29 ms·

Are there limits to economic growth?

98 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

hprotagonist 5y ago
Yes. Some while back, I found myself sitting next to an accomplished economics professor at a dinner event. Shortly after pleasantries, I said to him, “economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,” just to see where things would go. It was a lively and informative conversation. I was somewhat alarmed by the disconnect between economic theory and physical constraints—not for the first time, but here it was up-close and personal. Though my memory is not keen enough to recount our conversation verbatim, I thought I would at least try to capture the key points and convey the essence of the tennis match—with some entertainment value thrown in. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- toto444 5y ago
  If you read the blog post shared by hprotagonist (which is very good), make sure to read the comments which give a more nunanced view of the questino.
- DicIfTEx 5y ago
  Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist[0] addresses this area well and contains a lot of similar stories. [0] https://www.kateraworth.com/ https://www.kateraworth.com/
- rory 5y ago
  This argument doesn't seem to be particularly strong, and to be honest the overconfidence comes off a bit embarrassing for physicists. It basically amounts to: 1) Energy use must keep increasing for utility to increase. This is empirically false-- energy consumption in the developed world has already been decreasing for some time. And population growth is below replacement rate in much of it, so even if per capita energy use were to increase again, total energy use may not. 2) The physicist rejects utility from new technology (Not me. I suspect many would prefer the smell of real flowers—complete with aphids and sneezing;). How is this different from the Amish? Some will reject all new technologies, others will embrace the ones they like and gain new utility from them.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    Maybe economists should rebuild their theories from the ground up, starting with concepts like 'conservation of mass' and 'conservation of energy'? More precise definition of terms is also desirable. For example, plant growth results in accumulation of biomass, and plants have been steadily growing (absorbing CO2 and water to create biomass) for a long time, so 'indefinite growth' in this sense possible. However, if economic growth means 'accumulation of biomass', well, in a full-grown forest, the net biomass is constant, a dead tree is replaced by a new tree. Here we have a healthy dynamic system with zero net growth - how would economists model that?
    - rory 5y ago
      > More precise definition of terms is also desirable Which terms aren't well defined? > how would economists model that? Sounds kind of like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy Except that definitionally, economists try to model the interaction of sentient beings (generally humans), not plants.
- yyyk 5y ago
  This link is so extremely unconvincing I just upped my percentage of belief in unlimited growth (which was 0% before, but now I'm not so sure). If that's best he can give then he has no good argument against it. I should write something more substantive, but some things are so filled with bad arguments I don't know if I should bother.
  - 14 5y ago
    I thought the argument was good and convincing. Perhaps you could find the time to write something more substantive because I and others, as seen in comments, agree he has some good arguments. I would be interested in seeing what parts you don’t agree with.
    - EricE 5y ago
      Other than completely discounting innovation as a thing? How about starting with that one?
      - 14 5y ago
        I think the point was you can’t innovate past the laws of physics not that people can’t innovate.
    - yyyk 5y ago
      Everything is bad? Sorry, since you asked I'll explain. He's basically using an infinite timescale on one end (going as far as 1,400 years in the future) but bans quite a few futuristic technologies on the other end. This is super tilted. He wants to not talk about stuff like going to other planets. Sure, I can accept that in the next century. But in 400 years? 1,400 years? Please. When the timescales are so long, you're not merely doubting technological progress - you're either assuming collapse before it happens or making an impossibility theorem. The first isn't supported by the post (his mechanism is very slow), there's no reason for the second. I think the burden of proof is on the other end here, since we can come close to generation ships right now*, it's just absurdly uneconomic, nobody wants it and there's nowhere to send them to. Just a little research on suspension, and a slowwww generation ship is doable. Third, Virtual Reality is not what he should be looking at. He should be wondering if we can 'upload' our minds like some futurists suggest. Or if strong AI can be created and change everything. I don't usually bother with the 'Rationalists', but they do have some arguments that we can seriously expect AI in this century. And on the timescales he's using, he's making a very unsupported impossibility theorem. But lets accept all his arguments. He assumes people will be asked nicely to go to Virtual Reality. More likely, if resources are such a problem, costs of existing in the real world will increase so much they won't have any choice [were he an economist perhaps he'd have thought of this?]. This isn't nice, but it is compatible with the definition of growth he uses up to the last few paragraphs, which merely talks about GDP, not human happiness! * Scifi plot - future Earth sends out generation ships to limit overpopulation. The secret - they have nowhere to send them to. So the destinations are black holes and other disaster areas, the expeditions are meant to die so the plant can reduce energy expenditure thus increasing GDP. The colonists will never know since they're cryogenically suspended. One of the doomed generation ships somehow chances upon one of the rare relativistic black hole solutions that allow them to go back in time... To before they were sent. Now they go back and try to get even. But they can't change history, and they have few resources, so how will they achieve their revenge?
ladyattis 5y ago
The simple answer is that yes there's a limit to all growth. Economic growth in particular is mostly just made up in contrast to the limited material wealth produced. Just because a given corporate bond is valued at X plus some multiple of a given currency doesn't mean there's X plus multiple of the physical good or service produced. If anything economic growth leads to societies over shooting in production while at the same time artificially constraining consumption for the sake of property norms to enforce the fictitious growth. Worse still, we often don't see growth where it matters such as home economy or the work of artisans. These things never get captured into metrics such as GDP.
- rmah 5y ago
  That's because that's not what GDP tries to capture. Might as well complain the # of songs played on the radio doesn't capture the quality of music composition..
  - uoaei 5y ago
    When the GDP is used as a de facto synonym for "progress" in the entirety of popular culture, yours is not really a critique from solid ground.
  - ladyattis 5y ago
    That's kind of the problem. The originator of the GDP formula explicitly told Congress that it wasn't meant for wealth creation metrics but Congress continues to utilize it to measure said wealth creation for obvious reasons (haha, line goes up meme here).
refurb 5y ago
No, not in any near-term sense of the word. Machines have been created that produce the labor of 1,000 men. Nuclear energy can provide the power that took thousands of man-years of labor to extract from coal reserves. Science is producing advances that extend health life-years. Space exploration will open up new planets and resources. So of course, there is a limit to growth, but worrying about the limit is like worrying about the sun turning into a red giant. Yes it'll happen, but not on any time scale worth worrying about.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  You realize that 10% growth for 100 years would mean our economy is 13,780x bigger than it is now, right? Of course most people are arguing that growth (minus population growth) is close to zero already. Hardly anyone is saying 10%. And of course you probably aren't going to live 100 years more, even with new health advances. But still. This is something unlikely to matter much for 10 years, but completely ignoring it over a 30-50 year horizon seems misguided.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    The motivation of the economic agents determine this. Plenty of room at the bottom.
jerf 5y ago
