Numbers Don't Lie
affluent economies now consume annually about 150 billion joules (150 gigajoules) of primary energy per capita
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous (and oil- and natural gas–rich) nation, averages only 35 gigajoules.
Japan used that much energy by 1958 (an African lifetime ago), and France averaged 35 gigajoules already by 1880, putting Nigeria’s access to energy two lifetimes behind France.
Total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children born per woman during her lifetime.
when asked, the average number of children that Nigerien women would prefer is 9.1!).
By 2050, nearly three-quarters of humanity will reside in countries with below-replacement fertility.
regional high fertilities guarantee that nearly 75 percent of all births during the 50 years between 2020 and 2070 will be in Africa.
Once they slip below 1.5, such reversals appear increasingly unlikely: in 2019, there were record lows of 1.3 in Spain, Italy, and Romania, and 1.4 in Japan, Ukraine, Greece, and Croatia. Gradual population decline (with all of its social, economic, and strategic implications) seems to be the future of Japan and of many European countries. So far, no pro-natalist government policies have brought any major reversal, and the only obvious option to prevent depopulation is to open the gates for immigration—but that looks unlikely to happen.
economists—ever ready to reduce everything to money—prefer to rely on per capita values of gross domestic product (GDP) or disposable income. Both measures are obviously questionable. GDP goes up in a society where increasing violence requires more policing, higher investment in security measures, and more frequent admissions to hospitals; and average disposable income tells us nothing about the degree of economic inequality or about the social net available to disadvantaged families.
My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births.
What is not in doubt is that infant mortalities remain unacceptably high in a dozen of sub-Saharan nations. Their rates (above 60 per 1,000) are equal to those in western Europe some 100 years ago, a timespan that evokes the developmental gap those nations have to close in order to catch up with affluent economies.
Today, the standard practice everywhere is to inoculate children with a pentavalent vaccine that prevents diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio, as well as meningitis, otitis, and pneumonia, three infections caused by Haemophilus influenzae type B. The first dose comes 6 weeks after birth; the other two follow at 10 and 14 weeks. Each pentavalent vaccine costs less than $1, and
For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.
And when the analysis went beyond the restricted cost-of-illness approach and looked at broader economic benefits, it found the net benefit-cost ratio was more than twice as high—reaching 44 times, with an uncertainty range of 27 to 67. The highest rewards were for averting measles: a 58-fold return.
vaccination coverage in high-income countries is now nearly universal, at around 96 percent, and great advances have been made in low-income nations, where the coverage has risen from only 50 percent in the year 2000 to 80 percent in 2016.
The most common epidemiological approach is to calculate the case fatality risk: confirmed deaths associated with a virus are divided by the number of cases. The numerator (death certificates stating the cause of mortality) is obvious and in most countries that count is fairly reliable. But the choice of the denominator introduces many uncertainties. Which “cases”?
the 2009 influenza pandemic—which began in the US in January 2009, lingered in some places until August 2010, and was caused by a new H1N1 virus—illustrates the range of resulting uncertainties. Confirmed deaths were always in the numerator, but for the denominator there were three different categories of case definition: laboratory-confirmed cases, estimated symptomatic cases, and estimated infections (based on serology or on assumptions regarding the extent of asymptomatic infections). Resulting differences were very large, from less than 1 to more than 10,000 deaths per 100,000 people. As expected, the laboratory-confirmed approach yielded the highest risk (mostly between 100 and 5,000 deaths), while the symptomatic approach had the range of 5–50 deaths, and the estimated infections in the denominator yielded risks of just 1–10 deaths per 100,000 people: the first approach showed fatalities being up to 500 times higher than the last one did!
a relatively mild seasonal flu infected 38 million Americans (out of a population of about 330 million) and that it resulted in 22,000 deaths. This means that nearly 12 percent of all Americans got infected, and that nearly 0.06 percent of all infected people died (case mortality rate);
Although stunting (inadequate growth that produces low height for age in young children) remains common in many poor countries, its global prevalence has declined—mostly thanks to rapid improvement in China—from about 40 percent in 1990 to about 22 percent in 2020, and growing taller was a global trend of the 20th century.
being taller is associated with a surprisingly large number of benefits. These do not include generally higher life expectancy, but a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, and also higher cognitive ability, higher lifetime earnings, and higher social status. Correlation between height and earnings was first documented in 1915 and has since been confirmed repeatedly, for groups ranging from Indian coal miners to Swedish CEOs. Moreover, the latter study showed that the CEOs were taller in firms with larger assets!
