20 ms·

Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

269 points by cwwc 4y ago

unbalancedevh 4y ago
Daly makes the case that conventional economics deals with "intermediate" means and ends, such as food production and health/leisure; and that we should instead be more concerned with "ultimate" means and ends. He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on." Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
uoaei 4y ago
Matter and energy limits constrain volume. Entropy challenges efficiency. There are no exponential curves in nature -- only sigmoidal ones.
kalupa 4y ago
A finite system cannot sustain infinite growth. Not that this summarizes the article, but that'd be a pretty logical statement.
- bequanna 4y ago
  We are nowhere near exhausting the resources we have available. We are also nowhere near optimal efficiency when using resources.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    the externalities of resource use are arguably reaching catastrophic tipping points that will hit before depletion is an immediate concern
    - bequanna 4y ago
      > catastrophic tipping point This is pretty funny as people have been calling for some kind of human-caused apocalypse since forever. It must be human nature for some to believe such things. To see ourselves as inherently sinful, wicked, separate from nature and deserving of punishment. Climate alarmism has become a religion of sorts for many. Giving them maybe something to believe, maybe some purpose. At least something to talk about. There are countless other religious sects that also believe judgement day is “right around the corner”.
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- ardoise 4y ago
  But couldn't a finite system be configured and reconfigured in such a large number of ways that to all intents and purposes the possibilities are infinite? What if "growth" is about creating better and better knowledge of how to configure the system in more and more valuable ways?
  - sph 4y ago
    No because there are unbreakable physical limits. You cannot turn a finite system into an infinite amount of resources.
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slt2021 4y ago
Without peaceful growth, eventually there will be military growth [expansion by the means of military violence]. Op is right that our Earth is limited and cannot grow indefinitely. Sometimes it will be followed by redistribution of growth, so that someone will continue to grow, while others will experience radical negative growth
- newsclues 4y ago
  Why can’t we have stability?
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    fear of stagnation... ?
  - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    Inequality and (rightful or wrongful) envy.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    Because humans are hardcoded for maximising personal gain. There will always be someone who will not accept stability and escalate at a different level.
  - gryn 4y ago
    because you only need a few people not wanting that (ie people with a mindset somewhat similar to: I'd rather see people suffer than cooperate and compromise resulting in having less share of resources) for the rest to not matter. that 'stable' state is unstable (in the control theory sense of the word).
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- petermcneeley 4y ago
  “I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it.” - Dune
gsatic 4y ago
Decent Ultimate End would be: defense spending world wide=0
- bequanna 4y ago
  If growth becomes a zero sum game as “Economists” like this one would like, you better hope you live in country with a defense budget>0
  - gryn 4y ago
    I don't understand why you are down voted, you're absolutely right. if growth grinds to a halt and people still want that growth at all cost they will use the same old ways they achieved it before. and even if 90 out of 100 don't want to the 10/100 will force their hand.
  - gsatic 4y ago
    What he is encouraging you to do is ask yourself what you want the Ultimate End to be? You can't design anything new if the mentality is we can't change.
    - bequanna 4y ago
      I don’t follow you. Change what exactly? The fact that we will fight each other for scare resources? That is built into us, I am afraid.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Then we'll be sitting ducks for the extra-terrestrial invasion... Really though, good luck getting to that state.
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    I doubt our human technology will have much effect on any civilization capable of large scale space travel. We would be the equivalent of indigenous people using bows against European muskets and cannons.
eatsyourtacos 4y ago
Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise. The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime. And the hopes that if they get lucky enough with the market they can retire early (or at all). This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual. Also the rich have a massive incentive for everyone to "invest" (cough) and drive prices up, because the rich benefit insanely more by market movements than a standard person does. Maybe the system will explode in our lifetime, maybe not. But all this insanity focus of growth, profits, etc with no genuine regard to real social issues (providing basic stability to people whether it be healthcare, housing, food, childcare) is so sick I can barely even think about it. And there's almost nothing to do about it- that's the way things currently "work" and it seems insurmountable to do anything about it.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  The system is totally unsustainable... unless we're willing to have a society of debtors, noone is going to buy homes from the boomers. The majority of retirement the average middle class has is their home.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to “the system” but the extradorinaiy price increases in homes were caused by boomers printing an unprecedented amount of money for themselves and lowering interest rates. If history repeats itself, real estate valuations should revert to a long term mean which would make homes somewhat more affordable. There are some early indications that this is happening.
- CottonMcKnight 4y ago
  I would absolutely love it if dividend yield stocks made a big comeback.
- moffkalast 4y ago
mongol 4y ago
Is not growth inevitable? I hear criticisms of it but is it not what happens automatically when there is competition for resources? I can't really see what the alternative would be. I mean, ideally if you could just agree with everyone in the entire world that no one should strive for something better, we could stay where we are, but reaching such agreement seems impossible. And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
- jstx1 4y ago
  Now imagine that everyone's retirement is tied to the child's growth in height only and the people with most power and influence benefit the most from every additional inch of height.
- deleted 4y ago
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- neojebfkekeej 4y ago
  It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.
  - revscat 4y ago
    History is replete with fallen civilizations, lost civilizations, and civilizations we barely know exist. There are likely many who rose and fell and who we are wholly unaware of. So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  > That is also a kind of growth! Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes. The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
petermcneeley 4y ago
Club of Rome part 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
it 4y ago
There's a whole universe out there. We're not even close to exhausting how much we could grow.
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- api 4y ago
  Space migration is possible but would it matter? You could build a big Mars settlement and that would have its own economy but how much would that add growth to Earth? Transit times are long and the cost to move goods is high for fundamental physical reasons, leaving intangibles as the only thing that could trade in really high volume. I doubt an increase in software or media from Mars could compensate for limits to growth on Earth. On a side note: I suspect that demand limits to growth from stabilizing or falling population and decreasing marginal utility of goods and services (“saturation”) will be as significant as limiters of growth as supply side limits.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    it’s obviously no answer for increasingly short term concerns on earth
