What's holding back the world economy?
Malthus. Malthus, or more specifically, declining returns on investment in science and technology, is holding back the economy. It&#x27;s not debt levels or bad interest rate policy or currency manipulation; these effects are all second-order. The primary cause of the slowdown is that there&#x27;s just not much more to _do_.<p>This lack of opportunity is reflected in the very low interest rates available today combined with low growth. This technological stagnation is reflected in the massive funding of SV-area tech companies, which are shitty opportunities for a return on investment in a world full of even shittier opportunities.<p>Investors are desperate for a return anywhere. That it&#x27;s so hard to find a good ROI is against indicative of technological development petering out. After 300 years, we&#x27;ve reached the end of super-Malthusian growth, and we&#x27;re going to return, hopefully peacefully, to the normal steady-state conditions of human existence, albeit at a higher baseline technology level.<p>There are no major advances left. Physics can predict everything except the most extreme conditions at the largest and smallest scales, and there are no more bugs in the universe to exploit. Computing will see incremental improvements, but all the really hard problems have already been solved or proved impossible. Quantum computing will make some problems a square-root function easier, but won&#x27;t change anything. Biotechnology may help us live longer, but research that might change the human condition --- germ-line genomic editing --- has _already_ been banned.<p>Sure, you might argue, we&#x27;re still going through the technology revolution. But that&#x27;s petering out. Cell phone sales growth slipped into the single digits last year. Tablets are dead. Desktop sales have been declining forever. The commercialization of technology we&#x27;ve already developed --- e.g., self-driving cars, automated personal assistants, and high-efficiency power generation --- will decrease costs by some constant factor, but also put a lot of people out of work.<p>It&#x27;s remarkably, really, that the laws of the universe are such that humanity was able to elevate itself from ape to thinking ape, and then from thinking ape to calculating machine. It&#x27;s remarkable that we can compute. Why should we expect the universe to be further more compliant?