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New York Times
19-05-2025
- Science
- New York Times
A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret
Enrico Fermi's battle with cancer was nearing its end in late 1954 when he received a visitor. Fermi, a Nobel laureate in physics, had fled fascism in Europe and become a founder of the nuclear age, helping bring the world's first reactor and first atom bomb to life. The visitor, Richard L. Garwin, had been Fermi's student at the University of Chicago, the laureate calling him 'the only true genius I have ever met.' Now, he had done something known at the time only by Fermi and a handful of other experts. Not even his family knew. Three years earlier, the boy wonder, then 23, had designed the world's first hydrogen bomb, which brought the fury of the stars to Earth. In a test, it had exploded with a force nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, its power greater than all the explosives used in World War II. To his reverential student, Fermi confided a regret. He felt his life had involved too little participation in crucial issues of public policy. He died a few weeks later at 53. After that visit, Dr. Garwin set out on a new path, seeing nuclear scientists as having a responsibility to speak out. His resolve, he later told a historian, came from a desire to honor the memory of the scientist he had known best and admired most. 'I modeled myself to whatever extent I could after Fermi,' he said. Dr. Garwin, the designer of the world's deadliest weapon, died last Tuesday at age 97, leaving behind a legacy of nuclear horrors he devoted his life to countering. But he also left a strange puzzle. Why for a half-century did he hide what Fermi and a dozen presidents knew? It was a topic I discussed with him this January in an interview, the last of many. The riddle is especially odd because his central role in creating the H-bomb became the motivating force that drove him forward, that helped him turn Fermi's regrets into a life of political and social activism, that made him an inconspicuous giant of nuclear arms control. 'If I could wave a wand' to make the H-bomb vanish, he once told me, 'I would.' In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin's superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization. That bomb wasn't the only feat driven by Dr. Garwin's prodigious intellect. He made basic discoveries about the structure of the universe, laid the groundwork for wonders of health care and computers, and won many awards. He pushed back frontiers in astronomy, physics, superconductors, orbital reconnaissance and a multitude of other topics he investigated, often at the U.S. government's behest. But what drove him, what made him eager to advise presidents, was not his gift for coming up with marvels of discovery and innovation but, courtesy of Fermi, a personal crusade to save the world from his own creation. Henry A. Kissinger advised at least 12 American presidents in some capacity. Dr. Garwin never officially joined any president's cabinet, as Kissinger had. But in our last interview, the physicist looked over a list of presidents and one by one identified the commanders-in-chief he had counseled. There were 13. While eager to counter his brainchild, Dr. Garwin took no personal or moral responsibility for bringing the H-bomb into existence. Its birth, he argued, was inevitable. 'Maybe I sped up its development by a year or two,' he said in 2021. 'That's all.' Historians of the age tend to agree. The Soviet Union quickly followed his pioneering lead, then a half-dozen other nations. Today, hydrogen bombs have replaced atom bombs in most arsenals, creating a world of uneasy standoffs among nuclear foes. By all accounts, Dr. Garwin believed that he — and sometimes he alone — could peer into the chaos of the universe and discern its underlying order. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who during World War II led the making of the first atomic bomb, he could also be cruel and intolerant of those he saw as less gifted. Even so, Dr. Garwin showed a knack for teamwork and generosity with peers he respected. Over decades, the physicist worked hard to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted. He supported the construction of costly detectors, which, in 2015, successfully observed the ripples, opening a new window on the universe. Dr. Garwin beamed with pride when the finding won a Nobel Prize. So too, Dr. Garwin managed to walk a tricky path through the nation's military-industrial complex, which crushed Oppenheimer and coddled Edward Teller, an early proponent of hydrogen bomb research. For decades, he criticized the complex from within, promoting some ideas and undermining others, using his intellect and standing as a knowledgeable insider to shake things up — often anonymously. 'The most influential scientist you've never heard of' is how his biographer cast him. The physicist told newcomers to the federal apparatus that they could get something done or get credit, but not both. He was, in some respects, the antithesis of Kissinger, who carefully tended his public image. The left loved Dr. Garwin's attacks on the American military establishment, but his own compass seemed to align less with politics than pragmatism. He received awards from President George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as President Barack Obama, a Democrat. 