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Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

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Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#101

Post by jseliger »

lkrubner wrote: post #32

Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now…

The issue is less wages and more cots, especially of housing. http://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#102

Post by ch4s3 »

lkrubner wrote: post #32

Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now…

Did you read the article? Some of the resources hit peak use in the 1970s. With respect to crops, we're producing double the tonnage we did in 1980 with the same level of water and fertilizer, and greatly diminished acreage. There are also signs that new construction uses fewer materials to produce similar amounts of building.

There are similar indicators for Germany as well, and their wage picture is pretty different.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#103

Post by LoSboccacc »

orthecreedence wrote: post #100
LoSboccacc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) ...but when they do that same thing on earth temperature everyone loses his mind

"Gee, why is there a pool of water on the floor ever since the rain started? Do you think maybe the roof is leaking?" "Don't be silly! Just because there is water dripping from the ceiling doesn't mean there is a leak in the roof. Things just get wet sometimes. I'm sure there's a wonderful explanation besides the roof leaking. No sense in hiring someone to come look at the roof either. That would be a waste of resour…

case in point - did I say I am not believing that climate is changing? but no, as soon as one contest the wild exponential predictions, he gets scourged.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#104

Post by evunveot »

lkrubner wrote: post #32

Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now…

> Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying.

Check out [1] and scroll down to Table A-7 (it's an Excel file). It's the real earnings data (in 2018 dollars), by gender, from 1960 to 2018 (though it's kind of spotty before 1967). What sticks out to me:

* For men (looking at Total Workers), real earnings are currently around 10% higher than they were in the 70s (moving from low-$40K's to recently just past mid-$40K's, with some peaks and valleys along the way). Doesn't sound like much, but...

* For women, earnings have roughly doubled in that timespan

* The number of men in the workforce has increased by almost 50%

* The number of women in the workforce has increased by almost 100%

From a certain perspective, it's kind of amazing that real earnings haven't gone down significantly.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26... (Census report that came out last month)

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#105

Post by uoaei »

Considering how much of the economy is derivatives, options, and futures trading, this isn't exactly a surprise.

I'm no economist but the fact that we're using less of the most fundamental resources available despite a growing population doesn't seem like improving efficiency in aggregate, it just seems like decreasing activity masked by the inflated aggregated metrics about the 'economy'. A lot of money moves around nowadays and relatively little of it is actually put toward something "real", instead being diverted to quant firms' operational costs and their employees' bank accounts.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#106

Post by beckingz »

undershirt wrote: post #85
UK-Al05 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying more for things is also considered growth. Presumably higher quality content

More energy is required to create or obtain higher quality content. Some call this the “energy primacy” of the economy that is often not accounted for when talking about GDP growth—which I suspect is one of the reasons economics has been termed “the dismal science.”

Energy input per unit of GDP is an important metric that economists and environmentalists look at. Same for Co2 output per unit of GDP.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#107

Post by mywittyname »

anon1m0us wrote: post #97
pjmorris wrote: post #96

Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted. There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of i…

The same is true of coffee. A 1 pound coffee can is the same size it always was but now has 10 or 11 ounces of coffee in it.

This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#109

Post by em500 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

From the article: It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves.…

> So economists do the same thing, they take some ratio of numbers that seem to be tracking the 'size' of the economy and then run that trend out 50, 100, 500 years.

Very few academic economists do 30+ year extrapolations, let alone 50, 100, 500. The vast majority of long-term growth macro-economic literature are attempts to explain/model the large observed differences in outcomes in GDP/capita between different countries, and hopefully distill some useful policy advise from that. Forecasting beyond even 5 years or so is a very niche activity in academic economics. (Source: PhD economics and former model builder for pension fund and souvereign wealth funds)

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#110

Post by mywittyname »

chrisco255 wrote: post #17
TeMPOraL wrote: post #14

This reads to me mostly as the US importing more, so the increased material use doesn't show in statistics. The article also mentions increase in use of plastics. One thing I'm curious about though - how come energy use stopped being correlated with economic growth? That's new.

Just a hypothesis but I would guess it's because services and productivity improvements are driving economic growth rather than products.

I bet reoccurring service fees are accounting for an increasing proportion of spending to the average American. The traditional electricity, water, phone, cable, and internet services have largely increased in costs while also expanding to include house cleaning and sub services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Spotify, Patreon, Adobe, Dropbox, Curiosity Stream, etc. And that's not even including other sub services that offer physical goods at inflated prices over retail (butcherbox, stitchfix, wanc, birchbox).

There's just so much shit to subscribe to anymore.

Edit: I forgot, digital-only video games and movie rentals too.

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