Ignorance of Blisks

(On the Requirement of Manual Production for Aerospace Engineering Tools) In June, I spent some hours with my rocket-scientist little brother, and we talked about my own near-Singularitarianism. I may well have over-emphasized my liking for the idea of 3D printing, which I found esthetically appealing in the late 80s--still do, and now I do expect it to get to be important. Then in July in the mail I found a clipping from "Aviation Week and Space Technology" about the difficulties of manufacturing the machines that manufacture "blisks". There was a note attached; the note said that

this article reminds me of why I'm skeptical of "printable machines" in the next 10-20 years.

Umm..well, okay, Roger. I'm not even sure I disagree with you, in the sense that I'm not sure we'll see printed blisk-making machines within 20 years. (We might, or we might instead see "printed" blisks, or neither, and Hofstadter's Law applies as to the production of this note.) But when I'm not sure, I get even more verbose than when I am sure, and that's what I propose to do now -- and in any case, I am pretty sure that the article is wrong, whether or not your conclusion from it is correct. I was totally ignorant of blisks. My conclusions, introductions, and everything in betwen are therefore based on bliskful ignorance. Read at your own risk.

Oh, yeah? The magazine sets up the problem in paragraph 5: blisk-making needs

a machine tool whose cutting head can follow the digitally encoded design to within about 12 microns.

Okay, 12 microns is pretty small in today's world of practical machinery. However, I think the crucial statement in your magazine is in paragraph 6: this tool "must be built by hand" because, he claims,

No machine can make another as precise as itself.

If the author (Bradley Perrett) says that's true of the relevant machines at this moment, I have no reason to doubt him. If he says it as a statement of principle, or even as something that will reliably hold for any particular machines over the next 10-20 years (your chosen timeframe), I don't believe it at all. In general, I would say that we have machines of high precision because they have been built, with much difficulty, by machines of lesser precision -- under direction which has been human but which could be robotic. As a special case, I believe that it's perfectly possible for a machine to be built which builds a copy of itself, to exactly the same tolerances. Indeed, my sense of where the future is going, as well as my sense of the past few billion years of evolution, is based on that belief. So...

Replication and Precision: principle Some (especially analog) methods of replication will always diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by tactics such as grinding and polishing), whereas other (digital, including DNA) methods may or may not diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by error-correcting codes or simply by selection, as long as we can generate enough variants that some of them are okay, and the rest can be rejected.) In essence, I think Perrett is confusing the standard-meter problem:

• if you define the meter as a metal stick and try to make analog copies (even with a digitally-controlled tool) then you will lose some precision with each generation of copies. This has been going on for a while; a friend who's an archaeologist at Colgate (Rebecca Ammerman) has written about ancient terracotta goddess statues made from molds made from statues made from molds...(and about tracking the sequence via imperfections and size change.) I believe that's what Perrett is getting at with his "No machine can..." claim.
• If, however, you define the meter as a multiple of some reproducible wavelength, say a carbon-dioxide laser's 9.6 microns which I pick because it's close to the stated 12 microns, or a TEA laser's 337.1 nm, then the problem of measurement-reproducibility becomes solvable...not at all easy, but solvable.

Lasers are not crucial in principle, but they're conveniently well-defined, and the meter definition is already implemented via helium-neon lasers:

...actual laboratory realisations of the metre are still delineated by counting the required number of wavelengths of light along the distance.

And as you probably know, commercial laser interferometrics can provide pretty fair accuracy in a fairly large space:

With regard to the lineal control of the laser interferometer, the resolution is 0.16 microns; the repeatability is 1 micron +1 micron/meter; and the accuracy for radial distance is 10 microns +0.8 microns/meter.

I don't claim that this magically makes it easy to make blisks or blisk-makers, but the point of interferometry is that you're using precision that comes from the light-waves themselves -- and the effective precision can and does improve without any magical manual touch. I think of the improvements as a Moore's Law instance, but it may be that Moore's Law thinking is irrelevant here; after all, in 1991 we already had, in principle, a Laser interferometric system such that

This method achieved (i) sub-nanometer resolution (0.6 nm/LSB), (ii) high stability (2.5 nm/day), (iii) high linearity (less than 1 LSB), and (iv) high following speed (more than 1000mm s-1).

