Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?
There's been some of HN posts mentioning degrowth in the past but they were heavily criticized[2][3]. I get some degrowthist literature might seem too apocalyptic, but they make some good points:
- Criticism of "decoupling": there's no way of our GDP keeps growing indefinitely while reducing our ecological footprint. In fact, despite all the advancements made in renewables during the past decades global CO2 emissions are at an all-time high.
- Very few people know how to build/grow anything end to end. Consumerism appears to be the only way to live in the West right now (with it, a shared feeling of powerlessness).
At the same time, I stumble upon articles from time to time that are indirectly aligned with the same ideas although from an entirely different perspective. These couple of HN posts come to mind:
- "The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves" [4]
- "I, Pencil (1958)" [5]
- "CO2 emissions are being 'outsourced' by rich countries to rising economies"[6] (The Guardian, not HN)
I gotta admit, this has me pretty worried. However I also have hope (and with hope, it comes action). Questions that I'd like to get input on from the HN community:
1. Am I overly paranoid for believing this? (degrowth seems like our only way out)
2. Is believing technology will save us from climate collapse really that, a belief? Believing this would mean society should keep doing its thing for a tiny tiny chance of getting a free "get out of jail" card (i.e. decoupling is not a fable after all).
3. On the other hand, if we know it's a belief: why aren't our so-called leaders doing anything real about it (albeit at the cost of GDP), are they just trying to prevent widespread panic? I see how this might sound a bit "conspiranoic" but i can't just find better words for it...
4. Regardless of the answer to the question above on #2, why aren't people actively building resilient hyperlocal communities and actively ignore what brought us here in the first place? I.e. globalization and widespread consumerism
4.1. Low-tech, no-tech initiatives seem pretty plausible to me (provided we leave aside our current individualistic values as a society)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416815
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058894
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32711413
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016980
[6]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/19/co2-emissions-outsourced-rich-nations-rising-economies
138 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadThis is a stupid premise. People illiterate in both physics and economics seem to think that economic growth is bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
This is easily proven false by contradiction:
Let's say you have a few 2x4s and nails, by rearranging them into a chair you've created economic value. No extra raw materials were required to get from the planks of wood to the chair but value was created anyway. Find a better use for the wood and nails than a chair and we have economic growth.
The labor required to build the chair is one additional ingredient. The transformation of wood and nails to chair does not happen spontaneously.
Growth can happen by getting the same labor to do something more valuable (maybe building houses instead of chairs?)
Is your claim that growth in human population is required for economic growth?
Ok, I'll do another proof by contradiction using the chair analogy:
The carpenter uses the materials that would have been used to build 100 chairs to build a boat. That boat is then used to transport goods up and down a river. The economic value of that boat is greater than the 100 chairs but the carpenter has not done more work and they have not used more materials.
If all the human carpenters switch from creating chairs to creating boats you can get economic growth without using more materials or labor.
> Now what? That's not "growth", that's a chair
If somebody finds use from the chair that was growth, if it sits unused it was waste. Something of value was created from a bunch of useless pieces of wood and metal.
> How many times can you pull that trick? Eventually you'll reach the economically optimum configuration for those planks of wood.
Really? There is an economic optimum for the most valuable configuration of materials? This also ignores that while growth is occurring other things are being created which will impact the supposed equilibrium state that exists for wood and nails that will change what the most valuable configuration of those materials will be.
Anyway, let's go away from wood and nails. What about ink and paper. Or just words? Or just thoughts? What is the economic value of the observation the F = ma? Newton probably created infinite economic value by putting the observation that F=ma to paper.
In fact, you mention yourself the reason why growth is somehow in contradiction with the finite planetary boundaries: you say that if the carpenters do 1 boat instead of 100 chairs, they will create growth because the value of the boat is bigger than the value of the 100 chairs. So, you acknowledge that growth is led by "the more valuable thing to do, the more profitable". The problem is that, by construction, exploiting resources are way more profitable than not. For creating a boat, it's way easier to chop trees to get new 2x4s than to disassemble chairs (if it was the case, recycling would be the go-to process, and it is clearly not the case in reality. on top of that, some fabrication processes are not recyclable).
So, yeah, technically, we still can have some local growth after all resources are consumed (by just disassembling chairs to create boats), but in practice, this local growth is compensated by the negative growth of losing the big gain of consuming the resource.
