✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Second-wave endogenous growth models and automation — EA Forum

forum.effectivealtruism.org · 157 words · saved by 1 readers

This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary. Roughly speaking: In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth. “Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to

Larks 1y * 4 0 0 Thanks for sharing this! Your last paragraph reminded me of this blog post from Robin , where he argued Imagine that we made just as many cars, houses, clothes, meals, furniture, etc., each one just as big with just as high quality materials and craftsmanship. But instead of the making these in the stupefying variety that we do today, imagine that we made only a few standard variations, and didn’t update those variations as often. A few standard cars, standard clothes, standard meals, etc. Enough variety to handle different climates, body sizes, and food allergies, but not rem

Explore this link on the map →

related reading