20 ms·

This Can’t Go On

• ehmish 5y ago
  I think the thing that this article misses is that per capita growth (the thing that's important for people's experienced life satisfaction) can essentially grow a lot further with fewer atoms under cultivation if you increase density. Humanity probably doesnt have much more area under cultivation than 300 years ago, but it has several orders of magnitude more people. The way i see the future going is less people, but each one is a billionaire. Kind of like how when stars run out of fuel they don't just wither away, but turn into very hot, dense and fast spinning white dwarfs.
  • AndrewGaspar 5y ago
    World population in 1700 was 600 million, which is a single order of magnitude.
    • Kydlaw 5y ago
      Thank you for checking, I was dubious too about that claim.
    • ehmish 5y ago
      Yeah probably should have double-checked that, thanks. You prompted me to double-check my other claim (that land under cultivation didn't increase) and that was wrong too! According to this it's gone up by about 5x https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    This was accomplished with profligate use of fossil fuel based fertilizer, it’s a trick you can only do once. And nobody produces enough value on their own to become a billionaire, you have to be in a position in an organization where you can skim off the labor of a lot of people.
    • ehmish 5y ago
      I'm thinking if population growth continues to shrink and go negative and automation continues to increase, production will stay constant or even increase, even while population decreases. Which would mean that each individual would get more riches with less work.
• iforgetmypass 5y ago
  Does HN not have rules against clickbait titles? Edit: > ... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait
  • quietbritishjim 5y ago
    It seems the masses disagree with you, but personally I also find it objectionable. I shouldn't have to click through and increase someone's ad view count just to find out the article is completely irrelevant to me.
    • iforgetmypass 5y ago
      I see this all the time on HN and it's maddening. Every other site I read has rules against clickbait titles.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    I believe the rule is against changing the title to make it more click-baity. (Or for any reason besides necessary shortening.) In this case the title of the original article was used unchanged.
    • iforgetmypass 5y ago
      Wouldn't this be the original article author's problem, not HN readership's?
      • teddyh 5y ago
        The incentives are opposing; the original author wants clickbaity headlines, since it increases hit counts and therefore ad impressions, and ad income. HN readers would like descriptive (non-clickbaity) headlines so that they can choose not to click on a link.
        • iforgetmypass 5y ago
• tempestn 5y ago
  I would argue that the stagnation option is the most likely. After all, the exponential growth in technology and economics is made up of a series of smaller 'S' curves in individual technologies and industries. Each goes through an initial period of slow growth, followed by a rapid expansion, and then a slowing and leveling off of growth. We're already seeing this same pattern on a larger scale with population growth. Certainly a significant drop is possible. I suppose a 'singularity' is conceivable as well. But an S curve, with growth leveling off over time, seems like a good prior. (Of course, it won't be perfectly smooth. Zoomed in, it might end up feeling more like the sawtooth graph.)
• iammisc 5y ago
  This is silly. For one, large portions of the economy are not built on actual material. For example, take software, an evergrowing segment of the economy. The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true. Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters. The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe. The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material. Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material, but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good. For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff. And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which do not even require material goods proportional with the economic value added. In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand the economy due to a shortage of atoms.
  • babelfish 5y ago
    Everything you bring up requires mass amounts of energy, which consumes mass amounts of fossil fuels and natural gases, and is not “free”.
    • dougweltman 5y ago
      How much energy is stored in the chemical bonds of the materials that make up a camera? Or a Garmin GPS? Or a newspaper?
• babelfish 5y ago
  This is what terrifies me about the FIRE movement.
  • axiosgunnar 5y ago
    Could you elaborate? I am genuinely interested.
