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Vertical agriculture, cultured meat, automation and amplification of intelligence, age reversal, fusion and solar (virtually free power), automation of travel... there are many revolutions happening very quickly right now that will drastically improve quality of life in the areas Gordon is claiming stagnation.

Most major technological breakthroughs are preceded by "experts" giving a dozen legitimate reasons why said breakthrough won't happen or it won't be that great. Wilbur Wright said in 1901, 2 years before the first human flight, that human flight wouldn't happen for 50 years. 2 months before the Wright brothers' first flight, there was an article in the New York Times saying human flight would take millions of years. Yet, in less than 70 years, we were flying 3000 ton objects (basically 30 story buildings) at hypersonic speeds and using them to put humans on another celestial body, 250,000 miles away. Makes me take pessimism with a grain of salt

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Artificial intelligence PLUS robotics is the basis for why the US economy will continue to grow at a torrid pace. I’m surprised Gordon doesn’t have the vision to see this.

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Great one Pomp!

I am doing the Fiat Standard course with Saifedean Ammous and we are covering all the reason why Gordon is right!

As rightly mentioned, since 1970, we are living in a Fiat standard, and everything is controlled by our governments. They control everything! From our health, food, education, and our science!! As mentioned in your letter, most of the greatest inventions were created by entrepreneurs, inventors...

In our days, the governement decide what science should be invested in by supporting nonsense stuff which is destroying our life! We are no longer evolving… we are going down... People are going to freeze to death this winter... we are in 2022.

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wtfhappenedin1971.com

charts for days my dude.

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Growth is dead sounds like a nostalgic assessment of good old times. Apart from historic bias, reading the present is harder as you move with the present time. It is difficult to see the speed from inside the vehicle you travel with.

What happened after 1970? So much:

Internet has change the world immensely. Think of the massive productivity gains, the closeness of all people around the world, acceleration of innovation. We created a vaccine in one year!

What else: genetics, modern biotechnology and Pharma. Space! How could Gordon have missed that? Think Starlink. Starship. Moon & Mars expeditions being prepared as we speak.

What about EV revolution? Ten years ago people were laughing at Musk, and here we are in the middle of an EV explosion all around the world. All in such a short period of time.

Renewables. What a remarkable transformation. Yes, not enough, but you see where it is going.

Hydrogen. OK, this is a prediction, but check out the speed with which is happening.

Other transformation are in the pipeline: quantum computing, metaverse (OK, laugh if you wish, thinking of Zuckerberg, right? Check out Matterport to see where this is going. Or Nvidia's omniverse.

Neuromorphic computing. The wave of IoT transforming agriculture.

How can Gordon make this claim that growth stopped in 1970? It may be a stirring point for debate, but I find it absurd.

This erroneous assertion also points out, inadvertently, that we have a problem with the way we measure productivity and growth, probably for the same reason we have missed the economic value of mothers supporting families at home (household maintenance, care, child rearing, etc.): we are focused too much on formal business and less on what is actually happening in real life, in society.

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Great book review.

One glaring mistake in the statement below --- 0.06% growth compounded annually (1.0006)^100 for a century is ~82% growth over 100 years, not 6%.

“According to the great historian of economic growth, Angus Maddison, the annual rate of growth in the Western world from AD 1 to AD 1820 was a mere 0.06% per year, or 6% per century.”

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Hey Pomp, you’re an entrepreneur who has probably created many jobs for many people, which means your productivity via the internet has exponentially increased the productivity of the people you’ve employed. For example, last year you Tweeted about a job opening at BlockFi, so I applied, and got the job. Your productivity increased my productivity.

On the other hand, someone like me, I’ve never created a job for anyone, but I’m still quite productive via the internet. Maybe someday I’ll have enough capital to create jobs for people. Now I’m starting to see, productive people with capital exponentially increase the productivity of others. I’d love to see you write about your firsthand experiences increasing the productivity of others.

- Saltoshi

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1970s is an important point in time. The welfare state began. Redeploying assets and productivity into a less efficient space, redistribution of wealth by the government. Undoubtedly tremendous amount of innovation in the past 50 years which would lead one to believe a tremendous amount of unprecedented growth productivity and efficiencies . This is evidence of a large government impeding growth.

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First: Great article!

Second: I believe in automation as a tool to boost productivity / help us work less for the same output (This is my business, literally). Main limitations I see: not enough people with business problems know how to automate their tasks, most developers/engineers do not know what business problems is worth solving, most AI projects I have worked on or heard of under delivered.

Third: I also think that the level of growth we experienced was an anomaly (due to transportation innovation, sure, but paired with cheap energy). I don't think energy will ever be as inexpensive as it was - this probably makes me a pessimist.

Lateral thoughts: Climate change is destroying a lot of economic value we take for granted (crop yield, for instance) which will cost energy and work to balance out. More work and resources for a similar output does not seem ideal for stellar growth.

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If you're interested in economic growth read Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. Much shorter read that makes a compelling and hard to argue against case for economic growth.

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I have nothing in particular to say about this email/post, but I just want to say thank you Pomp for your constant drive to learn...it makes me want to learn more, and this book seems to be full of knowledge...can't wait to start reading it myself. Bang bang!

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022

Hi Anthony, very interesting that Gordon concluded 1970 was the end of hyperbolic growth and change. The biggest change of all started in 1971 with the invention of the microprocessor simultaneously at Intel and Texas Instruments. Since then, the digital economic efficiency revolution has proceeded in several major phases: a microcomputer on every desk in the 1980s (eg IBM PC and Apple MAC), connecting them all together worldwide with the internet in the 1990s (eg Cisco routers and communications infrastructure), a supercomputer in everyone's pocket in the 2000s (eg iPhone and Galaxy), and a microcomputer in everything in the 2010s (eg Internet of Things). The productivity boost from all this computing power in every area of the economy is continuing at an exponential rate. The pandemic expedited the adoption of the remote work organizational model enabled by these technologies, and for a large sector of the jobs market this will lead to far less commuting, shorter working hours, and better quality of life for many families. 1971 and the invention of the microprocessor was the beginning of a whole new era of productivity and change just as big as the ones that came before then. Good post, thanks for starting the conversation.

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1. Seems nobody else mentioned the oil crisis as one of the resasons.

2. I wonder if Gordon would still explore this narrative of declined growth after covid.

Just imagine how the pandemic would go 30 years ago. And how we actually coped with it.

He writes there was no progress in food, clothing, etc. But the progress on (online) availability of food and clothing is a tremendous progress for the humanity.

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Great article. Rule of law, labor flexibility, capital flexibility and availability, concentration of great universities, innovation, quality of life (stock of housing, leisure activities, personal mobility) and incredible hormetic nature the economy, society and political discourse are amongst America's greatest strengths ...and the gap with the rest of the world is accelerating. The 2020s will be America's decade.

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1. A book I do know you read, The Price of Tomorrow, emphasizes the deflationary forces of tech to be what will save our economics. I agree, thinking its not a "How much can we grow?" but "How can we do more with less?".

2. Have you read Matt Ridley's "How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom"? Think it would be a good companion to this book on how to foster innovation we need if growth is indeed floundering.

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I have not read the book (or even heard of it until now) but you have sparked my curiosity in it. I was wondering if you where going to bring up the shift to soft money and believe this had a dramatic effect on useful innovation. Fiat breads useless inventions where hard money breads large impact innovation. I also believe inventions and innovation happen in cycles just as most things do, hard times create hard men, hard men create good times, good times create weak men….

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