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I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good. Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are amo

• l_camacho 9y ago
  That's circular economy at the purest level. More and more I think we need to degrow. It's not a question of starting the green economy. That should had happen years before now. We were informed by environmentalist about the limits of growth. Now we need to act fast on reducing unnecessary consumption and also unethical/unsustainable productivity.
  • 49para 9y ago
    'degrow' == collapse The monetary system is based on debt, debt requires growth to service the interest, growth, at some point, is unsustainable. Collapse occurs at the point of 0.0 growth, i.e. the top of the curve. The question is : does growth stop voluntarily or when one of the feedstocks of growth reach a limit ? I find it odd that the people most associated with 'green' thinking, climate change etc, are the ones that seem to want growth in other areas, i.e. immigration to offset natural western population decline. I read comments from leftward progressives that they want to take Canada's population to 100m from 35m, given Canadian's comsume the most energy per capita, that sounds insane.
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    Very hard do to. Chinese population envy Americans their consumerist lifestyle. Various developing countries watch Hollywood movies and TV serials want some of that. Even if Americans led by example, that kind of economically wasteful lifestyle has become so associated with success it would take a long, long time to change culture.
• leephillips 9y ago
  I think the idea of "external wealth" is interesting. But how are banks culprits here? Are they forcing you to borrow money? Should they charge no interest so your business doesn't need to grow? Also, I don't follow. You need revenue to pay the interest (and principle), not constant growth.
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    I'm repeating that argumentation after Marcin Popkiewicz, a Polish climate expert. He wrote a few fat books about it. No one forces you to take bank loans, but banks definitely foster geometric growth. They want geometric returns on investment. If you don't have constant business growth, borrowing money from bank is losing money. I don't know what would be the right answer. I know what human population is growing at a geometric rate, and the planet is finite in size. If a colony of bacteria doubles in size every 30 minutes, and it fully covers a petri dish at 12:00 am, the dish would be half covered at 11:30. 25% covered at 11:00. My point is that when there's geometric population growth, saying "oh, we still have 75% of the planet left" is just stupid. At that point the time is almost up. Also, countries have a geopolitical interest to have as high population as possible, to have a manpower advantage over neighbors. This is why birth control - probably necessary at some point if the planet is finite - is bloody unlikely to happen. It would need to be introduced simultaneously in all countries. It reminds me of the story of Europeans buying African slaves at African shore. If there was a kingdom which refused selling slaves, they went to your neighbors and sold them rifles.
    • leephillips 9y ago
      I'm no economist, but: If I borrow from a bank to buy a hotdog stand, and the payback is two years at $500/month, I need to earn $500/month + other expenses + profit every month for two years (or default and give the bank the stand, which is the collateral). I don't need to grow. The bank gets its interest, and I get an income from my business. Win-win. Where is "growth" required?
      • yayana 9y ago
        Your hot dog stand was the growth and now they need a 10% bigger next investment for their return on it. They need you to have a competitor with a better stand so they can loan you both money or they need prices to have gone up thanks to other Banks finding speculations and you wanting to sell. Otherwise, they now have 10% more money they need to invest and less of a solution than 2 years ago.
• mikeash 9y ago
  I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that growth itself is the problem and should be eliminated. We should strive for sustainable growth, not stasis. The story of the African tribe with external wealth is nice, but doesn't seem like a good goal. What happens when some change in the climate (which can happen even without human intervention) wipes out a plant they rely on, or a long drought shrinks their food supply by half for a couple of years? Heck, what happens when somebody gets cancer, or cataracts, or an abscessed tooth?
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    Then build a bigger planet.
    • pc86 9y ago
      This is unnecessarily argumentative and intentionally misses the point of the response.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      Growth does not necessarily need more planet. The same amount of natural resources produces a lot more wealth today than it did a thousand years ago. The style and amount of growth we've seen in the past couple of centuries uses up more and more, but that doesn't have to be the only way.
      • b0rsuk 9y ago
        It doesn't have to be that way ? What else could people compete for ? Facebook likes ? So far, almost all wealth is material in nature. As for digital rewards, data-centers and other computer infrastructure needs constant input of energy. Human population is growing, humans love to copulate and take pride in having children. We need bigger and bigger internets for bigger facebooks.
