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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

#291

Post by roenxi »

philipkglass wrote: post #201
Cybiote wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buckminster Fuller made a similar observation or prediction even earlier, in the late 1930s. He called it ephemeralization, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization , the idea that increasing technological efficiency will allow us to do evermore with less. A possible counter-acting force is Jevon's paradox (a generalized economic form of Wirth's Law) but the linked empirical result suggests ephemeralization is…

The Jevons Paradox [1] is named a "paradox" as it is an unusual, apparently contradictory outcome. It can be considered a special case of the rebound effect [2] where the rebound is greater than 100%. Unlike rebound effects in general, a Jevons Paradox is not a routine outcome of any new technological efficiency gain. It is something that needs to be observed from data rather than assumed. In my experience, the Jevon…

There is a vast pent up global demand for electricity around the world. Africa needs electricity, China needs electricity, India, etc.

The world is changing but at the moment that electricity largely comes from burning fuel. And if it makes sense to mine fuel when the payoff is X, then if still makes sense when the payoff is X + something (as it is when efficiency improves).

It is a very safe assumption that Jevons's paradox applies to electricity consumption, there is no need to show it. Take a look at US coal production [0]. There is no evidence there that energy use from coal will decrease with improved technology. That is 150 years of technological innovation and we're basically seeing a linear uptrend in use. If domestic use levels off there will be exporting. That production is not going to go down without an uneconomic political intervention or literally running out.

Now I'll agree that Jevons's paradox does not apply to everything [1]. But energy in general and electricity in particular it is painfully obvious that there are more potential uses than there are efficiencies in the world. Give me cheap enough electricity and I can do anything; its use will not be suppressed by reducing need for it in specific cases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...

[1] Also my name isn't Bob.

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

#292

Post by dredmorbius »

testuser454 wrote: post #67
doctorpangloss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it occur to you that, like ordinary consumer products, industrial products also oversell their efficacy? There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields. If the question is, how does crop tonnage go up without water and fertilizer use, maybe the answer really is a computer helped people plan better and be less wasteful. Or all the least efficient farme…

"There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields." When my father was in a university geology department in an Agriculturally intensive midwestern state in the 80's, he worked on a few projects with farmers related to water use. One thing he looked into (unrelated to the main research project) was the cost/benefit of ferilizer use. The gist of it was that…

Leibig's Law of the Minimum strikes again.

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

#293

Post by dredmorbius »

ggm wrote: post #268

Moving an economy from real things to services and ideas begs many questions, not the least of which is "what does price even mean" because the cost/price nexus had some meaning with real goods, but has almost no meaning with services and ideas. A perfect cure for age related death is worth so much, it probably has undefined value. A TV show as a bitstream is worth nothing (bits ephemerally have no value), can be inf…

Economic treatment of costs varies, but there are two principle variants.

The mainstream view is that "all costs are opportunity costs", which is to say, the best alternative use of some input. This is probably best further expanded to the notion that an opportunity cost is based on the consumer value received from the use stream defined by the alternative use, which is a bit abstract, but generally tractable.

An alternative, with antecedants to Adam Smith, is that costs are based on the factor inputs to production. The mainstream views these as labour and capital (or increasingly, simply capital), but a more comprehensive view would be for a number of inputs: material, energy, knowledge, capital (itself reserved production from earlier periods), labour, organisational services, and sinks. An early version of this appears in Leo Tolsty's What is to be Done? (1886).

Service and information are distinct from material production (goods, construction, capital) in several regards, but are not fully immune to physical considerations. In particular:

- Services require labour, capital, and energy inputs.

- Services are, in the words of one of the early economists (Smith or Mill as I recall) "immediately extinguished". That is, in the most fundamental sense, services are non-capitalist in that one cannot reserve production of services as capital. (The results of services may be.)

- Information has numerous characteristics which make its pricing virtually completely incompatible with market-based systems as information is a pure public good, in the econonomic sense: nonrivalrous and nonexcludable.

The upshot is that service-and-information economies neither spare us from physical resources, nor are amenable to the management and explanatory concepts that have guided most of the past 200 or so years of economic development.

