Going to repost a comment I originally made on Noah Smith's blog, because it spells out part of the approach I believe we should be taking wrt China:
I've always gotten the vibe Chinese leadership in general fears a brain drain to the the West (especially US). So, when Washington's discriminatory policies make it harder for talented Chinese researchers (and well-educated people in general) to come to the United States, Xi and the Standing Committee aren't upset. In the least (their public rhetoric notwithstanding). Rather, they're doing high fives.
America should be doing everything in its power to attract the world's best and brightest: more student visas, more green cards, special visa programs for foreign graduates of US colleges, more H1s. All of it. And yes, that should include lots of China's best. STEAL THEIR TALENT. I guarantee many top Chinese brains will LEAP at the chance to trade in Chinese smog, crowds, low wages and totalitarian constraints for the freedom, clean air, potable water, wide open spaces, higher wages, and detached houses of Silicon Valley, Boston or Seattle. This is a complete no-brainer.
(Ok, so maybe not many will be able to buy a house in Palo Alto, at least right away! But it's getting pretty tough in Beijing or Hangzhou, too!)
PS — Completely non-scientific observation here, but, personal experience to me suggests China's educated classes are indeed getting a bit nervous, and there's a general increase in top level talent trying to get out. I've got five well-educated friends here who are finalizing exit strategies: three to Canada, one to the US, and one to Europe.
PPS — Preemptive reply to the inevitable objection based on national security: fears of Chinese espionage are overdone for a variety of reason; our people (FBI) in any event know how to handle this stuff, but if their budget needs to be increased, so be it; cutting ourselves off from an increasingly large portion of the planet's smartest folks isn't going to just help China: it'll also directly weaken US science.
"We are not going to hit the 1.5-degree or even 2-degree target, but 2.7 is much better than 3, and 2.4 is much better than 2.7 — we need to do what we can."
A good post, but I'm going to quibble with this particular sentence, because I think it leads to bad analysis and bad policy recommendations. True, we most likely can't hit the 1.5-degree target, but we most certainly can hit the 2-degree target. In the 2018-IPCC report (the newest report has roughly the same findings, but I'm a little less familiar with it) the remaining carbon budget of the whole world for the 2C-target with at least 2/3 probability was estimated to be a little above 1000 GtCO2. For 50 % probability, the budget is 1500 GtCO2.
That's between 20 and 35 years of our current global emissions! The carbon budget for the 1.5-degrees target however was just 420 GtCO2, which is roughly ten years of emissions (from 2015!). If we simplify enormously and assume a linear reduction to net zero from today, that means we need to get half way to zero emissions in ten years and all the way to zero in 20 years to limit warming til 1.5-degrees. To limit warming to 2-degrees might require halving emissions in 20-30 years, and then getting to net zero in the next 20-30. Even if emissions plateau for a few years and then start going down, we still have a few decades. Getting to net zero in a few decades certainly going to be difficult, but it is not at all inconceivable.
The climate science fully supports the notion that every 0.1 degrees C counts, like the post says. So stabilising the warming at 1.9, 1.8 or even 1.7 degrees instead of 2 degrees matters a lot. This perspective indicates that speeding up the transition to lower emissions is hugely important. And yes, the international negotiations do matter. If Chinas emissions peak a few years earlier and then falls gradually instead of plateauing, that matters a lot. International pressure, negotiations, but also technological and financial developments do affect this.
The longer time horizon of the 2-degree goal also means that technologies that take longer to mature can play a larger role. In climate circles many people say that advanced nuclear is not important, because it won't be ready and deployed at scale by 2030. But it might be technologically ready by the late 2020s and deployed at scale gradually through the 2030s. Furthermore, if that provides energy abundance, that could make some of the hardest climate problems (such as industrial heat, or heavy transport and air travel using synthetic fuels or hydrogen-based fuels) easier to achieve. The same applies to other technologies.
The current focus on the 1.5-degree target means that we need drastic action right now, or we fail. I would certainly support drastic action right now, but that's not the only option. Accepting 2.7 or 2.4 degree warming as the best we can do, means we can just patiently wait for technologies to mature. Aiming for limiting to at most 2, means that we need to act now and that there are plenty of politically realistic things we can do.
