19 ms·

Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

318 points by utternerd 7y ago

eutropia 7y ago
I think the subtext here is obvious to people on HN, but isn't this because so much value is generated using electrons on increasingly efficient computer systems?
- sp332 7y ago
  That doesn't explain crop tonnage going up while fertilizer and water use are going down.
  - atonse 7y ago
    Is this partly due to things like drip irrigation?
  - novok 7y ago
    A hypothetical example is drones going through a field and manually picking out weeds, increasing yield with the same amount of resources. Similarly you can get fine grained ‘crop analytics’ through drones scanning the field and acting in response.
    - sachdevap 7y ago
      And on what scale is this actually happening?
      - azernik 7y ago
        Very large scale, just not in the exact form GP is describing; instead, farmers drop stationary internet-connected sensors all over their fields, their sampling equipment GPS-tags results from every core sample, and tractors have computer-controlled equipment to feed location and quantity information to chemical dispensers. See e.g. https://home.agrian.com/what-we-do/ https://home.agrian.com/what-we-do/ for a company that manages this process.
        sachdevap 7y ago
        I am not at all denying the benefits of technology, or that companies are working in it, but I am skeptical of how widespread it is right now. Therefore, I would want to see some numbers to verify such a claim.
        azernik 7y ago
        I know that there is a profitable company whose people I have talked with, whose business is built on managing the data involved.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        I don't have any figures citations since my knowledge comes from when I used to hang out on Precision Agriculture forums, but it's common and getting more so. As drones get less expensive, it's easy to sit in your den and fly over the fields looking for the areas where you should go out and spray some more, or drive over in your UTV and take a closer look at that "weird spot" on the "back 80." Farmers are very aware of the benefits of technology (why else would you spend half a million $ on a combine?) and will take it up if they see a benefit.
        sachdevap 7y ago
        I am sure they are. But a leap from combines to decentralized sensing using drones is a big one, and I'd want to see some numbers to verify this.
        HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        Re-reading the post, it seems that he and I might be talking about different things. I'm referring to farmers using remote controlled drones with cameras to check the state of their crops/fields without having to drive over hundreds of acres. That's an actual thing and is quite common. OP seems to be talking about some kind of automated drone weeding (or just phrased what he meant poorly).
      - novok 7y ago
        You should go google and research the numbers yourself.
        sachdevap 7y ago
        Thank you for the advice!
  - doctorpangloss 7y ago
    Did it occur to you that, like ordinary consumer products, industrial products also oversell their efficacy? There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields. If the question is, how does crop tonnage go up without water and fertilizer use, maybe the answer really is a computer helped people plan better and be less wasteful. Or all the least efficient farmers were bankrupted out of the market.
    - wil421 7y ago
      Do you have any sources for your claims? I saw the article about the pesticide on HN or reddit but not anything else you claim.
      - Circuits 7y ago
        I can give some credence to the claim. I work for TeeJet a subset of Spray Systems and we design and manufacture application technology for the AG industry: "At TeeJet Technologies our single focus is on application technology. Our company and our products have been part of agricultural applications since the first crop protection products came onto the market in the 1940's. Our control systems date back to some of the earliest in-field uses of electronics in agriculture. This experience in the fields of spraying, fertilizing, and seeding means nobody is better suited to provide quality products and technical solutions for your business."
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      Corn yields have been going up a bit more than 1.5 bushels per acre since hybrid breeding started in the 1930's going from a steady ~25 bu/acre to >170/acre today. Farmers haven't just been adding a bit more fertilizer and water every year, and it has been going on long before computers. Many factors go into it: soil management with tilling practices and fertilizers, pest and weed management, improvements in irrigation and drainage, better harvesters which leave less on the ground, but very much most importantly, plant genetics.
      - shawn-butler 7y ago
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Technological advances in agriculture would presumably explain it, many of which are probably computer driven (precision agriculture, data-driven agriculture being two examples).
  - danans 7y ago
    Much more precise usage of water/fertilizer to optimize yield/input can be enabled by computation and data.
    - kevan 7y ago
      Precision Agriculture[1] is the term for anyone looking to learn more. Even small farms now track all inputs/outputs on every acre they farm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture
      - kube-system 7y ago
        The Land O Lakes CEO was showing this off on 60 minutes just this past week. Check out 5:22 in the video here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/land-olakes-ceo-beth-ford-and-the-changing-landscape-of-america-farms-60-minutes-2019-10-06/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/land-olakes-ceo-beth-ford-and-t...
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    CO2 has helped crop yields.
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    What about an increase in organic farming? Certified organic crops sell for higher prices, and all the big shops I see in California sell a lot of that. I'm under the impression that organic farms don't use petroleum derived fertilizers.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
    Glyphosate. Glyphosate, with GMO crops or without, means you don't need to till your land. It's enabled a huge fraction of productive acreage to become no-till or low-till, which preserves soil nutrients, aids soil water absorption, reduces agricultural runoff, improves cover-cropping, and more. There are a variety of farming practices that contribute to the efficiency of agriculture, but no-till is absolutely central. The late 90s through early oughts saw big increases in no-till acreage, up to ~20% of all land by 2002, precisely when fertilizer inputs started to decline. It sits between 40-50% now.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  No, it's because these things have been replaced by plastics.
  - eutropia 7y ago
    At least partially I'm sure that's the case, however it looks like we're approaching the apex of that trend as well: TFA: >> The growth in plastic consumption has slowed down greatly, to less than 2 percent per year between 2009 and 2015. This is almost 14 percent slower than GDP growth over the same period. So while America is not yet post-peak in its use of plastic, it's quickly closing in on this milestone. It will be interesting to see what our other material trends do once we do hit peak plastic, if we shift to using more paper and aluminum as people push back against plastics for their various drawbacks.
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      That's irrelevant because plastics are not produced domestically in the US. But the international production explains the decreased consumption of those other raw materials. This article is misleading horse shit.
sime 7y ago
The a16z podcast recently had an interesting episode featuring the author of this article. It discussed the divergence of the GDP + energy usage curves as well as some of the other stuff in his book. https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-technology-progress-more-from-less/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-techn...
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
Does this relate to the buyback-debt cycle of companies? [0] [0]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasingly-using-debt-to-repurchase-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin...
throwawaysea 7y ago
Is this simply because manufacturing is offshore?
- todipa 7y ago
  Exactly. The primary inputs analyzed here are manufacturing inputs and if manufacturing has been outsourced so should the consumption of the inputs.
- swebs 7y ago
  That seems like the most likely explanation, especially since this trend started right when trade opened with China.
  - cmrx64 7y ago
