The Failure of the Model When We Get Infinities

Robin Hanson attempted this in a paper some decades ago and found that with a little bit of sort of clever model selection and parameter selection, you can come up with a kind of fit all of known or estimated economic history going back millions of years to a series of three exponential modes. And so the funny thing about this is like, if you look at the relationship between one mode and the next, it turns out that each mode goes roughly two orders of magnitude faster. The length of time to the next mode arriving is like two orders magnitudes less. Then you get that like some fourth mode would arrive sometime in this century and it would just be, we'd just be growing unimaginably fast.