Cafe Hayek

Optimal Population?

In his new book, Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs expresses his concern about population growth.  Worried by a U.N. prediction that global population will rise to 9.2 billion by the year 2050, from 6.6 billion today, Sachs says (on page 23 of his new book) the following about these additional 2.6 billion persons:

I will argue at some length that this is too many people to absorb safely, especially since most of the population increase is going to occur in today’s poorest countries.  We should be aiming….to stabilize the world’s population at 8 billion by midcentury.

(HT Karol Boudreaux)

Eight billion.  I'm not sure where Sachs got that number.  And, to be frank, I'm not curious about where he got it.  He could have dreamed it up in his sleep, or taken it from a multi-year study conducted by a lavishly funded committee made up of the world's most accomplished economists, demographers, environmentalists, statisticians, physicians, and other Very Smart Experts.  No matter where the number comes from, it's worthless.  There is simply no way to know how many persons the earth can "support" in the year 2050 (or any other year, for that matter).

First is the question: support at what standard of living?  Even if we grant the validity of the resources-are-very-tightly-limited supposition (upon which fear of population growth chiefly rests), there is no objective, scientifically determinable "optimal" number of people who can be alive at any one time.  According to the resources-are-very-tightly-limited supposition, the less that people consume, the greater are the amounts of resources that will be left for the future -- the greater is the earth's carrying capacity.  In this view, resources are simply 'out there,' waiting to be gathered, processed, and consumed by humans.  So more humans (or the same number of humans consuming more) will deplete resources faster than will fewer humans (or the same number of humans consuming less).

So on this resources-are-very-tightly-limited supposition, as people decrease their material standard of living, the earth can sustain a larger population.

How do we know today at what average standard of living persons alive in 2050 will seek to achieve?  We don't.  It's conceivable that the typical person alive in 2050 will have become so devoted to saving the earth that the prevalent culture and norms will dictate that most persons settle for material living standards lower than those that ordinary Americans enjoy today -- or, perhaps even lower than ordinary Americans enjoyed in 1950.  If so, then surely the "optimal" global population in the year 2050 will be lower than it would be if most persons alive in 2050 will seek to achieve living standards much higher than ordinary Americans now enjoy.

A much deeper problem with Sachs's eight-billion number is that, in calculating it, there is no way to predict how human creativity will alter the world during the next 42 years.  It's ludicrous to pretend that we can know now what, say, the average MPG will be for internal-combustion engines in 2050.  Hell, we don't even know if automobiles and lawnmowers and the like will still use such engines then.

Will another Norman Borlaug arise, between now and 2050, to spark another green revolution?  Will someone invent a way to efficiently power automobiles with air?  Will someone develop new and better techniques for defining and enforcing private property rights in ocean-going fish stocks so that the tragedy of the commons called "over-fishing" is eliminated?  Will an enterprising entrepreneur invent a means for ordinary households to power their homes with mulch or autumn leaves or small fragments of fingernail clippings?

Think back 42 years to 1966.  Who in that year imagined personal computers in nearly every home in America?  The Internet?  Digital cameras?  Cell phones?  Quality wines sold in screw-top bottles?  Buying music with literally the click of a button (and not having to burn fossil fuels in driving to the record store).  Aluminum cans that contain only a fraction of the metal that cans contained back then?  The Kindle (that will reduce the number of trees cut down to enable people to read books)?  Medical advances that make hip-replacements about as routine as getting cavities filled by the dentist?  Microfiber?

There is no way -- literally, no way -- to know how technology and social institutions will change between now and 2050.  Given this impossibility -- and given the fact that we can nevertheless predict with confidence that technology will advance and that social institutions will change -- to assert that "optimal" population in the year 2050 will be eight-billion persons is ludicrous in the extreme.  It's faux-science, and deserves only ridicule.

