Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon | Hacker News Reader

Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon

nytimes.com

53 pointsdismal289 comments

If instead of talking about progress , we start to talk about change, things may look quite different than Gordon's view:

We live in a surveillance society(both governmental and commercial). We are glued to screens, having much less human interactions than before(and some psychologists think it greatly harms our empathy). Boredom is non existent. Something like addiction is everywhere. The variety and quality of our media and maybe experiences in general(think foodie culture) have greatly improved. For many jobs , the rate of learning, and the demand for creativity have greatly improved.

Of course this is good and bad.

And as for business: Business today looks totally different than before the internet.

So yes, the internet is a life changing technology if you look deeply. And there are many other life changing technologies in the work.

As for gdp growth - well isn't it more complex than - great new technology -> a lot of growth ?

Economists define growth as increase in GDP -- either nationally or per capita. Gordon's premise is that this is nearing an end for the United States, if not over.

There are numerous ways you can respond to this.

1. You can look to alternative measures of growth. Ecologists and anthropologists use the principle of total energy throughput. Seems that's starting to trail off as well.

2. You can look at re-allocating the fruits of the economy. The popular name for this would be "re-distribution", if it were popular, though generally in the US it isn't. That speaks to one of many reasons growth is popular: it allows offering (or perhaps only promising) more pie, by growing the pie, rather than reducing the share given any one person or group. That's also presented problems of late.

3. You can advocate for "virtual growth". More arts, more movies, more music, more creative activities. We're entering a post-scarcity period of abundance. This poses problems of price-discovery given zero-marginal-cost goods, which gets you back to distribution of purchasing power, and of how high up Maslow's Pyramid you can base the foundations of your economy.

More to the point, change, for its own sake, isn't progress. Re-shaking a salt-and-pepper mix may change the distribution. It's unlikely to re-sort it.

GDP growth is "more money". Money is created when people borrow against land. Most borrowing is against land. The boomers+ have stopped borrowing because they are going to die soon. Ergo end of "growth".

GDP is a very bad thing. Also 10% of GDP is "imputed rent" - the rent you would pay to yourself for your home if you were to rent it out. Ten percent. Yet again all tied into land lending/prices.

> GDP growth is "more money"

This is not true. A measure of the amount of money in the economy, as tracked by the Fed, has risen around 50% since 2008 [0] while GDP has only grown a few percent per year.

[0]: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2

ok it's also velocity, but in general once a boom starts and the taps come on it's both. Now I agree they are pushing on a string.

If velocity is held as a constant then creating more => "growth".

While it's true that money supply's grown and GDP hasn't by nearly as much, that's not the correct response -- OP mis-defined GDP.

I went on to qualify that I'm assuming velocity holds constant. I really think GDP is a terrible measure. We need something that reflects the actual amount of "good stuff" getting done, not the amount of fiat created by banks to ramp the same pile of bricks.

While we're agreed on the deficiencies of GDP, the original issue was how economists define growth -- and, well, that's how, and is what Gordon's book addresses.

Mismeasures notwithstanding, to a first approximation, GDP likely works fairly well. Not that it's not the fiat created by banks, but the turnover (revenues) generated in the process which would inflate GDP. Something I've been meaning to look into -- and which will likely upset a maths friend of mine on G+ -- is whether financial sector activity really ought be counted as productive. Much of it I suspect isn't.

That's my whole point. Loads of money is created for lending against land without a single brick being placed as banks force people to pledge all their future labour in exchange for the temerity to exist.

Incorrect. More money => inflation[1].

GDP growth is more total overall spending, plus certain adjustments, in real, constant currency units. That is, inflation adjusted.

The problems around GDP tend to be that:

1. It discounts nonfinacialised quality-of-life improvements.

2. It neglects the negative costs of financialised quality-of-life detriments.

I believe that the Wikipedia article links to several alternative measures of GDP. I find Herman Daly's discussion of these pretty good, or you might check to see what the WorldWatch Institute's come up with, to name another likely source.

________________________________

Notes:

1. So, you might ask, what of QE, why all this money and no inflation? Good question, and people are pursuing that. My theory is that a) the money's largely gone to banks and large institutional investors, b) see Robert Gordon, there's a long term secular decline in growth, so they're looking for alternative investments, resulting in c) Gee, stock markets and housing have been going gangbusters, but isn't that just asset price inflation, i.e., inflation on Stuff Rich People Buy? Seems fairly likely, particularly if you plot the Dow or S&P 500 average against the Fed's balance sheet (proxy for money supply / QE. Head over to the St. Louis Fed's FRED plotting toy[2] to see for yourself.\

2. It's actually a pretty cool toy. The sort of thing you might imagine a megolomanic conspiracy controlling the global money supply to come up with.[3]

3. I kid, I kid. It's the lizard-men.

We've had rampant land price inflation which is not correctly reflected in the stats. GDP uses a deflator and that deflator doesn't reflect land prices, therefore printing through land doesn't show up fully.

