“Hasn’t been born yet” – Michael Johnson on who can beat Usain Bolt.
The global economic model hinges on the concept of infinite growth. When you put money into a pension as a young person, you expect to get more out of it than you put in. Not because you got lucky and invested in Apple stock twenty years ago (though if you had spent that $5,700 in 1997 on Apple stock instead of the PowerBook laptop, you would have made in the region of $330,000) but because, generally speaking, growth just happens. Our entire way of life is based around this very fact. Economic growth means people will have more money and so stocks and shares will be worth more. Hello Costa del Sol. It’s why companies invest – they believe they will make more money in the future. It’s a big part of the reason why Japan hasn’t seen consistent economic growth in two decades. Their population is shrinking, so companies see no incentive to invest, and in doing so they have essentially abolished the business cycle.
I was wondering whether the same thing might ever occur in sport. Take tennis, and the recent useful example of the US Open final. The upward trajectory of men’s tennis has been undeniable in the last twenty years. No sooner did Pete Sampras achieve an unbreakable 14 major record, then Roger Federer came a long and smashed it in six years. Then this guy called Rafael Nadal comes along and beats Federer in pretty much every match they play. And now Novak Djokovic, playing better than both these guys, is currently racking up a faintly bizarre 64-2 record for the season. Permanent growth. How long does Djokovic have until some kid comes out of nowhere to be greater still?
Maybe longer than we think, if athletics is anything to go by. World records are a rare event these days, even with the spectacular Usain Bolt. Humans have physical limitations; the 100m will never be run in four seconds, even if the mile could (quite easily these days) be completed in under four minutes. Usain Bolt runs with 1000 pounds of force, so could there be a time when the human body simply collapses under its own force? One hundred metres is a short distance, with just a few technical stages. Room for improvement is minimal. "A pen is harder to refine than a tractor”, as Ato Bolden, four-time Olympic medallist, neatly puts it. Where can further progress come from? We’ve improved diets, training regimes and sports psychology. That sounds a lot like Tyler Cowen’s low-hanging fruit.
Over the last forty years, the 100m world record was broken in tiny increments of 0.1 and 0.2 seconds. Then, out of nowhere, a man seemingly too tall for the distance smashed it once, and then smashed it again (Richard Keys would be so proud). And herein lies our answer. Usain Bolt is the human embodiment of that new technology that comes along, and revolutionises the global economy. Humans were around for quite sometime before the invention of modern agriculture. Horses were the number one mode of transportation until the steam engine was conceived and these things call trains came along. Progression is never linear. Right now, the world is suffering from too few engines of growth. We are stuck, like those 100m athletes before Bolt, at incremental growth. This is not to say that governments and entrepreneurs should be lax, and simply assume that a technology or advancement will come along and save the world. But Bolt does offer a grain (cf Norman Borlaug and the Dwarf Wheat, the technology that saved the lives of millions of Indians) of hope. That if we keep trying to run as fast as possible, we'll get there in the end.
Except that it's infinite, so we won't. But the point remains.
