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My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the u

• turnsout 3y ago
  Came here to post exactly this. If it’s just about the amount of dollars in the world economy adjusted for inflation, then it’s just a graph of inflation and population growth. Despite the “size of the economy,” skyrocketing, peoples’ lives are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.
  • duped 3y ago
    You can't argue that last point and be taken seriously.
    • mejutoco 3y ago
      It depends on how much lifting the word fundamentally is doing. On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. On the other extreme we have tik tok so the times are fundamentally different.
      • konschubert 3y ago
        We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon.
        • turnsout 3y ago
          In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air travel" and feel just as smug. Jets and the moon landing are cool, but they happened closer to 1923 than 2023.
          • konschubert 3y ago
            I am not feeling smug, I am saying that there has been progress in the past 100 years.
            • turnsout 3y ago
              The point is not that there hasn’t been progress. The point is that the alleged explosion of the economy has not fundamentally changed society, which seems to run counter to OP’s point. I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. In 1923, there were people in Queens who took the train into Manhattan to work at a pharmacy, saving up to buy a radio. Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. The economy is “bigger” but thanks to inflation, does it matter? So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming.
              • mlyle 3y ago
                > I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. Average hours worked per week was about 25% more than today, with much more of your earnings going to necessity. Your odds of surviving from 18 to retirement age were roughly 50-50. You might not expect to be able to afford to actually retire depending upon your occupation. > Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. A cheap radio in 1923 cost far more than a cheap laptop today. Even more so if we compare to typical wages, and even more so if we compare to disposable income. > So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming. Resource intensity per person is far higher than in 1923. See the graph on page 3 of https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf
      • turnsout 3y ago
        Yeah, I guess I'm thinking: although we have the internet (neat!), most of western society is still organized around getting educated, getting a job and working for a living. It was not always this way, and if the OP was correct, we might expect that 100 years of explosive growth would have dramatically reshaped the structure of society. Basically, it hasn't. In 1923, you might have supported your family by working in a factory putting buttons on coats. Today, you might work in an office putting buttons on webpages. We have not descended back into feudalism; technology hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
        • stanski 3y ago
          Interesting that you are comparing a 1923 factory job to one in web development. It's a very delightful stretch of the imagination to put those two in the same sentence.
          • turnsout 3y ago
            As someone who has done both parts assembly and web dev, I assure you they are not worlds apart.
            • ben_w 3y ago
              I've also done both. Factory (making HVAC) had a truck-sized door open to the elements at all times. And workplace health and safety has changed a lot since 1923, like you're no longer supposed to use bare hands when threading synthetic wool through a mix of acid and formaldehyde: https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E
      • wussboy 3y ago
        > On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die I think you could probably back that one up earlier than "100 years ago".
      • II2II 3y ago
        > On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. Yet birth can involve medical procedures to protect the life of both child and mother. When and how often we choose to have children is different. We don't need to have as many children (indeed, it is undesirable to have as many children) because of that last point, how and when we die. While the causes of death to the body may be the same, the distribution of those causes is different since we tend to live to an older age. About 10 years ago, I went to an abandoned cemetary in a remote community. It was quite tragic simply seeing the distribution of those deaths. A great many were infants. A great many more were teens and young adults. Then there were the elders. While we still have deaths at all ages, we don't have as many people dying so young because the in between things, the factors in people's lives that cause them to die at a young age, are not a part of our lives. We must be careful about over generalizations and trivializing the challenges of past eras.
        • mejutoco 3y ago
          I did not trivialize them. I think my tik tok example came accross as sarcastic maybe? We can replace it with modern medicine and half the comments would agree with the interpretation. My whole point is it really depends on the interpretation of fundamentally. I am not advocating for any interpretation in particular. I thought it was completely uncontroversial. It is the old topic of Parmenides (nothing changes) or Heraclitus (everything is in permanent change).
      • johnnyworker 3y ago
        It's not doing any lifting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word As for changes: > For biodiversity loss, the estimated current boundary level of >100 extinctions per million species-years exceeds the space available in the figure. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m.pdf https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m...
    • wizofaus 3y ago
      Depends what perspective you take - we haven't escaped the basic biological limits imposed us by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as a species, even if we've stretched some of them a little. I don't doubt someone from 100 years ago could jump into today's world and adapt reasonable readily (and v/v). But at some point I don't expect that will continue to be true, esp. once we start messing around with our genetic makeup. Even the food we consume isn't so radically different to that from 100 years ago, but again, not hard to imagine some sort of future where our bodily energy supply becomes quite unrecognisable from what it is today.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Ultimately, even the amount of matter/energy you need to store a single instance of a number representing the sum of all dollars in the ever-growing economy, will exceed the capacity of observable universe...
• rewmie 3y ago
  > Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing. I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention recessions and outright deflations.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• gjm11 3y ago
  I think the claims in the piece are fairly robust to changes in the definition of economic growth. That is: for any reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth", etc., it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while, and (2) monstrously unlikely that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", can continue to grow at a few percent per year on average for, say, the next 10k years. (Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of per atom in the galaxy as we currently have in total.) So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something very radical would have to change. (We discover how to teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this galaxy. It turns out that humans really are immaterial souls that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of level of radical-ness.) Hence, either the growth we are all used to will have to slow dramatically, or some other radical change will have to happen, or both. None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would invalidate the argument. (When people talk about economic growth, they never mean growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly. They never mean mere population increase, independent of the wealth of that population. That would be silly.)
  • Supermancho 3y ago
    > it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while, It's not clear at all and I certainly don't think that's the case, personally. Dollar numbers went up, population went up (barely - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...). Wealth was extracted and concentrated, not necessarily grown. The wealth was extracted from more primitive foreign economies as the poor of the US became less attractive for labor. The number of fabs/factories that moved out the US is a telling factor.
    • 3y ago
• thomaslord 3y ago
  I imagine that economists probably correct for inflation when putting this data together. I can't speak for these graphs 100%, but I think the real issue we're talking about here is not money or people but resources. Resources can be roughly mapped to people, with the confounding factor that each person consumes a different level of resources. As we approach the resource limits of our planet (and potentially nearby planets) that confounding factor becomes less relevant, because we eventually won't have enough resources available for anyone to consume more than they strictly require to stay alive.
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  GDP measures the production of a country. It’s inflation-adjusted (as compared to nominal GDP, which goes up when inflation is high). This is just the worldwide version of GDP.
• Sniffnoy 3y ago
  > My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all. This is false. He links to an explanation of what he means by it in the very first footnote. (That link points here, btw: https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth/ https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth/ )
• irrational 3y ago
  > Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children. Except, it isn’t regulating to 2.2, is it? Many countries are already well below 2.2 and more are falling below that level each year. I assume the population implosion will have some affect on the economy.
  • ptdorf 3y ago
    > population implosion This is the real problem. The planet have resources to sustain 11 billion people. Real wages is consistently declining in the West over the last 50 years, as well incentives to raise children. These economies will stagnate, if not spiral negatively, as less consumers leads to lower financial ability to raise new generations. Not just the west but also China, Japan, South Korea.