Capital is Sufficient (Part 3): Pressure and Light

More on how we are not constrained by capital in meeting our needs. The previous post covered discharge (yuck) and temperature. All of this is part of the continued rewrite of the Appendix of my book The World After Capital. 

Pressure. Anybody who has gone diving will be aware that our bodies do not handle increased pressure very well. The same goes for decreased pressure, which is one of the reasons why we find air travel exhausting (airplane cabins maintain pressure similar to being at the top of an eight-thousand-foot mountain).

Thankfully we need minimal capital to meet our pressure needs. One might at first assume that we do not need any capital, but that’s not correct. For example, pretty much all commercial flights are in altitudes that require pressurized cabins and hence extra capital above and beyond what would be required for an unpressurized plane. For instance, at just 12 km of altitude pressure falls to 0.2 bar. At such a low pressure it is not just a lack of oxygen that would be fatal, but also decompression sickness may occur where gases that have been dissolved in the bloodstream may gas out resulting in sickness and even death.  As noted earlier, we cannot take the existence of the Earth’s atmosphere for granted. So in addition to giving thought on how to create a livable atmosphere on planets such as Mars that we may eventually want to settle, we need to pay attention to the various forces that could damage or even destroy the Earth’s atmosphere.

Light. Most humans would be hard-pressed to achieve much in complete darkness. For a long time, our need for light was met mainly by sunlight, but much human ingenuity has gone into the creation of artificial light sources.

Our ability to make artificial light is one of the great human achievements and also a story of ongoing progress. We are the only species that has the knowledge to make fire, a capability attributed in Greek mythology to Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. Capital is essential to making light, from the earliest time of gathering wood to the modern creation of light emitting diodes (LEDs). This progress has meant that light has become incredibly affordable in most parts of the world and consumption has gone up accordingly (for example, in the UK by four orders of magnitude over the last two hundred years). Even in extremely poor countries that lack electrical infrastructure, so-called “offgrid solar” is revolutionizing the availability of light, replacing the burning of kerosene and other dangerous fuels. In summary we are definitely not constrained by capital when it comes to our need for light.

Capital is Sufficient (Part 3): Discharge and Temperature

Today I am continuing my examination of whether or not capital is the binding constraint for meeting humanity’s needs. The prior post looked at our needs for calories and nutrients.

Discharge. We also need to get things out of our bodies by expelling processed food, radiating heat and exhaling carbon dioxide. Humans have made a great deal of progress around meeting our discharge needs, such as toilets and public sanitation.

Building public sanitation systems is one of the major contributors to improvements in life expectancy. As Steven Johnson documents in his books “The Ghost Map” (2007) and “Extra Life” (2021) the city of London was hit by repeated Cholera outbreaks until it separated sewage from fresh water delivery. Even back in the mid 1800s London had sufficient capital to build out a large scale sewer system.

In many countries we take this for granted today but there are still places in the world that have insufficient sewage treatment capacity. Globally the number of people without access to proper sanitation has been declining albeit slowly. That’s largely due to the fact that a lack of sanitation exists predominantly in the places with the highest population growth. Still at this point about two thirds of the global population has access to sanitation and the total number of people who do has grown by several billion in the last couple of decades. This has been possible as the overall capital required for achieving sufficient sanitation is relatively low and again has been declining with technological progress.

Sanitation provides another example of how a lack of attention to the right problems puts our ability to meet our needs at risk. Right here in New York City for example during heavy downpours raw sewage spills into the East and Hudson Rivers because of insufficient capacity in the rainwater runoff systems. With the climate crisis accelerating, the frequency of that kind of heavy rainfall is increasing rapidly.

Temperature. Our bodies can self-regulate their temperature, but only within a limited range of environmental temperature and humidity. Humans can easily freeze to death or die of overheating (we cool our bodies through sweating, also known as ‘evaporative cooling’, which stops working when the air gets too hot and humid). We therefore often need to help our bodies with temperature regulation by controlling our environment. Common strategies to meet our temperature needs include clothing, shelter, heating and air conditioning.

We have long had enough capital to provide everyone in the world with clothing. We are strictly faced with a distribution problem here. Some people don’t have the financial resources or live in circumstances, such as homelessness, that make it difficult for them to acquire and maintain sufficient clothing. Conversely in many advanced economies people have piles of unused clothes and the so-called fast fashion industry promotes rapid changes in style that result in massive additional consumption. 

