Cracks in the Great Stagnation? | Hacker News Reader

Cracks in the Great Stagnation?

agglomerations.tech

55 pointsedward115 comments

I think the author confuses what the past and future look like.

I think progress, at slow-mo pace of living through it, always feels slow and stagnant. We like to put placemarkers on "progress" - Columbus lands in America, Constantinople falls, etc. but in reality these are just the big event of a very slow transition. When you read about history of science, chains of developments are usually separated by decades, and only seem like a tight chain because (a) they are long time ago, and (b) they are conveniently filtered from the stuff that ends up being dead ends.

In reality, life expectancy rocketed over the past 60 years, especially so in poorer countries, progress in quantum mechanics, uses of space, democracy, access to education, have developed tremendously. It just feels like boring improvism, but isn't so different from the past.

A total aside, but I find it sooo funny when the author starts off with "the world is stagnating", and then swiftly moves on to "America is great again", completely ignoring the remaining 95% of the world by population.

EDIT: also meant to say, the author writes about exciting developments just around the corner. I think his list would be equally long at any time in the last 20 years. Exciting uses of internet, hydrogen, nuclear fusion of course almost there, rise of dotcoms. Above I describe what the past looks like, this is what the future looks like, always.

I'd like to somewhat disagree. We've never seen such great urbanization. In almost a generation we've moved from rural to urban. We moved from collecting firewood, by hand, and growing our own food. To being completely dependent on electricity, and the electrical grid. I've been luckily enough to meet many elderly people. People who grow up on farms, and moved to cities. Now in their 90s. The 20th century was such a great leap into the future.

I've heard countless times, of a person growing up on a small farm with 8 siblings. Seeing electricity come to their village, the first phones. Them seeing planes for the first time. Being able to afford to make an international phone call. I live in Canada.

Reminders like this send a shiver down my spine. Reality works on such a grander timescale than humans that it’s easy for us to convince ourselves that something is working when in reality it’s only worked so far. My family relies on the trucks to keep rolling. As much as I love post apocalyptically stories like zombies and what not, I firmly understand that I can’t feed my family and would likely be forced to watch them starve if the current world order broke down. Here’s to hoping that great leap into the future wasn’t into a really deep hole with a long fall before we hit solid ground.

The lose of being self-sufficient is one moral of the story. But, their is another that we've forgotten.

The absolute joy of modernity.

People abandoned those farms as quickly as they could. It was no fun working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day. A cow needs to be milked, or its utter bursts. Animals needs food and care. Wood needs to be chopped, or you get cold.

Factories were clean (compared to the farm), well lighted. You got Sunday off. You could save some money from your paycheck, take a vacation. The workday ended a 6, you'd be home and and have dinner at 6:30.

> The absolute joy of modernity.

Oh my god, No. This is not an absolute. Are some things better? Yes. Are some things worse, Yes. The relative mix of the two depends on who you are and what you have access to.

People abandoned those farms on the basis of optimism that certain things would improve, which you’ve pointed out, but how many of them had a crystal ball that foretold of environmental collapse, community collapse, loneliness, mental health issues, and massive and growing inequality?

Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.

You clearly have never been a farmer. People left the farms because the alternatives were BETTER. Not because of "optimism" but because working 12 hours a day for a guaranteed wage you could use to buy food / clothing / shelter was better than working 16 hours a day to try and grow food only to still potentially starve due to environmental factors outside your control. Modernity certainly has its problems, but for the vast, vast majority of people its much preferable to the drudgery, toil and uncertainty of being a subsistence farmer.

> Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.

A husband and wife team of sociologists tried this experiment and set up to live like the late 1800s.

The wife broke down after 3 weeks. The husband likely wasn't very far behind.

The wife spent ALL her time cooking and cleaning. The husband spent his time exhausted from physical work. Period. Repeat ad nauseam. There was a reason families had 10 children back then.

Electricity and the electric motor was HUGE. If you sent people back to the world before electricity, they would regard it as a literal hell.

Compare to the large groups of Amish, Mennonites and similar, who live like this currently but with the benefit of community and other things I mentioned above as negative components of modernity. One of the groups (Amish I believe) has something called Rumspringa, a time when teens leave the strict confines of the community to experience modernity. The vast, vast majority return to their communities.

A husband and wife team trying out the 1800s lack community and the other things I mention above. Also, using a husband and wife team of sociologists (meaning, educated, employed and highly employable with job security, salaried, with health care coverage, etc etc) as the quintessential example of a human under modernity seems fishy to me.

My point is not that modernity has no benefit whatsoever. My point is that it is ridiculous to called it an “absolute” joy, indicating no downside. Sure, for the privileged that may be true, but for many it is not the case.

It's not really fun being in those communities if you don't believe, or are gay. It's also hard to leave, as you might not have the resources to do so.

There are lots of things that need to be improved upon. I've seen enough miserable people, living alone, watching TV all day with no friends. Yes, for far too many this life is just the dregs.

Exactly, something that few are willing to recognize these days. Same people who will pay for any tiny convenience also tend to glamorize the past. None of them would put up with a day of an average person from 150 years ago.

20th century has certainly been revolutionary, no doubt about that. It is a bit of a apples-to-oranges comparison though. We can't resolve solved problems.

The starting point for, dunno, 1970, is a world where people don't have to plough fields by hand / oxen, at least in the developed world. This is the shoulders of giants we are standing on. The information revolution that happened since is enormous.