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    It seems like services, information, tech are all huge contributors to modern growth beyond just "raw physical" goods. Seems like it could have a substantial impact on Earth, especially when you consider innovations. Imagine having high billions-trillions of people and millions working on a given innovation or line of research or whatever.
    - convolvatron 4y ago
      if we cared about higher levels of innovation or research, we don't need to have a trillion babies. we just need to educate the ones we have already, and give them the opportunity to do that kind of work.
ttgurney 4y ago
Reminds me of the well-known quote I always enjoyed, though I never looked much into the context: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Quotes https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Quotes
- mjevans 4y ago
  Growth cannot continue forever without either changing the resource landscape (itrasolar / multi-planet / interstellar) OR exhausting resources. Resource contention... usually wars get fought over that. Sometimes regional, increasingly global, and increasingly against the destruction of the commons. As we see with the rise in energy accumulating in the global weather systems due to changes to the composition of our atmosphere by unchecked industrial side effects and land use in previously ecologically carbon sink regions.
nyolfen 4y ago
cool, what happens when a rival doesn't want to stop growing?
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  Exactly. This sounds like a psyop.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  You watch them become unable to support themselves when the last square meter is paved, see them slide into poverty and ruin?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    They'll invade you in the hopes of using your resources to last for a while longer long before that happens.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Not if you have nukes.
- sph 4y ago
  This is why everybody switched to the fiat standard during the world war. If one side can print money infinitely to sustain the war effort, the other side has to do the same or lose on the economic front. Growth is viral in competition.
nicodjimenez 4y ago
The only real alternative to growth is decline and eventually death. This is true for companies, individuals, and even countries. I say our obsession with _not_ growing must end!
- deleted 4y ago
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- philosopher1234 4y ago
  Where do you see an obsession with not growing in the world? Some rhetoric? Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs.
  - nicodjimenez 4y ago
    > Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs. Like what? The most basic thing you can do to help GDP growth is try to promote families and childbirth, and keep energy prices low. Right now birth rates are plummeting and oil & gas industry has become politicized, and people see the result at the gas pump. If there's some big heroic effort to actually grow the economy in a real way I'm not seeing it. You see what happened to the last guy that tried to do that. It did not go well for him.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well there is another option: finding a balance and keeping it. There's nothing wrong with keeping a replacement level population and producing enough goods for everyone, instead of trying to achieve some kind of maximum output while destroying the landscape around as quickly as possible. Doesn't mean improvements can't be made to quality of life despite that.
  - nicodjimenez 4y ago
    In nature, nothing is constant for very long.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I don't think economists use terms like 'growth' in a very consistent manner. For example: trees are constantly growing in a forest, and trees are also constantly dying, but the overall population size (number of trees in a forest) remains generally stable, in the absence of major changes in climate and animal predation of trees (such as clear-cutting forests). A lot of uses of growth in economics appear to be related to growth of rates, not growth of something like mass. For example, carbon flows through grasslands at a greater rate than it does in forests; the carbon in a grassland was in the atmosphere at most a few years ago while a tree in a forest can be several hundred years old. The rate at which money flows through an economy (less misers, basically, mean higher transactions) is linked to economic growth. However, growth in terms of growth of the number of buildings in a city and numbers of humans in a city, that's absolutely tied to the amount of arable land each human needs for food production, so obviously that's not an open-ended system, and in particular, if there's not enough water then the land isn't arable. Again, if a city of fixed size improves the average quality of life for its inhabitants, then that's a kind of economic growth, isn't it? Even if resource use (in terms of conservation of mass and energy) is fixed, you can still have economic improvements within that steady-state system, can't you?
- mongol 4y ago
  I also don't understand how they take into account innovation. A carrot was a carrot 1000 years ago, and is a carrot today. While the production of carrots certainly have increased manyfold between then and now, we also have innovations whose value we can't quantify in numbers but certainly are indicators of growth. What is the value of toothpaste compared with no toothpaste, and how much growth did the invention of toothpaste account for? While no number can be reliably given, it should account for some growth. If we halt growth, we halt progress.
  - TheCowboy 4y ago
    It's not really as bad as you think within the field of economics. If you were to major in economics, you would be taught that there is no single or multiple perfect measures of growth or innovation. It's important to have multiple metrics, understand their pros and cons. It's also important to have active research advancing the current state of understanding and not believe everything is settled theory.
pm90 4y ago
The pandemic made it clear that elites are ok with mass death and debilitation. It may not be a conspiracy, but people in power simply don’t care. So the logical conclusion is that a lot of the most vulnerable people are going to perish, the hardier ones will hobble by in filthy conditions like what you see in old age homes today (but there will be a gun around if they wanna quickly end their misery). Structural change on a massive scale is required to change the status quo.
- Guthur 4y ago
  No more massive scale anything. We can not manage societies like that. If you feel they should have shut down more and harder to save lives you are categorically wrong. It would never have worked in any degree of severity and has caused such damage as to have pushed us to disaster. The vaccines are nothing more than a redistribution of wealth to big pharma, wealth that many of us can not afford. I work and earn what should be a good salary yet I own nothing. I will not be locked in my house again by the government or anyone else, you will have to kill me.
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    It’s ok, this kind of thinking will have you locked in your house by climate catastrophe not government.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  What about the lockdowns, mandates, eviction moratoriums, handouts, and mass vaccination campaigns?
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- FiberBundle 4y ago
  Severe pandemics are actually really bad for elites, since large scale death increases the value of employees. See e.g. "The Great Leveler" by Scheidel.
xxpor 4y ago
>Every politician is in favor of growth,” Daly, who is 84, continues, “and no one speaks against growth or in favor of steady state or leveling off." Mr. Daly hasn't been to the Bay Area recently then, I see.
smeeth 4y ago
In practice I find that people who bemoan our "obsession with growth" or some such generally fall into one or more of the following buckets: - Wish they lived in a world we do not live in, such as one without violence or one where people were happy with what they have and do not strive for more. - Actually want growth, but the kind of growth where the things that grow are the things they like and the things they don't like go away. - Have a feeling or rationale that existing wealth and output can be easily redistributed, leading to a state of global contentment we would not need to improve on. All dreams, sadly.
- philosopher1234 4y ago
  You have provided no reason to believe any of your claims apply to the economist in question. I can say “I find people who defend our obsession with growth tend to be benefit heavily from our racist status quo, and would prefer for it to continue”. It’s lazy, and anti intellectual
  - smeeth 4y ago