This is almost entirely a definitional issue, and those are typically somewhat less interesting than the heat generated by the participants who don't realize that indicate. If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. If economic growth is defined as providing people things they want, a definition that normally makes economics make much more sense, it becomes much fuzzier. What is the "economic value" of an SD card loaded down with the entire run of the Simpsons and Friends? What is the "economic value" of an MP3? What is the "economic value" of knowing how to run a boarding school successfully? There's no obvious upper limit to how many desires could be satiated, especially once you get away from brute material concerns like food and water. If you're willing to go sci-fi, and let machines and perhaps simulated humans have desires that the economy could satisfy it becomes even harder (and as we already let "companies" have such desires it's not really that far a journey from where we are), and it was already pretty hard. (Note I'm not saying there are "no" limits in that case, I'm saying they become a lot harder to define, and much, much harder to defend. If there are limits, but we can't reach them by the end of a the longest lifetime a baby born today will live for, it's not particularly clear that our opinion has any meaning or force. The economy of 2132 will still have physical constraints but I wouldn't care to guess a whole lot about its nature and how "large" we would consider it to be versus today's economy. For that matter, how "large" is the 2022 economy versus 1822? It's a lot harder a question than meets the eye.)
- vimy 5y ago
  > If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. Once we master mining in space we will have limitless resources. I think this decade we’ll see the first attempts.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    There is no known engineering path to get there, where you come back with more resources than you spent. Not even if SpaceX Starship works as well as we hope.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
>Are there limits to economic growth? (nature.com) There is no limit to imagination other than time and resource, however if its possible to extend lifespans indefinitely, there may be no limit to imagination, and that might truly open up the field of quantum physics. However living within one's means or resources is what could limit lifespans and thus imagination if breeding continues unabated and thus stagnation of development & efficiency within a population and new resources can not be inputted. External inputs could include getting into space for additional resources, Helium13 is reportedly a good nuclear with little radioactive waste, rare on earth but abundant on the moon. Imagination can create changes in real life, which can make life more efficient, but there might come a point where eugenics makes a comeback if biology, technology doesnt make people more intelligent. Look at the factoid being bandied about that if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farmland, of course this ignores lab grown meat which is reportedly 66% more efficient, but like all new tech there will be pitfalls which might harm the early adopters but there again might not. Who bloody knows?
User23 5y ago
There is no limit to nominal growth. Consider the GDP formula: GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports A sovereign currency issuing government can directly grow nominal GDP as much as they like simply by some combination of direct investment, spending, or reducing imports and funding it by creating new money. Whether or not this "growth" will reflect greater productivity, general well-being, or even be net positive after accounting for inflation is another matter entirely.
slibhb 5y ago
The question isn't whether there are limits (given finite space, yes, of course) but what those limits are. The Limits of Growth and adjacent material are driven by an unfounded conviction that we are close to those limits.
- titzer 5y ago
  Well we are certainly getting further and further from those limits, because we cruised past them in 1970 [1] and it's gotten worse every year. We have the luxury of denial precisely because Earth's reservoirs are so deep we haven't immediately emptied them; we need a few more decades for that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
mabbo 5y ago
There's a wonderfully fun hard sci-fi novel by Daniel Suarez called "Delta-V", chronicling a group trying to mine the first asteroid (in secret). The premise of the book, however, is that doing this is not just going to make them wildly rich, but that doing so is the only way to maintain Earth's need for constant economic growth. There aren't the resources needed on the planet to bring everyone to the level of development we'd like, but there is an ethical need to not leave people behind. It's a fun book, but the premise really sticks with me. We need more resources. Asteroid mining could play a big role. Sure, on a long enough time scale we could use up the entire solar system, but at least we'll have more time to figure out a solution.
- dsign 5y ago
  I tend to be a little more extreme: we need to vacate Earth, leave it as a natural biosphere reserve, and try out all our environmental compromises and even wilder things (synthetic life?) in lush habitats out of planet.
  - mabbo 5y ago
    The energy needed to vacate the earth is some very long-term sci-fi indeed. You'd need a space elevator at a minimum. But mining rare-earth minerals in asteroids is theoretically feasible with today's technology.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Beware unqualified bare nouns. They are philosophical land-mines. Everyone says they want "progress". Progress is an unqualified _good_, right? Unless your doctor says you have a "progressive illness". That's not good! The way to understand this is as the difference between scalars and vectors. In Newtonian reality things like mass and time are scalars. More is just more. Later is just later. But ideas like progress are _vectors_, with magnitude and direction. Progress toward what? Growth sounds like a scalar, because we are used to the common-sense usage. Things just get bigger or smaller (in 3-dimensional volume usually). But really it's a vector in a multi-dimensional space of human and economic values. In that sense, GDP is a naive vestige of 19th century economics. So the question "are there limits to growth?" is meaningless. And Meadows knew that. Given what we really know about the universe we're in, the answer is probably "Hell, no! To infinity and beyond..." But the _actual_ question is more like: "Given the finite resources of the environment, human lifespans, available knowledge.. and so on..., at what point does economic and industrial growth in <_these specific ways_> stop adding to overall human happiness, utility and long term survival?" But we've been stuck with economists and politicians for 50 years who are basically too stupid to take such a complex question on-board. They just wanna talk about "growth = good"
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > the _actual_ question is more like: "Given the finite resources of the environment, human lifespans, available knowledge.. and so on..., at what point does economic and industrial growth in <_these specific ways_> stop adding to overall human happiness, utility and long term survival?" Take out the industrial growth requirement and other crud and this question naturally simplifies to “given finite resources how can we keep increasing human happiness, utility and surivival?” And the answer is simple. Use fewer resources to create more happiness. Which we’re doing. Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling. We need it to fall faster. And we probably need more metrics. But fundamentally, the issue isn’t a problem of stupid people. It’s one of limited definitions of production, growth and what makes us happy.
  - si1entstill 5y ago
    > Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling. Is this true globally, or just for specific economies? (My true quandary is probably evident:) Are those economies getting measurably more efficient overall, or have we just offloaded the energy and material intensive production?
Findeton 5y ago
Socialism is the limit. As long as you have it you won't have growth.
- unforswearing 5y ago
  Please explain your work.
nimbius 5y ago
as someone with at least a cursory knowledge of physics i can say with some degree of certitude there is no man-made system that is limitless in growth or expansion. eventually, you will run out of materials from which the growth of the system is derived. a better question might be, is the consumption of all available resources reasonable in the pursuit of maximizing economic growth?
sl8r 5y ago
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-w...
dsign 5y ago
