Alan Boyle writes that it may be not tourism, but research.
People are going to look back at the history, and wonder why we weren’t doing this decades ago. There was certainly no technological reason.
Category Archives: Economics
Matthew Yglesias
…meets Public Choice 101. I think that, more than anything, this demonstrates the potential for utter worthlessness of a Harvard degree. As Joe Katzman notes:
That’s what happens when you take classes in theoretics where critical thinking is actively expunged, and pay $100k+ for the privilege. It’s an extremely common way to be uneducated these days.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I went over and read Joe’s link on theoretics (by Orson Scott Card), and it turned out to be a lot more than that. It’s a piece about groupthink, and how it has poisoned the theoretical physics community with string theory. It actually reminded me a lot of the conventional wisdom of space policy and launch costs.
Ignorance On Space Power
I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:
Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.
…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.
The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.
And then we have this:
there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.
First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:
Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.
Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:
Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.
“…astronomical…” Sigh…
And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?
The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:
As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?
Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.
The Horror Of Climate Engineering
Some thoughts over at Tierneylab. I think that people like Roger Pielke are just sticking their head in the economics sand. As Professor Bickel points out, doing a cost/benefit analysis is unavoidable. The only issue is whether it’s implicit, or explicit. The Warm Mongers don’t want it to be explicit, because it makes it harder to defend their position.
Some Thoughts On Trust
This piece kind of jumped out at me, because of this post the other day:
…my Comcast cable service crashed yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house in the landline phone – and that’s only because, when Comcast offered that service as well, my wife replied, “I don’t trust you people not to screw that up as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right.”
And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet’s to file this column.
As someone noted in comments at the landline post, during Florida hurricanes, he lost everything, and his POTS phone line fell down on to the ground, but it never quit working. My experience during Frances and Jeanne five years ago was the same — no power, no cell, but I never lost phone, including DSL. I was blogging right after the storm, using a laptop and modem plugged into a power inverter running off the car battery.
Low US Life Expectancy
Don’t blame the health-care system. The socialists will have to come up with a different excuse.
[Update a few minutes later]
US life expectancy is at an all-time high.
In Government…
Oblivious to manifest failure, the liberal-progressive idea keeps itself afloat on intellectual water wings—insisting that most people still believe that if government commits itself to accomplishing a public good, it will more or less succeed despite the difficulties and inefficiencies of these great projects. Needed good gets done.
That civics-book faith in the good intentions of government has been on the bubble with a broad swath of the American people who don’t know left from right but only public performance. The Obama health-care proposal arrived at a particularly bad moment to be asking voters to “trust us.”
By the time Barack Obama entered the White House, the exploding of the housing bubble had covered the landscape with the bodies of bankers, brokers and politicians who’d promised people a yellow-brick road lined with houses sold with fairy-tale down payments. Then the gods delivered a final lesson in misplaced trust: the Madoff Ponzi scheme.
I believe Madoff’s massive and destructive breach of trust had an effect on the public mind that carried beyond the tragedy of its immediate victims. After Madoff, John Q. Public set the bar really high for anyone seeking a big commitment of trust with money. But that’s exactly what the ambitious Obama health plan did.
President Obama in his public pleas for the plan appears to be truly upset that his benign view of it isn’t obvious to all. In his op-ed Sunday for the New York Times he said, “We’ll cut hundreds of billions in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid.” Hundreds of billions? Just like that? This is nothing but an assertion by one man. It’s close to Peter Pan telling the children that thinking lovely thoughts will make them fly.
I think that when history records what happened, the straw that broke the camel’s back, after the disastrous stimulus that was rammed through, the cap’n’tax bill, the GM and Chrysler takeovers and handovers to the UAW, the inability of the administration to predict the economy and the failed unemployment promises, was cash for clunkers. The government couldn’t even write checks to car dealers, and they want to take over a sixth of the economy and our very physical well being?
Thanks, but no thanks. That could end up being Obama’s Katrina
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related thoughts from Chris Muir.
