The way I think of it is that in order for debt to exist, interest on the debt must be paid. But to pay interest, you must create more value than the debt you incurred, otherwise you'd not have enough to pay the interest!
But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But interest paid become a new deposit (for somebody), and from that new deposit, new debt is created...and hence, require infinite growth to continue to service interest payment.
I think there is something wrong with your premises. There is no rule of law nor nature that interest must be paid. Negative or zero interest are completely possible.
but if someone loaned out money to somebody else, you'd expect that they'd ask for interest payment.
negative interest rates seems like it's an impossibility (in the sense that only a central bank is willing and able to charge negative rates) for normal commercial loans. And if a bank charged negative rates on deposits (higher than it costs to keep cash safe in a secure safe!), then i suspect people will just withdraw their cash, unless something forces them to keep it in (like the abolishment of cash by central authorities).
In Denmark you can take a mortgage and "pay" negative interest rate [1]. That is, you pay less back than what you borrowed. I fully agree that most people would expect the interest rate to be positive, but their expectation is no rule.
Actually I am very sure interest rates have no causal relationship with continuous growth. The one (and only?) thing where the the continuous growth requirement comes from is that most people do not want to be unemployed. That is the choice you need to make. Do you want growth or unvoluntary unemployment?
that denmark negative interest rate is interesting. But it still doesn't quite answer the central issue - who is "giving up" money to lend? The guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019aug/13/danish-bank-lau...) only mentions that it's banks passing on negative rates from institutional lenders in money markets.
Anyway, it is ultimately (when you get your head around it, that is...) relatively simple. These institutional investors have cash (well, not exactly cash, but "cash" as in overnight deposits) that they need to invest. some poart of that they want to invest in "safe" instruments, e.g. bonds/commercial papers issued by banks. And it happens to be that they are willing to do that even if they are paid negative interest rate[1]. So the bank pays for its funding say -1.0%. Then the bank can lend the money forward with -0.5% and still make money.
[1] Why do they want to do that? If you have a decent amount of money, say millions, and you want to save that for a while to purchase something say next month, you have not that many good alternatives to bank deposits/commercial papers/bonds. Actual cash is surprisingly cumbersome and expensive. Stocks are risky, you may lose quite a bit within one month. Government bonds pay even less. so if your bank says yep, we take your money for a month and pay you back a bit less in a month, you are likely going to swallow it.
Maybe it is worthwhile to note that there is no money[1] that would not be someones loan from someone. Your moeny at the bank account? It literally only is "money" that you have lent to your bank. Cash? A bearer note from the central bank, i.e. a token that says that you are owed by the central bank.
[1] As per current typical definitions of money. If you consider gold or e.g. cryptocurrencies as money, then the statement does not hold.
Yeah, more like "on the other side of someone's deposit, there's X times more debt" - with X being generally allowed to go as high as 20... but the banks routinely break/work around that rule...
Debt-based monetary systems suggests that the supply of money will always grow but if inflation is high that doesn't tell anything about the wealth itself.
They actually require growth. A debt-based monetary system will eventually default in zero or negative-growth economy. Growth is needed to pay the interest.
I mean it's obviously possible. "Just" require prefunding without any growth assumptions. Of course, it would be tremendously expensive and workers would not appreciate the effect on wages.
Zero real growth is 0%, not -2%. -2% would be contraction. Even still, yes, it's pretty bad. People would have to work longer. Assuming kids account for about 25% of consumption during child rearing years, and assuming 40 years of work and 30 years of retirement (i.e. you live to 90), you wouldn't quite have to save 50% of your net, but the fraction would be significant. Many Americans do not have the head room to make the type of sacrifice. But many do and choose not to.
Agreed. you can not. There are just too many pensioners: "Between now and 2050,the number of older persons will rise from about 600 million to almost two billion. In less than 50 years from now, for the first time in history, the world will contain more people over 60 than under 15"
And how is that a problem? As long as productivity grows at same rate as workers/pensioners ratio, the portion of gdp that should go towards retired ppl remains constant.
That productivity will have to come from automation, and a robot doesn't get a salary so doesn't have to pay income tax. So that'll have to change if you plan on using the productivity growth to fund pensions, no?
You might not need a pension if you have a robot that is highly productive towards you. Everything might be so cheap. All the externalities that one needs to pay for a lot today, might be vastly available tomorrow. I think it is hard to predict the future.
This is an interesting thought experiment. I think it's conceivable the cost of many things one needs would fall as a result of automation - but there are many things which have limited supply and that there would still be competition for, many of them consumable - so you would still need a source of income for these.
Either that has to change, or taxation in general has to change. If 10% of your population can produce enough goods for everyone and yet the nation is struggling with providing pension for 40%, this means that the problems do not lie in the economic plane. It gets messy when multiple competing countries are involved though.
Imagine that you have a steady state society, of 1,000 people. There are no technological advancements, there is no population growth, there is no growth. Each year, 12.5 people are born. Each year, 12.5 people die. The average age of death is 80.
Each year, each person needs to consume 10 widgets to live. Each year, a healthy, working-age person can produce 20 widgets.
This society can clearly sustain itself, as long as each person spends half of their life working. To keep things simple (And to stick it to the DINKs), let's pretend that everyone has children, and is responsible for raising them until they can start working.
How would this society operate?
Well, you'd spend the first 25 years of your life supported by your parent (Who would work for 25 years to support themselves and you). You'd then spend 25 years supporting yourself, and your child. You'd then spend 15 years hoarding widgets, so that you can support your retirement. You'd retire at 65, with 150 widgets in the bank, and die at 80.
Essentially, you spend 40 years of life as a maker (Who can support two people in this time), and 40 years of your life as a taker (Who requires half of a maker's economic output to support them).
Everything works out wonderfully, and nobody needs a pension! Just save all the surplus you make between ages 50 and 65, and retire..! Except that there's two important differences between this abstraction, and the real world.
1. You can't hoard widgets in the real world. Goods have a very limited shelf life. Money gets eaten by inflation.
2. Even if the average age of death is 80, most people aren't average. If you were solely reliant on your personal hoard of widgets (Which was consumed away by spoilage/inflation) to see yourself through old age, you might still run out of widgets, because you happened to live till 83. Or you might have dropped dead two years after you retired - and thus all your savings would go to naught.
Pensions (Or social security, or some other similar instrument) are a solution to this problem. They solve the spoilage and inflation problem, by having your retired life being subsidized by widgets produced today (So they did not drop in value). They solve the 'average person' problem by pooling the risk, so that the very occasional person who happens to live to 90 doesn't go broke. They don't actually require any GDP growth, to work. What they do require is:
1. The same widget created today being more valuable than a 20-year old widget. (Due to spoilage or inflation. If we didn't have spoilage or inflation, we wouldn't need pensions.)
2. Proper levels of funding. The math for # of years worked, and # of years not worked has to add up.
3. There to not be GDP shrinkage. Things get problematic if your gdp or working population shrinks (Whether long-term, or short-term) - in that situation, pensioners have to take a haircut.
Since #1 is a given of the world we live in, and you are not asking about #3, all you need to handle correctly is #2.
As long as you have short term growth targets (quarterly financial results) you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment.
The only possible way is for people to stop buying unwanted stuff just because it is cheap.
> "you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment."
Well, that's what governments are for. It is the government's role to create regulations which promote the broader, long-term interests of the population and environment in situations where markets fail to do so.
Can we have prosperity without growth? No.
Can we have sustainability with growth? No.
Then we can not have prosperity and sustainability.
Can we afford not having sustainability? No.
Then we can not afford prosperity.
It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway).
The key issue is the global population.
(Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resources)
Europe, Japan and the native population of the US have elected themselves. Africa probably won’t have the population boom since education is spreading, which tends to slow reproduction rates. Problem is solved in about 30 years with the death of the boomers and the non-replacement rates.
What worries me is will we do enough damage in 30 years that it doesn’t matter? And will economies be able to adjust? Even if this happens, do we get to a steady state of 10bn? 9? I think our global population should be closer to 1bn if we want an ideal world.
Also boo to those who are downvoting you about the US comment. Either you can’t read or you’re intentionally not reading. The OP was referencing people who are citizens in the US who do it have as many kids as immigrants and without immigration would be below replacement rates.
In a perfect scenario you’d just have people have fewer babies. The issue is that countries want growth at all costs - the incentive is always more, bigger, faster.
Current forecasts are than we'll add about 3 billion human beings before population stabilises.
If you also take into account that the majority of human beings are poor by Western standards you can see that, IMO, sustainable global prosperity is likely impossible with these numbers, not least if we want to keep at least some wilderness on this planet.
Decreasing population is a function of increasing prosperity.
Prosperity includes increase in literacy and general education levels of the population. Most notably, women will have less children and shift towards actively taking jobs, opening businesses, research, civics,...
Lower birth rates and an ageing population then become a challenge to tackle.
Those who age stop actively working - adding direct economic value as taxes or as marketable goods & services - and their income is replaced by a pension provided by a public social security system and/or a pension fund they contributed to.
Now, this is where some will throw their hands in the air and yell "Doooooommmm! A dwindling active workforce can't possibly create enough wealth to sustain the pensions of those that don't!". hey then go on predicting how entire economies will collapse and how everyone will end up becoming working poor.
But that narrative hides tons of naive and downright wrong assumptions.
Like, how literally everyone should, can and will retire at 65 and spending their golden years on long holidays. Or, how it's impossible for anyone over 60 to be as productive or flexible as a 20 year old. Well, you can come up with a ton of other stereotypes.
In reality, tons of people over 60 or even 70 are able and willing to work and contribute to society. For instance, guess who makes up for a lot of the volunteering force in charities, public services and (libraries, archives, social work,...)? Young retirees. These are important fields that are publicly underfunded, and so retirees take up an important place here.
But you also find seniors taking up jobs again simply because their state pension is insufficient to make ends meet. That happens too.
The big challenge in this isn't the elderly population, it's adjusting our work culture to include older age cohorts. Because right now, workfloors and work in developed nations is entirely geared towards young people in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
The other big challenge is wealth inequality in general. As long as the system is geared towards extracting wealth to the top at the expense of the workforce - labor rights, minimum wage, healthcare,... - it's only to be expected that older people will drop out earlier rather then later.
So, that's basically what we're looking at. If you can balance an economy between sustainability and prosperity, you also solve the problem of population.
Now, guess what you need to do that? A proper, healthy social democracy that puts humans as their top priority. Not the interests of a few elites.
Because that's still science fiction. We have enough ressources to sustain current population/economic system for a few decades, a century at most (i'm thinking gas, rare earth, phosphore, etc).
It's been 50 years since we got to the moon and we're still stuck on low-orbit earth. Even getting to Mars is still very very hard. Do you think we'll be technologically ready to colonize an earth-like planet by the end of this century?
While we can't rule it out fure sure, it would be crazy to bet on that possibility.
I’d argue not that we’re ‘stuck’ here on Earth (just) because it’s hard, but because there’s been no major incentive to do otherwise for decades.
The original incentives for the space race were political during the Cold War - rockets, satellites, then landing on the moon. Since then, NASA has mostly stagnated without a clear vision to deliver. Likewise (until recently) the major aerospace providers were happy just doing well enough to make some dollars from their lobbying and ‘cost-plus’ contracts.
The only game-changer is SpaceX, set up to deliver the vision of a slightly eccentric multi-millionaire (now billionaire, of course). But I’d argue that SpaceX isn’t doing anything so revolutionary that it couldn’t have been done earlier by various others (including NASA itself) if they’d had the right vision and incentives. Sad, really - all of that money, time, effort, and human potential effectively wasted.
Because of interplanetary transportation costs, due to physically unavoidable planetary gravity wells, the existence of other inhabited planets has essentially zero effect on the prosperity of the average Earth inhabitant. There is physically no way to build the space equivalent of cheap maritime shipping.
Even if we successfully build a space elevator and putting stuff on orbit becomes relatively free, we would still need to build a 100% sustainable spaceship. Or a completely game-changing technology like teleportation, and there's no proof such thing is practically possible.
It seems to me that's an achievable goal... if everyone throws risk aversion/mitigation out of the window.
No rules about nuclear power on ships, no worrying about contamination on other planets, laissez-faire attitude about risks that come with space launches/travel and fully automated control of rockets/spaceships, massive investment in life support systems and AI, etc.
If humans can expand inter-galactically, then it likely it would have happened already by some other species, given the size and age of our galaxy. But since we're not part of some prior alien galactic empire, it's probably not feasible. And we would also be able to see the energy output from other galactic civilizations nearby. But we see nothing. Not from Andromeda, not from anywhere in our local cluster.
>If humans can expand inter-galactically, then it likely it would have happened already by some other species, given the size and age of our galaxy.
That's only true if we assume the chance of life arising is relatively high. It could actually be incredibly massively low, and we wouldn't notice, because we're observing from a position of extreme selection bias. I.e. probability(intelligentLifeInUniverse given weAreObservingIt) = 1.0.
Malthus was proven wrong by productivity gains. England did not starve due to a rising population, but went on to become an industrialized nation. Increased population allows for greater specialization.
This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make the Malthusian catastrophe self-fulfilling as the market can longer allocate resources efficiently.
Yes, but it would help if you could be a bit more specific. I fear this reply may be too general.
The post above suggests that we cannot have a sustainable, prosperous growing population. A rising population allows for greater specialization in that the general population can rely on specialists (auto mechanics, computer programmers, bakers, farmers) to handle their respective field of expertise. You do not need to farm wheat to eat bread in a modern society. Bread is lined up waiting for you in the nearest market. You can go online and have your groceries delivered by a truck.
His point is that you need less human labor to produce the same amount of stuff. Thus with a growing population you have ever increasing productivity, helping you offset potential negative effects of population.
That is just one of the effect that work together to over and over again prove the 'over-population' crowd wrong.
> Thus with a growing population you have ever increasing productivity, helping you offset potential negative effects of population.
I’m not sure I follow. How will we prevent over-fishing for example? Traffic? Deforestation? I think you can blunt the effects of overpopulation for humans (we probably won’t starve) but at what cost?
How will specialization affect human health and happiness? Are people who specialize in a very specific thing more happpy (or less) than people who do general tasks?
I would argue even right now we have plenty of people without meaningful work - how will increases in population improve that?
Fish farms, new more efficient methods of transport and agroforestry.
Consider all of the time saved with today's technological advancements and specialization. Years ago peasants would lay idle on near starvation diets for most of the winter. During the growing season they would work from dawn until dusk, just to enjoy a sustenance lifestyle.
So while work may not be as meaningful as we would like, our leisure time is increasing. Mass automation will likely provide even greater leisure and cheaper goods.
All of this ignores the rampant inflation of the money supply, which is silently taxing our leisure, labor and consumption. There are many who would like to increase this and would do so by indulging the fears you listed at the top of your comment.