Well, maybe. I expect that some future CNC systems, including but not limited to 3D printers, will use a well-defined 3D grid which will, if that's desirable, be based on counting off wavelengths one way or another. And later, maybe we'll be counting off specific (crystallized?) molecules. And later, maybe we'll be counting off spaces in a graphene grid, six carbon atoms around each hexagonal tile. And then maybe we'll have to stop, but 12 microns will not seem small. Twelve microns will seem, will be, huge.

And so? Somehow, Roger, I doubt that you'll consider that to be an adequate response. Maybe it isn't, but anyway you won't think so. Hmm...

Outline: I want to bloviate on our respective professional-geek biases (why you won't take this seriously), and then on my most fundamental caveats (why you shouldn't take this seriously), and then on what I am "predicting", to the extent that I'm predicting anything, and why. You can then decide whether you actually disagree, and whether any comment you might make could possibly lighten my hopeless ignorance.

Biases: In general, we judge and misjudge by supposing that the future will look like X, X being something we think we've learned from in the past, yes? Think back long before our respective PhuDs to the time of the moon landing, with us both in Colegio Nueva Granada -- high school for me, first grade (second?) for you. (Okay, maybe you don't remember it that clearly, but a high-school classmate named Al Borrero got in touch recently, I guess we'd both gotten in touch with "legendary guitarist" and anthro prof Hector Qirko who'd just been interviewed by instapundit, and Al remembers you and Magi as "very very bright." You were there, you were aware.) At that time, Moore's Law was four years old: two doublings since its proposal. It has gone on pretty well since, with some wobbles as to what was doubling. If your tools had improved the way mine have improved, I suppose we'd all be commuting to the moon, and we certainly wouldn't have to wait ten years to see if your itty-bitty rockets work when they get to Pluto. Your tools have not improved that much; in some respects they haven't improved fundamentally at all. It's natural for my model of improvement to be more dramatic than yours.

My well-grounded lack of confidence: That doesn't mean that Moore's Law is (or is not) now an appropriate model for your subject or mine. Back when I ended my PhuD work in 1980, I remember I believed predictions that we were nearing physical limits that would stop it cold. After that, we would depend on massive parallelism (remember the Connection Machine?) and so I was one of the throng doing proofs about parallel programs, functional programming, algebras of parallel-reducible expressions and automatic parallel scheduling of the evaluation of recursively-defined arrays...but Moore's Law kept on going, sequential machines were good enough to support the "desktop revolution" (say 1975 to 1990, though it continues) and then the "connectivity revolution" (say 1990 to 2005, though it continues). Anyway, Moore's Law kept on going: I wuz wrong. I still expect the original circuit-size Moore's Law (and the directly-associated variations, e.g. disk drive capacity per square inch) to hit a limit, and I still expect growth of effective computer capacity to continue for a while via massive parallelism, and I still even expect functional languages (e.g., within Erlang?) to play a larger role, but I don't have much of a track record for any predictions in any direction.

My basic "prediction": What I think I'm starting to see now, something I haven't seen before, is a robotics revolution to follow the connectivity revolution of WWW and cell phones. A Moore's Law progression beginning in robotics, 3D printing, and associated (CNC, mostly) technologies. Back in the 80s, I thought 3D printers might get real someday; now I mostly think that today's toys of that general category will be twice as good in a couple of years, and will similarly go on doubling their overall goodness (which I have no intention of trying to define) at roughly Moore's Law rates for the next decade or three.

Am I sure? Nah. What I see now might not continue. On the other hand, we might see growth (or size/cost shrinkage) a whole lot faster than Moore's Law, because lots of technologies for working at very small scales have already been developed.

Why am I talking this way? Basically, I look at reports of progress, of robotics in medical and military and pure-research and just for fun, of 3D printers and "fab labs" mostly in the last two categories, and the progress of productivity in random places: a robotics summary last year claimed that

Prices of industrial robots, expressed in constant 1990 US dollars, have fallen from an index 100 to 54 in the period 1990-2005, without taking into account that robots installed in 2005 had a much higher performance than those installed in 1990. When taking into account quality changes, it was estimated that the index would have fallen to 22.