Average male heights in preindustrial Europe were between 169 and 171 centimeters, and the global mean was about 167 centimeters.
Milk has been a key growth factor, be it in Japan or in the Netherlands. Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.
In 1850, the combined life expectancies of men and women stood at around 40 years in the United States, Canada, Japan, and much of Europe. Since then, the values have followed an impressive and almost perfectly linear increase that saw them nearly double.
The long-term trajectory of Japanese female life expectancy—which increased from 81.91 years in 1990 to 87.26 years in 2017—fits a symmetrical logistic curve that is already close to its asymptote of about 90 years.
A quadruped can take only a single breath per locomotive cycle, because its chest must absorb the impact on the front limbs. We, however, can choose other ratios, and that lets us use energy more flexibly. The second (and greater) advantage is in our extraordinary ability to regulate our body temperature, which allows us to do what lions cannot: run long and hard in the noonday sun.
The two large animals we have mainly used for transport perspire profusely compared to other quadrupeds: in one hour, a horse can lose about 100 grams of water per square meter of skin, and a camel can lose up to 250 g/m2. However, a human being can easily shed 500 g/m2, enough to remove between 550 and 600 watts’ worth of heat. Peak hourly sweating rates can surpass 2 kilograms per square meter, and the highest reported short-term sweating rate is twice that high.
Together, these advantages allowed our ancestors to become unrivaled as a diurnal, high-temperature predator. They could not outsprint an antelope, of course, but during a hot day they could dog its heels until it finally collapsed, exhausted.
barefoot running not only reduced their energy costs by about 4 percent (a nontrivial advantage on long runs), it also exposed them to fewer acute ankle and lower-leg injuries.
In the race of life, we humans are neither the fastest nor the most efficient. But thanks to our sweating capability, we are certainly the most persistent.
People unemployed 15 weeks or longer as a share of the civilian labor force: 1.2 percent.
People who lost jobs and who completed temporary jobs: 1.6 percent.
Total unemployment as a share of the civilian labor force (the official rate): 3.5 percent.
Total unemployed plus discouraged workers (those no longer looking for a job), as a share of the civilian labor force and discouraged workers: 3.7 percent.
The previous category enlarged by all people only “marginally attached” (doing temporary or occasional work) to the labor force: 4.2 percent. And finally, the last category plus those who work only part-time for economic reasons (that is, they would prefer to work full-time): 6.7 percent.
If you lose your job, you count as unemployed only if you keep looking for a new one; otherwise, you never get counted again. That is why, when trying to get closer to the “real” unemployment rate, you must look at the labor force participation rate (the number of people available for work as a percentage of the total population), which has recently been in decline.
European unemployment figures show how difficult it is to relate them to a country’s social fabric or to its inhabitants’ personal satisfaction. The lowest rate, at just above 2 percent, is in the Czech Republic; while Spain has endured years of high unemployment—more than 26 percent in 2013 and more than 14 percent in late 2019 for the entire population, and, even after declining a bit, still about 33 percent for Spanish youth in 2019 (the latter figure clearly a depressing reality for anybody entering the labor force).
Czech happiness score (see the following chapter) is only 8 percent ahead of the Spanish one, and the Czech suicide rate is, at just over 8 per 100,000, three times as high as in Spain. True, robberies are more common in Barcelona than in Prague, but the Spanish mean is only slightly higher than the British mean—and British unemployment is a quarter of the Spanish rate.
Finland was the world’s happiest country for the second time in a row, followed by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland; the Netherlands and Switzerland came just ahead of Sweden, which means that the Nordic nations took five of the top seven spots.
