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Can growth continue?

• joshlk 4y ago
  The argument is lead by a common misconception. Growth comes from only new resources but in reality it also comes from efficiency gains. And efficiency gains are not limited.
• everdrive 4y ago
  I've always been confused by growth arguments. Population and carrying capacity of the earth has always been one such argument. Are we near the carrying capacity now? Are we nowhere close to it? Have we already exceeded it? These are harder questions than people think, as technological and societal improvements can seriously modify this number. Thomas Malthus has been famously mocked for supposing that we had serious carrying capacity problems, only to be completely scooped by the agricultural revolution. But, even if we agree that we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the earth, there must be some number which does exceed it. And so growth cannot continue forever. And in that time, what do we do? How do we back off growth without ruin? Why wait for that higher number? Why not learn how to back off growth earlier than the highest possible limit? These are questions which I don't often see addressed when people discuss growth, stagnation, and the health of nations.
• apienx 4y ago
  Short answer is no (thermodynamics of course, but if you want to get whimsy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...). Long(er) answer is that the pace of growth experiences periods of acceleration/slowdown. On the grand scheme of things, we're still carried by the momentum of the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, socialism, and a lack of conviction from the enlightened few are the main headwinds at the moment. The cosmos is practically limitless in terms of energy and resources. But we won't be able to transform those into useful work within the current societal and political frameworks. Too many idiots with voting rights and too few smart folks in decision-making roles.
• kwindla 4y ago
  Related: "Must We Grow" -> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/09/must-we-grow-consumerism-michelle-nijhuis/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/09/must-we-grow-con...
• OtomotO 4y ago
  Sure, a malign tumor grows until the host dies. Same is true for our glorious, of course unavoidable, an extremely resilient and fair economic system. There is only black and white, zero and one, locusts capitalism and stalinistic communism... /s
• atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Didn't watch the video but the article was good. I think their mindset is absolutely correct- we should be worrying less about overpopulation than underpopulation and we should be pushing forward trying to make technological progress instead of embracing a degrowth mindset. While it does seem like big ideas are harder to find, I think some incentive shifting (e.g. more focus by corporates on long-term growth through productivity increases and innovation and less on financial chicanery) along with the innovation that comes sometimes with a single new platform (remember all the "Uber for X" products that the iphone enabled) that can help turn the tide. Plus, seems like many more people are concerned with progress, from Cowen to Progress.institute, so hopefully with more focus there will be more results.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    It seems quite obvious to me there is a lot of growth left with information being close to free now - and much of the adult world still being VERY poorly educated. The current children that replace them will be much more educated due to free information. I don't see how this doesn't create a huge jump in productivity in the developing world (~50% of the population).
    • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
      Good point, I remember seeing a report a little while ago about literacy rates even in the U.S. and they were surprisingly bad (a quick lookup on Wikipedia shows "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level") That said, I'm not sure it's a guarantee that kids will be more educated and productive. I spent quite a bit of time in Africa (Kenya and Cameroon for projects, Uganda for holiday) last year and many people are relatively highly educated (e.g. local university degree) but still cannot get work, access to finance to start their own biz and be productive, or as soon as they make some money their business will get taxed (legally or illegally) to death. So other factors beyond education holding folks back, and even if it was just enabled from online learning, I think we'd see much more takeup of MOOCs and the like. Edit: Grammar
    • 4y ago
• Leader2light 4y ago
• stouset 4y ago
  As a counterpoint to this, I'll reference the (absolutely incredible) Do the Math blog, by Tom Murphy at UCSD. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... A salient quote from the first article, that I find very relevant: > We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to address our problems. Its track record is most impressive… But we have to be careful about faith, and periodically reexamine its validity or possible limits.
  • jeffreyrogers 4y ago
    I thought his posts on how many batteries we'd need to convert to electric everything while maintaining living standards were very interesting.
    • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
      Is it this one? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
      • jeffreyrogers 4y ago
        Yep, that's what I was thinking of. (I think he has a couple of other posts along the same lines).
        • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
          Interesting article, thanks! Yeah, the move to electrify everything will have absolutely tremendous resource impacts-- I have been doing quite a bit of critical mineral policy work in the last ~6 months in the U.S. and the mining co's I talk to are all saying that the world needs to wake up and quick to just how many minerals need to be pulled out of the ground and that it'll take a whole of world collaboration to do it. Right now wealthy countries seem to prefer to let extraction happen in the developing world and processing in China because it's dirty and environmentally fraught, but something will break sooner or later because the demand is just astronomical. Maybe new mixtures will catch on (e.g. more high-end car manufacturers moving to LFP because of issues with the cobalt supply chain despite lower performance) but there's still going to be a lot of rocks that need to be dug out of the ground (or from space but no legacy mining co I've talked to believes that's realistic).
• sremani 4y ago
  For continued growth we need to embrace Space both civilian and military. Funding NASA to really get to Mars and a colony on Moon in the long run give the best bang for the buck. Longevity would help but will also ossify the institutions. There is a reason why the mindshare in the corridors of power view the world as if it is 1991, they are too damn old and do not acknowledge the new realities.
  • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    Could you help me understand the argument for longevity helping growth? I'm generally a fan (after all, I don't have a deathwish) but it's not clear to me how longer lifespans would lead to more productivity. I could theoretically see a scenario where as we continue getting more specialized we spend increasingly spend the first ~40+ years of our life in education (although hopefully new methods can speed learning rates) and then the next 40 years working and having longer productive lives would be better, but do people contribute significantly more in their last years than the rest of their careers?