'He's never met a problem he didn't want to solve,' Mr. Obama said in 2016 when he presented Dr. Garwin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The two-term president described the physicist as advising White House occupants 'rather bluntly.' Overall, Dr. Garwin's life can be seen as a tale of genius in which key manifestations were obscured by a wall of silence. Why, for instance, did he wait so long to tell his family about his H-bomb role? Was he trying to protect his loved ones from criticism and hateful bluster? No. It turned out that, as can happen in lives of government service, he felt that sensitive issues of national security loomed over him. In our last interview, Dr. Garwin said he worried that talkative family members might inadvertently bring him to the attention of foreign intelligence agencies eager to learn H-bomb secrets. That concern, he added, haunted him even after his role became known publicly. 'I still worry about that,' he said at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., on a cloudy winter day. He glanced out the window. 'They could be listening now.' Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928. His father taught electronics at a technical high school. As a child, Richard, called Dick, impressed adults with his language and math abilities. He loved to take apart and reassemble things, including a vacuum cleaner. Despite his obvious talents and his early entry into high school, an English teacher there told his parents that Dick would never get into college. He defied that prediction, studying physics at the Case School of Applied Science, in Cleveland. The teen lived at home, took the bus to school and worked nights. He graduated at 19 and Standard Oil offered him a full ride for graduate study at the University of Chicago, which had one of the nation's top physics departments. Fermi became the young man's adviser. Two years later, in 1949, Dr. Garwin graduated from Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor at the school. The 21-year-old had been too young to play a role in the Manhattan Project, but now found himself deeply involved in what followed. Like many Americans, Dr. Garwin grew concerned when Moscow that summer detonated its first atom bomb. How would Washington respond? In early 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced that the nation would seek to make 'the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.' Fermi invited Dr. Garwin to join him at Los Alamos, the base set amid the tall pines and deep canyons of New Mexico's backcountry where Oppenheimer's bomb was born. Now on the agenda for the sprawling lab: trying to make good on Truman's threat. Deep inside every star, extraordinarily high heats and pressures fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing bursts of energy. The Los Alamos idea was to mimic that fusion process. The experts called it thermonuclear — in part to distinguish its high-temperature reactions from those of atomic bombs, which start at room temperature. The general plan was that an exploding atom bomb would act as a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. The question was how. Early ideas had atomic and hydrogen fuels layered in alternating bands, similar to the insides of a baseball. The breakthrough came in early 1951. Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, a Los Alamos colleague, envisioned two distinct stages set next to each other inside a cylindrical casing. Moving at the speed of light, radiation from the exploding atom bomb would hit the casing's inner wall and, in a rebound, flood the interior with a colossal burst of rays that would compress and ignite the hydrogen fuel. The new idea gave the bomb unlimited power. Because the hydrogen fuel was separate from the initial mayhem of atomic debris and shock waves, it could, in theory, be infinitely large. Teller asked Dr. Garwin to draw up a detailed plan. He warned that it would have to address 'every conceivable doubt' of top scientists. 'Garwin's paper was criticized up and down,' Teller wrote in his memoirs, but the young man's plan 'remained unchanged.' The prodigy turned the rough idea into a four-page plan that's still classified top secret. He attached a large schematic diagram. On a coral atoll in the Western Pacific, the device grew slowly. Dr. Garwin never visited the test site where his finished creation stood two stories high and weighed 82 tons. The test blast, code-named Ivy Mike, took place on Nov. 1, 1952. It vaporized a Pacific isle and produced a mushroom cloud 100 miles wide. Dr. Garwin, then 24, kept his head down. No news accounts cited his name. No one condemned or praised him. He was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago, not a high government official or a scientific celebrity. A month after the blast, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, which allowed him to hold a physics post at Columbia University. In the decades to come, he was granted 47 patents for his IBM work. The unusual arrangement also gave him the freedom to repeatedly change the course of history. Dr. Garwin did so mainly by offering scientific counsel to presidents and their advisers — a continuum of White House consulting that ran from Eisenhower to Trump. President John F. Kennedy used the nation's scientific and military feats to spook Moscow and showcase the West's technological edge. It was his top Cold War strategy. Then disaster struck. In a case of bad things having good outcomes, the repercussions of the disaster helped give birth to the first successful instance of nuclear arms control. The crisis began on July 9, 1962, when the American military, seeking ways to destroy incoming Soviet warheads, detonated an