My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all.
Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.
Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.
Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and education, but on everything as the price of living in society and are expected to make regular payments?
What is “the size of the economy” and how is it relevant over a thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without knowing this.
I think the claims in the piece are fairly robust to changes in the definition of economic growth. That is: for any reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth", etc., it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while, and (2) monstrously unlikely that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", can continue to grow at a few percent per year on average for, say, the next 10k years.
(Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of per atom in the galaxy as we currently have in total.)
So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something very radical would have to change. (We discover how to teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this galaxy. It turns out that humans really are immaterial souls that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of level of radical-ness.)
Hence, either the growth we are all used to will have to slow dramatically, or some other radical change will have to happen, or both.
None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would invalidate the argument.
(When people talk about economic growth, they never mean growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly. They never mean mere population increase, independent of the wealth of that population. That would be silly.)
> My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all.
I imagine that economists probably correct for inflation when putting this data together. I can't speak for these graphs 100%, but I think the real issue we're talking about here is not money or people but resources. Resources can be roughly mapped to people, with the confounding factor that each person consumes a different level of resources. As we approach the resource limits of our planet (and potentially nearby planets) that confounding factor becomes less relevant, because we eventually won't have enough resources available for anyone to consume more than they strictly require to stay alive.
> Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.
Except, it isn’t regulating to 2.2, is it? Many countries are already well below 2.2 and more are falling below that level each year. I assume the population implosion will have some affect on the economy.
> Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.
I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention recessions and outright deflations.
Came here to post exactly this. If it’s just about the amount of dollars in the world economy adjusted for inflation, then it’s just a graph of inflation and population growth.
Despite the “size of the economy,” skyrocketing, peoples’ lives are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.
At the end of the Roman Empire [0] a lot of technology was lost, a lot of Europe went backwards in terms of the progress we see. A lot of people died. There was even a climate catastrophe [1].
The Anglo-Saxons told stories of the Giants who built the aqueducts, because the technology for building them was lost.
If you looked at GDP for Europe, it dived. Completely collapsed. Trade between areas of the former Empire ceased. Barbarians looted cities and destroyed infrastructure.
It took us a few hundred years to recover. But we did recover.
So, couple of points:
1. I don't see this collapse in these smooth graphs with the lines going up and to the right of the last few thousand years.
2. Like most graphs that go up and to the right, it's actually a mess of ups and downs if you zoom in. Progress isn't smooth - it's lumpy and sometimes goes backwards. And it's fractal. There's plenty of space there for things to go down as well as up on a macro scale.
3. We're in an "up" bit of the graph. Both in terms of the last few hundred years, and (zooming out) the last few thousand. That doesn't mean the whole graph always goes up and to the right.
So yes, I agree with TFA that "this can't go on" if "this" is portrayed as a smooth progression from barbarism to TikTok. But I disagree that "this" has been smooth. There have been plenty of downs as well. And so "this" can go on if we agree that the value of "this" can go down as well as up, on a macro scale as well as micro.
[0] The Western Roman Empire at least. The Eastern half carried on for quite a while longer. And arguably the Western half turned itself into a church instead of collapsing. But the point remains.
Articles like the one that is the focus of this thread always interest me; even if they're incorrect in their main argument, I sometimes feel like a broader perspective is needed than the post world war era-present perspective that's usually the focus of discussions. Usually it seems they only go back to the 1980s or so, and even less so to the 1950s, and even less so to the 1930s. But it seems some complete history, going back throughout history, is needed?
Do you or anyone here on HN have some good, quantitative references for something like World GDP per capita over all of human history? Obviously that's difficult but it seems as if some rough estimates could be obtained.
I looked in the linked article but didn't see anything quite like what I was looking for. But I might have missed it.
This is the only thing I could find offhand that's what I'm looking for, but I wondered if there's something more peer-reviewed:
In raw numbers (which is what I assume you mean, given that you linked to a fertility chart), the world is already dominated by populations that are religious and wealth-poor, and this has been true on a global scale for the entirety of recorded history. You appear to just be saying that it will be business as usual?
In 1972, the Club of Rome published their seminal report, “Limits to Growth”, which basically concluded the same thing - this can’t go on - and put an outer limit of around 2100 as to when this system will hit the wall (my words).
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't really understand the author's focus on monetary value here. The question I would be asking is: how is the capability of the individual changing? There is little point in comparing the value of a journey by horse four hundred years ago to the same journey by aeroplane today. To reduce each to a numerical value feels like a conflation that makes this argument deeply flawed at minimum.