    Well I didn't think I needed to spell it out since he spends most of the interview explicitly stating my second and third points. But if I must: - Daly points out that GDP growth != welfare growth. In fact, growing GDP has negative externalities that might decrease aggregate welfare. By reducing GDP growth in wealthy countries he argues we might open up resources for developing economies to grow. This reduces to something like: Daly thinks GDP growth is worth it in poor places but thinks the costs associated with GDP growth in rich economies outweigh the benefits. This is my second point explicitly: he wants growth, but only the type he likes and not the type he doesn't. - Daly talks about richer countries needing to make "ecological room" for poor countries to grow. What he means is that the growth of richer countries requires the use of natural resources that could otherwise be used to fill the more basic needs of poorer countries. Weird zero sum-ism aside, this is essentially my third point, that we can redistribute wealth/outputs (technically inputs, but let's not split hairs) to reach a state of stable global contentment. I have no way of knowing if your statement was entirely rhetorical or not, but indeed, I have both benefitted significantly from our imperfect status quo and I wish for something like it to continue. Over a billion humans have been lifted from extreme poverty since 1990 [0]. I like that. I want more of that. Thats not to say I would like for our system to remain totally unchanged, however. You and I probably agree on a lot. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
csours 4y ago
I have a heretical thought: the integrated circuit revolution has made capitalism and the economy in general look much better than it actually is.
- robocat 4y ago
  How do we measure the economic value of technology? Solow productivity paradox: “the computer age was everywhere except for the productivity statistics” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  It's actually not that heretical. It's pretty well documented that most of the gains in productivity in manufacturing have been driven by the computer industry, while the rest has largely stagnated.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  I don’t buy it. Even before mass adoption of integrated circuits capitalism was on a tear in the 20th century. We had Ford cranking out mass-produced automobiles on assembly lines, prefabricated homes, nuclear energy, advances in medicine and sanitation, advances in aerospace, and so on. While integrated circuits are great and clearly driving large parts of the economy, they aren’t the “source” of our economic success, but actually the latest manifestation of a long line of advances that have come out of a well functioning economic system. You can clearly see this distinction in fields like software engineering, where theoretically every country in the world is on an equal playing field, but the US still dominates. It’s because the economic system in the US is superior, and less capitalistic systems are not as good at driving innovation.
krm01 4y ago
I’ve had this sickness of growth in my early twenties. Rushed into a startup, burnt through 7 figures of VC money. Then took an other shot at it, but slower growth and no VC money. Bootstrapped that company and got acquired. Then started an agency [1] where we get to design B2B software products for a variety of startups. We are keeping it small on purpose and growth is never discussed. The focus is to do work we love with amazing teams of engineers and entrepreneurs. Accidentally we’re generating more money than in my previous ventures, even with a clear cap on growth. It just adds to our runway and makes working every day more fun and fulfilling. [1] https://fairpixels.pro https://fairpixels.pro
xnx 4y ago
Growth is clearly unsustainable until we can decouple happiness from exhaustion of finite material resources.
- sfvisser 4y ago
  Economic growth is more than just using finite material resources. It’s technical innovation, labor productivity increase, efficiency improvements due to economies of scale, specialization, efficiently recycling scarce commodities, etc etc Yes, we obviously need more economic growth, there simply is no alternative.
caramelcustard 4y ago
Encouraging stagnation among the easily impressionable English-speaking audiences of the economically successful nations i see. Good luck convincing certain Asian countries that they should stop their growth in the name of the "steady-state economy" just because. It's amusing how he goes from "...You can do fantastic computations now with a small material base in the computer..." to criticizing the concept of GDP ("We really don’t know that the standard is going up.") contradicting himself so quickly. The standard doesn't go up, but i sure like me my computer! "...Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer?..." increasing costs of what exactly? Manufacturing? Materials? Servicing? Marketing? Privately held assets? State corporation stocks? The cost of a pint at your local bar? The interviewer isn't any better. "... to accept the idea of having “enough” and that constraining the ability to pursue “more” is a good thing. Those ideas are basically anathema to modern Western society ..." completely CLUELESS take that implies that the ideas of striving for wealth, growth, luxurious consumption and people wanting things are exclusive to Western countries, but then you read about "Making ecological room" and it becomes clear what is the exact point of all that fancy talk. But back to the economist: "My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas. Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me." wink-wink With all due respect to academia, i don't think that ignoring the harsh reality of how people behave, attempting to lightly enforce a feeling of guilt upon the society thanks to which the academia has the privelege to just "...put out some ideas" is responsible at all. I sure hope that this is just a one off case of a bad interview.
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strongpigeon 4y ago
What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for. Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth". Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
- bnralt 4y ago
  I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and the interviewer doesn't seem interested, opting instead to ask questions about cosmology. It's a bizarre interview. His issue seems to be mostly with overconsumption of resources. But instead of creating a sustainable economy that can achieve growth through other areas (increased efficiency, increased use of renewable resources), he instead comes out against any growth and advocates a steady-state economy. But again, no specifics, just vague generalities and digressions into cosmology (arguing that economics should take into account religious questions). I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
  - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    This kind of topic is where podcasts shine, especially if the host is literate on the topic being discussed. Or even the raw transcript of this interview versus the content that ended up being published. I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.
ekkeke 4y ago
Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now? Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
- gryn 4y ago
  sure the end result (microprocessor) don't use too much resources, but the process that produces it does. you can keep improving but a point you reach physical and economist limit that you just can't outrun. the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    “There exists a limit to growth” and “we are remotely close to hitting the limit” are vastly different claims.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
      There are infinite limits on growth. The death of almost all plankton is one such limit. Look up.
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- birksherty 4y ago
scythe 4y ago
After this topic gained my attention for the umpteenth time, I have come to believe that the reason that growth remains a very high priority in the face of all the costs is a truly unpleasant justification. Consider the Soviet Union. During its early development the working day was progressively shortened, reaching seven hours by 1929 [1]. Certainly, many people would consider "working less" a nice alternative to endlessly pursuing growth. But then something funny happens. Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany and the Soviet workday gets longer [2]. The reason that we pursue growth so doggedly is not because we have a collective wish to do so. It's because we are afraid that $Enemy is going to grow faster than we are, for various values of $Enemy. The solution cannot be merely political; it must be geopolitical. 1: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/churches-closed/churches-closed-texts/seven-hour-working-day/ https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/churches-closed/churche... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_II#Wartime_economy_and_governmental_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_I...
