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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

#241

Post by WalterBright »

tartoran wrote: post #240
WalterBright wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I own a microwave, well not really, the apartment im renting comes with one and in all the years I’ve been here I did not use it even once. If it broke I wouldn’t miss it, I’d probably use the space it occupies more efficiently. Im inferring the point op was making was the price we pay for all these shortcuts and modern lifestyle should make us think well what is essential and do away with the rest.

Using your stove is far more environmentally costly than the microwave.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#242

Post by chii »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #208
gremlinsinc wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

degrowth is a movement currently and a worthy one. Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want. Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead o…

This is the TechShop business model, and they went out of business :/ I think fundamentally the problem is that we have been operating for a long time in an economic environment where "stuff" is relatively cheap, but land and labour close to population centres are relatively expensive. Very often the cost of the "co-ordination labour" required for sharing exceeds the "use value" of the item to the user. Ensuring the…

Not to mention the problem of how to acquire the initial capital to buy/make those equipments?

If it is a contribution model, where each member pays (an equal amount, let's say), then each member is incentivized to over-utilize the equipment to maximize their initial investment. This basically leads to the tragedy of the commons.

Private ownership of capital and equipment aligns the owner and the use of that equipment in a way that community ownership doesn't.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#243

Post by WalterBright »

chongli wrote: post #223
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.

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.

Yes, I know about helium.

> energy sink

The sun can be used to create more fuel. We prefer drilling for fossil fuels because it's cheaper. We know how to make synthetic oil and fuel.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#244

Post by tomc1985 »

WalterBright wrote: post #239
tomc1985 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you believe a microwave involves more pillaging than a gas oven? Let's say a modern oven isn't available. Just a word burning one. Operating one is an all day amount of work (there's little that's romantic about it). They're dangerous, filthy, and the smoke damages your lungs. If people switched to wood ovens the rest of the world's forests would be pillaged (stripped) of all wood. A wood burning stove has a lot o…

Considering that said microwave uses a lot more electronics than said oven and lasts 1/3 to 1/5 as long as one (per your own observations), between the energy consumption (because you are almost certainly not getting your energy from renewable sources) and the increasingly large bill of materials (with the microwave requiring many more exotics) averaged out over total lifespan, I would bet that a microwave and a gas oven are quite competitive over the long-term.

But the microwave is producing more waste as it isn't built to last as long, and the items you cook in it are probably wrapped in chemical-seeping plastic and printed cardboard. So the volume of waste with use is considerably higher as well.

And I'm not even considering electric ovens, which are becoming increasingly mandated.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#245

Post by scoofy »

chongli wrote: post #223
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.

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.

Theoretically, if we achieve fusion, wouldn't fusing hydrogen create unlimited helium?

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#246

Post by Apes »

ekkeke wrote: post #71

Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually m…

Efficiency isn't a silver bullet. There's a limit to free gains from efficiency - you can't go past 100% efficiency, and even at 100% efficiency, you still need to spend energy to do things. It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.

And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.

It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.

The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.

Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#247

Post by ekianjo »

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 question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?

we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#248

Post by dredmorbius »

pyuser583 wrote: post #135
mc32 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an economist and don't pretend to be... For thousands of years of our existence, progress was very slow and sometimes we went in reverse in some regions. Economic growth plus innovation resulted in progress and pulled the 99% who were not wealthy out of utter subsistence poverty over the last few hundred years. Also, we cannot grow forever (unless we figure out how to colonize other planets). We have to figur…

Why can’t we have economic growth forever? Economic growth is fueled largely by innovation. What it is the barrier to perpetual innovation? Will Apple say “Sorry, no more new iPhone versions. All out of ideas?” And all their competitors agree?

Economic growth is fueled largely by innovation.

That's a curiously unsupported hypothesis.

Re: Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end

#249

Post by credit_guy »

chongli wrote: post #223
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.

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.

Once a gas escapes into the atmosphere any gas (apart from O2, N2 and CO2) is irretrievable economocally. Helium happens to leave the planet, but so what?

Helium is continuously produced inside Earth, it is the alpha radiation produced by the decay of Radon. There are natural gas wells that yield up to 10% Helium. If the market demand were there (eg airships), the Helium production could probably go up by a factor of 10 or 100.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Uni...

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