"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.
"Rather it's a culture of safety obsession." Yes, that does capture it quite well. A friend of mine who was one of the "Undersecretaries" of Energy some decades ago told me that neither the government nor industry wanted nuclear to improve because they had worked out the fuel rod form factor. Any change to that would mean work for regulators and capital costs for industry. So they colluded to keep thwart any progress. He was very in favor of the stasis. So in addition to the safety obsession, there is one example of government regulation restricting progress. That regulatory history probably hasn't captured the space program yet.
"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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I agree with you on the economics. That's why Trump's aim was never to take over Greenland. Instead, he wanted a Cyprus-style* military base deal with gives America the legal right to make territorial right claims in the immediate vicinity. Sure, they won't be able to interdict Chinese or Russian shipping, but a Cyprus-style Greenland deal grants America a variety of regulatory, inspection, and escort rights which could also include fees for 'services' rendered.
Plus, it's about Artic dominance. The mere threat to China's arguably illegal extraction (they hold no legally valid territorial claims in the Arctic) in the Arctic changes the risk ratios and the costs of capital. Let's not forget that China has been gearing up for a potential Taiwan military takeover for the past 6 years. With difficulty, machines and infrastructure can be replaced. It's the skilled and highly knowledgeable workforce which is incomparably invaluable.
*Note: Cyprus SBAs generate revenue through local agreements.
I actually called the Cyprus play as soon as I heard the wording of Trump's initial speech at Davos. Explaining about the technicalities of leasing gave the game away. It's also worth noting that Russian sub technology is steadily improving, although the 5th generation fleet remains further away, with construction not due to start until 2027.
If you remember, in a comment on one of your previous essays, I specifically stated that maritime territorial rights were the main aim. If a relative layman like myself with a passing interest in geopolitics can predict it, it's pretty certain that one of Trump's advisors designed the plan.
Besides, we both know that Rare Earths were just a laser pointer/glitter ball for the MAGA base- the key choke point on Rare Earths is refinement capacity. China is unusual in that it's one of only a very few global players which has both a highly skilled technical elite and an abundant cheap labour force. Regulatory regime is also a key consideration.
Besides, you're usually annoyingly right on most things. Please allow me my temporary moment of glory:)
Well, I'll admit I'm a lot more neutral on the topic than I present. I'm purposefully contrarian in a lot of respects. I've found arguing with people helps me learn faster.
Plus, I'm a Brit (although eligible for American dual national status). My country is becoming increasingly dystopian.
Anyway, I tried something interesting the other day, using AI. I wrote a prompt which asked the AI to take BLS data and feed it into the UKs old NRS social grading system, as well as generating stats for non-citizen labour. The thing I really didn't anticipate was a significant foreign component in the C1 category. I then asked about social stratification.
The results reminded me of the discussion back in the mid-nineties/early noughties about the transition from an 'egg' economy to an hourglass. I think a lot of what we are seeing is a result of social stratification and declines in both intragenerational and intergenerational mobility.
The Opportunity Atlas is a really great data source. Low mobility areas show strong Trump support.
I have a question about the UK. It seems like anti-immigration feeling there is just as strong as on the continent, but don't non-white immigrants to the UK do about as well as local people, and far better than non-white immigrants to the continent? Or am I looking at the wrong data? Is the worry overcrowding and high housing costs?
Non-white immigrants have historically done very well. However, it's important to distinguish between the high integration immigration which occurred at much lower levels, and the more recent 'wave' migration we've seen in recent decades. There is great economics paper I found from the Netherlands recently which looked at the issue of wave migration in detail. The author seemed puzzled that migrants might forego better economic opportunities, engaging in an economic trade-off to ensure that their employment was with people from their own culture, and were even willing to tolerate periods of unemployment in pursuit of this goal.
