Comment by rewqfdsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rewqfdsa | Hacker News Reader

Malthus. Malthus, or more specifically, declining returns on investment in science and technology, is holding back the economy. It's not debt levels or bad interest rate policy or currency manipulation; these effects are all second-order. The primary cause of the slowdown is that there's just not much more to _do_.

This lack of opportunity is reflected in the very low interest rates available today combined with low growth. This technological stagnation is reflected in the massive funding of SV-area tech companies, which are shitty opportunities for a return on investment in a world full of even shittier opportunities.

Investors are desperate for a return anywhere. That it's so hard to find a good ROI is against indicative of technological development petering out. After 300 years, we've reached the end of super-Malthusian growth, and we're going to return, hopefully peacefully, to the normal steady-state conditions of human existence, albeit at a higher baseline technology level.

There are no major advances left. Physics can predict everything except the most extreme conditions at the largest and smallest scales, and there are no more bugs in the universe to exploit. Computing will see incremental improvements, but all the really hard problems have already been solved or proved impossible. Quantum computing will make some problems a square-root function easier, but won't change anything. Biotechnology may help us live longer, but research that might change the human condition --- germ-line genomic editing --- has _already_ been banned.

Sure, you might argue, we're still going through the technology revolution. But that's petering out. Cell phone sales growth slipped into the single digits last year. Tablets are dead. Desktop sales have been declining forever. The commercialization of technology we've already developed --- e.g., self-driving cars, automated personal assistants, and high-efficiency power generation --- will decrease costs by some constant factor, but also put a lot of people out of work.

It's remarkably, really, that the laws of the universe are such that humanity was able to elevate itself from ape to thinking ape, and then from thinking ape to calculating machine. It's remarkable that we can compute. Why should we expect the universe to be further more compliant?

> There are no major advances left.

I think the problem is elsewhere. There's noone doing the advancing. People like myself (smart, educated, ambitious, technically-oriented) are way better of doing the unproductive things (finance or ad-tech) than the productive (research). And by "way better" I mean it doesn't even compare! Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actually research).

Simply said, everyone is looking to invest capital in equity, but nobody actually wants to pay people to do the work. Give me a living wage (i.e. not 40k when the tiny apartment I live in costs 600k) and freedom to decide the direction I'll go in, and I'll gladly research "useful stuff". Otherwise, I'd rather chase my own interest by doing the "useless" (but highly-paid) stuff.

> Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actually research).

I have to wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to genuine advances just being harder to come by. When others have already filled in the color between the lines in your field except for tiny bits in the corners here and there, what's left to do but fudge experimental results, salami-slice what genuinely novel results you do see, and take advantage of publication bias?

Maybe researchers wouldn't need to resort to these shenanigans if we weren't running out of things to discover.

Here's a partial list of things that could have had more funding over the past twenty five years, and which are ripe for game-changer advances without needing completely new science:

Renewable energy Social housing Aerospace AI Quantum computing Transport infrastructure Novel Internet distribution/5G SETI Biotech Fusion power Next-generation operating systems

There's been an uptick in momentum in some of these over the last few years, but they're easily at least a decade behind where they could have been if money had been dropped on them from a helicopter instead of being wasted on (say) invading Afghanistan, and keeping banks fed and watered with QE.

The real problem is Wall St. So many PhDs moved there when they could have been doing useful, original research. And Wall St cannibalised academia in other ways, pressuring universities to offer stupendous ROI at the expense of genuine education and research, and warping what used to be a productive culture into yet another hyper-competitive sweat shop.

Financialisation has a social reverse Midas effect - it looks like it's producing gold in the short term, but over longer scales everything it touches turns to shrivelled crap.

You nailed it. I've been banging this drum for a decade. There is currently no feasible career that involves advancing humanity forward. Only different forms of plumbing the digital infrastructure which pay well.

Everyone I know wants to do research. No one wants to do it in academia, and no one wants to live below poverty levels.

The Star Trek economy is here, and it's here now. Basic income, flat-tax and publicly funded research infrastructure (e.g. Bell Labs) is the way forward. Asset bubbles, financial crookery, and trickle up economics are the way of the past.

Time to choose now. Sadly, as a scientist, I know this decision has already been made. Human greed is insatiable, and the top 0.1% won't be satisfied till they're the top 0.01%, and then the 0.001%, and then...

This sentence "Investors are desperate for a return anywhere."

and this sentence "The world economy is being held back by declining returns on investment in science and technology."

are not the same that "The primary cause of the slowdown is that there's just not much more to _do_."

There is a big different between "there are not easy profits in perspective" and "there is nothing more to do".

There are a lot of things to do. A lot of people is living in need and wherever you look you can see possible improvements in education, infrastructure, investigation, etc.

The fact that those things don't have a return of 15% shouldn't be a justification for, we, as a society, not doing them.

