Omicron is highly contagious, but has far lower rates of associated hospitalization and death. By one estimate it is essentially 3 times deadlier than the standard flu, which is bad, but modest compared to previous variants of Covid-19. The vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines, appear to help a lot towards further mitigating the cost of infection. That all said, there’s no reason to yet be confident it precludes one from “long Covid” symptoms, many of which are moderately terrifying to a relatively healthy person such as myself.

But, after being vaccinated and begging everyone in your life to get vaccinated, is there anything else we can do at this point? There is a cost-benefit analysis happening in all of our heads now, and many of us who were stridently in the “isolate at home and wait until the vaccine miracle arrives” camp got our miracle, only to find out other people were…less enthusiastic. Then Omicron showed up and it started to feel like the only options are to either return to home isolation (perhaps even more strictly than before) or just accept that you’re going to get it.

I don’t know the answer to this question, but as I sit here, wondering if any body ache or cough is the beginning of “my turn” with Covid, there isn’t the fear or rage I would have previously expected. Just a quiet resignation, a hope that my to-do-list doesn’t grow to unmanageable proportions while I am down, and a gratitude that my entire family (in the broadest possible definition) is vaccinated and boosted.

The road here has been long and dumb, but it also might be near the end. Not because we won, but because we’ve arrived at a point where more people will survive their bad decision-making while imposing a far smaller cost on the rest of us than before. Which is fine, I guess.

But is it? Or have we just let the experience of the last two years beat down our expectations to the point where we’ll willing to accept an endemic version of mild Covid and move on with our lives? You’d think the main take away would be that mankind has arrived at a point where we can make a bespoke vaccine in 18 months (it probably should be), but in all honesty I find our incredible innovation less shocking than how easily grotesque anti-science fictions have become not just limits on public health, but bonafide popular campaign strategies, rigid spines capable of supporting functioning political coalitions. Angry, dangerous people have found each other, found community, and many very ambitious people have figured out how to speak directly to them. I don’t see any way that isn’t a problem going forward.

I remain more optimistic than pessimistic with regards to our global future, but I can’t shake the feeling that this particular denouement to the pandemic should be viewed cautiously in how it portends for the near future.

What does effective political advocacy look like? There is an entire school of thought dedicated to effective altruism. Givewell.org exists solely to evaluate and promote efficient, high-impact charities to help donors maximize the value their donations create. But what about political advocacy? It doesn’t fall neatly within the realm of altruism or charity – there is certainly nothing wrong with advocacy on behalf of yourself or a group you count yourself among, but it’s not altruistic in the classic sense. It also doesn’t conform to the neater forms of dollar efficiency or target outcome analysis that a charity might be evaluated along. Political outcomes don’t always lend themselves to intuitive metrics, or even agreement over whether an outcome should be counted a good or bad thing. There’s nothing especially convenient about political advocacy as a tool for welfare maximization, but that doesn’t free us from its necessity. Abandoning politics for it’s frequent ugliness concedes the power of of governance to the ugliest among us.

Political advocacy requires, nearly by definition, to interface with government institutions. In the case of a democracy, this means working within the limits and incentive structures of politics, and all of the complexity that entails. Leaving behind the relatively straightforward prices and incentives of the marketplace, as well as the fungibility of direct charitable donations, politics demands coping with indirect routes to measurable outcomes and, most importantly, the inevitable arrival of oppositional forces. It doesn’t take long in any meaningful advocacy engagement before the arrival of people and resources working explicitly, if not directly, counter to your efforts. This is not something you have to deal with in most charitable endeavors – efforts to shutdown city food banks and block textbooks from reaching African schoolchildren are thankfully rare.

So, again, what might an effective advocacy practice look like? I imagine it would bare scarce resemblance to your modal election campaign, where the emphasis is on manufacturing turnout in a zero-sum competition with your opponent. I also doubt it would look like most lobbying efforts, where the dollars at work represent the selection-effects of classic collective action problems. Rather than the efficient welfare maximization that a hypothetical EffectiveAdvocacy.org would aspire to, the lion share of lobbying simply represents the interests of firms and groups who have identified a bundle of policies whose benefits are sufficiently concentrated within them that it is worth organizing, while at the same time the broader social costs are sufficiently spread out that an opposing forces cannot similarly get over the organizational hump (Yes, I know this is a restatement of the standard Olsonian collective action model of lobbying. Bear with me.)