That being said, in the past our university system has been a great cause of improving economic outcomes, particularly through fostering a secondary informal network. Raj Chetty did some work only recently on social capital and economic connectedness. The real insight is in understanding how tertiary education forms cross-class economic connectedness and informal social networks which can be leveraged for opportunity. It's also the case that universities tend to Westernise. Data on the Power Distance Index show that the tertiary educated from non-Western backgrounds have lower PDIs than normal for their culture, which is generally higher than in the West, with our egalitarian ethos, which doesn't look down on the lower status anywhere near as much as most of the rest of the world. PDI is a recipe for friction between lower status groups.
Housing is a huge issue, but one has to look at the detail level. Our government and the prevailing woke ideology has done huge harm in this respect. If you know a basic amount about ingroup and outgroup hostility, it's important to note that outgroup hostility can form for two reasons, fears of displacement and the perception of unequal treatment, even if the latter is intended for restorative reasons. And the perception of unfairness, of system rigging against one group is a far, far worse problem than that of fears of displacement.
There have a huge number of stories about unequal treatment reported by a few outlets, and plastered all over social media. The Pakistani grooming gangs and the treatment by authorities of working class teenage girls as underage prostitutes, sweeping the problem under the carpet caused immense harm. National news of people from minorities getting preferential treatment and lower standards for everything from police officer, to RAF pilot trainee (" stop sending us useless white males" was the phrase leaked by a woman RAF officer whistleblower), to BBC cameraman. Adverts which step right up to the legal line by discouraging White males from applying have been widely reported.
British families turfed out of rental accommodation because the landlord has signed a sweetheart deal with the authorities for a lucrative five year contract for the accommodation to be converted to housing for multiple occupancy to house recent migrants. Local councils prioritising social housing for MENA migrants and people from the 'Global Majority', when 60-80% of the local homeless population are white and male. And the readily apparent and easily provable two-tier justice system, which allows for special consideration for virtually every 'victim' group to the notable exception of straight white males with no history of mental illness.
If they were actively trying to provoke tensions between British people and recent arrivals, the British government couldn't do any worse. And then there is Islam. Trying to hide the ethnicity and religion of a religiously motivated attack on a female pensioner really doesn't help. It causes people to grossly overestimate the numbers, and creates the dystopian feeling that the authorities and media are conspiring against ordinary British people. For example, of a population peak of 56,000 migrants housed in hotels, rapes and sexual assaults were 200 per year. Many who follow social media or read the Daily Mail or Sun would imagine the figure to be far higher.
Baroness Casey said it best “I was following through on a children’s file in archive and found the word ‘Pakistani’ tippexed out…
I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town.
I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist… if good people don’t grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that’s why we have to do it as a society.”
I don't agree with the characterisation. The data on the percentages of racism in the UK show we are amongst the best globally, including in relation to the individually problematic, but population level informative, data on IAT- and certainly better than all of Europe. The data suggests that roughly 1 in 11 Reform voters fall into the range from racist to ethnonationalist. The problem is that people don't operate very well on the basis of the accumulation of anecdotes and it doesn't help when it appears that the entirety of the British Establishment has picked a side and it's not theirs.
The grooming gang scandal did far more harm than any other single cause. It's difficult to assess the size of the problem, but having looked at the matter closely and found a few reasonable if incomplete data sources (the Report for the Office of the Child Commissioner is the best, alongside that of the NCA taskforce) the figure is likely 1,000-4,000 underage teenage girls groomed and raped each year for 30 years, composing mainly working class white girls, but also Sikh girls and other non-Muslim girls of other Asian extractions.
The optics of the Palestine protests probably haven't helped. Having at least hundreds, possibly thousands of Muslims engaged in coordinated mass prayers to Mecca probably unsettled a lot of people.
If not for fears of Islam then it's highly likely the issue of mass migration wouldn't be such a pressing issue. It's also worth noting that MENA migrants don't perform as well in terms of integration and drawing level economically level with the existing host population. The problem can persist across multiple generations.
It's not a hard and fast problem. Urban populations are better, as are the tertiary educated in particular. But rural clan cultures don't do as well in the West, which you will probably find if you look into American migrant populations. It helps that the US was the go to destination for academic dissenters and heretics for so long.
