40 ms·

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

210 points by doctoroctogon 7y ago

enriquto 7y ago
Cue to a physicists view on this subject (starting from basic termodynamic principles): https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- lcam84 7y ago
  You also have the club of rome that used system theory and arrive the conclusion that growth have phisical limits [1]. We can also see the work of Vaclav Smil [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Z6h-U4CmI&t=187s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Z6h-U4CmI&t=187s [2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth
- spodek 7y ago
  Do the Math is one of my favorite sites on the internet for the value and perspective it brings. I had a few great conversations with its author on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy. I found this report valuable too: Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked.
- jffhn 7y ago
  From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource" Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.) The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.
_red 7y ago
Debt-based monetary systems will skew towards ever increasing growth.
- chii 7y ago
  The way I think of it is that in order for debt to exist, interest on the debt must be paid. But to pay interest, you must create more value than the debt you incurred, otherwise you'd not have enough to pay the interest! But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But interest paid become a new deposit (for somebody), and from that new deposit, new debt is created...and hence, require infinite growth to continue to service interest payment.
  - beefield 7y ago
    I think there is something wrong with your premises. There is no rule of law nor nature that interest must be paid. Negative or zero interest are completely possible.
    - chii 7y ago
      but if someone loaned out money to somebody else, you'd expect that they'd ask for interest payment. negative interest rates seems like it's an impossibility (in the sense that only a central bank is willing and able to charge negative rates) for normal commercial loans. And if a bank charged negative rates on deposits (higher than it costs to keep cash safe in a secure safe!), then i suspect people will just withdraw their cash, unless something forces them to keep it in (like the abolishment of cash by central authorities).
      - beefield 7y ago
        In Denmark you can take a mortgage and "pay" negative interest rate [1]. That is, you pay less back than what you borrowed. I fully agree that most people would expect the interest rate to be positive, but their expectation is no rule. Actually I am very sure interest rates have no causal relationship with continuous growth. The one (and only?) thing where the the continuous growth requirement comes from is that most people do not want to be unemployed. That is the choice you need to make. Do you want growth or unvoluntary unemployment? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/danish-bank-is-offering-10-year-mortgages-with-negative-interest-rates.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/danish-bank-is-offering-10-y...
rezeroed 7y ago
Can you get countries not to compete?
dharma1 7y ago
I'm not sure how you would fund pensions without growth
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I mean it's obviously possible. "Just" require prefunding without any growth assumptions. Of course, it would be tremendously expensive and workers would not appreciate the effect on wages.
  - dharma1 7y ago
    Imagining zero growth (-2% or so with inflation) and long life spans, I think the numbers would look pretty bad for most people
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      Zero real growth is 0%, not -2%. -2% would be contraction. Even still, yes, it's pretty bad. People would have to work longer. Assuming kids account for about 25% of consumption during child rearing years, and assuming 40 years of work and 30 years of retirement (i.e. you live to 90), you wouldn't quite have to save 50% of your net, but the fraction would be significant. Many Americans do not have the head room to make the type of sacrifice. But many do and choose not to.
- digitalengineer 7y ago
  Agreed. you can not. There are just too many pensioners: "Between now and 2050,the number of older persons will rise from about 600 million to almost two billion. In less than 50 years from now, for the first time in history, the world will contain more people over 60 than under 15" https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demographic-boom-and-bust https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demo...
  - atemerev 7y ago
    This is why UBI is impossible. It is about 10x harder financially than pension funds.
bra4you 7y ago
Short answer: No Long answer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta...
samdung 7y ago
As long as you have short term growth targets (quarterly financial results) you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment. The only possible way is for people to stop buying unwanted stuff just because it is cheap.
- Reason077 7y ago
  > "you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment." Well, that's what governments are for. It is the government's role to create regulations which promote the broader, long-term interests of the population and environment in situations where markets fail to do so.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    And the issue is that big business can afford to "buy" the government. I don't see any other solution to this than to outlaw big business...
- Retric 7y ago
  Taxes can account for externalities. Smog is a great example where modern western cities have higher air quality and much stronger economies.
julbaxter 7y ago
Can we have prosperity without growth? No. Can we have sustainability with growth? No. Then we can not have prosperity and sustainability. Can we afford not having sustainability? No. Then we can not afford prosperity.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resources)
  - aww_dang 7y ago
    Malthus was proven wrong by productivity gains. England did not starve due to a rising population, but went on to become an industrialized nation. Increased population allows for greater specialization. This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make the Malthusian catastrophe self-fulfilling as the market can longer allocate resources efficiently.
    - ericmay 7y ago
      > Increased population allows for greater specialization Can you elaborate on this point w.r.t the OP you’re discussing?
      - aww_dang 7y ago
        Yes, but it would help if you could be a bit more specific. I fear this reply may be too general. The post above suggests that we cannot have a sustainable, prosperous growing population. A rising population allows for greater specialization in that the general population can rely on specialists (auto mechanics, computer programmers, bakers, farmers) to handle their respective field of expertise. You do not need to farm wheat to eat bread in a modern society. Bread is lined up waiting for you in the nearest market. You can go online and have your groceries delivered by a truck.
