331–340 of 350 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful here - the economist's position about a finite world was something the physicist picked. The economist agreed to it early on, probably to try and seem agreeable, but it's not a reasonable concession to make. Space exists, we put things there today, presumably will put more things there in future. So there is no finite world. But let's make the same assumption for a moment. For economic growth [of wealth] t…
1) Space doesn't help you, it only postpones the inevitable. Eventually the ravenous maw of your exponentially growing civilization will run out of stars to harvest, trapped as it is inside a light bubble growing at 1c, its volume expanding with mere cubic growth. 2) You've just relabeled the discussion from "wealth" to "productivity". In any case, scoring some efficiency wins here and there is once again a game with…
When the pair of people in the article were talking about space they meant within the realm of reasonable projection. If your rebuttal to economics is that the field hasn't considered what happens when humanity runs out of galaxies to colonize they'll just chuckle and happily concede the point, because if that's your strongest criticism then for all practical purposes they've won (people will still listen to them because the point you're making is irrelevant in practice).
That's especially true if you make absurd arguments like the survival of the world being at stake because economists don't constantly caveat all their papers with footnotes saying it doesn't apply if humanity reaches the end of the universe. That's itself incredibly silly flat-earther levels of dialogue.
> You've just relabeled the discussion from "wealth" to "productivity".
No I haven't, but this whole thread is sort of proving the point that the term wealth is quite confusing to a lot of people.
We've already seen the economic definition of wealth. How can we obtain more wealth? Because wealth is just everything we do for each other summed up, the most obvious way is to add more people. But people don't work alone, we can increase our output by deploying technology and ideas. Economists call the output scaling of a person "productivity" and it's more or less a function of how much tech that person has access to. A farmer with a tractor is more productive than one with access to only a hoe. Culture and ideas are also a factor but it's mostly tech.
So wealth and productivity (and population size) are deeply related. One is the multiple of the other two:
Wealth = population x productivity
Assume a stable population. Then you are asserting there are limits to productivity due to physics. That may be so, but again, if those limits are hit in 50,000 years then nobody cares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not actually true. The conditions for the formation of coal and oil may likely never happen again because the bacteria to break decompose trees did not exist then but exist now, making oil formation impossible because trees decompose now. Unless they all die out, we won't get any new oil ever.
This nerdbait story is all over the internet but is not true. See https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1517943113 , "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production" Stop burning petroleum and wait long enough and it will re-form just fine.
> Instead, coal accumulation patterns implicate a unique combination of climate and tectonics during Pangea formation.
and I don't know how to determine if those conditions will happen again?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Space doesn't help you, it only postpones the inevitable. Eventually the ravenous maw of your exponentially growing civilization will run out of stars to harvest, trapped as it is inside a light bubble growing at 1c, its volume expanding with mere cubic growth. 2) You've just relabeled the discussion from "wealth" to "productivity". In any case, scoring some efficiency wins here and there is once again a game with…
Yes, very good. If we go hard sci-fi and talk about actually running out of stars in the universe, then I can just counter with some claim that by then we'll all have become inter-dimensional beings, or we'll never exhaust the stars before the next big bang, or that we'll discover that the universe is actually infinite somehow. When the pair of people in the article were talking about space they meant within the real…
> When the pair of people in the article were talking about space they meant within the realm of reasonable projection
Oh good. In that case the reasonable projection is that we'll never leave the solar system, probably barely leave the Earth. You were the one making wild predictions about sustaining infinite growth by colonizing the cosmos, not me.
>That may be so, but again, if those limits are hit in 50,000 years then nobody cares.
50,000? You fail to appreciate the scale of exponential growth. The whole point of the original article about tides, and the discussion between economist and the physicist, and for that matter this entire comment thread, is that exponential growth hits physical limits really quickly - hundreds of years, not tens of thousands.
You keep hopping between "unlimited physical growth is possible because SPACE" and "actually growth doesn't need to be physical to count". I hope we've knocked the first one down. As for the second, I ask for the third and hopefully final time - when everyone's fed and happy and jacked into the Matrix, what's left to grow? What even is "productivity" in that scenario?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economy is measured in money.
Money is itself a measure. Money is a measure of wealth, it is not wealth itself. Much as a ruler is a measure of length, not length itself. The ability to measure 1,000 km does not equate to the capacity to travel 1,000 km. The ability to measure a hectare of land does not equate to the possession of a hectare of land. The ability to measure a year's worth of labour productivity, or industrial output, does not equat…
For most of human history, money was itself physical wealth, or constrained in proportion to physical wealth. Which in turn constrained the maximum value of any good or service it could buy.