Great post and so much right. One add I would make, if the end game in Greenland is a much bigger US military presence this surely strengthens Europe's defences - in other words ties NATO closer despite the rhetoric. And if it means the US picks up some of the running cost I don't suppose the Danes will mind very much!
I don't see how Greenland has any impact on European defense. The actual threat to Europe is that Russia might do a land invasion of another European country, say Latvia.
I doubt whether Russia or China have any interest in Greenland. What would be the point? And don't say "control shipping lanes" Control of Greenland does not affect shipping beyond the 12-mile limit. If Russia tried to interfere with that they'd risk WWIII. Does that really seem likely? Why? What would they gain?
On the other hand, I do agree that Nato is important for Europe's defense.
The 12 mile limit is artificial and somewhat outdated in great power politics.
The South China Sea and Strait of Taiwan generate plenty of friction.
The point about NATO's involvement in Arctic defense is valid.
US leadership in NATO is critical to Europe's security for the foreseeable future. The level of US participation in NATO going forward will be contingent on Europe's perceived contribution to US security. Like China tariffs, future Democratic administrations are unlikely to reverse Trump's initiatives on Europe "paying their fair share".
I don't believe that Trump is doing anything effective to push Europe into doing more military spending. The Trump people are supporting right wing parties like the AfD that oppose Germany's current defense build-up. Actions speak louder than words.
Poor choice of words on my part. It will be seen and touted as helping European defence. In practice, you are quite correct it will have no real effect.
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.
The only Big Project we see succeeding now is Technocratic exploitation of humanity, and it gets easier day by day, because AI is evolving and we are degrading!🙈🤖
Scott, try not to let the messenger keep you from hearing the message.
EVERYONE intelligent agrees now that the US space race in the 1960s was really about getting ICBMs dialed in... why do you think (or pretend) it's about going to Mars now?
Elon is the Trump's Golden Dome. Palmer is building a hypersonic missile platform that will enable mass production of low-fuel gravity-propelled hypersonic missile variants that are launched from Starship (a 3-year orbiting MIRV) like a Pez dispenser and can be anywhere on Earth in 4-10 minutes.
Ships full of drones or Chinese infantry won't get out of the South China Sea. ICBMs will be obsolete. Nobody is getting to space without approval of their manifest. FOREVER. We are taking the high ground and defending it GLOBALLY. American Empire. WHY do we need total control of the Western Hemisphere? So the only missiles China or Russia can launch have to be launched from submarines. We can't have them installed in Greenland, Cuba, or VZ. And once everyone groks what the Golden Dome is, getting missiles closer to the US will be a scramble if we don't have it all locked down.
Why do you think Trump's military budget adds $500B?
Why do you think Elon is mentioning war in 5-10 years?
Why are the defense incumbents being spanked into acquiring startups for new management?
Why is Elon building capacity for 1-10K os a REUSABLE Starships? Because we send them up every day, and catch the ones that went up years ago (unused hopefully).
Watching boats get nuked from on high? Normalizes the fear globally. We no longer need to send out planes and ships to put huge munition payloads on you, the kinetic energy of the shit hitting you at Mach 10 in 4-10 minutes, anywhere on Earth will make Civis Americanus Sum a reality.
Look, even if you are Elon and you REALLY want to be the guy who gets us to Mars... this is the sustainable funding and the world-peace play to do it without another space race. Elon would want ALL the top engineers on Earth working towards that goal. Even the Chinese.
I never saw the Mercator projection on any of the world maps at the educational institutions I attended. The Robinson projection was the standard map across multiple schools and cities. The Mercator map was mentioned in passing in geography class, but it was not the map on the big roll at the front of the room.
It seems to me like the Mercator map has grown in use in the digital age. Computer people don't like the aesthetics of a non-rectangular map, even though there have been projections of a sphere onto a rectangle that don't distort areas going back to Archimedes.
The Mercator projection is great for navigation, but as most of the people I meet day to day are not sailing across the ocean, there is no reason for its widespread use.
"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.
How does SpaceX not come into this conversation?
