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Without meaning to judge, the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens. Fisheries would be one example, agriculture which

Without meaning to judge, the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens. Fisheries would be one example, agriculture which a sibling comment mentioned, another. But it's also pollution, labour laws, access to housing. It's tricky because the US is literally the most powerful economy ever, so it must be doing something right, equally it seems other countries care more about their citizens. Not China or North Korea ofc but Europe or Canada etc.

advantager 4y ago
And minerals and petroluem
halfdan 4y ago
I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Arabia’s oil it will eventually stop being a sustainable source for the economy. Alaskan fisheries collapsing, rivers that support water hungry crops in the desert running dry might be first indicators of many that things are collapsing.
- frozenport 4y ago
  The value of some large tech companies is orders of magnitude above the entire Alaska fishery. The US’s wealth is in it’s people not it’s fisheries.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    I think they meant the political climate in USA where corporate profits is the top of every political agenda, that helps all companies and not just Alaskan fisheries. If the government listened more to workers then USA probably wouldn't be as dominant as it is.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      On the other hand, the servers at restaurants in SF make more than most software engineers in Western Europe now. So probably good to focus a little more on economic growth.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      I don't think so necessarily, the US is still a huge, solid market market. If anything, I think it could be even richer and more powerful if more its populace were lifted from poverty.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Aye, about 2.5% of it's people
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  Huh, its almost like infinite growth is impossible in our context of the natural world. Who would have thought spreadsheets and magic market numbers had little material connection to the resources extracted to extrapolate those numbers.
  - gretch 4y ago
    Well yeah, obviously _infinite_ growth is not possible given the laws of physics. But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels. For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet. We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
    - secstate 4y ago
      While you're not technically wrong, the idea of net-zero sources of energy does not address what happens when you start concentrating "free energy" in new places. Fish farms are ecologically monstrosities in most places they exist. Electricity is only one input, fresh water is another, and we haven't figured out where to get that much fresh water for free yet. In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
      - greedo 4y ago
        Almost all our agriculture AND aquaculture are ecological monstrosities because we don't make the producers pay for externalities.
  - kiba 4y ago
    Eh, only within the current context of society and technology. For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet. The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.
hyperbovine 4y ago
> the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens. At the expense of *most* of its citizens. I know people who make a shocking amount of money fishing in Alaska every summer. The problem with the US is that it always prioritizes a few of its citizens getting rich, to the diffuse and often intangible detriment of the rest of us.
- notch898a 4y ago
  I worked in Alaska (fishing trawler). Most the people there are not making a "shocking" amount of money. It's basically minimum wage plus overtime (granted a shit ton of it) for people working in processing or the lowest positions onboard the vessel. A good representation of the people I found were Native Alaskans, immigrants, or felons who were attracted to the job because it was one of the damn few available to them. It was brutal work to eke out a basic existence.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I feel like I've been conned by Mike Rowe - I was under the impression that it was brutal work that at least paid pretty well. On the boats at least.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - etc-hosts 4y ago
      https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koch-backed-working-man-affectation-fa52e0e8d2e3 https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koc...
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    In the Netherlands the fishing industry has basically evaporated to less than 1% of GDP. But the loss of jobs has been amply compensated in other sectors.
Retric 4y ago
The US being one of the largest countries/empires to ever exist doesn’t have much competition to be the largest economy. Per capita we’re still doing ok but far from #1.
- Armisael16 4y ago
  The US is top 10 in PPP gdp per capita, and almost all of the states that are higher up are either tiny oil and gas states (eg Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait) or small states that focus on financial services for much larger areas (Luxembourg and Ireland for the EU, Singapore for the indopacific). Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE. #1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Do you know if the petro state per capita figures include the migrant/indentured workers employed there?
    - Armisael16 4y ago
      Per capita figures do include full-time residents, even migrant workers. They do not capture international commuters (most relevant for Luxembourg, which gets something like half its workforce from neighbors).
  - Retric 4y ago
    The US economy is more focused on finance and fossil fuel extraction than Ireland, which easily beats the US in terms of PPP per capita. Remove resource extraction and financial services from all economies and the list does look different, but the US’s position is still far from #1. Also, PPP comparisons between countries are rather suspect as costs for housing, food, etc vary widely across the US. There’s plenty of ways to run these numbers but the results are surprisingly arbitrary.
