Data Diary

The limits of growth – biology versus technology

Posted on 05 August 2010

The following chart plots the relative running speeds for men over various distances from 100m to the marathon.  The red line is based on those world records that stood at the time of the London Olympics in 2008.  The blue line represents current world record times.  It’s startling to think that we humans have improved our performance this much over the last 100 years (and even more startling to think that a modern marathon runner can sustain 20 km/h for 2 hours!).

Most of the improvement can probably be put down to diet and training.  Some might be attributed to a bigger pool of contestants.  A smidgeon might be attributed to some condensed version of evolution – the impacts of the environment across generations (eg. we are getting taller).  But – and here’s the point – we are approaching the boundary of these ‘easy’ gains.  Future gains are more likely to come from acceptance of the virtual – whether it be prosthetic limbs, tighter shorts or performance enhancing supplements (‘drugs’ for those of us born before 1999) – than from better training techniques.

Why is this relevant?

It’s an important counterpoint to the ‘demographics defines growth’ argument – eloquently stated by George Magnus in his article published by The Boeckh Investment Letter (here).

While I whole-heartedly accept the point that the changing nature of a society’s population will shape the way it accumulates or spends its wealth, it is also important to recognise the role of technology in changing that society’s productivity.  The demographics of the baby-boomers may not be growth friendly across the next few decades, but the accelerating nature of technological change may well be.

Need convincing – have a wander around my favourite mad scientist’s website (Ray Kurzweil here), he has charts a-plenty mapping the exponential evolution of our various technologies.  Singularity or not, it seems foolhardy to use the straight edge of a ruler to extrapolate expected productivity gains.

And to complete the circle, there is even a recent article by David Despain on “How to prevent an aging crisis” (here).