    It's confusing to me that this isn't proffered at all in the article or most of the comments here. Without understanding this factor, how can "dematerialization" be taken seriously?
    - throwawaysea 7y ago
      > Without understanding this factor, how can "dematerialization" be taken seriously? I don't think it can. My thought went to suspecting we simply don't "directly" consume raw materials only because this story doesn't pass the common sense 'sniff' test. If I look around me at my lifestyle or my friends/family/coworker's lifestyles, consumerism seems to have increased and not decreased. Think of the rise of ubiquitous handheld electronic devices, fast fashion (Forever 21, H&M, and so on), online shopping, and so on.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
  That would only explain manufacturing inputs. Also analyzed are building materials and agricultural inputs. Buildings can't be off-shored, and if anything, we're a net exporter of agricultural products. So the analysis holds.
NTDF9 7y ago
Isn't that a good thing? Use less real resources folks.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
This reads to me mostly as the US importing more, so the increased material use doesn't show in statistics. The article also mentions increase in use of plastics. One thing I'm curious about though - how come energy use stopped being correlated with economic growth? That's new.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  That doesn't explain the fertilizer usage very well, and from what I understand the story with ag is improvements in efficiency.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
    Agriculture is mostly down to glyphosate resistance, i.e. GMOs. If you can spray a field with glyphosate, you don't need to till at the start of the season. Tilling has huge externalities, both the carbon emitted from the powerful plow used, and also the runoff from the disturbed soil. That runoff, which can cause all sorts of contamination, algal blooms, etc., is also leeching needed nutrients from the soil. If you avoid tilling, you ultimately need to use less fertilizer.
    - ch4s3 7y ago
      Coupled with decreasing acreage for a given yield, that might be an ok trade off.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Just a hypothesis but I would guess it's because services and productivity improvements are driving economic growth rather than products.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    I bet reoccurring service fees are accounting for an increasing proportion of spending to the average American. The traditional electricity, water, phone, cable, and internet services have largely increased in costs while also expanding to include house cleaning and sub services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Spotify, Patreon, Adobe, Dropbox, Curiosity Stream, etc. And that's not even including other sub services that offer physical goods at inflated prices over retail (butcherbox, stitchfix, wanc, birchbox). There's just so much shit to subscribe to anymore. Edit: I forgot, digital-only video games and movie rentals too.
danans 7y ago
I wonder what this will look like in a renewable energy world where the cost of energy on the margin drops to the the small operating cost + the principal/interest on the capital expenditure. We might actually see a reduction in GDP in that case, especially if coupled with ever increasing production efficiency for energy consuming processes. In that case, we might have to re-evaluate how we define "success" to be less weighted for GDP, or include the reduction in fossil fuel externalities in the definition. Could be be best race-to-the-bottom ever.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  New Zealand is a model to follow [1]. As you mention, of course GDP will plummet as renewables and technology act as enormous deflationary forces (good luck Central Banks trying to inflate against those forces). Software is eating the world, there is no marginal unit cost for delivering that benefit to the world. For example, consider what was previously spent across the world on TLS certs that now Let's Encrypt provides to the world for a few million dollars a year. Every opportunity for a Unicorn is an opportunity for a lean, well functioning non-profit to deliver similar consumer excess (or as a Human would say in behavioral econ, "happiness") very inexpensively (another example I love: Watsi.org [2]). [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/8/18656710/new-zealand-wellbeing-budget-bhutan-happiness https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/8/18656710/new-zea... (Forget GDP — New Zealand is prioritizing gross national well-being) [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZq47h6jg7NX4ddhTS_H8JFVfLZiDbxwwdQD47_ow64 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZq47h6jg7NX4ddhTS_H... (Watsi.org Transparency Log)
- mempko 7y ago
  Margins for many of the oil, coal, and gas companies are already negative. The world subsidies those industries to the tune of $5 trillion a year. US subsidies it's fossil fuel industry to about $600 billion a year. In other words, energy is already cheap and GDP is still increasing.
- azernik 7y ago
  Falling costs of similar goods and inputs are treated as deflation in economic statistics. "Nominal" GDP would fall in that case, but "real" GDP, which is the number everyone cares about, would still rise.
not_a_cop75 7y ago
"Good news! We’re getting more while using less." Or maybe we just haven't accounted for inflation and the rampant advent of landlords and landlord-like start ups which consumes greater and greater slices of the consumer's money.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Yes. I think the financialization of the economy means you can't compare numbers over time.
seibelj 7y ago
Some people say growth can't happen forever, and all growth comes at environmental cost, but that simply isn't true. I can create digital goods and services which people buy, and this increases GDP, and it doesn't hurt the environment and is indeed economic growth in the realest sense. I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment.
- darkerside 7y ago
  There an upper bound created by the limits of possible human time spent. You can raise them with technology or population growth, but there again, you're bumping up against ecological constraints.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    Technology is the primary lever of pushing limits back.
  - NickM 7y ago
    You can raise them with technology or population growth, but there again, you're bumping up against ecological constraints. Population growth, yes, but technology? Why can't technology continue to improve in terms of efficiency and environmental impact as well as productivity?
    - bluGill 7y ago
      There are physical limits to efficiency. In different technologies were are different distances away, but there are always limits that we cannot exceed. We can get creative about not needing to get close to the limit, but the limits are always there stopping us.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - ralala 7y ago
        We might migrate to other planets. Also time and space are relative.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 7y ago
Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing.
- magduf 7y ago
  >This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing. Yeah, but this is a good thing. The labor class is a very strong supporter of the political party that pushes policies which increase the income gap, and votes strongly against anyone who tries to change this or go back to the policies you're talking about. So they're getting exactly what they're voting for.
  - Namrog84 7y ago
    They might be getting exactly what they're voting for. But they might not be voting for what they need or want. It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need. If people are intentionally voting for the opposite of what they actually need, why is this a problem? Who's the arbiter of what the voters "need" anyway? The voters are responsible for determining what they need, and voting for it; if they can't do that, then they're getting what they deserve, right? Basically, this comes down to an argument of democracy vs. authoritarianism. Should the voters get what they want or vote for, even if it's seemingly not in their best interest? Or should some other party decide what the citizens need and force it on them?
georgeburdell 7y ago
I didn’t see it addressed in the article so I’ll slip on my tinfoil hat for a moment... Could this be related to growing income and wealth inequality? Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes. Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food. The article notes 1970 as the critical turning point, which is the same year Piketty identifies in his book Capital as the inequality turning point in the U.S. and Europe
- chvid 7y ago
  In the 1970es the usd is also delinked from the price of gold. This allows for rampant inflation which should be filtered out from the growth figures but maybe it is not quite the case ...
