Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What is your vision for the long-term future? Do you see it as we’re going to have growth and then some kind of plateau? Or going to go up and down? Or will it just continue rising forever? I don’t think the rate of growth will rise forever. My view of economic history is that growth comes in spurts. It’s not an evenly managed process, though it was for part of the post–World War II era. You have a thing called general purpose technologies, one of those being fossil fuels plus machines, which became significant in the 19th century, and then you have the big growth spurt. You do everything you can, say, with fossil fuels and machines: you get cars, you get planes, electricity, powerful factories. But at some point, your cars only get so much better. And then you wait for the next big breakthrough. The next set of big breakthroughs may well involve the Internet, artificial intelligence, Internet of things. They are not quite here yet. You see many signs of them. They don’t yet make the growth rate much higher, and then you will have a big period of explosive growth and then a slowing down again. That’s my basic model. I was thinking less about growth and more thinking of just the absolute level of the economy or welfare in the universe, in the future. Do you think at some point it’s just going to level off because we’ll have done everything we can? We’ll have grabbed all of the matter we can access, and we’ll have figured out the best configuration for it to produce value. And at that point, it’s just a matter of milking it for as long as we can.…

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