12 ms·

Cracks in the Great Stagnation?

55 points by edward 6y ago

jargonology 6y ago
‪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.”
- rjknight 6y ago
  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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peek
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    You've linked to peeked not peaked, which was the GP's point. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peak 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 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peaked
    - rjknight 6y ago
      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 https://theoatmeal.com/comics/sneak_peek [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/finally-a-useful-twitter-bot-it-corrects-people-who-write-sneak-peak/250873/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/final...
- jjgreen 6y ago
  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 ...).
- permo-w 6y ago
  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?
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> 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-breakthrough-global-covid-19-vaccine https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-11-23-oxford-university-break...
- quicklime 6y ago
  Isn't the article talking about the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer (with some help from Germany's BioNTech)?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    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-vaccine-team-couple-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-va...
    - svara 6y ago
      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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jacobush 6y ago
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?
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Muh Russia is about as bad as QAnon as far as existing evidence for it; the only difference being the level of respectability it achieved.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Personally, the notion that the Democratic party is controlled by a collection of Satan-worshipping paedophiles seems a little less plausible than that an election candidate worked with a foreign government against his opponents, but then I'm not American so what do I know?
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      Well, there's actually evidence of pedophile blackmail rings for one thing; Franklin Scandal, Dutreux, Epstein, Hastert, Trump's mentor Roy Cohn. Nothing particularly Satan worshipping or Democratic party about it. Meanwhile, muh Russia idea has .... Trump said something nice about Putin once.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        > Nothing particularly Satan worshipping or Democratic party about it. Isn't that the core idea behind QAnon? I think our differing viewpoints on this perhaps point to the notion that we don't see things as they are, rather we see them as we are.
        scottlocklin 6y ago
        >Isn't that the core idea behind QAnon? I'm pretty sure pedophile blackmail rings would like everyone to pay attention to the ridiculous idea rather than the "actually exists in the corporeal world" idea. Hence, QAnon. Seriously: Roy Cohn, Dennis Hastert, Franklin Scandal -all republican pedophile scandals, or republican pedophile blackmailers. Epstein obviously an apolotical rapist of children and blackmailer of politicians. Dutreux affair was in Europe. None were particularly satanic. All are real things which actually happened and feed into QAnon horse shit. QAnon obviously disinfo. Muh Russia is just horse shit that never happened in any meaningful way beyond the usual countries fucking with each other thing. I don't think we have differing viewpoints, particularly. Which viewpoint do you disagree with?
choeger 6y ago
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?
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > 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.
  - jansan 6y ago
    >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?
    - nl 6y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
scottlocklin 6y ago
>is going to be open to the public without any safety driver in the front seat... Yeah; it will be a remote pilot instead. Nobody talks about this[0]. Nobody but the guy Cowen stole the idea for the great stagnation from (aka me)[1]. >The NYT reports that a compact nuclear fusion reactor is “Very Likely to Work” I wonder how often the NYT has reported that in the past? Either way: it is almost certainly a false statement. Citing "impossible burger" as progress is pretty typical of modern technology fans. I am pretty sure we had dystopian soyburgers 10, 20, even 50 years ago. The main difference is we have a larger population of ninnies who will eat them to prove their superior environmental awareness. mRNA vaccines; for Moderna anyway, it's really hard to square their executives dumping stock back in June with a successful vaccine that won't kill you[2]. [0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US9465388B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9465388B1/en -I attempted to patent this in 2015, as it was obvious they were mechanical turking it. [1] https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_pr... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/09/04/why-are-moderna-insiders-selling-so-many-shares/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/09/04/why-are-m...
cblconfederate 6y ago
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.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  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.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    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.
- adventured 6y ago
  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.
bawolff 6y ago
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?
- wcoenen 6y ago
  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.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    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.
    - wcoenen 6y ago
      > 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.
      - occamsrazorwit 6y ago
        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.
jhoechtl 6y ago
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.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Cold fusion is mortal nonsense. That is, it's so unlikely you could safely bet your life on it being bogus.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    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.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      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.
Tepix 6y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  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.
  - Tepix 6y ago
    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.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Almost all game consoles launch heavily subsidized, in order to establish a dominant sub-monopoly and reap the game licensing royalties later on.
exar0815 6y ago
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.
- hedberg10 6y ago
  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.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  When you read biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/820 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.
  - 6y ago
rich_sasha 6y ago
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.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  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.
  - purple-again 6y ago
    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.
addicted 6y ago
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”.
- md_ 6y ago
  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.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  > 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".
fallingfrog 6y ago
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.
chadash 6y ago
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!
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  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.html http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.h...)
- yostrovs 6y ago
  Natural diamonds were already being manufactured long before your birth. They're just bigger now. Otherwise in full agreement!
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  >> 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 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.
jariel 6y ago
'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.
aaron695 6y ago
There seems confusion on what the Great Stagnation is - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation 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.
occamsrazorwit 6y ago
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.