Reason077 7y ago
Perhaps a better way to phrase the question would be: Can we have economic growth, improving prosperity and quality-of-life, while reducing our environmental impact?
- hannob 7y ago
  That's actually the question most people have been asking for the past decades. The answer is: The world has tried and failed and there's some serious questions about the plausibility of that endeavour. The question whether growth==good or maybe just.. it's more complicated than that and we may be able to get more quality of life without growth is far more interesting.
  - Reason077 7y ago
    Have we really tried? Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues. Secondly, many of the technologies that will make this possible - renewable energy, electrification, energy storage, etc, are only just now beginning to reach the mainstream. Many of them seemed like science fiction in past decades.
    - hannob 7y ago
      > Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues. Interestiong question is what's cause and effect here. You could argue politicians haven't done more against CC because they always shy away from doing anything that might harm the economy.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  Probably not, because most people want a warm home, some means of transportation, food (especially meat), and other plastic consumer goods. You can't really change human nature, and you also can't fix that by some economic trickery. The only way is to find some technological solution.
b0rsuk 7y ago
Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for factories and plantations, so they would visit a coastal African country and buy slaves. You could refuse to sell them slaves, but then they would sail to your neighbors and sell them firearms. Then those neighbors would have substantial military advantage and could invade you. There were only two options: be the ones that receive the rifles, or form a large alliance which refuses to sell slaves to Europeans. Forming large alliances is HARD. Africans weren't stupid - they tried to negate the technical advantage, for example the king of Kongo wanted to pay well for ship technology. (source: "Black Mother" by Basil Davidson) Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. Produce terminator-like killer machines and drones to make up for less numerous army. Have super advanced science, strategy or diplomacy. The only country I know that comes close is Switzerland, and it has the advantage of mountainous terrain away from major transport routes. Ideally the advantages you have should be ones that can't be taken away from you or "stolen" via espionage.
- nickik 7y ago
  > I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. Or the population including the elites get sick of living poor country and the wont defend the government letting it be overthrown. > Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. If you are improving efficiency your economy is growing. Unless you assume people will deliberately use less resources once efficiency grows and I don't think that has ever happened.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  1% growth difference over 100 years is the difference between the per capita income of the US vs Mexico. So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon.
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novalis78 7y ago
It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Embedded in a vast ocean of mostly unattainable resources, pipe dreams of "conquering the universe" aside.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Embedded in a vast ocean of resources that are harder and harder to extract : http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/ http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
- paulintrognon 7y ago
  > Human ingenuity is key That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"? If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choo...
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    > That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude. As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
Double_a_92 7y ago
If an industry has grown so much that it can fulfill all the demand the market has for it, why does it need more growth? So "growth" would come from changing demands eventually.
fjfaase 7y ago
I am getting the impression that growth is largely an illusion, because there is also something like inflation. And it also seems that it is mostly the (very) rich that benefit from the growth.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Growth doesn't necessarily mean money-wise. And GDP is generally tweaked to make inflation disappear.
choonway 7y ago
But why? The universe is so vast and under-populated it's hard to make a case why growth would be constrained.
- coldtea 7y ago
  We don't live in the universe at large, we live on Earth. Until someone takes us there or shows us how to go practically, and bring stuff back practically (not with e.g. "generation ships" and not with hand-waving about what we could or could not do with "ingenuity" in 100 years), we should not use a mere wish as a permission to not respect the hard present limits. (That's not something said against the idea of space exploration. In the contrary, not respecting those limits might be the very reason why we never reach the universe -- e.g. because we collapse before we have a chance. Same in this regard as our playing with nukes and other careless follies).
  - allendoerfer 7y ago
    To do that, we need more research, more production, better technologies, better energy usage, which turns out to be growth.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      No, we could do that with limited growth (of general commerce economy) and just having more resources given to science. Even as a matter of political will (tons of resources in the US e.g. are given to the military which could be use for NASA programs). We went to space with an 1/10th the economy of today. We had not been to the moon for 40+ years, despite the economy growing ever stronger.
      - allendoerfer 7y ago
        What got America to the moon was taking the leftovers of an beyond-imagination evil dictatorship, designed to take over the world, and applying it to win a race against another dictatorship. During that whole process millions of people experienced horror or lost their lifes in the cruelest ways imaginable. While I acknowledge, that economic growth has problems, it does not seem all that bad to me. I imagine going to the moon just is not a priority right now. The superrich already want to spend their money on space projects. Let's wait what regular people want to buy, after health, etc. is solved.
mjburgess 7y ago
