Related papers: Infinite Growth: A Curse or a Blessing?
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 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…
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…
Civilization cannot sustain an exponential growth for long time even when neglecting numerous laws of physics! In this paper, we examine what are fundamental obstacles to long term survival of a civilization and its possibility to colonize…
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…
The ultimate fate of life in a universe with accelerated expansion is considered. Previous work showed that life cannot go on indefinitely in a universe dominated by a cosmological constant. In this paper we consider instead other models of…
Infinity, in various guises, has been invoked recently in order to `explain' a number of important questions regarding observable phenomena in science, and in particular in cosmology. Such explanations are by their nature speculative. Here…
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…
Most models that try to explain economic growth indicate exponential growth paths. In recent years, however, a lively discussion has emerged considering the validity of this notion. In the empirical literature dealing with drivers of…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
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…
High-dimensional computational challenges are frequently explained via the curse of dimensionality, i.e., increasing the number of dimensions leads to exponentially growing computational complexity. In this commentary, we argue that…
In this working paper, I developed a suite of macroeconomic models that shed light on the intricate relationship between economic development, health, and fertility. These innovative models conceptualize health as an intermediate good,…
We examine whether substantial AI automation could accelerate global economic growth by about an order of magnitude, akin to the economic growth effects of the Industrial Revolution. We identify three primary drivers for such growth: 1) the…
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…
We analyze mathematical models of the global human population growth and compare them to actual dynamics of the world population and of the world surplus product. We consider a possibility that the so-called world's demographic transition…
The cosmic expansion history tests the dynamics of the global evolution of the universe and its energy density contents, while the cosmic growth history tests the evolution of the inhomogeneous part of the energy density. Precision…
The concept of progress has characterized human society from millennia. However, this concept is elusive and too often given for certain. The goal of this paper is to suggest a general definition of human progress that satisfies, whenever…
The discovery of the present accelerated expansion of space changed everything regarding cosmology and life's ultimate prospects. Both the optimistic scenarios of an ever (but decelerated) expanding universe and of a collapsing universe…