Also, nit, the question is raised but not begged:

http://begthequestion.info

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

#294

Post by dredmorbius »

jdkee wrote: post #163

A parallel to this concept is that of "decontenting" a product. Nissan did this in the 1980s and 1990s to the Maxima to keep prices in line with the Camry and Accord. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent

Specific references on the Maxima and Nissan's practices?

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

#295

Post by dredmorbius »

jganetsk wrote: post #262

I would like to know how much of American dematerialization is just exporting materialization to China. They make our stuff, we import it. Does that count as materials consumed by Americans? Note that they mention the great reversal starting in 1970. Nixon went to China in 1972.

There's a strong reason to believe it's much of it.

See:

The true raw material footprint of nations

https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.u...

The material footprint of nations http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110

As of 2010, total global per capita energy consumption was rising:

http://i.imgur.com/5hO5Hep.png

Most of the above, plus further discussion:

Economic decoupling? The recent relationship between energy and growth

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economi...

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

#296

Post by pjmorris »

safgasCVS wrote: post #284
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…

'That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth.' - Unfortunately its not quite true! Fractional reserve banking (FRB) as is taught in most econ textbooks and courses is a myth. There's a very nice paper by the bank of england debunking this (Money creation in the modern economy). The idea behind QE and bailing out the banks was to create lending and liquidity in the market largely via…

> The money given to banks didn't result in increased lending but instead went into financial markets buying up assets.

This statement is precisely what I meant by 'put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth.' The trick is that QE took the bad mortgage loans (which are created as you say, loan first, not deposit first) off of the banks hands, and put real Fed-created money in the place of the loans (around 1.5-2T of QE went to mortgage-backed-securities.) That converted the bad loans into good credit, then used in the way you describe.

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

#297

Post by imtringued »

DangitBobby wrote: post #264
pm90 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More anecdotes. While you complain about your Owen, the efficient supply chains built across nations has enabled keeping costs low enough for Americans with stagnating wages to afford a reasonable standard of living.

You can cry anecdotes all you want, but planned obselesence is a highly observed and we'll documented phenomenon. A very cursory Google search will tell you as much. I wonder if the reason wages are stagnating is that the "efficiency" is a result of skimming off the top, and removing much of the value added by removing people from the process. Maybe appliances failing as soon as the warranty expires introduces market…

I don't really believe in planned obsolescence if it isn't enforced by electronics. In the 20th century it was common to use metal for things that we use plastics nowadays. Metal is expensive but lasts longer, plastic is cheap but it breaks easily. If you want to provide a cheap product then metal is out of the question. The end result is that we have too many crappy products but that doesn't mean they have been engineered to fail.

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

#298

Post by imtringued »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or simply reach peak population growth which is a common occurrence on the small scale. With population at a steady state, there is nothing GDP needs to outgrow.

Except interest rates. Things would be nicer if our economy didn't depend on paying back interest with economic growth.

Why would a business need the loan in the first place if it doesn't expect a return?

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

#299

Post by GarvielLoken »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #239
toast0 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting. If this random ice cream[1] is an indication, serving size is half a cup, so a half gallon should provide 16 servings. If you like the flavor, why not buy 16 servings at a time; if you live in a household with four people, that's 4 sittings of ice cream. [1] https://www.target.com/p/breyers-original-ice-cream-natural-...

>You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting. Kinda like how you don't drink a twelve pack in one night?

Maybe you don't

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

#300

Post by magduf »

Namrog84 wrote: post #94
magduf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing. Yeah, but this is a good thing. The labor class is a very strong supporter of the political party that pushes policies w…

They might be getting exactly what they're voting for. But they might not be voting for what they need or want. It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need.

>It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need.

If people are intentionally voting for the opposite of what they actually need, why is this a problem? Who's the arbiter of what the voters "need" anyway? The voters are responsible for determining what they need, and voting for it; if they can't do that, then they're getting what they deserve, right?

Basically, this comes down to an argument of democracy vs. authoritarianism. Should the voters get what they want or vote for, even if it's seemingly not in their best interest? Or should some other party decide what the citizens need and force it on them?

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