• dragontamer 9y ago
  > He argued the tribe (sorry I don't remember its name) can fully sustain itself by taking things from nature around it. All their wealth is external. They possess little, but whenever they have a need for something - food, medicine, water, paint, clothes, containers(...) they go to a forest, harvest a specific plant and get it IMO, one of the biggest myths is the myth of the primitive but efficient savage. Its almost always a "obscure tribesman" of some kind, be it a native American, or maybe an African tribesman... but the myth is always the same. Apply the "Mythical Efficient Tribesman" to real life, and things start to go awry. The mythical Tribesman poops in the river when he needs to use the bathroom for example... if a city of 1-million+ people poop in the river however, it creates contamination and disease... and probably isn't good for the general environment either. IIRC, the most efficient places on earth, as far as lowest environmental impacts, are generally cities. Cities with central sanitation to clean up sewage BEFORE it enters rivers for example. ---------------- A sustainable economy is about closing the loop, keeping track of trash and doing something about it. Landfills and recycling centers are actually hugely efficient in the USA, especially some materials like Aluminum. Waste Disposal centers have huge bins for a wide variety of items: textiles, metals, electronics, plastics, paper, oil, bio-wastes... each of which can be efficiently turned into new products. For a lot of people, simply being aware of your local waste disposal center and their services would greatly improve your environmentalism. Don't throw away old Jeans, send them to the "textile" center to be recycled. Purchase "Plastic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5", but not Plastic 6 (which is harder to recycle and very few centers actually recycle it). Etc. etc. Know what your city can offer and use their services. You don't need to run your own compost pile, just send your leaves / eggs / food waste to the landfill for it to be composted into mulch. In my experience: rural areas of the USA have very few waste disposal services... and may even be running local "septic tanks" as their primary means of treating sewage. But even these more primitive means of sewage treatment are far superior to "primitive tribesmen" who resort to effectively dumping their sewage untreated in a river.
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    Those "mythical tribesmen" produce no plastic or other materials which take very long to decompose. Poop, bone, leather, wood re-enter the system very quickly.
• pps43 9y ago
  5% interest rate does not imply 5% business growth. Interest rate simply reflects the fact that people prefer $1 right now to $1 a year later. In this context banks are time machines, moving money through time (glossing over credit risk, inflation, and other complexities).
  • kpil 9y ago
    The loan market is basically a consequence of our mortality.. .
  • valuearb 9y ago
    Right, and maybe the best way to describe it is if your business borrows at 5%, it has to earn more than 5% on that borrowed money. It has little to do with growth, and everything to do with profit margin. For example, lets say you want to start a business is investing in bonds. You work for wall street and are great at picking high yield bonds that aren't as risky as they look. You average a 7% return over time, which includes losses on your mistakes. But you have no money to invest to start the business, so you approach a bank and show them your long term results. The bank sees you as a good risk and offers to loan you $10M at 5% a year, so you can gross $700k a year, pay the bank $500k, and net $200k. But if the bank ever raises your rate to 7%, you are then out of business.
• gaius 9y ago
  Banks are among the biggest culprits. Oh come on. There were no investment banks in Soviet Russia yet the Soviets drove economic growth as hard as they could. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. So what? You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen and write a book. What is the economic value? Well it could be zero, or negative because you've wasted perfectly good paper and the time of everyone who read it. Or it could be billions because it's the next Harry Potter. But the raw materials consumed in the process are the same either way.
  • FooHentai 9y ago
    >You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen and write a book. What is the economic value? Well it could be zero, or negative because you've wasted perfectly good paper and the time of everyone who read it. Or it could be billions because it's the next Harry Potter. Isn't that dependent on the economic school of thought you subscribe to? While that may generate economic activity, unless you're exporting it won't generate economic growth, as no new tangible value has been realized. As per the current trope of selling houses to each other at ever-increasing prices. A billion dollars flowing from thousands of people to a few, all within a single economy, doesn't seem like growth, it just seems like activity. Now, foreign market sales or flogging off the international film rights to said book - That's growth.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Your book example, among other flaws, confuses revenue generation with true wealth creation. Consider an economy in which everyone is writing Harry Potters. What's the value? Or, if that strikes you as too contrived, iPhone apps or YC starups. What is wealth? Revenue? Value? Cost? Are there no limits? Hard limits? Based on what?
