The Tyler Cowen thesis of the Great Stagnation

Another discussion going on in the webosphere.  You can track it back by starting with Brian Caplan's latest post on the subject.  The thesis is that we had eaten the low hanging fruit by 1974, and until we find or create new sources of obvious gain in the environment, we will stagnate, be in a wait mode, so to speak.

In my model we are searching for unused entropy we can convert into work.  Both the knowledge of how much entropy we need, and for how long and where to look are all increasing.  So we have a ratio problem,  we have Entropy We Want/Entropy We Find. We want that ratio to drop.

The numerator is a complex function, including human bias, cultural biases and political biases.  It includes the uncertainty of human blunders.  The bottom part is much more straight forward to me, driven by science.  The solution comes when the bottom overwhelms the noise in the top. So I am with Tyler, we stagnate until we see some remarkable partial solution. But I am against Tyler in giving that a time frame, we simply do not know what the mad scientists will dream up.