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GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

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Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#41

Post by D-Coder »

codingdave wrote: post #28
a_c_s wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are parents for whom 1/3 of their children die as infants happier than those with children who live to adulthood? (Modern USA infant mortality is less than 0.6%)

Loss and grief are part of life. Your parents will die. Your grandparents as well. You either die young or live long enough to see some of your own generation die before you. If you are really "lucky", you see all of your friends die. Death is a part of life. Everyone hopes that they outlive all their children, but even if you do not, tragedies during your life do not mean that your entire life was unhappy.

We're not measuring this as a binary value happy/unhappy. Not all losses are equal. Your children dying before you is worse than most other losses.

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#42

Post by RobertoG »

tn13 wrote: post #36
RobertoG wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is far for being so white and black. Not all the growth come from free markets. More efficient use of resources and the discovery of new technologies come from improving our knowledge. Sometimes this is done by business, sometimes no. Also, there are economic theories (even mainstream economic theories) that express the view that some kind of redistribution is necessary for keeping the engines of growth wor…

As a free market guy, I don't think free market ideas are anti-redistribution. They are against redistribution through the coercive power of government as moral principle and utilitarian argument. I think private charity is far more effective in helping people in need. The government redistribution is merely a ploy to steal our wealth in the name of fighting poverty. I am totally surprised to see the amount of money…

Redistribution and charity are very different things. Redistribution comes from the idea that societies have goals, and that those goals are better served by thinking about where to spend resources instead of leaving it to blind markets.

I can see that you think of the government as 'them' instead of 'us', instead of something that we do as a society. We differ there.

Also, it worries me that you think (maybe I'm reading you wrong here) that is the spending of money, of all the things, what is the main problem with the war on Iraq.

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#43

Post by littletimmy »

D-Coder wrote: post #41
codingdave wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loss and grief are part of life. Your parents will die. Your grandparents as well. You either die young or live long enough to see some of your own generation die before you. If you are really "lucky", you see all of your friends die. Death is a part of life. Everyone hopes that they outlive all their children, but even if you do not, tragedies during your life do not mean that your entire life was unhappy.

We're not measuring this as a binary value happy/unhappy. Not all losses are equal. Your children dying before you is worse than most other losses.

In our culture. That might not be the case in every culture. Some cultures even practiced infanticide, others practiced child sacrifice. Surely it cannot universally be the worst thing or such practices could never exist.

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#44

Post by phrogdriver »

jdimov10 wrote: post #11
kfk wrote: post #6

And if you ask a person in the 18th century if we could grow GDP 30+ folds while increasing various folds also the world population he would say... you are going to finish all the Earth resources and die before you even get to a tenth of that! It's just to say: 1. productivity is always very misunderstood by people (hence Malthus); 2. poverty is better fought with growth, not re-distribution of wealth

3. Learned people are consistently and dramatically underestimating the capacity of Earth's "limited" resources to support a growing population.

Like all models, incorrect but useful, I think that the most useful model to view "value" and GDP is as a crude approximation of the human input that goes into making something or making it useful. Natural resources are only useful if humans exert effort to extract and refine them, services are only useful if some humans exert effort to save other humans more effort, manufacturing is only useful if the effort exerted is repaid in improved productivity or utility gained, etc. Once you abstract away from monetary units to say that we're all trading units of human effort at varying degrees of efficiency, it's clear that GDP growth and "the ability of limited resources to support a growing population" is dependent on the growth of both the amount and the efficiency of human capital rather than physical resources. I'd take Ehrlich's wager [0] at any point in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#45

Post by golergka »

vox_mollis wrote: post #34
golergka wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you back this statement up, please?

GDP measures vodka purchased by alcoholics; it measures chemotherapy; it measures bombs killing civilians; it measures bubble malinvestments; it measures settlements in police brutality suits; it measures daycare but not caring for your own kids. And most importantly, it measures the velocity at which these things occur.

So?

Isn't a society that can allow itself better alcohol, expensive medicine, better weapons, has more liquid cash, pays more in brutality suits (and pays them at all, to this matter), and spends more on daycare objectivelly better and more well-off than a society that doesn't have these things?

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#46

Post by phrogdriver »

stouset wrote: post #38
jdimov10 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. Learned people are consistently and dramatically underestimating the capacity of Earth's "limited" resources to support a growing population.

The Earth has finite resources, and is replenishing them more slowly than we're using them. You're making the argument that withdrawing exponentially increasing amounts from our sizable savings account is just fine, thank you on the assumption that it will never run out. This is a clear failure in understanding of the exponential function.

Or it could just be a disagreement that it is an exponential function on a longer timescale.

Re: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

#47

Post by tn13 »

RobertoG wrote: post #42
tn13 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a free market guy, I don't think free market ideas are anti-redistribution. They are against redistribution through the coercive power of government as moral principle and utilitarian argument. I think private charity is far more effective in helping people in need. The government redistribution is merely a ploy to steal our wealth in the name of fighting poverty. I am totally surprised to see the amount of money…

Redistribution and charity are very different things. Redistribution comes from the idea that societies have goals, and that those goals are better served by thinking about where to spend resources instead of leaving it to blind markets. I can see that you think of the government as 'them' instead of 'us', instead of something that we do as a society. We differ there. Also, it worries me that you think (maybe I'm rea…

We do disagree on the definition of redistribution. I do not accept that government=society. I also do not accept that society should have any goals and I would put individual liberty over everything else.

I do think spending money on Iraq war was bigger problem for Americans.I think you are referring to destabilization of middle east as another problem. We have essentially borrowed money from our children to simply waste it or rather on creating even huge problems for our children.

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