Respectfully, I disagree with the spirit of all of this excluding how peasants lived. I think saying "tech will solve it and we'll have great lives where everything is cheap" is equivalent to saying Jesus will come save us all.
Specialization is not an end to end solution. It is one specific effect where increase population gets you higher per-item efficiency. There are many other such effects we could be talking about.
> I’m not sure I follow. How will we prevent over-fishing for example?
Fishing is increasingly done in fishing farms. The scale of such farms in the open sea is only worth it for very large markets.
However for most fishing, the solution is actually property rights for a sustainable amount of fish and that is already done in many places.
> Deforestation?
Forest were actually smaller in the middle ages. Modern markets/technology leads to the ability to regrow forest. All the Western world is now reforesting, because proper forestry is actually a sustainable business, no need to deforest.
> I think you can blunt the effects of overpopulation for humans (we probably won’t starve) but at what cost?
The cost are really not that high. High traffic in the densest places is really not that high a cost. Our rivers are cleaner, our food higher quality, our food is cheaper, wild life is actually making a comeback in the Western world, the amount of commercial land use is decreasing, air quality is increasing and the list goes on.
> I would argue even right now we have plenty of people without meaningful work - how will increases in population improve that?
If people have work has far more to do with the political conditions of specific countries then with overpopulation as a whole. Historically places with high population growth and high overall economic growth correlate very well, more people creates lots of demands and new problems that need to be solved. There is really no evidence at all that population increase leads to increase in people out of work.
> This blissfully ignores the key issue under discussion: Our impact on the planet in doing so.
It still baffles me that we choose to ignore externalities in part because we cannot attach any “rational” prices to them, it’s like they don’t even exist to us as long as we cannot put them in an exact Excel sheet with a well-defined value.
In terms of political economy we could easily tabulate the money paid to lobbyists. For example, it is much cheaper for a coal fired power plant to pay politicians to implement their desired environmental regulations.
Instead of being liable for damages caused by their pollution, these energy producers can simply claim that they are within the regulations set forth by the EPA. The price discovery mechanism has been hampered by the victim's inability to collect damages.
How exactly was he proven wrong ? The rising productivity gains are built-in in his model.
Where do you get the idea that he "advocated excessive government intervention" ? He was instead criticized for his anti-welfare stance ! Or do you think that "educating women" is "excessive government intervention" ?!?
There was not mass starvation as I clearly stated.
The Malthusian position is one of finite resources and productivity. Peak oil, population control and assorted doomsaying. It would not be unreasonable to characterize the one child policy as excessive.
Your comment attempts to misconstrue cherry picked historical facts against the broader definition of Malthusianism.
It becomes offensive when you attempt to inject identity politics into what had been previously a mostly polite discussion. I'm afraid there is nothing for us to discuss.
A "broader definition" that you haven't even bothered to give ? Equating Malthus and "malthusians"? Straw-manning much ? What about the Irish Great Famine (shortly after Malthus' death). And I see that it's often blamed on laissez-faire politics ?
Where did you get "identity politics" from ?
Do you realize that peak oil denial is a deeply anti-science position ? (Unless you're thinking of abiotic oil?)
That is wrong. In fact we have a much larger population, in many ways human life is more sustainable then it ever was and its easily more prosperous then in the past.
Just like in the 60s the people over-hyping population growth are just as fundamentally wrong as the people who wanted to force cut of trade and foreign aid to India to force them to adopt population control matters.
These same terrible dangerous and fundamentally wrong ideas pop up over and over again.
In fact, with a growing population humans have been using less of earths space. More people live in much denser areas. And even with billions more people we are far below the peak amount of agro culture land. In fact all over the western world wood and wild lands are growing.
With Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Water energy the environmental impact will be far less then what we currently have (and countries with nuclear had for a long time). We could double and triple world population again and there would be no energy issue other then a temporary scale issue.
We have continuously expanded our use of land and resources.
That fact that forests are expanding in e.g. Europe, a continent that has already been completely devoid of wilderness should not mask what is happening in continents that are 'behind' like Africa, South America, and Asia.
This is the key issue at hand and is driven by population growth coupled with less poverty, and what is causing current climate and environmental issues.
Ignoring this is what is fundamentally dangerous and we can see the effects on the planet right now.
It's a diffult situation and not easy to find the true culprit, because the society we live in is a cascade of hacks of nature that started aprox. 10k years ago with the dawn of civilization and agriculture.
Nomadic tribes intrinsically self regulate, what can't be carried can't be possesed beyond group boundaries and falls back to the environment automatically.
That's actually the question most people have been asking for the past decades. The answer is: The world has tried and failed and there's some serious questions about the plausibility of that endeavour.
The question whether growth==good or maybe just.. it's more complicated than that and we may be able to get more quality of life without growth is far more interesting.
Have we really tried? Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues.
Secondly, many of the technologies that will make this possible - renewable energy, electrification, energy storage, etc, are only just now beginning to reach the mainstream. Many of them seemed like science fiction in past decades.
> Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues.
Interestiong question is what's cause and effect here. You could argue politicians haven't done more against CC because they always shy away from doing anything that might harm the economy.
Probably not, because most people want a warm home, some means of transportation, food (especially meat), and other plastic consumer goods. You can't really change human nature, and you also can't fix that by some economic trickery. The only way is to find some technological solution.
Do the Math is one of my favorite sites on the internet for the value and perspective it brings. I had a few great conversations with its author on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy.
I found this report valuable too: Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked.
From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource"
Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.)
The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.
I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically.
This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for factories and plantations, so they would visit a coastal African country and buy slaves. You could refuse to sell them slaves, but then they would sail to your neighbors and sell them firearms. Then those neighbors would have substantial military advantage and could invade you. There were only two options: be the ones that receive the rifles, or form a large alliance which refuses to sell slaves to Europeans. Forming large alliances is HARD. Africans weren't stupid - they tried to negate the technical advantage, for example the king of Kongo wanted to pay well for ship technology.
(source: "Black Mother" by Basil Davidson)
Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. Produce terminator-like killer machines and drones to make up for less numerous army. Have super advanced science, strategy or diplomacy. The only country I know that comes close is Switzerland, and it has the advantage of mountainous terrain away from major transport routes. Ideally the advantages you have should be ones that can't be taken away from you or "stolen" via espionage.
> I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically.
Or the population including the elites get sick of living poor country and the wont defend the government letting it be overthrown.
> Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard.
If you are improving efficiency your economy is growing. Unless you assume people will deliberately use less resources once efficiency grows and I don't think that has ever happened.
1% growth difference over 100 years is the difference between the per capita income of the US vs Mexico. So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon.
>So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy,
I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth.
Better that models that treat the environment as externalities, or which convolute and stress the daily life for ever more trinkets to fuel the growth machine...
For one, societies do have agency. People decide every day, with who they elect, where they spend their money, how they live. You don't need a conscious goal of X to act in a way that brings X. And if you know that your actions are part of the problem and you still doing them, that's even worse.
Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds.
An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.
No, I don't see "moar stuff, moar tech" as the ultimate reason of the human race.
I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever...
If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.
You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets.
This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me.
I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
> The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow?
The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)
I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years.
Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years.
Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
Do you also mean AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing, etc?
Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...
> Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth"
I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes.
Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole.
This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill.
They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs.
Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.
In the absence of discovering a natural resource bounty, GDP (economic) growth comes from two sources:
1. More people working harder.
2. Better technology.
If you exclude "medical advances and science" you're basically excluding (2) which means the only source of growth is (1). More people working harder. Saying the world can only get better by increasing the number of hours we work is dystopian and doesn't make sense to wish for.
Ultimately, all progress comes through technology.
How is a rise in house prices helping the nobler parts of the economy?
People spend considerable more of their income on mortgages or rents, leaving a lot less for other less fixed and shorter lived assets.
I'd be 1000% satisfied with a 50' house and valuation, leaving me to spend my money on travel, charity, high-tech or just work less, do stuff that really interests me; or spend a lot more on education.
How is the education bubble helping the progress of humanity?
I'd be extremely happy with the education + costs of 50 years ago, or just online education -- I'm not talking about content, but delivery and costs.
It boggles my mind that people don't see it for what it is -- the feudal lords are back and they take a lot more of your production just so you stay alive.
They are not helping humanity(except for some benevolent ones) progress, they 99% help themselves.
Sorry if the language wasn’t clear but that is the point I was trying to make: when we use economic growth as a measure of improving quality of life for people, it ceases to be a good measure.
This is a pretty common confusion. Economic growth is a growth in what economists call "wealth" (the goods and services around us that add up to our modern lifestyle). The closest approximate metric for this is real-terms GDP, i.e. the value of all goods and services sold added up and then adjusted for inflation. It's not about raw prices, which are distorted by government money creation (these days normally called quantitative easing but it goes via many names).
Progress and wealth creation actually occur when prices fall, not when they rise, even though it may not feel like it if you happen to be the owner of a fixed asset whose price is falling i.e. a house. In a static system if money is printed via the issuance of loans, and that causes house prices to rise whilst the prices of everything else remain stable, then all that's doing is reallocating wealth from non-home owners to homeowners and banks. But it's not actually increasing wealth.
For wealth to increase everyone would need to find it easier to buy things, and the only way to do that is for things to become cheaper in real terms. For instance the smartphone industry has created enormous wealth in the past 20 years. Smartphones got massively cheaper so everyone can have one, and they got massively better. This is what economists mean by wealth creation.
I have no idea where this contradiction is coming from. OP explicitly stated that they would maintain, keep, hold on to, medical advances and science growth... They would trade _other_ growth such as land values, asset inflation etc. to undo the harm done.
And just because I was perusing this earlier today: the UK Government's plan for the future /is/ to have people work for longer[1].
I agree with you. Make no mistake in that. Denying that those who push growth economics seek only to further their own interests, not those of humanity, is a curious and dangerous position in the face of the evidence. This graph[2] shows that since deregulation they have increased their relative gain, at the expense of those worse off. It would be trivial to show that these same people made their money by eroding the welfare of everyone else, environmentally and economically.
Not at all, there are huge efficiencies to be gained from societal change. You could double Russian GDP just by dealing with corruption.
Besides crime, there is- Education, computer literacy, drug problems, etc. Huge swathes of Africa lacks even basic sanitation, many people in US don't have healthcare, the list is endless.
Lastly, there is a difference between science and industry. Case in point: we have the technology for genetic engineering of humans, but we aren't doing that. It could probably increase GDP too.
Oh, but if we take that view - it's basically "rich and healthy is better than poor and sick". D'uh, of course I'd give up all the bad things if I could get more good things in return, who wouldn't?
I think the view that one president screwed you over is a bit myopic... It didn't happen in US, it happened all across the developed world. That shows it's a systemic thing - caused not by some policy, but by global forces. Those millions that came out of poverty did it pretty much at the expense of the western middle class (and yes, this was enabled & encouraged by the rich - who benefited from it; that much is true). It's not just a few people that got richer - many millions got richer. It's just that those millions are not in the developed world.
[edit]PS. I wonder if OP didn't add the "except" after my message... I don't remember seeing it initially (though it's entirely possible that I didn't pay close attention).
Has there been some enormous breakthrough in any of these things "AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing" in the last 20 years? Pretty sure there hasn't been! I mean, Pentiums are faster I guess! Not as different as people seem to think though. Otherwise; nothingburgers for anybody's real world experience. Space flight has arguably gotten worse in the West over the last 20.
Environment has gotten obviously shittier since then; looks like a good trade to me!
AI: has become actually useful over the last 20 years. Of course if you only use it for adtech and arbitrage the world doesn't see much benefit.
genome research: CRISPR etc.
space flight: reusability is a massive game changer. The Falcon 9 once they start reliably catching the fairings is about 90% reusable. The Falcon 9 makes things like constellations of 12,000 satellites feasible. The Starship is planning on 100% reusability which will reduce costs a futher couple of orders of magnitude. Elon is talking about sending 1000 Starships to Mars every 2 years in about a decade, and people are starting to learn that Elon might not be as crazy as people originally thought...
Environment: not so obviously shittier. For example, tree coverage has increased by 7% in the last 35 years. In general local environments in developed countries have gotten a lot cleaner. The global environment on the other hand suffers a massive tragedy of the commons type problem so it overshadows massively local improvements. So yes, you can say the environment has gotten worse, but it isn't "obviously" so.
I work in machine learning: your statement is questionable -it worked fine 20 years ago. DL is nowhere near the "breakthrough" people act like it is; the actual real world applications of it that non mentats might use appear to be the null set. And yeah, I don't count the corporate propaganda material about "autonomous cars" or whatever to be evidence to the contrary.
Genome research: so far a big nothing burger. Zero impacts on average people's daily lives. The entirety of genome research results on the real world seems to be enabling people to eat more sugar without dying.
Space flight reusability: dude, where's my space shuttle? Falcoln 9 isn't reusable when using its actual cargo capacity, and isn't cost effective when it is reusable; no game changer there. Neat trick though and it certainly looked cool.
Environment getting better: citations needed. Doom porn abounds at the very least. Maybe they're all lying about melting polar caps, plastic in the oceans and insane levels of chemicals in the eco system.
Where by "worked fine" you mean it couldn't tell a cat from a swan. Nowadays speech to text actually works, translation is actually usable, iPad unlocks with your face etc. Did you put in any effort to remember what it looked like 20 years ago, before saying "it worked fine"?
IF ML works great, yeah it could have a big positive impact, but not much for the average person so far, meanwhile it does work for the chinese dictatorship, hedge funds, the military, the scummy corrupt politicians to influence ellections; self driving cars will be a HUGE benefit, but guess who will take the lion's share of that benefit -- the 0.5% that will own the tech; maybe a little bit for you and I, but the milions of professional drivers will be crushed.
I'm not against tech, but the way it will be use to further re-feudalize the world and promote the accumulation of wealth to the 0.5% -- which will be terrible for the overall progress of humanity.
I guess we're arguing because I deny that there has been appreciable progress. Most of what passes for "progress" in tech and ML is simply adoption of old ideas, or improvements in lithography. Along with forgetting vastly more important ideas. IMO the most important real world idea in ML in current year, defined as "being used and changing how people solve problems" is not deep learning (God Bless Yann), it is Boosting; a 30 year old idea. For that matter, the most important stuff for future progress isn't deep learning either; it's a basket of ideas that hasn't congealed into a name yet (stuff like Volodya Vovk and pals, as well as Gunnar Carlson work on).
All that said; I 100% agree with you, the fruits of supervised learning will entirely accrue to oligarchs, governments and other such dirtbags who have the databases to fit against, do not have the well being of average people in mind. If we notice at all, it will be via blackmail, creepy ad tracking and late night knocks at the door.
Appreciable progress often comes through the adoption of old ideas. Something that only works in the lab if you squint at it carefully isn't useful; something that only 3 people know about isn't useful; but something that works reliably in the field is useful, even if their are no appreciable differences between them.
