What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for.
Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth".
Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and the interviewer doesn't seem interested, opting instead to ask questions about cosmology. It's a bizarre interview. His issue seems to be mostly with overconsumption of resources. But instead of creating a sustainable economy that can achieve growth through other areas (increased efficiency, increased use of renewable resources), he instead comes out against any growth and advocates a steady-state economy. But again, no specifics, just vague generalities and digressions into cosmology (arguing that economics should take into account religious questions).
I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
He's saying that growth (GDP) is an absolute measure that is only a sum without any costs. As one economist I can't recall put it "the hero of GDP is a cancer patient going through a costly divorce". GDP measures economic activity, with no consideration of the benefit obtained from that activity.
The interview was pretty bad, I agree. It's not clear what a "steady state economy" would look like, or what measures are held steady.
Is cancer treatment not a benefit? And I guess some people regard a divorce (even a costly one) as a benefit, or they wouldn't do it.
Economic activity is an indication for benefit for people. I see no need to make a distinction between economic activity and a benefit obtained from that activity.
I do share your gripes with the interviewer. However, I think that Daly’s questions regarding the ultimate end (meaning purpose) of economic growth are worth pondering. Basically what are we trying to achieve through economic growth? Growth for the purpose of growth is kind of meaningless. But if growth is for improving welfare, why isn’t that the focus, rather than GDP numbers? (And if it isn’t for welfare, what is it for?)
That being said, the interviewer then asking “what’s the meaning of life” was really pointless and unnecessarily edgy. I also agree that not trying to come up with any policy proposal is kind of intellectually lazy and has some strong “I’m just the idea guy” vibes.
I definitely agree that it's worth thinking about things like scarcity, our ultimate goals, what kind of societies we're creating, etc., and that an over focus on GDP growth or personal wealth is a problem. I've often talked about how much of our GDP is wasted on things that have a net negative value for society (but a positive value for GDP).
The issues I have with Daly's approach, though, is in placing the blame on growth and acting as if a steady-state economy is the answer. Even if we froze the economy today, we'd still be emitting too much CO2 and we'd still be wasting tons of time and resources on things that have a net negative value on society. Being simply opposed to growth doesn't solve the real issues. It just unnecessarily alienates people who would otherwise be willing to address the actual problems, and also places you in opposition to good forms of growth that don't cause these problems (and may help solve them).
And while I think it's important to think about the big questions, I don't think it should the focus of economists. The role of economists isn't to decide what our values and goals are, it's to give us an insight into how we can best pursue them after we decide those values and goals ourselves.
This kind of topic is where podcasts shine, especially if the host is literate on the topic being discussed. Or even the raw transcript of this interview versus the content that ended up being published.
I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.
I'm not sure increases in efficiency result in increased GDP.
To make that as clear as possible - imagine someone created low priced robots tomorrow that could make all your food, entertain you, build you a house etc etc for the one time fee of $100. They were incredibly efficient, consuming $10 worth of energy every year.
And what would people now do with all their free time?
They'd start to build other stuff. GDP would probably go through the roof, because if you measure the value of all that stuff in "old dollars" it would be incredible. And now in "new dollars" it's a tiny amount, but it also frees up human labor to do all sorts of new stuff, and these "new dollars" are so much more valuable.
Money is a tricky social constructed phenomenon. When there's such a shocking big change to technology as you propose, there has to be something to account for the difference in what it can purchase.
All this other stuff is, by current calculations, sub optimal. So all this other stuff would likely add to less than current GDP. And since current GDP has been replaced by 10's of dollars, total GDP would likely be much lower.
But, if your point is that it's not clear then yes, but that's my point.
People aren't buying much of anything in my scenario. The robot does everything you need. No transactions required. GDP only counts transactions.
Maybe consider this, sort of the opposite of my fantasy robot - GDP may well rise if the air got so polluted we had to buy fresh oxygen. An entire industry would exist, transactions would occur. Drugs might exist to cure sickness from the dirty air. Or consider cigarettes - a nice addition to GDP numbers.
If you are saying there are weaknesses to measuring GDP, sure, it's kind of a crappy measure. A terrible one. But still a useful one. All models are wrong, etc etc etc. I certainly don't fetishize GDP or assume that people only spend money on positive things for themselves or others.
But in your second scenario, the pollution of the air would have been a big drop in GDP, a ton of negative externalities that were not counted. And improving the air would be of value.