Capitalism: The Great Anti-Pollutant

We modern folk are fortunate to be able to worry, if we choose, about environmental problems such as global warming, species loss, and whether or not companies drill for oil off of the coast of California.  A principal cause of our good fortune is the fact that capitalism makes our daily lives so clean, sanitary, and healthy -- and, generally, wealthy -- that we can afford to stew in concern about environmental problems that are more speculative and far more distant than were the environmental problems that plagued our ancestors -- problems such as houses with thatched, bug-infested roofs and no indoor plumbing or hard flooring.

I call capitalism the great anti-pollutant.  Our lives truly and thoroughly are cleaned by capitalism.  This realization first hit me several years ago as I stood at an automatic-flush urinal in LaGuardia airport.  "I don't have to touch this thing to flush it; how wonderfully sanitary!" I marveled.

Well, here's a further development along these lines: no-touch dispensers of toilet paper.

Zillowicious

Type in an address and get a birds-eye view of the house and an estimate of what it's worth along with estimates of all the other houses in the neighborhood. You can also get a five year trend. The site is Zillow.com. (HT: Carpe Diem). What a world we live in.

A Note on Household Income and Women Entering the Workforce

Last May, Andrew Hacker wrote a thoughtful essay on income inequality for the New York Review of Books.  I wrote the following letter in response:

Dear Editor:

In his generally admirable essay on income inequality, Andrew Hacker discounts the significance of the 23 percent rise in median family incomes between 1982 and 2004 by saying that "this growth was almost entirely the result of the presence of additional earners, with more wives turning to full-time work" ("The Rich and Everyone Else, May 25, 2006).

True. But to the extent that women were released from housework by the greater availability of electrical appliances and better prepared foods, these gains in median household earnings represent real improvements for ordinary Americans. After all, housework - although uncompensated - has genuine and considerable value. Because much of the housework that in the past was done by "non-working" women is now done by appliances, supermarkets, and the like, the typical American household today still receives the value of housework plus the additional income women earn by working outside of the home.

I might also have added that the rate at which women entered the workforce was pretty much the same from 1982 on as it was for much of the 20th century.  For evidence, see the report mentioned here.

Reflections on the Desert

I am attending this weekend a Liberty Fund conference organized by Andy Morriss, my co-blogger over at Market Correction.  This conference is held at the White Stallion Ranch near Tucson,  Arizona.

I've been to the desert southwest many times (although never in the Summer).  Each time I'm here I'm struck by its beauty and charm.  Part of what's beautiful and charming, of course, is the landscape, weather, and flora and fauna.  For an east-coaster like me, saguaros remain quite exotic, as does the cloudless, cobalt-blue sky.  Equally exotic is the short-sleeve-shirt weather in February.

But at a deeper level it's not just the natural beauty of the Arizona desert that is appealing; ultimately what makes today's Arizona desert so appealing is that we humans have made it accessible and comfortable.

This desert, after all, is a place that receives precious little rainfall.  During the nights it gets quite cold and during the Summer days it gets scorchingly hot.  It has little natural shade, and almost no naturally arable land.  It's not an environment naturally congenial for human habitation -- and yet big cities thrive here and tourists flock here.

Air-conditioning, refrigeration, automobiles and 18-wheel trucks, harnessed electricity, irrigation technologies, screen doors, sun-screen, and countless other  bourgeois inventions -- mostly products of the market-driven division of labor -- make this desert not only habitable, but comfortable -- so comfortable that it looks to us humans to be be a beautiful and wonderful place.  It would certainly not look, or be, that way to us if we were forced to live here without modern amenities.

The Power of Innovation

Harold Evans, author of They Made America (a wonderful book), reacts in a letter to the editor ($) to the Atlantic Monthly's list of the 100 most influential Americans. After talking about some of the pluses and minuses of the list, he continues:

But the most fundamental point your panel missed is how much innovators have enabled America’s dedication to democracy and equal rights. A. P. Giannini opened banking to the common man. Madam C. J. Walker, the orphan daughter of slaves, built the largest black business of its day, liberating millions of African American women through the iconic status she achieved. Gary Kildall and Ken Olson expanded access to the computer beyond a select priesthood. The panel did mention Henry Ford, but failed to stress his singular achievement: giving practical reality to the rhetoric of democracy by fighting for the people’s car. Similarly, Cyrus McCormick’s truly original contribution—as important as his reaper—was his invention of easy credit for the masses of ordinary farmers who otherwise could not have afforded his machine.

