14 ms·

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 impleme

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.
- virgilp 7y ago
  Do you also mean AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing, etc? Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-by-world-region_v4_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...
  - rbrtl 7y ago
    I think you know OP didn't mean those: > Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes. Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole. This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill. They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs. Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.
    - thu2111 7y ago
baq 7y ago
limits of physics are well known and not about to change in 2, 200 or 20000 years. the current growth trajectory puts us at boiling oceans in about half of a millennium, assuming economic growth is correlated with energy consumption. remember all energy eventually ends up as heat and Earth can't radiate heat away fast enough if we grow too much. technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.

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.

virgilp 7y ago
Do you also mean AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing, etc? Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-by-world-region_v4_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...
- rbrtl 7y ago
  I think you know OP didn't mean those: > Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes. Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole. This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill. They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs. Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.
  - thu2111 7y ago

baq 7y ago

limits of physics are well known and not about to change in 2, 200 or 20000 years. the current growth trajectory puts us at boiling oceans in about half of a millennium, assuming economic growth is correlated with energy consumption. remember all energy eventually ends up as heat and Earth can't radiate heat away fast enough if we grow too much. technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.