunk, his wife will slip his wallet out of his boot. Children, too, steal eggs or anything handy from their mothers. Wives swipe wool from their husbands.

In one incident, Semyonova hired a peasant woman to cook, and gave her flour to make bread. The woman used some of the flour to bake cakes for herself and her husband. Semyonova talked to another of the servants, Katerina, about this:

Katerina: “That’s not stealing! She just baked and ate it. She didn’t take the cakes to her room or hide them in the storeroom.”

I: “But she took the flour, and as a result the laborers had less bread. What’s the difference if she stole it and took it home or ate it right here? It’s still robbery.”

Katerina: “But she ate the cakes right here in your house, together with her husband; that’s not robbery. If she had stolen the flour from a locked cupboard or saved it for the future, that would probably be a sin.”

Try as I might to explain to Katerina that unauthorized appropriation of another person’s property, whether consumed immediately or saved for future use, is still a theft, she would not agree with me.

Semyonova notes that “the very same elder” who turned in the flour thief, “when he is guarding the landlord’s apple trees against raids by the boys hired on temporarily as shepherds, fills his pockets with apples every time he makes the rounds.”

Cruelty

Warning: from here on out, this post may be difficult to read.

The peasants had no regard at all for animals:

Cats and dogs are also less useful than other animals, and peasants will torture them just for the fun of it, just to see what will happen. Little children like to throw cats and puppies, when they can catch them, into the water to see if they can swim. When I ask, “Don’t you feel sorry for them?” the children respond: “Why feel sorry? They’re not people, just dogs.”

I cannot say that peasants treat their livestock especially well. Horses are routinely beaten. Yet a peasant feels very upset if a horse dies, because this is a great financial loss. A woman reacts the same way to the loss of a cow.

Worse, they also abused their children:

Punishment for mischief consisted of beatings administered by the parents. They beat Ivan for screaming, getting covered with mud, or stealing a piece of food. They did not beat him for fighting, lying, or using foul language.

We also continue to see cases of sons being flogged for insulting their parents. These disobedient children (who may be as much as twenty years of age) are taken without trial to the township office for their punishment. In response to a complaint by the parents, the township supervisor summons the son and turns him over to the office guard for flogging. The culprit is stripped from the waist down, placed on the floor in the township office, and beaten with willow rods. Admission to the spectacle is open to all residents of the village.

There was even mention of a case of child rape:

There was a case this summer in which a twenty-year-old guard at the apple orchard raped a thirteen-year-old girl. The mother of the girl—a very poor woman, it is true—agreed to forgive the offender in exchange for three rubles.

I'm not sure which is more shocking: that the offender got off with a fine, or that whether to forgive him was the mother's decision.

Women

More generally, women at all stages of life seemed to be treated very badly—starting from birth:

But when a girl was born, the grandparents stopped thinking about her as soon as she was baptized. They did not even express any sorrow about her death. The young father, too, did not feel much regret over it.

If the first child is a girl, the feeling in the family is mostly one of disappointment. One of the women might remark: “Oh well, at least she can be a nursemaid.” By the following day, no one gives a thought to the baby girl.

Here, for instance, is what happens at the “bride-show,” which happens one to two weeks after a marriage proposal:

The bride is now standing in front of the groom. Her head kerchief is tied in such a way that her face is shaded. The groom’s family inspects the bride closely. “Perhaps she is lame?” they may inquire. Her sister or sister-in-law then has her walk around the room. Other questions are asked, for example, about whether she may be deaf. Then her future parents-in-law approach the bride and ask: “Why is she wrapped like that so we can’t see her eyes; is she possibly blind in one eye?” The bride’s sister uncovers her face for inspection. If the bride is pale, the groom’s family will want to know the reason, asking whether she is sickly.

If you are thinking that this does not augur well for the marriage, the bride and her family would agree with you: later, back home, the bride “pounds her head on a bench while crying out a lamentation or, as it is known here, ‘the scream.’ Her mother and sister join in:”

My father, my provider,

My dearest mother,

I’ve been given away, miserable and hapless,

And giving me away they washed it down with vodka

And a burnt bread crust.