Quite possibly. I'd amended my post prior to your reply, addressing this in part.

After just watching another Bernie Madoff documentary, Is it possible it's in those kind of imaginary assets?

Possibly. I highly recommend John Kenneth Galbraith's short, highly readable, and extremely enlightening book on the 1929 stock market crash, The Crash: 1929.

One concept he highlights is what he calls the "bezzle". That's the apparent increase in wealth through financial shennanigans. He describes it better than I can do justice here and now.

>> We're entering a post-scarcity period of abundance.

Let's say that would be the case. Doesn't it really break most economic theory we're used to and we'd have to design our systems and measurement tools from scratch ?

And even if it's partially true, and we're in a strong deflationary period, doesn't it makes gdp measurements much less valuable ?

Let's say the Moon was made of cheese.

I find the possibility too unlikely to be worth considering.

That said, it's usually a reliable indicator I can close the tab, turn the page, close the book, or otherwise move on.

Before you invest too much more time with the concept, I'd suggest picking up a good ecology textbook.

That was just a theoretical question to understand how does GDP looks in post-scarcity or deflationary periods.

And yes I agree that were far from post scarcity ,but wasn't the internet somewhat deflationary?

I find the idea that we are not going to see any more life-changing technological advances quite unpersuasive. New technology usually comes from scientific advances, and science in many fields is advancing rapidly.

I can think of at least four radical technological changes that might flow from new science, ones that would make people of the future look back in horror at at how we live today.

1) Ways of curing or eliminating the main health problems we have today, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and infectious diseases

2) Doubling the human life span

3) Greatly increasing the intelligence of the average person

4) Establishing mass colonies in space and moving much of the population there.

I'm sure HN readers can think of other plausible advances.

Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked. Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence. And physics has been brutally unyielding in making space colonization impractical for close to a century now.

That is not to say they'll never happen, but rather that those things are so out in the horizon as to be beyond the dividing line between prediction and speculation.

> space colonization impractical for close to a century now.

How close to a century?

General relativity killed the idea of faster than light travel a hundred years ago. Newtonian physics has made leaving earth's gravity on a mass scale for longer than that.

Awesome. Thanks!

So the parent said "in space" - doesn't mean another star.

Space is hard enough. Charlie Stross, "High Frontier Redux" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

As Charlie points out, he makes a living fanatasising about this stuff. But it's hard:

Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable.

Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...

Exactly. Think of how many space million-person space colonies orbiting our sun we could make from materials from asteroids.

I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade. Multiple nations are entering into the space race and have plans for manned missions as well as space stations. Multiple private corporations are making advances weekly and have plans for manned missions and orbital habitats.

Oncolytic Viruses seem very promising to me. CRISPR sounds like the invention of the transistor for genetics technology.

AI research is advancing at a scary pace and that will enhance all the other cylinders.

> "I think we'll see human activity in space increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade."

However, while I don't disagree with the potential for space activity in the coming decade(s), it makes a pale comparison to the first two-thirds of the 20th century, where humans went from largely ever living on the surface of the Earth (plus or minus 100 meters or so, for the eternity of humankind) to flying on a rocket to the f*ing MOON.

We will make it to Mars within the Century.

That's exactly what everyone thought when we landed on the moon.

Really? This century like within the succeeding hundred years or that century like the 20th Century? I'd be curious to learn more.

NASA had a plan in the early 70s to have humans on the surface of Mars by 1990. When Nixon canceled the Apollo and Saturn five missions, all that early planning went into the trashbin.

Hmmm, sounds like it was riding on government funding and not on the profit motive that doesn't speak to any technical encumbrances . . . I'd bet on the profit motive.

Increases in life span due to medical technology have been rapidly plateauing as the low-hanging fruit is picked.

True, because incrementally better treatments for cancer or heart disease just mean that you die at 84 instead of 82. But we've only recently started trying to prevent or repair the effects of aging, which has a much greater potential payoff.

That was my point, which I should have made more clearly. There is a good deal of research going on into what causes aging, and it seems likely it will pay off sooner or later in ways of delaying it.

The increase in life span at ages 40, 60, and 80 is still quite steady throughout the developed world,[1] and we've hardly even begun to apply powerful statistical techniques to national health care databases to identify best prevention and treatment practices better.

[1] "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

> Medical technology has yet to make any impact on human intelligence.