babypuncher 4y ago
We prioritize economic growth over the wellbeing of our citizens. The prevailing thought for decades was that more growth = more prosperity for everyone, but that facade has slowly melted away over the past ~40 years as more and more of that prosperity is funneled down to a small ultra-wealthy subset of the population.
anigbrowl 4y ago
so it must be doing something right Consider the fact that when the US was colonized, the native population was small and had a significant technological disadvantages - also true to some extent for central/South America. That gave the colonists a whole continent for virtually free, whereas in their territories of origin they would have had to compete with large incumbent populations that had similar technology, from weapons to the administrative organs of states. If youg et a huge resource boost you will surely find ways to profit, just as if you received a billion $ to play with. But getting thins for free - especially land - also means you can afford to care less about externalities, because you don't have as many neighbors or you are not jammed as closely together. And so it's easy and natural for people in that situation to prioritize resource extraction and profit maximization. California's gold rush is a relatively recent example of the same phenomenon. My pet theory is that when you do this on a continental scale, you end up with a culture that defaults to thinking of economic inputs as infinite, and even if they're not, to maximizing output for as long as possible and then moving on. It's slash-and-burn agriculture's mentality (with a side dose of captive labor) but on an industrial-technological scale. Fast-forward to the present, and there's an awareness that the civilizational free lunch is over, resources and livable territory are finite, and pollution has a nasty habit of ending up somewhere, but where it's still profitable to do business with the attitude described above. A lot of the bitterness in contemporary politics is due to the economic calculus being increasingly obvious thanks to widespread availability of scientific data and network infrastructure. Incumbents and wannabes whose economic interests/preferences tend toward extraction of resources or rents cannot publicly admit the validity of data about the downsides of their economic activity, because then they would also have to admit that they simply don't care and prefer making money in the short term to any sort of sustainability in the long term. Though numerous, they are too few in number to sustain such a position in face of broad opposition, so they maintain a set of policy arguments (and a polity) based around different but more emollient axioms. The more questionable or untenable those axioms, the more fervently they must be upheld, to maintain the support of their polity. In the US, the hardline extraction position has a significant overlap with Chrisitan Nationalism, a belief strongly held by ~10% of the population and accepted/supported by another ~20%. The CN position, when you get down to it, is that mankind was meant to exert total dominion over the Earth by divine fiat, and that in the not-too distant future the divine power will return and re-establish itself on earth following a period of apocalyptic upheaval.
AwaAwa 4y ago
If you actually looked at actions, you would see that Canada exploits its people vastly more than they exploit any of the resources that exist here. Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink. If you were to look at the details, I do not doubt that it would be the same in Europe. Please don't think that any of the 'developed' countries are holier-than-US.
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  Carbon and environmental externalities get displaced along with the manufacturing/industrial base. If you buy "stuff", you participate in the exploitation of nature.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink. 1. "Addition of a carbon" tax is highly misleading because it was enacted almost half a decade ago, and while there was an increase in carbon taxes during an inflationary period, that was scheduled years before.[1] 2. Dropping carbon (or similar) taxes to fight inflation is terrible policy. It's untargeted, benefits rich people more (the more gas you use the more you benefit), and encourages more consumption by lowering prices. If you want to provide relief, targeted subsidies work far better. 3. Carbon in the atmosphere is fungible so whether there are trees or not in your country is irrelevant. If your country is pumping 20 tons (or whatever) of carbon into the air, that's still 20 tons of carbon that's heating the atmosphere, or 20 tons that a developing country can no longer emit. 4. Forests are "carbon sinks" in the sense that if you keep them around you'll keep a lot of co2 from entering the atmosphere, but mature forests don't suck much carbon out of the atmosphere (on net). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:_Updated_federal_carbon_price,_reaching_$170_in_2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...
rbetts 4y ago
> ofc but Europe or Canada etc. I think the size and heterogeneity of the US is under-appreciated. Canada is a 1/10th the population of the US. Europeans are more likely to identify as Germans, Italians, etc. and see to their national interests before those of the EU as a whole. The US is the 3rd most populous country after China, India - ahead of Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil... And the 4th largest by landmass after Russia, Canada, and China.
luvItorLvit 4y ago
[dead]

advantager 4y ago

And minerals and petroluem

halfdan 4y ago

I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Arabia’s oil it will eventually stop being a sustainable source for the economy. Alaskan fisheries collapsing, rivers that support water hungry crops in the desert running dry might be first indicators of many that things are collapsing.