  • kapp_in_life 5y ago
    How do you mean? I'm sure even with flat yields people in that camp will be far better off than the average person since one of the prerequisites is getting assets equal to 20-30x your annual expense
    • quicklime 5y ago
      I'm not the grandparent poster, but I share the same thought. The ~4% SWR for FIRE assumes that we'll see sustained growth in equities markets, because that's what we've seen before. But the data really only goes back to the early 20th century (the data from the "Trinity Study" looked at the period from 1925 to 1995). I agree with you that people in the FIRE camp will still be far better off than the average person. But to me the terrifying scenario is retiring at 30 and then running out of money at 60 because the 4% rule didn't work out.
      • kapp_in_life 5y ago
        I suppose if someone performed exactly as in the study(fixed withdrawal rate, adjusted for inflation, no variations), but surely if yields flattened you'd be able to recognize it sooner than when your nest egg is nearly depleted. That might mean returning to work in your 40s or 50s part time or full time to fill the gap, but again you're no worse off than the average worker who was working all those years anyways. It definitely is justification for those people to make sure they build in a buffer though since its unlikely they'll be able to immediately return to their peak salary before retirement.
        • 5y ago
• Kydlaw 5y ago
  I'm surprised the author tackled this topic without mentioning World3 from The Limits to Growth or the heavy reliance of modern, developed societies on fossil fuels? Thus it's a very interesting economical opinion, but without adding the physical aspects (energy consumption) into the reflection, I don't see any interesting result.
  • perrygeo 5y ago
    This! In a world where oil discovery, extraction and distribution was ever increasing, betting on a bigger energy pie in the future made sense. All of our macro-economic theories were developed under the naive assumption of an increasing fossil-fueled bonanza. But in a world of no new oil fields and increasing costs for extraction, we no longer have the ever-growing pie to fund our future financial obligations. Credit looks risky and economic decline seems inevitable based on the energy availability alone. That's not even mentioning the externalities of fossil fuel consumption: climate impacts, ocean acidification, mass extinction, etc. make these economic issues even harder. Or is it the other way around? Either way, "this can't go on" and fossil fuels are a central part of the equation.
    • ravi-delia 5y ago
      There is every likelihood that we could in principle just keep drilling new oil. Our ability to extract oil at a cost effective rate scales almost exactly with the depletion of easy reserves. The reason we need to switch out is the devastating environmental impact, and only the devastating environmental impact.
      • AstralStorm 5y ago
        It's not the drilling, but leaks of oil, gas, fires and obviously actually burning this fuel without full recapture. (Not offset, that is insufficient and sleigh of hand.)
    • kiba 5y ago
      The externality of fossil fuel consumption by far is the most problematic part of our economy. We have more energy than we ever meet from the sun, nearly all of which is uselessly radiated out into space, never mind what we don't use when sunlights hit our Earth.
• N00bN00b 5y ago
  Honestly, I can just change what I consider economic growth and the problem immediately goes away. I can make that graph do anything I want, just a matter of convincing enough people to go along with it. Also: >Why can't this go on? >If this holds up, then 8200 years from now Alright. Well how about we worry about that in 8100 years?
  • redisman 5y ago
    For some perspective, 8000 years ago we were still in the Stone Age.
    • deviation 5y ago
      Yeah. I find this post's thought experiment both fascinating contradictory.. 8200 years from now (from a biological standard and considering our technological growth) we might barely be human anymore. We would sooner need to worry about our 6th dimensional energy-blob children getting tattoos before we need to worry about the economy.
  • jeremyjh 5y ago
    The point isn't that physical limits will only be a problem in 8200 years, it is to counter the defective idea that such growth can be sustained indefinitely. We don't have access to all the atoms in the galaxy, and can't even make use of most of the ones we have here on earth. We will hit a wall much, much sooner.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Ultimately an economy has to meet the fundamental physical needs of human beings (at least until we're all Singularitied into Hive Mind Cryostatsis Upload Tanks or equivalent). That's food, clothing, shelter, and the rest of it --- the base of Maslow's Pyramid. More money can solve some distributional probems, but ultimately not the problem of insufficient production or supply. The classic "toy economy" example of this is "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp", which looks at the use of cigarette-based currency within a World War II prisoner of war camp. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133 It's not a perfect analogue of a true economy (goods were largely supplied to the camp through the German authorities and Red Cross shipments, there was little actual production or labour). But what was illustrated were both price fluctuations as the currency (cigarettes) increased and decreased in prevalence, subject to an innate destructive demand (habitual smokers). And when the actual supply of goods (food and other items) dried up late in the war, no amount of currency could in fact make the camp economy function.
