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Death by hockey sticks

dothemath.ucsd.edu

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Re: Death by hockey sticks

#131

Post by dane-pgp »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #127
dane-pgp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).

Again. The point is a reductio ad absurdum on exponential growth. Exponential growth in a static environment is impossible. This is provable. With that conclusion ironclad you no longer get to tapdance around the point. Which is that we must end reliance on growth. There are other much sooner limits. Thermal forcing becomes as important as GHG forcing within a century, for example. Similarly you can't assert light wa…

> There are other much sooner limits.

Yes, that's my point. Arguing about the economic problems of the 25th century is at best a toy exercise in sci-fi mathematics/physics, and at worst a dangerous distraction from solving real problems that exist today.

> There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.

This I agree with 100%, and it would have made a much more productive topic for an article.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#132

Post by Schroedingersat »

dane-pgp wrote: post #131
Schroedingersat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again. The point is a reductio ad absurdum on exponential growth. Exponential growth in a static environment is impossible. This is provable. With that conclusion ironclad you no longer get to tapdance around the point. Which is that we must end reliance on growth. There are other much sooner limits. Thermal forcing becomes as important as GHG forcing within a century, for example. Similarly you can't assert light wa…

> There are other much sooner limits. Yes, that's my point. Arguing about the economic problems of the 25th century is at best a toy exercise in sci-fi mathematics/physics, and at worst a dangerous distraction from solving real problems that exist today. > There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some. This I agree with 100%, and it wo…

Then the article isn't for you.

It's for the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand that "line go up will fix everything" is neither possible nor a solution even if it were.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#133

Post by cornel_io »

sdenton4 wrote: post #44
mupra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be gettin…

Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources?

No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite.

Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#134

Post by cornel_io »

Robotbeat wrote: post #115
wongarsu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level. The cluster of reasons for this effect is indeed almost certainly why population levels will level off

And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd cent…

Even with a pessimistic estimate about the rate of progress, fully general AI will be here loooong before population decline decimates the economy, as will good robotics and all the stuff needed to basically put resource gathering and production on autopilot. At that point "on welfare" would easily be the equivalent of living like a millionaire today.

The bigger questions are whether global warming or WW3 will fuck us all before we get there, not to mention the question of whether fully general AI will be its own mega disaster.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#135

Post by dane-pgp »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #132
dane-pgp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are other much sooner limits. Yes, that's my point. Arguing about the economic problems of the 25th century is at best a toy exercise in sci-fi mathematics/physics, and at worst a dangerous distraction from solving real problems that exist today. > There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some. This I agree with 100%, and it wo…

Then the article isn't for you. It's for the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand that "line go up will fix everything" is neither possible nor a solution even if it were.

The people who believe "line go up will fix everything", need an article that doesn't give them false hope that the problems we face won't really become serious until after their lifetime.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#136

Post by Schroedingersat »

dane-pgp wrote: post #135
Schroedingersat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the article isn't for you. It's for the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand that "line go up will fix everything" is neither possible nor a solution even if it were.

The people who believe "line go up will fix everything", need an article that doesn't give them false hope that the problems we face won't really become serious until after their lifetime.

The ocean not boiling isn't 'not serious'. Everything dies long before that point.

If you don't start by eliminating 'line go up forever and big line means space magic will save us' then they tapdance around the same idiotic points as ever about how it's not zero sum and iphone means we all live like kings and then deflect any criticism with banal comments like

> The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)"

We must end growth or physics will end it for us. And if we pick the latter option then the result is not going to be pleasant for anyone. We have about a century (roughly the time people have been trying to sound the alarm on climate change).

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#137

Post by Schroedingersat »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #70

> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before). The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recentl…

> The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.

Land, energy, and other finite resources are zero sum.

Unless the amount of land required to have a good quality of life exponentially decreases then the following holds.

If your system permits me to increase the amount of land I control in direct proportion to the amount of land I control (ie. it is possible to profit).

Your rising tide isn't lifting all boats, it's lifting the superyacht while all the small boats are chained to the bottom.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#138

Post by Robotbeat »

cornel_io wrote: post #134
Robotbeat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd cent…

Even with a pessimistic estimate about the rate of progress, fully general AI will be here loooong before population decline decimates the economy, as will good robotics and all the stuff needed to basically put resource gathering and production on autopilot. At that point "on welfare" would easily be the equivalent of living like a millionaire today. The bigger questions are whether global warming or WW3 will fuck u…

Population decline will be a problem in your lifetime. I’ve become disillusioned with the idea that hyper-automation is just around the corner. Observing a Chrysler assembly plant from almost a century ago, vs our current car assembly plants (wiring harnesses still very stubbornly manual), has tempered my expectations of automation progress, as has the slowing of Moore’s Law and the failure of self-driving-cars to materialize in the last few years.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#139

Post by postkey »

cornel_io wrote: post #133
sdenton4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be gettin…

Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources? No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite. Who knows if Elon is right or you, but…

"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union."

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#140

Post by postkey »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #136
dane-pgp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who believe "line go up will fix everything", need an article that doesn't give them false hope that the problems we face won't really become serious until after their lifetime.

The ocean not boiling isn't 'not serious'. Everything dies long before that point. If you don't start by eliminating 'line go up forever and big line means space magic will save us' then they tapdance around the same idiotic points as ever about how it's not zero sum and iphone means we all live like kings and then deflect any criticism with banal comments like > The analysis also seems to completely miss how the glo…

'Growth' is 'coming to an end'?

"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union."

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...

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