In Favor of Designer Babies

The ethics of designer babies--humans with an enhanced genome--was a big topic last year; I imagine it will be again this year. And I imagine most of the arguments will, again, be against. This is a problem.

The pro-ban argument hinges on inequality: only the rich could afford giving their kids the genetic advantage. There would be haves and have-not. The gap between the rich and poor would widen.

To be clear: this widening does not come from the poor will be poorer. It would occur because the rich will be richer (or at least more secure in their wealth). And those gains will not come from corruption or favorable tax laws or money from a dead relative. Those gains will come from genetic enhancements. Intelligence is the clearest candidate but other traits such as work ethic, memory, and ambition could theoretically be boosted.

This is where the pro-ban argument falls apart. If there are more people who are smarter, without anyone being stupider, that's a better world. If there are more people who have great memories, without anyone being more forgetful, that's a better world. It means more and better inventors, doctors, entrepreneurs, and all the other occupations we associate with a better world. The designer babies will grow into designer adults who will be wealthy because they made the world a better place.

Designing your baby is no different than the many other things parents do to give their kid an advantage. Smart people tend to mate with other smart people because they don't want to risk having a stupid kid. No one argues that provides an unfair advantage, though the advantage is as fundamental as genetic engineering. Reading to your child gives them a huge advantage. As does raising them in a loving household.

When it's argued that we should do these things less, it's clear how backward a designer baby ban is. Last year, philosophy professor Adam Swift claimed parents shouldn't read to their kids because some kids have parents who don't read to them. It's an unfair advantage, he says. Same with loving your kids: a stable and caring household is an unfair advantage. But, obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes, the best response isn't to read to or love your kids less. It's that people should do these things more. 

And that's the final nail in the coffin for the pro-banners. All technology starts out as only for the rich but falls in price as production improves. Costs came down for computers, for cars, for air conditioning, for cell phones. Why not for genetic engineering? Imagine a world where a cocktail of genetic improvement is as standard as an ultrasound. Where everyone is cancer-resistant, Einstein-smart, and lives to be 200. That's a strictly better world.

But it can't happen if it can't ever get started.

A Very Interesting Sentence

Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car...

From The New Yorker

Things ARE Getting Better

I end each principles of microeconomics class talking about the future. Historically, innovation does well to solve problems associated with an increasing population and society ends up better off than when it was when fewer people were around.

One of my students was very skeptical, especially about our ability to cure cancer. I hope she finds this article uplifting. We may be closer than you think to a cure.

The Secret to Apple's Success

New York Times has a nice article over-viewing various patents which bear Steve Job's name (there are 313 total though I'm not sure the Times has them all indicated). Many relate to iconic Apple products. But many are just design patents including the casing for desktop computers, packaging for the iPhone, and the design layout for the iPod.

So Apple's secret seems to be claiming a monopoly on things people find cute. What's next? Patents on adorable kitten videos?

The Price of Patents

Google spent $400,000 per patent when it bought Motorola Mobility. Microsoft spent $510,204 per patent when it bought Novell. When Nortel Networks was bought, they got $750,000 per patent.

More here about the increasingly problematic patent war.

HT: Keith Pham

Social Insurance and aSTG

Lately I've been reading William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World, about the history of the steam engine. But that's not the most powerful idea: the notion that people have a right to profit from their invention is. (At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, this was a new idea.)

Rosen takes the time to explain the biology of how we get invention. In other words, when people have that eureka moment, what happening in the brain? The key, researchers Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios, found is that when there's a flash of insight, blood flows to the anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus (aSTG) in the right hemisphere. When you daydream, this is part of the brain that's responsible. Most of the time, the brain works to inhibit the flow of blood to this region. This makes evolutionary sense: daydreaming gets you killed because blood flowing to aSTG is blood that's not flowing to the parts of your brain which will tell you there's a lion about to kill you. This is also why you get flashes of insight when you're relaxing (taking a walk, in the shower).