Speech to text and machine translation worked about as well 20 years ago as it does now. Dunno where you were then. IPad unlocking with your face: what amazing progress. I feel so futuristic. Obviously this great boon to humanity is equivalent to say, those delivered in the decade between 1900 and 1910 (off the top of my head; safety razor, zeppelin, radio, air conditioning, powered heavier than air flight, electronic amplifiers, cellophane, mass produced automobiles, Haber process, talkie movies).
I think I'll take removing the last 20 years of environmental destruction and go back to using a 6 digit pin. Or a thumbprint reader.
FWIIW Dweeb Learning still has problems with image recognition, and people still don't understand how it works. Pretty sure that "progress" was mostly people writing frameworks for video cards.
Cool story bro. Enjoy your iphone face recognition; that's pretty much all you got in the last 20. Seems like the Haber–Bosch process slightly more important.
If you have an actual example of a past 20 years developed machine learning idea which has pushed the needle for normal people in the same way the Haber-Bosch process did (making an extra 6 billion lives possible); I'd love to hear about it!
Whereas you did claim that speech to text and translation were about as good 20 years ago. Basically, to use your chemistry analogy... you're saying "Haber Bosch was nothing new, Cavendish produced the same kind of results hundreds of years ago!"
Please characterize the amazing improvements the last 20 years have brought to these fields.
Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.
Care to tell me one single speech to text product that had at least a horrible 50% accuracy for Romanian 20 years ago? Because today I can dictate my messages to Google - that, plus the occasional correction, is faster than typing.
My apologies for not knowing the details of Romanian speech to text gizmos, but for English, Spanish and other more popular languages speech to text worked adequately, using contemporary hardware even back in the 1980s when Romania was still part of the Warsaw Pact. The fact that google or whatever has gotten around to training a vector quantizer on Romanian now isn't really a sign of actual technological progress. It's just last mile.
No, it did not work adequately, not even close, not even in English. Maybe if you gave it good conditions (god forbid any background noise!) and spoke clearly you could get some decent results. But that's not "adequate". How many people did you know using speech to text 20 years ago?
It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repeatable enough to be actually available in practice, to everyone".
I guess I'm always shocked and amazed how hypnotized people are by their ipotatoes, and how little technological perspective people actually have.
I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.
Yes. Romania. What you think software didn't run in Romania?
What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off.
Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs and attention. The basics of RNN were indeed there (LSTM was just published - though e.g. GRU is more recent), but attention was not. And attention is critical. That's just one of the things that's not "basically the same" and "worked just as well 20 years ago".
Yeah, we had a guy at LBNL who was a big OS2 fan. Worked fine for me, and I do have a fairly heavy coastal accent. Mind you it worked in a big, loud industrial facility.
I thought the previous KNN based approaches worked better than the RNN based ones. Which is more or less my point here. The main piece of "progress" we got was the result of a giant corporation having a large corpus of data. The actual technology hasn't improved or changed a whole hell of a lot.
I'm eventually going to write a history of technological progress documenting this. Progress is very obviously slowing down other than the improvements in lithography which are now fading out. Throw away anything with a screen in your household and life is basically identical to what it was 20, even 40 years ago. That wasn't true within my lifetime: there were huge strides made in technology in decades gone by -in my lifetime even. We're at the point where a lot of "progress" is just changes in fashion; KNN versus neural approaches. People buying the latest iphone (which is really no more capable than the early iphones); wondering at the facial recognition IR thingee. Oh sure, DL can do some tricks that were not possible before, but their actual real world impact is marginal, and sometimes, it's not even an improvement over other techniques.
Knn works better with little data, rnn with lots of data. But we do have lots of data - that, too, is part of the progress. Also progress is non-linear; and the real world impact is huge, though we may not always like it (social media & content algorithms have literally changed the world, influenced elections and sparked literal revolutions).
Driverless trucks would be a huge shift, and it’s not unconcievable that we’ll have them. RPA is threatening a lot of repetitive white collar jobs; sure it’s boring technology, but that’s exactly what makes it disruptive in my mind. Image understanding _did_ get a lot bettter (face recognition along with it) and we still haven’t fully processed the implications of that.
You have grounds to be skeptical about the future and to believe it is dark; but IMO you don’t have grounds to claim that there was no progress.
I don't claim there is NO progress; just that it's extremely weak compared to the huge triumphs of, say 1820 -> 1970.
re: face recognition: Viola Jones is almost 20 years old (we've been talking about 20 years periods). Eigenfaces is over 30 years old.
I don't believe in Driverless trucks, and it is emblematic of current year whenever I talk about technological progress, people bring up something that only marketing departments claim actually exists in the corporeal world.
FWIIW by "KNN" I don't mean the O(n^2) classic; the thing Google was using before was a bit more sophisticated than that, and it worked just fine. For some languages it worked better than the "advanced" RNN version of things.
How exactly do you do face recognition with Viola Jones? Nevermind an accurate-enough version to be used for biometric identification... just one that can distinguish you in your photo collection.
It is not disingenuous to think long term because of how growth compounds over time. Imagine average growth is 2% a year and we cap it to 1%. In 20 years the difference would be 48% vs 22% total growth, which may not sound bad. But in 200 years, it would be 5150% vs 632%, and it would only get larger.
Not so sure about the real growth after you add central bank induced asset price inflation or just the heavily skewed basic inflation central banks like to post every year.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the said growth is really just asset price inflation -- just let people overburden themselves with debt and a house costing 50000$ now costs 300000$ -- not just any house, EVERY house -- boom, you have huge "growth" and "wealth".
EDIT: I meant that it is disingenuous to look at 200 years because huge REAL advances have indeed taken place since then.
I'm totally against the financialization that has happened in the last 40-50 years, which is really 90% of the growth that has actually happened.
I mean, don't you think there's something deeply wrong and worrying with the fact that the financial industry is 80% of US GDP?
> Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
Well if we are just totally changing what growth means...
Listen -- if 0.5% of people see real economic growth of 10000% and the rest see negative growth after inflation, even if on paper, on average we have positive growth, the overall result is NEGATIVE if you ask me.
Just check real wage growth in the western world, after inflation it is stagnant or negative in the last decades; add in hugely inflated housing prices, education prices, and it is very clearly a big NEGATIVE outcome for the average person; this is only offset a bit by women entering the workforce, now you have 2 slaves instead of 1.
Yeah, the developing world might fare better -- for now -- as they are much cheaper then workers in the developed world, but the same trap awaits them, the same asset price inflation, education costs and so on is happening in the developing world, it's not fully our turn yet, but the writing is on the wall.
limits of physics are well known and not about to change in 2, 200 or 20000 years. the current growth trajectory puts us at boiling oceans in about half of a millennium, assuming economic growth is correlated with energy consumption. remember all energy eventually ends up as heat and Earth can't radiate heat away fast enough if we grow too much.
technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.
In fact I would say that the belief in perpetual growth is pretty much anti-science. It contradicts the evidence that the earth is a sphere to begin with.
I believe OP is saying the difference is equal to, not that the difference is caused by.
USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606
Mexico, ditto: $20602
20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6
The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.
==people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon==
On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?
But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents.
I don't really understand your post. Did you mean the US's mean income is double that of France's median income? I think[1] that's factually correct. I'm not sure if it's meaningful though.
Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs?
I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1]
If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2]
France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3]
Perhaps a shorter way to put it is that without growth the allocation of resources is zero sum. In a fixed sized pie any increase for one slice is a decrease for another. This begins a downward spiral since defection rather than cooperation is rewarded.
I understand the first two points, but I don't really get what this has to do with hobbies and sailboats in particular? As a sailor myself I guarantee that you could easily deliver many more boats if only there was demand for them. Sailing is considered by many as an elite hobby, but in reality you can buy a second-hand yacht cheaper than a decent car.
- There are going to be certain luxury goods whose supply is limited.
- I framed it in terms of hobbies in order to point out that in many cases "luxury goods" aren't just frivolous comforts but are instead things that people need to achieve meaningful personal goals.
(Also, on a completely off topic note: that's really interesting to hear about sailboats. I'm going to have look into how much they would cost to own and maintain in my area!)
Boats drop in value quickly because of maintenance. Sea can be a tough environment, sea water is really corrosive, you need to regularly anti-foul the hull, specialist gear is not cheap etc. You can keep the costs down if you have the time to learn and do some of the work yourself. Wooden boats are even more difficult to keep in good shape. Moreover, you need to rent a mooring for it, which can get really expensive depending on location.
That's the main reason why people half-jokingly say that the two happiest days for a boat owner are the day when they buy it and the day when they manage to sell it. Still it's worth all the effort if you have the time to sail it regularly. Otherwise, chartering (renting) a yacht for a period of time can be a much better option.
I haven’t heard of much shortage of any of those things in the OECD. If anything there’s a surplus of your third category. What’s desirable about land changes due to fashion even visibly within a human lifespan.
The US certainly has a shortage of desirable land (e.g. land in Manhattan and San Francisco). Even if the details of which land has more demand than supply changes over time, I don't think that changes the fact that at any given time there is a shortage.
There are definitely places in the US where housing prices are not high. However, I don't think that changes the fact that there are areas where the supply for housing cannot keep up with the demand. I don't think that your average person who wants to live in Manhattan would consider a house in Cleveland as an equivalent substitution.
I dont think that's correct to look at as shortage of land - Having more physical land does not solve the problem. You could put SanFrancisco on an infinite flat earth, and house prices would hardly budge.
I don't think that your African simile holds historically, as the slave traders were IIRC typically Arabs, not Africans, who just went on slaving expeditions into the interior, and had no scruples doing so.
>you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard.
You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).
What if halving the price now makes it possible to start producing a new product not economically feasible before? Hell the phone you use is only possible because of continued minituarization and cost cutting of previous generations’ computers.
>Wouldn't GDP actually decrease if the same number of widgets are made, but now for cheaper and so through competition have less "value"?
Cheaper doesn't mean less "value". If we have inflation, prices go up but value doesn't increase, and if deflation decreases prices, that doesn't mean a decrease in value. GDP calculations try to account for this, to capture the fact that e.g. a $500 phone today contains a lot more "value" than a $500 phone from 1995.
GDP would hence (ideally) account for the change in value-per-dollar. It would also include whatever new output was made possible by there being more resources left over now due to less being spent to fulfill people's widget needs (i.e. the money now not being spent on widgets will instead be invested or spent on something else).
Thanks for answering my honest questions. I didn't realize GDP accounts for perceived value. I had assumed it was restricted to the economic value strictly defined by the dollar. Thanks.
Why is it a given that this will show up as GDP growth, even accounting for approximation error?
If I make widget X twice as efficiently and buy fewer resources, isn't that a GDP loss? Or is there an assumption that I would make twice as many widgets and purchase the same resources AND be able to sell twice as many?
The idea is roughly that the remaining resources (that purchasers save by paying half as much, and you save due to being more efficient) would be used to produce something else that previously didn't exist, so the total amount of "stuff"/"product" produced would be greater. Now, you might wonder if X was saved, but then X was spent on something else, doesn't GDP remain the same? No, because GDP is supposed to capture extra output, so GDP calculations would (try to) factor in the fact that you can now get more widgets per unit money. The is not easy to do, but is attempted, so GDP today for instance tries to capture the fact $1000 of computer buys way more "compute" than $1000 of computer did 30 years ago.
Now, what if you did nothing with the extra money saved from being more efficient, and the widget purchasers did nothing with the money saved from it being cheaper (maybe they put it under their bed, or burned it)? This will still (in theory) show up in GDP because it reduces the money supply, hence increases the value of money, essentially transferring purchasing power from the money burner to the other people in the economy, which they could then use to produce more things than previously.
By and large the wealthier countries aren’t fighting wars (especially among themselves); in any case they have too much to lose by doing so. The larger economics are reversing to the mean, and smaller economies are patchily catching up.
Just as wealthier people (in aggregate) have fewer kids, wealthier countries these days have less reason to right wars.
Costa Rica abolished its milirptary years ago and is more prosperous than its neighbors.
The US is an outlier but like China its military serves several purposes like a jobs program, not just defense. And its economy many not have really grown in any but a statistical sense over he past 40 years. Instead it’s just become more “lumpy” in response to optimization for imperfect measures.
I'm not sure it did for them, though it certainly did for the non-nuclear countries that ended up being the sites of proxy wars. Small by the reckoning of the big powers but large of course for the victims.
Also isn't growth a natural result of human progress? As science and technology move forwards they allow for more productivity per person and thus drive growth right? Or is that an overly simplistic notion?
Progress also means that we can use resources more efficiently, e.g. by recycling them. By limiting progress (and growth) you're also making resource use less eficient, so that we'll run out of them faster.
Environmental damage is a problem but we certainly aren't running out of most minerals. Mineral extraction volume worldwide is steady or increasing for most types.
You're right, I should have been more careful using that term - but for how long ? Last time I checked, we only had a few decades left of potential resource extraction growth before we hit ~half of eventually extracted resources, and the production would start to decline.
In an ideal world, growth which took true account of things we currently consider externalities (i.e. pollution), would be ecologically sustainable, and, drastically reduce the human suffering and loss of life of countries which practiced it.
In my fantasy world, out of all the people who didn't die of cancer from air pollution, that lost human potential, translates into scientific, cultural, and technological advancements which balance out whatever military disadvantage may or may not exist : ).
Pollution is something so abstract, hard to measure and put a finger on that a lot of people get away with it. When you punch a person in the face or rob someone, soon there's one very angry person wanting to get even with you. Because of its nature, pollution diffuses in air or water. It's hard to see, put a finger on, point to the wrongdoer. There's a little bit of it everywhere, everyone is a bit harmed by it, but it's hard to reason about and notice until it's really bad. And by that time the guilty is either dead or far away. Or everyone is a little bit responsible.
Which reminds me of... democracy. The easiest way to make people not care about something wrong happening is to diffuse it. Like, diffuse responsibility.
How do you reconcile the existence of MAD with this?
Proponents of MAD insist that once attained, it makes military conflicts unnecessary - and this justifies the expense and the risk of the world walking a tightrope above nuclear Armageddon.
If I'm not mistaken, either they, or you are wrong about this point.
The US has been developing its defenses, becoming increasingly capable of intercepting the delivery systems responsible for MAD. Its enemies are responding by developing more nuclear warheads delivered by more and faster missiles.
This will keep going back and forth, it must if the balance is to be preserved. The moment one side gets a substantial advantage over everyone else, MAD is no longer assured.
If you just build some nuclear weapons and consider yourself in the MAD club because you've checked the "nuclear" box, then cease all relevant R&D and your nation goes permanently out to lunch afterwards, it's not going to go well in the long run unless every other nation does the same (they won't).
As I see it, there are a few ways for a nongrowing country to 'win' against a growing one.
