What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for.
Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth".
Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful.
This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.
Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."
"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."
That sums up his position.
He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years?
The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.
I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]
Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?
Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.
> The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.
The answer is now. The 2030s is the decade of peak everything. Production of everything has been growing exponentially, but at a cost that is growing fraster.
From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.
This ignores Services entirely, which are part of GDP..
If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive
Is not growth inevitable? I hear criticisms of it but is it not what happens automatically when there is competition for resources?
I can't really see what the alternative would be. I mean, ideally if you could just agree with everyone in the entire world that no one should strive for something better, we could stay where we are, but reaching such agreement seems impossible.
And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes.
The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
Now imagine that everyone's retirement is tied to the child's growth in height only and the people with most power and influence benefit the most from every additional inch of height.
degrowth is a movement currently and a worthy one.
Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want.
Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead of owning a 3d printer, the neighborhood tool-shed was a warehouse with bikes, tools, a maker space, cleaning supplies, perhaps even ATVs, and riding lawnmowers, etc.
Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once.
You might need an HOA-type fee to pay people to take care of the equipment, etc.
Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact.
Nice to haves:
- Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage.
- Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then. I haven't known a neighbor since the 90s, unless it was from work, school, or a roommate back in college. It might be nice to have potlucks, or cooks from the neighborhood could show off their talents maybe with a tip-hat.
Perhaps some people don't cook much at all, and just prepare quick dinners in the commercial kitchen space for their family, and decide they don't even need much in terms of appliances in their kitchen.
My point is we've been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't and there was a time when you needed something you'd borrow or trade with a neighbor.
It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.
"...we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc." This is literally what the criticized growth-focused system is doing: from recycling waste into new products to carbon-capture technology, sustainable polymers and much more, made and done with private equity.
I feel like this could have been a lot better if it were more concrete.
What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
- Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income?
- At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer?
- A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer?
Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
> The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare.
> The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each
family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work).
The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh.
> What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption.
It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
Daly makes the case that conventional economics deals with "intermediate" means and ends, such as food production and health/leisure; and that we should instead be more concerned with "ultimate" means and ends.
He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now?
Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
> Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily
The growth talked about in the board rooms is exactly that. More output of commercial goods, more sell, need more people buying these even if it's unnecessary for better life, popup more kids increase population so that sells will always increase, create more wealth for the already billionaires while keeping the minimum wage lowest possible, consume, consume more and more. Anything less than that is a disaster.
None of the growth ever talkes about the ecological collapse it's creating, never will. It's about quarterly report even if it complete destroys the future of all in next decade.
Efficiency isn't a silver bullet. There's a limit to free gains from efficiency - you can't go past 100% efficiency, and even at 100% efficiency, you still need to spend energy to do things. It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.
And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.
It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.
The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.
Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.
sure the end result (microprocessor) don't use too much resources, but the process that produces it does. you can keep improving but a point you reach physical and economist limit that you just can't outrun.
the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?
> (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input
It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.
People here also can calculate Pearson's coefficient between GDP and energy usage and understand by themselves that this is bullshit and that energy efficiency is less than minor in the grand scheme of things.
And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase.
I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...
And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.
under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy.
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
Growth cannot continue forever without either changing the resource landscape (itrasolar / multi-planet / interstellar) OR exhausting resources.
Resource contention... usually wars get fought over that. Sometimes regional, increasingly global, and increasingly against the destruction of the commons. As we see with the rise in energy accumulating in the global weather systems due to changes to the composition of our atmosphere by unchecked industrial side effects and land use in previously ecologically carbon sink regions.
part of the problem is that we're not just moving forward, we're also moving backwards at the same time. as populations get bigger and bigger materials become ever more scarce, as does land (at the least the amount of land that voters are willing to allow to develop). Increasing regulations continue to lower the standard of living: this is especially harmful to shelter needs. so we need growth, just to maintain our standard living, nevermind improve it. What really needs to happen is to deprioritize growth and prioritize standard of living instead by focusing on the cost of shelter, food, water and by extension, transportation, medical insurance and so called "education".
Any helpful new technology, including medicine, is growth. Any advancement of human knowledge is growth. Any durable improvements (pyramids, bridges) are growth. Cultural advancements (art, politics, religion) are growth.
