Alternative boondoggles
The direct cost to the US government of the war and occupation of Iraq — counting only funds appropriated by Congress — so far runs to roughly $523Bn.
However, that's the direct cost — money directly spent on the project. There are indirect costs, too: Joseph Stiglitz estimates the true cost of the war to be $3Tn to the United States, and $3Tn to the rest of the global economy. These are indirect costs, and factor in the long-term additional expenses that the war has accrued — everything from caring for brain-damaged soldiers for the next 50 years through to loss of economic productivity attributable to instabilities in the supply of oil from Iraq.
We can tap-dance around the indirect costs, but the direct costs (that headline figure of $523Bn) are inarguable.
So. What fun boondoggles could we have bought with either $523Bn (at the low end) or $6Tn (at the high end)?
NASA have plans for a manned Mars expedition based on the Ares spacecraft they're developing as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Price estimates vary from $20Bn (presumably for a single round-trip) to $450Bn (presumably for a single round trip plus all the externalities, like developing the spacecraft and equipment and conducting a thorough prior reconnaissance using unmanned landers).
Either way, the direct costs of the Iraq war exceed the maximum cost estimate for a manned Mars expedition, infrastructure and all, by 20%. If we take $20Bn as the cost per mission and $450Bn as the cost to develop the technology to go there, the direct cost of the Iraq war would be sufficient to develop a gold-plated Mars expeditionary capability and send six crews of astronauts to Mars (and bring them back afterwards).
Going by Stiglitz's indirect estimates, the picture is even more ludicrous; for $3Tn, assuming a crew of four per expedition, $20Bn per flight, and a basic $450 start-up price, you could send 510 astronauts to Mars. That's not a Mars exploration program, that's a battalion! It's a small colony! Regular readers will be familiar with my opinion of plans to colonize Mars ... but if you throw enough money at a scheme you can probably get something out of it, even if it's only another Darien Scheme.
Or perhaps we could tackle global warming by building nuclear reactors. Westinghouse AP1000 PWRs cost roughly $2Bn a pop and have a net output of 1117Mw (1.12Gw). For $513Bn we could probably negotiate a bulk discount of, say, 20%, in which case we're good for 320 reactors, or about 375Gw of output. Our entire planetary civilization consumes about 16Tw, but the USA accounts for about 40% of that, so we could buy, outright, the equivalent of 6% of the US's energy budget. But this stuff pays for itself (it's producing electricity, a fungible commodity) and in actual fact, 50% of the USA's energy budget is coal, burned for juice. So we could cut 12% of the USA's coal-sourced carbon emissions, enabling the USA to not only meet but exceed the Kyoto protocol requirements using a single, fiendishly expensive gambit (and treating it not as capital investment but as expenditure).
For $6Tn we could buy a lot of juice — a quarter of our global civilization's energy budget would go carbon-neutral at a stroke. (Yes, we just solved our carbon dioxide emissions problem by switching to a nuclear economy.) This probably isn't the ideal way of dealing with our environmental problems, and it's a naive treatment of the costs (has anyone done a proper treatment of the economic implications of shifting the planet over to a nuclear economy, say to the same extent as France?) but it's thought-provoking.
Finally, there's all the other little stuff we could solve by pointing $513Bn at it, never mind $6000Bn. Eliminating childhood diseases in South-East Asia? Piffle — Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to do that out of their pocket lint. Build first-world grade housing in shiny new cities for 600 million Chinese peasants, nearly a tenth of the planetary population? Yes, this budget will cover that. What else?
Yes, I'm asking you: what would you do with the cost of the Iraq war (take your pick: $513Bn or $6000Bn) in your budget? Colonise Mars? Solve our carbon emission problem and fix global warming? House half a billion people? Or something else ...?
(And what isn't going to happen now, because we pissed it all away on the desert sands?)
Comments
How about colonise the oceans, a la Aquarius in Marshall T Savage's Colonising the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps? No doubt it requires a LOT of hard cash, but you'd probably see a financial return quicker than investing in colonising Mars. While I strongly suspect much of the rest of the book doesn't stack up that well, colonising the oceans in that fashion is something that could be done if you threw enough money at it.
Posted by: Matthew Daly | May 26, 2008 11:24 AM
Increase spending on fusion research. It would guarantee the supply of energy for the coming centuries. Even if we switch to nuclear how long would the supply of Uranium or Plutonium last?
Posted by: cyber-whelk | May 26, 2008 11:42 AM
Money doesn't simply evaporate* - it changes hands. Besides thinking of what could have been done with the money spent, I think it's more important to know where it ended up/went through. A good, solid investigation would be very useful for people to wake up, and see exactly who profited from the Iraq "war". As a gedankenexperiment it would open a lot of eyes for the coming US presidential elections...
(* yes, the M3 soufflé can collapse if the oven door is banged a bit too hard and make all that "real" credit money just go kablooie)
Posted by: Pedro Pinheiro | May 26, 2008 12:01 PM
Darn it, just 2 postings and my idea is already mentioned.
@2: just to add a few figures. A number of nations spend more than a decade quibbling over who should pay how much to built ITER where. The total cost of the reactor - including running the experiments for some 15 years - was on the order of $25 billion. With just the direct cost of the war we could have had ITER finished by now and probably have the first commercial reactors long before 2025. This, however, is not necessarily a solution to our energy problems, since it is almost impossible to predict the results of this experiment and thus the cost for bigger reactors, that might result from large required amounts of unobtainium. But at a trifling 4% of the direct cost of the war, it would have been worth a shot, as it is one of the few constant energy sources with plenty of fuel around.
Posted by: tp1024 | May 26, 2008 12:12 PM
Another comparison:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/05/25/three-trillion-dollar-war-in-iraq/
For the price of the Iraq war, you could instead have distributed suit cases full of 1.5 million dollars to each family living in Iraq at the time the war began.
How many hearts and minds would that win over? Isn't that what it's all about?
Posted by: Yadda | May 26, 2008 12:27 PM
Buy a controlling interest in Microsoft and open source all their software.
Alternatively, pump some serious cash into basic research.
Posted by: Gustav Bertram | May 26, 2008 12:28 PM
Bussard's polywell fusion reactor research was looking promising before the Navy energy budget that was funding his work was zeroed to help fund the war in Iraq.
$500Bn should have been easily enough to get the technology ready for mass deployment.
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell)
Posted by: David McBride | May 26, 2008 12:29 PM
We could also invest it in renewable energy.
Humanity uses around 1.5e13 W, and the Earth receives around 1.366e3 W per m² from the Sun (varies with year and month).
Earth has a land area of around 1.5e8 km². Assuming 10% efficiency for photovoltaics, that means we need to cover around 1.1e5 km² with solar cells. That is around the land area of Cuba.
Not that I would advocate switching all our energy production over to solar, but it demonstrates how little is necessary to ensure all our needs are met.
Posted by: Markus Sablatnig | May 26, 2008 12:49 PM
@Markus And the beauty is that all the sunniest areas are deserts where there's plenty of room and few people live anyway - solar power plants in the Sahara could easily meet the world's need.