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  This is actually what I was thinking, but I live in opioid infested flyover country, so my mind always goes there. Not many people out here buying new cars, or washers and dryers, or even homes right now. And then in the other world I live in, tech, people not only do all that, but they also fly to Greek Islands for vacations. It's really kind of bi-polar right now. At least around here it is.
- mempko 7y ago
  There is nothing "tinfoil" hat about what you said. This is a known outcome of growing inequality.
- cpursley 7y ago
  The raw ingredients required for junk food require massive amounts of fertilizer (soy, corn, wheat, sugarcane).
- h3throw 7y ago
  This reminds me of the phrase "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail". > Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes One implication of the above statement would be that everyone is now buying less and yet somehow the economy is growing? Those two ideas aren't strictly necessarily opposed to one another but it certainly doesn't seem like a good place to start. The economy could only be growing through investment if this were the case. > Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food. Is there any junk food that isn't composed of organic matter primarily? Most "junk" food in the US that I can think of is corn based which would of course still require fertilizer...
erva 7y ago
Andrew McAfee did an interview last week w/ Sam Harris [1] that was a fun listen if you are interested in a conversational understanding before reading his book. [1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/
Decade 7y ago
This seems to be the flip side of designing things to be no more durable than necessary. With the highly regulated exception of cars, the profit motive is driving companies to use the least amount of material, whether it’s a washing machine made of stamped metal or a tissue-thin plastic bag. On the other hand, well-meaning socialist interventions are driving additional environmental impacts, as people buy “reusable” bags or higher-CO₂-impact paper bags instead of changing their behavior the proper way.
- thrower123 7y ago
  This feels right to me. At the peak material usage highlighted in the graphs, around 2000, consumer products seemed to built considerably more ruggedly than they are today - possibly over-built, really, in some cases. If you shave off 1 or 2% of the material going into a product year over year, that really amounts to something after two decades.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
From the article: It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves. One of the consistently annoying things, for me, in science reporting is the extrapolation of a given set of ratios out to some point where the result is very click-baity. The systems guy in me has experience that all exponential trends are s-curves, and so I feel that one must at least acknowledge that fact in your reporting. I understand it, it means that the predicted outcome might not happen at all, but it is important to the story. So economists do the same thing, they take some ratio of numbers that seem to be tracking the 'size' of the economy and then run that trend out 50, 100, 500 years. It really doesn't matter, but what is important, and this article and other papers on de-materialization have demonstrated, is that neither the economic growth rate, or the relationship between that growth rate and some other factor, are ever really constant. Thus any point that depends on them being constant for more than a decade or so, is really stretching it. Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) demonstrated in a clear and convincing way. [1] "Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) ...but when they do that same thing on earth temperature everyone loses his mind
  - orthecreedence 7y ago
    "Gee, why is there a pool of water on the floor ever since the rain started? Do you think maybe the roof is leaking?" "Don't be silly! Just because there is water dripping from the ceiling doesn't mean there is a leak in the roof. Things just get wet sometimes. I'm sure there's a wonderful explanation besides the roof leaking. No sense in hiring someone to come look at the roof either. That would be a waste of resources."
barnabee 7y ago
“but”? how about “and”… these are all positives
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  It doesn't fit the narrative.
Excel_Wizard 7y ago
More value with less inputs? Sign me up.
pjmorris 7y ago
Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted. There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. The article's example of lighter buildings is what I view as the same category, something blogger Yves Smith terms 'crapification.' We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large. The other trend is money supply; One of the chief problems leading to the 2008 financial crisis was that much more credit had been extended than could ever be paid back by those to whom it was loaned. The 'solution' was to have central banks 'pay back' the loans that never should've been made. That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth. I'd like to see an analysis of 'economic growth' where the contributions of resources and credit are accounted for separately.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  The same is true of coffee. A 1 pound coffee can is the same size it always was but now has 10 or 11 ounces of coffee in it.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.
    - OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago
      Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?
seamyb88 7y ago
Growth for who? Interestingly the words poverty, austerity, unemployment, education and health cuts are all missing from this "economics" article. There has been a single trend since Capitalism began centuries ago - the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. Yield curve's looking good today dear, we're being evicted, but damn it looks good.
uoaei 7y ago
Considering how much of the economy is derivatives, options, and futures trading, this isn't exactly a surprise. I'm no economist but the fact that we're using less of the most fundamental resources available despite a growing population doesn't seem like improving efficiency in aggregate, it just seems like decreasing activity masked by the inflated aggregated metrics about the 'economy'. A lot of money moves around nowadays and relatively little of it is actually put toward something "real", instead being diverted to quant firms' operational costs and their employees' bank accounts.
- lovecg 7y ago
  Define “real”. If I replaced your spreadsheet with a bunch of Python scripts, vastly improving your productivity, and you paid me for it, did something “real” get created in the process?
bronlund 7y ago
Because there is no growth! It's just the multiplujillion dollars The Fed plucked from thin air that make it seem so. Anyone with half a brain knows that something is fucky.
twoslide 7y ago
It really only makes sense to understand the world economy as a whole. On this scale, consumption (e.g. steel production or oil consumption) continue to grow [1,2]. Americans are in the fortunate position of selling services (e.g. finance, advertising, information management) and consuming finished products from the rest of the world, but the American economy should not be considered a closed system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [2] https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=INTL.44-1-AFRC-QBTU.A&vo=0&v=H&start=1980&end=2016 https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=IN...
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Indeed, or to be a bit cute about it: "Does the 'America' graph include the 'China' part of America?"
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Not that China is part of America. More like the two are squabbling lovers locked in an embrace so tight that it's literally "'til death do us part."
    - pm90 7y ago
      Doesn't matter. The amazing thing about trade is actually how much of a great tool it is in bringing countries and societies closer despite all other differences. Said in other ways, China and the US may not like each other, but they will never go to war with each other as long as they trade with each other.
- vannevar 7y ago
  Yes, leaving out the consumption of materials in the form of goods manufactured elsewhere is such a giant, glaring hole in the logic that it strains credibility to believe it's mere oversight. It looks like deliberate misinformation.
  - 7y ago
mooreds 7y ago
I had a friend who was gloomy about resource extraction one time. I comforted him by saying there are few limits on the number of masseuses and story tellers we need. As we get better and better at producing the necessities, we'll desire more luxuries, some of which are experiences. Glad to see it confirmed in the numbers.
ctdonath 7y ago