H-bomb some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The record height for a thermonuclear blast produced surprises both on the ground and in space. Streetlights in Hawaii went out. Satellites in orbit failed. It turned out the blast had pumped up the radiation belts around Earth, making the doughnut-like rings of energetic particles more dangerous. The military was planning an even higher-altitude detonation that summer — more than 800 miles up. Kennedy wanted to quickly assess the risks. Pressed by the Pentagon, he had already approved preparations for that extremely high blast, code-named Urraca. The president's urgent question was whether the detonation of U.S. nuclear arms in outer space could produce enough radiation to poison humans and ruin his announced plan to land astronauts on the moon. On July 25, 1962, he sent Dr. Garwin a telegram, inviting him to join his White House science advisory team. Weeks later, Kennedy met with Dr. Garwin and senior advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the radiation dangers. The physicist recalled the president fearing that the recent blast 'had killed the Apollo program,' which was working to put Americans on the moon. How long would the enhanced radiation last? 'A long time,' Dr. Garwin replied, adding that exactly how long was impossible to say. After some discussion of the risks and uncertainties, Dr. Garwin suggested that the danger zone might persist anywhere from two to 20 years. That Oval Office meeting was, in all likelihood, a turning point. On Sept. 5, 1962, Kennedy asked his national security and science advisers if the radiation hazard could 'make a lunar journey prohibitive.' They discussed the risks, the lineup of impending American nuclear tests and whether the military could live without the 800-mile-high Urraca detonation. At a National Security Council meeting two days later, the high-altitude test was canceled. The next year, Kennedy signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear tests in outer space, in the atmosphere and under water. The weapons could be tested only deep underground. Slowly, the heightened radiation levels in the planetary belts declined through the natural process of nuclear decay. From 1968 through 1972, NASA sent two dozen Apollo astronauts hurtling through the danger zones. Afterward, experts studying the crews' exposures found that their doses were less than those of workers who held industrial jobs involving radiation. The astronauts suffered no debilitating health effects. President Richard M. Nixon wanted Moscow and Washington to sign a historic pact to limit their nuclear arms. Formal talks began in 1969, the year he took office. In parallel, the president and his advisers sought ways to better assess the size of the Soviet arsenal and thus verify compliance with any accord. The overall aim was to make the balance of nuclear terror — the threat of mutually assured destruction — more stable, and a stronger deterrent to war. A new generation of spy satellites would be a central tool. High above the Earth, they would open a new lens on the secretive movements of Soviet bombers, submarines and missiles capable of hurling thermonuclear arms at the United States. Dr. Garwin, already one of President Nixon's science advisers, threw himself into the satellite effort. The nation's early spy satellites, which relied on photographic film, were slow, clumsy and wasteful. It could take weeks for exposed film to get to photo analysts. And the costly orbiters, once out of film, went into the celestial junkyard. Dr. Garwin led a team of experts who foresaw a more advanced type of spacecraft that would replace film with microelectronics and radio transmitters. Fresh images would flash to Earth. The team also called for powerful new telescopes. In effect, the spy craft were to be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at the Earth. Even by the usual standards of federal secrecy, the satellite project was extremely hush-hush. In July 1971, Dr. Garwin had drafts of the final report delivered by a special class of courier to members of his team. They were required to read them, return them and keep no copies. The next month, Dr. Garwin and a colleague briefed Kissinger, who backed the new electrooptical approach. Remarkably, the innovation was decades ahead of the shift in consumer cameras from film to digital. That September, President Nixon approved a plan to develop the new spy satellite, which became the archetype for all that followed. For East-West relations, the technology was seen as raising predictability and lessening surprise, thus lowering tensions between the superpowers. The next year, Nixon met in Moscow with the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to sign an accord that, for the first time, limited their nuclear arsenals. Dr. Garwin received two awards for this work, one from the C.I.A. in 1996, and another in 2000 from the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the satellite fleets. That office's citation said the physicist had helped Kissinger 'understand the critical role' the spy technology would come to play in national security — in stabilizing the uneasy standoff between foes armed with the deadliest of weapons. Simplicity made the Hiroshima bomb a sure thing. It had no test explosion. H-bombs were tricker. By definition, they needed multiple tests to uncover flaws and optimize results. For decades, Dr. Garwin's push for a comprehensive ban on test detonations rested primarily on that fact — no testing, no H-bomb. Though he saw Kennedy's space