"If in the 1960s you suggested that the next 60 years would see vast improvements in the quality of restaurant meals, but almost no improvement in manned space flight to other planets, people would have reacted in disbelief. But that’s what happened."
to my wife and she commented that having reached the moon, the populace had insufficient imagination to think of what to do next so instead they decided to go out to eat more.
I thought something similar, perhaps a bit harsher, that america in the interim became self indulgent and orgiastic. It says volumes about americans, that think each meal must be fantastic, that google sees fit to recommend food videos, food commercials, etc. Pleasuring ourselves cheaply seems to be the great reward of previous generations hard work.
> The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
I think so. I think a better progression would be: i was a military officer, so that my son could be a great military officer, so that his son could be the greatest military officer.
"We have forgotten how to do big projects." Anecdotally, I've concluded that one reason the Apollo missions were successful was because so many involved had been in WW2 or the Korean War as teenagers or young adults. They had been given significant responsibilities: "Deliver the food to feed those 1000 soldiers" and they did. "Sorry, couldn't make it happen" was not socially acceptable. In general, "making a mistake" was not necessarily a big deal. "Giving up" was. Responsibility was pushed down to very low levels, and that culture was key to the success of the Apollo project.
Two anecdotes, although not of military ancestry. As a kid I knew the PI for the Apollo 11 Lunar Laser Ranging project. He told me, shortly after the Apollo 11 mission, that when the astronauts first placed his mirror assembly they aimed it wrong. He just relayed for them to fix it. No big deal. Did it wrong, fixed it. Glorious success. Still works to this day (I think?).
Second anecdote. My dentist during the early 1990s was an EE grad from MIT. He worked at Draper after graduation, on the Apollo guidance systems. On one of the missions some warning light went off. It was his little bit of kit. The question of "false alarm or do we scrub the mission?" got pushed all the way down to him, the lowest of low technical staff. He made the call "false alarm" and mission continued and was successful. After the Apollo program ended he was put onto ballistic missile guidance, which was cumbersome and boring. So he left Draper and became a dentist.
These days the fear of failure and the cover-my-ass mentality dominates so many big projects.
Good points. But the Bloomberg piece suggests all sorts of safety problems in the program, despite our increased obsession with safety (which I agree is a factor in slowing big projects.)
I'm certainly not qualified to judge the current space program. But I have seen that making lots of safety regulations and moving responsibility from the lower echelons up to high level managers with a regulation book makes everybody less safe. I think "increased obsession with safety" is more "increased obsession with making regulations so that when something goes wrong nobody is to blame".
That make sense. But again, the problem doesn't seem to be the specific problem people worry about with nuclear--explicit government regulation. Rather it's a culture of safety obsession.
Regarding Alaska’s value: I don’t think it is a net drain to the federal government. Most of the value in the state is from the extraction industries, especially oil and gas. Alaska contains the 3-4th most proved reserves of the states and would be about #2 if we count probable and possible reserves.
The oil companies (CP, Hilcorp, Exxon, etc) pay large severance and ad valorem taxes, not to mention federal corporate taxes. But, since they are all head quartered elsewhere (mostly Texas), that corporate revenue stream is not counted as coming from Alaska.
Those numbers aren’t apples-to-apples since they come from 2 different years, but Alaska comes out ahead.
According to google AI, The IRS, when reporting how much federal corporate taxes come from each state, use the headquarters for the company. Most of the oil and gas companies in Alaska aren’t headquartered there.
ConocoPhillips payed 4.4 billion in fed corp taxes and about 10% of their production is Alaska, so I assume we could credit 440 million more to Alaska’s contribution.
Anyways your counterfactuals there would be the Louisiana Purchase and the forcible annexation of the northern half of Mexico both of which the US profited from quite well.
Also Alaska might be a net negative on the Federal budget but that is a meaningless measuring stick as they generate state budgets, increase GDP, and contribute to the private economy. And we already spend millions on Greenland now, people forget we already have extensive military bases there right now.
Lastly there is the moral case we preventing millions from suffering under communism for decades as the inhabitants of Alaska sans our purchase would have been Soviet Russians at some point. Also on that same note, how many trillions more would we have increased our Cold War defenses budget if the USSR had a giant land foot hole in North America?
You make many good points here. I want to comment on this one:
By overplaying his hand, Trump made it less likely that he will achieve his objective.
So true.