In the same period (1990-2005), the index of labour compensation in the American business sector increased from 100 to 179. This implies that the relative prices of robots fell from 100 in 1990 to 23 in 2005 without quality adjustment, and to 10 when taking into account quality improvements in robots.

I find that plausible; I expect it to continue; if it does continue, I expect to see the production and manipulation of objects revolutionized in much the same way that we've seen in the production and manipulation of data. I don't see why blisks should be an exception.

Of course, if robotic production of blisks (and of other things) does well enough, there will be correspondingly less incentive to speed the improvement of 3D printing. I expect 3D printing to improve at roughly Moore's Law rates also, I expect 3D printing to dominate robotic production for a large class of consumer goods within your chosen time-frame, but high-precision stuff that's tough enough for aerospace will be hard. It is possible that it won't work well enough until we can do atomic-level assembly (not just putting an atom in the right place, but putting it in the right place with the right bonds); that's hard. No, not impossible. Just hard--much harder than the industrial-robot approach for almost any individual problem (e.g., blisks.) . Consider Robot Sales Up 33% in North America in First Nine Months of 2007 - Robotics Online:

Among the best performing non-automotive markets this year are life sciences/pharmaceutical/ biomedical/medical devices (up 20%), food & consumer goods (up 15%) and plastics and rubber (up eight percent).

Of course those are sales, which as they admit are driven by cycles as well as by fundamental change; I expect many of those numbers to drop over the coming year, even if the actual-recession trade price is still under 50%. In the longer run, though, increasing required precision will force less manual processing, not more: Perrett is quite fundamentally wrong. I think. Your blisks will be produced automatically -- probably within your rocketry career (You don't personally get involved with blisks, do you?) Never mind, the point is increasingly automatic production, especially of the means of (increasingly automatic) production. Even though I did give my youngest a soldering kit for Christmas, and I'm hoping to get her to use it.

On the other hand, I think you're surer of what you're sure of than I am sure of what I'm sure of, and you may be right.

Or then again (and again and again), maybe not. Happy New Year!

Maximal Meaningful DNA: 25 Megabytes?

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky asserts that:

There's an upper bound, a speed limit to evolution: If Nature kills off a grand total of half the children, then the gene pool of the next generation can acquire a grand total of 1 bit of information.

and that's very cool. In a sense it's obvious; selection is pushing you down a tree of choices, rather like the tree of choices involved in sorting where we tediously show students how sorting can't be better than O(N*log(N)). We think of evolution as answering a series of yes/no questions, going from a breeding population of a zillion with no answer for question Q, to a population of two zillion young'uns of whom half try out "yes", half "no", and then to a surviving next-generation breeding population of a zillion who have survived by choosing the right answer. I like it. Yudkowsky continues:

I am informed that this speed limit holds even with semi-isolated breeding subpopulations, sexual reproduction, chromosomal linkages, and other complications.

Yeah, I think I can believe that. I think. It's very plausible, and I don't see a way to attack it -- if somebody challenged me with an attack I would not say it's a priori ridiculous to try, especially if there's a way to isolate subsystems of questions which are separately answered by subpopulations, but I would expect them to fail -- I don't think you can know which subsystems to isolate until after you have the answer. He then goes on with:

Let's repeat that. It's worth repeating. A mammalian gene pool can acquire at most 1 bit of information per generation.

and this is clearly dependent on the assumption (slightly discussed) that the selection of DNA sequences starts with a pool of roughly twice the surviving size, i.e. about four offspring per pair. For mammals, that sounds right, yes? And if so, we can go on with

Among mammals, the rate of DNA copying errors is roughly 10^-8 per base per generation.

and if we build up to 100,000,000 base pairs, then we can add one and lose one per generation so we've hit the maximum and that's two base-pairs per byte so we get 25 megabytes for the maximum meaningful mammalian DNA.

