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Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

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Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#141

Post by weeksie »

bilekas wrote: post #138
weeksie wrote: post #136

The one fundamental reason why growth is so important is that without growth, the economy becomes a zero sum game. In order for you to get more money you must take it from someone else since there is only a fixed amount. A low growth world is one where we plunder each others' wealth, not one were the incentives are aligned with building new industry. That's why productivity increases are so important. Without them, i…

Does what you're saying imply that growth can be perpetual ?

You still need energy inputs, so I'm not sure it does.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#142

Post by harimau777 »

gumby wrote: post #120
harimau777 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the problem is that many resources that people care about are limited: - desirable land - desirable mates - equipment for certain hobbies (e.g. sailboats, machine shops, etc.)

I haven’t heard of much shortage of any of those things in the OECD. If anything there’s a surplus of your third category. What’s desirable about land changes due to fashion even visibly within a human lifespan.

The US certainly has a shortage of desirable land (e.g. land in Manhattan and San Francisco). Even if the details of which land has more demand than supply changes over time, I don't think that changes the fact that at any given time there is a shortage.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#143

Post by mytailorisrich »

nickik wrote: post #57
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resou…

> It's a triangle That is wrong. In fact we have a much larger population, in many ways human life is more sustainable then it ever was and its easily more prosperous then in the past. Just like in the 60s the people over-hyping population growth are just as fundamentally wrong as the people who wanted to force cut of trade and foreign aid to India to force them to adopt population control matters. These same terribl…

We have continuously expanded our use of land and resources.

That fact that forests are expanding in e.g. Europe, a continent that has already been completely devoid of wilderness should not mask what is happening in continents that are 'behind' like Africa, South America, and Asia.

This is the key issue at hand and is driven by population growth coupled with less poverty, and what is causing current climate and environmental issues.

Ignoring this is what is fundamentally dangerous and we can see the effects on the planet right now.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#144

Post by virgilp »

andersonvieira wrote: post #99
coldtea wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better…

You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets. This w…

I largely agree with you, with some amendment:

> The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.

The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow?

The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#145

Post by rbrtl »

Kaiyou wrote: post #123
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see much evil in the absence of strategic intelligence required to avoid terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable?

Evil needs agency, so no, I don't see evil in the absence of something.

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#146

Post by logicchains »

dwiel wrote: post #117
logicchains wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).

You mean because with cheaper widgets, demand would increase and so monetary value of finished goods and would rise and so GDP as well? Wouldn't GDP actually decrease if the same number of widgets are made, but now for cheaper and so through competition have less "value"?

>Wouldn't GDP actually decrease if the same number of widgets are made, but now for cheaper and so through competition have less "value"?

Cheaper doesn't mean less "value". If we have inflation, prices go up but value doesn't increase, and if deflation decreases prices, that doesn't mean a decrease in value. GDP calculations try to account for this, to capture the fact that e.g. a $500 phone today contains a lot more "value" than a $500 phone from 1995.

GDP would hence (ideally) account for the change in value-per-dollar. It would also include whatever new output was made possible by there being more resources left over now due to less being spent to fulfill people's widget needs (i.e. the money now not being spent on widgets will instead be invested or spent on something else).

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#147

Post by raducu »

andersonvieira wrote: post #99
coldtea wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better…

You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets. This w…

I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years. Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years. Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#148

Post by luckylion »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #133

I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc. Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we wo…

> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.

Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"?

The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses.

Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#149

Post by virgilp »

raducu wrote: post #147
andersonvieira wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets. This w…

I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years. Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years. Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, mo…

Do you also mean AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing, etc?

Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#150

Post by raxxorrax »

jrimbault wrote: post #124
novalis78 wrote: post #33

It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.

Calculate what 2% growth per year means after say 5000 years. What implications this has. It means everything beyond the visible universe has been consumed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem This problem is weirdly everywhere. Especially in software, this should be understood. We can't have exponential anything, it's just reckless.

Logistics and communications certainly scale pretty well. Remembering how young the industrial revolution actually is and how many problems we already have, it seems be foolish to keep growth the goal.

Although you would need to differentiate. Growth in resource consumption? Nobody would want that. Growth in wealth? Yes, please...

Maybe logistics and communications had litte effort to keep up with exponential growth, but other sectors certainly seem tired from time to time. It just isn't possible to grow food with exponential efficiency, even if recent developments (last ~200 years would have us believe otherwise).

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