frozenport 4y ago
The value of some large tech companies is orders of magnitude above the entire Alaska fishery. The US’s wealth is in it’s people not it’s fisheries.
- Jensson 4y ago
  I think they meant the political climate in USA where corporate profits is the top of every political agenda, that helps all companies and not just Alaskan fisheries. If the government listened more to workers then USA probably wouldn't be as dominant as it is.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    On the other hand, the servers at restaurants in SF make more than most software engineers in Western Europe now. So probably good to focus a little more on economic growth.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    I don't think so necessarily, the US is still a huge, solid market market. If anything, I think it could be even richer and more powerful if more its populace were lifted from poverty.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Aye, about 2.5% of it's people
MSFT_Edging 4y ago
Huh, its almost like infinite growth is impossible in our context of the natural world. Who would have thought spreadsheets and magic market numbers had little material connection to the resources extracted to extrapolate those numbers.
- gretch 4y ago
  Well yeah, obviously _infinite_ growth is not possible given the laws of physics. But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels. For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet. We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
  - secstate 4y ago
    While you're not technically wrong, the idea of net-zero sources of energy does not address what happens when you start concentrating "free energy" in new places. Fish farms are ecologically monstrosities in most places they exist. Electricity is only one input, fresh water is another, and we haven't figured out where to get that much fresh water for free yet. In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
    - greedo 4y ago
      Almost all our agriculture AND aquaculture are ecological monstrosities because we don't make the producers pay for externalities.
- kiba 4y ago
  Eh, only within the current context of society and technology. For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet. The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.

hyperbovine 4y ago

> the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens. At the expense of *most* of its citizens. I know people who make a shocking amount of money fishing in Alaska every summer. The problem with the US is that it always prioritizes a few of its citizens getting rich, to the diffuse and often intangible detriment of the rest of us.

notch898a 4y ago
I worked in Alaska (fishing trawler). Most the people there are not making a "shocking" amount of money. It's basically minimum wage plus overtime (granted a shit ton of it) for people working in processing or the lowest positions onboard the vessel. A good representation of the people I found were Native Alaskans, immigrants, or felons who were attracted to the job because it was one of the damn few available to them. It was brutal work to eke out a basic existence.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I feel like I've been conned by Mike Rowe - I was under the impression that it was brutal work that at least paid pretty well. On the boats at least.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - etc-hosts 4y ago
    https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koch-backed-working-man-affectation-fa52e0e8d2e3 https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koc...
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  In the Netherlands the fishing industry has basically evaporated to less than 1% of GDP. But the loss of jobs has been amply compensated in other sectors.

Retric 4y ago

The US being one of the largest countries/empires to ever exist doesn’t have much competition to be the largest economy. Per capita we’re still doing ok but far from #1.

Armisael16 4y ago
The US is top 10 in PPP gdp per capita, and almost all of the states that are higher up are either tiny oil and gas states (eg Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait) or small states that focus on financial services for much larger areas (Luxembourg and Ireland for the EU, Singapore for the indopacific). Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE. #1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.
- shuckles 4y ago
  Do you know if the petro state per capita figures include the migrant/indentured workers employed there?
  - Armisael16 4y ago
    Per capita figures do include full-time residents, even migrant workers. They do not capture international commuters (most relevant for Luxembourg, which gets something like half its workforce from neighbors).
- Retric 4y ago
  The US economy is more focused on finance and fossil fuel extraction than Ireland, which easily beats the US in terms of PPP per capita. Remove resource extraction and financial services from all economies and the list does look different, but the US’s position is still far from #1. Also, PPP comparisons between countries are rather suspect as costs for housing, food, etc vary widely across the US. There’s plenty of ways to run these numbers but the results are surprisingly arbitrary.