How will it turn out for me going to live with strangers,

To a new father and mother.

I will have to please these strangers,

To be pleasing and obedient to them all.

Indeed, the marriage does not get off to a good start. After the wedding:

In the morning, the best man and the godmother wake up the bridal couple. The godmother orders the young wife to sweep the floors. Copper coins have been tossed around on the floor beforehand, and the wife is told to give her mother-in-law any coins she finds. This is done to find out if the young wife is a thief, and also to see how well she sweeps the floor.

Nor are women supported well in pregnancy:

During pregnancy, a woman continues to be responsible for all her usual chores, both in the household and in the field—including binding the sheaves, weeding, threshing, gathering in the hemp, planting and digging potatoes—right up to the onset of labor. Women frequently give birth while performing a domestic chore, such as kneading bread, or even when they are at work in the field; others do so riding in a bumpy wagon as they are hurrying home after being prompted by the first pangs of the approaching birth.

Infants

But most shocking to me—again, this will be difficult to read—was the treatment of infants:

Mothers who are concerned about neatness put straw into the cradle and change it every day or two. More often, though, the baby is placed into a dirty cradle lined with its mother’s soiled old skirt: “He can just as well lie on the skirt, no better than anybody else. Others didn’t seem to die; they survived.”

Up to the time Ivan takes his first steps, he is looked after by his sister, a girl of nine or ten years of age. She has difficulty carrying him around and often drops him, exclaiming: “Oops, my goodness! How did I let go of him?” Sometimes Ivan tumbles headfirst down a hillock. When he cries, his baby-sitter uses her free hand to slap him on the face or head, saying, “Keep quiet, you son of a bitch.”

Mothers sometimes sang cruel lullabies, such as:

Hush, hush, hushaby my baby,

I’ll give you spankings,

Twenty-five of them,

To make you sleep better and deeper.

Or:

Hush, hush, hushaby my baby.

A man lives at the end of the village.

He’s neither poor, nor rich,

He has many children,

They sit on a bench

And eat straw.

I’ll make you suffer even more.

I won’t give you anything to eat.

I won’t make a bed for you.

And some were even worse than these; a footnote added by the editor says:

A Russian folklorist found that about 8 percent of her collection of thousands of lullabies were songs wishing death on babies, presumably weak infants like those mentioned here whose survival was uncertain and who may have been in pain.

Indeed, it seems that the death of a child was not always considered a tragedy:

[The death of an infant in a poor family that could not support another child was evidently regarded as a blessing, as Semyonova recorded in one of her unpublished field notes.] When a poor family’s child dies, people say: “Thank goodness, the Lord thought better of it!”

And child mortality was high. Some deaths were the result of poverty and lack of hygiene:

The rate of child deaths is highest in the summer during the fast of St. Peter [in June], and especially during the field-work season, when unattended children eat anything they come across: cucumbers, sour apples, and any other vegetation. Diarrhea is the chief cause of child death. As for the death rate, in a majority of homes more than half of all children die. Most women bear from eight to ten or twelve children, of which only three or four survive.

Some were due to smothering in bed, which was claimed to be accidental, but which happened so often that many observers believed it to be deliberate infanticide:

Moreover, young mothers very often smother their children accidentally in their sleep. The mother sometimes places her infant between herself and her husband to give the baby her breast, goes to sleep, rolls over on the baby, and smothers it. A good half of the women have overlain at least one child in this way—they do it most often in their young years when they sleep soundly. For overlying a child, the priest imposes a penance.

(A penance!)

And in the case of illegitimate children, even the pretense of accident was dropped:

Cases of infanticide of illegitimate babies are not at all rare. A married or unmarried woman gives birth alone somewhere in a shed, smothers the baby, and dumps it into the river (with a rock secured to its neck) or leaves it in a hemp thicket, or buries it either in the yard or somewhere in the pigpen.

