The author makes the assumption that economic growth has to come from an increase in material output, resources consumed etc. when it can very well be the opposite. "Number of atoms in the universe" has nothing to do with anything, and is just used to (incorrectly) turn their subjective argument into a scientific one.
You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.
OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here. Your argument – a very common one and very influential in today's society – however is purely theoretical. As John O'Neil points out:
"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."
If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.
The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.
Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.
It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2
While not directly tied to economic growth, one factor this article leaves out is that global human population growth could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100) [1].
In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3].
With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).
Demographic leveling or collapse is in a category I've heard called "demand limits to growth."
Everyone always thinks about supply limits, with some making dire Malthusian prophecies of what happens if we exhaust our resources with runaway growth. I've seen surprisingly little discussion of demand limits.
Other possible sources of demand limits include: satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more), diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diminishing impact of new technologies (compare the next CPU density node to jet aircraft or antibiotics), consolidation of functionality into fewer more versatile products (e.g. computers and smart phones eating TVs, tape decks, radios, book shelves, CD collections, etc.), cultural shifts toward simplicity, replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars), etc.
The eternal growth assumption assumes both infinite supply and infinite demand.
This is silly. For one, large portions of the economy are not built on actual material. For example, take software, an evergrowing segment of the economy.
The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.
Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters. The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe.
The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.
Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material, but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good. For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which do not even require material goods proportional with the economic value added.
In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand the economy due to a shortage of atoms.
> The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.
You're going the wrong direction. The issue isn't fitting atoms into data. It's fitting data into atoms. You can give every atom a GUID, but you can't give every GUID an atom!
You don't have to put it in terms of economy. Our rate of growth for energy and data are unsustainable. Current growth would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range. So either we go beyond our needs for space and energy or growth slows down. Both of those are a big change from the status quo.
You can only run so much code with so many electrons. At a certain point, you run out of electrons.
Imagine a world in which there is just one person and the economy is just how big of a number this person can make on a computer.
If there is more than one person or more than one computer - you have less electrons at your disposal - because they're making up other people & computers respectively.
This is obviously very far into the future - but so is 8000 years!
Between 1960 and 1970 - global GDP increased by about ~$1T. That was about the same increase between 2018 and 2019 - even after adjusting for inflation.
That was a low-growth year for the last decade.
In the 1960s we had the entire space race and a lot of the modern computer (including the Internet).
If the trend continues, in another 60 years, we could accomplish about as much in a month. In another 120 years, about as much in a day. In another 120 years, about as much in an hour. Another 180 years, about as much in a minute, and in another 180 years, about as much in a second.
It's hard to argue you haven't hit the singularity at that point - and that's only 660 years away.
8000 years at this current growth rate would be truly unimaginably alien - and I'm not sure why everyone is convinced it could keep growing or would even need to.
If the population keeps growing at current rates - we'd have enough productivity for everyone to have a higher quality of life than Jeff Bezos does today in <700 years - at least, inflation adjusted, the average person on the planet would have >$15Bn in annual income.
This doesn’t really apply to housing or congestion of any sort. Space can be recycled but only when you’re not using it. Everyone and everything takes up space. Things like AirBnb only go so far to make cities more efficient. people don’t like getting packed in, so they will pay for more space.
>The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.
It's not a fallacy as long as economic activity is a proxy for human activity, because humans consume to survive. In your sheet metal example, while it's the same physical aluminum throughout the process, you've hired a team of people (and expended a huge amount of energy, incidentally). Each of those people will take that money and spend it on food, electricity, clothes, and luxuries. All economic activity ultimately boils down to that.
Software is actually very special: it can be an economic good (sold by companies), or service, or given away for free as open-source by volunteers.
A few weeks ago I heard a message about there being 3 major forms of investment: private companies (stocks), governments (bonds) and property (banks).
All these want to show exponential, compounding growth, but that isn't what happens. Stocks follow a business cycle of expand-contract. Governments grow in proportion to tax base, which is related to population. Property has been increasing in price due to the ever-increasing population, but this is likely to plateau soon.
I fear the day when companies realise that they can make more money for their shareholders by destroying governments and property through starting a war. (c.f. United Fruit Company, but with private space rockets = missiles).