karol 4y ago
Sounds like a limiting belief.
uhuruity 4y ago
As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?
- chobeat 4y ago
  under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy. Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek. Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.) A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on. This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.
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JauntTrooper 4y ago
Economic growth does not need to be extractive, nor is it zero sum. A vaccine is worth more than the sum of its parts. So is a bridge. We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains. The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.
narrator 4y ago
Serious egyptologists correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Egypt not change at all between 3000 B.C and the Bronze Age collapse almost 1000 years later? Is that where we're headed: perpetual stagnation?
marcell 4y ago
Author's premise is wrong. Once growth ends, the pie isn't growing. Pie not growing means the focus becomes dividing the pie. Dividing the pie means endless infighting, politics, and anger in a society. This may work in certain societies, but it will never work in America. Second, a growth-oriented society will naturally outgrow and overtake a non-growth oriented society, by definition. Societies choosing low growth will fall to the side. Third, you need an outlet for people in society who are entrepreneurial. Steve Jobs starting Apple is the exact same mindset as a punk kid spraying grafitti on a billboard. It's just a different implementation ambition and rule breaking. If you impose a non-growth mindset on society, what will all the glorified "crazy ones" [1] do? Nothing good. The answer, of course, is space exploration. Elon Musk has talked about this in detail many times: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1544720926020968453 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1544720926020968453 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4NS2zdrZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4NS2zdrZc
- dang 4y ago
  > Wrong, wrong, wrong. Can you please edit swipes like that out of your HN comments? They degrade discussion, break the site guidelines, and aren't needed. Your comment would be fine without that bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - marcell 4y ago
    Done
- tbskm 4y ago
  Is America not already there? Living in the southeast I literally see people in Home Depot buying garden tools wearing Proud Boys shirts. Every week brings a new mass shooting, several states equate the abortion of a 10-year-old rape victim with homicide, and the Texas GOP is now officially trying to abolish the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet America is one of the most rabidly pro-growth nations in the world. Elon Musk is a billionaire, who cares about his opinion on anything but making money? There are academic fields full of people who investigate the myriad problems of American (and, more generally, capitalist) societies. To ignore them all simply because you think entrepreneurs are “punk rock” is entirely unscientific. Of course Elon wants growth, his entire life is dedicated to it and he serves to gain the most if it occurs, regardless of its consequences for everyone else.
nostromo 4y ago
Ok, but... You better get used to higher taxes when you're of working age. And you better get used to reduced Social Security payments. Because these things rely on growth. You better get used to a flat stock market. If you want to live off your investments when you're old -- you're going to have to save a whole lot more. Growth helps governments inflate away their (very large) debts. In a static economy, this won't work -- so you better get ready to pay off all that money our government has borrowed. People are not "obsessed" with growth -- growth is built into our economy in a fundamental way -- and ending growth would be extremely painful to regular people.
- havblue 4y ago
  Ironically, economists know that people aren't obsessed with growth as much as just acting according to their own nature...
- deleted 4y ago
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- bamboozled 4y ago
  You're acting like all human history was crap until we created endless growth, but it wasn't. So I don't think you're right.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 I will add a quote that was popular in urban planning circles I used to hang in: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- deleted 4y ago
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neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/7fT1d https://archive.ph/7fT1d
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throw8383833jj 4y ago
part of the problem is that we're not just moving forward, we're also moving backwards at the same time. as populations get bigger and bigger materials become ever more scarce, as does land (at the least the amount of land that voters are willing to allow to develop). Increasing regulations continue to lower the standard of living: this is especially harmful to shelter needs. so we need growth, just to maintain our standard living, nevermind improve it. What really needs to happen is to deprioritize growth and prioritize standard of living instead by focusing on the cost of shelter, food, water and by extension, transportation, medical insurance and so called "education".
abeppu 4y ago
I feel like this could have been a lot better if it were more concrete. What's wrong with wanting GDP growth? - Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income? - At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer? - A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer? Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
- chii 4y ago
  > The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. > The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work). The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh. > What's wrong with wanting GDP growth? nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth. GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption. It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
chmod600 4y ago
Maybe it depends on what is growing? Any helpful new technology, including medicine, is growth. Any advancement of human knowledge is growth. Any durable improvements (pyramids, bridges) are growth. Cultural advancements (art, politics, religion) are growth. Many of these things are imperfectly represented in GDP growth. GDP also has many other known problems, like calling growth in consumption "growth" without really having a way to determine if it's really a good thing or not. But we don't want to go to a zero-growth economy where we are just comfortably existing without passing anything to the next generation.
ph4 4y ago
I was introduced to Daly's work recently through The Great Simplification podcast. I highly recommend this episode: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/06-herman-daly?fbclid=IwAR2aaKxCw1XOjPlnRrO7xVibD0_BlJLaEI1OBLeIBRWrOhe0JuSRxoeXYfU https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/06-herman-dal...
Animats 4y ago
Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful. This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side. Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future." "In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"." That sums up his position. He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources? Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy [3] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
- WalterBright 4y ago
  We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched. Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms. Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.
  - chii 4y ago
    > Anyone who writes software is creating wealth. this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.
rationalfaith 4y ago
snarfy 4y ago
Exponential growth and finite resources are fundamentally incompatible.
fithisux 4y ago
"Growth" is destroying our planet and our lives.
arisAlexis 4y ago
This is very flawed. Technology makes things easier so growth is inevitable. This "lauded, pioneering" economist seems to not understand evolution.
thelastgallon 4y ago
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.” [1] [1] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

