Month: December 2021

A very Omicron Christmas

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal , ,

Dec 26 JDN 2459575

Remember back in spring of 2020 when we thought that this pandemic would quickly get under control and life would go back to normal? How naive we were.

The newest Omicron strain seems to be the most infectious yet—even people who are fully vaccinated are catching it. The good news is that it also seems to be less deadly than most of the earlier strains. COVID is evolving to spread itself better, but not be as harmful to us—much as influenza and cold viruses evolved. While weekly cases are near an all-time peek, weekly deaths are well below the worst they had been.

Indeed, at this point, it’s looking like COVID will more or less be with us forever. In the most likely scenario, the virus will continue to evolve to be more infectious but less lethal, and then we will end up with another influenza on our hands: A virus that can’t be eradicated, gets huge numbers of people sick, but only kills a relatively small number. At some point we will decide that the risk of getting sick is low enough that it isn’t worth forcing people to work remotely or maybe even wear masks. And we’ll relax various restrictions and get back to normal with this new virus a regular part of our lives.


Merry Christmas?

But it’s not all bad news. The vaccination campaign has been staggeringly successful—now the total number of vaccine doses exceeds the world population, so the average human being has been vaccinated for COVID at least once.

And while 5.3 million deaths due to the virus over the last two years sounds terrible, it should be compared against the baseline rate of 15 million deaths during that same interval, and the fact that worldwide death rates have been rapidly declining. Had COVID not happened, 2021 would be like 2019, which had nearly the lowest death rate on record, at 7,579 deaths per million people per year. As it is, we’re looking at something more like 10,000 deaths per million people per year (1%), or roughly what we considered normal way back in the long-ago times of… the 1980s. To get even as bad as things were in the 1950s, we would have to double our current death rate.

Indeed, there’s something quite remarkable about the death rate we had in 2019, before the pandemic hit: 7,579 per million is only 0.76%. A being with a constant annual death rate of 0.76% would have a life expectancy of over 130 years. This very low death rate is partly due to demographics: The current world population is unusually young and healthy because the world recently went through huge surges in population growth. Due to demographic changes the UN forecasts that our death rate will start to climb again as fertility falls and the average age increases; but they are still predicting it will stabilize at about 11,200 per million per year, which would be a life expectancy of 90. And that estimate could well be too pessimistic, if medical technology continues advancing at anything like its current rate.

We call it Christmas, but it’s really a syncretized amalgamation of holidays: Yule, Saturnalia, various Solstice celebrations. (Indeed, there’s no particular reason to think Jesus was even born in December.) Most Northern-hemisphere civilizations have some sort of Solstice holiday, and we’ve greedily co-opted traditions from most of them. The common theme really seems to be this:

Now it is dark, but band together and have hope, for the light shall return.

Diurnal beings in northerly latitudes instinctively fear the winter, when it becomes dark and cold and life becomes more hazardous—but we have learned to overcome this fear together, and we remind ourselves that light and warmth will return by ritual celebrations.

The last two years have made those celebrations particularly difficult, as we have needed to isolate ourselves in order to keep ourselves and others safe. Humans are fundamentally social at a level most people—even most scientists—do not seem to grasp: We need contact with other human beings as deeply and vitally as we need food or sleep.

The Internet has allowed us to get some level of social contact while isolated, which has been a tremendous boon; but I think many of us underestimated how much we would miss real face-to-face contact. I think much of the vague sense of malaise we’ve all been feeling even when we aren’t sick and even when we’ve largely adapted our daily routine to working remotely comes from this: We just aren’t getting the chance to see people in person nearly as often as we want—as often as we hadn’t even realized we needed.

So, if you do travel to visit family this holiday season, I understand your need to do so. But be careful. Get vaccinated—three times, if you can. Don’t have any contact with others who are at high risk if you do have any reason to think you’re infected.

Let’s hope next Christmas is better.