What's a good investment during a war? I believe that philanthropy is the solution.
Schindler invested in his List of employees, rather than some economic instrument. They looked after him during his later years. People will try to protect their own lives, and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway.
Social connections can continue to grow factorially, as the world gets more connected. I think that this is always good, because it promotes peace and understanding among the diverse cultures that exist. I don't know how that can be harnessed economically, and I dislike the advertising model used by private companies to monetise the network. Still, I think that encouraging social connection will create viral growth, and be beneficial to the world.
> The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.
But what part of the economy does this represents?
Most of the Internet run through ads, whose objective is to sell stuff.
The real fallacy is the knowledge economy here.
The value of Internet is that it sells physical stuff, not that it makes people smarter or happier.
At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor. The Industrial Revolution kicked off because we learned how to harness steam powered by wood and coal, and how long "this can go on" is going to depend on how well we can manage the transition off fossil fuels into renewables, not just on a 1:1 replacement basis, but catering to increased future demand.
Yes, but renewables would only give us a chance to see growth plateau without our civilization disintegrating. The point the article makes is the year over year multiple-percent economic growth is impossible, and the limiting factor becomes the number of atoms in the galaxy on a timescale shorter than human civilization's total history.
The other part is increasing knowledge, which allows us to use energy more efficiently. This could theoretically allow continued growth with the same amount of energy.
> At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor.
That's just a restatement of the Victorian/Marxist model of industrial labor.
The actual reality is that energy intensity of the OECD economies has been dropping for decades. As well attested in several sources such as, say, EIA data.
I'm a big fan of energy consumption BTW, and think it should increase significantly on a per capita basis, especially in poorer regions (though not from fossil sources). I just have been following this particular statistic for years and see that growth is not proportional to energy consumption.
Honestly, I can just change what I consider economic growth and the problem immediately goes away. I can make that graph do anything I want, just a matter of convincing enough people to go along with it.
Also:
>Why can't this go on?
>If this holds up, then 8200 years from now
Alright. Well how about we worry about that in 8100 years?
Ultimately an economy has to meet the fundamental physical needs of human beings (at least until we're all Singularitied into Hive Mind Cryostatsis Upload Tanks or equivalent). That's food, clothing, shelter, and the rest of it --- the base of Maslow's Pyramid.
More money can solve some distributional probems, but ultimately not the problem of insufficient production or supply.
The classic "toy economy" example of this is "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp", which looks at the use of cigarette-based currency within a World War II prisoner of war camp.
It's not a perfect analogue of a true economy (goods were largely supplied to the camp through the German authorities and Red Cross shipments, there was little actual production or labour). But what was illustrated were both price fluctuations as the currency (cigarettes) increased and decreased in prevalence, subject to an innate destructive demand (habitual smokers). And when the actual supply of goods (food and other items) dried up late in the war, no amount of currency could in fact make the camp economy function.
The point isn't that physical limits will only be a problem in 8200 years, it is to counter the defective idea that such growth can be sustained indefinitely. We don't have access to all the atoms in the galaxy, and can't even make use of most of the ones we have here on earth. We will hit a wall much, much sooner.
I'm surprised the author tackled this topic without mentioning World3 from The Limits to Growth or the heavy reliance of modern, developed societies on fossil fuels?
Thus it's a very interesting economical opinion, but without adding the physical aspects (energy consumption) into the reflection, I don't see any interesting result.
This! In a world where oil discovery, extraction and distribution was ever increasing, betting on a bigger energy pie in the future made sense. All of our macro-economic theories were developed under the naive assumption of an increasing fossil-fueled bonanza.
But in a world of no new oil fields and increasing costs for extraction, we no longer have the ever-growing pie to fund our future financial obligations. Credit looks risky and economic decline seems inevitable based on the energy availability alone.
That's not even mentioning the externalities of fossil fuel consumption: climate impacts, ocean acidification, mass extinction, etc. make these economic issues even harder. Or is it the other way around? Either way, "this can't go on" and fossil fuels are a central part of the equation.
