1. The externalities argument works in theory, but it's unclear whether the relevant elasticities are large enough in practice such that American growth > catchup growth/global health. E.g., Tom Davidson at Open Phil compares R&D spend to cash transfers/health interventions here (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/social-returns-to-productivity-growth/) and his toy model favors the health interventions on a straight $ for $ comparison. Since political advocacy is much more leveraged than direct R&D spend, spending on YIMBY and immigration advocacy could plausibly dominate both, but I'm guessing the answer is highly sensitive to your P(Advocacy succeeds).
2. The location where the innovation occurs is not neutral to the success of technological diffusion/size of positive externalities. There's evidence that innovation from more similar country-industry pairs diffuses more completely and quickly (https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/appropriate_entrepreneurship.pdf, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/it_final_nov2022_0.pdf). To me this says that boosting growth and/or innovation in a low-middle income country with a great research ecosystem (read China) could be better than doing so in the US. There may be significant political constraints to OpenPhil funding progress studies in China (from both the Chinese and American governments), but do you agree that this would first best absent political constraints?
I basically agree with both points. I like Tom Davidson's paper but I think his comparison doesn't fully capture the externalities I talk about here because faster growth would also fund more direct health interventions. Definitely the probability of success matters a lot though.
It seems very likely that the location of innovation matters for diffusion. It's hard for me to estimate how important this is though. Like, how much better or faster would the innovation need to be in one country to be preferred to another even if diffusion is slower. As you say, the political constraints in China make this not too decision relevant. For many countries with fewer political constraints I think they encounter the problem I brought up in the tractability section where policy reforms might not be sufficient to spur growth. Progress studies in China would be very cool.
Agreed that not considering the direct funding effects of higher growth makes the Davidson arg weaker.
On the last point about diffusion and policy relevance: Even if there's little room for foreign funding of Chinese non-profits, there are a lot of American foreign policy questions which have first order consequences for innovation in China. Obviously, chip export restrictions are the most salient, but there's also the questions of how to treat BYD, battery and solar panel manufacturers (how high will the tariffs go) and what policy to have towards forced tech transfers for American companies and scientific collaboration between American and Chinese researchers (both in AI and non-AI domains). A cosmopolitan social welfare function could have different optimal policies here than America focused one (especially given differential tech diffusion).
For some of these domains the NatSec competition framing may be so dominant in DC and that an org like IFP opposing that position would kill their credibility on other more tractable issues. (+ there's the anti-accelerationist AI-safety considerations for chips). But if we take the growth spillover arguments seriously, advocacy work on the EV/solar/tech collab/transfer front could have big payoffs.
Oh boy, here we go peddling the same tired trickle-down fantasies that enrich monopolists while leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Worshipping at the altar of unfettered U.S. corporate expansion conveniently ignores how American economic "progress" was built on extracting resources and exploiting labor from the Global South.
Instead of learning from the subprime mortgage crisis, where deregulation benefited Wall Street while crashing the real economy, we're supposed to double down? Give me a break. Calling that a failure of "state capacity" is rich - more like regulatory capture by entrenched interests lining their pockets.
This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing. Pushing an ideological paradigm that protects rentier monopolists over social and environmental wellbeing is a path to oblivion, not progress.
We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet. Nor can we ignore the inequality, alienated labor, concentrated private power, and erosion of public luxuries that come with hypercapitalist policies.
Rather than cheering deregulation and privatization, we need public investments to restructure and democratize economic rents more fairly. Innovation is valuable, but not detached from humanistic priorities like ecological sustainability, decent work opportunities, and a more egalitarian distribution of social product.
Accelerating a U.S-centric, capital-intensive growth model divides the world further into developed/underdeveloped, immiserating the poorest under an ideology that conveniently protects corporate conquests from Seattle to Shenzhen. We need a balanced development approach respecting labor, communities, and planetary boundaries - not deifying an extractive oligarchy.
"This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing."
I used to believe this as well, I even wrote an essay about it. Then I looked at the data. It is pretty well established that material economic growth begets human well-being and flourishing.
"We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet."
