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What is energy, actually? (2011)

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Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#141

Post by chkaloon »

Ma8ee wrote: post #135
pjc50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions. I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth and no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That seems likely to accelerate the lethality of…

> I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth and no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. Is this really true? Aren't you mixing up production growth with production? Imagine I live alone on my small farm in the middle of nowhere. I produce 20 bags of wheat every year. I eat 19 and sa…

Your growing pile of wheat incurs increasing storage and maintenance costs over time. This will be measured as positive growth, and if growth is 0 in the overall system, by definition it needs to be negative in some other locality.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#142

Post by raxxorrax »

friendly_chap wrote: post #69
pjc50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions. I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth and no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That seems likely to accelerate the lethality of…

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. Not sure about the USA, but real inflation is closer to 7-8 percent in Europe, wage growth falling behind. "Unbiased private-sector efforts to calculate the real rate of inflation have yielded a rate of around 7% to 13% per year, depending on the locale — many multiples of the official rate of around 1% per year" https://www.businessinsider.com/if-people-knew-th…

Housing prices in my region are up 33% in 10 years. But I can buy a µC with internal memory, ad converters and countless I/O ports and interfaces for the price of a coke. The coke is actually significantly more expensive.

I like µC, but housing is really great too.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#143

Post by zaroth »

adventured wrote: post #98
new2628 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

It's asset inflation, which is where most of the Fed's inflation (eg many trillions of dollars of overvaluation into the stock market) via artificially low rates has gone since the Clinton and Bush years when they helped to spark the stock market bubble (#1, #2 and now #3) and then the housing bubble that way. Then they openly admitted to intentionally reinflating the housing market with their various market interven…

> Whenever economists claim inflation is low, they're almost always exclusively talking about traditional consumer goods (in which case it is low for the most part). They comically go out of their way to ignore the inflation in housing, healthcare, education and various asset classes.

This is false. The CPI weights the basket of goods that comprise the index based on the types of goods that people actually consume, which includes housing (either in the form of rent or mortgage payments), energy, as well as food and consumer goods. It adjusts for consumption patterns monthly, and re-weights the entire index every 2 years.

The BLS surveys rental prices as well as calculating something called “owner equivalent rent” for owner-occupied housing.

> The OER and Rent indexes have the largest weights of the 211 item categories (item strata) that comprise the CPI market basket. As of December 2008 their shares of the total weight (their relative importances) in the CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), were 24.433 percent and 5.957 percent, respectively.

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#144

Post by Ma8ee »

mikl wrote: post #139

Funny how it’s always private spending that’s being targeted by the people who want us to become poorer to save the environment. And yes, becoming poorer is what giving up on GDP growth means for most of us, since the population is growing. How about we started cutting the fat in the public sector? All that debt-fuelled overspending western governments engage in has a massive climate impact.

Yes! I think it is a no-brainer that we immediately cut all defense spending to a small fraction to what it is now. If we do, we can decrease the total public spending and at the same time provide good education and health services to everyone.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#145

Post by pjc50 »

new2628 wrote: post #83
pjc50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions. I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth and no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That seems likely to accelerate the lethality of…

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

There's a real discussion to be had here, but we have to be careful not to move the labels too much. The economics term for differential inflation in various goods is "Baumol cost disease": https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/4/15547364/baumol-cost-...

Tremendous graph there.

Basically, services that have to be provided by western labour in the west have got much more expensive, while goods that can be imported have got much cheaper.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#146

Post by pixl97 »

TwoHeadedBeast wrote: post #133
syshum wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent, Food, Gas, Utilities are the biggest drivers for personal cost of living increases, these do not have price cuts due to technology. All 4 of the big household expenses are increasing at a rate of 7-20% depending on where you live

Where are food prices going up? I can't say I've noticed it where I live.

Make sure your package sizes aren't getting smaller. 12oz cans are 10.5oz cans in most places now. Also in commodity foods, research if the government has increased subsidies to farms so the price stays the same for the end user.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#147

Post by pixl97 »

MaupitiBlue wrote: post #126
deergomoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long been of the opinion that the public trading of companies is directly responsible for much of the social injustice we see in the West. As soon as there's a fiduciary duty to maximise ROI, morals go out the window. If you as an officer resist, the collective of shareholders will replace you with someone who will make more money. There's a dissolution of responsibility that comes with the distributed nature of…

> As soon as there's a fiduciary duty to maximise ROI ... Your premise is wrong. As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." ( BURWELL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC. )

And yet these corporations behave as if it is the law.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#148

Post by Ma8ee »

imtringued wrote: post #105
tyzerdak wrote: post #3

I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas) If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always have not enough stuff...

House hold energy use is pretty much insignificant except in locations where the AC runs all day.

Or where we have to heat the house most of the year. I think there's a small part of all the houses that requires neither heating or cooling.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#149

Post by vixen99 »

mrpopo wrote: post #118
saint_fiasco wrote: post #106

That's easy to say from the First World, where they already traded our (global) environment for (local) gains. But what are the people in poor countries supposed to do? Just stay poor forever?

The problem of excessive energy consumption isn't caused by the people in poor countries though.

And who defines excessive? If you happen to be talking about CO2 emissions, the level in the UK (1% of total emissions) has been reduced to that last experienced in 1890. Aside from CO2 what's the problem with energy consumption in itself? There are plenty of people in the UK who have a financial problem in keeping warm in the winter. I see a figure of 4 million from 2016. That's not at all likely to get smaller as renewables push up from providing 22% (inc. non carbon) of the energy demand in the UK at present. https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#150

Post by alexnewman »

It is ludicrous how few economists are willing to take thermodynamics as a limiting theory to the economy when it's so critical in finance and science.

Not as crazy as the fact ISLM doesn't capture private debt, but still a huge problem

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