Date: May 20th, 2024 2:24 PM
Author: Underhanded ruddy theater
why does spending decline?
do lower population rich countries spend less than high population poor countries?
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beating around the bush here,
I think a good book to read and then ponder a bit is "Where's My Flying Car" by J Storrs Hall.
If you've got better things to do than devote 10+ hours reading a randomly recommended book on autoadmit, here's a pretty good summary -
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
If you've got better things to do than read a linked summary, let me try to give you my 2 minute summary:
The basic observation if the book is that technological progress has stalled, the question is why, and what next.
basically if you had taken the rate of technological progress from 1900 - 1950 or so, and projected to today, by now, we'd live like the Jetson, we'd have too cheap to meter nuclear energy, we'd have flying cars, nanotechnology, etc etc etc.
why didn't that happen?
what the book spends a lot of time arguing, is that it isn't the laws of physics that prevented that from happening, it was the people and institutions.
in large part, that we're victims of our own success, that we got too comfortable, and started bickering over how to split up the already large pie instead of growing the pie (largely through stuff like regulating the nuclear industry largely out of business).
If these are human problems rather than physics problems, that has certain implications.
It means there is a glut of technological solutions once the humans are sufficiently incentivized to go looking for and implement them.
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A thing to ponder is, how bad will human societies let things get before the implement available technological solutions?
If there are available technological solutions, who will figure out the human coordination problems, how and why will they do so?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5530555&forum_id=2#47677082)