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  fundamentally all human growth and expansion is in order to satiate desires for dopamine and other feel good chemicals. It's a relative cycle including what one has recently experienced, combined with observations of relative status (eg, what is your neighbor going through). This is a process whereby the only way to maintain good feelings is to incrementally consume more units of good per unit of dilution (eg time, or density). For example getting more reward experiences in succession -- this is the example of social media + video games. Another example is high fructose corn syrup sweeter per gram... Until we can get off that treadmill we're going to be more and more consumptive (than both our previous selves, and our peers)
• austinl 5y ago
  While not directly tied to economic growth, one factor this article leaves out is that global human population growth could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100) [1]. In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3]. With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...
  • ronlobo 5y ago
    I agree. The book "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling is an excellent read about the topic. Yes, growth in economy and population can go on and will likely result in an S-bend curve in the distant future.
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      Hans Rosling's presentation "Don't Panic" (produced by the BBC) is pretty good: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E It's an hour long; really interesting.
  • api 5y ago
    Demographic leveling or collapse is in a category I've heard called "demand limits to growth." Everyone always thinks about supply limits, with some making dire Malthusian prophecies of what happens if we exhaust our resources with runaway growth. I've seen surprisingly little discussion of demand limits. Other possible sources of demand limits include: satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more), diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diminishing impact of new technologies (compare the next CPU density node to jet aircraft or antibiotics), consolidation of functionality into fewer more versatile products (e.g. computers and smart phones eating TVs, tape decks, radios, book shelves, CD collections, etc.), cultural shifts toward simplicity, replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars), etc. The eternal growth assumption assumes both infinite supply and infinite demand.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  I have a feeling that people are just going to think my comments here are hyperbole or give me a lecture on how I don't understand economics, but I will say it anyway. And please read to the end because I believe my opinion is different from the normal sides taken. Money supply and debt are increasing in ways that are unsustainable in the current system. At the same time, there are reasons that this is being done, and it boils down to the fact that a fixed supply just doesn't work either. However, I believe that our money is too simple and our global political systems too disorganized continue this way. Essentially, at some point some countries have too many problems and cannot morally tolerate letting other countries produce money and throw debt into a hole while forcing them to live up to their obligations. If another system that is fair and based on sound cryptocurrency is not put into place, the result within the next few years may be a global war. The first part of this is using blockchains to prevent people from constantly cheating as is the current case. Also, I believe that a fixed supply is absolutely not appropriate, but so is an infinitely expanding supply. But beyond that, I think money needs to become a high technology. So rather than having a few valves that can be turned on or off by lucky people near them, there should be a lot more data involved and more levers. Such as connecting money in some way to real resources. Or regulating use for different purposes in different ways.
  • soared 5y ago
    crypto/blockchain or global war. Not the most nuanced of opinions ;)
• deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• fallingfrog 5y ago
  I’d put my money on stagnate. But, only compared with the exponential growth baseline. You can still have linear growth, and then gradual growth, for quite a while. The human population is already leveling off. I’d bet any amount of money that, within 50 to 100 years, economic output will also reach some more or less steady state.
• ksec 5y ago
  It is silly to look beyond a hundred years, let alone thousands.
  • travisjungroth 5y ago
    Why? What's "silly" about it? I think the article does the best you can at predicting that far out, which is saying which futures are incompatible with each other. I find meaning in thinking about the future and I like seeing it be done well.