babypuncher 4y ago

We prioritize economic growth over the wellbeing of our citizens. The prevailing thought for decades was that more growth = more prosperity for everyone, but that facade has slowly melted away over the past ~40 years as more and more of that prosperity is funneled down to a small ultra-wealthy subset of the population.

anigbrowl 4y ago

so it must be doing something right Consider the fact that when the US was colonized, the native population was small and had a significant technological disadvantages - also true to some extent for central/South America. That gave the colonists a whole continent for virtually free, whereas in their territories of origin they would have had to compete with large incumbent populations that had similar technology, from weapons to the administrative organs of states. If youg et a huge resource boost you will surely find ways to profit, just as if you received a billion $ to play with. But getting thins for free - especially land - also means you can afford to care less about externalities, because you don't have as many neighbors or you are not jammed as closely together. And so it's easy and natural for people in that situation to prioritize resource extraction and profit maximization. California's gold rush is a relatively recent example of the same phenomenon. My pet theory is that when you do this on a continental scale, you end up with a culture that defaults to thinking of economic inputs as infinite, and even if they're not, to maximizing output for as long as possible and then moving on. It's slash-and-burn agriculture's mentality (with a side dose of captive labor) but on an industrial-technological scale. Fast-forward to the present, and there's an awareness that the civilizational free lunch is over, resources and livable territory are finite, and pollution has a nasty habit of ending up somewhere, but where it's still profitable to do business with the attitude described above. A lot of the bitterness in contemporary politics is due to the economic calculus being increasingly obvious thanks to widespread availability of scientific data and network infrastructure. Incumbents and wannabes whose economic interests/preferences tend toward extraction of resources or rents cannot publicly admit the validity of data about the downsides of their economic activity, because then they would also have to admit that they simply don't care and prefer making money in the short term to any sort of sustainability in the long term. Though numerous, they are too few in number to sustain such a position in face of broad opposition, so they maintain a set of policy arguments (and a polity) based around different but more emollient axioms. The more questionable or untenable those axioms, the more fervently they must be upheld, to maintain the support of their polity. In the US, the hardline extraction position has a significant overlap with Chrisitan Nationalism, a belief strongly held by ~10% of the population and accepted/supported by another ~20%. The CN position, when you get down to it, is that mankind was meant to exert total dominion over the Earth by divine fiat, and that in the not-too distant future the divine power will return and re-establish itself on earth following a period of apocalyptic upheaval.

AwaAwa 4y ago

If you actually looked at actions, you would see that Canada exploits its people vastly more than they exploit any of the resources that exist here. Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink. If you were to look at the details, I do not doubt that it would be the same in Europe. Please don't think that any of the 'developed' countries are holier-than-US.

scottiebarnes 4y ago
Carbon and environmental externalities get displaced along with the manufacturing/industrial base. If you buy "stuff", you participate in the exploitation of nature.
gruez 4y ago
>Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink. 1. "Addition of a carbon" tax is highly misleading because it was enacted almost half a decade ago, and while there was an increase in carbon taxes during an inflationary period, that was scheduled years before.[1] 2. Dropping carbon (or similar) taxes to fight inflation is terrible policy. It's untargeted, benefits rich people more (the more gas you use the more you benefit), and encourages more consumption by lowering prices. If you want to provide relief, targeted subsidies work far better. 3. Carbon in the atmosphere is fungible so whether there are trees or not in your country is irrelevant. If your country is pumping 20 tons (or whatever) of carbon into the air, that's still 20 tons of carbon that's heating the atmosphere, or 20 tons that a developing country can no longer emit. 4. Forests are "carbon sinks" in the sense that if you keep them around you'll keep a lot of co2 from entering the atmosphere, but mature forests don't suck much carbon out of the atmosphere (on net). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:_Updated_federal_carbon_price,_reaching_$170_in_2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...

rbetts 4y ago

> ofc but Europe or Canada etc. I think the size and heterogeneity of the US is under-appreciated. Canada is a 1/10th the population of the US. Europeans are more likely to identify as Germans, Italians, etc. and see to their national interests before those of the EU as a whole. The US is the 3rd most populous country after China, India - ahead of Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil... And the 4th largest by landmass after Russia, Canada, and China.

luvItorLvit 4y ago

[dead]