> The fact that those things don't have a return of 15% shouldn't be a justification for, we, as a society, not doing them.

Isn't it, though? Doesn't ROI define what it means for something to be "worth doing"? If you think we should be doing X and X is not currently profitable, what's effective isn't expressing disappointment that X isn't being done. What's effective is changing the incentive structure so that X is profitable.

By the way, it's not a 15% return that's necessary. Right now, the current reserve on US federal bonds is 2.56% over 30 years. Investors are buying these things like crazy. It's really fucking sad that our society is so hard-pressed for things to do that 2.56% over 30 years looks like a great opportunity.

"Doesn't ROI define what it means for something to be "worth doing"?"

No, it doesn't. That was my point.

There is an infinite universe of actions we can take. We can sleep all day. We can wave our arms for hours. We can all decide to dress up as Ross Perot. We need some way to determine which actions are worth doing and which are not. You appear to reject the use of return on investment as this filter. With what do you propose to replace it?

I know. The resources are properly allocated by the market.

How do we know they are properly allocated? because in other case, the market would be allocating them in another way.

Don't you think there is a circular reasoning there somewhere?

Even when the economy is under-performing, and there are obviously underutilized resources, we have to accept it because there is not profit in perspective to make. This is the logic that, for instance, pursue austerity in Europe instead of counter-cyclic policies that would be the logic thing to do.

What about using markets as a tool for accomplish society goals instead of as the way to define the goals? What about defining goals using that other tool we have: democracy.

You seem to be pricing risk at $0.

As a simple and relevant example, would you rather invest in a company that has a 10% chance at a 1000% return (but otherwise returns 0%), or take the 2.56% bond?

The EV of the first option is 100% return (with high risk), whereas the other is 231% compounded (guaranteed).

There are lots of major advances left. You can't look at the past or present as a way of saying there are no major advances left. People throughout history could and have done this, only to be proven wrong. Don't equate breakthroughs/advances with scientific research, a lot of the breakthroughs and advances we take for granted today came out of some random human beings imagination. Disruptive breakthroughs does not take the game incremental and linear ahead through a predictable path - it shows a path no one before had thought of existed or even though possible.

I kinda like your response, and agree with many of the sentiments you express - a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the rest may be beyond the reach of most people. But the strange thing is that there is plenty of stuff "_to_do_"... but its not getting done, at least not very fast, for example:

- converting the economy to carbon neutral ( one "gigfactory" is getting build, but we could do with about 100) - curing cancer and heart disease (not to mention all the other diseases) - curing old age - colonizing the moon/Mars - creating a general purpose artificial intelligence... etc.

You might be interested in: http://thebaffler.com/videos/graeber-thiel

The counter would be that technology has created and is continuing to create significant economic changes that make investment predictions more difficult.

Improved transport and communications for a start have had, and will continue to have, massive impacts on both labour and assets by facilitating a more distributed workforce and changing the value of real estate (currently 60% of global assets). Those changes will definitely decrease the ROI of real estate investment, but don't necessarily reflect a decrease in production.

Meanwhile, disruptive technologies challenge traditional protected market sectors as regulatory barriers fail to catch-up with new threats to existing businesses (e.g. Uber, Airbnb). Again, those changes will decrease ROI in traditional sectors, and due to efficiencies in the new model the overall money spent in these sectors may decrease.

In effect we could be revisiting the arguments around Marx's "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...).

The flip side to these impacts is that the rapid change to the economy hasn't yet been fully appreciated or addressed by current government policy.

For example, improvements in health technology have extended the age to which the Baby Boomer generation has been able to remain in the workforce, as well as overall life expectancy, placing far greater strain on social services and health planning than expected.

At the same time, "entry" jobs have far greater expectations than 30 years ago as automation has reduced the need for unskilled/entry labour, while increasing the demand for highly-skilled specialisations. This has delayed the entry of Gen Y into the workplace (with many workplaces unwilling to invest in training entry-level workers and at best offering unpaid internships) which has meant far reduced consumption and tax revenue than might otherwise be expected demographically. This has created a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem as reduced consumption doesn't justify increased hiring, but the lack of jobs prevents consumption (and experience required to add greater wealth).

Finally, effects on the value of labour have increased inequality (for better or worse as the pg essay controversy demonstrates). In effect, if there is less value for unskilled labour there is the potential for increased demand on social services (see the whole Basic Income debate). Meanwhile the scarcity of high-demand labour increases the wealth accumulated by the educated and talented. How this plays out over time is an interesting question.

This problem has been exacerbated in recent times by monetary policy that has seen far more money flow into the economy only to be captured by well-placed rent-seekers (see Occupy Wall Street etc.).

Add in the historical increases in global debt and recent geopolitical pressure on energy production and you have a perfect recipe for current economic troubles.

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