241–250 of 343 posts
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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.
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…
One is simply a decisive first strike, before growth is able to widen the gap too much. Probably effective, but morally questionable.
Another would be to keep growth 'coiled' and let it ramp up quickly if a rival started growing. Morally less troubling, but exactly how one would keep growth in 'reserve' has not been worked out, as everyone wants it to happen sooner than later.
Finally, it might also be possible to stick to one's nongrowing principles and accept a subservient role, while 'locking up' sections of the dominant country's economy and waiting for a mistake - perhaps by monopolising a good or service that the growing economy values beyond reason. Highly moral, but the effectiveness would be the most dependent on outside factors.
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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…
Malthus was proven wrong by productivity gains. England did not starve due to a rising population, but went on to become an industrialized nation. Increased population allows for greater specialization. This only holds true as long as free markets are allowed to operate somewhat unimpeded. Typically the Malthusian position is one that advocates excessive government intervention. When taken to an extreme this can make…
Where do you get the idea that he "advocated excessive government intervention" ? He was instead criticized for his anti-welfare stance ! Or do you think that "educating women" is "excessive government intervention" ?!?
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…
There is a very good essay I came across relating a discussion between a physicist and an economist on the question of neverending economic growth: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
It's worth reading in its entirety regardless of which side one stands on.
I am getting the impression that growth is largely an illusion, because there is also something like inflation. And it also seems that it is mostly the (very) rich that benefit from the growth.
Yes, we can prosperity without growth. — We call that “socialism.”
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…
This is incorrect. If GDP is constant it means that every year the same amount of goods is produced. There can be a new industry in this case. It just means that another industry needs to get smaller. The workers in the other industry can move to the new one and no one is worse for the wear. GDP is the derivative of the amount of goods and not the amount of goods.
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>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".
9,125 pounds of dry feed and 7,300 of drinking water nets you 530lbs of meat.
We're going to stick with corn since it is a better cow-day yield per acre than oats.
- 9,125lbs of corn = more than 16 million kcals.
- 530lbs of 70/30 beef = 798,180 kcals.
That's 20x more calories if you fed the corn to humans than if you process it through a cow's stomach with a magic cow that doesn't exist. In reality it's more 30-40x. A single cow's annual intake can feed more than 20 humans a 2000 kcal diet for a year. If we switched the farmland feeding cows alone over to growing for humans, you could feed 30 billion people if you stick with corn.
Obviously humans can't surive on corn alone, realistically though you could feed 10-20 billion people with that same farmland, use less water, have far less environmental pollution, have less methane emissions, need far less refrigeration, drastically reduce the amount of antibiotics being used, improve soil quality, increase local pollinator populations by not turning square mile after square mile after square mile into the same crop, etc.
The water cattle drink is something like 16.58 million Olympic swimming pools annually, or 41.45 cubic kilometers of water.
Meat really is a luxury and needs to be treated as such.
> 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".
I made no such claim. I removed animal products from 95% of my meals last year. It isn't sustainable and it's creating all sorts of issues for the environment (and people).
Find and run the numbers yourself. Meat has to become a luxury.
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Source for the 1%? World bank data seems to differ: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
I believe OP is saying the difference is equal to, not that the difference is caused by. USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606 Mexico, ditto: $20602 20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6 The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.
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…