White Heat: The case for Acceleration

A nation needs three key elements:

Agriculture
Energy production
Human capital

Everything else is downstream of these things. No food means armies marching on empty stomachs. No energy production means no industrial capital. No human capital means we're growing crops and installing wind turbines for nothing.

A simple question: has the per-capita demand equivalents of these things decreased in the past ten years, or increased?

For ascendant nations, the energy portion of this has increased, not decreased. Such is the nature of the Jevons Paradox. For stagnant and declining powers, the opposite is true.

For Net Zero policy to work, it has to cap all three of these things and eventually make the per-capita amounts of agriculture, energy production, and human capital use reverse.

A cap on agriculture combined with an increasing amount of human capital results in that human capital starving. A cap on energy production combined with an increasing amount of human capital results in energy shortages. In the biz, we call this "Load shedding". And the less stated about the cap on human capital, the better: who wants to live in a country where education levels are stagnant?

Regardless: caps on supply without caps on demand results in artificial scarcity, and caps on demand are completely unfeasible without resorting to a 1984-style surveillance state, and given Britain doesn't even have a way to unify patient records between NHS trusts, it wouldn't work even if it was desirable that it did.

It's time to move on.

Let's look at proxies for the three basic elements.

1. Agriculture -> Land, crops, livestock, machinery

2. Energy production -> Fuel extraction, fuel consumption, energy storage

3. Human capital -> Food, shelter, physical safety, healthcare, education

How do we keep agriculture and energy production pace with the expansion in human capital?

Let's start by looking at what we shouldn't do.

We shouldn't:

Pay farmers to exit the agriculture business.
Prevent nuclear energy projects from happening because "it'll only come online in ten years' time".
Keep adding more human capital without considering the human capital use per capita or productivity per capita. This requires more nuanced discussion that just isn't possible in today's social climate.

So what should we do instead?

Encourage farmers to stay in the agriculture business. Make it easier for them to increase farm productivity. Encourage productivity increases through superior technology. If the Dutch can do it, Britain can do it too. Make food cheap again!
Build more energy production facilities. Cheap energy makes everything possible. Build nuclear power stations in every postcode area! Not just nuclear, either. Let there be a plurality of energy sources. The more the merrier.
Aim to increase the productivity of human capital. Instead of just adding more human capital units to the human capital pile, encourage people to pursue life-long learning. We used to do this with the Polytechnic system. The internet allows people to educate themselves for free, but there is still more to do here.

Look at these charts, courtesy of the ONS.

Housing (1987-2024)	Consumer Electronics (1987-2024)

The cost of housing has increased, while the quality of housing has decreased. Do you not want your Deanobox, Anon?

Meanwhile, consumer electronics have decreased in cost to the consumer and increased in quality. Compare an old cathode-ray box to a new 4K OLED panel, compare an old Nokia to a new iPhone, compare a PlayStation 1 to a PlayStation 5.

Who would you want running the world: the people who made housing ruinously expensive with paper-thin walls, or the people who made televisions cheap while making the screens contain 36 times as many pixels?

Imagine if your house was 36 times as good. Imagine if your healthcare was 36 times as good. Imagine if your education was 36 times as good. Why aren't they?

Cheap is better than free. Just because something could be free at the point of use doesn't mean that there are no costs to production. Making something free to the user simply means that the user will use it without consideration to cost. Remember the Dogecoin faucets? Where are they now?

cheap > free

Cheap, though? I think we can agree on making things cheaper. The only people who won't agree are the bagholders. I don't see anyone crying for speculators. Progress has its casualties.

You can climb a mountain

You can swim the sea

You can jump into the fire

But you'll never be free

When you think about it, acceleration is just thermodynamics. It's all just thermodynamics. Life is on fire, didn't you know.

The arrow of time goes in one direction. It never goes back. Deceleration is really acceleration in decay. Regardless of how much it decays, it won't stop. It will just creep along. Human growth is accelerating. Society must also accelerate. Technology is one way to achieve that.

Acceleration is the highest form of charity.

If you want the future to be bright, you need to accelerate. Step on the accelerator pedal with both feet. The future can look after itself.