From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Sep 04 2001 - 12:23:20 MDT
Another place to look is Robin Hanson's paper on economic growth
acceleration, http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.html. This does not try to
tote up signs of progress, which are varied and ever-changing. Instead it
goes to basics, looking at the raw data on total economic productivity,
the sum total of the economic output of the entire human race, looking
at progress not just over decades or centuries, but all the way back to
cave man days.
Robin fits the curve with a fairly simple formula and finds that human
history can be divided into periods of exponential growth, where the
fundamental growth rate has varied between periods. The growth rate
can be expressed as the doubling time, the time it takes for economic
output to double.
He identifies an early, pre-technology period, when biological evolution
seemed to dominate, with a doubling time of 34M years; a transition to
a hunting based economy with a doubling time of 224K years; a farming
economy with a doubling time of 904 years; and finally an industrial
economy with a doubling time of 6.3 years.
Looking world-wide, we are still in the transition from farming to
industrial phases. Current economic growth rates correspond to a doubling
time of about 20 years. By this model we would expect this to decrease
to about 6 years over the next few decades.
The increase in the rate of economic growth over the 20th century is
tangible and measurable data which directly drives the quality of life
and improvements in standard of living. Weighing washing machines
against cell phones is a more difficult basis to make a comparison.
The tantalizing part about Robin's analysis is the possibility of a future
transition to a new post-industrial economic mode. The productivity
data doesn't show it directly, but broadly speaking we are due for
a change, and of course as Extropians it is easy to anticipate one.
But based on the changes we have seen in the past from mode to mode,
each one has a doubling time maybe 100 times faster than the one before.
That would imply that the new mode could have an economic doubling time
of just a few weeks!
It's beyond my imagination to conceive of what a world would be like where
economic output doubled that fast. Average personal wealth would increase
by factors of thousands or even millions every year. Obviously such a
transition would imply fundamental changes in the human condition.
Of course it is risky to extrapolate data like this, but Robin's curve
fitting is impressively accurate, and it would be a departure from
the historical pattern if we never saw another transition. Whether it
would be as extreme as the previous transitions remains to be seen, but
looking at even just the potential future technologies we know about,
never mind the ones we haven't thought of, it certainly seems possible.
Hal
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