Capitalism at work, saving the environment. Increasing profits necessitates reducing one's demand for supply. Using less steel, paper, fertilizer, and energy to achieve same/better results while tautologically using less resources is indeed good all around (mostly).
- kls 7y ago
  While I don't disagree that capitalism is at work. It is almost a given that the reduction in steel is due to auto manufactures and many other industries have moved to aluminum or composite materials. Neither one of them offers a great environmental or energy savings over steel. Paper is most likely digitization which again just transfers the energy use into computing every time the document is viewed and is almost certainly a net negative in relation to energy consumption. Fertilizer I don't know but a half ass guess would be GMO's. As they are able to target traits that allow them to use less fertilizer and pesticides to produce the same amount of crop yield.
spodek 7y ago
Physics > Economics The Do The Math blog by Caltech-trained UCSD astrophysicist Tom Murphy is the best resource in this area. In particular the posts - Galactic Scale Energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy - Can Economic Growth Last? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last - The dinner conversation with an economist on this topic https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist
- nostrademons 7y ago
  I read those and conclude "Physics is not a particularly relevant constraint on economic growth." His energy analysis concluded that at 2.3% growth rate and current technology, we would need to use the entire energy supply falling upon the earth's surface within 275 years. Improving technology might be able to stretch that to 400 years. Within 1400 years, we would need to use the entire energy of our solar system. But we have a number of more pressing demographic constraints. As countries develop, fertility falls; fertility rates are currently below replacement in the entire developed world [1] with all regions other than Africa falling below replacement rate by 2050. Within 80 years, population is likely to start falling, with some studies predicting this within 30 years. Worse, there's a worldwide demographic bulge of 18-30 year old males that's hitting just about now; such demographics have been associated with a higher likelihood of war in the past. There's plenty of other problems that these bring: if you don't get killed in war and manage to find a mate, you're not likely to see your social security or 401(k) worth all that much, nor will you find health care unless your rich or lucky or both. But they'll happen way before we reach physical limits on growth. Our threat model should be stupid politicians doing stupid things at the behest of frustrated populations, not the laws of physics. [1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
  - freeflight 7y ago
    The demographics issue makes this whole situation such a massive paradox. On one hand, we want all those extra humans to generate "economic growth" to keep our perpetual growth train going. On the other hand, the environmental consequences of that seem already unbearable for our biome right now. It's like we want to have our cake and eat it too, it just won't work. If we want to "save the planet" then we need to let go of this insane idea of perpetual economic growth we supposedly only can solve by throwing more human bodies at it.
DeonPenny 7y ago
With information age I'd assume those things with more predictive logistics and transparency would get more efficient. We should add in data transported too in these metrics and I'd guess the correlation would become more obvious.
jdkee 7y ago
A parallel to this concept is that of "decontenting" a product. Nissan did this in the 1980s and 1990s to the Maxima to keep prices in line with the Camry and Accord. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Specific references on the Maxima and Nissan's practices?
  - jdkee 7y ago
    https://www.autonews.com/article/19960122/ANA/601220731/decontenting-when-there-s-no-costs-left-to-cut-japan-wrestles-with-what-to-take-out-of-cars-trucks https://www.autonews.com/article/19960122/ANA/601220731/deco...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Thanks, though I'll note that's a 23 year old article.
RenRav 7y ago
Related to this, he's made a whole slew of longbet predictions on us consumimg less of these resources. http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/ http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/
swiley 7y ago
Americans are flat out doing less. We move stuff around, tell people what to do in other countries, and write software and that’s kind of it.
stevespang 7y ago
Great title - - totally boring read.
grdeken 7y ago
Can we overlay the use of plastics? Which is curiously absent from this study?
jganetsk 7y ago
I would like to know how much of American dematerialization is just exporting materialization to China. They make our stuff, we import it. Does that count as materials consumed by Americans? Note that they mention the great reversal starting in 1970. Nixon went to China in 1972.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There's a strong reason to believe it's much of it. See: The true raw material footprint of nations https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-technology/true-raw-material-footprint-nations https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.u... The material footprint of nations http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110 As of 2010, total global per capita energy consumption was rising: http://i.imgur.com/5hO5Hep.png http://i.imgur.com/5hO5Hep.png Most of the above, plus further discussion: Economic decoupling? The recent relationship between energy and growth https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economic_decoupling_the_recent_relationship/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economi...
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Not only that, what about the end of infrastructure? Timber, steel, copper, asphalt, cement -- these are signs of a country investing in its infrastructure. Other than copper, if we saw a trillion dollar infrastructure package, our de-materialization would vanish in a heartbeat, and our carbon emissions would shoot WAY up.
ggm 7y ago
Moving an economy from real things to services and ideas begs many questions, not the least of which is "what does price even mean" because the cost/price nexus had some meaning with real goods, but has almost no meaning with services and ideas. A perfect cure for age related death is worth so much, it probably has undefined value. A TV show as a bitstream is worth nothing (bits ephemerally have no value), can be infinitely copied, and yet IPR law defines its value as a function of the lock on the disney vault.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Economic treatment of costs varies, but there are two principle variants. The mainstream view is that "all costs are opportunity costs", which is to say, the best alternative use of some input. This is probably best further expanded to the notion that an opportunity cost is based on the consumer value received from the use stream defined by the alternative use, which is a bit abstract, but generally tractable. An alternative, with antecedants to Adam Smith, is that costs are based on the factor inputs to production. The mainstream views these as labour and capital (or increasingly, simply capital), but a more comprehensive view would be for a number of inputs: material, energy, knowledge, capital (itself reserved production from earlier periods), labour, organisational services, and sinks. An early version of this appears in Leo Tolsty's What is to be Done? (1886). Service and information are distinct from material production (goods, construction, capital) in several regards, but are not fully immune to physical considerations. In particular: - Services require labour, capital, and energy inputs. - Services are, in the words of one of the early economists (Smith or Mill as I recall) "immediately extinguished". That is, in the most fundamental sense, services are non-capitalist in that one cannot reserve production of services as capital. (The results of services may be.) - Information has numerous characteristics which make its pricing virtually completely incompatible with market-based systems as information is a pure public good, in the econonomic sense: nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. The upshot is that service-and-information economies neither spare us from physical resources, nor are amenable to the management and explanatory concepts that have guided most of the past 200 or so years of economic development. Also, nit, the question is raised but not begged: http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info
pjmorris 7y ago
I'm no gold bug, but, looking at the graphs in the article, it's interesting how GDP decouples from resource use around the same time that the US went off of the gold standard.

