= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Daniel_Burfoot comments on The Onrushing Wave - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (32)
I am increasingly skeptical of people who claim that technology is going to "deliver enormous benefits". I feel that this model of socioeconomics creates a large number of unexplainable (under the model) anomalies, such as the fact that half of Europe and many American cities seem to be in absolute decline, in spite of having about as much technology as the rest of the world, or the fact that places like Hong Kong and Singapore are astoundingly rich and successful, in spite of not having any special technological proclivity.
My model now is that socioeconomic well-being is a function of several factors. Technology is a factor with a relatively small weight. Institutional quality is a far more important factor. My view of the US is that we've experienced a rapid uptake in technology alongside serious decline in institutional quality, and these two effects have more or less cancelled each other out, so that the well-being of people in the US is about unchanged over the last 1-2 decades.
To elaborate on this point, consider that the aggregate market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, and Facebook is about 1.5e12 dollars. Conservative estimates for the cost of the US war on terror since 2001 is about the same. It's not an exact comparison, but it's an order of magnitude sanity check on my claim that wealth increase due to technological advance is on the same order of magnitude as wealth decrease due to institutional failure.
Market cap only represents the value those tech companies have managed to capture, though. I rarely click on Google's ads and therefore contribute little to their market cap, but access to search engines like Google has had a tremendous impact on my life.
Although the US didn't capture all of the losses from the War on Terror, either!
What is your estimate of how much of Hong Kong's current wealth and success it would preserve if it were unable to make use of technology developed after, say, 1990?
Two answers, under different assumptions about what you're asking. If HK had no post-1990 tech and neither did the rest of the world, then it would maintain about 95% of its wealth. If HK was stuck in 1990 tech while the rest of the world wasn't then it could maintain about 85% of its wealth - it would still be richer than most of Europe. If this seems high to you, consider that a basic idea of economics suggests that countries will use trade to make up for their relative deficiencies and maximize their comparative advantage, and HK is an global center of trade.
I asked mostly because I wanted a concrete reference point for the claim you were making; it's easier to avoid talking past each other that way.
So, the last 20-25 years of technological development accounts for 5% of Hong Kong's current wealth? Sure, that seems plausible enough.
What sorts of numbers do you think the people who talk about the enormous benefits technology delivers have in mind for that question?
Well, the snippet from the article compares current technological advances to the first era of industrialisation, so they're probably thinking 100-200% range.
Gotcha. Yeah, the idea that we've doubled or tripled our real wealth in the last 25 years seems implausible.
I upvoted the whole chain of comments leading here because it shows how a rational discussion should go: Establish reference points. Elaborate. Agree!
I did the same. I wonder if it would be a good idea to document such cases as Examples of Best Practices.
They would be unable to do business in any real way with the rest of the world. They'd be communicating by landline phones, couriers, and carrier pidgeons. They'd just manage to get a 80486DX at a whopping 20MHz.
Some internet, but no HTTP, and likely no modern standards. Just how do you expect them to be a global center of trade in a world economy where their competition has modern computers, communications, and logistics?
Throw out their financial services industry and import/export businesses.
The advantage they're left with is the unique relation they have with China, where they have access to the market but don't have to play by the same rules. There's always value in legal privileges. Much of the world economy is driven by such privileges. But that's not an argument against the value and power of technology to create wealth.
They'd have to buy that tech including training and support. And as a trading center they could.
How would you measure or at least estimate institutional quality?
I would say that we have had modest technological progress and modest institutional decline. Progress has been overwhelmingly localized in IT/telecom/computers. We've seen small improvements in other areas.
It might seem like this would produce a wash in standard of living, but since we've also seen huge increases in inequality, standard of living for the bottom 75-90% of people is falling.
It seems to me that those things are pretty quickly explained if you throw race and IQ in to your model, which aren't likely to change in the near future, and tech is still the thing likely to change significantly in the near future.
Immigration can make countries much less homogenous in terms of race, to the point where you can't predict much about a country's or area's population. (I'm talking on a global scale, not about immigration to the US.)