"Rather it's a culture of safety obsession." Yes, that does capture it quite well. A friend of mine who was one of the "Undersecretaries" of Energy some decades ago told me that neither the government nor industry wanted nuclear to improve because they had worked out the fuel rod form factor. Any change to that would mean work for regulators and capital costs for industry. So they colluded to keep thwart any progress. He was very in favor of the stasis. So in addition to the safety obsession, there is one example of government regulation restricting progress. That regulatory history probably hasn't captured the space program yet.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
I agree with you on the economics. That's why Trump's aim was never to take over Greenland. Instead, he wanted a Cyprus-style* military base deal with gives America the legal right to make territorial right claims in the immediate vicinity. Sure, they won't be able to interdict Chinese or Russian shipping, but a Cyprus-style Greenland deal grants America a variety of regulatory, inspection, and escort rights which could also include fees for 'services' rendered.
Plus, it's about Artic dominance. The mere threat to China's arguably illegal extraction (they hold no legally valid territorial claims in the Arctic) in the Arctic changes the risk ratios and the costs of capital. Let's not forget that China has been gearing up for a potential Taiwan military takeover for the past 6 years. With difficulty, machines and infrastructure can be replaced. It's the skilled and highly knowledgeable workforce which is incomparably invaluable.
*Note: Cyprus SBAs generate revenue through local agreements.
I actually called the Cyprus play as soon as I heard the wording of Trump's initial speech at Davos. Explaining about the technicalities of leasing gave the game away. It's also worth noting that Russian sub technology is steadily improving, although the 5th generation fleet remains further away, with construction not due to start until 2027.
It wasn't about the economics.
Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
I find it amusing when Trump's complete incompetence blows up in his face, and then his supporters claim that he was actually playing 4-D chess.
If you remember, in a comment on one of your previous essays, I specifically stated that maritime territorial rights were the main aim. If a relative layman like myself with a passing interest in geopolitics can predict it, it's pretty certain that one of Trump's advisors designed the plan.
Besides, we both know that Rare Earths were just a laser pointer/glitter ball for the MAGA base- the key choke point on Rare Earths is refinement capacity. China is unusual in that it's one of only a very few global players which has both a highly skilled technical elite and an abundant cheap labour force. Regulatory regime is also a key consideration.
Besides, you're usually annoyingly right on most things. Please allow me my temporary moment of glory:)
Trump gained absolutely nothing from all this drama.
Well, I'll admit I'm a lot more neutral on the topic than I present. I'm purposefully contrarian in a lot of respects. I've found arguing with people helps me learn faster.
Plus, I'm a Brit (although eligible for American dual national status). My country is becoming increasingly dystopian.
Anyway, I tried something interesting the other day, using AI. I wrote a prompt which asked the AI to take BLS data and feed it into the UKs old NRS social grading system, as well as generating stats for non-citizen labour. The thing I really didn't anticipate was a significant foreign component in the C1 category. I then asked about social stratification.
The results reminded me of the discussion back in the mid-nineties/early noughties about the transition from an 'egg' economy to an hourglass. I think a lot of what we are seeing is a result of social stratification and declines in both intragenerational and intergenerational mobility.
The Opportunity Atlas is a really great data source. Low mobility areas show strong Trump support.
I have a question about the UK. It seems like anti-immigration feeling there is just as strong as on the continent, but don't non-white immigrants to the UK do about as well as local people, and far better than non-white immigrants to the continent? Or am I looking at the wrong data? Is the worry overcrowding and high housing costs?
Non-white immigrants have historically done very well. However, it's important to distinguish between the high integration immigration which occurred at much lower levels, and the more recent 'wave' migration we've seen in recent decades. There is great economics paper I found from the Netherlands recently which looked at the issue of wave migration in detail. The author seemed puzzled that migrants might forego better economic opportunities, engaging in an economic trade-off to ensure that their employment was with people from their own culture, and were even willing to tolerate periods of unemployment in pursuit of this goal.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-019-00953-8#Tab4
That being said, in the past our university system has been a great cause of improving economic outcomes, particularly through fostering a secondary informal network. Raj Chetty did some work only recently on social capital and economic connectedness. The real insight is in understanding how tertiary education forms cross-class economic connectedness and informal social networks which can be leveraged for opportunity. It's also the case that universities tend to Westernise. Data on the Power Distance Index show that the tertiary educated from non-Western backgrounds have lower PDIs than normal for their culture, which is generally higher than in the West, with our egalitarian ethos, which doesn't look down on the lower status anywhere near as much as most of the rest of the world. PDI is a recipe for friction between lower status groups.