Many of these things are imperfectly represented in GDP growth. GDP also has many other known problems, like calling growth in consumption "growth" without really having a way to determine if it's really a good thing or not.
But we don't want to go to a zero-growth economy where we are just comfortably existing without passing anything to the next generation.
Economic growth does not need to be extractive, nor is it zero sum. A vaccine is worth more than the sum of its parts. So is a bridge.
We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains.
The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.
Serious egyptologists correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Egypt not change at all between 3000 B.C and the Bronze Age collapse almost 1000 years later? Is that where we're headed: perpetual stagnation?
[+] [-] neonate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strongpigeon|3 years ago|reply
Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth".
Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.
Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."
"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."
That sums up his position.
He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources? Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
[3] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
[+] [-] abetusk|3 years ago|reply
I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]
Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?
Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.
[0] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Energy-Discussion.html
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms.
Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.
[+] [-] Schroedingersat|3 years ago|reply
From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive
[+] [-] Pokepokalypse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mongol|3 years ago|reply
And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|3 years ago|reply
Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes.
The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
[+] [-] jstx1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|3 years ago|reply
Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want.
Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead of owning a 3d printer, the neighborhood tool-shed was a warehouse with bikes, tools, a maker space, cleaning supplies, perhaps even ATVs, and riding lawnmowers, etc.
Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once.
You might need an HOA-type fee to pay people to take care of the equipment, etc.
Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact.
Nice to haves:
- Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage.
- Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then. I haven't known a neighbor since the 90s, unless it was from work, school, or a roommate back in college. It might be nice to have potlucks, or cooks from the neighborhood could show off their talents maybe with a tip-hat.
Perhaps some people don't cook much at all, and just prepare quick dinners in the commercial kitchen space for their family, and decide they don't even need much in terms of appliances in their kitchen.
My point is we've been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't and there was a time when you needed something you'd borrow or trade with a neighbor.
[+] [-] neojebfkekeej|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caramelcustard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] abeppu|3 years ago|reply
What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
- Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income?
- At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer?
- A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer?
Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
[+] [-] chii|3 years ago|reply
family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work).
The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh.
> What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption.
It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
[+] [-] unbalancedevh|3 years ago|reply
He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
[+] [-] ekkeke|3 years ago|reply
Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
[+] [-] birksherty|3 years ago|reply
The growth talked about in the board rooms is exactly that. More output of commercial goods, more sell, need more people buying these even if it's unnecessary for better life, popup more kids increase population so that sells will always increase, create more wealth for the already billionaires while keeping the minimum wage lowest possible, consume, consume more and more. Anything less than that is a disaster.
None of the growth ever talkes about the ecological collapse it's creating, never will. It's about quarterly report even if it complete destroys the future of all in next decade.
[+] [-] Apes|3 years ago|reply
And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.
It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.
The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.
Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gryn|3 years ago|reply
the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
[+] [-] uhuruity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|3 years ago|reply
It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.
[+] [-] orwin|3 years ago|reply
And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase. I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...
And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.
[+] [-] djenendik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chobeat|3 years ago|reply
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
[+] [-] ttgurney|3 years ago|reply
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Quotes
[+] [-] mjevans|3 years ago|reply
Resource contention... usually wars get fought over that. Sometimes regional, increasingly global, and increasingly against the destruction of the commons. As we see with the rise in energy accumulating in the global weather systems due to changes to the composition of our atmosphere by unchecked industrial side effects and land use in previously ecologically carbon sink regions.
[+] [-] uoaei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw8383833jj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|3 years ago|reply
Any helpful new technology, including medicine, is growth. Any advancement of human knowledge is growth. Any durable improvements (pyramids, bridges) are growth. Cultural advancements (art, politics, religion) are growth.
Many of these things are imperfectly represented in GDP growth. GDP also has many other known problems, like calling growth in consumption "growth" without really having a way to determine if it's really a good thing or not.
But we don't want to go to a zero-growth economy where we are just comfortably existing without passing anything to the next generation.
[+] [-] xxpor|3 years ago|reply
Mr. Daly hasn't been to the Bay Area recently then, I see.
[+] [-] JauntTrooper|3 years ago|reply
We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains.
The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.
[+] [-] ph4|3 years ago|reply
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/06-herman-dal...
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelastgallon|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
[+] [-] narrator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arisAlexis|3 years ago|reply