This strikes me as extremely cool, but actually my current opinion is that it's wrong for a very simple reason: http://www.google.com/search?q=viable.sperm yields over 62,000 hits, while http://www.google.com/search?q=viable.ova yields over 500. In other words, some of the DNA selection occurs before we see the offspring. How much? Well, as Simon Levay put it:

as anyone who has watched the Discovery Channel knows, a maverick sperm takes a flood of its buddies along for the ride — between one hundred million and seven hundred million tail-snapping semen-surfing spermatozoa in each ejaculation.

Of course that number can be a lot less and still have reproductive success, but clearly there is selection of sperm (and ova, to some extent) going on.

As a programmer, I'm thinking of sperm-selection and ovum-selection as module testing; the miscarriages that then take out at least some pregnancies serve as initial system-integration testing; and then we get the approximately one bit added from post-birth selection.

One major caveat: the external environment is not necessarily involved (it may be involved, since some environmental stimuli do clearly get through). So pre-birth selection is not equivalent to post-birth selection; in particular, it may have an extremely limited ability to select bits relating to the external environment. However, a whole lot of the environment, for any given gene's expressed proteins, consists of other genes' expressed proteins and their consequences.

So, how much meaningful DNA can be supported? Each doubling in offspring corresponds to an extra bit to be selected; a hundred-million-fold increase is more than 26 doublings. In fact using Scott Aaronson's summary

we’ll never find any organism in evolutionary equilibrium, with mutation rate ε and K offspring per mated pair, with more than (log2(K)-1)/(8388608ε) MB of functional DNA.

we're talking about a possibly 26-fold increase in log2(K); a few hundred megabytes, instead of just 25.

And ova? Well, it seems to me that if the ovum's genetic expression is largely independent (doing different things, expressing and testing different genes than sperm) then whatever expansion there is for ova should be a multiplier; if we form an embryo by choosing from 1E8 sperm and, say, 100 ova, then actually we're selecting from 1E10 potential embryos -- that would give us a basis for maintenance of all our DNA as non-junk. In this kind of consideration, the redundancy of the genes from parents is obviously relevant, and I'm not at all sure how to handle it; but we are able to use the zillions of sperm to get right answers to roughly log2(1E8) questions. Whether the actual reproductive process does so, and whether there really is a more than 25MB (or thereabouts) package of data, is an experimental issue, but I'm not sold on Yudkowsky's belief that this line of reasoning predicts the junkiness of junk DNA.

The principle, though, is clearly convincing.

A random thought, while updating: the error rate has to be non-negligible in order to accumulate information, but perhaps it could be a variable if there's a way of detecting "we're near a local optimum" (with better-than-random success) and stepping up error correction if so. In particular, consider the fact of variation at equilibrium; it's a little hard to think about this in the current context, where I've been supposing that each DNA locus has a single "right" answer, but a species in or near equilibrium, a "successful" species, doesn't generally consist of clones ... for a variety of reasons. I hereby conjecture that if you're a member of a species under stress, one far from equilibrium because it's "losing", then it's relatively more likely that your parents will both have had the same value for gene G, for any given G. (For example, a habitat changes temperature and only the least or most heat-sensitive survive.) If so, your error-correction algorithm should look at the genes it is copying and say "hmm...too many of these are identical. Better not try so hard." The effective mutation rate will therefore rise. I have no idea whether or not any real systems work this way, but they might.

Or then again, maybe not.

Solar Balloon Progress?

In July 2006 I sketched a solar-energy balloon notion: build a balloon which is roughly half transparent and half (inside) reflective, put a solar collector (I was thinking of solar Stirling engines) around the focal point, give it a supply of water to split into hydrogen, let it fly. I thought of this as part of our semi-Singularitarian notion of the Spike, by which human labor costs become a hyperbolically diminished factor in a world of self-reproducing machines. But maybe it's easier than that, and will come sooner. EcoGeek reports on "Inflatable Solar Arrays" being developed now:

The device uses very little actual photovoltaic material, and everything else is dirt cheap. The installation of something like this could even be several hundred feet off the ground, if one didn't want to disturb habitat.

How about several miles off the ground, to be above the weather? They'll last longer, and be more reliable as power sources. Is flight control really that hard? I don't think so: consider YouTube - solar airship:

This vehicle runs on sunlight, and thus can fly as long as the sun shines (which, of course, it always does above the clouds). You can see the panels inside (see hyperblimp.com for more info).