Housing is a huge issue, but one has to look at the detail level. Our government and the prevailing woke ideology has done huge harm in this respect. If you know a basic amount about ingroup and outgroup hostility, it's important to note that outgroup hostility can form for two reasons, fears of displacement and the perception of unequal treatment, even if the latter is intended for restorative reasons. And the perception of unfairness, of system rigging against one group is a far, far worse problem than that of fears of displacement.
There have a huge number of stories about unequal treatment reported by a few outlets, and plastered all over social media. The Pakistani grooming gangs and the treatment by authorities of working class teenage girls as underage prostitutes, sweeping the problem under the carpet caused immense harm. National news of people from minorities getting preferential treatment and lower standards for everything from police officer, to RAF pilot trainee (" stop sending us useless white males" was the phrase leaked by a woman RAF officer whistleblower), to BBC cameraman. Adverts which step right up to the legal line by discouraging White males from applying have been widely reported.
British families turfed out of rental accommodation because the landlord has signed a sweetheart deal with the authorities for a lucrative five year contract for the accommodation to be converted to housing for multiple occupancy to house recent migrants. Local councils prioritising social housing for MENA migrants and people from the 'Global Majority', when 60-80% of the local homeless population are white and male. And the readily apparent and easily provable two-tier justice system, which allows for special consideration for virtually every 'victim' group to the notable exception of straight white males with no history of mental illness.
If they were actively trying to provoke tensions between British people and recent arrivals, the British government couldn't do any worse. And then there is Islam. Trying to hide the ethnicity and religion of a religiously motivated attack on a female pensioner really doesn't help. It causes people to grossly overestimate the numbers, and creates the dystopian feeling that the authorities and media are conspiring against ordinary British people. For example, of a population peak of 56,000 migrants housed in hotels, rapes and sexual assaults were 200 per year. Many who follow social media or read the Daily Mail or Sun would imagine the figure to be far higher.
Baroness Casey said it best “I was following through on a children’s file in archive and found the word ‘Pakistani’ tippexed out…
I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town.
I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist… if good people don’t grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that’s why we have to do it as a society.”
I don't agree with the characterisation. The data on the percentages of racism in the UK show we are amongst the best globally, including in relation to the individually problematic, but population level informative, data on IAT- and certainly better than all of Europe. The data suggests that roughly 1 in 11 Reform voters fall into the range from racist to ethnonationalist. The problem is that people don't operate very well on the basis of the accumulation of anecdotes and it doesn't help when it appears that the entirety of the British Establishment has picked a side and it's not theirs.
The grooming gang scandal did far more harm than any other single cause. It's difficult to assess the size of the problem, but having looked at the matter closely and found a few reasonable if incomplete data sources (the Report for the Office of the Child Commissioner is the best, alongside that of the NCA taskforce) the figure is likely 1,000-4,000 underage teenage girls groomed and raped each year for 30 years, composing mainly working class white girls, but also Sikh girls and other non-Muslim girls of other Asian extractions.
The optics of the Palestine protests probably haven't helped. Having at least hundreds, possibly thousands of Muslims engaged in coordinated mass prayers to Mecca probably unsettled a lot of people.
If not for fears of Islam then it's highly likely the issue of mass migration wouldn't be such a pressing issue. It's also worth noting that MENA migrants don't perform as well in terms of integration and drawing level economically level with the existing host population. The problem can persist across multiple generations.
It's not a hard and fast problem. Urban populations are better, as are the tertiary educated in particular. But rural clan cultures don't do as well in the West, which you will probably find if you look into American migrant populations. It helps that the US was the go to destination for academic dissenters and heretics for so long.