269 points by cwwc 4y ago

Daly makes the case that conventional economics deals with "intermediate" means and ends, such as food production and health/leisure; and that we should instead be more concerned with "ultimate" means and ends. He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on." Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.

uoaei 4y ago

Matter and energy limits constrain volume. Entropy challenges efficiency. There are no exponential curves in nature -- only sigmoidal ones.

kalupa 4y ago

A finite system cannot sustain infinite growth. Not that this summarizes the article, but that'd be a pretty logical statement.

bequanna 4y ago
We are nowhere near exhausting the resources we have available. We are also nowhere near optimal efficiency when using resources.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  the externalities of resource use are arguably reaching catastrophic tipping points that will hit before depletion is an immediate concern
  - bequanna 4y ago
    > catastrophic tipping point This is pretty funny as people have been calling for some kind of human-caused apocalypse since forever. It must be human nature for some to believe such things. To see ourselves as inherently sinful, wicked, separate from nature and deserving of punishment. Climate alarmism has become a religion of sorts for many. Giving them maybe something to believe, maybe some purpose. At least something to talk about. There are countless other religious sects that also believe judgement day is “right around the corner”.
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ardoise 4y ago
But couldn't a finite system be configured and reconfigured in such a large number of ways that to all intents and purposes the possibilities are infinite? What if "growth" is about creating better and better knowledge of how to configure the system in more and more valuable ways?
- sph 4y ago
  No because there are unbreakable physical limits. You cannot turn a finite system into an infinite amount of resources.
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slt2021 4y ago

Without peaceful growth, eventually there will be military growth [expansion by the means of military violence]. Op is right that our Earth is limited and cannot grow indefinitely. Sometimes it will be followed by redistribution of growth, so that someone will continue to grow, while others will experience radical negative growth

newsclues 4y ago
Why can’t we have stability?
- bsedlm 4y ago
  fear of stagnation... ?
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  Inequality and (rightful or wrongful) envy.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Because humans are hardcoded for maximising personal gain. There will always be someone who will not accept stability and escalate at a different level.
- gryn 4y ago
  because you only need a few people not wanting that (ie people with a mindset somewhat similar to: I'd rather see people suffer than cooperate and compromise resulting in having less share of resources) for the rest to not matter. that 'stable' state is unstable (in the control theory sense of the word).
- deleted 4y ago
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petermcneeley 4y ago
“I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it.” - Dune

gsatic 4y ago

Decent Ultimate End would be: defense spending world wide=0

bequanna 4y ago
If growth becomes a zero sum game as “Economists” like this one would like, you better hope you live in country with a defense budget>0
- gryn 4y ago
  I don't understand why you are down voted, you're absolutely right. if growth grinds to a halt and people still want that growth at all cost they will use the same old ways they achieved it before. and even if 90 out of 100 don't want to the 10/100 will force their hand.
- gsatic 4y ago
  What he is encouraging you to do is ask yourself what you want the Ultimate End to be? You can't design anything new if the mentality is we can't change.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    I don’t follow you. Change what exactly? The fact that we will fight each other for scare resources? That is built into us, I am afraid.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Then we'll be sitting ducks for the extra-terrestrial invasion... Really though, good luck getting to that state.
- trinovantes 4y ago
  I doubt our human technology will have much effect on any civilization capable of large scale space travel. We would be the equivalent of indigenous people using bows against European muskets and cannons.

eatsyourtacos 4y ago

Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise. The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime. And the hopes that if they get lucky enough with the market they can retire early (or at all). This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual. Also the rich have a massive incentive for everyone to "invest" (cough) and drive prices up, because the rich benefit insanely more by market movements than a standard person does. Maybe the system will explode in our lifetime, maybe not. But all this insanity focus of growth, profits, etc with no genuine regard to real social issues (providing basic stability to people whether it be healthcare, housing, food, childcare) is so sick I can barely even think about it. And there's almost nothing to do about it- that's the way things currently "work" and it seems insurmountable to do anything about it.

WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
The system is totally unsustainable... unless we're willing to have a society of debtors, noone is going to buy homes from the boomers. The majority of retirement the average middle class has is their home.
- bequanna 4y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to “the system” but the extradorinaiy price increases in homes were caused by boomers printing an unprecedented amount of money for themselves and lowering interest rates. If history repeats itself, real estate valuations should revert to a long term mean which would make homes somewhat more affordable. There are some early indications that this is happening.
CottonMcKnight 4y ago
I would absolutely love it if dividend yield stocks made a big comeback.
moffkalast 4y ago

mongol 4y ago

Is not growth inevitable? I hear criticisms of it but is it not what happens automatically when there is competition for resources? I can't really see what the alternative would be. I mean, ideally if you could just agree with everyone in the entire world that no one should strive for something better, we could stay where we are, but reaching such agreement seems impossible. And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.

jstx1 4y ago
Now imagine that everyone's retirement is tied to the child's growth in height only and the people with most power and influence benefit the most from every additional inch of height.
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neojebfkekeej 4y ago
It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.
- revscat 4y ago
  History is replete with fallen civilizations, lost civilizations, and civilizations we barely know exist. There are likely many who rose and fell and who we are wholly unaware of. So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.
jjoonathan 4y ago
> That is also a kind of growth! Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes. The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!

petermcneeley 4y ago

Club of Rome part 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

it 4y ago

There's a whole universe out there. We're not even close to exhausting how much we could grow.

deleted 4y ago
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api 4y ago
Space migration is possible but would it matter? You could build a big Mars settlement and that would have its own economy but how much would that add growth to Earth? Transit times are long and the cost to move goods is high for fundamental physical reasons, leaving intangibles as the only thing that could trade in really high volume. I doubt an increase in software or media from Mars could compensate for limits to growth on Earth. On a side note: I suspect that demand limits to growth from stabilizing or falling population and decreasing marginal utility of goods and services (“saturation”) will be as significant as limiters of growth as supply side limits.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  it’s obviously no answer for increasingly short term concerns on earth
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  It seems like services, information, tech are all huge contributors to modern growth beyond just "raw physical" goods. Seems like it could have a substantial impact on Earth, especially when you consider innovations. Imagine having high billions-trillions of people and millions working on a given innovation or line of research or whatever.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    if we cared about higher levels of innovation or research, we don't need to have a trillion babies. we just need to educate the ones we have already, and give them the opportunity to do that kind of work.