    • sfink 4y ago
      My guess is that increasing life expectancy would retard (economic) growth, increasing the proportion of life that is healthy without changing life expectancy would improve growth, "longevity" can refer to one or both of those, and if you do both at the same time it's hard to predict the effects. It seems like we'd be better off if we could evolve out of the need for growth, or at least the sort of growth that depends on limited external resources. That's tough to do because the most ravenous consumers tend to win out and be selected for, so even if you have a movement of people who are more efficient with resources (resources per unit of well-being), they'll tend to be shunted aside by the greediest segment of the population. More efficient bacteria can win out, but only if the inefficient greedy subset is made to be affected by the resource constraints. To address that, I'll make a modest proposal: find a valley somewhere and get all of the people most driven by external accumulation to move there. Make them compete with each other, creating ever more ostentatious and expensive ways for them to demonstrate their superiority. Create cultural barriers to moving anywhere else, except for people who are willing to let go of the rat race. Let nature run its course. Speed it up by seeding the population with a gender imbalance and cultural pressures to maintain or magnify that imbalance, so that breeding opportunities are limited. This will produce a lot of churn and waste in the process, so make sure there's a sandy substrate to allow for good drainage. That last part got a bit metaphorical, and would be even more so if I referred to this valley's sand by one of its principal components: silicon.
• candiddevmike 4y ago
  I think what's holding back growth is inequality and the 40 hour work week. Imagine how much economic activity would be generated by fixing those things.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Be careful. Fixing inequality could be helpful. "Fixing" it may be disastrous. Remember that political changes often don't do what the label says.
    • candiddevmike 4y ago
      Indeed, we need a New Deal, not a Final Solution.
      • avgcorrection 4y ago
        That’s a Holocaust reference. How in the world is that appropriate to bring up in a discussion about fixing inequality?
        • candiddevmike 4y ago
          History has shown that inequality, when left unchecked, tends to "fix itself" by way of blaming others (race, sex, creed) for the inequality (Germany) or through terrible, bloody revolutions (France, Russia). The US passing the New Deal and focusing on improving the life of workers let the steam off the inequality pressure cooker for a bit, and we need more of that now.
          • avgcorrection 4y ago
            Fascistic forces rise up when workers and hardliners like communists get active during times of inequality in order to protect capital from revolution. The New Deal is also something that can happen when the capitalists would rather resolve the situation peacefully than to lose everything. A New Deal won’t happen now because there aren’t enough actors who are forcing the hand of the capitalist class.
• austinl 4y ago
  It's interesting to consider that the total global human population could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100). Global population growth rate has already peaked at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped to 1.1%. [1]. In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6, South Korea, 0.81). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3]. With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...
  • vidarh 4y ago
    More than just the most developed industrialised countries too. India has just reached replacement and is set to start declining in a few decades. And China ditched the one child policy years ago and are now pushing for more in a bid to prevent a crash landing after they dropped below years ago - currently they're maybe ~20 years from starting to see population decline unless they soften immigration rules. It's going to take a long time before this change sinks in for people who are still used to worrying about overpopulation, outside of the fringe groups panicking over "white replacement".
    • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      A lot of people aren't worried about overpopulation in a vacuum. They are worried about overpopulation along with the rise of personal consumption and potential competition (read: perceived zero-sum games). The job market is already ridiculously competitive. Rent and homes are already crazy, partially due to so many people insisting on living alone and many countries still not having adapted to an increasingly more individualistic society. Telling them "it'll cool off in 20 years" is about the equivalent of telling them "yeah the problems we have now will continue another 20 years, deal with it".
• jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  > In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth... Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall. Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains. And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the most efficient way of getting them.
  • alexose 4y ago
    You're so right. I strongly dislike the argument put forward by Bezos and others (paraphrased, "imagine how many Einsteins we would have with a much larger world population"). Completely ignoring the billions of human brains that are full of scientific potential but forced to spend their efforts trying to figure out how to survive. I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable) percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about abstract concepts all day.
    • bojangleslover 4y ago
      I'm tired of this doom and gloom. Things have never been better for the average person globally. Someone in relative poverty today lives better than even the wealthiest people a few hundred years ago.
    • zmgsabst 4y ago
      Do you have any evidence to support your view? Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do science is greatly impacted by raising the total population and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.
      • vishnugupta 4y ago
        China has made big progress in building mega infrastructures while at the same time aggressively pursuing population control strategies. They did so by reallocation of people from farming to factories. It could be argued that building high speed rail isn’t same as doing science. But it does provide excellent raw material for scientific research. I won’t be surprised if we start seeing scientific breakthroughs from China in next few decades. We have hundreds of millions of people using most of their cognitive bandwidth just to survive. Imagine what’s possible if even a fraction of those stop worrying about their survival and start pursuing their curiosity.
• BenoitP 4y ago
  In a pond, water lilies multiply each day so as to double in size. It takes 30 days to occupy half the pond. How much time is left until the pond is full? ---- In other words: when we'll reach the limits, we won't have a lot of time to react.
  • pphysch 4y ago
    We don't have a steady 100%/day population growth rate, we have a 1%/year and falling growth rate. Your analogy is off by several orders of magnitude, which leads to qualitative differences.