How about, uh, the Republican Party radicalizing against democracy? Was a bit amazed to see out-there stuff like 'AI takeover' mentioned in the piece, but not the fact that one of our two major parties is turning into some kind of Peronist/North Korean-hybrid personality cult.
If we had a more logical electoral system, a lot of Republican craziness would be for naught. But we have a very specific failure point in the ridiculous Electoral College, where Constitutionally there is at least some play for states to send electors based on whatever criteria they please. I have seen a number of thoughtful commenters, including conservatives, note that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and others could send the 'wrong' electors just based on allegations of voter fraud. Even if the court system sorted it out later, the loss of perceived political stability to the US would be permanent, permanent damage. We could divide American history into before and after. And that's without rioting, supporters clashing in the streets, shootings, etc.
BTW, Trumpist hysteria & death threats against Republican legislators who voted for the infrastructure bill kinda debunks MY's pieces about how the R's are becoming more politically moderate (while procedurally radical). I don't expect them to be loudly for it, but being (literally) violently against even bridges & roads is a pretty ominous sign
The first is that people believe the lies that hucksters tell and give these systems more control in safety-critical situations for which they cannot safely perform (see: everyone thinking Tesla’s autopilot features are actually sufficient to drive for them).
The second is that people use algorithms to bias-launder. Doing things like releasing resume-scanning systems that somehow always reject non-white applicants (likely because it’s training data was from compiled by racially-biased people) yet claiming that the system cannot be biased because it is a computer and cannot harbor personal racial hated.
The former will likely go away when more people have more hands-on experience and recognize how much crap like “autopilot” is janky as all hell. The later is a much bigger and more imminent threat. But what is not a threat is any kind of singularity/SkyNet situation where strong AI comes into being. When people were resigning in protest from Google/Alphabet’s AI ethics group, it wasn’t because the researchers were concerned about an evil strong AI that Google refused to stop creating. It was because of the bias-laundering issue.
It's surprising to me that someone who wrote preciently about the structural threats to American democracy would not consider that to be one of the important issues facing us.
Re what matters, why are the Dems allotting $285 billion - the SECOND LARGEST PROGRAM in BBB - to helping out the well-to-do by lifting the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes (SALT)? I guess this shows that "working families" are less of a priority than they claim.
Dumb hot take: we can solve the global warming risk and AI existential risk by doing a particularly terrible job at the super power war risk. We'll get into a land war with China over Taiwan and in the combat, the world's major semiconductor fabs will all be destroyed, absolutely devastating the global economy and reducing green house gasses in a super-depression, while also setting back AI research due to lack of computing power.
"we ultimately need a vision for America that doesn’t rely on hoping the Chinese economy collapses if we want to remain the number one economy in the world."
China will be the world's number one economy unless it collapses. This is just math. China is already the biggest economy in purchasing power terms. If it can achieve the per capita GDP of Greece or Hungary, its economy would be twice as big as ours. Neither of those countries is well run. It's an easy mark to hit.
The good news is relative decline isnt that bad, especially if you chill out. The UK is a good illustration. It was the biggest Western economy in 1850. In the last 170 years, its standing has declined relative to almost every other Western country, yet median British incomes today are 10 times what they were in 1850. Britons are much better off despite all that relative decline.
The biggest peril of relative decline is killing people by overplaying one's hand. It's fine to invest in a navy and nuclear weapons, but Britain has fared poorly every time it has fought great power conflicts on land. Its position declined somewhat during World War One and catastrophically during World War Two. Britain never came close to its original war aim of preserving Poland's independence. It would have done much better to sit out World War Two and let the Nazis and communists duke it out. It could have protected Jewish lives much more effectively by opening India (and possibly the Dominions) to immigration than by fighting a war it had no way of winning. I see a similar dynamic with Taiwan and I dont want my son to die defending the "indepedence" of an island that was part of China for 200 years.
>>Instead of trying to offer smart, market-oriented critiques of America’s excessively inflexible public health bureaucracy, the right is going all-in on anti-vax propaganda.<<
They did the exact same thing with climate change. And with universal healthcare coverage. There's a crying need for a smart party of the center right in America—one that offers up solutions to big problems while eschewing a dirigiste approach. But the existing party of the right has descended into madness and nihilism.
>>If they don’t, then I hope the CTC expansion is extended when it expires next year.<<
Really? It's set to expire in 2022? Why did Democrats get so horrendously bad at policy? Matt's right that child poverty in a country that produces such staggering wealth—where there are multiple individuals worth more than $100 billion—really is a scandal.