Posted by: Matthew Daly | May 26, 2008 1:02 PM
With a few $Billion, the following would be a doddle.
Algae can be grown to make bio-diesel.
Grow it in tubes to reduced contamination issues.
Put tubes in desert to not compete with food crops.
Run your SUV's forever; cheaper; CO2 neutral.
Stop fighting wars over the flammable stuff.
Not my URL below, but it's relevant.
Posted by: Andrew Downing | May 26, 2008 1:38 PM
Education, education, education.
Invest it in educating the global population up a few holons, so they won't be as keen to a) buy plasma TVs and SUVs, b) kill each other. Having sufficient awareness of one's connectedness to other beings/the planet (and therefore the consequences of action) goes hand in hand with cognitive advancement.
David Bohm got it spot on 'On Dialogue' (to paraphrase poorly) "What's the point in cleaning up the planet if we haven't cleaned up ourselves first".
Education in the broadest commonsensical sense, not SATs, what's needed in C21 is meta education. Equipping people with the tools to learn what they need to learn for themselves. And that's a sea change and to do it quickly will need plenty of resource.
Fix education and everything else will follow in just a generation or two. It's not like we don't have the technology or at least the dreaming of it.
Posted by: Greg Eden | May 26, 2008 2:05 PM
The US could have built out a world-class medium-range rail system, something that will look more and more useful as oil reserves drop.
I have a feeling that money will be missed as climate disasters continue to grow in strength and frequency.
Posted by: Owen Williams | May 26, 2008 2:12 PM
My top 3 would be:
1) Batteries. Or, to be more pedantic, efficient energy transportation methods and tools. The main reason we're using petrol and its derivatives is because it's the most efficient form of energy transportation we have currently at our disposal. I'd gladly replace my fuel tank with a reasonable sized ultra capacitor. And that wad of cash would just about cover the cost of converting all those petrol stations into charging outlets.
2) Nanotech research. I want a 2mm thick diamond window in my house for $2. I want solar-powered nanobots breaking down sand and carbon dioxide at the same time and turning it into oxygen and silicone (or silicone carbide) for all our computing needs. I want my self-upgradable computer and intelligent house and flying car, dammit! :)
3) Lunar base. If those money could put 500 people on Mars, I guess they could pay for a self-sustaining lunar colony in place. So who cares that it will evolve into an independent nation - undoubtedly called the Heinlein Republic. It would still be nice to know that if we Earthlings mess up our home planet big time, there's still going to be someone left to try again (aside from the cockroaches).
Posted by: Laur | May 26, 2008 2:26 PM
I would hire 100,000 of the under-employed and I would run fiber optic cable to every residence and business in the country. What a wonderful improvement in our global competitiveness that would be.
Posted by: Don McArthur | May 26, 2008 2:34 PM
Don, you're thinking small. Hire 100,000 folks -- on a $500Bn budget -- and you'll be paying them $5M each (or expecting 'em to use the thick end of $5M of equipment each). Plus, I think you'd find it'd take closer to a million folks to build out cable to every residence in the US -- some of those residences are remote!
Laur: I take it you don't share my opinion of space colonization.
Greg: so refershing to see someone don the deep green hair shirt of puritanism again! Yes, I'm sure we could make everything work just fine if only everybody stopped thinking Wrong Thoughts and realised the sinfulness of buying SUVs and plasma TVs. But once they've seen the bright lights, how're you going to keep 'em down on the farm?
Matthew: the Sahara could indeed meet our energy needs, if only we could keep it in sunlight 24 hours a day. Until then, we're going to need an intercontinental super-grid and/or some way of turning sunlight into storable energy.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 2:49 PM
Even at $6Tn, the Iraq war pales into insignificance next to the ongoing cost to humanity of, to pick a religion at random, the catholic church. How long did it spend squatting over Europe demanding, and receiving, 10% of pretty much everything? Would the world have seen anything like the 11/9/2001 attacks if some 11th century christian dumbass hadn't invented the crusade? Hell, if there's no church, there's no "Divine Right of Kings" - what might the world look like if people had realised that earlier?
It's nice to dream...
As for the half trillion? I'd spend it on malaria research, decent sewerage and universal education. That people are still dying of cholera more than 150 years after John Snow removed the Broad Street pump handle is an affront to humanity. Heck, the effort would probably pay for itself in the unleashed economic potential of the poor buggers currently oppressed by circumstance.
Posted by: Piers Cawley | May 26, 2008 2:54 PM
Charlie: Space colonization is the stuff of science-fiction. But I believe lunar colonization isn't; we could probably do it in this century, if we wanted to. I would argue that the science advances deriving from such an endeavour would alone make it a worthwhile project. That being said, it's still third on my list. :)
It's a funny coincidence that today BBC's "World have your say" decides to talk about what else could we have done with the $500 million invested in the Mars Phoenix space mission. Maybe you should call in? :)
Posted by: Laur | May 26, 2008 3:08 PM
I don't wish to see this thread hijacked but I really must answer Mr. Cawley and his anti-Catholic bigotry.
Without the Catholic Church, there would be no music, no art, no science, no social organization, no international law - in short, no Western Civilization. We might still be living like the savage barbarians that the church molded over the centuries into law abiding civility.
Or we would all be Muslim. The crusades were a minor, local counter attack compared to the total war waged by jihad from China to Spain. it may come as a shock to the historically ignorant (such as Mr. Cawley) but Islam was not spread peacefully.
Truely it is said that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the pseudo intellectual. Good day Mr. Cawley.
Posted by: atlatl | May 26, 2008 3:52 PM
About that sharp stint of communism for the USA that you've recommended in the past... where do I sign?
(Surely 6 trillion dollars worth of research is enough to get us to a very spiffy cybernetic economy (in the original sense of the word cybernetic
Posted by: B.Dewhirst | May 26, 2008 3:57 PM
@atlatl
And without the Catholic Church, there'd be a hell of a lot more South American Indians and a hell of a lot less molested children.
As far as "saving civilization"-- you burnt Alexandria in the first place, so don't talk to me about saving civilization.
Were the Catholic Church any institution other than a religious one, it would have gone the way of the Nazi party-- the Nuremburg trials followed by constitutional abolition of anything that even vaguely looks like it across all of Europe.
Posted by: B.Dewhirst | May 26, 2008 4:09 PM
It's not anticatholic bigotry. It's antitheism. Catholicism is just the example I chose. Religious thinking is a cancer of the human spirit, whether it be christianity, judaism, islam, buddhism, hinduism or any other creed that offers final solutions.
Posted by: Piers Cawley | May 26, 2008 4:10 PM
... and Mr/Ms. atlatl , with regards to your anti-islamic remarks in your post critical of anti-catholic remarks...
If you are really unfamiliar with who started the Crusades and who saved all those pretty books your boys in the white collars spent a millenia burning, you may wish to google it...
Posted by: B.Dewhirst | May 26, 2008 4:12 PM
Had there been no war, some of that money would have gone back to the taxpayer to use for private space ventures.
