3 ms·

One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil

One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil price. Sometimes that supply effect of higher prices is limited (we are, potentially, seeing this with copper) but if you are projecting linear trends, you don't understand economics (and btw, this was the issue with the original Limits to Growth and almost all of these studies...for some reason, people who are attracted to this problem spend more time fooling around with their toy models rather than just talking to someone in mining or O&G). That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania). So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.

maybelsyrup 5y ago
> population control isn't popular anymore The IUD in my gf says otherwise. What forms of population control did you have in mind? (And where are you in the queue?)
fennecfoxen 5y ago
Economic growth is not just energy consumption. We measure it in dollars, not watts, because energy is just an input. We have ways of optimizing to use less or do more valuable things with it.
- panta 5y ago
  Yes, there are ofc different byproducts (knowledge, health, leisure, fulfillment of needs, …) but, at the end of the chain, a dollar spent is ultimately converted into energy/resource consumption, no?
  - tlocke 5y ago
    You're right that energy ultimately dissipates as heat, but the important thing is what the energy achieves in between hitting the earth as sunlight and then heading off into space as infrared. If you put a solar panel in place to turn the light into electricity and then use that electricity to write a Python plugin for Flake8 https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize then maybe you've contributed something to the economy :-)
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    I've always seen it more as a measure of human attention. A dollar gives you acces to someone else's time. Energy and resources are force multipliers for that human, so making more energy available increases what someone can do. There is also an organisational aspect in there: A better organized group can do more with resources and reach more resources for the same amount of human time. A human's time is more valuable if the human has a more centralized location an an organisation. I look at psychologists, hookers, priests as people who sell basically their attention for emotional needs. Not much energy or resources in those transactions, but very lucrative. At the other end of the spectrum is the sun, dumping tons of energy on us, mostly worthless until humans organize the power.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Not really. It used to be that economic growth is strongly coupled to energy and resource consumption, that meeting more needs was done through people getting more stuff. But this has decoupled now for some decades already (in the developed world - in the developing world there's still a hug lag of "stuff backlog") as consumption and its growth shifts towards various intangible goods and services where people get increasingly more desires met in better ways (i.e. economic growth) without an increase in electricity and metal and plastics required for that. More people than before getting a car inherently requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources as car manufacturing needs to grow; but more people getting access to a Netflix series does not; if people use larger cars then it requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources, but iPhone 12 mini is much better than the original first iPhone and meets more needs while requiring about the same energy and resources.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> population control isn't popular anymore The IUD in my gf says otherwise. What forms of population control did you have in mind? (And where are you in the queue?)

fennecfoxen 5y ago

Economic growth is not just energy consumption. We measure it in dollars, not watts, because energy is just an input. We have ways of optimizing to use less or do more valuable things with it.

panta 5y ago
Yes, there are ofc different byproducts (knowledge, health, leisure, fulfillment of needs, …) but, at the end of the chain, a dollar spent is ultimately converted into energy/resource consumption, no?
- tlocke 5y ago
  You're right that energy ultimately dissipates as heat, but the important thing is what the energy achieves in between hitting the earth as sunlight and then heading off into space as infrared. If you put a solar panel in place to turn the light into electricity and then use that electricity to write a Python plugin for Flake8 https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize then maybe you've contributed something to the economy :-)
- hyperman1 5y ago
  I've always seen it more as a measure of human attention. A dollar gives you acces to someone else's time. Energy and resources are force multipliers for that human, so making more energy available increases what someone can do. There is also an organisational aspect in there: A better organized group can do more with resources and reach more resources for the same amount of human time. A human's time is more valuable if the human has a more centralized location an an organisation. I look at psychologists, hookers, priests as people who sell basically their attention for emotional needs. Not much energy or resources in those transactions, but very lucrative. At the other end of the spectrum is the sun, dumping tons of energy on us, mostly worthless until humans organize the power.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Not really. It used to be that economic growth is strongly coupled to energy and resource consumption, that meeting more needs was done through people getting more stuff. But this has decoupled now for some decades already (in the developed world - in the developing world there's still a hug lag of "stuff backlog") as consumption and its growth shifts towards various intangible goods and services where people get increasingly more desires met in better ways (i.e. economic growth) without an increase in electricity and metal and plastics required for that. More people than before getting a car inherently requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources as car manufacturing needs to grow; but more people getting access to a Netflix series does not; if people use larger cars then it requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources, but iPhone 12 mini is much better than the original first iPhone and meets more needs while requiring about the same energy and resources.