Results for “great stagnation”
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The talks from the Civic Future conference on the Great Stagnation

From my email, from Civic Future:

We held our inaugural annual conference The Great Stagnation Summit 2023 last month at the University of Cambridge. Well, you can now watch and listen to videos of the panel discussions on our YouTube channel. We have also made the discussion transcripts available, which you can read using the links below or on the summit page.

Progress: Have we run out of road? – Tyler Cowen (keynote),  David Edgerton, Sam Bowman, Diane Coyle  Video / Transcript

Rekindling Britain’s economic flame – Lord Sainsbury, Andy Haldane, Anton Howes, Deirdre McCloskey, Tim Besley Video / Transcript

Progress on trial – Aria Babu, Nicholas Boys Smith, Matt Ridley, Sam Richards, Inaya Folarin Iman  Video / Transcript

How to be good stewards of progress – James Phillips, Ben Reinhardt, Stian Westlake, Rachel Wolf, Munira Mirza Video / Transcript

Unlocking the Potential – Matt Clifford, Logan Graham, Saffron Huang, Marc Warner, John Thornhill Video / Transcript

Semaglutide, Ozempic, and the end of the Great Stagnation

I am no expert on this weight loss drug, but many people on both the bio side and the VC side are telling me it works.  Might it, or some variant thereof, become the best-selling drug of all time?

Just think that within five years we likely will have come up with good, serious remedies to Covid, to obesity (a major, major public health problem, especially in America), to malaria, and to dengue, vaccines in the latter two cases.  And that is unlikely to be the end of the list.

That is an astonishing record, and we are truly living in a golden age for biomedicine.  Ozempic is further evidence that the great stagnation is over, even though the current world is not mimicking the physical dynamism of say the 1920s.

The great stagnation and the primacy of foreign policy

One cause (and effect) of the great stagnation, as emphasized by Peter Thiel and others (including myself), is our inability to imagine a future radically different from the immediate past.  We view progress as gentrification and more nice restaurants, not fundamental transformation.

This same lack of imagination makes it difficult to understand the primacy of foreign policy in understanding the world on a day-to-day basis.  If you lack imagination, you will tend to assume that the current configurations of countries, alliances, and so on are simply going to last.

But they are not, and they never have.  And thus the primacy of foreign policy considerations.  But for many people this is difficult to grasp.

Me on the end of the Great Stagnation

Here is some (edited) transcript from an AEI symposium, via Jim Pethokoukis:

We’ve come up with great new ideas, took a little while to figure out how to use them and how to spread throughout the economy, and eventually they made big differences. Are we assuming that these new technologies are like the ones in the past and they’ll have that eventual impact?

I think the new innovations will be special in at least one significant way: A lot of them will not contribute that much to per capita GDP. So, if you take the mRNA vaccines, they’re influencing what would normally be called the “cyclical component.” If you think of older people as more likely to die from COVID-19 . . . by saving lives — I’m not suggesting per capita GDP will go down — but the impact on human welfare will be much greater than what would appear to be the long-term secular trend in GDP. Also, two of the big advances that might happen are a vaccine against HIV/AIDS and an effective vaccine against malaria. Those would be incredible advances for humanity, but I don’t know how much they would show up in US per capita GDP or productivity — possibly not really much at all.

The other new wave of innovations, which you could call green energy — again, you could be very optimistic about those, but the main thing they’re doing is helping us avoid a catastrophe. So they’re boosting GDP relative to a quite awful counterfactual of just continuing to burn coal and other fossil fuels. But I’m not sure we’ll feel we have higher standards of living relative to what we were used to simply because there’s a solar panel on your home. It might in some ways make your energy supply better, but again, it will be hidden by the counterfactual. So, it will be a very strange kind of technology boom when I look at the two main areas where I see a lot of progress.

If we go through a period where none of this stuff is really showing up in data and maybe it’s not obvious that people’s living standards are rising, do we risk having less societal tolerance for the kinds of disruptions that economic growth and progress naturally make?

Here’s one of my fears: The biomedical innovation progress is so fast but the rest of the economy stays relatively static, so we become older as a society more quickly than we had been expecting. You could have a lot more status quo bias — just more entrenchment, 10 years more of a problem — and we could, in a funny way, innovate ourselves into a tighter complacency and a tighter stagnation.

I’m not rooting against increases in life expectancy. Ceteris paribus, I would take them, obviously. But that said, you want to be careful about the order in which progress comes, and I’m not sure if we’re going to get it in an optimal order.

Here is the complete excerpt.

Remote Work Impact on Ending The Great Stagnation?

Jeff Allen emails me:

If the Great Stagnation is ending (we will see), it seems as if the COVID-forced remote work revolution has to have played some sort of role.

Speaking from personal experience as a white collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated, as have their personal time investments like physically visiting the grocery store or running errands. Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant.