318 points by utternerd 7y ago

I think the subtext here is obvious to people on HN, but isn't this because so much value is generated using electrons on increasingly efficient computer systems?

sp332 7y ago
That doesn't explain crop tonnage going up while fertilizer and water use are going down.
- atonse 7y ago
  Is this partly due to things like drip irrigation?
- novok 7y ago
  A hypothetical example is drones going through a field and manually picking out weeds, increasing yield with the same amount of resources. Similarly you can get fine grained ‘crop analytics’ through drones scanning the field and acting in response.
  - sachdevap 7y ago
    And on what scale is this actually happening?
    - azernik 7y ago
      Very large scale, just not in the exact form GP is describing; instead, farmers drop stationary internet-connected sensors all over their fields, their sampling equipment GPS-tags results from every core sample, and tractors have computer-controlled equipment to feed location and quantity information to chemical dispensers. See e.g. https://home.agrian.com/what-we-do/ https://home.agrian.com/what-we-do/ for a company that manages this process.
      - sachdevap 7y ago
        I am not at all denying the benefits of technology, or that companies are working in it, but I am skeptical of how widespread it is right now. Therefore, I would want to see some numbers to verify such a claim.
        azernik 7y ago
        I know that there is a profitable company whose people I have talked with, whose business is built on managing the data involved.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
      I don't have any figures citations since my knowledge comes from when I used to hang out on Precision Agriculture forums, but it's common and getting more so. As drones get less expensive, it's easy to sit in your den and fly over the fields looking for the areas where you should go out and spray some more, or drive over in your UTV and take a closer look at that "weird spot" on the "back 80." Farmers are very aware of the benefits of technology (why else would you spend half a million $ on a combine?) and will take it up if they see a benefit.
      - sachdevap 7y ago
        I am sure they are. But a leap from combines to decentralized sensing using drones is a big one, and I'd want to see some numbers to verify this.
        HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        Re-reading the post, it seems that he and I might be talking about different things. I'm referring to farmers using remote controlled drones with cameras to check the state of their crops/fields without having to drive over hundreds of acres. That's an actual thing and is quite common. OP seems to be talking about some kind of automated drone weeding (or just phrased what he meant poorly).
    - novok 7y ago
      You should go google and research the numbers yourself.
      - sachdevap 7y ago
        Thank you for the advice!
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  Did it occur to you that, like ordinary consumer products, industrial products also oversell their efficacy? There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields. If the question is, how does crop tonnage go up without water and fertilizer use, maybe the answer really is a computer helped people plan better and be less wasteful. Or all the least efficient farmers were bankrupted out of the market.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Do you have any sources for your claims? I saw the article about the pesticide on HN or reddit but not anything else you claim.
    - Circuits 7y ago
      I can give some credence to the claim. I work for TeeJet a subset of Spray Systems and we design and manufacture application technology for the AG industry: "At TeeJet Technologies our single focus is on application technology. Our company and our products have been part of agricultural applications since the first crop protection products came onto the market in the 1940's. Our control systems date back to some of the earliest in-field uses of electronics in agriculture. This experience in the fields of spraying, fertilizing, and seeding means nobody is better suited to provide quality products and technical solutions for your business."
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Corn yields have been going up a bit more than 1.5 bushels per acre since hybrid breeding started in the 1930's going from a steady ~25 bu/acre to >170/acre today. Farmers haven't just been adding a bit more fertilizer and water every year, and it has been going on long before computers. Many factors go into it: soil management with tilling practices and fertilizers, pest and weed management, improvements in irrigation and drainage, better harvesters which leave less on the ground, but very much most importantly, plant genetics.
    - shawn-butler 7y ago
- weberc2 7y ago
  Technological advances in agriculture would presumably explain it, many of which are probably computer driven (precision agriculture, data-driven agriculture being two examples).
- danans 7y ago
  Much more precise usage of water/fertilizer to optimize yield/input can be enabled by computation and data.
  - kevan 7y ago
    Precision Agriculture[1] is the term for anyone looking to learn more. Even small farms now track all inputs/outputs on every acre they farm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture
    - kube-system 7y ago
      The Land O Lakes CEO was showing this off on 60 minutes just this past week. Check out 5:22 in the video here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/land-olakes-ceo-beth-ford-and-the-changing-landscape-of-america-farms-60-minutes-2019-10-06/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/land-olakes-ceo-beth-ford-and-t...
- chrisco255 7y ago
  CO2 has helped crop yields.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  What about an increase in organic farming? Certified organic crops sell for higher prices, and all the big shops I see in California sell a lot of that. I'm under the impression that organic farms don't use petroleum derived fertilizers.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
  Glyphosate. Glyphosate, with GMO crops or without, means you don't need to till your land. It's enabled a huge fraction of productive acreage to become no-till or low-till, which preserves soil nutrients, aids soil water absorption, reduces agricultural runoff, improves cover-cropping, and more. There are a variety of farming practices that contribute to the efficiency of agriculture, but no-till is absolutely central. The late 90s through early oughts saw big increases in no-till acreage, up to ~20% of all land by 2002, precisely when fertilizer inputs started to decline. It sits between 40-50% now.
codesushi42 7y ago
No, it's because these things have been replaced by plastics.
- eutropia 7y ago
  At least partially I'm sure that's the case, however it looks like we're approaching the apex of that trend as well: TFA: >> The growth in plastic consumption has slowed down greatly, to less than 2 percent per year between 2009 and 2015. This is almost 14 percent slower than GDP growth over the same period. So while America is not yet post-peak in its use of plastic, it's quickly closing in on this milestone. It will be interesting to see what our other material trends do once we do hit peak plastic, if we shift to using more paper and aluminum as people push back against plastics for their various drawbacks.
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    That's irrelevant because plastics are not produced domestically in the US. But the international production explains the decreased consumption of those other raw materials. This article is misleading horse shit.

sime 7y ago

The a16z podcast recently had an interesting episode featuring the author of this article. It discussed the divergence of the GDP + energy usage curves as well as some of the other stuff in his book. https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-technology-progress-more-from-less/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-techn...

