Raoul Pal|9月 16, 2026 20:33
The old GDP formula was population growth + productivity growth + debt growth.
It ran for decades and it worked beautifully for the most part... populations grew, people got more productive, and debt was there to smooth the edges.
In recent years demographics have weakened, productivity has stalled, and debt has ended up carrying the whole bloody thing. This is the crux of The Everything Code and it's exactly why we're stuck in this cycle, printing to service what we owe.
But there's a way out. The economic singularity version of the formula is population growth + productivity growth + debt growth + AI + robots.
Productivity becomes how much intelligence you can produce per unit of energy, and suddenly the first two engines are back on.
We've seen this play out before. In the 1950s a generation walked out of the war and made a load of babies, GDP boomed, and the debt just got smaller and smaller as a share of the economy until nobody thought about it anymore.
Same thing's about to happen again. Except this time we have robots.
I wrote the whole thing up today, from 1929 to now. Link below.
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