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I’m skeptical of the closing claim that exponential growth keeps happening forever. Yes, you can grow GDP 2% for 200 years, that results in an economy 50x the s
by yojo 6y ago
I’m skeptical of the closing claim that exponential growth keeps happening forever. Yes, you can grow GDP 2% for 200 years, that results in an economy 50x the start size. Expand it to 1000 years and you’re talking about an economy 400 million times as large. After 2100 years you’re up to an economy a QUINTILLION times as large.
At some point the exponential curve has to go S-shaped. Maybe we’re still in the happy exponential looking part of the curve. There are also signs we might be transitioning. Population growth has slowed, productivity growth has slowed, and the marginal return on capital seems to be somewhere around zero given modern interest rates.
- emteycz 6y agoConsider the last 2000 years. The global market went from nothing to outlandish emperor-level luxuries available to multiple billions of humans + all the stuff that we have that even emperors didn't imagine. I think quintillion times growth in "actual value to humans" is not that off. And thinking about the next 2000 years, I don't see any hard limits there too.
- ben_w 6y agoA quintillion is larger than the ratio of a synaptic refractory period and a human lifetime by a factor of about 1.5 million. Even with my optimism about transhumanism, I’d be very surprised if that was accurate or will ever be.
- emteycz 6y agoIt's not about transhumanism, it's simply the (Kardashev) scale of society.
- ericmay 6y agoWell, eventually what will happen is countries will disappear, wars will destroy things, and other events will wipe out economies, savings, or entire companies. The growth model will probably always be exponential, but from time to time things will reset to 0.
- simonsarris 6y agoor 1% more optimistically: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/reset/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/reset/
- luckman212 6y agoPBF is so genius. I had forgotten about it, thank you for the reminder.
- dstick 6y agoWhile I agree with your sentiment, how has this worked in the past? Did things reset to 0 during WW1 and 2?
- zamfi 6y agoIn much of Europe and east Asia, yes! Germany and Japan in particular were bombed basically to 0...
- est31 6y agoThose two nations still had the right culture and social structure to build blooming new societies. In this context, with "culture" I don't mean political views or such, but work ethic, and things like literacy, education, etc. The German car industry wouldn't have been thinkable hadn't the Germans invested a lot of research into building machines in a mass produced way, motor research, etc. Sure, the factories themselves were destroyed, but the engineers together with their knowledge remained. In fact, there are theories that disruptive events are even helpful for economic progress in the long run because they filter out the lazy elite of rich people while giving opportunities for new ideas to be tried out, and hard working people to rise to wealth and influence.
- ericmay 6y agoSure, but that filtering out means wealth is destroyed and you have to start over. The account resets to $0.00. Also, these events "filter out" a lot more than just "lazy elite rich people". Plenty of productive rich people and regular every day people are filtered out as well.
- mjfl 6y agoImagine a world with 1 trillion people on it. A new Einstein is born every 10 years. Better access to information, the ability to augment their minds with computers makes them 10x smarter than Einstein was. Is it so hard to imagine that the economy would be 50x bigger in that situation?
- antoineMoPa 6y agoThis assumes we can really empower brilliant people all over the globe.
- ravi-delia 6y agoUnless more of the world falls out of economic development, the opposite of the trend we've seen for decades, the Einsteins born in areas that can empower them will increase in number proportionally. In fact, our current accounting of Einsteins is limited to the ones that were empowered, so if trends continue we should expect a larger than proportional increase.
- yojo 6y agoIt is unclear if the Earth’s carrying capacity reaches a trillion, that’s certainly in the high side of forecasts. It does not look like we’re on a trajectory to hit anywhere near that. I also question the value of genius at driving GDP growth indefinitely. Eventually you run into natural laws that are insurmountable; you can’t genius your way out of entropy. That said, the GDP wall could well be millennia away and we still have tons of room for growth. Maybe we finally bring cheap fusion online, solve asteroid mining, and terraform anything remotely habitable around us. Or maybe we don’t, investment as a vehicle for income fails, and no one gets to retire in 50 years.
- pm90 6y agoIt’s been pretty clear for some time now that inability to inhabit anything besides earth is a huge failure mode for the species. It might possibly be the unifying goal for the species to put aside its petty differences and come together on a grand project. I gotta say though, the chances seem extremely slim and it’s more likely that climate change would trigger a reduction in the production capacity of humanity triggering political changes that may make it impossible to solve these problems.
- dasudasu 6y ago"In the long term we are all dead" so why would it even matter if over 2100 years your perfect 5% compounding hasn't happened as expected? No place on earth experienced nothing short of complete societal overhaul in that span -- most often multiple times at that.
- yojo 6y agoI threw out some numbers to set a baseline of “this can’t go on forever.” I don’t pretend to know when it starts to transition, or the speed of the transition. The fact that the rate of growth will someday slow means assumptions you make about your 401k may or may not hold if we happen to be at the wrong point on the curve.
- ivalm 6y agoBut humans also don’t have infinite demand on production. If we have a sufficiently high amount of production per capita (ie we are post-scarcity) then growth becomes irrelevant (especially if overall population isn’t growing, which with current trends seems reasonable). At that point the only thing is to ensure that output distribution is sufficiently equitable. We can then have millions of years of stable happy humanity with zero growth.
- xchaotic 6y agoThe rich will not give away their stuff. You’d probably have to give away 90% of your wealth to be level with the rest of the world. Also it is communism and it doesn’t work in practice.