So far, so good. But what does this have to do with social insurance? It occurs to me that if you are constantly concerned about survival, you have no time for flashes of insight (note to get these eureka moments, you also have to know the material...daydreaming is not a substitute for reading). I see this as a potential barrier for income mobility. If there's a safety net loose enough to encourage hard work but strong enough to allow people to relax everyone once in a while, then you're more likely to get new ideas (not just inventions, but things from small business ideas to solving everyday problems).

It should be stressed that this can easily be justification for more aid to the developing world and I tepidly agree. All things being equal, yes. But I must return to the thesis of Rosen's book: allow people to profit from their ideas. In the developing world, where it is nearly impossible to start a (legal) business, secure a loan, etc, having great ideas isn't enough to pull a country out of poverty.

But it's a start.

Collaboration Brings Progress on Alzheimer’s

My research involves how patents make it difficult to share their knowledge which makes it harder to create derivative inventions. Suppose everyone controlled a single puzzle piece. Putting together that puzzle would involve negotiations for each piece and even if you were to get 90% of what you need to assemble it, the puzzle won't be complete and it'll show. Knowing that danger, you don't bother trying to assemble the pieces.

Patents are puzzle pieces and gathered together the right ones can make something truly amazing. But getting them together is hard, especially in the biotech world where so many crucial pieces are spread among so many people/firms. So I was thrilled when I read this in the NYT:

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.

While patent pools--firms making an agreement to share each others' patents--is not new, the notion of not allowing people to patent the work in the first place is. One of the unintended consequences of patent pools is that firms patent things just so they can join the pool. This method avoids that problem, though the fact that if focuses on basic research is surely an important part of its to-date success.

The Apartment that Simon Built

It was Julian Simon who wrote in the Ultimate Resource 2 (p12):

Greater consumption due to increase in population and growth of income heightens scarcity and induces price run-ups. A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen.

In Hong Kong, population density means space is at a premium. Responding to high rents and tight quarters, architect Gary Chang found a way to fit 24 rooms into one.



The narrator calls the house "a technological marvel" but there's nothing in inherent the idea which prevents it from being implemented 10, 20, or 50 years ago (and to lesser degrees, such an idea has been used before). What's important is that all this amazing apartment took was hard work and some creativity, effort that might not have been worth the time if Hong Kong had fewer people in it.

Patent Number 5,547,091

When I shop for toothpaste, I prefer the caps with the flip top so I don't have to remove the cap when I brush my teeth. I usually forget to look since I tend to forgot to buy it in the first place but today I remembered. In my search for the flip-top cap, I discovered only one brand, Colgate, has them. Moments after I thought that was strange, I suspected the answer. A search at the PTO website confirmed my suspicions. It's patent number is 5,547,091. Here's the abstract:

A closure for a container having a dispensing nozzle include a central aperture to receive the nozzle. In one embodiment, the nozzle extends through the aperture and projects upwardly from the base cap. The base cap further includes a top wall inclined with respect to the central axis of the base cap to assist in dispensing of the contents of the container. A cap lid is hinged to the base cap by a snap hinge assembly.

The patent was issued on August 20, 1996. Thus, on 2016, the "who didn't replace the cap on the toothpaste" arguments will evolve into "who didn't shut the toothpaste" arguments. And we'll all be happier for it.

The Profit Motive of Eureka

Yesterday on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough mixed up his economics. While expressing disgust that a 4% of the world "taking" 25% of its resource output, he proposed that if

....we control the next wave of energy, we will own the 21st Century...in America we have eight of the top ten research universities on the planet. Why not tap into that and really have a focused effort to create the next wave of energy resources....

Those in the developed world do not take resources; they buy them. And they can afford so much because they produce so much, notably the technology that Scarborough wishes to see. Since private investors and inventors are creating the next waves of technology, his insistence of an American focused effort can only mean some sort of central government planning. This deadly pair--economic nationalism and government centralization--is truly wasteful. Technology becomes harder to produce under such large bureaucracies, especially when you restrain where in the world you can draw your inputs for discovery from.

There is a big push for new technology and it's been that way since the dawn of human civilization. Only in the past few hundred years has government been laissez-faire enough to let it truly flourish. And look how far we've come so quickly! Technology creates resources far more than it consumes them. It is our greatest source of genuine growth and with so much wealth up for grabs, it instantaneously creates a vast network of entrepreneurs far more focused than Scarborough could ever imagine.

Tabarrok At TED

My dissertation chair, Alex Tabarrok, gives an inspiring talk at TED on growth and the future. Watch, won't you?

Google > CDC

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes flu data, but with a lag to allow for the data to arrive. Google decided to track the searches for flu, and gets numbers similar to the CDC, but only without the lag. Thus if you want to know the current flu situation, you are better off with Google than the CDC.

People Are Not Passive

Are there limits to growth? That's what people tell me while citing higher food prices, a planet of 6.7 billion, and cities often exceeding ten million. "There are too many people," they say. What nonsense.

Eleven years ago, Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug wrote that with current technology we could feed 10 billion people (a population we're not going to reach until around 2050). With 21st century technology we can surely feed more. Alex Tabarrok reminds us that US land use for crops has been steady from the late 1930s to the late 1980s, a trend likely continuing right now.

Whenever people make note of the resource usage of developed countries or the "carrying capacity" of the planet, they always ignore that people are not passive. We are not infants, sucking thoughtlessly away at the tit of the world. We create more than we consume. Our inventions exceed our immolations (at least in today's world). For every mouth to feed there is a mind to think, hands to work, and feet to move. We cherish our lives, our wealth, and our hope for a better future and we will lash out with every appendage to maintain our true and steady course.

Are there limits to growth? Probably, but we're not going to encounter then in our lifetime. Or even in our grandchildren's grandchildren's lifetime. History is replete with doomsayers and prophecies of cataclysm. And as seductive as their wild-eyed claims are, as invincible as they seem, they're always wrong. Never forget that.

There Is No Peak of Progress

James Howard Kunstler appeared on the Colbert Report today promoting his new novel about a world without oil. Kunstler claimed we have hit the peak of oil and now we must get off of oil and abandon our Wal-Mart suburbia ways.

Kunstler is mistaking economics with physics. There's a finite amount of oil, but that's not what we care about. We care about energy. As the price of oil rises we find new sources of electricity. We improve wind, solar, nuclear, coal, geothermal, and oil efficiency. We find new deposits, including things we never considered oil before. Someday we will not use oil, but it will be phased out, not ripped away. Kunstler imagines the oil wells "drying up" will come as a surprise--a paradox concerning that's what everyone talks about. Assuming ignorance on the part of the oil companies (who's fortunes are made on the stuff) is patently absurd.

Colbert wisely (though I doubt he meant it this way) brought up the terror of Y2K, asking "When's that going to hit?" I remember the scares of the millennium bug vividly, the concern that planes will fall out of the sky and the world will suddenly end. It didn't. No one wanted to go back to the Stone Age so programmers fixed the problem. Now we are better off than we were eight years ago, and the Y2K scare a distance and quaint memory. Kunstler's novel will surely follow the same path.

Car of the Future?

I mentioned recently a $1 billion prized if you can "Achieve 150 miles per gallon of gasoline in a 3,000 lb. car, using EPA standards; without increasing the cost of a normal car more than 10%." I wonder if this guy knows about it. It looks like he is working for a different prize, although for a bit less money.

Our Utopian Society

From an article on Salon about the history of cleanliness, I found this quote to be interesting:

In the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," said she dreamed of a time when there would be one bathroom in an American house for every three or four bedrooms. People at the time thought that was just crazy utopian, just so over the top compared to what they were used to. Now a luxury apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has more bathrooms than bedrooms.

