Hi Robi, thanks for your response. Are you referring to the endogenous growth models, where additional people have growth effects rather than level effects as in the semi-endogenous growth model (they increase the future growth rate)? or are you referring to historical trends? I am personally not very convinced of both.
“they’re another person all eight billion previous people can bounce ideas off of”
This seems to depend on whether people actually have more connections. Even if they have more connections AND you think that research is driven by bouncing off ideas, you might think that this positive effect is smaller than the negative effect of research duplication when the population becomes bigger. But I agree it is plausible that the relevant parameter in the semi-endogneous growth model, lambda, is greater than 1.
I’m sympathetic to Robi’s claim that growth rates may be a superexponential function of population. I suspect that the argument around people bouncing ideas off each other might be just one of the mechanisms.
I don’t want to try to articulate all of those mechanisms here, but here’s another one:
Imagine some proportion (e.g. 1%) of the population has some issue which is holding back their productivity (e.g. an illness or way of working which could be improved with a productivity app)
If the total population is small, then resolving that need may be unfeasible because the addressable market is small
However in a larger population this issue could be resolved, enabling that proportion of the population to be more productive
Hi Robi, thanks for your response. Are you referring to the endogenous growth models, where additional people have growth effects rather than level effects as in the semi-endogenous growth model (they increase the future growth rate)? or are you referring to historical trends? I am personally not very convinced of both.
“they’re another person all eight billion previous people can bounce ideas off of”
This seems to depend on whether people actually have more connections. Even if they have more connections AND you think that research is driven by bouncing off ideas, you might think that this positive effect is smaller than the negative effect of research duplication when the population becomes bigger. But I agree it is plausible that the relevant parameter in the semi-endogneous growth model, lambda, is greater than 1.
I’m sympathetic to Robi’s claim that growth rates may be a superexponential function of population. I suspect that the argument around people bouncing ideas off each other might be just one of the mechanisms.
I don’t want to try to articulate all of those mechanisms here, but here’s another one:
Imagine some proportion (e.g. 1%) of the population has some issue which is holding back their productivity (e.g. an illness or way of working which could be improved with a productivity app)
If the total population is small, then resolving that need may be unfeasible because the addressable market is small
However in a larger population this issue could be resolved, enabling that proportion of the population to be more productive