What rarely gets reported is what actually goes into constructing these national scores: GDP per capita, social support (determined by asking if, when in trouble, people have relatives or friends to count on), healthy life expectancy (taken from the World Health Organization’s assessment of 100 different health factors), freedom to make life choices (scored by answering the question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”), generosity (“Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?”), and perceptions of corruption (throughout the government and within business).
As with all indices, this one contains a mix of components, including: a notoriously questionable indicator (national GDP converted to US dollars); answers that cannot be easily compared across cultures (perception of freedom to choose); and scores based on objective and revealing variables (healthy life expectancy). This mélange alone indicates that there should be a great deal of skepticism regarding any precise ranking—and this feeling is mightily reinforced when one looks closely at what never gets reported in the media: the actual country scores (accurate to the third decimal digit!).
And then there is that remarkable lack of correlation between happiness and suicide—plotting the two variables for all European countries shows a complete absence of a relationship.
That Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan are the three least happy countries of the 156 ranked nations is, sadly, quite expected (civil wars have been destroying them for far too long). But 23rd-place Mexico (a narco state with an extraordinarily high rate of violence and murder) ahead of France? Guatemala ahead of Saudi Arabia? Panama ahead of Italy? Colombia ahead of Kuwait? Argentina ahead of Japan? And Ecuador ahead of South Korea? Clearly, these pairs form a remarkable pattern: their second members are richer (often vastly so), more stable, less violent, and offer a considerably easier life than the first countries of every pair, whose commonalities are obvious—they may be relatively poor, troubled, and even violent, but they are all former Spanish colonies and hence overwhelmingly Catholic. And all of them are in the top 50 (Ecuador is in the 50th spot), well ahead of Japan (58) and far ahead of China (93), the country that has been seen by naive Westerners as a veritable economic paradise full of happy shoppers. But while Louis Vuitton may be making a bundle in China, neither the massive malls nor the leadership of the all-knowing party make the Chinese happy; even the citizens of dysfunctional and much poorer Nigeria (85) feel happier.
The lessons are clear: if you cannot fit into the top 10 (not being Nordic, Dutch, Swiss, Kiwi, or Canadian), convert to Catholicism and start learning castellano. ¡Buena suerte con eso!
In 1800, less than 2 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; by 1900 the share was still only about 5 percent. By 1950 it had reached 30 percent, and 2007 became the first year when more than half of humanity lived in cities.
By 2016, the United Nations’ comprehensive survey found 512 cities with a population greater than 1 million, with 45 of them larger than 5 million and 31 surpassing 10 million. This largest group has a special name: “megacities.”
In 1900, 9 of the world’s 10 largest cities were in Europe and the United States. In 1950 New York and Tokyo were the only megacities, and the third, Mexico City, was added in 1975. But by the century’s end the list had grown to 18 megacities, and by 2020 it reached 35 with a total of more than half a billion inhabitants.
Tokyo (with more people than Canada, and generating economic product equal to about half of the German total) remains at the top, and 20 out of the 35 megacities (nearly 60 percent) are in Asia. There are six in Latin America, two in Europe (Moscow and Paris), three in Africa (Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa), and three in North America (New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, counted also as part of Latin America).
in the marginWhich are the megacities
the United Nations has forecast the emergence of 10 additional megacities by 2030: six in Asia (including India’s Ahmedabad and Hyderabad), three in Africa (Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, Luanda), and Colombia’s Bogotá.
But amid all these developments, we must single out the momentous innovation that allowed a blockaded Germany to endure its two-front war for four years: the synthesis of ammonia. When the war began, the British navy cut Germany off from imports of Chilean nitrates needed to produce explosives. But thanks to a remarkable coincidence, Germany could instead supply itself with homemade nitrates.
In 1909, Fritz Haber, a professor at the University of Karlsruhe, had ended the long-running quest for synthesizing ammonia from its elements. Nitrogen and hydrogen were combined under high pressure and in the presence of a catalyst, to make ammonia (NH3
By October 1913, BASF—then the world’s leading chemical conglomerate, under the leadership of Carl Bosch—had commercialized the process at the world’s first ammonia plant, in Oppau in Germany. This synthetic ammonia was to be used in the production of such solid fertilizers as sodium or ammonium nitrate (see the world without synthetic ammonia, this page). But the war began less than a year later, and instead of converting ammonia into fertilizer, BASF began to mass-produce the compound for conversion into nitric acid to be used in the synthesis of wartime explosives.
