Stagnant

You may argue there may still be ground-breaking advances from new research and, even when we confine our discussion to medical science, new problems continue to come up and there are always fertile fields to explore.

(The favorite examples quoted by many are the epidemic – of medical literature, I mean – about heart attack in the past two hundred years, and about AIDS in the recent two decades. In the latter case it actually saved an entire subspecialty – well, yes, saved by half; another half by influenza – oh, I should shut up.)

I could not agree more.

Nonetheless, how much resource, once again, in terms of money and manpower, could the human society afford to advance our knowledge? If the global GDP becomes stagnant, the amount of money available for research would follow, and the actual advance in our knowledge – I’m not talking about the number of scientific publications – would continue at best in a slow steady speed. (In reality it will become slower and slower, because with the increasing number of areas of interest and a fixed amount of resource, the material advance in each of the area will be less.)

And it is not a fancy idea – the scenario that we are seeing in every developed country is not a transient hiccup of a continual and exponentially growing global economy. As long been predicted by Adam Smith, in a fully developed economic system, both the interest rate and the growth of GDP will become very low.

Go read The Wealth of Nations.

PS. In his Facebook, my friend JW recently put up a summary about the increase in GDP of Hong Kong and other countries. I am less depressed but more pessimistic (if you know what I mean) and consider that just another example of the problem faced by all developed and declining societies - we see the same thing in America and Europe.