He's so used to negotiating over modest amounts of money (in this case, even 10s of millions can be modest) with smaller parties. Parties that might not be able to bear the risks of a lawsuit etc. They settle and avoid him thereafter. Countries can't do that. It's a repeat game.
We need to take Greenland in order to defend it from Russia and China. As Greenland is part of NATO, if Russia or China invaded, Trump would not defend it.
Thank you, Scott! All these notions of “Progress” achieve two goals - giving a national “purpose” as in the 1960’s supposed race to the Moon to beat the Russians, as well as alleviating human boredom - the primary driver of the economy. This type of Progress must be proscribed on a planet with diminishing low-EROEI resources and far more important issues to address.
In other words, Denmark really dropped the ball here. There were folks saying they might get $700B for Greenland. They could have been the Norway with no oil.
Humorously I can't get two different AI chatbots to agree on which entity would get the money. Greenland has a right to self-determination, but international law says that the sovereign state receives payment in territorial transfers.
Nevertheless, even if you're right, the Greenlanders should be plenty upset with Denmark for putting the kybosh on their ~$12M per capita buyout.
"but almost no improvement in manned space flight to other planets, people would have reacted in disbelief. But that’s what happened." And of course not just space travel. Planes, trains and automobiles are still planes, trains and automobiles and travel time between places isn't improving like it did prior. Space travel was rockets then, its rockets now. Indeed air travel a bit slower since retirement of Concorde.
"In the final three decades of the 19th century, we built almost our entire rail network, roughly 170,000 miles. Today, we are unable to build a 400-mile rail line from LA to San Francisco." Of course in the 19th century they'd have posters advertising NY to SF by boat around Cape Horn so the railroads were then night and day better than the preexisting alternatives. They have Acela in the NE corridor, when I lived in North Jersey I never took it because first mile/last mile would be a problem so you may as well just drive and if you weren't going to drive, well, then you'd fly because flying is faster and cheaper. Does it have a niche? Sure, if you're walkable to Penn Station NY and are going to some place walkable to Union Station in DC, yeah, Acela works well, but there's no real impetus, let's say gas went to $100 per gallon? They'd build it in a hurry, there'd be the urgency of genuine need. Right now if they don't build LA to SF, well, then you drive there or fly there. In FL they did build Brightline, of course large stretches are through nothingness so no political objection. Even so why I would ever take this from South FL to CFL? It just seems to leave me in CFL without a car having spent $300 on train tickets for a family of 4 when it'd cost me $40 in gas to just drive there?
If we had true HSR in the Northeast, you wouldn't need it to be "walkable", merely as easy to get to as the airport. (Which is true of Boston, for instance.) It would be just as fast as flying--90 minutes to NYC.
In WWII, The Brits were in hard straits. Not enough metal, and needed to produce warplanes, especially bombers.
"The de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito is a British twin-engined, multirole combat aircraft, introduced during the Second World War. Unusual in that its airframe was constructed mostly of wood, it was nicknamed the "Wooden Wonder",[4] or "Mossie".[5][6] In 1941, it was one of the fastest operational aircraft in the world.[7]"
Designed initially as a bomber, the Mossie simply outran German fighter craft. Cleverly, the Brits put underutilized furniture workers to work on the bombers.
But, when loaded up with guns in the nose, the Mossie became lethal to German fighters, and so that happened too.
There is this: "On 1 March 1940, Air Marshal Roderic Hill issued a contract under Specification B.1/40, for 50 bomber-reconnaissance variants of the DH.98; this contract included the prototype"
Yes, de Havilland finally got a contract in spring of 1940, and had them in the air by 1941, despite the usual government dickering.
In the US today, 20-30 years can go by, or more, from military jet inception to production.
The California bullet train is a monument to a really bad idea, crushed by governmental miscalculation and delay. No, two negatives do not make a positive.
On a brighter note: The Ukrainians appear able to innovate and produce quickly.
In the past the US had as many as 50 military installations in Greenland. We shut all but one down since the end of the Cold War. Under the current treaty we could build more bases again if we want. Just building bases would be much cheaper than buying the place. Neither Russia nor China is going to invade. Both have very limited ability to project force away from their borders. So I totally agree, buying Greenland is a waste of money.
Trump wanting Greenland is a headscratcher and if so important to have which see as not the case since US military installations are there, but if more control needed of part of the island, then Mr Real Estate man might consider this: Enter in to some long term lease agreement of say 99 years; certainly likely to be more economically beneficial to the US than an outright buy.
