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That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress"

• thrance 1y ago
  At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.
  • nathan_douglas 1y ago
    This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation. > Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe. > However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off. ...
    • fnord77 1y ago
      Stagnation is environmentally sustainable. Constant creation-destruction cycles will ultimately deplete the environment
      • lanfeust6 1y ago
        Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. Population growth is stagnating and will peak in less than 100 years. Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
        • cassianoleal 1y ago
          > Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. ...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though. Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
          • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
            The metric you’re looking for is energy intensity of GDP [1]. How much energy does each unit of GDP cost. It’s been going down, and it’s lower in rich countries than less developed ones. (Its material counterpart is material intensity of GDP.) [1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
            • cassianoleal 1y ago
              Thanks, that's an interesting reference. I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources. In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
              • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
                > unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage Sure. Link in population and living standards and you start to get a toy model that dispels the notion that all growth must be about consumption. (A palette of iPhones represents growth from mainframes of equal mass and energy consumption.)
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Stagnation is environmentally sustainable We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.
    • mallowdram 1y ago
      There was more likely a series of 2K-4K golden ages diffused across areas globally 5-1K BCE where stagnation wasn't the rule. We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
    • geysersam 1y ago
      > Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth since the end of the 19th century... Am I missing something? How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history? Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history? Straw man. Nobody argues this.
        • geysersam 1y ago
          > production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle > sustained economic growth Is it really such an unreasonable reading?
          • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
            > Is it really such an unreasonable reading? It's reasonable but unnecessarily reductive. Particulalry when TFA is linked above.
  • lanfeust6 1y ago
    The world/universe doesnt last forever either. That does not say much. Unless you have reason to believe technilogical innovation will end in a foreseeable future, growth will not be expected to end in that timeline
  • IAmBroom 1y ago
    Nothing about "sustained" implies "forever". Sustained notes at the symphony don't continue after the audience leaves.
    • creer 1y ago
      More usefully, constantly looking at "forever" while living at human life time scales and engineering and scientific progress time scales - is absurd.
• dkural 1y ago
  There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
  • geysersam 1y ago
    Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
    • IAmBroom 1y ago
      Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do. Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
      • paganel 1y ago
        If you view the humans actually producing stuff as human capital, which many economists have done, then keeping that (human) capital in decent enough form by allowing it to have access to decent enough healthcare is a logical step forward. We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
        • 1oooqooq 1y ago
          nobody does. which is ironic since root for capital is latin for head count.
          • paganel 1y ago
            Gary Becker famously did, a fellow Nobel laureate. Granted, I haven’t kept pace with the latest in economics, it could be that is has become all mathematicised by this point, which is par for the course for this dismal science.
• HSO 1y ago
  This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently) Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor. Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats. Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues. The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today. Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
  • newyankee 1y ago
    May be progress is as simple as making energy very cheap, ensuring a diverse manufacturing capability with most efficient methods while making sure 1 or 2 inputs do not bottleneck you. Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • addcommitpush 1y ago
• yobbo 1y ago
  From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity. But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc. Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food. To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this. So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
  • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. Energy is a critical quantity in multiple subfields of economy including environmental economy where it's a core issue.
    • paganel 1y ago
      There’s also almost the entire economics-related work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From his Wikipedia page: > He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    > To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
• bawolff 1y ago
  Isn't that almost a tautology? Technological progress is often defined as something that increases efficiency. It would be shocking if they weren't connected.