That assumes a human with a remote control, but we do have people working on solar-powered airships to stay up for "a week or more", as in Danger Room's Commandos Get Hydrogen-Powered Drone

Global Observer, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, will fly at 55,000 to 65,000 feet, serving as a communications' relay for commandos -- and keeping watching over the ground below.

That's a plan, but already we have Slashdot's report of Solar Craft Flies Through Two Nights:

A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours,

and open-source UAV flight-control is coming right along at Chris Anderson's Do-it-yourself drones. I'm feeling optimistic. This morning they announce the winner(s) of the robot car "race":

The three other cars that were out on the DARPA Urban Challenge course when the three front runners came in have now crossed the finish line. That makes 6 cars that completed the 60-mile course, out of 11 starters.

Their task was immensely harder than getting a solar-powered blimp to lift off, ride the upper winds for a day, and land -- but even that's not needed, if we leave the power stations to fly gradually around and around the world, with manned airships to tend them, supply more water, collect more hydrogen...(or whatever fuel turns out to be the best way to transport the solar energy.)

Faster, please.

Financial Times on Torture

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal says

Tyler Cowen (where does he ever find the time?) alerts me that the extremely sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook now has a weblog.

Generally, when something is agreed upon by DeLong and Cowen, I'm likely to find it of value, and so I've tentatively subscribed to CrookBlog. Okay...but in reading a few entries, I find myself stuck on FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: It depends what you mean by "torture":

If anything is torture, simulated drowning is torture. If you need to remind yourself what waterboarding entails, read how the Khmer Rouge did it...Which principled defence of "aggressive questioning" permits simulated drowning but prohibits thumb-screws or the rack?

But I don't need to read how the Khmer Rouge did it. I can watch it performed the way that the Americans do it, as done to a Fox News guy named Steve Harrigan.

So okay, I know what it is. Is it "torture"? Well, gee. Yes, it depends on what you mean by "torture", and some people -- knowing what waterboarding is -- will include waterboarding within "torture", and others won't. What I'm looking at, though, is Crook's If anything is torture, simulating drowning is torture.

This strikes me as fundamentally unserious. Waterboarding is an unpleasant experience which some not-obviously-insane people volunteer for, and don't seem to regret afterwards. (So far as I know, this line excludes both thumbscrews and rack.) We can draw the "torture" line to exclude such things; in that case waterboarding won't be torture, and yet I think we'll have a quite intellectually and morally coherent view of what torture is (and why, in a morality which tries to pay some attention to the Golden Rule, we don't torture.)

I imagine we can also have an intellectually and morally coherent view of torture which does include waterboarding, which we therefore don't do. Maybe we can have an actual discussion of it. However, the post I'm linking does not seem to rise above the "if anything is torture" level. So I have to start my reading of CrookBlog with a down-check on credibility within some domain of discourse whose scope is yet to be determined. That's okay; there are major places where I down-check DeLong, and yet he's still worth reading. But still, it's not a good start, and I read too many blogs.

or maybe not? hmmm..

On Legitimacy

I see that Randy Barnett is recapitulating his Lost Constitution book as a response to Leiter on Originalism:

(1) In Restoring, I begin by denying that the legitimacy of a constitution of the sort that governs a territory like the United States could ever be grounded on the "consent of the governed" because such consent is and must always be a fiction. If such a constitution is ever legitimate at all (and perhaps none can be), it must be because it is warranted in imposing its commands on nonconsenting members of the public.

It's funny how much of his later argument I find convincing, after totally rejecting this starting point. I don't believe that either consent or legitimacy are binary values.

No government is totally consensual or non-consensual, no government is totally legitimate or illegitimate.

Considering that the whole point of government is that it requires that you change your behavior, "the consent of the governed" is never 100%, but that doesn't make it a fiction: consent is not always additive because we consent to different things. Every government, even a thugocracy, is somewhat consensual. In the absence of Madison's angels, no real-world government can be fully consensual -- and if we had such angels as citizens, then Madison correctly points out that no government would be needed. A maximally legitimate government is one for which any change would make it even less legitimate -- less consensual -- than it is. Anarchy is pretty much the least consensual form of "government" for the simple reason that practically nobody consents to it; government by (consent of) "We the People" (via representatives picking metarules by which to pick rules) is necessarily far from perfect, but it's probably better -- more consensual -- than any of the alternatives.

