I don’t think it makes sense to compare America’s growth vs China or India’s growth over this period.
Yes, the countries were adopting similar technologies, but when America was adopting them, they were adopting those technologies at the technological frontier. When China and India were adopting them, they were not. It’s easier to grow by adopting already invented technologies than by inventing new ones. This is essentially the logic behind Solow-Swan convergence between rich and poor countries, which as an economic model has held up pretty well to what we observe in the real world.
As advocates of progress studies, we should be looking to see if it is possible to accelerate the rate of frontier growth. There are good reasons to think it might be. As others mentioned, J. Storrs Hall lays out some technologies that were not adopted for various reasons. AI could greatly accelerate technological and economic development. But also, we’ve also observed upshifts in economic growth in the past. Post-Industrial revolution, the economic growth rate, at the frontier and per capita, was about 1% a year, then about 1.5% a year after 1880, and about 2.5% a year after 1930 (I think—my memory is a little fuzzy on the exact numbers here). Thomas Philippon’s paper (summarized by the author in Tweet form here) offers some interesting insights into why this might be. We’ve seen the story of accelerating frontier growth before—the question is why haven’t seen it again in the past 50 years.
I agree that making direct comparisons don’t make sense on their own merits; I used them as stand-ins for the previous period of American growth (which may be in the book, but were not in the link). I don’t think the frontier-vs-catch-up distinction matters to the point argued in the post, though: I strongly expect the American technical frontier 1920-1970 period looks more like the China or India catch-up 1970-2020 period than it does the American technical frontier 1970-2020.
Phrased another way, the time-price method gives us the same stagnation story as the conventional methods do. This is a separate question than what is to be done to speed up frontier progress.
The tweet summary from Philippon is very interesting—I just pulled it from NBER, where the title appears to be Additive Growth.
I don’t think it makes sense to compare America’s growth vs China or India’s growth over this period.
Yes, the countries were adopting similar technologies, but when America was adopting them, they were adopting those technologies at the technological frontier. When China and India were adopting them, they were not. It’s easier to grow by adopting already invented technologies than by inventing new ones. This is essentially the logic behind Solow-Swan convergence between rich and poor countries, which as an economic model has held up pretty well to what we observe in the real world.
As advocates of progress studies, we should be looking to see if it is possible to accelerate the rate of frontier growth. There are good reasons to think it might be. As others mentioned, J. Storrs Hall lays out some technologies that were not adopted for various reasons. AI could greatly accelerate technological and economic development. But also, we’ve also observed upshifts in economic growth in the past. Post-Industrial revolution, the economic growth rate, at the frontier and per capita, was about 1% a year, then about 1.5% a year after 1880, and about 2.5% a year after 1930 (I think—my memory is a little fuzzy on the exact numbers here). Thomas Philippon’s paper (summarized by the author in Tweet form here) offers some interesting insights into why this might be. We’ve seen the story of accelerating frontier growth before—the question is why haven’t seen it again in the past 50 years.
I agree that making direct comparisons don’t make sense on their own merits; I used them as stand-ins for the previous period of American growth (which may be in the book, but were not in the link). I don’t think the frontier-vs-catch-up distinction matters to the point argued in the post, though: I strongly expect the American technical frontier 1920-1970 period looks more like the China or India catch-up 1970-2020 period than it does the American technical frontier 1970-2020.
Phrased another way, the time-price method gives us the same stagnation story as the conventional methods do. This is a separate question than what is to be done to speed up frontier progress.
The tweet summary from Philippon is very interesting—I just pulled it from NBER, where the title appears to be Additive Growth.