2019 letter

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2018)

Following the twists and turns of the trade war meant that I had less time for personal writing this year, so this letter is the only piece I’ll publish. I’m disappointed not to write more here, but on the other hand it might allow us to identify, for academic purposes, my lack of personal output to be the smallest and most trivial casualty of the trade war.

This year I want to discuss mostly science and technology. First, some thoughts on China’s technology efforts. Then I’ll present a few reflections on science fiction, with a focus on Philip K. Dick and Liu Cixin. Next I’ll discuss books I read on American industrial history. I save personal reflections for the end.

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I spend most of my time thinking about China’s technology trajectory. The main ideas can be summed up in two broad strokes. First, China’s technology foundations are fragile, which the trade war has made evident. Second, over the longer term, I expect that China will stiffen those foundations and develop firms capable of pushing forward the technological frontier.

In my view, there’s not yet much terribly impressive about China’s technology achievements. It’s true that the country leads on mobile payments and the consumer internet, as well as the buildout of infrastructure projects like a high-speed rail network. These however have more to do with differences in the social environment and regulatory regime. More importantly, much of China’s technology stack is built on American components, especially semiconductors. Failure to develop more foundational technologies has meant that the US has had an at-will ability to kneecap major firms, and to be able to impose at least significant operational hassles on Huawei. Over the medium term, US controls will disrupt the ability of Chinese firms to acquire leading technologies. And so long as substantial US tariffs stay in place, Chinese firms will have worse access to the world’s largest and best consumer market, meaning that they’ll be exposed to less export discipline.

I am constructive however for China’s longer-term industrial development. I expect that Chinese firms will build strong technological capabilities, with companies that will reach the leading edge and push it forward. On the supply side, Chinese workers engage in a greater amount of technological learning than anyone else, for the simple reason that most supply chains are in China. On the demand side, a huge and dynamic market will pull forward domestic capabilities. And US controls can only be successful in the short term; it’s not likely that it can monopolize key technologies forever.

I. Fragile foundations

There are certain lights under which Chinese technology efforts look spectacular. China is the only country other than the US to have been able to develop internet giants, which can look upon their Silicon Valley counterparts as peers. The Chinese mobile internet experience certainly is far more fun than what consumers in the US are able to play with. Chinese firms have built up credible positions in certain industrial technologies that include solar energy generation, mobile infrastructure equipment, and high-speed rail. They’re also making good inroads in consumer electronics, from smartphones to drones. And Chinese firms have a plausible shot at leading in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

These are not trivial achievements. But neither are they earth-shattering successes. Consider first the internet companies. I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.

The internet companies in San Francisco and Beijing are highly skilled at business model innovation and leveraging network effects, not necessarily R&D and the creation of new IP. (That’s why, I think, that the companies in Beijing work so hard. Since no one has any real, defensible IP, the only path to success is to brutally outwork the competition.) I wish we would drop the notion that China is leading in technology because it has a vibrant consumer internet. A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader. 

Although Alibaba and Tencent may be technically impressive on software development, their business success is mostly a function of the size of the market as well as the social and regulatory environment. The ubiquity of mobile payments is the result not just of technological innovation (substantial though that might be), but also the financial regulatory regime and the leapfrog over credit cards. Ecommerce works great because China has built first-rate infrastructure and because many migrant workers are available to deliver goods in dense urban areas. These are fine companies, but in my view, the milestones of our technological civilization ought to be found in scientific and industrial achievements instead. Now even if one did want to consider consumer internet the be the most important sector, the US still looks good. A rough rule-of-thumb comparison: market caps of the five biggest US tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook) add up to US$5tn at the time of this writing, while the two Chinese internet giants (Alibaba and Tencent) add up to US$1tn. This 5:1 advantage to the US feels intuitively right to me as a measure of relative capabilities.

As a tangent, I’ve found it curious that Congress has become so keen to publicly beat up on Facebook and Google while the US considers itself in technological competition with China. In my view, antitrust arguments apply better to companies like Intel and Boeing, which are the tech giants that wield much greater market power. Maybe the contrarian move however is to recognize the cleverness of Congress. The legislators might in fact understand that semiconductors and jet engines are a core strategic asset, in a way that social networks and search engines are not. Therefore Congress is actually exercising a judicious use of political power to bully cash-rich companies to do more on innovation, or at least employment.

China has a strong position when it comes to manufacturing industrial goods. A few firms have staked out leading positions in industries that include steel, solar power generation, and telecommunications equipment. The bulk still has a long way to go however before they can really be considered the peers of German, Japanese, Korean, and American giants. In fact, I suspect that Chinese firms should be considered underperformers as a whole. Few domestic firms have become globally-successful brands, and Chinese firms are still far behind more technologically-sophisticated industries like aviation and semiconductors. As a rule of thumb, it’s harder to name global Chinese brands than Japanese and Korean ones, even when they were close to China’s current level of per capita GDP. Shouldn’t we expect more from the world’s second-largest market?

How about emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, hypersonics, and other buzzing areas? I think there’s no scientific consensus on China’s position on any of these technologies, but let’s consider it at least a plausible claim that Chinese firms might lead in them. So far however these fields are closer to being speculative science projects than real, commercial industries. AI is mostly a vague product or an add-on service whose total industry revenue is difficult to determine, and that goes for many of these other items. In my view, focusing the discussion on the Chinese position in emerging technologies distracts from its weaknesses in established technologies. Take semiconductors, machine tools, and commercial aviation, which are measured by clearer technical and commercial benchmarks. They are considerably more difficult than making steel and solar panels, and Chinese firms have a poor track record of breaking into these industries.

The focus on speculative science projects brings to light another issue around discussions of China and technology: an emphasis on quantifying inputs. So much of the general commentary focuses on its growth in patent registrations, R&D spending, journal publications, and other types of inputs. One can find data on these metrics, which is why measures of “innovation” are often constructed around them. But these inputs are irrelevant if they don’t deliver output, and it’s not clear that they often do, neither in China nor anywhere else. Wonderfully asymptoting charts on Chinese patent registrations and R&D spending suggest that Chinese firms might overrun the rest of the world any day now. So far however the commercial outputs are not so impressive.

The trade war has produced the clearest evidence that China’s technology foundations are fragile. When the US government decided to restrict technology exports to particular firms, it drove ZTE to near bankruptcy, crippled the operations of Fujian Jinhua, and has at least dealt a major blow to Huawei. US sanctions have revealed that most Chinese firms engage in only a thin layer of innovation, and that Chinese firms in general have not had serious success mastering more foundational technologies. The most important of these is the semiconductor. Without particular chips like CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, which for the most part come from American providers, even a firm as large as Huawei can struggle. 

The US has the policy tools in place to slow down China’s technology progress, at least in the short term. Creating hassles for large companies slow down the entire ecosystem, because leading companies spend the most on R&D and serve as downstream buyers. The US can escalate the use of export controls in still more ominous ways, and in some cases also prevent other countries from shipping goods to China. CFIUS will make it more difficult for Chinese firms to engage in technological learning through equity investments. And if US tariffs stay on for an extended period, Chinese firms will not be able to learn to improve their products in the world’s largest market of sophisticated consumers. The medium-term outlook for China’s technology progress is in my view not so cheerful.

A calm look at China’s technology achievements should pick up strengths as well as weaknesses. China is the only country after the US to have built internet giants, which puts it in a good position to continue developing digital technologies. It has built credible firms in certain hardware technologies—like the smartphone—and many types of industrial goods. And they’re making good consumer products, though not global brands. The lack of success in brandbuilding shows that Chinese firms (not foreign firms producing in China) are actually poor exporters. In industries involving R&D-intensive technologies like automotives, semiconductors, and aviation, Chinese firms have a weak position even in the domestic market. In many ways, China’s technology success is too much like a paper tiger, impressive in appearance but in reality not so powerful.

II. Learning by doing

I think however that long-term prospects are bright. In my view, Chinese firms face favorable odds first in reaching the technological frontier and next in pushing it forward. I consider two advantages to be important. First, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they’re capturing most of the knowledge that comes from the production process. Second, China is a large and dynamic market. On top of these structural factors, Chinese firms have stiffened their resolve to master important technologies after repeated US sanctions.

My essay How Technology Grows argues that technological capabilities ought to be represented in the form of an experienced workforce. We should distinguish technology in three forms: tools, direct instructions (like blueprints and IP), and process knowledge. The third is most important: “Process knowledge is hard to write down as an instruction: you can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it’s hard to make a great dish.”

We should think of technology as a living product, which has to be practiced for knowledge even to be maintained at its current level. I offered the example of the Ise Grand Shrine, which Japanese caretakers tear down and rebuild anew every generation so that they don’t lose its production knowledge. Here’s an example I came across more recently: Mother Jones reported in 2009 that the US government forgot how to produce “Fogbank,” a classified material essential to the production of the hydrogen bomb, because relevant experts had retired. The government then had to spend millions of dollars to recover that production knowledge. I believe that the hard-to-measure process knowledge is more important than the more easily observable tools and IP. We would be capable of making few meaningful advancements if a civilization from 2,000 years in the future were able to dump blueprints on us, just as the Pharaohs and Caesars from 2,000 years in the past would have been able to do nothing with the blueprints of today.

Today, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they engage more than anyone else in the technological learning process. Few Chinese firms are world-leading brands. But workers in China are using the latest tools to manufacture many of the most sophisticated products in the world. They’re capturing the marginal process knowledge, and my hypothesis is that puts them in a better place than anyone else to develop the next technological advancements. To be more concrete, Chinese workers will be able to replicate the mostly-foreign capital equipment they currently use, make more of their own IP, and build globally-competitive final products.

That has roughly been the story in the consumer electronics sector. Every year over the last decade, Apple trained a million workers in Shenzhen and other cities to manufacture the world’s most complex consumer electronics. The smart narrative on the iPhone has been that Chinese workers are engaged in mere assembly, of mostly foreign parts to boot, while Apple keeps all the profits. That story is true, but it misses a great deal. First, even if most of the workforce learns little, a few thousand line engineers become the world’s greatest experts in electronics assembly. Combine that fact with the billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain, and it’s no wonder that Shenzhen is driving the marginal innovation on hardware today, from consumer drones to scooters. Second, Chinese brands were able to tap into the same supply chain and learn how to make pretty good products; collectively they make up around 40% of global smartphone sales (though they earn little profit). Third, the Chinese share of added value per phone has zoomed up, from 4% to 25% over the course of a decade, according to an academic estimate. It’s no longer the case that China is responsible only for assembly; Chinese firms have figured out how to make the more valuable parts of the phone as well.

By aggregating the smartphone supply chain, Chinese firms learned how to make sophisticated components and become exportable brands. They’re still far behind on making the underlying software of the phone, but if one leaves that aside, isn’t it a pretty good success story for Chinese firms? The power of compounded workforce training pulled Chinese capabilities to the technological frontier, and now these firms are in a good place to push that frontier forward. Chinese firms are now also leading in all the follow-on technologies of the smartphone, like the consumer drone. Now consider that it’s not just the electronics supply chain that is centered in China. Design and production of many goods, from furniture to heavy industry, are concentrated in gigantic Chinese production hubs. These hubs allow for tight connections between R&D and manufacturing, shortening the circulation of knowledge in a production loop.

China is now responsible for around a fifth of the world’s total manufactures exports because few multinationals have resisted moving production there. US, German, and Japanese firms like to say that they’ve kept the most valuable work domestically. That’s true for the most part, but they’re betting that the Chinese workforce many of them are training will fail to digest foreign technologies and replicate it. That bet has failed at least in technologies that include high-speed rail, shipbuilding, and telecommunications equipment. And I expect that as China’s economy grows more sophisticated, its absorptive and learning capacity will improve as well.

Technological learning in the labor force is a supply-side factor pulling forward the capabilities of Chinese firms. They benefit also from a demand-side factor: the domestic market is really big. People tend to forget that fact. It’s true that Chinese firms haven’t yet had much success in creating global brands, but perhaps they can be forgiven for focusing on the world’s fastest-growing large market. The size of the market can overwhelm many deficiencies, like problems with the education system stifling creativity. And although consumer internet companies are not strategically so important, they buy upstream components, and are in a more credible position than European and Japanese firms in developing future digital technologies. China today is a huge internal market made up dynamic firms, ingenious workers, and a strong interest in technology. That’s rather like the US in the second half of the 19th century, which built the largest firms in the world mostly by relying on domestic demand.

And then there’s a matter of will. Chinese aspirations to replace US technology has long been a whimsical task. But after US sanctions started taking down giants, private companies are thinking more carefully about how to maintain continuous access to supplies. I’ve heard a company tell me that US political actions are now as unpredictable as major earthquakes, and have the same effects on supply chains. Every company has to cultivate non-US (and ideally Chinese) alternatives. That task is taken most seriously by the technology sector, since the lack of only a few components can defeat a system as complex as a smartphone or base station.

The government is on board. I’ve been quoted in saying that China finds it politically intolerable that the US has an at-will ability to cripple major firms like ZTE and Huawei. It’s now a matter of national security for China to strengthen every major technological capability. The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China mostly by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, the US is triggering one in China. I’m surprised that esoteric details like the de minimis threshold of the export administration regulations is starting to be the subject of conversation of educated people in Beijing. Meanwhile, the strategic solution to Chinese problems cannot be more straightforward: replicate American products, or at least find alternative vendors.

China’s technology foundation has been fragile, but it will patch up now that everyone has realized it. Good Marxists after all have to make sure that workers own the means of production. And I’m constructive on the idea that many of these ideas will be successful. Chinese engineers are trying only to replace existing technologies, which is relatively simpler than inventing them de novo. Their existence in the first place removes the idea that there’s any theoretical barrier, and it’s rare in the history of technology for there to be only a single path to a product.

And it’s difficult for any country to monopolize a key technology over the long term. Baghdad couldn’t have done it with agriculture, the Chinese didn’t do it with gunpowder, and Britain failed to maintain its control over textile technologies. After the UK imposed export controls on industrial mills in the 18th century, US firms simply hired a few people who memorized their designs. One of them, Samuel Slater, is known as “Slater the Traitor” in the UK and the “father of the US industrial revolution” stateside. The saying I picked up when I worked in California is that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to share, and it’s hard to stop technical knowledge from diffusing. There wouldn’t be technological clusters like Silicon Valley in the first place if that principle were not true.

This commitment to technology and growth is not simply a reaction to a feeling of being besieged. The country still feels like a highly optimistic place. International survey results consistently show that Chinese rank at the top of feeling optimism for the future. And in my view, government institutions are organized around the ideas of adaptation and progress. Consider a few of their names. In 2003, the economic super-ministry renamed itself from the State Planning Commission to the National Development and Reform Commission. The most important government body is the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reform. “Development” and “reform” are splendidly Hegelian ideas: both are forward-looking and without end. Surely it’s better to be a developing country than a developed one, for the latter means that everything is done and finished. And a commitment to continuous “reform” recognizes the impossibility of overcoming every contradiction entailed by modernization, and therefore institutions need to be perpetually adaptive. Incantation alone cannot make something true, but getting names right is a nice part of institutional success.