A larger ammonia plant was completed by April 1917 in Leuna, west of Leipzig, and the combined production of the two plants sufficed to support Germany’s manufacture of explosives until the war’s end.
former President Obama, the man known for his unemotional approach to governing and hence a reluctant endorser to begin with, has come around. Early in his presidency (in April 2009), he affirmed his belief by essentially denying it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” By May of 2014, he had relented: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”
Infant mortality is an excellent proxy for a wide range of conditions, including income, quality of housing, nutrition, education, and investment in healthcare. Very few babies die in those affluent countries where people live in good housing and where well-educated parents (themselves well nourished) feed their children properly and have access to medical care (see the best indicator of quality of life? try infant mortality, this page
So how does the United States rank among the world’s roughly 200 nations? The latest available comparison shows that with 6 of every 1,000 live-born babies dying in the first year of life, the US does not figure among the top 25 nations. Its infant mortality is far higher than in France (4), Germany (3), and Japan (2). And the US rate was 50 percent higher than in Greece…
Excusing that very poor rating by saying that the European countries have homogeneous populations does not work: modern France and Germany are full of recent immigrants (just…
What matters more is parental knowledge, good nutrition, the extent of economic inequality, and access to universal healthcare, the United States being (notoriously) the…
And looking at the journey’s end gives an almost identically poor result: recent US life expectancy (nearly 79 years for both sexes) does not even rank among the top two dozen countries worldwide, and is—again—behind Greece (about 81), as well as South Korea (nearly 83). Canadians live more than three years longer on average…
Educational achievements of US students (or a lack thereof) are scrutinized with every new edition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The latest results (2018) for 15-year-olds show that, in math, the United States ranks just below Russia, Slovakia, and Spain, but far lower than Canada, Germany, and Japan. In science, US schoolchildren place just below the mean PISA score (497 versus 501); in reading, they are barely above it (498 versus 496)—and they are far behind all the populous, affluent Western nations. PISA, like any such study,…
In the United States, babies are more likely to die and high schoolers are less likely to learn than their counterparts in other affluent countries. Politicians may look far and wide for evidence of American exceptionalism,…
On January 1, 1958, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany jointly formed the European Economic Community (EEC) with the aim of economic…
In the founding document, the Treaty of Rome, the member states declared their determination “to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe” and “to ensure the economic and social progress of their countries by…
In 1993, the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union; in 1999, a common currency, the euro, was created; and 27 nations now belong to the Union.
The EU has just over 450 million people, less than 6 percent of the global population, but it generates nearly 20 percent of the world’s economic output, as against almost 25 percent for the United States.
It accounts for nearly 15 percent of global exports of goods—a third more than the United States—including cars, airliners, pharmaceuticals, and luxury goods. Moreover, half of its 27 members are among the top 30 countries in terms of quality of life, as measured by the United Nations’ Human Development Index.
Japan is not only the world’s fastest-aging major economy (already every fourth person is older than 65, and by 2050 that share will be nearly 40 percent), its population is also declining. Today’s 127 million will shrink to 97 million by 2050, and forecasts show shortages of the young labor force needed in construction and healthcare. Who will maintain Japan’s extensive and admirably efficient transportation infrastructures? Who will take care of the millions of old people? By 2050, people above the age of 80 will outnumber the children.
according to the World Health Organization, the maximum acceptable level of particulates with diameters under 2.5 nanometers is 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air, but many Chinese cities have repeatedly exceeded 500 μg/m3. Some cities have even seen maximums above 1,000. In 2015, Beijing averaged 80 μg/m3, compared with less than 10 for New York City. Such extremely high levels of pollution increase the incidence of respiratory and heart diseases, and shorten expected lifespans.
The country has less arable land per capita than India, and unlike the much smaller Japan, it could never rely largely on imports.
Finally, the country’s population is aging rather rapidly—that’s why the Communist Party abandoned its one-child-per-couple policy in 2015—and, as a result, its demographic advantage is already receding. The ratio of economically active to economically dependent people peaked in 2010, and as the ratio declines, so will China’s industrial dynamism.
Meanwhile, it is fascinating to compare the two giga-states. Both countries selectively abort many girls, creating abnormal sex ratios at birth. The normal ratio is 1.06 males per one female, but India stands at 1.12 and China at 1.15.
in the marginIndia vs china
In 2019, China’s per capita average, measured in terms of purchasing power parity, was (according to the IMF) more than twice as high as India’s ($20,980 versus $9,030).
On the other hand, China is a tightly controlled one-party state run by a politburo of seven aged men, while India continues as a highly imperfect but undeniably democratic polity. In 2019, Freedom House assigned India 75 points on its freedom index, compared with a measly 11 points for China (the UK got 93 and Canada 99).
It will be fascinating to see to what extent India can replicate China’s economic success. And China, for its part, must cope with its loss of the demographic dividend: since 2012, its dependency ratio—the number of people of working age divided by the number of those who are too young or too old to work—has been rising (it is now just over 40 percent). The question is whether the country will become old before it can become truly rich.
One last complication: these two nuclear powers have yet to sign a binding treaty to end their territorial disagreement in the Himalayas. They’ve come to blows over the matter, most notably in 1962.
And yet this conflict is not India’s greatest immediate challenge. More pressing are the need to further lower its fertility rate as rapidly as possible (everything else being equal, that raises per capita income), the challenges of maintaining basic food self-sufficiency (a country of more than 1.4 billion is too large to rely on imports),
Based on the United Nations’ uniform national statistics, the manufacturing sector’s contribution to global economic product declined from 25 percent in 1970 to less than 16 percent by 2017.
And yet manufacturing is still important for the health of a country’s economy, because no other sector can generate nearly as many well-paying jobs. Take Facebook, which at the end of 2019 had about 43,000 employees versus the 370,000 or so that Toyota had during the 2019 fiscal year. Making things still matters.
If you rank countries by per capita manufacturing value, then Germany, with about $10,200 in 2018, came out on top among the big four, followed by Japan with about $7,900, the United States with about $6,800, and China with only $2,900.
But the global leader is now Ireland, the country that until it joined the EU (then known as the EEC) in 1973 had only a small manufacturing sector. Its low corporate tax (12.5 percent) has attracted scores of multinationals, who now produce 90 percent of the country’s manufactured exports, and the country’s manufacturing value per capita has surpassed $25,000 a year, ahead of Switzerland’s $15,000.
In August 2019, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia; both sides are developing new missiles; and the countries have been sparring over the future of the once-Soviet Ukraine.
When in 2011 Samuel Arbesman, at that time at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, analyzed the lifespans of 41 ancient empires that existed between 3000 bce and 600 ce, he found that their mean duration was 220 years, but that the distribution of imperial lifespans was highly skewed, with those empires enduring at least 200 years being roughly six times as common as those surviving for eight centuries.
Obviously the Chinese Communist Party that is trying to suppress Tibet and Xinjiang, whose policies have not earned it any genuine friends along the country’s long borders and have led to overreaching into the South China Sea, and whose decision to invest heavily (Silk Road–style) in poorer Asian and African countries is to buy long-term political influence.
But the 1880s are also embedded in our lives in many smaller ways. Over a decade ago, in Creating the Twentieth Century, I traced several daily American experiences through mundane artifacts and actions that stem from that miraculous decade. A woman wakes up today in an American city and makes a cup of Maxwell House coffee (launched in 1886). She considers eating her favorite Aunt Jemima pancakes (sold since 1889) but goes for packaged Quaker Oats (available since 1884). She touches up her blouse with an electric iron (patented in 1882), applies antiperspirant (available since 1888), but cannot pack her lunch because she has run out of brown paper bags (the process to make strong kraft paper was commercialized in the 1880s).
Then she goes up to the 10th floor in an elevator (the first electric one was installed in a New York City building in 1889),
ballpoint pen (patented in 1888).
