Someone Has to Make the Pie.
28th July 2013
Jerry Pournelle, whom you really ought to be reading all the time.
Democracies endure until the majority learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury. Up to that point awarding yourself money for doing nothing was known as graft. Old Ed Crump, the highly popular and successful city boss of Memphis when I was growing up, used to talk about ‘honest graft’ dishonest graft. Honest graft was the sort of thing like knowing where a road would be built or improved and tipping off your friends to buy out in that direction. Dishonest graft was stealing money from the treasury or intimidating taxpayers. Crump talked openly about it: he didn’t put up with theft and embezzlement and incompetence, but he rewarded efficiency and honesty. Oddly enough, most people believed him, and did so all the time I was in Memphis. I haven’t been back since. I suppose there has been some kind of debunking and posthumous degrading of the old man since I left in 1950.
Unfortunately, most of our politicians grew up reading Rawls, who just assumed that a pie drops magically from the sky and spent all of his time obsessing about how it was going to be divided; his intellectual progeny spend all their time focusing on distribution and not enough of it on production, with results as you see them.
Moore’s law is inexorable. We can do more and more with less and less. The precision gyros and accelerometers in a Minuteman missile cost millions of dollars. Now you can get a full set of gyros and accelerometers with a GPS receiver to boot on a chip for under $50, and that cost is falling. You can build a satellite capable of doing crop forecasts for a few thousand dollars and get it launched as a cube sat. Telemetry is no longer expensive – the batteries cost more than the electronics. In the early days of spy satellites we had to drop physical film packages and catch them off Hawaii before they fell into the sea to get good pictures of the Soviet ICBM installations. Now a cubesat can give you an instant picture at much better resolution.