• avip 9y ago
  The self-sufficient tribe is romantic, and it worked once upon a time. I believe we're now 1-2 orders of magnitude away (in headcount) from the possibility of returning to the "sustainable tribe" stage.
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    So if population keeps growing, and the planet remains finite, the result will be scarcity of resources. Scarcity of resources produces wars.
    • avip 9y ago
      "Will be"? That's the current situation. Are people not aware of that?
  • lostmsu 9y ago
    Nothing is sustainable in the Universe. Heat death seems to be inevitable.
    • maxerickson 9y ago
      We'd be in pretty good shape if heat death was the obvious catastrophic horizon.
• valuearb 9y ago
  Modern capitalism can be easily sustainable. You just have to do two things. 1) Legislate frameworks for market based solutions to externalities i.e. tragedies of the commons such as air pollution, water quality, etc. Cap and trade would be one framework for addressing CO2. 2) Eliminate mercantilism, where government policies are used to interfere in market forces, usually for the benefit of wealthy business owners. I.e no more subsidies, of any business, no more "incentives" to overbuild, overproduce, etc. Boom done. For those of you who say yea, but it's impossible that those 2 things could ever be legislated successfully, I say, yea, your right. But that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge the solution. And for those of you who say, but capitalism bad! I say, yea but those two things are just as impossible to implement under socialism, communism, marxism or any other system you can devise. In reality, the only solution is to have a Julius Caesar conquer the known world, declare himself or herself dictator for life, and then say, you idiots, we need to have a sustainable planet, and just implement those changes by edict. Unfortunately the new Caesar would then drop by the senate for a session, and senators backed by the dozen biggest corporate welfare recipients would stab him or her to death. And the senate would immediately repeal the new laws.
  • avip 9y ago
    So TLDR "X can easily become Y, you just have to fulfil 2 impossible conditions A and B"
  • ams6110 9y ago
    You would just see 2) disguised as 1). How much pollution is OK? What is the market price for a pound of carbon in the air or part-per-billion of mercury in waste water? Those decisions would be made by regulators, meaning there would be influence-peddling.
  • FooHentai 9y ago
    >For those of you who say yea, but it's impossible that those 2 things could ever be legislated successfully, I say, yea, your right. But that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge the solution. And for those of you who say, but capitalism bad! I say, yea but those two things are just as impossible to implement under socialism, communism, marxism or any other system you can devise. It is curious to argue that something is a solution, and also assert that it is impossible.
• lkrubner 9y ago
  As Robert Kennedy said in 1968: Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert-kennedy-gdp https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
• jeffdavis 9y ago
  "the tribe can fully sustain itself" That's called a subsistence economy. It has downsides, such as very high rates of violence and other preventable deaths (like death during childbirth). One could imagine trying to solve these problems, but all the solutions sound more like dystopia rather than utopia. In any case, there is a fair amount of unsettled land. You can probably buy some or even squat, and try to make your own tribe.
• bitL 9y ago
  Exponential growth is a pipe dream sustained only by exponential inflation and destroying Earth. Economies have overcapacity, with ML coming into play it's going to be evident everywhere. We will need a big political change; I hope people won't go with the traditional solution - war, genocide etc. Technology now enabled a few people to literally own the whole planet, so while they were playing this pointless domination game, environment suffered and might never fully recover.
• grondilu 9y ago
  > Banks are among the biggest culprits. Wow. From an article about insects you arrived to banks in three sentences. Kind of impressive.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
  How about reliable birth control and treatments for childhood diseases? Without those 2 things, women in the tribe are basically consigned to being pregnant and rearing a lot of children hoping some of them survive. That is the dark side of going back to some mythic close to nature society. It will make inequality many times worse than it is now.
• taw55 9y ago
  A problem that often gets overlooked are the (geo) political ramifications of differences in economic output. I’m not sure if this is an existing hypothesis, but it seems evident to me. If one actor grabs the bigger share of economic growth that puts it in a position of power over others. Nation states that can grow their population, resource extraction and have export surplus can use those things to exert political power over others. This means that states have a strong incentive for growth. Likewise, if a population is dependent on money for their necessities, and there exists a limited stock of it, those who command a large fraction of it have defacto leverage over those with little.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Take a look at William Ophuls and, maybe, Thomas Homer-Dixon.