Effective advocacy would demand working with not just the limited resources of a group without a built-in constituency of concentrated benefits, but also a focused strategy of identifying welfare-maximizing policies unlikely to generate organizable opposition. That’s a tall order. I mean, if you’re going to convince me such a thing is feasible, an example would go a long way. Can you name one?

I’m glad I asked.

The good people at Marginal Revolution posting a link to a paper about the de facto banning of HIV home tests that has been in effect at the FDA for almost 40 years. Suffice it to say, the banning of home tests for a deadly communicable disease is a horrifying policy, one that has without question killed people by the thousands at best and the millions at worst. I imagine the origin story of this regulatory horror is not dissimilar from the opposition to the HPV vaccine – a macabre desire to raise the costs of an undesired behavior. Homosexuality was viewed by many in the not distant past as a choice, HIV/AIDS was killing homosexuals, and a home test would feasibly lower the risk to gay men, so advocates successfully blocked the development of tests. Why did opposition to HPV vaccines find less success? Because HPV is connected to cervical cancer in everyone, and being pro-cancer in the 2010’s enjoyed less popular support than being anti-gay in the 1980s.

This story is a tragic history, but it also represents an opportunity for effective advocacy. The policy, born of homophobia, would never enjoy such popular support today. It survives almost exclusively of regulatory inertia today. A minimum of lobbying resources could feasibly end the policy in large part because it’s originating constituency is diminished and would be unlikely to successfully organize.

This, in a nutshell, is the opportunity for effective advocacy – the strategic search for welfare-harming policies whose originating constituencies have shrunken or disappeared. It’s not particularly exciting, the notion of combing through policies on the books, agency by agency, looking for harmful policies with little to no continuing political support, but it is in that lack of excitement within which the opportunity lies. Reform of headline- and chryon-inducing policies have built in opposition. Any political or politics-adjacent effort that garners significant media attention always promises similar attention for opposing forces. It is within the boring stuff, the bureaucratic protocols and categorical bans produced at the margins of historical political battles, where advocacy, particularly crowd-sourced efforts, motivated by the same sentiments behind effective altruism and efficient charity might make contributions to our government institutions in the best way possible: by making changes that nobody can get attention from opposing.

That’s just one opportunity for effective altruism: inattention. There are no doubt more, but I suspect many will share at least a sliver of unsexy monotony. A better world through boredom.

Organized shoplifting mobs! Retailers claiming increases in shoplifting! Journalists claiming its an overstated numbers grift! Other journalists saying we should ignore shoplifting because corporate theft! The conversation about shoplifting is often hysterical and occasionally stupid, but that doesn’t mean something isn’t actually happening. Some of the facts seem clear, others murkier, and the underlying causes, like everything during this pandemic, are no doubt complex and uncertain. Let’s see if we can organize our thoughts a bit.

What we know

Shoplifting has been on the rise across the United States, with increasing theft of both staples for survival and the goods most easily resold on the black market. More specifically, and perhaps even more certainly, a still wealthy San Francisco, where one would expect retailers to desperately want a presence, can only seem to watch as its retailers flee. CVS is out. Walgreens is out. One Target it out (but not the biggest one). And the reason they claim is not commercial real estate overhead costs or declining customer bases, but an overwhelming increase in shoplifting (or what the retail industry used to call “inventory shrink”). While obviously not the whole story, the effective decriminalization of theft under $950 in San Francisco seems a key component. It doesn’t take any clever or subtle theorizing to expect that if the cost of theft under a certain threshold is radically lowered, then all you have to do is disaggregate your theft events across time and people to yield a sufficiently lucrative use of time (especially for those who are struggling or already carry the far weightier burden of a felony record). You can’t lower the opportunity cost of labor (less jail time) in a field of endeavor (boosting consumer goods) and pretend to be shocked when supply increases (more theft).

What we think

I am sure there is no shortage of “greedy corporations are abandoning American cities” and other malice-based theories, but those aren’t particularly useful theories. Retailers want customers and cities have a lot lot of them. So the first possibility is that they are simply telling us, and their shareholders, the truth– theft has reduced the profitability of stores such that the optimal decision is to close the doors. It would be a pretty shocking development to look back one day and realize that shoplifting was what closed the book on brick and mortar retail. Not Amazon or delivery drones, but the favored hobby of bored delinquents and subsidy of struggling families.

