The Ultimate Resource is Peaking

Charles Kenny

No 630, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: Julian Simon argued that more people were associated with more prosperity: human talents were the “ultimate resource” and the force behind rising living standards. The last 30 years have been consistent with that view. But, globally, we are making fewer workers—and, more importantly, fewer potential innovators. In rich countries, human capital is growing considerably more slowly than in the past. Meanwhile innovation per researcher appears to be dropping as the population of researchers ages, while it takes longer to get to the knowledge frontier and more collaboration to expand it. Combined with the fact we are increasingly intolerant of risk and increasingly desirous of innovations in sectors where it is particularly hard to increase productivity, it is little surprise that productivity growth is indeed declining. To extend our two-century era of comparatively rapid progress, we need radically reduced discrimination in the global opportunity to innovate.

Keywords: technology; demographics; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E10 F01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2023-01-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/ultimate-resourc ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:630

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().