And that's why we should pick it. (So am I ready to define "more consensual"? Absobloominglutelynot. I know it when I see it, except when I'm not sure, or when I'm wrong. But consent is weighted, in some sense: if you come up and hit me in the nose, to which you consent and I do not, then that's a whole lot less consensual than if the nice policeman stops you, to which I consent and you do not. If you claim that you don't believe this, I am skeptical about your disbelief.)

And yet Barnett goes on to derive presumptions of liberty and all kinds of good stuff which I also find to follow from my very different premises. This may indicate that I'm being convinced, and perhaps even that he's being convinced, by something other than the ostensible basis of argument.

Or then again, maybe not.

update: Barnett now points to Solum on Leiter (and Me) on Originalism:

The truth of semantic originalism, by itself, has no normative implications. Even if the semantic content of the constitution is the original public meaning, it could be the case that constitutional practice should deviate from that meaning. For example, one might argue that precedent should trump the original public meaning. Or one might argue that the difficulty of constitutional amendment so undermines the democratic legitimacy of the Constitution that the political branches are justified in “amending constructions” that give the text new and different semantic content. Or one might believe that the constitution is so undesirable or unjust ...

As a simple-minded geek, I think that Solum is using the same oversimplification that Barnett does: I would say that semantic originalism (original public meaning) has no normative implications in a predicate-calculus prove-true-or-false sense, but that it has normative weight in that the original public meaning is what was agreed/consented to at the time, and times, of the agreement and its subsequent amendments. That's where consensuality comes in. Other issues (including justice, not always separate from consensuality) come in too, of course. I would like to disagree with Solum (and Barnett, I think) about constitutional underspecification, especially vagueness, in that if the original public meaning is vague, then surely (I wish) it does not constrain, so anything goes within the range of vagueness. Unfortunately, I can't do that, because the clear non-vague original public meaning of the 9th Amendment says that there are "rights" -- constraints on Congress -- as a part of this stuff that we're consenting to, that are not enumerated. The resolution of this underspecification in particular, and perhaps vagueness-underspecification as well, is clearly not being left to Congress and presumably not to the Executive either; it's gotta be a judicial function. I really don't like that, but maybe it was the best available option and, gee, what can I say? It's what they consented to, and I have no clarifying amendments to suggest.

Self-experimentation, dental care, health-care policy

As I mentioned in a self-experimentation post, I've been following Seth Robert's recommendation of flaxseed oil for calorie management (because the diet was so strange, but explained so plausibly, that I wanted to try it despite not being actually overweight, and I did lose weight) and I was interested in his series of gum inflammation (and other omega-3 factors) posts. I don't have a major problem there either, but I have had a problem in the past -- a root canal thirty years ago which had to be redone, with gum surgery, fifteen years ago, leaving a plastic-on-gold-on-tungsten implant. It kept getting moderately inflamed, then less, then more; a common discussion topic after tooth-cleaning. Lately it hasn't been a problem; today I was very conscious that there just wasn't a problem. And my eldest son, who has had a problem, recently wrote that his "one gum, which was the only one that bled regularly with flossing, has almost completely stopped. i don't know if it's the flaxseed oil, but it sure could be. the big test will be the next dentist appt...".

Systematic self-experimentation does not appeal to me; I'm just not sufficiently obsessive about data collection. But I'm very glad there are people like Seth Roberts in the universe, and I'm hoping that improved technology will gradually increase their number and effectiveness. If I were In Charge, there would be basic health-care vouchers for everyone, and expanded vouchers for everyone willing to sign up for data-collection services, and big cash prizes for donations of patents (to an open-innovation patent protection fund) to make that collection easier. I would like to have lots of us live long enough to outlive the whole idea of "aging".