One is simply a decisive first strike, before growth is able to widen the gap too much. Probably effective, but morally questionable.
Another would be to keep growth 'coiled' and let it ramp up quickly if a rival started growing. Morally less troubling, but exactly how one would keep growth in 'reserve' has not been worked out, as everyone wants it to happen sooner than later.
Finally, it might also be possible to stick to one's nongrowing principles and accept a subservient role, while 'locking up' sections of the dominant country's economy and waiting for a mistake - perhaps by monopolising a good or service that the growing economy values beyond reason. Highly moral, but the effectiveness would be the most dependent on outside factors.
This is a idea that needs to be flipped on its head. Nobody is an American, or a Canadian, or an Australian to a greater extent than they are a human. Also, individuals represent things that their respective countries never will.
It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.
That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"?
If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake.
> That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take.
So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude.
As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
I'm not saying "let's just despair and do nothing", of course we should focus resources on innovation. In fact that's what we're doing right now. But let's not focus _all_ of our resources on a hope.
Don't you think it's safe to assume that technologies might not save us and that we should work on some alternatives, just in case the first scenario doesn't work?
> collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
So you're saying that the _only_ way of preventing collapse is by technological advance? And that we should not try to make sociaty sustainable without growth, or at least to do some reasearch on how that might be possible?
Yeah, and one key issue seems to be how "technological progress" is associated with "anything that uses ever more resources" or these days "anything that has a computer inside, even though there's no good reason that the user would need it".
Most of human ingenuity is based on the consumption of cheap finite resources. Every time we had new tecnologies it results in more consuption of resources.
We need to listen what the science is telling us for 40 years now with the report from the club of rome "limits of growth", and slow down our consuption levels.
Apply new techonologies as an excuse to keep growth (green growth) will accelerate the degradation of the environment.
It depends. If it generate any kind of money exchange it counts to GDP. But there are many solutions that don't generate growth (like walking to work instead of using other means of transportation)
The way we measure growth is nuts. the best way to acknowledge that is to watch this speech from Robert F Kennedy
I can’t emphasize enough to check out Dr Robert Zubrin’s work, founder of the Mars Society. In this particular context his book ‘Merchants of despair’ a great resource on Antihumanism of the Malthusian flavor.
> Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource
This reads like prosperity gospel and law of attraction nonsense rolled together and repackaged for a technical audience.
A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth. No technology will change that within my lifetime. If there are no physics-redefining advances in nuclear fusion and/or nuclear fission, my grandchildren will probably be able to make the same claim.
>A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth.
Eh, that's because you, like most of humanity, like to hide 99% of the cost. What is the cost of pollution? What is the cost of environmental destruction? Once you destroy a habitat on earth, there is no more cost associated with it, it's just gone and no amount of money can ever bring it back.
You're responding to something I didn't write. You have an obvious great respect for the environment. I do, too.
Mining asteroids and colonizing other planets will do more to destroy Earth's environment than just building nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro, and improving battery technology without leaving this planet.
>A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth.
This is true, if you are on Earth and wish to remain there.
If you are in space already, and don't have deal with pesky things like gravity and friction, it could conceivably be way easier to chip a lump of metal off an asteroid and hurl it in the general direction of where it needs to be, than to dig it up and put it on a boat. It's a bit chicken and egg, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where off-world becomes the new Shenzen.
> It's a bit chicken and egg, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where off-world becomes the new Shenzen.
So easy to imagine that we've been doing so for 40 years [0]. In fact, the basic technology seems to have been in place for 40 years as well, but no economic incentive to execute on these grand plans for permanent human habitation in space has yet been found. Furthermore, I have yet to see any evidence that such incentive will ever be found.
I believe GP meant "human ingenuity" is the "resource" making this "vast ocean" in which we swim. I think that because I've seen this phrasing before.
Of course it makes absolutely no sense to put "human ingenuity" in the same category as oil, metals or fertile land. It's just a way for entrepreneurs to justify their entrepreneurship.
Calculate what 2% growth per year means after say 5000 years. What implications this has. It means everything beyond the visible universe has been consumed.
Logistics and communications certainly scale pretty well. Remembering how young the industrial revolution actually is and how many problems we already have, it seems be foolish to keep growth the goal.
Although you would need to differentiate. Growth in resource consumption? Nobody would want that. Growth in wealth? Yes, please...
Maybe logistics and communications had litte effort to keep up with exponential growth, but other sectors certainly seem tired from time to time. It just isn't possible to grow food with exponential efficiency, even if recent developments (last ~200 years would have us believe otherwise).
I am getting the impression that growth is largely an illusion, because there is also something like inflation. And it also seems that it is mostly the (very) rich that benefit from the growth.
We don't live in the universe at large, we live on Earth. Until someone takes us there or shows us how to go practically, and bring stuff back practically (not with e.g. "generation ships" and not with hand-waving about what we could or could not do with "ingenuity" in 100 years), we should not use a mere wish as a permission to not respect the hard present limits.
(That's not something said against the idea of space exploration. In the contrary, not respecting those limits might be the very reason why we never reach the universe -- e.g. because we collapse before we have a chance. Same in this regard as our playing with nukes and other careless follies).
No, we could do that with limited growth (of general commerce economy) and just having more resources given to science. Even as a matter of political will (tons of resources in the US e.g. are given to the military which could be use for NASA programs).
We went to space with an 1/10th the economy of today. We had not been to the moon for 40+ years, despite the economy growing ever stronger.
What got America to the moon was taking the leftovers of an beyond-imagination evil dictatorship, designed to take over the world, and applying it to win a race against another dictatorship. During that whole process millions of people experienced horror or lost their lifes in the cruelest ways imaginable.
While I acknowledge, that economic growth has problems, it does not seem all that bad to me.
I imagine going to the moon just is not a priority right now. The superrich already want to spend their money on space projects. Let's wait what regular people want to buy, after health, etc. is solved.
As far as I can tell this is just a misunderstanding of "growth" in an economic sense. Growth is the result of improvements in productivity, which tend to reduce energy use (per item produced). We consume more energy net because we produce more.
If, eg., products became more expensive because of limited energy (or relevant taxing of externalities) then we would grow more slowly -- we can still produce more through innovation and consume less energy.
It took a huge amount of energy in the past to make a single pair of socks -- today, it takes a tiny amount.
I think the relevant question for 'exponential energy-consumption graphs' is what the relationship is to growth (it simply cannot be assumed that there is a 'deep causal' relationship; this is fallacious equivocation).
Eg., population has been increasing exponentially. Could a static population size produce a flat (or falling) net energy use graph -- whilst still obtaining economic growth (ie., productivity improvements)?
There is a lot of raw materials and energy. The problem is how clean we can do extraction and energy generation. So it's not surprising that we are still very much tracking both correlates.
Increasingly in the Information Age, my intuition is that people are paying more and more as a fraction of their income for non-physical goods/services, which don't have much of an energy footprint.
Growth can come both from using more inputs (capital, energy, labor) or using the same input more efficiently (i.e. technological progress). There is no reason to claim that only technological progress induced growth counts as growth but when the GDP increases because we use more inputs it is not somehow growth.
Lots of people underestimate the degree to which economic growth fuels good life outcomes for wide swaths of people.
-Even though many people live paycheck to paycheck at many different income levels, enough income growth can get you out of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and enable you to have real financial autonomy.
-One thing that has stuck in my mind over the last few years is that one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems.
-The pace at which we solve real, useful problems grows with economic growth.
More importantly, you can enjoy (maybe exploding inequality moderates this a bit) a rising standard of living while living from paycheck to paycheck.
Growing up I was raised by classical musicians permanently on the bleeding edge of solvency (not with debt either) but new stuff kept coming that increased both their quality of life and ”nonmonetary” productivity: microwave ovens and computers that my dad could use to take his orchestral compositions (in sheet music for all parts) to part sheets (for individual players) automagically whereas this was work before.
We weren’t in the kind of self-reproducing poverty because my parents had a high “cultural level”, but we were definitely cash poor, and yet kept getting wealthier and wealthier.
Growth is good but we are entering an economic environment where countries and companies are growing simply to show growth. It’s inorganic. In the past this type of behavior would result in boom and bust cycles, now the easy money has made it possible for us to go on indefinitely.
This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.
"Growth" just means "Wall St gets a positive return". That's all it has ever meant.
When wealth was being more aggressively redistributed this also meant the rest of the US saw some practical benefits. Now that's no longer true, it's just a numbers game for the 1%.
"Growth" is surely a good way to ease domestic pressure, but I believe it's not the only option. What we need is more "optimization", not corporate-wide, but society-wide.
The idea is still vague even to myself, so let me give a concrete example: self-driving car. While CV/AI-based self-driving cars certainly can drive, it should still acquire most critical information, like signals, crossroads, lanes, obstacles, etc, through ambiguous-at-best algorithms. At the same time, the inherent difficulty in making good-enough AI empowers companies over people, which is a straight highway to cyberpunk dystopia.
However, what if we implant digital data sources all over the road? (1) self-driving cars will always acquire correct data (2) developing safe self-driving cars become much easier (2-1) market diversity is ensured (2-2) people regain power (3) it is much easier to achieve the economy of scale with sensor nodes than cars.
Or, perhaps, what about delivery/reservation services? If the standard protocols are enforced on all restaurants, we can cut all the middlemen, lowering the prices. The same can work for taxi, hotel, scooter, bicycle, etc.
We really should start rethinking about things we have and use. The industrial structure we have today is just a mess caused by the rapid IT revolution. We weren't really ready for it. But now we've expanded enough, and should shrink down, so that we can have breathing room for another move.
Innovation can positively influence growth. But the article, including references and papers, is not about reducing innovation.
It is about the fallacy that economic growth (= increase in GDP), somehow magically solves all problems of society. This belief is mostly ideological and the implication is that the market should not be regulated, which would reduce growth and prosperity. The effects of this strategy include increased inequality, weak infrastructure/education and ecological exploitation with dire consequences.
Innovation, which really advances society in sustainable ways, is often intrinsically or socially motivated, not financially and certainly not by a GDP increase, which benefits a tiny minority.
Reducing inequality, improving education and increasing individual freedom within organizations seem to be much more sensible ways to fuel innovation in the long term, than just deregulating the market.
I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc.
Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel.
The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need.
As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style.
Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.
> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.
Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"?
The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses.
Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).
> Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"?
Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example.
Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away.
Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
> Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
I don't mind the idea of not eating meat, I eat meat maybe three times a year and I wouldn't mind not doing that, it's more of a habit of family members to have it on Christmas, not something I care for.
I'm kind of allergic to this "we must save the planet, and by we I mean the poor" stuff though. It often comes in the form of "we must save the landscape, we can't have too much dense housing, it doesn't look natural", which typically comes from people who can afford luxurious mansions in the country-side. I get that they don't want other people to live there because it wouldn't be as nice if it was crowded, but I don't like that being turned into "I just want to save the environment". It's right next to "mass tourism is terrible" from people who can pay the premium for individual tourism and just don't want to share their destination with those people.
I am mostly with you. It is not as much about at a large scale supporting the poor (locally, I donate my time to our local food bank) but being a nation of laws that are fairly applied to corporations, rich, middle class, and poor. Our political and legal frameworks really leave a lot of room for improvement!
(Also, I've heard that having at least 1 year of college (or other form of superior education?) meant that one was in the top 1% of world most "educated", but haven't found any sources that would confirm/infirm that...)
I wanted to make some allowances for HN readers in poorer countries which I know some do. But yes the overwhelming majority are in the global 1%. My original statement was even broader that just by having internet access and a computer you're in the top but access has been growing so much I'm not as certain.
- 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's
- 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed
Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc.
I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri.
Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life.
That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day.
If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre.
Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn.
There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day...
Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need".
I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
Processed insect protein might actually be a nice way to replace most of the meat ?
(Tried some dried insects recently, taste like meat dust.)
Anyway, this "fuck the average people, they shouldn't [do X] while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income" goes for anything really...
Ideally, public shaming should be enough - though it often isn't.
(At least Al Gore political career didn't work out !)
Let's pretend you make a magical cow that you can get from birth to slaughter in 1 year and has a normal food intake and normal average slaughter weight and magically grinds up into a uniform 70% lean meat / 30% fat.
9,125 pounds of dry feed and 7,300 of drinking water nets you 530lbs of meat.
We're going to stick with corn since it is a better cow-day yield per acre than oats.
- 9,125lbs of corn = more than 16 million kcals.
- 530lbs of 70/30 beef = 798,180 kcals.
That's 20x more calories if you fed the corn to humans than if you process it through a cow's stomach with a magic cow that doesn't exist. In reality it's more 30-40x. A single cow's annual intake can feed more than 20 humans a 2000 kcal diet for a year. If we switched the farmland feeding cows alone over to growing for humans, you could feed 30 billion people if you stick with corn.
Obviously humans can't surive on corn alone, realistically though you could feed 10-20 billion people with that same farmland, use less water, have far less environmental pollution, have less methane emissions, need far less refrigeration, drastically reduce the amount of antibiotics being used, improve soil quality, increase local pollinator populations by not turning square mile after square mile after square mile into the same crop, etc.
The water cattle drink is something like 16.58 million Olympic swimming pools annually, or 41.45 cubic kilometers of water.
Meat really is a luxury and needs to be treated as such.
> I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
I made no such claim. I removed animal products from 95% of my meals last year. It isn't sustainable and it's creating all sorts of issues for the environment (and people).
Find and run the numbers yourself. Meat has to become a luxury.
The soil is good but there isn't enough fresh water in most valleys, and the aquifers are heavily fragmented with poor interconnectivity so you can't treat them as one big aquifer. Consequently, there is often local water that isn't connected to any other watershed i.e. if it wasn't used for local agriculture it could not be used at all because it doesn't go anywhere.
The high desert is a good environment for growing many types of high-quality forage, both natural and farmed, so that tends to be what the land is used for. Cattle are raised on natural forage in the summer months and farmed forage in the winter months.
Agriculture is highly adapted to the economics and resources of the local environment. For example, there are parts of the high desert that specialize in onion production, of all things. It makes sense in context.
> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry
Do you have a source for that? Every one I have been able to find indicates that total meat and dairy subsidies are less than that, let alone just water subsidies for the beef industry.
I doubt it's a remotely accurate figure. However, cattle consume a LOT of water. 20~ gallons per head per day is a fairly accurate figure and the US has something like 95 million cows.
So with farming and animal husbandry water rights are a big thing. Often water rights will go to farmers/ranchers long before they go to people.
So you've got cows, with a conservative estimate, using 500 billion gallons of water a year in the U.S. alone just for drinking. Obviously most of that is coming from natural sources but that has financial impacts on the treated water that ends up pumped to your house/business via pipes. How big is that financial impact? shrugs
I highly doubt it's close to 50 billion USD a year though.