ttgurney 4y ago

Reminds me of the well-known quote I always enjoyed, though I never looked much into the context: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Quotes https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Quotes

mjevans 4y ago
Growth cannot continue forever without either changing the resource landscape (itrasolar / multi-planet / interstellar) OR exhausting resources. Resource contention... usually wars get fought over that. Sometimes regional, increasingly global, and increasingly against the destruction of the commons. As we see with the rise in energy accumulating in the global weather systems due to changes to the composition of our atmosphere by unchecked industrial side effects and land use in previously ecologically carbon sink regions.

nyolfen 4y ago

cool, what happens when a rival doesn't want to stop growing?

scifibestfi 4y ago
Exactly. This sounds like a psyop.
moffkalast 4y ago
You watch them become unable to support themselves when the last square meter is paved, see them slide into poverty and ruin?
- int_19h 4y ago
  They'll invade you in the hopes of using your resources to last for a while longer long before that happens.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Not if you have nukes.
sph 4y ago
This is why everybody switched to the fiat standard during the world war. If one side can print money infinitely to sustain the war effort, the other side has to do the same or lose on the economic front. Growth is viral in competition.

nicodjimenez 4y ago

The only real alternative to growth is decline and eventually death. This is true for companies, individuals, and even countries. I say our obsession with _not_ growing must end!

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philosopher1234 4y ago
Where do you see an obsession with not growing in the world? Some rhetoric? Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs.
- nicodjimenez 4y ago
  > Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs. Like what? The most basic thing you can do to help GDP growth is try to promote families and childbirth, and keep energy prices low. Right now birth rates are plummeting and oil & gas industry has become politicized, and people see the result at the gas pump. If there's some big heroic effort to actually grow the economy in a real way I'm not seeing it. You see what happened to the last guy that tried to do that. It did not go well for him.
moffkalast 4y ago
Well there is another option: finding a balance and keeping it. There's nothing wrong with keeping a replacement level population and producing enough goods for everyone, instead of trying to achieve some kind of maximum output while destroying the landscape around as quickly as possible. Doesn't mean improvements can't be made to quality of life despite that.
- nicodjimenez 4y ago
  In nature, nothing is constant for very long.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I don't think economists use terms like 'growth' in a very consistent manner. For example: trees are constantly growing in a forest, and trees are also constantly dying, but the overall population size (number of trees in a forest) remains generally stable, in the absence of major changes in climate and animal predation of trees (such as clear-cutting forests). A lot of uses of growth in economics appear to be related to growth of rates, not growth of something like mass. For example, carbon flows through grasslands at a greater rate than it does in forests; the carbon in a grassland was in the atmosphere at most a few years ago while a tree in a forest can be several hundred years old. The rate at which money flows through an economy (less misers, basically, mean higher transactions) is linked to economic growth. However, growth in terms of growth of the number of buildings in a city and numbers of humans in a city, that's absolutely tied to the amount of arable land each human needs for food production, so obviously that's not an open-ended system, and in particular, if there's not enough water then the land isn't arable. Again, if a city of fixed size improves the average quality of life for its inhabitants, then that's a kind of economic growth, isn't it? Even if resource use (in terms of conservation of mass and energy) is fixed, you can still have economic improvements within that steady-state system, can't you?

mongol 4y ago
I also don't understand how they take into account innovation. A carrot was a carrot 1000 years ago, and is a carrot today. While the production of carrots certainly have increased manyfold between then and now, we also have innovations whose value we can't quantify in numbers but certainly are indicators of growth. What is the value of toothpaste compared with no toothpaste, and how much growth did the invention of toothpaste account for? While no number can be reliably given, it should account for some growth. If we halt growth, we halt progress.
- TheCowboy 4y ago
  It's not really as bad as you think within the field of economics. If you were to major in economics, you would be taught that there is no single or multiple perfect measures of growth or innovation. It's important to have multiple metrics, understand their pros and cons. It's also important to have active research advancing the current state of understanding and not believe everything is settled theory.

pm90 4y ago

The pandemic made it clear that elites are ok with mass death and debilitation. It may not be a conspiracy, but people in power simply don’t care. So the logical conclusion is that a lot of the most vulnerable people are going to perish, the hardier ones will hobble by in filthy conditions like what you see in old age homes today (but there will be a gun around if they wanna quickly end their misery). Structural change on a massive scale is required to change the status quo.

Guthur 4y ago
No more massive scale anything. We can not manage societies like that. If you feel they should have shut down more and harder to save lives you are categorically wrong. It would never have worked in any degree of severity and has caused such damage as to have pushed us to disaster. The vaccines are nothing more than a redistribution of wealth to big pharma, wealth that many of us can not afford. I work and earn what should be a good salary yet I own nothing. I will not be locked in my house again by the government or anyone else, you will have to kill me.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  It’s ok, this kind of thinking will have you locked in your house by climate catastrophe not government.
oneoff786 4y ago
What about the lockdowns, mandates, eviction moratoriums, handouts, and mass vaccination campaigns?
- deleted 4y ago
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FiberBundle 4y ago
Severe pandemics are actually really bad for elites, since large scale death increases the value of employees. See e.g. "The Great Leveler" by Scheidel.

xxpor 4y ago

>Every politician is in favor of growth,” Daly, who is 84, continues, “and no one speaks against growth or in favor of steady state or leveling off." Mr. Daly hasn't been to the Bay Area recently then, I see.

smeeth 4y ago

In practice I find that people who bemoan our "obsession with growth" or some such generally fall into one or more of the following buckets: - Wish they lived in a world we do not live in, such as one without violence or one where people were happy with what they have and do not strive for more. - Actually want growth, but the kind of growth where the things that grow are the things they like and the things they don't like go away. - Have a feeling or rationale that existing wealth and output can be easily redistributed, leading to a state of global contentment we would not need to improve on. All dreams, sadly.