But what about shelter? This is a more difficult problem that requires significantly more capital. Here too the evidence suggests that we have sufficient physical capital. For example it is estimated that in 2015 we already had over 220 billion square meters of buildings globally. This amounts to 30 square meters per person. Now of course some part of that is commercial and industrial space, still this shows that as a first approximation we can house everyone. Even more impressive is the rate at which we are adding space. The same report estimates that by 2030 we will be at over 300 billion square meters of buildings. We also have a lot of circumstantial evidence that supports this conclusion. In particular building booms in various parts of the world, including China, the US and the Middle East, created vast local oversupplies of housing. For instance at the height of the China boom enough housing was added annually for the equivalent of two new ten million resident cities.

And yet again we encounter the climate crisis as the biggest threat to our ability to provide adequate shelter to everyone. In the US alone, nearly 15 million housing units are threatened by floods as found by a recently updated federal mapping exercise. That doesn’t count homes threatened by forest fires. Over longer time horizons sea level rise will make large coastal areas around the world uninhabitable. We are already experiencing significant climate refugee movements today. In 2020 alone it is estimated that 30 million people were displaced globally due to storms and floods. The forecasts are that by 2050 as many as 1 billion people may need shelter in a new location.

Can we heat and cool all this space as needed? The capital requirements here are accelerating rapidly at the moment due to the unfolding climate crisis which is increasing cooling requirements globally. This is not just a question of convenience. In hot and humid conditions evaporative cooling via sweat stops working and when that happens people die from overheating. This is now a routine occurrence in many parts of the world and even a relatively northern region such as Europe is affected, with the 2019 heat wave causing over two thousand deaths. 

As of 2020 there are an estimated 1.9 billion AC units in the world, adding about 110 million units annually at an accelerating pace. The key constraint here is not capital but electricity to run all of these new units, which will be further exacerbated by the need to switch heating from fossil fuels to electricity. This constraint will be looked at in the energy section in a later post.

Capital is Sufficient (Part 3): Calories and Nutrients

Today I am continuing my examination of whether or not capital is the binding constraint for meeting humanity’s needs. The prior post looked at our needs for oxygen and water.

Calories. To power our bodies, adults need between 1,500 and 3,200 calories per day, a need we mainly meet by eating and drinking. The best way to obtain calories, however, is surprisingly poorly understood – the mix between proteins, lipids and carbohydrates is subject to debate.

Eating food is the primary solution to our need for calories. This is where Malthus expected the big shortfall to come from. Agriculture simply wouldn’t be able to keep up with the growth in population. The big breakthrough that he didn’t anticipate was the Haber Bosch process of nitrogen fixation, which powered the so-called green revolution. Equipped with artificial nitrogen fertilizer, agricultural output soared. 

The other big win in agriculture was the use of machinery. Today in the US only 1.3% of the employed population works in agriculture and the entire food supply system at $1.1 trillion represents only 5% of total GDP. Even in countries that are further back in development such as India, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has been shrinking, a decline made possible by the availability of sufficient physical capital.

Now clearly not everyone has access to enough calories to meet their needs. For example, starvation is ravaging Yemen right now as a result of the ongoing war there. Overall, however, since the 1970s the incidence of death from famine has been at historic lows. And even before that as Amartya Sen and others have documented many famines resulted from a failure to distribute food, not an absolute lack of it (with examples of rotting supplies in harbors while people starve nearby).

Here too though we cannot rest on our accomplishments. The biggest risk to humanity’s ability to meet everyone’s need for calories is the climate crisis which is disrupting the relatively stable weather patterns required by agriculture. So far we have been experiencing crop failures only locally and sometimes regionally. A global large scale crop failure would result in starvation as we have very limited stockpiles.

Nutrients. The body cannot synthesize all the materials it requires, including a couple of fatty acids, some amino acids, as well as a few vitamins and minerals – these are called “essential” and must be obtained as part of our nutrition. This is another area that is surprisingly poorly understood, meaning that the actual mix and amount of required nutrients we need to take in seems unsettled.

Nutrients, while important, are needed in relatively small amounts. For example, the daily recommended amount for alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) is between 0.5g and 1.6g. The biggest intake requirements are the essential amino acids, with adults probably needing about 7g daily of Leucine as one example. For minerals and vitamins we are talking about even smaller amounts. These are mostly in the milligram and microgram range with the exception of Calcium, Chloride and Sodium, which are needed in a few grams each.