To those ends, though, a meteoric rise in shoplifting nonetheless feels, if not convenient, then incomplete as an explanation. CVS isn’t just closing in San Francisco, it’s closing 900 stores and moving to a new “store format”. Perhaps the better way of framing these closures isn’t a “crime wave of shoplifting” but rather more evidence that the brick and mortar retail industry is incredibly fragile, where any unforeseen increase in costs immediately threatens profitability. In a composite of shoplifting, online competition, the unabated growth of Costco and other wholesale clubs, and the rise in reservation wages of labor all across the country, which story would you want to emphasize to your shareholders as you close shops in urban centers? That you can’t compete? That you can’t afford labor? Or that you are being forced out by the crumbling of civilization into Mad Max dens of wayward lawlessness? At least the last one holds out hope that your business model isn’t wholly obsolete.

Still, people definitely seem to be stealing a lot of stuff, and that just creates one more cost advantage for online competitors and venues that require membership for admission. Things are changing, perhaps at an accelerated rate thanks to the pandemic and it’s accompanying bundle of policy responses. When considering fundamental change, observation of chaos rarely offers evidence to the contrary.

What can or should we do?

There are lots of things we should decriminalize. Lots. But I am extremely confident that theft is not one of them. The consequences are obvious, and in the short run will be felt almost exclusively by the poorest, who depend on local retailers, particularly those on the public transportation routes they take to work. Further, this is a problem that can metastasize as people don’t just supplement their incomes with theft, but specialize in it. It will hollow out the largest retailers and the smallest bodegas. It will change the the entire structure of physical marketplaces. It will change how people interact with core components of our welfare system. It will poison another relationship, this time between seller and customer, where people are increasingly viewed as a threat.

So what should we do? Desperate people stealing rice and other staples is one more argument for an unconditional universal basic income. People opting for black market income is one more argument for wage subsidies to increase relative attractiveness of wages in the legal market. And people stealing because the price of getting caught approaches zero? That’s an argument for raising the price of theft. Not to new and cruel heights, but to the levels they were at before i.e. high enough that theft is nothing but a last resort. A very last one.

In our eternal quest to never let go of any effective rhetorical device that can double as a headline, the last 12-18 months have been dubbed The Great Resignation. Within voluntary job separations, a sizable chunk of which appear to be early retirements, many are young people transitioning from low-paying jobs to those that have seen fit to adapt to the labor shortage faster, offering some combination of higher wages, better benefits, or a higher quality of life, often through the channel of relaxed educational or experience prerequisites.

The Great Resignation isn’t really about what most ppl call "quitting." And not really about burnout, like the media says.

It's a free agency period for low-wage workers switching jobs for money, plus a moderate surge of early retirements in a pandemic.https://t.co/NijfeXcFTQ

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) December 8, 2021

Some, generally from the political left, are framing this as a shift in power from management to labor, particularly for those who hope this can be the moment that pushes unionization back to the forefront. Others, mostly from the political right, are framing this as a catastrophic undercutting of the incentive to work induced by the expanded welfare state. I tend to see these positions as frantic over-optimism or pessimism from those desperate for a sexy political narrative to sell.

I think the closer parallel, in terms of mechanism (not scale), isn’t the Great Depression or the New Deal era that followed, but rather the World War II draft-accelerated entry of women into the workforce. I think what we’re seeing is a massive reorganization of the US labor market. If this half-baked generalization were true, what would it look like?

1. Education, Training, and Experience reconsidered

My guess is that managers in a range of fields have long had a itch in the back of their minds that they weren’t always hiring the right people. Specifically, they were eliminating large swaths of applicants from the pool of consideration because they lacked the minimum formal education or years of narrowly defined experience. A lot of these requirements, I suspect, existed not as tried and true markers of the subset of optimal candidates, but because they could be routinized through online job applications and human resources triage, largely in an effort to conserve on managerial and administrative time. Combined CYA incentives and other sources of herding behavior both within and across firms (i.e. no one gets fired for only hiring college graduates), these are exactly that kind of sub-optimal practices that can widely embed themselves when an economy is growing, but the labor market is relatively loose, so any suboptimality is lost in the wash.

A negative labor shock, be it a military draft or global pandemic, is exactly the kind of thing that rewards firms that begin hiring from whole strata of previously unconsidered job candidates. Not for nothing, that’s how you end learning all kinds of new things: the relative value of various degrees and training, the cross-applicability of job experience previously treated as irrelevant to an open position, and the marginal products of a firms employment portfolio.