Now goods and services can grow as valuable as we ever want them to be. They can even be imaginary. That's how a few thousand smart people at Apple who produce nothing physical can be considered nearly 6x the value of ExxonMobil and the tremendous amounts of land and resources it controls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this, or any other hypothetical "decoupled growth" argument is that, well, it's purely hypothetical. There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies , which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, an…
Conversely the people who argue against growth never have any answers they want to elaborate on. They have "well we can't have endless growth" and that's where the conversation stops. They never want to examine the consequences of that thought (no growth means we're into a zero-sum game) or whether they think we're even plausibly close to the limit (instead they want to have a proxy argument about environmental damag…
I've mentioned numerous specific examples refuting that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399144>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't deny that it's likely an exceedingly had thing to do, to transition, and that it's likely harder the longer you wait, just that when you're dealing with exponential growth that opting out too early is likely disastrous in it's own way. I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some…
One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint . What the country with a higher nominal GDP growth rate does is ... hit that limit sooner rather than later. We've seen countries go through tremendous growth spurts: the UK ~1800 -- 1914; the US ~1870--1970; post-WWII Japan 1945--1990; the "Asian Tigers" of South Korea (particularly cont…
> One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint.
This is an interesting concept, and depending on what we believe fuels growth is obviously true to a greater or lesser extent (mostly greater, in my opinion). It's obvious that resources fuel growth, and different countries have different kinds and amounts of resources, so those eventually being tapped means loss of at least one fuel of growth. Population also fuels growth, but there are obviously limits there (even if people often can't agree on how and when they will express themselves), such as living space and ability to source food.
At the same time, there are things that fuel growth (in this case whether we're talking about GDP or some more holistic metrics of citizen wealth or well-being) such as new technology, whether it be spurred advances in the hard sciences or soft. Political, organizational and social technologies are not to be underestimated here I think. A change on society that causes a marked decrease in psychological problems such as depression, or increase in happiness in some other way, would be immensely important.
In the end though, the technological changes are probably hard to hoard for the benefit of one nation over the other (even if adoption of something that seems extremely beneficial doesn't often happen on short time frames), so the things that cause growth that are limited resources at likely the important thing to focus on. It seems fairly obvious to me that different nations already have different amounts of these resources or the ability to grow them, and will hit those limits at different times.
In the end though, it may not be what matters, as while there are countries of different relative potential, there's also growth through current relative power. Powerful countries can achieve better terms in trade with others by leveraging that power, so the more powerful you are, and the sooner you can bring that power to bear, the more benefit it brings you. In this way, being economically more powerful than others is itself is a form resource to be tapped for more growth.
> ere is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction.
To be clear, my argument is not necessarily to grow as quickly as possible (I think that's obviously non-optimal given the negative repercussions and the unknown time at which growth becomes capped), but to continue to try to leverage resources into growth when still possible as fast as is safe (which is obciously complex and hard to do and a moving target).
In large I think that means countries should keep doing what they're doing. IU also think ecological sustainability should be more emphasized, but I don't think that is antithetical to what I just said. We should attempt to grow as much as we can, but pay close attention to the consequences and try to minimize the negative ones. Hopefully that means we're also paying attention to any eventual slowing of cessation of a lot of growth drivers and planning for what that entails as we near it.
> My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. ... Invest in infrastructure, healthcare ...
That investment is where I would like to see a lot of the growth funneled into. The quicker we grow in ways which do not exacerbate those problems, the more resources we'll have to put towards solving them. Ultimately, in a perfect world that might mean picking the areas of growth that have the most bang-for-the-buck to leverage that towards actual problems for people (because it's easy to abstract this away to countries and just say let's get more people which will drive more growth), to make individuals happier, because otherwise why are we bothering.
That most of these decisions are made by large machines that often work through emergent behavior that is hard to steer is not lost on me, and I understand most my arguments are academic and ivory tower in nature.