The cost and capital required to produce all of these essential nutrients has been declining substantially over time as a result of scientific and engineering progress. For example, we have recently figured out how to grow rice that has more Vitamin A in it, called Golden Rice. More than half the global population eats rice daily and so having it deliver enough Vitamin A is a major way of ensuring sufficient amounts of that essential nutrient are available.

Here too, capital is not the binding constraint today. But as the example of Golden Rice shows, it will continue to be important to innovate so as to better meet nutrient needs for everyone and not just those who can currently afford to buy every possible supplement by walking into the nearest drug store. Further research is also required to understand which nutrients we really need and in what dosage for humans to thrive and live long, healthy lives.

Capital is Sufficient (Part 3): Oxygen and Water

This is the third part of a rewriting of the appendix to The World After Capital. In the first part, I provided evidence on the tremendous growth of physical capital over the past one hundred years. The second part dealt with looking at World War II production as an indication for how much excess capital we have above what we need to meet our needs. Now comes a more specific examination of our needs with regard to the sufficiency of capital.

The overall physical capital statistics provided earlier abstract away any regional differences. The examination of World War II showed that the US was able to meet people’s needs with a fraction of the available capital but obviously that wasn’t true elsewhere. In particular of course in the actual war zones much physical capital was destroyed, resulting in needs going unmet. In the following discussion too we will see that capital is not yet sufficient everywhere. Given the total amount of aggregate physical capital available now that is a distribution problem (which is really an attention scarcity problem). Paraphrasing a famous William Gibson quote: capital is already sufficient, it is just not yet evenly distributed.

Furthermore, I should caveat that I am providing a mix of statistics, anecdotes and arguments. My goal is not to make an incontrovertible case that capital is sufficient. I doubt this would be possible even with a lot more time, given the limited state of measurement of much of the world’s capital. Incidentally, I believe that eventually this paucity of data will be something humanity will look back in surprise, much as we sometimes wonder how things worked before we had mobile phones. Thankfully Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and the rest of the team at Our World in Data are starting to make a dent here. Instead, I am simply aiming to make a case that’s compelling enough to bolster the overall argument that attention has now become humanity’s critical scarcity.

I initially planned to publish this as a single post but am now realizing that would be much too long. I am breaking it up into a series of posts instead addressing one or two needs at a time.

In the following the passage from the needs section is in italics, followed by an examination of the sufficiency of capital. I would love feedback on the level of detail here.

Oxygen. On average, humans need about 550 liters of oxygen every day, depending on the size of our body and physical exertion. Our most common way of meeting this need is breathing air. Although that may sound obvious, we have developed other solutions through technology – for example, the blood of patients struggling to breathe can be oxygenated externally.

There is no shortage of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. Throughout industrialization the issue has been air pollution. For example, in London the air was so bad that the Great Smog of 1952 killed four thousand people in the span of less than a week. More recently it has been Indian and Chinese cities that are experiencing similar levels of air pollution. This can definitely be seen as an example of a local insufficiency of capital. In the more developed countries the passage of clean air acts forced the installation of catalytic converters, a switch from coal to gas heat, etc. and largely resolved this deficiency. These same and even more advanced technologies (e.g. electric vehicles) can be deployed globally. China has already taken crucial steps in this direction, with the province of Hainan setting a 2030 deadline for all new and replacement vehicles to be emission free.

We should, however, not take the earth’s atmosphere for granted. Many different phenomena resulted in the existence of and maintenance of today’s breathable atmosphere. For example, the Earth’s magnetic field protects it from the solar winds which would otherwise tear off large parts of the atmosphere. A reduction in or even loss of the magnetic field is exactly the kind of long tail “Black Swan” type of event that we do not pay nearly enough attention to as humanity.

Water. We need to ingest two or three liters of water per day to stay hydrated depending on factors such as body size, exertion and temperature. In addition to drinking water and fluids that contain it, we have other solutions for this, such as the water contained in the foods that we eat.