philosopher1234 4y ago
You have provided no reason to believe any of your claims apply to the economist in question. I can say “I find people who defend our obsession with growth tend to be benefit heavily from our racist status quo, and would prefer for it to continue”. It’s lazy, and anti intellectual
- smeeth 4y ago
  Well I didn't think I needed to spell it out since he spends most of the interview explicitly stating my second and third points. But if I must: - Daly points out that GDP growth != welfare growth. In fact, growing GDP has negative externalities that might decrease aggregate welfare. By reducing GDP growth in wealthy countries he argues we might open up resources for developing economies to grow. This reduces to something like: Daly thinks GDP growth is worth it in poor places but thinks the costs associated with GDP growth in rich economies outweigh the benefits. This is my second point explicitly: he wants growth, but only the type he likes and not the type he doesn't. - Daly talks about richer countries needing to make "ecological room" for poor countries to grow. What he means is that the growth of richer countries requires the use of natural resources that could otherwise be used to fill the more basic needs of poorer countries. Weird zero sum-ism aside, this is essentially my third point, that we can redistribute wealth/outputs (technically inputs, but let's not split hairs) to reach a state of stable global contentment. I have no way of knowing if your statement was entirely rhetorical or not, but indeed, I have both benefitted significantly from our imperfect status quo and I wish for something like it to continue. Over a billion humans have been lifted from extreme poverty since 1990 [0]. I like that. I want more of that. Thats not to say I would like for our system to remain totally unchanged, however. You and I probably agree on a lot. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

csours 4y ago

I have a heretical thought: the integrated circuit revolution has made capitalism and the economy in general look much better than it actually is.

robocat 4y ago
How do we measure the economic value of technology? Solow productivity paradox: “the computer age was everywhere except for the productivity statistics” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
kareemsabri 4y ago
It's actually not that heretical. It's pretty well documented that most of the gains in productivity in manufacturing have been driven by the computer industry, while the rest has largely stagnated.
oceanplexian 4y ago
I don’t buy it. Even before mass adoption of integrated circuits capitalism was on a tear in the 20th century. We had Ford cranking out mass-produced automobiles on assembly lines, prefabricated homes, nuclear energy, advances in medicine and sanitation, advances in aerospace, and so on. While integrated circuits are great and clearly driving large parts of the economy, they aren’t the “source” of our economic success, but actually the latest manifestation of a long line of advances that have come out of a well functioning economic system. You can clearly see this distinction in fields like software engineering, where theoretically every country in the world is on an equal playing field, but the US still dominates. It’s because the economic system in the US is superior, and less capitalistic systems are not as good at driving innovation.

krm01 4y ago

I’ve had this sickness of growth in my early twenties. Rushed into a startup, burnt through 7 figures of VC money. Then took an other shot at it, but slower growth and no VC money. Bootstrapped that company and got acquired. Then started an agency [1] where we get to design B2B software products for a variety of startups. We are keeping it small on purpose and growth is never discussed. The focus is to do work we love with amazing teams of engineers and entrepreneurs. Accidentally we’re generating more money than in my previous ventures, even with a clear cap on growth. It just adds to our runway and makes working every day more fun and fulfilling. [1] https://fairpixels.pro https://fairpixels.pro

xnx 4y ago

Growth is clearly unsustainable until we can decouple happiness from exhaustion of finite material resources.

sfvisser 4y ago
Economic growth is more than just using finite material resources. It’s technical innovation, labor productivity increase, efficiency improvements due to economies of scale, specialization, efficiently recycling scarce commodities, etc etc Yes, we obviously need more economic growth, there simply is no alternative.

caramelcustard 4y ago

Encouraging stagnation among the easily impressionable English-speaking audiences of the economically successful nations i see. Good luck convincing certain Asian countries that they should stop their growth in the name of the "steady-state economy" just because. It's amusing how he goes from "...You can do fantastic computations now with a small material base in the computer..." to criticizing the concept of GDP ("We really don’t know that the standard is going up.") contradicting himself so quickly. The standard doesn't go up, but i sure like me my computer! "...Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer?..." increasing costs of what exactly? Manufacturing? Materials? Servicing? Marketing? Privately held assets? State corporation stocks? The cost of a pint at your local bar? The interviewer isn't any better. "... to accept the idea of having “enough” and that constraining the ability to pursue “more” is a good thing. Those ideas are basically anathema to modern Western society ..." completely CLUELESS take that implies that the ideas of striving for wealth, growth, luxurious consumption and people wanting things are exclusive to Western countries, but then you read about "Making ecological room" and it becomes clear what is the exact point of all that fancy talk. But back to the economist: "My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas. Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me." wink-wink With all due respect to academia, i don't think that ignoring the harsh reality of how people behave, attempting to lightly enforce a feeling of guilt upon the society thanks to which the academia has the privelege to just "...put out some ideas" is responsible at all. I sure hope that this is just a one off case of a bad interview.

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strongpigeon 4y ago

What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for. Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth". Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.

bnralt 4y ago
I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and the interviewer doesn't seem interested, opting instead to ask questions about cosmology. It's a bizarre interview. His issue seems to be mostly with overconsumption of resources. But instead of creating a sustainable economy that can achieve growth through other areas (increased efficiency, increased use of renewable resources), he instead comes out against any growth and advocates a steady-state economy. But again, no specifics, just vague generalities and digressions into cosmology (arguing that economics should take into account religious questions). I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  This kind of topic is where podcasts shine, especially if the host is literate on the topic being discussed. Or even the raw transcript of this interview versus the content that ended up being published. I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.

ekkeke 4y ago

Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now? Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?

gryn 4y ago
sure the end result (microprocessor) don't use too much resources, but the process that produces it does. you can keep improving but a point you reach physical and economist limit that you just can't outrun. the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  “There exists a limit to growth” and “we are remotely close to hitting the limit” are vastly different claims.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
    There are infinite limits on growth. The death of almost all plankton is one such limit. Look up.
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birksherty 4y ago

scythe 4y ago

After this topic gained my attention for the umpteenth time, I have come to believe that the reason that growth remains a very high priority in the face of all the costs is a truly unpleasant justification. Consider the Soviet Union. During its early development the working day was progressively shortened, reaching seven hours by 1929 [1]. Certainly, many people would consider "working less" a nice alternative to endlessly pursuing growth. But then something funny happens. Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany and the Soviet workday gets longer [2]. The reason that we pursue growth so doggedly is not because we have a collective wish to do so. It's because we are afraid that $Enemy is going to grow faster than we are, for various values of $Enemy. The solution cannot be merely political; it must be geopolitical. 1: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/churches-closed/churches-closed-texts/seven-hour-working-day/ https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/churches-closed/churche... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_II#Wartime_economy_and_governmental_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_I...

karol 4y ago

Sounds like a limiting belief.

uhuruity 4y ago

As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?

chobeat 4y ago
under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy. Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek. Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
- skybrian 4y ago
  You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.) A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.
- dionidium 4y ago
  This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on. This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.

