TEDxEast - Tyler Cowen - The Great Stagnation

[nykos222]

It takes increasingly smarter people to do science.We are reaching the limits of our intelligence as human beings.We simply don't have the mental capacity to go beyond what we already know today, b/c those concepts are too advanced for our limited minds to grasp (the same way quantum mechanics is to chimps)

Until recently,natural selection weeded out the genes of those with lesser intelligence.This is how we humans came to be.With modern medicine, idiots get to reproduce more than smart people.

[82goggles]

Yay Scientists! Celebrities can suck it!

[FoxKnightJ07]

For Science!

[MarkProffitt]

He points out some truths but ignores gigantic changes & makes incorrect conclusions even when he points at causes of serious problems.

A poor person in the 3rd world can video conference with anyone anyplace in the world from a handheld device. Forget flying cars, that is teleportation basically for free.

Hobbyists build 3D printers from junk, robots building themselves from free materials.

Books going into a machine then into students mind's is happening. Archive.org, translate.google.com

[nykos222]

@MarkProffitt The 3rd world is poor precisely because their average intelligence is lower than of the 1st world (+China), for reasons which are mainly genetic. It takes high average intelligence of a population to produce genius-level outliers (like, say, Albert Einstein).

The Nobel Prize list, with its disproportionate number of Jews, is a perfect illustration that it takes high average intelligence to contribute to science. Jews have been shown to have an average IQ close to 110.

[kraskata2012]

it's funny how a serious (or maybe not so serious) economist would accept some author's fantasy about the future as a baseline for comparison

[moridinamael]

It seems like he's just using a naive, antiquated assessment of what counts as an innovation. Every single new computer program is an innovation which increases our effectiveness.

[TheCalifornianMatado]

@moridinamael I wouldn't say that. Computer games are programs that take away a lot of our productivity. They may increase temporary happiness, but time that could have been spent focusing on creating new programs that really increased productivity and made our lives more efficient and easier.

[hyperthreaded]

If you want further evidence for what this guy is talking about, just look at the number of views this video has compared to one that shows a talking dog. :-P

[WillWeSeeDivinity]

We have to recognize that like Tyler said, innovation today is occuring at the margin, and therefore education needs to get people into specialized fields as early as possible, starting in middle school, rather than waiting until the later years of college.

[DaFuckyouat]

That's because industrialization has eliminated many jobs. Creating jobs in the services, like education, create the illusion that there are many more jobs than there really are. Making education more efficient, would eliminate many of the non-health care and non-finance jobs that haven't been offshored. The real problems are sociological and are not scientific and have no real solution.

[DaFuckyouat]

@DaFuckyouat Too much of innovation is aimed at trying to sustain the unsustainable or attempt the impossible (space travel). Instead of admitting that encouraging more car ownership is unsustainable or that space travel is virtually impossible without an enormous, e-norm-ous energy source --we're selling pipe dreams of a world where 11 billion people can consume as much as a family in New York City making 300,000 USD a year and or can live on Mars. Not gonna happen.

[WillWeSeeDivinity]

Some educational practices are productivity destroying, like forcing future carpenters/customer-service/no­n-scientists to take years of high school education that are mostly useless for those fields, instead of helping them get started in what they actually will do. Also university degrees are unnecessarily prolonged by requiring classes outside of the topic of major, and people too often don't get jobs in their major anyway. The drug war has been rather productivity destroying as well.

[WillWeSeeDivinity]

Books have to be your best friends.  Everyone has to converse like the characters on The Big Bang Theory.

[WestPhillyCat]

wow, great talk!

[DaFuckyouat]

. Stagnation has set in because the next great leap in knowledge requires more time and resources. The amount of knowledge a human can accumulate over a lifetime to make a breaktrhough is limited. The amount of resources at the human race's disposal to tackle difficult problems is stagnating, particularly, energy.

[DannyMullenBjj]

This guy wrote my college econ textbooks and they were excellent. Brilliant guy, I need to get my hands on his books.

[melkaira]

Law of diminishing returns, anyone?

[GhostsAndAliens]

Sooo glad this presentation debuted. You can almost feel the stagnation. Scientists around the world have their sights on innovations that could revolutionize the planet. Namely cures for heart disease, cancer and aging itself (imagine!) Clean energy too. Problem is that wealth has concentrated so much that the owners refuse to invest in the proper R&D to get to these milestones (greed!) How can we advance when the avg researcher doing the drudgery has the same salary as his 70's counterpart!

[MrAdvancedAtheist]

@GhostsAndAliens Why would the richest people want to stop medical progress? They want to stay alive and healthy just like everyone else, and they suffer from the same diseases as poor people. Don't you think Steve Jobs wants a cure for his cancer, which his billions of dollars can't buy for him?

[niradg]

we have the technology to connect our cities with 300mph maglev trains. we have the technology to power our cars with electricity. we have the technology to power our homes almost entirely with solar and wind and heat and cool them with geothermal. we have the technology to make our food supply healthier and more nutritious to reduce heart disease and obesity-related illness.

but the established rent-seeking industries who control our government generally don't want those things.

[DaFuckyouat]

@niradg @niradg You're clueless. Solar and wind energy require fossil fuels to produce the turbines and solar panels. Both require liquid fuel from fossil fuels to keep the electric grid running. The mantainence vehicles that service the electric grid run on fossil fuels and converting them to hydrogen power require energy inputs from other energy sources and those energy sources (wind or solar panel. Wind and solar depend on global supply chanis. Global supply chains depend on oil.)

[MrAdvancedAtheist]

@DaFuckyouat Companies which manufacture solar and wind equipment don't run on electricity from solar and wind power, in other words, but from conventional sources.. They can't bootstrap themselves into a state of no dependency on fossil fuels.

[cristoretornebiblia]

Good video I agree at the end about more respect for Scientists compared to the plastic celebrity culture, sadly that industry of pop music, magazine, mtv is a big industry. As for the increase I agree we are at a peak, but I think because when they is a new idea the general trend would go upwards then eventually meet a peak, that goes with anything, playing a new sport you may make good gains then plateau

[MrAdvancedAtheist]

@cristoretornebiblia Stupid people determine the market for popular culture because they outnumber smart people, and they want to see celebrities doing things they can understand, like throwing balls around.