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Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

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Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#121

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

bitxbit wrote: post #81

Growth is good but we are entering an economic environment where countries and companies are growing simply to show growth. It’s inorganic. In the past this type of behavior would result in boom and bust cycles, now the easy money has made it possible for us to go on indefinitely. This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.

"Growth" just means "Wall St gets a positive return". That's all it has ever meant.

When wealth was being more aggressively redistributed this also meant the rest of the US saw some practical benefits. Now that's no longer true, it's just a numbers game for the 1%.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#122

Post by slumdev »

pixl97 wrote: post #111
slumdev wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource This reads like prosperity gospel and law of attraction nonsense rolled together and repackaged for a technical audience. A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth. No technology will change that within my lifetime. If there are no physics-redefining advances in nuclear fusion and/or nuclear fission, m…

>A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth. Eh, that's because you, like most of humanity, like to hide 99% of the cost. What is the cost of pollution? What is the cost of environmental destruction? Once you destroy a habitat on earth, there is no more cost associated with it, it's just gone and no amount of money can ever bring it back.

You're responding to something I didn't write. You have an obvious great respect for the environment. I do, too.

Mining asteroids and colonizing other planets will do more to destroy Earth's environment than just building nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro, and improving battery technology without leaving this planet.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#123

Post by Kaiyou »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #97
shaftoe wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see much evil to handicapping the entire human race?

You don't see much evil in the absence of strategic intelligence required to avoid terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable?

Evil needs agency, so no, I don't see evil in the absence of something.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#124

Post by jrimbault »

novalis78 wrote: post #33

It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.

Calculate what 2% growth per year means after say 5000 years. What implications this has. It means everything beyond the visible universe has been consumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

This problem is weirdly everywhere. Especially in software, this should be understood. We can't have exponential anything, it's just reckless.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#125

Post by Bjartr »

logicchains wrote: post #87
b0rsuk wrote: post #28

Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for fact…

>you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).

Why is it a given that this will show up as GDP growth, even accounting for approximation error?

If I make widget X twice as efficiently and buy fewer resources, isn't that a GDP loss? Or is there an assumption that I would make twice as many widgets and purchase the same resources AND be able to sell twice as many?

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#126

Post by allendoerfer »

coldtea wrote: post #75
choonway wrote: post #45

But why? The universe is so vast and under-populated it's hard to make a case why growth would be constrained.

We don't live in the universe at large, we live on Earth. Until someone takes us there or shows us how to go practically, and bring stuff back practically (not with e.g. "generation ships" and not with hand-waving about what we could or could not do with "ingenuity" in 100 years), we should not use a mere wish as a permission to not respect the hard present limits. (That's not something said against the idea of space…

To do that, we need more research, more production, better technologies, better energy usage, which turns out to be growth.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#128

Post by vlovich123 »

dwiel wrote: post #117
logicchains wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you would need to continuously improve efficiency and that's hard. You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).

You mean because with cheaper widgets, demand would increase and so monetary value of finished goods and would rise and so GDP as well? Wouldn't GDP actually decrease if the same number of widgets are made, but now for cheaper and so through competition have less "value"?

What if halving the price now makes it possible to start producing a new product not economically feasible before? Hell the phone you use is only possible because of continued minituarization and cost cutting of previous generations’ computers.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#129

Post by anonymou2 »

coldtea wrote: post #70
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…

> 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, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better…

In fact I would say that the belief in perpetual growth is pretty much anti-science. It contradicts the evidence that the earth is a sphere to begin with.

Re: Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

#130

Post by dredmorbius »

novalis78 wrote: post #33

It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.

What are the specific mechanism of ingenuity, innovation and technology?

Is this a general notion, or is there a limited set of dynamics in play?

What are the capabilities and limitations of those dynamics?

What are the role of latent, occult, or unintended consequences? How do those develop with time?

What is progress? What are the goals of progress? What are its limitations?

What are technology traps? What are progress traps?

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