But stay tuned! Human intelligence is now modifiable. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been done for a while, and increasingly is done with SNP arrays. That means you can use the polygenic scores from past GWAS studies on intelligence. I've been modeling this, and with a fairly realistic model of how IVF & PGD works and the best current polygenic score publicly available, an American could expect a gain of ~0.2 IQ points right now if they used PGD to select for intelligence, which is potentially cost-effective even. This will go up as additional GWASes come out (SSGAC has one coming out soon which should at least double the gain).

More strikingly: CRISPR has already been used to edit human embryos fairly successfully. Once CRISPR is finetuned to the point of being safe enough to use for 1 edit, as the several planned human trials point to being the case now or very shortly, then 1 edit will buy you 0.5 IQ points (the effect of the largest identified gene), and as CRISPR improves linearly, the gains will scale nicely with the number of edits you can do; progress in CRISPR is so fast that it may be able to go from 'irrelevant' to 'game-changer' in a few years, somewhat like the NN Go players recently went from 'terrible' to 'amazing' just a year or two by constant improvement.

(In contrast, embryo selection is easy to implement technically, but highly limited in its potential power because you turn out to be bottlenecked by how many eggs you can extract from a woman and how many of them will survive fertilization and implantation to yield a live birth.)

I'm pretty sure preimplantation diagnostics are in many cases done with next-gen sequencing these days.

Also even accepting the idea that GWAS studies for IQ yield real and useful results (a claim most people I know in the human genetics field find highly dubious) CRISPR isn't a panacea.

I posted a more detailed description above, but in short CRISPR causes a massively disruptive amount of damage in a cell. It does it very accurately, but a double strand break is definitely a Big Deal for a cell. This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology.

CRISPR is an unbelievably useful tool for research and a huge advance, but it's not the Solution to Human Genetic Engineering. We're still a long ways from that.

> Also even accepting the idea that GWAS studies for IQ yield real and useful results (a claim most people I know in the human genetics field find highly dubious)

It's not 'highly dubious' at all, I don't know who is telling you that or why. The twin studies have told us for a century that there are a lot of intelligence genes for us to find; the family studies have told us that for a century; the GCTAs have told us for half a decade that there were a lot of SNPs for us to find; the polygenic scores from the early GWASes told us there were a lot of SNPs for us to find once sample sizes got big enough; when the sample sizes reached the hundreds of thousands, the hits started coming and many of them were on genes already associated with the brain; the hits replicated in other samples (often using different but still highly g-loaded constructs) and had predictive power within-family too; followup GWASes replicated them, and they've been shown in Swedes, Englishmen, Chinese, European-Americans, African-Americans; the phenome studies have shown that intelligence SNPs and polygenic scores predict not just other cognitive constructs (both phenotype and polygenic scores thereof) but things already correlated with phenotypic intelligence like longevity or schizophrenia; and so on. The results are about as dubious as the height GWAS results - not at all.

> This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology.

We'll see what sort of yields we get; embryos also have the advantage of being small, smaller than a whole body or even an eye. I'm sure you already saw the Chinese paper... Since one gets a median of ~9 eggs from each egg extract and about half of them will be implantable, one could afford to lose a decent fraction of them in exchange for a big enough payoff, and check with sequencing.

Increases in lifespan in the US since the 1950s have been far more from bringing up the lower end (improved outcomes for underprivileged minorities) than by extending top-end (white female & male) life expectency. Almost as if there were a diminishing returns setting in.

There's actually been some recent improvement following the 1990s, but the vast bulk of life-expectency / mortality improvements came prior to 1920. Predating virtually all of modern medicine, but benefiting tremendously from antisceptics, sewerage systems, municipal garbage collection, refrigeration, and some early food safety and disease control, especially over cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.

I think when 3D printing can print electronics and metals embedded with plastics at good resolution, then we will see most consumer goods 3D printed whole, rather than being assembled, reducing their cost substantially.

This is more short to medium term - say 5 to 12 years away, but would have a lot of economic impact.

I think we'll see the end of organ donors in our time. Growing fresh organs on scaffolds from adult stem cells has already been done. The first transplant of a lab grown body part has already been done. [0]

Eliminating the need for a donor registry and transplanting organs with almost no risk of rejection (and no taking drugs for the rest of your life) would be species-altering (I really don't think I'm exaggerating) - and it would have saved the lives of at least two people I was related to. Growing working complex organs has been done, but not transplanted in humans yet. It's also crazy expensive. But it becoming generally available is something I think I'll live to see.

That alone, forget everything else that will likely happen in my lifetime, disproves that point completely. IMHO.

[0] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/using-lab-grow...

I would expect this to be the tip of the iceberg in regards to serious genetic hacking.

Modify your own genome and wait for your body to heal itself? ... Sounds kind of risky and frightening!