The economics of interstellar travel

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, futurism , , , , , , ,

Dec 19 JDN 2459568

Since these are rather dark times—the Omicron strain means that COVID is still very much with us, after nearly two years—I thought we could all use something a bit more light-hearted and optimistic.

In 1978 Paul Krugman wrote a paper entitled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade”, which has what is surely one of the greatest abstracts of all time:

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

The rest of the paper is equally delightful, and well worth a read. Of particular note are these two sentences, which should give you a feel: “The rest of the paper is, will be, or has been, depending on the reader’s inertial frame, divided into three sections.” and “This extension is left as an exercise for interested readers because the author does not understand general relativity, and therefore cannot do it himself.”

As someone with training in both economics and relativistic physics, I can tell you that Krugman’s analysis is entirely valid, given its assumptions. (Really, this is unsurprising: He’s a Nobel Laureate. One could imagine he got his physics wrong, but he didn’t—and of course he didn’t get his economics wrong.) But, like much high-falutin economic theory, it relies upon assumptions that are unlikely to be true.

Set aside the assumptions of perfect competition and unlimited arbitrage that yield Krugman’s key result of equalized interest rates. These are indeed implausible, but they’re also so standard in economics as to be pedestrian.

No, what really concerns me is this: Why bother with interstellar trade at all?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of interstellar travel and interstellar colonization. I want humanity to expand and explore the galaxy (or rather, I want that to be done by whatever humanity becomes, likely some kind of cybernetically and biogenetically enhanced transhumans in endless varieties we can scarcely imagine). But once we’ve gone through all the effort to spread ourselves to distant stars, it’s not clear to me that we’d ever have much reason to trade across interstellar distances.

If we ever manage to invent efficient, reliable, affordable faster-than-light (FTL) travel ala Star Trek, sure. In that case, there’s no fundamental difference between interstellar trade and any other kind of trade. But that’s not what Krugman’s paper is about, as its key theorems are actually about interest rates and prices in different inertial reference frames, which is only relevant if you’re limited to relativistic—that is, slower-than-light—velocities.

Moreover, as far as we can tell, that’s impossible. Yes, there are still some vague slivers of hope left with the Alcubierre Drive, wormholes, etc.; but by far the most likely scenario is that FTL travel is simply impossible and always will be.

FTL communication is much more plausible, as it merely requires the exploitation of nonlocal quantum entanglement outside quantum equilibrium; if the Bohm Interpretation is correct (as I strongly believe it is), then this is a technological problem rather than a theoretical one. At best this might one day lead to some form of nonlocal teleportation—but definitely not FTL starships. Since our souls are made of software, sending information can, in principle, send a person; but we almost surely won’t be sending mass faster than light.

So let’s assume, as Krugman did, that we will be limited to travel close to, but less than, the speed of light. (I recently picked up a term for this from Ursula K. Le Guin: “NAFAL”, “nearly-as-fast-as-light”.)

This means that any transfer of material from one star system to another will take, at minimum, years. It could even be decades or centuries, depending on how close to the speed of light we are able to get.

Assuming we have abundant antimatter or some similarly extremely energy-dense propulsion, it would reasonable to expect that we could build interstellar spacecraft that would be capable of accelerating at approximately Earth gravity (i.e. 1 g) for several years at a time. This would be quite comfortable for the crew of the ship—it would just feel like standing on Earth. And it turns out that this is sufficient to attain velocities quite close to the speed of light over the distances to nearby stars.

I will spare you the complicated derivation, but there are well-known equations which allow us to convert from proper acceleration (the acceleration felt on a spacecraft, i.e. 1 g in this case) to maximum velocity and total travel time, and they imply that a vessel which was constantly accelerating at 1 g (speeding up for the first half, then slowing down for the second half) could reach most nearby stars within about 50 to 100 years Earth time, or as little as 10 to 20 years ship time.

With higher levels of acceleration, you can shorten the trip; but that would require designing ships (or engineering crews?) in such a way as to sustain these high levels of acceleration for years at a time. Humans can sustain 3 g’s for hours, but not for years.

