"In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation."
I'd argue it's a result of artificially low interest rates which effectively increased societal time preference. In short, we spent the last 40 years or so eating our future. We've run out of future to borrow from.
I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road, make dinner reservations, and answer a work related question via email is not advancing anything just because the science behind it was settled in the 1970s? The amount of wealth and coordination in society to make that happen at such a low price is difficult to get your head around. It wasn't innovation policy that lead to these things though it was the result of the market providing services to people who want thme and individuals working very hard to make it happen.
Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Combine that with taking on a lot of debt that cannot be repaid and you have a recipe for low growth. I'm afraid that any innovation policy that isn't just will just end up as gifts to those who are well connected.
Part of the problem is that some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice.
> "some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice"
This is very true: Kasparov is frankly wrong to say the last 'revolutionary' technology was the Apple II back in the 70s. The past thirty years since then have brought many huge technological developments with lasting impact on global society. The internet, mobile telephony, DNA sequencing and profiling...
What Kasparov doesn't seem prepared to accept is that most innovation is iterative. This iteration can be compressed, but even dramatic events like the moon landings were based on decades of research and iterative development.
I just can't take someone seriously who claims there has been no revolutionary tech since 1977. It undermines some of the other points Kasparov is trying to make, particularly around growth and monetary policy.
The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone with enough relevant functionality to make it to a 5th version.
It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world.
I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would really be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.
"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy."
And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances?
The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources.
If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did.
The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)
It could be argued that the huge stack of software simply build on languages created in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, and the hardware movement you mention is the evidence of Moores Law in action. I do not think these are evidence of radical innovation.
Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use.
There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.
Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.
I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.
There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, Silicon Valley. Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.
Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff.
Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.
The argument about computers and computer technology being almost stagnant for the past 40 years is the science behind it.
Look at programming languages. They still borrow from C very heavily. What major advancements have there been during the past 10-20 years? Look at operating systems. The Unix way of thinking and the fundamental concepts still live on, because they work. What advancements have there been to the fundamental ideas and aspects of operating systems? How about compilers? How about computer architecture? CISC to RISC? We still use von Neumann architecture from 50's, surely by now we would have came up with something superior? No. Your iPhone 5 relies on the concepts realized by scientists 50-60 years ago.
The thing is, that most advancements in the field come from technological advancemnts which actually come from our ability to produce better-performing silicon chips. iPhone owes so much to semiconductor industry and other advancements in physical technology which takes advantage of the fundamental CS concepts developed mainly in the 60's and 70's. Computer science itself has been still for ages, and will remain so, unless some new science comes up and revolutionarizes the field. Until then we owe to Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Dikstra, Knuth, Ritchie and so on. Not to Jobs. Or Gates. Or Torvalds. These people are irrelevant from science point of view.
We need new sciences to fuel technologies which can be put to use. Praise semiconductor industry, chemistry, physics, nanotechnology and so on. But don't ever relate iPhone or whatever else web 2.0-Apple-Social-cult to the science behind computing.
In short, we build upon what was discovered 30-40 years ago, and no new fundamental discoveries are made.
What's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward.
Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc.
What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth.
If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy.
If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.
There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster.
On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA.
The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.
As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.
Why so much hate? The foundations of Apple were built by Jobs and Woz. Several days ago someone else on HN pointed out that had it not been for Jobs, Woz probably would have been just another nameless, brilliant engineer at HP. Likewise, without Woz, Jobs probably would not have had a computer to sell.
Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.
You are looking at what you see and don't consider what you don't see. You are seeing how government intervention did these things but you are not considering that without this intervention society would have made other uses of the resources. I realize it's impossible but any analysis has to take into account unseen possibilities when considering government intervention. Ignoring the unseen effects of your actions leaves your analysis incomplete.
What taxes are you talking about that are much higher than in prior periods? I've heard from a lot of investors that high taxes don't really impact their decisions. A good investment is a good investment. High taxes on middle class people however can have a stifling effect, because they don't have the extra cash to keep circulating in the economy.
As a (well-paid) international tax lawyer, my anecdotal evidence is that high taxes absolutely impact business and investment decisions. I too see these quotes about tax being an irrelevant item to business decisions. I call bullshit on them, and especially Warren Buffett when he says it.
Tax is regulation. Just as you see the entrenched cab industry attempting to cudgel Uber out of the marketplace, so too do entrenched interests use tax law to their advantage or to their competitors' disadvantage.