2. Compensation bundles rebalanced

There’s plenty of fuss (rightly so) over the shift towards working from home. Yes, it saves on fixed costs, particularly in cities with sky-high commercial real estate costs, but I suspect the greater impact in the long run will be on the composition of wages+benefits+flexibility in employee compensation bundles, where flexibility is largely a catch-all for the quality of life component associated with any job. Maybe we already knew that health insurance and paid leave were valuable, but I think a lot of employees have discovered they were previously undervaluing the costs of commuting, schedule uncertainty, and existing “on call” for co-workers and superiors. Whether its working from home or as an independent contractor, many people are discovering that recapturing 10 hours a week of the rest of your life is worth a lot more than the wages being foregone. We already know that women are the future, but we also know that women value flexibility in work schedules more than men. A shift towards quality of life in compensation bundles was likely already in the cards, the pandemic just accelerated it.

For firms that have spent the last 20 years burning out the handful of key employees, rewarding their exceptional productivity by turning them into productivity bottlenecks, they are either going to have to find a way to spread the work thinner or recapture those key employees by finding other means of maintaining the quality of their employee lives.

3. The service industry is dead. Long live the service industry?

We’ve been eating on borrowed time. Through the combination of over-priced and over-valued higher education, a gratuitous over-stigmatization of non-violent criminal records, and the employment trap of limited human capital building, but lots of cash in hand, the service industry has been feeding us all on the cheap for a very long time now.

Turns out, though, that the relative frugality of diners has squeezed margins in restaurants razor thin, and has largely come at the expense of servers and kitchen staff. Came at the expense, I should say. I think we’re all going to have find a new normal where outsourcing meal preparation is, at the margin, slightly less of a staple and slightly more of a luxury. I still see Help Needed signs in lots of restaurants, and owners complaining in news stories that “No one wants to work“, but I’m also seeing new employees bring home higher salaries at McDonald’s after 90 days than fine dining cooks in their 3rd year working sauté. Eventually the new equilibrium will be reached, and I predict it’s going to involve higher salaries and better benefits for line cooks, but it’s also going to mean customers are going to have to get over there perceived $28 ceiling on entrees. Also, don’t expect your favorite restaurants to be open on Monday’s and Tuesdays, because it turns out everyone wants to have weekend.

4. The same, but different
What will the labor market look like in 5 years? Forecasting is a fool’s errand, but I never promised anyone I wasn’t a fool. Here’s my best guess:

I don’t expect a revival of unionization, but I do expect that employment will start taking on a lot of the attributes that pro-union people are currently agitating for. There will be more people with 3 and 4-day work weeks, though I suspect those people will be working 10 and 12 hour shifts. I think there will be a lot of flexible office-home work schedules, where firms coordinate their employees around days when everyone is in the office, the rest floating between the office and home as the work dictates. I expect there will be more independent contractors, but unlike previously self-employed people who bounced from contract to contract, they will instead be people who balance a portfolio of employment, with what amounts a small number of long term contracts. Rather than work for one person at a time 40 hours a week, they’ll work for 2 or 3, 8-10 hours each, building up enough firm-specific capital that contracts will last years, even decades, at a time.

I expect kitchens will remain hot, crowded, and loud. I expect chef’s will remain angry and owner’s tight-fisted with every penny. I expect that servers will still finish every shift with sore feet and stories of annoying customers. Maybe even more annoying than before, because those customer’s will be paying 15% more than the prices they already manage to complain about. But it’ll be okay, because everyone in that restaurant is going to be earning a much better living. They’ll have to, because otherwise they’re not coming back.

These two tweets came through my feed today through secondhand channels

Merry Christmas! 🎄
ps. Santa, please bring ammo. 🎁 pic.twitter.com/NVawULhCNr

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 4, 2021

People really underestimate how dystopian the United States is

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) December 4, 2021

I am not suggesting that these two tweets are equivalent. The first is grotesque cosplay, the second a bit of hyperbole (possibly inspired by the first). Rather, I think they are both part of the same democratic mechanism – the belief that there are more votes to be gained from incentivizing turnout of the base rather than persuading those at the margin. The voters in your base have already decided you and your party are a better option than the rival option, so the only obstacle between you and their vote is the opportunity cost of their time relative to their chances of being decisive in the next election. None of this is new – this uncanny astuteness is how 24 of the last 3 failures of the Median Voter Theorem were predicted. If you want the base to show up, you don’t need to persuade them – you need to scare them.