I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess, and that the creation of new tools and IP are the milestones of better training. Chinese workers are working with the latest tools to produce most of the world’s goods; over the longer term, my hypothesis is that they’ll be able to replicate the tooling and make just as good final products. They can do so because the domestic market is huge and dynamic.  China today has a large industrial system with few missing backward and forward linkages, which means it’s a mostly-complete learning loop. The government and businesses are motivated by a sense of urgency to master most technologies.

But I also recognize that this case is theoretical and a priori. There are many things that can get in the way. Perhaps workers fail to understand the tools they work with well enough to replicate it and invent the next iteration. Although the domestic market is large, policy distortions restrict competitive pressures. Productivity growth has been slowing down for a decade. And perhaps the market conditions aren’t yet right for engagement in high technology; it’s hard to see the case for investing in the development of the world’s best software and robotics systems when Chinese labor is still so much cheaper than developed levels. So let’s see how the constructive case runs against these practical challenges.

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Hegel proclaimed: “The philosopher must command as much aesthetic power as the poet.” So too, I submit, must the economist. But what sort of instrument is at her disposal to inspire people about economic growth? It’s fine and important to argue its case directly, as Tyler does in Stubborn Attachments. But I believe that more powerful instruments are available, and that science fiction is one of them. I want to discuss the utility of science fiction as a tool to promote cognitive wonder.

I read a dozen books by Philip K. Dick this year, which are intoxicating, but I’ll discuss them mostly for their negative inspirational value. More useful instead to take up works by authors like Olaf Stapledon, Neal Stephenson, and Liu Cixin.

Reading Philip K. Dick (PKD going forward) is like being plunged into a dreadful nightmare, of the type that he himself suffered as a result of far too much drug use. Everyone who drinks from the well of PKD is charmed and frustrated by different things, and every critic is eager to tell us how he correctly predicted this or that aspect of our modern world. I can do no differently. Instead of picking up his predictions of technology or corporatism, I want to dwell on how PKD’s political vision of elites. “We are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business,” Strauss wrote in Natural Right and History, “and gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues—retail sanity and wholesale madness.” PKD excels at working through the logic of such systems, which I think are reflected a little too well in the developed world.

Such a system exists in Hong Kong (from where I departed in the beginning of the year). Visitors like to compare the city’s skyline to the physical setting of Blade Runner, which is based on one of PKD’s lesser books. Rather than limiting myself to the physical setting, I find the social system in PKD’s books a more useful guide to Hong Kong’s tycoon-dominated polity. As a city, Hong Kong is governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and TV like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses. Hong Kong is organized entirely to serve elite business interests, which take the form of conglomerates and property developers. That is pretty much the setting of the modal PKD novel.

An afternoon of walking around Hong Kong is the best argument against the idea that growth is some sort of automatic process, which we can count on as a matter of course. Between its economic stagnation and general air of nostalgia, it’s difficult to identify anything in the streets of Hong Kong that didn’t already exist in the ‘90s. Instead of arguing that case here, I’ll refer readers to Simon Cartledge’s essay on the city’s lack of dynamism. Stagnation might be fine if Hong Kong were the only place afflicted. I worry that the rest of the developed world (namely the US, Europe, and Japan) is turning into larger Hong Kongs.

That’s when PKD becomes most relevant. His novels feature smart—and often even brilliant—elites, who feel hemmed in by forces they cannot understand. PKD’s novels are good at depicting the frustrations of elites, whose only satisfaction comes from toying with the fates of smaller characters. They have good reactive instincts and can manage problems that flare up, but lack the confidence that they can affect larger outcomes, and thus have no real sense of initiative beyond petty matters. That’s the story of an elite in Hong Kong, and I worry that US elites are giving in to the same tendencies. They are well-meaning and well-educated, but also risk-averse and pessimistic: retail sanity and wholesale madness. My feeling is that the main pre-occupation of US elites is to impress their peer class, an instinct that was honed by Girardian pressures in college. And it might be worse in Europe and Japan, where elites are even more pessimistic because they have to deal with lower growth rates and deeper population drags.

Disappointment with elites is the theme that shines most brightly in my reading of PKD. Here’s another reason I enjoy him, which I’ve never seen discussed: He’s an excellent writer on interiority, on this front the equal to Proust. (One interesting strand in his work is an abiding interest in German culture, history, and philosophy—thus surely he’s familiar with the idea of bildung, or personal cultivation.) PKD came of age in the postwar boom years of California, a setting in which people held earnest beliefs in utopia, inflected at the same time by paranoid fears driven by the Cold War. His books tend to feature a more-or-less ordinary person who is dropped into a perplexing dream. PKD places us in the shoes of a person who finds the world very odd. He’s telling us that the world is in fact deeply weird, and that it’s difficult to really understand other people. And that makes him a very good friend for the nerd.

It’s hard to discuss PKD’s books without acknowledging their terrible flaws. Even his best novels are blemished by a few too many twists and unnecessary complications. He wrote because he needed money—he published 11 books between 1963 and 1964—and it’s easy to be frustrated that he didn’t appropriately prosecute his many brilliant ideas. Drugs drove his life, which means that they also drove the lives of many of his characters, and that element quickly wore me out. And he’ll disappoint the science fiction reader who looks for at least a modicum of rigor; instead of engaging in technical details, he throws in zap guns and multi-armed aliens as gratuitous ornaments.

PKD’s whole body of works is difficult to negotiate, here’s my guide. I think it’s valid to start with his most acclaimed works: Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and The Man in the High Castle. The first two are fun, the third is more serious: untypically well-crafted and the result of deep research. It’s his only book I feel the urge to flip through every so often, for its discussions of the Nazi bureaucracy, and for the exquisite moral dilemma situated at the center of the plot. If one enjoys these three, move on to PKD’s weirder side. My favorites are Now Wait for Last Year, Our Friends from Frolix 8, and his final work, the Valis trilogy.

I describe PKD at length not because his books describe the mood of the current day. He’s fun to read, but he doesn’t represent my ideal of science fiction. Stubborn Attachments acknowledges that it’s difficult to make people feel strongly about preferring 2.1% economic growth to 2.0% economic growth. I don’t think that accountant-style arguments for structurally higher growth, even extrapolations of per capita GDP in different trend lines, are enough to change hearts and minds.

Instead we should harness the aesthetic powers of science fiction. Science fiction is uniquely capable of provoking imagination for radically better futures. By radically better, I mean far more than progress on a few technologies and social problems. Instead I like the idea of books that sketch out humanity 5,000 years from now, after we’ve made major advances in energy, materials science, space, and in civilizing humanity. I’m advocating to treat science fiction as a political project, to spur a better vision of the future as well as the hard work to make it reality.

Olaf Stapledon has written that type of book. His Last and First Men is one of my favorite two books this year (I discuss the other, Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction, below). Last and First Men has the dizzying ambition to present the evolution of human intelligence across two billion years, over 18 different iterations of the human species. Each round of humanity is wiped out by war, natural catastrophe, solar flares, or something more bizarre, each time nearly annihilated before bouncing back to reach a more civilized form. The book is made up of gestures like: “We have now followed man’s career during some forty million years,” and “The Fifteenth Men first set themselves to abolish five great evils, namely disease, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, ill-will. The story of their devotion, their many disastrous experiments and ultimate triumph, cannot here be told.”

Last and First Men is 200 pages of high stimulation. The book ends on a joyfully triumphant note, after the Eighteenth Men have understood all the mysteries of physics and biology, thus commanding the ability to populate the rest of the galaxy. Stapledon is interested in civilizing the human species, which I think is just as worthwhile as discussing how to equip it with many types of technologies. I think more of us should read Stapledon and try our hands at writing out the next million years of human history.

After Stapledon, I most appreciate the works of Neal Stephenson and Liu Cixin. Cryptonomicon, my favorite Stephenson book, isn’t necessarily inspirational on the topic of growth or the future. Seveneves is. I like its challenge theme: humanity faces a civilization-ending threat; instead of giving in to despair, people work steadfastly on the scientific and engineering challenges required to overcome it; they succeed after enormous struggle. We need more books with that theme.

There’s another great part about Seveneves. I’m delighted that Stephenson pays homage to Stapledon in the final third of the book, which zooms 5,000 years into the future. By that point, humans have mastered many more technologies while also physically evolving in odd ways. Meanwhile, the new era offers more types of contradictions that they have to overcome. I admire Stephenson for another move: making this utopia free of the internet and social media. His advanced civilization maintains a focus on the material and industrial world.

And I’ve already written extensively on Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy. It shares the challenge theme: instead of giving in to despair about an imminent catastrophe, humanity overcomes the threat through ingenuity and a massive industrial effort. The trilogy’s mood is pessimistic, but its results are optimistic. Liu is telling us that the problems ahead are difficult, but they are solvable. He offers reminder after reminder against complacency. For example, after centuries of careful preparation, humanity’s fleet is abruptly wiped out by first contact with aliens. People have to remain undaunted and to move forward.

Science fiction is the most political genre. It’s fine that much of science fiction consists of critiques of contemporary society. It’s more interesting when it assumes a technological breakthrough or exaggerates a social trend to correctly predict an aspect of the future. It’s most useful when it can be used to spur hard work to build the future. Science fiction has the capacity to inspire by setting the vision of a radically better future, and by making it clear that the future won’t happen unless we put in the work.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet early in the year. Certainly I enjoyed the series, but am now less struck by the idea of it, and want to read it through again in a few years to see how well it holds up before I offer comment. The main effect of these books is for me to want to spend some time in Naples, which I hope to do soon.

It’s easier to comment on another piece of fiction I enjoyed this year: American Tabloid by James Ellroy. It’s a thrilling plot in incandescent prose. Ellroy is the antidote to Philip K. Dick. It’s a portrait of a highly masculine era, when gangsters and government types displayed an extraordinary degree of personal initiative, believing themselves capable of anything, until they ran headfirst into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. What a mad idea it looks like in retrospect—D-Day this was not. Ellroy’s account is a work of fiction, but I wonder if that particular failure contributed significantly to the decline of ambition in the US government. Kennedy’s space program redeemed the some of the sense of optimism, but it feels today like the final effort of a system that had begun to run out of steam by the early ‘60s.

The best nonfiction I read this year were two books about the Nazis. Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is an economic history of the Third Reich, from the ‘20s through the war. It’s my ideal of a history book: conceptually-driven (as opposed to being a psychological account of personalities), with a focus on structural factors like industrial capacities and economic facts. My main, incredible takeaway was how under-provisioned the Nazis were when they launched the war. They were short of everything: fuel, steel, coal, labor, foreign exchange, officers, winter coats, rubber, and on and on. By the middle of the war, economic administrators were engaged in grim mathematical calculations to determine the minimum amount of proteins required to extract an adequate amount of industrial output from workers.

Wages of Destruction is an excellent companion to Ben Shepherd’s book on the Wehrmacht, which offers operational details, and Victor David Hanson, who presents systematic comparative data. Each of them presents compelling arguments with carefully-researched arrays of facts. The lesson I draw from these books is something like the following: the most important priorities in war are management of material resources, then operational excellence, and finally general strategy. The Axis batted one out of three—operational excellence—while the Allies did well on each. If a country cannot convince the domestic population to deliver soldiers and industrial output, and if the logistics networks cannot transport these to the front, then strategy matters for little. And if soldiers are poorly trained, then strategy also matters little. Thus in my view, the best minds in wartime ought to be focused on motivating the home population, working on logistics, and improving operational capabilities of troops, all of which expand strategic space. Then one can worry about strategy more directly.

No less dreary than Tooze is Michael Kater’s Culture in Nazi Germany. Kater evaluates the artistic, literary, and musical output of the Third Reich, and makes a good case that the regime produced little of lasting value. It tried, but perhaps the failure ought not be so surprising, given that the state drove away or murdered many of its most creative talents. I enjoyed the section on Minister Goebbel’s struggles to manage public opinion after the war effort turned against Germany: “The public started asking detailed questions, such as: Why was Stalingrad not evacuated while there was still time? Why was the Red Army’s strength so obviously underestimated? Why was its pincer-movement offensive of last November not detected?” Another excellent section dealt with the difficulties that German artists encountered in California, where many had emigrated. These artists were miserable in sunny LA (their accents made them a poor fit for Hollywood blockbusters), and they took it out on newer arrivals, who “were exiled again by the exiles.”

Let’s return to discussing science and technology. I read a trio of books on US industrialization this year. The most interesting was David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. The other two (biographies of Vannevar Bush and Gordon Moore) offer interesting facts but were less good books to read. I’ll focus the discussion on Hounshell.

From the American System to Mass Production is a technical history book. The “American system” stresses the concept of interchangeability. There were essentially two manufacturing principles in the 19th century: the British focused more on cultivating highly-skilled master craftsmen; the US placed greater emphasis on mechanization and the interchangeability of parts. Its prime mover was the United States Ordnance Department, which insisted on machine-made interoperable parts production of small arms. The department practiced this principle at its national armories in Springfield and Harpers Ferry, and also required its private contractors to adopt interchangeability. It wasn’t easy to do. The principle was more of a political and aesthetic ideal until the end of the century. It took two generations of skilled mechanics to perfect interchangeability, after having developed gauges capable of precise measurements and machine tools to produce fine enough components that could be assembled with little fitting.

The results were spectacular when they succeeded. Hounshell traces the development of the sewing machine, reaper, and bicycle as the practice rounds in the perfection of interchangeability. These led to innovations in machine tooling, woodworking, and metalworking. The story culminates with the triumph of Ford’s Model T, which propelled US industry to a philosophically-higher stage of development: mass production. The Ford system required the manufacture of massive quantities of interchangeable parts, the installation of huge numbers of specialized machine tools, and workers able to adapt to a mechanized environment. When it worked, it worked. Between 1908 and 1916, Ford increased production of the Model T by 40 times between while more than halving its price. 

The progress towards mass production required decades of pain and experimentation. When it succeeded, General Patton could rightfully say: “Americans are the foremost mechanics in the world, and America as a nation has the greatest ability for mass production of machines.” My only issue with Hounshell’s book is that it doesn’t present on whether this investment in interchangeability was really worth it. Yes, Ford was able to mass produce the automobile, but is that so much because of principles long set by the Ordnance Department, or some other reason? After all, the British and Germans were not so far behind in becoming manufacturing giants, without such a long-running political obsession with interchangeability. 

Suppose for the sake of argument however that this focus on interchangeability was a prerequisite for mass production later on. What should we learn? Here I’ll draw on the biographies of Gordon Moore and Vannevar Bush as well. One lesson is that technology is highly path-dependent. There are arguably only a half-dozen countries that really do high technology: the US, a few countries in Europe, and a few more in Asia. These countries are technology successes because they have favorable initial endowments and then have figured out important principles, like interchangeability. It’s really hard to get these things right. The skills US workers learned in the process of becoming an industrial giant helped set the US up for technological leadership over the rest of the century.

It’s still odd however how different places become major centers of production. Detroit became a major auto producer because it had large numbers of skilled mechanics in the form of marine and railroad engineers. Silicon Valley was seeded by William Shockley, who moved to Palo Alto because his mother was there; he brought Gordon Moore back from the east, who was eager to return to the San Mateo county area, where he grew up. They turned the Bay Area into the center of the semiconductor industry, which subsequently became the center of telecommunication, software, and the consumer internet. It’s not really clear how and why these clusters develop, and why they can endure for a long time.

