11 ms·

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

53 points by dismal2 11y ago

api 11y ago
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_20150417085212.jpg 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?
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  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.
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- deleted 11y ago
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- gopher2 11y ago
  You say you've thought this for years. What would have to happen to change your mind? The world seems pretty innovative.
  - api 11y ago
    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 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.
cushychicken 11y ago
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.
- dismal2 11y ago
  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-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
  - cushychicken 11y ago
    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.
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woodandsteel 11y ago
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.
- rayiner 11y ago
  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.
  - maerF0x0 11y ago
    > space colonization impractical for close to a century now. How close to a century?
    - rayiner 11y ago
      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.
      - maerF0x0 11y ago
        Awesome. Thanks!
  - 11y ago
kristianp 11y ago
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 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)
tn13 11y ago
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.
- woodandsteel 11y ago
  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.
oldmanjay 11y ago
only a very old person would think you could take a modern youth away from the Internet without horrifying them.
petra 11y ago
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 ?
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  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.
  - branchless 11y ago
    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.
nickbauman 11y ago
The invention of the washing machine has had more of a disruptive social impact than the invention of the Internet.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  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.
underbluewaters 11y ago
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.
- lkrubner 11y ago
  I wish your comment had been upvoted more.
jqm 11y ago
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.
- mercer 11y ago
  ) (Sorry. This is possibly my first truly useless comment. I blame my recent forays into Clojure territory.)
  - jqm 11y ago
    What do you mean? That comment was useful. We can't have unclosed parentheses or the compiler will throw an error.
dredmorbius 11y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Krugman's LTG post: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/limits-to-growth-and-related-stuff/comment-page-1/ 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-over.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/opinion/krugman-is-growth-...
erikpukinskis 11y ago
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.
jhbadger 11y ago
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.

53 points by dismal2 11y ago

api 11y ago

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_20150417085212.jpg 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?

xyzzy4 11y ago
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.
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gopher2 11y ago
You say you've thought this for years. What would have to happen to change your mind? The world seems pretty innovative.
- api 11y ago
  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 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.

cushychicken 11y ago

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.

dismal2 11y ago
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-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
- cushychicken 11y ago
  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.
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woodandsteel 11y ago

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.

rayiner 11y ago
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.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  > space colonization impractical for close to a century now. How close to a century?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    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.
    - maerF0x0 11y ago
      Awesome. Thanks!
- 11y ago

kristianp 11y ago

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 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)

tn13 11y ago

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.

woodandsteel 11y ago
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.

oldmanjay 11y ago

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

petra 11y ago

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 ?

dredmorbius 11y ago
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.
- branchless 11y ago
  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.

nickbauman 11y ago

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

erikpukinskis 11y ago
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.

underbluewaters 11y ago

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.

lkrubner 11y ago
I wish your comment had been upvoted more.

jqm 11y ago

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.

mercer 11y ago
) (Sorry. This is possibly my first truly useless comment. I blame my recent forays into Clojure territory.)
- jqm 11y ago
  What do you mean? That comment was useful. We can't have unclosed parentheses or the compiler will throw an error.

dredmorbius 11y ago

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.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Krugman's LTG post: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/limits-to-growth-and-related-stuff/comment-page-1/ 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-over.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/opinion/krugman-is-growth-...

erikpukinskis 11y ago

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.

jhbadger 11y ago

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.