Beyond this, it was amazing to see no mention of the new nation’s first notable innovator, Oliver Evans (the high-pressure steam engine), or Charles Goodyear (vulcanized rubber), Philo T. Farnsworth (television), Herbert Boyer (the father of biotechnology), Theodore Judah (the architect of the transcontinental railroad) … I could go on!

Rather than depreciating the achievements of our innovators in business and technology, historians should acknowledge how much we need them for making a better America—independent of foreign fossil fuel, ready to cope with the effects of global warming and with competition from low-cost economies. Just as they made yesterday’s America, the innovators are crucial to making tomorrow’s.

What an insightful breath of optimism.

 

The most beautiful toy, yet

Apple hits a home run. No, a grand slam. Actually, a five-run homer, the kind you're not supposed to try to hit. If the phone pictured here actually works and the price point is anywhere near the competition and if they can get them made in any volume, it's going to be the best-selling tech product ever. It makes the Razr and the Zune and the Treo and Blackberry look like lego toys.

UPDATE: It's going to be $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version. It's going to sell like hotcakes. Zero calorie hotcakes. Expects to ship June 2007. Jobs is claiming to aim for a 1% share of the phone market in 2008. Ten million phones. If they can get them made, they'll sell them all.

We Do Cooperate

I'm pleased that The New York Review of Books published this letter of mine, as well as author Bill McKibben's response to my missive, in its Dec. 21 issue:

HOW CLOSE TO CATASTROPHE?

By Donald J. Boudreaux, Reply by Bill McKibben            

In response to How Close to Catastrophe? (November 16, 2006)

To the Editors:

I've read few passages in your pages that are as mistaken as Bill McKibben's assertion that "the technology we need most badly is the technology of community—the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.... We Americans haven't needed our neighbors for anything important..." ["How Close to Catastrophe?," NYR, November 16].

Each of us cooperates daily with countless others—neighbors, fellow citizens, foreigners—to ensure not only our prosperity but our very existence. My mind boggles at the number of people who cooperated to make available to me, for example, the shirt on my back. Cotton growers in Egypt; fashion designers in Italy; textile workers in Malaysia; merchant marines from around the globe; investment bankers in Manhattan; insurers in Hartford; truck drivers along the East Coast; department store executives in Seattle; security guards and retail clerks in Virginia—these people and millions of others cooperated so that I might wear an ordinary shirt. Ditto for my house, my food, my subscription to The New York Review of Books.

For McKibben to say that "cheap fossil fuel has allowed us all to become extremely individualized, even hyperindividualized" is to be blind to the amazing and vast system of cooperation that today spans the globe. Clearly, we have, in spades, "knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done."

Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia

Bill McKibben replies:

Donald J. Boudreaux's response proves precisely the point I was trying to make—and it says something about the blinders that too many economists have strapped on. We do cooperate, unconsciously, to promote our individual self-interest; Chairman Boudreaux's slightly less elegant restatement of Adam Smith's remarks about the butcher and the baker are, as far as I can tell, not in serious dispute. What is in dispute is whether this cooperation carries over into more crucial matters—like keeping the planet from overheating in the next decade. Since my article came out, the British government has released a report estimating that the economic cost of global warming will exceed the combined impact of both world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s. So far, there is precious little sign of our communities coming together to meet this challenge—politically, economically, culturally. Which doesn't prove Smith—or even Boudreaux—wrong. Just incomplete.

And I thank Tibor Machan for alerting me to my letter's appearance in TNYRB -- a fact that prompts me to share with you this wonderful recent op-ed by Tibor.

The Fundamental Importance of Economic Freedom

The release today of the new Economic Freedom of the World: 2006 Annual Report -- by Jim Gwartney, Bob Lawson, and Bill Easterly, and published jointly by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute -- prompts me to revisit, today at Tech Central Station, one of my favorite themes: economic freedom is more fundamental than technology in raising living standards.

