281–290 of 299 posts
cool, what happens when a rival doesn't want to stop growing?
Growth is viral in competition.
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But what is a dollar worth now? A dollar can buy an incredible amount of stuff compared to just before the invention of the technology. GDP accounts for the change in the value of a dollar. So your setup is obscuring what it would mean for GDP.
People aren't buying much of anything in my scenario. The robot does everything you need. No transactions required. GDP only counts transactions. Maybe consider this, sort of the opposite of my fantasy robot - GDP may well rise if the air got so polluted we had to buy fresh oxygen. An entire industry would exist, transactions would occur. Drugs might exist to cure sickness from the dirty air. Or consider cigarettes -…
But in your second scenario, the pollution of the air would have been a big drop in GDP, a ton of negative externalities that were not counted. And improving the air would be of value.
The most convincing flaw about GDP and trade, to me, is about real labor, productive value to society, that has or has not been captured by GDP. For example, child care. Child care by a stay at home parent is not captured by GDP, but child care that is paid for is a massive expense, one that many families can not afford at all. So that is uncompensated labor that should probably be included as part of our GDP. Child care is being produced, but not in exchange with others.
But if we invented magic robots that did everything an individual needed, I don't think that would reduce trade much. We would still be interacting with each other, buying each others' art, trading living locations, etc.
A finite system cannot sustain infinite growth. Not that this summarizes the article, but that'd be a pretty logical statement.
But couldn't a finite system be configured and reconfigured in such a large number of ways that to all intents and purposes the possibilities are infinite? What if "growth" is about creating better and better knowledge of how to configure the system in more and more valuable ways?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People aren't buying much of anything in my scenario. The robot does everything you need. No transactions required. GDP only counts transactions. Maybe consider this, sort of the opposite of my fantasy robot - GDP may well rise if the air got so polluted we had to buy fresh oxygen. An entire industry would exist, transactions would occur. Drugs might exist to cure sickness from the dirty air. Or consider cigarettes -…
If you are saying there are weaknesses to measuring GDP, sure, it's kind of a crappy measure. A terrible one. But still a useful one. All models are wrong, etc etc etc. I certainly don't fetishize GDP or assume that people only spend money on positive things for themselves or others. But in your second scenario, the pollution of the air would have been a big drop in GDP, a ton of negative externalities that were not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Economic growth isn’t dependent on a certain amount of mass, energy, or entropy. It is though, you might be making the same mass and energy more efficient on a dollar terms, but there is an upper limit and that upper limit is dictated by entropy. There are only so many things that matters on Earth can do under the current physics. We're not that close but not too far away either.
Ok … I’ll bite … how far away are we?
we have 4 magnitudes to go before our energy consumption match all renewable energy source here on Earth.
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It seems like services, information, tech are all huge contributors to modern growth beyond just "raw physical" goods. Seems like it could have a substantial impact on Earth, especially when you consider innovations. Imagine having high billions-trillions of people and millions working on a given innovation or line of research or whatever.
if we cared about higher levels of innovation or research, we don't need to have a trillion babies. we just need to educate the ones we have already, and give them the opportunity to do that kind of work.
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.
A surprising amount of modern thought falls victim to the trap of only looking at the shock size and not accounting for the likely adjustment duration (I'm especially looking at you environmentalists talking about sea level rise over a century).
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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is true if the change could happen overnight, but in reality that is never what happens. It will take a considerable amount of time to reach this end state where robots are cheap and plentiful. How this will start out is with limited production with high profits on the robots that is eroded over time as production capacity comes online and a stock of robots is built up. This will give the displaced labor time to…
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…
There’s also the mental exercise one can take of can we make GDP -> inf in a constrained system. Of course not. There are limits. Economics assumes no limits on growth. That’s absurd on the surface. Just like I can’t super saturate sugar into a water solution beyond a certain point, I can’t materially transform the material provided by the earth into useful economic production irrespective of the earths limits. That seems pretty much vacuously true.
Hence his point.