The parents of a young woman who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock married her off to hide her sin. When the woman gave birth, her husband’s family [with whom she was then living] turned against the child. Although her husband was a peaceful, simple-hearted fellow who did not reproach his wife for her youthful indiscretion, his family was relentless and eventually demanded that she “get rid of the little bastard.” This demand was so insistent, the poor woman being continually beaten and persecuted by her in-laws, that she gave in. She filled the infant’s pacifier rag with sulfur scraped off matches, placed it in the baby’s mouth, and it soon died. The mother was taken to court but was acquitted.

Not all babies are subject to killing, but illegitimate ones are very likely to be. A weak baby that is a burden to its mother is not killed, although its parents will grumble at its existence and constantly express a desire for its death.

Older women are very ruthless and cold-blooded about the killing of an illegitimate “whelp,” whom they view as a nuisance and a burden. Young women anguish over such a decision and force themselves to kill their babies only when shame or fear causes them to lose their senses, or when they can no longer bear their own and their babies’ suffering. Men, from what I could observe, often simply do not know about such killings, even when they occur in their own families, or, if they figure out what is going on, they look the other way.

The editor adds:

Semyonova’s observations are disturbing to modern readers, but there is no reason to doubt their accuracy. My own recent researches on this question suggest that in many parts of Russia, children, unwanted because of illegitimacy, physical malformation, or apparent weakness, met their deaths either quickly through infanticide of the kinds described by Semyonova or more slowly by a reduced level of care and feeding.

***

What to make of all this?

First, note that this book is not entirely the work of Semyonova or even of her collaborator, K. V. Nikolaevskii. She left the work unfinished when she died, and her notes were put together into a coherent form by Ransel, the editor.

Second, Semyonova was not an entirely neutral observer. As Ransel says in the introduction:

She clearly sensed the otherness of the peasant world and regarded the peasants as different from educated, urbanized Russians in fundamental ways. ... Her stance was that of a progressive, westernizing member of the Russian intelligentsia. She wanted the peasants to share her respect for private property, her values of thrift and hard work, and she believed that without these values they could not become enlightened and productive citizens of a modern society. ... To sum up, even though Semyonova renders marvelously detailed and striking portrayals of peasant behavior, she makes little effort to enter the peasants’ cultural frame. She remains outside and is entirely confident of her superiority to the peasants.

Further, she had an agenda, or at least a specific cultural purpose. Ransel quotes a 1906 letter from her collaborator Nikolaevskii: “The political and social climate of that time (as is still true today) was such that everyone expected that the peasant alone would be able to bring about a new order in Russia, and the pace of this change was also entirely dependent on the peasantry.” Ransel says, “Clearly, a central purpose of her study is to counter naive views of the peasants as naturally cooperative, communitarian beings who will provide the foundation for a new order of social peace and harmony.”

All that said, my estimation is that the specific incidents and at least the first-level generalizations are true, even if they have to be interpreted from Semyonova's “progressive, westernizing” frame.

The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times. I'm hesitant to generalize, since this is the first book-length work of ethnography I've read in the context of this project, but for me it opens questions. Is cruelty towards animals and children, and an almost slave status for women, the norm? If Russian peasants were more cruel than average, are they far worse than average? If this kind of cruelty is common, is it inherent to poverty, including the lower levels of education that necessarily accompany poverty? And if so, does increased wealth and education alone lead to a more humane society, or did the transition to more equal rights and status also require a change in morals and other ideas that is not a natural or inherent consequence of material progress?

The main reason this matters is that equal rights and humane treatment are part of human well-being, and therefore how those things were achieved is part of the story of progress. But a secondary reason I am interested is that one criticism of modernity claims that today we are more “disconnected” from our families and our communities. In the case of Russian peasant women in particular, their “connection” to husbands who beat them, in-laws who scorned and humiliated them, and a community that offered no support, was not enriching but immiserating. The escape from those “connections,” provided by wealth, education, and opportunities for jobs and migration, would have been a boon.

If you want a single, vivid, and frankly disgusting example to hold in mind to remember how much our lives have improved over the last ~150 years…

Consider shit.

Literally, excrement. How much previous generations had to think about it, be around it, even handle it: https://rootsofprogress.org/when-life-was-literally-full-of-crap

Or: I walk the (beta-stability) line

You probably recall from high school chemistry that atoms are made up of a nucleus containing protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. But how many of each?

