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> Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run. Besides being a fundamentally politically charged statement, I see no good argument on w

> Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run. Besides being a fundamentally politically charged statement, I see no good argument on why not, so I'm sure you're ready to present some evidence behind that. Where you're completely right is that fundamental exponential resource usage is not sustainable. But in fact, OP makes a pretty convincing argument that resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth (in fact, exponentially so). Adding the exponentially growing level of automation and still-dropping cost-effective renewables into the mix (as well as their synergetic effect on each other), it's a rationally following thought that energy will be almost-free in the near future. With an exponential growth of external (solar) energy into the system, it's not far off to channel this energy into GDP to sustain the growth. Just one example: Water problem. There's a drinking water shortage everywhere but if you look at the globe from orbit, you see the planet does not have a water shortage. In fact, it's just an energy shortage of desalinating that water. Bring that almost-free water to the deserts around the equator and you're in fact creating resources. I think the idea of degrowth is a fundamental error. It's only when the ecological finally gets economical when you convince the naysayers as well.

Certhas 5y ago
The universe is finite, it's very big but finite. All growth eventually hits limits. Exponential growth hits the limits in logarithmic time. The question is just whether this brings the time scale to time scales that humans can and should care about. It's also a straw-man to imply that degrowth advocates want to eliminate all development. Nobody I know (but I am not that well read in the field, maybe it's just my pocket) is talking about stopping technological research, or science, or cultural growth. It's about the subset of human activities that are today labelled as economic.
- zzzzzzzza 5y ago
  economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my own
  - Certhas 5y ago
    Have you never done anything for anyone without being paid for it? I believe the fundamental model of having money and passing it around, and thereby acknowledging that we do things for each other is absolutely fantastic. But the secondary effects absolutely swamp the primary purpose by now. I can do things for other people, but I can also run ad campaigns, or engineer the culture in such a way that they will desire what I can produce. Desires are not a preexisting thing that a disinterested economic system is more and more efficiently satisfying. The desires are shaped by the wider social system of which the economic system and its intrinsic logic is a core part.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      If desires aren’t a preexisting thing, then why did trade happen in the ancient and mediaeval world?
      - Certhas 5y ago
        I don't understand why you think it implies trade shouldn't have happened. Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires? Either way, I more precisely should have said "fixed pre-existing thing". Obviously there are some needs and desires rooted in biology and probably, somewhere in the incomprehensible depth of time, these kick-started things. However, as fun as it is to speculate about pre-history, it's largely irrelevant to the conversation. There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives. As an aside: Humans seem to have a great need to pretend that their cultural constructs, whether gods or status symbols or desires or gender roles, are objective aspects of the universe. This does seem to be a very deep need... But the fact that this is a fallacy doesn't imply that there isn't also a rich tapestry of objective truths, and a subtle interaction between the two.
        goatlover 5y ago
        > There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives. Status seeking would likely be the biological imperative. Of course the specific desire is going to be culturally dependent. > Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires? I assume that desires are not created but rather channelled or cultivated within their cultural context based on what's available. Sure, someone with a new product is going to use advertising to try and influence consumers to buy their product. But this assumes their product is something consumers would desire, or something that can be associated with something consumers desire, such as status or convenience.
trainsplanes 5y ago
Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a problem with our limited amounts of desalination. Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited. If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.
- endymi0n 5y ago
  It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly believing in a possibility of managing those and be better off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently rising anyway, so we're synergetic. We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.
  - trainsplanes 5y ago
    Free energy isn’t a thing. There’s a cost to building it. Mining absolutely wrecks environments. And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any exponential progression gets absurd on a surprisingly short time scale. In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's referring to being in the second half, without recognising the absurdity of pretending something is growing exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of whatever is still rare.

Certhas 5y ago

The universe is finite, it's very big but finite. All growth eventually hits limits. Exponential growth hits the limits in logarithmic time. The question is just whether this brings the time scale to time scales that humans can and should care about. It's also a straw-man to imply that degrowth advocates want to eliminate all development. Nobody I know (but I am not that well read in the field, maybe it's just my pocket) is talking about stopping technological research, or science, or cultural growth. It's about the subset of human activities that are today labelled as economic.

zzzzzzzza 5y ago
economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my own
- Certhas 5y ago
  Have you never done anything for anyone without being paid for it? I believe the fundamental model of having money and passing it around, and thereby acknowledging that we do things for each other is absolutely fantastic. But the secondary effects absolutely swamp the primary purpose by now. I can do things for other people, but I can also run ad campaigns, or engineer the culture in such a way that they will desire what I can produce. Desires are not a preexisting thing that a disinterested economic system is more and more efficiently satisfying. The desires are shaped by the wider social system of which the economic system and its intrinsic logic is a core part.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    If desires aren’t a preexisting thing, then why did trade happen in the ancient and mediaeval world?
    - Certhas 5y ago
      I don't understand why you think it implies trade shouldn't have happened. Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires? Either way, I more precisely should have said "fixed pre-existing thing". Obviously there are some needs and desires rooted in biology and probably, somewhere in the incomprehensible depth of time, these kick-started things. However, as fun as it is to speculate about pre-history, it's largely irrelevant to the conversation. There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives. As an aside: Humans seem to have a great need to pretend that their cultural constructs, whether gods or status symbols or desires or gender roles, are objective aspects of the universe. This does seem to be a very deep need... But the fact that this is a fallacy doesn't imply that there isn't also a rich tapestry of objective truths, and a subtle interaction between the two.
      - goatlover 5y ago
        > There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives. Status seeking would likely be the biological imperative. Of course the specific desire is going to be culturally dependent. > Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires? I assume that desires are not created but rather channelled or cultivated within their cultural context based on what's available. Sure, someone with a new product is going to use advertising to try and influence consumers to buy their product. But this assumes their product is something consumers would desire, or something that can be associated with something consumers desire, such as status or convenience.

trainsplanes 5y ago

Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a problem with our limited amounts of desalination. Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited. If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.

endymi0n 5y ago
It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly believing in a possibility of managing those and be better off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently rising anyway, so we're synergetic. We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.
- trainsplanes 5y ago
  Free energy isn’t a thing. There’s a cost to building it. Mining absolutely wrecks environments. And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any exponential progression gets absurd on a surprisingly short time scale. In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's referring to being in the second half, without recognising the absurdity of pretending something is growing exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of whatever is still rare.