Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#231

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

modo_mario wrote: post #47

chii wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I think of it is that in order for debt to exist, interest on the debt must be paid. But to pay interest, you must create more value than the debt you incurred, otherwise you'd not have enough to pay the interest! But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But intere…

>But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. Not necessarily. Modern banking systems have created plenty of 'money' out of nowhere.

Yeah, more like "on the other side of someone's deposit, there's X times more debt" - with X being generally allowed to go as high as 20... but the banks routinely break/work around that rule...

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#232

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #24

samdung wrote: post #7

As long as you have short term growth targets (quarterly financial results) you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment. The only possible way is for people to stop buying unwanted stuff just because it is cheap.

> "you cannot get big businesses to reckon with the environment." Well, that's what governments are for. It is the government's role to create regulations which promote the broader, long-term interests of the population and environment in situations where markets fail to do so.

And the issue is that big business can afford to "buy" the government. I don't see any other solution to this than to outlaw big business...

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#233

Post by vkou » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

b0rsuk wrote: post #28

Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for fact…

> Growth is an international arms race.

How do you reconcile the existence of MAD with this?

Proponents of MAD insist that once attained, it makes military conflicts unnecessary - and this justifies the expense and the risk of the world walking a tightrope above nuclear Armageddon.

If I'm not mistaken, either they, or you are wrong about this point.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#234

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #135

This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too: The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to: (1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status go…

ur dumb :p

No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse...

Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#235

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

hx87 wrote: post #198

The more important question is: can we have growth in economic output (which is what we actually want) without growth in economic input (which is purely instrumental)?

Short-term - maybe, though past history isn't exactly positive about that.

Long-term : no, as this would reduce economic input to an arbitrary small fraction of the overall wealth, which anyone would be able to corner. So it's either self-limiting or unstable.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#236

Post by baq » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

thegabriele wrote: post #214

bilekas wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It should last until we get to strong AI or fusion energy, both i believe will have too much an impact to be again in the hands of the fews (perhaps a global war will be in order before). Then, the problem will be about literally physical space on earth.

don't forget about waste heat, we'll get cooked alive in a few hundred years of 3% yoy growth in energy produced

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#237

Post by hliyan » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

b0rsuk wrote: post #28

Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for fact…

A few months ago, I argued that the most realistic way to curb unsustainable growth is to curb inflation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21663922

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#238

Post by baq » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #212

ryanmercer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? It absolutely should. https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought... - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's - 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will t…

> Meat is a luxury man. A luxury. Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need". I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".

decouple food from income, problem solved.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#239

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #203

virgilp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & paci…

Has there been some enormous breakthrough in any of these things "AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing" in the last 20 years? Pretty sure there hasn't been! I mean, Pentiums are faster I guess! Not as different as people seem to think though. Otherwise; nothingburgers for anybody's real world experience. Space flight has arguably gotten worse in the West over the last 20. Environment has gotten o…

AI: has become actually useful over the last 20 years. Of course if you only use it for adtech and arbitrage the world doesn't see much benefit.

genome research: CRISPR etc.

space flight: reusability is a massive game changer. The Falcon 9 once they start reliably catching the fairings is about 90% reusable. The Falcon 9 makes things like constellations of 12,000 satellites feasible. The Starship is planning on 100% reusability which will reduce costs a futher couple of orders of magnitude. Elon is talking about sending 1000 Starships to Mars every 2 years in about a decade, and people are starting to learn that Elon might not be as crazy as people originally thought...

Environment: not so obviously shittier. For example, tree coverage has increased by 7% in the last 35 years. In general local environments in developed countries have gotten a lot cleaner. The global environment on the other hand suffers a massive tragedy of the commons type problem so it overshadows massively local improvements. So yes, you can say the environment has gotten worse, but it isn't "obviously" so.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#240

Post by jffhn » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #23

Cue to a physicists view on this subject (starting from basic termodynamic principles): https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource"

Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.)

The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.