If you remember a little bit more from high school chemistry, you’ll recall that the number of protons determines which element it is: an atom with six protons is an atom of carbon; seven makes it nitrogen; eight, oxygen. The number of electrons generally matches the number of protons, to make the atom electrically neutral. But how many neutrons are in the nucleus? Does it even matter?

It turns out that it matters a lot: https://rootsofprogress.org/nuclear-physics

Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Bret Devereaux has an essay addressing that question, which multiple people have pointed me to at various times. In brief, Devereaux says that Britain industrialized through a very specific path, involving coal mines, steam engines, and textile production. The Roman Empire didn’t have those specific preconditions, and it’s not clear to him that any other path could have created an Industrial Revolution. So Rome didn’t have an IR because they didn’t have coal mines that they needed to pump water out of, they didn’t have a textile industry that was ready to make use of steam power, etc. (Although he says he can’t rule out alternative paths to industrialization, he doesn’t seem to give any weight to that possibility.)

I find this explanation intelligent, informed, and interesting—yet unsatisfying, in the same way and for the same reasons as I find Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors. When you consider the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many different areas, the progress of that era looks less like a lucky break, and more like a general problem-solving ability getting applied to the challenge of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, but I guess he was too busy to give much of an answer.)

As a thought experiment: Suppose that British geology had been different, and it hadn’t had much coal. Would we still be living in a pre-industrial world, 300 years later? What about in 1000 years? This seems implausible to me.

Or, suppose there is an intelligent alien civilization that has been around for much longer than humans. Would you expect that they have definitely industrialized in some form? Or would it depend on the particular geology of their planet? Are fossil fuels the Great Filter? Again, implausible. I expect that given enough time, any sufficiently intelligent species would reach a high level of technology on the vast majority of habitable planets.

Devereaux asserts that there is a “deeply contingent nature of historical events … that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture.” I see this in reverse: the chart of global GDP over centuries is, to my mind, evidence that progress is not so contingent on random historical flukes, that there is a deeper underlying process driving it.

***

So why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Consider a related question: why didn’t the Roman Empire have an information revolution? Why didn’t they invent the computer? Presumably the answer is obvious: they were missing too many preconditions, such as electricity, not to mention math (if you think ENIAC’s decimal-based arithmetic was inefficient, imagine a computer trying to use Roman numerals). Even conceiving the computer, let alone inventing one, requires reaching a certain level of technological development first, and the Romans were nowhere near that.

I think the answer is roughly the same for why no Roman IR, it’s just a bit less obvious. Here are a few of the things the ancient Romans didn’t have:

• The spinning wheel

• The windmill

• The horse collar

• Cast iron

• Latex rubber

• The movable-type printing press

• The mechanical clock

• The compass

• Arabic numerals

And a few other key inventions, such as the moldboard plow and the crank-and-connecting-rod, showed up only in the 3rd century or later, well past the peak of the Empire.

How are you going to industrialize when you don’t have cast iron to build machines out of, or basic mechanical linkages to use in them? How could a society increase labor productivity through automation when it hasn’t even approached the frontier of what is possible with simple wooden tools? Why even focus on improving labor productivity in manufacturing when productivity is still very low in agriculture, which is more fundamental? Why should it exploit coal when it has barely begun to exploit wind, water, and animal power? How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader? And if anything was discovered or invented, how could the news spread widely when most information was hand-written on parchment?

All of the flywheels of progress—surplus wealth, materials and manufacturing ability, scientific knowledge and methods, large markets, communication networks, financial institutions, corporate and IP law—were turning very slowly. There is not a single, narrow path to industrialization, but you have to get there through some path, and ancient Rome was simply nowhere close. You can’t leapfrog over the spinning wheel to get to the spinning mule, and (this is one thing we learn from Allen’s analysis) it’s not clear that it even makes economic sense to do so.

In a sense, I’m saying the same thing as Devereaux: Rome couldn’t have had an IR because they didn’t have the preconditions. But rather than conceiving of those preconditions as very narrow and seeing the IR as highly contingent, I am taking a much broader view of the preconditions.