As far as I can tell this is just a misunderstanding of "growth" in an economic sense. Growth is the result of improvements in productivity, which tend to reduce energy use (per item produced). We consume more energy net because we produce more. If, eg., products became more expensive because of limited energy (or relevant taxing of externalities) then we would grow more slowly -- we can still produce more through innovation and consume less energy. It took a huge amount of energy in the past to make a single pair of socks -- today, it takes a tiny amount. I think the relevant question for 'exponential energy-consumption graphs' is what the relationship is to growth (it simply cannot be assumed that there is a 'deep causal' relationship; this is fallacious equivocation). Eg., population has been increasing exponentially. Could a static population size produce a flat (or falling) net energy use graph -- whilst still obtaining economic growth (ie., productivity improvements)?
- adolph 7y ago
  You might enjoy or be thinking about this episode of the Econtalk podcast “ Andrew McAfee on More from Less”: http://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/ http://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
- paulintrognon 7y ago
  Empirically, economic growth has always been related to consumption of energy and raw materials. One explanation is the Rebound effect[1] Maybe theorically they can be decoupled, but we have yet to see that in the real world. More about it: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
  - pas 7y ago
    There is a lot of raw materials and energy. The problem is how clean we can do extraction and energy generation. So it's not surprising that we are still very much tracking both correlates.
- HPsquared 7y ago
jhoechtl 7y ago
As long as * our needs and deeds don't take over * marketing stops to teach us longings for things we actually do not need -- Yes!
mech1234 7y ago
Lots of people underestimate the degree to which economic growth fuels good life outcomes for wide swaths of people. -Even though many people live paycheck to paycheck at many different income levels, enough income growth can get you out of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and enable you to have real financial autonomy. -One thing that has stuck in my mind over the last few years is that one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems. -The pace at which we solve real, useful problems grows with economic growth.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  More importantly, you can enjoy (maybe exploding inequality moderates this a bit) a rising standard of living while living from paycheck to paycheck. Growing up I was raised by classical musicians permanently on the bleeding edge of solvency (not with debt either) but new stuff kept coming that increased both their quality of life and ”nonmonetary” productivity: microwave ovens and computers that my dad could use to take his orchestral compositions (in sheet music for all parts) to part sheets (for individual players) automagically whereas this was work before. We weren’t in the kind of self-reproducing poverty because my parents had a high “cultural level”, but we were definitely cash poor, and yet kept getting wealthier and wealthier.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  > one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems This is more the outcome of de-socialisation, which unemployment tends to cause. (Compare with retirement.)
bitxbit 7y ago
Growth is good but we are entering an economic environment where countries and companies are growing simply to show growth. It’s inorganic. In the past this type of behavior would result in boom and bust cycles, now the easy money has made it possible for us to go on indefinitely. This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  "Simply to show growth"? People like generally money, what's changed?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  "Growth" just means "Wall St gets a positive return". That's all it has ever meant. When wealth was being more aggressively redistributed this also meant the rest of the US saw some practical benefits. Now that's no longer true, it's just a numbers game for the 1%.
coretx 7y ago
Prosperity is subjective. Growth is not or relative. Can we turn a long string into a boolean? So no. The question itself is logically flawed.
esjeon 7y ago
"Growth" is surely a good way to ease domestic pressure, but I believe it's not the only option. What we need is more "optimization", not corporate-wide, but society-wide. The idea is still vague even to myself, so let me give a concrete example: self-driving car. While CV/AI-based self-driving cars certainly can drive, it should still acquire most critical information, like signals, crossroads, lanes, obstacles, etc, through ambiguous-at-best algorithms. At the same time, the inherent difficulty in making good-enough AI empowers companies over people, which is a straight highway to cyberpunk dystopia. However, what if we implant digital data sources all over the road? (1) self-driving cars will always acquire correct data (2) developing safe self-driving cars become much easier (2-1) market diversity is ensured (2-2) people regain power (3) it is much easier to achieve the economy of scale with sensor nodes than cars. Or, perhaps, what about delivery/reservation services? If the standard protocols are enforced on all restaurants, we can cut all the middlemen, lowering the prices. The same can work for taxi, hotel, scooter, bicycle, etc. We really should start rethinking about things we have and use. The industrial structure we have today is just a mess caused by the rapid IT revolution. We weren't really ready for it. But now we've expanded enough, and should shrink down, so that we can have breathing room for another move.
- machiaweliczny 7y ago
  100% agree - Most likely data interoperation/protocols need to be enforced by government as there is no economic incentive to do so otherwise.
whiddershins 7y ago
Growth includes technological advancement, including for example ... trying to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s. Am I correct in this? If so, please let’s stick with growth.
- dgb23 7y ago
  Innovation can positively influence growth. But the article, including references and papers, is not about reducing innovation. It is about the fallacy that economic growth (= increase in GDP), somehow magically solves all problems of society. This belief is mostly ideological and the implication is that the market should not be regulated, which would reduce growth and prosperity. The effects of this strategy include increased inequality, weak infrastructure/education and ecological exploitation with dire consequences. Innovation, which really advances society in sustainable ways, is often intrinsically or socially motivated, not financially and certainly not by a GDP increase, which benefits a tiny minority. Reducing inequality, improving education and increasing individual freedom within organizations seem to be much more sensible ways to fuel innovation in the long term, than just deregulating the market.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc. Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel. The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need. As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style. Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store. Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses. Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    > Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example. Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away. Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
