Related papers: Science and the Future: Introduction
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
The article discusses the controversy over infinite growth. It analyzes the two dominant perspectives on economic growth and finds them based on a limited and subjective view of reality. An examination of the principal aspects of economic…
For those concerned with the long-term value of their accounts, it can be a challenge to plan in the present for inflation-adjusted economic growth over coming decades. Here, I argue that there exists an economic constant that carries…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
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…
I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
Functions or 'functionings' enable to give a structure to any activity and their combinations constitute the capabilities which characterize economic assets such as work utility. The basic law of supply and demand naturally emerges from…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
The so-called great divergence in the income per capita is described in the Unified Growth Theory as the mind-boggling and unresolved mystery about the growth process. This mystery has now been solved: the great divergence never happened.…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author…
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 physics, I noticed subjects not explained by formulas were often not studied, like how uncontrolled growth systems changed form. Weather, businesses, societies, environments, communities, cultures, groups, relationships, lives, and…
Voluntary insurance contracts constitute a puzzle because they increase the expectation value of one party's wealth, whereas both parties must sign for such contracts to exist. Classically, the puzzle is resolved by introducing non-linear…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
Economic growth and the growth of human population in the past 2,000,000 years are extensively examined. Data are found to be in a clear contradiction of the currently accepted explanations of the mechanism of growth, which revolve around…
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…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Science is essential to innovation and economic prosperity. Although studies have shown that national scientific development is affected by geographic, historic, and economic factors, it remains unclear whether there are universal…