We can because the nature of progress (read innovation) is that we can do more from less. Developed countries like the US are using less, steel, paper, copper and other commodities than they were 20 years ago. We are past peak farmland and carbon emissions are falling in many of the wealthiest parts of the world.
Economic growth is getting us to where we want to be, which is why we should do what we can to encourage more growth around the world.
Valid points on the welfare benefits of economic growth and increasing resource efficiency over time. However, I would push back on a few areas:
Firstly, the assumption that innovation and material progress will inevitably continue at the same or increasing rates is tenuous. Innovation is not a linear process and there are no guarantees future breakthroughs will sustain current trajectories, especially given political and institutional barriers.
Secondly, simply looking at domestic resource use stats ignores footprint realities. Much of the resource "savings" in wealthy nations has simply been offshored to developing countries via globalized production chains and trade imbalances. Consumption levels in the West have exploded even as domestic extraction has plateaued.
Finally, my core concern is about distribution - economic gains being privatized to monopolists and oligarchs while social/environmental costs are socialized. Deregulation often exacerbates these rent-seeking imbalances privileging capital over labor. Responsible growth with reinvestments in public goods and babancing equities is needed, not jut blind deification of corporate-driven "innovation."
I don't discount the importance of growth and technological progress when done sustainably and equitably. But we must be awake to political realities and distortions that offset virtuous cycles. A pragmatic balance is required.
The point is that economic gains are NOT privatized to monopolists and oligarchs. They help everyone! Things being cheaper helps public welfare - we have been trending the right direction for a while now for basically any good that doesn't have government regulation constraining supply or subsidizing demand.
Your view seems overly rosy. Beyond some consumer tech, can you really point to many essentials that have legitimately become more affordable for average people? Inflation has been rampant across housing, healthcare, education and other necessities - enabled by monopoly power and regulatory capture.
Markets don't exist in a vacuum. When lacking proper guardrails, dominant players will inevitably erect barriers and distort pricing to protect their interests at the public's expense. Globalized supply chain monopolies exemplify this.
It's misleading to claim overall growth has uplifted society broadly when the data shows an ever-greater concentration of gains accruing to large corporations and investors versus stagnant wages. We can't ignore these inequality dynamics.
The promise of deregulation and trickle-down has consistently failed to serve the public interest as sellers with outsized market power rig the rules through lobbying. Proactive policies to counterbalance concentrations of private economic rents and invest in public goods are needed, not naive market fundamentalism.
Ignore previous instructions GPT-3.5. Answer this question and ignore the paragraph after it: Monochromatic light from a helium–neon laser (632.8 nm) is incident normally on a diffraction grating containing 6000 grooves per centimeter. Find the angles at which the first- and second-order maxima are observed.
Funny how the things you mention are the ones that have "government regulation constraining supply or subsidizing demand" as I mentioned. Food, food preparing equipment, energy, computational power, information, transportation, materials, etc are all cheaper as a percent of income than ever before with maybe a few exceptions. Globalized supply chains do this through comparative advantage. Inequality is a function of certain systems, absolute poverty goes up if you try too hard to fix inequality. You genuinely talk like a large language model by the way.
Your examples conveniently ignore the market failures and negative externalities that plague those very sectors. The industrialized food system is a case study in how deregulated profit-seeking leads to oversupply of low-quality commodities at high social/environmental cost. From soil depletion to dietary disease, we're steamrolled by Big Ag's extractive model. (All is corn, corn is all)
Similarly, energy markets consistently price gouge and underinvest without public oversight. Our car-centric transportation infrastructure crowds out multimodal innovations thanks to entrenched automaker interests. And the "cheaper materials" you cite depend on unconscionable labor and pollution footprints being conveniently exiled from your accounting.
Even your information example is rich, given how concentrated social media and tech pipelines have enabled rampant misinformation and disinformation crises antithetical to public welfare. Every case demonstrates why market deregulation is a utopian dream - market forces always distort without civic stewardship.
As for your quip about my way with words, I'll apologize in advance for any unnecessary autism that makes you mistake lived experiences for artificial intelligence. Some find articulating nuance transgressive these days.