But why only focus on the regrets now? The war isn't quite over. There's still time to save more billions.
While it is a bit late to ask al-Sadr to stop fighting, it's definitely not too late to ask Iran to stop funding their end of the fight.
Posted by: Randy Beck | May 26, 2008 4:19 PM
-nitpick mode ON-
The symbol for watt is a capital W.
As with every SI unit whose name is derived from the proper name of a person, the first letter of its symbol is uppercase (W).
-nitpick mode OFF-
Posted by: John Rynne | May 26, 2008 4:20 PM
Really spiffy pants!
Posted by: Clayton | May 26, 2008 4:35 PM
Since it's not popped up here yet, let us recall Bill Hick's suggested application of funds:
"You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? Instead -- just play with this -- if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world -- and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded -- we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace."
...though I admit he probably didn't do the math in depth, the idea is still sound. But the devil would be in the details, of course.
How much money would have to go into the practical infrastructure on any of these ideas - I mean in terms of the bribes, advertising and other crass manipulations required to make people change what they're already doing and making money from)?
Anyone got a figure for what the infrastructure costs would be for feeding the world? Would it be doable (both in monetary and environmental cost) with the figures quoted if we keep eating meat, or would we have to go vegan?
Posted by: Cat Vincent | May 26, 2008 4:56 PM
I nominate the SOlar grand plan from Scientific American I read about last year:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
It would cost 420 billion dollars of subsidy from 2011 to 2050, and woudl end up supplying 69% of electricity and 35% of total energy by 2050.
So, you get to stimulate the global solar economy, in ways which will benefit everyone, reduce the USA's dependence upon foreign fuels, and it will cost you less than 1 Iraq war.
Leaving plenty left over to spend on nukes.
I wonder how far 500 billion dollars would go in start up projects and leg up projects in Africa, South America and elsewhere? Probably a very long way.
Posted by: guthrie | May 26, 2008 5:03 PM
RE AtlAtl comments.
How can you say there would be no art or music without the Catholic Church ? People had been drawing and painting long before the church existed.
What about the Easter Island sculptures, French cave paintings and Chinese and other Asian art.
I could be wrong but music would have been around before the church, Native American and African rituals used rhythm and dance as did other cultures that were isolated prior to exploration.
Just to be fair yes the church did promote great art but so did plenty of other organisations and people.
People have an innate desire to create and to express themselves you don't need a religion for creativity to flourish.
Also never forget all the creativity religions have tried to suppress down the centuries all those books burned
and people persecuted for the crime of independent thought or belief. I include all religions in this most of them have done their share and in some places still do or would if they got half a chance.
As far as all that wasted money goes how about a worldwide effort to deal with poverty and decent living standards and medical provision for children and communities in the third world. Were in the 21st century and people are still dying from diseases caused by unsafe water and poverty.
How about a UN led effort for research into an HIV vaccine or cure, free generic medication for HIV to help deal with the problems its causing in Africa and other places
Increased public genome and stem cell research for the benefit of everyone not just for private profit.
Decent housing and social provision do something about homelessness. Also don't forget its not just America that pays for the war in Iraq.
Finally if you send people off to fight have the decency to provide properly funded long term medical care if they need it when they come back.
Posted by: George Jones | May 26, 2008 5:16 PM
Buy everyone on the planet a "$100 laptop" and a free chunk of broadband internet connection. Then provide a global education program through them. That would address several issues with one program and significantly warm up the global economy too.
Posted by: John B Stone | May 26, 2008 5:18 PM
Charlie: Damn this shirt is itchy. No no no! :) You missed what I said. What I'm talking about is explicitly post Green meme. Wrong thoughts is where the good shit happens, so we need plenty of those.
Toy's are fun and useful, but the better educated people are as a whole, the less chance of killing each other with them and the greater the chance they'll work out how to power them without poisoning the bathwater, as it were.
"Equipping people with the tools to learn what they need to learn for themselves". I mean that in the most anarchic sense ie http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/. They can climb the ladder of awareness (self -> tribal -> global) if they so choose, though really, in the long run, evolution ain't giving them the choice.
"Gimme those Plasma TVs & SUVs" is a completely congruent thought for a stage of development.
Unless you're so Red you think everything is flat and hierarchies of consciousness don't (or shouldn't) exist?
Going the education route will mean bringing people up through different stages of awareness and yeah at some point plasma tvs and SUVs rule man. And they do.
But even Iain Banks ditched his and I doubt it was just to hang the press release off... :)
Posted by: Greg Eden | May 26, 2008 5:19 PM
Mr Stross (and readers),
One thing many of you are forgetting is that the money did indeed just change hands, and not simply disappear. While the U.S. did directly spend $523 Bn, much of that was towards rebuilding large portions of Iraq: schools and basic utilities, most of which we didn't destroy in the first place, as the neglect of Saddam's regime had already done that. The $6Tn figure (and there have been plenty of critiques of that number), as "indirect" costs, are in many cases costs that we would have spent anyways, regardless of whether we were in Iraq or not, and again, many of them are costs that end up investing in various places in the development of useful infrastructure (and not necessarily in Iraq, for the indirect costs).
Now, I know most of you opposed going into Iraq in the first place. But try to put that aside as you consider this: Iraq has been going incredibly well since the surge, and the Iraqis think they may be able to completely take over the security of their country by the end of the year (keeping U.S. forces around for logistics and support a while longer). In other words, we're pretty close to winning this fight. Also, the Iraq GDP has been growing phenomenally, well past what it ever was during Saddam's reign, ever since he was deposed.
Now, if Iraq succeeds, and if Iraq grows like some of the other countries we've rebuilt such as Japan or South Korea, ask yourselves several questions:
First, how much is it worth, the lives we've saved from Saddam's tyranny (he was killing about 100,000 a year, far more than the terrorists have managed to kill while we've been fighting them throughout Iraq), and the quality of life that we've given the Iraqi populace? Could we have matched a similar number of lives saved/quality of life improved for less money anywhere else? I'm thinking only a couple of investments - most notably clean drinking water worldwide, a couple diseases, and perhaps a couple other tyrannical regimes deposed, such as perhaps North Korea, could have such a positive impact on the world for the price we paid.
Also, how quickly would having a stable, successful, Democratically run country in the middle east pay back the world economy the costs spent making it so?
Posted by: taoist | May 26, 2008 5:31 PM
Cat:
"How much money would have to go into the practical infrastructure on any of these ideas - I mean in terms of the bribes, advertising and other crass manipulations required to make people change what they're already doing and making money from)?"
Or, more to the point, how many bastards would the world have to kill off to get them out of the way so they wouldn't screw things up like they've been doing for, oh, all of history?
For the last half-century, at least, there have been no natural famines in the Earth. None. Every single time a population group has been starving, it's been because some other group had enough guns and/or political clout to MAKE them starve and die.
Education? Education is easy and cheap, to get people from "don't know anything" to "hey, I can read and do enough math to bootstrap myself." The problem is that, for the most part, a lot of folks think that "those people" don't need to learn anything useful, because they're just peasants (or "untouchables," or ).
