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Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

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Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#281

Post by merpnderp »

take_a_breath wrote: post #251
merpnderp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% growth difference over 100 years is the difference between the per capita income of the US vs Mexico. 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, people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations o…

==people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon== On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?

But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents.

Growth rates matter.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#282

Post by SkyMarshal »

pif wrote: post #206
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…

As bilekas was saying, the one fundamental reason why growth must not be so important is that it cannot continue ad infinitum, thus we will have to learn and cope with that. While you state an important point, the issue of growth having to stop (sooner or later) cannot be ignored.

Growth may eventually stop if humans remain constrained to Earth, but if we can advance to a point where we can mine the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the wealth influx from that will be enough to sustain growth in human society far into the future.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#284

Post by BlueTemplar »

mamon wrote: post #257
BlueTemplar wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the whole issue is how we are running out of mineral/natural/ecological resources. And at an exponential speed.

Progress also means that we can use resources more efficiently, e.g. by recycling them. By limiting progress (and growth) you're also making resource use less eficient, so that we'll run out of them faster.

Jevon's Paradox means that increasing efficiency also increases resource use, and us running out of them faster !

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#285

Post by gumby »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #207
gumby wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems cynical and zero sum to me. By and large the wealthier countries aren’t fighting wars (especially among themselves); in any case they have too much to lose by doing so. The larger economics are reversing to the mean, and smaller economies are patchily catching up. Just as wealthier people (in aggregate) have fewer kids, wealthier countries these days have less reason to right wars. Costa Rica abolished its…

Mutually Assured Destruction certainly changed things... at least for the countries that managed to get in the club !

I'm not sure it did for them, though it certainly did for the non-nuclear countries that ended up being the sites of proxy wars. Small by the reckoning of the big powers but large of course for the victims.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#286

Post by scottlocklin »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #239
scottlocklin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

I work in machine learning: your statement is questionable -it worked fine 20 years ago. DL is nowhere near the "breakthrough" people act like it is; the actual real world applications of it that non mentats might use appear to be the null set. And yeah, I don't count the corporate propaganda material about "autonomous cars" or whatever to be evidence to the contrary.

Genome research: so far a big nothing burger. Zero impacts on average people's daily lives. The entirety of genome research results on the real world seems to be enabling people to eat more sugar without dying.

Space flight reusability: dude, where's my space shuttle? Falcoln 9 isn't reusable when using its actual cargo capacity, and isn't cost effective when it is reusable; no game changer there. Neat trick though and it certainly looked cool.

Environment getting better: citations needed. Doom porn abounds at the very least. Maybe they're all lying about melting polar caps, plastic in the oceans and insane levels of chemicals in the eco system.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#287

Post by pasabagi »

merpnderp wrote: post #281
take_a_breath wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon== On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?

But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents. Growth rates matter.

I don't really understand your post. Did you mean the US's mean income is double that of France's median income? I think[1] that's factually correct. I'm not sure if it's meaningful though.

Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs?

[1] ten minutes on wikipedia.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#288

Post by take_a_breath »

merpnderp wrote: post #281
take_a_breath wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations on the moon== On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?

But that sums up my point. The US's median income is nearly 2x France's mean income. Nearly everyone in the US is earns more than their income percentile equivalent in France, and the vast majority earn multiples of their equivalents. Growth rates matter.

Can you provide a citation for this claim?

I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1]

If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2]

France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#289

Post by nnq »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #234
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 !

Ofc you'll say that "it only got worse" overall bc other things got worse... The digital-virtual economy needs to grow at least 10x, and percentually to at least 95% of the actual economy (physical goods need to be comoditized, and some maybe distribute equally in a pseudo-socialistic way, outside of the economical system - the fight should be for virtual resources). You're not going to see any "things getting better" result yet, we need to go full-speed all-in in this direction, not half-heartedly... Virtual economy has a > 100x growth potential once we have better VR, AR, and later neural interfaces. "Demand" will appear or be manufactured, in the end we'll probably have too much of it.

And tons of services can be created even around the negative consequences of this... all the cornucopia of new diseases mental and physical brought about by excessive virtual consumption will boom into a huge healthcare industry etc. This will also be growth!

And just like "power" can't be real or fake, it either is or isn't, same with resources - as long as there are exchange mechanisms, there's no difference between "real" or "virtual", everything is as real as everything else...

Entities that insist on "old fashion fighting for `real` resources" should be restructured. People rewired / reeducated.

We're on the right path, but yeah, we're maybe only 0.01% of the way there... need to do things faster and harder. Let's not chicken out now and go retro/conservative instead of pushing further! The future is... amazingly incomprehensible! Heil to it!

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#290

Post by weeksie »

cjfd wrote: post #279
duxut_staglatz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so you are agreeing with the comment you said you were disagreeing with (zero sum economy means if someone increases their amount of stuff, someone else must have less stuff, otherwise the amount of stuff would not stay constant). You are making a different point, which is that more stuff does not equal happiness, so we should not care about it.

Your original comment talked about this zero-sum game being a very grim circumstance. It talks about 'plunder' and the like. This is in part what I was commenting about, noting that it is not necessarily a grim thing. The other thing is that your talking about 'stuff' and zero-sum games still sounds a bit off. I am wondering if you are not using the term 'zero sum economy' in one meaning while at the same time evokin…

Oh why not. Normally I don't get involved in these, but since you thought it was me replying to you all along I feel like I should at least reply :)

What I said is not theoretical. We have examples of zero sum economies, in fact that's how the world was everywhere right up until the industrial revolution.

I would urge you to re-read my original comment, since I address the very point you're making about cooperation inside a zero productivity growth environment. You can pay positive sum games! That's great! However any wealth generated by a positive sum game is, by definition, growth. I'm suspicious that it could be enough to matter. Productivity growth is a big deal.

In any case I am not convinced that zero productivity growth + positive sum games are a stable equilibrium.

Perhaps you could have a zero growth society where frequent jubilees reset everybody's wealth at regular intervals, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice and I'm also not sure it wouldn't be just as bloody as a zero sum land rush after the reset. You could do this with very high inflation levels, perhaps. Might make a fun science fiction short.

I'm hoping you give me a generous reading here, since I have neither the time nor inclination to deep-dive on a lot of my points, and I'm afraid I'd be boring as batshit if I did.

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