As with oxygen, there is no shortage of water on Earth. The challenge is access to drinkable water which means sufficiently clean and desalinated water. Here too we can see how at an earlier point in development capital was insufficient. Again London serves as a great example: frequent Cholera outbreaks were the result of water wells that were not separated from sewage. John Snow famously documented the connection by establishing a detailed map in the 1854 outbreak which helped to overcome the prior “Miasma” theory of Cholera and ultimately resulted in London building out an elaborate water infrastructure.

A more recent example is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan where lead from old pipes resulted in toxic drinking water. So we can see how capital has been insufficient here and is still insufficient in some parts of the world but not because of some fundamental lack of technology or capital but rather because of a failure of attention to clean water access. The World Bank has come up with an estimate of only about $28 billion annually to provide everyone in the world with basic water, sanitation and hygiene, and about $114 billion to make these services available continuously. These surprisingly low numbers show how little physical capital would need to be deployed. Clean drinking water is a great example of the type of problem where markets tend to fail and hence attention allocation needs to happen through other processes (e.g. by electing a capable city government).

Escape from Apple: Trying a Linux Laptop

For quite a few years my only computer has been a 12″ Macbook. Apple, for reasons unknown, discontinued that model which had the perfect form factor in terms of weight to size tradeoff. While my  machine still works (with different keys getting stuck on occasion), I had been on the hunt for a non-Apple replacement for some time. Apple’s hypocritical stance on why they need to completely control their phones has long annoyed me and I would rather not buy their products.

I am writing this post on what will hopefully be my new machine for a few years, a DELL XPS 13 laptop running Ubuntu (I wasn’t going to leave Apple for Microsoft, even though they are at present the most benign of the big tech companies)

Here are my first impressions of the setup. On the plus side, the hardware is excellent with a super crisp screen (that looks good in several different resolutions), an amazing keyboard (I forgot how much I actually missed that on the Macbook) and a fingerprint reader in the power button. Also all the software that I really need is “readily” available: a web browser (the machine shipped with both Chrome and Firefox pre-installed), plus Zoom and 1Password. I put “readily” in quotation marks because both Zoom and 1Password required installation.

For both Zoom and 1Password that meant downloading a .deb file and finding the right command line incantation (”sudo dpkg -i package_file.deb”). Of course in both cases there were some missing dependencies (Zoom needed Curl and 1Password a bunch of things). I discovered that there is now a much easier way to fix this then when I had last mucked around with Linux, simply use “sudo apt –fix-broken install” (or maybe that was always a possibility and I just found it yesterday). All in all this part literally took less than half an hour before I was fully up and running. I am grateful that both Zoom and 1Password make Linux versions as I couldn’t have pursued this route otherwise.

But then I encountered what looked like a potential showstopper: the machine would not properly wake up after sleeping for more than a few minutes. If closed the lid for a short period everything was fine, but after more time something happened and it would not wake up requiring a power cycle instead. Given that I like to leave a lot of tabs open in the browser (who doesn’t?) that wasn’t going to work. So I spend a bunch of time searching for an answer, which is of course exactly what nobody really wants to do when setting up a brand new machine, certainly not a mainstream user.

Unless you have the same problem you can simply skip the following section. I  discovered that a bunch of people had this issue and since I wasn’t going to be defeated this easily, I decided to delve in more deeply. The machine is a DELL XPS 13 9310 running Ubuntu 20.04. I first checked the kernel and BIOS versions and both were completely up-to-date. I also found that it only supports one kind of sleep mode at present which is a lighter sleep (meaning consumes more battery) but while a bit annoying that turn out not to be the cause of the problem. Finally, a bunch of people referred to being able to fix the problem by turning off the “sign of life” settings in the BIOS. Because I am a dinosaur, I actually knew what the BIOS was and wasn’t afraid of tweaking it, which on this particular machine requires pressing F2 repeatedly during startup until you get to a BIOS configuration screen. Then you need to click around using the arrow and Enter keys until you find the options, which are now under the “Boot” section. I have no idea what these options do, but turning them both off actually fixed the problem for me.

So while this works for me (for now), the simple summary here is: so close and yet so far. So close to a terrific combination of software and hardware and yet for the average enduser a complete nonstarter in terms of getting it to work. This strikes me as a terrific business opportunity. Laptop hardware has largely entered the flat part of the curve so that there isn’t a rush for faster processors, more memory, higher resolution camera, etc. every year. It would seem that the focus instead should now be on stability and ease of use. Someone (apparently not DELL so far) should focus on that.