"Concrete things are not only more important, but precisely because they are concrete, they are more amenable to compromises and win-win solutions than zero-sum symbolic battles over symbolism and social status."
Thank you for saying this, it's a really important point that I've been trying to make for years. I see it as a symptom of capitalist overproduction; in this "Age of Information" symbols are the commodities, and in order to sustain ever-expanding growth people need to be convinced that the symbols are really really important. It's not evil, but it's wrecking everything because it's displacing "normal" politics and blinding us to what really matters.
Why don't you list the rise of autocrats and transnational gangsters/ strongmen/ plutocrats/ billionaires? And the accompanying destruction of liberal democratic norms?
Whether it's Putin, Zuckerberg, Xi, Theil, Orban, or Trump, this seems like a very important long term trend.
Dan Quayle is looking more and more prescient:
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change."
Also, if you want to see an almost eerie level of prognostication about things that will matter many years in the future, check out this side-panel from the 1997 issue of Wired about "The Long Boom". The main article spent thousands of words supporting its thesis that we were poised for a 25-year period of peace, prosperity, and amazing human advancement. Then, as a literal aside, they mention 10 things that could just possible prevent this long boom. Guess how many of those 10 things happened? https://i.imgur.com/rW0It9k.jpg
I like the idea here of the 80 years on perspective. What will people remember about a given time 80 years later?
I'm imagining the folks back in 1941 wondering if people in 2021 will remember or think important, oh, the German invasion of the USSR and Pearl Harbor. Probably not, they'll conclude; they'll be too busy dodging other flying cars and planning their move to the lunar colonies.
But more seriously, this little exercise gives me hope. Matt's list is important but not *that* important: e.g., child poverty is bad but "the poor have always been with us." Instead, this gives me a welcome Pinkerian vibe: like it or not, we've come a helluva way since 1941 -- or 1861 or 1781 for that matter.
Going to repost a comment I originally made on Noah Smith's blog, because it spells out part of the approach I believe we should be taking wrt China:
I've always gotten the vibe Chinese leadership in general fears a brain drain to the the West (especially US). So, when Washington's discriminatory policies make it harder for talented Chinese researchers (and well-educated people in general) to come to the United States, Xi and the Standing Committee aren't upset. In the least (their public rhetoric notwithstanding). Rather, they're doing high fives.
America should be doing everything in its power to attract the world's best and brightest: more student visas, more green cards, special visa programs for foreign graduates of US colleges, more H1s. All of it. And yes, that should include lots of China's best. STEAL THEIR TALENT. I guarantee many top Chinese brains will LEAP at the chance to trade in Chinese smog, crowds, low wages and totalitarian constraints for the freedom, clean air, potable water, wide open spaces, higher wages, and detached houses of Silicon Valley, Boston or Seattle. This is a complete no-brainer.
(Ok, so maybe not many will be able to buy a house in Palo Alto, at least right away! But it's getting pretty tough in Beijing or Hangzhou, too!)
PS — Completely non-scientific observation here, but, personal experience to me suggests China's educated classes are indeed getting a bit nervous, and there's a general increase in top level talent trying to get out. I've got five well-educated friends here who are finalizing exit strategies: three to Canada, one to the US, and one to Europe.
PPS — Preemptive reply to the inevitable objection based on national security: fears of Chinese espionage are overdone for a variety of reason; our people (FBI) in any event know how to handle this stuff, but if their budget needs to be increased, so be it; cutting ourselves off from an increasingly large portion of the planet's smartest folks isn't going to just help China: it'll also directly weaken US science.
"We are not going to hit the 1.5-degree or even 2-degree target, but 2.7 is much better than 3, and 2.4 is much better than 2.7 — we need to do what we can."
A good post, but I'm going to quibble with this particular sentence, because I think it leads to bad analysis and bad policy recommendations. True, we most likely can't hit the 1.5-degree target, but we most certainly can hit the 2-degree target. In the 2018-IPCC report (the newest report has roughly the same findings, but I'm a little less familiar with it) the remaining carbon budget of the whole world for the 2C-target with at least 2/3 probability was estimated to be a little above 1000 GtCO2. For 50 % probability, the budget is 1500 GtCO2.
