Flutterby™! : Innovation & Energy

On this morning's run I listened to a couple of Planet Money episodes. Specifically, I listened to The Friday Podcast: What Is Occupy Wall Street?, and The Tuesday Podcast: The Future Of Energy.

In the former, they interviewed Robin Hahnel, a proponent of something he calls "participatory economics", a system which, as described on the podcast, gave me tremendous eye-rolling because it was very clear to me that his system, even as described, would very shortly evolve into needing some substantial futures market, and just for convenience's sake you'd shortly have a straight capitalist black market running on top of his little utopian dream. It seemed to me a particularly short-sighted academic view of the world, but this was pertinent because in a lot of the reading on transportation I'm running into the same sort of deliberate blinders.

In the latter, they talked about the future of energy with Daniel Yergin. In that discussion the moon shot and the atomic bomb came up as discussion of big government projects, as deliberately product/results oriented projects that were unlike what we need to accomplish in terms of changes in energy.

There are many different spins on the history of personal computing and on the history of the internet, but the myth which most resonates with me is a bunch of people experimenting at the fringes of technology. They're actually doing so without a whole lot of government help.

Yeah, I know, that view isn't terribly popular on the origins of the Internet, but hear me out: Back in the early '90s, I was working with various people on improving FidoNet, on building some real-time communications systems. Chattanooga had just gotten cheap ISDN, and people were starting to play with switching and data transfer on that. It was around this time that the Internet got opened up, and those of us who had been playing with BBSs decided to lease T1s and sell access and create a real-time network, but had the government not been involved a real-time network would have evolved shortly anyway.

You can, of course, find your own myth for the personal computer revolution, but this is the sort of change that we're going to need with energy. It isn't going to come from conventional thinking with tons of money thrown at it, ala Solyndra. It isn't going to be a big government project because, frankly, big government projects all fall prey to that sort of blinders thinking exemplified by Robin Hahnel.

If you're looking for policy on how to create large scale changes in society and technology, look to ways that individual small-scale solutions can flourish, rather than throwing big money at huge projects which will do one thing, accomplish that, and then disappear.