Advanced noodle engineering
And the flywheel of technology and capitalism
This is issue #10 of Russell’s Index, where I write about the lessons I’ve learned—and continue to learn—as a founding employee at SharpestMinds. Subscribe for a new issue in your inbox every week-ish. Emphasis on the ish.
First, some meta
Issue #10! It’s been hard to keep up the weekly pace, recently. I don’t want to blame it all on the puppy… but she really shook up all my routines and I’m still adapting.
My experience tells me that I should lower my expectations—by either reducing the frequency or by hitting “Publish” a lot sooner. I am going to aim for the latter. Consistency is more important than scope and I’m determined to hit that weekly cadence.
The upshot is that I may start deviating from things that are related to my career at SharpestMinds. To get this writing habit back on track, I’ll need to ride the waves of whatever I happen to be interested in. This week, it’s noodles.
Advanced noodle engineering
I came across a paper—Morphing pasta and beyond—that I found amusing. From the introduction (emphasis mine):
[A]lthough three-dimensional (3D) pasta is widely known for its unique texture, mouth feel, and pairing with different sauces, it takes up more space than flat pasta when packaged and becomes more fragile during transportation. Flat-packed 3D pasta may, therefore, be a possibility if a suitable morphing mechanism can be developed that enables flat pasta to morph into the target 3D shapes during cooking.
First of all, I find the term mouth feel hilarious—especially in the context of a scientific paper. But, as a pasta lover, I agree that mouth feel is very important.
It seems like the paper is primarily a proof-of-concept. But the concept is very interesting. The pasta industry could save on space and packaging by shipping only flat noodles. Tiny grooves in the noodles would cause them to morph into a 3D shape when they are cooked.
At first, this seems like pure novelty. But if it could be deployed at scale, the impact on the bottom line for pasta manufacturers could be significant. It made me think about Andrew McCafee’s book More from Less in which he argues that the collaboration between technology and capitalism has been leading to more prosperity from fewer resources.
Economic growth used to come from extracting more and more resources from the earth. But, in recent decades, technological advances combined with the desire to save a buck are leading to more productivity from less stuff. McCafee cites many examples, like aluminum cans using less raw material thanks to computer-aided design and improvements in fertilizer and farming technology leading to more crops with much less farmland.
It’s an optimistic book and provides some good counterarguments to the degrowth movement—the idea that we should abandon the pursuit of economic growth to protect the environment.1 Much of the world is still living in poverty, and economic growth is the best way to lift them out of it. Technology unlocks more efficient ways of doing things, and companies are incentivized to put that technology to use because it helps their bottom lines.
One great example is solar power. It’s gotten much cheaper over the years. Noah Smith—techno-optimist—has written a lot about this:
Electricity can be decarbonized by replacing coal and gas plants with solar and wind. Ten years ago, the thought of doing this at a large scale seemed laughable to many; solar and wind were just too expensive. But then it turned out that as we built more solar and more wind, they got cheaper and cheaper — a phenomenon known as a learning curve.
There are economic incentives to switch to solar power—it’s cheaper! We should expect adoption to speed up. More adoption will drive the cost down even more—this is the Learning curve that Noah referenced above. If it continues, we can expect a future where we have increased energy output (which we will need as developing countries modernize, and our cars and appliances go electric) with less carbon. Economic growth in the energy sector is something we should encourage.
Of course, nobody smart in this camp is arguing that the solution to climate change is to let capitalism run amok. Andre McCafee identifies four drivers that contribute to the trend of getting “more from less”: technology, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government. Populations need to be aware of the potential problems, and we need governments to listen and act on that awareness.
Solar power, for example, was initially too expensive for cost-sensitive companies to invest in. Until it got a kickstart from the German government. From The Economist ($):
Social Democrats and strongly pro-solar Greens running Germany beefed up a subsidy system previously geared to encouraging solar power on a village-by-village or roof-by-roof basis. As of 2004, installations of any size could sell any amount of solar energy to the grid for €457 ($567) per megawatt-hour—about five times what it cost to generate electricity from coal at the time. The price was guaranteed for 20 years… And the rocket took off. By 2012 Germany had paid out more than €200bn in subsidies. It had also changed the world. Between 2004 and 2010 the global market for solar panels grew 30-fold as investors in Germany and the other countries which followed its lead piled in.
Obviously, self-folding noodles are not in the same category as cheap solar power. But these kinds of tiny technological improvements add up. A 1% improvement applied at scale can make a big difference. And the flywheel of technology and capitalism leads to more and more of these tiny improvements, which can have compounding effects.
- Russell
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I’m probably straw-manning here. But this is, at least, what a subset of degrowthers believe.