Rodrik on Development

I've been reading Dani Rodrik's blog and now his current book, One Economics, Many Recipes. He is lots more enthusiastic about government than I am, and mostly I feel battered in that he is mostly making a good case for stuff that I'd rather not believe: sometimes interventionist government works better than minimalist government. This makes my worldview more complicated than -- as a laygeek interested in economics and specifically in development economics -- I want it to be. I see in Arnold Kling's review that he (albeit not a laygeek) feels more or less the same way, which is not a big surprise -- my views often overlap with his.

However, I'm still feeling bothered by the book's start, right on page 1 of the Introduction:

ON A VISIT to a small Latin American country a few years back, my colleagues and I paid a courtesy visit to the minister of finance...a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his economy's recent progress...listed all the reforms...Trade barriers had been removed, price controls had been lifted, and all public enterprises had been privatized. Fiscal policy was tight, public debt levels low, and inflation nonexistent. Labor markets were as flexible as they come. There were no exchange or capital controls, and the economy was open to foreign investments of all kind. [sic] "We have done all the first-generation reforms, all the second-generation reforms, and are now embarking on...

...Alas...The economy was scarcely growing, private investment remained depressed...poverty and inequality were on the rise. What had gone wrong?

This opening created, for me, a tension for which I have not yet seen a resolution in the book; I'm not nearly done, but I don't see it indicated in Kling's review either, or when I follow up the obvious terms -- "corruption", "transparency", "bureaucracy" -- in the index. It sounds to me as if Rodrik is reporting that the minister of finance told him they'd done all the reforms...except for reform.

[[personal background: I grew up largely in Latin America, with a dad who was trying to assist businesses large and small, from the early 60s when he ran the Veracruz shipyard for Baltimore Shipbuilding and Drydock, the mid-60s lumber mill in Nicaragua, the late 60s and 70s as a "project engineer" for dams and road and shipyards for the Interamerican Development Bank in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and so on to his death in the late 80s; he was always trying on the side to help little businesses get going. (This was his peculiar version of Quakerism.) He kept saying he was going to write a book about Latin America's failures, but I think in the end it would have been a less abstract, more dramatized version of parts of De Soto's Mystery of Capital but without de Soto's central real-estate insight; it was all about corruption, lack of transparency, and bureaucracy.]]

I look at Transparency International's corruption perceptions map and wonder which Latin American country Rodrik could be talking about: Chile is pretty good and Uruguay is not bad, but Chile's been growing pretty fast (and is pretty big, anyway) and Uruguay isn't privatized, so I guess by my standards (especially in the light of Uruguay's poor commercial (small-biz) characteristics) their respective growth patterns, and those of their neighbors, are not terribly surprising.

I remember Dad talking in 1970 about helping somebody set up a small export (leatherwork) business in Montevideo; the basic forms took more than a year, stopping at several dozen desks, even with him pushing them along as if the IDB (or BID, if you speak Spanish) thought they were important. Without that help they would have simply failed -- not necessarily from corruption, but from bureaucracy.

That's been my model of Latin American government all my life: any given government will have a lot of honest people in it, but the net effect will usually range from actively predatory down to parasitic, with the exception of Chile. (Mexico is not an exception, but has benefited and suffered in various ways from proximity to the US -- I'm thinking of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and the drug trade as well as legal trade and a few invasions.)

I'm not saying that government has to be a baleful influence. In the US, my plumber is a business, the carpenter is a business... -- I'm a business and a half (half of a partnership) duly registered for small fees with the county clerk. The Small Business Administration and Federation of Small Businesses are not perfect, but my feeling is that they are actually pretty good. The US overall has a pro-growth government, in many ways, and I'm fairly comfortable with that kind of interventionism -- but mostly that's a kind of interventionism that has to do with constantly adjusting the regulatory barriers that keep businesses from getting too predatory, rather than assisting them (and bureaucrats) in being predatory. I do get muchly less comfortable when it tries to intervene in favor of specific industries, areas, companies, people -- there you get massively harmful rent-seeking as with our agricultural subsidies. Still, there are some government interventions which may make sense, and Rodrik argues effectively. Mostly.

However, I'm not comfortable with Rodrik's starting point; it struck me as pretty strange.

(Well, maybe not.)