Capital is Sufficient (Part 2)

In last week’s post, I provided some data on how much physical capital has grown in the last one hundred years. When measured by certain proxies, such as the production of steel, it looks like about a 30x growth in the last 100 years and nearly 100x if you go back just two decades further to 1900. We also saw that significant growth has occurred since World War II, which as a first approximation is at least a 10x growth.

Now someone might suggest that this growth could all be due to the population explosion, but that’s not the case. Over the same timeframe the global population has grown a lot less: from 1900 to today a bit less than 5x and from the end of World War II to today only by a bit more than 3x. Put differently, the increase in physical capital has far outstripped population growth.

Now one might still question whether this capital is sufficient to meet everyone’s needs as I have asserted. I believe that the strongest evidence for my claim comes from considering what happened during World War II. Here is a chart that shows how government share of GDP in the US spiked during the war years.

Let’s dive a bit deeper and look at the manufacturing efforts. The US ramped production of tanks, airplanes, battleships and guns at an extraordinary clip in the war years. Here is a table that tabulates this for different weapons systems.

The numbers are staggering. For example, in 1943 the US built 2654 major naval vessels. That’s more than 7 every day, or roughly one every three and half hours! In 1944 the US built over 74 thousand combat aircraft, that’s about 8.5 combat aircraft *every hour*.

We are not talking about simple devices here. These are complex high-performance systems with many components (think of the aircraft engines alone!). And that’s just the US production. There were similar scale efforts in Germany, Japan, the UK, and Russia. For example, adding up all the combat aircraft production in 1944 is 185 thousand units, which is 21 aircraft every hour.

Now here in the US while all of this production was happening, people were not starving, there was enough clothing, and were doing surprisingly well overall. But as we saw in last week’s post, the production of cars dropped dramatically — so how were people’s transportation needs met during this time? Through a massive increase in public transportation. The connection was made quite explicitly with the government running ads “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” This is a perfect illustration of separating a need, transportation, from its solutions, in this case individual versus shared mobility.

The continued ability to meet needs while at the same time repurposing half or more of physical capital strongly supports the claim of sufficient capital. As a first approximation much of that capital was previously used to meet wants. And it went back to meeting wants after World War II which partially explains the tremendous economic boom of the post war years.

All of this is to say that today’s economy with at least an order of magnitude more capital than during World War II can easily meet our needs. Importantly it also means that we have plenty of additional capacity that could be allocated to solving the climate crisis. For example, we could dramatically ramp the production of everything from solar panels to nuclear reactors to heat pumps.

But there is more to be gleaned from what happened during World War II production. It isn’t just that we collectively made a lot of complicated stuff rapidly. We also innovated on extremely compressed time scales. The Manhattan project is the most obvious example of that which in a span of three years developed the nuclear bomb. It is hard to exaggerate how extensive this effort was, including for example uranium mining, as well as the exploration of several different bomb designs.

Important technologies were either invented or significantly advanced during World War II. For example, at the beginning of the war, radar was a nascent technology. Towards the end of World War II through the invention of the cavity magnetron, the Allies managed to build radars small and lightweight enough to put on planes. Penicillin, which had been discovered in 1928, was not widely used until mass production was unlocked as part of a secretive World War II effort.

Production and deployment at high volume also drove important improvements. Take fighter planes as an example. Early fighters had limited range which meant that bombers had to fly into enemy territory without escorts. Their only defense against local fighters were plane mounted machine guns. It was only as the war went on that escort fighters of sufficient range were developed to accompany bombers. This was made possible by a combination of technological advances, such as more powerful engines, and the insights gained from battle.

So what are the key takeaways? First, during peacetime mode much of the capital is used to meet wants not needs (the third installment in this post will look at this with regard to all the needs identified). Second, when switched into wartime mode, much of the productive capital can be redirected quickly towards accomplishing specific goals that are different from needs. This was already true at a much lower amount of physical capital per capita than is available today. Third, innovation can in fact be accelerated dramatically by focusing resources on critical problems.

The obvious threat we are facing today that requires a massive reallocation of – and improvement in – capital is the climate crisis. Whether this can be accomplished is determined entirely by what we choose to pay attention to. Hence, the defining scarcity of our time is attention, not capital.