nnq 7y ago
This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too: The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to: (1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.! (2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...) A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"... So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  ur dumb :p No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse... Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !
weeksie 7y ago
The one fundamental reason why growth is so important is that without growth, the economy becomes a zero sum game. In order for you to get more money you must take it from someone else since there is only a fixed amount. A low growth world is one where we plunder each others' wealth, not one were the incentives are aligned with building new industry. That's why productivity increases are so important. Without them, if we want growth, we have to get it from positive sum games. I'm skeptical that will provide enough to stop people from reverting to a more Malthusian plunder mindset. Any vision of a non-growth world needs to take that into account. Without growth we'd have to fundamentally rethink how we handle distribution without reverting to bloodsport.
- bilekas 7y ago
  Does what you're saying imply that growth can be perpetual ?
  - weeksie 7y ago
    You still need energy inputs, so I'm not sure it does.
  - thegabriele 7y ago
    It should last until we get to strong AI or fusion energy, both i believe will have too much an impact to be again in the hands of the fews (perhaps a global war will be in order before). Then, the problem will be about literally physical space on earth.
    - baq 7y ago
      don't forget about waste heat, we'll get cooked alive in a few hundred years of 3% yoy growth in energy produced
      - thegabriele 7y ago
        Yep, the constraint here is not to wipe out ourself in the meantime!
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naringas 7y ago
well, we better figure out how to do it or will kill the planet and then die along with it. it's not an easy challenge; over 6000 years of western cultural evolution are built, hinged and based on growth and expansion by exploitation. but there aren't many thing left to exploit nor expand into.
egberts1 7y ago
Yes, we can prosperity without growth. — We call that “socialism.”
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  The USSR in the early 20th century astounded everyone by its amazing growth. Not surprising since Lenin's main goal was to beat the capitalists at their own game! (But the price paid was very high too...)
bawana 7y ago
Prosperity without growth. Only possible if money has a half life. This slow devaluation of money over time would allow stable prices, growth and more granular control of the economy. This kind of money could be electronic and only minted by the fed as FED-COIN. The blockchain would be essential in tracking and controlling each fedcoin. An interesting solution might be for the fed to give fed coin to people as a UBI(Universal basic income). Of course once the fedcoin is spent(undergoes a transaction) it’s value would freeze. the seller of a product would then have regular money. The current mode of the fed being limited to repo operations is blunt. Direct involvement of the fed with the public would allow more direct management of the economy. In addition fedcoin would traceable (anti crime), taxable, and controllable(it might have no value for example in trade for gambling, cigarettes alcohol or other items that are unhealthy)
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  The easy way to devalue money would be to print more of it.
  - bawana 7y ago
    It’s not just the printing of money but it’s proper delivery. Currently the fed uses money in repo operations. This was fine back in the day but today it’s different. Since the weaking of glass stegall banks are looking to financial tools for higher roi. Now it seems the fed’s behavior is propping up equities markets while real wages stagnate.
- acoye 7y ago
  You would then have to try to ban bitcoin Why would an individual want to keep around an eroding by design currency? > In addition fedcoin would traceable (anti crime) You would only successfully trace the law abiding citizen IMO.
  - bawana 7y ago
    The incentive to spend it will drive the economy. The ability to prevent its use in ‘bad’ transactions will limit ‘bad’ behavior.
hx87 7y ago
The more important question is: can we have growth in economic output (which is what we actually want) without growth in economic input (which is purely instrumental)?
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Short-term - maybe, though past history isn't exactly positive about that. Long-term : no, as this would reduce economic input to an arbitrary small fraction of the overall wealth, which anyone would be able to corner. So it's either self-limiting or unstable.
sunsu 7y ago
Relevant: WTFHappenedIn1971.com
hwdug8278 7y ago
I've heard this argument before. This is what the Anti-spiral said in TTGL.
subject119 7y ago
> Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? The answer is a definitive no. Reasons supporting the limit of growth are dwindling as people like Marc Andreessen openly state that the acceleration of growth is vital for the rehabilitation and improvement of our environment. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU5Dikdr2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU5Dikdr2U) Other negative externality arguments of growth are starting to fall apart as well. Creative Destruction, Public Health, and Income Inequality are all being positively impacted from the reduction in unemployment and improvements in technology.
journeymanblue 7y ago
What a more important measure is growth per capita, not growth in the absolute for personal prosperity / national stability etc. Population decline combined with growth per capita can both bring prosperity while reducing our adverse impact on the planet.
patrickskim 7y ago
It depends on who "we" includes.
pjkundert 7y ago
Yes — iff your monetary base isn’t brought into being by payment of interest. If interest must be payed in order for each unit of currency to exist, then growth is required. If not, then equilibrium between stock/flow of money and available goods/services/wealth for sale can be maintained. If currency is brought into being by attachment of wealth (as is done in typical users based Fiat via Liens), then issuance/withdrawal of units of currency is accomplished across the entire base, to ensure absolute value stability vs. a reference basket of arbitrary commodities (or whatever)
biolurker1 7y ago
Europe
adultSwim 7y ago
Yes