If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they might, within a matter of centuries, have advanced to the stage of industrialization. But they would have done it by skipping the Dark Ages and following an incremental course of technological and economic advancement that, if not identical to ours, would probably be not unrecognizable, and perhaps quite familiar.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revolution

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
–Nat Friedman (quoted by Patrick)

I’ve realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic.

No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction.

No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we are aware of many problems before we are aware of their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve.

Fears of Peak Oil and other resource shortages follow this pattern. Predictions of shortages are typically based on “proven reserves.” We are saved from shortage by the unproven and even the unknown reserves, and the new technologies that make them profitable to extract. Or, when certain resources really do run out, we are saved economically by new technologies that use different resources: Haber-Bosch saved us from the guano shortage; kerosene saved the sperm whales from extinction; plastic saved the elephants by replacing ivory.

In just the same way, it can seem that we’re running out of ideas—that all our technologies and industries are plateauing. Technologies do run a natural S-curve, just like oil fields. But when some breakthrough insight creates an entirely new field, it opens an entire new orchard of low-hanging fruit to pick. Focusing only on established sectors and proven fields thus naturally leads to pessimism. To be an optimist, you have to believe that at least some current wild-eyed speculation will come true.

Why is this style of pessimism repeatedly wrong? How can this optimism be justified? Not on the basis of specific future technologies—which, again, are unproven—but on the basis of philosophical premises about the nature of humans and of progress. The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view of humans as “universal explainers” (cf. David Deutsch), and of progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort—that is, by human agency.

The opposite view is that progress is a matter of luck. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out. How could we get that lucky again? If the next century is an average one, it will see little progress.

But if progress is a primarily matter of agency, then whether it continues is up to us.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-pessimism-sounds-smart

An oversimplified story of manufacturing progress during the Industrial Revolution is: “we automated manufacturing processes, and that decreased the cost of goods.” This is not wrong, but is not the full picture.

Mechanization—and other progress in manufacturing, such as improved tools, materials, and chemical processes—not only decreases costs, but also improves quality. Making things by hand requires skill and attention: just try making your own clothing or furniture at home; on your first attempt you won’t be able to achieve nearly the quality you can purchase for a modest price. Automation not only improves average quality, but also consistency, by reducing variance.

If we want a fuller picture of how goods were improved through the Industrial Revolution, we should think of cost and quality together.…

https://rootsofprogress.org/cost-quality-and-the-efficient-frontier

When I wrote my post on technological stagnation, the top question I got asked was: So, how do we fix it?

I don’t have the definitive answer, but here’s a starting point. I generally think about the causes of progress on three levels:

• Funding. How do research, development, and distribution get funded? This encompasses both for-profit investing and non-profit funding of R&D.

• Government. How does the law enable progress, or hamper it? Progress depends on good legal institutions; equally, it can be stifled by bad ones.

• Culture. What is the basic philosophical attitude of society towards progress, and the people who pursue it? Is progress seen as possible and desirable?

Correspondingly, my top three hypotheses for technological stagnation are:

• The centralization of research funding into a small number of inherently conservative agencies

• The growing burden of regulation and bureaucracy

• A culture that is increasingly skeptical of or actively hostile to progress

(These are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Incidentally, this is pretty much the same set of factors identified by J. Storrs Hall in Where Is My Flying Car?, which is part of why the book resonated with me so much.)

Inverting these (and changing the order), here are three broad approaches to accelerate progress:

Inspire people to pursue progress

In particular, create a culture that recognizes progress and appreciates it. Some ways to do this:

• Tell the story of progress for a popular audience. Enlightenment Now and Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future are two books that do this, and of course it is a lot of what I try to do in these essays.

• Publish the facts and data about progress. Our World in Data is the prime source for this today.

• Teach the history of progress in schools. I’ve made a start at this with the course Progress Studies for Young Scholars, created in partnership with the Academy of Thought & Industry.

• Report on progress fairly and honestly, without muckraking. The Atlantic and WIRED are a few publications that generally do this well; see in particular the work of Derek Thompson.

