Yep, you are correct about what I meant by a longtermist framing. I meant to say that arguing for economic growth based on its long term effects is a little controversial. I am only 60% certain that economic growth is good after 40 years in the future, but I am more like 80% certain that it’s good in the 40 year time-frame.
On how long can wealthy countries continue to benefit from growth: Looking at individual life satisfaction data, it looks like income doublings may continue to steadily increase life satisfaction at incomes that are at least 8x today’s United States median income. Considering that median wages in developed countries have been growing pretty slowly the past few decades, it seems likely that we have another few centuries of growth in the richest countries before we have to start worrying about reaching a limit. More speculatively, I am also not sure that we ever have to reach a limit. It seems like there should be biological limits to how happy you can feel in the moment, but it might be possible to be 10x as satisfied with your life as you are right now. I agree with you that relationships and meaning are more likely to get you there than material goods. But richer people in the US seem to participate in communities more and have better relationships, and I believe people in richer countries broadly have more close relationships than people in poorer ones.
On frontier growth lowering existential risk: I definitely think it’s plausible. But technological progress so far has only seemed to consistently increase existential risk. I think there is a large burden of proof on the claim that going forward things will be different. I think the EA community should be especially suspicious of such claims considering how much we discuss mechanisms of how further developments in synthetic biology or AI could pose an existential risk.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply.
First let me say that I agree with you that the impacts of economic growth are likely to be much higher than those implied by the conservative 40 years I chose to consider in order to present something like a lower bound on impacts.
But then let me follow you in presenting two additional counter-arguments to the more long-termist framing:
It is possible that we should expect any growth our interventions generate to be canceled by a dip at some point in the future. I don’t know much about the topic, but I believe the economics literature leans towards suggesting this is generally not the case. However, it seems plausible that an intervention that drove a country to operate above its productive capacity would likely be canceled in the future.
The kinds of interventions I imagine to be effective at stimulating growth would likely be interventions to help a poorer country catch up with the productive frontier. In those cases, an intervention would potentially simply help a country get to that frontier faster, and after that growth would be slower than it would otherwise have been. I still think we would get far more than 40 years of benefit out of these kinds of interventions, but they would not propagate into the long-term.
I am also interested in your comment about reaching diminishing marginal utility of GDP in more developed countries today. I ran a quick regression of the developed countries in Easterlin’s dataset, and the coefficient on GDP growth actually increases. This implies that an income doubling actually matters more in rich countries today than it does for poorer countries. I believe I’ve seen economists who have looked at the data noting the same. This result is surprising to me, so I would be interested for your thoughts.
Lastly, I share the intuition that we should not worry as much about happiness as existential security. This may be another argument against thinking too much about stimulating the kind of growth that would compound into the long-term. That kind of growth would likely be frontier growth, potentially increasing existential risk as we develop new technologies.