The other apparent fact in these three books is how much government, and especially its demand for war, drove technological growth. It’s obvious in the case of Vannevar Bush, who helped to develop the radar and the atomic bomb while he administered the scientific research apparatus during the war. It’s also obvious in the case of interchangeability, which was driven by the Ordnance Department’s goal to produce weapons quickly and cheaply. And it’s also important in the history of semiconductors, to a degree that surprised me. Shockley, Texas Instruments, and Fairchild were set up explicitly with the idea of capturing the lucrative contracts of the US Air Force. The firms were all involved with weaponry, of the mass destruction kind: Bell Labs helped to transistorize the nuclear-armed Nike Missiles; Fairchild supplied the B-70 Valkyrie bomber and the Minuteman II ICBM. The Pentagon funded nearly all early semiconductor research, and played a big role in the industry by being a price-indiscriminate buyer. Arnold Thackray writes that a quarter of Intel’s transistors went to military uses by as late as 1972. A discussion of ethics in tech 40 years ago, which didn’t publicly happen in a big way, would have had higher stakes.

***

Personal matters for last. 

The major event of my life this year was to move from Hong Kong to Beijing. Beijing has few redeeming qualities as a city—mostly unwalkable, unpleasant weather, generally maddening—but it’s a fascinating place to be. There are a few places that feel like the center of the world when you’re there, and Beijing is one of them. (I offer San Francisco, Tokyo, and DC as other candidates.) I like a remark from a friend: Beijing is a city that emanates a sense of sinister power, in a way that Mumbai and Naples also do. They’re each places that have had foreign rule over significant periods, filled with intimidating buildings that have entryways that convey mystery. It’s worth keeping in mind that the city has been sustained through sheer political will; which other major cities can be so far away from a significant river or body of water? Beijing was founded to be the point that connects the horse lands of the north with the rice lands of the south. Although muskets made horses obsolete, Beijing has clung on to be the capital mostly continuously for 800 years.

There are not many cities that are more interesting to live in. Beijing isn’t attracting people who want a pleasant life. There are many easier places in Asia for that: Hong Kong is a tropical island, Singapore basically the same, Taipei is wonderfully livable, and Tokyo is Tokyo. Beijing is the magnet for many of the smartest people in China, and then for many interesting people in the world. The conversations one has in San Francisco and New York now feel so limited, to no more than a dozen topics that people turn over and over again. I wish that more young people would spend some time living abroad. Beijing is the center of so many important stories, but moving to any city in Asia will be terribly interesting: the food is revelatory, one can live well, and it’s easy to get around to explore the world’s most dynamic region. One can after all always return to San Francisco or New York, after acquiring a much richer set of experiences than one’s peers.

Here’s an example of the type of interesting story I mean. I wrote last year that I could identify precisely a single example of a successful Chinese export of a cultural product: Liu’s Three-Body trilogy. This year I can add one more: TikTok. Both are great things. But in my view, it’s a stunning disappointment that China has failed to create more products that excite the rest of the world over the last decade, in the course of doubling its per capita GDP. Will the next decade be different, such that we see a burst of globally-exciting cultural creations? That question can best be answered from Beijing.

Friends tend to ask if the air in Beijing is bad. Certainly it can be, and my health was slightly wobbly this year, but I’m not sure if it’s the air or the fact that I tripled my amount of travel. I averaged two weeks on the road every month in 2019, mostly around Asia, California, and New York; the longest stretch was a continuous seven weeks away. I’m glad to know Taipei and Tokyo much better this year. And I loved each of the new cities I visited: Mumbai & Chennai—which made up my first trip to India—and Seoul. And I was pleased to have been in LA for a stretch, which is the first time I’ve properly seen the city. I’m now a partisan for Tinseltown: Isn’t LA superior in every way to SF? How sad that the semiconductor industry was centered in northern instead of southern California, as was nearly the case given the presence of the Air Force there as well as the electronics companies based in Fullerton in the ‘50s. Tech would be less made fun of if it were more integrated with LA.

Frequent travel is exhausting, but there’s almost no better way to learn how to be highly efficient. My total work output was higher this year in spite of much more time on the road. One has to learn to be effective at every step: preparing for trips, sustaining energy during the trip, and delivering output afterwards. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down. It’s great when it works out, I feel that I’m reaching close to my personal production possibilities frontier. 

The best place to start for anyone interested in my work this year is the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast I recorded with Joe in June. I was very happy this year to become a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion. I wrote only two pieces there in 2019, but I’m hopeful to do more next year, and here’s my author page if you’d like to follow along. I was also pleased to be invited by the Asia Society to give two talks. The first was at Stanford University in January, where I presented on semiconductors and China’s technology development. The second was an event co-hosted with the Financial Times at UC Berkeley, where I spoke on a panel on technology decoupling. Both recordings are on Youtube, and if scheduling works out I expect to do a bit more public speaking next year.

I liked this series of movie posters designed by Huang Hai; this one is of Spirited Away, my other favorites are of Ash is Purest White.

This year I came across three essays that show deep respect for the metaphysical lives of animals. They are good examples of what the best in humanities could be. And they exemplify the type of whimsical, passionate projects that I wish more of us would create.

In Castoria, by Justin E.H. Smith, is a meditation on the historical idea of the beaver. It’s the article I enjoyed the most this year. Among the issues it resolves: beavers and castration; their frightening power to fell whole trees; their portrayal as the most industrious of all animals.

Do elephants have souls?, by Caitrin Keiper, is the closest we’ll get to seeing the world from an elephantine perspective. The best is the section called “Elephantasies,” which ponders whether the big beast is capable of metaphysics. I wonder about the sort of novels we should hope that elephants can write.

Consider the whimsical animal series, by Katherine Rundell, an expanding set of profiles of delightful animals, like the wombat, the narwhal, the lemur. My favorites are the profiles of the swift and the golden mole, a poor blind creature distantly related to the elephant, whose fur gently glows. “So they burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly shining.”

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2018 letter

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2017)

I want to kick off this post by making a point about Moore’s Law. That’s the observation, which later turned into a prediction, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months.

Moore’s Law is not some natural law built into the fabric of the universe, designed to self-execute without a bit of engineering effort. Instead, it’s a massive industrial undertaking to push forward this technological frontier. It follows that we have agency on how quickly we can maintain the pace of technology improvements. The semiconductor industry set a benchmark for improvement early on, one that seems kind of arbitrary today, and made a collective effort to execute against it. Semiconductor companies—the leaders of which are TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—adopted Moore’s Law as an industry goal. The rate of progress seems to have gotten slower and more expensive, but it’s remarkable that Moore’s Law has held up for decades.

Now I wonder to what extent we can replicate exponential progress by doing some branding. Moore’s Law turned from a neat backwards-looking observation into an obligation for the entire chips industry to keep improving. One description that I like of it is that it’s a “clock that has become a chaotic attractor for innovation.” I don’t think there are many other technologies in which exponential growth in performance over decades is possible. But maybe there’s a handful more that are, and they await a nice label that will concentrate minds, mobilize capital, and attract talent to keep improving. Coming up with that label might be a kind of low-hanging fruit that would encourage greater growth.

I’d like this exponential progress to come to other fields, especially industrial technologies. Semiconductors are upstream of all electronics, which is a sector that has been vibrantly innovative over the last few decades. If we had exponential progress in a few more upstream technologies, we may be able to enjoy faster innovation in fields beyond computers, software, and the internet. Silicon Valley is rightly celebrated as a driver of innovation and wealth creation. But I’m not sure to what extent that Silicon Valley companies have yet promoted dynamism in the broader non-tech world. Companies there are very good at building software on top of and abstracted from the physical world. The tech companies we hear most often about tend to be capital-light, beautifully-scalable businesses that earn the most handsome returns for investors.

We’re excited about companies like Airbnb and Uber, which match consumers with underutilized assets. Better matching of supply and demand is valuable, but I’m looking for something more ambitious. Focusing on industrial technologies is more like taking a firm hold of the supply curve and pulling it downwards; that process can unconstrain the growth of many downstream companies. For example, energy is upstream of everything in the economy; think about how much more room AI would have to play with if energy costs were measured in cents rather than dollars. Smartphone components today would have been military-grade technology just two decades ago. Their costs have been brought down in some cases by the hundredfold, and are cheap enough to create whole new categories of products, like the consumer drone and virtual reality headsets.

Instead of being enamored with downstream, consumer-facing internet companies, I wish more people could be excited about upstream, industrial technology companies. It’s easy to love smartphones, the internet, and all the apps we use without thinking about how semiconductor improvements have made a lot of these things possible. Furthermore, I wish that more of these industrial components can improve at the pace of Moore’s Law. We haven’t had quite as much progress in energy, space, chemicals, and medicine that we were expecting decades ago.

To some extent, Moore’s Law is an irrational commitment by the chips industry. It’s expressly driven by an engineering benchmark, i.e. to keep doubling transistor density, which is not necessarily a market- or customer-driven demand. This is a triumph of scientists and engineers over financial types, who would question why an abstract scientific challenge should be invoked for capital allocation decisions. In my view, this sort of irrationality is not a bad thing. In many cases, we should invest more in upstream technologies, even if we have no idea what sort of downstream uses they may enable. I don’t think it would be terrible if many industries developed a maniacal commitment to lowering input costs or broadening the capabilities of these inputs.

***

This year, my tastes in music veered towards the more adventurous. That means I made a conscious decision to dwell less on Beethoven and Wagner. I attended three performances worth noting: the Vienna Philharmonic playing Wagner in Tokyo; the Berlin Philharmonic playing Mozart in Berlin; and the Deutsche Oper staging Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District. The first two were nice examples of technical perfection, I enjoyed the third one the best.

Shostakovich may have had too much fun for his own good when he composed Lady Macbeth. It’s no wonder that Stalin is rumored to have personally penned an editorial in Pravda to denounce the work. The best parts of the opera come from the juxtaposition of beautiful musical passages with wildly inappropriate desires acted out on stage. For example, when a kulak decides that he will at last make a move on his daughter-in-law, forcing down the bedroom door if necessary, the music erupts into a gorgeous Viennese waltz. Shostakovich is not the only composer to play these kinds of games. The music of Strauss is most fine when the action on stage becomes most dreadful; sweet and triumphant tones ring out from the orchestra as Salomé fondles the head of John the Baptist, which she had just ordered to be separated from the rest of his body.

Let’s stay a bit longer on music. When I read Tyler’s interview of Elisa New this year, it struck me that many of her suggestions of how to get started on poetry apply just as well as how to get started on opera. The general plan should not be to absorb a whole work sequentially and all at once. (That is, don’t put on Parsifal or Don Carlo, plan to sit still for six hours, and expect to get something out of it.) Instead, the plan should be to look for small moments as entry points, which one can use as beachheads to expand towards the rest of the work.

While most parts of every opera are boring, some parts are the peaks of composed music. Nobody, I submit, can sit in rapture for the entirety of every performance. Instead, I believe that we’re all seeking a few morsels from any particular work. For many moments, you can’t actually hear anything the first few times. I mean that literally, in the sense that even the most beautiful bits will not necessarily register cognitively until a dozen times of repeated listening, often with more than one conductor.

I’ll suggest a few heuristics when it comes to finding morsels in Mozart and Verdi, two of my favorites. First, the endings of acts tend to burst with drama, in which large parts of the cast gather around to issue a gigantic statement of terror or grief; Verdi especially means for these scenes to arouse. Second, look for scenes with multiple voices, like duets, trios, and quartets—to me, these represent the musical peaks. (Rarely am I very moved by solos or the entire chorus.) I found the quartets in Don Giovanni and Rigoletto to be compelling beyond belief, and they were responsible for drawing me into the rest of Mozart and Verdi.

It’s sort of surprising that Verdi works as well as he does. I think it was Alex Ross who suggested that it’s hard to make sense of Verdi from the page: the orchestral accompaniment looks crude, offering usually unimaginative beats. Verdi’s best moments feature a mix of voices that drive the momentum, with urgency that’s hard to pick up from the sheet. I consider the best parts of Verdi to be the ruminative sections, like the quartets in Don Carlo and Rigoletto, in which each person is making a private confession of grief or joy, where none can enjoy the consistent support of the orchestra. Or the concluding duet of Aida, in which the tenor and soprano come to terms that death is the condition for politically-forbidden love, their voices rising and falling on top of shimmering strings. If the ruminative parts of Verdi don’t grab you, look for the fast-paced parts that feature tight rhythms: Il Trovatore offers many such points of ignition. Muti is certainly my favorite Verdi conductor.

Whereas the best of Verdi are the ruminative parts, the best of Mozart are in the flourishes, in which strings propel the action. Instead of dwelling on something marvelously beautiful, as Strauss would, Mozart wraps things up so that he can get on to unfurling the next perfect moment. He’s not like Beethoven, who is sober by default; nor like Verdi, who draws out sad moments with special weight; nor like Wagner, entirely without frivolity, who brings listeners into trancelike states of wonder.

I spent a lot of time this year listening to the Da Ponte operas. Many conductors have recorded these works, I like Currentzis and Gardiner the best. I know that we’re all supposed to prefer Don Giovanni to Figaro and Cosi, but I want to present a dissenting view. I feel that Mozart has a tendency to be ironic and cheerful. It’s harder to pull that off with Don Giovanni, which starts out being objectionable, then turns moralistic, and ends on a sappy note. Figaro and Cosi are less serious and more dialectical. Everyone has a chance to be deceitful and villainous, there is no single person who is the obvious rake. The tender moments of Figaro and Cosi feel more real, and they feature a better use of irony. My favorite morsels from these works include the false wooing of Fiordiligi by Ferrando, the false acceptance of wooing by Susanna from Count Almaviva, and the way-too-real wooing of Donna Elvira by Don Giovanni.

Here is Tyler on Mozart and his advice on how to get into opera. If you should enjoy Lady Macbeth, perhaps you’d also be interested in Jenufa by Janacek, Salomé by Strauss, and Lulu by Berg.

***

I’m spending most of my time studying Chinese industrial policy and the country’s technology upgrading process. This was a busy year for work given the escalating trade war. I wrote reports on topics that included the long-term outlook of China’s semiconductor development (and how export controls can derail that progress); how China’s internet and smartphone companies are going abroad, mostly to developing countries; how multinationals are adjusting their supply chains given tariffs; a general evaluation of the prospects of success of 2025; and other stuff.

Fragments of that work exist in public. If you’re curious, you can listen to a podcast I recorded for Bloomberg’s Odd Lots, with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway. I did some live TV with Bloomberg as well, and I’ll link to that segment when it becomes available. There are also bits of my commentary in news stories. For example, I talked about China’s chip capabilities with the FT, electric vehicles with the WSJ, 2025 with the NYT, and data centers in Guizhou with the Economist.

Last year, I visited many cities of the Sinosphere. This year, aside from some time in Tokyo and Berlin, most of travel was in China itself. I’m glad to have visited eight of the country’s ten richest cities, for work or pleasure. (The two I missed were Tianjin and Suzhou.) The least interesting city of them all is Wuhan, which seems to have nothing other than industry, and no food worth remarking upon. I had the most fun in Hangzhou and Chongqing. They’re a nice study in contrasts, and I recommend visiting them as a pair.