...and no, bribes don't work. A huge part of that starvation is because of hatred, not a lack of cash in some jerk's bank account. They want their tribe to run things, and in most cases that means getting rid of all other tribes (political groups, people with different skin colors, et bloody cetera).
The amount of money involved in the sort of undertaking mentioned at the top of this reply would make the Iraq war look like an impulse buy - and would have less of a guarantee of working.
Posted by: cirby | May 26, 2008 5:41 PM
cirby: ... or women. Their brains overheat you know.
Posted by: Piers Cawley | May 26, 2008 5:48 PM
Good point, taoist.
The cost of doing nothing could have been extremely high. We can talk about indirect costs but a false peace had indirect costs as well.
Not going into Iraq would have kept Afghanistan as the focus, calling the jihadis there instead, which is tougher for U.S. troops to get to. We'd likely still need a base in Saudi Arabia, and that was a big part of Bin Laden's agit-prop.
Military spending overall is actually now over $600B. Not all of the increase is because of the war. Bush was going to raise the defense budget anyway, just as Clinton had done in his final budget.
It's all here:
www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/hist.html
It may seem like a lot, but as a percentage of GDP, total U.S. defense spending isn't even where it was in the Reagan era, which was still a drop in the bucket compared to the '50s and '60s.
Posted by: Randy Beck | May 26, 2008 5:57 PM
I'd spend the money on nice, wide freeways all over Africa. With 6 trillion I could probably build those freeways partially out of solar cells and solve two problems. The results of everyone in Africa being able to easily ship their products to the coast/to Europe (through Turkey or a Gibraltar Bridge) would be a bit more interesting than a colony on the moon, IMO.
Posted by: Russell Dovey | May 26, 2008 6:06 PM
That's a nice figure to work with. My rule for fantasizing about vast wealth used to be "assume your personal fortune equals the US national debt," but this is a comparable figure in magnitude and makes a stronger rhetorical point.
Unfortunately, I'm currently getting over a nasty respiratory thing that's triggered a migraine, so I'm not feeling very creative. If I think of anything I'll come back. But good premise!
Posted by: William H. Stoddard | May 26, 2008 6:09 PM
You know, if we just had a benevolent dictatorship of the scientific elite, like they had on Krypton, we wouldn't be in this mess :-)
I mean it to be funny, but it really isn't as facetious as it sounds. The one venue that the government has uncontested authority over is the ability to wage war, and insofar as it has managed to commandeer resources, however poorly its managed them, it has done a fantastic job. But this sort of authority doesn't extend elsewhere, and I think it is legitimate to ask whether this is a necessarily a good thing, in the light of recent troubles.
Plus, if we had a scientific dictatorship, the Ruling Council and their lackeys would probably have a much snappier dress sense, like those tabards Kal-El wore.
Posted by: ScentOfViolets | May 26, 2008 6:11 PM
Taoist at #30
As to the quality of life in Iraq, check out Ana Badkhen's posts from Iraq, particularly her recent Has life in Iraq improved?, which begins:
Posted by: John Rynne | May 26, 2008 6:18 PM
GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT: while anti-clericalism sometimes amuses, this is Not the thread for it. Further posts on the subject of whether or not the Catholic Church/Islam/J. Random Cult is the root of all Evil will therefore be deleted without warning.
taoist @30: your agenda is showing, and your propaganda talking points don't convince anyone. Piss off back to Little Green Turdballs before I spank you publicly (and ban you). Randy: this goes for you, too. Neocon apologists are no longer welcome on this blog.
ScentOfViolets: aha, I see you're a closet Platonist, yes?
FURTHER GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT: This thread is for the discussion of what you'd spend $513Bn or $3-6Tn on, given your druthers. Apologias for the policy decisions that incurred the sums in question are verboten. And please, can we try to keep our desires realistic? (Diamond window panes would be great -- and I suspect we could develop the engineering processes for manufacturing them in due course for a lot less than $0.5Tn -- but they're not exactly something we can assume is feasible, or feasible at a reasonable price. Ditto mature molecular nanotech, or other magic wand technologies.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 6:28 PM
i think it cost only a trifling amount of money (twenty billion or so) to vaccinate everybody in the world against various diseases.
Posted by: Martin Wisse | May 26, 2008 6:47 PM
Martin: of course, you'd then be up against the anti-vaccination idiots, not to mention stuff like this (which would make me want to tear my hair out -- if I had any).
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 6:54 PM
Here's a radical idea for you. How about giving that money back to the people who actually earned it?
Posted by: zeph | May 26, 2008 7:09 PM
Zeph: you mean, the Chinese and European institutional lenders?
(Hint: there is a reason the US government is running a record deficit ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 7:14 PM
I'm thinking solar panels on every house! Let's take energy production AWAY from centralized, for-profit sources that have no interest but to exploit - who's still making money on all this expensive oil? - and put on your roof. Sell back into the grid on sunny days, take only when you need. Bingo!
Posted by: scott r | May 26, 2008 7:30 PM
Ha. I'm feeling kind of smug.. I brought up the calculation about reactors several months ago at certain other writer's forum)..
Myself, I would settle for the reactors.. and research into them and battery technology.. There really is no choice. Either we invent long-range electric cars, or the car civilization is going to croak and stink mightily as it decomposes..
Unfortunately, it's easier to steal from war contracts and war has a better image than nuclear reactors.. so war it was. Besides, it was good for Isreal..(how much less trouble would there be if Jews instead got some part of Germany... there was plenty of space considering all the war dead..)
Posted by: Stirlitz | May 26, 2008 7:42 PM
I like the idea of spending money on education. What would it cost to give everyone in the world a laptop like the OLPC and plumb every inhabited area on the planet for broadband wireless internet (plus beefing up the backbone to handle the traffic)? The computers would cost less than $600 Bn, probably less than $200 Bn given economies of scale in manufacturing and the fact that not everyone needs to get one. I'm more hazy on the infrastructure, but I doubt it would cost more than a $1 Tn or so, so there's still enough money left over to build several open online universities, with staff, infrastructure, and curricula.
I'm less concerned about evolving people's consciousness than about leveling the playing field between the average citizen of the first and third worlds and getting a lot more motivated and educated people into the world economy. The additional capability certainly wouldn't cost as much carbon load as building everyone a car, and would probably on average raise everyone's standard of living more.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | May 26, 2008 8:19 PM
Scott R: one problem with solar: until recently, the dirty little secret of the photovoltaic industry was that it takes more energy to make a photovoltaic cell than the thing will produce before it dies of old age. I gather we now have solar cells that (gasp!) are actually net energy positive, but only in the past few years.
Another problem with solar is: it only works when the sun's shining. I might be an easier sell if I lived in New Mexico instead of, oh, Scotland (fifty miles north of Moscow) where at midwinter we get less than six hours' daylight in every 24.
Finally, it's not compatible with high-density housing. (I live in an apartment that shares a single roof with five other dwellings. That's an improvement: I used to share a roof with ten.)