> The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being. It would be nice to see some science fiction where people succeed at doing just that, not with futuristic tech, but with the tech and constraints we have today. "Alia, have you ever tasted meat?" "The synthetic type?" "Yes, of course." "Yes, for one birthday, my friends cooked some." ... "My grandpa is sailing to the States for a company convention, he will be back for Easter. It's so relaxing... can't imagine when one hundred years ago people had to travel in airplanes without stretching their legs for eight hours. You can stretch your legs during all the weeks you spend in the ocean, you know." ... Oh the plot twists!
- nickpp 5y ago
  Old communist propaganda worked a lot like that. The sci-fi of the era described a future deeply permeated by their ideology. The nice part was that is was universally optimistic - no dystopias allowed in the red future. The bad part was that is was ridiculous: they were talking about astronauts and colonizing far away planets while we were starving in food lines. Still, as a child behind the iron curtain lacking access to western writings, I read and enjoyed quite a lot of it. Not sure if you can find it anymore though.
- el_nahual 5y ago
  We have the technology, it's called "taxes", but nobody seems to want to use it. I suspect that it's actually because nobody has actually find the legwork to go beyond that: how much in taxes, levied how, the money goes where, what are the penalties for non compliance? And of course the sci-fi elements: what are the unintended consequences? How does life change? Who loses, who wins?
  - dsign 5y ago
    > We have the technology, it's called "taxes", but nobody seems to want to use it. We are seeing a little bit of that now with fuel prices. Some countries are compounding the pain by having high taxes on fuel. The way it is working for me personally is that I have decided to drive electric, and I'm glad that I can afford it. But I have a salary in the high percentiles. Most people simply can't go that way. IMO, in some cases regulation by taxation can create a lot of stress and increase inequality. Furthermore, if cars are affordable to one person out of twenty, and they happen to live in a democracy, there may be an incentive for the nineteen people to vote (directly or indirectly) for banning cars altogether.Fill in "meat", "airplanes", "crypto-currency mining-cards", etc. I think we are between the knife and a hard place, no matter what.
photochemsyn 5y ago
'Economic growth' is a really slippery concept because the precise meaning of 'growth' matters a lot to the overall picture. Growth can be steady-state or not - for example, the global biosphere 'grows' by about 100 gigatons of carbon per year due to photosynthesis, but also 'dies' by about the same amount, due to breakdown of organic matter to CO2 by insects, fungi etc. In contrast, biological succession on a volcanic island, from bare rock to a dense cover of rainforest, results in an accumalation of biomass until a new steady state is reached. That accumulation-phase growth is very different from the steady-state dynamic condition. Economically, 'growth' (as used in the article) seems to refer to the accumulation-phase (*say, the accumulation of capital). Now if your capital-accumulation model is to chop down a forest, sell the wood, build housing, move in a farm and a town, and become an agricultural-industrial center operating under steady-state economic conditions (little capital accumulation, but lots of capital movement) - OK, eventually you run out of forest for your accumulation-of-capital model. The thing is, humans can do perfectly well with the steady-state economic-ecological model, given that the total human population remains stable. Here, however, competition is a bit rougher - the success of one entity in a steady-state system means the decline of another, there are far fewer open horizons. Nevertheless an individual company can experience 'economic growth' in this situation (someone else gets 'economic death', aka loss of market share). Evolution comes into play here, so we'd hope that competition in a steady-state system would select for efficiency, quality, etc. In contrast, doubling the human population could mean doubling the demand for goods and services. That would be accumulative growth, and economic growth is always the desirable good thing, certainly...? Accumulative growth on a finite planet is, obviously enough, not going to go on forever. The only point to consider is how close we are to reaching that limit, and what kind of average quality of life (including access to untouched wilderness) we'd like to enjoy.
zuminator 5y ago
There are two reasons at least for contimuing growth. The first is to increase wealth, so we have more mansions, more yachts, more billionaires, more greed, more stuff. The second is to alleviate poverty. Clearly Amy continued growth will run into resource limits eventually. We'll run out of fuels, exotic metals, fresh water, processing power, and cooling ability, eventually. But the limit to decreasing poverty is just -- no poverty. And that is in theory achievable. We can reduce the amount of hungry and unhomed people to near zero without running out of resources, at least provided population levels plateau. Achieving that goal would make it easier for us to re-examine the need for growth of the first kind.
deleted 5y ago
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tyjen 5y ago
I'd like to reference the classical economist's answer: it depends. It's obvious that without leaving this planet that we're limited to the resources on it, so economic growth is limited barring any massively revolutionary technology allowing us to skirt that seemingly hardcoded ceiling limit. Even including stuff like the Metaverse as economic growth, physical servers are necessary for them to operate. It's entirely possible we reach a global steady-state economy point, but that shouldn't stall lateral growth due to obsolete sectors shrinking and disappearing to make room for newer advancing sectors. Total growth wouldn't be the goal in this case. It depends on a lot of factors that are difficult to take into account, but I do agree with the underlying premise of the article: humanity needs to start figuring out how to "best" use the finite resources that we do have. But, that's an incredibly sensitive topic, I mean this is an issue that has arguably started most violent conflicts in our history. Without going down the all the potential rabbit holes this topic creates, it depends on a lot of which is uncertain. Notably, what sort of values we want to apply moving forward, which is difficult to coalesce to say the least.
sfvisser 5y ago
No, we’re always at the beginning of infinity.
it_does_follow 5y ago
> They point to evidence, notably from the Nordic nations, that economies can continue to grow even as carbon emissions start to come down. This a pretty laughable piece of "evidence" given that the most important export from the Nordic countries is petroleum. But even if this wasn't the case, you can't talk about global systems on a local scale. There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks. The US has seen a bit of this, but we also exported a lot of our energy intensive manufacturing to other countries. I'm sure someone will point out that some studies have tried to correct for this by measuring the carbon foot print of imports. But these studies are also flawed for several reasons. First the reduced cost of good is China is not only the lower labor cost but all of the other industrial services nearby that allow those goods to be created efficiently. It's very difficult to determine how far up the chain of production you need to go. The other is that there's never an attempt to account for how much energy/fossil fuels go into the dollars that flood into an economy. If your finance sector is making a lot of money of foreign energy consumption, that counts. The bottom line is that global consumption of energy has never decreased for any source[0]. We even burn more wood to produce energy than we did when that was one of of the major source of home energy! We are already hitting the limits to growth, but the reality of that is too terrifying for most people to accept so we end up convincing ourselves that its not happening... while we're watching a war over fossil fuels develop in Europe. 0.https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks. The UK did this by switching from coal to gas powered electricity generation. It wasn't an accounting trick, it really did have an impact. The economy continued to grow.
golemotron 5y ago
A large part of austerity is ressentiment.
mro_name 5y ago
Is there water in the ocean? There is always somebody saying 'it depends'.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mro_name 5y ago
> best way to use and care for Earth’s resources. that's not interesting. 'Good enough' would suffice. An idea might be to stop depleting.
istjohn 5y ago
Sadly, there is maybe one comment here that engages with the actual article instead of the link-bait title. The nut of the article is: > Although there’s now a consensus that human activities have irreversible environmental effects, researchers disagree on the solutions — especially if that involves curbing economic growth. That disagreement is impeding action. It’s time for researchers to end their debate. The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being. It goes on to describe the debate over whether we should intentionally slow economic growth for environmental reasons.