Have your heart or liver transplant source one that's 5/10/15% "better" (in function, endurance, etc)? Well, you already needed a new one...

It's interesting to see this, particularly given Krugman's history. His graduate advisor was William Nordhaus, who'd written a strong (and among the more reputable) criticism of Limits to Growth, published in 1972. Krugman's written on that, as well as Gordon's earlier published paper on economic growth.

The technological argument's a strong one, and many others have pointed it out. Vaclav Smil suggests the single decade of the 1880s was the most profoundly inventive in history (though fire, speech, ag, and writing are strong contenders for influence). Robert Ayres has several papers on technological waves, there's W. Brian Arthur of Stanford / Santa Fe Institute (itself a fascinating research centre), and Kevin Kelley's What Technology Wants.

Krugman mentioned one of the futurist books of the 1960s. There was rather a burst of them, going back a decade or so. Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years (1952), Harrison Brown, et al's more modest The Next Hundred Years (1957), Meadows et al, Limits to Growth, Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, Richard Meier's Science and Economic Development (1955, 1965). Some agreement, some disagreement, and interesting insights, as with all technical debugging processes, on what they got right and what was wrong.

I've been in and around the tech world for over four decades, and have come to an appreciation of what is possible (the world in a tablet on my lap with full-day battery capacity and WiFi Internet -- though many of those publications require SciHub or BooksXX to access), and what isn't -- 2001's Discover, T.A. Heppenheimer's colonies in space, and the solar powersats they were to have built, lunar colonies, mass drivers, and even simply high speed rail networks within North America, have all failed rather spectacularly to emerge.

Venture Capital and high-tech startups have proved spectacularly incapable of addressing (or even identifying) Big Problems. It's questionable whether they can even address funding for necessary technical infrastructure development on the free software foundations from which they're built (a VC is exploring that possibility now).

More troubling for me, many of the models we use to understand, or attempt to predict, our reality strike me as quite flawed. Economics itself not the least among them.

Krugman's LTG post: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/limits-to-growth...

On Gordon's paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/opinion/krugman-is-growth-...

> More troubling for me, many of the models we use to understand, or attempt to predict, our reality strike me as quite flawed. Economics itself not the least among them.

What troubles me more is that there are plenty of useful and 'proven' models that we don't even use in practice. From the way we approach crime and addiction to group dynamics, from the power of advertising/propaganda to education, there's plenty of stuff we know pretty well, and yet don't implement.

I've eschewed a career in academia, as well as one in politics, but I wouldn't mind dedicating at least part of my life to figuring out how to optimize the process of bringing the more solid discoveries into the 'real world'. I'm just not entirely sure where to start.

On a smaller level, I notice this disconnect in the personal lives of my friends as well as my own. We know quite a bit about how willpower works, for example, and how important habit formation is, and yet for the most part this knowledge only barely trickles down into our lives. Most changes seem to just sort of happen as I age, if at all, and that usually feels too slow and too late.

After a few decades of living and noticing this in myself and others time and time again, I've been trying to address the issue at its roots through mindfulness, habit formation, and some degree of organized group effort. And while it definitely seems to work, it feels a bit too small as a goal.

This shouldn't be a radical hypothesis, that there are physical limits to human technological advancement. It's a convenient solution to the Fermi Paradox.

I wish your comment had been upvoted more.

While things like flush toilets and electricity might be technically more important, I think Krugman is really underestimating how amazing the modern world is. I'm in my 40s and I certainly remember how hard it was to learn something prior to the mid-1990s. You had to go to a library or bookshop and hope they'd have a book that would have the info you needed. If it was obscure, probably not. Now we can have the info on basically anything that's known in seconds.

The biggest misconception people have about contemporary history is that computers have already "happened". We haven't even finished setting up the network yet. We're in the equivalent of the day you move into your new house and are just unpacking and playing with the new surroundings. We haven't even seen 1% of the change computers will orchestrate.

The massive and rapid dissemination of knowledge the internet has provided will produce vast and unknowable changes over the next several generations. I believe it may be ultimately a considerably larger change than the industrial revolution. Knowledge changes everything.

(Of course then there's Facebook so maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

)

(Sorry. This is possibly my first truly useless comment. I blame my recent forays into Clojure territory.)

What do you mean? That comment was useful.

We can't have unclosed parentheses or the compiler will throw an error.

The invention of the washing machine has had more of a disruptive social impact than the invention of the Internet.

That's absurd. The effects of the heightened awareness the Internet has sustained are immeasurable and omnipresent. The washing machine just tells a cleaner story.

SMS+social feeds have created an entirely new way of knowing which is unbounded by space or fixed infrastructure.

