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".
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The overarching story is still faster-than-exponential
I've heard a lot of people lately incorrectly using the word "exponential" to just mean "pretty fast." It has a specific mathematical meaning which you clearly don't know, but which you should know if you're going to throw around words like "exponential."
If growth over the period you're talking about has 6% per year as an upper bound, that's really saying it's bounded above by some curve of the form
f(t) = k0*1.06^t
where k0 is the GDP at the start of your period. The function f(t) is an exponential function. So your growth is not "faster-than-exponential" since it's bounded above by an exponential function.
The only way you can get faster-than-exponential growth is if the percentage growth of GDP is itself growing every year. Needless to say this will eventually become ridiculously fast growth: If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year. Insane!
Faster-than-exponential means the rate of growth increases as time progresses, e.g. e^(e^t).
By "the overarching story is still faster-than-exponential", what I mean is that the rate of economic growth itself is growing-- taking the long (hundreds of years) view. In agrarian times, 0.1% per year was typical. By the 1700s, we were up to 0.3-0.5% per year. By 1825, 1% per year was typical. Now, global economic growth is about 4% per year.
If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year.
It won't grow that fast. My guess is that the growth rate's own doubling rate is about once every 150 years or so (with noise) meaning we'll see 9-10% growth as the norm in the mid-22nd century. Obviously, there's some limit to this, but once humanity is post-scarcity (ca. 2120) who cares?
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".