CONVERGENZA O DIVERGENZA?

Riccardo Mariani

Adesso · 

CONVERGENZA O DIVERGENZA?

Nell'eterna corsa all'oro, ci si chiede se i poveri raggiungeranno mai i ricchi oppure le distanze si amplieranno con i ricchi relativamente sempre più ricchi e i poveri relativamente sempre più poveri. Che ne dicono gli economisti? La risposta è differente a seconda del modello di crescita che si adotta. I più comuni sono due:

1) SOLOW: la crescita dipende dal capitale e il capitale ha rendimenti decrescenti. Se ho 10 schiavi posso frustarli finché voglio ma la loro produttività cresce sempre meno. Se ho una laurea posso prenderne una seconda ma la mia produttività non raddoppia. Nel mondo è abbastanza evidente che i paesi ricchi crescono molto meno di certi paesi poveri.

2) ROMER: la crescita dipende dalle idee e le idee hanno rendimenti crescenti. Perché nella Firenze rinascimentale registriamo una tale concentrazione di geni? Perché oggi il medesimo fenomeno lo vediamo all'opera nella Silicon Valley? Perché le idee sono contagiose: puo' goderne anche chi si trova nei paraggi e dare il suo contributo.

Secondo Solow la convergenza è inevitabile, ci ritroveremo tutti alla frontiera tecnologica. Secondo Romer la divergenza è il nostro destino, i ricchi saranno un puntino distante e sempre più piccolo.

Secondo Solow, nei paesi ricchi l'investimento ha importanza relativa, faremmo meglio a destinare più ricchezze verso chi ha veramente bisogno. Secondo Romer ha invece un' importanza fondamentale e non realizzarlo puo' costarci molto molto caro.

Personalmente, prendo Romer.

HL PREFA+INTRO+1

PREFACE
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This book tells the story of a single technical paper in economics
Note:OGETTO

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1990
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economic growth: what it is, what makes it happen, how we share it, how we measure it, what it costs us, and why it is worth having.
Note:OGGETTO INDIRETTO

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an illustration of how mathematics became the working language of modern economics,
Note:ESEMPLARE

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The new growth story shows how economic discovery occurs—in intense intellectual competition among small groups of researchers working in rival universities.
Note:DI COSA PARLA NG?

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INTRODUCTION
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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Note:L ADAGIO

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invent a better method of fishing, or of farming fish, selling fish, changing fish (through genetic engineering), or preventing overfishing in the sea, and you feed a great many people, because these methods can be copied virtually without cost and spread around the world.
Note:L AGGIUNTA

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New ideas, more than savings or investment or even education,
Note:IL MOTORE

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Yet it was not until October 1990 when a thirty-six-year-old University of Chicago economist named Paul Romer published a mathematical model
Note:PRIMA FORMULAZIONE DOPO 200 ANNI DI BACKGROUND INFORMALE

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“Endogenous Technological Change.”
Note:PRIMA TUTTO PIOVEVA DAL CIELO

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“A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” published in 1956 by Robert Solow.
Note:IL PRECEDENTE ISPIRATORE

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it is a nonrival, partially excludable good….”
Note:TIPICO DELLE IDEE

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“public” goods, supplied by governments, and “private” goods, supplied by market
Note:LO SCHEMA PRECEDENTE

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A designer dress. The operating system software in a personal computer. A jazz concert. A Beatles recording.
Note:NN RIVAL

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All these are nonrival goods because they can be copied or shared and used by many people at the same time.
Note:DEF

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Rival goods are objects and nonrival goods are ideas—“atoms” and “bits,”
Note:DIFFERENZA

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“convexities” and “nonconvexities,” in the more austere language of mathematics.
Note:GERGO

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the source of “market failure”
Note:CONCETTI NN NUOVI

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marrying nonrivalry to the concept of excludability,
Note:LA NOVOTÀ

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tension between creating incentives for the production of new ideas and maintaining incentives for the efficient distribution and use of existing knowledge
Note:LA TENSIONE

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say something practical and new about how to encourage economic development in places where it had failed to occur.
Note:LA VITTORIA DI ROMER

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That there might exist a “right answer” to the riddle of economic growth,

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IN MOLTI DUBITAVANO

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a secure role finally was assigned to that long-neglected figure (at least in economics classrooms), the enterpreneur.
Note:AL VCENTRO...OLTRE ALLE ISTITUZIONI

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land, labor, and capital.
Note:FATTORI PRODUTTIVI NEI CLASSICI