Perhaps most importantly, work *travel* is not happening. Valuable collaborations with colleagues, customers, regulators or other partner companies aren’t delayed by the vagaries of the various groups’ availability to meet in person, navigating being in different cities, flights, hotels, etc. Collaboration happens as soon as you have the idea to meet via Zoom. And a lot *more* collaboration happens as a result. It may be lower productivity collaboration than meeting in person around a whiteboard (maybe), but the sheer quantity of it means on net there’s perhaps been a boom in cross-pollination of ideas.

Not to mention all of the wasted productivity time that work travel eats up by putting high value workers in low productivity transit mode….Uber to airport, security lines, wait for flight in the terminal, maybe grab an hour of in-flight WiFi to catch up on email, land, taxi on the airstrip for 20 minutes, Uber to hotel…is completely gone from our lives.

In general, I think we drastically overrate the value of work travel.

I’m sure this Mass Virtualization event doesn’t benefit all workers equally.

But could it be an accelerant for certain high-value innovations worked on by the best of the best in science and technology?

I’m not saying I don’t want the world to go back to normal. Travel is great. In-person human interaction certainly has many benefits (duh). But I think we should ask ourselves how we can retain some of the best advantages this last year has brought us, even after the vaccines and herd immunity bring us back to something resembling normalcy in 2021.

Here is a related Robin Hanson post on the importance of work from a distance.  Of course remote work is, to some extent, a way around both immigration and NIMBY restrictions.  You will note this is all very much in line with my earlier take that, if the great stagnation ends, it will be because we have placed the internet at the center of our institutions, rather than using the internet as an add-on.

What might an end to the Great Stagnation consist of?

If indeed it did, they are asking a similar question at The Economist. In recent times you might cite the onset of Apple’s M1, GPT-3, DeepMind’s application of AI to protein folding, phase III for a credible malaria vaccine, a CRISPR/sickle cell cure, the possibility of a universal flu vaccine, mRNA vaccines, ongoing solar power progress, wonderful new batteries for electric vehicles, a possibly new method for Chinese fusion (?), Chinese photon quantum computing, and ongoing advances in space exploration, most of all from SpaceX. Tesla has a very high market valuation, and Elon is the world’s second richest man.

Distanced work is very important, and here is a separate post on that.

I would say that almost certainly the great stagnation is over in the biomedical sciences.  It is less obvious that the great stagnation is over more generally, as we might simply retreat into our former sloth and complacency once we are mostly vaccinated.  Applied Divinity Studies has posed some pointed questions about why we might think that stagnation is over.

If you are looking for a quick metric to indicate the great stagnation might be over, consider total factor productivity.  It is entirely possible that tfp in 2021 will be 5 or more, its highest level ever.  (To be sure, this will show up as a measured increase in inputs more than as tfp, but we all know why those inputs will be increasing and that is because of science…yes this is a problem with tfp measures!)  Over the two years to follow after that, we should be seeing very high tfps around the world.  So that will be very high tfp for a few years.

Again, that is not proof of a permanent or even an ongoing end to the great stagnation.  But it is something.

Two more general points seem relevant.  First, many of the biomedical advances seem connected to new platforms, new modes of computation, new uses of AI, and so on, and they should be leading to yet further advances.  Second, there are (finally!) some very real advances in energy use, and those tend to bring yet other advances in their wake, and not just advances in bit space.

But not all is rosy.  If you recall my paper with Ben Southwood, the obstacles standing in the way of faster scientific progress, such as specialization and bureaucratization, mostly remain and some of them will be getting worse.

My The Great Stagnation, published in 2011, offered some pointed predictions.  It argued that the “next big thing” was already with us, namely the internet, but we simply hadn’t learned to use it effectively yet.  Once we put the internet at the center of many more of our institutions, rather than treating it as an add-on, the great stagnation would end.  Numerous times (using roughly a 2011 start date) I predicted that the great stagnation would be over within twenty years time, though not in the next few years.  The Great Stagnation in fact was an optimistic book, at least if you read it to the end and do not just mood affiliate over the title.

By no means would I say that specific scenario has been validated, but as a prediction it is looking not so crazy.

The gains from truly mobilizing the internet may in fact right now be swamping all of the accumulated obstacles we have put in the way of progress.

I also wrote, in 2011, that as the great stagnation approaches its end, we will all be deeply upset, and long for the earlier times.  That too is by no means obviously wrong.

How should the possible end of the Great Stagnation influence your media diet?

I’ll soon write more on whether the Great Stagnation truly is over, and how we might know, but for now it suffices to mention a lot is going on in science and also in applied science and actual invention, not just nifty articles in Atlantic.  On net, this means you should spend more time consuming YouTube videos (try this one on protein folding).  They tend to be current, and to explain difficult matters in visual and also in fairly memorable terms.  There will be such videos for virtually every new advance.  You should read fewer normal books, more vertigo-inducing books, and spend less time on social media.  You should read more Wikipedia articles, and when you read books you should select more from the history of science and times of turmoil.  You should read this blog more often too.