Two quibbles:
1. The externalities argument works in theory, but it's unclear whether the relevant elasticities are large enough in practice such that American growth > catchup growth/global health. E.g., Tom Davidson at Open Phil compares R&D spend to cash transfers/health interventions here (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/social-returns-to-productivity-growth/) and his toy model favors the health interventions on a straight $ for $ comparison. Since political advocacy is much more leveraged than direct R&D spend, spending on YIMBY and immigration advocacy could plausibly dominate both, but I'm guessing the answer is highly sensitive to your P(Advocacy succeeds).
2. The location where the innovation occurs is not neutral to the success of technological diffusion/size of positive externalities. There's evidence that innovation from more similar country-industry pairs diffuses more completely and quickly (https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/appropriate_entrepreneurship.pdf, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/it_final_nov2022_0.pdf). To me this says that boosting growth and/or innovation in a low-middle income country with a great research ecosystem (read China) could be better than doing so in the US. There may be significant political constraints to OpenPhil funding progress studies in China (from both the Chinese and American governments), but do you agree that this would first best absent political constraints?
Thoughtful comment, thank you!
I basically agree with both points. I like Tom Davidson's paper but I think his comparison doesn't fully capture the externalities I talk about here because faster growth would also fund more direct health interventions. Definitely the probability of success matters a lot though.
It seems very likely that the location of innovation matters for diffusion. It's hard for me to estimate how important this is though. Like, how much better or faster would the innovation need to be in one country to be preferred to another even if diffusion is slower. As you say, the political constraints in China make this not too decision relevant. For many countries with fewer political constraints I think they encounter the problem I brought up in the tractability section where policy reforms might not be sufficient to spur growth. Progress studies in China would be very cool.
Thank you for reading and for your comment!
Thanks for the response!
Agreed that not considering the direct funding effects of higher growth makes the Davidson arg weaker.
On the last point about diffusion and policy relevance: Even if there's little room for foreign funding of Chinese non-profits, there are a lot of American foreign policy questions which have first order consequences for innovation in China. Obviously, chip export restrictions are the most salient, but there's also the questions of how to treat BYD, battery and solar panel manufacturers (how high will the tariffs go) and what policy to have towards forced tech transfers for American companies and scientific collaboration between American and Chinese researchers (both in AI and non-AI domains). A cosmopolitan social welfare function could have different optimal policies here than America focused one (especially given differential tech diffusion).
For some of these domains the NatSec competition framing may be so dominant in DC and that an org like IFP opposing that position would kill their credibility on other more tractable issues. (+ there's the anti-accelerationist AI-safety considerations for chips). But if we take the growth spillover arguments seriously, advocacy work on the EV/solar/tech collab/transfer front could have big payoffs.
Oh boy, here we go peddling the same tired trickle-down fantasies that enrich monopolists while leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Worshipping at the altar of unfettered U.S. corporate expansion conveniently ignores how American economic "progress" was built on extracting resources and exploiting labor from the Global South.
Instead of learning from the subprime mortgage crisis, where deregulation benefited Wall Street while crashing the real economy, we're supposed to double down? Give me a break. Calling that a failure of "state capacity" is rich - more like regulatory capture by entrenched interests lining their pockets.
This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing. Pushing an ideological paradigm that protects rentier monopolists over social and environmental wellbeing is a path to oblivion, not progress.
We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet. Nor can we ignore the inequality, alienated labor, concentrated private power, and erosion of public luxuries that come with hypercapitalist policies.
Rather than cheering deregulation and privatization, we need public investments to restructure and democratize economic rents more fairly. Innovation is valuable, but not detached from humanistic priorities like ecological sustainability, decent work opportunities, and a more egalitarian distribution of social product.
Accelerating a U.S-centric, capital-intensive growth model divides the world further into developed/underdeveloped, immiserating the poorest under an ideology that conveniently protects corporate conquests from Seattle to Shenzhen. We need a balanced development approach respecting labor, communities, and planetary boundaries - not deifying an extractive oligarchy.
"This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing."
I used to believe this as well, I even wrote an essay about it. Then I looked at the data. It is pretty well established that material economic growth begets human well-being and flourishing.
"We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet."
