The short answer here is: yes agreed, the level of real interest rates certainly seems consistent with “market has some probability on TAI and some [possibly smaller] probability on a second dark age”.
Whether that’s a possibility worth putting weight on—speaking for myself, I’m happy to leave that up to readers.
(ie: seems unlikely to me! What would the story there be? Extremely rapid diminishing returns to innovation from the current margin, or faster-than-expected fertility declines?)
As you say, perhaps the possibility of the stagnation/degrowth scenario would have other implications for other asset prices, which could be informative for assessing likelihood.
For what it’s worth, I suspect many readers do think there’s some chance of stagnation (i.e. put 5% credence or more). Will MacAskill devotes an entire chapter to growth stagnation in What We Owe the Future. In fact he thinks it’s the most likely of the four future trajectories discussed in the book, giving it 35% credence (see note 22 to chapter 2, p. 273-4).
The Samotsvety forecasters think this is too high, but each still puts at least 1% credence on the scenario and their aggregated forecast is 5%. Low, but suggesting it’s worth considering.
Thanks for these comments!
The short answer here is: yes agreed, the level of real interest rates certainly seems consistent with “market has some probability on TAI and some [possibly smaller] probability on a second dark age”.
Whether that’s a possibility worth putting weight on—speaking for myself, I’m happy to leave that up to readers.
(ie: seems unlikely to me! What would the story there be? Extremely rapid diminishing returns to innovation from the current margin, or faster-than-expected fertility declines?)
As you say, perhaps the possibility of the stagnation/degrowth scenario would have other implications for other asset prices, which could be informative for assessing likelihood.
For what it’s worth, I suspect many readers do think there’s some chance of stagnation (i.e. put 5% credence or more). Will MacAskill devotes an entire chapter to growth stagnation in What We Owe the Future. In fact he thinks it’s the most likely of the four future trajectories discussed in the book, giving it 35% credence (see note 22 to chapter 2, p. 273-4).
The Samotsvety forecasters think this is too high, but each still puts at least 1% credence on the scenario and their aggregated forecast is 5%. Low, but suggesting it’s worth considering.