    • soared 5y ago
      It doesn’t make any sense to graph something like gdp or economic output on a scale of thousands of years. The world looks nothing like it did 2000 years ago, and 2000 years from now, by the authors own admission, it will look entirely different. IMO the graphs the author uses are like graphing something like baking a cake. Y axis is “how much is this thing a cake” and x axis is time. It’s zero pretty much the whole time, then you stick it in the oven and it rapidly becomes a cake. Funny thought experiment I guess, but it provides no value.
  • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    Science fiction would never exist with this attitude and we can read early science fiction and see that much of it was in fact quite correct. The speculation gets us to thinking about what is coming and what we can do to make it better.
• paxys 5y ago
  The author makes the assumption that economic growth has to come from an increase in material output, resources consumed etc. when it can very well be the opposite. "Number of atoms in the universe" has nothing to do with anything, and is just used to (incorrectly) turn their subjective argument into a scientific one. You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.
  • jbay808 5y ago
    The rebuttal to this is presented in "Exponential Economist vs Finite Physicist": https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.
    • jimmyed 5y ago
      Well, it doesn't have to be finite. Imagine if the Chinese get around to generating electricity from hydrogen fusion, we'll all have "infinite" energy
      • positr0n 5y ago
        The limit is very high. Every kW generated by hydrogen fusion is a kW that, by the laws of physics, will eventually be dissipated. Enough exponential growth fusing hydrogen on this planet and the earth would quite literally become a mini sun. That is the theoretical limit referred too.
    • novok 5y ago
      For now, there is a lot of 'economy' inside making energy usage more efficient. Like the LED bulb vs the incandescent.
• robertwt7 5y ago
  This is actually interesting. I think tech era has redefined the way people value a company? It is not based on the P/e ratio anymore, people keep buying stocks from companies that are not even making money yet. Basically most people are betting their money based on trust that these tech companies are going viral one day. Either way, i'm not an economist so maybe that's just a high level or me being dumb
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    No, you’re not dumb, it’s a bubble. If I write you an iou for a million dollars, and you write me an iou for a million dollars, we can both be millionaires, and if everyone does that for everyone else, then we can all be millionaires, but only until too many people try to trade those IOU’s for something real at the same time.
    • NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      No; if we write each other IOUs for a million dollars, our net worth remains the same, right?
      • Cheezmeister 5y ago
        Not if you can both Doublethink cleverly enough.
      • JanisL 5y ago
        Well on the surface it might seem like it but there's a huge amount of nuance here. What happens if the act of writing these IOUs creates a situation where economic activity can happen that creates real wealth (or destroys real wealth)? This hints at one of the crucial dynamics when debt interacts with money which is that the value of money is not constant over time in a debt-based monetary system.
    • nostrademons 5y ago
      That describes inflation, not a bubble, unless you mean a bubble in $USD. If I then go to trade my million-dollar IOU for a house that now costs a million dollars because everybody has a million, that's a price increase. More dollars in circulation means higher prices for everything, which is inflation. A bubble would be if I went to go buy a house and then found that your IOU was good for nothing and you didn't actually have a million dollars to give me. This was the situation in 2009 but doesn't appear to be the situation today.
• AstralStorm 5y ago
  A few other possibilities are: - edge of punctuated equilibrium: we reach a Kardashev level and getting through it requires major breakthrough again - would produce a flattening increasing sigmoid zigzag - slow catastrophe pending resource depletion outstripping rate of innovation or travel, very slowly reversing progress - singularity immediately halting the progress - flat horizontal line - the Accelerando situation - potential speciation or technological fragmentation where it stops to be useful to talk about a single progress
• bottled_poe 5y ago
  The market for information is practically infinite and this resource isn't limited along the axes presented in the article. Not sure what else to say.
• mbfg 5y ago
  does anyone really think that humanity will be here in 200 years? 500 years? I think that's a real stretch. There are 100 ways we will go extinct, and we don't care about any of them.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    I get that, but we survived the world wars and the cold war, so I hold out some hope.
