In the FT magazine, here is the end bit:
In short, if Cowen is right, there will be less growth in future unless a new wave of technology arrives, and our political institutions will have to cope, if they can. The same argument surely applies to western Europe too, and will come as no news to Japan.
And the solution? I am not sure, and neither is Cowen. He hopes to raise the status of scientists and researchers – a good idea, but how? The UK coalition plans to introduce charter schools; we shall have to see whether that delivers results. The government is also reducing subsidies for universities and, indirectly, for public libraries. Both those policies are probably progressive: universities (certainly) and libraries (probably) tend to be middle-class haunts. But if the great stagnation is the problem, making access to knowledge more expensive is surely not much of a solution.
The gradual addition of ~2 billion people to the ranks of the developed world over the next 50-100 years will certainly change the game. We'll have more people from more countries with greater resources pushing on the technological frontier. Innovation and productivity blooms could very well become more frequent.
oh, we could spend some money on actual research. Theres quite a lot of low hanging fruit on that. Not the sort of thing that works for private payoffs though.
If Bruce Charlton is right and The West is plagued by a decline in the quality of scientists and a corruption of science, then perhaps we'd better all hope that The East takes up science in the way that The West used to do it.
charltonteaching.blogspot.com
I'm really confident that this "decline in innovation" is based on bad data, or a bad understanding of innovation.
I hope you didn't fall for the "patents per population" bs pushed by neo-malthusians. Patents in our modern world are a very poor proxy for invention, and the "per population" has incredibly less meaning in a connected world.
Subscribe to the "hack a day" rss feed. Amazing intellectual capital there, amazingly not profit focussed, and certainly not patent generating.
Tyler, would it be correct to say that education spending in the sense that Tim suggests would be best spent on the cognitive elite, rather than on basic education for the needy, if long-run economic growth is the goal?
"Access to knowledge has literally never been cheaper than it is at this very moment."
But can't you imagine how that could be exactly the problem?
The Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot center (note my high status reference material) indicates that bursts of innovation coincide with advances in communication. It's great, but the spread of innovation doesn't increase the available innovations to be spread, it reduces them, at least short term.
Given 5 minutes, coffee, and a keyboard, I suppose I can continue. I am not a techno-utopian by any means. I don't think everything will get better. I just see that some things will. We will indeed have greater ability to innovate, any one of us, and to build off what has been done, with less time spent in accidental duplication of experiments.
That won't change the globalization and labor dynamic. That won't change environmental over-use. It will just mean that gadgets come faster and faster. Some of those are pretty neat. I'm running a road trip pretty much off a Droid X right now, and it's pretty amazing. Yelp seems to have enough critical mass now that "highest rated – $" restaurants are pretty good picks.
Wow, technology promotes growth and states are affected by unemployment.
This guy really knows what he's talking about.
In his response to the book Tim Harford seems trapped in today’s British BBCish middle class angst about cutbacks, which is lovely and warm but not very tough.
Say we accept Cowen’s analysis of the technological dimension of future growth, and his solutions. Neo Schumpeterian technology scholars like Nelson, Freeman, Dosi, and perhaps even Baumol have been arguing for decades that government has a critical role in R&D and basic science. Even when the private sector dynamics of oligopolistic and competitive innovation are working OK, there are some really important basic things in research and training that firms can’t or won’t do.
I’ve always thought it unfortunate — given the fact that economic progress involves such a large element of technological *determination* — that government funding and organization of R&D simply got wrapped up in the controversial envelope of industrial policy. Even from a free market perspective, even from the perspective of reducing state functions down to *the essential minimum*, you can still justify doses of government-led R&D. Of course you have to make sure it will be administered efficiently and as far as possible a-politically without rent-seeking, and it’s easier to focus on that management/transparency task when the state is already doing much less in non-essential areas. But the justification for government-assisted science is probably stronger than the justification for government-run schools.
Which brings me back to Harford — the vision needed at the political level should confront bigger questions than trite hand-wringing over generalities like “reducing subsidies to universitiesâ€. Government should bravely be justifying a clear policy to provide more financial support and structured incentives to science and other hard subjects — with direct relevance to techno-economic progress — and proportionally less to humanities etc. Here they can emulate East Asia. The debate (which could have been settled 20-30 years ago) should revolve around the *relative proportions*. No one is proposing to kill of the humanities completely (though I do privately think some of the lightweight “studies†could be rationally eliminated without any impoverishment to society!!!). After all, society's technological trajectory would be really be a mess and a danger without political philosophy…
As for public libraries, well we love ‘em but in 2011 don’t *need* them… as much. As another commenter and Tyler himself say, knowledge is now cheaper than ever and the internet has done wonders for the production and diffusion of science.
Sorry didn’t have time to write a shorter comment.
In the next decades China will pull Europe and the US forward. A country of 1.3 billion will produce the bulk of the technological innovations of the next decades.
Re: raising the status of scientists, a curious historical footnote:
— http://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/WranglersWh…
And those mathematics Tripos exams (at least in the 1830s and 1840s before more specialization was introduced) covered a great deal more than pure mathematics: there were questions covering optics, mechanics, astronomy, hydrostatics, and so forth (see for instance, here or here).
Even if you agree that universities and public libraries are just "middle-class haunts" (which I don't), what is so progressive about impoverishing the middle class?
It is interesting that he says the progressives are against the bourgeois and their middle-class haunts, the universities where they are educated into the postmodern world by progressives.
What class of person today is considered more highly than the Scientist?
There are several ways to raise the status of scientists. First, increase the salaries of basic researchers. Too many great scientists realize that they can make a lot more money in non-productive fields like finance and law. Second, fund more basic research. It's remarkably cheap. Stop trying to "manage" particular fields or questions by offering special pots of money just for certain topics, but rather put money into all fields of science. Third, weaken the influence of anti-science ideologies such as fundamentalist religions—in the US, why not end tax-exempt status for religious organizations for example?
"In the next decades China will pull Europe and the US forward. A country of 1.3 billion will produce the bulk of the technological innovations of the next decades."
What an utterly bizarre comment. Aside from just being wrong, why on earth would you select China and cite its population size rather than India – which will quickly blow past China not only in population size but in favorability of demographics?
The question I have for those that tout quality is why aren't people willing or able to pay more for it, for if they were it would be measurable.
I don't understand how the argument "with an additional 1 to 2 billion people to boot" holds here. Wasn't that the case at the turn of the 20th century as well? I know past performance cannot be a reliable indicator of future results, but let's not make any Malthusian errors.
The big question is whether technology can continue to support jobs into the 21st century. In a recent blog post, I wrote about how technology can actually drive inequality:
http://dqydj.net/skill-based-inequality-due-to-te…
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