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This approach is fundamentally flawed. Exponential economic growth can continue as long as economic substitutes can be found. For example, extrapolating the gro

This approach is fundamentally flawed. Exponential economic growth can continue as long as economic substitutes can be found. For example, extrapolating the growth of road transport at the start of the 19th century would have predicted that by the year 2000 we would have so many horses that the entire arable surface of the world would be dedicated to feeding them. Fortunately, substitutes were found and the pasturepocalipse was averted. Economic growth deals with money and things that can be expressed in money. If in the future human contact becomes a highly sought after commodity and people are willing to pay a market price of $1 million for a hand-holding session, then as far as the GDP is concerned, 1$ million of economic value has been created. For another example, a new smartphone delivers without any doubt orders of magnitude more economic utility than a traditional telephone in your home, while requiring a tiny amount of actual physical resources, miles and miles of dedicated copper wire for each subscriber etc. Undoubtedly, there are still some human desires that are quite toxic to our limited planet and can't be virtualized easily - for example, the dream of suburban mcmansions a few billion earthlings share, and continuing to grow mindlessly would wreck a good part of the planet. It's quite a distant problem for all but the most prosperous and dense countries, but we will need to deal with it - "no, you can't have more than one home on each continent". But fundamentally speaking, economic growth is about relative value we place on things not absolute consumption of resources.

Loquebantur 3y ago
It is precisely the point that in reality, the system under consideration is finite. Consequently, you cannot find "economic substitutes" forever, as they are finite and limited themselves. One central restriction here is the limit to pollution, which you cannot help by polluting with different stuff. So long as the economy depends on physical objects, these restrictions apply. And they aren't "in the distance" either, but right around the corner.
- cornholio 3y ago
  > the economy depends on physical objects That's entirely the point, the economy is quickly dematerializing. As the smartphone example shows, we can provide the same service (and in fact, a far superior one) using a tiny fraction of physical resources. Electronic mail and newspapers, online marketplaces, real time video-communication are in every way better, cheaper and environmentally friendlier than their traditional counterparts. So we can generate far more economic output (defined as transactions people are willing to make, for example software licenses, apps etc) using the same physical input.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    No, it's not. The "virtualizable" part of the economy is limited. While it gets digitized, the remaining part continues to grow exponentially, rendering the former irrelevant. The primary problem here is the generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based and all those material products have a very limited lifespan, ending as pollution. What you need is complete recycling, which necessitates to incorporate that goal in the design phase already.
    - cornholio 3y ago
      > generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based The current system is unscalable, sure, but are these fundamental limits that preclude growth? The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets. So we are many, many doublings away from hitting the physical limits on growth, and we can barely comprehend how our society would look like in such a scenario.
      - fluoridation 3y ago
        The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.
        defrost 3y ago
        To be more specific the person you replied to has confused total amount present (of U, etc), with total amount recoverable (at any cost), and not even addressed total amount that is economically feasible (a cost that can be afforded). WRT: "total amount" Elements in suspension in ocean water become increasingly dilute as more of them are removed .. so "in theory" 'all you need to do' is move the entire ocean from one bucket to another and remove what you need as you do so ... (otherwise you are constamtly circling back for diminishing returns). WRT: "recoverable" Then there is the no small matter of exactly how uranium (or other elements) are extracted, by what means and at what efficiency - today it's unclear what the answer for that is at scale. WRT: "economically feasible" Once you have a method, how much can be recovered at a sensible cost .. for less energy than the energy expended for the recovery task, how much gold can you mine for lesss than the value of the gold recovered, etc. It's not feasible to mine all the roadways on the planet to recover all the valuable minerals burnt away in catalytic converter.
mempko 3y ago
You are right but for the wrong reason. This is why measures like GDP are just silly. Because you can have most of the population starving, while posting economic growth. The LtG is measuring growth as resource use. So you are comparing apples to oranges. Who cares if GDP is rising if people are getting more hungry or dying in the streets?
- cornholio 3y ago
  People don't generally starve in countries with high GDP - when they do, it's a distributional problem and a flawed social system at work. If we define GDP as the totality of transactions people are willing to make, then an inflation adjusted growth means that the average citizen will enter more transaction of a higher subjective value. Therefore (again, assuming inflation and the price of basic necessities is controlled for) it stands to reason more of those transactions will be directed towards the basic necessities. So, generally, higher GDP means fewer people starving, with the distributional and inflation caveats mentioned.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
xg15 3y ago
The problem is that in such a world where most economic growth is "virtual", you have to increasingly work with artificial, deliberate scarcity to keep all the virtual goods from losing their value. I.e., you now have to intentionally make the world a progressively shittier place for the majority of the population, just to keep the economy going. You can illustrate this effect with your example of the 1M$ handholding session. That's a shitty world right there in which no one who isn't a millionaire has any chance of human contact. But now suddenly there is a political imperative to maintain this state of affairs: Because should there suddenly appear a movement of people who want to decommodize human contact again ("free hugs" etc), this movement would trigger a risk of economic collapse.