Is it not interesting because there's nothing to argue? If the author focused on something from Limits to Growth, it would be possible to argue about whether the world was actually that way. As a logical argument based only on historical trends and physical impossibility, it's a much stronger argument than it would be were it possible to pick holes in the detail.
The world3 model is not really something you can use to make predictions- it’s got variables like “resources” with no units. And the conclusion you get from it was programmed into it.
I’d put my money on “steady state” or maybe “steady state but after a contraction due to climate change”, but not due to the world3 model.
"But I don't think [stagnation is] the most likely future."
Why not? Thomas Malthus predicted[1] that population would explode and collapse, but it didn't... and it looks like it's stabilizing.
The author should be wary of making the same mistake.
Come to think about it, a high tech and stable economy could be a very nice place to live. It could also be a totalitarian dystopia, depending on exactly how things play out. But one can at least imagine it working out well.
I think stagnation, or at least a change through successively smaller exponential regimes, should be the base case. I'm bullish on our future tech prospects and I know we have the entire universe from which to draw resources. But for all the real world cases of exponential growth, I think they are all limited.
And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.
- edge of punctuated equilibrium: we reach a Kardashev level and getting through it requires major breakthrough again - would produce a flattening increasing sigmoid zigzag
- slow catastrophe pending resource depletion outstripping rate of innovation or travel, very slowly reversing progress
- singularity immediately halting the progress - flat horizontal line - the Accelerando situation
- potential speciation or technological fragmentation where it stops to be useful to talk about a single progress
Some economic thoughts I always bring up in such discussions.
- There is much economic activity that comes from increasing inefficiency, think cost disease, this is a feature not a bug in a system straining to maintain full employment at all costs that is increasingly managed in a top-down manner
- queueing theory probably explains most monetary policy, as inflation gas pedal is feathered to make historically large debts look like speed bumps in the rear view they do the same to buying power but the inverse to assets, keeping this process slow enough but not too slow probably has something to do with avg human lifespan
- no empire lasts forever and usually exhaust their hinterland expansion efforts for various reasons ultimately debasing the currency to mfg more growth while the fundamental drivers are long gone, what is the hinterland for our empire and how much more of it can we exploit?
- During the Black Plague something like 1/3 of Europe died off, this gave rise to a new wealthy class of inheritors laying some foundations for the Renaissance, we are on the edge of a historic population decline as birth rates plunge across the world, will we see a similar effect, or does this only work when lives are cut short?
I would argue that the stagnation option is the most likely. After all, the exponential growth in technology and economics is made up of a series of smaller 'S' curves in individual technologies and industries. Each goes through an initial period of slow growth, followed by a rapid expansion, and then a slowing and leveling off of growth. We're already seeing this same pattern on a larger scale with population growth. Certainly a significant drop is possible. I suppose a 'singularity' is conceivable as well. But an S curve, with growth leveling off over time, seems like a good prior. (Of course, it won't be perfectly smooth. Zoomed in, it might end up feeling more like the sawtooth graph.)
The obvious counter argument is that economic growth is not measured in any physically stable form. If it was, then yes, there would be a limit.
But if we measure economic growth in the amount of money that moves across the globe in a defined time interval, there is not necessarily any limit.
The interesting question is whether we are willing to accept that physical goods will stop getting cheaper at some point. We seem to accept this when it comes to real estate so I assume we will also accept it when it comes to cars and computers some day.
"Economic growth" as measured by numbers moving around is just a proxy for what we really care about, which is increased availability of goods and services. Goods and services necessarily entail resource expenditure. If you're just moving numbers without any actual physical effect, you don't really have an "economy" to speak of.
Why? What's "silly" about it? I think the article does the best you can at predicting that far out, which is saying which futures are incompatible with each other. I find meaning in thinking about the future and I like seeing it be done well.
Science fiction would never exist with this attitude and we can read early science fiction and see that much of it was in fact quite correct. The speculation gets us to thinking about what is coming and what we can do to make it better.
As interesting as these topics are for an extended dinner table conversation, they actually move the focus away from the hard work necessarily to create "progress".
Yes, we could worry about running out of atoms in the universe sometime in the future, but why not put that effort in developing broad spectrum antivirals instead?