Am suggesting this as only some middle ground if feasible and of course would be best to cease just to leave well enough alone.
Interesting if somewhat profitable provocative points. Aren’t you making things a bit too simple? The US-Mexico war was imperialistic in design and genocidal in follow-up, but I guess you will not deny its outcome was overall immensely profitable for the US. Having read some of your film reviews I simply can’t believe that you really believe that Renaissance Art was about recreating Greek Sculpture (this was what Roman sculpture was largely about, actually). You would need anyway a theory for Renaissance painting, since they did not have Greek paintings to copy. And Brunelleschi came up with an engineering solution to the dome of Florence’s Duomo that the Roman architects had not figured out. Finally, I am not sure about your ‘religion’ (to borrow from French) on great projects. I can agree with you that sending men to the moon some sixty years from the first landing is not such an exciting goal, but the fact that apparently we are not able to replicate the feat should be worrying, shouldn’t it?
I was discussing Renaissance sculpture, not paintings. I agree that they surpassed the ancients in painting and architecture. Probably even sculpture, but the point is it took 2000 years to even catch up.
I read this bit:
"If in the 1960s you suggested that the next 60 years would see vast improvements in the quality of restaurant meals, but almost no improvement in manned space flight to other planets, people would have reacted in disbelief. But that’s what happened."
to my wife and she commented that having reached the moon, the populace had insufficient imagination to think of what to do next so instead they decided to go out to eat more.
I thought something similar, perhaps a bit harsher, that america in the interim became self indulgent and orgiastic. It says volumes about americans, that think each meal must be fantastic, that google sees fit to recommend food videos, food commercials, etc. Pleasuring ourselves cheaply seems to be the great reward of previous generations hard work.
Didn't someone once say: "I was a military officer, so that my son could be a businessman, so that his son could be an artist."
> The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
John Adams (1780), letter to Abigail Adams, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond
I think so. I think a better progression would be: i was a military officer, so that my son could be a great military officer, so that his son could be the greatest military officer.
"We have forgotten how to do big projects." Anecdotally, I've concluded that one reason the Apollo missions were successful was because so many involved had been in WW2 or the Korean War as teenagers or young adults. They had been given significant responsibilities: "Deliver the food to feed those 1000 soldiers" and they did. "Sorry, couldn't make it happen" was not socially acceptable. In general, "making a mistake" was not necessarily a big deal. "Giving up" was. Responsibility was pushed down to very low levels, and that culture was key to the success of the Apollo project.
Two anecdotes, although not of military ancestry. As a kid I knew the PI for the Apollo 11 Lunar Laser Ranging project. He told me, shortly after the Apollo 11 mission, that when the astronauts first placed his mirror assembly they aimed it wrong. He just relayed for them to fix it. No big deal. Did it wrong, fixed it. Glorious success. Still works to this day (I think?).
Second anecdote. My dentist during the early 1990s was an EE grad from MIT. He worked at Draper after graduation, on the Apollo guidance systems. On one of the missions some warning light went off. It was his little bit of kit. The question of "false alarm or do we scrub the mission?" got pushed all the way down to him, the lowest of low technical staff. He made the call "false alarm" and mission continued and was successful. After the Apollo program ended he was put onto ballistic missile guidance, which was cumbersome and boring. So he left Draper and became a dentist.
These days the fear of failure and the cover-my-ass mentality dominates so many big projects.
Good points. But the Bloomberg piece suggests all sorts of safety problems in the program, despite our increased obsession with safety (which I agree is a factor in slowing big projects.)
I'm certainly not qualified to judge the current space program. But I have seen that making lots of safety regulations and moving responsibility from the lower echelons up to high level managers with a regulation book makes everybody less safe. I think "increased obsession with safety" is more "increased obsession with making regulations so that when something goes wrong nobody is to blame".
That make sense. But again, the problem doesn't seem to be the specific problem people worry about with nuclear--explicit government regulation. Rather it's a culture of safety obsession.
Regarding Alaska’s value: I don’t think it is a net drain to the federal government. Most of the value in the state is from the extraction industries, especially oil and gas. Alaska contains the 3-4th most proved reserves of the states and would be about #2 if we count probable and possible reserves.
The oil companies (CP, Hilcorp, Exxon, etc) pay large severance and ad valorem taxes, not to mention federal corporate taxes. But, since they are all head quartered elsewhere (mostly Texas), that corporate revenue stream is not counted as coming from Alaska.