Start the trip in Chongqing, a chaotic city in a bizarre geographic setting, with tall buildings growing out of gorges and hills. I find the dusk and night scenes there to be more dramatic than even Hong Kong’s. No wonder the gallery of cyberpunk transformations of Chongqing seems so fitting. Then head to Hangzhou, which I consider the most pleasant large city in China; when I gazed at its lake and surrounding hills of tea plantations, I thought it could plausibly resemble parts of Ontario or upstate New York. Walking around, one can tell that Hangzhou anchored the richest region of China for 1,000 years, why the poets dwelled there to find inspiration, and why the emperors liked to visit. The spicy food of Chongqing is indeed what it’s cracked up to be; and the food in Hangzhou is so fine that I feel that Jiangnan cuisine might be the most wonderful cuisine of them all.

***

Enough highlights; let’s get on to self-criticism.

I regret that I wrote only three pieces on this site in 2018. It’s half the number of the previous year. Ultimately I’m not so bothered however, that writing personal essays took a concession to quite a lot of work, travel, and reading. Furthermore I’m quite pleased with how my two non-review pieces turned out. Imperial History and Classical Aesthetics was an effort to capture some of the flavors of Chinese cultural sensibilities, and I’m modestly satisfied with the result. How Technology Grows is an elaboration of my thoughts on definite optimism: that we should reach for economic growth and pay more attention to the industrial world. Come to think of it, that’s a rather nice thesis statement for my site. The essay also makes the point that knowledge ought to be considered a living product, which needs to be practiced for it to be even sustained at its current level.

Certainly next year I’ll try to write more, but again I won’t be much bothered if writing here takes a backseat to other stuff. This is after all only an effort that’s meant to be for fun. Much more of my quick-take output has moved to emails and group texts, with some of it spilling over to Twitter.

I’m more aggrieved by my lack of movie and television consumption in 2018. This year I watched only a handful of movies, I think fewer than a half-dozen, and no TV. I’ll repeat what I said from last year: “I regret to have ignored TV as a creative stimulus this year, and concede that my imaginative capacity has possibly suffered as a result.” Of the few movies that I watched, three made an impression.

Ash is Purest White, Jia Zhangke. It’s a gangster movie for the first hour that turns into a Jia movie in the second, starring as usual Zhao Tao. The trailer is great. One kind of knows now what one is getting into with Jia: he will offer poignant scenes, sometimes dropping in the baffling or surreal, and adding a touch of the supernatural. Jia prefers understatement, but the prospect of violence hovers more closely in sight in this more than his other movies.

There are many references to his previous works. Zhao Tao travels through the Three Gorges as she did previously in Still Life. I love that you can find random snatches of Village People in Jia’s movies; he must appreciate their terrible catchiness. Jia used mobile phones to marvelous effect in The World, and the evolution of their use features prominently in Ash is Purest White.

2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick. I saw this movie on TV maybe a decade ago and didn’t think much of it. This time I saw it in 70mm with a full sound system at the Alamos Drafthouse and found the experience stunning. (I’m thankful to Eugene Wei for taking me to the showing; one of my goals in life is to follow Eugene to at least one movie a year.) I thought that the depictions of space travel and orbiting structures were really marvelous. Afterwards I was astonished to discover that the movie was released in 1968, i.e. a full year before we were sure that we could put a man on the moon. Wasn’t it remarkable that Kubrick and the rest of Hollywood had such confidence that space travel could be easy, and a bit disappointing that we’re not going to space in the same way, 17 years after his expected timeline?

Here’s another thought about the movie’s circumstances. I had just finished the fourth volume of Caro’s biography of LBJ before I watched the movie. Towards the end, Caro discusses Johnson’s Great Society initiative to alleviate widespread poverty in the US. It’s all the remarkable then that the US government prioritized going to space—at the peak committing a mid-single-digits share of the federal budget to NASA—before trying to reduce poverty at home. The government made a political decision that technology should come before poverty relief. Regardless of whether one thinks whether that was the right tradeoff then, it’s quite a bit more difficult to imagine that the US government could commit so much to a scientific endeavor today.

After the movie, I re-read Kennedy’s moon speech. Isn’t it a wonderful example of definite optimism? “If I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall… made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun… and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.”

The US did all this, and did it right, and did it before the decade was out.

Since I bring up Kennedy, it’s also fair to bring up the definite optimism of Khrushchev. Whereas Kennedy directed his gaze towards celestial bodies, Khrushchev—who supervised the construction of subway lines in Moscow—concerned himself with matters closer to the earth. I’ve discovered a speech the general secretary gave to the National Conference of Builders, Architects, and Workers in 1954. It was an impassioned argument on the virtues of construction in concrete, lasting the better part of two hours. Has any other modern head of state been so full of whimsy as Khrushchev, and could make such a well-informed case for a building material?

Concrete construction prompted a building boom of squat, low-cost apartment buildings that earned the affectionate name of Khrushchyovka. (No wonder the USSR urbanized so quickly.) Khrushchev listened to his scientific and engineering advisors, gained personal conviction of the superiority of concrete, and took it upon himself to sell the idea to the public, which he did with enthusiasm. Shouldn’t this trait, possessed by both Kennedy and Khrushchev, be one of the top qualities we ought to seek in our politicians today?

The Story of Qiu Ju, an early Zhang Yimou movie, maybe the better translation is Qiu Ju Goes to Court or Qiu Ju Pursues Litigation. It’s charming from beginning to end, with many occasions for whimsy. Some of the street scenes were filmed live with a hidden camera. So many shots of ordinary life in a mid-sized Chinese city in the ‘90s would make the movie worth watching alone.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

My fiction reading this year revolved around Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s the chronicle of the fortunes of a noble family during peak-Qing, which enjoyed prosperity until it fell into imperial disfavor, after which it suffered waves of calamity. The Dream is our Proust. I mean that the plot is mostly beside the point: one needs not ever care about our protagonist, who is an absurd boy. Instead, it is about drinking in the scenes of everyday life that make the novel so worthwhile.

The novel features many details. These include intricacies of food, textiles, and trinkets, along with how they’re used in family and imperial rites. How the noble Jia family, which managed to produce an imperial concubine, has to pay attention to the changing political currents at court. How the family has to manage an enormous staff of servants, who are able to assert their independence by generating an endless stream of gossip. How the women, both noble and common, could spend all day weaving. (While I was reading the books, I was pleased to come across Melanie Xue’s research, which brought up the fact that regions with more pre-modern cotton-textile production were more likely to view women to be just as competent as men.) I thought that the second half of the dream was most interesting. The family is no longer prosperous and has to suffer unrelenting woe. The characters then stop being such models of piety and literary virtuosity, instead descending into deception, pride, and superstition. It’s a wonderfully Chinese novel.

The Dream has one important difference with Proust worth highlighting: Cao uses his considerable powers to paint vivid female leads, while his men tend to be boring and stupid. (Our protagonist literally turns into an imbecile in the final quarter of our dream.) It’s much the opposite with Proust, whose female characters are mostly flat.

To my surprise, my nonfiction reading revolved around three political biographies this year. They are Deng Xiaoping (by Vogel), Park Chung Hee (by Kim and Vogel), and Lyndon B. Johnson (Caro, specifically Volume 4: The Passage of Power). I found the books about Deng and Park to be useful, and the book about Johnson to be most enjoyable. At last I can appreciate why my friend Kevin Kwok is prosecuting such a spirited campaign to compel everyone he knows to read the Caro books. I don’t care much about LBJ himself, instead I was absorbed by the storytelling. The usual exhaustion of following small details never overwhelmed me, because Caro is so earnest about their importance.

It’s easy to recommend these books. But you’ve likely already heard of them, and I don’t see my role here to be telling people to read what many other people are already recommending. Instead I feel that I can play a more useful role by pointing towards more obscure works. Of this genre I wish to cast a spotlight on three.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, by René Girard. This short book is the best case I’ve read for Christianity. Most faiths (and pagan myths) take the side of the crowd when they strike down their victims, who are denounced to be the cause of general misfortune and woe. The Bible takes the side of victims. It offers one example after another to show how crowds can be whipped up to persecute the innocent. I thought that nearly every page of this book offered insight, all the way through the end where Girard evaluates Nietzsche.

I consider the Cultural Revolution to be the greatest possible Girardian nightmare, and I wish that many more Chinese would study the work of Girard. More people should get to know the virtues of Girardian renunciation and forbearance. I’d even go as far to suggest that encouraging the appreciation of Girard in China could be one of the highest-leverage acts that we can do for humanity, and I’m personally willing to put in some effort to encourage more people to study his work.

Exact Thinking in Demented Times, by Karl Sigmund, can one imagine a more delightful title? A professor of mathematics has written this intellectual biography of the Vienna Circle, a group of logicians, mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who worked in Austria over the ‘20s and ‘30s. Readers will recognize the names of members of this circle and those who dropped in on them: Gödel, Carnap, Popper, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Mach, and more. The Vienna Circle held monthly discussions to clarify questions in language, logic, and mathematics. Its members produced insights that fundamentally advanced progress in physics and computing.

The group probed ever more abstract questions while the real world fell apart around them. They wanted to debate logic, but increasingly unnerving events of the world had a tendency to intervene—the German annexation of Austria was not even the most severe disruption that the group had to face. This society of logicians and mathematicians was shockingly susceptible to murder and intrigue. Ludwig Boltzmann died by his own hand, after declaring that too many smart people become obsessed with sterile pseudo-problems. (Perhaps we’re not much closer to eradicating this epidemic today.) Kurt Gödel descended into paranoia, eventually starving himself to death after he emigrated to the US. Moritz Schlick, chief organizer of the Vienna Circle, was murdered by a deranged student, who got off easy after the press mostly took the killer’s side.

I liked this bit about Hans Hahn, the mathematician: “His talks and papers were of supreme clarity. To deliver his daily lectures, which he always prepared with meticulous care, he had developed a peculiar technique and carried it to its limits. His favorite student Karl Menger wrote: ‘He proceeded by taking almost imperceptible steps, following the principle that a mathematical proof consists in tautological transformations; yet at the end of each lecture, he left the audience dazzled by the sheer number of ideas he managed to cover.’”

The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, by Timothy Brook. How quickly could a Ming emperor’s couriers reach the distant outposts of the empire? How did the merely wealthy try to match the fashions of the actually noble elite, and how did the elite stay a step ahead? How did local cadres attempt to govern in an age of growing commercial sophistication? How did the empire deal with massive weather disruptions through the Little Ice Age? Why did the spread of the printing press cause a century of sectarian warfare in Europe, but barely a political ripple for the Ming?

Brook offers answers to these questions and many others. It’s valuable to read about the development of the crafts and commercial culture on its own terms; Brook makes it easy by being a wonderful stylist. My favorite parts were about how foreigners and imperial subjects were able to travel throughout the empire, on a well-functioning logistics network. This book and the Dream offer reminders of the importance of the material world. We take tools and trinkets for granted, but these books remind us how difficult it was to produce anything at all, much less move it at any distance.

I should also mention that I loved Disturbing the Universe, the memoirs of Freeman Dyson. He is someone we can say has been living a full life. Outside of books, I loved this article by Doug Irwin on the semiconductor trade war that the US launched against Japan in the ‘80s. It’s a fascinating history of technology and political economy. It features a diverse cast that includes the USTR, Japanese trade negotiators, the PC industry, and other fun characters. Semiconductors are kind of a successful application of US industrial policy.

***

My life this year was not totally bereft of television entertainment. The most novel thing I watched this year was the UFC fight between McGregor and Nurmagomedov. I found it a deep experience, and I thank my friend Dave Petersen for putting it on TV and insisting that I watch it with him.

At first I found the show too gruesome to endure. There were many moments where I could hardly believe what I was seeing, like when one grown man had another pinned to the floor, landing punches on his opponent’s face, while the victim’s own blood was dripping on him from his aggressor’s mouth. But the more I watched, the more I was engrossed. Not so much by the fight, but by everything around the fight.

When I saw the Berlin Philharmonic this year, I thought about the complex system required to produce music of this quality. The few dozen musicians on stage are extraordinarily talented. They’re so good because the world, and especially Germany, has developed a superb pipeline of talent to staff this orchestra and others. The program was Schoenberg and Mozart, and I thought about how long it took to develop such a deep repertory of pieces that would include these two composers. I can also bring up the technologies required for the orchestra. The Berlin audience was sophisticated, and that takes time to develop too. That is a wonderful system that has gotten a lot of things right.

I had the same type of thought watching UFC as I did when I listened to the Berlin Philharmonic. UFC is an amazing spectacle, and so many things had to be developed before something of that quality could be produced. Think of Vegas, first of all, a remote city in the desert that has managed to attract people, not just for this fight, but year-round for entertainment. Second, consider all the accouterments around the fight: the seamless transitions; the interludes from Joe Rogan and Bruce Buffer, who are both talented announcers; the special effects of lighting, fog, and music, all of which combine to marvelous effect. Third, think about what it takes to market this type of event. And finally the fighters themselves, who know what they have to do to provide a good show.

It was then I felt that I grasped how outstanding the US is at producing entertainment. This is a valuable cultural competence. I don’t think there are any other countries that can develop an audience and put on so many types of high-quality shows.

***

I failed this year when it comes to the most important type of learning activity that I do: playing enough sessions of Avalon, my favorite board game. Kevin suggests that he’d like to promote Avalon to become the golf of tech. I want that as well, so I’ll take this chance to evangelize the game.

Avalon is made up of typically seven players: three are evil—and they know who each other are—and four are good, and they generally don’t know who anyone else is. The goal for the good people is to discover the identities of the evil people; the goal for the evil people is to insinuate themselves as good people. Everyone takes turns proposing different configurations of people to make up a team. We’ll find out if the proposed team includes any evil people, discuss the results, and engage in a total of five rounds of play.

Gameplay is simple, the dynamics are not. There are several remarkable things about Avalon. First, it’s a game that gets more interesting by playing with the same group. Usually board games stop being fun once everyone has mastered the mechanics; that’s not the case for Avalon, because the rules are few, and the game is fundamentally about trying to understand other people. I play with different groups in a few cities, and perceive a distinct hierarchy of competence. At the bottom of the hierarchy are tech people in San Francisco: they tend to misread probabilities, stick with their early impressions of people without updating their views given new information, and are worse at moving fluidly between good and evil roles. The mostly-finance crowd I play with in New York are better on every front, probably because there’s a greater role for scheming when one works at a big bank.

The very best Avalon players are mainland Chinese, who astonish me again and again with their brilliance. I’ve come to believe that merely thinking in Mandarin makes one a better Avalon player.

I’ve appreciated an analogy a friend offered about Avalon. He compares playing the game to getting into the mindset of the Enigma codebreakers (as depicted in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.) The Allies may have broken the codes of the Axis, but generals and admirals shouldn’t act on every piece of intelligence. Instead, they have to engage in parallel construction based on public data to maintain the enemy’s faith in his communications system. So the Allies might send surveillance planes to where the enemy is known to be, make sure that the enemy sees these planes, and engage in combat only afterwards. One is always asking: how deeply to press the information advantage, and is it possible to generate alternative explanations for success?