Capital is Sufficient (Part 1)

In a push to wrap up my book The World After Capital to a point where I will make a print copy available, I am finally tackling the appendix one more time. The goal of the appendix is to provide more data to show that physical capital is no longer humanity’s binding constraint. Or in the language of the book, the goal is to show that physical capital is sufficient.

The plan of attack is as follows. I will first be pulling together some general data on global physical capital (this is today’s post). I will then use some data from World War II to show what can be accomplished when there is a decision to redirect physical capital towards fighting a specific crisis. Finally I plan to examine the sufficiency of capital with respect to our human needs.

It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find global data on physical capital. The best source I have been able to locate is the World Bank, which publishes a data series on gross capital formation. Unfortunately the data here reaches back only to 1970 but it still shows an increase from roughly $5 trillion to $22 trillion in 2019 (this is measured on constant 2010 dollars, i.e. adjusted for inflation).

For triangulation it is worth considering the output of some things that require productive capacity. Put differently we can infer the availability of physical capital through outputs. To that end, I was able to find the following chart of global crude steel production over time

Compared to gross capital there is only about a twofold growth here from 1970 to today, but it is important to keep in mind that during that time period we have come up with many materials other than steel from which to make things, such as aluminum and of course plastics. Importantly though this graph lets us compare steel output today with output at the time of World War II and we can see that there has been more than an order of magnitude growth (roughly 15x).

What about finished goods production? This too is of course a good proxy for the amount of total available physical capital. A great example is the global production of cars. Here is a chart that shows it over time going back to the earliest days of the industry.

Here again we can see a roughly twofold increase relative to the 1970s and a greater 10x increase if we go back further. This chart has an important feature worth pointing out now: there is a dip to near zero production in the mid 1940s corresponding to World War II.

Here is a dramatic example of what all this productive capacity makes possible. The first commercially available handheld mobile phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x which became available in 1984. Here is the growth of mobile phones since then, measured in active subscriptions (these are totaled from published carrier statistics)

Over the course of three decades we basically went from not having mobile phones to having more than the global population (this of course brings to mind William Gibson’s great quote that “[t]he future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” – with many people having two mobile phones, one for work and oner personal for example, while others have none).

And here is one more example that’s highly relevant to the climate crisis: the rate at which we have produced solar panels. 

Over a decade and a half we went from basically making none, to making 150 Gigawatts in new panels on what looks like an exponential growth trajectory. Now crucially we are currently using a small part of our productive capital to make solar panels. How do we know this? Because we have not yet taken the drastic steps necessary to fighting the climate crisis, which will eventually have to reach levels similar to the resource deployment in World War II.

What is possible when a larger part of the economy is pointed at a specific challenge will be the next post.

Chiara Marletto: The Science of Can and Can’t (Book Review)

Quantum mechanics and general relativity, the last two foundational breakthroughs in science, are a century old each. Since then we have made tons of progress in more applied science, such as learning to decode and manipulate DNA and RNA, but we have been in a rut when it comes to developing a deeper understanding of such fundamental phenomena as information and heat. I believe that this lack of a new fundamental breakthrough is contributor to an overall slowing down of scientific progress that has been widely noted.

In her wonderful book “The Science of Can and Can’t” Chiara Marletto takes us on a fascinating journey into the foundations of scientific theories. Newtonian (classical) mechanics, quantum mechanics and general relativity all share the same structure: a description of states of the world combined with laws of motion which govern how states evolve. This approach has proven incredibly powerful but also has important limits.

Chiara introduces an alternative approach called Constructor Theory, which she has been developing together with David Deutsch and a small team at Oxford. Instead of states and laws of motion. Constructor Theory builds upon the distinction between possible and impossible transformations (hence the title of the book). In doing so, Constructor Theory makes counterfactuals first class elements of science, i.e. statements about what could be or could have been, but maybe has not (yet) occurred.

The book does a terrific job explaining why this matters and what Constructor Theory is seeking to accomplish. Let me provide just a few hints. First, a precise theory of such phenomena as heat, which current theories approach statistically. Second, a unification of our understanding of classical and quantum information theories. Third, a theory of quantum computing that is abstracted from quantum mechanics (our theory of classical computation after all isn’t tied to classical mechanics or electric fields).

One of the many lovely illustrations from the book:

There is also an important philosophical aspect to this new approach. In our existing theories there is exceedingly little room for freedom. In the strictest application of the laws of motion approach the fact that I am writing these words right now was already determined eons ago. In fact everything that’s happening is just the deterministic consequence of prior states via the laws of motion (this is even true for the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics). Constructor Theory, on the other hand, by allowing for counterfactuals, cracks space wide open for meaningful constructs of human freedom and agency.

