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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 whi
by 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 agoThere 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 agoTechnology is the primary lever of pushing limits back.
- NickM 7y agoYou 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 agoThere 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 agoWe might migrate to other planets. Also time and space are relative.
- bluGill 7y agoI doubt it. Maybe mars and venus, but even there getting self sustaining is going to be hard. There is no reason to suspect that we will ever be able to get anywhere else with less than a generation ship, and no reason to believe we can make one them them that will work long enough... Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207011 which coincidentally happened to be in new articles when I checked...
- Wohlf 7y agoI don't doubt there is, but we really don't know when we'll hit the limits technology allows for. Present and future technological plateaus may just be temporary.
- gimmeThaBeet 7y agoProductivity growth is in that equation, which is also in admittedly short supply. Probably the most underrated essential factor of growth in a mature economy.
- undershirt 7y agoBut doesn’t economic growth means an increase in consumption, however immaterial the product is? Meaning, there will still be a limit in what people can (not to mention want to) consume at the point we are saturated in Content™, so more people will just have to be made to increase economic growth.
- UK-Al05 7y agoPaying more for things is also considered growth. Presumably higher quality content
- azernik 7y agoInflation is removed from "real" (yes, that's the technical term) growth numbers.
- undershirt 7y agoMore energy is required to create or obtain higher quality content. Some call this the “energy primacy” of the economy that is often not accounted for when talking about GDP growth—which I suspect is one of the reasons economics has been termed “the dismal science.”
- beckingz 7y agoEnergy input per unit of GDP is an important metric that economists and environmentalists look at. Same for Co2 output per unit of GDP.
- mempko 7y agoIf technological efficiency had any effect on lowering overall consumption, we would see that now. But we don't. Consumption in real terms is increasing at an exponential rate. This is called The Great Acceleration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration Turns out people use the efficiency of technology to just consume more. Your internet goods and services might increase consumption somewhere else. Some of it is even explicit. Google Ads is a digital service that explicitly is designed to increase consumption. In fact, all the great technology companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) are designed around the idea that people will consume more. The tech industry, in aggregate, has been designed around getting people to consume more. Even Tesla, a green play, is designed around more consumption. Tesla could have been a company where you paid them, and they took your car and converted it to be an electric car by stripping the engine and adding batteries. This kind of play could have reduced real consumption. But that's not what Tesla is about.
- undershirt 7y agoon efficiency increasing net consumption, this is called Jevon’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- mempko 7y agoThanks! I knew there was a name for it but.couldn't remember.
- Nasrudith 7y agoWe already did actually. LED lightbulbs caused household power useage to drop in spite of the proliferation of networked computing devices. Thats right adding in a whole new category of power consumers wasn't enough to make up for the drop.
- qsymmachus 7y agoThis is incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs. > I can create digital goods and services which people buy Your digital goods and services require physical machines to run on. These machines are made of physical materials, including some rare earth minerals that are costly to extract. These machines require energy to run, which also requires material inputs. > I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment Human beings like yourself require material inputs to live – food, shelter, energy, to name only a few. Just by being alive on a biosphere, you are impacting the environment in some way. The size of that impact depends on your individual lifestyle. There is simply no such thing as "immaterial" economic production.
- abstractbarista 7y agoAhh but those machines are constantly becoming simultaneously more efficient and more powerful. And soon enough they'll all be ran on renewable energy. OP said nothing about growing the population. His statement can be true even as world population growth is slowing. Like many things, there may be no purely immaterial, but there is much (and increasing) practically immaterial.
- LoSboccacc 7y agowe need to build the first solar power plant only using the output of a smaller solar plant, so electric digger, hydroponics for food, electric smelters etc. after that it's all downhill.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> Ahh but those machines are constantly becoming simultaneously more efficient and more powerful. There are limits to efficiency due to fundamental laws of physics. We're already hitting some, we might be far from others, but a) we may not hit all of them fast enough to met the demand of exponential growth, and b) after we hit them, we can't improve those machines/processes further.
- gumby 7y ago> This is simply incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs...There is simply no such thing as "immaterial" economic production. Parent post was talking about marginal cost of production. E.g. where once we'd buy servers to run services on, we now share servers rented "by the cycle" from providers who amortize the cost over many users. Idle servers can be running at-the-moment economically valuable code for others. It's even possible that some economically valuable computation I might cause to be performed could consume an immeasurably small amount of power compared to the server sitting idle. Your formulation reminds me of the "labour theory of value" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value).
- jahaja 7y agoEven if this is would be true, is the idea that everyone shall work as and end in itself because of a dogmatic growth goal? At what point do we realise that it's based on artificial scarcity?