They definitely do get comparatively obscene amounts of financial benefit though. Water rights, forage disaster, livestock compensation, indemnity payments, feed assistance, general relief, then you have to think about what sort of subsidies the growers get that then gets passed through as a benefit in the price of the feed going to the livestock...
Man I love meat, I love love love meat, but I switched to primarily whole food plant based last year. WFPB is far more sustainable as far as water and land, arguably much healthier, requires far less fossil fuel input, and noticeably cheaper (my weekly grocery bill as halved).
You can have more than other people without tangibly owning more. Books like The Millionaire Next Door cover this. These millionaires don't own more physical resources, but have brokerage accounts that aren't subject to conspicuous consumption. They may also own a home or car, but it's not a mansion or anything more than a standard commuter vehicle.
I read the book The Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. It changed my views on properly handling wealth/assets. Collecting wealth to impress other people is a loser move, but all too common.
Marketable water rights in cattle ranching regions are around $0.01 per gallon in many areas last I checked. These are fully priced into the cost of beef because the producers are often literally paying for it. This isn't a hidden subsidy. Clearly the above "subsidy" numbers must have taken some liberties with the truth, or beef would be impossibly expensive at the grocery store.
Source: I used to own water rights in cattle country and did deals with beef producers that wanted to use that water for cattle.
This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too:
The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to:
(1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.!
(2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...)
A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"...
So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).
No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse...
Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !
Ofc you'll say that "it only got worse" overall bc other things got worse... The digital-virtual economy needs to grow at least 10x, and percentually to at least 95% of the actual economy (physical goods need to be comoditized, and some maybe distribute equally in a pseudo-socialistic way, outside of the economical system - the fight should be for virtual resources). You're not going to see any "things getting better" result yet, we need to go full-speed all-in in this direction, not half-heartedly... Virtual economy has a > 100x growth potential once we have better VR, AR, and later neural interfaces. "Demand" will appear or be manufactured, in the end we'll probably have too much of it.
And tons of services can be created even around the negative consequences of this... all the cornucopia of new diseases mental and physical brought about by excessive virtual consumption will boom into a huge healthcare industry etc. This will also be growth!
And just like "power" can't be real or fake, it either is or isn't, same with resources - as long as there are exchange mechanisms, there's no difference between "real" or "virtual", everything is as real as everything else...
Entities that insist on "old fashion fighting for `real` resources" should be restructured. People rewired / reeducated.
We're on the right path, but yeah, we're maybe only 0.01% of the way there... need to do things faster and harder. Let's not chicken out now and go retro/conservative instead of pushing further! The future is... amazingly incomprehensible! Heil to it!
I concur, you'll either have the power working to make your computer/VR/network run - or not. And it's the people that have the control over that power delivery that are going to have the real power (as they always did). Who is going to restructure / rewire / reeducate Vladimir Putin (or the like), hmm ?
> Who is going to restructure / rewire / reeducate Vladimir Putin (or the like), hmm ?
"Control over physical resources" is just a means, not an end... If you want "more power for your nation" or whatever and the world stage has been restructured so you can better get that by playing a different game, you'll switch the game. And Russia seems to be good at both cyber-warfare and "mental games", they can get even better and win even more, good for them, whatever.
(And the future of cheap-renewables plus mini-nuclear will mean power/energy will be available to everyone... fight would be more on "fabrication and repair capability/tech for next-gen hardware" or stuff like that - here China and SE-Asia seem to be winning the game, and they overall are pretty pro-globalistic and pro-virtual... for their own f up reasons, but whatever, if it pushes things in the right direction, fine.)
Anyway, things are going fine, though slow (sometimes progress goes one casket at a time unfortunately)... let's just hope some people don't f things up because they have their own personal/national/etc. crusade to fight for and mix it up with nostalgia for the "past full of meaning" and they drag us into some messed up war. Let's try and be peaceful and keep commerce flowing, previous generations have worked too hard to get this global system going for us to f it up by, ironically, being nostalgic for some good-ol-times that never actually existed...
> And the future of cheap-renewables plus mini-nuclear will mean power/energy will be available to everyone...
This is wishful thinking. You would need incredible improvements in technology to maybe hope to start reducing resource consumption. Because so far, resource consumption only got worse as efficiency got better.
The one fundamental reason why growth is so important is that without growth, the economy becomes a zero sum game. In order for you to get more money you must take it from someone else since there is only a fixed amount. A low growth world is one where we plunder each others' wealth, not one were the incentives are aligned with building new industry.
That's why productivity increases are so important. Without them, if we want growth, we have to get it from positive sum games. I'm skeptical that will provide enough to stop people from reverting to a more Malthusian plunder mindset.
Any vision of a non-growth world needs to take that into account. Without growth we'd have to fundamentally rethink how we handle distribution without reverting to bloodsport.
It should last until we get to strong AI or fusion energy, both i believe will have too much an impact to be again in the hands of the fews (perhaps a global war will be in order before).
Then, the problem will be about literally physical space on earth.
Yeah. To achieve 3% growth per year for several hundred years we have to expand beyond Earth. Beyond a few hundred years, it starts getting more difficult. I wonder how much waste heat Mars or other large bodies could absorb. Or what is the largest possible radiator we could build in space...
Some fun facts I calculated while thinking about this:
1. If you look at the productivity gains in the U.S. over the past 50 years, the vast majority of the gains have been captured by a very small subset of the population.
2. A zero sum game in terms of the distribution of money is not the same as a similar distribution of wealth.
The first point directly contradicts your main argument; that without growth, economics is zero-sum. We have growth, yet none of that growth is captured by middle income people. The growth (and wealth) is being plundered.
It's false that none of the growth is being captured by middle income people. It is being captured to a greater extent by the very top of the income distribution and by the global poor, but income is growing across the board.
Real median wages and household income in the U.S. are higher than they've ever been.
This is all despite the increased international competition typified by globalization trends and detailed by the Elephant Curve.
Your second link proves that middle income people are getting virtually none of the growth; at best, scraps. The difference between "none" and "effectively none" isn't a mischaracterization on my part. I will clarify by "middle income" I meant the American middle class, and not the global median.
Notably, the graph provided at the second link covers a time period ending in 2008, the depths of the great recession. Things are numerically a bit better than depicted there. The overall story is the same- the bottom and the top of the worldwide income distribution is where things are growing fastest, but the middle is growing slower. It is certainly growing though.
10% real median income growth since the 80's is nothing to sneeze at.
That's 10% total --over 40 years-- not 10% annualized. In 1979, the median real weekly earnings was $335. Today, it is $362. The actual calculation, 362-335/335 = 8.05%. Over 40 years, 8.05% is 0.2% annualized growth.
Let's compare to the S&P 500 index. From Jan 1979 to Dec 2019, the S&P has returned 746% (2,401% including dividend reinvestment) -- both figures adjusted for inflation (as is the FRED data). Annualized, these figures are 5.35% and 8.16%. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
Another well-regarded source is the congressional budget office. The data linked below from 2014 is even more optimistic than my previous data because it uses household income instead of individual income. (because the distribution of individual incomes is skewed and growing even more skewed, median household incomes grow faster than individual incomes). The CBO data shows 26.1% growth in the incomes of middle quintile households since 1979. This growth is larger if you look at the lowest quintile, include taxes and transfers, or do both. The data goes up to 2014 and would show larger growth still if it went all the way to 2019.
No. Household sizes have been getting smaller, not larger, over time. It would be pretty far-fetched for the combinatorial effects of mixed-income households to boost the median in spite of this.
Why does this matter? If we expand the timeline to the last 200 years, the gains in agricultural productivity have gone to a very small subset of the population (around 2%). This is in fact the major reason you're able to write comments on the Internet rather than having to plow your field. I'd rather live in a world where we can maximize the productivity gains of the entire population and let us have more leisure than one which we jam the gears of the machines because we're jealous that any given productivity gain has a power law distribution.
Your comment about "distribution of money" and "distribution of wealth" makes no sense, but let's assume that by "money" you mean "income." By definition, looking at the distribution of anything is zero-sum. The problem is, growth has nothing to do with distribution and everything to do with production. Production is not a fixed-sum game: you can have positive-, negative- or zero-sum production at any given time. The chief question of production is how do we produce more wealth using fewer resources, or more efficient combinations of existing resources? How we should distribute that wealth, income and control over the products made is an ethical and political question (though I am strongly opposed to any scheme that seeks to deprive a person from owning the product of her labor).
In fact, in the pre-modern world there were large spans of space and time where growth was so slow as to be invisible within a person's lifetime and people did think of wealth as being zero-sum. To a feudal lord, land = wealth and being wealthier was about having more land. Someone already had all the land, so the only way of getting more was taking someone else's.
This is incorrect. If GDP is constant it means that every year the same amount of goods is produced. There can be a new industry in this case. It just means that another industry needs to get smaller. The workers in the other industry can move to the new one and no one is worse for the wear.
GDP is the derivative of the amount of goods and not the amount of goods.
So if 1. the same amount of goods and services is produced and 2. you get more goods and/or services this year than last year, this means than 3. someone else must have less goods or services this year. I do not follow where this was incorrect.
Well, this response sounds a bit more measured than what you originally wrote but it is still seems a bit weird. For one thing, sometimes people consume less just because they do not need as much in a particular year. E.g., a person might buy a new car every ten years. Is he poorer in the nine years that he did not buy a car than in the one year that he did? That the amount that a person consumes may fluctuate is not very important nor should anyone start panicking about it nor as a signal that it is necessary to go into some fierce kind of competition.
Durable goods obfuscate the issue, but let's take your example.
Let's say I want to have both an all-terrain car for the weekend and my regular car on the weekdays. I now consume two new cars very ten years instead of one. The same number of car has been produced in those ten years (no growth). Where does my extra car come from?
Let us tell a bit of a story. You bought your two cars because your all-terrain car hobby is very important to you. This was a bit of a financial squeeze and you could not go on holidays as often as you liked. But since the car hobby is more important to you, you think you made the right decision and are happy about it. There is another person who thinks going on holiday is the greatest thing ever. He went on holidays five times last year. This was a bit costly but he decided he did not need a car that badly and could use public transport instead. This was a bit less comfortable but he thought the great experience of going on holidays five times was well worth the inconvenience. So, where did your car come from? It did come from the other person who did not buy a car but went on holidays instead. But both of you were happy with your decisions. No crisis situation or fierce competition is needed in situations where not everybody gets what they want. In fact, both persons might choose to forego a promotion that was offered to them and which would have contributed to economic growth because it would leave the one person with too little time for his car hobby and the other with too little time for this travels.
Ok, so you are agreeing with the comment you said you were disagreeing with (zero sum economy means if someone increases their amount of stuff, someone else must have less stuff, otherwise the amount of stuff would not stay constant).
You are making a different point, which is that more stuff does not equal happiness, so we should not care about it.
Your original comment talked about this zero-sum game being a very grim circumstance. It talks about 'plunder' and the like. This is in part what I was commenting about, noting that it is not necessarily a grim thing. The other thing is that your talking about 'stuff' and zero-sum games still sounds a bit off. I am wondering if you are not using the term 'zero sum economy' in one meaning while at the same time evoking associations with another meaning of that same term. The 'zero sum economy' (the one with constant GDP) is still an economy where everybody is enjoying the benefits of trade and specialization. In that sense it is still a positive sum economy and if you start doing the 'plunder' that your first post talks about and lose the benefits of trade because you now have bad relationships between people and everybody will get poorer. Hence the 'zero sum economy' cannot be one of 'taking things' and 'plunder'. Also, the comments about 'stuff' still sound off. In fact in the 'zero sum economy' the amount of stuff gets increased every year by an amount that is exactly equal to GDP. That is the definition of GDP. There is also stuff that breaks down but it is not the case that other people take that stuff from you, just the forces of entropy. Maybe you mean to say things that are all correct but it just sounds a bit off to me. I can't shake the impression that you are confusing yourself by talking about one thing while thinking about another and/or evoking associations with it. For one thing, It is still quite unclear to me why you paint a very grim picture of the zero sum economy in your first post.
Oh why not. Normally I don't get involved in these, but since you thought it was me replying to you all along I feel like I should at least reply :)
What I said is not theoretical. We have examples of zero sum economies, in fact that's how the world was everywhere right up until the industrial revolution.
I would urge you to re-read my original comment, since I address the very point you're making about cooperation inside a zero productivity growth environment. You can pay positive sum games! That's great! However any wealth generated by a positive sum game is, by definition, growth. I'm suspicious that it could be enough to matter. Productivity growth is a big deal.
In any case I am not convinced that zero productivity growth + positive sum games are a stable equilibrium.
Perhaps you could have a zero growth society where frequent jubilees reset everybody's wealth at regular intervals, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice and I'm also not sure it wouldn't be just as bloody as a zero sum land rush after the reset. You could do this with very high inflation levels, perhaps. Might make a fun science fiction short.
I'm hoping you give me a generous reading here, since I have neither the time nor inclination to deep-dive on a lot of my points, and I'm afraid I'd be boring as batshit if I did.
This sounds like a legitimate fear that one could have. I can't really say I share it, tough. Also, at some point one does have to note that economic growth cannot go on indefinitely, although it is quite clear that it still can go on for quite a while, hopefully in a way that is more environmentally sustainable than the current way things are going.
Another thing to note is that current world GDP certainly is not enough because it leaves many people quite impoverished so we certainly still have some growing to do.
As bilekas was saying, the one fundamental reason why growth must not be so important is that it cannot continue ad infinitum, thus we will have to learn and cope with that.
While you state an important point, the issue of growth having to stop (sooner or later) cannot be ignored.
Why can't it be ignored? I think we're very far away from the point where growth is impossible. We haven't even left Earth yet. Imagine the amount of wealth you could create with a moon-based space elevator.
Growth may eventually stop if humans remain constrained to Earth, but if we can advance to a point where we can mine the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the wealth influx from that will be enough to sustain growth in human society far into the future.
This is especially at the world stage. In a zero-sum economy, either some countries are left in an awful state of poverty for ever (no growth, same distribution of income) or people from rich countries must significantly decrease their consumption (no growth, equalization of income).
For reference, the average world GDP is about US$17,300.
At the OECD tax-to-GDP average rate, about $6000 would be spent through public institutions (i.e. taxes and public services). So that leaves about $11500 for both consumption and maintaining the capital stock.
The consumption of fixed capital is about 15% of GDP per year, so that leaves about $9775 a year, or $815 per month to consume stuff.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadBut the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But interest paid become a new deposit (for somebody), and from that new deposit, new debt is created...and hence, require infinite growth to continue to service interest payment.
negative interest rates seems like it's an impossibility (in the sense that only a central bank is willing and able to charge negative rates) for normal commercial loans. And if a bank charged negative rates on deposits (higher than it costs to keep cash safe in a secure safe!), then i suspect people will just withdraw their cash, unless something forces them to keep it in (like the abolishment of cash by central authorities).