You need people to vote, so you give them big stakes. Of course, mathematically no stakes short of global extinction are big enough to warrant voting in a national election. The thing about stakes, though, is that even short of extinction-level threats, they still increase the value of a vote that absolves your guilt if the other side wins. You can move on with your life because at least you tried.

When you’re trying to bring out the base, stakes are everything. Problem is, people start to catch on when every election somehow manages to be the most important one ever. You need to recruit someone to convince your base that this election is the most important one ever. Someone credible. And that’s what politicians and activists have figured out. The most credible source for the potential terror that only our candidate can hold at bay is the opposition. Not their candidates or campaigns, mind you. Their base.

The most credible way to increase the stakes for your base is the rile up the rage and vitriol of the the opposition’s. If you want to truly convince your voters that the stakes are high, all you have to do is chum the water and let the craziest avatars of your political opposition do the work for you. They’ll wave their guns, call each other “comrade”, insult their religious faith, call them stupid, make veiled threats, make unveiled threats, all of which will make perfectly clear that if we don’t win this next election, these people will win. They will win and have power. They must be stopped.

This is the principal reason there has been such a meteoric rise of professional trolls and hyperbolic “reply-guys”. The trolls, your Tucker Carlson’s and Chapo Trap Houses chum the waters, and then an entire ecosystem of reply-guys respond, quote tweet, and record 30 second CNN/Fox News video commentaries. Politicians have discovered that truly horrific people, and the shrieking dystopia fetishists that swarm them, are amazing at bringing out political support, not through persuasion or direct signaling of group identity, but through the specter of the lunacy of the opposition, and the subtle implication that if you don’t signal your affinity for our group, you are by implication associated with the toxicity of our opposition.

Which is why when these sort of messages show up on social media or television sound bites, you can quickly see that they aren’t propaganda or even fan service. They’re bait.

And just so you don’t get the wrong impression, I fall for this too. I try not to, but these people are professionals for a reason.

I try to ignore these silly bits of political cosplay, but this one really did its job. I'm hard-pressed to imagine something more perfectly designed as both crowd-pleasing petty fun and brazen cruelty. The glib hypocrisy of a Christmas tree surrounded by $15k of murder tools… https://t.co/8i8Vfq2kbs

— Mike Makowsky is here to violently equivocate (@mikemakowsky) December 5, 2021

Just because I’m an economist, and one who studies political economy at that, that doesn’t mean I not still a sucker.

There are lots of big questions about welfare programs and how to design them. I am not going to answer any of those questions here, but I am going to ask a few, specifically these two:

1. Should receipt of welfare be means-tested for need (e.g. TANF) or universal (i.e. a minimum income for everyone)?
2. Should receipt of welfare be conditional on employment?

The good arguments for means-testing usually boil down to maximizing impact. If we have a fixed amount of resources we can redistribute, then we can maximize the impact of those resources by directing them towards the people with the greatest need (rather than spreading it thinner across everyone). The good arguments against means-testing revolve around changing incentives at the margin. Even when designed with gradual phasing out as a person’s income rises, there remains the unavoidable reality that means-tested welfare reduces the value of every marginal dollar earned within the phase-out window.

The good arguments for requiring employment to receive a form of welfare are, again, incentives to work, this time at the extensive margin (i.e. how many people in the population choose to work at all). The good arguments against requiring employment are the obstacles that poverty places between people and finding work. It becomes a classic Catch-22 – you’re poor because you can’t find work, but you can’t find work because you are poor. Welfare unconditional of employment can help people get over the hump and into their next job.

None of these observations are new, and these very much remain hard questions. Yes, we should be concerned with incentives to work at the margin, but the fact remains resources are finite, and many people will, at some point in their lives, need a lot of help. The more we can give them the better. This pushes me towards means-testing. But then I remember that those marginal incentives to work at the intensive margin (how much to work) depend on phasing out of benefits with increasing visible income. For people living in poverty, there exist a number of viable earning options that are not visible to the institutions testing their means. A dollar earned in legal wages might reduce TANF benefits by $0.15, but a dollar earned in the black/gray market leaves those benefits untouched. Yes, illegal earnings come with risks, including future access to benefits, but the possibility remains that means-testing benefits could have the perverse effect of increasing the relative value of any and all “off-the-books” income, be it cash labor in the gray market or explicit criminal earnings.