    • howaboutnope 5y ago
      For me the question isn't if there will be warm bodies around, but if they will have agency, dignity, a longing for justice and a capability for empathy, plus a lot of other things at least I associate with humans being human, rather than appendages of machinery that accumulates power without any use for it other than accumulating more power.
    • mbfg 5y ago
      yes. but we were far less capable of killing ourselves then. The further we go, the more easily we will find it to kill ourselves.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    We might lose billions on the way but I don't really see why humanity wouldn't survive with 10 million people alive in 500 years assuming extinction level natural disasters.
• worik 5y ago
  This has been known to everybody but economists since at least 1972
• cratermoon 5y ago
  See also https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-growth/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-gro...
• lootsauce 5y ago
  Some economic thoughts I always bring up in such discussions. - There is much economic activity that comes from increasing inefficiency, think cost disease, this is a feature not a bug in a system straining to maintain full employment at all costs that is increasingly managed in a top-down manner - queueing theory probably explains most monetary policy, as inflation gas pedal is feathered to make historically large debts look like speed bumps in the rear view they do the same to buying power but the inverse to assets, keeping this process slow enough but not too slow probably has something to do with avg human lifespan - no empire lasts forever and usually exhaust their hinterland expansion efforts for various reasons ultimately debasing the currency to mfg more growth while the fundamental drivers are long gone, what is the hinterland for our empire and how much more of it can we exploit? - During the Black Plague something like 1/3 of Europe died off, this gave rise to a new wealthy class of inheritors laying some foundations for the Renaissance, we are on the edge of a historic population decline as birth rates plunge across the world, will we see a similar effect, or does this only work when lives are cut short?
• Clewza313 5y ago
  At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor. The Industrial Revolution kicked off because we learned how to harness steam powered by wood and coal, and how long "this can go on" is going to depend on how well we can manage the transition off fossil fuels into renewables, not just on a 1:1 replacement basis, but catering to increased future demand.
  • jeremyjh 5y ago
    Yes, but renewables would only give us a chance to see growth plateau without our civilization disintegrating. The point the article makes is the year over year multiple-percent economic growth is impossible, and the limiting factor becomes the number of atoms in the galaxy on a timescale shorter than human civilization's total history.
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    The other part is increasing knowledge, which allows us to use energy more efficiently. This could theoretically allow continued growth with the same amount of energy.
    • dTal 5y ago
      More efficiency just means more consumption. Every year our technology has grown more efficient, and every year we use more energy.
  • gumby 5y ago
    > At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor. That's just a restatement of the Victorian/Marxist model of industrial labor. The actual reality is that energy intensity of the OECD economies has been dropping for decades. As well attested in several sources such as, say, EIA data. I'm a big fan of energy consumption BTW, and think it should increase significantly on a per capita basis, especially in poorer regions (though not from fossil sources). I just have been following this particular statistic for years and see that growth is not proportional to energy consumption.
• jrm4 5y ago
  What does "the economy" count, precisely, and furthermore why do we believe that it is likely that whatever "the economy" counts is going to continue to be an important thing to count?
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    If economy is not an important thing to count in the future, that is a strong case for This (status quo) Can't Go On.
• chmod600 5y ago
  "But I don't think [stagnation is] the most likely future." Why not? Thomas Malthus predicted[1] that population would explode and collapse, but it didn't... and it looks like it's stabilizing. The author should be wary of making the same mistake. Come to think about it, a high tech and stable economy could be a very nice place to live. It could also be a totalitarian dystopia, depending on exactly how things play out. But one can at least imagine it working out well. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
  • gpsx 5y ago
    I think stagnation, or at least a change through successively smaller exponential regimes, should be the base case. I'm bullish on our future tech prospects and I know we have the entire universe from which to draw resources. But for all the real world cases of exponential growth, I think they are all limited. And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.