The most convincing flaw about GDP and trade, to me, is about real labor, productive value to society, that has or has not been captured by GDP. For example, child care. Child care by a stay at home parent is not captured by GDP, but child care that is paid for is a massive expense, one that many families can not afford at all. So that is uncompensated labor that should probably be included as part of our GDP. Child care is being produced, but not in exchange with others.
But if we invented magic robots that did everything an individual needed, I don't think that would reduce trade much. We would still be interacting with each other, buying each others' art, trading living locations, etc.
How would the air pollution cause a drop in GDP?? GDP measures all end user sales of goods & services. It isn't some general idea of good and bad. Fresh air currently adds zero to GDP, there is no market. Dirty air would create a market.
This is true if the change could happen overnight, but in reality that is never what happens. It will take a considerable amount of time to reach this end state where robots are cheap and plentiful. How this will start out is with limited production with high profits on the robots that is eroded over time as production capacity comes online and a stock of robots is built up. This will give the displaced labor time to adjust/pursue other jobs/create new industries to employ the freed up labor. This is why GDP has never fallen off a cliff solely because of technological improvement (and indeed has so far eventually increased with technological improvement).
A surprising amount of modern thought falls victim to the trap of only looking at the shock size and not accounting for the likely adjustment duration (I'm especially looking at you environmentalists talking about sea level rise over a century).
Yep, it's a crazy hypothetical. It's perhaps a bad attempt to show that efficiency and GDP aren't the same thing. GDP is simply measuring transactions by end users.
well, to be clear, I'm saying it is only true that efficiency gains don't cause higher GDP under very stringent scenarios that broadly have not happened. while GDP and efficiency aren't the same thing, they are extremely highly correlated with a bit of a lag. The situations where people thought GDP will fall and stay down with a technological change have so far been completely wrong because the calamity comes from assuming something is instantaneous that can't be instantaneous and it is a very common thought process error these days.
I don't think this is knowable. Efficiency can result in various things - less labor required, higher quality goods and services for the same cost, more convenience, less uncertainty (and probably others i can't think of off hand).
Your claim has been true for labor to this point. Not sure it's a given going forward.
Goods and services have gotten better in a way which isn't captured by GDP because the price for the good/service hasn't gone up.
efficiency results in one thing: more stuff for the same cost as before (or put another way the same stuff as before for less money).
And yes, this is definitely knowable because the one thing efficiency results in causes a wealth effect for all consumers (and/or a wealth effect for capital owners to the extent they can capture the gains from efficiency vs having them competed away causing lower prices and a wealth effect for consumers) and a negative income effect on the subset of workers no longer needed because of the efficiency gain. For an efficiency gain to not cause a GDP increase eventually the income effect has to swamp the wealth effect for all time, which has never happened and is unlikely to happen any time soon, as there are no signs of any abatement in consumption demand that would cause a wealth effect to not cause a consumption increase (this is especially true given the incremental nature of efficiency improvement implementation over time primarily because of various productive limitations on adopting new tech. The more time people have to grow into a higher consumption state the more likely and easier it happens.)
This is a repeat of the same claim regarding labor.
And even then there are holes in this position. Efficiency often won't lead to a wealth effect. In many industries (Buffett highlights textiles frequently, but it's also true of agriculture, many consumer electronics, cars) the competitive dynamic is such that increasing efficiency just lets the company stand still. Cars and TVs for example have become significantly better over 40 years(not all due to efficiency, but a good amount) and the prices haven't much changed, due to competition. The companies in question are still earning low returns on capital despite their efforts. I don't feel richer because my $600 TV is 60 inches v 30 inches, and I don't go spend more money because of it.
GDP has holes like this. It's literally just measuring end user transactions.
Idk, it seems like one of those things that is hard to predict. Would gdp actually fall off a cliff? There would be a lot of steps that would have to happen along the way. Plus the premise isn’t really rooted in any kind of reality, so it may be a flawed argument to begin with. Just my $0.02
Agreed, except in the current economy they would always go with the highest pricing they can get away with. Capitalism promised “efficiency” with regard to use of resources by always throwing a market mechanism at a problem and assuming the best. In reality, companies realized they could profit a lot more if rules were written in their favour and buying lobbyists/politicians was a bargain. So what “the markets” found was a way to maximise externalities to keep as much profit for themselves as they could (like always). And sadly this obsession for growth and wealth will lead to so much suffering due to all those externalities, especially related to the acceleration the stable climate breakdown.
I think betting on efficiency is essentially the same fallacy that he identifies in the article - that the future will solve the problems we create today.