I'm reasonably sure that robots (starting with self-driving cars) and genetic medicine are going to prove this gentleman very, very wrong. Self-driving cars by themselves have enough power to shape the petroleum economy in a single stroke. Once it's affordable enough for everywhere to have on demand car service a la Uber, gasoline will start to become a massive commodity, traded like steel or coal, not a consumer product. This will have an enormous impact on the petroleum industry. I'd hypothesize that it will spawn another innovation in batteries and clean energy, because no overlord of a fleet of autonomous cars is going to want to pay the recurring cost of gasoline.

If anything self driving cars will be most disruptive in trucking and delivery and in the process destroy the economy of middle america [1]. As for everyone having an on demand car, it has been stated here a number of times that most people still all need to get to work around the same time. If anything, automation and robots are a race to the bottom if we stick with capitalism in its current form.

[1] https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...

On reflection, self-driving cars might be a bad example; considering that "truck driver" is the most widely held occupation in America, it's logical to infer that a ton of people are going to lose their jobs when automated trucking comes about. What makes me hopeful is that it's an example of robotics enriching the standard of life across the board. I can't help but feel it's inevitable that advances in that area will fuel learning that drives robotic innovation in other areas.

Sure, it could lead to America (and the world as a whole) turning into a dismal hellhole of widening economic disparity between the haves and the have-nots. However, given the fact that humans are terrible at predicting so much as the weather in ten days, I can't help but retain a sense of optimism just out of lack of a productive alternative in mindset.

My self driving car will be super useful when it can drop me off at work and then go home and plug itself in. Or keep itself charged so that I can use it with my predetermined schedule. I goto work at 9, I leave at 5. Do whatever it takes to remain charged for that schedule...

Therein lies the social change though. Because fundamentally, most people go to work at 9 and leave at 5. Driverless cars don't alter this without other changes: you still need a car for every commuter to satisfy maximum demand (9am, 5pm).

You have to combine that with flexible work hours (honestly, no reason this isn't already a thing), carpooling, or hybrid transport with car+rail/bus to have any impact on car ownership.

Your last bit seems to be key. Self-driving cars will make public transportation more attractive by filling the "last-mile" role, letting governments invest in better service along core transit lines.

Wake up, do your morning routine, walk out the door, and there's a car waiting to chauffeur you to the subway station (or long-distance bus service)... preset with your favorite seat position, climate, and music.

Flex hours would help drive down costs by reducing idle capacity between 9 and 5 though.

> carpooling Self-driving vanpools with just-in-time routing FTW.

personally speaking my gripe with public transit isnt last mile (getting to the bus/train stop) its the stopping and accelerating at everyone elses stops along the way. a 10 minute drive becomes 15 mins because suzie expects me to stop at her work and johnny wants me to stop at his gym. Wasted time. single passenger (ie very small) autonomous vehicles seems like the best fleet. Now the hard part of getting people to accept them socially. (eg: "I look like a wimp in that small thing, I want a hummer" or what have you)

Right now bus stops are set with the idea that everyone will walk to their final destination. Stops will go down if we have autonomous "last-mile" taxis.

> (honestly, no reason this isn't already a thing)

I suspect that the need to sync up with kiddie prison (aka school) is what locks everything into 9-to-5.

Unless you can get back to a majority of households having only one working adult, I don't think this is going to change any time soon.

Another major factor for 9to5 is probably having a common time that businesses are open. Many businesses need to interact with a multitude of other companies during their working hours. Having the same working hours as every other company you need to interact with makes scheduling meetings/phonecalls/etc a lot easier, or reduces the need for scheduling and the overhead that comes with it. I'm sure there's a good way to solve this too, but I can't think of one off the top of my head at the moment.

This is absolutely true for a number of businesses, however as things are becoming more global (or at least one part of the human touch is) I believe it's fading.

I think a lot of processes could be migrated to asynchronous B2B communication without an overall impact on efficiency. Indeed, probably some gains from batching similar parcels of work together as opposed to a day of "What about X1?" "What about Y1?" "What about X2?" etc etc.

Isn't gasoline a commodity now? And isn't a self driving car essentially the same thing as a taxi?

> Isn't gasoline a commodity now?

You missed the core of my point in your haste to nitpick: "not a consumer product". As in, regular folks aren't buying it anymore.

> And isn't a self driving car essentially the same thing as a taxi?

Yes, minus one employed person driving the car.

> I'd hypothesize that it will spawn another innovation in batteries and clean energy, because no overlord of a fleet of autonomous cars is going to want to pay the recurring cost of gasoline.

Furthermore, I can't see how value of car (regardless of who owns it) isn't in some way directly proportional to its utilization percentage. And a more heavily utilized car (because it's auto-navigating and picking up multiple passengers all day) is worth more. And a car that's worth more is a more financially feasible platform to install more expensive technology on.