Actually I am very sure interest rates have no causal relationship with continuous growth. The one (and only?) thing where the the continuous growth requirement comes from is that most people do not want to be unemployed. That is the choice you need to make. Do you want growth or unvoluntary unemployment?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/danish-bank-is-offering-10-y...
Anyway, it is ultimately (when you get your head around it, that is...) relatively simple. These institutional investors have cash (well, not exactly cash, but "cash" as in overnight deposits) that they need to invest. some poart of that they want to invest in "safe" instruments, e.g. bonds/commercial papers issued by banks. And it happens to be that they are willing to do that even if they are paid negative interest rate[1]. So the bank pays for its funding say -1.0%. Then the bank can lend the money forward with -0.5% and still make money.
[1] Why do they want to do that? If you have a decent amount of money, say millions, and you want to save that for a while to purchase something say next month, you have not that many good alternatives to bank deposits/commercial papers/bonds. Actual cash is surprisingly cumbersome and expensive. Stocks are risky, you may lose quite a bit within one month. Government bonds pay even less. so if your bank says yep, we take your money for a month and pay you back a bit less in a month, you are likely going to swallow it.
[1] As per current typical definitions of money. If you consider gold or e.g. cryptocurrencies as money, then the statement does not hold.
Not necessarily. Modern banking systems have created plenty of 'money' out of nowhere.
Debt has been a fundamental part of what allowed our society to even talk on this forum, its crazy to me what it reputation is now.
https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demo...
So it would eventually become a distribution problem...
Each year, each person needs to consume 10 widgets to live. Each year, a healthy, working-age person can produce 20 widgets.
This society can clearly sustain itself, as long as each person spends half of their life working. To keep things simple (And to stick it to the DINKs), let's pretend that everyone has children, and is responsible for raising them until they can start working.
How would this society operate?
Well, you'd spend the first 25 years of your life supported by your parent (Who would work for 25 years to support themselves and you). You'd then spend 25 years supporting yourself, and your child. You'd then spend 15 years hoarding widgets, so that you can support your retirement. You'd retire at 65, with 150 widgets in the bank, and die at 80.
Essentially, you spend 40 years of life as a maker (Who can support two people in this time), and 40 years of your life as a taker (Who requires half of a maker's economic output to support them).
Everything works out wonderfully, and nobody needs a pension! Just save all the surplus you make between ages 50 and 65, and retire..! Except that there's two important differences between this abstraction, and the real world.
1. You can't hoard widgets in the real world. Goods have a very limited shelf life. Money gets eaten by inflation.
2. Even if the average age of death is 80, most people aren't average. If you were solely reliant on your personal hoard of widgets (Which was consumed away by spoilage/inflation) to see yourself through old age, you might still run out of widgets, because you happened to live till 83. Or you might have dropped dead two years after you retired - and thus all your savings would go to naught.
Pensions (Or social security, or some other similar instrument) are a solution to this problem. They solve the spoilage and inflation problem, by having your retired life being subsidized by widgets produced today (So they did not drop in value). They solve the 'average person' problem by pooling the risk, so that the very occasional person who happens to live to 90 doesn't go broke. They don't actually require any GDP growth, to work. What they do require is:
1. The same widget created today being more valuable than a 20-year old widget. (Due to spoilage or inflation. If we didn't have spoilage or inflation, we wouldn't need pensions.)
2. Proper levels of funding. The math for # of years worked, and # of years not worked has to add up.
3. There to not be GDP shrinkage. Things get problematic if your gdp or working population shrinks (Whether long-term, or short-term) - in that situation, pensioners have to take a haircut.
Since #1 is a given of the world we live in, and you are not asking about #3, all you need to handle correctly is #2.
Long answer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta...
Well, that's what governments are for. It is the government's role to create regulations which promote the broader, long-term interests of the population and environment in situations where markets fail to do so.
It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway).
The key issue is the global population.
(Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resources)
They're already tiny af tho
Also boo to those who are downvoting you about the US comment. Either you can’t read or you’re intentionally not reading. The OP was referencing people who are citizens in the US who do it have as many kids as immigrants and without immigration would be below replacement rates.
That is happening.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate
If you also take into account that the majority of human beings are poor by Western standards you can see that, IMO, sustainable global prosperity is likely impossible with these numbers, not least if we want to keep at least some wilderness on this planet.
Prosperity includes increase in literacy and general education levels of the population. Most notably, women will have less children and shift towards actively taking jobs, opening businesses, research, civics,...
Lower birth rates and an ageing population then become a challenge to tackle.
Those who age stop actively working - adding direct economic value as taxes or as marketable goods & services - and their income is replaced by a pension provided by a public social security system and/or a pension fund they contributed to.
Now, this is where some will throw their hands in the air and yell "Doooooommmm! A dwindling active workforce can't possibly create enough wealth to sustain the pensions of those that don't!". hey then go on predicting how entire economies will collapse and how everyone will end up becoming working poor.
But that narrative hides tons of naive and downright wrong assumptions.
Like, how literally everyone should, can and will retire at 65 and spending their golden years on long holidays. Or, how it's impossible for anyone over 60 to be as productive or flexible as a 20 year old. Well, you can come up with a ton of other stereotypes.
In reality, tons of people over 60 or even 70 are able and willing to work and contribute to society. For instance, guess who makes up for a lot of the volunteering force in charities, public services and (libraries, archives, social work,...)? Young retirees. These are important fields that are publicly underfunded, and so retirees take up an important place here.
But you also find seniors taking up jobs again simply because their state pension is insufficient to make ends meet. That happens too.
The big challenge in this isn't the elderly population, it's adjusting our work culture to include older age cohorts. Because right now, workfloors and work in developed nations is entirely geared towards young people in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
The other big challenge is wealth inequality in general. As long as the system is geared towards extracting wealth to the top at the expense of the workforce - labor rights, minimum wage, healthcare,... - it's only to be expected that older people will drop out earlier rather then later.
So, that's basically what we're looking at. If you can balance an economy between sustainability and prosperity, you also solve the problem of population.
Now, guess what you need to do that? A proper, healthy social democracy that puts humans as their top priority. Not the interests of a few elites.
While we can't rule it out fure sure, it would be crazy to bet on that possibility.
The original incentives for the space race were political during the Cold War - rockets, satellites, then landing on the moon. Since then, NASA has mostly stagnated without a clear vision to deliver. Likewise (until recently) the major aerospace providers were happy just doing well enough to make some dollars from their lobbying and ‘cost-plus’ contracts.
The only game-changer is SpaceX, set up to deliver the vision of a slightly eccentric multi-millionaire (now billionaire, of course). But I’d argue that SpaceX isn’t doing anything so revolutionary that it couldn’t have been done earlier by various others (including NASA itself) if they’d had the right vision and incentives. Sad, really - all of that money, time, effort, and human potential effectively wasted.
No rules about nuclear power on ships, no worrying about contamination on other planets, laissez-faire attitude about risks that come with space launches/travel and fully automated control of rockets/spaceships, massive investment in life support systems and AI, etc.
Yet for the purpose of this article, or at least discussion, people are acting like the Earth is.
That's only true if we assume the chance of life arising is relatively high. It could actually be incredibly massively low, and we wouldn't notice, because we're observing from a position of extreme selection bias. I.e. probability(intelligentLifeInUniverse given weAreObservingIt) = 1.0.
or they are utilizing an energy source so efficient that no leaks happen (that we can observe).
This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make the Malthusian catastrophe self-fulfilling as the market can longer allocate resources efficiently.
Can you elaborate on this point w.r.t the OP you’re discussing?
The post above suggests that we cannot have a sustainable, prosperous growing population. A rising population allows for greater specialization in that the general population can rely on specialists (auto mechanics, computer programmers, bakers, farmers) to handle their respective field of expertise. You do not need to farm wheat to eat bread in a modern society. Bread is lined up waiting for you in the nearest market. You can go online and have your groceries delivered by a truck.
That is just one of the effect that work together to over and over again prove the 'over-population' crowd wrong.
I’m not sure I follow. How will we prevent over-fishing for example? Traffic? Deforestation? I think you can blunt the effects of overpopulation for humans (we probably won’t starve) but at what cost?
How will specialization affect human health and happiness? Are people who specialize in a very specific thing more happpy (or less) than people who do general tasks?
I would argue even right now we have plenty of people without meaningful work - how will increases in population improve that?
Consider all of the time saved with today's technological advancements and specialization. Years ago peasants would lay idle on near starvation diets for most of the winter. During the growing season they would work from dawn until dusk, just to enjoy a sustenance lifestyle.
So while work may not be as meaningful as we would like, our leisure time is increasing. Mass automation will likely provide even greater leisure and cheaper goods.
All of this ignores the rampant inflation of the money supply, which is silently taxing our leisure, labor and consumption. There are many who would like to increase this and would do so by indulging the fears you listed at the top of your comment.
> I’m not sure I follow. How will we prevent over-fishing for example?
Fishing is increasingly done in fishing farms. The scale of such farms in the open sea is only worth it for very large markets.
However for most fishing, the solution is actually property rights for a sustainable amount of fish and that is already done in many places.
> Deforestation?
Forest were actually smaller in the middle ages. Modern markets/technology leads to the ability to regrow forest. All the Western world is now reforesting, because proper forestry is actually a sustainable business, no need to deforest.
> I think you can blunt the effects of overpopulation for humans (we probably won’t starve) but at what cost?
The cost are really not that high. High traffic in the densest places is really not that high a cost. Our rivers are cleaner, our food higher quality, our food is cheaper, wild life is actually making a comeback in the Western world, the amount of commercial land use is decreasing, air quality is increasing and the list goes on.
> I would argue even right now we have plenty of people without meaningful work - how will increases in population improve that?
If people have work has far more to do with the political conditions of specific countries then with overpopulation as a whole. Historically places with high population growth and high overall economic growth correlate very well, more people creates lots of demands and new problems that need to be solved. There is really no evidence at all that population increase leads to increase in people out of work.
This blissfully ignores the key issue under discussion: Our impact on the planet in doing so.
It still baffles me that we choose to ignore externalities in part because we cannot attach any “rational” prices to them, it’s like they don’t even exist to us as long as we cannot put them in an exact Excel sheet with a well-defined value.
Instead of being liable for damages caused by their pollution, these energy producers can simply claim that they are within the regulations set forth by the EPA. The price discovery mechanism has been hampered by the victim's inability to collect damages.
Where do you get the idea that he "advocated excessive government intervention" ? He was instead criticized for his anti-welfare stance ! Or do you think that "educating women" is "excessive government intervention" ?!?
The Malthusian position is one of finite resources and productivity. Peak oil, population control and assorted doomsaying. It would not be unreasonable to characterize the one child policy as excessive.
Your comment attempts to misconstrue cherry picked historical facts against the broader definition of Malthusianism.
It becomes offensive when you attempt to inject identity politics into what had been previously a mostly polite discussion. I'm afraid there is nothing for us to discuss.
Where did you get "identity politics" from ?
Do you realize that peak oil denial is a deeply anti-science position ? (Unless you're thinking of abiotic oil?)
That is wrong. In fact we have a much larger population, in many ways human life is more sustainable then it ever was and its easily more prosperous then in the past.
Just like in the 60s the people over-hyping population growth are just as fundamentally wrong as the people who wanted to force cut of trade and foreign aid to India to force them to adopt population control matters.
These same terrible dangerous and fundamentally wrong ideas pop up over and over again.
In fact, with a growing population humans have been using less of earths space. More people live in much denser areas. And even with billions more people we are far below the peak amount of agro culture land. In fact all over the western world wood and wild lands are growing.
With Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Water energy the environmental impact will be far less then what we currently have (and countries with nuclear had for a long time). We could double and triple world population again and there would be no energy issue other then a temporary scale issue.
That fact that forests are expanding in e.g. Europe, a continent that has already been completely devoid of wilderness should not mask what is happening in continents that are 'behind' like Africa, South America, and Asia.
This is the key issue at hand and is driven by population growth coupled with less poverty, and what is causing current climate and environmental issues.
Ignoring this is what is fundamentally dangerous and we can see the effects on the planet right now.
Nomadic tribes intrinsically self regulate, what can't be carried can't be possesed beyond group boundaries and falls back to the environment automatically.
Can we have economic growth, improving prosperity and quality-of-life, while reducing our environmental impact?
The question whether growth==good or maybe just.. it's more complicated than that and we may be able to get more quality of life without growth is far more interesting.
Secondly, many of the technologies that will make this possible - renewable energy, electrification, energy storage, etc, are only just now beginning to reach the mainstream. Many of them seemed like science fiction in past decades.
Interestiong question is what's cause and effect here. You could argue politicians haven't done more against CC because they always shy away from doing anything that might harm the economy.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
We can also see the work of Vaclav Smil [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Z6h-U4CmI&t=187s [2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth
I found this report valuable too: Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked.
Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.)
The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.
I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically.
This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for factories and plantations, so they would visit a coastal African country and buy slaves. You could refuse to sell them slaves, but then they would sail to your neighbors and sell them firearms. Then those neighbors would have substantial military advantage and could invade you. There were only two options: be the ones that receive the rifles, or form a large alliance which refuses to sell slaves to Europeans. Forming large alliances is HARD. Africans weren't stupid - they tried to negate the technical advantage, for example the king of Kongo wanted to pay well for ship technology. (source: "Black Mother" by Basil Davidson)
Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. Produce terminator-like killer machines and drones to make up for less numerous army. Have super advanced science, strategy or diplomacy. The only country I know that comes close is Switzerland, and it has the advantage of mountainous terrain away from major transport routes. Ideally the advantages you have should be ones that can't be taken away from you or "stolen" via espionage.
Or the population including the elites get sick of living poor country and the wont defend the government letting it be overthrown.
> Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard.
If you are improving efficiency your economy is growing. Unless you assume people will deliberately use less resources once efficiency grows and I don't think that has ever happened.
I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth.
Better that models that treat the environment as externalities, or which convolute and stress the daily life for ever more trinkets to fuel the growth machine...
Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds.
An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.
We need to constrain growth to science and efficiency, and pull back on population and land use.
I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever...
If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.
This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me.
I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
> The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow?
The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)
Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...
> Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth"
I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes.
Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole.
This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill.
They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs.
Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.
In the absence of discovering a natural resource bounty, GDP (economic) growth comes from two sources:
1. More people working harder.
2. Better technology.
If you exclude "medical advances and science" you're basically excluding (2) which means the only source of growth is (1). More people working harder. Saying the world can only get better by increasing the number of hours we work is dystopian and doesn't make sense to wish for.
Ultimately, all progress comes through technology.
It seems to me that conflating humanity's progress and economic growth is exactly where our problems start.
I'd be extremely happy with the education + costs of 50 years ago, or just online education -- I'm not talking about content, but delivery and costs.
