In the my first post in this series, Stagnation 1: The phenomenon and a simple-minded model with some remarks on search (pharmaceuticals) and process re-engineering (semiconductors), I asserted that “the economists have black box which we can call, say, the innovation engine. They don’t really know what goes on inside, but they are sure there are ideas in there, whatever they are”. Just what sorts of things do economists imagine to be in that black box other than ideas?
I’m not an economist. I don’t know, though I can imagine all sorts of things. As for myself, I went on to argue that something we might call The Structure of the World is in there as well.
In its naked generality “the structure of the world” is rather nebulous: Just what does it mean? In the two examples I considered in some detail, Moore’s Law in chip fabrication and the search for drugs that work on heart disease and cancer, I was able to be more specific. In the case of Moore’s Law we’re interested in the physical and chemical structure of chip materials at scales starting at, say one centimeter, and getting smaller by however many orders of magnitude. In the case of drug creation we’re interested in the very small set of compounds that can intervene in disease pathways in ways beneficial to patients.
What Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Web [1] have been characterizing as the difficulty of finding ideas is, from my point of view, the cost of discovering more about the world. Knowledge doesn’t come free. The world would have to be a very different place in order for that to be the case.
That brings me to a question that seems rather philosophical in character. Is the cost of knowledge to be considered incidental to that knowledge – that seems to be the default position of philosophers – or is it intrinsic? At the moment I favor the latter, though I don’t intend to offer a strong argument. Rather, just an informal observation or two.
Let us start with the perceptual psychology of J.J. Gibson. His ecological psychology, as he called, is grounded in the assertion that we cannot understand how perception works without understanding the structure of the environment in which the perceptual system must operate. In the context of his analysis of visual perception Gibson [2] addressed an issue formulated most poignantly by Rene Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641): How do I distinguish between a valid perception and an illusory image, such as a dream? The difference, Gibson tells us, between mere image and reality is that, upon repeated examination, reality shows us something new, whereas images only reiterate what we have seen before (256-257).
A surface is seen with more or less definition as the accommodation of the lens changes; an image is not. A surface becomes clearer when fixated; an image does not. A surface can be scanned; an image cannot. When the eyes converge on an object in the world, the sensation of crossed diplopia disappears, and when the eyes diverge, the “double image” reappears; this does not happen for an image in the space of the mind. [...] No image can be scrutinized – not an afterimage, not a so-called eidetic image, not the image in a dream, and not even a hallucination. An imaginary object can undergo an imaginary scrutiny, no doubt, but you are not going to discover a new and surprising feature of the object this way.
Gibson presupposes an organism which is actively examining its environment for useful information. It can lift, touch, turn, taste, tear and otherwise manipulate the object so that its parts and qualities are exposed to many sensory channels. Under such treatment reality continually shows new faces. Dream, on the other hand, simply collapses. Dream objects are not indefinitely rich. They may change bafflingly into other objects, but in themselves they are finite.
Gibson’s remark has an economic cast, where I mean economics in the broadest sense. Perception, and cognition by implication, requires effort, and will be undertaken only so far as that effort is rewarded. It is not only that it takes effort to apprehend reality, but that we take reality to be bounded by effort that is acceptably rewarded. When the rewards drop below threshold we conclude that we are no longer in touch with the real and we abandon the effort.
To the extent that I am correct in this, it would seem that the economists’ work on productivity, especially the exponential cost of achieving linear increases in productivity has fundamental philosophical implications.
* * * * *
This concludes my first set of remarks about and economics of productivity and the problem of stagnation. Now I want to switch gears and place these reflections in the context of human cultural evolution. At the moment I am imagining two (rather long) posts with provisional titles as follows:
- Stagnation 2.0: The measurement of culture [there was stagnation in the past, long periods of it]
- Stagnation 2.1: Ideas in the world and the phenomenon of rankshift
In the first post I’ll review some empirical work that has been done on measuring socio-cultural complexity while the second post has some more speculative reflections about major transformations in the course of the social-cultural evolution of human society.
References
[1] Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? March 5, 2018, https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf.
[2] Gibson, J. J., 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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