At last, economic growth (also known as “escape from poverty”) is demanding a little more attention. Ray Kurzweil has written a new book about the probabilities, not just possibilities, of quickly -compounding growth in the very near future. Thanks to a TCS article by Arnold Kling, I found out about it yesterday, and it’s now on the way. I’ll read Kurzweil’s book about our economic future (The Singularity is Near) right after I finish John Steele Gordon’s book about our economic history (An Empire of Wealth).
How does a doubling of GDP per worker in five years sound to you? How about faster than that? For me, books and articles like this are the perfect antidote to all the politically-inspired pessimistic doomsday material monopolizing today's headlines.
Here’s an excerpt from Arnold Kling’s article in Tech Central Station (go read the whole thing):
This good news [that productivity has been speeding up since 1992] rarely surfaces in the media. In part, this represents a general pessimistic bias in the media and among the population at large. In part, it reflects the inability of people to grasp nonlinear thinking...
If output per person in 2025 is more than 5 times what it is today, then the economy will have won the race. That means that all of the concerns that economists raise about the middle of this century, such as the external debt of the U.S. economy (the cumulative trade deficit), the fiscal implications of Social Security and Medicare, or gloomy scenarios for global warming, will be trivialized by the sheer heights that economic wealth will have scaled by that time. If Kurzweil is correct, then the mountain of debt that we fear we are accumulating now will seem like a molehill by 2040. We will pay off this debt the way someone who wins a million-dollar lottery pays off a car loan.
I’ll be sending a link to Arnold Kling’s article to a few of my debt-phobia-afflicted friends. Maybe a copy of Kurzweil’s book, too, if it turns out to be as good as it looks.