How do you even make a meaningful comparison to the "size of the economy"? What was the price of an air conditioner in 1850? Effectively infinite, it didn't exist. Clothing used to take hundreds of man-hours to make and clean and repair and it's almost disposable today. There's so much more like that. If the economy is "bigger" in some sense, it's not just that there's more activity going on, but there are also entirely new types of activities that weren't even possible before. It has nothing to do with the number of atoms available.
> [Growth is] faster than it can be for all that much longer (there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years).
This assume that growth has to involve atoms.
If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature superconductor, we don't necessarily need to use more stuff - in fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms that we needed earlier to build just one.
The argument isn't "economic growth has to be growth in number of atoms".
It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without anything happening that today's physics says is downright impossible, then at the end of that time humanity will (1) still be physically confined to this galaxy and (2) be so wealthy that we will have as much wealth as the whole present-day economy times the number of atoms at our disposal; hence either (a) that growth will slow dramatically, or (b) something will happen that today's physics says is downright impossible, or (c) some other change will happen that decouples us from our component atoms so radically that it's possible to have a whole present-day economy's worth of wealth per atom or more; none of these options can reasonably be described as "business as usual".
So you've made each thing of a single atom, and yet still used every atom.
10^86 fundamental particles in the entire observable universe is great, until you have 2% compound annual interest for ten millennia that's giving you 1.02^10,000 growth factor, which is 10^86.
I think economic growth is the wrong metric to be measuring as it is a number which we ourselves have created, and if we say today there are 10 trillion and tomorrow there are 1,000 trillion it doesn't REALLY change anything.
This doesn't map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are not finite, we can make them up, and have been.
Yes, our technological progress has been increasing exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known, what does that mean for us?
At that point, we'll be able to answer if we're operating in a simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?
> The world can't just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy).
Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.
There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking.
"Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet. There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking."
OP was written by the person who co-founded GiveWell[1] to make charitable giving more effective, and who while running Open Philanthropy oversaw lots of grants to things like innovation policy[2], scientific research[3], and land use reform[4].
Anyway, more broadly I think you present a false dilemma. You can both prepare for tail risks and also make important marginal and efficiency improvements.
Good point. Improving efficiency alone can bring increased consumption, not less. I think if we think of the world as regions it is easy to think of regional collapses while the world as a whole keeps growing. We, or at least me, have been lucky so far.
> It’s hard to make a simple chart of how fast science and technology are advancing, the same way we can make a chart for economic growth. But I think that if we could, it would present a broadly similar picture as the economic growth chart.
This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you'd have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up.
Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.
I think the 1880s person might have an easier time with smartphones.
Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation.
Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous).
Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing.
-
And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs.
What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which.
> We're used to the world economy growing a few percent per year. This has been the case for many generations.
This is a thing that has been puzzling me for a while. Isn't "growth by a few percent each year" already exponential?
E.g. if you had a constant economic growth of 1% per year, that would mean that this year's GDP would always be 101% of last year's GDP, which is exponential growth.
So even with a "constant" relative growth rate, the plot of "absolute" GDP over time would eventually become a hockey-stick curve - things would be expected to get weird at some point if the steepness of the curve crosses some threshold.
I don’t really understand the “atoms in the universe” argument. That has nothing to do with the size of an economy. We don’t need an atom to represent every “bit” of an economy.
Their point was that -- since there are a finite number of atoms in the universe-- it is a given that there exists some upper-bound on growth.
They are intentionally calling attention to that absurd extreme as a rhetoric device, not out of a belief that that's when we'll hit the wall. (It's a safe bet they believe will hit the wall much much much sooner.)
It’s a poor way of phrasing things, but think like this - there are certain physical inputs to the economy. Ores, power, water, stuff like that. That stuff is processed into stuff of greater value, and that adds value to the economy. We can also increase the value by extracting more raw inputs.
So let’s say the economy is growing exponentially, some percentage per year. Either we keep using more raw inputs, or we keep increasing the value of those inputs. That is where the 2% growth comes from.
If we don’t add new inputs, and exponential growth continues, the outputs will grow to such great value that the raw materials are relatively worthless. But that seems wrong to me - if the physical materials are worthless, someone could buy them all and corner the market and charge whatever they want. It can only happen if scarcity is completely eliminated.
Fundamentally, the "size of the economy" measures value creation, i.e. the conversion of low value atoms into higher value atoms.
The economy grows by either converting more atoms, or changing the value of the in/output.
Obviously "sustaining more people" requires proportionally more atoms, so exponentially growing population implies exponential economic growth.