Avalon rewards people for being both social and deductive. Unlike Werewolf, it’s not a purely social game, in which unfounded accusations are all that anyone has to go on; nor chess, a game with perfect information. Avalon is more like poker, in which a player has to persuade with both logic and lies.

(I loved this gallery of different celestial bodies produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Visions of the Future, with a hat tip to @natfriedman. This picture of Europa makes me recall a line in my previous post: “Why have we not made it a priority to look for extraterrestrial life that might exist on our planetary doorstep, within our very own solar system? I’m volunteering right now to go on the mission that explores these oceans (of the moons of Jupiter). If I must crowdfund my way up there, I’ll offer to write the next Moby-Dick, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, depending of course on the nature and economic value of the monsters that dwell in those depths.”)

***

I have several questions.

When I cast my eye around the industrial world, I see many consolidated industries. We went from having around 20 DRAM memory chip makers in 1995 to 11 in 2008, and just 3 players today. Wide-body aircraft is a well-known duopoly made up of Boeing and Airbus. For many segments of semiconductors, there’s a single overwhelmingly dominant company or a few holders of critical IP. This list can go on. So why does so much of the popular antitrust discussion in the US focus on internet companies, which I would say for the most part are providing nearly free products to consumers? I’m not saying that the internet companies should be free from regulatory scrutiny, nor that industrial technology companies are totally free from competition. But as a first cut, I think that there are worthier tech targets for competition regulators than the internet giants.

Any sufficiently-capitalized firm is able to buy leading tools from the market to make advanced technology products. But industrial technology companies are concentrated in only a handful of rich countries. In a more extreme case, PCs and software is accessible to most people in the world, but nearly all large internet companies are based in either the US or China. Isn’t that a good case that agglomeration effects and process knowledge are important for building large companies? And should some other hard-to-measure factor be thrown into that consideration?

Michael Pettis is an optimist on Chinese contemporary culture: “the culture that is emerging out of young, urban China is vibrant, exciting, chaotic, and perhaps among the most interesting in the world.” That’s not all: “there is a positive side to this dizzying social transformation, namely the explosion of new culture emanating from China—not just on the music scene but also in literature (especially science fiction), painting and comic-book art, along with fashion and other aspects of youth culture… young Chinese artists are negotiating their complicated and confusing world with a cultural elan whose exuberance probably will be remembered and admired for hundreds of years.” Liu’s Three Body Problem has been a nice export success, but I struggle to name many other examples of Chinese cultural products being noticed abroad. Will we see an acceleration of Chinese cultural products becoming globally popular, or will most of them be confined to being displayed in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu?

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How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)

I consider Definite Optimism as Human Capital to be my most creative piece. Unfortunately, it’s oblique and meandering. So I thought to write a followup to lay out its premises more directly and to offer a restatement of its ideas.

The goal of both pieces is to broaden the terms in which we discuss “technology.” Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.

I submit that we have two big biases when we talk about technology. First, we think about it too much in terms of tools and recipes, when really we should think about it more in terms of process knowledge and technical experience. Second, most of us focus too much on the digital world and not enough on the industrial world. Our obsession with the digital world has pushed our expectation of the technological future in the direction of cyberpunk dystopia; I hope instead that we can look forward to a joyful vision of the technological future, driven by advances in industry.

Process knowledge is represented by an experienced workforce. I’ve been studying the semiconductor industry, and that has helped to clarify my thoughts on technological innovation more broadly. It’s easy to identify all three forms of technology in the production of semiconductors: tools, instructions, and process knowledge. The three firms most responsible for executing Moore’s Law—TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—make use of each. All three companies invest north of $10 billion a year to push forward that technological frontier.

The tools and IP held by these firms are easy to observe. I think that the process knowledge they possess is even more important. The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise; in the case of semiconductors, that includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This kind of knowledge is won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess.

I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.

The accumulated process knowledge plus capital allows the semiconductor companies to continue to produce ever-more sophisticated chips. The doubling of transistor density every 24 months wouldn’t be possible if these firms didn’t already possess deep pools of process knowledge. It’s not just about the tools, which any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy; or the blueprints, which are hard to follow without experience of what went into codifying them. The US has many decades of experience in designing and fabricating semiconductors, and it has developed the talent ecosystem that succeeds in pushing Moore’s Law forward. This cluster of talent allows the US to maintain its lead on a critically-important technology.

The US industrial base has been in decline. But sustained innovation in semiconductors is an exception in US manufacturing. The country used to nurture vibrant communities of engineering practice (a term I like from Brad DeLong), which is another way to talk about the accumulated process knowledge in many segments of industry. But not all communities of engineering practice have been in good shape.

The real output of the US manufacturing sector is at a lower level than before the 2008 recession; that means that there has not been real growth in US manufacturing for an entire decade. (In fact, this measure may be too rosy—the ITIF has put forward an argument that manufacturing output measures are skewed by excessive quality adjustments in computer speeds. Take away computers, which fewer and fewer people are buying these days, and US real output in manufacturing would be meaningfully lower.) Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at nearly 20 million workers; it fell to 17 million in 2000, 14 million in 2008, and stands at 12 million today. The US population has grown by 40% since 1979, while the number of manufacturing workers has nearly halved.

When firms and factories go away, the accumulated process knowledge disappears too. Industrial experience, scaling expertise, and all the things that come with learning-by-doing would decay. I visited Germany earlier this year to talk to people in industry. One point Germans kept bringing up was that the US has de-industrialized itself and scattered its production networks. While Germany responded to globalization by moving up the value chain, the US manufacturing base mostly responded by abandoning production.

Brad Setser has shown that the US stands out amongst rich countries for its low level of manufactured goods exports. Call me simple-minded, but I believe that the world’s most developed country ought to be responsible for exporting goods around the world. Instead, the US runs both a trade deficit and a current account deficit. The US trade deficit is high not only because it imports a lot of goods; it’s high also because it doesn’t export very much. In order for other countries to import more from the US, first it should have better goods to sell.

Knowledge should circulate throughout the supply chain, flowing both up and down the stack. Successful industries tend to cluster into tight-knit production networks. The easiest way to appreciate the marvel of clusters is to look at Silicon Valley, where capital, academia, a large pool of eager labor, and companies both large and small sit next to each other. To any of us who have spent some time in Silicon Valley, it’s obvious that this concentration of economic linkages is part of the magic that makes the system work.

There are many other examples of industrial clusters. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry was founded and is still centered around a small industrial park south of Taipei. Silicon Valley is so-named because it was the center of semiconductor production (and it has enough toxic Superfund sites nearby to prove that heritage). It’s not just chips: autos, electronics, biotech, aviation, and machine parts all tend to be geographically clustered.

Proximity makes it easier to generate process knowledge. But what happens when we tear apart these production networks by separating design and manufacturing? Sometimes it’s no big deal, sometimes it works out great. But I believe that in most cases, dislocation makes it more difficult to maintain process knowledge.

Both the design process and production process generate useful information, and dislocation makes it difficult for that information to circulate. I think we tend to discount how much knowledge we can gain in the course of production, as well as how it should feed back into the design process. Maybe it’s easier to appreciate that with an example from computing. Arjun Narayan tells me that good software design requires a deep understanding of chips, and vice versa. The best developers are those who understand how processes interact both up and down the stack.

What happens when we stop the flow of knowledge up the stack? I think that the weakness of the US industrial robotics sector is instructive. The US has little position in making high-end precision manufacturing equipment. When it comes to factory automation systems, machine tools, robot arms, and other types of production machinery, the most advanced suppliers are in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. I think the reason that the US has little position can be tied directly to the departure of firms from so many segments of manufacturing. How do engineers work on the design of automation systems if they don’t have exposure to industrial processes?

A quote from the article: “A report to President Barack Obama on advanced manufacturing, prepared by his council of science advisers in 2012, concluded that the ‘hard truth’ was that the U.S. lagged other rich nations on manufacturing innovation.”

I don’t see enough Americans being troubled by the idea that America isn’t making advanced industrial robots. It might be fine to think that robots will be doing all the manufacturing work in the future; but someone has to build these robots, and own the IP of advanced robotmaking, and for the most part, that someone is not the US. It can’t be an accident that the countries with the healthiest communities of engineering practice are also in the lead in designing tools for the sector. They’re able to embed knowledge into new tools, because they continue to generate process knowledge.

Let’s try to preserve process knowledge. The decline of industrial work makes it harder to accumulate process knowledge. If a state has lost most of its jobs for electrical engineers, civil engineers, or nuclear engineers, then fewer young people will enter into these fields. Technological development slows down, and it turns into a self-reinforcing cycle of decline. I think we should try to hold on to process knowledge.

Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine is an extraordinary example in that genre. Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down the shrine and build it anew. The wooden shrine has been rebuilt again and again for 1,200 years. Locals want to make sure that they don’t ever forget the production knowledge that goes into constructing the shrine. There’s a very clear sense that the older generation wants to teach the building techniques to the younger generation: “I will leave these duties to you next time.”

Regularly tearing down and rebuilding a wooden temple might not sound like a great use of time. But I’m not sure if local priorities are entirely screwed up here. These people understand that it’s too difficult to write down every instruction necessary for building even a single wooden structure; imagine how much more difficult it is to create instructions for a machinery part, or a chip. Every so often we discover ancient tools of which we have no idea how to use. These shrine caretakers have decided that preservation of production knowledge is important, and I find that admirable.

Building a vast industrial base and practicing learning-by-doing used to be the American way. Brad DeLong again: “When the technologies of the second industrial revolution arrived, the United States with its cotton and wide market, and its rich natural resources, and its communities of engineering excellence, was able to leap ahead—and in fact greatly surpass Britain in manufacturing productivity pretty much everywhere. So that the 20th century became an American century, rather than a second British century, in large part because of the bets Hamilton had induced the United States to make on not simply following comparative advantage.”

The future should be more than services. Isn’t manufacturing always the low value-added stuff, and that the future should be driven by services instead? I’m not so sure. I’m skeptical that we can pin all our hopes on the services sector because it tends to have two big problems: a lot of it is winner-take-all, and much of the rest is zero-sum.

One of the issues with services jobs in the US is that most of the gains are captured by very few workers. Two services sectors are enormously productive: tech and finance. But other sectors, like retail, hospitality, and food services don’t generate productivity growth quite as quickly. Therefore, while aggregate production can rise, consumption doesn’t tend to keep up. That’s because overall production gains in services are asymmetrically generated by hedge fund managers and machine learning engineers, not the hotel workers and retail staff, and these highly productive workers can only consume so much.

Another issue with a lot of service work is that much of it is zero-sum, a point made very well by Adair Turner. Too many service jobs are meant to cancel out the efforts of other service jobs, for example in litigation, where a plaintiff’s lawyer creates a job for the defendant’s lawyer. And often the zero-sumness is asymmetric: a dozen hackers make a theft, and companies everywhere subsequently need to spend collective billions on staff or contractors to protect themselves; a few criminal plague a state, and the government subsequently needs to hire hundreds of officers to make people feel safe; a few people commit accounting fraud, and the ensuing uproar forces companies and banks to ramp up the size of their compliance departments by tens of thousands in the aggregate.

There’s an entertaining line in the Brad Setser piece I linked to earlier. He tells us that one of the reasons that the US has such a high surplus in the services trade is that Americans have a low propensity to travel abroad. I don’t view that as a great way to earn a trade surplus.

My favorite genre of the Bloomberg column has become Noah Smith dunking on the United Kingdom. Services make up about 80% of the British economy, and that has brought along a host of problems. These include low levels of productivity growth over the last two decades, extraordinary vulnerability to the financial crisis, and low levels of R&D spending by its biggest companies. Matt Klein has put forward a fun claim: “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”

One more thing on the UK: I really enjoyed Power to Compete, a book made up of the dialogue between two Japanese thinkers. (Thanks to Noah for making the recommendation.) There are many good lines, one that jumped out at me was: “If you look at the United Kingdom, I think the policy of prioritizing debating and thinking has failed them.” (I would also suggest that this liberal arts emphasis on argument turns universities into incubators of Girardian terror.)

Power to Compete is worth reading because it’s by two people who clearly recognize the problem of low growth and are serious about offering solutions. There is no attitude I find more refreshing.

How are we going to do science fiction without an industrial base? I’ve made the negative case for services; is there a positive case for industry? Yes, I think so.

The internet is important, and we’re likely still underrating its effects. But I don’t think that we should let innovation be confined entirely to the digital world, because there’s still too much left to build. The world isn’t yet developed enough that everyone has access to shelter, food, water, and energy at a low share of income. Hundreds of millions still live in extreme poverty, which means that manufacturing and logistics haven’t overcome the obstacles of delivering cheap material comfort to all.

And I submit we can’t bring ourselves to calling it the “developed” world until we’ve built so many other things, a point made best by Peter Thiel. We go to work in subways built in the ‘70s, guided by signals equipment put in place in the ‘20s. We’ve been moving more slowly across the planet ever since we decommissioned the Concorde, at a time when global travelers want faster access to major hubs. Are we sure that the developed world is not undergoing its own premature deindustrialization? When people bring up that the fact that the digital world has become very fun, I tend to think that the response smacks of “Let them eat iPhones.”

I’m not saying that manufacturing has special moral worth, and I’ve previously acknowledged that much of manufacturing is unpleasant and hazardous. I’m interested in industry because I see the maintenance of an industrial base as a precondition to building the science fiction technologies of the future.

What are some of the things I’m looking for? For starters: energy too cheap to meter; colonies on Mars and beyond; re-forestization of our deserts; nanotechnology that lets us print basic materials; medical devices and pharmaceuticals that prevent, treat, or cure most ailments; a deeper understanding of materials; and so many other things. To make these all happen, we need to have the development of a lot more tools and machinery.

People who grew up during the Space Age remind us how much lower we’ve re-calibrated our technological expectations. Here’s George Dyson, son of Freeman, after watching a space tourist rocket launch from Baikonur: “When I grew up as a child, Freeman was building this spaceship that was supposed to leave in 1965 with 50 people for Mars and Saturn. The question then was whether the Americans or the Russians would take over the solar system. Here we are, 50 years later after Sputnik, and I’m watching an American pay $35 million to ride on a Soviet-era rocket into low Earth orbit.”

Let’s stay on the subject of space travel. It’s possible that there are warm oceans on the various moons of Jupiter. Why have we not made it a priority to look for extraterrestrial life that might exist on our planetary doorstep, within our very own solar system? I’m volunteering right now to go on the mission that explores these oceans. If I must crowdfund my way up there, I’ll offer to write the next Moby-Dick, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, depending of course on the nature and economic value of the monsters that dwell in those depths.

I acknowledge that there’s a chance that all these innovations will come. Cars are becoming self-driving, and they may even fly soon; the private space efforts look very cool indeed; Boom might be bringing back supersonic jets. But I don’t find their potential sum to be sufficiently exciting. And we may not get them all: The US hasn’t been able to create a national tolling system because it’s too difficult to ask different states to shift their transponders to the same radio frequency (even after an act of Congress required them to do so). If we can’t figure out an interoperable toll system across the states, how soon will we be able to work out the regulatory system for self-driving cars?

The US should emulate a different country. There’s a country I admire whose experiences thread together many of the themes of this piece: I think that the US should learn from Germany. I think of Germany as the country that has done the best job of nurturing its communities of engineering practice. For decades, or maybe centuries, Germany has engaged in industrial deepening.

