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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Circling back around to the topic of space exploration, this article by Palladium on the reasons for exploring space brings up an interesting shift in how geopolitical justifications are made over the last hundred years or so.

The main thrust of the article hypothesizes that there may never be a truly strong economic or political incentive to push space travel. I'm not necessarily convinced this is the case, but I agree that most people that try to justify going to space all those terms are fighting a losing battle. Even if we do stand to gain massively from an economic perspective by pioneering various space initiatives, the timescale for any reasonable returns is in the hundreds of years. Not something that will motivate people to come out to the ballot box anytime soon.

What's really fascinating about the conclusion, however, is that the article points out in excellent pro something I hadn't really grasped before:

Modern governments are often wrongly derided for lacking vision. In fact, they are already committed to multi-trillion-dollar, multi-decade-long visions that require all of society, technology, and world geopolitics to be back-engineered accordingly. The U.S. government, for example, spends half its budget on social welfare programs, especially for the elderly. We take for granted that this is unremarkable, when in fact it is extremely historically unusual and a reflection of our deep commitment to a certain kind of post-industrial society that existentially values comfort and individuality.

While it's debatable whether or not the modern welfare state and social security in western countries really qualifies as a 'vision' of the future, it's absolutely true that the massive social engineering projects we have going on nowadays are far more ambitious and far more expensive than any of the space initiatives that have been proposed so far. This discrepancy is to the tune of multiple orders of magnitude.

The article rightly points out that the only thing that ever motivates people to enact these massive governmental projects are social, religious, or emotional goals. Despite all of our fancy rhetoric, humanity as a whole is nowhere near rational in our large scale decision making. This is a fundamental flaw when it comes to most rationalists or philosophers trying to create policy prescriptions - they lay out a beautiful argument, but failed to give any reasons that will truly motivate people to follow their argument.

I'll let the article conclude itself:

The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.

More importantly, the sociological challenge of persuading a whole society to migrate into the unknown is very different from that of an explorer’s mission, which needs only the promise of adventure. Like the ancient Israelites, the Pilgrims, or the Mormons, a great migration will only occur when a Promised Land has been credibly found. Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough. Whether with colossal space telescopes or ultra-fast nano-probes armed with cameras, we will need to have beautiful images and real maps of alien worlds before human civilization can become interstellar. The purpose of interplanetary expansion is to build the infrastructure and technology to make such scopes and probes feasible. These will be our cathedrals, the legacy which we will leave to our descendants.

it's absolutely true that the massive social engineering projects we have going on nowadays are far more ambitious and far more expensive than any of the space initiatives that have been proposed so far. This discrepancy is to the tune of multiple orders of magnitude.

I'm 100% onboard with having a magnitudes-richer space program and reevaluating our budget priorities. But I just wanted to raise a minor note of pushback on this specific (very common) rhetoric.

Social security mostly takes the form of 'We take in $X dollars in taxes, we send out $X dollars in direct checks to citizens'.

While it is certainly included in all the charts of the federal budget, I always find it mistaken/disingenuous to call something like this 'government spending.'

It's just a redistribution program. The government isn't taking money from people and spending it on government programs, it's taking money from people and giving it to other people.

It's certainly a huge redistribution program that constitutes major social engineering, but it's not exactly spending in the way that a space program or a military or the FDA are spending. It's paid for by a dedicated tax just for itself.

If the military went away, the government would have a lot of freed up money to spend on different things. And if they lowered taxes by the amount the military cost, the the people would have more money to spend on things than they did before.

If Social Security went away, it would be hard to justify not also getting rid of Social Security taxes, so the government wouldn't have more to spend on other things. And the people wouldn't have more to spend on other things, either, since they were already getting that money back in direct checks anyway.

I agree that we should direct a bunch of the federal budget to space flight and other big ambitious projects. But it feels disingenuous/mistaken to look at things like Social Security when making those comparisons.

That's a fair point, and I can see how the comparison might come off a little disingenuous. As you say though, we are still taxing the money from people. I know at least for many younger generations, the expectation that they will get any rewards personally out of social security is close to nil. I'm sure the vast majority don't even think about it though, and grumble about "taxes" in general.

So it shows that the tax burden can support a great amount. I'd love to replace social security with space flight, but that's definitely a pipe dream.

What other big ambitious projects would you want funded?

Fair enough, although I'd like to see if I can sell you on the idea that if we ended Social Security, the 40 years olds who currently grumble about payroll taxes, would instead grumble about having to support their now-penniless retired parents. We'd still have to pay to support those old people somehow, so it's not 'free' money...

Of course, it could be that they'd just mostly move in with their kids, or we'd find some other solution that's less expensive than the current model, so in that sense maybe we are spending more on them now than we would without SS (but getting whatever benefit we get from old people being more independent... social engineering stuff, as you say).

If we're calling SS-style 'tax people then send out checks' government spending, then I'm a big proponent of a universal generous UBI (handled in the same way, tax everyone using progressive taxation then send out the same amount in checks, so it's effectively downward redistribution). I think we're kind of stuck in a sub-optimal Nashe equilibrium that produces a lot of unnecessary unproductive labor, because the universal 40 hour workweek is expected and people don't have the financial leverage to negotiate any changes to it.

I think we may as well make some big infrastructure improvements, including clean energy (counting nuclear) and massively increasing the supply of housing to drive down costs. Also the types of internet and community infrastructure projects needed to help people capable of doing remote work move out of cities, I feel like the population could be a lot less centralized at this point in our economic development.

I'd sort of like to see a massive effort to gather the type of data it would take to actually understand and map how modern technology (screens all the time, social media, engagement algorithms, etc) are affecting people and society, and test better options at large scales. Lots of individual researchers are studying those things but generally in small ways in small labs, I think a really big unified effort would be needed to do the type of data collection and analysis necessary to really learn much. I'm not sure the government is competent to do that, but they could at least provide enough resources to gather the data that other researchers could analyze.

Of course, it could be that they'd just mostly move in with their kids, or we'd find some other solution that's less expensive than the current model, so in that sense maybe we are spending more on them now than we would without SS

It seems like most of them would sell their houses to fund their retirements.

Oh, the dream!!!!! Don't tempt me more with these beautiful visions of Paradise, I don't know if my poor heart can take it....

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