Finally, thanks for including a large supplementary comment of sources. I'll be adding them to the stack of things I should read (but unfortunately rarely allow myself time for). I truly appreciate it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is itself a measure. Money is a measure of wealth, it is not wealth itself. Much as a ruler is a measure of length, not length itself. The ability to measure 1,000 km does not equate to the capacity to travel 1,000 km. The ability to measure a hectare of land does not equate to the possession of a hectare of land. The ability to measure a year's worth of labour productivity, or industrial output, does not equat…
Money is a measure now . For most of human history, money was itself physical wealth, or constrained in proportion to physical wealth. Which in turn constrained the maximum value of any good or service it could buy. Now goods and services can grow as valuable as we ever want them to be. They can even be imaginary. That's how a few thousand smart people at Apple who produce nothing physical can be considered nearly 6x…
There are commodity monies, where some underlying commodity serves as money. However that relationship is often symbolic rather than strict. One classic instance is in the 1945 paper "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford, which describes the goods-and-services economy which emerged largely around the "currency" of cigarette packs amongst Allied prisoners within Axis prisoner of war camps during World War II. The paper illustrates both the capabilities and limitations of currencies in effecting trade (a surplus of cigarettes with a surfeit of actual goods ... means there's no effective economy), as well as the dual role of cigarettes as having utility (at least to some prisoners) in addition to their exchange value. Highly worthwhile reading:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133>
I've addressed the nature of money as a commodity grounded in trust in this earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389020>
More generally, I've found it useful to think of money as the commodity of most universal demand. That is, whatever else it is you have, a sufficient quantity of money is preferable. Where fiat or coined money isn't available, this often becomes some commodity: grain, hides, shells, raw gold (or silver or copper), nails, cattle, etc.
William Stanley Jevons identified a properties of money as utility and value, portability, indestructability, homogeneity, divisibility, stability of value, and cognisability. Of those, I differ with him on utility and value, as we have fiat currencies and accounts notations of no intrinsic value themselves, rather utility and value are the inverse of trust in the money-issuing authority. "Seignorage" in specie is then a measure of trust, and fiat currency effectively has infinite trust.
William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange Chapter 5: https://archive.org/details/cu31924013816172>
In your Apple example: what Apple produces is a future stream of profits, and systems which provide utility to purchasers of those systems. Apple is actually a poor choice to illustrate your argument as contrasted with a pure-play software or information provider (say: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or Disney) in that Apple is fundamentally a hardware producer, and their business model is actually predicated on physical products (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro, etc., and increasingly the chips which power those devices: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/>).
The notion that immaterial production is economic is far older than the modern Internet economy. Any service, starting with unskilled labour, is immaterial in a similar sense.
And the value of more abstract economic activity is actually grounded in primary productivity, a distinction that goes back to at least the Physiocrats and Quesnay's Tableau Économique. More recent variants include Clark & Kennessey's multi-sectoral classification:
- Primary Activities: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Mining
- Secondary Activities: Construction; Manufacturing
- Tertiary Activities: Transportation, electric, gas and sanitary services; Wholesale trade; Retail trade
- Quatenary Activities: Finance, insurance, and real estate; Services; Public administration
Zoltan Kenessey "The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Sectors of the Economy" (1987) DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987.tb00680.x. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987....>
Every activity beyond primary is based on the consumer surplus value and energetic potential of the primary activities. Absent ag, forestry, fishing, and mining, you'll have no Apples.
More: https://web.archive.org/web/20230612141005/https://old.reddi...>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> France is estimated to import between 117 and 750Mt of CO2 a year, quite a large error margin… I don't know, if your basis for your opinion is that you googled it and you got some very wide ranging and contradictory results then that seems like a poor foundation to start with. > Why? These exports from China generates GDP in China so it just grow the energy consumption as well as the Chinese GDP, making the ratio f…
> If you are exports were dominated specifically by the use of energy (over say human capital or laxer pollution standards) But nobody ever said that. Chinese exports don't have to be driven by the use of energy to actually consume the energy! Labor cost was the main factor (but not really anymore, and the most labor intensive industries like clothing have long transitioned to even lower-wage countries in South-East…
If you don't have the data that's fine, I was hoping for data!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386474 > Again: I have sources. You? I'm reading this as you don't.
Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399144 >
My question was quite specific: what do you think we should do in the next 5 to 10 years? Apparently you've read widely on this topic! So widely that when asked this question, the only thing you did was throw book titles and author names around and talk about how great they are. Rather then anything about what they say.
I mean presumably all these distinguished luminaries drew some actionable conclusions right? Because you are calling for actionable things to happen - such as?