The societal changes, where expectations on women went from make-babies-and-stay-at-home to forge-your-own-destiny is massive (WIP sadly, but going in a good direction). Access to education and real access to democracy have hugely improved in the last decades. Internet revolutionised information access. How crazy it is that any aspiring teenager, in US, India or Tonga, can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, download state-of-the-art programming language frameworks, follow free tutorials on-line, do courses on Coursera... that is, to me, as liberating as the farmland-to-downtown transition, just in a different sphere of life, and, well for people who live "far away" - doesn't make it any less impressive...

The "stagnation" argument is probably specifically about productivity growth, which is best documented by Robert Gordon:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w18315

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/th...

The above are strictly American phenomena, though similar trends exist elsewhere in the world. Gordon also claims that these trends are most visible in the US, since the US is in many ways at the vanguard of technology-driven productivity growth; other economists have well documented that GDP growth is highest among economies playing "catch up" (which is why, in bull markets, developing markets often have far greater growth than developed markets).

I don't have them on hand, but there are some interesting papers on the "cost of innovation", some of which have recently been on HN. The estimated ROI (measured by cost-per-patent or cost-per-new-pharmaceutical development, for example) is claimed to be declining. (See https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-the-u-s-innovation-ecosystem-is-... for a summary.)

To your specific examples:

* Life expectancy increased primarily due to widespread vaccination and better public health (e.g. clean drinking water, pasteurization). These are "one time" gains; the efficacy and returns (in terms of QUALYs) on investment in new health technologies have been much lower in the last few decades, which leads one to wonder if the low-hanging fruit have been plucked.

* Use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains (like GPS, mass wireless communications, or cheaper areal surveillance), but, again, these seem to be declining returns; it's not clear that we possess the technical means to make interplanetary travel economically viable, so this seems analogous to an observation of Gordon's that I love: that in 1960 you could get between NYC and San Francisco in about 6 hours, and today, you can do so in about 6 hours.

Interestingly, I disagree with the authors of this essay in exactly the opposite direction you do: I think the "Great Stagnation" is real, and I think their "innovations" are underwhelming. (So I can wear a screen on my face instead of holding it in my hands? Big deal!)

Ray Kurzweil somewhat famously suffers from a severe recency bias when he claims increasing rates of innovation: to him, the change from (say) iron to steel is kind of minor, but the change from analog to digital TV—that's a big deal!

I feel these authors make a similar error. In 100 years, I don't think many people are going to care deeply about when we came up with the Oculus.

Very much this.

People need to look at things from a "technology in use" perspective rather than just read press releases about the latest invention.

David Edgerton's The Shock Of The Old[1] is a useful corrective to the gee-whizzery of pieces like the OP. (I'm re-reading it at the moment.)

1. https://www.amazon.com/Shock-Old-Technology-Global-History/d...

I agree with your point. That being said, something to be said about the decreasing ROI of R&D - There is evidence that the rate of return of all capital investment is going down slowly since the 50s, in the US.

Hmm, but how do you know that rates of return on capital in general aren't declining simply because of reductions in productivity growth or decreased innovation? I'm not even clear on causality here—if return on capital goes down, maybe people choose less productive investments, which leads to less innovation and less development of new productivity drivers?

Anyway, I have not seen the claim that return on capital is declining. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp2017-25.pdf (first Google result ;) ) doesn't seem to indicate that.

Got a link? I'm curious to read... :)

The issue with that paper is that it takes into account the rate of return of everything, not just capital. From the studies I've read, the decline in capital returns has been compensated for by increase in rents, capital gains, and increase in housing value. It also takes into account all countries, instead of just the US. So in the end it's not really relevant to the rate of return on capital, because they don't even make an attempt to evaluate it - the closest they get is equity, but then they count capital gains and have incomplete dividend data.

It's not immediately clear that increases in productivity growth or increases in innovation would necessarily lead to increase in returns - because if everyone innovates, you won't be able to transform those into increased profit easily.

There's only a few dozen studies on the return of capital, instead of general returns, and they tend to be made by heterodox economists, but they are correct and peer-reviewed, such as this one : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/04866134114238...

Huh? In most usage I've seen, "return on capital" means on all capital, not just equity (and not just dividends on equity, which I think you are implying?).

But I'm not an economist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding you or the paper. In particular, returns on real estate or capital gains are certainly "return on capital". Are you saying otherwise?

> It's not immediately clear that increases in productivity growth or increases in innovation would necessarily lead to increase in returns - because if everyone innovates, you won't be able to transform those into increased profit easily.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I recall an argument (I can't remember who makes this) that as labor productivity decreases (i.e., cost of labor goes up relative to its returns), more money flows into capital investments, because (to take a factory example) lower and lower value capital investments now look attractive (relative to spending that money on more labor). So that suggests that as labor gets more expensive, return on capital may (on average) decline.

That suggests in turn that if labor productivity increases, less money is invested in capital improvements, meaning on average return on capital increases.

But that's a sort of funny way of arguing what I really meant, which is that there's a more direct causal relationship: capital investments result in labor productivity increases, which result in increased return on capital. That is, after all, the very rationale behind such investments.

For the last few hundred years we’ve been living in a period of exponential growth- in population, in scientific understanding, in production of all sorts.