Great post and so much right. One add I would make, if the end game in Greenland is a much bigger US military presence this surely strengthens Europe's defences - in other words ties NATO closer despite the rhetoric. And if it means the US picks up some of the running cost I don't suppose the Danes will mind very much!
I don't see how Greenland has any impact on European defense. The actual threat to Europe is that Russia might do a land invasion of another European country, say Latvia.
I doubt whether Russia or China have any interest in Greenland. What would be the point? And don't say "control shipping lanes" Control of Greenland does not affect shipping beyond the 12-mile limit. If Russia tried to interfere with that they'd risk WWIII. Does that really seem likely? Why? What would they gain?
On the other hand, I do agree that Nato is important for Europe's defense.
The 12 mile limit is artificial and somewhat outdated in great power politics.
The South China Sea and Strait of Taiwan generate plenty of friction.
The point about NATO's involvement in Arctic defense is valid.
US leadership in NATO is critical to Europe's security for the foreseeable future. The level of US participation in NATO going forward will be contingent on Europe's perceived contribution to US security. Like China tariffs, future Democratic administrations are unlikely to reverse Trump's initiatives on Europe "paying their fair share".
I don't believe that Trump is doing anything effective to push Europe into doing more military spending. The Trump people are supporting right wing parties like the AfD that oppose Germany's current defense build-up. Actions speak louder than words.
Poor choice of words on my part. It will be seen and touted as helping European defence. In practice, you are quite correct it will have no real effect.
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.
The only Big Project we see succeeding now is Technocratic exploitation of humanity, and it gets easier day by day, because AI is evolving and we are degrading!🙈🤖
Scott, try not to let the messenger keep you from hearing the message.
EVERYONE intelligent agrees now that the US space race in the 1960s was really about getting ICBMs dialed in... why do you think (or pretend) it's about going to Mars now?
Elon is the Trump's Golden Dome. Palmer is building a hypersonic missile platform that will enable mass production of low-fuel gravity-propelled hypersonic missile variants that are launched from Starship (a 3-year orbiting MIRV) like a Pez dispenser and can be anywhere on Earth in 4-10 minutes.
Ships full of drones or Chinese infantry won't get out of the South China Sea. ICBMs will be obsolete. Nobody is getting to space without approval of their manifest. FOREVER. We are taking the high ground and defending it GLOBALLY. American Empire. WHY do we need total control of the Western Hemisphere? So the only missiles China or Russia can launch have to be launched from submarines. We can't have them installed in Greenland, Cuba, or VZ. And once everyone groks what the Golden Dome is, getting missiles closer to the US will be a scramble if we don't have it all locked down.
Why do you think Trump's military budget adds $500B?
Why do you think Elon is mentioning war in 5-10 years?
Why are the defense incumbents being spanked into acquiring startups for new management?
Why is Elon building capacity for 1-10K os a REUSABLE Starships? Because we send them up every day, and catch the ones that went up years ago (unused hopefully).
Watching boats get nuked from on high? Normalizes the fear globally. We no longer need to send out planes and ships to put huge munition payloads on you, the kinetic energy of the shit hitting you at Mach 10 in 4-10 minutes, anywhere on Earth will make Civis Americanus Sum a reality.
Look, even if you are Elon and you REALLY want to be the guy who gets us to Mars... this is the sustainable funding and the world-peace play to do it without another space race. Elon would want ALL the top engineers on Earth working towards that goal. Even the Chinese.
I never saw the Mercator projection on any of the world maps at the educational institutions I attended. The Robinson projection was the standard map across multiple schools and cities. The Mercator map was mentioned in passing in geography class, but it was not the map on the big roll at the front of the room.
Perhaps things have changed since the 1960s.
It seems to me like the Mercator map has grown in use in the digital age. Computer people don't like the aesthetics of a non-rectangular map, even though there have been projections of a sphere onto a rectangle that don't distort areas going back to Archimedes.
The Mercator projection is great for navigation, but as most of the people I meet day to day are not sailing across the ocean, there is no reason for its widespread use.