- ivalm 6y agoCurrent world is not post-scarcity. However, there is a point where marginal value of “extra” stuff is essentially zero. When everyone can be at that level is what I mean by post-scarcity.
- lovecg 6y ago
- irrational 6y agoWith the world’s population projected to severely contract in the coming centuries, I wonder how that will effect the possibility of exponential growth.
- marvin 6y agoGeneral artificial intelligence, once we figure it out, will cause an increase in the annual economic growth more extreme than even the industrial revolution caused. Either that or a disaster, but hopefully the former. Anyone who thinks we will run out of things to create just lacks imagination. There's so much stuff we'd really, really like to have but haven't been able to economically create yet. Medicine, body modifications, automation of all that's boring, cheaper manufacturing of everything, entertainment, recreation, transport, space habitats and almost anything else you can imagine.
- xchaotic 6y agoBut as things get automated and cheaper that’s actually negative gdp growth. So it won’t pay your retirement
- chii 6y agoIf things get cheaper, you can live off less income from your investments .
- marvin 6y agoYep, and in such a world, a reasonable level of taxation would eventually be able to pay for a modest lifestyle for everyone who wanted it. In a world of such dramatic surplus, it's either that or violent revolution, so I'm fairly sure it would sort itself out.
- shoo 6y ago> I claim that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely. [...] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- sudosysgen 6y agoI made exactly that argument on HN a few months ago! I found that the inflection point would be 200-400 years into the future.
- lern_too_spel 6y agoThe physicist says that per capita energy use has surged, but that is only true in the developing world. California's per capita consumption of electrical energy has not changed since 1975. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi_14fAxoPtAhXKl54KHUPTDeQQFjANegQICRAB&usg=AOvVaw2yqiJdQ3FsZ-U6rIHLrc4S https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nrdc.org/sites/defa...
- crisdux 6y agoConsider that are dealing with a bias metric. California's weather makes it the least energy intensive state. In 1975 about 50% of the homes in my state had air-conditioning. Now its about 95%. Similar story with heating modern systems. Even in the 70s, older generations dealt with a much colder home in the winter than most people would normally allow today. The days that require climate control in my state are something like 2-3x the average number of days in California and at a much higher intensity. Additionally, California has exported much of it's energy use to other states and countries.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago> At some point the exponential curve has to go S-shaped. In principle yes, of course. In practice, you are imagining a world in which we never expand our civilization into space and across the galaxy, because otherwise you would be looking at the S curve and thinking "wow, this thing has only just gotten started" and marveling at what lies ahead.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoOur space-ward expansion has some hard physics limits. And we've not yet eclipsed what was already done decades ago. And even settling Mars will require more sustainable lifestyles than most first world citizens now enjoy.
- xmprt 6y agoWe're talking about hundreds and thousands of years though. A few hundred years ago, the mere thought of airplanes and cell phones would be considered witchcraft. I don't think it's a long shot to be reasonably optimistic about where humanity can get in terms of technology.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoImagination is unlimited. I don't mean to harsh anyone's dreams. But technological development isn't a predictable march forward. There is less low hanging fruit as things progress. I'd guess we're very close to the peak of attainable technology. Once sustainability comes into the picture then, IMO, we're beyond the limit.
- xmprt 6y agoIt's not supposed to be all easy. A big part of advancement is creating technology that enables us to reach higher with less effort. Sustainability is a big issue now that a lot of people are working towards. Once we unlock more efficient techniques of capturing solar energy, energy becomes almost a non issue until we reach another barrier that's orders of magnitude away. Space travel will reduce resource limitations too.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThe problem with this is how you measure it. In dollars? Inflation adjusted dollars? How to measure that inflation?
- patjenk 6y agoSorry to be dense, but where in the article does it claim that GDP will grow forever? An as an aside, GDP is only a proxy for how prolific an economy/country is. The country's output can continue to grow without generating more dollars.
- gexla 6y agoParking my comment here to be part of the dense club. Why would you even need forever growth? Is it good enough that old companies die and new companies replace the old? In that process, there's always growth to find and invest in?
- refurb 6y agoIn that scenario, the economy does become a zero-sum game, no? Your returns are just someone else's loses.
- gexla 6y agoThere's always winners and losers. We hope the market provides us with ever improving options, which could be a win for everyone. Some may lose by taking down zombies, but the market overall improves. </overly simplified and probably wrong answer>
- spullara 6y agoOver that time, you could populate a good portion of nearby systems. It would only take 1m years for humans to populate every possible planet in the galaxy: https://www.learnastronomyhq.com/articles/how-long-would-it-take-for.html https://www.learnastronomyhq.com/articles/how-long-would-it-... Plenty of room for a very large economy. The next galaxy would take some doing though since it is 2.5 million ly away.
- Robotbeat 6y agoSure, but then your economy is still constrained to grow at the speed of light. A shell of some thickness expanding at the speed of light. The volume of that shell increases parabolically, not exponentially. So it still needs to slow down growth, although growth can still occur indefinitely. Well, billions of years until stars naturally start burning out, in which case you get a slowing of growth and degrowth until you're huddled around red dwarfs for a trillion or so years and then harvesting energy from black holes until like a quadrillion years.
- onion2k 6y ago"only a million years" seems like a slightly flippant statement in light of the fact humans have only had about 5000 years of civilisation so far.
- spullara 6y agoAfter it starts it would hard to stop because of the separation except by some other group of similar creatures.