55 points by edward 6y ago

‪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.”

rjknight 6y ago
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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peek
- mattmanser 6y ago
  You've linked to peeked not peaked, which was the GP's point. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peak 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 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/peaked
  - rjknight 6y ago
    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 https://theoatmeal.com/comics/sneak_peek [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/finally-a-useful-twitter-bot-it-corrects-people-who-write-sneak-peak/250873/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/final...
jjgreen 6y ago
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 ...).
permo-w 6y ago
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?

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

> 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-breakthrough-global-covid-19-vaccine https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-11-23-oxford-university-break...

quicklime 6y ago
Isn't the article talking about the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer (with some help from Germany's BioNTech)?
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  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-vaccine-team-couple-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-va...
  - svara 6y ago
    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.

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jacobush 6y ago

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?

scottlocklin 6y ago
Muh Russia is about as bad as QAnon as far as existing evidence for it; the only difference being the level of respectability it achieved.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Personally, the notion that the Democratic party is controlled by a collection of Satan-worshipping paedophiles seems a little less plausible than that an election candidate worked with a foreign government against his opponents, but then I'm not American so what do I know?
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Well, there's actually evidence of pedophile blackmail rings for one thing; Franklin Scandal, Dutreux, Epstein, Hastert, Trump's mentor Roy Cohn. Nothing particularly Satan worshipping or Democratic party about it. Meanwhile, muh Russia idea has .... Trump said something nice about Putin once.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      > Nothing particularly Satan worshipping or Democratic party about it. Isn't that the core idea behind QAnon? I think our differing viewpoints on this perhaps point to the notion that we don't see things as they are, rather we see them as we are.
      - scottlocklin 6y ago
        >Isn't that the core idea behind QAnon? I'm pretty sure pedophile blackmail rings would like everyone to pay attention to the ridiculous idea rather than the "actually exists in the corporeal world" idea. Hence, QAnon. Seriously: Roy Cohn, Dennis Hastert, Franklin Scandal -all republican pedophile scandals, or republican pedophile blackmailers. Epstein obviously an apolotical rapist of children and blackmailer of politicians. Dutreux affair was in Europe. None were particularly satanic. All are real things which actually happened and feed into QAnon horse shit. QAnon obviously disinfo. Muh Russia is just horse shit that never happened in any meaningful way beyond the usual countries fucking with each other thing. I don't think we have differing viewpoints, particularly. Which viewpoint do you disagree with?

choeger 6y ago

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?

Hokusai 6y ago
> 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.
- jansan 6y ago
  >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?
  - nl 6y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

scottlocklin 6y ago

>is going to be open to the public without any safety driver in the front seat... Yeah; it will be a remote pilot instead. Nobody talks about this[0]. Nobody but the guy Cowen stole the idea for the great stagnation from (aka me)[1]. >The NYT reports that a compact nuclear fusion reactor is “Very Likely to Work” I wonder how often the NYT has reported that in the past? Either way: it is almost certainly a false statement. Citing "impossible burger" as progress is pretty typical of modern technology fans. I am pretty sure we had dystopian soyburgers 10, 20, even 50 years ago. The main difference is we have a larger population of ninnies who will eat them to prove their superior environmental awareness. mRNA vaccines; for Moderna anyway, it's really hard to square their executives dumping stock back in June with a successful vaccine that won't kill you[2]. [0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US9465388B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9465388B1/en -I attempted to patent this in 2015, as it was obvious they were mechanical turking it. [1] https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_pr... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/09/04/why-are-moderna-insiders-selling-so-many-shares/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/09/04/why-are-m...

cblconfederate 6y ago

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.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
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.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  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.
adventured 6y ago
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.

bawolff 6y ago

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?

wcoenen 6y ago
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.
- bawolff 6y ago
  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.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    > 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.
    - occamsrazorwit 6y ago
      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.

jhoechtl 6y ago

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.

pfdietz 6y ago
Cold fusion is mortal nonsense. That is, it's so unlikely you could safely bet your life on it being bogus.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  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.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    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.

Tepix 6y ago

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.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
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.
- Tepix 6y ago
  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.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Almost all game consoles launch heavily subsidized, in order to establish a dominant sub-monopoly and reap the game licensing royalties later on.

exar0815 6y ago

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.

hedberg10 6y ago
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.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
When you read biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/820 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.
- 6y ago

rich_sasha 6y ago

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.

mymythisisthis 6y ago
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.
- purple-again 6y ago
  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.

addicted 6y ago

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”.

md_ 6y ago
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.
randallsquared 6y ago
> 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".

fallingfrog 6y ago

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.

chadash 6y ago

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!

mymythisisthis 6y ago
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.html http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.h...)
yostrovs 6y ago
Natural diamonds were already being manufactured long before your birth. They're just bigger now. Otherwise in full agreement!
rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> 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 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.

jariel 6y ago

'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.

aaron695 6y ago

There seems confusion on what the Great Stagnation is - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation 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.

occamsrazorwit 6y ago

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.