When I started this Substack six months ago, I made it explicitly a techno-optimist blog. A number of my earliest posts were

Answering the Techno-Pessimists (complete)

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2021-05-30 16:30:02

When I started this Substack six months ago, I made it explicitly a techno-optimist blog. A number of my earliest posts were gushing with optimism over the magical new technologies of cheap solar, cheap batteries, mRNA vaccines, and so on. But a blogger at a blog called Applied Divinity Studies wrote a post demanding more rigor to accompany my rosy projections, and putting forth a number of arguments in favor of continued stagnation. Heavily paraphrased, these were:

Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood are not techno-pessimists, but they also made the argument that plateauing U.S. life expectancy is a sign of recent technological stagnation.

But there are two big problems with this argument. First of all, life expectancy hasn’t actually stagnated. Here’s a graph with some other developed nations included:

You can see that the stagnation is almost entirely a U.S.-specific phenomenon. The U.S. falls behind other advanced countries in life expectancy growth around 1980, and absolute life expectancy in the mid-80s, and it never catches back up. It’s also possible that the UK has experienced a stagnation in life expectancy just in the past few years, but too early to tell. The U.S. is really the only one who has clearly plateaued.

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