World economic growth metrics? (was Re: [extropy-chat] The emergence of AI)

[Robin Hanson]

At 02:05 AM 12/5/2004, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> >Economic growth is the fully recursive self-improvement of the world 
> economy as a whole.
>
>... does it actually make sense to speak of a single world economy as 
>something that
>has a growth that can be meaningfully measured?
>It seems to me that currently the world is not a homogeneous system
>under a single set of laws. This means that many of the transactions
>that take place between persons (both natural and legal) on the planet
>do so on a basis that is anything but fully voluntary for many people.

All the usual growth metrics can work on the world level as well as the 
national level.  The involuntary nature of transactions can complicate 
estimates of the value people place on the goods transacted (ick, what a 
verb), but don't make them impossible.  The core idea is to see what stuff 
(goods and services) people have, and use their trades and other choices to 
estimate the value they place on that stuff.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323