- EricE 5y ago
  Intentionally slow? That's the policy of our current administration in the US and look at the UTTER disaster it is continuing to unfold into. The problem with any pessimistic prediction - including the recent hysteria over "global warming" - is it completely discounts the human ability to innovate and overcome problems. So HELL NO I don't want any egg-head interference such as deliberately slowing anything. The US is already the global leader in reducing carbon emissions and that sure as hell didn't happen by slowing our economic growth. Our economic growth FUNDED and FUELED that capability. You NEVER improve by deliberately tying all your hands behind your back. How freaking stupid do you have to be to think that's even reasonable or "intelligent" line of reason? It's the same reason central planning fails MISERABLY compared to open, independent systems such as capitalism. Innovation. Economic natural selection. Wisdom of the crowd. People these days love to slam open markets - the problem is we haven't had anything resembling an open market for some time. I don't think we should have unfettered open markets, I do think there is a role for some regulation - but we have swung so far into the regulation side (mostly drive by lobbying/market leaders to further consolidation - COVID restrictions were the catalyst from the greatest consolidation of wealth to the largest entities we have seen in recent human history) that the term open market is used but it references very little of what we have today. So yeah, F off with this intentional meddling. NO thanks.
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    If you're an advocate for markets and innovation solving climate change, I'd gather you support a hefty but revenue neutral carbon tax to properly price in the harm emissions are currently doing?
vishnugupta 5y ago
I stumbled on this interesting visualisation while researching about all the wealth in the world [1] The last blob of Derivatives immediately jumps out. Not sure how useful is for the current discussion; just that it fascinates me; the disparity between the actual wealth and the notional value that's at stake if things go wrong. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2020/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...
cjfd 5y ago
If we are, in aggregate, happier with the things we buy this year than we are with the things we bought last year then there has been economic growth.... since humans can always tell themselves the current thing is better than the previous one there can, in theory, always be economic growth.
sydbarrett74 5y ago
Economic growth is bounded by the laws of physics, particularly the laws of thermodynamics.
steve76 5y ago
pesmhey 5y ago
No.
MaxMoney 5y ago
[dead]
mbostleman 5y ago
Related and seems as if it should have been considered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
David Graeber's "Debt: the first 5000 years" makes a fairly coherent case that the first instance of interest-accruing debt [EDIT: I had called this usury, but that implies unethical, which is tangential to the point] inevitably leads to an economic requirement for conventional economic growth. The borrower must pay the lender more than was borrowed. The only way to accomplish this is to do something that is essentially always considered to be "growth" by economists. I didn't accept this argument when I first heard it, but I spent at least 2 days debating it while hiking in Scotland, trying to find ways around it, and ultimately accepted that it seems completely true.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  It could also be inflation...
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    In theory lenders are supposed to set their rates to get the desired real return. If inflation is 10% they'll add 10% to their rates to make sure they stay ahead of it. (This actually happened in the 1970s, and is a major reason why rates were so high.)
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Theory is great but my radio station is filled with ads about loan rates that starts with 2.
      - nostrademons 5y ago
        Yes, and this is a great opportunity for profiting at a lender's expense.
      - uoaei 5y ago
        Money is a lot freer than it was.
  - rank0 5y ago
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
Here is my favorite answer to this question which counters economics with physics: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... "Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."
- bhelkey 5y ago
  > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. Growth rate of what? It is important to be clear. Growth in energy consumption is not the same as economic growth. Total energy consumption per unit of GDP is not constant but is in fact on a downward trend[1]. [1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
    It was energy consumption, the link has the full conversation. They then talk about the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth.
    - bhelkey 5y ago
      I, and looking around this thread many others, find his argument to be unconvincing to say the least. E.g. his argument against energy becoming almost free, "But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt." One of the many problems with this is that we already live with a finite resource that is completely free but also a hard requirement for all economic activity: air.
      - ben_w 5y ago
dqpb 5y ago
I continuously increase the economic output of my computer without any increase in consumption of physical resources. In fact, my output has increased near exponentially over the last several years, while my computer has remained the same, and it's electricity consumption has remained constant.
dqpb 5y ago
This title is stupid. It appears to be asking "Is there a theoretical limit to how much value can be produced?" but it's really asking "Will we destroy our planet and/or run out of resources?". Also, this article is an editorial with apparently no author, so I don't even know who I'm supposed to be grumpy at.
known 5y ago
srean 5y ago
I have wondered what would happen after we gain direct, easy and cheap interventional access to our neurochemistry -- dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline etc. That's where human wants and desires and their satiation regulated. This doesnt solve the problem of course because the next question becomes 'how cheap' and how is that to be paid for.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Ask any capitalist economic adviser and they will have no alternative to perpetual growth.
cannabis_sam 5y ago
Economic growth? Of course there are limits, considering the audience here, anyone who’s studied CS at the most basic level should treat this as self-evident. The only reason why we are having this discussion, literally a fifth into the 21th century, is the barrage of propaganda around economics, usually packaged around empty slogans like “zero sum”, “comparative advantage”, “free markets”, etc. (the list is endless). The fact that anyone even asks this question seriously, reveals their deep delusion about how reality actually works. (Just to be clear, general economic activity does not entail the same limitations as when you restrict that activity to growth)
jah242 5y ago
Having read through quite a few of the comments lots of people seem to be drawing the conclusion 'obviously no, we have finite material resources'. I think this misunderstands the concept, as economic growth does not necessarily imply more material resources being used. In fact in developed economies the vast majority of GDP is now services (law, accounting, media etc.), which whilst obviously partly material resources based is much less material resource in intensive than say building a new car. More interestingly over time the material resource intensity of economic activity (material resources used per $ of GDP) declines as countries develop. In the future it seems very likely that demand for creative digital and media products e.g avatars, games, films, instagram filters etc. will account for an ever larger share of GDP. If every year a company's designers creates a 'better looking / cooler' avatar range that people are willing to pay more for then we still have economic growth and assuming the avatars use the same computing power to render we would have essentially 0% growth in material resources used. Therefore, whilst unbounded and unregulated economic growth causes lots of problems (and has for a long time), the idea it could go on for ever is not as stupid as it sounds, so long as people keep desiring more and more intangible products.
mediumsmart 5y ago
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
mgh2 5y ago
The parallel question is: are there limits to population growth and productivity?

