Disasters and the Drake Equation

The fact that we know of no other civilization in our galaxy gives social scientists a hint of the potential future of human kind. If no other intelligent life form has developed technology advanced enough to reach us, maybe that means we won't either. I believe Carl Sagan suggested - perhaps during the height of the Cold War? - that other life forms, once sufficiently advanced, rub themselves out, though I will propose below that it may also be that they stagnate forever. The Drake Equation takes the number of stars in the Milky Way (or the rate of star formation), multiplies the number by a series of fractions less than one to weed out the ones unsuitable for life, and arrives at an incredibly rough estimate of the number of advanced life forms. The equation's purpose is not actually to estimate any number, but to stimulate discussion on the topic and it seems a widespread opinion that there ought to be at least a few more civilizations in the Milky Way in addition to humanity.

One of those fractions reduces the number of solar systems home to intelligent life to the number of them which go on to develop technology useful for interstellar communication. Maybe there are non-violent explanations - which would still be disastrous - for why this fraction is actually such as to render it extremely unlikely that a civilization should progress far enough to have radio communication or other ways of contacting the stars - not to mention travelling there. One such explanation is found in the potential for laws of social science to cause intelligent civilizations to stagnate forever.

I am not suggesting that this will happen. Nobody knows the future, so I merely point out that it could happen for all we know. There are a number of mechanisms by which stagnation could happen and go on forever. For instance, Joseph Schumpeter predicted socialism to become the norm due to advances in technology and material life. Judging by long-run trends, it could be that the government continues to expand and the resultant increase in incompetent decision-making could kill growth forever.

Alternatively, spending on health care as a share of GDP has grown steadily over the past several decades and health care is subject to Baumol's Cost Disease. A nurse cannot very well increase her productivity without worsening the care provided, but to attract nurses requires payment of competitive wages, which means that a nurse's salary must increase in line with the wages of sectors where productivity does grow. Thus, in this simplified way, if the quantity demanded of health care rises over time, spending on it must rise more than proportionately. Health care is increasingly the government's business and I am not confident that the government will deliver any growth.

Or it could be that voters favour increasingly bad policies the richer they get. For example, the people of developing countries consistently have more positive (i.e. more accurate) views on international trade than do people in rich countries, according to this Pew Research Report from last month. To the extent that public opinion matters to political decisions, any general tendencies here could be dangerous. Similarly, if one goes to the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Website and runs rather a façile regression of the government's share of GDP on purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita, one finds a statistically significant positive-but-small relationship. Maybe citizens become more active politically as they get wealthier? Given the (rational) incompetence of the average citizen, this would not be a good development. Since the individual citizen has no incentive to support good policies (being merely one voice amidst millions), individuals can indulge their fallacies and the gross domestic product suffers accordingly.

I don't know, but there appears to be some potential in these trends and explanations. Given that advanced alien civilizations must also have societies and given that several of these suggestions may be general enough to apply even to extraterrestrial life, perhaps part of the reason we receive no signals from other parts of the Milky Way is that these tendencies simply stop them from progressing that far?

Patriotism or Prosperity

Patriotism, defined as a national loyalty which does not extend farther than peaceably wanting what is best for the political jurisdiction of one's passport, is seldom the recipient of any scorn and rarely argued against, yet a well-known result in trade theory clearly indicates that patriotism of precisely this variety makes the world poorer.

 

The well-known result is that restricting exports of something not widely produced in the rest of the world can benefit the home country, and it is easily explained by analogy to the textbook treatment of monopolies. A monopolistic firm earns profits by restricting supply, so that its reduced level multiplied by the higher price minus costs comes to something more than does the same calculation for higher output, lower price, and a different cost structure.

 

So, if a country happens to be the sole (or a really big) producer of something that is valued in the rest of the world, its politicians' restricting the country's (competitive) firms' exports to the outside world makes its citizen-"monopolists" richer. But just like consumers would gain more surplus than the monopolist loses in the textbook treatment, if supply and prices were at perfectly competitive levels, the world as a whole loses from this restriction in free trade.

 

So, if one gets behind the statement that a good dash of patriotism - in the sense of "merely" wanting what is good for the political jurisdiction issuing one's passport - is only sound, one must also stand for this sort of restrictions in trade and concomitant reductions in worldwide prosperity. If this is what it means to be a patriot, then being a patriot means to be against general prosperity. I have never seen a more harmless definition of patriotism anywhere; if this is the kindest definition possible, it stands to reason that patriotism is actually quite pernicious.

The Level Playing Field

Some trade Economists occasionally argue in favour of a "level playing field" in international trade. What they mean is that, if foreign competitors to domestic industry receive subsidies (say, in the form of an artificially-depressed currency or tax breaks), it is a good idea for the domestic government to have institutions in place to raise the stakes sufficiently to match their actions. Such, I gather, is the idea behind the topical Export-Import Bank, much ballyhooed by the otherwise venerable Larry Summers, which offers credit to American companies looking to export their products.

Summers' tag-line for his Financial Times article reads "a failure to engage with global economic issues is a failure to mount a strong defence". The "engagement"-part is to some extent about the Export-Import Bank, and the "failure to mount a strong defence"-part recurs later when Summers likens its elimination to "unilateral disarmament". The thing is, though, that unilateral military disarmament may well be a good thing! At the very least, Summers should not treat a negatory answer as self-evident; many prominent intellectuals have outlined strong cases for pacifism.

 

But why should a playing field be level, anyway? My playing field is certainly not level enough for me to compete with, say, mechanized farmers, let alone unmechanized ones. I have neither land nor skills. Yet who wants to give me a subsidy? I am guessing what is really meant by a "level playing field" is that, if I were to take up farming, government-imposed distortions affecting comparative advantages ought to be corrected, if need be by other government-imposed distortions ("corrections").

Of course, in a way I may be able to "compete" with the farmers even absent government assistance, albeit in a rather a more indirect fashion. With my economics (and my side business), I can do my best to create higher value for certain consumers than does marginal farm output; "a good book is worth a meal", as they say. Furthermore, others' engagement in farming means that they raise my chances of success in my field, for while they still compete with me for the favour of the consumer in a world of scarcity, they could have chosen to offer much closer substitutes for my services. Since they did not, I find it somewhat easier to survive in my business. Importantly, I should think I am more able to find competitive business ventures in the absence of costly tax-financed enterprises than in the case in which I have to co-fund them.

Now speaking of costs, Summers actually says that the Export-Import Bank operates "at no cost to the government", but this must be nonsense. Are there no alternative ends for what money the government can obtain? It is true that the Bank has an incredibly low default rate at (recently) less than two per cent of lending, but this means that borrowers should tend to be creditworthy and have no problems raising money elsewhere. The low default rate is also indicative of borrowed funds being mostly in the hands of well-established firms spending resources to gain influence useful in obtaining favourable credit conditions.

If foreign companies are advantaged (by their versions of hidden subsidies from their versions of Export-Import Banks), this means that other foreign markets, operating sans these privileges, find it harder to grow. It follows that American companies are advantaged in these markets. So if my playing field may still be judged to be level with the world's best farmers as per my example above, surely the world market is a level playing field even in the presence of foreign governments' subsidising foreign industries. For a subsidy to industries in one sector is an impediment to the growth of industry in others.

The thing that changes is not the differences between competitors in terms of some being on higher levels than are others. Rather, the overall level for everyone is a bit lower due to the costly rent-seeking activities which entities like the Export-Import Bank encourages.