Results for “no great stagnation”
495 found

The greatest stagnation, the economy that is Japan

From the 4th quarter of 2013 to the 2nd quarter of 2015 the Japanese economy grew by a grand total of 0.1%.  And the unemployment rate continued to fall, from 3.7% to 3.4%.  That’s right, over the past 6 quarters the Japanese economy has been growing at above trend.  But that blistering pace can’t go on forever.  The unemployment rate is down to 3.4%, and unless I’m mistaken there is a theoretical “zero lower bound” on unemployment that is even more certain than interest rates. The Japanese economy is like a Galapagos tortoise that has just sprinted 20 meters, and needs a long rest.

That is from Scott Sumner, there is more at the link.

There is no great penal stagnation, a drone and cell phone twofer

…the warden of the Lee Correctional Institute, Cecilia Reynolds, said that in recent weeks her officers found 17 phones in one inmate’s cell. She said she suspected that the phones continue to come in on drones.

There is more here, interesting throughout.  How about this bit?:

Prison officials, echoing Ms. Reynolds, say that convicts and their families and friends are willing to pay more than $1,000 to get a device – like an iPhone — into a prison. Smartphones are so desirable because unlike pay phones at prisons, they are not recorded or monitored, enabling gang leaders to freely run their criminal activities from behind bars. The phones also allow them to watch pornography and communicate surreptitiously with fellow prisoners.

The phones are essential for coordinating with smugglers using drones, because the prisoners need to know where to find the deliveries in the yard. Most important for the smugglers, the prisoners can then use the phones to quickly pay them.

How about blocking cell phone signals inside the jail?  Elsewhere, a possibly radioactive drone was found on the roof of the office of Prime Minister Abe.  As I’ve said already on Twitter, the drone wars have begun…

There is no feline great stagnation

Facial recognition is helping improve everything from gaming to fighting crime – and now it could help in the battle against cat obesity.

A new gadget that uses ‘cutting-edge cat facial recognition technology’ promises to monitor our feline friends’ appetites and alert owners to any problems.

The Bistro system, created by Taiwanese company 42Ark, uses a camera at the front of a feeder to identify each of the cats.

There is more here, along with obligatory cat photo, with the cat’s face being scanned by facial recognition technology.  For the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.

There is no great rent-seeking stagnation

An enterprising young French man, however, has solved the problems of anyone who has encountered a malfunctioning vending machine by inventing a robot that can go inside one and ‘steal’ any item.

Here is the link, which offers a video in French and some unnecessary noise if you click on it.

For the pointer I thank the excellent Mark Thorson.

*Economist* symposium on *The Great Stagnation*

You will find it here, with contributions from Viral Acharya, Scott Sumner, Hal Varian, and Paul Seabright.  From elsewhere, Noah Smith cautions economists not to invoke technology too often.  Brad DeLong chimes in.  From a few years ago, Austan Goolsbee measures the consumer surplus from the internet; his numbers do not refute the standard view that median income growth has become much much slower.

The Great Spanish Estancamiento (from my email)

I’ve read an interesting article over at “El Pais” on the Spanish stagnation ( https://cincodias.elpais.com/opinion/2023-10-10/por-que-no-cambia-el-modelo-productivo-espanol.html , paywalled). Some interesting bits:

–  Spain’s GDP per capita, measured at constant prices in 2022, has shown minimal growth compared to 2007, with just a 0.8 per cent increase over 15 years. Meanwhile, other European countries have seen significant growth: France by 7 per cent, the Netherlands by 10.7 per cent, and Germany by 13.7 per cent.

– Spanish productivity is being dragged down by small businesses, while medium and large companies perform closer to the EU average.The article claims that “la particularidad española es que el peso relativo de estas empresas pequeñas en el tejido productivo es mucho mayor que en los países vecinos”.

My digression: some (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/italys-productivity-conundrum-role-resource-misallocation) point out that in Italy TFP is declining because of large firms.

– In 2022, the rate of “early leavers from education and training” has reached 13.9 per cent. In the EU only Romania surpasses Spain in this regard. The authors point to tourism as the main culprit. But in the two EU countries where tourism contributes the largest share to GDP – Croatia and Greece  – the percentage of such young people is the lowest (  https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:V2-early-leavers-230523.png ).

The authors support some sort of industrial policy for Spain as a way to overcome the stagnation. Even with the changing climate of opinion in Brussels and a more mercantilist mindset, I doubt that a full-blown, national industrial policy is possible within the EU. Probably, as with Italy (see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09538259.2022.2091408 ), without constraints imposed by Brussels, the stagnation wouldn’t be as deep as it is.

It would be great to see a comparative analysis of TFP stagnation in the European South!

That is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.

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 (British) Stagnation

David Wallace-Wells in the NYTimes:

In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.

It’s not just the NHS

By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.

Wallace-Wells puts the blame on “austerity”. I see austerity as more obviously a consequence than a cause of stagnation. Government spending in Poland and Slovenia is modestly less than in the UK and the central government in Poland and Slovenia spend far less than the UK does on health. The question is not why the UK spends less–it doesn’t–the question is why it spends so much and gets so little.

See also Tyler and Tyrone on this issue.

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.