Faith in Technology [repaired]
Now, this may come as a shock to you, but many so-called environmentalists seem to have an anti-technology gene in them. That's strange, because so many of them seem to think that somehow we can change things around so that we can enjoy a reasonable standard of living slightly below the one we have now, but without so much impact on the environment, and not require any technology to do it. So, any time you see a disagreement between people on large-scale issues like global warming, energy, famine, food, etc., someone is bound to introduce Julian Simon into the debate, and the anti-technologist is going to shoot back something about faith in technology, repeatedly resorting to the use of "faith" as if people who explicitly rely on science are somehow hypocrites for having little fear of something about which we cannot have evidence (the future).*
So a few weeks ago, I was reading Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and came across the use of this interesting graph form. He uses it repeatedly to show how disruptive technologies come into a market as inferior technologies, then gradually take market share.
One of Simon's favorite techniques was to show that the projected demand for anything (food, fuel, housing, etc.) could be met - even if barely - with current typical practices, but easily met with current best practices, and met with ridiculously few resources using the best experimental practices.
Applying Christensen's graphical depiction to Simon's thesis, we get a picture like this the one nearby. There are those still practicing the outdated practices, and others practicing a typical method. Mathematically, the average method always yields less than the state-of-the-art method, unless every competitor is using the best practice (unlikely, unless there is only one competitor). Therefore, there is always room for improvement simply by adopting different but known practices. Furthermore, there is always a better idea just below market acceptance, and a few more even less well developed than that. That is now, not later.
I also remembered reading an article in the Journal of Law and Economics a while back in which the authors found that "first to the market" status conferred a positive advantage, but that the length of that advantage had declined from 30 years in 1887-1906 to about 4.5 years in 1986. In other words, the rate of change is accelerating. The article was "First-Mover Advantage and the Speed of Competitive Entry, 1887-1986", JLE vol XIV, April 2001.
HP had a winner with the Laserjet, but other companies held the low end of the market with dot matrix. A few years later, HP destroyed the dot matrix market with the inkjet printer. Nobody saw it coming; inkjet was inferior to both dot matrix (speed and total cost of operation) and Laserjet (resolution) at its inception, but soon took over enough of each that it cannibalized Laserjet sales. Ex ante, a disruptive innovation always seems like it came from nowhere. Ex post, it seems strange that it took so long. Now, it may be faith to believe that all problems are going to be solvable by something other than the trivial solution (e.g. everyone dying is a trivial solution to peak oil), but that's not what I'm arguing. I am suggesting that many solvable problems seem unsolvable by people who disregard the fact that so many potential solutions are either existing best practices, best lab technologies, or even below marketability. These solutions are available now, even though the dominant solution, the market average, may even be the low cost alternative at present.
Think about that for a second: why would anyone even be looking for a solution when the existing solution is the low-cost or high-performance alternative? And yet, people are not only trying to introduce an "inferior technology" (soon to become the next dominant technology, per Christensen), but they are looking beyond that for the next disruptive technology. Look at this post at Green Car Congress, for example: we are in Biofuels Gen 2, which will be sulfur-free and reduced aromatics compared to existing fuels, while people are already looking at Gen 3, 4, and 5 (reduced emissions, reduced emissions and lower CO2, and emission- and CO2-free, respectively). None of them are economically or perhaps even technically feasible now, but the research is going on even though oil is hands-down the cheapest alternative.
Now, since the Green Car Congress is "green", i.e. they favor the right policy mix, they are activists. If Julian Simon says the same thing, he is not an activist, he is a crackpot. He is "not realistic", "putting his faith in the Almighty Free Market", "putting his faith in Almighty Science and Technology", etc. Extrapolation from historical and contemporary facts is not faith any more than the belief that things dropped will fall. Simon was ridiculed for that view: critics said that when falling from a ten story building, Simon would claim that everything was okay until just before he hit the ground.
That's a poor analogy on several counts; one suspects that men falling from buildings would be aware of it, even to the point of obsession, and would not only not answer glibly, but they may not be able to answer intelligibly at all. It is at least arguable whether our current situation is one as dire as falling to certain death. After all, if our civilization's demise is certain, then why try to change? Even people who ostensibly believe (as the Club of Rome appear to in The Limits to Growth) that we are doomed also try to induce change to cheat the inevitable. Once you accept the premise that our trajectory can be changed, then Simon is on the same level of credibility, but with a different normative prescription. Simon's counter-analogy was that when sky-diving, the (hard) Greens would prefer to cut themselves free of their free market parachute on the theory that it might not work this time. He put their thinking in a third category: neither faith, nor reality-based, but rather like faithlessness.
