Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

politico.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 245 posts

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#51

Post by abeppu »

abeppu wrote: post #44

I don't have any deep background in econ, but do we not need to switch from talking about GDP to talking about a version of Net Domestic Product where "net" includes: - changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest) - amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from oth…

Also this isn't only a gap about environmental issues. If you pay X for child daycare and work but only make X+taxes, and have a dumb pointless job, GDP says the economy is at least 2X+tax larger than if you took care of your own child during the day (bc your employer paid you and you paid your daycare). This seems dumb at an accounting level, even before we consider that you probably get a greater emotional benefit from being with your child than does the daycare worker.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#52

Post by simgt »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #13

This ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption. By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make…

People are emigrating to the U.S because of decades of soft power and propaganda, and mostly to make money to send to their families or head back after a couple years.

On all the metrics that actually matter to quality of life (ie. not sqm of mowed grass per person or avg height of SUV bonnet), the EU rates higher than the US.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#54

Post by abeppu »

ixxie wrote: post #49
abeppu wrote: post #44

I don't have any deep background in econ, but do we not need to switch from talking about GDP to talking about a version of Net Domestic Product where "net" includes: - changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest) - amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from oth…

It's just very hard to measure. On the corporate scale, see the whole carbon / ESG / impact measure ent industry. Lifecycle Analysis, supply chain extrapolation, Bill of Materials analysis. You only get some relatively crude estimate and a lot of missing data points, whereas economic growth can conveniently assign a dollar value on everything. I think it only gets worse as you scale up.

But we have a lot of sources of information already available that do not seem to be incorporated into any kind of top-level number that we grade ourselves on.

- when we have an estimate of how many hundreds of billions it costs to rebuild after a hurricane that would not have happened but for climate change, existing economic processes generate that number

- when insurers raise rates throughout a region, this reflects an expectation on the cost of damage, and the change over time reflects the increase in risk we've created

- when a heatwave kills a bunch of people, we already have a range of ways of estimating a monetary value for those lives from insurance, healthcare and liability litigation.

Further ... suppose your elderly relative left you a bunch of jewelry. You don't know how much it's worth and getting it appraised can actually be a bit complicated and doesn't give you complete certainty over value. But it would be _bonkers_ to continually take unappraised jewelry out into the marketplace, liquidate it, and pretend that the whole sales price was _earnings_. After the transaction, you don't have a thing you had before. You didn't know what it was worth initially but that doesn't mean that it was worthless, and you probably got scammed. Yes, measuring the full environmental impact of all our industries is hard, but pretending it's 0 is silly.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#55

Post by streetfighter64 »

pfdietz wrote: post #17

Countries that fail to compete trying to hold back the winners.

Destroying the environment more efficiently is the opposite of being a winner. Are laws against scamming and dealing drugs also "holding back the winners"? I mean, scammers and drug dealers do get rich, so if that's all that matters to you I guess they're winners.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#56

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

tehjoker wrote: post #50
canadiantim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or biology class to learn that resources grow linearly (arithmetically) but populations grow geometrically (exponentially). So it is possible for everyone to grow exponentially, it's just not sustainable and generally leads to mass famine, disease or war.

This is the malthusian argument, and in a vacuum it sounds right but didn’t account for decreasing family size with wealth and the ability of the economy to just barely eke out something like a percent or two of surplus. In China, the one child policy, for better or worse, was instituted to ensure that gains from industrialization were not eaten up immediately, leaving no surplus for quality of life and reinvestment.…

we can save our children/grandchildren from a lot of pain an suffering. The earth will be here long after we are gone.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#57

Post by lm28469 »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #13

This ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption. By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make…

> see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution

I love how people keep using the "it was worse during the industrial evolution" argument as a gotcha for every environmental and societal issues... no shit my dude, really? even in the middle of the "dark ages" we didn't send 8 years old kids down mines for 10+ hours a day or make people work 12 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week... WW2 era Poland was literally a better place to live in than England during the industrial revolution

They had 0 smog and 0 pollution before all these innovations, we had 200 years of insane innovations and smog/pollution is now consistently in the top 5 leading causes of deaths every single year, you scaled it from like 5 cities in England to the entire planet

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#58

Post by GolfPopper »

pjmlp wrote: post #3

Of course, the MBAs pushing for growth missed on physics class that it is impossible for everyone to growth expontentially.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#59

Post by Aurornis »

canadiantim wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #3

Of course, the MBAs pushing for growth missed on physics class that it is impossible for everyone to growth expontentially.

Or biology class to learn that resources grow linearly (arithmetically) but populations grow geometrically (exponentially). So it is possible for everyone to grow exponentially, it's just not sustainable and generally leads to mass famine, disease or war.

Yet population growth is slowing while our access to resources is growing rapidly.

Human population growth is not exponential. That’s so obvious that it’s hard to take anything about this argument seriously.

Biology isn’t a good proxy for society-scale economic changes.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#60

Post by lm28469 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #14
lanfeust6 wrote: post #13

This ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption. By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make…

These arguments all fell like they're warning that we'll all be drowning in horse manure and running out of guano in 5 years. Likening economic growth to the growth of organisms in a petri dish is the wrong model entirely. We are all the time finding new uses for things and moving on from old ways of powering society. It on;y looks static if you're quite myopic.

Meanwhile we observe a 75% collapse of wildlife world wide since 1970, but yeah sure we are constantly finding new "things"! Amazing!
Post reply on HN