Productivity Growth, Civilizational Collapse, and Social Complexity

A new movement is taking shape around the idea of restoring "abundance." Uniting thinkers from across the political spectrum -- including "supply-side progressives," "conservative futurists," and "state capacity libertarians" -- the movement aims to jump-start technological and economic progress by removing artificial constraints on supply and improving the quality of government. On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey interviews a leading analyst and advocate of abundance: Eli Dourado, chief economist at the new Abundance Institute and an expert on policy barriers to the emergence of new technologies. Discussing the "great stagnation" in productivity growth, Lindsey and Dourado focus on how most of productivity growth occurs outside the R&D lab, and how therefore broad institutional and cultural factors weigh heavily in determining an economy's overall vitality. Sharing an interest in the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter, a leading theorist of civilizational collapse, the two also discuss our modern technological civilization's vulnerability to decline and cataclysm -- and how an abundance agenda can reduce that vulnerability.