Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org)
jasoncrawford
Karma: 514
That said, I agree that it’s possible that the future could hold something different, and the demographic transition is a good reason why. Chad Jones has drawn attention to this. We need more people and more brains to continue growth. I tend to think we will solve this by (1) solving the fertility crisis and getting back to high rates of population growth, and/or (2) using AI to substitute for human researchers.
No, you’re looking at too short a timescale [edit: to be clear, this is referring to your specific point about constant growth rates over the last 200 years]. Zoom out to the last few thousand, or few tens of thousand years.
See this from Paul Romer: https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/
Key excerpt:
My conviction that the rate of growth in GDP per capita at the technological frontier had to be increasing over time sprang from a simple calculation. Suppose the modern rate of growth of real GDP per capita (that is the growth rate after taking out the effects of inflation) is equal to 2% per year and that income per capita in year 2000 is $40,000. If this rate had prevailed for the last 1000 years, then in the year 1000, income per capita measured in the purchasing power of dollars today would have been $0.0001, or 0.01 cents. This is way too small to sustain life. If the growth rate had been falling over time instead of remaining constant, then the implied measure of GDP per capita in the year 1000 would have been even lower. …
Reasonable people can differ about what the future holds, but the simple calculation that first got me thinking about this (and which no doubt influenced how Maddison did the backward projections to come up with his estimates) leaves no room for doubt about what happened in the past. The rate of growth of GDP per capita has increased over time. The rate of progress in standards of living has increased even more.
[Further edit for clarity:] I think your contention is: there are basically two growth regimes. There is a low-growth regime, which most countries were in for most of history. Then there is a high-growth regime, which countries enter once they industrialize. This is an acceleration but it’s a one-time thing. Any seeming longer-term, more-spread-out acceleration is just a compositional effect.
That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I think it’s wrong. It may be true that there are discrete growth regimes, but I think there are more than two of them, historically. Progress was extremely slow in stone age. It sped up somewhat in the early agricultural age. It sped up more in the modern era after Gutenberg, Bacon, etc. It sped up more after industrialization. And I think it will speed up still more in the future—possibly after we cross some next threshold, whatever that is exactly.
Absolutely true that new subdomains open up new areas of low-hanging fruit. It is the “stacked S-curve” model.
Not immediately clear whether what this means for β>0. I think this model may be addressed in Bloom et al, or maybe in an earlier paper by Jones. I vaguely recall that it doesn’t make a difference whether you analyze things in terms of the subdomains or the economy at large, but I don’t have the exact reference at hand.
No. The Precautionary Principle doesn’t just mean “take precautions when warranted.” No one would be against that. It has become more like a bias towards inaction, regardless of cost/benefit calculations. See Ridley’s quote above, about how this “superficially sensible idea” was transformed into something irrational.
Haha, fair point! (Although I would suggest that the most productive way to do that would be to pen an opposing manifesto.)
To be exact, what he said was:
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign … under varying names like … “Precautionary Principle” [etc.]
I interpret that to mean not that he’s against precaution, but that he thinks terms like that are being used to promote bad ideas.
Also, the Precautionary Principle is objectively bad:
As we look back on the failed civilizations of the past, we can see that they were so poor, their technology was so feeble, and their explanations of the world so fragmentary and full of misconceptions that their caution about innovation and progress was as perverse as expecting a blindfold to be useful when navigating dangerous waters. Pessimists believe that the present state of our own civilization is an exception to that pattern. But what does the precautionary principle say about that claim? Can we be sure that our present knowledge, too, is not riddled with dangerous gaps and misconceptions? That our present wealth is not pathetically inadequate to deal with unforeseen problems? Since we cannot be sure, would not the precautionary principle require us to confine ourselves to the policy that would always have been salutary in the past—namely innovation and, in emergencies, even blind optimism about the benefits of new knowledge?
–David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
The EU had by now installed the precautionary principle as a guiding light. This superficially sensible idea—that we should worry about unintended consequences of innovation—morphed into a device by which activists prevent life-saving new technologies displacing more dangerous ones. As formally adopted by the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty, the principle holds the new to a higher standard than the old and is essentially a barrier to all innovations, however safe, on behalf of all existing practices, however dangerous. This is because it considers the potential hazards, but not the likely benefits of an innovation, shifting the burden of proof to an innovator to prove that its product will not cause harm, but not allowing that innovator to demonstrate that it might cause good, or might displace a technology that already causes harm.
–Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works
Which specifics?