210 points by doctoroctogon 7y ago

Cue to a physicists view on this subject (starting from basic termodynamic principles): https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

lcam84 7y ago
You also have the club of rome that used system theory and arrive the conclusion that growth have phisical limits [1]. We can also see the work of Vaclav Smil [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Z6h-U4CmI&t=187s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Z6h-U4CmI&t=187s [2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth
spodek 7y ago
Do the Math is one of my favorite sites on the internet for the value and perspective it brings. I had a few great conversations with its author on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy. I found this report valuable too: Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked.
jffhn 7y ago
From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource" Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.) The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.

_red 7y ago

Debt-based monetary systems will skew towards ever increasing growth.

chii 7y ago
The way I think of it is that in order for debt to exist, interest on the debt must be paid. But to pay interest, you must create more value than the debt you incurred, otherwise you'd not have enough to pay the interest! But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But interest paid become a new deposit (for somebody), and from that new deposit, new debt is created...and hence, require infinite growth to continue to service interest payment.
- beefield 7y ago
  I think there is something wrong with your premises. There is no rule of law nor nature that interest must be paid. Negative or zero interest are completely possible.
  - chii 7y ago
    but if someone loaned out money to somebody else, you'd expect that they'd ask for interest payment. negative interest rates seems like it's an impossibility (in the sense that only a central bank is willing and able to charge negative rates) for normal commercial loans. And if a bank charged negative rates on deposits (higher than it costs to keep cash safe in a secure safe!), then i suspect people will just withdraw their cash, unless something forces them to keep it in (like the abolishment of cash by central authorities).
    - beefield 7y ago
      In Denmark you can take a mortgage and "pay" negative interest rate [1]. That is, you pay less back than what you borrowed. I fully agree that most people would expect the interest rate to be positive, but their expectation is no rule. Actually I am very sure interest rates have no causal relationship with continuous growth. The one (and only?) thing where the the continuous growth requirement comes from is that most people do not want to be unemployed. That is the choice you need to make. Do you want growth or unvoluntary unemployment? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/danish-bank-is-offering-10-year-mortgages-with-negative-interest-rates.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/danish-bank-is-offering-10-y...

rezeroed 7y ago

Can you get countries not to compete?

dharma1 7y ago

I'm not sure how you would fund pensions without growth

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I mean it's obviously possible. "Just" require prefunding without any growth assumptions. Of course, it would be tremendously expensive and workers would not appreciate the effect on wages.
- dharma1 7y ago
  Imagining zero growth (-2% or so with inflation) and long life spans, I think the numbers would look pretty bad for most people
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Zero real growth is 0%, not -2%. -2% would be contraction. Even still, yes, it's pretty bad. People would have to work longer. Assuming kids account for about 25% of consumption during child rearing years, and assuming 40 years of work and 30 years of retirement (i.e. you live to 90), you wouldn't quite have to save 50% of your net, but the fraction would be significant. Many Americans do not have the head room to make the type of sacrifice. But many do and choose not to.
digitalengineer 7y ago
Agreed. you can not. There are just too many pensioners: "Between now and 2050,the number of older persons will rise from about 600 million to almost two billion. In less than 50 years from now, for the first time in history, the world will contain more people over 60 than under 15" https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demographic-boom-and-bust https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demo...
- atemerev 7y ago
  This is why UBI is impossible. It is about 10x harder financially than pension funds.

bra4you 7y ago

Short answer: No Long answer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta...

samdung 7y ago

As long as you have short term growth targets (quarterly financial results) you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment. The only possible way is for people to stop buying unwanted stuff just because it is cheap.

Reason077 7y ago
> "you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment." Well, that's what governments are for. It is the government's role to create regulations which promote the broader, long-term interests of the population and environment in situations where markets fail to do so.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  And the issue is that big business can afford to "buy" the government. I don't see any other solution to this than to outlaw big business...
Retric 7y ago
Taxes can account for externalities. Smog is a great example where modern western cities have higher air quality and much stronger economies.

julbaxter 7y ago

Can we have prosperity without growth? No. Can we have sustainability with growth? No. Then we can not have prosperity and sustainability. Can we afford not having sustainability? No. Then we can not afford prosperity.

mytailorisrich 7y ago
We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resources)
- aww_dang 7y ago
  Malthus was proven wrong by productivity gains. England did not starve due to a rising population, but went on to become an industrialized nation. Increased population allows for greater specialization. This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make the Malthusian catastrophe self-fulfilling as the market can longer allocate resources efficiently.
  - ericmay 7y ago
    > Increased population allows for greater specialization Can you elaborate on this point w.r.t the OP you’re discussing?
    - aww_dang 7y ago
      Yes, but it would help if you could be a bit more specific. I fear this reply may be too general. The post above suggests that we cannot have a sustainable, prosperous growing population. A rising population allows for greater specialization in that the general population can rely on specialists (auto mechanics, computer programmers, bakers, farmers) to handle their respective field of expertise. You do not need to farm wheat to eat bread in a modern society. Bread is lined up waiting for you in the nearest market. You can go online and have your groceries delivered by a truck.