Higher car utilization through shared ownership is going to alter a lot of the economics around what tech we can afford to put into vehicles.

Genetic medicine is a tough problem. CRISPR isn't a panacea, and if I had to place bets, it's primarily going to massively accelerate basic biological research rather than itself be a clinical tool except in certain limited contexts.

It's pretty easy to edit a genome, just shoot some radiation at it. It's a lot harder to do it precisely, and though CRISPR is a huge step in that direction, it's not likely that in 10 years you'll be able to walk into a doctor's office and they'll CRISPR that nagging genetic imperfection out of you.

CRISPR is a DNA nuclease, it cuts both strands of DNA at a site that is very precisely (though not perfectly) governed by an RNA template. If you cut both strands of a living thing's DNA, that's a Very Bad Thing for that organism. In fact, that's why it evolved, as a tool for bacteria to combat viruses.

CRISPR based tools depend on reassembling that DNA properly, ideally with the desired alteration (inserting or deleting other pieces of DNA at the cut site). This works well if you have the opportunity to try a whole bunch of cells, and then can figure out which ones have the desired DNA modification.

In an R&D context, that's an easy bar to clear, but in the clinic that means you're somewhat limited to things you can take out of the person, modify, multiply, and put back in the person. Often that means blood cells right now, but could eventually be adult stem cells. A huge advance to be sure, but many many diseases can't be addressed this way.

CRISPR is just one of the recent trends in genetic research that gives me hope for the future. You make valid points about its difficulty, but I see that as an area of science in which humanity is just barely starting to scratch the surface.

I think the big advances will come through efficiency improvements:

We may not make huge leaps in anything but I don't think making things run smarter and more efficiently should be scoffed at.

From my background as a materials engineer I'm optimistic about finding applications for Graphene and advances in high temperature superconductors. I think both have the potential to be game-changers.

Gas powered self driving cabs will have 2x the cost per mile of electric, which will grow to 10x over the next couple decades.

Gas cars will be playthings within 20 years.

These are possibilities for great growth, if the technology can be developed. The first 3 are 50-100 years away though.

1) Asteroid mining and construction in space.

2) Nanotube or other materials technology enabling space elevators or Skyhooks, or other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

3) Fusion through alternatives to tokomaks

4) Self driving, electric cars

5) AI and robotics

6) Micro Black holes as power sources (ok this one's 500-1000 years away)

I see bureaucracy and government control of education is primary speed breakers in the human potential in the coming decade.

The way I see it human creativity is expanding at rapid rate than ever thanks to advancement in technology. The government is however slow, rigid, corrupt and unwilling to relent. This is a clash that is going to define the coming decade or so. If the government wins, I am pretty sure there wont be any improvement in an Average American's life.

One has to look at countries like India which were totally government controlled upto 90s. From 1950s to 1990s India barely changed. Everyone remained poor. Some minor reforms led to explosive growth.

In USA I see the trend as opposite. We have a government that is focused on intangible and dubious goals such as climate change while hurting people with ridiculous regulation.

I don't know about government regulation in general, but what happened in this country from Reagan on was the extensive New Deal regulations of the financial industry were taken down, piece by piece.

I've thought for years that fundamental technological innovation basically stopped around 1970, and that almost everything since then has been refinement and broadening existing technology.

I've observed a similar thing in areas like film: most of today's films are reboots, rehashes, and remakes or at least are exploring themes and plot templates already laid down. Musical innovation lasted longer but seems to have effectively stagnated since the late 1990s. I haven't heard anything in a long time that doesn't just riff on something pioneered before the year 2000.

There are pockets here and there: films like Primer and Upstream Color, experimental electronic music, deep learning. But none of these things are quite as dramatic as, say, the film 2001, Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, or the integrated circuit.

There's objective evidence of something "breaking" around that time in economics, too. Wage growth basically stopped shortly after 1970: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HY153_realwa_G_...

I've wondered if future historians might not look back at ~1970 as the end of the enlightenment and the beginning of the next dark age.

But what happened?

I haven't got a clue. Explanations I've toyed around with include things like:

- Philosophy: the 1970s saw the rise of both religious fundamentalism and its secular "Skeptic" counterpart -- dogmatic, fundamentalist ideologies that assert that we already know everything and there is nothing new to discover. When I go back before 1970 I'm often struck by the boldness and fearlessness of scientists and other intellectuals back then. The rise of "new age" thinking, which is also hostile to reason and enlightenment ideas, might also play a role. It seems like since 1970 people have become either total woo-woo new-age flakes (no rigor) or closed-minded fundamentalists (no creativity or imagination). Before that time it seems like you had more who were both rigorous and visionary.