  • time_to_smile 4y ago
    This isn't a great example because most species will experience sigmoidal growth, not exponential growth, and consequently not suffer catastrophic collapse. As they put pressure on the carrying capacity of their environment, the environment pushes back effectively and puts pressure on the populations. In most systems some sort of stasis is reached (or you get some kind of cyclical population trend). The trouble with humans is, because of ready access to fossil fuels and non-renewable energy, we have been able to artificially (or maybe more accurately phrased "unsustainably") extend beyond the carrying capacity of our ecosystem. Indigenous populations of the Americas had populations in the millions but never risked, at least in North America, systemic collapse because they largely lived sustainably. Ironically it's precisely because Malthus was proven wrong that we are in trouble. We have way, way higher energy demands than can be reasonably sustained without relying on a non-renewable source of energy. This completely disregards the additional problem of climate change. This sets us up for a type of collapse that is not usually a problem for most species, such as your lily pads.
    • nverno 4y ago
      If you consider nuclear a renewable source, we could easily cover our current costs with it.
      • dane-pgp 4y ago
• time_to_smile 4y ago
  This makes a common error in the direction of a causal arrow: Technological progress is the result of ready access to fossil fuels. That is it is the result of our prosperity not it's cause. The reason Malthus was wrong was because ready access to hydrocarbons made the Haber-Bosch process possible and easily scalable. In a world without massive amount of hydrocarbons the Haber-Bosch process is never discovered. We know this because technological advancement trail energy discovery. I highly recommend reading through Smil's Energy and Civilization to get a better sense of this. We are like yeast brewing in a giant vat of malted barely, seeing a what looks like an infinite amount of energy, expanding well beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the vat. Suddenly some yeast scientists notice there is a concerning amount of alcohol in the atmosphere. Yeast economist point out this is nothing to worry about because we have solved every problem in the past, so there's nothing to really worry about. I also can't stand the "look Malthus, Hubert and Jevons were all wrong!!!", on the scale of a 200k year species, predicted the ended within a few hundred years is pretty accurate. We just have trouble thinking beyond the time scale of a few human generations. Finally, whale oil is a terrible example of a transition fuel. We stopped using it because we ran out of whales, but so far we've never decreased usage of an energy source that was still available to us [0]. This is no different than yeast that will consume energy filled sugars until the poison themselves. But hey, at least we get beer. 0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
  • slothtrop 4y ago
    > Technological progress is the result of ready access to fossil fuels. This doesn't account for nations with ready access to fossil fuels who don't progress.
  • danny_codes 4y ago
    Climate change is a political problem, not a technology problem. The technology to move beyond fossil fuels has existed since the 1950s. No new inventions are required. If our leaders decided today to migrate primary energy to nuclear power climate change would be "solved" within 20 years.
• havblue 4y ago
  While this article discusses the macro benefits of maintaining population growth, the reasons for the birth dropoff in developed countries is microeconomic. Kids are expensive to raise and it's hard for two parents to have successful careers with kids. Even after the one child policy ended, China's birthrate is still declining.
• pphysch 4y ago
  Growth is and will continue to hit the limits of the domain, until the domain is expanded. The principles of Western capitalism that drove growth for centuries are less and less reliable, so we need to adapt our principles.
• jgon 4y ago
  Everytime I read one of these articles I get the feeling that I'm reading a report from the village elders that people have never been fuller or more prosperous now that we've consumed all our seed corn. We just need to keep eating all the corn we can, and let's not worry about winter because our priests (engineers) tell us they'll probably find a way around it. I don't know, maybe its the background environment that I've spent my whole life growing up in, but every time I read this I'm always left asking what it is that I don't know/can't see, especially when it comes to the billionaire class. Do they have access to different reports that suggest global warming won't be as devastating as the scientific consensus broadly predicts? Is it nihilism/sociopathy, aka I'll be dead by the time it gets bad and I can't feel any sort of connection/care for my offspring, let alone my fellow humans? At the risk of memeing, is there a project to build Elysium going on that us plebs don't know about and that's what SpaceX/Blue Origin is all about? I just find it hard to square what the current message is wrt to global warming, a message that appears highly credible to my lay understanding, with the behaviour of the people who have the power to help nudge the direction our society is headed. Does anyone else get this, or have thoughts on it? I am genuinely asking here, because I can't resolve the contradiction and it weighs on me.
  • sfink 4y ago
    The Elysium is already here, it's just less separate than you imagine. The $100M and billionaire classes are quite good at wresting a higher standard of living for themselves, and naturally select for those who feel separate from and superior to the unwashed masses. They're not thinking they'll be dead by the time it matters, they are concerned about their offspring, they just know that their offspring won't be the ones suffering. Large disruptions always create opportunities for a limited subset of people to do even better at the cost of everyone else doing much worse. The billionaire class is doing everything in their control to be in that elite subset, and so far they've been quite successful at that and there really isn't any reason in sight as to why their approach is going to fail any time soon. Elysium is made out of people who live among us for as long as it is advantageous to them to do so, who can pay reputation consultants to keep the mobs with pitchforks away, who are pouring their money and influence into promoting a culture that makes everyone feel like the elite deserve their exalted positions and that if you don't feel that way, you're at risk of losing your chance of getting up there to be with them. And making us feel like that chance is real, it's just a breakout app away, and you'd better keep playing the game or you'll be driven into medical bankruptcy and your kids will get shot at school.
• solatic 4y ago
  The free market is pretty phenomenal at ensuring that technological growth will continue until we hit theoretical limits. Shortages cause price increases. Price increases make it more economical to pay up-front costs to develop technology whose per-unit costs permit extracting a profit compared to competitors who are not as technologically advanced, who die out and are replaced by new competitors who buy the technology off-the-shelf and reduce the price further in second-mover advantage, back down to the now-lower per-unit cost. Eventually demand develops to the point where there is a persistent shortage again and the cycle repeats. The question is, what are the theoretical limits? Will we run out of oxygen? Unlikely, the CO2 we breathe out can be recycled back into oxygen. Water? Also unlikely, for similar reasons. Food? With hydroponics, we're no longer limited by the amount of land we have, and it's renewable. Energy? The Sahara is a vast, untapped source of solar electricity which we haven't tapped because a) transmission lines are too expensive and b) security is too expensive. When energy costs rise enough to make those costs economical, the free market will get the underlying infrastructure built, and then we're good to go. So yeah, growth will continue.
  • honkler 4y ago
    why didn't the great god progress save many of the past fallen civilizations? were they running out of Oxygen?
    • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      Progress requires failure, and learning from it.
    • vkou 4y ago
      Because this time it's different, and we can safely expect that yet-to-be-invented technologies will save us.
      • honkler 4y ago
        just one more app!
    • 4y ago
• mcone 4y ago
  > We are currently funded by donors including Patrick and John Collison This message brought to you by individuals who have a vested interest in seeing growth continue.
  • cm2012 4y ago
    Everyone on earth has a vested interest in seeing growth continue, whether they know that or not.
    • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      Most people know that, but a subset of us doesn't think it's an achievable goal and that trying to achieve it would be harmful.
• Isamu 4y ago
  >there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas. I think this bears repeating. It is counterintuitive and maybe even repulsive to some people.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  At the end, the author says: > In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth. Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall. It should be noted that the vast majority of human brains do not today get the opportunity to work with ideas or push technology forward. Many people don’t even get enough to eat or drink. We have a loooong way to go on the basics of organizing human society before we need to worry about the intellectual constraint of total population size.
  • dgs_sgd 4y ago
    You don't have to wait until the entire world has this opportunity before ringing the alarm. If population growth is going down in the areas where the ideas are worked on, namely the developed world, which it is, we should still worry.
    • snowwrestler 4y ago
      No we shouldn’t, because “the developed world” is not a fixed thing. We can make the entire world developed.
      • TremendousJudge 4y ago
        But who'll work the sweatshops then?
        • munk-a 4y ago
          Nobody. Who ever said sweatshops were a necessary part of a functioning economy?
        • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
          If only we could have developed some machine that are good at doing repetitive work. One can only dream. /S But yeah, I get your point. The fact that we still rely on sweatshop imports proves there's something wrong with our society.
• streetcat1 4y ago
  The article is missing a crucial point. Not only do we need more brains, but we also need robust knowledge transfers between generations (between current and new brains). I.e. for new brains to be effective, they must start from the point that the old brains stopped. As I see it the opposite process is at play. For example, cloud computing decrease the need to understand hardware/os. Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.
  • zmgsabst 4y ago
    > Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline. This is why Boeing can’t build planes anymore: They decided midcareer engineers were too expensive and their crop of senior engineers are aging out — so they no longer have the expertise necessary, due to outsourcing and not supporting their young employees.
    • aeternum 4y ago
      Another way to look at this is just as an optimization problem. We found a good local optimum and it became too costly to search further. In the early days of aerospace, the search space was mostly unknown and there were tons of companies investing R&D in a wide variety of designs. Huge amounts of human capital were invested, and as in all things, some designs worked, some didn't. Many companies went bankrupt. Eventually we find some good designs and the risk/reward of searching the space further just doesn't make sense. Only recently with improved tech and ML/AI + simulation has the cost to search been reduced enough that it makes economic sense to try again.
  • munk-a 4y ago
    I enjoy the freedom to have a closet full of extremely finely tailored clothes (going by the 1800s standards) I'm practically living the millionaire's dream from that era... but never in my life have I learned how to operate a flying shuttle loom - some information is specialized and doesn't need widespread knowing. When I went to uni (and I'm only 35 so I'm not talking about the 80s) we learned about low level data structures, I took a course in relational algebra, operating system design, assembly language - these were necessary (imo) broadening exercises that have enabled me to better understand how to make things work performantly at a high level. Now a company may only need one or two folks like me with a passion for algorithm design among a dev team of fifty - but we don't all need formal training in every little thing. Imparting the knowledge of how to learn, along with those pieces of basic information we deem critical, can be enough.
• benstrumental 4y ago
  The post focuses on countering the strawman-like argument that resource shortages are the primary threat with overpopulation. However, it is overwhelmingly clear that climate change is the biggest threat related to overpopulation, unless we are able to get carbon emissions per capita below 0 globally.
  • rr808 4y ago
    Meh. Climate change is devastating for huge chunks of the planet. But the population of the hottest parts could easily move to cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely populated.
    • benstrumental 4y ago
      >But the population of the hottest parts could easily move to cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely populated. I would not describe relocating billions of people hundreds to thousands of miles north, often across country borders, as easy. This article contains some stories of a few climate refugees of today: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...
      • rr808 4y ago
        I cant see the article but yes it isn't easy to be a refugee right now. However I'd think places like Siberia would actually be much better with 100 million poor people from India who could build cities from scratch (over decades of course).
  • jbotz 4y ago
    And in a very real sense AGW is a resource shortage problem... the natural resource that's being depleted here is the natural carbon cycle that that kept CO2 levels fairly stable and gave us temperatures at the near optimal levels they were at during the time that civilization developed. We are "depleting" this resource by overloading it with excess CO2 and by destroying natural carbon sinks. Natural resources aren't limited to materials, natural processes also qualify. So it is also with fresh water... we won't "run out" of water, but we are exceeding the water-recycling capacities of the biosphere and thus this absolutely essential natural resource is becoming quite scarce in a lot of places. Theoretically you can replace it with artificial processes (desalination, treating contaminated water, etc) but to do that on a scale that can replace that natural water cycle is completely beyond our technology for now.