That was never going to last forever. Every exponential growth process eventually reaches its limit. The exponential turns into a logistic curve as the limit is approached. It’s not the end of the world by any means.

But what I think is inaccurate is posing the regime of exponential growth as a normal state of affairs that can be returned to. Clearly that period was totally unique in all human history. If you assume it was going to last forever you get mathematically absurd results. For example if you assume 3% per year growth in wages over the next 1000 years then every worker is going to be making 274 quadrillion dollars per year. In 2000 years they are making 1.89x10^30 dollars. In 3000 years they are making 1.23x10^43 dollars. In 4000 years it’s 9x10^55 dollars, which is enough money to buy each atom that makes up the planet earth at a price of $100000 per atom. These are silly numbers, but that’s the point: exponential growth ends.

Energy is key, obviously. If we ever want to reap the benefits of autonomous cars, we need cheap sustainable energy. With cheap energy we are not constrained to ever denser mega cities with their social, political, and safety problems.

Productivity will likely never stop growing. That would imply that we don't learn. The question is: Will it grow strong enough and in a sustainable manner?

> With cheap energy we are not constrained to ever denser mega cities with their social, political, and safety problems.

Mega cities may show to be a huge engine for innovation. People accumulate on cities for a reason. Productivity grows as more people interacts and share ideas.

Cities are safe, diverse, places where you do not depend on the judgement of a small set of popular people in your community. My father family comes from a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is an oppressive feeling with consequences for anyone that does not conform to the prevailing mindset.

Mid/small size cities (1-3 million) seems a good size for me. So, I also share part of your feelings. I could not live in a small town thou, it is not for me.

It is obvious that large cities exist for a reason. But it is also obvious that some people can cope with their limitations much better than others. Think of young, able, independent, wealthy adults vs. families, for instance. Families in general do much better in smaller communities, because they offer more space and less traffic (up to a point, though because schools etc. should preferably be in walking distance).

That being said, cities might offer communities thag provide for special needs whereas towns and villages tend to be more streamlined. Living with kids is such a streamlined thing.

"Cope with their limitations"? Many people actively enjoy living in busy cities, and I would not voluntarily move to a place that's not Alpha- or higher on this list:

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

Choeger meant that some people are more comfortable living in a busy city than others (alternatively, some people cope with the side-effects of busy cities better than others), choeger didn't deny that cities are advantageous for certain activities and people. I think it's just a semantic issue and there's no real disagreement here.

And many people despise living in cities! As a New Yorker who worked in NYC for many years, I would not voluntarily move to any city for any reason.

Los Angeles is a megacity with lots of space. It's nothing like Manhattan; most of the space is taken up by single-story houses with yards.

In fact, most of New York is not like Manhattan, either -- but its buildings are packed much more densely than LA's.

The case can be made that cities produce well rounded children, that mature faster. Cities expose children to all sorts situations, and people, that they learn to handle. Children in cities are also more independent able to go on the bus, bicycle to where every they want. There are more resources for children, such as museums, pools.

It's harder to raise a child in a small city. You always have to drive them somewhere, and become a hoovering babysitter. They can't see their friends, unless driven. They are bussed to school, and home. Meaning that they don't get extra-curricular activities.

Some studies, however, have shown that medium sized cities are best. 50K people, because a child will get special attention from a teacher/mentor. Many good athletes come from medium sized cities. But, it may be hard for some kids to find a teacher that holds their interest. For example a kid that likes astronomy.

>Cities are safe,

This may be up for discussion, and the unsafest places usually happen to be parts of large cities.

>Mid/small size cities (1-3 million)

Really? Where are you from, that those cities are considered small/mid size?

One of the big issues when talking about "city size" is the definition of city.

When people outside the US talk about "San Francisco" they mean the 9 county San Francisco Bay Area[1] (pop: nearly 7m), and almost never the City of San Francisco[2] (pop: nearly 900K).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

You are right. Metropolitan area makes more sense. There are administrative reasons for a metropolitan area to be subdivided in cities or towns but effectively it acts as just one city.

I was thinking about Paris (city 2 million, metro 12.5 million) or Barcelona (city 1.6 million, metro 5.5 million). Similar to your example.

Cities are also layers of people. You'll find, many times, that some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods are a 5 minute walk from some of the poorest. But, the people will never interact. So safety stats about cities are misleading.

> social, political, and safety problems.

What are those "social" and "political" problems associated with cities?

Social: Housing, for instance.

Political: The inability to execute policies due to the sheer inertia of the city.

> With cheap energy we are not constrained to ever denser mega cities with their social, political, and safety problems.

If we want to leave room for intact ecosystems, dense cities are the only way.

Your advocating more sprawl. What's needed for long term survival of the human race (from an environmental sustainability perspective) is more urban concentration.

If I were very cynical, i would see the reason for the great stagnation in the fact that the USA wasn't able to either rob any country blind or profit from some widespread unrest in the last decades. A lot of the technical leadership the US has maintained in the 20th century was built on the shoulders of others. Be it the german pharmaceutical industry after world war 1, jewish immigrants from europe, operation paperclip, east european intellectuals during the cold war, asian immigrants fleeing wars, the US has always attracted or coerced these people. And I think atleast voluntary immigration to the US is declining due to the political and social issues with which the US is associated more and more. At least in my wider social circle (Engineering/Sciences), very few people are even considering the US to emigrate to anymore, which is a major contrast to 10-15 years ago.