Not saying you are wrong, but do you have any data to back up that claim?
My calculations were:
The IRS shows 7.3 billion in collections from Alaska in 2024
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/24dbs01t05co.xlsx
According to the US census bureau, Federal outlays to Alaska in 2022 were 6.2 billion:
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-money-does-the-federal-government-provide-state-and-local-governments/state/alaska/
Those numbers aren’t apples-to-apples since they come from 2 different years, but Alaska comes out ahead.
According to google AI, The IRS, when reporting how much federal corporate taxes come from each state, use the headquarters for the company. Most of the oil and gas companies in Alaska aren’t headquartered there.
ConocoPhillips payed 4.4 billion in fed corp taxes and about 10% of their production is Alaska, so I assume we could credit 440 million more to Alaska’s contribution.
https://static.conocophillips.com/files/resources/2024-annual-report.pdf
Then there is Exxon, Hilcorp and some other minor firms.
Interesting. This source gives a radically different answer:
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/states-most-dependent-federal-government-2023
As does this one:
https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/
I will keep an open mind on the question--you may be correct.
I missed that Econlog post oddly.
Anyways your counterfactuals there would be the Louisiana Purchase and the forcible annexation of the northern half of Mexico both of which the US profited from quite well.
Also Alaska might be a net negative on the Federal budget but that is a meaningless measuring stick as they generate state budgets, increase GDP, and contribute to the private economy. And we already spend millions on Greenland now, people forget we already have extensive military bases there right now.
Lastly there is the moral case we preventing millions from suffering under communism for decades as the inhabitants of Alaska sans our purchase would have been Soviet Russians at some point. Also on that same note, how many trillions more would we have increased our Cold War defenses budget if the USSR had a giant land foot hole in North America?
Good point about Soviet communism in Alaska, but of course this argument doesn't apply to Greenland.
"people forget we already have extensive military bases there right now."
Another reason not to buy Greenland.
I agree that the Louisiana Purchase was profitable, but I suspect we would have gotten that land through settlement, even if we had not bought it.
You make many good points here. I want to comment on this one:
By overplaying his hand, Trump made it less likely that he will achieve his objective.
So true.
He's so used to negotiating over modest amounts of money (in this case, even 10s of millions can be modest) with smaller parties. Parties that might not be able to bear the risks of a lawsuit etc. They settle and avoid him thereafter. Countries can't do that. It's a repeat game.
Good point. I think other countries are beginning to figure out that he's a paper tiger.
His only tool is a hammer. So every problem...
We need to take Greenland in order to defend it from Russia and China. As Greenland is part of NATO, if Russia or China invaded, Trump would not defend it.
Russia and China are not going to invade Greenland. People need to get serious. The actual threat is Russia invading eastern Europe.
Twas a joke.
Sorry, I see so much nonsense in the comment section. My bad.
It's like when I can't tell if a Trump tweet is an actual Trump tweet, or The Onion doing a satirical take on Trump tweets.
Thank you, Scott! All these notions of “Progress” achieve two goals - giving a national “purpose” as in the 1960’s supposed race to the Moon to beat the Russians, as well as alleviating human boredom - the primary driver of the economy. This type of Progress must be proscribed on a planet with diminishing low-EROEI resources and far more important issues to address.
In other words, Denmark really dropped the ball here. There were folks saying they might get $700B for Greenland. They could have been the Norway with no oil.
No, the money would have gone to Greenland, not Denmark.
Humorously I can't get two different AI chatbots to agree on which entity would get the money. Greenland has a right to self-determination, but international law says that the sovereign state receives payment in territorial transfers.
Nevertheless, even if you're right, the Greenlanders should be plenty upset with Denmark for putting the kybosh on their ~$12M per capita buyout.
In practice, it would have been the Greenlanders. But it's a moot point, because obviously Congress would have never approved the $600 billion.
"but almost no improvement in manned space flight to other planets, people would have reacted in disbelief. But that’s what happened." And of course not just space travel. Planes, trains and automobiles are still planes, trains and automobiles and travel time between places isn't improving like it did prior. Space travel was rockets then, its rockets now. Indeed air travel a bit slower since retirement of Concorde.
Even ordinary jets are slower (for fuel economy reasons.)