People who say decisions are not affected by tax are saying that decisions are made on factors other than net profit after tax. They are also assuming that all investments are made within a single taxing jurisdiction, so that it is impossible to take your money from a 40% tax jurisdiction and put it to work in a 10% tax jurisdiction.
Tax is not the only factor in play for business and investment decisions. There are other factors as well. Government red tape is, in my experience, a greater deterrent to business and investment expansion than tax.
A high-tax country with a highly efficient, transparent, and predictable bureaucracy (think Western Europe, with variations of course) will be more attractive than an inefficient, dunderheaded bureaucracy-ridden country with a looser tax policy (think Southern Europe).
There are lessons for the United States in all of this. Why does money flee from some places? And how can the United States avoid creating the same factors that make capital flee?
Don't get me started on government policies that make brains flee the country. That's an order of magnitude more damaging than watching money go away.
> Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth.
Are you sure about this? If you're talking about manufacturing regulations, I'd be more wary about buying electronics or toys manufactured in China...
Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.
Regulations that are good for workers are important as far as I'm concerned too. And do play a factor in purchase decisions. Basically everyone is worker and consumer, so strengthening consumer and worker rights is good as far as I'm concerned.
> Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.
That's an excellent point, and one people don't consider enough. Almost nobody in the US picks up an item off the grocery store shelves and says, "Hey, is this safe?" That isn't inevitable, as China's scandals show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_Pe...
That kind of trust in the marketplace is incredibly valuable to innovators. If only some food is safe, then people will only buy new products from known, high-value brands.
A good opposite example is Facebook. At my last company we had some great ideas for useful Facebook apps. But in our user tests people had a strong learned aversion to the Facebook auth dialog; they knew that if they said ok, they might look dumb in front of all their friends.
As entrepreneurs, we wanted more regulation. We would have happily paid $25k to Facebook to be part of a trusted apps program where they vetted us and then gave us a seal of approval.
>Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods.
Can we keep the libertarian troll out of these comments? Do you really want to discuss taxes? Most of my wealth is taxed via capital gains. I pay maybe half the taxes my friends pay.
My dad used to run his own business in the 70s and 80s. His tax rate was unbelievable back then for his bracket.
We live in a low tax low regulation period right now. There's no denying it. Sorry Mitt lost the election, but don't fret, you'll get over it.
You mention something very interesting, it seems like even though science and technology advance at a really fast pace, there more developed a society/community is, the harder it is to implement and adopt new technologies, or the other way around, it is really easy for undeveloped countries to pick up new technologies, because there's no previous technology/standard to compete with.
- This seems to have hit the great middle... The one downside of people getting hyper-productive with technology is the masses who can't keep up do get left behind. This is more a problem for the customers of YC than HN's readers.
or at least his blog. It is a pretty interesting analysis that deserves serious consideration. He does point out that communications and the internet are a bright spot of hope in our otherwise slowly growing economy.
It seems that you have some good points, but please fix the formatting. I can't read it at all on my mobile. You can copy and paste from another editor if you need a more comfortable way to view it.
For the rest of us, the comment ends up entirely cut off by the overflow: scroll CSS attribute.
I would suggest the use of an extension that allows you to edit text in any editor you like, where you can freely use any font you like, such as It's All Text! for Firefox. That would solve this problem on any site you use.
There are many known-unknowns in the sphere of biology, and by extension, medicine right now. We may be approaching the top of the s-curve for computational and industrial technology, but we are at the bottom left of the biology curve, and now we have the tools to start exploring that space systematically.
The entire time I'm reading the article and the comments, I'm just mentally jaw-dropped by these comments. We are no where near the top of the 's-curve' for computational or industrial technology.
The entire argument is a straw man by Kasparov. Name a single science which has not been dramatically changed in the last 20 years by the application of computation. Its just boggling to me how Kasparov's argument holds any sway.
I continue to be surprised at how little attention economists are paying to the role of tight oil supplies in dragging the economy. The 2008 crash was triggered by an oil price that spiked to nearly $150 a barrel in response to strong growth in demand against a flat supply. Since then, every time the economy tries to pick up, the oil price drifts back up to $100/barrel and GDP stagnates.
What has Peter Thiel built that is so earth-changing? (And don't say Paypal.) He sure likes to talk a lot, but I'm waiting for him to come up with the next game-changing, once-a-millennium innovation. It isn't hedge funds or other financial trickery.
From the article: "There are certainly those who believe that the wellsprings of science are running dry..."
What a load of horse shit! We're just getting started here, the "Internet Revolution" just discovered non-computer devices! And biology is just getting tapped...