* Of course, if the future is absolutely unknowable, there is neither reason to fear nor embrace it.
peak oil julian simon innovators dilemma Limits to Growth
So a few weeks ago, I was reading Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and came across the use of this interesting graph form. He uses it repeatedly to show how disruptive technologies come into a market as inferior technologies, then gradually take market share.
One of Simon's favorite techniques was to show that the projected demand for anything (food, fuel, housing, etc.) could be met - even if barely - with current typical practices, but easily met with current best practices, and met with ridiculously few resources using the best experimental practices.
Applying Christensen's graphical depiction to Simon's thesis, we get a picture like this the one nearby. There are those still practicing the outdated practices, and others practicing a typical method. Mathematically, the average method always yields less than the state-of-the-art method, unless every competitor is using the best practice (unlikely, unless there is only one competitor). Therefore, there is always room for improvement simply by adopting different but known practices. Furthermore, there is always a better idea just below market acceptance, and a few more even less well developed than that. That is now, not later.
I also remembered reading an article in the Journal of Law and Economics a while back in which the authors found that "first to the market" status conferred a positive advantage, but that the length of that advantage had declined from 30 years in 1887-1906 to about 4.5 years in 1986. In other words, the rate of change is accelerating. The article was "First-Mover Advantage and the Speed of Competitive Entry, 1887-1986", JLE vol XIV, April 2001.
HP had a winner with the Laserjet, but other companies held the low end of the market with dot matrix. A few years later, HP destroyed the dot matrix market with the inkjet printer. Nobody saw it coming; inkjet was inferior to both dot matrix (speed and total cost of operation) and Laserjet (resolution) at its inception, but soon took over enough of each that it cannibalized Laserjet sales. Ex ante, a disruptive innovation always seems like it came from nowhere. Ex post, it seems strange that it took so long. Now, it may be faith to believe that all problems are going to be solvable by something other than the trivial solution (e.g. everyone dying is a trivial solution to peak oil), but that's not what I'm arguing. I am suggesting that many solvable problems seem unsolvable by people who disregard the fact that so many potential solutions are either existing best practices, best lab technologies, or even below marketability. These solutions are available now, even though the dominant solution, the market average, may even be the low cost alternative at present.
Think about that for a second: why would anyone even be looking for a solution when the existing solution is the low-cost or high-performance alternative? And yet, people are not only trying to introduce an "inferior technology" (soon to become the next dominant technology, per Christensen), but they are looking beyond that for the next disruptive technology. Look at this post at Green Car Congress, for example: we are in Biofuels Gen 2, which will be sulfur-free and reduced aromatics compared to existing fuels, while people are already looking at Gen 3, 4, and 5 (reduced emissions, reduced emissions and lower CO2, and emission- and CO2-free, respectively). None of them are economically or perhaps even technically feasible now, but the research is going on even though oil is hands-down the cheapest alternative.
Now, since the Green Car Congress is "green", i.e. they favor the right policy mix, they are activists. If Julian Simon says the same thing, he is not an activist, he is a crackpot. He is "not realistic", "putting his faith in the Almighty Free Market", "putting his faith in Almighty Science and Technology", etc. Extrapolation from historical and contemporary facts is not faith any more than the belief that things dropped will fall. Simon was ridiculed for that view: critics said that when falling from a ten story building, Simon would claim that everything was okay until just before he hit the ground.
That's a poor analogy on several counts; one suspects that men falling from buildings would be aware of it, even to the point of obsession, and would not only not answer glibly, but they may not be able to answer intelligibly at all. It is at least arguable whether our current situation is one as dire as falling to certain death. After all, if our civilization's demise is certain, then why try to change? Even people who ostensibly believe (as the Club of Rome appear to in The Limits to Growth) that we are doomed also try to induce change to cheat the inevitable. Once you accept the premise that our trajectory can be changed, then Simon is on the same level of credibility, but with a different normative prescription. Simon's counter-analogy was that when sky-diving, the (hard) Greens would prefer to cut themselves free of their free market parachute on the theory that it might not work this time. He put their thinking in a third category: neither faith, nor reality-based, but rather like faithlessness.
* Of course, if the future is absolutely unknowable, there is neither reason to fear nor embrace it.
peak oil julian simon innovators dilemma Limits to Growth
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