Editor’s Note

Published April 25, 2022

 

Dogged correspondent JG of Passadumkeag, Maine, writes to ask why the print edition of the Review is always 96 pages long. Glad to be able to clear this up, JG. Many readers assume that it’s tied to the demands of the printing presses. In fact, it seems to have something to do with a tradition dating back to the ancient Egyptian god Ptah, who had a thing for the number 96. Or maybe it was Horus, the Egyptian god of war… you wouldn’t want to mess with him, either. In any case, we’ve packed the 96 pages of this issue with tons of important and diverting content.


Zhu Zheng Xinhua/Eyevine/Red ux

Larry Fisher, a former New York Times reporter who specializes in technology, sounds the alarm on the looming failure of our arsenal of antibiotics and explains why government intervention is desperately needed to prevent disaster. “Developing an antibiotic costs as much as developing any other novel drug — $1 billion or more — but the public has grown accustomed to paying just pennies a pill, and patients rarely take them for long,” writes Fisher. “So only a handful of large pharmaceutical companies are still trying.”

Matt Darling, a fellow at the Niskanen Center think tank in Washington, explains why Congressional conservatives’ decision to block the renewal of the little-known federal Child Tax Credit was a giant step backward in what might have been a uniquely bipartisan effort to fight poverty. “The sad truth here is that conservatives are at war with themselves,” writes Darling. “For libertarian-leaning conservatives, the CTC seems a marvelous means of sustaining a civilized society that depends less on government and minimizes restrictions on freedom. But for a more familiar kind of American conservative, the CTC is a temptation to laziness — never mind the evidence to the contrary.”

Larry Goulder, an economist at Stanford, and Dick Morgenstern, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, take a close look at China’s approach to using market forces to contain climate emissions. “Their chosen instrument for control is not as cost-effective as cap-and-trade,” they write. “But none of the limitations of China’s emissions trading system should be allowed to obscure the fact that China is proving it is seriously in the game: the world’s largest economy (and carbon emitter) is now clearly taking a leadership role in the fight to contain climate change.”

Bill Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzes the freshly released results of the 2020 decennial census. “While big demographic changes have been brewing for decades, they now contrast more sharply with the last half of the 20th century than ever before,” Frey concludes. “We have become a nation characterized by sluggish population growth and, above all, increasing racial and ethnic diversity. In fact, were it not for the gains in the non-white population, the U.S. population would have shrunk over the past decade and become even more top-heavy in its age structure than it is today.”

Senior researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute ponder the radical divergence between the growth of wealth and the growth of output since 2000 — and the potential consequences in terms of economic stability and inequality.

“One school of thought holds that the extraordinarily low interest rates of the past three decades, which contributed to everhigher asset valuations, reflect permanent societal changes,” the MGI researchers note. “An alternative view suggests that the current period of comparatively high net worth will eventually end, and that the prices of real assets will once again more closely track the trajectory of GDP. In this case, a reversion to historical averages could play out as an assetprice correction with repercussions for the viability of debt backed by those assets.”

Edward Tenner, a research affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and Rutgers University, dazzles with an essay on the efforts of the high and mighty to extend their influence far into the future.

Browsing Tenner almost at random: “In public buildings the tradition of perpetual naming rights has run up against the evolution of technical standards plus the ravages of inflation, so that naming rights will be coming up more often. When the New York Philharmonic Society determined that Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center needed renovations that would cost $100 million, ten-fold the original gift from the mogul of hi-fi home audio, it was necessary to rename the building after a more recent entertainment industry prince, David Geffen, who could absorb such a staggering construction bill. Avery Fisher’s three children agreed to the change in return for a $15 million quasi-refund.”

Wait, there’s more — excerpts from two new books worth a close gander. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake’s book Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy ties much of the perceived malaise of contemporary economic activity to the rapid (and largely desirable) change in investment from bricks and mortar and such to the digital revolution. Gernot Wagner’s Geoengineering: The Gamble tackles the knotty question of whether path-of-least-resistance technofixes for climate change could sap our will to confront emissions containment head-on.

 

Happy perusing. — Peter Passell