Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

nobelprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 217 posts

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#141

Post by scythe »

dkural wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #10

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…

There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.

A somewhat unfair characterization of the historical norm. Before the Italian Renaissance, history was marked by periods of growth interleaved with periods of decline, in many cases because a societal crisis caused a destructive regime to take hold. For example, the Mongol conquests installed an extractive regime that was soon replaced by the ultraconservative Ming dynasty, which resulted in China's progress stalling for some four centuries.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#142

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fnord77 wrote: post #22
nathan_douglas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stagnation is environmentally sustainable. Constant creation-destruction cycles will ultimately deplete the environment

> Stagnation is environmentally sustainable

We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#143

Post by snowAbstraction »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #17

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…

Maybe I will try Mokyr. I saw his "A Culture of Growth" is available as an audio book. What do you think about that book? Thanks

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#144

Post by JumpCrisscross »

simiones wrote: post #53
sethammons wrote: post #39

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.

A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it g…

> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows

Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago.

Earth’s biosphere’s energy flux is higher today than it was hundreds of billions of years ago [1]. This is due to various metabolic “innovations.” It also occurred because life directly altered Earth’s atmosphere and at least surface geology that made it more conducive to more life [2].

> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed

This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10288578/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-00116-w

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#145

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cassianoleal wrote: post #96
lanfeust6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. Population growth is stagnating and will peak in less than 100 years. Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was

> Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. ...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though. Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

The metric you’re looking for is energy intensity of GDP [1]. How much energy does each unit of GDP cost. It’s been going down, and it’s lower in rich countries than less developed ones. (Its material counterpart is material intensity of GDP.)

[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#146

Post by bell-cot »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #139
bell-cot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reducing energy use, social values matter at least as much as technology. Imagine if we had no better technology - but most people drove small cars instead of large SUV's and trucks, and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people.

> and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people So lower standards of living.

Feel free to live in a modest-sized, well-insulated version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers with a live-in domestic staff serving your meals on solid gold plates.

Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#147

Post by [deleted] »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #135
philipallstar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who coul…

What racist and xenophobic BS. Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another. The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.

[deleted]

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#148

Post by JumpCrisscross »

belter wrote: post #78
IAmBroom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ... When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...

Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions...

> Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions

I genuinely have no idea why so many commenters on HN will spout nonsense based on high school curriculum with the confidence of a PhD when it comes to economics, but won’t embarrass themselves in other fields.

Yes, economics—particularly microeconomics—is constantly subject to experimentation. Macroeconomics is closer to astronomy, in that models are developed, novel data sources sought, old models tested and then validated or rejected. Also like astronomy, or perhaps more accurately fundamental physics, it’s currently off in a loop of DSGE optimizations which are mathematically pretty for the field but not super interesting outside it. (This work is not in that category.)

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#149

Post by 331c8c71 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138
331c8c71 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo the economics profession very much suffers from inferiority complex known as "physics envy".

> economics profession very much suffers from inferiority complex known as "physics envy" You’re mixing up quantitative finance and economics.

Excuse me? Quant finance doesn't claim to be devising grand theories about how the world operates (is more akin to engineering). And when it does, any delineation from economics is moot.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#150

Post by philipallstar »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #135
philipallstar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who coul…

What racist and xenophobic BS. Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another. The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.

> Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions

I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".

> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.

Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.

> What racist and xenophobic BS.

A much clearer head.

Post reply on HN