[Update a couple minutes later still]
“Questions of competence start to dog Obama team.” Gee, ya think?
It’s been 177 days since Obama made his initial pitch for a health care overhaul to a joint session of Congress. That the president’s team is still spending so much time stroking the Democratic base is evidence of how dire the situation is for this young administration.
Two decisions on health care have rattled Democrats.
First, the president chose to not sell his own plan but instead tried to get Congress to rush something through before lawmakers — and the public — fully understood what was in the bill. Second, the administration attempted an ungainly flip-flop on the issue of government-run insurance.
Many Democrats think that the stars were aligned for health care but increasingly see the administration as having squandered the moment.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took a beating Tuesday for an outright evasion on whether Obama has changed his position on the public option. Down the hall, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel snarled to the New York Times that the White House is finally done with bipartisanship … again.
Democrats can’t be blamed for wondering if these guys know what they’re doing.
And it’s pretty hard to dispel them when you have a boob like Robert Gibbs as your spokeshole. But particularly when the questions seem to be being answered, every day. There was never any reason to think that the guy would have any competence at running the country. He had never run anything so much as a lemonade stand before running for president, other than campaigns (and he didn’t really even do that), or if he did, it was probably subsidized by his mother. You hire someone with no experience, and this is what you get. I think that buyer’s remorse has to be setting in even among Democrats, even if they won’t admit it. This sums up their cluelessness (and that of the conventional wisdom in the fellating media all last year):
The way Obama brushed off the challenges of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain last year made Democrats believe he had infallible political instincts and was a forceful leader.
But what if Obama was lucky in the adversaries he drew and in the timing of the economic collapse? What if Democrats confused serendipity and ego for keen judgment and executive ability?
What if, indeed?
Plus, we’re getting tired of being demonized by our own government because we see through the fraud:
I do have all the hallmarks of the cynic. “In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain,” President Barack Obama wrote in The New York Times on Sunday, after gazing into the near future of the health care debate and seeing a dystopia full of “scare tactics.” And it’s true. I am “exploiting” “concerns.” By expressing them. In print. In conversation. My 30 to 60 percent fearmongering brethren and I, cynics that we are, just keep having concerns.
We fearmongers and our “concerns” wield an unholy power over the political process. How else to explain what happened? A plan—noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in form admirable—was presented to the American people. The obvious genius of the plan failed to carry it through intact. As more details were revealed, more and more people got antsy about the whole endeavor. They mentioned their concerns to their congressmen, sometimes loudly. Congress got cold feet, and now everyone is sitting in time out, thinking about what they did wrong.
When Obama, the man of hope, tells this story, it sounds like a failure of the democratic process, corrupted by special interests who somehow forced all those people to holler at town meetings and forced me to write this article. Again, though, without the actual writing of checks. But someone of a non-cynical nature might equally see this story as a great success of participatory democracy, with representatives accountable to the people.
Let’s hope that accounting comes next year.
[Afternoon update]
Public-relations nitwits:
The problem for Obama is deep and not easily fixable. The hallmark of good public relations is to stay on message. Everyone knows that. But in order to do that you have to have a message. Some people seem to think his message is “socialism.” Maybe some days. I don’t even think he’s that consistent. I think this man is flying blind. Not surprising, really. All he ever did was run for office. No wonder he has had no time to formulate policy.
As I’ve said previously, it’s not enough to have a better dog-food commercial if the dog thinks the food tastes like crap.
And Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the meltdown:
Cap-and-trade, the mega-deficits, the apology tours, and the sleaze of some appointments and congressional grandees (cf. Rangel, Dodd, Murtha, etc.) were stimulants, but not in themselves enough to awaken the somnolent American people from their collective trance. Yet health care was like a shot of adrenaline that jolted the patient out of his slumber. Suddenly hope and change no longer worked like the swinging watch and “you’re getting sleepy” lingo. Voters are feeling they’ve been “had” and were mesmerized into being used for an extremist agenda.
