Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Automation and AI will increase productivity and leisure time". We got told this in the 70's (the automation part at least), yet seem to be working more and more hours now.
It seems to me that the amount of time people work stays broadly constant, but automation changes what is considered "work". To a farm labourer from 500 years ago, sitting on factory production line attaching two parts together doesn't feel much like work. To a production line worker from 100 years ago, sitting at a computer typing emails to people and going to meetings doesn't feel much like work. To us today, sitti…
Why Economic Growth Will Fall
71–80 of 176 posts
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the mood affiliation of the post - it is in fact the only position on infrastructure that is within the overton window. But I'm citing the graphs, not the mood affiliation. The graphs show a large increase in spending on transit/water infrastructure and a large increase in costs. There is also relatively flat per-capita government investment in structures (a broader category which includes buildings/similar t…
Hang on, are you really pointing to nominal spending increases while hand-waving away that real, per-capita spending is down?
Since 1992, federal spending (in real terms) on transportation/water infrastructure has doubled. State spending has increased by 2.5x. Population has increased 25%.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#73Maybe growth has slowed, not because of an inherent limit of technology, but because we just don't have problems as big as our great-grandparents. The biggest enemy we have left is ourselves. We crave attention more, overeat, and look forward to a retirement where our minds waste away. There are some exciting advances we need to extend the modern world to all of humanity without destroying the planet. But for those o…
GDP/GNP is not a measurement of happiness or standard of living.
>Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
-RFK, Speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence (18 March 1968)
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that is the prevalent scientific opinion We are on a course for a confluence of some major technologies this century which could result in another great leap forward. Anyways i forgot why i dont bother to reply much on this site, got down voted for my above comment yet no indication as to why (is it my comment about working on advertising? its ok that's what I work in too myself have to pay bills somehow, but…
The observable universe is very much finite. (And if speed of light is a barrier, than the observable universe is about the biggest thing we can ever influence.) Sure, there will be lots of nice technology coming over the next century. No doubts about that.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And to add to that, it always baffled me how Malthus's name has always had such a bad reputation. The economics for handling a planet inhabited by 1.5 billion people in the late 1800s (we only reached 2 billion people in 1927) are totally different from the economics of a planet inhabited by 7+ billion people, going on 10. Our resources are finite, no matter how much we try to hide it. I still don't get how Malthus…
The implication is that some sort of population control might be necessary, if psych/soc pressures don't stabilize the population by themselves. Population control is antithetical to western individualistic values, so people reject the premise because one of the potential policy consequences (population control) causes an emotional melt-down. If desire to believe in an abstract principle is strong enough, facts will…
It is to be noted that resource pressure is not the same thing as poverty. A lot of poor regions produce more babies than say people in Manhattan, because people in Manhattan have higher life quality expectation for their kids, than people living in a poor region.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The implication is that some sort of population control might be necessary, if psych/soc pressures don't stabilize the population by themselves. Population control is antithetical to western individualistic values, so people reject the premise because one of the potential policy consequences (population control) causes an emotional melt-down. If desire to believe in an abstract principle is strong enough, facts will…
"if psych/soc pressures don't stabilize the population by themselves." Since at the moment, the evidence strongly suggests that they are, "population control" measures sound even more evil to me than they did before. The problem is that when you go to concretize the abstract question, you end up with the question " Who gets the power to decide who lives and dies?" (or reproduces) and one need not study history for ve…
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#77Maybe growth has slowed, not because of an inherent limit of technology, but because we just don't have problems as big as our great-grandparents. The biggest enemy we have left is ourselves. We crave attention more, overeat, and look forward to a retirement where our minds waste away. There are some exciting advances we need to extend the modern world to all of humanity without destroying the planet. But for those o…
>I keep trying to come up with a reason for how recent advances are improving our lives without increasing GDP. Does anyone have a compelling one? GDP/GNP is not a measurement of happiness or standard of living. >Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It c…
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#78I agree that it's impossible for the rates of economic growth and lifestyle improvements we saw since the late 1800s to continue indefinitely, but the key to growth is investment. And from the late-1800s till the mid-1900s, there were huge government investments made in building new and innovative infrastructure in the US--railroads, the phone network, state universities and K-12 public education, electricity generat…
> Very-low cost higher education was a thing in mid-20th-century America--it was possible to attend your in-state university for a few thousand bucks in today's dollars. I went to a state school in mid 2000's and paid around $1700/sem in-state tuition for full-time course load. Is this still an option?
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/23/charts-just-h...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-18/college-t...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/18/college-tuition-una...
Whether obscure deals or aid make things possible today, I don't know. Put simply: today's students are not looking at the same options as those just a few years ago.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#79I agree that it's impossible for the rates of economic growth and lifestyle improvements we saw since the late 1800s to continue indefinitely, but the key to growth is investment. And from the late-1800s till the mid-1900s, there were huge government investments made in building new and innovative infrastructure in the US--railroads, the phone network, state universities and K-12 public education, electricity generat…
> What happened? As long as we pretend these things are too expensive to invest in, then we're sure to enter a long slow decline. I'll go on the Marxist side of things and say that "quantitative differences have turned out into qualitative ones". What I want to say is that scale matters. Regarding investment in higher-education, it was relatively ok and feasible to give Government subsidies for all the students atten…
1) If we were running out of food it would be reflected in the price. The price of wheat in British pounds has stayed relatively constant for ~800 years, staying within the range of 1-5 pounds per bushel. That's right, we've had inflation in everything but the price of food.
A bushel of wheat contains approximately one month's worth of calories. You used to be able to buy a slave for ~100 pounds. Today that buys about a day's worth of labour, but it still buys the same amount of wheat.
2) It's trivially easy to grow more food per acre than today's farms do. There are probably hundreds of different ways we could do so. We don't do any of them because they are all too expensive. If the price of food rose, those techniques would become viable. For example, we can increase production several orders of magnitude in temperate regions by building greenhouses.
We had a food price spike 5 years ago, the price of wheat went to about $10/bushel, a historically unprecedented level. Farmers responded by farming more intensively, and now the price is below $4/bushel.
3) To a first order approximation, food is created from energy and water. We use raw solar energy for food production because it's the cheapest, but we're reaching a point where it's starting to become feasible to use other forms of energy. Given desalination, our water supply is also only limited by our energy supply. Virtually all of the other secondary inputs to food production are basically transformed energy: diesel, fertilizer, herbicides, et cetera.
And every other element required for food production usually has its prevalence expressed as a percentage of the earth's crust. For example, Potassium is 2.6% of the earth's crust. So for all intents and purposes, unlimited. The energy required to extract the potassium is the limiting factor, not the potassium itself.
Is our world energy supply finite? Yes, but we can expand it using nuclear & solar faster than we can expand the world's population.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#80GDP growth is totally, completely correlated to energy consumption. In the future, energy availability will at best plateau, or more probably decline. GDP growth then will be a blip in a long trend of stability, and steep decline is ahead to fall back to a sustainable level (i.e. entirely from renewable resources, as it was for the past millions of years).
Data speaks for itself, see many article from a physicist here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/03/bbc-questions-in...
See immense resources from a specialized engineer here: http://manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/kaya_...