> There are likely fewer than 10^70 atoms in our galaxy, which we would not be able to travel beyond within the 8200-year time frame.
This offers an interesting upper bound on growth, being that our energy consumption couldn’t possibly outpace our ability to travel (at the speed of light) to obtain new sources of energy. (Of course assuming no FTL tech or and no way of generating energy without interacting with matter).
For example, consider we’ve learned to harness 100% of the sun’s output, and we’re looking to double what we can harness. The next nearest star is at least 4ly away, so the doubling time is at least 4 years. To double again, we now need to find two additional stars, each with their own travel limitations. This doesn’t include overhead, like the time it takes to build a dyson sphere or collect the raw materials to do so.
It seems the masses disagree with you, but personally I also find it objectionable. I shouldn't have to click through and increase someone's ad view count just to find out the article is completely irrelevant to me.
I believe the rule is against changing the title to make it more click-baity. (Or for any reason besides necessary shortening.) In this case the title of the original article was used unchanged.
What I learnt from the comments here is that this is a highly emotional subject and many people are making strong assertions without the strong evidence to back up their claims - on both sides.
If people from both sides could recommend books to read on this subject, I'd appreciate that more than the offhand comments.
Specifically: it would be great to reach a consensus on a few books that argue the case that the economy relies on finite and nearly exhausted resources, and a few books that argue that technological advances will greatly increase the capacity of economic growth.
What does "the economy" count, precisely, and furthermore why do we believe that it is likely that whatever "the economy" counts is going to continue to be an important thing to count?
I think tech era has redefined the way people value a company? It is not based on the P/e ratio anymore, people keep buying stocks from companies that are not even making money yet. Basically most people are betting their money based on trust that these tech companies are going viral one day.
Either way, i'm not an economist so maybe that's just a high level or me being dumb
Yes, exponential growth cannot continue forever. Fortunately exponential shrinkage of the population is baked into the world' populate pyramid. As for economics, we can still get wealthier on a per-capita basis by generating more and higher quality activity per-person, though at some point one does expect decreasing returns.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.
[+] [-] ttiurani|4 years ago|reply
"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."
If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.
[+] [-] jbay808|4 years ago|reply
The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.
[+] [-] worik|4 years ago|reply
Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.
It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2
[+] [-] austinl|4 years ago|reply
In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3].
With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
Everyone always thinks about supply limits, with some making dire Malthusian prophecies of what happens if we exhaust our resources with runaway growth. I've seen surprisingly little discussion of demand limits.
Other possible sources of demand limits include: satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more), diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diminishing impact of new technologies (compare the next CPU density node to jet aircraft or antibiotics), consolidation of functionality into fewer more versatile products (e.g. computers and smart phones eating TVs, tape decks, radios, book shelves, CD collections, etc.), cultural shifts toward simplicity, replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars), etc.
The eternal growth assumption assumes both infinite supply and infinite demand.
[+] [-] ronlobo|4 years ago|reply
Yes, growth in economy and population can go on and will likely result in an S-bend curve in the distant future.
[+] [-] iammisc|4 years ago|reply
The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.
Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters. The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe.
The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.
Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material, but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good. For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which do not even require material goods proportional with the economic value added.
In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand the economy due to a shortage of atoms.
[+] [-] travisjungroth|4 years ago|reply
You're going the wrong direction. The issue isn't fitting atoms into data. It's fitting data into atoms. You can give every atom a GUID, but you can't give every GUID an atom!
You don't have to put it in terms of economy. Our rate of growth for energy and data are unsustainable. Current growth would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range. So either we go beyond our needs for space and energy or growth slows down. Both of those are a big change from the status quo.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
Imagine a world in which there is just one person and the economy is just how big of a number this person can make on a computer.
If there is more than one person or more than one computer - you have less electrons at your disposal - because they're making up other people & computers respectively.
This is obviously very far into the future - but so is 8000 years!
Between 1960 and 1970 - global GDP increased by about ~$1T. That was about the same increase between 2018 and 2019 - even after adjusting for inflation.
That was a low-growth year for the last decade.
In the 1960s we had the entire space race and a lot of the modern computer (including the Internet).