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These categories had been worked out during the seventeenth century,
Note:ROBA VECCHIA

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some circumstances in the human condition were simply taken for granted. The extent of knowledge was one.
Note:FIN DALL'INIZIO

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Human nature itself, expressed as tastes and preferences,
Note:ALTRO DATO

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determined by noneconomic forces
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treated as being exogenous
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“increasing returns” to scale.
Note:ALTRI CONCETTI

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Decreasing returns to additional investment
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increasing returns were present any time there was little or no additional cost to adding a customer to a network—railroads, electricity, telephones, for example.
Note:APPROSSIMAZIONE AL NN RIVALE

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such businesses soon were declared to be not just monopolies but “natural monopolies,”
Note:TALE FU SCONCERTANTE LA SCOPERTA

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Monopolies were understood to be exceptions to the rule.
Note:MA

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special cases of “market failure,”
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They set out to make formal models of the phenomena that led to increasing returns.
Note:70/80 TRA CHICAGO E IL MIT

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Robert Solow born in 1924, Robert Lucas born in 1937, and Paul Romer born in 1955.
Note:I PROTAGONISTI

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the traditional “factors of production” were redefined.
Note:ARRIVA ROMER

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This most elementary classification was supplanted by people, ideas, and things.
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the economics of knowledge was recognized as differing in crucial respects (nonrival, partially excludable goods!)
Note:LO SPECIFICO

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The familiar principle of scarcity had been augmented by the important principle of abundance.
Note:MAI PIÙ SCIENZA TRISTE

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Technical change and the growth of knowledge had become endogenous
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CHAPTER ONE The Discipline
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On the first weekend after New Year’s Day, economists who are members of the AEA and various hangers-on gather in a big hotel
Note:THE MEETING

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a sharp distinction between academic economists and markets men
Note:TUTTI PROFESSSORI!

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So significant a figure as Paul Volcker disparaged economic book-learning, even though (or perhaps because) he received a master’s degree at Harvard in the early 1950s.
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His successor, Alan Greenspan, completed his New York University Ph.D., but only twenty-seven years after leaving school,

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overwhelming majority of participants in markets—executives, money managers, traders, accountants, lawyers, practitioners of all sorts—are not economists at all.
Note:MEGLIO RICORDARLO

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economics is a science practiced and overseen by a professoriate, like astronomy, chemistry, physics, and molecular biology.
Note:IL SUCCO DEL MEETING

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Why does America dominate? Because it is by far the world’s broadest, deepest market for what economics has to offer
Note:DOMINIO

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There is Arnold Harberger, whose marriage to a Chilean woman foreshadowed the establishment of a strong and durable connection between Chilean technocrats and the University of Chicago,
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Il futuro della crescita economica

Growth - The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

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Premessa: nell’economia del futuro a lavorare saranno dei robot: ovvero emulatori azionati con upload di intelligenze umane opportunamente selezionate e velocizzate. Gli uomini vivranno perlopiù in campagna con la rendita azionaria delle compagnie che producono emulatori.

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Faster Growth

the em economy should be more competitive in the sense of more aggressively and more easily replacing low-efficiency items and arrangements with higher-efficiency versions.

Note:PIÙ COMPETITIVI

Stronger urban concentration should also help promote innovation (Carlino and Kerr 2014

Note:INNOVAZIONE

For a long time, most innovation, and most of the total value of innovation, has been associated with a great many small and context-dependent changes (Sahal 1981). Most innovation has also long come from application and practice, rather than from “researchers” or “inventors” narrowly conceived. Most of the research that aids innovation is “applied” as opposed to “basic” research. Thus we expect most of this better and faster em innovation to consist of many small innovations that arise in the context of application and practice.

Note:INNVAZIONE CONTESTUALE APPLICATA E PRATICA

One might guess that a future very computer-centered economy improves at something closer to the recent rate at which computer technologies have improved. This suggests that the global em economy might double as fast as every year and a half, which is 10 times faster than today’s economic doubling time of about 15 years.

Note:CRESCITA: 10 VOLTE PIÙ VELOCE

our growth of inputs is still limited because of the limited rate at which we can increase the number of skilled laborers. There is little point in making twice as many machines if we don’t have twice as many people to run them.

Note:L’ INPUT CONTA PIU’ DELLA PRODUTTIVITA’

So the world economy has lately been doubling roughly every 15 years… In an em economy, however, labor can be grown as easily as capital; factories can make more ems to run machines as fast as they can make more machines to be run….

