All of Alexander's Comments + Replies

Thank you Jason. That's a very thoughtful response. I will check out those recommendations.

Introductions thread (please introduce yourself)

I'm Alexander. I'm a software engineer who loves economics. I don't have an official credential as my major was in computing, but I enjoy reading economics, and do it almost daily. It's my favourite nonfiction genre. I've read and enjoyed Cowen, Stiglitz, Caplan, Hanson, Banerjee and Duflo, etc. I've taken one economics class under Borland, who's done some work on economic progress, such as showing that learning-by-doing plays a role in the evolution of countries to greater specialisation in production (Yang and Borland 1991).

Some of my favourite economics... (read more)

Alexander's Shortform

Alexander2y1

In many discussions about economic progress, concerns around safety and sustainability were raised.

I really liked how Tyler Cowen used the phrase "sustainable economic growth" in Stubborn Attachments to encompass concerns around safety and sustainability. My view is that progress which inevitably leads us off a cliff isn't real progress because over some time interval it approaches zero.

I find that framing progress in terms of resource efficiency to be useful. A lot of people equate economic progress with an image of factories spewing smoke into the atmosp... (read more)

2jasoncrawford2yEfficiency is a dimension of progress, but it is only one dimension. Sometimes we make progress by improving the power, speed, or throughput of our machines or processes. Not all improvements are efficiency improvements. But over time, higher efficiency is one of the big trends of industrial progress. I agree that anything that leads us off a cliff, that is, leads us to some disaster for humanity, is not progress. But the problem with the concept of “sustainability” is: what are you trying to sustain? Our goal should be sustained progress, sustained economic growth, sustained improvements in human well-being—not sustaining indefinitely the use of some particular technology, which is in fact stagnation, the opposite of progress. We have sustainable progress not by using “sustainable” resources, but by switching to new, much more abundant resources when old ones are running out—as we switched from whale oil to petroleum, or from ivory to plastic, or from manure to synthetic fertilizer. More here: Unsustainable [https://rootsofprogress.org/unsustainable] See also: A dialogue on growth, progress, and “sustainability” [https://rootsofprogress.org/a-dialogue-on-growth-progress-and-sustainability]; Reframing “sustainability” [https://rootsofprogress.org/reframing-sustainability]