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Beware unqualified bare nouns. They are philosophical land-mines. Everyone says they want "progress". Progress is an unqualified _good_, right? Unless your do
by 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?
- kcatskcolbdi 5y ago> Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling. Would love to know how you measure that.
- uoaei 5y agoGDP is not a measure of happiness, it is a measure of revenue. Also GDP is meaningless when each "domestic" sovereignty can externalize its costs to poorer nations. It would make much more sense to study some globally-determined quantities, considering the completely globalized economy we have engendered.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> Everyone says they want "progress". Progress is an unqualified _good_, right? "The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its critics" by Chris Lasch specifically attempts to refute the idea that humanity has always shared a notion of progress. He essentially claims that it's a relatively new idea, and has been shared only by distinct socio-economic classes.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago> "The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its critics" by Chris Lasch Thanks! Great lead, I wasn't aware of Lasch.