Reason077 7y ago

Perhaps a better way to phrase the question would be: Can we have economic growth, improving prosperity and quality-of-life, while reducing our environmental impact?

hannob 7y ago
That's actually the question most people have been asking for the past decades. The answer is: The world has tried and failed and there's some serious questions about the plausibility of that endeavour. The question whether growth==good or maybe just.. it's more complicated than that and we may be able to get more quality of life without growth is far more interesting.
- Reason077 7y ago
  Have we really tried? Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues. Secondly, many of the technologies that will make this possible - renewable energy, electrification, energy storage, etc, are only just now beginning to reach the mainstream. Many of them seemed like science fiction in past decades.
  - hannob 7y ago
    > Firstly, despite a lot of talk and bluster, politicians around the world have done very little to regulate against climate change and other environmental issues. Interestiong question is what's cause and effect here. You could argue politicians haven't done more against CC because they always shy away from doing anything that might harm the economy.
Double_a_92 7y ago
Probably not, because most people want a warm home, some means of transportation, food (especially meat), and other plastic consumer goods. You can't really change human nature, and you also can't fix that by some economic trickery. The only way is to find some technological solution.

b0rsuk 7y ago

Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for factories and plantations, so they would visit a coastal African country and buy slaves. You could refuse to sell them slaves, but then they would sail to your neighbors and sell them firearms. Then those neighbors would have substantial military advantage and could invade you. There were only two options: be the ones that receive the rifles, or form a large alliance which refuses to sell slaves to Europeans. Forming large alliances is HARD. Africans weren't stupid - they tried to negate the technical advantage, for example the king of Kongo wanted to pay well for ship technology. (source: "Black Mother" by Basil Davidson) Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. Produce terminator-like killer machines and drones to make up for less numerous army. Have super advanced science, strategy or diplomacy. The only country I know that comes close is Switzerland, and it has the advantage of mountainous terrain away from major transport routes. Ideally the advantages you have should be ones that can't be taken away from you or "stolen" via espionage.

nickik 7y ago
> I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. Or the population including the elites get sick of living poor country and the wont defend the government letting it be overthrown. > Back to prosperity without growth. To resist pressure from neighboring states that practice economic growth, you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. If you are improving efficiency your economy is growing. Unless you assume people will deliberately use less resources once efficiency grows and I don't think that has ever happened.
merpnderp 7y ago
1% growth difference over 100 years is the difference between the per capita income of the US vs Mexico. So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

novalis78 7y ago

It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.

coldtea 7y ago
Embedded in a vast ocean of mostly unattainable resources, pipe dreams of "conquering the universe" aside.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Embedded in a vast ocean of resources that are harder and harder to extract : http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/ http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
paulintrognon 7y ago
> Human ingenuity is key That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"? If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choo...
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude. As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.

Double_a_92 7y ago

If an industry has grown so much that it can fulfill all the demand the market has for it, why does it need more growth? So "growth" would come from changing demands eventually.

fjfaase 7y ago

I am getting the impression that growth is largely an illusion, because there is also something like inflation. And it also seems that it is mostly the (very) rich that benefit from the growth.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Growth doesn't necessarily mean money-wise. And GDP is generally tweaked to make inflation disappear.

choonway 7y ago

But why? The universe is so vast and under-populated it's hard to make a case why growth would be constrained.

coldtea 7y ago
We don't live in the universe at large, we live on Earth. Until someone takes us there or shows us how to go practically, and bring stuff back practically (not with e.g. "generation ships" and not with hand-waving about what we could or could not do with "ingenuity" in 100 years), we should not use a mere wish as a permission to not respect the hard present limits. (That's not something said against the idea of space exploration. In the contrary, not respecting those limits might be the very reason why we never reach the universe -- e.g. because we collapse before we have a chance. Same in this regard as our playing with nukes and other careless follies).
- allendoerfer 7y ago
  To do that, we need more research, more production, better technologies, better energy usage, which turns out to be growth.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    No, we could do that with limited growth (of general commerce economy) and just having more resources given to science. Even as a matter of political will (tons of resources in the US e.g. are given to the military which could be use for NASA programs). We went to space with an 1/10th the economy of today. We had not been to the moon for 40+ years, despite the economy growing ever stronger.
    - allendoerfer 7y ago
      What got America to the moon was taking the leftovers of an beyond-imagination evil dictatorship, designed to take over the world, and applying it to win a race against another dictatorship. During that whole process millions of people experienced horror or lost their lifes in the cruelest ways imaginable. While I acknowledge, that economic growth has problems, it does not seem all that bad to me. I imagine going to the moon just is not a priority right now. The superrich already want to spend their money on space projects. Let's wait what regular people want to buy, after health, etc. is solved.

mjburgess 7y ago

As far as I can tell this is just a misunderstanding of "growth" in an economic sense. Growth is the result of improvements in productivity, which tend to reduce energy use (per item produced). We consume more energy net because we produce more. If, eg., products became more expensive because of limited energy (or relevant taxing of externalities) then we would grow more slowly -- we can still produce more through innovation and consume less energy. It took a huge amount of energy in the past to make a single pair of socks -- today, it takes a tiny amount. I think the relevant question for 'exponential energy-consumption graphs' is what the relationship is to growth (it simply cannot be assumed that there is a 'deep causal' relationship; this is fallacious equivocation). Eg., population has been increasing exponentially. Could a static population size produce a flat (or falling) net energy use graph -- whilst still obtaining economic growth (ie., productivity improvements)?