I used to buy distilled water from my grocery store. The water had to be shipped to the store, that took gas. Not green, not efficient compared to: Now the same store has a reverse osmosis machine, available because of new technology, that uses regular city water and filters it. It's half the price. No gas is used to transport the water to the store, it flows through a pipe to get to the store. This increases GDP, the same amount of water (at least) is bought, but lots of peole have some extra money left over. GDP increased, pollution decreased substantially.
BUT. The discussion does go on from there. The people with extra dollars might spend that on something polluting - maybe even as polluting as trucking water around - but they might well not.
Even so, as with the original example, only better, this is an example of economic growth that actually decreases consumption, taken by itself. (Now comes the argument about knock-on effects such as what the freed bucks get spent on, and the named law (word) saying that when you make a good more efficiently, demand for it increases.)
If you're a Marxist you can substitute "freed labor is spent doing" for "freed bucks is spent on" above, I suppose.
It's called change and accepting that has made life much more bearable.
While change is increasingly happening faster, the changes are (mostly) smaller. We're in one of the longest periods of “peace time“ and threat of war/death continue to decrease (while not evenly distributed that's not a reason to lose hope).
There seems a pile of circumstantial evidence that the rotating series of crises may merely be a device for controlling the masses through fear.
And who is doing the controlling? Wouldn't it be easier to control people if they are happy and content, given that in human history revolutions were almost always a product of suffering and unhappiness?
Isn't it much more likely that the many crises we perceive are a product of imperfect human perception and the enormous development of mass media instead of an enormous conspiracy theory?
It's easier to rule happy people. If you want to control them, you can lull them into inaction with vices, then control them with fear. We're all individuals; divide and conquer.
The connection between - media producers make money by grabbing attention - grabbing attention is easier if you create threats and crises --> the media tends to overblow things
seems so much more straightforward.
> Also, "divide et impera" might be reasonable if you are in the business of ancient roman foreign policy but I would need to be convinced that it holds true for the inner workings of modern democracies.
If you've been awake in the past 3 years you will have seen obvious government overreach. You can justify it if you want to, but it's clearly gone way beyond public health concerns.
> I don't have the feeling that the people around me are particularly afraid all the time and if they are, it leads to them wanting change instead of being paralysed.
I'll assume you're American. What percentage of Americans do you think use psychiatric medication or drugs (including alcohol) on a regular basis?
Horrible situation such'n'such is an existential threat! Vote for me or give me money to save all of humanity!
The other side of it lately has been creating crisis that divide and conquer society. Most of the "crisis" in the past several years have been terribly polarized. Keeping people divided stops them from focusing on the real issues that politicians can't/won't tackle, and it prevents them from uniting against politicians/corporations/etc.
I think that's much more reasonable. I wouldn't agree with you that it's "most" but sure, that's certainly happening to some amount.
>Keeping people divided stops them from focusing on the real issues that politicians can't/won't tackle, and it prevents them from uniting against politicians/corporations/etc.
This part however, I don't buy. That's a conspiracy theory. Who exactly is carrying out this nefarious plan? And how do they manage to have that much influence to be able to do that in most countries?
What issues led you to this opinion that they’re overblown?
See first sentence of my post. Those demanding sacrifices might start with themselves.
The mass migration of people across borders as a result of climate change might cause wars that are such a threat though. But still I don't consider climate change itself as such.
Regardless, the pedantry is unwarranted.
If 100k humans survive that's more than enough to carry on humans and civilization as a whole.
Our existence for the majority of us is at risk.
Our existence as a nation is at risk.
I didn't say "and existential threat for the human race". Even if I had, the pedantry is unwarranted.
It doesn’t even have to be a world war. It will only take 1 nation to make the choice
We’re one mistake from extinction
God forbid we might be entering the "big proxy war" between all mayor powers. (If India and china start supplying the ukraine front etc)
To contextualize with OP: yes the world is always changing, but the next decade might become extremely uncomfortable.
We won’t learn without catastrophe, and it’s anyone’s guess what will be learned from that.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-...
I don't truly see the "no one knows how to do anything end to end". This is somewhat true - but I don't know if 500 years ago the same person necessarily knew how to work with bronze and to raise cattle and to preserve foods for the winter. Perhaps it seems easier since there was less things, but there was also a lot less ability to move around and learn about things so I'm not so sure.