It boggles my mind that people don't see it for what it is -- the feudal lords are back and they take a lot more of your production just so you stay alive.
They are not helping humanity(except for some benevolent ones) progress, they 99% help themselves.
Progress and wealth creation actually occur when prices fall, not when they rise, even though it may not feel like it if you happen to be the owner of a fixed asset whose price is falling i.e. a house. In a static system if money is printed via the issuance of loans, and that causes house prices to rise whilst the prices of everything else remain stable, then all that's doing is reallocating wealth from non-home owners to homeowners and banks. But it's not actually increasing wealth.
For wealth to increase everyone would need to find it easier to buy things, and the only way to do that is for things to become cheaper in real terms. For instance the smartphone industry has created enormous wealth in the past 20 years. Smartphones got massively cheaper so everyone can have one, and they got massively better. This is what economists mean by wealth creation.
And just because I was perusing this earlier today: the UK Government's plan for the future /is/ to have people work for longer[1].
I agree with you. Make no mistake in that. Denying that those who push growth economics seek only to further their own interests, not those of humanity, is a curious and dangerous position in the face of the evidence. This graph[2] shows that since deregulation they have increased their relative gain, at the expense of those worse off. It would be trivial to show that these same people made their money by eroding the welfare of everyone else, environmentally and economically.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/19...
Besides crime, there is- Education, computer literacy, drug problems, etc. Huge swathes of Africa lacks even basic sanitation, many people in US don't have healthcare, the list is endless.
Lastly, there is a difference between science and industry. Case in point: we have the technology for genetic engineering of humans, but we aren't doing that. It could probably increase GDP too.
I think the view that one president screwed you over is a bit myopic... It didn't happen in US, it happened all across the developed world. That shows it's a systemic thing - caused not by some policy, but by global forces. Those millions that came out of poverty did it pretty much at the expense of the western middle class (and yes, this was enabled & encouraged by the rich - who benefited from it; that much is true). It's not just a few people that got richer - many millions got richer. It's just that those millions are not in the developed world.
[edit]PS. I wonder if OP didn't add the "except" after my message... I don't remember seeing it initially (though it's entirely possible that I didn't pay close attention).
Environment has gotten obviously shittier since then; looks like a good trade to me!
genome research: CRISPR etc.
space flight: reusability is a massive game changer. The Falcon 9 once they start reliably catching the fairings is about 90% reusable. The Falcon 9 makes things like constellations of 12,000 satellites feasible. The Starship is planning on 100% reusability which will reduce costs a futher couple of orders of magnitude. Elon is talking about sending 1000 Starships to Mars every 2 years in about a decade, and people are starting to learn that Elon might not be as crazy as people originally thought...
Environment: not so obviously shittier. For example, tree coverage has increased by 7% in the last 35 years. In general local environments in developed countries have gotten a lot cleaner. The global environment on the other hand suffers a massive tragedy of the commons type problem so it overshadows massively local improvements. So yes, you can say the environment has gotten worse, but it isn't "obviously" so.
Genome research: so far a big nothing burger. Zero impacts on average people's daily lives. The entirety of genome research results on the real world seems to be enabling people to eat more sugar without dying.
Space flight reusability: dude, where's my space shuttle? Falcoln 9 isn't reusable when using its actual cargo capacity, and isn't cost effective when it is reusable; no game changer there. Neat trick though and it certainly looked cool.
Environment getting better: citations needed. Doom porn abounds at the very least. Maybe they're all lying about melting polar caps, plastic in the oceans and insane levels of chemicals in the eco system.
IF ML works great, yeah it could have a big positive impact, but not much for the average person so far, meanwhile it does work for the chinese dictatorship, hedge funds, the military, the scummy corrupt politicians to influence ellections; self driving cars will be a HUGE benefit, but guess who will take the lion's share of that benefit -- the 0.5% that will own the tech; maybe a little bit for you and I, but the milions of professional drivers will be crushed.
I'm not against tech, but the way it will be use to further re-feudalize the world and promote the accumulation of wealth to the 0.5% -- which will be terrible for the overall progress of humanity.
All that said; I 100% agree with you, the fruits of supervised learning will entirely accrue to oligarchs, governments and other such dirtbags who have the databases to fit against, do not have the well being of average people in mind. If we notice at all, it will be via blackmail, creepy ad tracking and late night knocks at the door.
I think I'll take removing the last 20 years of environmental destruction and go back to using a 6 digit pin. Or a thumbprint reader.
FWIIW Dweeb Learning still has problems with image recognition, and people still don't understand how it works. Pretty sure that "progress" was mostly people writing frameworks for video cards.
Pretty sure you either don't know as much as you claim, or are knowingly claiming things that are blatantly false
If you have an actual example of a past 20 years developed machine learning idea which has pushed the needle for normal people in the same way the Haber-Bosch process did (making an extra 6 billion lives possible); I'd love to hear about it!
Whereas you did claim that speech to text and translation were about as good 20 years ago. Basically, to use your chemistry analogy... you're saying "Haber Bosch was nothing new, Cavendish produced the same kind of results hundreds of years ago!"
Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.
It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repeatable enough to be actually available in practice, to everyone".
I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.
What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off.
Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs and attention. The basics of RNN were indeed there (LSTM was just published - though e.g. GRU is more recent), but attention was not. And attention is critical. That's just one of the things that's not "basically the same" and "worked just as well 20 years ago".
I thought the previous KNN based approaches worked better than the RNN based ones. Which is more or less my point here. The main piece of "progress" we got was the result of a giant corporation having a large corpus of data. The actual technology hasn't improved or changed a whole hell of a lot.
I'm eventually going to write a history of technological progress documenting this. Progress is very obviously slowing down other than the improvements in lithography which are now fading out. Throw away anything with a screen in your household and life is basically identical to what it was 20, even 40 years ago. That wasn't true within my lifetime: there were huge strides made in technology in decades gone by -in my lifetime even. We're at the point where a lot of "progress" is just changes in fashion; KNN versus neural approaches. People buying the latest iphone (which is really no more capable than the early iphones); wondering at the facial recognition IR thingee. Oh sure, DL can do some tricks that were not possible before, but their actual real world impact is marginal, and sometimes, it's not even an improvement over other techniques.
You have grounds to be skeptical about the future and to believe it is dark; but IMO you don’t have grounds to claim that there was no progress.
re: face recognition: Viola Jones is almost 20 years old (we've been talking about 20 years periods). Eigenfaces is over 30 years old.
I don't believe in Driverless trucks, and it is emblematic of current year whenever I talk about technological progress, people bring up something that only marketing departments claim actually exists in the corporeal world.
FWIIW by "KNN" I don't mean the O(n^2) classic; the thing Google was using before was a bit more sophisticated than that, and it worked just fine. For some languages it worked better than the "advanced" RNN version of things.
How exactly do you do face recognition with Viola Jones? Nevermind an accurate-enough version to be used for biometric identification... just one that can distinguish you in your photo collection.
There is something hollow about the technological advances of the last 40 years.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the said growth is really just asset price inflation -- just let people overburden themselves with debt and a house costing 50000$ now costs 300000$ -- not just any house, EVERY house -- boom, you have huge "growth" and "wealth".
EDIT: I meant that it is disingenuous to look at 200 years because huge REAL advances have indeed taken place since then.
I'm totally against the financialization that has happened in the last 40-50 years, which is really 90% of the growth that has actually happened.
I mean, don't you think there's something deeply wrong and worrying with the fact that the financial industry is 80% of US GDP?
Well if we are just totally changing what growth means...
Just check real wage growth in the western world, after inflation it is stagnant or negative in the last decades; add in hugely inflated housing prices, education prices, and it is very clearly a big NEGATIVE outcome for the average person; this is only offset a bit by women entering the workforce, now you have 2 slaves instead of 1.
Yeah, the developing world might fare better -- for now -- as they are much cheaper then workers in the developed world, but the same trap awaits them, the same asset price inflation, education costs and so on is happening in the developing world, it's not fully our turn yet, but the writing is on the wall.
technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.
World bank data seems to differ:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606
Mexico, ditto: $20602
20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6
The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.
On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?
Growth rates matter.
Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs?
[1] ten minutes on wikipedia.
I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1]
If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2]
France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3]
[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
That's not a problem when there are plentiful resources.
It's also the only option when many resources are not renewable, and this zero-sum themselves.
- desirable land
- desirable mates
- equipment for certain hobbies (e.g. sailboats, machine shops, etc.)
Basically my thinking is:
- There are going to be certain luxury goods whose supply is limited.
- I framed it in terms of hobbies in order to point out that in many cases "luxury goods" aren't just frivolous comforts but are instead things that people need to achieve meaningful personal goals.
(Also, on a completely off topic note: that's really interesting to hear about sailboats. I'm going to have look into how much they would cost to own and maintain in my area!)
That's the main reason why people half-jokingly say that the two happiest days for a boat owner are the day when they buy it and the day when they manage to sell it. Still it's worth all the effort if you have the time to sail it regularly. Otherwise, chartering (renting) a yacht for a period of time can be a much better option.
Another example is Bhutan, which implemeneted Gross National Happiness [1] as their primary goal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).
Wouldn't GDP actually decrease if the same number of widgets are made, but now for cheaper and so through competition have less "value"?
Cheaper doesn't mean less "value". If we have inflation, prices go up but value doesn't increase, and if deflation decreases prices, that doesn't mean a decrease in value. GDP calculations try to account for this, to capture the fact that e.g. a $500 phone today contains a lot more "value" than a $500 phone from 1995.
GDP would hence (ideally) account for the change in value-per-dollar. It would also include whatever new output was made possible by there being more resources left over now due to less being spent to fulfill people's widget needs (i.e. the money now not being spent on widgets will instead be invested or spent on something else).
If I make widget X twice as efficiently and buy fewer resources, isn't that a GDP loss? Or is there an assumption that I would make twice as many widgets and purchase the same resources AND be able to sell twice as many?
Now, what if you did nothing with the extra money saved from being more efficient, and the widget purchasers did nothing with the money saved from it being cheaper (maybe they put it under their bed, or burned it)? This will still (in theory) show up in GDP because it reduces the money supply, hence increases the value of money, essentially transferring purchasing power from the money burner to the other people in the economy, which they could then use to produce more things than previously.
By and large the wealthier countries aren’t fighting wars (especially among themselves); in any case they have too much to lose by doing so. The larger economics are reversing to the mean, and smaller economies are patchily catching up.
Just as wealthier people (in aggregate) have fewer kids, wealthier countries these days have less reason to right wars.
Costa Rica abolished its milirptary years ago and is more prosperous than its neighbors.
The US is an outlier but like China its military serves several purposes like a jobs program, not just defense. And its economy many not have really grown in any but a statistical sense over he past 40 years. Instead it’s just become more “lumpy” in response to optimization for imperfect measures.
Granted some growth (productivity driven) is better than others (resource driven.)
For better or worse we can’t fund solutions to the world’s problems with austerity.
What we have to read these days -_-
In my fantasy world, out of all the people who didn't die of cancer from air pollution, that lost human potential, translates into scientific, cultural, and technological advancements which balance out whatever military disadvantage may or may not exist : ).
Which reminds me of... democracy. The easiest way to make people not care about something wrong happening is to diffuse it. Like, diffuse responsibility.
How do you reconcile the existence of MAD with this?
Proponents of MAD insist that once attained, it makes military conflicts unnecessary - and this justifies the expense and the risk of the world walking a tightrope above nuclear Armageddon.
If I'm not mistaken, either they, or you are wrong about this point.
The US has been developing its defenses, becoming increasingly capable of intercepting the delivery systems responsible for MAD. Its enemies are responding by developing more nuclear warheads delivered by more and faster missiles.
This will keep going back and forth, it must if the balance is to be preserved. The moment one side gets a substantial advantage over everyone else, MAD is no longer assured.
If you just build some nuclear weapons and consider yourself in the MAD club because you've checked the "nuclear" box, then cease all relevant R&D and your nation goes permanently out to lunch afterwards, it's not going to go well in the long run unless every other nation does the same (they won't).
One is simply a decisive first strike, before growth is able to widen the gap too much. Probably effective, but morally questionable.
Another would be to keep growth 'coiled' and let it ramp up quickly if a rival started growing. Morally less troubling, but exactly how one would keep growth in 'reserve' has not been worked out, as everyone wants it to happen sooner than later.
Finally, it might also be possible to stick to one's nongrowing principles and accept a subservient role, while 'locking up' sections of the dominant country's economy and waiting for a mistake - perhaps by monopolising a good or service that the growing economy values beyond reason. Highly moral, but the effectiveness would be the most dependent on outside factors.
That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"?
If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choo...
So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude.
As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
Don't you think it's safe to assume that technologies might not save us and that we should work on some alternatives, just in case the first scenario doesn't work?
> collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
So you're saying that the _only_ way of preventing collapse is by technological advance? And that we should not try to make sociaty sustainable without growth, or at least to do some reasearch on how that might be possible?
We need to listen what the science is telling us for 40 years now with the report from the club of rome "limits of growth", and slow down our consuption levels.
Apply new techonologies as an excuse to keep growth (green growth) will accelerate the degradation of the environment.
Edit: typos
The way we measure growth is nuts. the best way to acknowledge that is to watch this speech from Robert F Kennedy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY
This reads like prosperity gospel and law of attraction nonsense rolled together and repackaged for a technical audience.
A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth. No technology will change that within my lifetime. If there are no physics-redefining advances in nuclear fusion and/or nuclear fission, my grandchildren will probably be able to make the same claim.
Eh, that's because you, like most of humanity, like to hide 99% of the cost. What is the cost of pollution? What is the cost of environmental destruction? Once you destroy a habitat on earth, there is no more cost associated with it, it's just gone and no amount of money can ever bring it back.
Mining asteroids and colonizing other planets will do more to destroy Earth's environment than just building nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro, and improving battery technology without leaving this planet.
This is true, if you are on Earth and wish to remain there.
If you are in space already, and don't have deal with pesky things like gravity and friction, it could conceivably be way easier to chip a lump of metal off an asteroid and hurl it in the general direction of where it needs to be, than to dig it up and put it on a boat. It's a bit chicken and egg, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where off-world becomes the new Shenzen.
So easy to imagine that we've been doing so for 40 years [0]. In fact, the basic technology seems to have been in place for 40 years as well, but no economic incentive to execute on these grand plans for permanent human habitation in space has yet been found. Furthermore, I have yet to see any evidence that such incentive will ever be found.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
Of course it makes absolutely no sense to put "human ingenuity" in the same category as oil, metals or fertile land. It's just a way for entrepreneurs to justify their entrepreneurship.
I'll let you play this for a bit.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem
This problem is weirdly everywhere. Especially in software, this should be understood. We can't have exponential anything, it's just reckless.
Although you would need to differentiate. Growth in resource consumption? Nobody would want that. Growth in wealth? Yes, please...
