3 ms·

At some point the pyramid has to reach a bottom. There is no infinite grown in this universe. Especially not exponential growth. Even if you assume that we'll

by j-pb 5y ago

At some point the pyramid has to reach a bottom. There is no infinite grown in this universe. Especially not exponential growth. Even if you assume that we'll reach space at some point and infinitely expand into the universe. Resources available to that civilisation will grow at most cubically (based on the fact that our universe has 3 dimensions). That growth is not caused by magic, the reason why you'd still get a return of investment is because that growth has been fuelled in an unsustainable way with externalised costs. So for the "small long term investor" the pyramid ends at enslaved children in Bangladesh sewing shirts and shoes, overfished oceans, pollution, and climate-change. Pensioners and small investors get scammed by the rich and powerful above them, the kid in Bangladesh, the Somalian fisherman, the person dying during a hurricane, flood, or heatwave, got scammed by everybody else above them. Somebody gets scammed when there is a continuous indefinite return from a single investment.

strken 5y ago
Whether it's possible to grow forever isn't relevant to whether we can grow for another 10, 100, or 1000 years. At some point the sun is going to burn out, and even further than that the universe is going to reach heat death, but they belong to an entirely different class of problem than where to invest your money to prepare for retirement. The growth of economies doesn't rest solely on forcing enslaved Bangladeshi youth to make t-shirts, or causing environmental disasters. It's also powered by the Haber process, cheap power from renewables, efficient labour markets that don't rely on wildly inefficient slavery to assign workers to jobs, assembly lines, spreadsheets, and the other boring but efficient advancements we've made. If I'm reading it right, this is a claim that we're hitting fundamental limits of how large an economy can be, so all future growth will come at the cost of the "bottom of the pyramid". You're claiming that there is no possible future growth, that technology has hit a hard limit, and that any growing company will intrinsically be exploitative because there's no possible way for it to grow otherwise. This is a very extraordinary claim.
- j-pb 5y ago
  Yes, there are sustainable factors to economic growth, but that is not where the majority of it comes from, and we (the part of the world where some percentage of the population can invest into stock) have hit the point of too much growth a long time ago. There is an entire non-profit dedicated to calculating the resource consumption of different countries, based on re-growable biological resources: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ The entire western world is essentially consuming 2-10x as much per person as the planet can provide for that person. That consumption needs to come at the expense of somebody else, in a zero-sum game. I'm not saying that technology has hit that hard limit per se, but many technologies are at points of diminishing returns where further advances are possible, but so expensive that they don't increase efficiency. E.g. Combustion engine efficiency, Solar Panel efficiency (price is still going down though luckily), moores law (at least in terms of clock speed, and per transistor costs die to node shrinking), crop growth rate. The things you listed are great, but they have not been the driving factor behind growth. Look around, does that look like a planet that got the way it is from boring sustainable growth? Even the Habor process, has resulted in massive nitrate polution, algea blooms, and reduced biodiversity. You're not gonna get back from consuming 4x too much, from a few percent here and there. What I'm saying is that our current notion of economic growth and the idea that with a one time investment, you get an asymptotically infinite and indefinite return on said investment, is unsustainable and explotiative. And that we need to apply different metrics to success, than blindly aiming at growth. E.g. biodiversity, individual free time, children above the poverty line. A more sustainable model for example for retirement saving is a PAYGO system, like germany has. Everybody receives their fair share from the resources available each year, and you don't need to worry about some burst bubble, or crash, wiping out your lives savings.

by j-pb 5y ago

strken 5y ago

Whether it's possible to grow forever isn't relevant to whether we can grow for another 10, 100, or 1000 years. At some point the sun is going to burn out, and even further than that the universe is going to reach heat death, but they belong to an entirely different class of problem than where to invest your money to prepare for retirement. The growth of economies doesn't rest solely on forcing enslaved Bangladeshi youth to make t-shirts, or causing environmental disasters. It's also powered by the Haber process, cheap power from renewables, efficient labour markets that don't rely on wildly inefficient slavery to assign workers to jobs, assembly lines, spreadsheets, and the other boring but efficient advancements we've made. If I'm reading it right, this is a claim that we're hitting fundamental limits of how large an economy can be, so all future growth will come at the cost of the "bottom of the pyramid". You're claiming that there is no possible future growth, that technology has hit a hard limit, and that any growing company will intrinsically be exploitative because there's no possible way for it to grow otherwise. This is a very extraordinary claim.

j-pb 5y ago
Yes, there are sustainable factors to economic growth, but that is not where the majority of it comes from, and we (the part of the world where some percentage of the population can invest into stock) have hit the point of too much growth a long time ago. There is an entire non-profit dedicated to calculating the resource consumption of different countries, based on re-growable biological resources: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ The entire western world is essentially consuming 2-10x as much per person as the planet can provide for that person. That consumption needs to come at the expense of somebody else, in a zero-sum game. I'm not saying that technology has hit that hard limit per se, but many technologies are at points of diminishing returns where further advances are possible, but so expensive that they don't increase efficiency. E.g. Combustion engine efficiency, Solar Panel efficiency (price is still going down though luckily), moores law (at least in terms of clock speed, and per transistor costs die to node shrinking), crop growth rate. The things you listed are great, but they have not been the driving factor behind growth. Look around, does that look like a planet that got the way it is from boring sustainable growth? Even the Habor process, has resulted in massive nitrate polution, algea blooms, and reduced biodiversity. You're not gonna get back from consuming 4x too much, from a few percent here and there. What I'm saying is that our current notion of economic growth and the idea that with a one time investment, you get an asymptotically infinite and indefinite return on said investment, is unsustainable and explotiative. And that we need to apply different metrics to success, than blindly aiming at growth. E.g. biodiversity, individual free time, children above the poverty line. A more sustainable model for example for retirement saving is a PAYGO system, like germany has. Everybody receives their fair share from the resources available each year, and you don't need to worry about some burst bubble, or crash, wiping out your lives savings.