Scott,
Regarding NASA, I recommend Casey Handmer's blog. He has a few critical posts about NASA, for example:
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Also, it's amusing to me that your AI image has Franklin
Thanks Garrett
"In the final three decades of the 19th century, we built almost our entire rail network, roughly 170,000 miles. Today, we are unable to build a 400-mile rail line from LA to San Francisco." Of course in the 19th century they'd have posters advertising NY to SF by boat around Cape Horn so the railroads were then night and day better than the preexisting alternatives. They have Acela in the NE corridor, when I lived in North Jersey I never took it because first mile/last mile would be a problem so you may as well just drive and if you weren't going to drive, well, then you'd fly because flying is faster and cheaper. Does it have a niche? Sure, if you're walkable to Penn Station NY and are going to some place walkable to Union Station in DC, yeah, Acela works well, but there's no real impetus, let's say gas went to $100 per gallon? They'd build it in a hurry, there'd be the urgency of genuine need. Right now if they don't build LA to SF, well, then you drive there or fly there. In FL they did build Brightline, of course large stretches are through nothingness so no political objection. Even so why I would ever take this from South FL to CFL? It just seems to leave me in CFL without a car having spent $300 on train tickets for a family of 4 when it'd cost me $40 in gas to just drive there?
If we had true HSR in the Northeast, you wouldn't need it to be "walkable", merely as easy to get to as the airport. (Which is true of Boston, for instance.) It would be just as fast as flying--90 minutes to NYC.
Did Fl to NY once for the experience and memory saying 88mph south of DC and 110mph per my phone's GPS speedometer.
Greenland is fucking amazing btw. Visited recently.
Never been there, but Iceland is really cool.
Verily, I agree.
My fave example of big project decay:
In WWII, The Brits were in hard straits. Not enough metal, and needed to produce warplanes, especially bombers.
"The de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito is a British twin-engined, multirole combat aircraft, introduced during the Second World War. Unusual in that its airframe was constructed mostly of wood, it was nicknamed the "Wooden Wonder",[4] or "Mossie".[5][6] In 1941, it was one of the fastest operational aircraft in the world.[7]"
Designed initially as a bomber, the Mossie simply outran German fighter craft. Cleverly, the Brits put underutilized furniture workers to work on the bombers.
But, when loaded up with guns in the nose, the Mossie became lethal to German fighters, and so that happened too.
There is this: "On 1 March 1940, Air Marshal Roderic Hill issued a contract under Specification B.1/40, for 50 bomber-reconnaissance variants of the DH.98; this contract included the prototype"
Yes, de Havilland finally got a contract in spring of 1940, and had them in the air by 1941, despite the usual government dickering.
In the US today, 20-30 years can go by, or more, from military jet inception to production.
The California bullet train is a monument to a really bad idea, crushed by governmental miscalculation and delay. No, two negatives do not make a positive.
On a brighter note: The Ukrainians appear able to innovate and produce quickly.
In the past the US had as many as 50 military installations in Greenland. We shut all but one down since the end of the Cold War. Under the current treaty we could build more bases again if we want. Just building bases would be much cheaper than buying the place. Neither Russia nor China is going to invade. Both have very limited ability to project force away from their borders. So I totally agree, buying Greenland is a waste of money.
Steve
Trump wanting Greenland is a headscratcher and if so important to have which see as not the case since US military installations are there, but if more control needed of part of the island, then Mr Real Estate man might consider this: Enter in to some long term lease agreement of say 99 years; certainly likely to be more economically beneficial to the US than an outright buy.
Am suggesting this as only some middle ground if feasible and of course would be best to cease just to leave well enough alone.
Interesting if somewhat profitable provocative points. Aren’t you making things a bit too simple? The US-Mexico war was imperialistic in design and genocidal in follow-up, but I guess you will not deny its outcome was overall immensely profitable for the US. Having read some of your film reviews I simply can’t believe that you really believe that Renaissance Art was about recreating Greek Sculpture (this was what Roman sculpture was largely about, actually). You would need anyway a theory for Renaissance painting, since they did not have Greek paintings to copy. And Brunelleschi came up with an engineering solution to the dome of Florence’s Duomo that the Roman architects had not figured out. Finally, I am not sure about your ‘religion’ (to borrow from French) on great projects. I can agree with you that sending men to the moon some sixty years from the first landing is not such an exciting goal, but the fact that apparently we are not able to replicate the feat should be worrying, shouldn’t it?
I was discussing Renaissance sculpture, not paintings. I agree that they surpassed the ancients in painting and architecture. Probably even sculpture, but the point is it took 2000 years to even catch up.