Hackers and Painters

I recently stumbled on Paul Graham, an entrepreneur, hacker and writer.  He has a lot of wise things to say about start-ups, entrepreneurship, the source of wealth and a million other things.  His writing style is forceful, extremely clear and he has a big brain that is happy to think in unusual ways.  Very interesting guy.  I just got his book, Hackers and Painters, and am looking forward to reading it.  Many of the essays in it can be found here. 

Start with "How to Make Wealth."  An excerpt:

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment.  But that's not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie.  "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true.  If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood.  This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth.  If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

Graham's other essays include fascinating observations on procrastination, being a nerd, the stupidity of smart people and lots of other stuff.

The Luddite in Me

I love technology.  I love my iPod.  I love my digital camera and the pictures it creates on my computer.  I love the Powerbook G4 I’m using to write this post.  I even once loved my Treo 600 though that infatuation is fading as its email program capabilities have unexpectedly deteriorated.  But I still love the idea of being able to get my email whenever and wherever I want.  I love the antibiotic that cured my wife’s pneumonia last winter.  I love blogging.  I love the special features on the DVD.  I love that Dr. Jonas can save this boy’s life (rr).  I love the idea of Skype.  If I could find a decent USB headset and mic that worked as it should on a Mac I'd love Skype itself.  I love podcasting.  If I watched TV, I'd love Tivo.

I understand that the antibiotic and Dr. Jonas's surgery is more important than the elegance of my iPod.  But I love them all  Okay, I don’t really love any of them, I merely like them a great deal, but sometimes I’m shocked by how much pleasure I get from the gadgets in my life.

Does the gloss of my computer’s titanium casing distract me from things with deeper and more significant meaning?  I know I have an urge to compulsively check my email.  This is not healthy.  Can gadgets and technology take us away from what is real?  Or is the reality of my fingers clicking the keys no more real than the words that are posted in cyberspace? 

Mark Helprin comes down on one side of these questions in his short story, "Jacob Bayer and the Telephone" from his magnificent collection of stories, The Pacific.  Bayer is an itinerant Jewish school teacher in Russia in 1913 who stumbles on a town that worships the telephone.  The telephone has made the town wealthier and healthier than any of the impoverished villages in the region.  Everyone has one of these black devices and the leaders of the town proselytize for more telephones. At a town meeting, Bayer speaks of the real meaning of this seductive gadget:

Can you boil water with a telephone?  Will it warm you like a fire on a cold night?  Can you embrace it like a woman?  If you pick it up, will you feel the sun on your face, hear the birds in the trees, see and feel the wind moving across a lake or whipping and thrashing a wheat field into what I suppose, never having seen it, looks like the sea?  Will the telephone sit in your lap, like a child, or sleep in your arms, like a baby?  Will you love it?  Will it love you?  Will you cry for its beauty, and sob when it passes?  Will have a scent like pine tar or salt air or rose?  Will it speak fearlessly like the prophets, and hold fast as truth takes its sharp turns?  Will it show courage in the face of danger and death?  Will it make a single line of poetry?  Or bake a single loaf of bread?…

This thing that you greet with erotic and worshipful enthusiasm, and the wealth it brings in train, are the golden calf.  You are worshipping what you have made, which is shallow and dead, and have averted your eyes from the world you have been given, which is magnificent and full.

There's almost no Luddite in me.  But it's nice to be reminded of the virtues of meatspace.  Does anyone write better than Mark Helprin?

The Jacob Bayer story first appeared in Forbes.  You can read the whole thing here.  Isn't the internet the greatest?

How It's Made

One of my son's favorite television show (I proudly reveal!) is a show on the Science Channel called "How It's Made."  (I apologize: I can find no really good link to the show; the link here is just the Science Channel's scheduled airing of the show.)

Each half-hour segment features three or four explanations of how ordinary things are manufactured. Among the familiar items whose manufacture Thomas and I have learned about by watching this program are digital CDs, mozzarella cheese, sliced bread, pantyhose, and toothpicks.