That's between 20 and 35 years of our current global emissions! The carbon budget for the 1.5-degrees target however was just 420 GtCO2, which is roughly ten years of emissions (from 2015!). If we simplify enormously and assume a linear reduction to net zero from today, that means we need to get half way to zero emissions in ten years and all the way to zero in 20 years to limit warming til 1.5-degrees. To limit warming to 2-degrees might require halving emissions in 20-30 years, and then getting to net zero in the next 20-30. Even if emissions plateau for a few years and then start going down, we still have a few decades. Getting to net zero in a few decades certainly going to be difficult, but it is not at all inconceivable.
The climate science fully supports the notion that every 0.1 degrees C counts, like the post says. So stabilising the warming at 1.9, 1.8 or even 1.7 degrees instead of 2 degrees matters a lot. This perspective indicates that speeding up the transition to lower emissions is hugely important. And yes, the international negotiations do matter. If Chinas emissions peak a few years earlier and then falls gradually instead of plateauing, that matters a lot. International pressure, negotiations, but also technological and financial developments do affect this.
The longer time horizon of the 2-degree goal also means that technologies that take longer to mature can play a larger role. In climate circles many people say that advanced nuclear is not important, because it won't be ready and deployed at scale by 2030. But it might be technologically ready by the late 2020s and deployed at scale gradually through the 2030s. Furthermore, if that provides energy abundance, that could make some of the hardest climate problems (such as industrial heat, or heavy transport and air travel using synthetic fuels or hydrogen-based fuels) easier to achieve. The same applies to other technologies.
The current focus on the 1.5-degree target means that we need drastic action right now, or we fail. I would certainly support drastic action right now, but that's not the only option. Accepting 2.7 or 2.4 degree warming as the best we can do, means we can just patiently wait for technologies to mature. Aiming for limiting to at most 2, means that we need to act now and that there are plenty of politically realistic things we can do.
"Each story you read out of Xinjiang is more horrifying than the next."
Whew! Thank god it's getting better all the time. I was afraid you were going to say it was getting worse!
How about, uh, the Republican Party radicalizing against democracy? Was a bit amazed to see out-there stuff like 'AI takeover' mentioned in the piece, but not the fact that one of our two major parties is turning into some kind of Peronist/North Korean-hybrid personality cult.
If we had a more logical electoral system, a lot of Republican craziness would be for naught. But we have a very specific failure point in the ridiculous Electoral College, where Constitutionally there is at least some play for states to send electors based on whatever criteria they please. I have seen a number of thoughtful commenters, including conservatives, note that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and others could send the 'wrong' electors just based on allegations of voter fraud. Even if the court system sorted it out later, the loss of perceived political stability to the US would be permanent, permanent damage. We could divide American history into before and after. And that's without rioting, supporters clashing in the streets, shootings, etc.
BTW, Trumpist hysteria & death threats against Republican legislators who voted for the infrastructure bill kinda debunks MY's pieces about how the R's are becoming more politically moderate (while procedurally radical). I don't expect them to be loudly for it, but being (literally) violently against even bridges & roads is a pretty ominous sign
The are only two major threats from AI.
The first is that people believe the lies that hucksters tell and give these systems more control in safety-critical situations for which they cannot safely perform (see: everyone thinking Tesla’s autopilot features are actually sufficient to drive for them).
The second is that people use algorithms to bias-launder. Doing things like releasing resume-scanning systems that somehow always reject non-white applicants (likely because it’s training data was from compiled by racially-biased people) yet claiming that the system cannot be biased because it is a computer and cannot harbor personal racial hated.
The former will likely go away when more people have more hands-on experience and recognize how much crap like “autopilot” is janky as all hell. The later is a much bigger and more imminent threat. But what is not a threat is any kind of singularity/SkyNet situation where strong AI comes into being. When people were resigning in protest from Google/Alphabet’s AI ethics group, it wasn’t because the researchers were concerned about an evil strong AI that Google refused to stop creating. It was because of the bias-laundering issue.
It's surprising to me that someone who wrote preciently about the structural threats to American democracy would not consider that to be one of the important issues facing us.