The fact that you aren't considering asian or jewish immigrants to be American is somewhat telling of your view of America in general. Immigrating to the US for better economic opportunities isn't the US building "on the shoulders of others" as you put it. Those immigrants are Americans, and they are almost exclusively why America sustained technical dominance post WW2.

They are Americans now, but they weren't when they decided to come to the US, and were it not for some disaster they likely would have stayed or left in much lower numbers.

The fact that America does not suffer from the kind of disruptions that cause other countries to lose their talent may be the reason for its winning advantage. Why not look for what that is instead of blaming a country for giving refuge to those that need it and benefiting from the natural rewards that come.

I didn't see the parent doing that. The parent was theorizing that the reason why US/Western tech is in some kind of stagnation is because the world is more stable and so the stability advantage is reduced.

Also, it is an undeniable fact that the US and the Western world in general were in no small part the causes, or certainly exacerbating factors, of these disruptions.

Agreed on the latter point, and the burgeoning global software industry will likely break stagnation even further, but all the examples of breaking stagnation in the article are American companies.

Anyways I don't want to come off as some flag-waving nationalist, I just dont think that the story of immigrant success in the United States should be painted as America exploiting these people's talents at their expense.

Sure, if everyone was content no one would look for opportunities. I don't see the point.

The point is that the gradient of discontent is no longer as harsh in the western direction, and that the OP theorizes that this is a reason for the decreasing share of the productivity growth focused in the West/US.

There is some empirical evidence for those theories. The US and the West in general have profited of disruptions they caused or partially helped, from scuttling research projects using political pressure and then hiring the researchers into the US up to arming rebellions and indeed military intervention.

while those immigrants did great things. the economy was certainly not exclusively built on them. in fact it’s the opposite. they came to america because it was growing with a lot of opportunity and wealth. you’re reversing the causality

When you read biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/820) you get a sense of how quickly innovation moved. And, how far ahead the USA was, of everyone else.

Also when you read these biographies you realize that science education has never really been appreciated in the USA or England. These countries do occasionally spit out great innovators, but not because of the educational system. It's because people in the USA are free to peruse what they want, and the USA has lots of capital.

> When you read [ American ] biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's ... you get a sense of how quickly innovation moved. And, how far ahead the USA was, of everyone else.

Don't forget these are self-serving documents. This is not a slur on Americans: I once gave a talk at La Vilette in Paris. An English colleague of mine came along. As we walked in he sneered, "this is the kind of place where the French claim to have invented everything." Of course in the UK you can find such places as well. You can find the same elsewhere.

Edison did good work on the light bulb ... building on a Canadian patent. The automobile was not invented in the USA. The A bomb was invented in the USA by ... an international team. Especially in the early 20s the USA was not "far ahead of everyone else".

Where the US does endanger itself is a certain myopia. For example space museums in the US typically only discuss the US space program, as if, apart from a quick mention of Sputnik and perhaps Gargarin, it was the only one. It's understandable that many people will be more interested in the developments of their country! But that view, writ large, means people will suffer crappy things too (e.g. lousy medical system) not realizing that things really are better elsewhere. It also means, when, say, jobs move to China, that that country must be an "enemy". In reality it's not a wealthy country and has a lot of tough problems. And has advanced technology the US does not.

The idea that immigration is declining due to social and political issues lacks perspective.

Despite all the rhetoric, the US is high among the most equitable, least racist, safest and politically free countries in the world.

If immigration regulation were relaxed, there would be a flood of well-educated people from China, India and many other nations.

On the other hand, immigrants from western Europe don't have much to gain from moving the the US. They basically would be trading higher salaries for higher expenses.

I can tell you as a matter of fact that many immigrants, even outside of Western Europe, no longer see as much of an incentive to emigrate, and when they do the US is no longer the undisputed #1 place to go. I would imagine this is certainly even more the case in China and India, where development is even faster, and you can even notice immigrants leaving the US.

This isn't really a concern when at the same time the people wishing to immigrate vastly outnumber the people accepted for immigration, as evidenced by the yearly limit for most visas being reached within days.

The vast majority of people that want to immigrate to the US are not going to contribute to innovation, and those that do are accepted.

Why did you move the goalpost towards "innovation"? If you're on an H1B visa, you're probably contributing to some company attempting to be innovative. If not, who cares? The economy doesn't run on innovation alone.

The thesis of the article is that the US economy's "Great Stagnation" in productivity is due to a lack of innovation. There are no goalposts being moved.

Contributing to a company attempting to be innovative doesn't mean that you are being innovative, and so the degree at which you are capable of innovation doesn't matter very much. As for people being recruited specifically for innovation, there is essentially no limit in their immigration.

The American self hate / leftist meme ("America is only great because it robs other people") is fascinating. There are very good arguments against it.

I wouldn't assume the opposite and become a boastful patriot either, but maybe the big leaps taken in the past were so good that people got lazy. You didn't need to innovate or only innovate for money (which isn't nearly as effective a motivator as being annihilated by Germans or ICBMs). There is also the argument of low hanging fruits, but I find that it's easy to undervalue the inventions of things you already know very well.

There is no grand narrative anymore. Things are just chugging along. Covid is a new narrative and voilá: mRNA vaccine.

