It&#x27;s interesting to see this, particularly given Krugman&#x27;s history. His graduate advisor was William Nordhaus, who&#x27;d written a strong (and among the more reputable) criticism of <i>Limits to Growth</i>, published in 1972. Krugman&#x27;s written on that, as well as Gordon&#x27;s earlier published paper on economic growth.<p>The technological argument&#x27;s a strong one, and many others have pointed it out.  Vaclav Smil suggests the single decade of the 1880s was the most profoundly inventive in history (though fire, speech, ag, and writing are strong contenders for influence). Robert Ayres has several papers on technological waves, there&#x27;s W. Brian Arthur of Stanford &#x2F; Santa Fe Institute (itself a fascinating research centre), and Kevin Kelley&#x27;s <i>What Technology Wants</i>.<p>Krugman mentioned one of the futurist books of the 1960s.  There was rather a burst of them, going back a decade or so. Charles Galton Darwin&#x27;s <i>The Next Million Years</i> (1952), Harrison Brown, et al&#x27;s more modest <i>The Next Hundred Years</i> (1957), Meadows et al, <i>Limits to Growth</i>, Ehrlich&#x27;s <i>The Population Bomb</i>, Richard Meier&#x27;s <i>Science and Economic Development</i> (1955, 1965).  Some agreement, some disagreement, and interesting insights, as with all technical debugging processes, on what they got right and what was wrong.<p>I&#x27;ve been in and around the tech world for over four decades, and have come to an appreciation of what is possible (the world in a tablet on my lap with full-day battery capacity and WiFi Internet -- though many of those publications require SciHub or BooksXX to access), and what isn&#x27;t -- 2001&#x27;s <i>Discover</i>, T.A. Heppenheimer&#x27;s colonies in space, and the solar powersats they were to have built, lunar colonies, mass drivers, and even simply high speed rail networks within North America, have all failed rather spectacularly to emerge.<p>Venture Capital and high-tech startups have proved spectacularly incapable of addressing (or even identifying) Big Problems.  It&#x27;s questionable whether they can even address funding for necessary technical infrastructure development on the free software foundations from which they&#x27;re built (a VC is exploring that possibility now).<p>More troubling for me, many of the models we use to understand, or attempt to predict, our reality strike me as quite flawed. Economics itself not the least among them.