• brodo 4y ago
  Most people on the post-growth side of the argument tend to argue that outputs (green house gases, toxins) and not inputs are the major constraining factor. He should really have addressed that.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Notably this article doesn't mention water, and doesn't discuss land much other than a single line about Malthus and farmland. Then there's this assertion: > "But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas." Arable land - i.e. topsoil - is not a product of technology, it's a product of geology and biology, namely the erosion of rocks and the accumulation of biomass. Yes, one can indeed make an artificial soil-like system (hydroponics), but this in turn requires raw materials (typically clay pebbles, plastic pots, plastic pipes, plus a complete nutrient mixture of simple chemicals) which are in turn made from limited material resources. Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow. Just look at a population density map of the United States - note how few people live in the desert zones. Again, there are technological approaches: desalinate ocean water, pump it to the desert, and grow food hydroponically. This requires an investment of material resources and energy. I get this feeling that economimsts who makes these claims about infinite growth have simply never studied the conservation of energy, or the conservation of mass. Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods. US farmland is about 166 million hectares, so that sort of fits, as the US population is about 330 million; exports of food also appear to match imports of food so that's a wash. So clearly there are limits on the growth of the human population on a finite planet. If the question is, "can you have infinite economic growth with a fixed human population", well, whatever discipline makes claims like that is one entirely divorced from physical reality. Inflation maybe?
  • munk-a 4y ago
    While the world has numerous issues that need to be solved - I think we've, for the time being, been able to classify exhaustion of materials as a problem we won't have to deal with for a long time. The earth has a lot of matter in it - it is absurdly massive - technological advances in replicating necessary raw resources (and your topsoil one is particularly good to demonstrate this) have pushed us from looking at an absolute limit to instead viewing the perpetual creation of new components as a steadily rising economic burden. One raw resource that is actually quickly depleting is river sand for concrete - our current consumption trends are extremely scary here and some governments (CoughIndiaCough) are doing an absolutely terrible job at properly enforcing externality costs on extraction leading to mass habitat destruction. But, if we suddenly found ourselves without easy access to rough river sand we do have alternative construction materials including processed wood in various forms that can be extremely resilient. I don't really like the wording of the article in defining all resources as artificial - but the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant.
• _448 4y ago
  > And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas. Ideas are an abstract thing. To realise an idea, one needs material resources. The problem has nothing to do with either finite material resources or ideas. The problem is what those material resources get converted into. What we do is we transform one type of material into another during any activity. How we can limit ourselves to not transforming these useable material into unuseable material is what is the challenge for growth. We should only be promoting those ideas that have a better opportunity to transform one usable material resource into another usable resource without taking much time and without harming the ecology.
  • danans 4y ago
    > We should only be promoting those ideas that have a better opportunity to transform one usable material resource into another usable resource without taking much time and without harming the ecology. This is quite insightful. Biological systems have this characteristic. It uses the circular conversion of resources as a way to channel energy into whatever is useful for it. Humans beings, as a type of biology do this, but have for a few centuries been converting a useful material (fossil hydrocarbons) into a comparatively useless material (C02) at rate faster than the ecosystem can reabsorb it. The question is how we can return to something like the previous equilibrium where we rebuild our modern lifestyles around energy "springs" - aka energy storage and release mechanisms - that absorb and release it to do useful work for us, alleviating the need to burn and release long fossilized energy to achieve that.
    • walleeee 4y ago
      good points also related to circular economics is the principle that tools should be easy to supersede when we discover undesirable side effects or invent new techniques we build software to be easy to refactor, we might benefit from building societies and technologies with this in mind as well an atmosphere full of carbon is not easy to deprecate, nor are pervasive hydrocarbon infrastructure, urban areas designed around the automobile, etc before we deploy something at scale it may be wise to have some idea how to gracefully roll it back or put something else in its place
• frontman1988 4y ago
  The solution to tackling declining population can be by generating Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans will be smarter and stronger than the current lot due to eugenics. CRISPR will make it possible and it's already happening in China. The west needs to look at it instead of ramping up immigration and importing instability from third world countries.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    That sounds pretty cool, if you're writing dystopian sci-fi. Back in the trenches, I'm thinking that people making "have a baby, or not?" decisions will not find "But you could have a SuperBaby!" to be a persuasive argument. Without plot armor, who's magically making sure that SuperBaby doesn't have some grim bugs, which might take a while to manifest? Any good reason to think that SuperBaby will need fewer diaper changes and less parental resources long-term? Will want to look after his or her non-Super "parents" in their old age? Or that the currently available version of SuperBaby won't be obsoleted by v2.0 in a year or two - with upgrades to v2.0 being "less than practical and satisfactory"? Really, it'd be smarter to wait until v2.0 comes out...wait until v2.4 comes out...until 3.0...wait...still waiting...still waiting...
