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This is: Technological stagnation: Why I came around, published by jasoncrawford on the effective altruism forum.
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“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, expressing a sort of jaded disappointment with technological progress. (The fact that the 140 characters have become 280, a 100% increase, does not seem to have impressed him.)
Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number, since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.
When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. The arguments weren’t convincing to me. But as I studied the history of progress (and looked at the numbers), I slowly came around, and now I’m fairly convinced. So convinced, in fact, that I now seem to be more pessimistic about ending stagnation than some of its original proponents.
In this essay I’ll try to capture both why I was originally skeptical, and also why I changed my mind. If you have heard some of the same arguments that I did, and are skeptical for the same reasons, maybe my framing of the issue will help.
Stagnation is relative
To get one misconception out of the way first: “stagnation” does not mean zero progress. No one is claiming that. There wasn’t zero progress even before the Industrial Revolution (or the civilizations of Europe and Asia would have looked no different in 1700 than they did in the days of nomadic hunter-gatherers, tens of thousands of years ago).
Stagnation just means slower progress. And not even slower than that pre-industrial era, but slower than, roughly, the late 1800s to mid-1900s, when growth rates are said to have peaked.
Because of this, we can’t resolve the issue by pointing to isolated advances. The microwave, the air conditioner, the electronic pacemaker, a new cancer drug—these are great, but they don’t disprove stagnation.
Stagnation is relative, and so to evaluate the hypothesis we must find some way to compare magnitudes. This is difficult.
Only 140 characters?
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a global communications network to connect everyone on the planet to each other and to the whole of the world’s knowledge, art, philosophy and culture.” When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.
Indeed, the digital revolution has been absolutely amazing. It’s up there with electricity, the internal combustion engine, or mass manufacturing: one of the great, fundamental, transformative technologies of the industrial age. (Although admittedly it’s hard to see the effect of computers in the productivity statistics, and I don’t know why.)
But we don’t need to downplay the magnitude of the digital revolution to see stagnation; conversely, proving its importance will not defeat the stagnation hypothesis. Again, stagnation is relative, and we must find some way to compare the current period to those that came before.
Argumentum ad living room
Eric Weinstein proposes a test: “Go into a room and subtract off all of the screens. How do you know you’re not in 1973, but for issues of design?”
This too I found unconvincing. It felt like a weak thought experiment that relied too much on intuition, revealing one’s own priors more than anything else. And why should we necessarily expect progress to be visible directly from the home or office? Maybe it is happening in specialized environments that the layman wouldn’t have much intuition about: in the factory, the power plant, the agricultural field, the hospital, the oil rig, the cargo ship, the research lab.
No progress except for all the progress
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