The optimistic conservative’s guide to the future
James B. Meigs
As a former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, I’ve asked many scientists and tech entrepreneurs how they first fell in love with science and technology. Most mention stories that captivated them when they were young. For some, it was the classic science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Ursula Le Guin. Others fell under the spell of Star Wars or Star Trek. They were all drawn to the kind of speculative fiction that asked what sorts of worlds humans might be capable of building. Science fiction, at least in its pre-dystopian era, imbued American culture with the idea that anything was within humanity’s grasp. In turn, that spirit helped make high-tech breakthroughs possible by inspiring bright young misfits to pursue mastery of difficult fields. Companies like Apple and SpaceX might not exist today if not for the generations of nerds who grew up on Star Trek and now spend their lives trying to “make it so.”
Writer James Pethokoukis was one of those nerds. With his new book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, the American Enterprise Institute scholar hopes to revive the spirit of possibility embodied in the best science fiction. But first, he must answer a nagging question: What ever happened to those Apollo-era dreams? Whenever I used to tell people where I worked, they invariably asked, “So, where’s my flying car?” Sure, we have smartphones and online shopping today. But where are all the techno-miracles depicted in the Futurama exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair or predicted by midcentury futurists like Alvin Toffler and Hermann Kahn? What happened to underwater cities, fusion power, rocket planes, or a cure for cancer?
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To explain why midcentury techno-optimism fizzled, Pethokoukis borrows a concept from 1970s futurist F.M. Esfandiary. Esfandiary thought traditional right-wing and left-wing political labels were obsolete. Instead, he proposed the terms “Up Wing” to denote an ideology of hopeful futurism and “Down Wing” to describe a zero-sum worldview focused on limits and risk avoidance. In this framing, the years from about 1955 to 1973 were emphatically Up Wing. Boosted by new technologies, living standards and worker productivity soared, Pethokoukis observes, making the ‘50s and ‘60s “the fastest-growing decades of the past century.” That optimism was echoed in popular entertainment, from cartoons like The Jetsons to the 1968 sci-fi landmark 2001, which predicted routine Pan Am flights to the moon just over three decades hence.
But in the early 1970s, just as the last Apollo flight returned to Earth, everything changed. The economy soured, interest rates soared, and optimism sank. The “Space Age was suddenly grounded,” Pethokoukis writes, and “the Atomic Age began powering down.” Instead of predicting vibrant futures, leading intellectuals embraced a dour Down Wing outlook; they warned that population growth would cause “a race to oblivion” and stressed “limits to growth.” The era of techno-optimist entertainment was over as well. With movies like Soylent Green (overpopulation leads to cannibalism) and Westworld (robots run amok), science fiction took a dystopian turn that mostly continues to this day.
Pethokoukis calls this pivot “the Great Downshift.” Had we stayed on the economic trajectory of the ‘50s and ‘60s, he notes, the U.S. economy would be almost twice as large today, with a median household income of $125,000 instead of our current $70,000. Economic growth and worker productivity showed a promising blip during the 1990s tech boom. But with the collapse of dot-com stocks in 2000 and the much bigger implosion of the housing bubble a few years later, the U.S. economy slid into a low-growth torpor from which it has never fully recovered.
The conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart used to say, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Pethokoukis argues something similar, that cultural attitudes influence government policies, which in turn shape economic conditions. The Down Wing turn our intellectual and popular culture took in the 1970s reflected some valid concerns, including air and water pollution and the threat of nuclear war. But others — notably, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s prediction that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s — were wildly off base.
The policies inspired by this Down Wing mindset proved heavy-handed as well. Pethokoukis devotes a chapter to what he calls “the mystery of the Great Downshift: what we did to ourselves.” Starting around 1970, he writes, “America experienced a regulatory explosion that continues to reverberate.” The National Environmental Policy Act, passed that year, created an ever-expanding obstacle course for industries trying to grow. Environmental Impact Statements that originally required 10 pages generally exceed 500 today. Obtaining permits for infrastructure projects can take a decade or more. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a regulatory regime inspired by a “limits to growth” ideology wound up … limiting growth.
Exhibit A in Pethokoukis’s account is the Western world’s irrational retreat from nuclear power. Yes, the accidents at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island (1979), the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl (1986), and Japan’s Fukushima (2011) plants understandably rattled people. And yet those accidents, even Chernobyl, had small health impacts compared to the daily death toll caused by burning coal and other fossil fuels. Had the United States and other developed nations continued building nuclear plants at the 1970s pace, both carbon emissions and electricity prices would be dramatically lower today. Instead, policymakers followed a Down Wing ethos, obsessing over minuscule risks while ignoring nuclear fission’s huge environmental and economic benefits. Thankfully, many nations are taking a fresh look at nuclear power today. But more than three decades of progress have been lost to what the author calls “anti-growth safetyism.”
Pethokoukis’s prescription for bringing back Up Wing America has two main elements. First, we need to dismantle obstacles to progress. It is possible to protect the environment without the elaborate restrictions imposed by NEPA, he writes: “Let’s raze that bureaucratic barrier.” Ditto for the regulations that help NIMBY activists stymie dense, affordable housing. Second, America should revive the Right Stuff ethos of the 1960s. That means rediscovering the upsides of rational risk-taking. Let’s colonize the moon, he urges, and start mining asteroids.
Down here on Earth, Pethokoukis writes, we should speed up the rollout of new designs for super safe, small modular fission reactors. Fusion power, another futuristic dream from the ‘60s, is finally showing promise after decades of research. Let’s double down on that potentially world-changing development. In fact, he writes, we should “double all forms of R&D in the American economy.”
For a conservative, Pethokoukis sometimes seems a bit too enamored of big Apollo-style federally funded projects. The federal government’s track record is decidedly mixed when it comes to making wise investments. (Just look at NASA’s current wildly overbudget Artemis moonshot program.) But he is on target advocating more public-private partnerships of the sort NASA has with SpaceX and that rapidly produced COVID-19 vaccines under Operation Warp Speed.
Pethokoukis writes in a sunny, upbeat style that matches his message. The key, he says, is not just to back specific policies or technologies but to embrace an Up Wing culture. We need to tune out Down Wing ideologies, especially the radical climate activists advocating “degrowth.” The key to solving climate change and other problems that face us is abundant clean energy, technological innovation, and economic growth. “Growth is good, for our body, minds, and souls,” he writes. In the Down Wing worldview, humanity is seen as a problem to be managed. Pethokoukis takes the opposite view — that free, empowered people are the solution. Maybe we’ll even get our flying cars.
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.