Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org)
jasoncrawford
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The Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Jason’s links digest, 2023-11-07: Techno-optimism and more
What I’ve been reading, November 2023
Thanks. What I see is that this paper specifies “a non-naive precautionary principle” or “an intelligent application of the precautionary principle,” which implies something about what the precautionary principle might end up being in practice without those qualifiers…
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:
Between 38,000 B.C. and 1750 B.C., the real price of light fell by a total of about 17%, based on the transition from animal or vegetable fat to sesame oil as a fuel. The use of candles and whale oil reduced the price by a further 87% by the early 1800s, an average annual rate of decline of 0.06% per year. Between 1800 and 1900, the price of light fell at an annual rate that was 38 times faster, 2.3%, with the introduction of the carbon filament lamp. And then in the 20th century, the price of light has fallen at the truly remarkable pace of 6.3% per year with the use of tungsten filaments and fluorescent lighting.
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.
Where I have landed on “ideas getting harder to find”, in a nutshell
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?
Podcast interview: Luminary.fm with Erik Cederwall and Sachin Gandhi
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.
Marc Andreessen pens “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Discuss
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.)
I wonder if there is also a psychological factor at work. Something along the lines of: a major world crisis, especially one that causes a lot of deaths, makes you think about the ephemeral nature of life and what’s really important, and you either decide to have kids or to stop putting it off. Imagine someone reading about deaths among the elderly and thinking, “I really want Mom and Dad to meet their grandkids—better get on it.”
Curious if Claudia Goldin’s work is relevant here?