Moore’s Law is invoked across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as a name for the rapid, compounding improvement in computing technology produced by private-sector innovation. The term is attributed in the excerpts to Gordon Moore, described by Amity Shlaes as the source of the idea that the quality and efficacy of chips in our lives increase geometrically, and in the end geometrically increase our own well-being Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). The episodes use the concept less as a technical proposition than as a benchmark: a rate of change that government-delivered goods and services are measured against, and a factor that complicates how economic statistics are read.
Private-sector innovation and the microchip
In the 2019 episode with Amity Shlaes, Moore’s Law is introduced through the story of the microchip business. Shlaes says the 1960s contained a great deal of serendipity and happiness, and that everybody wanted a great society, including the private sector. She profiles three companies in her book, one of which is what became Intel, whose men were at Fairchild at the time — Fairchild Camera — where scientists and engineers Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore discovered that science could work in the private sector, did not need to be part of the military-industrial complex, and could improve lives and give us the small electronics we now have in our hand Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes frames this discovery as an alternative to government planning, and sets Moore’s Law directly against a pessimistic view of institutions. She says government is a sort of Murphy’s Law, in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong, but that there is also Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore’s idea that we geometrically increase the quality and efficacy of little chips in our lives to also in the end geometrically increase our own well-being Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). In her telling, the microchip business was as idealistic and dramatic in improving lives as any government program, and she traces the evolution of Fairchild into Intel and the importance of the individual and the ideas they came up with.
Government-controlled sectors and the pace of change
Moore’s Law first appears in the 2010 episode with Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, during a discussion of which sectors of American life work least well. Welch argues that the sectors most under the control of government are, without exception, the ones that work the least well — whether the DMV, the local school system, or Social Security, which he calls a sort of economic Ponzi scheme. By contrast, he says, the things that give the most pleasure or utility or joy in life are likely to be found on the internet, and that places where the government is least involved tend to be places that bring an incredible Moore’s Law pace of change A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Welch’s framing is explicitly comparative. He poses the challenge for public policy as how to translate the revolution that has so enriched lives privately so that it has an impact on the goods and services government publicly delivers, calling that the great challenge of our age A Libertarian Plan (2010). In this episode Moore’s Law is not explained in technical terms; it functions as a measure of what unregulated activity achieves, set against the performance of government-controlled sectors. Bob Zadek’s own contribution to the exchange is a separate analogy — that harnessing capitalism to serve public good is to destroy it, as a capitalistic lobotomy neuters the system and makes the right to fail disappear — which he offers before Welch takes up the question of government-controlled sectors.
Hedonic adjustments and median income
In the 2021 episode with Roger L. Martin, Moore’s Law appears in a discussion of why falling prices for consumer goods do not settle the question of stagnating wages. Bob Zadek observes that the cost of computing power, of TVs, and of every consumer good has gone down profoundly, and asks why it is a systemic problem rather than a personal one if the value of somebody’s time has gone down When More is Not Better (2021).
Martin answers that it becomes a problem if you want to have a democracy, where 51% of people decide on the system of government and what government does. He identifies the move Zadek is describing as what geeky economists call hedonic adjustments — the practice of saying that wages do not really count and GDP is not really right, and that one must adjust for all the things that have gone down in price for the value, and everybody because of Moore’s Law, that being the case in computing When More is Not Better (2021). Martin’s point is that the adjustment is selective: lots of things have gone way up in real terms in prices, education and healthcare being two big ones.
Martin goes on to describe how the adjustments are made. Those who do them pick a base year and say that since 1976 there has been a certain decrease in the prices of various things, so that rather than median income growing at 0.4 of 1%, it grows at 0.6 of 1% — and 0.6 is not that bad compared to the 2.4 before that. What they do not do, he says, is go back to say 40 years before 1976 and ask what GDP growth would have been if hedonic adjustments had been done in that period. He calls this a little bit of lies, lies, and damned statistics, and describes a dramatic decrease in the pace at which median families move forward, which he agrees is the natural outcome of the economic system as it is being run When More is Not Better (2021). Among the broader consequences he names is a rise in the percentage of the US population who say that socialism would not be a bad thing to try — a prospect he says scares the bejesus out of him, because he does not want people to think that a dramatically different system that has never ever worked is the right recipe for the stagnation of the middle class.
Across episodes
The three episodes treat Moore’s Law as a shared reference point rather than a subject argued between them. In 2010 Matt Welch uses it as a measure of the pace of change in places where government is least involved; in 2019 Amity Shlaes attributes the idea to Gordon Moore and places it, alongside Bob Noyce and Fairchild, in the private-sector microchip business as an alternative to the military-industrial complex; in 2021 Roger L. Martin cites it as the computing case underlying hedonic adjustments to income statistics. The excerpts show no development or disagreement over what Moore’s Law is — each speaker deploys it for a different argument, and none of the later episodes responds to an earlier treatment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the content of Moore’s Law as a formal proposition, nor any date, publication, or original formulation of it. They do not say what became of Fairchild or Intel beyond Shlaes’s mention of the evolution between them, and they give no figures for chip performance or prices. No excerpt describes a legal, legislative, or regulatory treatment of the semiconductor industry, and the episodes do not connect Moore’s Law to any case, statute, or amendment.