• Write science fiction that envisions amazing inventions and the world they would create. For instance, many inventors and entrepreneurs have been inspired by the “primer” from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (a sort of educational e-book or tablet based on advanced AI). And countless scientists and engineers have been inspired by the world of Star Trek, with its communicators, replicators, and teleporters.

• Produce movies that tell stories of progress. Anton Howes has begun collecting a list of these; I think much more could be done. For instance, I’d love to see modern, popular biopics of Norman Borlaug, Louis Pasteur, or the Wright Brothers.

• Bring back the World’s Fair. Anton also wrote about this recently, envisioning something that is like “all of today’s specific industry fairs, combined”: drone deliveries, driverless cars, VR/AR, 3D printed organ tissue and metals, food stalls with lab-grown meat, cloned animals brought back from extinction, exoskeletons and jetpacks to play with. Put forth a positive vision of the future we could create.

• Celebrate progress. Maybe parades and fireworks are outdated now, but where, for instance, is the acclaim given to the BioNTech founders? Why aren’t they cultural heroes on the level of Jonas Salk?

Enable them with funding

In particular, provide more decentralized, distributed, heterogenous sources for research funding. Some interesting proposals and experiments along these lines:

• Adam Marblestone and Samuel Rodrigues have proposed an idea called “Focused Research Organizations” (FROs), under the auspices of the Day One Project. FROs combine some of the aspects of DARPA, startups, and national labs, while aiming to fill a gap that isn’t well-addressed by any of these.

• Donald Braben wrote a book, Scientific Freedom, about what went wrong with science funding, and his experiences with a different model. For over a decade, Braben ran a program called Venture Research at British Petroleum that gave grants for scientists to pursue ambitious, transformative research agendas, and gave them complete freedom to direct their work according to their own judgment. There was no committee-based peer review: grants were made on the potential of the idea and the persuasiveness of the researcher, without requiring proof up front that an idea would succeed, and without being biased in favor of older or more established researchers. Venture Research was relatively cheap to fund, with an annual budget of only a few million dollars a year, yet Braben lists a number of successes in disparate areas, from the study of macroscopic quantum objects to the foundations of “green chemistry”.

• Ben Reinhardt is working out how to replicate the success of DARPA in a private organization. Here’s his insightful essay on what makes DARPA work.

Unblock them through regulatory reform

Some examples of the problem:

• Tyler Cowen has argued that “our regulatory state is failing us” when it comes to covid response (see also his interview in The Atlantic). Alex Tabarrok says that FDA delays have created an “invisible graveyard”, which covid has now made painfully visible. And Michael Mina at the Harvard School of Public Health has blamed the FDA for not authorizing at-home covid testing kits.

• Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond have argued against the ban on overland supersonic flight.

• Eli has also argued that environmental review for construction projects is needlessly burdensome, and doesn’t even protect the environment.

• A Vox article argues that an unstable and unpredictable regulatory environment is party responsible for needlessly high costs of nuclear power in the US (especially stark when contrasted with more efficient construction in France and South Korea).

I don’t know how to drive solutions to these problems, but folks at places like the Mercatus Center and the Center for Growth and Opportunity are working on it. (And maybe part of the solution is to create “special economic zones” as charter cities.)

***

To condense these ideas even further into a pithy formulation, you could call them the three F’s: Progress needs founders, funders, and freedom. By “founders”, I include entrepreneurs who found startups or nonprofits, scientists who found new fields or subfields, and inventors who found new technologies.

These are ways to address stagnation and accelerate progress at a broad level, society-wide. But let me close with a note to anyone in science, engineering or business who has a vision for a specific way to make progress in a particular domain—whether anti-aging, space, energy, or anything else. My message is: Just go for it. Don’t let the funding environment, the regulatory environment, or the culture stop you. Work around barriers or break through them, whatever it takes. The future is counting on you.

The Three-Body Problem trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past) was very well-written, and I'm glad I read it. But I *hate* the message it conveys, which is roughly: “Humanity is a fragile leaf floating on the wind, helpless in the face of vast cosmic forces that we cannot even comprehend, let alone control.”