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

Does this relate to the buyback-debt cycle of companies? [0] [0]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasingly-using-debt-to-repurchase-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin...

throwawaysea 7y ago

Is this simply because manufacturing is offshore?

todipa 7y ago
Exactly. The primary inputs analyzed here are manufacturing inputs and if manufacturing has been outsourced so should the consumption of the inputs.
swebs 7y ago
That seems like the most likely explanation, especially since this trend started right when trade opened with China.
- cmrx64 7y ago
  It's confusing to me that this isn't proffered at all in the article or most of the comments here. Without understanding this factor, how can "dematerialization" be taken seriously?
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    > Without understanding this factor, how can "dematerialization" be taken seriously? I don't think it can. My thought went to suspecting we simply don't "directly" consume raw materials only because this story doesn't pass the common sense 'sniff' test. If I look around me at my lifestyle or my friends/family/coworker's lifestyles, consumerism seems to have increased and not decreased. Think of the rise of ubiquitous handheld electronic devices, fast fashion (Forever 21, H&M, and so on), online shopping, and so on.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
That would only explain manufacturing inputs. Also analyzed are building materials and agricultural inputs. Buildings can't be off-shored, and if anything, we're a net exporter of agricultural products. So the analysis holds.

NTDF9 7y ago

Isn't that a good thing? Use less real resources folks.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

This reads to me mostly as the US importing more, so the increased material use doesn't show in statistics. The article also mentions increase in use of plastics. One thing I'm curious about though - how come energy use stopped being correlated with economic growth? That's new.

ch4s3 7y ago
That doesn't explain the fertilizer usage very well, and from what I understand the story with ag is improvements in efficiency.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
  Agriculture is mostly down to glyphosate resistance, i.e. GMOs. If you can spray a field with glyphosate, you don't need to till at the start of the season. Tilling has huge externalities, both the carbon emitted from the powerful plow used, and also the runoff from the disturbed soil. That runoff, which can cause all sorts of contamination, algal blooms, etc., is also leeching needed nutrients from the soil. If you avoid tilling, you ultimately need to use less fertilizer.
  - ch4s3 7y ago
    Coupled with decreasing acreage for a given yield, that might be an ok trade off.
chrisco255 7y ago
Just a hypothesis but I would guess it's because services and productivity improvements are driving economic growth rather than products.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  I bet reoccurring service fees are accounting for an increasing proportion of spending to the average American. The traditional electricity, water, phone, cable, and internet services have largely increased in costs while also expanding to include house cleaning and sub services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Spotify, Patreon, Adobe, Dropbox, Curiosity Stream, etc. And that's not even including other sub services that offer physical goods at inflated prices over retail (butcherbox, stitchfix, wanc, birchbox). There's just so much shit to subscribe to anymore. Edit: I forgot, digital-only video games and movie rentals too.

danans 7y ago

I wonder what this will look like in a renewable energy world where the cost of energy on the margin drops to the the small operating cost + the principal/interest on the capital expenditure. We might actually see a reduction in GDP in that case, especially if coupled with ever increasing production efficiency for energy consuming processes. In that case, we might have to re-evaluate how we define "success" to be less weighted for GDP, or include the reduction in fossil fuel externalities in the definition. Could be be best race-to-the-bottom ever.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
New Zealand is a model to follow [1]. As you mention, of course GDP will plummet as renewables and technology act as enormous deflationary forces (good luck Central Banks trying to inflate against those forces). Software is eating the world, there is no marginal unit cost for delivering that benefit to the world. For example, consider what was previously spent across the world on TLS certs that now Let's Encrypt provides to the world for a few million dollars a year. Every opportunity for a Unicorn is an opportunity for a lean, well functioning non-profit to deliver similar consumer excess (or as a Human would say in behavioral econ, "happiness") very inexpensively (another example I love: Watsi.org [2]). [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/8/18656710/new-zealand-wellbeing-budget-bhutan-happiness https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/8/18656710/new-zea... (Forget GDP — New Zealand is prioritizing gross national well-being) [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZq47h6jg7NX4ddhTS_H8JFVfLZiDbxwwdQD47_ow64 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZq47h6jg7NX4ddhTS_H... (Watsi.org Transparency Log)
mempko 7y ago
Margins for many of the oil, coal, and gas companies are already negative. The world subsidies those industries to the tune of $5 trillion a year. US subsidies it's fossil fuel industry to about $600 billion a year. In other words, energy is already cheap and GDP is still increasing.
azernik 7y ago
Falling costs of similar goods and inputs are treated as deflation in economic statistics. "Nominal" GDP would fall in that case, but "real" GDP, which is the number everyone cares about, would still rise.

not_a_cop75 7y ago

"Good news! We’re getting more while using less." Or maybe we just haven't accounted for inflation and the rampant advent of landlords and landlord-like start ups which consumes greater and greater slices of the consumer's money.

Gibbon1 7y ago
Yes. I think the financialization of the economy means you can't compare numbers over time.

seibelj 7y ago

Some people say growth can't happen forever, and all growth comes at environmental cost, but that simply isn't true. I can create digital goods and services which people buy, and this increases GDP, and it doesn't hurt the environment and is indeed economic growth in the realest sense. I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment.

darkerside 7y ago
There an upper bound created by the limits of possible human time spent. You can raise them with technology or population growth, but there again, you're bumping up against ecological constraints.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Technology is the primary lever of pushing limits back.
- NickM 7y ago
  You can raise them with technology or population growth, but there again, you're bumping up against ecological constraints. Population growth, yes, but technology? Why can't technology continue to improve in terms of efficiency and environmental impact as well as productivity?
  - bluGill 7y ago
    There are physical limits to efficiency. In different technologies were are different distances away, but there are always limits that we cannot exceed. We can get creative about not needing to get close to the limit, but the limits are always there stopping us.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ralala 7y ago
      We might migrate to other planets. Also time and space are relative.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lkrubner 7y ago

Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing.

magduf 7y ago
>This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing. Yeah, but this is a good thing. The labor class is a very strong supporter of the political party that pushes policies which increase the income gap, and votes strongly against anyone who tries to change this or go back to the policies you're talking about. So they're getting exactly what they're voting for.
- Namrog84 7y ago
  They might be getting exactly what they're voting for. But they might not be voting for what they need or want. It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need. If people are intentionally voting for the opposite of what they actually need, why is this a problem? Who's the arbiter of what the voters "need" anyway? The voters are responsible for determining what they need, and voting for it; if they can't do that, then they're getting what they deserve, right? Basically, this comes down to an argument of democracy vs. authoritarianism. Should the voters get what they want or vote for, even if it's seemingly not in their best interest? Or should some other party decide what the citizens need and force it on them?