I’m in my thirties and I’m my lifetime we’ve seen:

- Growth of the Internet into a worldwide network that has changed life as we know it

- supercomputers that can fit in your pocket (and not only that... some people find them too small!)

- treatment for HIV progress to the point where you can live a normal life with it

- similar advances for many types of cancer

- the ability to synthesize diamonds

- electric cars that perform as well or better than gasoline cars

- airplanes so reliable that there has been one death on a US commercial flight in over a decade, and even that was a freak accident

But yeah, I guess these are all tiny achievements!

>> But yeah, I guess these are all tiny achievements!

Compared to what my grandparents had seen between the time they were born and middle age, say 1920-1970, yes, those are tiny achievements.

You: Growth of the Internet, supercomputers that can fit in your pocket

Them: Invention of FM radio, transistors, broadcast and cable TV, transcontinental phone cables, industrial robots, lasers, integrated circuits, hand held calculators, computers, internet, virtual reality, video games, PCs, liquid crystal displays, silicon solar panels, microwave ovens, nuclear fission

You: treatment for HIV progress to the point where you can live a normal life with it, similar advances for many types of cancer

Them: Vaccines for polio and measles, penicillin, antiviral drugs, insulin, organ transplants, smallpox almost eradicated, elimination of hookworm, oral contraceptives, artificial hearts, CPR, defibrillators. Life expectancy of 53 in 1920, 70 in 1970. 78 today, which is a decrease from 2015. Infant mortality of around 100 per 1000 in 1920 to 22 in 1970. 6 today. Plus no HIV.

You: the ability to synthesize diamonds

Them: Diamonds were first synthesized in 1954: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

You: electric cars that perform as well or better than gasoline cars, reliable airplanes

Them: Liquid-fueled rockets, ballistic missiles, satellites, jet engines, supersonic aircraft, nuclear submarines along with mass ownership of automobiles. In 1970, there were four living people who had walked on the moon. Today, there are four living people who walked on the moon, the youngest one is 85.

In addition, to all that you have the demographic changes. 30% of the population worked on farms in 1920, only 4% by 1970. 51% urban in 1920, 74% in 1970. High school graduation rate of 17% in 1920, 79% in 1970. Around 4% of the population had a college degree in 1920.

To me, the changes in my lifetime do seem pretty minor in comparison.

Not as romantic as Nellie Bly going around the world in 72 days (1890). Using trains, steamship and the telegraph she wrote about the voyage for her newspaper. Meeting up in France with Jules Verne. Taking an express train from California back to New York to beat out a competitor, doing the same trip, but travelling in the other direction, and for a rival newspaper. (http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.h...)

Natural diamonds were already being manufactured long before your birth. They're just bigger now. Otherwise in full agreement!

There seems confusion on what the Great Stagnation is -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation

A new laptop won't just reverse it after 70 years of computers not 'cracking it'.

The Great Stagnation is pausing for now because of one thing.

The Internet.

The article mentions VR.

The fantastic low price of the Oculus Quest 2 VR device is not real. It's heavily subsidized by Facebook, who wants to be the dominant player in the market and makes money by selling your data and eyeballs to advertisers.

Tons of things are subsidized to push down the price; oil & fuel, farmed goods, electric cars, everything you can buy on on Amazon, inkjet printers, groceries (discounts, coupons, promotions), games (Steam sale, G4A), etc. Discounts / subsidies / whatever you want to call them are an established and accepted sales tactic, because people realized volume trumps everything else, and more recently, recurring payments trump single purchases.

It's a problem when a large market player such as Facebook with large earnings from its advertising business prevents new entries in the VR marketplace from being competitive.

Almost all game consoles launch heavily subsidized, in order to establish a dominant sub-monopoly and reap the game licensing royalties later on.

Maybe the concept of "we wanted flying chars - got 140 chars" was a little bit misguided. People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them, but boy do they want to entertain themselves and overcommunicate with their circle through their phones.

They may not even want self-driving cars. If 40% work remotely , driving becomes a leasurely activity, so maybe improving communication networks is more important than adding computers to cars.

Tons of airlines and tour operators are going bankrupt with the pandemic in europe. The tourism bubble was a hugely wasteful treadmill perpetuated by people forced live in tiny spaces in expensive cities. Airlines didn't want faster or bigger planes, they wanted cheaper airports.

Surely COVID was a great accelerator for trends that preexisted. Biotech seems the biggest winner, not because it accelerated discovery, but because it removed regulatory hurdles. It remains to be seen how effective the change will be, as the vaccines haven't yet been rolled out. OTOH technologies like VR don't seem to be going anywhere despite being heavily pushed.

> "People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them"

Firstly they do, most cars go 3 - 5 times above the speed limit. Never saw a car that can't exceed the speed limit and is not in a museum.

Secondly, flying cars are not about speed, they are about freedom of movement and lack of congestion.

>"Airlines didn't want faster or bigger planes, they wanted cheaper airports."

What are you referrring to or comparing to, planes from 1920's, or the past few decades? Becauae we've made great strides in efficiency of said planes in the past few decades.

Also its the travelers that want this or that, Airlines don't want anything.

You re talking about top speeds which have incremental improvemetns, but people's popular choices are not roadsters, but rather bulky and slow SUVs. And if we re talking about flying cars, we don't know the demand they 'd have, but even now people don't move outside of crowded cities just to avoid congestion.