Re what matters, why are the Dems allotting $285 billion - the SECOND LARGEST PROGRAM in BBB - to helping out the well-to-do by lifting the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes (SALT)? I guess this shows that "working families" are less of a priority than they claim.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/16/second-biggest-program-democrats-budget-gives-billions-rich
Dumb hot take: we can solve the global warming risk and AI existential risk by doing a particularly terrible job at the super power war risk. We'll get into a land war with China over Taiwan and in the combat, the world's major semiconductor fabs will all be destroyed, absolutely devastating the global economy and reducing green house gasses in a super-depression, while also setting back AI research due to lack of computing power.
"we ultimately need a vision for America that doesn’t rely on hoping the Chinese economy collapses if we want to remain the number one economy in the world."
China will be the world's number one economy unless it collapses. This is just math. China is already the biggest economy in purchasing power terms. If it can achieve the per capita GDP of Greece or Hungary, its economy would be twice as big as ours. Neither of those countries is well run. It's an easy mark to hit.
The good news is relative decline isnt that bad, especially if you chill out. The UK is a good illustration. It was the biggest Western economy in 1850. In the last 170 years, its standing has declined relative to almost every other Western country, yet median British incomes today are 10 times what they were in 1850. Britons are much better off despite all that relative decline.
The biggest peril of relative decline is killing people by overplaying one's hand. It's fine to invest in a navy and nuclear weapons, but Britain has fared poorly every time it has fought great power conflicts on land. Its position declined somewhat during World War One and catastrophically during World War Two. Britain never came close to its original war aim of preserving Poland's independence. It would have done much better to sit out World War Two and let the Nazis and communists duke it out. It could have protected Jewish lives much more effectively by opening India (and possibly the Dominions) to immigration than by fighting a war it had no way of winning. I see a similar dynamic with Taiwan and I dont want my son to die defending the "indepedence" of an island that was part of China for 200 years.
>>Instead of trying to offer smart, market-oriented critiques of America’s excessively inflexible public health bureaucracy, the right is going all-in on anti-vax propaganda.<<
They did the exact same thing with climate change. And with universal healthcare coverage. There's a crying need for a smart party of the center right in America—one that offers up solutions to big problems while eschewing a dirigiste approach. But the existing party of the right has descended into madness and nihilism.
>>If they don’t, then I hope the CTC expansion is extended when it expires next year.<<
Really? It's set to expire in 2022? Why did Democrats get so horrendously bad at policy? Matt's right that child poverty in a country that produces such staggering wealth—where there are multiple individuals worth more than $100 billion—really is a scandal.
On what matters- in the long term the only major issue is the collapsing birth rate.
"Concrete things are not only more important, but precisely because they are concrete, they are more amenable to compromises and win-win solutions than zero-sum symbolic battles over symbolism and social status."
Thank you for saying this, it's a really important point that I've been trying to make for years. I see it as a symptom of capitalist overproduction; in this "Age of Information" symbols are the commodities, and in order to sustain ever-expanding growth people need to be convinced that the symbols are really really important. It's not evil, but it's wrecking everything because it's displacing "normal" politics and blinding us to what really matters.
Really loved this post.
Why don't you list the rise of autocrats and transnational gangsters/ strongmen/ plutocrats/ billionaires? And the accompanying destruction of liberal democratic norms?
Whether it's Putin, Zuckerberg, Xi, Theil, Orban, or Trump, this seems like a very important long term trend.
Dan Quayle is looking more and more prescient:
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change."
Also, if you want to see an almost eerie level of prognostication about things that will matter many years in the future, check out this side-panel from the 1997 issue of Wired about "The Long Boom". The main article spent thousands of words supporting its thesis that we were poised for a 25-year period of peace, prosperity, and amazing human advancement. Then, as a literal aside, they mention 10 things that could just possible prevent this long boom. Guess how many of those 10 things happened? https://i.imgur.com/rW0It9k.jpg
I like the idea here of the 80 years on perspective. What will people remember about a given time 80 years later?
I'm imagining the folks back in 1941 wondering if people in 2021 will remember or think important, oh, the German invasion of the USSR and Pearl Harbor. Probably not, they'll conclude; they'll be too busy dodging other flying cars and planning their move to the lunar colonies.
But more seriously, this little exercise gives me hope. Matt's list is important but not *that* important: e.g., child poverty is bad but "the poor have always been with us." Instead, this gives me a welcome Pinkerian vibe: like it or not, we've come a helluva way since 1941 -- or 1861 or 1781 for that matter.