98 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

Yes. Some while back, I found myself sitting next to an accomplished economics professor at a dinner event. Shortly after pleasantries, I said to him, “economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,” just to see where things would go. It was a lively and informative conversation. I was somewhat alarmed by the disconnect between economic theory and physical constraints—not for the first time, but here it was up-close and personal. Though my memory is not keen enough to recount our conversation verbatim, I thought I would at least try to capture the key points and convey the essence of the tennis match—with some entertainment value thrown in. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

toto444 5y ago
If you read the blog post shared by hprotagonist (which is very good), make sure to read the comments which give a more nunanced view of the questino.
DicIfTEx 5y ago
Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist[0] addresses this area well and contains a lot of similar stories. [0] https://www.kateraworth.com/ https://www.kateraworth.com/
rory 5y ago
This argument doesn't seem to be particularly strong, and to be honest the overconfidence comes off a bit embarrassing for physicists. It basically amounts to: 1) Energy use must keep increasing for utility to increase. This is empirically false-- energy consumption in the developed world has already been decreasing for some time. And population growth is below replacement rate in much of it, so even if per capita energy use were to increase again, total energy use may not. 2) The physicist rejects utility from new technology (Not me. I suspect many would prefer the smell of real flowers—complete with aphids and sneezing;). How is this different from the Amish? Some will reject all new technologies, others will embrace the ones they like and gain new utility from them.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  Maybe economists should rebuild their theories from the ground up, starting with concepts like 'conservation of mass' and 'conservation of energy'? More precise definition of terms is also desirable. For example, plant growth results in accumulation of biomass, and plants have been steadily growing (absorbing CO2 and water to create biomass) for a long time, so 'indefinite growth' in this sense possible. However, if economic growth means 'accumulation of biomass', well, in a full-grown forest, the net biomass is constant, a dead tree is replaced by a new tree. Here we have a healthy dynamic system with zero net growth - how would economists model that?
  - rory 5y ago
    > More precise definition of terms is also desirable Which terms aren't well defined? > how would economists model that? Sounds kind of like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy Except that definitionally, economists try to model the interaction of sentient beings (generally humans), not plants.
yyyk 5y ago
This link is so extremely unconvincing I just upped my percentage of belief in unlimited growth (which was 0% before, but now I'm not so sure). If that's best he can give then he has no good argument against it. I should write something more substantive, but some things are so filled with bad arguments I don't know if I should bother.
- 14 5y ago
  I thought the argument was good and convincing. Perhaps you could find the time to write something more substantive because I and others, as seen in comments, agree he has some good arguments. I would be interested in seeing what parts you don’t agree with.
  - EricE 5y ago
    Other than completely discounting innovation as a thing? How about starting with that one?
    - 14 5y ago
      I think the point was you can’t innovate past the laws of physics not that people can’t innovate.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Everything is bad? Sorry, since you asked I'll explain. He's basically using an infinite timescale on one end (going as far as 1,400 years in the future) but bans quite a few futuristic technologies on the other end. This is super tilted. He wants to not talk about stuff like going to other planets. Sure, I can accept that in the next century. But in 400 years? 1,400 years? Please. When the timescales are so long, you're not merely doubting technological progress - you're either assuming collapse before it happens or making an impossibility theorem. The first isn't supported by the post (his mechanism is very slow), there's no reason for the second. I think the burden of proof is on the other end here, since we can come close to generation ships right now*, it's just absurdly uneconomic, nobody wants it and there's nowhere to send them to. Just a little research on suspension, and a slowwww generation ship is doable. Third, Virtual Reality is not what he should be looking at. He should be wondering if we can 'upload' our minds like some futurists suggest. Or if strong AI can be created and change everything. I don't usually bother with the 'Rationalists', but they do have some arguments that we can seriously expect AI in this century. And on the timescales he's using, he's making a very unsupported impossibility theorem. But lets accept all his arguments. He assumes people will be asked nicely to go to Virtual Reality. More likely, if resources are such a problem, costs of existing in the real world will increase so much they won't have any choice [were he an economist perhaps he'd have thought of this?]. This isn't nice, but it is compatible with the definition of growth he uses up to the last few paragraphs, which merely talks about GDP, not human happiness! * Scifi plot - future Earth sends out generation ships to limit overpopulation. The secret - they have nowhere to send them to. So the destinations are black holes and other disaster areas, the expeditions are meant to die so the plant can reduce energy expenditure thus increasing GDP. The colonists will never know since they're cryogenically suspended. One of the doomed generation ships somehow chances upon one of the rare relativistic black hole solutions that allow them to go back in time... To before they were sent. Now they go back and try to get even. But they can't change history, and they have few resources, so how will they achieve their revenge?

ladyattis 5y ago

The simple answer is that yes there's a limit to all growth. Economic growth in particular is mostly just made up in contrast to the limited material wealth produced. Just because a given corporate bond is valued at X plus some multiple of a given currency doesn't mean there's X plus multiple of the physical good or service produced. If anything economic growth leads to societies over shooting in production while at the same time artificially constraining consumption for the sake of property norms to enforce the fictitious growth. Worse still, we often don't see growth where it matters such as home economy or the work of artisans. These things never get captured into metrics such as GDP.

rmah 5y ago
That's because that's not what GDP tries to capture. Might as well complain the # of songs played on the radio doesn't capture the quality of music composition..
- uoaei 5y ago
  When the GDP is used as a de facto synonym for "progress" in the entirety of popular culture, yours is not really a critique from solid ground.
- ladyattis 5y ago
  That's kind of the problem. The originator of the GDP formula explicitly told Congress that it wasn't meant for wealth creation metrics but Congress continues to utilize it to measure said wealth creation for obvious reasons (haha, line goes up meme here).

refurb 5y ago

No, not in any near-term sense of the word. Machines have been created that produce the labor of 1,000 men. Nuclear energy can provide the power that took thousands of man-years of labor to extract from coal reserves. Science is producing advances that extend health life-years. Space exploration will open up new planets and resources. So of course, there is a limit to growth, but worrying about the limit is like worrying about the sun turning into a red giant. Yes it'll happen, but not on any time scale worth worrying about.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
You realize that 10% growth for 100 years would mean our economy is 13,780x bigger than it is now, right? Of course most people are arguing that growth (minus population growth) is close to zero already. Hardly anyone is saying 10%. And of course you probably aren't going to live 100 years more, even with new health advances. But still. This is something unlikely to matter much for 10 years, but completely ignoring it over a 30-50 year horizon seems misguided.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  The motivation of the economic agents determine this. Plenty of room at the bottom.