Even with only 1-g acceleration, the fuel costs for such a trip are staggering: Even with antimatter fuel you need dozens or hundreds of times as much mass in fuel as you have in payload—and with anything less than antimatter it’s basically just not possible. Yet there is nothing in the laws of physics saying you can’t do it, and I believe that someday we will.

Yet I sincerely doubt we would want to make such trips often. It’s one thing to send occasional waves of colonists, perhaps one each generation. It’s quite another to establish real two-way trade in goods.

Imagine placing an order for something—anything—and not receiving it for another 50 years. Even if, as I hope and believe, our descendants have attained far longer lifespans than we have, asymptotically approaching immortality, it seems unlikely that they’d be willing to wait decades for their shipments to arrive. In the same amount of time you could establish an entire industry in your own star system, built from the ground up, fully scaled to service entire planets.

In order to justify such a transit, you need to be carrying something truly impossible to produce locally. And there just won’t be very many such things.

People, yes. Definitely in the first wave of colonization, but likely in later waves as well, people will want to move themselves and their families across star systems, and will be willing to wait (especially since the time they experience on the ship won’t be nearly as daunting).

And there will be knowledge and experiences that are unique to particular star systems—but we’ll be sending that by radio signal and it will only take as many years as there are light-years between us; or we may even manage to figure out FTL ansibles and send it even faster than that.

It’s difficult for me to imagine what sort of goods could ever be so precious, so irreplaceable, that it would actually make sense to trade them across an interstellar distance. All habitable planets are likely to be made of essentially the same elements, in approximately the same proportions; whatever you may want, it’s almost certainly going to be easier to get it locally than it would be to buy it from another star system.

This is also why I think alien invasion is unlikely: There’s nothing they would particularly want from us that they couldn’t get more easily. Their most likely reason for invading would be specifically to conquer and rule us.

Certainly if you want gold or neodymium or deuterium, it’ll be thousands of times easier to get it at home. But even if you want something hard to make, like antimatter, or something organic and unique, like oregano, building up the industry to manufacture a product or the agriculture to grow a living organism is almost certainly going to be faster and easier than buying it from another solar system.

This is why I believe that for the first generation of interstellar colonists, imports will be textbooks, blueprints, and schematics to help build, and films, games, and songs to stay entertained and tied to home; exports will consist of of scientific data about the new planet as well as artistic depictions of life on an alien world. For later generations, it won’t be so lopsided: The colonies will have new ideas in science and engineering as well as new art forms to share. Billions of people on Earth and thousands or millions on each colony world will await each new transmission of knowledge and art with bated breath.

Long-distance trade historically was mainly conducted via precious metals such as gold; but if interstellar travel is feasible, gold is going to be dirt cheap. Any civilization capable of even sending a small intrepid crew of colonists to Epsilon Eridani is going to consider mining asteroids an utterly trivial task.

Will such transactions involve money? Will we sell these ideas, or simply give them away? Unlike my previous post where I focused on the local economy, here I find myself agreeing with Star Trek: Money isn’t going to make sense for interstellar travel. Unless we have very fast communication, the time lag between paying money out and then seeing it circulate back will be so long that the money returned to you will be basically worthless. And that’s assuming you figure out a way to make transactions clear that doesn’t require real-time authentication—because you won’t have it.

Consider Epsilon Eridani, a plausible choice for one of the first star systems we will colonize. That’s 10.5 light-years away, so a round-trip signal will take 21 years. If inflation is a steady 2%, that means that $100 today will need to come back as $151 to have the same value by the time you hear back from your transaction. If you had the option to invest in a 5% bond instead, you’d have $279 by then. And this is a nearby star.

It would be much easier to simply trade data for data, maybe just gigabyte for gigabyte or maybe by some more sophisticated notion of relative prices. You don’t need to worry about what your dollar will be worth 20 years from now; you know how much effort went into designing that blueprint for an antimatter processor and you know how much you’ll appreciate seeing that VR documentary on the rings of Aegir. You may even have in mind how much it cost you to pay people to design prototypes and how much you can sell the documentary for; but those monetary transactions will be conducted within your own star system, independently of whatever monetary system prevails on other stars.