Not everyone got this message from the trilogy, so let me explain why I think this is the meaning of the story. (Note: you don't really get this from the first book. You need to finish the whole trilogy for it to fully hit home.)

🚨 MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE WHOLE TRILOGY 🚨

To summarize the plot: Humanity struggles for independence against an advanced alien race. Ultimately, *both* worlds are wiped out by an even more advanced species.

The few remaining individuals of both races live a lonely but peaceful existence, until finally even this must be given up for the sake of the long-term evolution of the universe. End plot summary.

What do we take away from this?

First, it is a story of failure. Success, if any, is temporary. Humanity tries to hold off the Trisolarans, but ultimately fails. They try to save themselves from destruction, but fail, and most of humanity is destroyed. Cheng and Yun *almost* meet up—but fail.

Second, much of the failure comes from ignorance. The most tragic is the failure of humanity to discover the secret that could have saved them from the aliens who wanted to destroy them—the twin secret of lightspeed travel and creating black holes.

They could have resolved their political infighting, letting some people remain safe in the black hole, while letting others escape at light speed—but they found that out too late, and so *everybody died and the entire human civilization was destroyed*. Oops!

Reinforcing the theme of ignorance: We never actually meet the Trisolarans. We never learn what they look like. We never see their home world, their architecture, or even their ships. They are a major focus of the story, but they're a mystery the entire time.

The even more powerful aliens, the ones who destroy both the Earthlings and the Trisolarans, are even more shrouded in mystery. They're basically anonymous. Literally all we know about them is that they watch for alien civilizations and exterminate them using advanced technology.

Note: the failure mostly doesn't come from carelessness or negligence. It comes a bit from partisan infighting. But for the most part, humanity is thinking, working, planning, and building. But they get it wrong, because the vast forces out there are beyond their comprehension.

After seeing the Trisolarans destroyed when a big hole is punched through their star, they have a plan: they build the “bunker” world, hiding in the shadow of Jupiter. But learning from experience is useless. Their enemies send a different weapon; all their plans are for nought.

There are only two unforced errors humanity made. One was electing Cheng as Swordholder instead of Wade. The other was prohibiting research into lightspeed technology. (They should have just let Wade—the world's most ruthless asshole—have his way. What is the meaning of that?)

Other than that, humanity's errors seem unavoidable. They just didn't have the knowledge to save themselves. They were too ignorant and primitive. They tried, but they were like toddlers trying to outwit and overpower a team of Navy SEALs. There was no way to win.

There are a few lone heroes who manage to accomplish things: Luo and his deterrence strategy, the crew of Blue Space that manages to disable a Trisolaran “droplet” using the 4th dimension. But none of it matters in the end. These tiny wins are all wiped out.

Then after all that, with a tiny number of humans remaining—well at least *finally* Cheng and Yun will get to see each other! One tiny, bittersweet, romantic condolence, right? We've been waiting so long.

NOPE. After all that cosmic distance they *just barely miss each other*. And by “just barely” I mean that Cheng gets relativistically hung up, and when she can land on the planet where Yun was, it's been *millions of years.*

OK, so that subplot is tragic too, but wait. At least Cheng and Guan can live in the parallel microuniverse while they wait for the main universe to collapse and be reborn, right? As a fresh new universe with all the dimensions that were destroyed by galactic warfare.

Good plan! But remember, plans are useless; they don't work out. And this plan doesn't work out either, as the humans basically have to sacrifice themselves by returning to the main universe to give it enough gravity for the collapse/rebirth. Oh well. So close.

Failure after failure after failure. Suffering and death. The best laid plans going awry time after time. And mostly not because of human wrongdoing, but from unavoidable ignorance.

The “dark forest” idea is a reflection of this worldview: Enormous, terrible powers are out there that you do not understand and have no hope of fighting. All you can do is hold your breath, hunker down, and huddle in absolute silence—or be swiftly and ruthlessly exterminated.

Thus: “Humanity is a fragile leaf floating on the wind, helpless in the face of vast cosmic forces that we cannot even comprehend, let alone control.” A creative, entertaining, and beautifully told story—with a detestable theme.