ban as a good start, he wanted to head off not only new arms races, but also new states aspiring to the world's most destructive weapons. The end of the Cold War seemed like the moment. In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced plans for a treaty in which all nations would forgo all nuclear blasts, as Washington was doing unilaterally. This meant banning tests even underground, the last permissible zone. In 1993, Dr. Garwin became chair of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board in the State Department, which guided senior federal officials, including in the White House. It also helped build public support for a test-ban agreement. Crucially, in August 1995, Dr. Garwin helped resolve a technical dispute that was threatening to become a deal-breaker in the treaty negotiations. It centered on whether a ban should allow minuscule blasts. He addressed it as a longtime member of the Jasons, a secretive group of independent federal science advisers. In a lengthy report, the group backed the comprehensive ban, saying the United States could sign a treaty even if it ruled out minute tests. Days later, Mr. Clinton echoed that finding in announcing that he would seek what experts called a zero-yield treaty. 'I hope,' he said, 'it will lead to an early consensus' at the negotiating table. Instead, the talks dragged on. And France and China rushed to do last-minute detonations before any ban took effect. Finally, in September 1996, a solemn procession of world government representatives, including Mr. Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Then things fell apart. Mr. Clinton won re-election that November but now faced Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. Worse, the president's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, an intern, came to light in early 1998, fueling a political firestorm that crippled the White House. As Senate Republicans raced for a quick treaty vote, Dr. Garwin testified before the Foreign Relations Committee. 'We are better off,' he argued, 'with a test ban than without it.' Six days later, on Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the treaty. Though eventually signed by 187 nations, the treaty never entered into force because the United States and a handful of other key players failed to ratify it. Still, Dr. Garwin and his colleagues had created a new global norm. The long, hard process of hammering out a global consensus on the merits of a ban, embraced by thermonuclear states, led to a more stable new era. Gone were the shock waves that had radiated from underground test sites and ricocheted around the globe. Since then, the United States and other main nuclear powers have tested no weapons. Now there's a new kind of silence. 'You do these things,' Dr. Garwin told me shortly after the Senate rejected the treaty. 'And if you keep at it for a long time, sometimes you win.' In 1979, Edward Teller suffered a heart attack and so discovered, as he told a friend, 'that I am not immortal.' While recovering, he shared his recollections on the making of the hydrogen bomb with that friend, who had brought along a tape recorder. 'So that first design,' Teller said, 'was made by Dick Garwin.' He repeated the tribute to avoid any misunderstanding. For 22 years, that recording was lost to history. By chance, it also fit nicely with Dr. Garwin's own determination to hide his H-bomb role. Myths spread. In 1995, 'Dark Sun,' a 700-page account of the hydrogen bomb's making, attributed its design to a committee of elder scientists. It made no mention of the Cleveland upstart. That changed in April 2001. George A. Keyworth II, Teller's friend, who later served as President Ronald Reagan's science adviser, gave me a transcript of the tape recording and I wrote about it for The New York Times. It was noticed, including by Dr. Garwin and his family. Though Teller had previously acknowledged the young physicist's role, those mentions were buried in specialist writings and meetings. Now, suddenly — a half-century after the fact — Dr. Garwin gained wide public recognition as the H-bomb's designer. 'That was when people really knew,' Lois, his wife, told a historian. 'And people who knew Dick very, very well, and had known him for a very long time, expressed real surprise.' After that, as much as ever, he raced ahead. The polymath lectured and wrote papers on space weapons, land mines, terrorism, pandemics, submarines, science advising, food aid programs, automatic teller machines, Iran's nuclear ambitions, the nation's electrical grid, the disposal of radioactive waste, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament. The last entry in his comprehensive archive is dated early this year. Around that time, I decided that the elder statesman of nuclear arms control, like Teller, was probably not going to live forever. He was 96. I had some questions. During that interview, to my surprise, Dr. Garwin said Fermi had emphasized the wrong danger in once calling the H-bomb 'an evil thing' because of its unlimited destructiveness. 'That's not the threat,' he said. The great danger, he added, is 'so many nuclear weapons,' which raise the risk of theft, missteps, accidents, unauthorized use — and the world falling from mutual deterrence into a thermonuclear abyss. To me, that last visit with Dr. Garwin was another glimpse of a bygone era in which he struggled inconspicuously to counter an existential threat to humankind. I asked if he had ever considered a memoir. 'I tried,' said the man known for his blunt honesty. 'It's an impossible job.'
