Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I’m still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I’m trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there’s then a pandemic that kills a bunch of people and curtails quality of life drastically (just outside the bounds of our growth measurement, arguendo). So, especially as the world gets more and more crazy and plausibly near end-game, I’m willing to trade off increasingly more GDP growth for other things like liberties, nimble government, less-partisan politics, literal political experimentation, etc, that increase quality of life and general or political sanity and decrease likelihood of disasters. I could imagine a world where those things also cashed out immediately in enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but I could also imagine a world where there were ways to get some of these that required real economic sacrifices.
Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I’m still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I’m trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there’s then a pandemic that kills a bunch of people and curtails quality of life drastically (just outside the bounds of our growth measurement, arguendo). So, especially as the world gets more and more crazy and plausibly near end-game, I’m willing to trade off increasingly more GDP growth for other things like liberties, nimble government, less-partisan politics, literal political experimentation, etc, that increase quality of life and general or political sanity and decrease likelihood of disasters. I could imagine a world where those things also cashed out immediately in enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but I could also imagine a world where there were ways to get some of these that required real economic sacrifices.