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Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

nytimes.com

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Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#221

Post by WalterBright »

tomc1985 wrote: post #218
WalterBright wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave. Everything you and I buy we buy because the value of what we are buying is worth more to us than the…

> More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave. This was the promise. But all we really have today is cost disease. For every microwave the US also has infrastructural costs that are 10x+ that of other countries and a culture that is being increasing…

Do you own a microwave? I bet you do. I bet if it broke you'd buy another one, because you'll find it worth the money. Ditto for your other appliances, like your dishwasher, stove, oven, vacuum cleaner, toilet, shower, phone, etc.

Don't forget the computer you bought to access HackerNews with!

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#222

Post by chii »

WalterBright wrote: post #213
Animats wrote: post #199

Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful. This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side. Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in tha…

We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched. Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms. Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

> Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#223

Post by chongli »

WalterBright wrote: post #213
Animats wrote: post #199

Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful. This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side. Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in tha…

We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched. Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms. Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

Helium can definitely be used up if we keep putting it in balloons and allowing it to escape into space. Radioisotopes are also used up. Sure, we could transmute radioactive waste back into usable uranium or thorium but that would be a big energy sink, negating the primary use for those minerals. Fossil fuels have the same problem.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#224

Post by uhuruity »

pdonis wrote: post #166
uhuruity wrote: post #82

As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progr…

> (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a l…

Right, I agree completely. By 'output' I suppose I meant goods and services that provide utility to humans.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#225

Post by kareemsabri »

chii wrote: post #222
WalterBright wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched. Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms. Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

> Anyone who writes software is creating wealth. this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.

The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree. This has documented by other economists / historians as "bullshit jobs" / "useless jobs". People sending emails all day or influencers obviously depend on mineral extraction to exist, but the direct inputs to their wealth creation are not minerals. You can "implement ideas" with a relatively small footprint.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#226

Post by Schroedingersat »

Animats wrote: post #199

Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful. This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side. Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in tha…

The answer is now. The 2030s is the decade of peak everything. Production of everything has been growing exponentially, but at a cost that is growing fraster.

From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#227

Post by dionidium »

fleddr wrote: post #212
dionidium wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or l…

That's not how it works at all. Say a machine gets installed at work that increases productivity by 20%. In a sane system, you could now work 20% less for the same output, a vast improvement in quality of life. In reality, you might lose your job. Or if you keep it, you'll work the same hours as before. You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity. Meanwhile, cost of living keeps rising.

You probably can't do every job at 20% speed and expect to keep it. If you're a middle manager at a giant corporation, for example, there is no 1-day-per-week option. It's all or nothing. But that's not all jobs. Any freelance work, obviously, fits the bill. As does restaurant work. (In fact, I know a fair number of people who are (at varying levels of awareness) actively enacting this work-less-and-live-on-less strategy, by hopping along a never-ending string of part-time bartending and server positions.)

The great thing about trying to live like it's 1917 in 2022 is that you still have access to all this 2022 technology to make it happen. A software engineer could pretty clearly choose to do the equivalent of 1-day-per-week's worth of work throughout the year by taking on freelance/consulting projects. Most software engineers don't do this for the simple fact that they'd rather work more and make more.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#228

Post by epistasis »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #203
strongpigeon wrote: post #63

What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for. Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun…

I'm not sure increases in efficiency result in increased GDP. To make that as clear as possible - imagine someone created low priced robots tomorrow that could make all your food, entertain you, build you a house etc etc for the one time fee of $100. They were incredibly efficient, consuming $10 worth of energy every year. GDP would fall off a cliff.

And what would people now do with all their free time?

They'd start to build other stuff. GDP would probably go through the roof, because if you measure the value of all that stuff in "old dollars" it would be incredible. And now in "new dollars" it's a tiny amount, but it also frees up human labor to do all sorts of new stuff, and these "new dollars" are so much more valuable.

Money is a tricky social constructed phenomenon. When there's such a shocking big change to technology as you propose, there has to be something to account for the difference in what it can purchase.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#229

Post by kareemsabri »

bnralt wrote: post #175
strongpigeon wrote: post #63

What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for. Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun…

I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and the interviewer doesn't seem interested, opting instead to ask questions about cosmology. It's a bizarre interview. His issue seems to be mostly with overconsumption of resources. But instead of c…

He's saying that growth (GDP) is an absolute measure that is only a sum without any costs. As one economist I can't recall put it "the hero of GDP is a cancer patient going through a costly divorce". GDP measures economic activity, with no consideration of the benefit obtained from that activity.

The interview was pretty bad, I agree. It's not clear what a "steady state economy" would look like, or what measures are held steady.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#230

Post by tomc1985 »

WalterBright wrote: post #221
tomc1985 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave. This was the promise. But all we really have today is cost disease. For every microwave the US also has infrastructural costs that are 10x+ that of other countries and a culture that is being increasing…

Do you own a microwave? I bet you do. I bet if it broke you'd buy another one, because you'll find it worth the money. Ditto for your other appliances, like your dishwasher, stove, oven, vacuum cleaner, toilet, shower, phone, etc. Don't forget the computer you bought to access HackerNews with!

My point is that those things are a red herring. The people peddling this shit peddle a narrative of increased efficiency, better life, and so on, focusing us on these little incremental improvements, while they pillage other parts of the world to bring you these things.

And you very clearly overestimate the need for a microwave. A gas oven, range, or BBQ produces considerably better results for many things for only a 2x or 3x investment of time and effort. I have several friends that have opted not to own a microwave.

Hell, large parts of the world don't have a microwave and they're fine. There's a good chance they are even building our microwaves for us. You know, I would rather we focus our efforts on lifting them up so that they can have their own microwaves and other nice things before I stand in line to buy yet another microwave, because it was made so poorly by microwave makers that cheap out on microwave building.

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