jerf 5y ago

This is almost entirely a definitional issue, and those are typically somewhat less interesting than the heat generated by the participants who don't realize that indicate. If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. If economic growth is defined as providing people things they want, a definition that normally makes economics make much more sense, it becomes much fuzzier. What is the "economic value" of an SD card loaded down with the entire run of the Simpsons and Friends? What is the "economic value" of an MP3? What is the "economic value" of knowing how to run a boarding school successfully? There's no obvious upper limit to how many desires could be satiated, especially once you get away from brute material concerns like food and water. If you're willing to go sci-fi, and let machines and perhaps simulated humans have desires that the economy could satisfy it becomes even harder (and as we already let "companies" have such desires it's not really that far a journey from where we are), and it was already pretty hard. (Note I'm not saying there are "no" limits in that case, I'm saying they become a lot harder to define, and much, much harder to defend. If there are limits, but we can't reach them by the end of a the longest lifetime a baby born today will live for, it's not particularly clear that our opinion has any meaning or force. The economy of 2132 will still have physical constraints but I wouldn't care to guess a whole lot about its nature and how "large" we would consider it to be versus today's economy. For that matter, how "large" is the 2022 economy versus 1822? It's a lot harder a question than meets the eye.)

vimy 5y ago
> If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. Once we master mining in space we will have limitless resources. I think this decade we’ll see the first attempts.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  There is no known engineering path to get there, where you come back with more resources than you spent. Not even if SpaceX Starship works as well as we hope.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

>Are there limits to economic growth? (nature.com) There is no limit to imagination other than time and resource, however if its possible to extend lifespans indefinitely, there may be no limit to imagination, and that might truly open up the field of quantum physics. However living within one's means or resources is what could limit lifespans and thus imagination if breeding continues unabated and thus stagnation of development & efficiency within a population and new resources can not be inputted. External inputs could include getting into space for additional resources, Helium13 is reportedly a good nuclear with little radioactive waste, rare on earth but abundant on the moon. Imagination can create changes in real life, which can make life more efficient, but there might come a point where eugenics makes a comeback if biology, technology doesnt make people more intelligent. Look at the factoid being bandied about that if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farmland, of course this ignores lab grown meat which is reportedly 66% more efficient, but like all new tech there will be pitfalls which might harm the early adopters but there again might not. Who bloody knows?

User23 5y ago

There is no limit to nominal growth. Consider the GDP formula: GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports A sovereign currency issuing government can directly grow nominal GDP as much as they like simply by some combination of direct investment, spending, or reducing imports and funding it by creating new money. Whether or not this "growth" will reflect greater productivity, general well-being, or even be net positive after accounting for inflation is another matter entirely.

slibhb 5y ago

The question isn't whether there are limits (given finite space, yes, of course) but what those limits are. The Limits of Growth and adjacent material are driven by an unfounded conviction that we are close to those limits.

titzer 5y ago
Well we are certainly getting further and further from those limits, because we cruised past them in 1970 [1] and it's gotten worse every year. We have the luxury of denial precisely because Earth's reservoirs are so deep we haven't immediately emptied them; we need a few more decades for that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

mabbo 5y ago

There's a wonderfully fun hard sci-fi novel by Daniel Suarez called "Delta-V", chronicling a group trying to mine the first asteroid (in secret). The premise of the book, however, is that doing this is not just going to make them wildly rich, but that doing so is the only way to maintain Earth's need for constant economic growth. There aren't the resources needed on the planet to bring everyone to the level of development we'd like, but there is an ethical need to not leave people behind. It's a fun book, but the premise really sticks with me. We need more resources. Asteroid mining could play a big role. Sure, on a long enough time scale we could use up the entire solar system, but at least we'll have more time to figure out a solution.

dsign 5y ago
I tend to be a little more extreme: we need to vacate Earth, leave it as a natural biosphere reserve, and try out all our environmental compromises and even wilder things (synthetic life?) in lush habitats out of planet.
- mabbo 5y ago
  The energy needed to vacate the earth is some very long-term sci-fi indeed. You'd need a space elevator at a minimum. But mining rare-earth minerals in asteroids is theoretically feasible with today's technology.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Beware unqualified bare nouns. They are philosophical land-mines. Everyone says they want "progress". Progress is an unqualified _good_, right? Unless your doctor says you have a "progressive illness". That's not good! The way to understand this is as the difference between scalars and vectors. In Newtonian reality things like mass and time are scalars. More is just more. Later is just later. But ideas like progress are _vectors_, with magnitude and direction. Progress toward what? Growth sounds like a scalar, because we are used to the common-sense usage. Things just get bigger or smaller (in 3-dimensional volume usually). But really it's a vector in a multi-dimensional space of human and economic values. In that sense, GDP is a naive vestige of 19th century economics. So the question "are there limits to growth?" is meaningless. And Meadows knew that. Given what we really know about the universe we're in, the answer is probably "Hell, no! To infinity and beyond..." But the _actual_ question is more like: "Given the finite resources of the environment, human lifespans, available knowledge.. and so on..., at what point does economic and industrial growth in <_these specific ways_> stop adding to overall human happiness, utility and long term survival?" But we've been stuck with economists and politicians for 50 years who are basically too stupid to take such a complex question on-board. They just wanna talk about "growth = good"

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the _actual_ question is more like: "Given the finite resources of the environment, human lifespans, available knowledge.. and so on..., at what point does economic and industrial growth in <_these specific ways_> stop adding to overall human happiness, utility and long term survival?" Take out the industrial growth requirement and other crud and this question naturally simplifies to “given finite resources how can we keep increasing human happiness, utility and surivival?” And the answer is simple. Use fewer resources to create more happiness. Which we’re doing. Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling. We need it to fall faster. And we probably need more metrics. But fundamentally, the issue isn’t a problem of stupid people. It’s one of limited definitions of production, growth and what makes us happy.
- si1entstill 5y ago
  > Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling. Is this true globally, or just for specific economies? (My true quandary is probably evident:) Are those economies getting measurably more efficient overall, or have we just offloaded the energy and material intensive production?