I was there earlier this year to study its excellence in industry. I can’t claim to totally understand how the systems all work, but I can identify at least a few factors of success: academic collaboration, corporate encouragement, and a commitment to pass on skills all play a part. I’m especially struck by the attitude of older workers, who feel they have a responsibility to transfer their knowledge to younger workers. Today, German companies remain leaders in many segments of industrial technologies.

That’s not to say that everything is going great for Germany. Germany and the rest of Europe seem to have missed the bus to the digital age. It’s hard to name many European companies started in the last 30 years that are leaders in their industry; the best example I can think of is Infineon, a semiconductor spinoff from Siemens with a market cap of $30 billion, and I guess we can include Spotify, though I’m not sure if it’s really a leader. Here’s a remarkable line from the Economist: “If Ericsson and Nokia continue to shrink, only one European firm, Schneider Electric, would be left among the world’s 35 biggest tech companies by revenue.”

Germany and the US have different strengths. The former is good at industry, the latter is good at information technology. But I find it odd that each is poor at what the other is good at. There’s no principle I can discern that forces us to choose one or the other, and I’m optimistic that a country should be able to excel at both industry and the internet.

Both the US and Germany have experienced disappointing growth over the last few decades; I can identify incriminating data points for each country. In the US, rent growth in major cities have outpaced income growth; for reasons I can’t yet get my mind around, homeowners in cities like San Francisco have the ability to veto the creation of new housing stock. Who can believe that they’re able to get away with this? In Germany, more than half of all wealth is now inherited, up from 20% in the 1970s (bringing it nearly to UK levels). It seems like people have mostly given up on the idea of generating wealth by doing new things.

Here’s another issue: the US government is slowly giving up its room for fiscal maneuver. Non-defense discretionary spending made up over 60% of the federal budget in 1962. By 2017, that figure has fallen to 15%, and it’s expected to continue its decline. As that share falls, I wonder how that affects the mindset of legislators, who anticipate diminishing responsibility for allocating funds. In absolute terms, the budget they control is still enormous. But I suspect that it takes away the initiative of US politicians: they can simply let the government go on autopilot, since their predecessors have already committed most available funds. If legislators no longer have room to identify new initiatives for spending, what is there to do except find new things to ban, and then argue with the other side?

The US and Germany are innovative in different ways, and they each have big flaws. I hope they fix these flaws. I believe that we can have a country in which wealth is primarily created by new economic activity, instead of by inheritance; which builds new housing stock, instead of permitting current residents to veto construction; which has a government willing to think hard about new projects that it should initiate, instead of letting the budget run on autopilot. I don’t think that we should have to choose between industry and the internet; we can have a country that has both a vibrant industrial sector and a thriving internet sector.

Development is the only hard truth (or, the social consequences of economic growth). It’s easy to discount the benefits of economic growth if one has lived in a low-growth society for too long. Acceptance of low economic growth is the hidden premise in most commentary that I read. I consider it to be the deepest bias in American and European intellectual society today: it pervades nearly every piece of discourse, from blog posts and bestselling books to movies and pop songs. And I find no theme more radical and refreshing than generalized frustration that economic growth is way too low.

I’d like more people to consider that there are major positive consequences for high economic growth. When people have experienced a few years of high growth, they’re conditioned to expect more of it. That expectation increases risk appetites for both companies and individuals: people have seen their lives getting better in a hundred different ways in the last four decades, and they can be optimistic that more things will improve. They’d be more comfortable starting new businesses or trying on new careers, and these activities won’t even feel like risky events, because new opportunities have always been coming along.

All of this is on top of the fact that higher growth improves our capabilities to deal with various problems. If we’re accustomed to low growth, it’s more difficult to imagine a big improvement to our lives unless we can force a redistribution of wealth. But if we’ve experienced high income growth for a few decades, then it’s easier to imagine that we can make our problems go away because we keep accruing greater resources to deal with them.

It’s the same story with businesses, which can feel emboldened to expand and try new things, because they expect demand to be greater next year than today. I think that these principles are clear to companies in Silicon Valley, where executives make decisions based on their expected position in six months rather than their current position. I suspect that a history of growth also has positive effects on government policies. It encourages the government to engage in long-term planning, because legislators have seen things get better and expect greater room for maneuver.

That view is informed by Bryan Caplan’s idea trap, with which I had not been familiar when I wrote my original piece. I find Caplan’s idea compelling, and it has influenced my baseline model of the world. The countries with low growth will continue to stagnate, because economic rigidity is self-reinforcing; the countries with high growth will continue to grow, because dynamism is self-reinforcing. The latter will have optimistic people, while the former have settled into complacency.

Dystopian science fiction is the natural outcome of stagnant growth; no wonder so much of the science fiction published in the last few decades has been so bleak. What else should we expect when digital technology accelerates but nothing else does? If nicer shops and more hipster cafés are one’s only exposure to physical change, then it’s hard to imagine how the future can be radically different. On the other hand, if cities are rezoning and reinventing themselves every decade, it’s much easier to expect change.

My message to US, Japanese, and European voters is to please cast off this appalling indifference to low economic growth. It seems like you can get the electorate fired up on any political issue except for serious discussions on how to reach a sustained acceleration of GDP. How about electing leaders who can offer a plan to reach 3% GDP growth and sustain it for a few decades? Unfortunately, not even Caplan is sure about how to escape the idea trap, because he says that the only way to break out of this equilibrium is “luck.”

Optimism as a propellant of growth (or, more industry and less Twitter). Instead of waving my hands around to claim that growth comes down to luck, I’d like to wave my hands around in a different way and say that it comes down to a choice to be optimistic. I concede the circularity to the argument, because optimism is probably endogenous to growth. But I’d suggest that optimism can also be the result of proximity to industry, greater enjoyment of science fiction, and avoiding Twitter and politics.

I wish that more of us would study the ‘30s, a decade which saw the systematic application of American ingenuity to the improvement of machinery. That was a time of fantastic advances in chemicals, rubber, electrical machinery, scientific instruments, and many other things. It was a decade in which “technology” referred to advances in aviation, radios, oil recovery, cinemas, and more. How refreshing to consider that people thought that technology was accelerating on many fronts, not just a handful.

1939 was the year of the New York World’s Fair. It was an enormous production that encouraged people to imagine the promise of industrial technologies and to think about how the future will be better than the past. It’s fun to read some of the accounts of Futurama exhibit: “Sponsored by General Motors to the tune of seven million dollars, the equivalent of ninety-one million dollars today, it was the largest animated model ever built: 35,738 square feet. It required the labor of some three thousand carpenters, electricians, draftsmen, and model-makers, and the manufacture of five-hundred thousand miniature buildings varying in scale, and fifty thousand futuristic silver automobiles—ten thousand of them designed to move.”

I think that US culture took a wrong turn when we decided to make fun of plastics and subsequently to celebrate Wall Street instead. Plastics are extraordinary, but the graduates of our top schools are much more enthusiastic about joining an investment bank than to improve our mastery over materials. If we view excellent talent as a scarce resource, then I think it’s regrettable that asset management attracts so many smart young people. I’m not sure that improvements to capital allocation is the most critical accelerant of our technological civilization; on the margin, the more direct improvement probably comes from having smart people make their careers in industry.

I’d like more of us to have greater exposure to industrial processes. Let’s look more at heavy machinery, chemicals, rockets, and all the marvels of the industrial world. Would anyone else like to subscribe to a magazine on industrial goings-on? I’d like for there to be a monthly publication that features interviews of engineers in different segments of industry. We can hear about the current state of the art, how they got here, what are the current constraints, what’s coming down the pipeline, and then to speculate a bit: If we solve some of the big constraints, what kind of advances can we look forward to?

That’s all stuff I hope more of us can develop an interest in. On the margin, what should we be diverting our attention from? Easy: Twitter and politics.

I mean to tune out the angry side of Twitter. The good parts of Twitter are very good indeed, and every day I marvel at how many great links are dropped into my feed by people I follow. I tweet/retweet three things: informationally-dense pieces, interesting pictures, and good jokes. Generally I try to follow people who do the same. Occasionally the waves of angry Twitter wash up on my happy island, but it’s not frequent.

There’s an endless array of social issues to get mad about: we can argue all day on Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, as indeed some of us do. I confess surprise at the amount of outrage that Twitter can muster over “takes.” The national sport of Twitter is to denounce columnists of the New York Times, which anyone can play from the sidelines. I submit that we don’t have to give in and let everyone know we feel that a column is trash, that the columnist is awful, and that the paper deserves censure as a whole. We should resist this tendency to think that a loud tweet has the capability to inflict devastating blows on the other side: “You get to lose your innocence only once.”

Most of us don’t need to pay attention to the day-to-day of politics, no matter how much the media is trying to convince us otherwise. Let’s turn our minds to more productive uses, like reading books and acquiring skills. One of the first things I did after the 2016 election was to cancel my subscription to the New Yorker; I’m still proud of myself for having quickly taken decisive action. Another possibility is to leave the US, as I did. I understand that this is not an option for everyone, but for some young people at least, maybe this is a good time to spend time abroad. Get out when unproductive debate is the ambient national mood, and move to a more sane environment where you can really learn something instead.

I know few people who are broadly curious about the material world and industrial technologies. I hope that we can turn our minds towards studying them, at the expense of paying attention to politics.

People with the right priorities. In my previous post, I cited Neal Stephenson’s ideas extensively. His novels stress the importance of the material world; and he believes in the capacity of science fiction to inspire optimism. I find that Matt Levine is another writer who has a clear sense of the limits of digital technologies. His newsletters feature many examples of how the real world is a mess, and that it can’t be dealt with entirely as a financial or digital abstraction.

Here are a few other people I want to highlight as having the right priorities. They each played some role in helping to build out the digital world. After they put in that work, they mostly switched their attention to improving the material world.

Bill Gates. What did the co-founder of Microsoft decide to focus his energy on after he left the company? Not computers, the internet, or mobile. Instead, it’s philanthropy, with an emphasis on health, education, and energy. He thought that there were enough people working on the digital world, and that he (and his capital) should mostly try to improve the material world instead.

Freeman Dyson has a wild imagination, and usually his crazy ideas have nothing to do with the digital world. There has never been a Dyson interview that I haven’t enjoyed reading. Here’s one of his early projects: “We decided we would go around the solar system with a spaceship driven by nuclear bombs. We would launch the ship into space — ‘bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,’ about four bombs per second — going up all the way to Mars and then afterwards to Jupiter and Saturn, and we intended to go ourselves.”

Andy Grove. The former Intel CEO became a vocal advocate for American manufacturing in his later years. He laid out his case in a 2010 Bloomberg Businessweek essay. I’ll just lay out the most bare of summaries here: Grove was skeptical that startups can provide a large number of jobs; that the US should focus on scaling up the startups into big companies; and that when the US exports jobs, it also exports innovative capacity and scaling expertise. In other words, he lamented the loss of process knowledge. He recognizes that when manufacturing jobs left the US, “we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological innovation.”

Here’s more from Grove: “Our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”

Grove ended his essay with a call to rebuild the US industrial commons; or as I would put it, to regain the pools of process knowledge. A lot of this piece is driven by what I’ve been learning about the semiconductor industry, and I find it heartening to discover that one of the industry’s most important figures thought in similar terms. I’m happy to flag that the ideas of Andy Grove, Tyler Cowen, and Peter Thiel are the driving forces behind this essay.

Does better capital allocation always lead to technological acceleration? I don’t think so. In fact, I would argue that some of the responsibility for the loss of process knowledge can be attributed to the US financial sector, consisting of both investors and financial analysts, with its emphasis on return on capital. (This is also something that Andy Grove brought up.)

My fundamental argument is that technology ultimately progresses because of people, and in particular the amount of process knowledge they’ve managed to accumulate. In my opinion, the US financial sector has underappreciated how important it is to have a deep pool of technically-experienced workers. It’s certainly much easier to identify and measure the stock of tools and IP instead of process knowledge, which exists in people’s heads. As a result, investors and financial analysts have systematically rewarded the firms that are most eager to reduce headcount, which they see as a cost. But just because we struggle to straightforwardly measure process knowledge doesn’t mean that we can dismiss its importance.

I believe that tools and IP are the natural consequence of developing process knowledge. The opposite sequence, however, doesn’t hold: merely having a large stock of tools and IP is no guarantee that we can create more of them. Thus I’m nervous about the loss of process knowledge, and admire countries like Germany and Japan that have kept up the health of their communities of engineering practice.

What are some challenges to these views? I’d like to preserve process knowledge, because I think it’s important for growth and to build the industrial technologies of the future. I also acknowledge that there are many challenges to my argument. Here are a few I find most interesting.

The number of German manufacturing workers has also been in decline. Yes, the number of German manufacturing employees has also been falling (see the statistics, and the chart in this Brad DeLong piece). Doesn’t that suggest that my favored country also hasn’t preserved its communities of engineering practice? I would cite a few things to say that it has preserved them. First, while real output of manufacturing in the US is still at a lower level than in 2008, German real manufacturing output has significantly surpassed its pre-recession levels and has returned to its long-run growth trend. And if we take a look at the sectors that have experienced job losses, we can see that they’re concentrated in lower-value sectors like mining and textile production; over the last decade, Germany has gained employment in higher-value sectors like chemicals, autos, machinery, and electrical equipment. Digging into the data makes me more confident in my claim that Germany reacted to globalization in the correct way, by shedding jobs that aren’t likely to make big gains in process knowledge, and continuing to move up the value chain.

Dematerialization. I remember reading a post by Scott Sumner outlining all the ways that we’re no longer interested in physical things. Sumner is prolific and I can’t find the post anymore; I just remember that he offered many examples in which young people have become more interested in experiences than in owning stuff. (If anyone can email that post to me, I’d be happy to link to it here. Update: The post is here.) If it’s really the case that we’re more interested in establishing status through going to concerts and on exotic vacations, then it’s possible that we won’t have the aggregate demand required to sustain a growing industrial base.

Has most process knowledge already been embedded into tools? One of the best essays I read recently is by Willy Shih, who argues for the affirmative. I recommend reading the whole thing, that essay is one of the prompts for this piece. I’m not sure if it’s easy to cite any aggregate statistics to try to refute it, but I can gesture at a few things. I don’t think it’s the case yet that everyone is effectively able to use the latest tools; we see that companies in semiconductors, aviation, and the internet are mostly concentrated in a few countries. Relatedly, income between countries has continued to diverge even though any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy the same advanced machinery. These facts suggest that some countries are using tools more effectively than others, probably because they have more process knowledge.

I’m happy to acknowledge that there are many more challenges that I haven’t laid out. I’m not saying that I’ve figured out which industries should be better developed and when to let an unproductive industry go. It’s probably wrong to be critical about rational business decisions if I feel that they get rid of process knowledge. The thrust of my piece is to ask more people to consider how process knowledge grows and to suggest that we should be pushing forward the technological frontier on many more fronts.

There’s more cool artwork of space colonies from the Nasa Ames Research Center.