Indeed, it’s likely that we wouldn’t even bother trying to negotiate how much to send—because that itself would have such overhead and face the same time-lags—and would instead simply make a habit of sending everything we possibly can. Such interchanges could be managed by governments at each end, supported by public endowments. “This year’s content from Epsilon Eridani, brought to you by the Smithsonian Institution.”

We probably won’t ever have—or need, or want—huge freighter ships carrying containers of goods from star to star. But with any luck, we will one day have art and ideas from across the galaxy shared by all of the endless variety of beings humanity has become.

Economists aren’t that crazy

PNRJ Uncategorized

Dec 12 JDN 2459561

I’ve been seeing this meme go around lately, and I felt a need to respond:

Economics: “Humans only value things monetarily.”

Sociology: “Uh, I don’t…”

Economics: “Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus.”

Sociology: “Uhhh, Psy, can you help?”

Psychology: “That’s not how humans…”

Economics: “ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!”

Physics: drops teacup

I have plenty of criticisms to make of neoclassical economics—but this is clearly unfair.

Economists aren’t that crazy.

Above all, economists don’t actually believe in exponential growth forever. I literally have never met one who does. The mainstream, uncontroversial (I daresay milquetoast)neoclassical growth model, the Solow-Swan model, predicts a long-run decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find that long-run per-capita GDP growth is asymptotic, meaning that there is some standard of living that we can never expect the world to exceed. It’s simply a question of what that limit is, and it is most likely a good deal better than how we live even in First World countries.

It’s nothing more than a strawman of neoclassical economics to assert otherwise. Yes, economists do believe that current growth can and should continue for some time yet—though even among them it is controversial how long it will continue. But they absolutely do not believe that we can expect 3% annual growth in per-capita GDP for the next 1000 years. And indeed, it is precisely their mathematical sophistication that makes this so: They would be the first to recognize that this implies a 6.8 trillion-fold increase in standard of living, which is obviously ludicrous. A much more plausible figure for that timescale is something like 0.2%, which would be only a 7-fold increase over that same interval. And if you really want to extrapolate to millions of years, the only plausible long-run economic growth rate over that period is basically 0%. Yet billions of lives hinge upon whether it is actually 0.0001%, 0.0002%, or 0.0003%—if indeed human beings don’t go extinct long before then.

What about the other two claims? Well, neoclassical economists do have a habit of assuming greater rationality than human beings actually exhibit, and of trying to value everything in monetary terms. And economists are nothing if not arrogant in their relationship to other fields of social science. So here, at least, there is a kernel of truth.

Yet that makes this at best hyperbole for comedic effect—and at worst highly misleading as to what actual economists believe. You can find a few fringe economists who might seriously assent to the claim “humans are always rational”, and you can easily find plenty of amoral corporate shills who are paid to say such things on TV. (Krugman refers to them as “professionally conservative economists”.)

Moreover, I think the behavioral economics paradigm still hasn’t penetrated fully enough—most economists will give lip service to the idea of irrational behavior without being willing to seriously face up to how frequent it is or what this implies for policy. But no serious mainstream economist actually believes that all human beings are always rational.

And while there is surely a tendency to over-emphasize monetary costs and try to put everything in monetary terms, I don’t think I’ve ever met an economist who genuinely believes that all humans value everything monetarily. At most they might think that everyone should value everything monetarily—and even then the only ones who say things like this are weird fringe figures like that guy who hates Christmas.

Am I reading too much into a joke? Maybe. But given how poorly most people understand economics, this kind of joke can do real damage. It’s already a big problem that (aforementioned) corporate shills can present themselves as economic experts, but if popular culture is accustomed to dismissing the claims of actual economic experts, that makes matters much worse. And rather than the playful ribbing that neoclassical economists well deserve (like Jon Stewart gave them: “People are screwy.” “You’re just now figuring this out?”), this meme mocks economists aggressively enough that it seems to be trying to actively undermine their credibility.

