Science is making the world get more and more expensive. When science brings out a new gadget it costs more than the others. People have to earn more to buy it. So science is making the world more difficult, more complex. It makes people run more. What we need is to rest more, talk more, walk more, fuck more and enjoy things in life more. There’s a limit to what Europeans call technological and industrial development. When that limit is achieved society just crumbles. That’s why I see the day Europe, America and Russia will come to a standstill.

The goal, of course, is not to throw 23 million people out of work, but to refocus their talents on productive activities. If each of these individuals contributed $148,000 to the economy, rather than zero, GDP would increase by roughly $3.4 trillion. That gain, if achieved in equal increments over the next ten years, would add nearly 1.6 percent to annual productivity growth, which would more than double the 1.3 percent rate turned in between 2007 and 2018. Achieving similar gains across the OECD would add $10 trillion to global output.

In a recent article called “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” economists from Stanford and LSE analysed this phenomenon quantitatively. Across a range of industries, across firms, and in the aggregate economic data they found the same thing: progress becomes harder and harder. Based on their numbers, in order to double our overall level of technological advancement, we need to put in, conservatively, four times as much research effort as we did for the previous doubling. To illustrate, suppose (simplistically) that initially it took 10 person-years of “research” to double the world’s level of technological advancement: to move from knowing only how to make a stone axe to knowing how to make both an axe and a spear. In order to get the next doubling of technological progress, it would take 40 person-years of research. The next doubling would take 160 person-years, then 640 person-years, then 2,560 person-years, and so on.

Here are two reasons why this might happen. First, perhaps, as political economist Benjamin Friedman argues, people are more morally motivated in times of economic growth. When the economy is growing, everyone can be better off than they were in the past. This means, Friedman argues, that citizens will worry less about how their life compares to the lives of people around them and will be more supportive of generous, open, and tolerant social policies. And if you look at the historical record, he claims, countries tend to make moral progress—becoming fairer, more open, and more egalitarian—during higher-growth periods, and they tend to morally regress during periods of stagnation.

A second reason ties back to our earlier discussion of cultural evolution. When technological innovation is possible, there are great economic gains to be had from critical thinking and scientific inquiry; and since economically successful cultures gain more members, cultural evolution currently selects for traits conducive to science. As a side effect, so this argument goes, we apply our critical capacities to moral issues, too, and therefore make moral progress. In a stagnant world, the economic reasons to engage in critical thinking and scientific inquiry would be much weaker. Instead, other values would be selected for, such as those favouring hierarchy and conformity, which have guided so many societies in the past.

Failure to recognise that economic growth is mostly better rather than more is why the sages who have repeatedly predicted that growth must end because we will run out of – first it was wood, then it was coal, then nitrates and then oil – have always been wrong. We haven’t run out of arable land and our progress will not be halted by a shortage of lithium. All physical resources have finite limits, but human ingenuity does not.