  • wcoenen 4y ago
    It may be a bit misleading to say that CRISPR babies are "already happening in China". Yes, there was a researcher who genetically modified a few babies. (Specifically, to give them HIV resistance.) But he received a prison sentence for his actions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
• peterweyand0 4y ago
  The author uses several analogies which are rather cutesy, but doesn't address the main issue in a salient way. All consumption comes from some combination of raw resources and the addition of technological input. In real prices, as the cost of raw resources increases over time, this means that technological innovation is not making up for how much of those resources are being consumed as compared to the population as a whole. At it's most basic we can calculate the rate of change as the amount of time it takes the average worker to buy a gallon of water or food and shelter for a single person. These are resources that aren't substitute-able, and are required for life. Other costs are rather nebulous (how much does a college education cost and what does this say about society now versus how much technological innovation is necessary for the continuation of the species)? So then the question then becomes, does the real rate of return for any particular company or the stock market as a whole assume that a potential future exists in which that real rate of return is actually possible to exist? Let's assume, in a model as simplistic as possible, that there is one stock (or market) that represents all of the world's companies that has a real rate of return of 2.5 percent per annum that is compounded once per year. As a sum total of world wide growth this would seem rather modest. The worldwide initial capital we'll assume is $100. So the growth rate is given by A = P(100 + r/n)^(nt) which would be in our case (for an investment of 100 dollars) - 100x(1.025^10) = $128. So for the real capital stock of $100 to increase to a real capital stock of $128 some combination of things must happen - the amount of capital stock in terms of raw resources must increase in real terms and the amount of technology must increase in order to make the use of these inputs more efficiently. If technology remains constant then there must be an increase of 28% over ten years of capital. If capital remains constant then technology must make the current use of capital 28% more efficient. Compound return over time is concerning in the long run, and hand waving it away is either ignorant at best or disingenuous at worst. And capitalism is still the best distribution system we have come up with. Most of the world is working with a single overall social model, because it has been so successful, and we don't have a backup that's been shown to work in practice. My concern isn't in favor of Das Kapital or Marxism - who owns the product of labor and historicism over labor rights isn't as concerning as compound interest over all. Most economists I've worked with don't seem to think that this is a problem or that technology will magically free market a utopian future of plenty for all. This is an article of faith.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  The answer is yes for now. We can continue to grow. We are in the process of creating a whole new virtual world which will expand the economic possibilities. Even if natural resources become scarce, we have a whole new virtual world explore and develop. The real limit to growth is population. Population growth is coming to halt in the next 50 years and that will dictate our growth capabilities then.
• kkfx 4y ago
  With confusing growth and evolution / progress? Can't we be "richer" without "growth" in the inflationary broad sense? Surely change is hard, inevitably have issues during the change, but change can bring richness without growth, they are conceptually distinct things, merged into one by the actual model, not by nature.
• smaddox 4y ago
  Well, if our energy use continues to grow at the current rate, we'll boil the oceans in about 450 years, so I would say no. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
  • rnd33 4y ago
    What a ridiculous article... everyone understands that exponential growth cannot continue forever. The bigger and more interesting question is what the life of an average human looks like when growth inevitable slows down, and how fast we can get there. Because the assumption that we will grow our energy use indefinitely is flawed. Energy use has diminishing returns, eventually we'll run out of useful work we want to perform. At least in terms of material wealth and comfort. There's probably also major opportunities for energy savings that extends this timeframe greatly. Incandescent -> LED lights have reduced energy consumption by a factor of 10. Technology improvements in just the last 5 years have halved the energy consumption of air conditioners.
    • smaddox 4y ago
      > everyone understands that exponential growth cannot continue forever Everyone understands? Why do you believe that? As far as I can tell, most people, especially economists, think it can. If population continues to grow exponentially (it likely won't), I see no reason to think our energy use would not continue to grow exponentially. Efficiency improvements are linear, not exponential. They cannot compensate for exponential growth in population.
• Archelaos 4y ago
  > Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall. This is utter nonsense. Progress never stalls (except if we happen to extinguish ourselves). It did not stall the last 10,000+ years despite very low population numbers except in the last 300 years. Of course, it might go a bit slower or faster depending on demographics. But that is not important. We already have all the technology that could make a decent life possible for everyone on this planet. It's more a matter of applying what we already know. Of course, better technology might help with that -- as could a decrease in population. But if we do not get better in applying our knowledge for the benefit of all, we are doomed.
• ambientenv 4y ago
  I watched The Great Simplification [1] last night, and it provided some perspective on this question which, until now, I had not fully considered in context. [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/ https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
• human_person 4y ago
  So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. But even taking that premiss as correct If you want more brain power you don't need more people, you can simply treat the people that already exist better. Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. People who dont have enough money to survive, people who are in debt, spend so much mental energy just trying to survive. Calculating how much they can afford, how they can stretch their money. Its such a waste, when we could just provide them with the necessities they need to live a dignified life. And then we could see what they created. Sure some people make it out, but percentage wise they are the exception that proves the rule. Based on what we know about epidemiology, the impact of pollution, the impact of prenatal and early childhood stress. Just consider how those compound with years of poorly funded education in neighborhoods made unstable by the transience of poverty. Add in the school to prison pipeline (partially fueled by a rise in police officers in schools in response to school shootings) and (imo) inevitable substance abuse and think about how many brain cells have been destroyed. I dont think I'd be able to think deeply in those situations. If brains/ideas are our most important resource we are wasting them. On an almost unimaginable scale.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    And yet, it seems that one of the first casualties of mass communications is intelligent thought. Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow. Simple aggregation does not work for brains. Message assessment and discrimination are expensive.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy. It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...
