Andrew McAfee
About
Co-author of The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine
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Claims by Andrew McAfee (20 of 88)
Profit Motive Drives Dematerialization Via Computers
The computer let capitalism's relentless drive to cut costs find overlapping ways to get more prosperity from fewer material inputs: because customers value the product not the materials, firms use computer-aided design to slash inputs (e.g., aluminum cans now weigh about one-fifth of the original), and digital tracking (RFID on boxcars) cuts the physical capital needed—so the same greed that once drove extraction now drives material savings.
Pro-Nuclear Power As Climate Solution
The current distaste for nuclear power is not grounded in evidence and serves us poorly in an overheating world, because nuclear is the one power source that is clean, green, safe, scalable, and near cost-efficient; a new modular class of reactor is safer and produces less weaponizable waste, and a jointly financed multi-country effort—possibly a global patent bank waiving royalties—could deploy it to low-carbon ends.
Pollution Regulation Has Not Overshot
It is reasonable to ask whether environmental regulation has overshot, but the evidence answers no: current pollution levels still cause measurable harm—removing turnpike tollbooths (ending idling) made surrounding neighborhoods healthier, and shutting down power plants raised downwind children's health and test scores—so rolling back auto-emission, methane, and wetlands protections is unjustified and the bang-for-the-buck of further cleanup is overwhelming.
Smartphone Absorbed Thirteen Separate Devices
A 1991 Radio Shack ad contained 15 gadgets, 13 of which (camcorder, camera, cordless phone, answering machine, Walkman, etc.) have since vanished into a single smartphone, illustrating how dematerialization replaces many resource-intensive devices with one small light object.
Automation And Globalization Erase Routine Jobs
The rich-world middle class has been built on routine work (assembly-line workers, payroll clerks), and those jobs are vanishing quickly to both globalization and automation and are not coming back—leaving communities behind, with a weak toolkit and poor track record for revitalizing them.
Eliminating Mosquitoes Is Worth The Risk
Because the mosquito is responsible for so much human misery and death (malaria), it would be worth using gene-drive technology to eliminate it, even though this opens a new and uncertain category of intervention requiring care and vigilance about downstream ecological effects.
Elephant Graph Explains Rich-World Populism
The elephant graph—plotting income growth from 1988 to 2008 by global income rank—shows most of humanity (poor and middle-income in developing countries) and the global elite both gained substantially, while the lower-middle to middle class of the rich world sits at the graph's low point with stagnant wages; because this group is large and decisive in electing rich-world leaders, their accurate sense of being left behind helps explain the rise of populism, demagoguery, and authoritarianism.
Pre-Industrial Life Was Brutal And Static
Prior to 1800 global life expectancy was about 28.5 years with no region exceeding roughly 35, and you could drop a person into any 10,000-year interval and they would recognize all the same tools, practices, and diseases—because for nearly all of human history no one had ever met anyone who imagined the future could be different.
Malthus Was Right Until The Industrial Revolution
Malthus was correct as a historian: charting English population versus prosperity from roughly 1200 to 1800 shows a pendulum where people were only prosperous when few in number, because a hard ceiling on extractable resources (chiefly food) capped wellbeing—until the industrial revolution broke that ceiling by harnessing fossil-fuel energy, allowing population and prosperity to rise together for the first time.
Prosperity Has Decoupled From Resource Use
Advanced economies, exemplified by the US (about 25% of the world economy), have for the first time decoupled growing prosperity from taking more from the earth—increasing economic size and human wellbeing while reducing the aggregate physical footprint on the planet.
Industrial Capitalism And Tech Progress Are Paired
Capitalism and technological progress form a mutually reinforcing one-two punch: profit-seeking firms deploy ever more powerful technology, which massively increased prosperity and population for 170+ years (proving Marx wrong) but also drove an ever-heavier, rapacious footprint on the planet through more cropland, mining, deforestation, fossil-fuel extraction, pollution, and species exploitation.
Indoor Plumbing Is The Top Industrial Technology
Indoor plumbing—access to clean water and the removal of waste—may be the single most important technology of the industrial era, above steam, electrification, and internal combustion, because of its enormous effect on human health, longevity, and maternal and child mortality.
Markets Fail On Negative Externalities
Markets are the best way to allocate goods and services, but they are imperfect: when an economic transaction imposes costs on third parties who aren't party to it—pollution being the classic case, like a dairy fouling the air of downwind neighbors—markets cannot be relied on to fix it, which is why government must price the externality.
China Cleans Up Earlier Than Rich Countries Did
China is taking environmentally smart actions far earlier in its economic trajectory than rich countries did—banning rhino and tiger products and reducing particulate pollution by 30% nationwide in four years, whereas it took the US 12 years after the Clean Air Act to achieve the same reduction while being much richer—suggesting countries care about the environment earlier when richer.
Developing World Won't Repeat Dirty Revolution
Today's low-income countries will not recapitulate the wasteful, polluting industrial revolution because they start from a much higher technological baseline—skipping copper telecoms for mobile, building fewer coal plants per capita, never adopting film photography—and they will demand cleaner technology not from altruism but because it is the cheapest, most effective solution.
Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax Is Best Climate Tool
The single best tool for fighting global warming is a revenue-neutral carbon tax that rises gradually over time: the government acts as a pass-through, collecting from emitters and returning the money as a carbon dividend (larger for lower-income people); because of substitution effects, people shift spending away from now-costlier carbon even as their income rises, and companies 'run from increased costs like antelope run when they smell a lion.'
Soviet Whaling Shows Failure Without Accountability
The Soviet whale hunt illustrates what happens absent public awareness and responsive government: despite signing the 1948 quota treaty, the USSR—with no international observers aboard—killed hundreds of thousands of excess whales for no real need (using only ~30% blubber, despite being oil-self-sufficient) simply to meet Stalinist five-year fisheries-tonnage plans, rewarding hunters as heroes for output disconnected from what people needed.
Public Awareness Plus Responsive Government Protects Nature
When public awareness of a problem (e.g., whale hunting) is coupled with responsive government—governments that respond to the will of their people with good ideas—markets' blind spots get covered, as shown by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which removed whales from the market by banning hunting and trade in their products regardless of price.
US Returned Farmland The Size Of Washington
Since the early 1980s the US has given back to nature an amount of farmland equal in size to the state of Washington, because that land became economically unviable—allowing forests and wildlife to return, though it also displaced the people who once farmed it.
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