If the trend continues, in another 60 years, we could accomplish about as much in a month. In another 120 years, about as much in a day. In another 120 years, about as much in an hour. Another 180 years, about as much in a minute, and in another 180 years, about as much in a second.
It's hard to argue you haven't hit the singularity at that point - and that's only 660 years away.
8000 years at this current growth rate would be truly unimaginably alien - and I'm not sure why everyone is convinced it could keep growing or would even need to.
If the population keeps growing at current rates - we'd have enough productivity for everyone to have a higher quality of life than Jeff Bezos does today in <700 years - at least, inflation adjusted, the average person on the planet would have >$15Bn in annual income.
[+] [-] skybrian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babelfish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|4 years ago|reply
It's not a fallacy as long as economic activity is a proxy for human activity, because humans consume to survive. In your sheet metal example, while it's the same physical aluminum throughout the process, you've hired a team of people (and expended a huge amount of energy, incidentally). Each of those people will take that money and spend it on food, electricity, clothes, and luxuries. All economic activity ultimately boils down to that.
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|4 years ago|reply
A few weeks ago I heard a message about there being 3 major forms of investment: private companies (stocks), governments (bonds) and property (banks).
All these want to show exponential, compounding growth, but that isn't what happens. Stocks follow a business cycle of expand-contract. Governments grow in proportion to tax base, which is related to population. Property has been increasing in price due to the ever-increasing population, but this is likely to plateau soon.
I fear the day when companies realise that they can make more money for their shareholders by destroying governments and property through starting a war. (c.f. United Fruit Company, but with private space rockets = missiles).
What's a good investment during a war? I believe that philanthropy is the solution.
Schindler invested in his List of employees, rather than some economic instrument. They looked after him during his later years. People will try to protect their own lives, and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway.
Social connections can continue to grow factorially, as the world gets more connected. I think that this is always good, because it promotes peace and understanding among the diverse cultures that exist. I don't know how that can be harnessed economically, and I dislike the advertising model used by private companies to monetise the network. Still, I think that encouraging social connection will create viral growth, and be beneficial to the world.
[+] [-] Kydlaw|4 years ago|reply
But what part of the economy does this represents? Most of the Internet run through ads, whose objective is to sell stuff. The real fallacy is the knowledge economy here. The value of Internet is that it sells physical stuff, not that it makes people smarter or happier.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
Money isn’t magical. You can’t create infinite value out of nothing.
[+] [-] Clewza313|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyjh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
That's just a restatement of the Victorian/Marxist model of industrial labor.
The actual reality is that energy intensity of the OECD economies has been dropping for decades. As well attested in several sources such as, say, EIA data.
I'm a big fan of energy consumption BTW, and think it should increase significantly on a per capita basis, especially in poorer regions (though not from fossil sources). I just have been following this particular statistic for years and see that growth is not proportional to energy consumption.
[+] [-] N00bN00b|4 years ago|reply
Also:
>Why can't this go on?
>If this holds up, then 8200 years from now
Alright. Well how about we worry about that in 8100 years?
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
More money can solve some distributional probems, but ultimately not the problem of insufficient production or supply.
The classic "toy economy" example of this is "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp", which looks at the use of cigarette-based currency within a World War II prisoner of war camp.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133
It's not a perfect analogue of a true economy (goods were largely supplied to the camp through the German authorities and Red Cross shipments, there was little actual production or labour). But what was illustrated were both price fluctuations as the currency (cigarettes) increased and decreased in prevalence, subject to an innate destructive demand (habitual smokers). And when the actual supply of goods (food and other items) dried up late in the war, no amount of currency could in fact make the camp economy function.
[+] [-] jeremyjh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kydlaw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perrygeo|4 years ago|reply
But in a world of no new oil fields and increasing costs for extraction, we no longer have the ever-growing pie to fund our future financial obligations. Credit looks risky and economic decline seems inevitable based on the energy availability alone.
That's not even mentioning the externalities of fossil fuel consumption: climate impacts, ocean acidification, mass extinction, etc. make these economic issues even harder. Or is it the other way around? Either way, "this can't go on" and fossil fuels are a central part of the equation.