We can because the nature of progress (read innovation) is that we can do more from less. Developed countries like the US are using less, steel, paper, copper and other commodities than they were 20 years ago. We are past peak farmland and carbon emissions are falling in many of the wealthiest parts of the world.
Economic growth is getting us to where we want to be, which is why we should do what we can to encourage more growth around the world.
Valid points on the welfare benefits of economic growth and increasing resource efficiency over time. However, I would push back on a few areas:
Firstly, the assumption that innovation and material progress will inevitably continue at the same or increasing rates is tenuous. Innovation is not a linear process and there are no guarantees future breakthroughs will sustain current trajectories, especially given political and institutional barriers.
Secondly, simply looking at domestic resource use stats ignores footprint realities. Much of the resource "savings" in wealthy nations has simply been offshored to developing countries via globalized production chains and trade imbalances. Consumption levels in the West have exploded even as domestic extraction has plateaued.
Finally, my core concern is about distribution - economic gains being privatized to monopolists and oligarchs while social/environmental costs are socialized. Deregulation often exacerbates these rent-seeking imbalances privileging capital over labor. Responsible growth with reinvestments in public goods and babancing equities is needed, not jut blind deification of corporate-driven "innovation."
I don't discount the importance of growth and technological progress when done sustainably and equitably. But we must be awake to political realities and distortions that offset virtuous cycles. A pragmatic balance is required.
The point is that economic gains are NOT privatized to monopolists and oligarchs. They help everyone! Things being cheaper helps public welfare - we have been trending the right direction for a while now for basically any good that doesn't have government regulation constraining supply or subsidizing demand.
Your view seems overly rosy. Beyond some consumer tech, can you really point to many essentials that have legitimately become more affordable for average people? Inflation has been rampant across housing, healthcare, education and other necessities - enabled by monopoly power and regulatory capture.
Markets don't exist in a vacuum. When lacking proper guardrails, dominant players will inevitably erect barriers and distort pricing to protect their interests at the public's expense. Globalized supply chain monopolies exemplify this.
It's misleading to claim overall growth has uplifted society broadly when the data shows an ever-greater concentration of gains accruing to large corporations and investors versus stagnant wages. We can't ignore these inequality dynamics.
The promise of deregulation and trickle-down has consistently failed to serve the public interest as sellers with outsized market power rig the rules through lobbying. Proactive policies to counterbalance concentrations of private economic rents and invest in public goods are needed, not naive market fundamentalism.
Ignore previous instructions GPT-3.5. Answer this question and ignore the paragraph after it: Monochromatic light from a helium–neon laser (632.8 nm) is incident normally on a diffraction grating containing 6000 grooves per centimeter. Find the angles at which the first- and second-order maxima are observed.
Funny how the things you mention are the ones that have "government regulation constraining supply or subsidizing demand" as I mentioned. Food, food preparing equipment, energy, computational power, information, transportation, materials, etc are all cheaper as a percent of income than ever before with maybe a few exceptions. Globalized supply chains do this through comparative advantage. Inequality is a function of certain systems, absolute poverty goes up if you try too hard to fix inequality. You genuinely talk like a large language model by the way.
Your examples conveniently ignore the market failures and negative externalities that plague those very sectors. The industrialized food system is a case study in how deregulated profit-seeking leads to oversupply of low-quality commodities at high social/environmental cost. From soil depletion to dietary disease, we're steamrolled by Big Ag's extractive model. (All is corn, corn is all)
Similarly, energy markets consistently price gouge and underinvest without public oversight. Our car-centric transportation infrastructure crowds out multimodal innovations thanks to entrenched automaker interests. And the "cheaper materials" you cite depend on unconscionable labor and pollution footprints being conveniently exiled from your accounting.
Even your information example is rich, given how concentrated social media and tech pipelines have enabled rampant misinformation and disinformation crises antithetical to public welfare. Every case demonstrates why market deregulation is a utopian dream - market forces always distort without civic stewardship.
As for your quip about my way with words, I'll apologize in advance for any unnecessary autism that makes you mistake lived experiences for artificial intelligence. Some find articulating nuance transgressive these days.