

Is Growth Over? - lkrubner
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/

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richcollins
_So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all
the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots._

The robots will create wealth for the people that don't own robots. If they
can't afford this wealth the robots will never be created in the first place.
It's no different than any other automation technology.

~~~
altcognito
_Only_ if those replaced by automation can provide value to society
(employment). Assuming they will find jobs with ever increasing amounts of
automation seems naive. Manufacturing and farming employed the __VAST
__majority of people in the past.

~~~
richcollins
If the vast majority of people are unemployed there won't be anyone to support
said automation and it won't exist.

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ErikAugust
Growth may not over but I've been thinking a lot of thoughts related to
Krugman's final point. I think employment may generally decline and perhaps a
skills gap will only continue to widen. Wealth disparity will widen also,
perhaps.

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michaelochurch
I think that humanity will eventually go to a basic income, first on a
national and then on a world scale. I think national BI will follow the next
real economic catastrophe (not 2008, but 1930s) and the global one will be
possibly 50 years later. I'm optimistic on the long-term future, but I think
we have at least one more Great Depression and, unfortunately, at least one
big-ass war ahead of us.

BI will probably happen too late, but if we don't want to die, we will
implement it. It used to be that it took a 22-year one-time investment to get
people ready for the work force, but now it requires continual education, and
without BI, people who lack independent income are going to be in trouble.

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learc83
I lean heavily libertarian, but my practical side says we should implement a
basic income and do away with almost all labor regulations.

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michaelochurch
Same here. Minimum wage is, effectively, an incompetently structured and
meager basic income financed by low-end employers (who react by reducing low-
end jobs).

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erikpukinskis
I actually think we're just at the very beginning of the information
revolution. The reason growth seems to have slowed is that we experienced a
hype bubble. People (correctly) predicted that a globally connected network of
pervasive computers would fundamentally change every industry, it just looks
like it's going to take 50 or 100 years, not 5 or 10.

At the turn of the millenium people got tired of waiting and the speculative
markets fell apart.

But the engineering continues. The friction separating the world's information
is in mid-collapse, but the actual diffusion has barely even started.

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kqr2
Also check out Marshall Brain's essay _Robotic Nation_.

<http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

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bloaf
I think the biggest insight here is "Clearly, such a technology would remove
all limits on per capita GDP, as long as you don’t count robots among the
capitas." You could make the same point about slaves. I'm not opposed to the
idea of robot workers, but I suspect that a robot-driven economy will look a
lot like a slave-driven economy. Poor and unskilled workers will strongly
resent that their jobs are going to robots, just as they did during slave
times. Those fortunate enough to own robots will essentially live a life of
leisure. The profitability of robots will be heavily reliant on exports, as
robots can produce significantly more than they and their owners could
consume.

~~~
batgaijin
The unfortunate inevitability when welfare turns into negative income tax.

What's the difference? One acts like it's supposed to help you when you happen
to not have a job. The other treats not having a job as an inevitability of
the increasing incentive for automation.

See: 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut

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csense
Anyone want to speculate on what's going to be IR #4? I'm thinking either
biotech (an industry I know little about) or widespread Internet-enabled
custom manufacturing of real-world stuff.

Space colonization will probably be another IR, but it seems like serious
efforts at a permanent self-sustaining colony (that could survive indefinitely
if something really bad happened and the human race on Earth was wiped out)
are at least 50 years away.

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artsrc
What does "growth" measure?

If we buy a $7 kindle book rather than a $16 paper back does that halve GDP?

We have improved medical care that costs the same does that imply no growth?

If twice as many people use air travel, but it costs half as much does that
mean there is no growth?

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michaelochurch
Growth is not over, but the pace has slowed, due to decreased R&D investment.
The reason for the 5-6% global growth of the 1950s-60s (which we haven't seen
since then) is all of the research that was being funded during the Cold War.
When research funding dried up, smart people (even in unrelated sectors) could
no longer demand autonomy to the same degree, and the economy slowed as the
empty suits took over (and redistributed all the wealth to themselves).

The overarching story is still faster-than-exponential. A lackluster (in
comparison to what was before it) 50 years does not mean that growth is
"over".

~~~
dmix
They are comparing growth from 1750-2012. I'm not sure how relevant the one
productive decade (or two) NASA and a few other agencies had during the cold
war is to the discussion of macro-economic growth.

Also do you have a source on the reduction in R&D investment in the economy
from the cold war until now (for the entire economy)?

~~~
michaelochurch
It's hard to get those numbers, because of questions regarding how R&D is
defined, but:

* Decent academic jobs have become extremely rare in the past 30 years. * Blue-sky corporate R&D has been slashed. * Worker autonomy is decreasing in most companies, resulting in low job satisfaction.

No one in the R&D world debates the contention that this contraction has been
going on for 30+ years and that it's immensely destructive.

~~~
dmix
I agree with the engineers vs suits sentiment. But I think that has more to do
with bureaucracy as the result of mega-corporations gaining dominance, bigger
universities, population growth and the government growing in size - than it
has to do with government (or university) R&D investment.

The startup scene shows engineers and innovations still reign outside of large
organizational structures.

~~~
michaelochurch
_The startup scene shows engineers and innovations still reign outside of
large organizational structures._

Disagree, at least if by "startup scene" you mean VC-istan. The VCs hold all
the cards, and most of those startups aren't very interesting or innovative.

VC-istan is a postmodern tech company. A fairly good one, but more like a
large bureaucracy than a research center. The CEOs are semi-independent PMs
who are still beholden to their VC bosses.

The only way to turn VC-istan into something decent would be to impose strict
regulations over communications between VCs in order to restrict their ability
to collude on terms or blacklist entrepreneurs who piss them off.

~~~
dmix
Ugh, regulate communications? That means they'd have to monitor communication.

You can prevent collusion by creating more market options (removing barriers
to entry) and promoting greater transparency in the industry.

I'll never understand why people don't look for solutions involving freedom
first but instead always look to the government to add restrictions and
regulations by force.

That would just make the VC's use encryption and other means of evasion,
further pushing their negative activity underground and making it harder for
new VC's to get started due to more costs in following regulation.

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pebb
Growth in the developed world is over.

