There are a couple of Atlantic articles I wanted to comment on. The first, “Why the Age of American Progress Ended” by Derek Thompson, illustrates a fundamental misconception. His basic point is that we have overvalued invention at the expense of deployment:
the end of smallpox offers a usefully complete story, in which humanity triumphed unequivocally over a natural adversary. It’s a saga that offers lessons about progress—each of which pertains to America today.
The most fundamental is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress—a lesson the U.S. has failed to heed for the past several generations. Edward Jenner’s original vaccine could not have gone far without major assistance from early evangelists, such as Henry Cline; distribution strategies to preserve the vaccine across the Atlantic; and a sustained push from global bureaucracies more than a century after Jenner’s death.
The rest of the piece is mostly a complaint that we’re not living in the world of the Jetsons (“where’s my flying car?”). His solution, apparently, is more public-private partnerships:
The United States once believed in partnerships among the government, private industry, and the people to advance material progress. The Lincoln administration helped build the railroads. The New Deal helped electrify rural America. Dwight Eisenhower signed the Price-Anderson Act, which guaranteed government funds and limited liability for nuclear-energy firms in case of serious accidents, facilitating the construction of nuclear-power plants. John F. Kennedy’s space ambitions made NASA a major consumer of early microchips, which helped reduce their price by a factor of 30 in a matter of years, accelerating the software revolution.
I think the problem is somewhat different than he does and it has two factors. The first is that we’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit from a technological standpoint and the amount of time, effort, and investment required for that next technological breakthrough will be greater than for the previous ones. The pace of technological development is neither linear nor geometric. It’s hyperbolic.
Turning to electronics, the transistor was an enormous breakthrough relative to vacuum tubes. Semiconductors were invented nearly a century and a half ago; transistors 75 years ago. Contrary to popular view there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough since—what has happened are elaborations on the breakthrough technologies.
The second factor is that in the real world things must make economic sense. We haven’t gone back to the moon, not because we had lost the ability but because it just didn’t make economic sense. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there just wasn’t a pressing geopolitical need and the cost (and danger) of the venture led us to turn to other things. Now our interest has been piqued again because of the activities of the Chinese in space.