> efficiency of said planes

And yet planes are slower and smaller. Sure, i m talking about what travelers want. Turns out people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes like the concorde or A380, and airlines adapted

> "slow SUVs" Thats a meaningless statement without numbers. How many people are buying SUVs? I live im Britain, there are hardly any SUV's, most of the world is not living in US.

A roadster is not just a faster car, its tiny, useless and expensive to boot. It can't travel a mile down a road in Russia without getting stuck. It still can't (legally) exceed the speed limit. It's utility advantage over a compact is zero.

If people bought roadsters, that still has no relevance to flying cars.

People live in cities because that's where the well paid jobs are. Many mouve out when they hit pention. It's a completely separate set of tradeoffs that has nothing to do with the subject

The whole argument about flying cars makes no sense.

> people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes

Its the other way round - people pay extra for smaller planes that take them directly to their destination, as opposed to taking a big plane and then change flights in a spoke and hub model.

Also planes are not any slower, speeds of all subsonic planes have been very consistent.

Well, if there was demand for faster cars there would be demand for faster roads. Frankly, if people really had an appetite to live in futuristic cities, they might move to newly built cities in Asia/ME, but it's not really happening. The top reason to fly is still "leasure purposes", which hardly sounds urgent and explains why people are happy with direct but slow flights. I actually think people's priorities are different and the futurism of the past did not prove to be a good predictor for the future.

A major shift is of course the end of the Cold war, which cooled down innovation in general, but it s still curious why digital tech did so much better.

VR needs more advanced and miniaturized battery and display technology. In it's current form it's blurry, clunky, overly constrained and unrealized by any game. If it had a killer game the people would come despite the other shortcomings. A killer game is unlikely without the others progressing further.

And "better gaming" is not productivity-enhancing in the way that penicillin or telephones were.

Sure, VR may be useful for training (or even actual work) in some industries, but the operative word here is "some". Few workers will don VR headsets in their working lives.

[Summary/Long:] "Low-hanging fruits been plucked, the use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains,"

"immigrants moving seems trading higher salaries for higher expenses,"

"inaccurate is posing the regime of exponential growth as a normal state of affairs that can be returned to If you assume it was going to last forever you get mathematically absurd results. For example if you assume 3% per year growth in wages over the next 1000 years then every worker is going to be making 274 quadrillion dollars per year. In 2000 years they are making 1.89x10^30 dollars. In 3000 years they are making 1.23x10^43 dollars. In 4000 years it’s 9x10^55 dollars, which is enough money to buy each atom that makes up the planet earth at a price of $100000 per atom."

> "Does it sound obvious that some people can cope better with limitations than others?"

[short/conclusion:] (painoptimized^^) Duh "We want flying cars" But... um How else do we get the (armored) anti-riot water cannon truck upstairs ?

May robots carry'em ? P-:

hint: it wasn't intentionally but "anecdotes that have a place in a 'bigger' picture" for a first look, wow...interestic thread, you have... (-:

The core separation was always arbitrary and overly staged to the benefit of the author's position. Peter Thiel is fond of dividing between atoms and bits, where he then proclaims that the only substantial progress has been in the world of bits. That's a poorly staged argument for his benefit, as in reality progress in the world of bits is progress in the world of atoms. It's all the same real world. It's a borderline mystical separation, like pretending the body and brain are not connected, or that the body has a distinct magical soul separate from the physical (and Thiel is loaded with mystical beliefs, so it makes sense that his irrationality would predictably repeat). It's a particularly amusing logic failure by Thiel because he attempts to take up a pro-science, pro-reason position. As one example, the mass global adoption of email (and numerous other similarly effective instant communication tools) over the last 20-25 years is a tangible, real thing and it involves atoms as much as a skyscraper or an automobile does. If our computing improves by ten fold, if we build giant globe-spanning systems for commerce, communication, media, entertainment, knowledge/education - that's all extraordinary progress in the world of atoms. You get a sense of Thiel's personal snobbery and bias in what he chooses to proclaim to be real progress. The very rapid advance of the GPU the past two decades, along with what it enables in the so-called world of bits (which, again, is actually the world of atoms as well), is every bit as important as many prominent world of atoms events in the 20th century, yet Thiel's position is to debase such accomplishments, because his argument is harmed by that advancement.

Building data centers is building a mill or factory. That obviously isn't to imply they employ the same number of people (which is a distinct issue of automation, efficiency, etc). Thiel & Co. like to pretend there's some magic to steel or plastic and there is nothing special (atoms tangible) about a data center - and all the technology that goes with it - linked up at the speed of light to the rest of the world. It's nothing more than a silly and arbitrary line they've drawn to the benefit of their position.

This is downright silly -improvements in material science, like inventing stainless steel, immediately levels up all industries in all of civilisation, from heavy industry to street furniture to cuttlery.

Faster GPU's do not directly improve life of an average Joe, they might enable some second order effect, like research or production of educational videos, etc. But the effects are much smaller and you can only equate the two if you are living in fantasy land

If we go from GPUs to CPUs and memory or even generic IC. Faster CPUs meant also more efficient and smaller CPUs meaning cheaper CPUs. Brining down the price of mobile phones and computers. And even increasing the rates of data transfer.

I can't say that there has not been massive change for average Joe in last 30 years due to this...