And those thinking along the lines "most people already have everything they need": well, duh, it's always that way. It's the unreasonable, the uncomfortable, and the restless who create and self actualize. The majority of human nature looks around themselves, takes care of their "necessities" and lives and dies with what is given to them. We, as those hard ass freaks that can't be satisfied, will always push against our limitations, our "gifts", to self actualize, to grow beyond our capabilities, and create something unheard of, unexpected, wonderful and disruptive.
Now, sure Mr. Thiel is a wealthy entrepreneur, but his wealth and fame derives from creating PayPal - a translation of existing credit card transactions to an online environment. I have no doubet it took great effort, but PayPal is hardly innovative, and hence his dark view of real innovation. Plus he's now a VC, so he sees all kinds of half baked startups failing...
As far as Mr Kasparov, I don't consider him an authority on anything. May as well be a super model, considering Kasparov's involvement in invention, new technology and start ups. He's merely famous for chess and writing essays. Not exactly developing science or new ideas at all...
I can't agree more. As the article points out, we're seeing huge advances in plenty of scientific fields. We're talking about storing terabytes on a cube on DNA no larger than a drop of water, we're synthesizing drugs that travel to tumors, activating only on arrival, we're gearing up to put people on mars... Really? No progress? No innovation?
Why are we even listening to a chess champion espousing crap about scientific progress? And Pieter Thiel might have entrepreneurship credentials, but he's no scientist.
The main problem of the 21st century is and will continue to be energy.
We have the science to do amazing things, but we can't afford the power requirements. We wont be able to advance as a civilization without something radically different in the way of generating power.
This is essentially what it all comes back to right? The thing which drives me insane is so many presidents and administrations have been unable to grasp this. I still think back to Jimmy Carter's speech in 1978 warning about the need for affordable, sustainable energy.
What have we done in the past 30+ years to address this imminent crossroads? Next to nothing.
I am always amazed by these sorts of articles, in part because it is always nominally 'successful' people who have these sorts of doubts and in part because Toffler's "Future Shock" can express itself in ways that look like the medical condition.
The changes they aren't ready for are the biological ones. You see the whole '10 years of trials from monkeys to humans' thing which limits the application of biological agents is going to change once we understand how the machine, we call a human, really works. We are getting closer. Once we're there you won't have to 'test to see the effect' you will 'design for this particular effect.' That will make things very different.
We're starting to see the leading edge of the carbon age. I pointed out once that if you name the human "ages" by the primary material of their tools, we had stone, bronze, iron, steel, and now silicon. Next up, carbon.
We're about to expand into space. Unlike Apollo which was like a program written to do one thing, SpaceX and others are building space flight capabilities that will mix and match to create space access as a function of money, not expertise.
I've always enjoyed stories where authors imagined the transition from 'now' to 'star trek' like universes. We are in a transition, of that there is no doubt. the next level will be interesting, of that I have no doubt.
I wonder if a slow-down or plateau-ing of technological advancement would make us focus more on cultural/philosophical advancements that improve: average happiness per-person per-"day lived".
That would be an interesting paradigm shift...
...assuming there are such advancements to be made.
I feel like most of the comments are reading the title and not the article.
The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong, and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means (results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to invent).
I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.
We live in, presumably, a consumer-spending driven economy. The problem I see is that in the efforts of businesses to become more efficient and to outsource, they're creating a tragedy of the commons effect - if no one is willing to stay in the US and pay US workers highly, US consumers won't have anything to spend.
I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap, but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest cost.
Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient (Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?
This might make economists cringe, but here's how I see it:
In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course, early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story).
Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things that can easily be dropped when money runs tight.
I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of fairness.
This article misses some huge innovations that have taken place in manufacturing and other heavy industrial areas.
Take just one example in 3D printing. When this technology matures, the result will be no less profound than the invention of spare parts (hard to believe, but the idea of standardized parts that could be replaced when worn out is relatively new - few hundred years). Imagine a house that builds (or prints) itself?
Today that technology is already getting a lot of adoption in aerospace, where the waste produced by machining is so expensive, it makes the costs of new technologies look like a bargain.
Another good example is our ability to process data. The old saying goes: "Knowledge is power". Well, today we can process petabytes of data and extract knowledge out of it as routinely as flying from SF to NY...
Whenever my father uses Skype, he still can't grasp the fact that we can make long distance video(!) calls for free. He keeps reminding me that when he had to walk 3 km by foot to a Public Call Office and book a call for a max. 3 minutes to talk to my grand mother.