What is highly unusual about this book is that it provides an introduction accessible to lay readers to a theory that is currently under active development. This is a bit akin to being able to look over the shoulder of someone like Bohr or Einstein while they were working on their breakthroughs. This serves as an invitation to follow along on a journey that will be ongoing for many years. There is no way to read the book and not marvel simultaneously at how far we have come and how much still lies ahead.

Full disclosure: Susan and I have been supporting Chiara’s research for several years and thus aren’t exactly unbiased observers of the importance of her work.

Some Notes on Fundraising

Over the last two decades I have helped many companies raise venture capital rounds. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this.

If your company is growing like crazy you will have an easy time fundraising and you can ignore pretty much everything that follows. Put differently, what I am writing here is for companies where the ability to raise money is somewhat in question.

Fundraising is selling. You are literally getting money in return for selling a part of your company. Because fundraising is selling, many of the lessons from how to be effective at sales apply directly to fundraising. This starts with the crucial need for qualification of who you are talking to. Build a broad funnel so that you can qualify hard. Otherwise you will wind up spending a lot of time with VC firms that will never get there. How do you qualify firms? Through an initial conversation where you figure out such things as do they seem to know the space you are operating in? What is their process and are you talking to the right people?

The second crucial insight from selling is that your goal is to get from push mode into pull mode as quickly as possibly. What do I mean by that? You want to stop talking and let the investors ask questions. That means the investors are engaged and ideally are starting to sell themselves on the opportunity. A bad pitch is one where you do all the talking. A good one is where the investors are tripping over themselves to ask questions. So what does this imply? Keep your pitch geared towards being intriguing rather than trying to answer every question upfront.

Closely related: be prepared for questions. I recommend to every company that I work with on a fundraise to keep a written FAQ. For every question you are likely to get have a succinct answer ready. A strong answer will be short and whenever possible will include both an abstract argument and a concrete example or statistic. For example a question about gross margins might be answered by saying: “We are currently at x% but can already see the beginning of scale effects that are allowing us to reduce our bill of materials by y% for each time we double output.”

The crucial art of giving an answer is to deliver it firmly and then shut up. Nine times out of ten that’s it and the conversation will move on to a different question. The confident delivery of the answer will increase investor confidence in what you are doing. Conversely a meandering answer raises more questions. Only one times out of ten the investors will actually want to go deep. Now the opposite is the case. You need to come along and really go deep as opposed to try to head off the question. Ideally you already have several slides ready that you can use to go deep but if not just engage in the discussion. As you meet with firms keep the FAQ updated with new questions.

What about the deck itself? Here we are getting into fairly subjective territory, so what follows next may or may not work for you based on your own style of delivery (e.g. some people do well with many slides that they present briefly, others better with fewer slides to which they speak at more length). Still I find the following to be important.

First, you only have a relatively short time upfront to grab people’s attention. So ideally you start with a hook. Something provocative or at least surprising works well here (again if you are growing like crazy, that would simply be your growth slide).

Second, keep each slide to one clear message that’s easily discernible from the title of the slide. Many times someone in the audience will be momentarily distracted (e.g. by an incoming text message) and when they look back it needs to be easy for them to figure out what’s going on or you have lost them for good.

Third, no matter if you go withe many or few slides, keep each slide as visual and as uncluttered as possible. Less is more.

Fourth, make only your strongest points. For example, if your product has a long list of advantages, talking about all the ancillary ones will actually detract from the central ones, so stick to those.

Fifth, if your business has an obvious weakness, address it in the presentation and be upfront and non-defensive about it. This is especially true for businesses that have been around for a while and had a setback.

Tying everything together: your task is to tell an interesting story that engages the audience. The second the audience starts to engage (from push to pull) you need to stop talking at them and enter what Adam Grant in his new book “Think Again” calls a “dance.” If you do this with the right firms (thanks to qualification) then good things will result.

Climate 101: Part 3 Actions

This is the third installment in a three part series on the climate crisis originally presented for The Spark of Hudson. Following a first talk about causes and a second one about solutions, this one addresses what actions we can take. As with the prior ones, you can find the slides online as well.