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There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the envir

• hh3k0 6y ago
  "We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist." David Attenborough
  • qazpot 6y ago
    SpaceX is trying to solve the finite environment problem.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That's good. It buys us more time. But we need to ease up on the exponent anyway.
    • _qulr 6y ago
      Is it? Earth is, or was, extremely hospitable to humans. Mars is, and will be for a very long time, extremely inhospitable to humans. If we can't even take care of the Earth, what hope is there of taking care of Mars? The more likely scenario is that greedy Martians destroy their own Martian environment very quickly and make themselves extinct. It's much easier to destroy Mars (for human life) than it is to destroy Earth. We need to focus on sustainability, otherwise Mars will also be unsustainable. Just wait until oxygen itself becomes a commodity, like in the film "Total Recall". Except unlike in film, there's no deus ex machina native ancient technology to suddenly make the entire atmosphere breathable.
      • tomatotomato37 6y ago
        Your mistake is thinking that the plan is to move humanity away into space, instead of bringing space (or more accurately mineral-rich asteroids and solar energy) to humanity. That way we can just externalize all industry & pollution to a lagrange point somewhere and let the earth take care of healing itself.
        • shafyy 6y ago
          If we continue like this, humans will be long gone before we reach that point (IF we reach that point at all).
    • rapnie 6y ago
      Given the timescale of building an endurable self-sustaining civilization on another planet, and the speed with which we are destructing our own environment for humans to live in (and capability to provide high-tech support for this space adventure), my guess is that this is a pipe dream. And that the Mars thing is a nice rich man's hobby, scientists playground, and bread-and-games diversion tactic for the rest of mankind.
    • titzer 6y ago
      Taken to its absolute limit, space travel is limited by the speed of light. So when you get to that limit, you are limited by space, as you can only expand in a sphere--i.e. O(n^3). Space is so enormous that even the tiniest exponential will overrun O(n^3) before even getting out of our galaxy. Result. That exponential is going to flatten out and look more like a sigmoid.
  • Matticus_Rex 6y ago
    One thing this argument misses is that much of economic growth comes not from increasing consumption, but from making that consumption more efficient.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      The problem isn't solved while consumption of matter and energy grows exponentially.
    • mromanuk 6y ago
      When efficiency is achieved, the economic growth is later converted to "everybody should use this new efficiency". And more importantly, efficiency in the consumption is not translated in efficiency in the use of resources (which is the important one): transporting goods by horse vs faster transportation with combustion engines.
    • A12-B 6y ago
      But the result is more consumption, because you spend the money saved on inefficiency on more consumption. If coca cola produces 1m bottles of coke in 1 year and finds a way to produce that many in half a year, they're not going to produce 1m bottles a year anymore, they're going to produce 2m bottles a year.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        I know it is besides the point, but just to illustrate the scale of Coca-Cola, they produce 108 billion bottles per year.
      • Matticus_Rex 6y ago
        Probably not, no. They're already selling as many as they can at the current price -- there's no shortage of Coke out there. They might lower the price and thereby sell more (though they're unlikely to sell twice as much without more than halving the price), but that's not necessarily a bad thing; it means people are having to do less to get the same amount of Coke.
    • 6y ago
  • belval 6y ago
    That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. Sure a company like Coca-Cola can only grow so much before it effectively covers the entire planet, but they can still reduce costs to improve their profit margins and displace existing drinks from other companies with a new product. The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that address ever changing needs and making the clients more dependent on said products. There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.
    • revax 6y ago
      >That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. I really think the opposite is true, what makes you think that?
      • sitkack 6y ago
        The only growth that could be tied to non-natural resources is something like the combinatoric possibilities between a set of options. Everything else links back to matter. Even my "internet points" on HN are tied back to the food I had to eat to type in that sweet sweet snark. This notion that economics isn't ultimately a resource scheduling theory that falls out of a base set of behaviors (commerce). If we removed choice, we get operations research. Capitalism is akin to wanting to cook a hotdog on a campfire and burning down an entire house to do it.
    • heymijo 6y ago
      “There are no environmental restrictions here.” Cloud is still computing. Computers with a finite life that need to be produced, from natural resources. Computing that needs to be powered and cooled. Those have environmental impacts and very much align with OPs quote.
    • baron_harkonnen 6y ago
      This is a wildly out of touch view of how economic growth works. First off, where do you think "the cloud" comes from? Even if we assume 100% renewable grid (which is currently impossible) the computers that run the cloud require an enormous amount raw materials and labor to manufacture. But far more importantly, where does your clients capital come from? The greatest accounting trick capitalism every pulled was to get people to think of individual parts of a system rather then the entire thing. There's real magical thinking involved to think that capital just appears in these clients at now real cost. At some point labor and resource exploitation is required to create economic value which is then passed around throughout the system. Just because you can skim off some surplus value selling some SaaS product in the cloud doesn't mean that the value you are paid with doesn't come from the exploitation of resources. Finally, you can easily dispel this myth by looking at the current state of our global environment. Show me any period of economic growth that isn't also tied to increased energy and resource usage.
  • joehx2 6y ago
    You can have unending growth even with finite resources. It's Zeno's Paradox - if you have use half of the resources, and then half of the remaining, and then half of that remaining, you could continue forever.
• isoprophlex 6y ago
  > There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. Excuse my language but... who the actual fuck thinks otherwise? This is extremely perplexing to me. How many layers of double speak must one hide behind before you can believe that sustained growth for its own sake can be a healthy, sustainable goal?