Loquebantur 3y ago

It is precisely the point that in reality, the system under consideration is finite. Consequently, you cannot find "economic substitutes" forever, as they are finite and limited themselves. One central restriction here is the limit to pollution, which you cannot help by polluting with different stuff. So long as the economy depends on physical objects, these restrictions apply. And they aren't "in the distance" either, but right around the corner.

cornholio 3y ago
> the economy depends on physical objects That's entirely the point, the economy is quickly dematerializing. As the smartphone example shows, we can provide the same service (and in fact, a far superior one) using a tiny fraction of physical resources. Electronic mail and newspapers, online marketplaces, real time video-communication are in every way better, cheaper and environmentally friendlier than their traditional counterparts. So we can generate far more economic output (defined as transactions people are willing to make, for example software licenses, apps etc) using the same physical input.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  No, it's not. The "virtualizable" part of the economy is limited. While it gets digitized, the remaining part continues to grow exponentially, rendering the former irrelevant. The primary problem here is the generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based and all those material products have a very limited lifespan, ending as pollution. What you need is complete recycling, which necessitates to incorporate that goal in the design phase already.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    > generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based The current system is unscalable, sure, but are these fundamental limits that preclude growth? The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets. So we are many, many doublings away from hitting the physical limits on growth, and we can barely comprehend how our society would look like in such a scenario.
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.
      - defrost 3y ago
        To be more specific the person you replied to has confused total amount present (of U, etc), with total amount recoverable (at any cost), and not even addressed total amount that is economically feasible (a cost that can be afforded). WRT: "total amount" Elements in suspension in ocean water become increasingly dilute as more of them are removed .. so "in theory" 'all you need to do' is move the entire ocean from one bucket to another and remove what you need as you do so ... (otherwise you are constamtly circling back for diminishing returns). WRT: "recoverable" Then there is the no small matter of exactly how uranium (or other elements) are extracted, by what means and at what efficiency - today it's unclear what the answer for that is at scale. WRT: "economically feasible" Once you have a method, how much can be recovered at a sensible cost .. for less energy than the energy expended for the recovery task, how much gold can you mine for lesss than the value of the gold recovered, etc. It's not feasible to mine all the roadways on the planet to recover all the valuable minerals burnt away in catalytic converter.

mempko 3y ago

You are right but for the wrong reason. This is why measures like GDP are just silly. Because you can have most of the population starving, while posting economic growth. The LtG is measuring growth as resource use. So you are comparing apples to oranges. Who cares if GDP is rising if people are getting more hungry or dying in the streets?

cornholio 3y ago
People don't generally starve in countries with high GDP - when they do, it's a distributional problem and a flawed social system at work. If we define GDP as the totality of transactions people are willing to make, then an inflation adjusted growth means that the average citizen will enter more transaction of a higher subjective value. Therefore (again, assuming inflation and the price of basic necessities is controlled for) it stands to reason more of those transactions will be directed towards the basic necessities. So, generally, higher GDP means fewer people starving, with the distributional and inflation caveats mentioned.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

xg15 3y ago

The problem is that in such a world where most economic growth is "virtual", you have to increasingly work with artificial, deliberate scarcity to keep all the virtual goods from losing their value. I.e., you now have to intentionally make the world a progressively shittier place for the majority of the population, just to keep the economy going. You can illustrate this effect with your example of the 1M$ handholding session. That's a shitty world right there in which no one who isn't a millionaire has any chance of human contact. But now suddenly there is a political imperative to maintain this state of affairs: Because should there suddenly appear a movement of people who want to decommodize human contact again ("free hugs" etc), this movement would trigger a risk of economic collapse.