Tes ofcourse but imagine if that kimd of improvement happened in metallurgy, we'd have space elevators, you could have a vication on Ganymede and the concept of rare metal would cease to exist

I find this argument sophomoric and that it misses the point. You are combining the infrastructure with the thing itself.

Maybe emails are sent using a physical infrastructure. How many atoms would it take to send the same number of physical mails (letters on paper)? Remember to account for the atoms in the transport infrastructure, as you are doing for emails.

Theil's comparison is between progress in moving information around versus progress in our ability to create physical structures - to move mass around.

More importantly, though, the advent of email has not shown up in productivity statstics. Office worker productivty growth did not change observably after email became ubiquitous.

Thiel perhaps believes that a x10 improvement in speed of creating physical structures would show up in productivity figures. I'm doubtful, because I think the stagnation has happened for reasons other than stagnation in our ability to move mass.

'Productivity' is a measure of surplus to the business sector, it doesn't measure consumer surplus.

Literally, the more we pay out of pocket for whatever good, the higher the productivity numbers.

Producers forced to compete and reduce prices ... productivity numbers go down because we measure the lower prices as implying lower value when that's not the case.

The fact that this is an ideological screed as opposed to a thoughtful piece comes through almost immediately. (E.g. blaming the regulatory state for failing to impose mask restrictions, which in the US at least, was a result of the current administration going out of their way to dismantle the apparatus setup to handle pandemics).

That would be ok if there were some numbers or data presented to show that the great stagnation was indeed coming to an end. Unfortunately it’s simply a collection of dubious anecdotes that really don’t mean much in the bigger picture. Anyone could collect a similar collection of anecdotes which were less dubious than what the author has picked from almost any time period during the “great stagnation”.

I tend to agree with your second paragraph, but this is a blog post and is clearly speculative; it's not an econ paper.

To your first paragraph: AFAICT this is a blog by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is a centrist Democratic think tank. I think they were just "blaming the regulatory state" in the sort of formal sense that they were saying there was lost productivity due to regulatory missteps; they weren't making an ideological screed about harmful regulation.

> blaming the regulatory state for failing to impose mask restrictions, which in the US at least, was a result of the current administration going out of their way to dismantle the apparatus setup to handle pandemics

It's interesting that the CDC's initial statements that masks don't work and are counterproductive (later reported to be deliberately misleading) seem to be fading from memory so fast that it's not even a conceivable criticism, which leaves us with "well, they didn't impose mask restrictions".

The "Innovation in the physical world" section seems to have little that actually addresses the productivity and societal part of the Great Stagnation. mRNA vaccines aren't some massive innovation over traditional vaccines, and the difference between mRNA and traditional vaccines won't have a visible impact on daily life. Clean energy and lab-grown meat are great innovations, but the ideal case for both is that they're indistinguishable from dirty energy and animal meat in use case.

‪Good ideas here. Better writing would be less distracting. Light does not have eyes with which to peek, but it can leak through a crack And peek is spelled with 2 Es, as in “to peek through a crack in a wall” not peak, as in the top of a mountain.‬

“There seem to be cracks in the Great Stagnation and light is peaking through on the other end.”

Wiktionary gives a definition of "To be only slightly, partially visible, as if peering out from a hiding place"[1], which seems to be the sense it was used in here. That said, Merriam-Webster and the OED do not include that definition, so perhaps it is non-standard.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peek

You've linked to peeked not peaked, which was the GP's point.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peak

For other readers, wikitionary does not make any such claim about 'peaked'. The only definition it contains is this:

"Having a peak or peaks"

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peaked

My understanding of the GP's post was they believed that: a) "peak" was a typo or mis-spelling, and the intended word was "peek", and b) that "peek" is incorrect anyway. The link was intended to show that there is a definition of "peek" which would make sense. I think that "peak" is a typo, as it is common enough to be the subject of jokes. [1][2]

[1] https://theoatmeal.com/comics/sneak_peek [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/final...

It’s spelt wrong, but light doesn’t need eyes to peek. It’s a metaphor.

Using a metaphor is not bad writing. Also, why does it matter? If you know what he’s saying, why complain?

It's a grim sentence for sure, but one might have a mountain peaking through the clouds, or a whale peaking through the waves in the correct sense (its peak passes through ...).

The vaccine is great, but that seems like a one-off caused by throwing massive amounts of money at a critical problem.

The rest seem less like breakthroughs and more just improvements as time marches on. Are these really the best examples of breakthroughs that the western world can come up with?

Focus on 'western world' might be a mistake?

A lot of gamechanging science emerged from cold war. Not only did USSR produce some science, western scientists did not have to jump through hoops all day to get funding - politicians knew falling behind was not an option

Oh definitely, but the article seems US-centric for some reason.

It wasn't a one-off, it has accelerated the development of mRNA vaccines. This is a new type of vaccine that will be applied to other diseases as well.

The article primarily talks about the compressed timeline, not the fact its mRNA. I maintain the timeline is a one-off.

The new technology is super exciting though, so lets give the article that. We're hardly so stagnant that a single technological breakthrough is unheard of in the last 50 years and signals an end of stagnancy.

> The article primarily talks about the compressed timeline, not the fact its mRNA. I maintain the timeline is a one-off.

I feel that you're splitting hairs here. The article mentions both in adjacent paragraphs.