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JauntTrooper 4y ago

Economic growth does not need to be extractive, nor is it zero sum. A vaccine is worth more than the sum of its parts. So is a bridge. We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains. The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.

narrator 4y ago

Serious egyptologists correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Egypt not change at all between 3000 B.C and the Bronze Age collapse almost 1000 years later? Is that where we're headed: perpetual stagnation?

marcell 4y ago

Author's premise is wrong. Once growth ends, the pie isn't growing. Pie not growing means the focus becomes dividing the pie. Dividing the pie means endless infighting, politics, and anger in a society. This may work in certain societies, but it will never work in America. Second, a growth-oriented society will naturally outgrow and overtake a non-growth oriented society, by definition. Societies choosing low growth will fall to the side. Third, you need an outlet for people in society who are entrepreneurial. Steve Jobs starting Apple is the exact same mindset as a punk kid spraying grafitti on a billboard. It's just a different implementation ambition and rule breaking. If you impose a non-growth mindset on society, what will all the glorified "crazy ones" [1] do? Nothing good. The answer, of course, is space exploration. Elon Musk has talked about this in detail many times: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1544720926020968453 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1544720926020968453 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4NS2zdrZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4NS2zdrZc

dang 4y ago
> Wrong, wrong, wrong. Can you please edit swipes like that out of your HN comments? They degrade discussion, break the site guidelines, and aren't needed. Your comment would be fine without that bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- marcell 4y ago
  Done
tbskm 4y ago
Is America not already there? Living in the southeast I literally see people in Home Depot buying garden tools wearing Proud Boys shirts. Every week brings a new mass shooting, several states equate the abortion of a 10-year-old rape victim with homicide, and the Texas GOP is now officially trying to abolish the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet America is one of the most rabidly pro-growth nations in the world. Elon Musk is a billionaire, who cares about his opinion on anything but making money? There are academic fields full of people who investigate the myriad problems of American (and, more generally, capitalist) societies. To ignore them all simply because you think entrepreneurs are “punk rock” is entirely unscientific. Of course Elon wants growth, his entire life is dedicated to it and he serves to gain the most if it occurs, regardless of its consequences for everyone else.

nostromo 4y ago

Ok, but... You better get used to higher taxes when you're of working age. And you better get used to reduced Social Security payments. Because these things rely on growth. You better get used to a flat stock market. If you want to live off your investments when you're old -- you're going to have to save a whole lot more. Growth helps governments inflate away their (very large) debts. In a static economy, this won't work -- so you better get ready to pay off all that money our government has borrowed. People are not "obsessed" with growth -- growth is built into our economy in a fundamental way -- and ending growth would be extremely painful to regular people.

havblue 4y ago
Ironically, economists know that people aren't obsessed with growth as much as just acting according to their own nature...
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bamboozled 4y ago
You're acting like all human history was crap until we created endless growth, but it wasn't. So I don't think you're right.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 I will add a quote that was popular in urban planning circles I used to hang in: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

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neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/7fT1d https://archive.ph/7fT1d

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throw8383833jj 4y ago

part of the problem is that we're not just moving forward, we're also moving backwards at the same time. as populations get bigger and bigger materials become ever more scarce, as does land (at the least the amount of land that voters are willing to allow to develop). Increasing regulations continue to lower the standard of living: this is especially harmful to shelter needs. so we need growth, just to maintain our standard living, nevermind improve it. What really needs to happen is to deprioritize growth and prioritize standard of living instead by focusing on the cost of shelter, food, water and by extension, transportation, medical insurance and so called "education".

abeppu 4y ago

I feel like this could have been a lot better if it were more concrete. What's wrong with wanting GDP growth? - Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income? - At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer? - A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer? Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?

chii 4y ago
> The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. > The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work). The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh. > What's wrong with wanting GDP growth? nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth. GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption. It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.

chmod600 4y ago

Maybe it depends on what is growing? Any helpful new technology, including medicine, is growth. Any advancement of human knowledge is growth. Any durable improvements (pyramids, bridges) are growth. Cultural advancements (art, politics, religion) are growth. Many of these things are imperfectly represented in GDP growth. GDP also has many other known problems, like calling growth in consumption "growth" without really having a way to determine if it's really a good thing or not. But we don't want to go to a zero-growth economy where we are just comfortably existing without passing anything to the next generation.

ph4 4y ago

I was introduced to Daly's work recently through The Great Simplification podcast. I highly recommend this episode: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/06-herman-daly?fbclid=IwAR2aaKxCw1XOjPlnRrO7xVibD0_BlJLaEI1OBLeIBRWrOhe0JuSRxoeXYfU https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/06-herman-dal...

Animats 4y ago

Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful. This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side. Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future." "In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"." That sums up his position. He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources? Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy [3] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...

WalterBright 4y ago
We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched. Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms. Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.
- chii 4y ago
  > Anyone who writes software is creating wealth. this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.

rationalfaith 4y ago

snarfy 4y ago

Exponential growth and finite resources are fundamentally incompatible.

fithisux 4y ago

"Growth" is destroying our planet and our lives.

arisAlexis 4y ago

This is very flawed. Technology makes things easier so growth is inevitable. This "lauded, pioneering" economist seems to not understand evolution.

thelastgallon 4y ago

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.” [1] [1] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995