Ultimately it seems like the absolute worst case scenario is that a shock causes a partial collapse of western society to the point where people are very poor and not able to use technology we take for granted, but this is pretty close to what an honest degrowther sees as the best case scenario. If you want to experience life as it existed before modern technology there are plenty of places in the world that moreorless still live as they did hundreds of years ago - and it would only be romanticizing them so say they dont have their own very severe issues that are objectively worse than what we have.
Imam: "Have you heard anything I've said?"
Riddick: "You said it's all circling the drain, the whole universe. Right?"
Imam: "That's right."
Riddick: "Had to end sometime."
On top of this there is also the problem of an economic model that incentivizes ransacking natural resources in order to turn it into profits. That's probably the main reason there is a lot of pushback to degrowth philosophies because it requires a fundamentally new way of measuring economic activity and value. No economic models properly account for biospheric destruction and resource depletion from human economic activity so almost all existing economic thinking is completely useless for addressing the current crisis.
All the pie in sky solutions to the current crisis assume we solve the problem of limited energy resources and then use this newly abundant source of energy to terraform the planet and fix the problems created by industrial activity. I'm calling it pie in the sky because I have seen no real concerted effort to actually make this happen. The timelines for fusion reactors make no sense and will not be ready in time to address the impending ecological disasters. Almost every other technical solution is equally nonsensical, e.g. AGI.
Yes there is. We are vastly ineffecient with our use of energy. Fusion power, better use of solar, wind, geothermal power, better energy storage. The amount of solar hitting the Earth every day is several orders of magnitude larger than what is needed to run society at our current level. There is no shortage of energy, only our ability to make use of it.
Obviously nothing grows indefinitely. Eventually the sun will go supernova and consume the solar system. For an amount of energy needed to sustain human life comfortably, there is more than enough.
The degrowthers would have us go back to living in grass huts and dying in droves from diseases we have long since eradicated. It is not a way forward. It is species suicide.
> there's no way of our GDP keeps growing indefinitely while reducing our ecological footprint.
This is at its core not a truth, but really an unsound belief system that could have been phrased the same about water quality, acid rain, leaded gasoline or the ozone hole. Yet these have all been tackled by humanity as a whole already, because we saw a pretty bad impact on our livelyhood quickly.
No doubt, CO2 is really the greatest challenge of all times, compared to nearly any global problem before. But it‘s far from insurmountable, and definitely not directly coupled to growth.
All it would take is a (literal) moonshot effort: Taking the same funds as the Apollo Program (in 2022 adjusted dollars) would be enough for a full transition.
Before this decade is over. Not because it‘s easy, but because it is hard.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have run out of massively visionary presidents since 1968.
"Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
That also ignores the fact that technology gets more efficient. A laptop today uses 50W and is thousands of times more powerful than a roomful of computers 50 years ago that used thousands of watts. It’s doing much more and releasing a fraction of the heat.
Energy from our human scale today is basically infinite when we count all the sources available to us.
With cheap enough energy and more practice (descending the engineering learning curve) producing food this way may be profitable in 30 or 40 years. We can re-wild all arable land.
There are at least dozens and possibly hundreds of alternatives to lithium chemistry for batteries, that are nearly competitive with it. Some of them are better than lithium in some applications. Watch for CATL's sodium batteries.
But say it's worst case, none of the alternatives turn out to be better cheaper, and more environmentally benign: no problem. There most definitely is enough mineable lithium. There's a temporary shortage of lithium refining factories.
If we had to, we could get by with water, rock, iron, sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphates, carbon, aluminum, and trace amounts of other things. The minerals we need a lot of, we have a lot of.
This isn't necessarily done consciously - the scientists who often make these predictions, like all scientists, have a very high standards for what facts are. While this is good for creating sound science, it's bad for predicting the direction of tech/econ development because this method essentially always fails because it's overly rearward looking, using a mix of linear progress lines to predict what ends up being an exponential process.
See this chart for an example of this happening with solar deployment:https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...
(2) On decoupling, it looks like advanced economies are doing this, but the problem is the rest are still going through the CO2 expansionary phase.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
(3) My main issue with Hickel's work is that his proposal (and other degrowthers) is actually less likely to lead to carbon reductions than the green growth scenario. Namely, you're never going to convince those countries to slow growth enough, so your time is best spent figuring out better green growth or things like geoengineering.
(4) It seems like the degrowthers are more shouting into the void because they actually also have anti-capitalist sentiments (in addition to there environmental ones) which aren't going well. I really recommend Leigh Phillips' book: "Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff" for a defense of green growth from the Left.
https://www.amazon.com/Austerity-Ecology-Collapse-Porn-Addic...