This isn't to say that distributed solar doesn't have a role to play ... but it ain't going to help me, or most anyone else in my country, or a huge number of other people outside it.
Stirlitz: we have a problem with batteries: the more energy they can store, the more they tend to deflagrate violently if something goes wrong. At least petrol-powered cars don't explode on impact or electrocute the guy wielding the jaws of life after a crash. Now this might be a way out of the quandry ...
NB: note that your last comment about Israel is somewhat, ahem, liable to prove controversial. As you're new around here I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt this time, but I strongly suggest you avoid trolling on that topic. If you want to stick around, that is.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 8:19 PM
"Oh"
*Checks globe*
So we are.
As far as I have read, solar cells in the UK are pointless. Solar water heating though, is a good idea, as is building glass porches and other passive methods of allowing heat into a building. None of this is rocket science, it has been known about for 30, 40, 50 years.
George Monbiot has what sounds a plausible enough plan for Europe that involves wave power in the north, energy conservation measures of the sort we already know about, and solar power in the South of Europe and the Sahara, connecting everything in a large DC electricity networked grid. WE've done it with gas, we already transfer electricity around by AC, so I don't see any technical problems with it. Its more a matter of deciding to spend the money.
I wonder what different 100 million dollars in superconductor research would make?
When I get back to work I'll pester the salesman for information about our customers, and find out more about what solar panel processes they are working on.
One of them, Evergreen, has a natty new way of making the cells:
http://www.evergreensolar.com/app/en/technology/item/48
Instead of using the CZ process, of pulling out a single crystal of silicon, say a foot thick, then sawing it into thin wafers, their process produces the thin sheets of silicon straight away. I suppose they'll be polymorphic, but anyway, it is a vast improvement in terms of energy efficiency of manufacture.
Posted by: guthrie | May 26, 2008 8:32 PM
[ DELETED BY MODERATOR ]
(I warned you not to go off on that tangent, and you had to do it. Take it elsewhere. -- Charlie.)
Posted by: Berend de Boer | May 26, 2008 8:37 PM
For principle: I'd return the money to the its previous owners.
For fun: I'd hold a giant world lottery. I can't decide which would be better: mint six thousand new billionaires or six million new millionaires. (The numbers could be higher if lottery tickets cost money, and the money from the tickets went into the award pool.)
Posted by: David A. Harding | May 26, 2008 8:52 PM
I'd like to pass out lots of those cute little Canadian self-contained reactors.
I'd like to feed and water everybody on the planet, but in many cases, that would mean becoming Iraq-like with the dictators and people probably would still starve.
I'd like to set up broadband everywhere and give out cheap computers (like the OLPC) so everybody has access to information (and give them a brief lesson in learning who to trust). If they're cheap enough and everybody has them, they can't be taken by the ruling gangs.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | May 26, 2008 9:20 PM
I`d put that money into developing killer sats and clean fusion bombs. Then I`d nuke the hell out of anything except USA and close allies and build an utopia.
See, Charlie, worst things can be done than just invading one third world country... 8-)
Posted by: Anatoly Meller | May 26, 2008 9:56 PM
"that would mean becoming Iraq-like with the dictators and people probably would still starve."
...in the short run. Is it better to leave the bad guys in charge? Look at Myanmar. The people running that hellhole have already caused more deaths this MONTH than died in Iraq, total, since 2003. Is inaction better?
"If they're cheap enough and everybody has them, they can't be taken by the ruling gangs."
They used to say that about food shipments to places like Somalia, and it was overly optimistic then, too.
You'd have to get orders-of-magnitude improvements in things like power (built-in solar cells and batteries that could run them), networking efficiency (the distributed web), size (iPhone sized, small enough to hide from the people who would want to confiscate or destroy them), and electronic countermeasures (to obscure their location when the bad guys show up with correspondingly-sized network sniffers - check the history of the USSR for references).
A lot of the "energy advances" we're going to see over the next few decades will be in the manner of effective power, not total power. Heating and cooling homes with 1/10 the energy, running computers for days off of a small, not-dense battery, and getting around on 1/3 the fuel in whatever vehicle ends up being popular. That sort of thing.
...and the big advance that could make human life more tolerable for more than half of the planet would be less people to share it with. Birth control is the big one, and it tends to sort itself out when you give a population a high enough standard of living. Less-demanding devices would go a long way to do that for us.
Posted by: cirby | May 26, 2008 9:56 PM
Whether $513Bn or $6000Bn, spend it on the basic research needed to slay Nick Bostrom's Dragon-Tyrant:
Posted by: Jocelyn Paine | May 26, 2008 10:11 PM
Developing manned space tech. That would likely include a Mars mission, larger space station, and moonbase. Investigate ways of living and working in space -- manufacturing, agriculture, asteroid mining.
The spin-off techs should be good, compact and safe nuclear reactors would be one that comes to mind.
Posted by: Andrew G. | May 26, 2008 10:13 PM
Anatoly, you probably shouldn't consider me to be a close ally. (More like the worried-looking guy in the back row, alternately staring between the back of the lunatic's head and the way to the emergency exit.)
Cirby: we have no way of knowing whether anything that replaced the Myanmar junta would be better -- or not. That's the fun dilemma of international intervention, in a nutshell. (One might hope than Aung Sung Suu Kyi would do a better job, but right now she's under house arrest, and her very legitimacy as a nucleus of opposition relies on her having won an election; mount an invasion and put her on the throne and you actually undermine that legitimacy. See? Another happy fun paradox!)
You want a metaphor for why the rest of the world shouldn't intervene in Myanmar? Imagine this scenario: it's late 2000, in the aftermath of a tightly-contested presidential election, and the Galactic Federation shows up in Earth orbit. They believe in freedom'n'democracy'n'apple pie, and they look at your election results, and unilaterally declare that (a) George W. Bush lost the election, and (b) stick Al Gore in the White House. How do you feel about this? And do you consider Al Gore, at this point, to be your legitimate President (if he's been installed by alien fiat, after conceding the election some months earlier)?
Climbing up on my soapbox yet again, I think one of the big problems you Americans have got in engaging with the real world is that no foreign army has put its boots on your soil since, oh, 1812 or thereabouts. Consequently, your visions of military action abroad are bloodless daydreams of adventure, with no potential for blowback, no threat of retaliation leading to rape and pillage in the ruins of your cities. The lack of any understanding that actions have consequences led directly to 9/11. And you know what? I'm not seeing any signs of progress here.
Jocelyn: I agree wholeheartedly.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 10:17 PM
How about clean water and sanitation?
As it happens, it's the International Year Of Sanitation, and one page says
But that's only $170 to $270bn, and is expected to have huge economic returns as a side effect of vastly reducing misery. Let's just double that for cleaning up and improving access water, so now I've managed to spend the immediate sum in question by 2035.Blog software comment: BTW, each time I hit preview I get another layer of rel="nofollow nofollow nofollow". Good that you're using a real HTML generator instead of a heap of regexps though.
Posted by: Jay Carlson | May 26, 2008 10:33 PM
Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative.
