5 ms·

> Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run. Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things.

• boudin 5y ago
  Is this really true? All those objects are fairly low tech, between the lifetime of a torch or calculator which is way longer than the one of an iphone and the simpler production process behind it, I wouldn't be surprised that producing an iphone requires more materials, generates more defects for one working device and requires an way more complex supply chain.
  • toto444 5y ago
    This is discussed at length here : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... and in the comments.
  • mmarq 5y ago
    The very fact that my iPhone is lighter than my father’s calculator, should say something at least about raw materials.
    • i_am_proteus 5y ago
      Similarly, my bicycle is lighter than my father's horse. Mass alone does not tell the whole story.
      • mmarq 5y ago
        And it also requires much less energy and maintenance to be produced and operated. Growth.
      • taneq 5y ago
        I'm actually curious, which one DOES take more resources all up? And what do you count as a resource? ie. the bicycle would take far more coal and iron ore (neither of which the horse needs) but the horse would use up far more water and otherwise edible grains.
        • boudin 5y ago
          There's actually more to take into account to push the subject a lot. The human on a bicycle also needs food and water to move the bicycle. Which is the more efficient at converting those resources into movement and in which scenario ?
        • i_am_proteus 5y ago
          The horse also generates more power than a human on a bicycle. The horse does not need improved roads the way most bicycles do, and is more reliable off road than most mountain bikes. Lots of food for thought here.
          • goatlover 5y ago
            A horse also needs food and shelter and they poop. An early argument in favor of cars over horses were that cars didn’t leave fecal matter everywhere in cities.
        • imtringued 5y ago
          An electric bike does not need to be fed with crops.
    • dariosalvi78 5y ago
      well, have you considered how much material is used for producing that iPhone? have you got an idea of how much water is used for that tshirt you probably wearing right now?
      • mmarq 5y ago
        Lots of material would go into the production of all the tools it replaces. A programmable calculator, a mobile phone a GameBoy, a music player, my mother’s cook books, etc… combined will likely require more raw materials.
    • boudin 5y ago
      First, that might just mean that you live at a higher altitude than your father, but I guess you meant mass. Then, it might just mean that your father's calculator use material of higher density. More seriously. when building something, there's a lot more material than what comes in the final product: - the scrap generated by the by the manufacturing process. The more elements, the more it's going to be. - the number of defects, for every parts of the device (for some parts it will be extremely low, for some it would be quite higher, but there's always some). Granted, some defects can be re-purposed, but it's not always the case - The raw materials to actually manufacture (like water) - The average number of repairs required over a lifetime (replacing the screen on a iphone is quite frequent) - The materials required to build the supply chain that can build such devices. - The materials required to generate the energy required to build the factories. And there's plenty of other things to take into account. In the end it's not about the volume of raw material as such, that doesn't mean much as it is. It's for each material, to take into consideration if it's renewable, what's the impact of extracting it and many other questions.
      • mmarq 5y ago
        I think it’s undeniable that iPhone uses less materials than all the objects it replaces combined, even if it consumes more materials and pollutes more than a 1970s programmable calculator (and I’m not too sure about that), it certainly requires less resources than a calculator plus a mobile phone plus a stereo plus blablabla
        • boudin 5y ago
          It's not undeniable at all, you made an assertion without any base. This is far from being obvious, there's way too much things to take into consideration to be able to make such claim out of thin air.
• Tade0 5y ago
  > This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible. Such growth is anything but exponential. In fact, it's logarithmic.
  • mmarq 5y ago
    Maybe, I have a degree in economics, but I’m a software developer and not an economist. I’d say that if innovations are built on top of other innovations and if we get occasional breakthroughs, the process may be approximated with an exponential. Otherwise, even logarithmic growth tends to infinity, not to de-growth.
• whiteboardr 5y ago
  Not entirely true. It really doesn’t matter if whatever is created is better or just more of the same. New things will require more things. I highly recommend reading Rich Gold’s excellent book The Plenitude: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude
• agent008t 5y ago
  Some (a lot?) of economic activity seems to be self-serving, not making our lives better (and sometimes making them worse). The lockdowns demonstrated that very well. For example: social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us less social); 'influencers'; a good chunk of the hospitality industry; anything to do with crypto. Very often, free alternatives / those not involving 3rd parties, simpler living, are better for us overall. But if more expensive options are available, we are pressured to take them so that we are not left behind / feel like we fit in / have a social life. Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will.
  • mmarq 5y ago
    > Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will. If this were true, your innovating competitors will lose money. There’s a discussion to be had on bad innovations (such as almost everything related to the so-called “attention economy), but they are a drop in the ocean.
    • agent008t 5y ago
      There are a lot of reasons to get the newest phone with the best features, and many of those reasons are not wholesome ones. For example, my iPhone 6 is getting obsolete just because it would not get latest iOS updates. Many apps are no longer supporting the old OS version. Yet these apps are not video games requiring the latest hardware - they are simply glorified web pages. There is no objective reason for why the phone could not run them.
  • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    > social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us less social) People in a lot of places literally couldn't socialise physically for much of the last 18 months, surely social media must have helped? Like one can argue that it's a cure worse than the diseases, but it's difficult to say that it's entirely useless.
• Applejinx 5y ago
  If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand. I think if you correctly account for all the materials required to support every last stage of process from dirt, ore and sand all the way to the finished iPhone, the result would be awe-inspiring and dismaying.
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    > If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand. What a silly assertion. The mere fact you can't create something easily does not mean it does not necessitate less resources to build. The support system an supply chain is huge, but the resources it uses could be quite small if you divide by the number of units produced. Even so, there are many tools that a smartphone replaces that would have needed in the past a full product just to do a single thing. It can replace a PC, a game console, a tv, a flashlight, a calculator, tons of books, measuring instruments, keys. Many many things that have now moved into one small device. Maybe the resources for a torch are not more than for a iPhone, but adding all the functions it fills, surely, it is more resource efficient than the past alternatives.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      Your latter point is good. That kind of consolidation of purpose is really handy, indeed I think it's the future of resource management. We can work out how to efficiently use these things. Former point? No. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum, or form a CPU-ready silicon wafer? Wood for torches grows out of the ground. You don't seem to have any idea of supply chain infrastructure, and it matters. There's a fairly close mapping between the amount of infrastructure involved, and the cost of the thing (Veblen goods aside). You can buy a flammable stick fairly cheaply, but buying a smartphone really does not wind up being the cost of the raw materials or even close… and this is because you're not looking at the infrastructure costs of producing the final result. Sorry, you're way off base. Smart technological stuff is really cool in its own right, but it's mind-bogglingly wasteful by 'degrowth' standards.
• bildung 5y ago
  > Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc… an iPhone requires far less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible. In the debate, this is called decoupling, meaning the decoupling of rising material and/or energy consumption with economic growth. The problem is that absolute decoupling couldn't been shown anywhere, when looking at actual empirical data. This is a pretty exhaustive summary of current research about this: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
• jccodez 5y ago
  i love my headphone jack on my 6s, its very innovative. talk about ioc.
• dariosalvi78 5y ago
  you probably ignore the amount of raw materials needed to produce your iPhone (not what actually ends up in the product itself). No, that's not an argument. The only argument is that you can keep growing by not selling anything material at all, like insurances, but with finite, actually soon degrowing population, how would you even think of doing it?
• tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  If you make better things, say a car that costs half of its predecessors then all else being equal you have halved your economic output. The reality is that we use that efficiency to buy more so the price stays the same but cars are twice as big and we buy many more of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox