Day: November 18, 2004

Romance and Realism in Space Tourism

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Space tourism is romantic but is it realistic?  On the basis of 40 years of data, I argued that rockets are dangerous and show no signs of the sort of safety improvements that are required to sustain a serious space tourism industry.  Response fell into two camps, those who misunderstood the argument and those who wanted to deny it. 

David at Cronaca pointed to the continuing demand to climb Mount Everest despite a fatality rate on the order of 4 percent.  Quite right, but that is precisely my point.  At best and for the foreseeable future space travel will remain akin to climbing Everest, dangerous and uncommon.  Yes, we might see 100 flights a year but that’s not space tourism – tourism is fat guys with cameras.  Branson and Rutan, for example, have predicted that in 10-12 years, 100,000 or more "ordinary people" will fly into space.  No way.

The other type of response is well illustrated by Rand Simberg’s reply at TechCentralStation.  Simberg argues that forty years of data are irrelevant because with SpaceShipOne "everything changed."  According to Simberg, SpaceShipOne is "a complete discontinuity", "an entirely new and different approach", and yes – you saw it coming didn’t you? – "the beginning of a new paradigm."

These are statements of faith not of reason.  Simberg has no data to back these claims because none exist.  Let’s also remember that we have heard this sort of thing many times before.  As far back as the 1960s PanAm was selling advance tickets for its inaugural moon flight.  Need I remind you where PanAm is today?

I admire Rutan and I have little doubt that he has made significant advances in rocket design but what I showed in my article was that safety could have improved by a factor of ten or even 100 and rockets would still be too unsafe to support a large tourism industry.

What’s so great about space tourism anyway?  Even though an increase in rocket safety of a factor of ten is not much when considering the safety of large numbers of people it is very significant when thinking about satellite launches or temporary low-orbit launches.  A reduction of risk of this amount means much lower insurance costs that will open up space to new private development.


Gossip from the Bush Administration

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Washington Post reports that the Bush Administration is courting James Poterba to replace N. Gregory Mankiw at the Council of Economic Advisers.  Harvey Rosen may head the bipartisan committee on tax reform, among other tidbits. 

Today’s WSJ lists four candidates to succeed Greenspan, all four are renowned economists: Martin Feldstein, Glenn Hubbard, John Taylor, and Ben Bernanke.

I’m not confirming any of these speculations, just passing them along.

Stupid Professor Tricks

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Professors at the Claremont schools are at it again.  Last year a visiting psychology professor sprayed her own car with racial and religious
epithets, slashed her tires and then reported the incident as a
hate crime.  Why?  In order to draw attention to the issue, of course.

More recently, SUVS at adjacent Pomona college were painted with anti-SUV messages like "My SUV wastes 33% more gas than a car" and "Is your image a good reason for people to die."  (The paint is apparently washable).  When the offending students were caught they had a surprising defense: their vandalism was part of an approved class project!

Bizarrely the students were taking a class in German Studies and were given an assignment to "develop your own political voice."  According to the Dean of Students:


Approximately one week before the assignment was due, the students
asked for and received written approval from the professor for several
alternate projects, including the one that was carried out. Considering
that they acted from what they thought was within the parameters of the
class, we believe that they should not be sanctioned for their actions.

The professor claims the approval was "inadvertent."  It doesn’t inspire confidence, however, when one reads the description of another one of her courses:

132 National Socialism and Today’s Media. Ms. Houy. Attempts
to manipulate public opinion have become more effective through mass
media; new communication technologies can empower resistance to such
attempts. This course studies the propaganda machinery of National
Socialism in order to explore current abuses of communication
technologies and imagine ways of resisting such abuses.

Ok Kristallnacht it ain’t but this does suggest the professor knew what she was doing.

Thanks to Right Reason and an anonymous tipster.

Uncommon common sense on welfare and poverty

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jane Galt, read the whole thing.

For me the most intriguing passage (but not the central point) is:

Something that conservatives, and especially libertarians, have been slow to grapple with is that the more productive our society gets, the greater the possibility that some peoples’ labour simply isn’t productive enough to support them at a minimum level. Can we really tell former welfare mothers to go bunk ten to a room the way my Irish ancestors did? We’re a pretty rich country. Are we comfortable telling people to live as if they’re nineteenth century peasants, if their cognitive gifts, or education, won’t stretch to more?

I wonder whether increasing wealth will ever eliminate the case (sound or not) for, say, welfare payments or the public funding of education.  Won’t the U.S. at some point, however near or distant, become rich enough so that government won’t have to…fill in the rest of the sentence yourself…?  Or does growing wealth jack up land prices so much that subsistence becomes increasingly harder to achieve?  I’m not talking about a relative status effect here, or changing expectations as to what is a decent life (though those factors play a role too).  To some extent higher real wages also boost the cost of producing human beings (i.e., raising children), analogous to William Baumol’s "cost disease."  You can raise a family of seven in Mexico on one thousand dollars a year, just try that in Fairfax County.  And might further economic growth only exacerbate this contrast?

Some mid-level developing countries address this problem by allowing shantytowns to spring up in or near their major cities.  The wealthy live in the "normal" city, the poor in the shantys.  There are other ways of setting up parallel colonies on low-wage land.  Randall Parker writes of old people moving to low-cost cruise ships (no, not ice floes), and of course many of the elderly migrate to Mexico or Costa Rica.  The default of course is to keep everybody in the higher-rent, higher-value network, and not coincidentally raise general taxes over time.  We will all continue to pay lip service to the integrationist ideal, but let’s say you think the case for welfare will never go away, no matter how wealthy we become.  This view implies that the pressure for "separate colonies" will only increase over time.