- Economics: did we "cancel progress" by shifting from a progressive economic system that invested in the future to a conservative one that only invests in the present? Or was the decoupling of wages from productivity the actual root cause of the rest of the apparent stagnation?

- Psychological: did we experience "future shock" and double down on retro and nostalgia? This sort of fits in with what I discuss under philosophy.

- Television: before the popularity of TV people read books and interacted socially and kids played outside. TV is a passive medium that pulls people in and then feeds them all the same information, and it takes time that people might otherwise spend on interactive, social, and exploratory pursuits. Did TV make us stupid? The generation who grew up watching TV started to enter the workforce around 1970.

- The War on Drugs: To what extent were the geniuses of the past "augmenting" with over-the-counter amphetamines, easily obtainable psychedelics, etc.? I've heard anecdotes but has anyone ever even asked this question in anything approaching a rigorous way? Or is it too taboo? There was a general worldwide crackdown on mind-altering substances around 1970. Perhaps the kind of crazy creativity and extreme achievement we saw during the glory days is simply not something the human mind tends to do in its natural state.

- Slow Malthusian Collapse: was the "limits to growth" more or less correct, but the effect is unfolding a lot slower than predicted and with strain and collapse manifesting in less obvious ways?

- Bureaucratization: Was there a shift during that time toward a more bureaucratic academic and scientific community that is more hostile to "maverick" thinkers and new ideas? Do today's researchers spend more time sucking up to grant funding and tenure committees and making sure to walk the straight and narrow to avoid being labeled "cranks" instead of really thinking and investigating? Or do the systems for selecting for scientific careers select good bureaucrats over geniuses? The same processes might be at work in other areas, e.g. the takeover of music and film industries by "MBA thinking" over people who actually care about art.

- Educational System Decline: Did we over-bureaucratize or otherwise compromise education somehow? Were older teaching methods better?

- Demographics: We're having smaller families, which might affect both growth and parenting styles (more "helicopter parenting"). Nothing obvious here but who knows?

Shrug. But it is alarming to say the least.

Edit: here are some explanations I don't buy:

- Political Correctness / Diversity: There's a wing of the right that thinks that runaway equality and diversity ideology has some responsibility for this. If that's true then why are some of today's most innovative places also left-of-center culturally and why are the bastions of Red State America not centers of innovation? At best I see no correlation in either direction.

- Dysgenics: Even if "stupid people" are breeding more, genetic changes are too slow to account for this. Then you have things like the Flynn Effect, which argue the opposite. Again I see at best no correlation.

- Lack of War: Was it all WWII? I personally don't buy it. WWI didn't result in anything close to the postwar boom, and before that we had millennia of running around and hacking each other up with swords without inventing any integrated circuits or jet engines. Why didn't the Crusades or the endless wars of late Rome lead to a technological explosion? Why didn't Genghis Khan or the Aztecs land on the Moon?

Don't forget how everything is over-regulated nowadays. Anything you do that's too different will probably run afoul of some law. For example, the Intrade shutdown.

You say you've thought this for years. What would have to happen to change your mind? The world seems pretty innovative.

Something fundamental.

There's a qualitative difference between fundamental and incremental innovation.

An example of a fundamental innovation would be radio. Before radio there was... no radio. Nobody could communicate across vast distances invisibly and without sound. After radio, they could. It's an absolute, sharp discontinuity.

An example of an incremental one would be multi-core processors, self-driving cars, or reusable rockets that land themselves. These are awesome don't get me wrong but they're refinements of things we already have. We already had cars, CPUs, and rockets, and now we have better ones.

The line is not perfectly sharp. Were ICs fundamental or just a refinement of transistors? (I'd argue that the photographic down-projection of circuitry in that way was fundamental.) But I think it's fairly clear to me that nothing of even the magnitude of the IC has come about since 1970. Certainly there hasn't been anything of the magnitude of radio, electromagnetism, powered flight, or rocketry in a long time. The last was probably understanding DNA and the DNS->RNA->protein synthesis pathway.

At this point I'm fairly convinced that this doesn't work, but if it had worked it would have qualified:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster

"Cold" fusion, had it actually worked, would also have qualified. Something like that would convince me we have not entered a new dark age.

A possibility I didn't mention in my OP is that we've hit the limits of human cognition. I find it hard to believe that we understand "all of science," but maybe we are close to understanding all that the brain of homo sapiens can process.

Possible candidates for your definition of "fundamental":

- CRISPR

- Machine Learning (the unsupervised variety, specifically)

- Quantum computing (not there yet)

I think these are the three we are "on the cusp" on. They're the ones we'll likely look back on 20 years from now and say "yeah, that sure changed everything, didn't it?"