Who made the following decisions? 1) to propose a 1,000 page bill that no one had read, much less could explain?; 2) to ram down the greatest change in the US economy in fifty years by the August recess?; 3) to talk loosely of the “uninsured” without knowing why they were not insured, how much it would cost to insure them, or whether they currently in fact find some sort of care?; 4) to reference Rahm Emanuel’s doctor brother as a source of wisdom? 5) to demonize the health-care industry as greedy?
(NB: Does Obama really believe that illegal aliens do not possess 200-300 dollars a month to buy catastrophic health coverage, when they send on average at least that amount back to Mexico on the assumption the emergency room here is free, for everything from injuries to natal care? Does he believe that a 25-year old does not gamble that his robust health means he prefers his I-pod, DVDs, and nights out to squirreling away cash each month for health insurance? There are flaws in our system that must be corrected, but the notion of conspirators in black hats who plot to prevent health care for the “uninsured” is fallacious.
He also has some good advice, that the president almost certainly won’t take, because it simply isn’t in his nature.
The Landline Problem
I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.
I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.
Unaccountability
Some thoughts:
The Empire State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs New York City’s buses and subways, is not that different from Citigroup, in that it’s a supposedly independent, corporate-style public authority that enjoys the perception of a government guarantee.
Last week, the MTA consummated an embarrassingly profligate deal with its largest labor union, and yet the political class has largely escaped accountability.
Because the MTA is supposedly independent of political forces, Governor Paterson can adeptly deflect attention away from his responsibility for the deal, although the powerful transit union, of course, knows to be thankful.
Meanwhile, the MTA’s own management bureaucracy plays its role only too well. The MTA itself largely serves as a distracting generator of incompetence and intrigue, so the media doesn’t focus consistently on the fact that it’s the elected pols who are only to happy to give away the store at the expense of actual investment in transit and in the city’s economy.
Do we really want the global financial industry — necessarily affected by Citi’s outsized, government-guaranteed role — to be subject to the same poisonous and demoralizing political and public-policy dynamics as New York’s MTA?
This is where corporatism (in the interest of political correctness, I won’t call it by its true name — fascism) leads.
Long Live Space Station!
So says Jeff Manber:
By all media accounts, including that of Augustine himself on the news shows, the officials were told that going back to the Moon or on to Mars is impossible at current budget levels. I’m happy about that—because it just seems to me that the Augustine panel’s report should focus not on another hardware project, but how the federal government procures space goods and hardware.
I’ve thought from the start that a government commission deciding which rocket should be built, or where the orbiting gas stations should be located, smacks of government planning at its worst. If all of Washington, including President Obama, can agree that despite investing $50 billion in General Motors, the auto czar has no place selecting the new models of automobiles, why should it be different for rockets or lunar modules?
For me, it was kind of a Cold War throwback to have watched as members of the Augustine panel have traveled around the country listening to engineers and industry executives talk up one launch system and bad mouth another, push for one new NASA program and throw cold water on another. Think “sunshine laws” meets a Politburo meeting.
Norm Augustine should report to the president that the problem afflicting our space program is not this hardware or that program, but the way we are spending our tens of billions for space.
Exactly.
[Afternoon update]
The Space Frontier Foundation says that Ares needs a death panel:
“Derivatives of proven commercial launch systems, and new ones under development, could meet any reasonable need for heavy lift,” said Foundation co-Founder, James Muncy. “The barrier is psychological: NASA will have to stop pretending it can design cost-effective launch vehicles and instead focus on exploration systems that fit on the launch vehicles taxpayers can really afford.”
Werb concluded: “The choice is clear. We can continue funding an overpriced, government space limousine, or we can kick-start a whole new industry that will reduce government’s costs and create new jobs. The tools of private sector innovation and competition offer our best and only chance to have affordable and sustainable human space exploration.”
Unfortunately, it’s not so clear to those who want to keep Huntsville green.