I run a blog called Maximum Progress which covers topics in economics, mathematics, philosophy, history, and technology. You can read all of my essays on my Substack here: https://maximumprogress.substack.com/
Maxwell Tabarrok
Karma: 48
The 2nd Demographic Transition
American Acceleration vs Development
Claude vs GPT
Don’t Endorse the Idea of Market Failure
We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA Reform
When Should Copyright Get Shorter?
Practicing my Handwriting in 1439
Surgery Works Well Without The FDA
Against the Burden of Knowledge
Land Reclamation is in the 9th Circle of Stagnation Hell
Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA
The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes
Why Did NEPA Peak in 2016?
Fertility as Metascience
Why is the government letting private firms outspend them on the world’s most important externality?
Why Governments Can’t be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future
Did Medieval Peasants Have More Vacation Time Than Us?
No you’re right, I had a section in there evaluating the different possible reasons for slow down but it got too long so that will be coming in future posts. Sorry for the hyperbolic title!
I basically agree with everything you’ve said here.
On the subdomains point, you can have decreasing returns within each subdomain but constant returns overall if you keep finding new subdomains. I think this is an accurate model of progress. It captures ideas like paradigm shifts and also integrates the intuitions for low-hanging fruit and burden of knowledge in a way which still allows rapid progress. My favorite example is the Copernican revolution. There were huge obstacles from burden of knowledge and low-hanging fruit in Ptolemaic astronomy. It took so much extra data and education to improve the epicycles of Mercury by a few decimal points. But once astronomy moved to a new model, there was a whole new grove of low hanging fruit and almost none of the investment in Ptolemaic astronomy was necessary to make progress so the burden of knowledge was reset.
Well if it affects one plot of land that is currently the property of just 1 person it can still be an externality because lots of different people will own this land in the future.