So...where are all these people going to live once they, you know, stop dying? You really want an expanding Heinlein-style universe beloved of space-cadets for the lebensraum before you get immortality. Though admittedly people might breed a bit less once they started to see their offspring more as competitors.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | May 26, 2008 10:43 PM
"If they're cheap enough and everybody has them, they can't be taken by the ruling gangs."
>They used to say that about food shipments to places >like Somalia, and it was overly optimistic then, too.
I've quoted Cirby because I'm rather amused by his take on the Somali issue. I'm not sure how the laptop plan connects with the persistence of warfare in Somalia - I do know that cirby is not the most well-informed of people when it comes to African or Somali issues.
In the early 1990s, it was indeed proposed that the country be flooded with aid in order to end the (artificially induced) famine. I know of no evidence that this was even attempted. Certainly Alex de Waal doesn't mention it in his excellent work _Famine Crimes_, which includes a compelling critique of 'humanitarian intervention' in Somalia.
If cirby knows better, I'd be very interested to hear *his* evidence.
As for the wider stuff about African infrastructure above, I'd say they're not too far off target. I'd remind anyone interested in those issues that Africa is a far more complex place than it might look from behind a VDU in some western suburb - and that the first task of anyone proposing new developments is to learn a bit of humility. The second task is to read up on what is actually involved in the problem of 'African complexity' - and how Africans themselves deal with it.
>>>You'd have to get orders-of-magnitude improvements in things like power (built-in solar cells and batteries that could run them), networking efficiency (the distributed web), size (iPhone sized, small enough to hide from the people who would want to confiscate or destroy them), and electronic countermeasures (to obscure their location when the bad guys show up with correspondingly-sized network sniffers - check the history of the USSR for references).
For example, if cirby knew anything about Africa today, he'd know that mobile/cell phone technology is taking off in Africa in a BIG way, and often in surprising ways too. The latest issue of the Guardian Weekly to reach me here in Auckland (nb, I read the Guardian, but I am not a 'Guardian reader')includes a report from the town of Gisenye, on the shores of lake Kivu. Amonghts other things it states that the central bus station is filled 'with kids wandering round clutching office telephones. They've somehow reconfigured desktop phones to work as mobiles, and use them to offer roaming calls from the middle of the street. There's stiff competition, as passers-by and bus passengers are approached to select their favourite handset, often fielding calls through the window of buses as they wait to depart'.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 26, 2008 10:45 PM
Ahhh, Africa.
Funnily enough it has come up several times already today, so I'll blether on about my recollections of what it was that came up.
Firstly, an extract from a book looking at the terrible place that Johannesburg is, and how divided it is, and the effects of privatising water supplies and suchlike.
So, we could spend a few tens of billions on decent water supplies.
Then Radio 4 had something about food, and food in Africa, well, the people they had on generally agreed that the World bank/ neo-liberal policy of no government aid or intervnetion was a pile of shite, and actually giving away some seeds, fertiliser and advice worked quite well in terms of boosting crop output.
So thats another few billion spent...
And on other occaisions I have read news reports and suchlike showing the effect that properly targeted aid can have, from clean water from a well, to educating the locals on how to farm better, and giving them a cow. Even better, in one part of Sub-Saharan Africa, they found that the locals had worked out themselves over the past decade or so, how to farm better. Now they have trees, mixed crops, water storage, etc etc, in place of the near desert they tried to farm 10 and 20 years ago.
There is more than enough knowledge out there now, it just needs spread around.
So I guess all of that would cost 500 billion dollars.
Posted by: guthrie | May 26, 2008 10:57 PM
Charlie @ 55:
Wasn't it 1746 there in Scotland?In the US it is considered outside the mainstream discourse to consider the possible creation of legitimate grievances abroad by US government action. Trying to fight this here in an even-numbered year is grander folly.
Posted by: Jay Carlson | May 26, 2008 11:05 PM
Adrian: the question isn't about stopping people from dying; it's about stopping people from dying of a particular disease state that we generally term 'old age' (and which is progressive, crippling, and hideously debilitating -- I'm getting an eyeful right now thanks to some older relatives). Senescence is a particularly cruel killer and it degrades and violates its victims horribly. Finding a cure for it does not imply immortality; even in the total absence of old age or disease people would tend to die of other causes over time (including accidents, violence, and suicide). I find your response interesting, insofar as it represents a rather milder version of thanatophiliac dingbats like Leon Kass.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 11:09 PM
Jay: 1746 for boots and armies; considerably more recently -- indeed, within living memory -- if you count being bombed by the Luftwaffe.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 11:13 PM
I find your response interesting, insofar as it represents a rather milder version of thanatophiliac dingbats like Leon Kass.
Well, death has historically been part of life, you know? You got a way to advance beyond that, or even just change the equilibrium drastically, I'm all ears. Blithe assertions that it isn't a problem worthy of consideration, OTOH...
Posted by: Adrian Smith | May 26, 2008 11:24 PM
Adrian: the fact that death ends all lives does not mean that one should hurry it on, much less enthusiastically embrace leprosy. The aging process isn't inevitable; we know of many species that don't undergo it in quite the same way that we do. And it has horrible and unpleasant side-effects. I'm all in favour of mitigating them, and the best means of mitigation would appear to be to look at the underlying cause of the pathology rather than treating the symptoms with ear-trumpets and artificial hip joints.
As long as our total fertility rate doesn't go above 2.1, and we manage to get our environmental footprint under control, I don't see any major drawback to abolishing senescence; a civilization of SUV-driving immortal baby factories would of course be another matter.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 26, 2008 11:31 PM
If they're driving SUVs, they're more likely to drive them into trees etc, so it's a net carbon win for the world!
One thing that's been bugging me about all this talk of buying discoveries is that we're not playing Civ. How much does it cost to steal one quantum chemist back from finance, and what's the marginal cost of growing a new one, and not just a warm body in it for the cash?
In the short term all we can do is a) redirect research away from other areas in a field and b) pay for conferences, gear, and clerical help. After that there are inelasticities in the labor supplied graph---maybe it's better to think of it as the careers supplied graph.
Posted by: Jay Carlson | May 26, 2008 11:48 PM
I'm not sure if this is against the rules, at least in principle, but -
Find the five smartest people with philanthropic ideas you can.
Give them $10 billion each.
Tell them that if they have demonstrable results worth the money, there's another $90 billion waiting for each of them.
Posted by: Hugh "Nomad" Hancock | May 26, 2008 11:52 PM
38: By Platonist, do you mean TOST, or 'The Republic'?
Here's a nice illustrative doomsday scenario: its found sometime in the spring of 2009 that the temperature is going up 1 degree C above average every two months, and that this will continue for at least the next two years. What is the role of government then? Would this still be a case of just letting the good ol' free market relatively unconstrained by democratic institutions roll on down to a local optimum?
50: Two words - Grail Slavers. Admittedly fictional, but depressingly true to life. Not that there aren't plenty of real-life examples.
