9 ms·

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 t

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.

coldtea 7y ago
>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, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better that models that treat the environment as externalities, or which convolute and stress the daily life for ever more trinkets to fuel the growth machine...
- shaftoe 7y ago
  You don't see much evil to handicapping the entire human race?
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    You don't see much evil in the absence of strategic intelligence required to avoid terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable?
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      Evil needs agency, so no, I don't see evil in the absence of something.
      - rbrtl 7y ago
        "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."
        Kaiyou 7y ago
        Emphasize on "good men". They're not evil for doing nothing.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        A convenient abdication of responsibility, isnt it? We we not responsible for plane crash/ financial crysis / climate change, it just happened!
        Kaiyou 7y ago
        I was talking about evil, not responsibility.
      - jhrmnn 7y ago
        What about the absence of resistance to evil? Perhaps not evil per se, but one could call it absence of good.
        Kaiyou 7y ago
        That depends on your definition of 'good', I guess. I wouldn't say that you have to fight evil to be good.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        For one, societies do have agency. People decide every day, with who they elect, where they spend their money, how they live. You don't need a conscious goal of X to act in a way that brings X. And if you know that your actions are part of the problem and you still doing them, that's even worse. Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds. An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    I do, and that's what cancerous infinite growth on every dimension will eventually do to us (or is already doing?) We need to constrain growth to science and efficiency, and pull back on population and land use.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    No, I don't see "moar stuff, moar tech" as the ultimate reason of the human race. I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever... If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.
- andersonvieira 7y ago
  You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets. This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me. I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
  - virgilp 7y ago
    I largely agree with you, with some amendment: > The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now. The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow? The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)
  - raducu 7y ago
    I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years. Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years. Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
- anonymou2 7y ago
  In fact I would say that the belief in perpetual growth is pretty much anti-science. It contradicts the evidence that the earth is a sphere to begin with.
- Aunche 7y ago
  It doesn't matter if you're ok with it. The problem is that everyone has to agree with you for it to work, which can't happen outside of force.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    All these plans for utopia always rely on bending other people to their will at the end of a gun, exactly like every other utopian nightmare.
anotherone18 7y ago
Source for the 1%? World bank data seems to differ: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=US-CA-MX https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
- ben_w 7y ago
  I believe OP is saying the difference is equal to, not that the difference is caused by. USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606 Mexico, ditto: $20602 20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6 The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    Thanks, that’s indeed what I meant. It was an example of why growth matters.
take_a_breath 7y ago
==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== On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?
- merpnderp 7y ago
  But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents. Growth rates matter.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    I don't really understand your post. Did you mean the US's mean income is double that of France's median income? I think[1] that's factually correct. I'm not sure if it's meaningful though. Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs? [1] ten minutes on wikipedia.
  - take_a_breath 7y ago
    Can you provide a citation for this claim? I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1] If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2] France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3] [1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle-class/524193/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#item-average-wealthy-countries-spend-half-much-per-person-health-u-s-spends https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

coldtea 7y ago

>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, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better that models that treat the environment as externalities, or which convolute and stress the daily life for ever more trinkets to fuel the growth machine...

shaftoe 7y ago
You don't see much evil to handicapping the entire human race?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  You don't see much evil in the absence of strategic intelligence required to avoid terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable?
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    Evil needs agency, so no, I don't see evil in the absence of something.
    - rbrtl 7y ago
      "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        Emphasize on "good men". They're not evil for doing nothing.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      A convenient abdication of responsibility, isnt it? We we not responsible for plane crash/ financial crysis / climate change, it just happened!
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        I was talking about evil, not responsibility.
    - jhrmnn 7y ago
      What about the absence of resistance to evil? Perhaps not evil per se, but one could call it absence of good.
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        That depends on your definition of 'good', I guess. I wouldn't say that you have to fight evil to be good.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      For one, societies do have agency. People decide every day, with who they elect, where they spend their money, how they live. You don't need a conscious goal of X to act in a way that brings X. And if you know that your actions are part of the problem and you still doing them, that's even worse. Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds. An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  I do, and that's what cancerous infinite growth on every dimension will eventually do to us (or is already doing?) We need to constrain growth to science and efficiency, and pull back on population and land use.
- coldtea 7y ago
  No, I don't see "moar stuff, moar tech" as the ultimate reason of the human race. I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever... If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.
andersonvieira 7y ago
You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets. This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me. I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
- virgilp 7y ago
  I largely agree with you, with some amendment: > The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now. The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow? The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)
- raducu 7y ago
  I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years. Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years. Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
anonymou2 7y ago
In fact I would say that the belief in perpetual growth is pretty much anti-science. It contradicts the evidence that the earth is a sphere to begin with.
Aunche 7y ago
It doesn't matter if you're ok with it. The problem is that everyone has to agree with you for it to work, which can't happen outside of force.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  All these plans for utopia always rely on bending other people to their will at the end of a gun, exactly like every other utopian nightmare.

anotherone18 7y ago

Source for the 1%? World bank data seems to differ: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=US-CA-MX https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

ben_w 7y ago
I believe OP is saying the difference is equal to, not that the difference is caused by. USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606 Mexico, ditto: $20602 20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6 The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Thanks, that’s indeed what I meant. It was an example of why growth matters.

take_a_breath 7y ago

==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== On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?

merpnderp 7y ago
But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents. Growth rates matter.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I don't really understand your post. Did you mean the US's mean income is double that of France's median income? I think[1] that's factually correct. I'm not sure if it's meaningful though. Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs? [1] ten minutes on wikipedia.
- take_a_breath 7y ago
  Can you provide a citation for this claim? I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1] If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2] France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3] [1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle-class/524193/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#item-average-wealthy-countries-spend-half-much-per-person-health-u-s-spends https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...