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You might look into Eric Weinstein and his Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO) hypothesis. Everything in modern society has been set up expecting and relying on ex
by cronix 5y ago
You might look into Eric Weinstein and his Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO) hypothesis. Everything in modern society has been set up expecting and relying on exponential growth. Everything from attending college, to law firms, to doctors, to college professors, to social security and pension plans, and exponential growth is impossible to maintain long term. It worked great post WWII up until about the 70's.
Take a law firm, or most any similar hierarchical structure. You have someone at the top making the big bucks, with x junior's under them who all want to be at the top one day earning the big bucks. Once trained and experienced, most eventually move up. Maybe the same law firm, maybe they start their own. They then get x juniors to train under them, who rise up and who then get x juniors, who rise up, etc. At some point, you have more than enough lawyers and can't continue growing exponentially and expect the same level of prestige and compensation. Market saturation. But, we keep on going anyway, because that's how we've been collectively trained and it's ingrained in everything. Truly systemic to the point we are blind to it and wonder what's wrong. We've built a system of many systems all with an N+1 query problem and trying to come up with workarounds instead of fixing the poorly designed query in order to become performant again.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoYou point out some important issues. I encounter this in academia— if each professor trains 5-10 PhD students, where will they go and be professors? I just want to point out that these systems you mention are all changeable within the larger democratic/market system without a revolution. It might be hard, but lots of things are hard and still get done.
- dane-pgp 5y agoWhile this "limits of exponential growth" theory sounds plausible, the obvious rebuttal is "When will/did we reach that limit?". Was there some point in history when each professor only taught one PhD student, or did each professor teach 2 students and the number of universities doubled every 5 years? Similarly, for how long have the number of lawyers been exponentially growing? Shakespeare wrote "let's kill all the lawyers" in 1591, and fortunately people didn't take that suggestion seriously, so presumably we've had 400 years of exponential growth. If there was one lawyer in 1591, and it takes 10 years for a junior to become a senior lawyer and start training the next generation, then there should be 2^40 lawyers right now. (That assumes that each lawyer lives forever, so the actual number won't be over one trillion, but still).