Several things strike me about this program. Here’s one.

The level of automation is truly astonishing. Viewers of "How It’s Made" almost never see a human being. It’s almost all machines – computerized robots – doing the work. Even the most mundane of everyday items such as sliced bread and toothpicks are produced today with truly impressive advanced technology.

Watching "How It’s Made" last night brought to mind Adam Smith’s important insight that one advantage of the division of labor is that as tasks become more specialized they are more likely to become mechanized, thereby releasing scarce, precious human labor to do other valuable jobs.

We live truly in a world of wonders. The lowly toothpick – a splinter of birch wood – is the product of millions upon millions of dollars of investment and unmeasurable human creativity – and, of course, our happy propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,

Mel Brooks was right

When I was a kid,one of my favorite routines was Mel Brooks as the 2000 year-old man interviewed by Carl Reiner. At one point, Reiner asks Brooks his candidate for the greatest invention of all time. Brooks, without hesitation answers:

Saran Wrap! You can make a big saran wrap, a small saran wrap, you can see right through it!

Saran Wrap??!! What about fire, Reiner asks.

That was good, Brooks answers pensively.

Though it came out more like, "dat vas gud" using the Jewish accent he used for the character and Reiner's question may have been about the wheel. And there's more to the saran wrap riff—it goes on for a while, there's something about a peach. I haven't heard the routine in decades so I'm working from very old memories.

Having moved into a new house earlier this week, I'm coming around to the Brooksian viewpoint. (Though go here for my nomination for the greatest product of the 20th century.) You'd think moving was basically an unimprovable exercise—a bunch of really strong people put your stuff on a truck and then take it off. But there has been innovation in moving and Saran Wrap is a key part of it.

They Saran Wrap all the dressers. OK, it's more like a shrink wrap but it's the same stuff. You don't have to unpack the dresser before they load it onto the truck. They just wrap up the dressers in plastic wrap that holds the drawers closed and protected for the move. What a pleasure. We have a big bookcase with doors. They took the doors off, wrapped each one in quilts then shrinkwrapped them to hold the quilts in place and give the doors some more protection. Then they strapped them standing up to the wall of the truck. Beautiful.

Another innovation is one of technique not technology. These guys could carry three boxes of books at a time, maybe 150 lbs. How did they do it without hurting themselves? They carried them behind their back. They bent down facing away from the boxes and picked them up with their arms behind their back, supporting the bottom box with their fingers and letting most of the weight of the top two boxes fall on their backs. Do not try this at home. But it sure looked easy. It wasn't, but if they had carried them in the traditional way, in front, they'd have broken down or the moving company would have had to have sent much larger people to get the job done.

Almost as good as having a Blackberry

I'm listening to William Manchester's bio of Churchill on my commute. (The link will take you to Audible.com's version. Warning: I'm enjoying it greatly but it is only available in relatively low audio quality. Listen to the sample before you buy.) According to Manchester, London in 1875 had ten (10!) mail deliveries a day. Slightly more labor intensive than email. Such a system makes sense when labor is relatively cheap and people really want to stay in touch. Another interesting number—1000 people died a year in England's coal mines. Makes nuclear power look really safe, even in a week when an accident in Japan kills four people. By the way, the population of England in the last quarter on the nineteenth century was about 30 million.

Making the world smaller

We tend to romaticize manufacturing jobs and look down on service jobs. We associate the former with rugged steelworkers, grimy in their overalls, using a smelter. Service jobs don't produce anything, say the critics. On the surface, Federal Express merely moves packages around. But actually Federal Express does something quite extraordinary—they make the world smaller buy getting packages from here to there more quickly.

Cheaper long-distance does the same thing. In 1920, it cost $26 a minute to make a phone call from New York to Los Angeles. Today, it's virtually free as this article in today's Washington Post points out. But that $26 figure was in 1920 dollars. In today's dollars, the cost in 1920 was $287. Here's the chart from the Post article showing the long decline, in real and nominal terms of the cost of long distance:

That change in costs makes the world smaller. I can talk to my parents and brother and sister and old friends around the world as if they lived around the corner instead of being scattered around the country.