adolph 7y ago
You might enjoy or be thinking about this episode of the Econtalk podcast “ Andrew McAfee on More from Less”: http://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/ http://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
paulintrognon 7y ago
Empirically, economic growth has always been related to consumption of energy and raw materials. One explanation is the Rebound effect[1] Maybe theorically they can be decoupled, but we have yet to see that in the real world. More about it: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
- pas 7y ago
  There is a lot of raw materials and energy. The problem is how clean we can do extraction and energy generation. So it's not surprising that we are still very much tracking both correlates.
HPsquared 7y ago

jhoechtl 7y ago

As long as * our needs and deeds don't take over * marketing stops to teach us longings for things we actually do not need -- Yes!

mech1234 7y ago

Lots of people underestimate the degree to which economic growth fuels good life outcomes for wide swaths of people. -Even though many people live paycheck to paycheck at many different income levels, enough income growth can get you out of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and enable you to have real financial autonomy. -One thing that has stuck in my mind over the last few years is that one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems. -The pace at which we solve real, useful problems grows with economic growth.

thanatropism 7y ago
More importantly, you can enjoy (maybe exploding inequality moderates this a bit) a rising standard of living while living from paycheck to paycheck. Growing up I was raised by classical musicians permanently on the bleeding edge of solvency (not with debt either) but new stuff kept coming that increased both their quality of life and ”nonmonetary” productivity: microwave ovens and computers that my dad could use to take his orchestral compositions (in sheet music for all parts) to part sheets (for individual players) automagically whereas this was work before. We weren’t in the kind of self-reproducing poverty because my parents had a high “cultural level”, but we were definitely cash poor, and yet kept getting wealthier and wealthier.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
> one of the worst outcomes of unemployment is when people feel useless as a person- leading to psychological problems and behavioral problems This is more the outcome of de-socialisation, which unemployment tends to cause. (Compare with retirement.)

bitxbit 7y ago

Growth is good but we are entering an economic environment where countries and companies are growing simply to show growth. It’s inorganic. In the past this type of behavior would result in boom and bust cycles, now the easy money has made it possible for us to go on indefinitely. This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.

mhh__ 7y ago
"Simply to show growth"? People like generally money, what's changed?
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
"Growth" just means "Wall St gets a positive return". That's all it has ever meant. When wealth was being more aggressively redistributed this also meant the rest of the US saw some practical benefits. Now that's no longer true, it's just a numbers game for the 1%.

coretx 7y ago

Prosperity is subjective. Growth is not or relative. Can we turn a long string into a boolean? So no. The question itself is logically flawed.

esjeon 7y ago

"Growth" is surely a good way to ease domestic pressure, but I believe it's not the only option. What we need is more "optimization", not corporate-wide, but society-wide. The idea is still vague even to myself, so let me give a concrete example: self-driving car. While CV/AI-based self-driving cars certainly can drive, it should still acquire most critical information, like signals, crossroads, lanes, obstacles, etc, through ambiguous-at-best algorithms. At the same time, the inherent difficulty in making good-enough AI empowers companies over people, which is a straight highway to cyberpunk dystopia. However, what if we implant digital data sources all over the road? (1) self-driving cars will always acquire correct data (2) developing safe self-driving cars become much easier (2-1) market diversity is ensured (2-2) people regain power (3) it is much easier to achieve the economy of scale with sensor nodes than cars. Or, perhaps, what about delivery/reservation services? If the standard protocols are enforced on all restaurants, we can cut all the middlemen, lowering the prices. The same can work for taxi, hotel, scooter, bicycle, etc. We really should start rethinking about things we have and use. The industrial structure we have today is just a mess caused by the rapid IT revolution. We weren't really ready for it. But now we've expanded enough, and should shrink down, so that we can have breathing room for another move.

machiaweliczny 7y ago
100% agree - Most likely data interoperation/protocols need to be enforced by government as there is no economic incentive to do so otherwise.

whiddershins 7y ago

Growth includes technological advancement, including for example ... trying to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s. Am I correct in this? If so, please let’s stick with growth.

dgb23 7y ago
Innovation can positively influence growth. But the article, including references and papers, is not about reducing innovation. It is about the fallacy that economic growth (= increase in GDP), somehow magically solves all problems of society. This belief is mostly ideological and the implication is that the market should not be regulated, which would reduce growth and prosperity. The effects of this strategy include increased inequality, weak infrastructure/education and ecological exploitation with dire consequences. Innovation, which really advances society in sustainable ways, is often intrinsically or socially motivated, not financially and certainly not by a GDP increase, which benefits a tiny minority. Reducing inequality, improving education and increasing individual freedom within organizations seem to be much more sensible ways to fuel innovation in the long term, than just deregulating the market.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc. Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel. The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need. As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style. Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.

luckylion 7y ago
> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store. Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses. Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).
- rtkwe 7y ago
  > Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example. Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away. Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.

nnq 7y ago

This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too: The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to: (1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.! (2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...) A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"... So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).