Definite optimism as human capital. I want to tie this piece off by returning to semiconductors. I believe that technological progress is not inevitable, and that we have agency on how hard to push it forward. A doubling of transistor density every 24 months is not some foreordained natural law, gifted to us through heavenly benevolence. That sort of progress doesn’t happen unless we put a bit of thought into it. Moore’s Law is not a promise, but a challenge, and we’ve met it pretty well so far.

One day, we can throw up our hands and declare that we’ve had enough innovation in semiconductors. “The future is in services instead, not in this kind of toxic manufacturing work.” We can fire all the nerds, throw out all their books, and shut down all these fabs. Let’s say it takes a few years for us to come back to our senses. When we subsequently want to revive the industry, it may not be as simple as plugging in the machines, blowing the dust off of the blueprints, and then happily expect production to resume at prior levels. The hard-won process knowledge held by these engineers will have decayed, and the workers will have to relearn a bunch of things.

I think this decay in process knowledge has happened to a lot of industries. That’s not exactly the case in Germany (although it has its own problems). When I talked to Germans about industry, they declared that they’re vigilant against de-industrialization. They say that engineering is a part of the German identity, and they’re not likely to let go of that very easily. I find that a wonderful thing to believe in. Let’s take a look again at the UK, which seems to have made a conscious decision that it will no longer do industry: “Van Reenen determined that British firms had lagging R&D investment across most of the country’s industrial sectors. This decline was compounded by a significant withdrawal of government support for R&D in the 1980s.” It’s easy to let industry decline if we want it to.

I wish that more of us would study production networks. That means thinking more in terms of systems. Healthy ecosystems are hard to maintain, but if you build them up and continue to inject vitality into them, they deliver sustained breakthroughs. These types of production systems can be grasped well enough by people in service sectors like tech and law; I hope that we can consider the industrial base in those terms as well.

I don’t contend that the internet is anything but amazing. But I think that the marvels of the digital world have made it harder to see how slowly everything else has moved. Many segments of technology have made cautious progress, and we neglect to see that because our phones engross us so. Our apps keep getting better while our physical world is mostly stagnant; I think that the wonders of consumer internet have deluded us on how contingent our technological foundations have been.

Here’s Peter Thiel: “The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert.”

One of the possible consequences is that much of the science fiction published in the last few decades veer towards cyberpunk dystopia. (The Three Body Problem is an exception.) We don’t see much change in the physical landscape of our cities, and instead we get a proliferation of sensors, information, and screens. By contrast, the science fiction of the ‘50s and ‘60s were much more optimistic. That was the space age, a time when we were busy reshaping our physical world, and by which point the industrial achievements of the ‘30s had made themselves obvious. Industrial deepening leads to science fiction that is optimistic, while digital proliferation pushes it towards dystopia.

The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair was enormously popular: people thought that the science fiction technologies of the exhibit really would come along by 1960. But people subsequently began to lower their expectations. Here’s an excerpt from the book about technology in the ‘30s: “A quarter-century later, GM tried to replicate its earlier success with a new Futurama, looking forward another quarter century and beyond… It was unable to capture the popular imagination, and its forecasts of the future have proved far off the mark. The contrasting receptions of these two similarly titled exhibits are consistent with what the aggregate and sectoral data are trying to tell us.”

I’d like for us to return to optimism. It’s not enough to tell everyone: “Just choose to be optimistic.” Instead, I’m suggesting that we can nurture optimism by developing a greater appreciation for industry and by reaching for higher economic growth. Pushing forward the technological frontier should not simply be someone else’s problem. Instead, the question of how to do so should preoccupy many more of us.

Please see my followup essay: 2019 Letter
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Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror

I’ve written about René Girard’s ideas once before, to try my hand at identifying mimetic crises in the world of George R. R. Martin. Today I’d like to apply Girard’s ideas to another world in which people are driven to conflict over small differences and personal slights.

(Rather than attempting to explain Girard’s ideas in depth, I leave concessions to the reader, and point instead to discussions from the Raven Foundation and the IEP. If you’re looking for a quick introduction to the life of Girard, take a look at his obituary in the Times.)

Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie; instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. Consider the origin of the ancient grudge laid out in the opening line of Romeo and Juliet: “Two houses, both alike in dignity…” The Montagues and Capulets fight not because they’re so different but because they’re so alike.

The closer we are to other people—Girard means this in multiple dimensions—the more intensely that mimetic contagion will spread. Alternatively, competition is fiercer the more that competitors resemble each other. When we’re not so different from people around us, it’s irresistible to become obsessed about beating others. Girard’s framework vastly improves Freud’s phrase “the narcissism of small differences.” It’s also a framework for Kissinger’s quip: “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”

Where should we expect Girard’s predictions for mimetic crises to run most rampant? At places where values are confused and people are much the same. To me, that description best fits one place in particular: the American college.

In the US, where I attended college, nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18. When they start school, few people have a clear sense of the career path they’ll set on; it’s rare to meet a person who has high confidence of what they’ll end up doing, and even rarer to see someone who actually follows that plan. Instead, people happily confess that they don’t know what they’ll do, and that they’ll figure it out by trying different classes and by joining clubs, sports teams, fraternities, and so on.

None of this is bad, really. Unless you’re a Girardian.

It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other. By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions. These tournament-type distinctions include: SAT scores at or near perfection; being a top player on a sports team; gaining master status from chess matches; playing first instrument in state orchestra; earning high rankings in Math Olympiad; and so on, culminating in gaining admission to a particular college.

Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs. The biggest source of mimetic pressures are the classes. Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes; those seeking distinction throw themselves into the hardest classes, or seek tutelage from star professors, and try to earn the highest grades.

There’s very little external intermediation, instead all competitive dynamics are internally mediated. The prizes are so obvious. The big companies that come to career fairs soothingly assure high-status jobs; the speakers at convocation tell us that we too will become as successful as them one day; our peers hold leadership positions at clubs, get internships at exciting companies, and earn those chances to have lunch with the university’s president.

The lack of external mediation explains why objects of desire on campus can be seen to have such high worth. And why certain leadership positions on campus are heavily fought over, even though they don’t seem to have much influence. It also helps to explain why so many people enter into only a handful of fields.

Mimetic contagion magnifies small fights by making people focus on each other. These processes follow their own logic until they reach conclusions that look so extreme to the outside world. Once internal rivalries are sorted out, people coalesce into groups united against something foreign. These tendencies help explain why events on campus so often make the news—it seems like every other week we see some campus activity being labeled a “witch hunt,” “riot,” or something else that involves violence, implied or explicit. I don’t care to link to these events, they’re so easy to find. It’s interesting to see that academics are increasingly becoming the target of student activities. The Girardian terror devours its children first, who have tolerated or fanned mimetic contagion for so long.

Girard’s main mechanism for renunciation of metaphysical desire doesn’t seem to have a big presence on most campuses. I think that’s also the case for secular society in general. (As an aside, I’ve started to become curious if the rationality movement, broadly defined, is the secular answer to Girardian renunciation.) I invite Girard scholars to tell me how or if he saw secular ways for conflict to be resolved.

No one has ever asked me how one should escape mimetic contagion on campus. Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead.

***

René Girard’s most famous student did not take the threat of mimetic contagion lightly when he ran a company. When Peter Thiel was the CEO of PayPal, he tried to minimize mimetic contagion, possibly because the company was hiring a bunch of kids who’ve been socialized in elite colleges. Keith Rabois has recounted that as a manager, Thiel allowed everyone to work on one thing and one thing only. Rabois couches in terms of ridding distractions, but it’s clear that this is good Girardian practice. People will not feel mimetic envy if they cannot look at the work of others.

Thiel’s comments on management more generally are worth reading. The Girardian themes are clear if one looks for them: “If you were a sociopathic boss who wanted to create trouble for your employees, the formula you would follow would be to tell two people to do the exact same thing. That’s a guaranteed formula for creating conflict. If you’re not a sociopath, you want to be very careful to avoid this.”

From the same interview, here are his entertaining remarks on business schools: “The conceit of the MBA is that you don’t need to have any substance at all. It’s just this management science, and you can apply that equally well in a software company or an oil drilling company or a fashion company or a rocket company. That’s the bias I’d want us to cut against. So for the degree, people would learn substantive things and then on the side you’d pick up some business skills. But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing.

“I think one challenge a lot of business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hothouse environment for a few years—at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that they largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley expect for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.”

***

I haven’t watched much TV recently, but the new show I’ve liked best is *Big Little Lies* on HBO. Rich suburban moms, with desires mediated by their children, are incited towards violence against each other in gorgeous Monterey, California. Who can resist?

The parents have drawn their battle lines by the first episode. The Girardian themes get heavier and heavier throughout the series, until the astonishing finale, which culminates in violent murder. Mimetic contagion races through the group of mothers, who battle over progressively higher stakes, until the show ends with communal violence against a mysterious outsider, the death of whom unites the community in frolicking harmony. The murder takes place during a masquerade-like public performance, over flames, alcohol, and music; the perpetrators each have a hand in violence; scenes of a beating are interspersed with the breaking of Pacific waves on rocks in all directions. That murder unites feuding groups under a lie, and previously lingering questions are papered over, without resolution nor need of one.

Isn’t this a fairly compelling depiction of a Girardian war and peace? I want to only gesture at another question: The parents make every effort to spare pain from the children, but isn’t it the case that the kids see things far more clearly than the adults?

I liked the show a lot. Apart from the Girardian themes, the shots of Monterey are beautiful, the characters are compelling, and there are many funny moments. Do watch.

***

Here’s an article about how literal memes spread on campus. Apparently many colleges have Facebook meme groups sharing jokes particular to that school. The dankness of one’s meme reflects the high quality of the school.

Elsewhere in meme culture on campus, Harvard recently rescinded offers to at least ten incoming freshmen because they shared memes that were either sexually explicit or racist. This story is just too good. The college set up a Facebook group for the Class of 2021. People started to befriend each other and created a meme group. Unsatisfied with the lightheartedness of most memes, some members started a “dark” group, which created these unacceptable memes. To gain membership in this dark group, first one had to post a risqué meme in the general group.

It’s amazing that even before they met each other, the class of ’21 was already testing its members’ limits, sorting themselves into elite sections, and trying to outdo each other in explicitness. Instead of being focused on real goals, their gaze is directed at each other, and each concentrates on one-upping the previous go. Internally every move is so compelling; externally the situation turns too extreme.

***

If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?

I want to make a point that I’ve brought up once before: Because acts of youth are more easily recalled, our future elites will be made up of people who’ve managed to keep their records unsullied. What happens when most records of our life are accessible via Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or blogs? I think that makes it so that our future leaders will be selected for whether they were willing to be really boring in their 20s, who have no recorded indiscretions that might derail a Senate confirmation. Are these the people we want to be governed by?

I liked this piece by Mihir Desai: “The Trouble with Optionality,” published in the Harvard Crimson: “The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!

“This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up.”

***

I think mimetic contagion is worst in US colleges. In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses. And when I attended a German university, students told me that German 18-year-olds don’t usually go directly to university after high school. Instead, they take a year off to travel, work, or volunteer. These experiences create difference and maturity, thus better inoculating people against mimetic contagion.

I wonder about graduate schools in the US. I think they’re more free from Girardian conflict, though I’m not sure by how much. The place where one expects people to be most susceptible to mimetic contagion—business school—is composed of people with somewhat distinctive starting points and end goals. Those who start MBA programs usually vary more by age and have a clearer idea of what they want, at least relative to undergrads.

I submit that anyone who accepts the ideas of Girard should be extremely wary of being in anything resembling the college environment. It might be too much to ask high school students to read I See Satan Fall Like Lightning or Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. But anyone who’s familiar with these works ought to feel grand Girardian horror to contemplate exposure to these dynamics in college-like corporate environments or graduate school.

An unhappy study shows that one in two PhD students experiences psychological distress, and that one in three is at risk of a common psychiatric disorder.

***

The two best novelistic modelers of mimetic desire are Marcel Proust and Stendhal. (And as I’ve written before, George R. R. Martin isn’t bad either.) I feel that I’d have said this even if the triangular desire in these novels weren’t pointed out by Girard himself.

Having Girard in the back of one’s mind is helpful for reading Proust in particular. His novels are like agonized letters. At first I found his transitions bewildering and his anecdotes too tedious to follow. Afterwards I felt a craving for his daily epiphanies, which really cannot be rivaled in their acuity.

It’s fun to read Proust with a particularly Girardian question in mind: Does our narrator ever have spontaneous desires of his own? Each episode of his various obsessions starts with someone else pointing out that a particular person is worth acquaintance or a piece of art is worth appreciation. The best examples are the actress La Berma and the painter Elstir. Once someone whispers to our narrator that he is in the presence of an exceptional talent, he feels the greatest sense of worship. If there are any instances in which our narrator comes to desire without a mediator, I’ve yet to find it.

At some other point I’d like to write about Girard and Stendhal, as well as more generally the validity of extracting lessons of mimetic contagion from literature.

***

To me, America’s greatest feature is that it allows people to embrace mimesis or free themselves from it. Society allows people of both types to thrive. It’s not like in other countries, where people are forced to socialize in certain ways or find it too easy to extricate themselves from society.

I want to make clear that mimetic tendencies aren’t all bad. Two types of people have the greatest capacity for learning: Those who are intensely mimetic and those who are incapable of mimesis.

Thiel gets at the learning capacity of the latter when he makes a point about Aspergers in the Valley: “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, then you’re less likely to do the same thing as everyone else around you. If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue these activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”

Meanwhile, those who are susceptible to mimesis can be excellent learners too. They’re better able to pick up social cues than anyone else, and they have a greater capacity to please. Mimetic ability manifests in “conscientiousness,” such a popular trait these days. They have a clearer sense of who successful models are, and they have the greatest eagerness to learn from them.

I submit that the key to success is to be aware of one’s tendencies, either to be very mimetic or not at all. Then one can harness these tendencies to maximize learning, and not spend all one’s time indulging solitary whims or be governed by mimetic contagion. It’s possible that the greatest amount of learning comes as a result of fluctuating between these extremes. And I feel that kind of fluctuation is possible only in America, not really anywhere else I’ve lived—Canada, China, Germany, and now Hong Kong.

***

A few last thoughts:

If you’re looking for an overview of René Girard’s work, I recommend Wolfgang Palaver’s primer.

The best case against my argument that college generates Girardian terror is the tendency for most people to remember their college years fondly. I concede that my analysis may be badly wrong. First, that I’m in error, in my analysis of Girard; second, that Girard is in error, in his analysis of the human condition; third, that more people are immune to mimetic contagion than this piece suggests; or fourth, that the warm light of memory makes people forget about these dynamics, so that they remember the peaks of what made college fun instead.

For academic year 2017-18, the school I attended—Rochester—will charge a $67,708 to incoming freshmen. At least I think that’s the case when I tally fees from this page. Curiously, the school offers breakdown of costs, but not their sum. That’s confusing because some fees are mandatory while others are not. That’s not the extent of total fees; the school mandates people to purchase health insurance, and if you take the one offered by the university, a freshman’s charge comes to a cool $70,000 a year. Other private schools are drifting to $70,000. For the upcoming academic year, Harvard’s billed costs are $65,609, Yale is at $66,900, Princeton is at $67,100. I’m sure you can find less well-ranked schools that present a higher bill.