georgeburdell 7y ago

I didn’t see it addressed in the article so I’ll slip on my tinfoil hat for a moment... Could this be related to growing income and wealth inequality? Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes. Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food. The article notes 1970 as the critical turning point, which is the same year Piketty identifies in his book Capital as the inequality turning point in the U.S. and Europe

chvid 7y ago
In the 1970es the usd is also delinked from the price of gold. This allows for rampant inflation which should be filtered out from the growth figures but maybe it is not quite the case ...
bilbo0s 7y ago
This is actually what I was thinking, but I live in opioid infested flyover country, so my mind always goes there. Not many people out here buying new cars, or washers and dryers, or even homes right now. And then in the other world I live in, tech, people not only do all that, but they also fly to Greek Islands for vacations. It's really kind of bi-polar right now. At least around here it is.
mempko 7y ago
There is nothing "tinfoil" hat about what you said. This is a known outcome of growing inequality.
cpursley 7y ago
The raw ingredients required for junk food require massive amounts of fertilizer (soy, corn, wheat, sugarcane).
h3throw 7y ago
This reminds me of the phrase "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail". > Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes One implication of the above statement would be that everyone is now buying less and yet somehow the economy is growing? Those two ideas aren't strictly necessarily opposed to one another but it certainly doesn't seem like a good place to start. The economy could only be growing through investment if this were the case. > Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food. Is there any junk food that isn't composed of organic matter primarily? Most "junk" food in the US that I can think of is corn based which would of course still require fertilizer...

erva 7y ago

Andrew McAfee did an interview last week w/ Sam Harris [1] that was a fun listen if you are interested in a conversational understanding before reading his book. [1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/

Decade 7y ago

This seems to be the flip side of designing things to be no more durable than necessary. With the highly regulated exception of cars, the profit motive is driving companies to use the least amount of material, whether it’s a washing machine made of stamped metal or a tissue-thin plastic bag. On the other hand, well-meaning socialist interventions are driving additional environmental impacts, as people buy “reusable” bags or higher-CO₂-impact paper bags instead of changing their behavior the proper way.

thrower123 7y ago
This feels right to me. At the peak material usage highlighted in the graphs, around 2000, consumer products seemed to built considerably more ruggedly than they are today - possibly over-built, really, in some cases. If you shave off 1 or 2% of the material going into a product year over year, that really amounts to something after two decades.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

From the article: It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves. One of the consistently annoying things, for me, in science reporting is the extrapolation of a given set of ratios out to some point where the result is very click-baity. The systems guy in me has experience that all exponential trends are s-curves, and so I feel that one must at least acknowledge that fact in your reporting. I understand it, it means that the predicted outcome might not happen at all, but it is important to the story. So economists do the same thing, they take some ratio of numbers that seem to be tracking the 'size' of the economy and then run that trend out 50, 100, 500 years. It really doesn't matter, but what is important, and this article and other papers on de-materialization have demonstrated, is that neither the economic growth rate, or the relationship between that growth rate and some other factor, are ever really constant. Thus any point that depends on them being constant for more than a decade or so, is really stretching it. Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) demonstrated in a clear and convincing way. [1] "Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

LoSboccacc 7y ago
> Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) ...but when they do that same thing on earth temperature everyone loses his mind
- orthecreedence 7y ago
  "Gee, why is there a pool of water on the floor ever since the rain started? Do you think maybe the roof is leaking?" "Don't be silly! Just because there is water dripping from the ceiling doesn't mean there is a leak in the roof. Things just get wet sometimes. I'm sure there's a wonderful explanation besides the roof leaking. No sense in hiring someone to come look at the roof either. That would be a waste of resources."

barnabee 7y ago

“but”? how about “and”… these are all positives

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
It doesn't fit the narrative.

Excel_Wizard 7y ago

More value with less inputs? Sign me up.

pjmorris 7y ago

Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted. There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. The article's example of lighter buildings is what I view as the same category, something blogger Yves Smith terms 'crapification.' We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large. The other trend is money supply; One of the chief problems leading to the 2008 financial crisis was that much more credit had been extended than could ever be paid back by those to whom it was loaned. The 'solution' was to have central banks 'pay back' the loans that never should've been made. That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth. I'd like to see an analysis of 'economic growth' where the contributions of resources and credit are accounted for separately.

anon1m0us 7y ago
The same is true of coffee. A 1 pound coffee can is the same size it always was but now has 10 or 11 ounces of coffee in it.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.
  - OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago
    Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?

seamyb88 7y ago

Growth for who? Interestingly the words poverty, austerity, unemployment, education and health cuts are all missing from this "economics" article. There has been a single trend since Capitalism began centuries ago - the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. Yield curve's looking good today dear, we're being evicted, but damn it looks good.

uoaei 7y ago

Considering how much of the economy is derivatives, options, and futures trading, this isn't exactly a surprise. I'm no economist but the fact that we're using less of the most fundamental resources available despite a growing population doesn't seem like improving efficiency in aggregate, it just seems like decreasing activity masked by the inflated aggregated metrics about the 'economy'. A lot of money moves around nowadays and relatively little of it is actually put toward something "real", instead being diverted to quant firms' operational costs and their employees' bank accounts.

lovecg 7y ago
Define “real”. If I replaced your spreadsheet with a bunch of Python scripts, vastly improving your productivity, and you paid me for it, did something “real” get created in the process?

bronlund 7y ago

Because there is no growth! It's just the multiplujillion dollars The Fed plucked from thin air that make it seem so. Anyone with half a brain knows that something is fucky.

twoslide 7y ago

It really only makes sense to understand the world economy as a whole. On this scale, consumption (e.g. steel production or oil consumption) continue to grow [1,2]. Americans are in the fortunate position of selling services (e.g. finance, advertising, information management) and consuming finished products from the rest of the world, but the American economy should not be considered a closed system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [2] https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=INTL.44-1-AFRC-QBTU.A&vo=0&v=H&start=1980&end=2016 https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=IN...

rdiddly 7y ago
Indeed, or to be a bit cute about it: "Does the 'America' graph include the 'China' part of America?"
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Not that China is part of America. More like the two are squabbling lovers locked in an embrace so tight that it's literally "'til death do us part."
  - pm90 7y ago
    Doesn't matter. The amazing thing about trade is actually how much of a great tool it is in bringing countries and societies closer despite all other differences. Said in other ways, China and the US may not like each other, but they will never go to war with each other as long as they trade with each other.
vannevar 7y ago
Yes, leaving out the consumption of materials in the form of goods manufactured elsewhere is such a giant, glaring hole in the logic that it strains credibility to believe it's mere oversight. It looks like deliberate misinformation.
- 7y ago

mooreds 7y ago

I had a friend who was gloomy about resource extraction one time. I comforted him by saying there are few limits on the number of masseuses and story tellers we need. As we get better and better at producing the necessities, we'll desire more luxuries, some of which are experiences. Glad to see it confirmed in the numbers.