Posted by: ScentOfViolets | May 26, 2008 11:54 PM
"I'm all in favour of mitigating them, and the best means of mitigation would appear to be to look at the underlying cause of the pathology rather than treating the symptoms with ear-trumpets and artificial hip joints."
Isn't this the current thought, though? That 'aging' is the sum total of wear and tear plus imperfect repair mechanisms? No death genes, no generalized Hayflick limit, no 'programmed for death' etiology?
Posted by: ScentOfViolets | May 26, 2008 11:59 PM
I'll back D.J.P O'Kane's point; the last figure I heard is that there are currently 3 billion (as in 10^9) cell phones in operation in the world today. That means that there are a lot more cell phones outside the "industrialized world" than in it. If someone's taking them all away there's a hell of a big pile of old phones somewhere.
And I'll second Charlie about old age; senescence is a terrible way to go; I just watched my father-in-law go out that way a couple of years ago, and my mother-in-law is heading down the pike fast. As far as breeding ourselves into a sardine can, notice that the world birth rate has been going down pretty steadily since the mid-20th century; the population growth prediction in 1950 based on contemporary rates was that population in 2000 would be well over 8 billion, possibly as high as 10. Oddly enough, making people's lives better off seems to make them less interested in having lots and lots of children.
Back to the phones for a second; giving everyone in the world a smartphone with a screen the size of an iPhone would cost little more than giving everyone an OLPC, and the wireless infrastructure would be pretty much the same. So our peace dividend could give everyone a computer with wideband net that they could hold in one hand and get the same benefits as a laptop, while also giving convenient location services, emergency services, and day-to-day communications. So let me change my vote to that.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | May 27, 2008 12:10 AM
I guess this discussion had a bad start. Having read through it, I think the main problem is, that people think they should take $BIGNUM, put it into ONE project that is presumably intended to safe humanity or whatever.
If you really want to spend a large sum, you shouldn't say "on which project should we spend $BIGNUM". But rather "What would be a project that you would like to see realized, what would the benefits be, what are the drawbacks, what are possible interactions with other projects, what do you think would happen in case of mass adoption (think: car->traffic jam), what is your cost estimate? Don't repeat suggestions by others."
Next someone biased in an agreeable way (usually termed "unbiased") gets to select those projects that offer the greatest benefits for the given cost estimate in such a way that one third to half the budget gets spend. The rest will fall prey to cost overruns anyway.
Posted by: tp1024 | May 27, 2008 12:11 AM
Boondoggles aside, the much more sensible thing to do with the money spent on the war is not to take it in the first place. Much of it is borrowed, since the GOP is tax-phobic. We never really had the money to begin with...
Better to continue to run a surplus and pay down the national debt. Without the debt we'd have a couple hundred billion extra each year to play with...
Posted by: Andrew G. | May 27, 2008 12:29 AM
Charlie, I really like your nuclear reactor plan (it is one of the few methods we have that are suitable for supplying the base load of the grid). I would modify it though, as we have non-base-load needs that aren't being currently supplied, the largest of which is going to be the creation of clean water. Due to climate change, water is going to be the new oil pretty soon.
I'd spend a shitload of money (up to ~20% of the total budget) on building pilot desalination plants intended to supply the American Southwest. There are crossover opportunities with concentrating solar power-generation (ie. non-PV) and desalination, with sewage treatment, as well as with thermal 'cracking' of water, and a few other opportunities. There are a whole bunch of ideas on mixing and matching these, so I'd fund pilot programs for all of them just to find out what works best and then standardizing on it for deployment in the US (example: concentrated solar sterilization of sewage for use as algae feedstock for biodiesel)
The commercial opportunities for deploying the debugged designs worldwide are going to be pretty interesting within less than 20 years, but few are investing now on that basis.
Posted by: Michael R. Bernstein | May 27, 2008 1:08 AM
AI.
I'd blow the entire $500-6000×109 on AI research, in a vain attempt to immanentize the eschaton or whatever.
Probably, I'd just end up blowing most of the money on useless waste, by creating a new bureaucratic class of "AI Researchers" who don't actually do any research—just push papers around and try to justify their own expenses. There are, after all, only so many smart people around who have any ability to do useful research.
But hey, something good would probably come out of it. Particularly if I earmark a measly $100×109 or so for the development of a robot housekeeper. We seem particularly bad at research into robots, too, but it would lead to some really amusing demonstrations.
And after all, this is the Iraq War we're talking about. Creating a new useless bureaucratic class of Faux Researchers can hardly be a worse boondoggle...
Posted by: Justin | May 27, 2008 1:28 AM
$500 billion? Pump it all into advancing the Singularity and then let The Machine figure the world's problems out.
No, seriously. We're talk about spending billions (trillions?) on long-term research of something that an exponentially increasing AI could figure out in no time once it reaches the tipping point. Building hundreds of nuclear reactors would take a long time using today's methods. Educating the world would take a long time using today's methods.
Perhaps The Machine figures out a cure for cancer, instant education and a way to power an SUV by smiling. Perhaps because its so damn concerned for our welfare that it dismantles all the weapons with its nanotech and turns them into swingsets and mechanical puppies.
Could someone just make sure it doesn't see humans as some sort of energy source?
Sounds a bit crazy? Blame Charlie. I'm just the acolyte.
Posted by: rentedmule | May 27, 2008 1:47 AM
>then let The Machine figure the world's problems out.
'All humans are as vermin in the eyes of MORBO'.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 27, 2008 2:35 AM
How much would a prototype orbital solar-power satellite and base-station cost? Often mooted, never tested. First person to build one could open up a world market in clean electricity: pay us $MONEY a year, build a rectenna, and we'll point electricity at you...
Posted by: Chris L | May 27, 2008 2:59 AM
Actually solar makes sense even in the UK, a typical house, obviously not flats, with a battery set up could be pretty much electrically self sufficient with current PV technology anywhere in England.
The thing is, PV is just part of an overall solution.
In terms of what to spend that money on... hmmm... a chunk into capacity and super conductor research would be handy too.
Posted by: Dave O'Neill | May 27, 2008 3:25 AM
Chris @ 76:
The big problem (well, one of the big problems) with space solar power is that launch costs are outrageous. For something like that to make sense, you'd either have to have a ridiculously light powersat, space-based construction (read: factories on the moon), or, well, cheap launches.
So, if you want powersats, the thing to do is to blow the money on cheap launch systems and moon or asteroid mining.
Of course, there are other problems. For one thing, people might complain about you ruining the night sky with your titanic mirror platforms...
And lest you think that $500-6000×109 is plenty, keep in mind that we're talking outrageous here.
Posted by: Justin | May 27, 2008 3:27 AM
Charlie: could you please step down off your soapbox?
The epithet that the US has not seen a foreign invasion force on its lands since whenever, is cheap, dismissive and not particularly constructive. 20th century events didn't deter Mr. Blair from being rather cooperative with the US' deceitful plans. As for the vision of bloodless adventure known as US military action, I don't know about that. I for one can remember any number of films about US military action that was anything less than bloodless, so I would say that not even our "visions" meet the basic criteria we are being accused of. Also, I can pull-up at a moments notice (and occasionally do) international coverage of various bad things happening around the world, military and not, and actually see what is going on. I don't own a television, and I generally get a limited amount of my "news" from "mainstream" US news sources because they tend to be woefully watered down, and often the analysis is simply wrong. Not to mention that US news sources are, well, US centric.