Here’s an observation from Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora: ”One may admit to pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, and laziness… There is only one capital sin no one admits to: envy.” Most New Yorker cartoons are Girardian, this one especially so: “It’s not enough that dogs succeed, cats must also fail.”

I’ll end with a quote from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: “Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

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Californian Dreams

I watched two movies recently, Hail, Caesar! and La La Land, both of which are celebrations of Los Angeles. They made me reminisce about the year I spent living in San Francisco, and prompted me to think more deeply about California as a whole. In particular, I wonder if California felt so odd (to me) because of the winner-take-all effects of tech and entertainment. What happens to the way that people think when two of its big industries have extreme blockbuster dynamics?

I have three questions:

  1. California’s economy is massive, but two industries dominate popular imagination: tech in Silicon Valley/San Francisco and entertainment in Hollywood/Los Angeles. Far fewer than 1 percent of all new stars and startups can expect to break out every year; those that do find terrific success. How do these dynamics change the culture of the state and the way that people live, if at all?
  1. California is the land of sunny optimism. But one detects, in so much of the creative output, a strain of melancholy, or at least ennui. You hear it in the Beach Boys; see it in both Hail Caesar and La La Land; read it in Philip K. Dick, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and so many others. What do people have to worry about in the land of gold and gentle weather?
  1. In a country of immigrants, California seems to be the state of immigrants. It’s not just that many are of Asian or Latin American descent; in the beginning (i.e. about a century and a half ago), California was significantly populated with migrants-twice-over who came from the eastern U.S. Within the self-selected group of immigrants, these people were willing to decamp once more to search for gold or fame. If the U.S. is the country of immigrants, is California then the most American of all states?

I’m not sure that I can answer these questions directly, but here are a few thoughts around them.

***

Every movie can be thought of as a startup. They both begin as ideas in notepads. Creators pitch them to studios and VCs for funding. It’s up to the creator to sell the vision and recruit others who believe in them. Most startups and movies break even or lose money; a few become massively scalable successes that are economically and culturally important for years, perhaps decades.1 They have many differences, but they share at least these characteristics.

That’s from the perspective of creators and founders. For employees of startups and movie productions, there are similarities as well. Young people toil, not always in great positions, but they can always be on the lookout for other opportunities. It’s expected to be passionate about what you do. Things change in a big way if you meet someone willing to help you. (From one of the big numbers in La La Land: “Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know; the one to finally lift you off the ground… if you’re the someone ready to be found.”) Or people are not so fortunate. Tens of thousands of dreamers move to Hollywood every year, but only a few become stars.

One tangible difference between startups and movies is that the latter needs a team to assemble for a much shorter period of time. A more interesting difference is an intangible one: While both are blockbuster industries, one can argue that Hollywood has a more zero-sum attitude than Silicon Valley does. Annual consumer spending on movies and music is fairly stable, which means that studios are fighting over a non-growing share of peoples’ budgets. Meanwhile, only a few movies become blockbusters, making competition for that handful of roles more severe for actors. The world of startups doesn’t seem so zero-sum.

The zero-sum competitiveness of Hollywood is one reason that Peter Thiel disliked Sorkin’s The Social Network. He wrote that the movie is more emblematic of Hollywood than the positive-sum thinking that’s more common in Silicon Valley.

***

What accounts for the strain of melancholy in Californian optimism?

It’s warm and sunny in both Hail Caesar and La La Land. (When I saw La La Land on a snowy day, I thought that the director was playing a cruel joke to divide the movie in seasons: Los Angeles in the winter and summer scenes looked identical.) But you can pick out the constant doubt and deep unhappiness of the main characters. The lyrics of the Beach Boys are sunny too; but why do they sound so sad? Maybe California is less happy than it looks.

Is it because the sunsets in California are so singularly beautiful? It is darkness when the greatest point of beauty has passed. Do the long shadows of autumn drag themselves over our mood especially heavily because they bring darkness but not cold?

Does desperation accompany its natural optimism because homelessness is so plausible? La La Land’s opening number is about how California will always have another day of sun. The mild, warm weather makes that condition far less punishing than in the northeast. One certainly encounters many examples of it in San Francisco. Homelessness won’t likely affect most tech workers, but even for them the prospect of sudden, faultless unemployment looms large. Will they be able to stay in their very expensive apartments for long?

Are the landscapes of Northern California so stark and breathtaking because they’re far too dry? The Golden Gate is placid, and is that because the yellow hills and brackish water don’t allow life to thrive?

***

I haven’t spent much time in LA, but I loved my brief visit. It’s the only place in which a stranger at a party remarked to me: “I didn’t like my face, so I changed it, with plastic surgery.” One would not find such candidness in San Francisco or in New York.

Werner Herzog has great things to say about the city. He lives there now, having moved from SF’s Pac Heights neighborhood, where I used to live. It’s worth quoting him at length:

“Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles.

“Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans. In the last half century every significant cultural and technical trend has emerged from California, including the Free Speech Movement and the acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified society, computers and the Internet, and—thanks to Hollywood—the collective dreams of the entire world. A fascinating density of things exists there like nowhere else in the world.”

***

Here’s something I’ve come to appreciate recently: There’s a world of difference between value-creation and mistake-avoidance.

In the corporate context, that’s the difference between top line and bottom line activities. The first is about generating revenue and the latter is about cutting costs. Upside is limitless for salespeople, while the beancounters have only so much to cut.

Let me sharpen the point with reference to writing. Academic writing is often plodding and obtuse; I submit that it’s because academics are more concerned with showing that they’re avoiding errors rather than trying to communicate incisive ideas. The opposite of academic articles may be something like blog posts; the latter may be fuzzy, poorly-defined, or outright mistaken, but that’s tolerable so long as they introduce fresh ideas.

I feel that California is a place that better embodies the top line mindset and that New York is dominated by the bottom line mindset. California, venture capital, and movie studios are trying to pick the winner that makes irrelevant their losses. New York is complicated, but I want to argue that it’s finance-driven, and exemplified by the practice of insurance in particular. Insurance is about collecting a steady stream of revenue—on the liabilities side—without making a catastrophically wrong investment that wipes out half the value of assets. (A more colorful way to put it is to pick up nickels in front of a steamroller.) Venture capital tolerates mistakes in the search for a winner; insurance spends most effort avoiding big mistakes.

Finding brilliant successes and avoiding catastrophic failures are very different activities. Both are important, but they require different mindsets. I’ve found it useful to distinguish the two in nearly everything I do and see. Maybe that distinction goes some way to explaining why California and New York feel so different.

***

I don’t know much about California’s history, but I do know that a lot of people moved to the state in the 19th century gold rush. After gold, there came a silver rush, an oil boom, aviation, entertainment, and tech. I’m stealing a friend’s phrase: “Manifest destiny continues, not only through physical space.”

Each of these are winner-take-all industries. So you see, blockbuster dynamics have continually infused the state. Maybe we should expect that the people who were willing to move to California to be some of the most ambitious and can-do people in the world. And that subsequent generations have been nurtured with the same values as people who worked in other winner-take-all industries.

Or maybe not. Northern California offers the most outrageous examples of nimbyism, which is the total antithesis to a culture that accepts change and risk. The government doesn’t seem so can-do either. In eastern SF, replacing the Bay Bridge was initially estimated to cost $250 million; it was completed nearly 20 years later, for $6.4 billion, or a run-up of roughly 2,500 percent. In northern SF, the government has spent more time and about as much money (in real terms) building an access tunnel to the Golden Gate Bridge than it did building the bridge. California’s high-speed rail will be one of the slowest high-speed rail systems in the world, at the highest cost per mile of track. No wonder the state’s finances are a mess.

Virginia Postrel’s book on glamour highlights California as a particularly glamorous icon. It’s always attracted the ambitious. But for all the innovations of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, I wonder if people have lost some of the risk-taking tendencies of the past. Longtime residents and Uber drivers are always eager to let people know that the city isn’t like it once was. Perhaps they’re right, and the city’s startup scene is imprinted with a little bit more of the East Coast finance culture than techs would like to admit.

And maybe this is the right place to cite that, under generous definitions, about 10 percent of the San Francisco workforce is directly involved in the tech industry. That figure is closer to 20 percent for the Bay Area as a whole. And the state may not be attracting as many migrants. California’s net migration was negative between 2003 and 2014, losing about a million more people than it gained through migration. Instead of moving from Oklahoma to California, traffic may now be more common the other way. While IT and entertainment are big sectors, together they account for only around 10 percent of state GDP—though it’s possible to argue for a bigger share under different definitions. The two big blockbuster industries may not have that big of an impact in the day-to-day lives of most Californians.

But if they do, then maybe that helps to explain a bit of the melancholy in the culture and why those who were once ahead have tried to lock in their gains.

***

(Picture I took last year, off Highway 1. Does the California coast look so calm because the dryness doesn’t allow for a lot of life to thrive?)

A few last notes:

I’d like to read a book about California. Not a fiction nor a work of poetry by a Californian author; instead I’m looking for a history of the state as a whole. Any recommendations?

Right now, Seattle is the part of the country I’d most like to visit. Going purely off the descriptions of Cryptonomicon, it seems like geek heaven. Is it California-lite, with its own set of tech giants and blockbuster dynamics?

I loved both Hail, Caesar! and La La Land while I was watching them. Upon reflection, I liked Hail, Caesar! more and La La Land less. Both films are excellently reviewed by Richard Brody: “The Coen Brothers’ Marvelous ‘Hail, Caesar!’” and “The Empty Exertions of ‘La La Land.’

Thanks to MG, EW, PS, SG, and AN for discussions of these ideas.

1. Thanks especially to Michael Gibson for elaboration.

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The life of Philip Glass

I picked up Philip Glass’s memoir not because I’m very familiar with his music, but because I’d heard that he drove taxis and worked the odd plumbing job before he was well-known. I know of few other people in the classical music world who’ve taken a similar path, so I thought that this would be an interesting account of a life in the arts.

I ended up being far more impressed with it than I expected. Words Without Music is written simply, winningly, without much commentary on music. And that’s just fine because we get to read about Glass’s very interesting life. (I’ll share a few excerpts below.)

Glass didn’t work just as a taxi driver and as a (self-taught) plumber. He also worked in a steel factory, as a gallery assistant, and as a furniture mover. He continued doing these jobs until the age of 41, when a commission from the Netherlands Opera decisively freed him from having to drive taxis. Just in time, too, as he describes an instance when he came worryingly close to being murdered in his own cab. The book offers many other interesting details, e.g. deciding to attend the University of Chicago at age 15, inviting a blind and homeless musician to live with him for a year, hitchhiking through Iran before it was closed to Americans and Afghanistan before it was invaded by the Soviets.

These biographical details are manifestations of a quality I admire. Glass never needed much convincing to drop everything in his life to go on a risky venture. I’m not familiar with the many plot twists in his life, and found the book engaging because I had no idea what new adventure he was going to go on next. It’s astonishing how open-minded he is. Consider: His decision to go to India was based entirely on seeing a striking illustration in a random book he grabbed off a friend’s shelf. In addition, he never hesitated to go into personal debt, at times quite steep, because his music couldn’t wait. The book is filled with instances of him saying “sure, when?” to improbable proposals without dwelling on their costs.

He seemed uninterested in stabilizing his position with more regular income. He never took up an honorary conductor position. He never ensconced himself in a plush conservatory professorship. And he didn’t even apply for grants because he didn’t like that they imposed terms.

Glass is either oblivious to conventions or fond of ignoring them. He mentions a few times that he was born with an “I-don’t-care-what-you-think” gene. There’s often reason to distrust these proclamations, but I did enjoying cataloguing his contrarianism. Other performers may look down on amplifiers, but he adapted them no less to the opera house. Other musicians may revere figures like Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, but he rebelled and talked back to them. Other composers may scoff off film soundtrack commissions, but he tried them out and with success. Other music students may spend their Juilliard prize monies to practice and compose, but he bought a motorcycle so that he can ride around the country. When people made fun of him for appearing in a whiskey ad, he retorted: “It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out… must have had rich parents.”

Here is a short clip of “In the Upper Room,” choreographed by Twyla Tharp and performed by the Ballet de Lorraine.

Now some promised excerpts. These are passages I found striking.

Being able to visualize: My father taught me to play mental chess. I would be with him in the car and he would say, “Knight to Bishop’s 3” and I’d say, “Pawn to Queen 3.” We went through a game together and I learned to visualize chess. I was probably seven or eight years old and I could already do that. Years later when I was learning to do exercises in visualization, I discovered I had developed this aptitude when I was very young… I discovered that many people couldn’t see anything, but I could see right away, and that was a big help. I had a number of friends who said they were having trouble visualizing and I realized I didn’t have any trouble. When I wondered why I didn’t I remembered those chess games that Ben and I used to play.

Keeping an open mind: When my father started to sell records, he didn’t know which were the good records and which were the bad… But he noticed that some records sold and some records didn’t, so as a businessman he wanted to know why some of the records didn’t sell. He would take them home and listen to them, thinking if he could find out what was wrong with them, he wouldn’t buy the bad ones anymore. In the late forties, the music that didn’t sell was by Bartok, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky. [emphasis DW’s.] Ben listened to them over and over again, trying to understand what was wrong, but he ended up loving their music. He became a strong advocate of new music and began to sell it in his store.

Working: Luckily for me, I never minded earning money as best I could, and I actually enjoyed working at the [steel mill]… My curiosity about life trumped any disdain I might have about working. So if this was a reality check, then I had happily signed on at a fairly early age.

On being influenced by Bruckner: One major, and unforeseen benefit of the Bruckner expertise I acquired came when my friend Dennis Russell Davies became the music director and conductor of the Linz Opera and the Bruckner House Orchestra. I went to Linz for the first time with the poorly conceived idea that my music would sound better played by an American orchestra, because they would understand the rhythms I was composing. To my surprise, the Bruckner Orchestra played these compositions better than American orchestras.

Upon noticing a man in his sixties composing music in a coffee shop, when he was doing the same while still a student: It never occurred to me that, perhaps, it was a harbinger of my own future. No, I didn’t think that way at all. My thought was that his presence confirmed that what I was doing was correct. Here was an example of an obviously mature composer pursuing his career in these unexpected surroundings… The main thing was that I didn’t find it worrisome. If anything I admired his resolve, his composure. It was inspiring.

An early job: In Pittsburgh, I wrote some music for children in grade school and some for high school orchestras… At the end of the year we had a big concert, where all the music I had written was played. It was very satisfying. Here I was, twenty-six years old, and I was having a complete concert of my own music.

His first wedding: We continued our trip, driving west to Gibraltar. “You know,” JoAnne said, “we can get married here for five pounds.” We were both twenty-eight years old… We took our five pounds to the civil office of a Mr. Gonzalez, and that’s where we were married.

At a performance in Amsterdam: Before I had gotten even halfway through my performance, I noticed someone had joined me on the stage. The next thing I knew he was at the keyboard banging on the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage. Half the audience cheered and the rest either booed or laughed. Without a pause, I began playing again, having lost the momentum of the music for not much more than five to six seconds.

For some reason Google Music offers woefully light coverage of Glass’s music. There are few of his symphonies, few of his early works, no Akhnaten, not even Satyagraha. You might expect him to be well covered given that he has some status in pop culture, but no. Why are his albums so absent from Google Music?