• cryptonector 5y ago
  Yes, exponential growth cannot continue forever. Fortunately exponential shrinkage of the population is baked into the world' populate pyramid. As for economics, we can still get wealthier on a per-capita basis by generating more and higher quality activity per-person, though at some point one does expect decreasing returns.
• alphachloride 5y ago
  The number of atoms on earth has remained the same, more or less, over the last 5000 years. The size of the economy, as the author charts, has increased many fold. So why does he then expect the number of atoms on earth and outside to be pertinent to the size of the economy into the future? I think the article contradicts itself.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    The number of atoms on earth in the past isn't relevant because we were not close to exhausting the earth's resources in the past. The author is demonstrating that if this rate of growth were continue in the future, eventually we would run up into physical limitations; the idea that we could sustain a whole present day earth's worth of activity for each individual atom in the galaxy seems more than a little unlikely. Of course, there would certainly be other bottlenecks hit first; looking at atoms in the galaxy is just a clear-cut way to show that there is almost certainly a limit to growth somewhere, and that even in that extreme case we would hit it in a short time frame, relatively speaking.
• seventytwo 5y ago
  > There are likely fewer than 10^70 atoms in our galaxy, which we would not be able to travel beyond within the 8200-year time frame. This offers an interesting upper bound on growth, being that our energy consumption couldn’t possibly outpace our ability to travel (at the speed of light) to obtain new sources of energy. (Of course assuming no FTL tech or and no way of generating energy without interacting with matter). For example, consider we’ve learned to harness 100% of the sun’s output, and we’re looking to double what we can harness. The next nearest star is at least 4ly away, so the doubling time is at least 4 years. To double again, we now need to find two additional stars, each with their own travel limitations. This doesn’t include overhead, like the time it takes to build a dyson sphere or collect the raw materials to do so.
• perl4ever 5y ago
  Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"
• SeriousM 5y ago
  A little sidetrack question: why are news headlines 90% in the wrong case? Because of the language "Go" and this platform I have to rephrase some headlines with "go" in it a couple of times until it's kinda clear what the content might be.
• pope_meat 5y ago
  Infinite economic growth is possible, heat death of the universe be damned.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    </s>
  • imtringued 5y ago
    What if we find a way to create more universes? The power of interest...
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Does the graph account for GDP per capita? Seems like the population graph would similarly take a big uptick from historical norms and it's fairly well studied that it is reaching a steady state now. So, do we need the same GDP growth with the same or less amount of people to be/feel richer?
  • imtringued 5y ago
    If there are two humans left in the economy would one end the other's life to get that final doubling?
• randomsearch 5y ago
  What I learnt from the comments here is that this is a highly emotional subject and many people are making strong assertions without the strong evidence to back up their claims - on both sides. If people from both sides could recommend books to read on this subject, I'd appreciate that more than the offhand comments. Specifically: it would be great to reach a consensus on a few books that argue the case that the economy relies on finite and nearly exhausted resources, and a few books that argue that technological advances will greatly increase the capacity of economic growth.
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  As interesting as these topics are for an extended dinner table conversation, they actually move the focus away from the hard work necessarily to create "progress". Yes, we could worry about running out of atoms in the universe sometime in the future, but why not put that effort in developing broad spectrum antivirals instead?
• code_duck 5y ago
  I don't really think anyone is expecting economic growth to continue in a straight line for 8,000 or 2,500 years.
• wazoox 5y ago
  Food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration https://stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html https://stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundarie... We're most probably heading towards collapse real soon now (for some undetermined value of "soon" between a few months and a few decades). Of course, this is to be received with strong rejection in the HN techno-optimist bubble :)
  • pas 5y ago
    What's your model of this? What data do you base this on? What the quantitative value of "most probably"? What's a collapse? I mean, I'm not optimist, but I'm aware that my doom and gloom about how stupid and irrational we are is just a gut feeling. Yes, we're squarely out of the easily comprehensible by naive human wetware regime. But then we should recognize that instead of doubling down and giving in to the fear coming of an even primal faculty. The "this can't go on" chart has a very simple solution. This can go on because very easily, because we're still burning fossil fuels, and every time we switch to a healthier alternative that chart goes up. And we are furiously trying to switch, not necessarily everybody, but ask anyone who lives in cities who doesn't want less smog, who doesn't want less noise pollution, etc. And that graph is also going up because people are moving to cities en masse. (See the real estate prices all around the most desirable living places, but urbanization is happening everywhere else too.) People who live in cities simply by participating in a more productive economy make that chart go up again. Sure going on like this forever is impossible. But a collapse is not the only alternative.