Tesla was not the first to go public: in March 1888, the Italian engineer Galileo Ferraris gave a lecture on AC motors to the Royal Academy of Science in Turin, and published his findings a month later. This was a month before Tesla’s corresponding lecture at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
However, it was Tesla, helped with generous financing from US investors, who designed not only the AC induction motors but also the requisite AC transformers and distribution system. The two basic patents for his polyphase motor were granted in 1888. He filed some three dozen more by 1891.
But many chargers contain even tinier transformers. These are non-Stanley (that is, not wire-wound) devices that take advantage of the piezoelectric effect—the ability of a strained crystal to produce a current, and of a current to strain or deform a crystal.
And the latest innovation is electronic transformers. They are much reduced in volume and mass compared with traditional units, and they will become particularly important for integrating intermittent sources of electricity—wind and solar—into the grid and for enabling DC microgrids.
Over time, that efficiency gap has narrowed, but today’s diesel engines remain at least 15 to 20 percent more efficient than their gasoline-fueled rivals.
Diesels are the uncontested enablers of massively centralized industrial production and the irreplaceable prime movers of globalization. Diesels power virtually all container ships and all carriers of vehicles and bulk commodities such as oil, liquefied natural gas, ores, cement, fertilizers, and grain. They also power nearly all trucks and freight trains. Most of the items that readers of this book eat or wear are transported at least once, and usually many times, by diesel-powered machines, often from other continents: clothes from Bangladesh, oranges from South Africa, crude oil from the Middle East, bauxite from Jamaica, cars from Japan, computers from China. Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.
Muybridge’s galloping horse
Sallie Gardner, the horse Stanford had provided for the test, clearly had all four hooves off the ground at the gallop. But the airborne moment did not take place as portrayed in famous paintings, perhaps most notably Théodore Géricault’s The 1821 Derby at Epsom, now hanging in the Louvre, which shows the animal’s legs extended away from its body. Instead, it occurred when the horse’s legs were beneath its body, just prior to the moment the horse pushed off with its hind legs.
Edison got his first telephone-related patents in 1878. He noticed that playing a recorded telegraph tape at a high speed produced noises resembling spoken words. What would happen if he recorded a telephone message by attaching a needle to the receiver’s diaphragm, produced a pricked tape, and then replayed that tape? He designed a small device with a grooved cylinder overlaid with tinfoil that could easily receive and record the motions of the diaphragm. “I then shouted, ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ etc.,” Edison later recalled. “I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”
Between 1973 and 2014, the fuel-conversion efficiency of new US passenger cars (even after excluding monstrous SUVs and pickups) rose at an annual rate of just 2.5 percent, from 13.5 to 37 miles per gallon (that’s from 17.4 to 6.4 liters per 100 kilometers).
And so, outside the microchip-dominated world, innovation simply does not obey Moore’s Law, proceeding at rates that are lower by an order of magnitude.
The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the fifth century bce, amounts to about 300,000 (or 105) bytes. Some rich senators in imperial Rome had libraries housing hundreds of scrolls, with one large collection holding at least 100 megabytes (108 bytes).
By the year 2000, all books in the Library of Congress held more than 1013 bytes (more than 10 terabytes), but that was less than 1 percent of the total collection (1015 bytes, or about 3 petabytes) once all photographs, maps, movies, and audio recordings were added.
In 1974, General Electric predicted that by 2000 about 90 percent of the United States’ electricity would come from fast breeders. GE was merely reflecting a widespread expectation: during the 1970s, the governments of France, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States were all investing heavily in the development of breeders. But high costs, technical problems, and environmental concerns led to shutdowns of British, French, Japanese, American (and also smaller German and Italian) programs, while China, India, Japan, and Russia are still operating experimental reactors. After the world as a whole spent well above $100 billion in today’s money over some six decades of effort, there has been no real commercial payoff.
even efficiencies in excess of 40 percent produce exhaust gases of about 600°C, hot enough to generate steam in an attached steam turbine. This tandem of a gas turbine and a steam turbine—combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT)—was first developed in the late 1960s, and the best efficiencies of CCGTs now top 60 percent. No other prime mover is less wasteful.