Although I cannot make this claim with any scientific authority, my personal experience, among my friends is similar: people in America are diversifying their information sources. At least some of them are ;-) . It's probably not a good idea to assume that all Americans are isolationist or immature or "importantly" inexperienced.
Posted by: Jim Powers | May 27, 2008 3:54 AM
>Oddly enough, making people's lives better off seems to make them less interested in having lots and lots of children.
I'll return the favour by backing up Bruce here. The pattern he points to here has certainly been the case in Ireland; no longer would you find people having double-digit families (my grandfather came from a family of 16 for example).
This is the point that was hammered home to me when I was an undergraduate and the question 'was Malthus right' came up. I hammer it home to my kids today; it's just a pity it has yet to filter out into the wider world, where the thought of 'all those brown people' keeps too many people awake at night. If you're going to stay up at night worrying, there are far more credible threats out there.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 27, 2008 3:58 AM
There are? The differential in birth rates (and I'm focused on..oh..a difference of belief rather than skin colour) for immigrant groups into the West has not dropped, and indeed has risen, even while the source countries has dropped. This...is a concern, especially when certain groups are repeatedly seen in certain catagories of vicious crime. Anyway..
(Erk. You're making me sound Right Wing, and that's bad)
Anyway, the uranium wouldn't last if you built that many reactors without also spending on the far, far more expensive breeder reactors. Or cracked the thorium cycle.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | May 27, 2008 4:21 AM
I'm all for curing senescence, but you're not being realistic if you think overpopulation won't be a problem. It's true that fertility rates in the west are now below 2.1, implying negative population growth, but --
(I would also like to note that high TFRs are not exclusive to religious nuts, but they alone are sufficient to make this point).
-Finally, if you beat senescence you probably extend a woman's window of time to have a baby from age 40 or so to $AGE_SHE_GETS_HIT_BY_BUS. Women will no longer have to choose between career and children, lonely empty nesters will be able to have babies - as a father of a young child who has seen how old ladies react to babies I would be happy to bet anybody that they would make more of them if it were physically possible. Therefore, this technology would increase TFR.
Of course, there's a simple solution to this problem - Chinese-style regulation of reproduction. For a modern Westerner, to contemplate this idea is to go way off the reservation, but no more so than it would have been for, say, one of Cromwell's subjects to envision a multicultural secular society. The alternative would be rather Malthusian.
Anyway, as for what to do with the money, I would balance the budget. Maybe I didn't read carefully enough, but if anybody has already mentioned the fact that the US govt has been bleeding red ink this whole time, and that the low end figure wouldn't even balance the budget, I missed it.
Posted by: c23 | May 27, 2008 5:21 AM
Well, I have just been going over this rather good discussion (except where in went on weird tangents) and I am surprised no one brought up this website
http://3trillion.org/
It's by on of those left progressive groups, and you just 'shop' and see how much of that money you can spend. And big scale projects are included. WARNING: Site is American-centric, and also leans heavily left. But they did include worldwide vaccination as an option.
Also curing old age would be nice; but does that mean the end would be like going out 'as an old one horse shay'. And lets see who gets THAT reference.
Posted by: charles | May 27, 2008 5:38 AM
charles @83 "Also curing old age would be nice; but does that mean the end would be like going out 'as an old one horse shay'. And lets see who gets THAT reference."
Well, Randall Garrett did, in The Sixteen Keys.
And I'd take it, in preference to many long years of painful physical and mental incapacity. I would like having the part of my life that's worth living extended, but the worth living bit is important.
And to get back to other concerns, life in a world crammed with immortal SUV-wielding baby factories is unlikely to be worth living. So one way or another, we all die, and that's not a bad thing. But we should not have to be miserable while waiting for it.
JHomes
Posted by: JHomes | May 27, 2008 6:01 AM
There are? The differential in birth rates (and I'm focused on..oh..a difference of belief rather than skin colour) for immigrant groups into the West has not dropped, and indeed has risen, even while the source countries has dropped. This...is a concern, especially when certain groups are repeatedly seen in certain catagories of vicious crime. Anyway..
Andrew, dear boy - could you tell me which specific cases (if any), you're thinking of?
I ask because I'd say that if certain immigrant groups are carrying on high birth rates even when the birth rate in their home countries have dropped, that proves the point about birth rates being an epiphenomenon of other social factors, not (as Malthus saw it) an independent variable in its own right.
And if certain groups (again, which groups?) are overrepresented for some sorts of crime (btw, do you mean political crimes, or those committed by what is known in Northern Ireland as 'Ordinary Decent Criminals'?) then again that is, IMO, a product of the social environment rather than anything inherent in whatever specific immigrant groups we may be talking about.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 27, 2008 7:59 AM
This just in: new study appears to show that the Muslim fertility in Europe is beginning to decline, indicating that the neocons were wrong when they painted our Muslim friends as a ticking time bomb in our midst.
See here: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2008/muslimsineurope.aspx
When my mum was completing her medical training in Cork city in the late 1960s, she had to deal with a case of a woman whose uterus failed after having her 12th child. My mum tells me that when she and the nurses pulled back this woman's bedclothes they found that the whole bed was sodden with blood from this woman's haemorrhaging. It took 24 hours (and stealing blood from other parts of the hospital) to staunch the flow.
Once Ireland started to close the development gap, you found that people very rapidly abandoned both the practice of having superlarge families and also the wider religious belief systems that encouraged that practice.
Interestingly enough, while condoms were illegal in Ireland until 1987, the contraceptive was never banned, so long as you could persuade your doctor that you needed it to regularise your periods. Irish women, for some years, posted the world's highest incidence of dysmennorhea.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 27, 2008 8:19 AM
'Contraceptive' in the above post should be followed by 'pill' as in 'contraceptive pill'.
Posted by: D.J.P. O'Kane | May 27, 2008 8:24 AM
It's fascinating, in the way a slow-motion movie of a train-wreck might be, to see what comes out of the woodwork.
Allowing for inflation, the Iraq war expenditure is about five times what the Marshall Plan cost.
It's four Apollo programs, and that includes duplicating the design, the devolopment, and the infrastructure.
And these fed money back into the American economy. The Marshall Plan gave European countries, short of foreign exchange, the dollars to buy goods from the USA. When a Saturn V was "thrown away" the money had already been paid to American industry and American workers.
Where has the money spent on Iraq gone?
To be honest, I wonder where some of the money which went into the craziness of mortgage derivatives, and current weirdnesses of commodity futures, has come from.
Still, that much money could buy a lot of assassinations. You might have to work through a certain sort of politician a few times, and where would a new Nye Bevan come from anyway?
Posted by: Dave Bell | May 27, 2008 8:56 AM
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Posted by: Alan Kellogg | May 27, 2008 9:08 AM