Findeton 5y ago

Socialism is the limit. As long as you have it you won't have growth.

unforswearing 5y ago
Please explain your work.

nimbius 5y ago

as someone with at least a cursory knowledge of physics i can say with some degree of certitude there is no man-made system that is limitless in growth or expansion. eventually, you will run out of materials from which the growth of the system is derived. a better question might be, is the consumption of all available resources reasonable in the pursuit of maximizing economic growth?

sl8r 5y ago

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-w...

dsign 5y ago

> The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being. It would be nice to see some science fiction where people succeed at doing just that, not with futuristic tech, but with the tech and constraints we have today. "Alia, have you ever tasted meat?" "The synthetic type?" "Yes, of course." "Yes, for one birthday, my friends cooked some." ... "My grandpa is sailing to the States for a company convention, he will be back for Easter. It's so relaxing... can't imagine when one hundred years ago people had to travel in airplanes without stretching their legs for eight hours. You can stretch your legs during all the weeks you spend in the ocean, you know." ... Oh the plot twists!

nickpp 5y ago
Old communist propaganda worked a lot like that. The sci-fi of the era described a future deeply permeated by their ideology. The nice part was that is was universally optimistic - no dystopias allowed in the red future. The bad part was that is was ridiculous: they were talking about astronauts and colonizing far away planets while we were starving in food lines. Still, as a child behind the iron curtain lacking access to western writings, I read and enjoyed quite a lot of it. Not sure if you can find it anymore though.
el_nahual 5y ago
We have the technology, it's called "taxes", but nobody seems to want to use it. I suspect that it's actually because nobody has actually find the legwork to go beyond that: how much in taxes, levied how, the money goes where, what are the penalties for non compliance? And of course the sci-fi elements: what are the unintended consequences? How does life change? Who loses, who wins?
- dsign 5y ago
  > We have the technology, it's called "taxes", but nobody seems to want to use it. We are seeing a little bit of that now with fuel prices. Some countries are compounding the pain by having high taxes on fuel. The way it is working for me personally is that I have decided to drive electric, and I'm glad that I can afford it. But I have a salary in the high percentiles. Most people simply can't go that way. IMO, in some cases regulation by taxation can create a lot of stress and increase inequality. Furthermore, if cars are affordable to one person out of twenty, and they happen to live in a democracy, there may be an incentive for the nineteen people to vote (directly or indirectly) for banning cars altogether.Fill in "meat", "airplanes", "crypto-currency mining-cards", etc. I think we are between the knife and a hard place, no matter what.

photochemsyn 5y ago

'Economic growth' is a really slippery concept because the precise meaning of 'growth' matters a lot to the overall picture. Growth can be steady-state or not - for example, the global biosphere 'grows' by about 100 gigatons of carbon per year due to photosynthesis, but also 'dies' by about the same amount, due to breakdown of organic matter to CO2 by insects, fungi etc. In contrast, biological succession on a volcanic island, from bare rock to a dense cover of rainforest, results in an accumalation of biomass until a new steady state is reached. That accumulation-phase growth is very different from the steady-state dynamic condition. Economically, 'growth' (as used in the article) seems to refer to the accumulation-phase (*say, the accumulation of capital). Now if your capital-accumulation model is to chop down a forest, sell the wood, build housing, move in a farm and a town, and become an agricultural-industrial center operating under steady-state economic conditions (little capital accumulation, but lots of capital movement) - OK, eventually you run out of forest for your accumulation-of-capital model. The thing is, humans can do perfectly well with the steady-state economic-ecological model, given that the total human population remains stable. Here, however, competition is a bit rougher - the success of one entity in a steady-state system means the decline of another, there are far fewer open horizons. Nevertheless an individual company can experience 'economic growth' in this situation (someone else gets 'economic death', aka loss of market share). Evolution comes into play here, so we'd hope that competition in a steady-state system would select for efficiency, quality, etc. In contrast, doubling the human population could mean doubling the demand for goods and services. That would be accumulative growth, and economic growth is always the desirable good thing, certainly...? Accumulative growth on a finite planet is, obviously enough, not going to go on forever. The only point to consider is how close we are to reaching that limit, and what kind of average quality of life (including access to untouched wilderness) we'd like to enjoy.

zuminator 5y ago

There are two reasons at least for contimuing growth. The first is to increase wealth, so we have more mansions, more yachts, more billionaires, more greed, more stuff. The second is to alleviate poverty. Clearly Amy continued growth will run into resource limits eventually. We'll run out of fuels, exotic metals, fresh water, processing power, and cooling ability, eventually. But the limit to decreasing poverty is just -- no poverty. And that is in theory achievable. We can reduce the amount of hungry and unhomed people to near zero without running out of resources, at least provided population levels plateau. Achieving that goal would make it easier for us to re-examine the need for growth of the first kind.

deleted 5y ago

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tyjen 5y ago

I'd like to reference the classical economist's answer: it depends. It's obvious that without leaving this planet that we're limited to the resources on it, so economic growth is limited barring any massively revolutionary technology allowing us to skirt that seemingly hardcoded ceiling limit. Even including stuff like the Metaverse as economic growth, physical servers are necessary for them to operate. It's entirely possible we reach a global steady-state economy point, but that shouldn't stall lateral growth due to obsolete sectors shrinking and disappearing to make room for newer advancing sectors. Total growth wouldn't be the goal in this case. It depends on a lot of factors that are difficult to take into account, but I do agree with the underlying premise of the article: humanity needs to start figuring out how to "best" use the finite resources that we do have. But, that's an incredibly sensitive topic, I mean this is an issue that has arguably started most violent conflicts in our history. Without going down the all the potential rabbit holes this topic creates, it depends on a lot of which is uncertain. Notably, what sort of values we want to apply moving forward, which is difficult to coalesce to say the least.

sfvisser 5y ago

No, we’re always at the beginning of infinity.

it_does_follow 5y ago

> They point to evidence, notably from the Nordic nations, that economies can continue to grow even as carbon emissions start to come down. This a pretty laughable piece of "evidence" given that the most important export from the Nordic countries is petroleum. But even if this wasn't the case, you can't talk about global systems on a local scale. There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks. The US has seen a bit of this, but we also exported a lot of our energy intensive manufacturing to other countries. I'm sure someone will point out that some studies have tried to correct for this by measuring the carbon foot print of imports. But these studies are also flawed for several reasons. First the reduced cost of good is China is not only the lower labor cost but all of the other industrial services nearby that allow those goods to be created efficiently. It's very difficult to determine how far up the chain of production you need to go. The other is that there's never an attempt to account for how much energy/fossil fuels go into the dollars that flood into an economy. If your finance sector is making a lot of money of foreign energy consumption, that counts. The bottom line is that global consumption of energy has never decreased for any source[0]. We even burn more wood to produce energy than we did when that was one of of the major source of home energy! We are already hitting the limits to growth, but the reality of that is too terrifying for most people to accept so we end up convincing ourselves that its not happening... while we're watching a war over fossil fuels develop in Europe. 0.https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks. The UK did this by switching from coal to gas powered electricity generation. It wasn't an accounting trick, it really did have an impact. The economy continued to grow.

golemotron 5y ago

A large part of austerity is ressentiment.

mro_name 5y ago

Is there water in the ocean? There is always somebody saying 'it depends'.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mro_name 5y ago

> best way to use and care for Earth’s resources. that's not interesting. 'Good enough' would suffice. An idea might be to stop depleting.

istjohn 5y ago

Sadly, there is maybe one comment here that engages with the actual article instead of the link-bait title. The nut of the article is: > Although there’s now a consensus that human activities have irreversible environmental effects, researchers disagree on the solutions — especially if that involves curbing economic growth. That disagreement is impeding action. It’s time for researchers to end their debate. The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being. It goes on to describe the debate over whether we should intentionally slow economic growth for environmental reasons.

