Are We Living in a Golden Era?

Rapid technological development may not last forever.

Photo by Kevin Noble on Unsplash

Will future generations look back at our time with envy? That was the suggestion made in a recent article in The Economist, looking at how a world with falling populations might play out. The result, at least according to a paper by Stanford economist Charles Jones, is a decline in scientific and technological progress that will make the current period look like a golden age.

Is that really something we should be worrying about? Global populations already look like they will start falling in the next few decades. Some rich areas, especially Europe, Japan and maybe China are already starting to see populations decline.

Does that inevitably mean progress will slow? Fewer people mean fewer new ideas, at least according to Jones. Couple that with the suggestion made in a paper last year that new ideas are getting harder to find, and the outcome seems to be a rapid fall in the rate of idea generation.

Fewer new ideas, all else being equal, means less innovation and progress. That would have profound implications for the economic systems our societies are based on. We’ve grown used to the idea that technology is accelerating. Entire industries, from computing to the stock market, are built around this idea. If the acceleration ends…