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…
Define “real”. If I replaced your spreadsheet with a bunch of Python scripts, vastly improving your productivity, and you paid me for it, did something “real” get created in the process?
That doesn't explain the fertilizer usage very well, and from what I understand the story with ag is improvements in efficiency.
Agriculture is mostly down to glyphosate resistance, i.e. GMOs. If you can spray a field with glyphosate, you don't need to till at the start of the season. Tilling has huge externalities, both the carbon emitted from the powerful plow used, and also the runoff from the disturbed soil. That runoff, which can cause all sorts of contamination, algal blooms, etc., is also leeching needed nutrients from the soil. If you…
Coupled with decreasing acreage for a given yield, that might be an ok trade off.
Some people say growth can't happen forever, and all growth comes at environmental cost, but that simply isn't true. I can create digital goods and services which people buy, and this increases GDP, and it doesn't hurt the environment and is indeed economic growth in the realest sense. I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment.
This is incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs. > I can create digital goods and services which people buy Your digital goods and services require physical machines to run on. These machines are made of physical materials, including some rare earth minerals that are costly to extract. These machines require energy to run, which also requires material inputs. > I can even give massages all day, and…
that is a shortsighted reading. OP's job could have shifted from e.g. "driving a heavy truck all day for my plate of food" to running a program on a computer which generates only a miniscule fraction of the emissions. As such , the economy overall has become "greener" for equal benefit.
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.
Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?
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…
In the EU, shops are required to display the price per , i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.
There used to be an even more drastic law proscribing certain sizes and disallowing all others. Flour would only be available in 500g and 1kg bags, for example. They got rid of it, possibly because they got sick of people making fun of EU regulations (that's what happened with the famous banana ratings)
This is incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs. > I can create digital goods and services which people buy Your digital goods and services require physical machines to run on. These machines are made of physical materials, including some rare earth minerals that are costly to extract. These machines require energy to run, which also requires material inputs. > I can even give massages all day, and…
> This is simply incorrect. Every economic output requires material inputs...There is simply no such thing as "immaterial" economic production. Parent post was talking about marginal cost of production. E.g. where once we'd buy servers to run services on, we now share servers rented "by the cycle" from providers who amortize the cost over many users. Idle servers can be running at-the-moment economically valuable cod…
i'm partial to the labor theory of value, not for pricing (which is better modeled with marginalism, as you speak to), but for an intrinsic value by which we can evaluate how well a particular market might be working. a well-functioning market should tend toward the intrinsic (labor) value of a good (if, for example, relevant information is widely available and known, competitors can easily enter and exit, distortions are minimized, etc.).
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.
Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?
It still seems purely disingenuous to package them deceptively to appear to be the same quantity.
It really only makes sense to understand the world economy as a whole. On this scale, consumption (e.g. steel production or oil consumption) continue to grow [1,2]. Americans are in the fortunate position of selling services (e.g. finance, advertising, information management) and consuming finished products from the rest of the world, but the American economy should not be considered a closed system.
Very large scale, just not in the exact form GP is describing; instead, farmers drop stationary internet-connected sensors all over their fields, their sampling equipment GPS-tags results from every core sample, and tractors have computer-controlled equipment to feed location and quantity information to chemical dispensers. See e.g. https://home.agrian.com/what-we-do/ for a company that manages this process.
I am not at all denying the benefits of technology, or that companies are working in it, but I am skeptical of how widespread it is right now. Therefore, I would want to see some numbers to verify such a claim.