(5) On preppers, crazy news, etc. I think we're going through a very real systemic inflection point similar to how the Industrial Revolution in Europe led to capitalism and liberalization of governments. The same types of forces are at play, putting pressure on our whole social structure and even to the global ecology itself.
Add to this, the collapse of meaning-making structures like family, community, religion, etc. and you have a machine that converts external stress into personal stress - even if you're personally doing fine. Like all those rich preppers.
(6) Long story short: Hang in there! We are probably going to go through some crazy shit in the coming years because of recession, political upheaval, wars, etc., but remember that even throughout all of humanity's worst times, most of us survived and in the moment mostly lived decent lives.
We may need to temper our expectations and be okay with a little rough living, but we are human fucking beings god dammit! and we were built to resilient in the face of crazy odds, and we made it this far!!!
Maintain your optimism and dreams personally. Focus on what you can actually control and who/what matters most to you. Life is too short for constant worry, and if it should pass that our world does end, take solace in that, no matter what we do, we're all dead in the end. So enjoy this life while you've got it.
Good luck stranger and godspeed!
2. I don't know what you mean by "collapse", but yes it's a belief. "Tech will save us" is one of the (IIRC) 3 textbook responses to the climate change narrative.
3. IDK it looks like Western Europe is de-industrializing, we'll see how much this winter but I'm hearing about large industries shutting down in response to fuel prices. They're definitely not trying to prevent panic, just trying to maintain hypernormalization.
4. They are and you can go outside and you can find them. You don't hear about it on the internet because the internet is run by multinational corporations selling you products made many thousands of miles from where you live.
4.1 Technology is a force multiplier - people with more technology are better at conquering their rivals. I think this is mentioned in Industrial Society and it's future.
You need energy to do that.
The decoupling we saw in the last years is the same decoupling France saw after the Mesmer plan, and probably caused by renewables. There is basically no decoupling between energy and GDP.
Services are just second hand production basically.
We managed to reduce food production from something like 90% of the economy to 5%, industry to 15%.
Maybe at some point all of non-virtual part will be like 1% of our total economy?
By most measures the biosphere is close to ecological collapse and the markets have not taken any notice of this fact because quarterly profits do not require a livable and ecologically stable planet. As long as this quarter's profits are the same or higher than last quarter's it doesn't matter how much damage was done to the biosphere to achieve those profits. Most large scale organizations are effectively accelerating ecological collapse because they operate by an economic model that is completely at odds with the reality of biological existence on a finite planet. Instead of being concerned about AGI, recessions, and infinite markets people should really be concerned about unsustainable business models at odds with the physical constraints and dynamics of the planet. There is no economics without a sustainable ecology and more people need to wake up and notice this fact.
I completely agree with that. I think markets should be informed of the total cost of their activity through taxation of resources (like energy, metals and such) and damaging activity (like manufactureing of plastic bottles and other things that become the problem at their end of life or CO2 emissions).
Not necessarily. For exmaple, if I recite a poem to you for a dollar and you sing to me a song for a dollar, GDP increases without changing the ecological footprint.
And even if the ecological footprint per capita is growing, we might be able to reduce the overall ecological footprint in a few decades, when earth's population is declining. It depends on the ratio between the two tendencies.
I am not sure if that will really be the case, but it is a possibility.
And what if we raise our prices, so I recite a bad poem for $1M and you sing a terrible, off-key song to me for the same price? Isn't that effectively massively raising the GDP without doing any useful work at all?
Technically, things are looking pretty good. Energy is a problem only in the near term. Solar, wind, and batteries are so cheap that massive deployment is happening for purely economic reasons. Population is leveling off. Computing is in good shape.
Arable land under threat -https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
Fish stock collapse -https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/november8/ocean-110806.h...
Lack of fresh water -https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170412-is-the-world-run...
There are many other things, such as the continued reliance on fossil fuels and still increasing demand for crude, coupled with a lack of new oil exploration.
It’s time to walk the walk. Plenty of people have a doomer mindset about the future. Prepare now. Commit yourself to an ascetic lifestyle and you won’t be disappointed.
But I doubt many will voluntarily live this way. It’s just like everybody upset about the climate, but none of them have installed solar and geothermal on their home.
Given that we're in an economic downturn/recession, it's really hard to use what you said as evidence for degrowth, which implies some sort of long term phenomena rather than a 1-2 year thing.
