X-Message-Number: 31864
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Krugman Explains Why Progress Is Slowing Down
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:49:31 -0700


This blog post doesn't provide the "why," however. It just recounts Krugman's 
examples showing that progress has decelerated.

http://io9.com/5335000/krugman-explains-why-progress-is-slowing-down


      Krugman Explains Why Progress Is Slowing Down
      By Charlie Jane Anders, 10:09 AM on Tue Aug 11 2009, 2,532 views 


      It's become a cliche to say that our world is changing faster and faster, 
      as we hurtle towards an ultra-advanced future. But it's not true, Nobel 
      Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told Worldcon. Actually, change is 
      slowing down.


      Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite 
      living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed 
      because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science 
      fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac 
      Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, 
      since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said 
      this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's 
      New York Times Book Review.)


      But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the 
      world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of 
      change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he 
      claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as
      the world of 1959 was from 1909."


      So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in
      a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for 
      sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, 
      said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a 
      head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and
      they could result in a drastically different world.


      Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons 
      of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance
      review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself 
      tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were 
      depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s 
      or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the 
      future.


      And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the 
      world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and 
      yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember 
      reading something which had all these people flying around between 
      planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said 
      Krugman.





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