Has anyone thought about Kremer/Jones-like economic growth models (where larger populations generate more ideas, leading to superexponential growth) but where some ideas are bad? I think there’s an interesting, loose analogy between these growth models and a model of the “tug of war” between passengers and drivers in cancer. In the absence of deleterious mutations the tumor in this model grows superexponentially. The fact that fixation of a driver makes the whole population grow better is a bit like the non-rival nature of ideas. But the growth models seem to have no analog to the deleterious passengers—bad ideas that might still fix, stochastically, and reduce the technology prefactor “A”.
Such a model might then exhibit a “critical population size” (as for lesion size) below which there is techno-cultural decline (ancient Tasmania?). And is there a social analog of “mutational meltdown”—in population genetics, if mutations arrive too quickly, beneficial and deleterious mutations get trapped in the same lineages (clonal interference) and cannot be independently selected. Perhaps cultural/technological change that comes too rapidly leads to memeplexes with mixtures of good and bad ideas, which are linked and so cannot be independently selected for / against…
Has anyone thought about Kremer/Jones-like economic growth models (where larger populations generate more ideas, leading to superexponential growth) but where some ideas are bad? I think there’s an interesting, loose analogy between these growth models and a model of the “tug of war” between passengers and drivers in cancer. In the absence of deleterious mutations the tumor in this model grows superexponentially. The fact that fixation of a driver makes the whole population grow better is a bit like the non-rival nature of ideas. But the growth models seem to have no analog to the deleterious passengers—bad ideas that might still fix, stochastically, and reduce the technology prefactor “A”.
Such a model might then exhibit a “critical population size” (as for lesion size) below which there is techno-cultural decline (ancient Tasmania?). And is there a social analog of “mutational meltdown”—in population genetics, if mutations arrive too quickly, beneficial and deleterious mutations get trapped in the same lineages (clonal interference) and cannot be independently selected. Perhaps cultural/technological change that comes too rapidly leads to memeplexes with mixtures of good and bad ideas, which are linked and so cannot be independently selected for / against…