  • titzer 6y ago
    People with no imagination, knowledge of history, or capacity to think about anything but themselves. People who think humans have a right to obliterate all other forms of life in order to carpet this planet with...whatever we want. People who go to zoos and watch Ow My Balls.
• Diggsey 6y ago
  Continued growth: absolutely. Capitalism itself only exists because resources are finite though. It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources. Allocating resources is a hard problem to solve. If we had infinite resources we would not need to solve it.
  • A12-B 6y ago
    Unfortunately, a transition to a more planned economy is going to be necessary, because individual actors working independently of the needs of others might be a surprisingly good way to allocate resources, but it's not smart enough to be done sustainably.
    • vidarh 6y ago
      It doesn't need to be planned. The markets just need to be constrained and regulated. In some extents they can be expanded. E.g. you can force companies to buy and trade quotas for different types of externalities to cover undoing those externalities and let the markets sort out the most efficient way of addressing them. There is complexity there (you need to ensure there aren't any easily exploitable loopholes), but markets have lots of uses.
  • baron_harkonnen 6y ago
    > It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources. This is where true why is our way of life less sustainable today than it was 1000 years ago? Nearly all first nations tribes lived in a way of live that was sustainable indefinitely. In 250 years of developing capitalism we have destroyed most of the biosphere, and trigger climate change that has the potential to undo civilization as we know it. Capitalism and rapid hydrocarbon extraction has allowed the species to surpass the carrying capacity of the planet in away that cannot possibly be sustained. Personally, I think this was always our destiny, but to try to delude yourself into believing that capitalism is making things better is a strange form of denial.
    • scatters 6y ago
• indymike 6y ago
  I think capitalism is being misused in this sentence, and that is making it hard for people to make sense of. Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism. Being able to own companies, property and hold currency are all features of capitalism. If you are trying to say "infinite growth is unsustainable" that stands on it's own and is worth discussing.
  • vidarh 6y ago
    Growth, is however, an emergent property of capitalism by virtue of the competitive model, that is very hard to counter.
  • rapnie 6y ago
    A problem with capitalism may be that it is a very broad category, and that currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?) to avoid the endless discussion & confusion whether its all good and natural, or utterly broken (at least for the common folks participating in it). It seems to me we had a form of capitalism that flourished (piggy-backed) well on top of democracy, and now it has morphed into a form that thrives best in a plutocracy (where democracies are eventually just Putin-style husks of their former glory).
    • munificent 6y ago
      > currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?) Corporatism. It's publicly-traded corporations that cause many of these negative effects: * Since investors treat corporations as black boxes that are just numbers going up or down, they are separated from the non-financial ethical consequences of what the business does. We all, through our 401ks, probably own stock in companies doing outright horrendous things to human rights in developing countries or harming the environment. * Investors put pressure on corporations to grow at the expense of all other things. Corporations that fail to prioritize that will be replaced by better-capitalized corporations that do. It is an evolutionary environment where the primary selection pressure is growth. * An effective way for a corporation to grow is, instead of competing, simply acquire competition to reduce selection pressure and then do things like regulatory capture to rig the system.
• vidarh 6y ago
  That thought that continued growth is eventually unsustainable has been there since at least the 1840's. The core of Marxism is the idea that capitalism is the most effective method of increasing productive capacity, and that this is fantastic (the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is fanboy-level praise for capitalism), until it runs out of room to grow into. Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the core problem it posits - that capitalism will grow out of markets to expand into, and that once it does, it will fundamentally change the game - matters. We can necessarily not have growth forever - if not before, eventually we run out of exploitable energy within our light-cone. In practice we'll hit limits far sooner that will cause competition to drive down production cost will be far harsher than it needs to be in an environment where you can compensate by expansion. Marx thought that would happen "soon" - when capitalism has spread to the entire world. But it's a question when, not if, we hit a ceiling where further demand growth can't physically happen, and quite likely we'll reach a ceiling long before there where it's not happening fast enough to counter competitive pressure. The world population is expected to stabilise and start dropping - at least for a while - possibly as soon as towards the end of this century. What happens to growth then? Whenever we reach a point where capitalism is no longer getting growth by growing into expanding markets, the question becomes whether capitalist competition will drive us to a level of automation that threatens to kill capitalism. Marx believed that would happen by causing crises of "overproduction", where improved efficiency would cause mass unemployment and by extension kneecap demand by taking away peoples incomes. Alternatively, whether we'll be able to as a society reign things in and ensure people share in enough of the improvements in efficiency for capitalism to survive - be it with UBI, or shortening working hours, or other means. Because it's easy to forget that one of the "promises" of capitalist competitive pressure is to drive margins towards zero, because a company that can survive with lower margins can out-compete one that can't. And ultimately that means driving every cost that can be reduced down, and that means ultimately driving labour costs down as far as they can go...
  • js8 6y ago
    I agree with a lot of what you just said, I think Marx was correct about the idea that capitalism requires the growth. I would state his thesis as follows: If you reward continued production of goods (which requires investment) with property, eventually you will run out of property to give away. I believe in the 20th century, this conundrum was resolved in enormous growth of what we consider to be property assets. We have not only reached the limit of exploitation of natural resources on the planet, but also added intelectual property, military-industrial complexes, various financial instruments, healthcare, and as of late, we have monetized human attention and behavioral data. On top of that, we monetized human servitude, now lot of well-off people are in debt (at least with mortgages and student loans).
• mbrodersen 6y ago
  There are many flavours of Capitalism. Some work extremely well (Scandinavia) others less so (Russia/China). However Capitalism still beats anything else humans have ever tried.