41–50 of 217 posts
Economist here… An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one. What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lo…
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proo…
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
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At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.
This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation. > Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life f…
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
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HN discussions are predictable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692 Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables. When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ... Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later." https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
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I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale. They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena a…
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron. There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias. Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/ Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bia…
A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot. Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proo…
This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently) Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor. Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and…
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot. Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.