Free Solo and Economic Growth

Regarding economic growth and growth theories, I found Dr. Paul Romer's (2018 Economics winner) Nobel Prize Lecture on his work, economic growth theories, and hope for the future to be excellent and stimulating.

> Paul M. Romer: Lecture in Economic Sciences 2018 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmgZGIZtiM

> Nobel Page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2018/rom...

I watched and really enjoyed this movie. Essentially for both of these reasons.

1. The psychology of fear and how we can learn to overcome fear. I think there is a lot to say about the tantalising experience of facing death.

2. The evolutionary nature of a discipline. Some disciplines improve with technology, others with knowledge.

I really love technical sports and am inspired by the amount of sharing in the communities. It is also easy to see in the newer sports how much progress has been made.

It's exciting seeing how far we can push ourselves through what we previously thought was difficult/impossible and redefine the frontiers of the sport

> I think that in studying economic growth, we (and especially we in the Silicon Valley) focus way too much on gadgets, and too little on the simple fact of human knowledge of how to do things.

This is a major component of software's power – it's a tool for formalizing knowledge and skills permanently and distributing it rapidly at ~0 marginal cost. If a piece of software is both correct and performant, it can last a very, very long time, possibly outliving its creators. And the best software composes, so one program can build on top of another to build up a massive skillset.

You should detract from the author's point, because it only works if you are largely ignorant of how things like this actually happens. It is essentially always not generics, but specifics. Specific people doing specific things in specific places with specific technology and culture. Without knowing much of the "extreme climbing community" I would bet that it is a rather specific group of people and largely non-existent outside of that.

The author is largely trying to sell exceptionalism. That everything will be fine with generic improvements. Yet, of course that isn't true. Both state of technology and the economy is probably better than ever yet deliver less and less value. Chances are people like Alex Honnold did it despite of the policies of this economist.

> And now, the technology of the internet. Each new idea in rock climbing is accessible quickly all over the world. Without that large group of interested people, this communal knowledge would not have advanced so far. [The Article]

> After a year, he dropped out of Berkeley and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. "I'd wound up with my mom's old minivan, and that was my base," he said. "I'd use it to drive to Joshua Tree to climb or I'd drive to LA to see my girlfriend. My orbit was tiny and really cheap. I destroyed that van fairly quickly; it died on me one day, and for the next year I lived just on my bicycle and in a tent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold

> Climbing without protection has more to do with being a daredevil than a climber.

I think it's important to recognise that there are many different ways to get up a piece of rock, these are a choice in "style", and each style has different challenges, different qualities etc. No one style is better than another, they are a personal choice, and this is part of what makes the sport so great... if you want to invent a new style, you can, it can be completely made up and personalized and obscure, perhaps it is even a one time thing, climb route x in slippers on christmas. People only argue about the validity of the most common styles, but they often forget they are only a style.