Average cost of a residential geothermal system: $15k to $38k[1]
Average cost of solar panel roof: $11k to $14k after tax credits[2]
Also your roof shingles should be 10 years old or less before installation[3] (my roof shingles are definitely that old), so for a lot of people they'd have to replace their roof first, so tack on another $5.5k to $11k on top of that for many homes[4].
Total cost to meet your criteria: $26k to $62k.
I'd love for everyone to have solar panels and geothermal heat pumps, but I get why it hasn't happened very much yet. We need a lot more incentives (or major public/private infrastructure projects) to convert these more quickly.
(I realize there ads all over the internet for companies claiming they'll install solar panels for "free", but the BBB warns that those are often scams or can be more expensive for you in the long run[5]).
[1]: https://modernize.com/hvac/heating-repair-installation/heat-...
[2]: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/solar-energy/how-much-do-sol...
[3]: https://www.owenscorning.com/en-us/roofing/tools/solar-panel...
[4]: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/roofing/roof-replace...
[5]: https://www.bbb.org/article/scams/27595-bbb-scam-alert-free-...
There's no shortage of articles about people being priced out of ever owning a home. If true, they also won't be able to install solar panels or other environmentally beneficial home improvement technologies, which is bad for everyone. I've never heard of a landlord of a small proprty doing it, but surely some of them do.
Some renters are rough on property, but many renters are not and look after the property the best they can, considering they are generally forbidden from doing any proper improvements or maintenance.
After all, many renters don't want to keep moving (and are not renting by choice), especially if they have children in school or a job nearby, so they have reason to look after the property they are in for as long as they can stay.
'Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [from 1970] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”' (ibid)
I love science and I do agree mankind (specifically commercial activity since the Industrial Revolution) has caused climate change. I'm happy that government regulations have (for instance) cleaned the toxic NO2 smog many of our cities suffered with 50 years ago. But my view is that it's "a bridge too far" to succumb to the temptation to imagine that we have "now" arrived at a critical inflection point which creates a moment of destiny for mankind.
In fact, people are taking action and pushing back. Only last year, a costly, multi-year project to construct a water desalination plant in California was rejected based on its potential impact to marine life. [1] So, my overall point is that the posted premise is flawed due to the fact that there is no such thing as "infinite expansion of the economy". Political regimes come and go and with them some progress toward smarter growth is made here, some protections get tossed out there. It's a tug-of-war, not a steam-roll by the pro-growthers. And importantly: over-stating the case that "now is the time!" when we must radically alter the order of things to prevent catastrophe has, in my opinion, only created a harmful sense of fatigue on the ears of many reasonable people who live long enough to notice that the predicted dire consequences were, to put it benevolently, prematurely announced.
[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
And even if the problem was seen and alerted on since last century, little significant advances were done to stop it. Degrowth, decarbonization of economy, carbon capture, changes on we deal with energy, transport and more are required changes to try to avoid the worst consequences, and time is running out.
Regarding technical solutions, inventions and so on, I try to not solve with just technology what is an organizational or administrative problem. Not dealing with the core problem will eventually kick back in a bad way.
Mariana Mazzucato (https://marianamazzucato.com) talks about the spectrum of models capitalism can take in this interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prof-g-show-with-s....
“Betterness” by Umair Haque talks about the need for metrics that augment GDP by serving as indicators of wealth: https://store.hbr.org/product/betterness-economics-for-human... (also available on Amazon, iBooks, etc.).
The David Graeber Institute (https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/) has done a lot of work to explore how we allocate labor to tasks. The book “Bullshit Jobs” is a worthwhile overview of the Institute’s research.
Edit: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker (not an economist) is another look at progress. While Pinker acknowledges it’s possible to be born during a local minima, the book charts how things continue to improve for people across many metrics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
Steve Jobs described the computer as “a bicycle for the mind”. Bicycle technology allows a human to move faster than a cheetah (https://www.travelwriter.nl/english-blog-faster-than-a-cheet...). Computers help people think and compute faster than an organic brain. However, the human must *choose* to use the technology. That’s a social choice. Human problems are social problems. I do believe we have adequate technology to bring the world into an age of prosperity. But it will only happen if we choose, as a society, to do it.
For a variety of reasons, I don’t think giving up technology to pursue a low tech / no tech society would be helpful. Often, low tech solutions actually make things worse when applied at scale with as many people as we have.