ctdonath 7y ago

Capitalism at work, saving the environment. Increasing profits necessitates reducing one's demand for supply. Using less steel, paper, fertilizer, and energy to achieve same/better results while tautologically using less resources is indeed good all around (mostly).

kls 7y ago
While I don't disagree that capitalism is at work. It is almost a given that the reduction in steel is due to auto manufactures and many other industries have moved to aluminum or composite materials. Neither one of them offers a great environmental or energy savings over steel. Paper is most likely digitization which again just transfers the energy use into computing every time the document is viewed and is almost certainly a net negative in relation to energy consumption. Fertilizer I don't know but a half ass guess would be GMO's. As they are able to target traits that allow them to use less fertilizer and pesticides to produce the same amount of crop yield.

spodek 7y ago

Physics > Economics The Do The Math blog by Caltech-trained UCSD astrophysicist Tom Murphy is the best resource in this area. In particular the posts - Galactic Scale Energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy - Can Economic Growth Last? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last - The dinner conversation with an economist on this topic https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist

nostrademons 7y ago
I read those and conclude "Physics is not a particularly relevant constraint on economic growth." His energy analysis concluded that at 2.3% growth rate and current technology, we would need to use the entire energy supply falling upon the earth's surface within 275 years. Improving technology might be able to stretch that to 400 years. Within 1400 years, we would need to use the entire energy of our solar system. But we have a number of more pressing demographic constraints. As countries develop, fertility falls; fertility rates are currently below replacement in the entire developed world [1] with all regions other than Africa falling below replacement rate by 2050. Within 80 years, population is likely to start falling, with some studies predicting this within 30 years. Worse, there's a worldwide demographic bulge of 18-30 year old males that's hitting just about now; such demographics have been associated with a higher likelihood of war in the past. There's plenty of other problems that these bring: if you don't get killed in war and manage to find a mate, you're not likely to see your social security or 401(k) worth all that much, nor will you find health care unless your rich or lucky or both. But they'll happen way before we reach physical limits on growth. Our threat model should be stupid politicians doing stupid things at the behest of frustrated populations, not the laws of physics. [1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
- freeflight 7y ago
  The demographics issue makes this whole situation such a massive paradox. On one hand, we want all those extra humans to generate "economic growth" to keep our perpetual growth train going. On the other hand, the environmental consequences of that seem already unbearable for our biome right now. It's like we want to have our cake and eat it too, it just won't work. If we want to "save the planet" then we need to let go of this insane idea of perpetual economic growth we supposedly only can solve by throwing more human bodies at it.

DeonPenny 7y ago

With information age I'd assume those things with more predictive logistics and transparency would get more efficient. We should add in data transported too in these metrics and I'd guess the correlation would become more obvious.

jdkee 7y ago

A parallel to this concept is that of "decontenting" a product. Nissan did this in the 1980s and 1990s to the Maxima to keep prices in line with the Camry and Accord. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent

dredmorbius 7y ago
Specific references on the Maxima and Nissan's practices?
- jdkee 7y ago
  https://www.autonews.com/article/19960122/ANA/601220731/decontenting-when-there-s-no-costs-left-to-cut-japan-wrestles-with-what-to-take-out-of-cars-trucks https://www.autonews.com/article/19960122/ANA/601220731/deco...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Thanks, though I'll note that's a 23 year old article.

RenRav 7y ago

Related to this, he's made a whole slew of longbet predictions on us consumimg less of these resources. http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/ http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/

swiley 7y ago

Americans are flat out doing less. We move stuff around, tell people what to do in other countries, and write software and that’s kind of it.

stevespang 7y ago

Great title - - totally boring read.

grdeken 7y ago

Can we overlay the use of plastics? Which is curiously absent from this study?

jganetsk 7y ago

I would like to know how much of American dematerialization is just exporting materialization to China. They make our stuff, we import it. Does that count as materials consumed by Americans? Note that they mention the great reversal starting in 1970. Nixon went to China in 1972.

dredmorbius 7y ago
There's a strong reason to believe it's much of it. See: The true raw material footprint of nations https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-technology/true-raw-material-footprint-nations https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.u... The material footprint of nations http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110 As of 2010, total global per capita energy consumption was rising: http://i.imgur.com/5hO5Hep.png http://i.imgur.com/5hO5Hep.png Most of the above, plus further discussion: Economic decoupling? The recent relationship between energy and growth https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economic_decoupling_the_recent_relationship/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economi...
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Not only that, what about the end of infrastructure? Timber, steel, copper, asphalt, cement -- these are signs of a country investing in its infrastructure. Other than copper, if we saw a trillion dollar infrastructure package, our de-materialization would vanish in a heartbeat, and our carbon emissions would shoot WAY up.

ggm 7y ago

Moving an economy from real things to services and ideas begs many questions, not the least of which is "what does price even mean" because the cost/price nexus had some meaning with real goods, but has almost no meaning with services and ideas. A perfect cure for age related death is worth so much, it probably has undefined value. A TV show as a bitstream is worth nothing (bits ephemerally have no value), can be infinitely copied, and yet IPR law defines its value as a function of the lock on the disney vault.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Economic treatment of costs varies, but there are two principle variants. The mainstream view is that "all costs are opportunity costs", which is to say, the best alternative use of some input. This is probably best further expanded to the notion that an opportunity cost is based on the consumer value received from the use stream defined by the alternative use, which is a bit abstract, but generally tractable. An alternative, with antecedants to Adam Smith, is that costs are based on the factor inputs to production. The mainstream views these as labour and capital (or increasingly, simply capital), but a more comprehensive view would be for a number of inputs: material, energy, knowledge, capital (itself reserved production from earlier periods), labour, organisational services, and sinks. An early version of this appears in Leo Tolsty's What is to be Done? (1886). Service and information are distinct from material production (goods, construction, capital) in several regards, but are not fully immune to physical considerations. In particular: - Services require labour, capital, and energy inputs. - Services are, in the words of one of the early economists (Smith or Mill as I recall) "immediately extinguished". That is, in the most fundamental sense, services are non-capitalist in that one cannot reserve production of services as capital. (The results of services may be.) - Information has numerous characteristics which make its pricing virtually completely incompatible with market-based systems as information is a pure public good, in the econonomic sense: nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. The upshot is that service-and-information economies neither spare us from physical resources, nor are amenable to the management and explanatory concepts that have guided most of the past 200 or so years of economic development. Also, nit, the question is raised but not begged: http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info

pjmorris 7y ago

I'm no gold bug, but, looking at the graphs in the article, it's interesting how GDP decouples from resource use around the same time that the US went off of the gold standard.