And the fact that the vaccine was developed faster was also not a one-off, this is a feature of mRNA vaccines. Future vaccines can be manufactured with the same blueprint by just swapping out the mRNA sequence.

How does developing a vaccine two months faster have a lasting impact on daily life? The best case argument for having a noticeable impact is COVID, and we can't even use that because we split vaccine development into multiple tracks. It's possible that we would've had a traditional vaccine around the same time if we focused more resources on it and less on a novel technique.

> the successful development of several vaccines to the novel coronavirus are a sign that America (with some help from Germany) is still capable of achieving Big Things when we are pushed to it.

So the The Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID vaccine is from the USA then? Wrong. It just isn't. (1)

Bad data in gives bad conclusion out.

Likewise, I would be more impressed by a competent rail rollout (both urban driverless; and long-distance high speed) using technologies proven for decades, than with promises of self-driving cars real soon.

1) https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-11-23-oxford-university-break...

The author is "Director of Innovation Policy" at a US-based think-tank. His agenda (which I agree with, fwiw!) is to influence US government policy. He is trying to do this by encouraging the belief that American innovation has high returns on investment right now, as the "great stagation" may be coming to an end.

Because it's political rhetoric rather than scentific argument, some fudging of the facts is to be expected. The only people likely to be offended at having credit for the innovations stolen are outside the US, and they are not the audience.

It doesn't really detract from the force of the argument, since anything that can be said about American innovation could reasonably be said about European innovation, and "America" could be taken as short-hand for "developed nations at the technological frontier".

> "America" could be taken as short-hand for "developed nations at the technological frontier".

Only in the USA. The rest of us aren't buying it at present. It's navel-gazing.

The USA frankly has some ground to cover to get back to the front rank in governance. The terrible outcome and deepening crisis from COVID-19 in the USA is stark evidence of that, and it can't be wished away by being loose with the facts. It is the legacy of wishful thinking over facts.

Wouldn't it be better for an article which is meant to influence US policy to be grounded in facts? Or are you saying it's fine to make up any old thing because the ends justify the means?

> Wouldn't it be better for an article which is meant to influence US policy to be grounded in facts?

IMHO, the last few years in the USA should serve as a strong lesson in why fact-based policy is superior to fantasy politics.

It might be preferable if everyone dealt in facts all of the time, but political influence is a competitive game. I'm not saying that it's fine to elide the details, just that it's understandable, and understanding why people do things is fun and interesting.

> It might be preferable if everyone dealt in facts all of the time, but political influence is a competitive game.

And how is playing Liar's Poker with a pandemic virus working out for you?

Read the mood, man. Like they say, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked."

Isn't the article talking about the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer (with some help from Germany's BioNTech)?

Last time I checked, there were preliminary results from 3 different vaccines, with teams based in Germany (BioNTech - Pfizer), USA (Moderna in Cambridge Mass) and the UK (Oxford University - AstraZeneca).

So the statement that "the USA has achieved several vaccines" _plural_ is sloppy wording and sloppy with the facts, and just as sloppy thinking.

Pfizer in Germany: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-va...

The company that CNN article is referring to is called BioNTech, not Pfizer, and they have been working on RNA based therapeutics (mostly as cancer treatments) for a long time. They started working on the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in January 2020.

As is often the case when a relatively small pharmaceutical company develops a new product, they teamed up with Pfizer to run the trials, manufacturing and logistics.

The article misrepresents this in multiple ways.

> The company ... is called BioNTech, not Pfizer,

You are correct. They seem to be based in Mainz, Germany. Not American in any sense at all.

I have edited grandparent comment to read "BioNTech - Pfizer", in similar style to "Oxford University - AstraZeneca"

I don’t know. With QAnon people in Congress (M. Greene) I wonder if the tide can be stemmed. Or was it always this bad?

The only breakthrough innovation in my book would be cold fusion - it unlocks so many possbilities and enables solutions to problems which are unthinkable right now as they are to polluting the environment or are prohibitively inefficient. It will be a disruptive change like we saw with steam engines taking over, the ICE or electric power transmission.

Second comes self-driving cars. Not because they unlock the potential to stare at your smartphone so that you can give away more of your personal data to the Internet advertisment industry. But it would result in a turmoil in an endless list of supply chains living from the car industry. With self-driving cars, actually owning a car becomes a luxury only a few will be able to afford. The insurance system or fuel supply system will experience dramatic changes. This Schumpeterian destruction will unlock something. I don't know if it will be growth. The past told us that high cultures also quickly disapeared from time to time.

Cold fusion is mortal nonsense. That is, it's so unlikely you could safely bet your life on it being bogus.

I'm not as convinced as you. There does appear to be something going on with the experiments I've looked at, but I doubt it can be commercialized. For one thing, it's very unreliable and hard to reproduce, so if it is a real phenomenon it probably relies on some unknown conditions that we don't know how to bring about. For another, even in the experiments that demonstrate it, the amount of energy produced is not very much so unless someone can find a way to make it happen reliably and scale it up it seems more like a neat physical oddity than a useful power source.

Ah, the "there must be a pony in here somewhere" argument.

No, that's the meaningless noise one gets when one throws enough bad researchers at a crap subject over a sufficiently long time.

Maybe. That's why I hedged a bit by saying "if it is a real phenomenon". I'm not convinced it is real, but I'm also not convinced there's nothing to it. Schwinger thought there was something to it, so they're not all bad.

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