Related papers: Can we predict long-run economic growth?
This article derives prognostic expressions for the evolution of globally aggregated economic wealth, productivity, inflation, technological change, innovation and growth. The approach is to treat civilization as an open, non-equilibrium…
In a recent study (Garrett, 2011), I described theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing how civilization evolution might be considered from a purely physical basis. One implication is that civilization exhibits the property of…
Growth rate of the world Growth Domestic Product (GDP) is analysed to determine possible pathways of the future economic growth. The analysis is based on using the latest data of the World Bank and it reveals that the growth rate between…
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between…
Long-range climate forecasts use integrated assessment models to link the global economy to greenhouse gas emissions. This paper evaluates an alternative economic framework outlined in part 1 of this study (Garrett, 2014) that approaches…
Economic growth is unpredictable unless demand is quantified. We solve this problem by introducing the demand for unpaid spare time and a user quantity named human capacity. It organizes and amplifies spare time required for enjoying…
Is a causal description of human wealth history conceivable? To investigate the matter we introduce a simple causal albeit strongly aggregated model, assuming that the observed wealth growth is mainly driven by human collaborative efforts…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
The dependence of world GDP on current energy consumption and total energy produced over the previous period and materialized in the form of production infrastructure is studied. The dependence describes empirical data with high accuracy…
Inflation is known to be generically eternal to the future: the false vacuum is thermalized in some regions of space, while inflation continues in other regions. Here, we address the question of whether inflation can also be eternal to the…
Economic growth is measured as the rate of relative change in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Yet, when incomes follow random multiplicative growth, the ensemble-average (GDP per capita) growth rate is higher than the time-average…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
Since the advent of inflation, several theorems have been proven suggesting that although inflation can (and generically does) continue eternally into the future, it cannot be extended eternally into the past to create a ``steady-state''…
We analyze the household savings problem in a general setting where returns on assets, non-financial income and impatience are all state dependent and fluctuate over time. All three processes can be serially correlated and mutually…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
Eternal inflation, the idea that there is always a part of the universe that is expanding exponentially, is a frequent feature of inflationary models. It has been argued that eternal inflation requires the violation of energy conditions,…
In a prior study, I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made…
Optimization and expansion are two modes of staged evolution of complex systems where macroscopic observables change at a decreasing, respectively increasing, rate. A prime example of evolutionary expansion, Gross Domestic Product (GDP)…