Manhattan Project as Metaphor
RABKIN, ARI
Manhattan Project as Metaphor And a very misleading one. BY ARI RABKIN At the “town hall” presidential debate last week, moderator Tom Brokaw asked if, in the interest of coming up with...
...These effi ciencies came not from pouring money into the search for one technical breakthrough, but from incremental improvements in many different systems and components...
...We cannot reliably predict how easy it will be to eke out gains in transportation, versus electrical transmission, versus manufacturing, versus residential illumination...
...When Congress sought to promote space research two decades ago, the result was the Space Grant program...
...Succumbing to this urge will not help overcome national challenges...
...During the debate, he asserted that “when JFK said we’re going to the Moon in 10 years, nobody was sure how to do it, but we understood that, if the American people make a decision to do something, it gets done...
...A vast program of research, development, and production was brought to completion in three and a half years, culminating in the successful deployment of a radically new weapon, the atomic bomb, which brought the Second World War to a rapid end...
...President, I have just one question: Where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it...
...It will inevitably devolve into a vehicle by which Congress can funnel money to favored home-state institutions, rather than a tool for putting money where it will do the most good...
...A modern economy uses energy in many ways...
...But an increase in science funding, spread across dozens if not hundreds of research groups, is a far cry from “a new Manhattan Project...
...As it happens, most of the computing technology we use today was developed by private enterprise or by academic researchers with a great deal of independence...
...The latter describes the computer industry, one of the most successful parts of the American economy...
...Putting aside crass self-interest, most calls for a “new Manhattan Project” are rooted in the perennial fantasy that centralized government planning cures all social ills...
...The Manhattan Project required billions of dollars, much of America’s top scientifi c talent, and a quarter of American electrical production...
...This is the philosophy that leads to appointing enough “energy czars” and “drug czars” to fi ll out a dynasty—and most of these czars have been about as successful as the Romanovs or their successors...
...Such a program may have virtues, but effi ciency is not among them...
...In last week’s debate, he said that “we’re going to have to make an investment, the same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists” trying to meet military needs...
...The Manhattan Project, though, was unquestionably a triumph of government planning and engineering...
...Large all-encompassing development projects often founder where a swarm of smaller efforts might succeed...
...Increased energy efficiency will require incremental improvements across the board, rather than breakthroughs in one particular technology...
...We would have diffi culty even articulating our goals in detail, much less forming a coherent plan to achieve them...
...Speakers who invoke the Manhattan Project or the moon landings as examples of project management imply that all diffi culties are engineering diffi - culties and that these can be solved by a combination of lavish funding and government will...
...Far better to set up incentives for effi - ciency and get out of the way...
...What they usually have in mind is an open spigot of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent on science and engineering and on subsidies for preferred technologies...
...John McCain, while supporting government-funded research, endorsed the latter approach, saying that we should “obviously” leave product development to the private sector...
...And earlier this year, he told a CNBC interviewer explicitly that he had in mind as president “a Manhattan Project to embark upon that new energy future that we need...
...These resources were entrusted to the sole direction of General Leslie Groves, the project’s director...
...Energy is a major cost for companies such as Google and IBM that have hundreds of thousands of computers running all the time...
...BY ARI RABKIN At the “town hall” presidential debate last week, moderator Tom Brokaw asked if, in the interest of coming up with alternative forms of energy, we should “fund a Manhattanlike Project . . . or 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley...
...The phrase provides cover for all-but-limitless spending of an unusually misguided sort, while offering the public a specious reassurance that nothing more need be done...
...There are many potential solutions: hydrogen cars, electric cars, hybrid cars, trains, buses, and so forth...
...There may even be a role for government subsidy to encourage solution of national problems...
...This program spread funding across all 50 states, and across such institutions as the University of Delaware and Brevard Community College in Florida...
...This is a terrible model for economic planning, or even for environmentally conscious or consumer-oriented engineering projects...
...Barack Obama appears to have the opposite view...
...To develop solutions for large-scale national problems, we should try to emulate the computer industry—those 100,000 garages— rather than our wartime command economy...
...Consider transportation...
...If fuel effi ciency is a national priority, by all means, let us tax fuel...
...We are much better off, as a society, allowing individuals, businesses, and local governments to explore various options, rather than trying to pick one approach, and enforce it by decree...
...But if this were true, then Soviet and Chinese economic planning would have produced triumph, instead of disaster...
...There are many competing goals: fuel effi ciency, safety, performance, low production costs, and more...
...Correctly weighting the importance of various goals is diffi cult and is what makes engineering management an art...
...We don’t want fuel effi cient cars “at any cost”—a great many costs, both economic and noneconomic, must be factored in and weighted...
...This is a very distorted view...
...Research and development are worthy investments...
...But the phrase “new Manhattan Project” obscures more than it reveals and misleads more than it inspires...
...Such a program would have little in common with the Manhattan Project— and would have very poor prospects for success...
...Groves was subject to virtually no political oversight...
...Economies cannot be readily engineered...
...The computer industry, in which I’ve been working for the last few years, demonstrates that without government mandates or supervision, the private sector is able to make signifi cant effi - ciency gains...
...There is no reason to believe that future government policies will be any wiser or more durable...
...Government planning decisions produced the freewayoriented development of the last 30 years so often decried by the left...
...Asked to hide a $2 billion appropriation, Senator McKellar responded, “Mr...
...Those demanding a new Manhattan Project seldom mean draft scientists into secret duty, spend a lot of money without public oversight, and damn the radiation leaks and other safety consequences...
...This has been driven not simply by a desire to be climate-conscious, but because it makes good economic sense...
...The same holds true in microcosm in many areas...
...The Manhattan Project was oriented to a narrow goal: build an atomic bomb, as fast as possible, at any cost...
...Ari Rabkin is a graduate student researcher in computer science who works part time in Silicon Valley...
...But those who uphold the Manhattan Project as an exemplar of government success often forget that this achievement required methods we would not care to employ today...
...His offi ce issued no environmental impact statements...
...Radiation was known at the time to be dangerous, and yet the Manhattan Project dispersed nuclear fallout across large areas of the West at the sole decree of General Groves...
...If research for its own sake is a goal, we can offer tax credits for corporate grants to researchers...
...For the last several years, increased energy effi ciency, has become a major goal of the industry...
...Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander has a favorite anecdote about his predecessor Kenneth McKellar’s support for the original Manhattan Project...
...He decided, without any room for legal or other challenge, which technical risks to run, and which health risks to impose on the American public...
...Any “new Manhattan Project” oriented to funding research risks likewise becoming an all-purpose tool for funneling federal dollars to favored academic constituencies...
...Many of those backing “new Manhattan Projects” doubtless are likewise motivated by the opportunity to spend billions of dollars without being asked any hard questions...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 6
