Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

More Lane Thoughts

2 Comments

I put up a post the other day in which I described how unimpressed I was with Neal Lane’s comments on space policy. It turns out that Paul Spudis didn’t think much of them, either. He’s actually harder on him than I was:

(Neal Lane) has made some public statements that are so egregiously ignorant that I cannot remain silent.

Tell us how you really feel, Paul.

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul writes:

Aside from the idea of continuing to fly the Space Shuttle (not a very good idea for many reasons), none of this is particularly new but rather a re-statement of the Apollo-era meme that, “If we can go to the Moon, we can solve the (fill-in-the-blank) crisis.” Since energy and climate change are the current crises du jour, some seek to capitalize on the public’s fondness for the NASA of old (“The Right Stuff”) with the frantic cry that it should be redirected to make these “fixes.”

I deconstructed this kind of thinking last summer, for the Apollo landing anniversary:

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones.

As I note at the end of the piece, if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we get people to stop making inappropriate analogies with landing a man on the moon?

[Saturday morning update]

Over at Space Politics, commenter “Red” has some useful thoughts:

Continue reading More Lane Thoughts →

Political Commentary, Space

A Space Council?

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Jeff Foust has some interesting testimony from the president’s science adviser:

We have been looking at what the best way to resurrect the National Space Council in the White House would be. I think that’s going to happen. There’s no question that the gap in our capacity to put people in space is a matter of great concern with the shuttle program coming to an end and its successor program not yet ready.

That seems like good news. I wonder who will head it. Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s involvement is minimal.

He also lays out rationale for space:

Space is crucial to our national defense; it’s crucial to civil as well as military communications and geopositioning; it’s crucial to weather forecasting and storm monitoring; crucial to observation and scientific study of the condition of our home planet’s land, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere; and it’s crucial to scientific study and exploration looking outward.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but no mention of planetary defense or off-planet economic development or resources. There is nothing in there that would support an effort to open up space for the masses, or imply more support for private efforts. Too bad that there was no follow-up questioning in that regard.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Ended The Depression

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Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).

One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”

[Update a while later]

OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.

What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]

[Late morning update]

Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.

And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Shameless

Here’s a good round up of the corruption and collusion between Congress and the financial industry:

While Americans were asked to foot the bill—for generations—to bail out Wall Street executives from their sub-prime, mortgage-mad, derivatives driven, un-regulated market—politicians from all parties lined up to feed at the trough—knowing full well that it was these same companies’ bad business practices that placed our financial system at systemic risk.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is being paid by taxpayers to oversee these institutions, should return the money on principle or resign from the committee.

Don’t hold your breath.