What happens in the constant population assumption is an open question.
It could be that our rate of atom conversion also becomes constant/decline. We might become more efficient and grow the economy by increasing the value of the atoms we convert. The economy might cease growing altogether because we reach a technological plateau and need satiety.
But it's also possible that we'll decouple demand from the capitas, and find whole new ways and reasons to increase atom conversion.
I have always seen the fundamentals of "growth in the economy" as either more efficient use of energy (such as moving from open campfire to heath and chimney). But that begs the question "use to do what?" And that leads us to "human satisfaction". We measure all of this in an entirely anthropomorphic manner.
And so we could "grow" the economy by increasing human welfare - we could in theory keep the economy the same "size" but distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent's can talk of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day. Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth".
The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed, yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but maximising human utility
Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and education, health and politics that benefit all humankind
We will find more "growth" in socialism than capitalism and more happiness in democracy than totalitarianism
[+] [-] hyperhello|2 years ago|reply
Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.
Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.
Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and education, but on everything as the price of living in society and are expected to make regular payments?
What is “the size of the economy” and how is it relevant over a thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without knowing this.
[+] [-] gjm11|2 years ago|reply
(Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of per atom in the galaxy as we currently have in total.)
So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something very radical would have to change. (We discover how to teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this galaxy. It turns out that humans really are immaterial souls that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of level of radical-ness.)
Hence, either the growth we are all used to will have to slow dramatically, or some other radical change will have to happen, or both.
None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would invalidate the argument.
(When people talk about economic growth, they never mean growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly. They never mean mere population increase, independent of the wealth of that population. That would be silly.)
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|2 years ago|reply
This is false. He links to an explanation of what he means by it in the very first footnote. (That link points here, btw: https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth/ )
[+] [-] thomaslord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|2 years ago|reply
Except, it isn’t regulating to 2.2, is it? Many countries are already well below 2.2 and more are falling below that level each year. I assume the population implosion will have some affect on the economy.
[+] [-] NotYourLawyer|2 years ago|reply
This is just the worldwide version of GDP.
[+] [-] rewmie|2 years ago|reply
I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention recessions and outright deflations.
[+] [-] turnsout|2 years ago|reply
Despite the “size of the economy,” skyrocketing, peoples’ lives are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.
[+] [-] louwrentius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|2 years ago|reply
The Anglo-Saxons told stories of the Giants who built the aqueducts, because the technology for building them was lost.
If you looked at GDP for Europe, it dived. Completely collapsed. Trade between areas of the former Empire ceased. Barbarians looted cities and destroyed infrastructure.
It took us a few hundred years to recover. But we did recover.
So, couple of points:
1. I don't see this collapse in these smooth graphs with the lines going up and to the right of the last few thousand years.
2. Like most graphs that go up and to the right, it's actually a mess of ups and downs if you zoom in. Progress isn't smooth - it's lumpy and sometimes goes backwards. And it's fractal. There's plenty of space there for things to go down as well as up on a macro scale.
3. We're in an "up" bit of the graph. Both in terms of the last few hundred years, and (zooming out) the last few thousand. That doesn't mean the whole graph always goes up and to the right.
So yes, I agree with TFA that "this can't go on" if "this" is portrayed as a smooth progression from barbarism to TikTok. But I disagree that "this" has been smooth. There have been plenty of downs as well. And so "this" can go on if we agree that the value of "this" can go down as well as up, on a macro scale as well as micro.
[0] The Western Roman Empire at least. The Eastern half carried on for quite a while longer. And arguably the Western half turned itself into a church instead of collapsing. But the point remains.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
[+] [-] derbOac|2 years ago|reply
Do you or anyone here on HN have some good, quantitative references for something like World GDP per capita over all of human history? Obviously that's difficult but it seems as if some rough estimates could be obtained.
I looked in the linked article but didn't see anything quite like what I was looking for. But I might have missed it.
This is the only thing I could find offhand that's what I'm looking for, but I wondered if there's something more peer-reviewed:
https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf
I think the data in there is roughly consistent with the assumptions of the linked post but it's hard to find concrete estimates.
Then there's stuff like this which is what you're pointing out:
https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ355/choi/rankh.htm
It too is what I had always read and learned in history courses but without concrete economic figures.
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Note that below 2.1 on that chart, the human population shrinks.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertil...
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phs318u|2 years ago|reply
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
[+] [-] 3abiton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delocalized|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konschubert|2 years ago|reply
This assume that growth has to involve atoms.
