That’s one important flywheel, but there are others. To paraphrase another comment I made here: If we lost all of our institutions, wealth, and infrastructure, except for our ability to precisely transfer information, growth would slow way down. So the only way to fully understand long-term growth is to understand all of these overlapping, interacting flywheels.
Absolute growth would slow down but relative growth would increase.
For example, if there’s only one working 30 foot sailboat in year zero, and next year there are 1000 such sailboats, that’s a 100000% growth rate. And there’s definitely more than enough people alive who could hand build such sailboat from wooden planks and easily built pre-industrial revolution tools.
But of course this assumes the preservation of memetic information.
Conversely if humanity lost its accumulated memetic information in this area and adjacent areas, but all equipment, tools, institutions, etc., were preserved, it would not be possible to build a single one within a year since it takes more than a year to relearn the process via trial-and-error.
Maybe if there was a fully automated factory that had a ‘make sailboat’ button then this would be possible. Though that just moves the need for accurate transfer of information from humans to the factory machines.
Either way you look at it, the ‘make sailboat’ knowledge would be by far the biggest determinant in growth rate of sailboat production post-catastrophe, at least for the first few years. Once the knowledge has been reacquired then growth rates will skyrocket compared to the world where only information has been preserved. This seems to indicate the biggest ‘flywheel’ would be time variant.
That’s one important flywheel, but there are others. To paraphrase another comment I made here: If we lost all of our institutions, wealth, and infrastructure, except for our ability to precisely transfer information, growth would slow way down. So the only way to fully understand long-term growth is to understand all of these overlapping, interacting flywheels.
Absolute growth would slow down but relative growth would increase.
For example, if there’s only one working 30 foot sailboat in year zero, and next year there are 1000 such sailboats, that’s a 100000% growth rate. And there’s definitely more than enough people alive who could hand build such sailboat from wooden planks and easily built pre-industrial revolution tools.
But of course this assumes the preservation of memetic information.
Conversely if humanity lost its accumulated memetic information in this area and adjacent areas, but all equipment, tools, institutions, etc., were preserved, it would not be possible to build a single one within a year since it takes more than a year to relearn the process via trial-and-error.
Maybe if there was a fully automated factory that had a ‘make sailboat’ button then this would be possible. Though that just moves the need for accurate transfer of information from humans to the factory machines.
Either way you look at it, the ‘make sailboat’ knowledge would be by far the biggest determinant in growth rate of sailboat production post-catastrophe, at least for the first few years. Once the knowledge has been reacquired then growth rates will skyrocket compared to the world where only information has been preserved. This seems to indicate the biggest ‘flywheel’ would be time variant.