Why Economic Growth Will Fall • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#81

Post by wil421 » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #69

skywhopper wrote: post #24

I 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?

I also went to a 2 year school first and paid around the same.

When I transferred to a 4 year school the tuition doubled to a little over 3k. At the time I wasn't making anything waiting tables so I qualified for the Pell Grant. Graduated a few years older than usually graduates but with 0 student debt.

It's most definitely an option but most students are fine with Student debt. Many people I've met have student debt more than the first house I want to buy.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#82

Post by danbruc » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #26

gggggg11111 wrote: post #7

Considering we live in an infinite universe I do not see why economic growth can not continue even accelerate. Especially seeing that sometime this century we will get cheap space travel (getting there) and AI (getting there) and transition from fossil fuels to renewables and fusion (getting there) Tho' yes seeing how some of our best and brightest are working on how to serve more ads and how to get people spend thei…

I also think that we underestimate the amount of unused resources that we haven't tapped into yet (e.g. planets in our solar systems) and the resources that we might not even know about yet (e.g. new forms of matter or "new" laws of physics). Also, it seems likely that paradigm-shifting technological breakthroughs will continue pushing the boundaries of our growth further out. An interesting read in that respect is "…

Starting with 7.4 billion people in 2016 and a population growth rate of 1 % per year we will reach the carrying capacity of Earth in less than 1400 years - the body heat alone will raise the surface temperature above the boiling point of water.

Once we reach the carrying capacity of Earth - no matter when that is - and decide to move into space we have 2685 more years until we run out of places to live in the Milky Way assuming 400 billion stars and one Earth-like colonizable planet per star.

Unfortunately 2685 years is not nearly enough time to reach all the stars in the Milky Way even if you would be traveling at the speed of light, you could cross just about 2 % in that time.

There are very real limits to the possible growth and we are talking about centuries or a few millennia. With a growth rate of 0.1 % per year one can push that to tens of millennia but that is still the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. And while I used population growth, things of course don't change if you substitute energy consumption per capita.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#83

Post by atrus » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

gggggg11111 wrote: post #74

eru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets assume we develop technology to travel at near light speeds and go mad colonising the universe, what exactly contains us to the observable universe, move 4 light years in another direction and your observable horizon shifts

Except the expansion is happening faster than the speed of light.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c...

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#84

Post by wil421 » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #78

dominotw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

For most cases, no. Tuition rates have skyrocketed since only 10 years ago. 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…

I graduated 3 years ago and what the parent said is definitely still an option. Especially if you transfer in to a larger school after 2 years.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#85

Post by internaut » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:07 PM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #31

skywhopper wrote: post #24

I 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. 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 don't think your point about education makes sense. You want more investment, but then bemoan the fact that it costs mor…

> People are investing in their education at record levels!

They are investing in formal qualifications. Certificates.

As Thiel points out, a university degree has transmogrified from "investment" to "insurance" to "tournament".

The reality is that the previous generation knows jack shit about the environment facing the current generation. Their 'common sense' can be thrown out nearly entirely with few exceptions. In today's environment most of them wouldn't stand a chance.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#86

Post by jamesrom » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

cheriot wrote: post #37

Bill Gates' review of this book takes a techo-optimist view of it. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-Americ... "Most reviews have focused on the “fall” indicated in the title: the last hundred pages or so, in which Gordon predicts that the future won’t live up to the past in terms of economic growth. I strongly disagree with him on that point, as I discuss below. But I did find his historical anal…

Excellent read. Thanks.

Something I've always tried to understand is the value of these digital things. How much would it cost, in 1970, to have a library of all the worlds music? Today it's 10 bucks a month.

How much value do we put on information? What is the value of the bits of information that make up the Wikipedia page "Smallpox vaccine"? How about in 1960? Can you even put a dollar value on it?

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#87

Post by danbruc » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #79

paganel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Malthus's arguments may have made some sense when he made them, the green revolution may have been difficult to predict back then. But any neo-Malthusian arguments don't pass the smell test today. 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'v…

If you increased our energy consumption by 1 % per year, we would all be dead in less than 1000 years because at that point the surface temperature of the Earth would have reached the boiling point of water.

EDIT: In case the down votes are for the numbers. The total emission of an ideal black body with surface area of 510.1 million km² at 373.15 K is 560,791 TW. The world total primary energy supply in 2012 is estimated to have been 155,505 TWh which is 17.75 TW on average. That is a factor of 31,591 from what Earth could radiate into space at 100 °C or 1,041 years of 1 % growth per year.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#88

Post by splintercell » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

georgeecollins wrote: post #56

Thomas Piketty is so important about this because he shows how exceptional America was in that it had plentiful capital in terms of land, so that labor was unusually valuable vs capital when compared to Europe. It shapes American's thinking in a positive way, but we need to acknowledge things have changed. Formerly, almost anyone who was willing to work hard and take a risk could build a homestead. Now the conditions…

> Now the conditions for opportunity are available but more restricted. Restricted, yet it beats rest of the world hands down in terms of opportunities.

When the rest of the world looks at America, they just see a nation which got lucky with land and capital. But the fact is, America had people before it was discovered by the Europeans, and there was no great civilization here unlike almost everywhere else in the world, which leads you to believe that maybe it isn't really all about the geography.

America is a plentiful place where individuals who wanted to achieve something (the 'American way of thinking') they arrived here. This still holds true, and will continue to hold true as long as this American way of thinking remains around.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#89

Post by davidiach » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:23 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #32

skywhopper wrote: post #24

I 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…

You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well?

And I hope you also realize that "natural resources" is not an intrinsic property that some things have, it's just a way of describing things around us and for which we figured out use cases. It's like when someone says that a certain phenomenon is mysterious. That's not a description of the phenomenon itself, it just describes the state of knowledge of the person making the claim. Likewise, the reason gold, iron, oil and wood are "natural resources" is because we figured out stuff to do with them. Worrying about running out of resources is basically worrying that we exhausted all the ways we can rearrange atoms to better achieve our purposes.

Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall

#90

Post by crimsonalucard » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

piaste wrote: post #4

crimsonalucard wrote: post #2

This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…

This is some of the shallowest, most misleading insight I've ever read. "Human achievement will probably reach a limit at some point" is effectively an empty statement. Even if you could take its truth for granted, it is completely useless information. There is zero actionable difference between a limit that doesn't exist, and a limit that is unknowable and unguessable. Your behaviour should stay exactly the same eit…

Your argument applies to science fiction and other works that make grand speculations about the future. The future is not knowable thus it is useless and misleading to speculate according to your argument. Your counter argument is far more shallow and misleading.

Our progress towards the future happens regardless of a limit. So why write science fiction? Why write fiction at all? Because we're human. I speculate, therefore I am.

Either way your argument doesn't address the heart of the matter. Is my speculation correct? Or is it incorrect? You have failed to logically address this argument. On the other hand I have only said that one outcome is far more likely than the other, I have not been definitive about it either.