    • wazoox 5y ago
      Did you check my links? "Collapse" may have several definitions; generally for a complex society or ecosystem it's a rapid simplification, reduction of exchanges and population. Here is our situation: as you may have heard, every year around August we reach the "Overshoot day". That means that we use more resources (even renewable ones) than the Earth can produce (its carrying capacity), i.e. we're actually "mining" renewables resources such as oceans, soil, forests, etc. That means that the quantity of renewable resources globally available tends to go down while our resource usage still goes up. At some point, our resource usage WILL fall down UNDER the line of globally available renewable resources. The longer we wait, the LOWER we will need to back down. See https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/over-carry.html https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/over-carry.html for a relatively detailed explanation and real-life examples. Also I don't really get where you're going with your fossil fuels example. We switched from renewables to fossil fuels back in the 18 and 19th centuries because they're so much denser, easier to use and powerful than renewables. They enabled the "great acceleration" by providing almost limitless energy, and doing without them is a tremendous, unprecedented effort. Human history is about getting better energy sources: our ancestors got bigger brains by eating meat (more energy). Then they invented fire (more energy) to make their food more digestible (more energy). Later on they invented agriculture (more energy), then burned forests for more energy, and switched to peat and coal by lack of wood (more energy), then oil and gas and nuclear (still more energy). Notice that we never "switched" from an energy source to another: we piled them up. Coal usage nowadays is higher than it ever was during the 19th and 20th centuries. See https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/energie_graph1.jpg https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/energie_gra... For the very first time in 300 000 years, we'll have to go from a dense, easy to transport and store energy sources to more diffuse, harder to transport and store ones. We'll have to go from an incredible abundance to relative (or maybe not so relative) scarcity. It's literally an unprecedented challenge, particularly at the global scale we're talking about.
• choeger 5y ago
  The obvious counter argument is that economic growth is not measured in any physically stable form. If it was, then yes, there would be a limit. But if we measure economic growth in the amount of money that moves across the globe in a defined time interval, there is not necessarily any limit. The interesting question is whether we are willing to accept that physical goods will stop getting cheaper at some point. We seem to accept this when it comes to real estate so I assume we will also accept it when it comes to cars and computers some day.
  • dTal 5y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14 "Economic growth" as measured by numbers moving around is just a proxy for what we really care about, which is increased availability of goods and services. Goods and services necessarily entail resource expenditure. If you're just moving numbers without any actual physical effect, you don't really have an "economy" to speak of.
    • choeger 5y ago
      That is obviously true but not an argument for a limit. Availability of goods and services could grow logarithmically while prices could grow exponentially, you'd still see linear nominal economic growth.
      • dTal 5y ago
        I don't understand what you're saying. Logarithmic, exponential, it doesn't matter what shape the curve is or how fast you get there - all "growth" we care about is ultimately backed by expenditure of physical resources, which are clearly limited. If you redefine "the economy" in such a way that it's not limited, you also break its connection to the real world. Honestly, all this talk about money is distracting from the core issue, which is that we are unsustainably increasing our consumption of limited resources.
• garbagecoder 5y ago
  omg someone read Malthus!
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I expected more intelligent discussion of this from HN. I’m quite disappointed. Every comment dismisses what he is saying and I guess that is what we should expect from a culture that doesn’t realize how bizarrely different and unsustainable their era is.