I discuss the economics of accelerating growth in my latest essay.

If output per person in 2025 is more than 5 times what it is today, then the economy will have won the race. That means that all of the concerns that economists raise about the middle of this century, such as the external debt of the U.S. economy (the cumulative trade deficit), the fiscal implications of Social Security and Medicare, or gloomy scenarios for global warming, will be trivialized by the sheer heights that economic wealth will have scaled by that time. If Kurzweil is correct, then the mountain of debt that we fear we are accumulating now will seem like a molehill by 2040.

See Ben Bernanke’s speech on productivity for an overview of recent developments.

UPDATE: My second essay on Kurzweil is here.

For Discussion. Given the nonlinear nature of Kurzweil’s forecast, how will we know that we are on the path to much higher growth until we are almost there?