Note:OGGI RADDOPPIAMO LA RICCHEZZA OGNO 15 ANNI

Our basic economic theories of growth strongly suggest that this ability to rapidly increase inputs could allow an em economy to grow much faster than the 1.5-year doubling time weakly suggested by an em economy being computer-based (Fernald and Jones 2014; Nordhaus 2015). In fact, basic economic theory allows for the economy to double in a month, week, day, or even faster.

Note:DOMANI: RADDOPPIO OGNI MESE

Faster growth and innovation in the em era should encourage an emphasis on less durable capital equipment, including buildings. Such equipment should be designed for a shorter useful lifespan, under the expectation that more efficient designs will quickly become available.

Note:BENI A RAPIDA OBSOLESCIENZA

large increases in growth rates translate into large cost increases for systems that produce steady value, relative to systems that produce value quickly all at once and then end. So ems will use rockets and other disposable products more,

Note:TRIONFO DELL' USA E GETTA

Growth Estimate

To generate an empirical estimate of em economy doubling times, we can look at the timescales it takes for machine shops and factories today to make a mass of machines of a quality, quantity, variety, and value similar to that of machines that they themselves contain. Today, that timescale is roughly 1

Note:QUANTO IMPIEGANO LE MACCHINE A REPLICARSI

Today, humans are such a left-out component; our economy doesn’t grow this fast because we can’t replicate people as quickly as machines.

Note:REPLICARE L' UOMO, QUESTA LA DIFFERENZA COL PASSATO

an em economy focuses much more than ours does on computer capital, which has long seen much faster rates of innovation than has other forms of manufactured capital.

Note:RITMO DELL' INNOVAZIONE

the economy might double every (objective) year, month, week, or day (Hanson 1998)

Note:CONCLUSIONE

Another way to estimate the economic growth rate of the next era is to assume that the next era will grow faster than our industrial era by a factor similar to the factor by which our era grows faster than the farming era, or by which the farming era grew faster than the forager era.

Note:ANALOGIE: DIFFERENZIALE TRA AGRICOLTURA E INDUSTRIA

This method estimates a roughly 1 week to 1 month economic doubling time for the next era.

Note:STIME DEL SECONDO METODO

Growth Myths

There are several factors that some expect to influence growth rates, but which probably have at best modest effects. One such factor is the mental speed of citizens… Yes, there could be some weak effects because of ems running faster or slower, but these are mostly minor. It is mainly the existing capacity that creates more capacity, not the mental speed…

Note:IL MITO DELLA VELOCITÀ

Another factor that does not obviously suggest faster growth rates is the larger size of the em economy. Yes, a larger economy has more resources to pursue more possible innovations. But there are also usually diminishing returns in new ideas;

Note:IL MITO DELLE ECONOMIE DI SCALA

A third factor that does not obviously suggest faster growth rates is greater intelligence. While more intelligent people are more productive, and more productivity gives more growth, even so there isn’t obviously a more direct connection here, a connection not mediated by productivity.

Note:IL MITO DELL' INTELLIGENZA

Smarter people are awarded more patents, but that is in part because smarter people tend more to be sorted into the types of jobs that produce patents.

Note:TEST BREVETTI

A fourth factor that is less relevant for growth than many think is the number of researchers… even if the em world coordinates somewhat better than today, it seems that growth would increase by only a modest amount, as nations that do more research today do not grow noticeably faster (Ulku 2004)…. increases in research funding usually give much less than proportionate increases in research progress in a field (Alston et al. 2011…

Note:IL MITO DELLA RICERCA

Finance

Among their many roles, clans likely also serve as a basic unit of financial organization. For example, individual ems and subclans could relatively easily turn to their larger clans to insure against risks. Hidden information and actions, which are often obstacles to insurance, are less of a problem within a clan, especially when shallow mindreading is feasible.

Note:RITORNO DEI CLAN

A more competitive em economy likely adopts more efficient financial institutions. This plausibly includes more support for hostile takeovers of public firms (Macey 2008), and more use of private ownership of firms. As having worker control over firm management seems to reduce productivity, ems probably avoid that (Gorton and Schmid 2004).

Note:SCALATE OSTILI E COOPERATIVE

In most models and real markets so far, average interest rates (i.e., rates of return on investments) have usually been at least as large as economic growth rates. Thus as em era growth rates are large, em era interest rates are also large. This tempts slow humans and em retirees to save a large fraction of their income.

LA RENDITA