That was only 35 years ago.
You can innovate all you want, but if people don't want or need it they aren't going to buy it.
Moving from a farming/subsistence economy where most people had something to do with food production to survive, to our present post-farming/industrial whatever-this-age-is was a huge leap, and there was a lot of peripheral infrastructure to build up.
Now we're there, and yes there's more room for innovation, but there's no existential leap forward in front of us.
We have enough. We're not fundamentally changing the way of the world (not in developed countries). That doesn't generate a lot of peripheral work.
What if they are wrong as in completely wrong? Then I dare say we are also in trouble. The only road not littered with trouble is if the current state and pace can be kept.
Not that I'm an acolyte of Kurzweil, but he does make a pretty convincing case that humans have a tendency to locally linearize things that really aren't linear, and then extrapolate linearly out into the future. This seems as if this may be one more example of that.
It's like saying that there will be no more exciting music and it all pretty much ended with Mozart and Beethoven. And one thing that is very consistent for human kind (with few very bright exceptions, of course), is the poor ability to predict future innovations and technologies. If you look at 100 year old drawings of year 2000, you will see flying steam engines, coal powered robotic maids and biplanes used for public transportation. So.. let's just wait and see what happens. A cure for cancer may be just as exciting breakthrough as electricity was in its time, and it may as well be just around the corner :)
You can argue that the pace of innovative growth is slowing because of whatever reason, but I would like to post a few things worth thinking about, given that I was thinking about this the other day.
Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.
Here's the thing, we (as a planet) could put men on the moon. Granted we're not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved. Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.
I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - nanotechnology and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see that there's plenty of space for innovation.
I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing, a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed, fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.
If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.
Alarmist, but I cannot object to manifestos that aim to improve the rate of innovation!
Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become riddled with complexity over time.
The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to process the relevant information also improves.
The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing (by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.
The global megatrend is still the developing world developing. There are so many people who don't have clean water, don't get good food, don't have electricity or automobiles so that things can "get better" for the median person on Earth for a long time.
If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.
You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms, the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as "tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming, terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.
However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you can buy on Etsy.
I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more interesting.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI'd argue it's a result of artificially low interest rates which effectively increased societal time preference. In short, we spent the last 40 years or so eating our future. We've run out of future to borrow from.
I'm glad to see Thiel is kind of in agreement. :)
Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Combine that with taking on a lot of debt that cannot be repaid and you have a recipe for low growth. I'm afraid that any innovation policy that isn't just will just end up as gifts to those who are well connected.
Part of the problem is that some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice.
This is very true: Kasparov is frankly wrong to say the last 'revolutionary' technology was the Apple II back in the 70s. The past thirty years since then have brought many huge technological developments with lasting impact on global society. The internet, mobile telephony, DNA sequencing and profiling...
What Kasparov doesn't seem prepared to accept is that most innovation is iterative. This iteration can be compressed, but even dramatic events like the moon landings were based on decades of research and iterative development.
I just can't take someone seriously who claims there has been no revolutionary tech since 1977. It undermines some of the other points Kasparov is trying to make, particularly around growth and monetary policy.
It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world.
I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would really be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.
And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances?
The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources.
If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did.
The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)
There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.
Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.
I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.
Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.
Look at programming languages. They still borrow from C very heavily. What major advancements have there been during the past 10-20 years? Look at operating systems. The Unix way of thinking and the fundamental concepts still live on, because they work. What advancements have there been to the fundamental ideas and aspects of operating systems? How about compilers? How about computer architecture? CISC to RISC? We still use von Neumann architecture from 50's, surely by now we would have came up with something superior? No. Your iPhone 5 relies on the concepts realized by scientists 50-60 years ago.
The thing is, that most advancements in the field come from technological advancemnts which actually come from our ability to produce better-performing silicon chips. iPhone owes so much to semiconductor industry and other advancements in physical technology which takes advantage of the fundamental CS concepts developed mainly in the 60's and 70's. Computer science itself has been still for ages, and will remain so, unless some new science comes up and revolutionarizes the field. Until then we owe to Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Dikstra, Knuth, Ritchie and so on. Not to Jobs. Or Gates. Or Torvalds. These people are irrelevant from science point of view.
We need new sciences to fuel technologies which can be put to use. Praise semiconductor industry, chemistry, physics, nanotechnology and so on. But don't ever relate iPhone or whatever else web 2.0-Apple-Social-cult to the science behind computing.
