Validating Mark's world view?

I made a nuisance of myself in the cryonics community in 1993 or so by trying to draw attention to The Evolution of Progress, by Owen Paepke. Paepke argues that economic progress shows signs of self-limitation because of the finite nature of human desires and other factors like order-of-magnitude considerations. (If you drop the price of important commodity X by a factor of ten, namely, if you make something 90 percent cheaper than previously, then whittling away at that last 10 percent won't cause as great an economic revolution as the first 90 percent price reduction. Electricity has already dropped in price by an order of magnitude, for example. But even with "free" electricity from, say, fusion power, you'd still have to pay a power bill to keep up the infrastructure which delivers electricity to the end users.)

Paepke wrote his book in response to the stagnation in American productivity growth since 1973, so perhaps the 20 year sample his book dealt with just represented an adjustment period instead of a secular trend. Other people like the Bionomics author Michael Rothschild tried to argue that it would take a while for the economy to figure out what to do with all the new-fangled information technology and resolve what the economists of the early 1990's called the "productivity paradox."

Yet after nearly another 20 years of economic underperformance, the stagnation argument doesn't sound so implausible. One of my correspondents drew my attention to a new work about this problem. Economist Tyler Cowen has recently published a pamphlet-length ebook, titled The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. I've bought and skimmed through the Nook version, and I still have to digest Cowen's argument. But a couple of passages stood out, and they almost sound like things I could have written.

For example, in the section titled "The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate," Cowen writes:

Today, in contrast, apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch, even if dimmers are more common these days. The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960's, have not come to pass. You don't have a jet pack. You won't live forever or visit a Mars colony. Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.

I've similarly drawn attention to the fact the the real 21st Century, so far, doesn't much resemble the sales job about it presented in the 20th Century's science fiction and futurology. I suspect the disconnection accounts in part for the failure of cryonics to thrive.

The section in Cowen's ebook about the internet also points out the internet's paradox as a form of technological progress. It supplies practically free content which has value in the sense that people want to spend time consuming it, and in abundant forms which we didn't have access to before. But the process of supplying this content generates few jobs and little revenue. Hence we see the explosive growth of the internet on the one hand, and the collapse of the real economy on the other, to the extent that so many people can't pay their bills.

I see two oversights in Cowen's analysis: The costs of maintaining the American military empire, and the costs of deindustrializing the U.S. in favor of a low-wage servility economy. Both of these things interrelate, in that we don't quite know what to do as a society with run-of-the-mill young men whom we no longer need for tangible production in factories. Many of these young men have unattractive choices: Either become servility workers and, say, spend their youth gathering shopping carts from the parking lots of Wal-Marts; or else join the armed forces and supply the warm bodies for overseas military adventures. The former represents underused economic potential, not to mention the fact that it creates a utilitarian disaster from the resulting humiliation and loss of hope; while the latter represents absolute waste, not only of wealth but also of human lives, even though the warrior culture can satisfy many young men's psychological needs; and both options must drag down the American economy to a measurable extent.

I haven't decided yet what to make of Cowen's prediction that we've just gotten stuck on a "temporary" plateau of technological stagnation, and with the right change in incentives (Cowen suggests making science a higher-status occupation), we could bounce off the plateau and resume an upward economic and technological trajectory. Saying that things will get better in "the long run" doesn't help the people who have projects like cryonics in the here and now which require an indefinite quantity of capital investment and technological progress to succeed.