In this post (Bret Swanson - Maximum Entropy » Blog Archive » Doom? Or Boom?.technologist Bret Swanson gives us his slides from a recent presentation in which he tries to measure the growth of consumer bandwidth and to show how the pace of technological change in other areas is likely to continue remaking our world for the better.
Do we really understand just how fast technology advances over time? And the magnitude of price changes and innovations it yields?
Especially in the realm of public policy, we often obsess over today’s seemingly intractable problems without realizing that technology and economic growth often show us a way out.
And this is the BIG question during this critical moment in history. Is growth good or bad? If growth is good then how will we fuel all that growth? Resources are finite, especially energy.
And right in time, famed money manager Jeremy Grantham predicts slow economic growth for at least seven years. But that's not even the worst part, he says here
...we are simply running out of everything at a dangerous rate. We apparently have trouble processing numeric issues of this kind, and this missing faculty will cause considerable grief. We do not understand the implications of exponential or compound growth rates: the main implication being that they are impossible to sustain.
Who is right? I am not willing to bet yet because all near certainties seem to have disappeared lately. Will growth rescue us if we let it? Or are we doomed to live a life of increasing scarcity and higher prices where our children live a much poorer life than we did?
It seems that the nation at a time of peril had chosen the shrinking pie path. Lately, it seems that we are getting a lot more pessimism and anti-growth rhetoric than we bargained for.
What do you think?
Berk
It seems the season for predictions of that kind, as was the 1970s. All that's missing to recreate the '70s is a ramp-up in inflation and the goldbugs showing up...
Posted by: Daniel M. Ryan | July 30, 2009 at 02:46 AM
Goldbugs are here as many hedge funds - value guys -initiated positions in gold last quarter. I've got my bell bottoms on and I'm ready for disco.
Posted by: Berk | July 30, 2009 at 06:54 PM
Good for you. A lack of a Studio 54 notwithstanding, there'll be some discoing in the near future.
Posted by: Daniel M. Ryan | August 02, 2009 at 05:05 PM