[+] [-] randallsquared|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
I’d put my money on “steady state” or maybe “steady state but after a contraction due to climate change”, but not due to the world3 model.
[+] [-] rasengan0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|4 years ago|reply
Why not? Thomas Malthus predicted[1] that population would explode and collapse, but it didn't... and it looks like it's stabilizing.
The author should be wary of making the same mistake.
Come to think about it, a high tech and stable economy could be a very nice place to live. It could also be a totalitarian dystopia, depending on exactly how things play out. But one can at least imagine it working out well.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
[+] [-] gpsx|4 years ago|reply
And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.
[+] [-] AstralStorm|4 years ago|reply
- edge of punctuated equilibrium: we reach a Kardashev level and getting through it requires major breakthrough again - would produce a flattening increasing sigmoid zigzag
- slow catastrophe pending resource depletion outstripping rate of innovation or travel, very slowly reversing progress
- singularity immediately halting the progress - flat horizontal line - the Accelerando situation
- potential speciation or technological fragmentation where it stops to be useful to talk about a single progress
[+] [-] lootsauce|4 years ago|reply
- There is much economic activity that comes from increasing inefficiency, think cost disease, this is a feature not a bug in a system straining to maintain full employment at all costs that is increasingly managed in a top-down manner
- queueing theory probably explains most monetary policy, as inflation gas pedal is feathered to make historically large debts look like speed bumps in the rear view they do the same to buying power but the inverse to assets, keeping this process slow enough but not too slow probably has something to do with avg human lifespan
- no empire lasts forever and usually exhaust their hinterland expansion efforts for various reasons ultimately debasing the currency to mfg more growth while the fundamental drivers are long gone, what is the hinterland for our empire and how much more of it can we exploit?
- During the Black Plague something like 1/3 of Europe died off, this gave rise to a new wealthy class of inheritors laying some foundations for the Renaissance, we are on the edge of a historic population decline as birth rates plunge across the world, will we see a similar effect, or does this only work when lives are cut short?
[+] [-] tempestn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choeger|4 years ago|reply
But if we measure economic growth in the amount of money that moves across the globe in a defined time interval, there is not necessarily any limit.
The interesting question is whether we are willing to accept that physical goods will stop getting cheaper at some point. We seem to accept this when it comes to real estate so I assume we will also accept it when it comes to cars and computers some day.
[+] [-] dTal|4 years ago|reply
"Economic growth" as measured by numbers moving around is just a proxy for what we really care about, which is increased availability of goods and services. Goods and services necessarily entail resource expenditure. If you're just moving numbers without any actual physical effect, you don't really have an "economy" to speak of.
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travisjungroth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomLensman|4 years ago|reply
Yes, we could worry about running out of atoms in the universe sometime in the future, but why not put that effort in developing broad spectrum antivirals instead?
[+] [-] seventytwo|4 years ago|reply
This offers an interesting upper bound on growth, being that our energy consumption couldn’t possibly outpace our ability to travel (at the speed of light) to obtain new sources of energy. (Of course assuming no FTL tech or and no way of generating energy without interacting with matter).
For example, consider we’ve learned to harness 100% of the sun’s output, and we’re looking to double what we can harness. The next nearest star is at least 4ly away, so the doubling time is at least 4 years. To double again, we now need to find two additional stars, each with their own travel limitations. This doesn’t include overhead, like the time it takes to build a dyson sphere or collect the raw materials to do so.
[+] [-] iforgetmypass|4 years ago|reply
Edit:
> ... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempestn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|4 years ago|reply
If people from both sides could recommend books to read on this subject, I'd appreciate that more than the offhand comments.
Specifically: it would be great to reach a consensus on a few books that argue the case that the economy relies on finite and nearly exhausted resources, and a few books that argue that technological advances will greatly increase the capacity of economic growth.
[+] [-] jrm4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertwt7|4 years ago|reply
I think tech era has redefined the way people value a company? It is not based on the P/e ratio anymore, people keep buying stocks from companies that are not even making money yet. Basically most people are betting their money based on trust that these tech companies are going viral one day.
Either way, i'm not an economist so maybe that's just a high level or me being dumb
[+] [-] cryptonector|4 years ago|reply