Another revealing chart would be the number of people who work in the long-distance business per call made. That number has plummeted as well which is merely the flip side of saying it has gotten cheaper. We've substituted technology for people and freed up the people who would have been necessary to create the billions of minutes we use to instead do other things instead.

This is just another example of the point made by my co-blogger Don Boudreaux that jobs are costs not benefits. The American economy is very good at creating jobs. The key question is what kind of jobs. Imagine keeping long-distance technology unchanged at its 1920 level. We'd have saved the jobs of all those telephone operators and made the world poorer and more isolated. We let those jobs go and created new jobs in all the industries we couldn't have dreamed of in 1920.

Ironically, the process of substituting technology for people is what creates our rising standard of living over time. It appears to be the opposite—surely we can't get richer as a people if we're losing jobs in the telephone industry—surely that makes us poorer. But it makes the nation as a whole richer to have cheap long-distance. The telephone operators who lose their jobs have to find a new job. Sometimes it will pay less because their skills may not be as useful in other industries that will arise. But their children and grandchildren inherit a richer world where people are closer together. Do that in industry after industry and you get a change in our standard of living over the last 100 years of something between ten and thirty TIMES higher.

Making the world smaller

We tend to romaticize manufacturing jobs and look down on service jobs. We associate the former with rugged steelworkers, grimy in their overalls, using a smelter. Service jobs don't produce anything, say the critics. On the surface, Federal Express merely moves packages around. But actually Federal Express does something quite extraordinary—they make the world smaller buy getting packages from here to there more quickly.

Cheaper long-distance does the same thing. In 1920, it cost $26 a minute to make a phone call from New York to Los Angeles. Today, it's virtually free as this article in today's Washington Post points out. But that $26 figure was in 1920 dollars. In today's dollars, the cost in 1920 was $287. Here's the chart from the Post article showing the long decline, in real and nominal terms of the cost of long distance:

That change in costs makes the world smaller. I can talk to my parents and brother and sister and old friends around the world as if they lived around the corner instead of being scattered around the country.

Another revealing chart would be the number of people who work in the long-distance business per call made. That number has plummeted as well which is merely the flip side of saying it has gotten cheaper. We've substituted technology for people and freed up the people who would have been necessary to create the billions of minutes we use to instead do other things instead.

This is just another example of the point made by my co-blogger Don Boudreaux that jobs are costs not benefits. The American economy is very good at creating jobs. The key question is what kind of jobs. Imagine keeping long-distance technology unchanged at its 1920 level. We'd have saved the jobs of all those telephone operators and made the world poorer and more isolated. We let those jobs go and created new jobs in all the industries we couldn't have dreamed of in 1920.

Energy Politics

Researchers at Alfred University are exploring a fascinating and weird way to get us to the hydrogen economy. Researchers there, according to this MSNBC article, have found a way to get hydrogen into tiny glass spheres, each smaller than a grain of salt. The virtue of this system is that it solves a safety problem:

The miniature glass spheres, known as microspheres, "are a much safer method for transporting hydrogen," says Jim Shelby, project leader and professor of ceramic engineering at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y.

"Each tiny microsphere acts as its own pressure vessel. In an accident, they would not break and release a large quantity of hydrogen, as would the rupture of a big tank of gas," he adds. Instead, the spheres would just spill onto the ground, some possibly breaking into beads that would release minute amounts of hydrogen.

Now for the poetry and romance:

Shelby envisions a day when drivers fill up cars with microspheres the way they pump gasoline. "The refueling process would be in two steps. First, a vacuum would suck the used spheres out and send them to a tank for refilling. New, filled spheres would then be pumped in from a different tank," he says. "The consumer would not see much difference from today's system."

Made of sand, the microspheres are very light, inexpensive, easily recycled "and can be repeatedly filled and refilled without degradation," he adds.

Sounds great. But there's a small problem:

Technical hurdles with the project include finding a reliable way to release the hydrogen on demand. And that's where the Alfred University researchers came up with a breakthrough: using light to trigger that reaction.

