V_V comments on Assessing Kurzweil: the results - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 16 January 2013 04:51PM

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Comment author: V_V 31 January 2013 09:45:26PM 0 points [-]

Whether you will be hacked and your trade secrets leaked to a competitor is not irrelevant. Whether you'll be forced to bribe officials to do business is not irrelevant. Whether you can count on them to stay bribed and not be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether you have to worry, ala Rio Tinto, that your executives will be imprisoned is not irrelevant.

China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.

Whether the succession of power will be smooth and not descend into coups or other infighting is not irrelevant.

The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

And if you look at the growth rate, you see that not only was the growth rate leading to exponential growth (4% a year compounding), the growth rate itself grew to 7.15%, after which it fell a percentage point or two a year until in 1998 it was actually negative 2%, whereupon it hovers around 0% with occasional small periods of growth counterbalanced by disasters like negative 5.5% in 2009 ('may have started to grow again'?).

Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.

A flat real GDP contradicts your previous claims that a stable economy should then grow at the rate of technological improvements; or has there been no such improvements since 1989?

Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.

Refused? I already answered: it looks like the middle-income trap which has affected many countries. The country just stops growing significantly, or actually declines in real terms, due to any of the potential problems already listed.

The middle-income trap that didn't happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.

Comment author: gwern 31 January 2013 10:24:55PM 1 point [-]

China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.

Handwaving away just one of the examples.

The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

Yes, minus some minor events like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Russia & China nearly going to nuclear war in 1969, Tienanmen Square... Gosh, there's no reason to think that China is at the slightest risk of war or revolution; it'd be like worrying about nuclear warfare when the last nuclear bomb used in a war was back in 1946!

Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.

Better yet, let's look at 1989-2011 using the FRED data on real GDP. Over 23 years, the economy increased in size by 26%, for an annualized growth rate of ~1%. This in a time period which saw, among other things, the Internet revolution start and reach maturity. Did technology really improve only by 1% Is this really consistent with your claim that Japan hit the limits of what is possible?

Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.

Use real figures. Inflation has not been 0% the entire period, and your chosen graphs aren't even being reported in yen.

The middle-income trap that didn't happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.

'Many'? Look at a ranking of real PPP, there's a great many countries well below South Korea. Above SK, it's basically oil countries, European/American countries, and tiny outliers like Singapore.

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