I strongly agree with this, but feel that it’s been acknowledged both in the reports I draw on and in my pieces.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll just clarify that my point isn’t merely that economic growth has declined significantly since the 1960s. That would be a fairly trivial and obvious point. :)
The key point I was gesturing at, and which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else, is that when we look at doubling rates across the entire history of economic growth (and perhaps the history of life, cf. Hanson, 1998), we have seen a slowdown since the mid-20th century that’s unprecedentedin that entire history. To quote the key passage:
The global economy has seen three doublings since 1965, where the annual growth rate was around six percent, and yet the annual growth rate today is only a little over half — around 3 percent — of, and lies stably below, what it was those three doublings ago. In the entire history of economic growth, this seems unprecedented, suggesting that we may already be on the other side of the highest growth rates we will ever see. For up until this point, a three-time doubling of the economy has, rare fluctuations aside, led to an increase in the annual growth rate.
And this “past peak growth” hypothesis looks even stronger if we look at 1955, with a growth rate of a little less than six percent and a world product at 5,430 billion 1990 US dollars, which doubled four times gives just under 87,000 billion — about where we should expect today’s world product to be. Yet throughout the history of our economic development, four doublings have meant a clear increase in the annual growth rate, at least in terms of the underlying trend; not a stable decrease of almost 50 percent [I strongly encourage people to look at the estimates of past growth and see this for themselves]. This tentatively suggests that we should not expect to see growth rates significantly higher than those of today sustained in the future.
This pattern seems overlooked in Hanson’s discussions of a future growth explosion (to be fair, the pattern was less clear when he wrote his 1998 paper, but it was clear when he wrote The Age of Em), and is relevant precisely because his analysis seems motivated by an inductive case for a new growth mode (which, to be clear, is by no means decisively undermined by the unprecedented slowdown we’ve seen since the mid-20th century, but this unique slowdown is highly relevant counterevidence that appears unduly neglected).
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll just clarify that my point isn’t merely that economic growth has declined significantly since the 1960s. That would be a fairly trivial and obvious point. :)
The key point I was gesturing at, and which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else, is that when we look at doubling rates across the entire history of economic growth (and perhaps the history of life, cf. Hanson, 1998), we have seen a slowdown since the mid-20th century that’s unprecedented in that entire history. To quote the key passage:
This pattern seems overlooked in Hanson’s discussions of a future growth explosion (to be fair, the pattern was less clear when he wrote his 1998 paper, but it was clear when he wrote The Age of Em), and is relevant precisely because his analysis seems motivated by an inductive case for a new growth mode (which, to be clear, is by no means decisively undermined by the unprecedented slowdown we’ve seen since the mid-20th century, but this unique slowdown is highly relevant counterevidence that appears unduly neglected).