In short, we build upon what was discovered 30-40 years ago, and no new fundamental discoveries are made.
Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc.
What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth.
If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy.
If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.
On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA.
The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.
Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.
I'm not under 30.
Tax is regulation. Just as you see the entrenched cab industry attempting to cudgel Uber out of the marketplace, so too do entrenched interests use tax law to their advantage or to their competitors' disadvantage.
People who say decisions are not affected by tax are saying that decisions are made on factors other than net profit after tax. They are also assuming that all investments are made within a single taxing jurisdiction, so that it is impossible to take your money from a 40% tax jurisdiction and put it to work in a 10% tax jurisdiction.
Tax is not the only factor in play for business and investment decisions. There are other factors as well. Government red tape is, in my experience, a greater deterrent to business and investment expansion than tax.
A high-tax country with a highly efficient, transparent, and predictable bureaucracy (think Western Europe, with variations of course) will be more attractive than an inefficient, dunderheaded bureaucracy-ridden country with a looser tax policy (think Southern Europe).
There are lessons for the United States in all of this. Why does money flee from some places? And how can the United States avoid creating the same factors that make capital flee?
Don't get me started on government policies that make brains flee the country. That's an order of magnitude more damaging than watching money go away.
Only if you have the money to invest, as opposed to keeping it to cover your tax bill.
Citation needed.
Actual numbers, such as the ones at http://www.deptofnumbers.com/blog/2010/08/tax-revenue-as-a-f..., emphatically disagree with you.
Are you sure about this? If you're talking about manufacturing regulations, I'd be more wary about buying electronics or toys manufactured in China...
Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.
That's an excellent point, and one people don't consider enough. Almost nobody in the US picks up an item off the grocery store shelves and says, "Hey, is this safe?" That isn't inevitable, as China's scandals show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_Pe...
That kind of trust in the marketplace is incredibly valuable to innovators. If only some food is safe, then people will only buy new products from known, high-value brands.
A good opposite example is Facebook. At my last company we had some great ideas for useful Facebook apps. But in our user tests people had a strong learned aversion to the Facebook auth dialog; they knew that if they said ok, they might look dumb in front of all their friends.
As entrepreneurs, we wanted more regulation. We would have happily paid $25k to Facebook to be part of a trusted apps program where they vetted us and then gave us a seal of approval.
Can we keep the libertarian troll out of these comments? Do you really want to discuss taxes? Most of my wealth is taxed via capital gains. I pay maybe half the taxes my friends pay.
My dad used to run his own business in the 70s and 80s. His tax rate was unbelievable back then for his bracket.
We live in a low tax low regulation period right now. There's no denying it. Sorry Mitt lost the election, but don't fret, you'll get over it.
I didn't vote for Romney.
A couple things to think about:
- There have been a lot of very smart people who have thought growth can't solve the world's problems. They've been wrong. For example.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
- This seems to have hit the great middle... The one downside of people getting hyper-productive with technology is the masses who can't keep up do get left behind. This is more a problem for the customers of YC than HN's readers.
or at least his blog. It is a pretty interesting analysis that deserves serious consideration. He does point out that communications and the internet are a bright spot of hope in our otherwise slowly growing economy.
The press like to focus on one issue at a time. Europe last week, US elections yesterday, fiscal cliff today and China tomorrow.
The reality is that there are many major problems.
Off the top of my head:
--
* People these days have everything they need. There are very few must-have items to spur sales
* The inventions so far cover a lot of what we need to live long in absolute safety and comfort. This is what Kasparov is noticing.
* Western Economies are 66% or more based on consumer spending ; any belt tightening has major impact
* People are still in too much debt, they're spending less
* Companies still have borrowed too much in the past: expecting boom years to continue 2050+
* Banks insolvent without support
* All governments bar Norway,Oz,Cananda? are in deficit
* Pensions are barely worth the contributions you put in over your lifetime. There has been no 5-8% increase as forecast
* Some countries have demographic problems where a lot of people will leave the income earning age
* It looks difficult for Democracies to reduce government spending. 'Pain-now', both real or perceived, is always deferred
[Edit for formatting, spelling]
The three spaces indicates pre-formatted text, so it won't line wrap.
It creates scrollbars on your comment, so less people will be able to read your points.
Please excuse my preference for commenting this way.
I would suggest the use of an extension that allows you to edit text in any editor you like, where you can freely use any font you like, such as It's All Text! for Firefox. That would solve this problem on any site you use.
