The Economist Who Knows the Miracle Is Over
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
"Over the years, he has flambéed no fewer than 11 people as the “stupidest man alive"
Yeah I probably won't be reading this book.
We can easily have a trillion humans living in abundance in our solar system. It is work to get there. But requires no new science, but more engineering. Reusable cheaper access to space, start building rotating habitats, surround the sun.
7 1/2 years. 2030. For sure.
No, we can't.
The more educated people get, the lower their fertility rate. Western countries are well below replacement fertility now, with the likes of the US and Canada being topped up by immigrants.
The reason is thought to be simple. Parents have a limit to the amount of time and money they want to invest in their children, and much of the investment is zero sum (getting your child into "better" schools, enrichment activities, etc.).
Unless you can describe a realistic way that the rest of the solar system can be settled by people with no more than 6 years of schooling, or you are proposing an army of test-tube clones, a trillion people is simply impossible.
"There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,"
Poverty and under-develppment are not a result of the market economy. In fact the market economy has been key in fighting poverty and under-development since the industrial revolution.
His point is that even though it has been key, it hasn't solved it.
Worth noting that Karl Polanyi, whose influence DeLong cites, made the opposite claim in The Great Transformation.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980)
But my problem with what you quote and what I replied to is the anti-capitalist, if not anti-imperialist/anti-western, undercurrent.
My take on this quote is the contrary: it is testament to the success of the Western/capitalist/free market economy system.
Why? Because the starting point for all of mankind is nothing. But somehow we managed to create a society that allowed Einstein to exist.
We should realise what a tremendous success that is.
Ultimately it is up to the people to make it happen in their own country and in their own way.
What's being said, I think, is that we could do even better
Inequality and America’s Lost Einsteins
https://kottke.org/17/12/inequality-and-americas-lost-einste...
I am curious to see some data to back up your assertion.
Here is some data that suggests that the world economy is growing exponentially. Access to capital is a basis for this economy.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...
It is this same economic growth that has fueled the global rise in quality of life. This article (2016) shows improvement in quality of life over time:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history...
But I stand ready to be corrected by your data.
We are on the verge of ending capitalism, so close to land value taxes and negative interest rates that will prevent the special interests of capital to distort the market and yet at the same we are so far away, scared of ending the endless rat race of outcompeting each other to death amidst a sea of prosperity, because we believe power should breed more power and everyone else should lose power until they end up with nothing.
The solutions are already there, the third way beyond capitalism and communism had already graced the planet and we just need to take a step, it isn't even a big one.
What society was that? Germany under the Kaiser was a very mixed bag running the gamut, for sure. Einstein spent a lot of time living in his own mind rather than in the world around him. He found it preferable to leave his native country behind more than once. We don't know which changes to society would give us more like him and which fewer.
> But my problem with what you quote and what I replied to is the anti-capitalist, if not anti-imperialist/anti-western, undercurrent.
I followed a few links here and there on this topic, and somewhere I found DeLong suggesting that he used to be a little closer to the thoughts you defend, something like 'the world keeps looking more like what the lefties said it was than like what I thought it was.' It's a rare person who can update their thoughts based on such observations.
I can't accept that DeLong is anti-capitalist. He identifies the creation of corporate research labs as one of the very important new factors producing the sharp rise in prosperity starting around 1870. Not all who walk their dogs on leashes are anti-dog.
DeLong is an economist, a student of the problems of humanity's production and distribution of goods and services. He sees, in retrospect, a system that has succeeded spectacularly at production but not equally well at distribution, to the point where the distribution problems are producing side-effects and conflicts that are impairing and may ultimately reverse the benefits to production.
> make it happen in their own country and in their own way
Except that one of the other very important new factors producing the sharp rise in prosperity after 1870 was globalization. The advantages of globalization have made self-sufficiency a fool's errand. International cooperation, organic or hierarchical, has too many advantages to be tossed away according to principle.
The spirit of the free market is not a market without regulations that lets existing power structures entrench themselves, yet capitalism is all about entrenching the power of capital and forcing the rest of society to obey. It would be more appropriate to call the market we need a liberated markets by that I mean liberated from special interests, monopolies and other forms of market distorting powers that take wealth without creating new wealth.
One and a half billion people are no longer behind a water buffalo.
"There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am"
I literally can't even.
But more realistically, there's numerous obscure unknown Americans scattered across the country who would make better leaders than anyone has ever seen. But these leadership positions are so lofty that unless all elements of good fortune are sequentially in place along with some recognized basic qualifications, over a career-defining number of years, no one else aspiring to such a position has very much of a chance to show what a naturally higher performer could accomplish the more there is at stake.
The potentially better leaders who have not benefitted from many, or any at all, of the milestone selective opportunities needed for rapid advancement over a single lifetime, or those who have suffered bad fortune instead, might as well be behind a water buffalo their dang self.
Even if they are regular ordinary Americans, quite comfortable by international standards, with not a foot in the rice paddy. Their chance is still nil.
And I'm talking about the virtual handful that could truly walk right into a top position and outperform the status quo hands down.
When it comes to economics, children having a natural ability to derive equations without training are just as likely to be born into an uneducated family background at the same rate that such a background or culture exists at the time.
Even without education some people whose ancestors have always been behind a water buffalo since ancient history are still around. Among them always have been those whose brain fills with complex concepts more advanced than most PhDs anyway, these can just be different concepts to a good extent.
The human species is failing. Assuming we do susvive, the population in 2050 will be *MUCH* smaller than the current one.
China will half in number, Russia will not exist nor Japan, Spain or Italy.
Africa will be the centre of the world.