Is Growth Over?
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
The robots will create wealth for the people that don't own robots. If they can't afford this wealth the robots will never be created in the first place. It's no different than any other automation technology.
BI will probably happen too late, but if we don't want to die, we will implement it. It used to be that it took a 22-year one-time investment to get people ready for the work force, but now it requires continual education, and without BI, people who lack independent income are going to be in trouble.
At the turn of the millenium people got tired of waiting and the speculative markets fell apart.
But the engineering continues. The friction separating the world's information is in mid-collapse, but the actual diffusion has barely even started.
What's the difference? One acts like it's supposed to help you when you happen to not have a job. The other treats not having a job as an inevitability of the increasing incentive for automation.
See: 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut
Space colonization will probably be another IR, but it seems like serious efforts at a permanent self-sustaining colony (that could survive indefinitely if something really bad happened and the human race on Earth was wiped out) are at least 50 years away.
If we buy a $7 kindle book rather than a $16 paper back does that halve GDP?
We have improved medical care that costs the same does that imply no growth?
If twice as many people use air travel, but it costs half as much does that mean there is no growth?
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The overarching story is still faster-than-exponential. A lackluster (in comparison to what was before it) 50 years does not mean that growth is "over".
Also do you have a source on the reduction in R&D investment in the economy from the cold war until now (for the entire economy)?
* Decent academic jobs have become extremely rare in the past 30 years. * Blue-sky corporate R&D has been slashed. * Worker autonomy is decreasing in most companies, resulting in low job satisfaction.
No one in the R&D world debates the contention that this contraction has been going on for 30+ years and that it's immensely destructive.
The startup scene shows engineers and innovations still reign outside of large organizational structures.
Disagree, at least if by "startup scene" you mean VC-istan. The VCs hold all the cards, and most of those startups aren't very interesting or innovative.
VC-istan is a postmodern tech company. A fairly good one, but more like a large bureaucracy than a research center. The CEOs are semi-independent PMs who are still beholden to their VC bosses.
The only way to turn VC-istan into something decent would be to impose strict regulations over communications between VCs in order to restrict their ability to collude on terms or blacklist entrepreneurs who piss them off.
You can prevent collusion by creating more market options (removing barriers to entry) and promoting greater transparency in the industry.
I'll never understand why people don't look for solutions involving freedom first but instead always look to the government to add restrictions and regulations by force.
That would just make the VC's use encryption and other means of evasion, further pushing their negative activity underground and making it harder for new VC's to get started due to more costs in following regulation.
> The overarching story is still faster-than-exponential
I've heard a lot of people lately incorrectly using the word "exponential" to just mean "pretty fast." It has a specific mathematical meaning which you clearly don't know, but which you should know if you're going to throw around words like "exponential."
If growth over the period you're talking about has 6% per year as an upper bound, that's really saying it's bounded above by some curve of the form
f(t) = k0*1.06^t
The only way you can get faster-than-exponential growth is if the percentage growth of GDP is itself growing every year. Needless to say this will eventually become ridiculously fast growth: If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year. Insane!
Faster-than-exponential means the rate of growth increases as time progresses, e.g. e^(e^t).
By "the overarching story is still faster-than-exponential", what I mean is that the rate of economic growth itself is growing-- taking the long (hundreds of years) view. In agrarian times, 0.1% per year was typical. By the 1700s, we were up to 0.3-0.5% per year. By 1825, 1% per year was typical. Now, global economic growth is about 4% per year.
If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year.
It won't grow that fast. My guess is that the growth rate's own doubling rate is about once every 150 years or so (with noise) meaning we'll see 9-10% growth as the norm in the mid-22nd century. Obviously, there's some limit to this, but once humanity is post-scarcity (ca. 2120) who cares?