There are many known-unknowns in the sphere of biology, and by extension, medicine right now. We may be approaching the top of the s-curve for computational and industrial technology, but we are at the bottom left of the biology curve, and now we have the tools to start exploring that space systematically.
The entire argument is a straw man by Kasparov. Name a single science which has not been dramatically changed in the last 20 years by the application of computation. Its just boggling to me how Kasparov's argument holds any sway.
What a load of horse shit! We're just getting started here, the "Internet Revolution" just discovered non-computer devices! And biology is just getting tapped...
And those thinking along the lines "most people already have everything they need": well, duh, it's always that way. It's the unreasonable, the uncomfortable, and the restless who create and self actualize. The majority of human nature looks around themselves, takes care of their "necessities" and lives and dies with what is given to them. We, as those hard ass freaks that can't be satisfied, will always push against our limitations, our "gifts", to self actualize, to grow beyond our capabilities, and create something unheard of, unexpected, wonderful and disruptive.
Now, sure Mr. Thiel is a wealthy entrepreneur, but his wealth and fame derives from creating PayPal - a translation of existing credit card transactions to an online environment. I have no doubet it took great effort, but PayPal is hardly innovative, and hence his dark view of real innovation. Plus he's now a VC, so he sees all kinds of half baked startups failing...
As far as Mr Kasparov, I don't consider him an authority on anything. May as well be a super model, considering Kasparov's involvement in invention, new technology and start ups. He's merely famous for chess and writing essays. Not exactly developing science or new ideas at all...
Why are we even listening to a chess champion espousing crap about scientific progress? And Pieter Thiel might have entrepreneurship credentials, but he's no scientist.
We have the science to do amazing things, but we can't afford the power requirements. We wont be able to advance as a civilization without something radically different in the way of generating power.
This is essentially what it all comes back to right? The thing which drives me insane is so many presidents and administrations have been unable to grasp this. I still think back to Jimmy Carter's speech in 1978 warning about the need for affordable, sustainable energy.
What have we done in the past 30+ years to address this imminent crossroads? Next to nothing.
The changes they aren't ready for are the biological ones. You see the whole '10 years of trials from monkeys to humans' thing which limits the application of biological agents is going to change once we understand how the machine, we call a human, really works. We are getting closer. Once we're there you won't have to 'test to see the effect' you will 'design for this particular effect.' That will make things very different.
We're starting to see the leading edge of the carbon age. I pointed out once that if you name the human "ages" by the primary material of their tools, we had stone, bronze, iron, steel, and now silicon. Next up, carbon.
We're about to expand into space. Unlike Apollo which was like a program written to do one thing, SpaceX and others are building space flight capabilities that will mix and match to create space access as a function of money, not expertise.
I've always enjoyed stories where authors imagined the transition from 'now' to 'star trek' like universes. We are in a transition, of that there is no doubt. the next level will be interesting, of that I have no doubt.
That would be an interesting paradigm shift...
...assuming there are such advancements to be made.
The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong, and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means (results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to invent).
I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.
I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap, but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest cost.
Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient (Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?
In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course, early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story).
Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things that can easily be dropped when money runs tight.
I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of fairness.
Take just one example in 3D printing. When this technology matures, the result will be no less profound than the invention of spare parts (hard to believe, but the idea of standardized parts that could be replaced when worn out is relatively new - few hundred years). Imagine a house that builds (or prints) itself?
Today that technology is already getting a lot of adoption in aerospace, where the waste produced by machining is so expensive, it makes the costs of new technologies look like a bargain.
Another good example is our ability to process data. The old saying goes: "Knowledge is power". Well, today we can process petabytes of data and extract knowledge out of it as routinely as flying from SF to NY...
Moving from a farming/subsistence economy where most people had something to do with food production to survive, to our present post-farming/industrial whatever-this-age-is was a huge leap, and there was a lot of peripheral infrastructure to build up.
Now we're there, and yes there's more room for innovation, but there's no existential leap forward in front of us.
We have enough. We're not fundamentally changing the way of the world (not in developed countries). That doesn't generate a lot of peripheral work.
Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.
Here's the thing, we (as a planet) could put men on the moon. Granted we're not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved. Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.
I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - nanotechnology and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see that there's plenty of space for innovation.
I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing, a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed, fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.
If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.
Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become riddled with complexity over time.
The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to process the relevant information also improves.
The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing (by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.
If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.
You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms, the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as "tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming, terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.
However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you can buy on Etsy.
I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more interesting.