Is the Great Stagnation over?

– A working mRNA vaccine (first ever in humans!),

– Apple M1 chip,

– SpaceX rocket launch,

– GPT-3,

– Tons of cool companies IPO’ing and tons more getting started,

– V-shaped recovery

– Electric cars

– Crypto going mainstream

That is from a tweet by Nabeel S.Qureshi.  One could add warp speed, affordable solar power, the eggplant, and distanced work to that list, the latter also implying significant rent declines and child care cost declines for many people.

Around the time The Great Stagnation came out in 2011, I predicted that it was most likely to end within the next twenty years.  We are not there yet, but that claim is no longer looking so absurd.

Note that the vaccine-driven recovery will measure as a rise in labor inputs, but in reality it will be pure TFP.  In 2021 (but which quarter?), true TFP will be remarkably high, maybe the highest ever?

Do beliefs cause the great stagnation to persist?

The Great Recession was a deep downturn with long-lasting effects on credit, employment, and output. While narratives about its causes abound, the persistence of gross domestic product below precrisis trends remains puzzling. We propose a simple persistence mechanism that can be quantified and combined with existing models. Our key premise is that agents do not know the true distribution of shocks but use data to estimate it nonparametrically. Then, transitory events, especially extreme ones, generate persistent changes in beliefs and macro outcomes. Embedding this mechanism in a neoclassical model, we find that it endogenously generates persistent drops in economic activity after tail events.

That is from a new piece by

Transparent erasers markets in everything there is no great stagnation

To many, Japan seems like a technological wonderland that’s at least a couple of decades ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to innovation. That even applies to something as seemingly mundane as office supplies, as is evident by this new see-through eraser that enhances precision by providing an unobstructed view of what’s actually being erased.

…And with a price tag of around $1.40 for a large version of the Clear Radar, and around 90 cents for a smaller one, Seed isn’t charging an inflated premium for this innovation, so why wouldn’t you upgrade?

Here is the full story, via Samuel Brenner.

There is no great stagnation in policing nature through the use of AI-regulated cat flaps

A cat flap that automatically bars entry to a pet if it tries to enter with prey in its jaws has been built as a DIY project by an Amazon employee.

Ben Hamm used machine-learning software to train a system to recognise when his cat Metric was approaching with a rodent or bird in its mouth.

When it detected such an attack, he said, a computer attached to the flap’s lock triggered a 15-minute shut-out.

Mr Hamm unveiled his invention at an event in Seattle last month.

Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson.

There is no great stagnation, refitted tuk-tuk edition

An Essex man has said he is “over the moon” after setting a new tuk-tuk land speed record, having purchased the three-wheeled Thai vehicle during a “boozy night on eBay”.

Over the course of two laps, Matt Everard reached a speed of 74.306mph (119.583km/h) after being set a target of 68.35mph (110km/h) by Guinness World Records.

Everard, 46, a freight firm boss from Billericay, drove the 1971 Bangkok taxi on Monday at the Elvington airfield in North Yorkshire, with his cousin, Russell Shearman, 49, as his backseat passenger.

Everard, a father of two, has spent more than £20,000 improving the vehicle after buying it from a seller in Bolton in 2017, saying he has worked on “every nut, bolt and bearing”.

Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson.

*First Man* and the great stagnation

I enjoyed this movie, although I would not describe it as a must-see.  It is best for showing the rickety and claustrophobic nature of the moon landing program.

Three points struck me in particular, both concerning progress.  First, the space shots in this movie are not better than those of Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There are even several Kubrick homage shots, and they don’t look any better than the originals, and arguably somewhat worse.  Perhaps most cinematic progress has come in shooting or better yet constructing dense scenes, but that does not apply to space.

Second, I walked to my (non-fancy) car and turned on the ignition right after watching the movie.  It was immediately striking how much better and more reliable was the software in my car than in the whole well-funded moon program.  In this sense technological progress has been immense.  That said, most cars in operation today are not that much better than cars from 1969, and they perform more or less the same functions, albeit more safely.  Improving car manufacture is not that hard, but improving the usefulness of cars in our daily lives is where the problem lies.  So this supports the “the consumer space is already filled out” interpretation of the great stagnation.

Third, perhaps it is the very absence of the internet and advanced information technology that made the moon program possible.  When Armstrong arrives at the moon, you realize it is pretty boring and it has not so much to offer, either in 1969 or today.  Would they have gone to such trouble if there had been better problems to work on?  Well before the end of the movie, I found myself wanting to check my email and refresh my Twitter feed.

By the way, this movie has bombed at the box office, perhaps not a good sign for the revival of adventure in contemporary culture.