Maybe logistics and communications had litte effort to keep up with exponential growth, but other sectors certainly seem tired from time to time. It just isn't possible to grow food with exponential efficiency, even if recent developments (last ~200 years would have us believe otherwise).
Is this a general notion, or is there a limited set of dynamics in play?
What are the capabilities and limitations of those dynamics?
What are the role of latent, occult, or unintended consequences? How do those develop with time?
What is progress? What are the goals of progress? What are its limitations?
What are technology traps? What are progress traps?
So "growth" would come from changing demands eventually.
(That's not something said against the idea of space exploration. In the contrary, not respecting those limits might be the very reason why we never reach the universe -- e.g. because we collapse before we have a chance. Same in this regard as our playing with nukes and other careless follies).
We went to space with an 1/10th the economy of today. We had not been to the moon for 40+ years, despite the economy growing ever stronger.
While I acknowledge, that economic growth has problems, it does not seem all that bad to me.
I imagine going to the moon just is not a priority right now. The superrich already want to spend their money on space projects. Let's wait what regular people want to buy, after health, etc. is solved.
If, eg., products became more expensive because of limited energy (or relevant taxing of externalities) then we would grow more slowly -- we can still produce more through innovation and consume less energy.
It took a huge amount of energy in the past to make a single pair of socks -- today, it takes a tiny amount.
I think the relevant question for 'exponential energy-consumption graphs' is what the relationship is to growth (it simply cannot be assumed that there is a 'deep causal' relationship; this is fallacious equivocation).
Eg., population has been increasing exponentially. Could a static population size produce a flat (or falling) net energy use graph -- whilst still obtaining economic growth (ie., productivity improvements)?
http://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
Maybe theorically they can be decoupled, but we have yet to see that in the real world.
More about it: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
* our needs and deeds don't take over
* marketing stops to teach us longings for things we actually do not need --
Yes!
-Even though many people live paycheck to paycheck at many different income levels, enough income growth can get you out of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and enable you to have real financial autonomy.
-One thing that has stuck in my mind over the last few years is that one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems.
-The pace at which we solve real, useful problems grows with economic growth.
Growing up I was raised by classical musicians permanently on the bleeding edge of solvency (not with debt either) but new stuff kept coming that increased both their quality of life and ”nonmonetary” productivity: microwave ovens and computers that my dad could use to take his orchestral compositions (in sheet music for all parts) to part sheets (for individual players) automagically whereas this was work before.
We weren’t in the kind of self-reproducing poverty because my parents had a high “cultural level”, but we were definitely cash poor, and yet kept getting wealthier and wealthier.
This is more the outcome of de-socialisation, which unemployment tends to cause. (Compare with retirement.)
This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.
When wealth was being more aggressively redistributed this also meant the rest of the US saw some practical benefits. Now that's no longer true, it's just a numbers game for the 1%.
The idea is still vague even to myself, so let me give a concrete example: self-driving car. While CV/AI-based self-driving cars certainly can drive, it should still acquire most critical information, like signals, crossroads, lanes, obstacles, etc, through ambiguous-at-best algorithms. At the same time, the inherent difficulty in making good-enough AI empowers companies over people, which is a straight highway to cyberpunk dystopia.
However, what if we implant digital data sources all over the road? (1) self-driving cars will always acquire correct data (2) developing safe self-driving cars become much easier (2-1) market diversity is ensured (2-2) people regain power (3) it is much easier to achieve the economy of scale with sensor nodes than cars.
Or, perhaps, what about delivery/reservation services? If the standard protocols are enforced on all restaurants, we can cut all the middlemen, lowering the prices. The same can work for taxi, hotel, scooter, bicycle, etc.
We really should start rethinking about things we have and use. The industrial structure we have today is just a mess caused by the rapid IT revolution. We weren't really ready for it. But now we've expanded enough, and should shrink down, so that we can have breathing room for another move.
Am I correct in this?
If so, please let’s stick with growth.
It is about the fallacy that economic growth (= increase in GDP), somehow magically solves all problems of society. This belief is mostly ideological and the implication is that the market should not be regulated, which would reduce growth and prosperity. The effects of this strategy include increased inequality, weak infrastructure/education and ecological exploitation with dire consequences.
Innovation, which really advances society in sustainable ways, is often intrinsically or socially motivated, not financially and certainly not by a GDP increase, which benefits a tiny minority.
Reducing inequality, improving education and increasing individual freedom within organizations seem to be much more sensible ways to fuel innovation in the long term, than just deregulating the market.
Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel.
The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need.
As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style.
Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.
Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"?
The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses.
Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).
Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example.
Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away.
Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
I don't mind the idea of not eating meat, I eat meat maybe three times a year and I wouldn't mind not doing that, it's more of a habit of family members to have it on Christmas, not something I care for.
I'm kind of allergic to this "we must save the planet, and by we I mean the poor" stuff though. It often comes in the form of "we must save the landscape, we can't have too much dense housing, it doesn't look natural", which typically comes from people who can afford luxurious mansions in the country-side. I get that they don't want other people to live there because it wouldn't be as nice if it was crowded, but I don't like that being turned into "I just want to save the environment". It's right next to "mass tourism is terrible" from people who can pay the premium for individual tourism and just don't want to share their destination with those people.
> $32,400 annual income
OR
> $770,000 in net worth
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
(Also, I've heard that having at least 1 year of college (or other form of superior education?) meant that one was in the top 1% of world most "educated", but haven't found any sources that would confirm/infirm that...)
It absolutely should.
https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought...
- 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's
- 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed
Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc.
I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri.
Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life.
That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day.
If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre.
Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn.
There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day...
Meat is a luxury man. A luxury.
Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need".
I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
Anyway, this "fuck the average people, they shouldn't [do X] while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income" goes for anything really... Ideally, public shaming should be enough - though it often isn't. (At least Al Gore political career didn't work out !)
9,125 pounds of dry feed and 7,300 of drinking water nets you 530lbs of meat.
We're going to stick with corn since it is a better cow-day yield per acre than oats.
- 9,125lbs of corn = more than 16 million kcals.
- 530lbs of 70/30 beef = 798,180 kcals.
That's 20x more calories if you fed the corn to humans than if you process it through a cow's stomach with a magic cow that doesn't exist. In reality it's more 30-40x. A single cow's annual intake can feed more than 20 humans a 2000 kcal diet for a year. If we switched the farmland feeding cows alone over to growing for humans, you could feed 30 billion people if you stick with corn.
Obviously humans can't surive on corn alone, realistically though you could feed 10-20 billion people with that same farmland, use less water, have far less environmental pollution, have less methane emissions, need far less refrigeration, drastically reduce the amount of antibiotics being used, improve soil quality, increase local pollinator populations by not turning square mile after square mile after square mile into the same crop, etc.
The water cattle drink is something like 16.58 million Olympic swimming pools annually, or 41.45 cubic kilometers of water.
Meat really is a luxury and needs to be treated as such.
> I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
I made no such claim. I removed animal products from 95% of my meals last year. It isn't sustainable and it's creating all sorts of issues for the environment (and people).
Find and run the numbers yourself. Meat has to become a luxury.
Is the soil in Nevada, Montana or Utah particularly suitable for growing anything other than hay?
The high desert is a good environment for growing many types of high-quality forage, both natural and farmed, so that tends to be what the land is used for. Cattle are raised on natural forage in the summer months and farmed forage in the winter months.
Agriculture is highly adapted to the economics and resources of the local environment. For example, there are parts of the high desert that specialize in onion production, of all things. It makes sense in context.
Do you have a source for that? Every one I have been able to find indicates that total meat and dairy subsidies are less than that, let alone just water subsidies for the beef industry.
I found one source for $38b for meat and fairly subsidies, but that likely includes things besides water subsidies.
I agree that $50b is too high of an estimate.
So with farming and animal husbandry water rights are a big thing. Often water rights will go to farmers/ranchers long before they go to people.
So you've got cows, with a conservative estimate, using 500 billion gallons of water a year in the U.S. alone just for drinking. Obviously most of that is coming from natural sources but that has financial impacts on the treated water that ends up pumped to your house/business via pipes. How big is that financial impact? shrugs
I highly doubt it's close to 50 billion USD a year though.
They definitely do get comparatively obscene amounts of financial benefit though. Water rights, forage disaster, livestock compensation, indemnity payments, feed assistance, general relief, then you have to think about what sort of subsidies the growers get that then gets passed through as a benefit in the price of the feed going to the livestock...
Man I love meat, I love love love meat, but I switched to primarily whole food plant based last year. WFPB is far more sustainable as far as water and land, arguably much healthier, requires far less fossil fuel input, and noticeably cheaper (my weekly grocery bill as halved).
I'm not saying it should our shouldn't be like this, just that it is.
You're thinking collectively while your neighbor defects and thinks about themselves first.
Source: I used to own water rights in cattle country and did deals with beef producers that wanted to use that water for cattle.
The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to:
(1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.!
(2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...)
A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"...
So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).
No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse...
Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !
And tons of services can be created even around the negative consequences of this... all the cornucopia of new diseases mental and physical brought about by excessive virtual consumption will boom into a huge healthcare industry etc. This will also be growth!
And just like "power" can't be real or fake, it either is or isn't, same with resources - as long as there are exchange mechanisms, there's no difference between "real" or "virtual", everything is as real as everything else...
Entities that insist on "old fashion fighting for `real` resources" should be restructured. People rewired / reeducated.
We're on the right path, but yeah, we're maybe only 0.01% of the way there... need to do things faster and harder. Let's not chicken out now and go retro/conservative instead of pushing further! The future is... amazingly incomprehensible! Heil to it!
"Control over physical resources" is just a means, not an end... If you want "more power for your nation" or whatever and the world stage has been restructured so you can better get that by playing a different game, you'll switch the game. And Russia seems to be good at both cyber-warfare and "mental games", they can get even better and win even more, good for them, whatever.
(And the future of cheap-renewables plus mini-nuclear will mean power/energy will be available to everyone... fight would be more on "fabrication and repair capability/tech for next-gen hardware" or stuff like that - here China and SE-Asia seem to be winning the game, and they overall are pretty pro-globalistic and pro-virtual... for their own f up reasons, but whatever, if it pushes things in the right direction, fine.)
Anyway, things are going fine, though slow (sometimes progress goes one casket at a time unfortunately)... let's just hope some people don't f things up because they have their own personal/national/etc. crusade to fight for and mix it up with nostalgia for the "past full of meaning" and they drag us into some messed up war. Let's try and be peaceful and keep commerce flowing, previous generations have worked too hard to get this global system going for us to f it up by, ironically, being nostalgic for some good-ol-times that never actually existed...
This is wishful thinking. You would need incredible improvements in technology to maybe hope to start reducing resource consumption. Because so far, resource consumption only got worse as efficiency got better.
That's why productivity increases are so important. Without them, if we want growth, we have to get it from positive sum games. I'm skeptical that will provide enough to stop people from reverting to a more Malthusian plunder mindset.
Any vision of a non-growth world needs to take that into account. Without growth we'd have to fundamentally rethink how we handle distribution without reverting to bloodsport.
Then, the problem will be about literally physical space on earth.
Some fun facts I calculated while thinking about this:
* 3% growth for 100 years is 20x
* 3% growth for 300 years is 7,000x
* 3% growth for 1,000 years is 7,000,000,000,000x
2. A zero sum game in terms of the distribution of money is not the same as a similar distribution of wealth.
Real median wages and household income in the U.S. are higher than they've ever been.
This is all despite the increased international competition typified by globalization trends and detailed by the Elephant Curve.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
https://milescorak.com/2016/05/18/the-winners-and-losers-of-...
Notably, the graph provided at the second link covers a time period ending in 2008, the depths of the great recession. Things are numerically a bit better than depicted there. The overall story is the same- the bottom and the top of the worldwide income distribution is where things are growing fastest, but the middle is growing slower. It is certainly growing though.
10% real median income growth since the 80's is nothing to sneeze at.
Let's compare to the S&P 500 index. From Jan 1979 to Dec 2019, the S&P has returned 746% (2,401% including dividend reinvestment) -- both figures adjusted for inflation (as is the FRED data). Annualized, these figures are 5.35% and 8.16%. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
For bonds, that's 262% and 3.19%, respectively. https://dqydj.com/treasury-return-calculator/
10% over 40 years is absolutely something to sneeze at. That cannot be characterized as meaningful growth.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53597
Your comment about "distribution of money" and "distribution of wealth" makes no sense, but let's assume that by "money" you mean "income." By definition, looking at the distribution of anything is zero-sum. The problem is, growth has nothing to do with distribution and everything to do with production. Production is not a fixed-sum game: you can have positive-, negative- or zero-sum production at any given time. The chief question of production is how do we produce more wealth using fewer resources, or more efficient combinations of existing resources? How we should distribute that wealth, income and control over the products made is an ethical and political question (though I am strongly opposed to any scheme that seeks to deprive a person from owning the product of her labor).
GDP is the derivative of the amount of goods and not the amount of goods.
Let's say I want to have both an all-terrain car for the weekend and my regular car on the weekdays. I now consume two new cars very ten years instead of one. The same number of car has been produced in those ten years (no growth). Where does my extra car come from?
You are making a different point, which is that more stuff does not equal happiness, so we should not care about it.
What I said is not theoretical. We have examples of zero sum economies, in fact that's how the world was everywhere right up until the industrial revolution.
I would urge you to re-read my original comment, since I address the very point you're making about cooperation inside a zero productivity growth environment. You can pay positive sum games! That's great! However any wealth generated by a positive sum game is, by definition, growth. I'm suspicious that it could be enough to matter. Productivity growth is a big deal.
In any case I am not convinced that zero productivity growth + positive sum games are a stable equilibrium.
Perhaps you could have a zero growth society where frequent jubilees reset everybody's wealth at regular intervals, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice and I'm also not sure it wouldn't be just as bloody as a zero sum land rush after the reset. You could do this with very high inflation levels, perhaps. Might make a fun science fiction short.
I'm hoping you give me a generous reading here, since I have neither the time nor inclination to deep-dive on a lot of my points, and I'm afraid I'd be boring as batshit if I did.
Another thing to note is that current world GDP certainly is not enough because it leaves many people quite impoverished so we certainly still have some growing to do.
While you state an important point, the issue of growth having to stop (sooner or later) cannot be ignored.
There is a very good essay I came across relating a discussion between a physicist and an economist on the question of neverending economic growth: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
It's worth reading in its entirety regardless of which side one stands on.
For reference, the average world GDP is about US$17,300.
At the OECD tax-to-GDP average rate, about $6000 would be spent through public institutions (i.e. taxes and public services). So that leaves about $11500 for both consumption and maintaining the capital stock.
The consumption of fixed capital is about 15% of GDP per year, so that leaves about $9775 a year, or $815 per month to consume stuff.