> This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.
No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s).
Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM.
Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement.
None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.
You don't need all industries to see 10 OM improvements to see a >8 OM improvement in total economic productivity. I imagine it's enough to improve how people coordinate resource usage by something like 10 OM to see that kind of improvement.
Ride-sharing, house-sharing, computerized car-navigation, self-driving cars, online banking, online shopping, Wikipedia, online directories of product/service providers, etc are all existing or emerging technologies that didn't exist 30 years and massively increase how effectively people can collectively utilize existing resources.
> This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.
No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s).
Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM.
Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement.
None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.