Against Explosive Growth

Humans don't like shocks. Explosive growth would definitely be a shock. We tend to like very gradual changes, or brief flirts with big change. 

Speaking generally, it is true that humans are frequently hesitant to change the status quo, and economic shocks can be quite scary to people. This provides one reason to think that people will try to stop explosive growth, and slow down the rate of change.

On the other hand, it's important to recognize the individual incentives involved here. On an individual, personal level, explosive growth is equivalent to a dramatic rise in real income over a short period of time. Suppose you were given the choice of increasing your current income by several-fold over the next few years. For example, if your real income is currently $100,000/year, then you would see it increase to $300,000/year in two years. Would you push back against this change? Would this rise in your personal income be too fast for your tastes? Would you try to slow it down?

Even if explosive growth is dramatic and scary on a collective and abstract level, it is not clearly bad on an individual level. Indeed, it seems quite clear to me that most people would be perfectly happy to see their incomes rise dramatically, even at a rate that far exceeded historical norms, unless they recognized a substantial and grave risk that would accompany this rise in their personal income. 

If we assume that people collectively follow what is in each of their individual interests, then we should conclude that incentives are pretty strongly in favor of explosive growth (at least when done with low risk), despite the fact that this change would be dramatic and large.

I think I agree with you that many people won't want rapid change.

However, it seems inevitable that some people will (even just part of the EA/rationalist sphere, though I think people wanting explosive growth would be a fair bit broader set). And so if even a small fraction of the population wants to undertake explosive growth, and they are free to do so, then it will happen and they will quickly comprise ~all of the world economy.

This is a huge if: maybe the status quo ante will have powerful enough proponents that they prevent anyone from pursuing explosive growth.

But I think it is also quite plausible a few people will go and colonise space or do some other explosive-growth-conducive thing, and that there will be a bunch of people kind of technologically 'left behind', perhaps by choice.

Thanks for this, which also helps me to reflect on what I value as well. There is wisdom and truth in your 5 arguments above - whether important enough to over-ride the benefits of explosive growth I'm not sure, but important to consider regardless.

As a side note, I'm not sure why people would downvote this - where's the bad karma? Disagree for sure, but why downvote? We are free to not like what we don't like, but......

I think this should be a frontpage post, not a community one