GDP growth of humanity over the very long run (opens in new tab)

Redistribution has very little effect on poverty, even at extreme levels.

The growth over the last 20 years is much less than before, which is a likely cause of the increasing inequality. In a zero-sum economy, trade tends to concentrate wealth.[1] Growth is plausibly strong enough to counteract this, and historically, is overwhelmingly correlated with falling inequality.

Policy is much weaker than growth at doing anything. I personally favor progressive taxation and a basic income, and I think we can continue to improve the effectiveness of policy, but governments (and humans generally) don't have so much freedom in economic matters as is often supposed.[2][3]

Free trade doesn't cause growth (as ten thousand years of history prior to 1800 shows) but it may be a necessary condition for it.

[1] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics... [2] https://plus.google.com/+CarlLumma/posts/T2fdtAHtU9W [3] https://plus.google.com/+CarlLumma/posts/fWhcsTxvZVM

Bottom quintile is a very vague term. Is it individual income of family income ? What is the breakdown of young population v/s > 40 year olds in this ?

Income remaining stagnant or going down for bottom quintile is not really a problem. When you look at the economy over decades what truly matters is the quality of life people could afford at that time compared to 20 years back despite being in the same quintile. That is going consistently up thanks to the efficiency brought in by the growth. A focus on redistribution might help the bottom quintile temporarily but it would hurt the efficiency of economy by moving the money from private hands to government hands. This hurts not just the poor people but also the middle class and rich.

If you want to look at things from a humanitarian perspective, then sure, let's talk re-distribution. But it should be in form of education and competitive markets (free milk quotas, anyone?). I struggle with the idea of making war to make peace (aka "democratization"). I also struggle with domestic re-distribution through "citizen income", because it makes life worst for all that pay taxes and those that are not "citizen" (foreigners, immigrants, etc.).

If we want to help the "poor", then we should make things more competitive, starting with relaxing immigration policies as much as possible...

Like all models, incorrect but useful, I think that the most useful model to view "value" and GDP is as a crude approximation of the human input that goes into making something or making it useful. Natural resources are only useful if humans exert effort to extract and refine them, services are only useful if some humans exert effort to save other humans more effort, manufacturing is only useful if the effort exerted is repaid in improved productivity or utility gained, etc. Once you abstract away from monetary units to say that we're all trading units of human effort at varying degrees of efficiency, it's clear that GDP growth and "the ability of limited resources to support a growing population" is dependent on the growth of both the amount and the efficiency of human capital rather than physical resources. I'd take Ehrlich's wager [0] at any point in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

The Earth has finite resources, and is replenishing them more slowly than we're using them. You're making the argument that withdrawing exponentially increasing amounts from our sizable savings account is just fine, thank you on the assumption that it will never run out.

This is a clear failure in understanding of the exponential function.

> assuming everything else has zero value

Ah, so if you ignore almost everything, you have a point. Like, for example 99% of the people on the planet. Because there is no way a hunter-gatherer system could support our population.

Not to mention I for one think not dying of the common cold has quite a lot of value.

WRT your PS about meat prices, I did some engineering back of envelope estimates with a million grams per ton and a ton of post-green revolution rice costing about three hundred bucks in 1990 (or so google says) and about 4 calories per gram of carbs, the world GDP "always" being $300 per person before the industrial revolution, and ended up with something around ten thousand calories of rice per person per day. Some googling indicates the green revolution plus industrialization plus factory farms has temporarily quintupled grain production per acre, well, absolute best case anyway. So assuming world productivity was solely focused on rice ag (cheapest calories there is... right?) then every human on the planet consumed 2000 calories per day of rice and absolutely nothing else happened. That sounds very unlikely. I'm not entirely sure people can live long term off absolutely nothing but heavy manual labor and 2000 calories or less of rice per day, for vitamin and mineral deficiency reasons if nothing else.

Generally when you're doing data analysis and some textbook curve pops out, that's a very strong indication you've screwed up your data, not that you've actually discovered anything. Far more likely despite attempts at short term correction the value of a supposedly fixed standard 1990 international dollar inflated exponentially over the past century or so, on a long enough scale. Once that correction is made, the data could be re-run to gather actual, useful results. Or rather than using inflation adjusted counters, just pick a valuable commodity like gold. Supposedly an ounce of gold has represented a year of labor from the dawn of trade up to the invention of steam powered mine pumps. A graph vs gold price might be useful. Or a hybrid of gold/oil for more recent stats.

Parent comment says GDP, not GDP per person.

Loss and grief are part of life. Your parents will die. Your grandparents as well. You either die young or live long enough to see some of your own generation die before you. If you are really "lucky", you see all of your friends die.

Death is a part of life. Everyone hopes that they outlive all their children, but even if you do not, tragedies during your life do not mean that your entire life was unhappy.

The point about toys and creature comforts is hardly important enough to address. Do you honestly think kids are happier with a motorized car than they are with a hand-stitched doll?

Your point about people being sick is valid, but not to the extent that you think. Firstly, it is not wise to suggest that hunter-gatherers were physically worse off than us. They got a lot of exercise, and were in all likelihood better physically. Secondly, the shorter lifespans statistic is an artifact of increased childhood mortality. Once you discount the child mortality, they had lifespans very similar to ours. Without all the diseases of affluence that we have, mind you (diabetes, for example).

GDP measures vodka purchased by alcoholics; it measures chemotherapy; it measures bombs killing civilians; it measures bubble malinvestments; it measures settlements in police brutality suits; it measures daycare but not caring for your own kids.

And most importantly, it measures the velocity at which these things occur.

Probably is not so much the looting as the fall in the population. Millions of people died from contact with the diseases from Europe (20 millions by some estimates).