By treating the spheres with various chemicals, the researchers use light to release the hydrogen in a second or two. They can also adjust the light's intensity to control the rate of flow.

"So starting the car would turn on the light at a level to begin production of electricity by a hydrogen fuel cell," says Shelby. "Acceleration would be done by just increasing the intensity of the light to provide more hydrogen to the fuel cell."

Perfecting that technique is where much of the research will focus and Shelby acknowledges that it will be "tricky."

Yes it will be. But it's still pretty cool. And who knows? Maybe this really is a glimpse of the future rather than an episode of the Jetsons.

There is one more issue. Politics:

The researchers realize they are small players in the hydrogen storage field — in fact their grant is a fraction of the $150 million doled out by the Energy Department for hydrogen storage research.

They also feel that their greatest challenge might be in overcoming what they see as institutional bias.

"In many ways, the key obstacles are not in the technology but in the politics of hydrogen," says Shelby. The large national labs are exploring more conventional storage devices, he notes, and "they have tens of millions of dollars of support each year."

"Since large research groups have been working in those areas for many years, they have established themselves as the 'viable' technologies," he adds. And that makes it hard for other ideas, like the spheres, "to get the attention of the vehicle manufacturers and funding agencies."

Ah those funding agencies. I sure wish investors with their own money on their line were making these decisions rather than a "funding agency" with no accountability for making a mistake with my taxes:

The research team is getting started thanks to a $2 million Energy Department grant that's part of President Bush's FreedomCar program — a $1.2 billion initiative to develop cars that run on hydrogen-powered fuel cells.

I suppose I should be happy that it's "only" 1.2 billion.

Spam and Pygmalion

Until recently, I felt like the good guys (that's me and you—the people who are content with our anatomy, house loans, and uninterested in helping former Nigerian leaders with their money laundering problems) were winning the war on spam. The quality of spam filters had forced the spammers into absurd spelling errors and random strings of words in their messages as a way of evading what seemed to be improved spam filters. That is a moral victory for us. While spam continues to get through, I always know it's spam. Recently, the volume seems to have escalated so I'm not so sure we're making progress.

There’s a weird tension in spam. The more annoying we find spam, the less we open it and click on those links. But as fewer and fewer of us respond, the spammers have to send out even more hooks looking for the few fish that still take the bait.

So it appears that ignoring spam is counterproductive. It just generates more spam. But eventually, if few enough people click-through, then spam becomes uneconomical and we’ll be free. So while the surge in spam I notice on my desk may be coming from technological improvement in the ability of the spammers, to reach us, I think part of it is born of despair at the low rates of return that spammers are earning on any one effort.

The lesson here is to keep ignoring those offers. Remember no matter how great your need is to lose weight while you sleep or to have those fuller lips or to get that low mortgage rates, responding to those offers is punishing the rest of us. So keep resisting. Buy your Viagra from your local pharmacist. Ignore that urgent request for help from the former Liberian Minister of Oil.

What we really need is some stigma or other punishment for people who buy from spammers. My colleague Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution suggests creating fake spam (talk about gilding the lilly or maybe it should be tarnishing the lead pipe) to find out who is responding and imposing costs on the rests of us. Alex would then publish the names of the responders as a hall of shame.

George Johnson offers a nice update in today's New York Times (rr) on spam and artificial intelligence. He gets in a reference to Pygmalion and puts spam filtering into the intellectual history of artificial intelligence and speaks very highly of Spamprobe as a successful filter. I'm going to give it a try. I have a small fear that it's a spamscam, a mole that will open up my computer to an unending stream of unwanted lunch meat. I'll keep you posted.

Technology Update

Reader Peter Hays points out that the technology in the parking lot delight is infrared just like the self-flushing toilets.

Reader Roger Meiners says his dentist doesn't use the modern day pliers for tooth removal, but a laser.

And in my list of modern day improvements, I should have mentioned self-dissolving sutures. Some comfort, but that laser is definitely the future. Or the present, for those lucky few.