Considering whether a source of welfare should be conditional on employment raises the question of wage subsidies versus cash welfare, but it’s really just the same question we were pondering previously, but with greater emphasis on incentives to work or not. These questions at the extensive margin, much like those at the intensive margin, become far more interesting when placed in the context of not just whether to work or not, but which market to work in. In a world of prohibitions scattered across a variety of extremely high demand (and high profit) markets, where licensing, educational norms, and discrimination all work to create a collage of cash opportunities outside of the well-lit protections of legal labor markets, there is no shortage of work that goes unseen. Welfare transfers conditional on legal labor can serve as incentive to pull people out of these market, and begin building a record of accomplishment that serve them going forward. This speaks in favor of conditioning welfare on employment, so long as everyone has access to employment.

This this thought experiment leaves me mostly where I started (no surprise, an hour’s reflection rarely changes my priors), namely that wage subsidies have a place in our welfare system, as does means-testing, but as welfare benefits rise, they should become more universal in their access across the income distribution, a lesson I expect we will learn in retrospect as we come out of “The Great Resignation”. A “universal basic income” need not be fully universal, but there are good reasons for it to reach well passed the median income. Or median voter, for that matter.

But maybe I repeat myself?

The Take Economy demands not just that you distinguish yourself with opinions that deviate from the median person, but that the manner in which your opinion deviates is immediately distinguishable from everyone else who is similarly deviating. This leaves us with a tendency to focus on what we don’t like – enjoying something is further evidence of the monoculture, while hate comes in a million shades of beige.

I bring this up because hating Thanksgiving foods, particularly turkey, oven-baked turkey, has been in vogue for years, and I’m sure stuffing is next. Everything is too dry, too bland, yada yada yada. It’s a boring take most often made by boring people. Not that such things usually matter to me, but in this case it does because Thanksgiving as a meal is not an epicurean holiday, it’s an attempt to solve a coordination game across families, friends, and geographies. When solving a coordination problem with so many players, with preferences and cost-constraints that make broadly amenable large-scale get-togethers increasingly difficult. Between navigating travel costs, sleeping arrangements, and the inevitable negative political externalities that some jackass in your family is going to pollute the familial air with, the last thing you have the resources to cope with is culinary coordination. So what do we do? We come up with a pseudo-national, heavily regional menu that we coordinate on, a$1.99 per pound Schelling point that’s a steal at thrice the price.

The turkey’s too dry? Drown it in gravy. The stuffing is too bland? Your aunt has hot sauce in her purse. Your cousin is explaining the vagaries of 18th century 2nd amendment judicial rulings? There’s a bottle of brown liquor quietly being shared on the porch this very minute that you can partake in for the price of nothing more than a pleading glance and keeping your politics to your self.

The food isn’t the point, but if you’re still feeling the pain of a sub-optimal meal, you can order Chinese with us later, and I’ll happily explain to you why you’re not just ordering the wrong dishes, you’re ordering off the wrong menu. Because I got food takes, just not when the meal isn’t about the food.

I had never spoken with someone so enthusiastic about what they could do with trash. A young, slender man from a city in India I was unfamiliar with explained to me how his machine transformed plastic refuse into an economically and environmentally superior substitute for concrete. This sort of techno-optimism fodder for “your daily reason to feel good” clickbait article provokes, but rarely maintains my optimism upon closer inspection. I listened, impressed by the person I was talking to, but unsure what to make of his elevator pitch.

Then he reached into his backpack and handed me a very real block of “Plascrete”. We’ve spent so much of the last 20 years inundated with ideas that were abstract software application propositions at best, and vaporware at worst, it was jarring to hold the physical manifestation of someone’s “big idea”. I spent the rest of the conversation, and a good chunk of my evening at the “unconference” being hosted by Emergent Ventures, thinking about the economic ramifications of Plascrete. What it could mean for developing countries to have a substitute for concrete that is 24 times stronger yet somehow 4 times cheaper – what it would mean for infrastructure and vertical housing construction. What the streets might look like picked clean of plastic bags and refuse. What happens to the lower tail of the wage distribution after the marginal product of trash-picking labor quintuples. How forecasted carbon emissions from developing countries might shift if the expected carbon footprint of construction were massively reduced.