  • bjornsing 4y ago
    I agree. But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended. The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world. Or at least that’s how I increasingly see it.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  > Now, that’s a problem for another time. But note that in five minutes we’ve gone from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation. That’s because we’ve traded a scarcity mindset, where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset, where it is limited only by our ingenuity. Just a motivational speech.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    I think that's also something that will be eventually be irrelevant. Right now it's standard for productivity of a person to be the driver or benchmark of an economy, but once you can automate a process so completely that there is no human involved in it then you can scale infinitely regardless of population, even if it stagnates or decreases. Raw resources aren't a exactly limited thing in the solar system, not on our scales anyway.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Not a single word is wasted on the externalities of growth. What it does to nature but also people. Just double down on producing, consuming, working.
• Gatsky 4y ago
  If you take it to the extreme, human growth will be limited by physical laws. There was an interesting paper where they calculated that growth would eventually slow to a crawl because we saturate the region of the universe we can reasonably reach without faster than light travel.
• softcactus 4y ago
  Can it continue? Sure. Theoretically we could all be hooked up to computers that slow our perception of reality and allow us to create 2x the digital commodities we could normally in our lifetime. This would technically count as "growth". But I think the actual question is flawed to begin with. Why do we need infinite growth? Do we really need 3% economic growth per year ad infinitum? Why is that our metric for optimization? Why don't choose something else to optimize on like human happiness or fulfillment or freedom?
  • smaudet 4y ago
    Because the world is a ponzii scheme, where we don't pay people for their time but for the going market rate. If you keep a stable population and pay people based upon life expectations * skill, no one would need a retirement account. But those with pull want to sit on their hands and do nothing, and throw around large sums of money, hence the ponzi scheme.
  • mgh2 4y ago
    Because it is tied to population growth and productivity: The optimal number of children is 2.1, for offspring to replace parents [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/fertility-rate https://www.britannica.com/topic/fertility-rate When there is no population growth, no inflation or economic growth: [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJis2K6B8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJis2K6B8Q You might think that worldwide and US has <2.1%, but technology amplifies productivity, so it is not a 1-1 ratio [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=Population%20in%20the%20world%20is,81%20million%20people%20per%20year https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=Popu.... [4] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...
    • softcactus 4y ago
      This still doesn't really address the why
      • pmohun 4y ago
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  Malthus was wrong isn't an argument. > But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas. That sounds far-stretched. The climate isn't an artificial resource, it's very natural and messing it up is going to seriously hinder growth. The fossil fuels that drove our growth for two centuries aren't artificial either, nor are they idea. The limits to growth is still valid today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth There's no scenario in which growth is perpetual. If people want to argue about perpetual growth, they should come with numbers based on known estimates of the resource available today. Otherwise, it's just faith and holds no scientific value.
  • PostOnce 4y ago
    The fossil fuels are pumped out (and refined) with billions (and billions...) of dollars of high tech machinery based on complex ideas, though, rather than just being natural pools of gasoline you drive your car up to.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      There were pools of gasoline (or at least light sweet crude) you could roll up to, at one time. Those turned out to be scarce and limited, and were used up quickly.
  • titzer 4y ago
    Just to take computing as an example analogy: the problem is that some physical limits are close at hand, like the heat dissipation possible per square or cubic centimeter, which constrains processor improvements more today than say, 30 years ago, and some limits are far away, like the number of bits that can stored per unit of volume given the inherent quantum noise, which is an enormous number of bits in a tiny space, and we are nowhere near close to this limit. So we can reasonably assume a long growth trajectory for storage density but a short and slow growth trajectory in compute. Malthus wasn't really wrong, we just pushed back the boundaries farther than what he imagined. For example, there was a lot more farmland available than he thought or calculated; we grew up to and past that. We also increased yields per acre roughly 4x in the 20th century. There's no realistic 4x happening for that again; in fact, soil quality has been depleted to the point that yields are flat or even falling. (plus climate change supercharges weather patterns and lots of crops are lost). Though his words were clunky, he was basically saying that exponential growth will outstrip polynomial growth in the end. And that's inescapable. Some resources on Earth are in tight supply, like helium and lithium, and others are super abundant, like uranium and water (though fresh water is tight!). But they are all limited and eventually the "ideas" we keep coming up to utilize them better will be no substitute.
• civilized 4y ago
  > ...there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas. Hmm. Let's not forget that we have one planet, and if we fry it, there may be no ideas that can bring it back.
• nathanaldensr 4y ago
  In a system with finite energy and resources--the real world--infinite anything is impossible.
• Banana699 4y ago
  I'm fundamentally anti-growth for reasons that short-circuits the whole " -'Oh nooo the Resources are running out' --'But Technology is getting better and better'" quagmire. Human brains and social structures were never meant to operate at the scale of city civilizations. We were never meant to be more than 1000 monkey living in the same social unit. 10000 is already pushing it hard. By the time we reached 50000 or 100000 in a single social unit, we were already lost. I can't emphasize enough how much evil in recorded human history was due to us applying puny human social structures and concepts to social units several hundreds of times larger than they evolved to handle. What we're doing is fundamentally ugly, and clueless. I hate what we term "Civilization", I hate how we came to live in amorphous masses of millions, how we go to war in millions, how we do everything in millions. We reinvented ants and bees, with vastly worse algorithms and data structures. Instead of asking oneself "Can growth continue?", one must ask oneself, for fucking once, "SHOULD growth continue?". Should you add that one last nameless billion of souls to the log? Should you stretch the already meaningless primate social protocols beyond meaninglessness yet again by running it against larger and larger input? Should you keep putting more and more monkeys in the ever more claustrophobic jungle, seeing just how much more they can keep getting more irrelevant and expendable? Before asking if you can, ask if you should.