BlueTemplar 7y ago
ur dumb :p No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse... Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !

weeksie 7y ago

The one fundamental reason why growth is so important is that without growth, the economy becomes a zero sum game. In order for you to get more money you must take it from someone else since there is only a fixed amount. A low growth world is one where we plunder each others' wealth, not one were the incentives are aligned with building new industry. That's why productivity increases are so important. Without them, if we want growth, we have to get it from positive sum games. I'm skeptical that will provide enough to stop people from reverting to a more Malthusian plunder mindset. Any vision of a non-growth world needs to take that into account. Without growth we'd have to fundamentally rethink how we handle distribution without reverting to bloodsport.

bilekas 7y ago
Does what you're saying imply that growth can be perpetual ?
- weeksie 7y ago
  You still need energy inputs, so I'm not sure it does.
- thegabriele 7y ago
  It should last until we get to strong AI or fusion energy, both i believe will have too much an impact to be again in the hands of the fews (perhaps a global war will be in order before). Then, the problem will be about literally physical space on earth.
  - baq 7y ago
    don't forget about waste heat, we'll get cooked alive in a few hundred years of 3% yoy growth in energy produced
    - thegabriele 7y ago
      Yep, the constraint here is not to wipe out ourself in the meantime!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

naringas 7y ago

well, we better figure out how to do it or will kill the planet and then die along with it. it's not an easy challenge; over 6000 years of western cultural evolution are built, hinged and based on growth and expansion by exploitation. but there aren't many thing left to exploit nor expand into.

egberts1 7y ago

Yes, we can prosperity without growth. — We call that “socialism.”

BlueTemplar 7y ago
The USSR in the early 20th century astounded everyone by its amazing growth. Not surprising since Lenin's main goal was to beat the capitalists at their own game! (But the price paid was very high too...)

bawana 7y ago

Prosperity without growth. Only possible if money has a half life. This slow devaluation of money over time would allow stable prices, growth and more granular control of the economy. This kind of money could be electronic and only minted by the fed as FED-COIN. The blockchain would be essential in tracking and controlling each fedcoin. An interesting solution might be for the fed to give fed coin to people as a UBI(Universal basic income). Of course once the fedcoin is spent(undergoes a transaction) it’s value would freeze. the seller of a product would then have regular money. The current mode of the fed being limited to repo operations is blunt. Direct involvement of the fed with the public would allow more direct management of the economy. In addition fedcoin would traceable (anti crime), taxable, and controllable(it might have no value for example in trade for gambling, cigarettes alcohol or other items that are unhealthy)

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
The easy way to devalue money would be to print more of it.
- bawana 7y ago
  It’s not just the printing of money but it’s proper delivery. Currently the fed uses money in repo operations. This was fine back in the day but today it’s different. Since the weaking of glass stegall banks are looking to financial tools for higher roi. Now it seems the fed’s behavior is propping up equities markets while real wages stagnate.
acoye 7y ago
You would then have to try to ban bitcoin Why would an individual want to keep around an eroding by design currency? > In addition fedcoin would traceable (anti crime) You would only successfully trace the law abiding citizen IMO.
- bawana 7y ago
  The incentive to spend it will drive the economy. The ability to prevent its use in ‘bad’ transactions will limit ‘bad’ behavior.

hx87 7y ago

The more important question is: can we have growth in economic output (which is what we actually want) without growth in economic input (which is purely instrumental)?

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Short-term - maybe, though past history isn't exactly positive about that. Long-term : no, as this would reduce economic input to an arbitrary small fraction of the overall wealth, which anyone would be able to corner. So it's either self-limiting or unstable.

sunsu 7y ago

Relevant: WTFHappenedIn1971.com

hwdug8278 7y ago

I've heard this argument before. This is what the Anti-spiral said in TTGL.

subject119 7y ago

> Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? The answer is a definitive no. Reasons supporting the limit of growth are dwindling as people like Marc Andreessen openly state that the acceleration of growth is vital for the rehabilitation and improvement of our environment. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU5Dikdr2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU5Dikdr2U) Other negative externality arguments of growth are starting to fall apart as well. Creative Destruction, Public Health, and Income Inequality are all being positively impacted from the reduction in unemployment and improvements in technology.

journeymanblue 7y ago

What a more important measure is growth per capita, not growth in the absolute for personal prosperity / national stability etc. Population decline combined with growth per capita can both bring prosperity while reducing our adverse impact on the planet.

patrickskim 7y ago

It depends on who "we" includes.

pjkundert 7y ago

Yes — iff your monetary base isn’t brought into being by payment of interest. If interest must be payed in order for each unit of currency to exist, then growth is required. If not, then equilibrium between stock/flow of money and available goods/services/wealth for sale can be maintained. If currency is brought into being by attachment of wealth (as is done in typical users based Fiat via Liens), then issuance/withdrawal of units of currency is accomplished across the entire base, to ensure absolute value stability vs. a reference basket of arbitrary commodities (or whatever)

biolurker1 7y ago

Europe

adultSwim 7y ago

Yes