I think CRISPR is a breakthrough for sure, it's quite unclear whether it will be "fundamental". It's a fantastic research tool. Clinical applications however are quite a bit more challenging and at least in its current incarnation it's hard to see how they might work.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a nuclease, it cuts both strands of the DNA. Doing that to your DNA is a Very Bad Thing and usually turns out poorly regardless of whether you're trying to introduce new DNA into that area. If you've got mouse cells, then cool you only care if you get a few cells get the mutation you want, and if the others are screwed who cares? You get to move on with your experiment radically more quickly than you used to be able to. But that same equation doesn't apply to humans.

Looking at your definition of "fundamental" , i think the thing that broke , was that in the 70's we already had too much fundamental technologies that required huge amount of human capital to "refine" the technologies into really useful things(an extremely hard task) , and of course the market pulled them , together with the issues of basic research we all know.

As for fundamental new things:

1. There's some research in fmri neurofeedback and magnetic stimulation on how to train/affect highly targeted brain regions to achieve variety of psychological effects including spiritual effects that take experienced meditators years to achieve, achieved in short periods of time.

2. lab on chip technology enables you to measure "everything" in the blood .Could lead to complete and fully accurate diagnostics. See healthtell.com

I was starting to write something similar, but realized I was really just projecting. You may be out of touch.

>I've observed a similar thing in areas like film: most of today's films are reboots, rehashes, and remakes or at least are exploring themes and plot templates already laid down. Musical innovation lasted longer but seems to have effectively stagnated since the late 1990s. I haven't heard anything in a long time that doesn't just riff on something pioneered before the year 2000.

There's a lot of wonderful modern stories being told, with new perspectives all the time in film. "Popular" movies have always played to the lowest common denominator.

What you probably missed around the year 2000 was the rise of electronic music. There is an explosion of creativity and new sounds coming out all the time. Again, "popular" music is frequently lowest common denominator.

The field of neuroscience and psychology has come a HUGE way since the 1970s. Remember when people were just "crazy"? Untreatable?

You might not see these things from your vantage point. As you grow older things start to look more and more the same - while it can be true that there are a lot of similarities, know that cognatively it'll be more difficult for you to actually pick out the "new" stuff.

Honest opinion - stop watching the news and hearing professional opinion sellers. There's not as much advertising revenue from telling you that things are doing just fine.

> the year 2000 was the rise of electronic music

Electronic music goes back to the 60's.

Synthpop became popular (mainstream) in the early 1980's as synthesizer keyboards became common.

The 90's dropped the synths as they became too much of a cliché. So you just had a bit of a silent period before 2000, so electronic music in 2000's seemed like something new, but it merely utilized the new technological possibilities.

I mean, thats one way to look at it. If you can't find anything unique in the tens of thousands of home producers nowadays I don't know that there'll be anything you'll find unique. What would you want, music via implant?

Putting it incredibly crudely - rich people started hoarding money, which made everyone else feel financially and personally less safe.

It's still happening. The effects for most of the population are:

Less disposable income Less secure employment Fewer employment choices Less free time away from work Increased debt More anxiety

None of the above are good for creativity or individual freedom. (They're not really good for anything.) And more anxiety usually means less tolerance of all kinds because the stakes for any bad decision are much higher.

In the 60s, universities were full of smart people with tenure, and the mandate of a university was education and research.

In the 10s, universities are full of adjuncts on poverty wages, and the mandate has become expansion and profit.

Wall St used to be under control. Now it's a place where physics PhDs - the ones who could be working on quantum gravity and nanoengineering - go to die.

>The same processes might be at work in other areas, e.g. the takeover of music and film industries by "MBA thinking" over people who actually care about art.

I've heard it called the Capitalist Counter-Reformation - analogous to the period of retrenchment and the reestablishment of regressive values and rigid power structures after the freedom and heterodoxy of the early Renaissance.

We're basically living in the 16th century - not a happy time - but with Internet. We have 21st century science, and 16th century politics and economics, with aristocratic nation states instead of aristocratic city states.

Hopefully we won't get The Inquisition. (I'd like to say I'm optimistic, but it's hard.)

The wealthy don't hoarde money if they can find someting better to do with it.

There's research suggesting a long-term secular decline in returns to business investment starting as early as the mid-1960s. I'd turned up research from the oxymoronically named Deloitte Center for the Edge a couple of years ago, something called the Shift Index.

That, shifts in tax code, generally declining labour power (weaker unions), political shifts, particularly in the US, and oil/energy price hikes and instability, as well as globalisation, all seem to have contributed.

The irony is that once the Internet is done with us, money will be much less useful than it is today. You'll be able to buy all the scrap metal you want, but you won't be able to get a cup of coffee without being polite to someone.

only a very old person would think you could take a modern youth away from the Internet without horrifying them.

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