I’ve heard people criticize this for lacking nuance, not engaging with critics, and not citing sources. I feel this misunderstands the genre. It’s a manifesto. It’s not supposed to be nuanced or appeal to critics; it’s supposed to be even a little divisive, drawing a line in the sand, recruiting those who are already sympathetic and ignoring or even repelling those who are not. It’s not supposed to argue for its claims, it’s supposed to stake out some beliefs and declare them.
If you just don’t like manifestos of any stripe, then fine; but it never makes sense to criticize a piece for not being in a different genre.
Some negative externalities and other problems of progress that may or may not be considered solved:
how technology can make war more deadly
how it can assist oppressive/authoritarian regimes
technological unemployment
unclean/unsafe food, water supplies
resource depletion
pollution of all kinds
carcinogens
Positive externalities are like, almost all of human wealth?
Yale economist William Nordhaus estimates that innovators capture a mere 2.2% of the total “surplus” from innovation. … If it is anywhere close to being an accurate estimate, the implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.
I am pretty convinced that β>0, even though I also think there is some contribution to slowdown from other factors. Some reasons:
Bloom et al observe β>0 not only in the economy at large but in various subdomains, such as transistors and Moore’s Law. If you want to argue that this is all caused by society’s resistance to innovation (which is real), then you have to argue that society also resists innovation in integrated circuits (which… doesn’t seem like a thing).
There are simple intuitions for β>0 based on low-hanging fruit and burden of knowledge (both of which you mentioned).
Scott Alexander gives some intuition for why we should expect β>0 here; if it weren’t then progress would long ago have accelerated to insane levels. In fact, I haven’t checked the math, but I think if β=0 you end up with a hyperbolic curve where GDP goes infinite in finite time; see this other Alexander post (although the paper that post is based on is kind of silly and not written by an expert in the field; Kremer 1993 is a better reference for this idea and is worth reading).
We arguably see similar patterns not only in technology and the economy but also in science and the arts. Holden Karnofsky makes an argument for this here.
That said, I am also pretty convinced that there is a contribution from institutions and other factors. (To paraphrase something Eli Dourado said to me, TFP growth is slow in Venezuela, and no one thinks that is because ideas are harder to find in Venezuela.)
What about land cost for solar? At what point does that become a significant part of energy cost? Solar is less diffuse than wind but more diffuse than any fuel-based energy technology.
If it’s not significant now, surely at some point on our way to becoming a Kardashev Type 1 civilization it becomes a problem?
You will hear a lot about Georgism which advocates a tax on the (unimproved) value of land. This might be a starting point: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
I don’t think there would be broad agreement within the progress community about the Singer argument, or more generally about utilitarianism.
Personally, I am neither a utilitarian nor an altruist, and I don’t agree with the drowning child argument as I understand it.
I think how much to spend on yourself vs. charity or other causes that you believe in is a personal decision, based on what is meaningful and important to you.
Hmm, I honestly don’t know whether progress studies can be applied to any random job or company. I think of it more about applying at a society-wide level. Of course, it might inspire some people to take jobs at more ambitious / cutting-edge companies (or start such companies!) But that also doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with companies that aren’t cutting-edge—it takes all kinds of companies to make a functioning economy.
If anything, maybe progress studies can help remind you all of the moral value of economic growth. To the extent you all do you job well, and create economic value, and produce an honest profit—you are contributing to the well-being of the world. That makes it worth taking pride in a job well done. Trite but true.
Update: I’m already planning to give brief remarks at a few events coming up very soon:
Thurs, Aug 24: Recur Club founders meetup in Indiranagar. Register/apply here
Sun, Aug 27: LessWrong / Astral Codex Ten meetup at Matteo Coffea
If you’re in/near Bangalore, hope to see you there!
Fascinating, thanks for the pointer!
This book is “for babies” but it’s probably just about right for a 3yo. It is the best “STEM for babies” book I have ever seen, maybe the only one I really like: https://computerengineeringforbabies.com/
I don’t know exactly how seriously to take it—but I know Michael Dearing, whose site that is, and he is 100% in favor of capitalism, so… at least partially serious?
Thanks Gergő. We’re doing this as a “work made for hire” meaning that the rights belong to us and we can then license it however we want.
FWIW, this Jones & Romer paper names “accelerating growth” as one of the key stylized facts that growth models should explain. See pp. 13–16.
One example of accelerating progress they give is from Nordhaus’s famous “price of light” paper: