Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon

53 pointsby dismal2over 9 years ago

13 comments

petraover 9 years ago

If instead of talking about progress , we start to talk about change, things may look quite different than Gordon's view:We live in a surveillance society(both governmental and commercial). We are glued to screens, having much less human interactions than before(and some psychologists think it greatly harms our empathy). Boredom is non existent. Something like addiction is everywhere. The variety and quality of our media and maybe experiences in general(think foodie culture) have greatly improved. For many jobs , the rate of learning, and the demand for creativity have greatly improved.Of course this is good and bad.And as for business: Business today looks totally different than before the internet.So yes, the internet is a life changing technology if you look deeply. And there are many other life changing technologies in the work.As for gdp growth - well isn't it more complex than - great new technology -> a lot of growth ?

评论 #10985704 未加载

woodandsteelover 9 years ago

I find the idea that we are not going to see any more life-changing technological advances quite unpersuasive. New technology usually comes from scientific advances, and science in many fields is advancing rapidly.I can think of at least four radical technological changes that might flow from new science, ones that would make people of the future look back in horror at at how we live today.1) Ways of curing or eliminating the main health problems we have today, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and infectious diseases2) Doubling the human life span3) Greatly increasing the intelligence of the average person4) Establishing mass colonies in space and moving much of the population there.I'm sure HN readers can think of other plausible advances.

评论 #10985100 未加载

评论 #10985538 未加载

评论 #10985454 未加载

dredmorbiusover 9 years ago

It's interesting to see this, particularly given Krugman's history. His graduate advisor was William Nordhaus, who'd written a strong (and among the more reputable) criticism of Limits to Growth, published in 1972. Krugman's written on that, as well as Gordon's earlier published paper on economic growth.The technological argument's a strong one, and many others have pointed it out. Vaclav Smil suggests the single decade of the 1880s was the most profoundly inventive in history (though fire, speech, ag, and writing are strong contenders for influence). Robert Ayres has several papers on technological waves, there's W. Brian Arthur of Stanford / Santa Fe Institute (itself a fascinating research centre), and Kevin Kelley's What Technology Wants.Krugman mentioned one of the futurist books of the 1960s. There was rather a burst of them, going back a decade or so. Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years (1952), Harrison Brown, et al's more modest The Next Hundred Years (1957), Meadows et al, Limits to Growth, Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, Richard Meier's Science and Economic Development (1955, 1965). Some agreement, some disagreement, and interesting insights, as with all technical debugging processes, on what they got right and what was wrong.I've been in and around the tech world for over four decades, and have come to an appreciation of what is possible (the world in a tablet on my lap with full-day battery capacity and WiFi Internet -- though many of those publications require SciHub or BooksXX to access), and what isn't -- 2001's Discover, T.A. Heppenheimer's colonies in space, and the solar powersats they were to have built, lunar colonies, mass drivers, and even simply high speed rail networks within North America, have all failed rather spectacularly to emerge.Venture Capital and high-tech startups have proved spectacularly incapable of addressing (or even identifying) Big Problems. It's questionable whether they can even address funding for necessary technical infrastructure development on the free software foundations from which they're built (a VC is exploring that possibility now).More troubling for me, many of the models we use to understand, or attempt to predict, our reality strike me as quite flawed. Economics itself not the least among them.

评论 #10986949 未加载

评论 #10986350 未加载

underbluewatersover 9 years ago

This shouldn't be a radical hypothesis, that there are physical limits to human technological advancement. It's a convenient solution to the Fermi Paradox.

评论 #10986032 未加载

jhbadgerover 9 years ago

While things like flush toilets and electricity might be technically more important, I think Krugman is really underestimating how amazing the modern world is. I'm in my 40s and I certainly remember how hard it was to learn something prior to the mid-1990s. You had to go to a library or bookshop and hope they'd have a book that would have the info you needed. If it was obscure, probably not. Now we can have the info on basically anything that's known in seconds.

erikpukinskisover 9 years ago

The biggest misconception people have about contemporary history is that computers have already "happened". We haven't even finished setting up the network yet. We're in the equivalent of the day you move into your new house and are just unpacking and playing with the new surroundings. We haven't even seen 1% of the change computers will orchestrate.

jqmover 9 years ago

The massive and rapid dissemination of knowledge the internet has provided will produce vast and unknowable changes over the next several generations. I believe it may be ultimately a considerably larger change than the industrial revolution. Knowledge changes everything.(Of course then there's Facebook so maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

评论 #10986969 未加载

nickbaumanover 9 years ago

The invention of the washing machine has had more of a disruptive social impact than the invention of the Internet.

评论 #11008785 未加载

cushychickenover 9 years ago

I'm reasonably sure that robots (starting with self-driving cars) and genetic medicine are going to prove this gentleman very, very wrong. Self-driving cars by themselves have enough power to shape the petroleum economy in a single stroke. Once it's affordable enough for everywhere to have on demand car service a la Uber, gasoline will start to become a massive commodity, traded like steel or coal, not a consumer product. This will have an enormous impact on the petroleum industry. I'd hypothesize that it will spawn another innovation in batteries and clean energy, because no overlord of a fleet of autonomous cars is going to want to pay the recurring cost of gasoline.

评论 #10985837 未加载

评论 #10985090 未加载

评论 #10985697 未加载

评论 #10986307 未加载

评论 #10985346 未加载

评论 #10985176 未加载

评论 #10999576 未加载

评论 #10985023 未加载

kristianpover 9 years ago

These are possibilities for great growth, if the technology can be developed. The first 3 are 50-100 years away though.1) Asteroid mining and construction in space.2) Nanotube or other materials technology enabling space elevators or Skyhooks, or other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch</a>3) Fusion through alternatives to tokomaks4) Self driving, electric cars5) AI and robotics6) Micro Black holes as power sources (ok this one's 500-1000 years away)

tn13over 9 years ago

I see bureaucracy and government control of education is primary speed breakers in the human potential in the coming decade.The way I see it human creativity is expanding at rapid rate than ever thanks to advancement in technology. The government is however slow, rigid, corrupt and unwilling to relent. This is a clash that is going to define the coming decade or so. If the government wins, I am pretty sure there wont be any improvement in an Average American's life.One has to look at countries like India which were totally government controlled upto 90s. From 1950s to 1990s India barely changed. Everyone remained poor. Some minor reforms led to explosive growth.In USA I see the trend as opposite. We have a government that is focused on intangible and dubious goals such as climate change while hurting people with ridiculous regulation.

评论 #10985588 未加载

apiover 9 years ago

I've thought for years that fundamental technological innovation basically stopped around 1970, and that almost everything since then has been refinement and broadening existing technology.I've observed a similar thing in areas like film: most of today's films are reboots, rehashes, and remakes or at least are exploring themes and plot templates already laid down. Musical innovation lasted longer but seems to have effectively stagnated since the late 1990s. I haven't heard anything in a long time that doesn't just riff on something pioneered before the year 2000.There are pockets here and there: films like Primer and Upstream Color, experimental electronic music, deep learning. But none of these things are quite as dramatic as, say, the film 2001, Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, or the integrated circuit.There's objective evidence of something "breaking" around that time in economics, too. Wage growth basically stopped shortly after 1970: <a href="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HY153_realwa_G_20150417085212.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HY153_realwa_G_...</a>I've wondered if future historians might not look back at ~1970 as the end of the enlightenment and the beginning of the next dark age.But what happened?I haven't got a clue. Explanations I've toyed around with include things like:- Philosophy: the 1970s saw the rise of both religious fundamentalism and its secular "Skeptic" counterpart -- dogmatic, fundamentalist ideologies that assert that we already know everything and there is nothing new to discover. When I go back before 1970 I'm often struck by the boldness and fearlessness of scientists and other intellectuals back then. The rise of "new age" thinking, which is also hostile to reason and enlightenment ideas, might also play a role. It seems like since 1970 people have become either total woo-woo new-age flakes (no rigor) or closed-minded fundamentalists (no creativity or imagination). Before that time it seems like you had more who were both rigorous and visionary.- Economics: did we "cancel progress" by shifting from a progressive economic system that invested in the future to a conservative one that only invests in the present? Or was the decoupling of wages from productivity the actual root cause of the rest of the apparent stagnation?- Psychological: did we experience "future shock" and double down on retro and nostalgia? This sort of fits in with what I discuss under philosophy.- Television: before the popularity of TV people read books and interacted socially and kids played outside. TV is a passive medium that pulls people in and then feeds them all the same information, and it takes time that people might otherwise spend on interactive, social, and exploratory pursuits. Did TV make us stupid? The generation who grew up watching TV started to enter the workforce around 1970.- The War on Drugs: To what extent were the geniuses of the past "augmenting" with over-the-counter amphetamines, easily obtainable psychedelics, etc.? I've heard anecdotes but has anyone ever even asked this question in anything approaching a rigorous way? Or is it too taboo? There was a general worldwide crackdown on mind-altering substances around 1970. Perhaps the kind of crazy creativity and extreme achievement we saw during the glory days is simply not something the human mind tends to do in its natural state.- Slow Malthusian Collapse: was the "limits to growth" more or less correct, but the effect is unfolding a lot slower than predicted and with strain and collapse manifesting in less obvious ways?- Bureaucratization: Was there a shift during that time toward a more bureaucratic academic and scientific community that is more hostile to "maverick" thinkers and new ideas? Do today's researchers spend more time sucking up to grant funding and tenure committees and making sure to walk the straight and narrow to avoid being labeled "cranks" instead of really thinking and investigating? Or do the systems for selecting for scientific careers select good bureaucrats over geniuses? The same processes might be at work in other areas, e.g. the takeover of music and film industries by "MBA thinking" over people who actually care about art.- Educational System Decline: Did we over-bureaucratize or otherwise compromise education somehow? Were older teaching methods better?- Demographics: We're having smaller families, which might affect both growth and parenting styles (more "helicopter parenting"). Nothing obvious here but who knows?Shrug. But it is alarming to say the least.Edit: here are some explanations I don't buy:- Political Correctness / Diversity: There's a wing of the right that thinks that runaway equality and diversity ideology has some responsibility for this. If that's true then why are some of today's most innovative places also left-of-center culturally and why are the bastions of Red State America not centers of innovation? At best I see no correlation in either direction.- Dysgenics: Even if "stupid people" are breeding more, genetic changes are too slow to account for this. Then you have things like the Flynn Effect, which argue the opposite. Again I see at best no correlation.- Lack of War: Was it all WWII? I personally don't buy it. WWI didn't result in anything close to the postwar boom, and before that we had millennia of running around and hacking each other up with swords without inventing any integrated circuits or jet engines. Why didn't the Crusades or the endless wars of late Rome lead to a technological explosion? Why didn't Genghis Khan or the Aztecs land on the Moon?

评论 #10985623 未加载

评论 #10985831 未加载

评论 #10985253 未加载

评论 #10985059 未加载

评论 #10985051 未加载

oldmanjayover 9 years ago

only a very old person would think you could take a modern youth away from the Internet without horrifying them.