Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Sure. So I think one of the most important facts in the world and sort of the history of civilization today is that the rate of progress has not been constant, right? If you look at sort of what happened in the world say between 0 and 1700, 1800, thereabouts, at the rate of progress, by any major metric in terms of, you know, average income or average life expectancy or infant mortality, any of these measures, it was either constant or only improving at a very slow rate, right? And then something happened, something changed around sort of 1700, 1750, you know, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the advent of something approximating modern science, and once that happened, so many things started to get better together. Incomes improved, life expectancies increased, we started to discover really fundamental knowledge about the world, we started to invent really important new technologies and these things, over the last couple of centuries, really diffused around the world, right? So that’s interesting and important, and the thing that has been a focus of both of ours for the past couple years is thinking about, well, we sort of transitioned from this regime where we weren’t making much progress to one where we had been making much more. Is this the best we can do, right? Or is there something that looks compared to status quo today, you know, so much better again that it’s sort of like a status quo before the Industrial Revolution. And as you look around the world today, on the one hand, we see the tremendous importance of the progress that we are generating and that for example the number of people in extreme poverty has declined by more than a billion people since I was born. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of suggestive evidence that maybe we aren’t as effective at generating progress today as we have been in the past. So for example, if you look at the U.S., productivity growth mid-century or say between, you know, 1920, 1970, was maybe about 1.9% a year. Now most economists think it’s much lower, maybe around sort of .4% a year, something like that. So we’re at least by economic measures, generating progress more slowly than we used to be. Now, whatever the rate at which we’re kind of making progress or figuring out ways to do things better today, whatever that absolute level is, it would be much better if we were doing it more effectively, if we were able to solve the most important problems that face us today in 50 years and 100 years rather than 500 years or a thousand years, right? So the meta question we’re really interested in is how does progress happen, how do we discover useful knowledge, how is that diffused, and how can we do it better? It’s important to understand, I think, how much this is an invisible crisis. So if you have a growth rate that is 1 percentage point lower, over the course of a bit more than a century, you could have been three times richer with a higher growth rate. That would be something like the difference between the United States today and Mexico. So by having a lower rate of productivity growth, in no given year does it feel that bad, but two, three generations later, you’re much worse off, it’s harder to pay off your debts, harder to solve climate change, harder to address a whole host of problems. Yeah, so before we kinda dive into how we can improve this, what do you say to the people who question whether all this progress is positive? I mean, certainly as we make progress in one area, it creates issues in other areas, and that’s been a big topic that I focused on in my work at Facebook over the last few years and a lot of these challenge discussions. But how does that fit into the overall framework of what you’re studying and this discipline here?…

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