• worik 4y ago
  Same old tired nonsense some of my (denser) economics lecturers used to spout. The idea that "ideas" can make up for a lack of resources is an old one. It holds for a while, if we ignore the overflowing sinks. The economy is a physical system where resources flow from low to high entropic states. What we do with that flow is a useful application of technology in a long term view. Simply increasing those flows (moving from biomass -> coal -> oil -> nuclear) is not useful in the log term. In the short term economic growth is the result. In the medium term (as many societies have discovered) it leads to collapse. As the "sinks" (where the high entropic waste ends up) over flow society gets less and less tenable. Then it collapses. The pattern has repeated many times. But: This time is different.
• worik 4y ago
  It is completely untrue that "growth can continue", for even the foreseeable future. On that we mostly agree, that Jason Crawford is wrong. That said economic growth is not a bad thing everywhere. Many parts of the world need economic growth (along with social development - democracy is what I recommend, but the Chinese have other ideas, still social development) The technologies used will be better than in the past, and there needs to be a target, a place where the growth slows to a stop (looking at you Manhattan) and lives are enriched in other ways than increasing consumption. But many many places absolutely require economic growth. Just not most of us!
• m0llusk 4y ago
  Growth is strongly linked to population which is stabilizing or falling in many regions. It is quite possible that this line of inquiry is already irrelevant.
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  Let me clarify the seemingly weird "all resources are artificial" with an example: Until ~150 years ago oil was a fairly useless sticky substance you sometimes encountered in nature. Then the internal combustion engine was invented, which made oil a hugely valuable resource. Another example among many: Lithium has recently become a very valuable resource because of advances in battery technology.
  • davidivadavid 4y ago
    This is honestly kind of a midwit take, though. They're "artifical" in the sense that nothing is inherently a resource until it's involved in a process where it's transformed into something we want. But it's certain still physical and limited in some way. That it's "artificial" doesn't mean we can conjure up resources out of thin air at will.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Oil being valuable did not create oil. Oil being valuable in China does not endow China with ample reserves of oil. Demand does not create supply. And humans are consuming oil at 5 million times the rate at which it was created. Moreover, what made oil a viable resource was a chain of inventions and capabilities --- pipe for well casings and transportation, which require Bessemer steel, which required iron ore, coal, and massive transportation capabilities. The underlying drilling technology was thousands of years old (used for drilling for salt in China). Further metallurgical capabilities were required for automobile engines (a light, powerful power plant), which also, coincidentally, solved the heavier-than-air powered flight problem at virtually the same instant. Even coal use emerged contingent on other technologies. Coal was known for a long time, but was challenging to transport. The US relied on wood --- most often locally available --- rather than coal, which require expensive overland transport. Why the Industrial Revolution occurred in England is among the great confounding questions of all time. I'd argue that it was a mix of factors: - A politically-stable island nation spared foreign invasion for well over a millennium. As with Japan, Hawaii, Madagascar, and New Zealand. - An island country with abundant transportation both on surrounding seas and with many inland rivers through modest terrain. Already, Britain distinguishes herself from most contenders. - An abundance of natural resources in the form of coal, literally falling out of cliffs onto the strand initially. Volcanic islands which lack the multi-hundred-million year geological history to form such resources can stand down: Japan, New Zealand, Hawaii. - A developed polity of broadly shared power, also generally permitting free inquiry. Though the invention of steam power still largely required being remote from centres of power, and occurred in Scotland, not England. - Ample food and ready applications for steam power, even in modest quantities. By 1800, there were about 500 steam engines, most producing a modest 5--10 horsepower (3-7 kW) throughout the country. These were low-pressure systems with power on the vacuum condenser stroke, not under high-pressure steam, due to James Watt's control of patents and refusal to permit high-pressure engines being developed. (That process began in the US and France, outside the scope of UK patents). By the late 19th century, England had an advanced industrial, metallurgical, and financial system, as well as a large navy it was looking to convert to oil, all of which lead to it becoming a leading developer of foreign oil reserves in the middle east. (I cannot recommend Daniel Yergin's book The Prize highly enough. I disagree strongly with the author's views concerning oil's future, he is however an outstanding historian of its past.) Lithium, similarly, is useful now thanks to a convergence of factors, though those might well prove short-lived. An automobile is at heart quite basic and requires a small number of distinct materials. An electric vehicle requires a large portion of the available periodic table, as well as abundant energy. I'm rooting for EVs. I'm not sanguine they will have a long or widespread application.
• boplicity 4y ago
  That graph of oil output is terrifying. Instead, it is greeted with optimism. Yikes! What is, oil, anyways? In essence, it is solar energy generated (via plant life) over millions and millions of years. Of course cashing in on that stored energy can cause massive "economic output." It's not just human "ingenuity," though. It really is the incredible amount of sunlight converted, over mind-boggling numbers of years, that made it possible. And we're burning right through it, consequences be damned. We'll figure it out, right, because we figured out how to burn oil! Right!? #@$#@$)(
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", which quantifies this. Humans burn through petroleum at 5 million times the rate at which it accumulated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28214230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28214230 https://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine https://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505 PDF: https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...
• mchusma 4y ago
  I think this article fails to grasp the scale of growth that can occur. If we disassemble mercury, and make it into conservatively the landmass of 28,000 Earths. This is a tiny example of the projects we can undertake. If we play the next millennium right, everything about the humans of today can seem tiny by scale. https://www.upgradingoptimism.com/p/disassembling-mercury?s=w https://www.upgradingoptimism.com/p/disassembling-mercury?s=...