But this post isn’t about Plascrete or the projected impact of any particular innovation. What I’m interested in this moment is the market for private venture capital.

The model of modern venture capital is built around the biggest of wins, those home run investments whose returns compensate for the more than 90% that largely fail. For the strategy to function, of course, means that every investment has to carry the possibility of prodigious returns, in the realm of 10 to 20-times investment, which limits the industries and technological categories under consideration. Tight profit margins are out. Factories, physical capital are out. Anything that might carry an inherent limitation to rapid scaling are out. What’s in are network consumer goods and zero marginal cost (e.g. software) products. So what does that leave out? Explicitly physical goods, such as inputs into shelter or food, things that require upfront investment in equipment where those costs increase with the scale of your output aspirations.

But that’s actually only the beginning of our problems. What about goods with enormous positive externalities, i.e. social benefits, that exist without the possibility of traditional property rights and monetization? Even if a private venture fund is culturally interested in such things, they are constrained by their model – any reduction in potential home run returns from their investment puts the short run solvency of their fund at risk, something unlikely to be tolerated by their investors. These problems are only compounded when considering positive externality generating technologies that are burdened with traditional physical capital needs and historically normal limits to scaling. Even if your product offers 100X social returns, that’s not going to keep the lights on for a series of high risk investments with private returns that top out at 5X.

Innovations whose adoption offers enormous positive externalities are, in theory, exactly why public support for general science exists (whether or not such things should fall within the domain of public funding agencies is a whole different question that I have no immediate interest in addressing). Let me simply say here that these hypothetical products require expertise in delivering a product to market and the capacity to appropriately take on risk. These are not the comparative advantages of large federal science funding agencies. Which leaves us with the dilemma motivating this entire rambling thought exercise. There seems to be an important gap in the market- and government-based institutions for funding innovation.

What I want to consider is the possibility of elevating the status and profile of private venture capital that goes towards profitable, self-sustaining technologies whose returns might only be considered prodigious if we include the broader positive externalities they have on human lives. The kinds of effects whose value may in fact scale exponentially as they diffuse through communities and networks, but will never be internalized into profits via property rights. I want to consider the reconstruction of the risk profile of an entire portfolio to optimize the ability of a fund to support these sorts of innovations in perpetuity. Earning returns sufficient to produce returns sufficient to self-sustain with a minimum of (if any) long run philanthropic subsidy.

Private capital with such a focus would find a niche that modern venture funds are unmotivated to serve and public scientific agencies are ill-equipped to support. Private funds focused on innovations with externally scaling returns would, in my half-baked hypothesis, would take on a two-tier model. The first tier would be composed of small investments scattered across a large number of very small grants (which is essentially the entire model of Emergent Ventures – I’m essentially plagiarizing the model I saw evidence of through two days of conversations with their grant recipients). These grants would predominantly be interested in people. These human lottery tickets would pursue their initial ideas through the proof-of-concept stages. Some would succeed, most will not, but all will benefit from their first connection to the broad international network of technology talent and talent-seekers. The small number who do succeed in producing compelling evidence of technological advancement would then enter the second tier, where large investments would be sought for a prototype and eventual distribution. What’s important to remember is that this remains a private good that must still enter and pass the market test. What distinguishes it is not an inability to economically self-sustain, but rather it’s inability to create profits so grandiose that it can subsidize a portfolio of failed moonshots. It’s prospective profitability need only justify it’s own independent risk of failure. This is not to say the bar is actually lower than traditional venture capital. While the profitability bar is lower, it must exceed a second, in many ways more difficult bar – it must produce a direct and attributable positive externality, be it through health, safety, or environmental channels. Its consumption must improve lives of not just its consumers, but those entirely uninvolved in its production or purchase.

I’m not an expert in venture capital or speculative philanthropy, but after the last week I can’t shake the idea that Michael Kremer was even more right than we realized: more people => more ideas => more economic growth. There are billions lottery tickets lying on the ground all over the developed world. We need to invent newer and better ways of picking more of them up.

I’ll be giving a presentation today at 12pm ET over Zoom for the Ostrom Workshop Colloquium Series at Indiana University. It is my understanding that it is open to the public. The format is different than your typical economics seminar. I will give an introduction and brief summary of the paper for 20 minutes followed by questions.

You can find the full working paper here.