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Where are all the aliens?: Fermi's Paradox explained
Astronomers raised hopes that humanity might not be alone in the universe by announcing on Thursday they have detected the most promising hints yet of life on a distant planet. But given the age and vastness of the universe, a different question has long puzzled some scientists: why haven't we already come in contact with aliens? "Where is everybody?" Enrico Fermi asked fellow famous physicists including Edward Teller over lunch in 1950. This quandary was named Fermi's Paradox. "It's a numbers game," Jason Wright, the director of the extraterrestrial intelligence centre at Pennsylvania State University, told AFP. The Milky Way is around 10 billion years old and is home to more than 100 billion stars. This suggests there is likely a mind-boggling number of potentially habitable planets in our home galaxy alone. That could include K2-18b, where astronomers said Thursday they have detected signs of a chemical that is only produced by microbial life on Earth. Wright said Fermi's Paradox essentially suggests that -- given enough time -- "every alien species will eventually have their own Elon Musk who will go out and settle the next star over". That we have not yet heard from aliens is known as "the mystery of the great silence". - So what are the theories? - At least 75 speculative solutions to Fermi's Paradox have been proposed so far, according to a 2015 book, though Wright guessed more have been added since. First, it is possible that humanity has not yet detected alien life because there isn't any -- we are truly alone. Many scientists feel this is unlikely. Some 87 percent of over 1,000 scientists in relevant fields surveyed in Nature Astronomy earlier this year agreed there is at least a basic form of extraterrestrial life. More than 67 percent agreed that intelligent aliens are out there. Of course, it is also possible that aliens are already here and we have not noticed -- or that it has been covered up. Or interstellar space could just be too difficult to traverse, the distances too vast, the resources needed too great. - What if there is a 'great filter'? - Another theory is that there is some kind of "great filter" that prevents life -- or intelligent life -- from occurring in the first place. Or perhaps there is some kind of barrier that stops civilisations from advancing beyond a certain point. For example, once civilisations develop the technology to travel through space, they might tend to destroy themselves with something like nuclear weapons. Or maybe they burn through their planet's natural resources, or make their climate unliveable. Some of these theories seem to be influenced by fears for human civilisation -- the one example we have of intelligent life. But Wright felt this was unlikely because any such barrier would have to be the same across the whole universe. It would also have to make the species go totally extinct every time, otherwise they would eventually bounce back and try again at space travel. - Are we in a zoo or planetarium? - There are even more galaxy-brained ideas. Under the "zoo" hypothesis, technologically advanced aliens would be leaving humans alone to observe us from afar, like animals in a zoo. The "planetarium" hypothesis posits that aliens could be creating an illusion that makes space seem empty to us, keeping us in the dark. - ...or a 'dark forest'? - This theory got its name from the second book in Chinese author Cixin Liu's science-fiction series "The Three-Body Problem". It posits that the universe is a "dark forest" in which no one wants to reveal their presence lest they be destroyed by others. There are other hypotheses that aliens prefer to "transcend" to another plane of existence -- which some have compared to virtual reality -- so don't bother with interstellar travel. - Why would they all be the same? - But there is a big problem with many of these "so-called solutions," Wright said. They tend to assume that all the hypothetical kinds of aliens across the universe would all behave in the same way -- forever. This has been dubbed the "monocultural fallacy". Wright, who has used SETI telescopes to search for radio signals or lasers from the stars, also pushed back against the idea that humanity would necessarily have already picked up on any alien signal. Aliens could be sending out messages using all sorts of unknown technology, so maybe the galaxy is not as silent as we think, he said. "Those of us looking for life in the universe generally don't think of the Fermi paradox or the great silence as such a big problem." dl/jm
Asia Times
18-03-2025
- Business
- Asia Times
A formula for making America solvent again
Although the way Statistical Offices calculate labor force and working age population numbers vary drastically across countries, it is possible to do a Fermi calculation about dealing with today's budgets and debts based on their different formulas. The calculation simplifies the problem and arrives at a quick estimate of a solution. In the present case, the solution implies an acceleration of education of the younger generation – real education, not certifications. Statistics offices calculate working populations in Western countries as the number of people aged between 25 and 65, though their definition of 'working' differs. The way they calculate labor force participation among countries varies, too. Still, the World Bank publishes the Labor Force Participation Rate, which is the labor force participation number divided by the working