If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature superconductor, we don't necessarily need to use more stuff - in fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms that we needed earlier to build just one.
That is growth, without using more atoms.
[+] [-] gjm11|2 years ago|reply
It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without anything happening that today's physics says is downright impossible, then at the end of that time humanity will (1) still be physically confined to this galaxy and (2) be so wealthy that we will have as much wealth as the whole present-day economy times the number of atoms at our disposal; hence either (a) that growth will slow dramatically, or (b) something will happen that today's physics says is downright impossible, or (c) some other change will happen that decouples us from our component atoms so radically that it's possible to have a whole present-day economy's worth of wealth per atom or more; none of these options can reasonably be described as "business as usual".
[+] [-] ben_w|2 years ago|reply
10^86 fundamental particles in the entire observable universe is great, until you have 2% compound annual interest for ten millennia that's giving you 1.02^10,000 growth factor, which is 10^86.
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|2 years ago|reply
This doesn't map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are not finite, we can make them up, and have been.
Yes, our technological progress has been increasing exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known, what does that mean for us?
At that point, we'll be able to answer if we're operating in a simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?
[+] [-] akira2501|2 years ago|reply
Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.
There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking.
[+] [-] erwald|2 years ago|reply
OP was written by the person who co-founded GiveWell[1] to make charitable giving more effective, and who while running Open Philanthropy oversaw lots of grants to things like innovation policy[2], scientific research[3], and land use reform[4].
Anyway, more broadly I think you present a false dilemma. You can both prepare for tail risks and also make important marginal and efficiency improvements.
[1] https://www.givewell.org/ [2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/innovation-policy/ [3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/ [4] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/land-use-reform/
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mejutoco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walleeee|2 years ago|reply
This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you'd have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up.
Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.
[+] [-] ben_w|2 years ago|reply
Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation.
Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous).
Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing.
-
And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs.
What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which.
GM food is pretty significant, too.
[+] [-] ziknard|2 years ago|reply
I think he is insane. So is anyone who is in favour of perpetual growth in a finite environment.
Apparently, our political leaders are also in favor of perpetual growth. So is the media.
They should all be locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomcam|2 years ago|reply
Now I’m getting nervous
/s
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
This is a thing that has been puzzling me for a while. Isn't "growth by a few percent each year" already exponential?
E.g. if you had a constant economic growth of 1% per year, that would mean that this year's GDP would always be 101% of last year's GDP, which is exponential growth.
So even with a "constant" relative growth rate, the plot of "absolute" GDP over time would eventually become a hockey-stick curve - things would be expected to get weird at some point if the steepness of the curve crosses some threshold.
[+] [-] rco8786|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvbissell|2 years ago|reply
They are intentionally calling attention to that absurd extreme as a rhetoric device, not out of a belief that that's when we'll hit the wall. (It's a safe bet they believe will hit the wall much much much sooner.)
[+] [-] swid|2 years ago|reply
So let’s say the economy is growing exponentially, some percentage per year. Either we keep using more raw inputs, or we keep increasing the value of those inputs. That is where the 2% growth comes from.
If we don’t add new inputs, and exponential growth continues, the outputs will grow to such great value that the raw materials are relatively worthless. But that seems wrong to me - if the physical materials are worthless, someone could buy them all and corner the market and charge whatever they want. It can only happen if scarcity is completely eliminated.
[+] [-] bloaf|2 years ago|reply
The economy grows by either converting more atoms, or changing the value of the in/output.
Obviously "sustaining more people" requires proportionally more atoms, so exponentially growing population implies exponential economic growth.
What happens in the constant population assumption is an open question.
It could be that our rate of atom conversion also becomes constant/decline. We might become more efficient and grow the economy by increasing the value of the atoms we convert. The economy might cease growing altogether because we reach a technological plateau and need satiety.
But it's also possible that we'll decouple demand from the capitas, and find whole new ways and reasons to increase atom conversion.
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwaltrip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|2 years ago|reply
And so we could "grow" the economy by increasing human welfare - we could in theory keep the economy the same "size" but distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent's can talk of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day. Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth".
The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed, yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but maximising human utility
Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and education, health and politics that benefit all humankind
We will find more "growth" in socialism than capitalism and more happiness in democracy than totalitarianism
[+] [-] Vt71fcAqt7|2 years ago|reply
The amount lost by America (if at all) is not equal to the Amount gained by China. So it is not re-distribution.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziknard|2 years ago|reply
It is delusional to think otherwise. We need to act as if this is our only home.
[+] [-] xwowsersx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepangolino|2 years ago|reply
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