Last Christmas I visited a great aunt of mine who lives in an old house in rural Ohio. She still doesn't have indoor plumbing; she has an outhouse and a pump in the kitchen for her sink. It's amazing how far we've come in the past couple hundred years, especially in things we take for granted like the number of bathrooms in our houses.

Trading With Prometheus

South Korean farmers are erupting in anger over the trade talks with the U.S. Fearful that American produce will flood their market, calling that their livelihoods are threatened and the agricultural sector will collapse. I'm sure such phrasing gets a lot of support in Korea, as labor unions are sympathized here.

But few mind when technology threatens jobs. Farmers rally against imports, not hydroponics: life should be autarkist, but not archaic. Few tears are shed when a new technology wipes out old jobs. Luddites are rare, particularly in today's society. But protectionists always seem to have the ear of the public.

It's strange because trade and technology are functionally the same. In both cases, a good is made cheaper. In both cases, jobs are lost to those that can do the same for less. In both cases, there are winners and losers. In both cases, society changes in unpredictable ways. People are perfectly willing to erect trade barriers to "protect jobs," but the same does not go for outlawing technologies. Such arguments center around the ethics of playing God, not ensuring employment.

If you like technology, if you think it makes us wealthier because it swaps the cheap with the valuable, then you are right. We get to do more with less and we are better off for it. But what difference does it make if the goods transform by man instead of machine?

Making Plans Centralized

Today on NPR's Kojo Nnamdi Show, guest Lee Gutkind discussed his new book Almost Human: Making Robots Think. Partway through the interview, Gutkind proclaimed that society needs to figure out what we want robots to do in our economy. Arguing for a massive convention of various disciplines such as (doctors, roboticists, industrialists and so forth), he said this meeting could plan "once and for all" what robots will do.

Gutkind's desire for planning sounds nice but is strangely placed. There was no such meeting when the Internet first appeared and after an admittedly hectic discovery process, we have learned what works as an online business and what does not. Gutkind's flaw lies in believing there is no planning going on in the realm of applied robotics but in truth there is a great deal of design. But unlike the centralized organization of a few that Gutkind imagines, the planning that is going on now is echoed across millions of minds in thousands of companies the world over. Through the activity of the market, we will learn where robots work well and where they don't. It'll be messy, but it will work far better than a handful of people meeting at a Holiday Inn.

Surface Trade, Not Deep Research

Over a mile below the surface South Dakota toils.

The state is looking to win an NSF bid for the construction of a "Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory." It has spent $2.1 million so far this year prepping an old gold mine.

If approved for funding, this will be the country's first DUSEL, with others existing in Russia, Japan, and Italy. Naturally, the fact that we don't have one was a cited reason for making it. On NPR today, I heard talk of needing to "catch up" with the rest of the world because the new science can be so powerful.

I have a much cheaper idea than spending $116 million to make a lab at least three other countries already have. Just do what we usually do when someone creates new technology we don't have: trade for it. We are, after all, "way behind" in Wii technology but we still have them.

Showing That You Care

Hillary Clinton recently spoke out against the restraints on federally-funded stem cell research. Her sentiment is in the right place. Why should a culture of cells much of the country doesn't even think is alive take precedent over those no one can deny are suffering?

And yet her perceptions are askew. At an event she said there are millions of families left

...waiting and wondering whether their government is really on the side of helping and saving the lives of their loved ones. Where we are now is, we're going backward. We're not just stalled. We're going backward.

The government may be going backwards, but despite what Clinton suggests it is not the only source of technology. Industry is far more effective at invention and innovation than government scientists. Congressional funding is fickle and oversight often oppressive.

Instead of engaging in the abortion battle, Clinton should encourage tax cuts for private research firms. Not only would that get past Mr. Bush, it would run counter to her platform. It would demonstrate that this really is about the sick and dying and not about playing politics with people's lives.