population while accepting the figures at face value. In the US and Germany, the number stands at 62%, whereas in France it's around 58%. Subtract from these percentages an optimistic 5% unemployment rate, and you get about a 55% rate of the working population. The last number implies that the income generated by this 55% of people working for roughly 40 years between the ages of 25 and 65, added to the returns on both assets they inherited and accumulated during their working years, pays for the living expenses of those under 25, who, assume for simplicity's sake, have no incomes. In addition, they also pay for the over-65 age group, as Social Security in the US is not capitalized. Since, according to the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the average retirement savings for all families is US$333,940, let us make another Fermi calculation. Assume that all this amount derives from returns on assets this group inherited and generated. Assume, too, that they can withdraw $20,000 every year after the age of 65, with life expectancy between 85-90. Even with such optimistic numbers, the 55% working population ends up paying for both the non-income generating younger population and 50% of the retired ones with increasing life expectancy (assuming $40,000 yearly income needed for living). As of 2023, US federal and state government spending stood at $10 trillion, roughly 36% of the $27 trillion GDP. Of this, the federal government spending amounted to roughly $6.5 trillion. Of this, $1.3 trillion was dedicated to Social Security, $1 trillion to Medicare, $1 trillion to the military, $1 trillion to interest payments and $300 billion to education (though it is hard to know how and where exactly the hundreds of billions in education debt forgiveness appear). Combined, these add to $4.6 trillion. If Medicare, Social Security, military and interest payment expenditures stay at present levels (never mind paying down the national debt), what is the only remedy left to significantly improve America's fiscal picture? Increased taxes are out of the question under the Trump administration. Perhaps DOGE can find over time a few hundred billion worth of savings in the other roughly $2 trillion worth of spending. Possibly elderly people will stay longer in the labor force, and life expectancy will stop rising. Perhaps the US' new $5 million per head green card, as well as green cards awarded for skilled workers, will bring new revenue-generating entrepreneurs. Although slashing regulations is in the current administration's picture, lowering taxes is not. How much more assets, how much faster and by how much the returns would exceed interest rates are thus all in the distance. What remains under immediate control is to drastically accelerate the younger generations' education and entry into the labor force. This can be done -– and was done in few countries (Israel and Switzerland among them) – in a variety of ways. Where done it required disciplined education from an early age and directed youth to a variety of rigorous technical education and apprenticeship programs after grades 7 or 8. Not all young students are interested in general education. As for colleges and universities, most programs could be completed in three years if such programs consisted of education to start with rather than indoctrination, lingering leisurely or marching and waving ignorantly for causes they often know little or nothing about. Although the $300 billion is the smallest number in the aforementioned US budget, abolishing it and also bringing education closer to parents in all states, would have significantly more impact than this number. First, future younger generations would join the working population one or two years earlier, meaning the age group would become significantly larger and thus help to sustain much other – as of now – 'untouchable spending.' Its impact would be more significant as this generation that starts to work at a younger age would conceivably be more disciplined. This is a quality change hard to put into numbers, though easily visualized by having institutions of higher learning reverting to what they once were: bastions of disciplined learning and civilized debate. By necessity, Eastern European countries have been moving in this direction, with mandatory conscription being an extreme example. That's something that Western European countries have just started to talk about – though, as of now, their younger generation identifies 'patriotism' with 'decarbonization.' The US has a chance to accelerate the creation of a more disciplined workforce while also attracting such talent from around the world. These have been one of the secret sauces of the prosperity miracles seen in 17th century Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Singapore's recent rises and on a larger scale in post-WWII West Germany, which received some 12 million German immigrants thrown out of Eastern European countries. The same went for Israel, which at the end of the 1980s added one million Russian migrants, a 25% addition to its then population. Combined with rapid decentralization, wars and three years of mandatory military service notwithstanding, Israel became a 'start-up' nation. Of course, the US has been the most obvious example of such experiments – and with the right reforms, it can be again. This article draws on Brenner's 'Accelerate Education,' (American Affairs), 'Accelerated Education Would Add Trillions,' (AEI) 'The Trouble with Aggregates,' and 'Avoiding Economic Pseudo-Science' (both in Law & Liberty).