If COVID taught us anything, it should be that expertise matters. Trusting experts more than we did would have saved thousands of lives—and trusting them less would have doomed even more.

So maybe a joke that will make people trust economic experts less isn’t so harmless after all?

Low-skill jobs

PNRJ ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , ,

Dec 5 JDN 2459554

I’ve seen this claim going around social media for awhile now: “Low-skill jobs are a classist myth created to justify poverty wages.”

I can understand why people would say things like this. I even appreciate that many low-skill jobs are underpaid and unfairly stigmatized. But it’s going a bit too far to claim that there is no such thing as a low-skill job.

Suppose all the world’s physicists and all the world’s truckers suddenly had to trade jobs for a month. Who would have a harder time?

If a mathematician were asked to do the work of a janitor, they’d be annoyed. If a janitor were asked to do the work of a mathematician, they’d be completely nonplussed.

I could keep going: Compare robotics engineers to dockworkers or software developers to fruit pickers.

Higher pay does not automatically equate to higher skills: welders are clearly more skilled than stock traders. Give any welder a million-dollar account and a few days of training, and they could do just as well as the average stock trader (which is to say, worse than the S&P 500). Give any stock trader welding equipment and a similar amount of training, and they’d be lucky to not burn their fingers off, much less actually usefully weld anything.

This is not to say that any random person off the street could do just as well as a janitor or dockworker as someone who has years of experience at that job. It is simply to say that they could do better—and pick up the necessary skills faster—than a random person trying to work as a physicist or software developer.

Moreover, this does justify some difference in pay. If some jobs are easier than others, in the sense that more people are qualified to do them, then the harder jobs will need to pay more in order to attract good talent—if they didn’t, they’d risk their high-skill workers going and working at the low-skill jobs instead.

This is of course assuming all else equal, which is clearly not the case. No two jobs are the same, and there are plenty of other considerations that go into choosing someone’s wage: For one, not simply what skills are required, but also the effort and unpleasantness involved in doing the work. I’m entirely prepared to believe that being a dockworker is less fun than being a physicist, and this should reduce the differential in pay between them. Indeed, it may have: Dockworkers are paid relatively well as far as low-skill jobs go—though nowhere near what physicists are paid. Then again, productivity is also a vital consideration, and there is a general tendency that high-skill jobs tend to be objectively more productive: A handful of robotics engineers can do what was once the work of hundreds of factory laborers.

There are also ways for a worker to be profitable without being particularly productive—that is, to be very good at rent-seeking. This is arguably the case for lawyers and real estate agents, and undeniably the case for derivatives traders and stockbrokers. Corporate executives aren’t stupid; they wouldn’t pay these workers astronomical salaries if they weren’t making money doing so. But it’s quite possible to make lots of money without actually producing anything of particular value for human society.

But that doesn’t mean that wages are always fair. Indeed, I dare say they typically are not. One of the most important determinants of wages is bargaining power. Unions don’t increase skill and probably don’t increase productivity—but they certainly increase wages, because they increase bargaining power.

And this is also something that’s correlated with lower levels of skill, because the more people there are who know how to do what you do, the harder it is for you to make yourself irreplaceable. A mathematician who works on the frontiers of conformal geometry or Teichmueller theory may literally be one of ten people in the world who can do what they do (quite frankly, even the number of people who know what they do is considerably constrained, though probably still at least in the millions). A dockworker, even one who is particularly good at loading cargo skillfully and safely, is still competing with millions of other people with similar skills. The easier a worker is to replace, the less bargaining power they have—in much the same way that a monopoly has higher profits than an oligopoly, which has higher profits that a competitive market.

This is why I support unions. I’m also a fan of co-ops, and an ardent supporter of progressive taxation and safety regulations. So don’t get me wrong: Plenty of low-skill workers are mistreated and underpaid, and they deserve better.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a lot easier to be a janitor than a physicist.