EricE 5y ago
Intentionally slow? That's the policy of our current administration in the US and look at the UTTER disaster it is continuing to unfold into. The problem with any pessimistic prediction - including the recent hysteria over "global warming" - is it completely discounts the human ability to innovate and overcome problems. So HELL NO I don't want any egg-head interference such as deliberately slowing anything. The US is already the global leader in reducing carbon emissions and that sure as hell didn't happen by slowing our economic growth. Our economic growth FUNDED and FUELED that capability. You NEVER improve by deliberately tying all your hands behind your back. How freaking stupid do you have to be to think that's even reasonable or "intelligent" line of reason? It's the same reason central planning fails MISERABLY compared to open, independent systems such as capitalism. Innovation. Economic natural selection. Wisdom of the crowd. People these days love to slam open markets - the problem is we haven't had anything resembling an open market for some time. I don't think we should have unfettered open markets, I do think there is a role for some regulation - but we have swung so far into the regulation side (mostly drive by lobbying/market leaders to further consolidation - COVID restrictions were the catalyst from the greatest consolidation of wealth to the largest entities we have seen in recent human history) that the term open market is used but it references very little of what we have today. So yeah, F off with this intentional meddling. NO thanks.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  If you're an advocate for markets and innovation solving climate change, I'd gather you support a hefty but revenue neutral carbon tax to properly price in the harm emissions are currently doing?

vishnugupta 5y ago

I stumbled on this interesting visualisation while researching about all the wealth in the world [1] The last blob of Derivatives immediately jumps out. Not sure how useful is for the current discussion; just that it fascinates me; the disparity between the actual wealth and the notional value that's at stake if things go wrong. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2020/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

cjfd 5y ago

If we are, in aggregate, happier with the things we buy this year than we are with the things we bought last year then there has been economic growth.... since humans can always tell themselves the current thing is better than the previous one there can, in theory, always be economic growth.

sydbarrett74 5y ago

Economic growth is bounded by the laws of physics, particularly the laws of thermodynamics.

steve76 5y ago

pesmhey 5y ago

No.

MaxMoney 5y ago

[dead]

mbostleman 5y ago

Related and seems as if it should have been considered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

David Graeber's "Debt: the first 5000 years" makes a fairly coherent case that the first instance of interest-accruing debt [EDIT: I had called this usury, but that implies unethical, which is tangential to the point] inevitably leads to an economic requirement for conventional economic growth. The borrower must pay the lender more than was borrowed. The only way to accomplish this is to do something that is essentially always considered to be "growth" by economists. I didn't accept this argument when I first heard it, but I spent at least 2 days debating it while hiking in Scotland, trying to find ways around it, and ultimately accepted that it seems completely true.

Aperocky 5y ago
It could also be inflation...
- nostrademons 5y ago
  In theory lenders are supposed to set their rates to get the desired real return. If inflation is 10% they'll add 10% to their rates to make sure they stay ahead of it. (This actually happened in the 1970s, and is a major reason why rates were so high.)
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Theory is great but my radio station is filled with ads about loan rates that starts with 2.
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      Yes, and this is a great opportunity for profiting at a lender's expense.
    - uoaei 5y ago
      Money is a lot freer than it was.
- rank0 5y ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

Here is my favorite answer to this question which counters economics with physics: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... "Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."

bhelkey 5y ago
> The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. Growth rate of what? It is important to be clear. Growth in energy consumption is not the same as economic growth. Total energy consumption per unit of GDP is not constant but is in fact on a downward trend[1]. [1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  It was energy consumption, the link has the full conversation. They then talk about the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth.
  - bhelkey 5y ago
    I, and looking around this thread many others, find his argument to be unconvincing to say the least. E.g. his argument against energy becoming almost free, "But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt." One of the many problems with this is that we already live with a finite resource that is completely free but also a hard requirement for all economic activity: air.
    - ben_w 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago

I continuously increase the economic output of my computer without any increase in consumption of physical resources. In fact, my output has increased near exponentially over the last several years, while my computer has remained the same, and it's electricity consumption has remained constant.

dqpb 5y ago

This title is stupid. It appears to be asking "Is there a theoretical limit to how much value can be produced?" but it's really asking "Will we destroy our planet and/or run out of resources?". Also, this article is an editorial with apparently no author, so I don't even know who I'm supposed to be grumpy at.

known 5y ago

srean 5y ago

I have wondered what would happen after we gain direct, easy and cheap interventional access to our neurochemistry -- dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline etc. That's where human wants and desires and their satiation regulated. This doesnt solve the problem of course because the next question becomes 'how cheap' and how is that to be paid for.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Ask any capitalist economic adviser and they will have no alternative to perpetual growth.

cannabis_sam 5y ago

Economic growth? Of course there are limits, considering the audience here, anyone who’s studied CS at the most basic level should treat this as self-evident. The only reason why we are having this discussion, literally a fifth into the 21th century, is the barrage of propaganda around economics, usually packaged around empty slogans like “zero sum”, “comparative advantage”, “free markets”, etc. (the list is endless). The fact that anyone even asks this question seriously, reveals their deep delusion about how reality actually works. (Just to be clear, general economic activity does not entail the same limitations as when you restrict that activity to growth)

jah242 5y ago

Having read through quite a few of the comments lots of people seem to be drawing the conclusion 'obviously no, we have finite material resources'. I think this misunderstands the concept, as economic growth does not necessarily imply more material resources being used. In fact in developed economies the vast majority of GDP is now services (law, accounting, media etc.), which whilst obviously partly material resources based is much less material resource in intensive than say building a new car. More interestingly over time the material resource intensity of economic activity (material resources used per $ of GDP) declines as countries develop. In the future it seems very likely that demand for creative digital and media products e.g avatars, games, films, instagram filters etc. will account for an ever larger share of GDP. If every year a company's designers creates a 'better looking / cooler' avatar range that people are willing to pay more for then we still have economic growth and assuming the avatars use the same computing power to render we would have essentially 0% growth in material resources used. Therefore, whilst unbounded and unregulated economic growth causes lots of problems (and has for a long time), the idea it could go on for ever is not as stupid as it sounds, so long as people keep desiring more and more intangible products.

mediumsmart 5y ago

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

mgh2 5y ago

The parallel question is: are there limits to population growth and productivity?