There’s also the mental exercise one can take of can we make GDP -> inf in a constrained system. Of course not. There are limits. Economics assumes no limits on growth. That’s absurd on the surface. Just like I can’t super saturate sugar into a water solution beyond a certain point, I can’t materially transform the
material provided by the earth into useful economic production irrespective of the earths limits. That seems pretty much vacuously true.
> Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners.
More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave.
Everything you and I buy we buy because the value of what we are buying is worth more to us than the money we give up to pay for it.
> How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
As I showed, society is getting the long end of the stick already.
> More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave.
This was the promise. But all we really have today is cost disease. For every microwave the US also has infrastructural costs that are 10x+ that of other countries and a culture that is being increasingly incentivized to hand over their wealth for short-term, materialistic gains, and goods/services that aren't worth the price being charged.
To say nothing of the fact that in most cases, said microwaves leaves you with lower-quality results concomitant with the time you saved. Which really feels like all of life; we are being sold a bill of plenty that is only paper-thin
Do you own a microwave? I bet you do. I bet if it broke you'd buy another one, because you'll find it worth the money. Ditto for your other appliances, like your dishwasher, stove, oven, vacuum cleaner, toilet, shower, phone, etc.
Don't forget the computer you bought to access HackerNews with!
I own a microwave, well not really, the apartment im renting comes with one and in all the years I’ve been here I did not use it even once. If it broke I wouldn’t miss it, I’d probably use the space it occupies more efficiently.
Im inferring the point op was making was the price we pay for all these shortcuts and modern lifestyle should make us think well what is essential and do away with the rest.
My point is that those things are a red herring. The people peddling this shit peddle a narrative of increased efficiency, better life, and so on, focusing us on these little incremental improvements, while they pillage other parts of the world to bring you these things.
And you very clearly overestimate the need for a microwave. A gas oven, range, or BBQ produces considerably better results for many things for only a 2x or 3x investment of time and effort. I have several friends that have opted not to own a microwave.
Hell, large parts of the world don't have a microwave and they're fine. There's a good chance they are even building our microwaves for us. You know, I would rather we focus our efforts on lifting them up so that they can have their own microwaves and other nice things before I stand in line to buy yet another microwave, because it was made so poorly by microwave makers that cheap out on microwave building.
Do you believe a microwave involves more pillaging than a gas oven?
Let's say a modern oven isn't available. Just a word burning one. Operating one is an all day amount of work (there's little that's romantic about it). They're dangerous, filthy, and the smoke damages your lungs. If people switched to wood ovens the rest of the world's forests would be pillaged (stripped) of all wood. A wood burning stove has a lot of iron in it, that requires an enormous amount of energy to smelt.
BTW, you should know that gas appliances are a major source of indoor air pollution. Microwaves aren't.
Also, I usually get 10 years out of a microwave. Not bad for an appliance. If you want to save the environment, they sell them in thrift stores for $10-20.
Considering that said microwave uses a lot more electronics than said oven and lasts 1/3 to 1/5 as long as one (per your own observations), between the energy consumption (because you are almost certainly not getting your energy from renewable sources) and the increasingly large bill of materials (with the microwave requiring many more exotics) averaged out over total lifespan, I would bet that a microwave and a gas oven are quite competitive over the long-term.
But the microwave is producing more waste as it isn't built to last as long, and the items you cook in it are probably wrapped in chemical-seeping plastic and printed cardboard. So the volume of waste with use is considerably higher as well.
And I'm not even considering electric ovens, which are becoming increasingly mandated.
Consider also that microwaves are considerably cheaper than gas or electric ovens, which is a strong clue that they are also much less costly and polluting to manufacture.
Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful.
This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.
Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."
"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."
That sums up his position.
He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years?
The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.
I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]
Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?
Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.
Helium can definitely be used up if we keep putting it in balloons and allowing it to escape into space. Radioisotopes are also used up. Sure, we could transmute radioactive waste back into usable uranium or thorium but that would be a big energy sink, negating the primary use for those minerals. Fossil fuels have the same problem.
Once a gas escapes into the atmosphere any gas (apart from O2, N2 and CO2) is irretrievable economocally. Helium happens to leave the planet, but so what?
Helium is continuously produced inside Earth, it is the alpha radiation produced by the decay of Radon. There are natural gas wells that yield up to 10% Helium. If the market demand were there (eg airships), the Helium production could probably go up by a factor of 10 or 100.
this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.
The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree. This has documented by other economists / historians as "bullshit jobs" / "useless jobs". People sending emails all day or influencers obviously depend on mineral extraction to exist, but the direct inputs to their wealth creation are not minerals. You can "implement ideas" with a relatively small footprint.
> The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree.
Have we really though, or is the coupling just obscured to the point of near invisibility?
Take software development. In a bounded context, a solo developer’s continued output of software looks quite clearly decoupled from material inputs. They may work essentially indefinitely, producing new wealth, powered only by renewable energy.
Step out of the bubble of the thought experiment, though, to look at the software development industry more broadly, and what do we see? A vast churn of new computing equipment in pockets, offices, unseen data centers, and embedded at every possible scale in between, with layer upon layer of software abstraction that chews up most of the increases in computing power anyhow.
> The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.
Imagination is not reality. Reality have constraints that can be so complex that can be really hard to imagine. This is why we run simulations on computers when it comes to lets say weather and not do thought experiments only.
I can even give a real life example here. I am from Poland. And at this moment we are facing a coal shortage (which will cause energetic crisis in the winter) while sitting at the same time atop one of the largest coal deposits in the world. No one could imagine this as a possibility a mere year ago.
The answer is now. The 2030s is the decade of peak everything. Production of everything has been growing exponentially, but at a cost that is growing fraster.
From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.
This ignores Services entirely, which are part of GDP..
If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive
Is not growth inevitable? I hear criticisms of it but is it not what happens automatically when there is competition for resources?
I can't really see what the alternative would be. I mean, ideally if you could just agree with everyone in the entire world that no one should strive for something better, we could stay where we are, but reaching such agreement seems impossible.
And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes.
The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
> ... not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich.
riches or wealth, is merely stored up work that could be expended, instead of consumed.
They aren't being paid just for being rich - they are making decisions on how to expend that stored up work to produce _even more_ stored up work for the future. By making that decision wisely, they earn the rewards of the stored up work!
Ok, suppose a new frontier has opened up. Maybe it's geographic, maybe a gold rush, maybe a technological revolution -- but in any case, there are lots of opportunities to forego consumption today in order to create greater value tomorrow. Stuff has to be built! Investment has value. We should want to encourage it and reward it, because everybody wins. Great! So what's the problem?
Well, what happens at the top of the growth sigmoid? The stuff has been built. Foregoing consumption today... just doesn't help in the way that it used to. Investment just doesn't have much value (gasp). Returns drop. In fact, they plummet, because now instead of having a lot of growth service a little capital you have a little growth service a lot of capital. Double whammy. Ok, markets contract, so what's the problem? There isn't one, if you let it happen -- but if you are a rich person, this is an existential threat. You can't get paid for being rich anymore. Unless... wealth is power, and power can be used to change the rules. So you change the rules. You invent other ways of getting payed for being rich. Because that's what you really care about.
That's the fundamental reason why our economic narrative pretends that everything is exponential, not sigmoid: the dirty deeds happen at the top of the sigmoid.
> You invent other ways of getting payed for being rich.
so what's this other way that's been implied, but never actually explicitly explained?
Lots of investors accept low returns now - that's _why_ prices are expensive. Unless you're talking about the corruption in countries like russia, where resources and power are usurped, rather than created.
Presumably grandparent means QE, ZIRP and the whole range of other easy money policies that inflate the money supply but give investment banks, and the financial industry generally, first crack at the new money. This is definitely a way in which "just being rich" gets you access to policy-defined ways of making money basically risklessly.
Now imagine that everyone's retirement is tied to the child's growth in height only and the people with most power and influence benefit the most from every additional inch of height.
degrowth is a movement currently and a worthy one.
Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want.
Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead of owning a 3d printer, the neighborhood tool-shed was a warehouse with bikes, tools, a maker space, cleaning supplies, perhaps even ATVs, and riding lawnmowers, etc.
Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once.
You might need an HOA-type fee to pay people to take care of the equipment, etc.
Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact.
Nice to haves:
- Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage.
- Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then. I haven't known a neighbor since the 90s, unless it was from work, school, or a roommate back in college. It might be nice to have potlucks, or cooks from the neighborhood could show off their talents maybe with a tip-hat.
Perhaps some people don't cook much at all, and just prepare quick dinners in the commercial kitchen space for their family, and decide they don't even need much in terms of appliances in their kitchen.
My point is we've been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't and there was a time when you needed something you'd borrow or trade with a neighbor.
So basically: instead of just having what you need, just, like, hope that your neighbour has what you need. Great plan, i also hope that the neighbours are going to always follow me (just in case i'm going to move elsewhere).
"Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once." or just have a garage or a shed for tools.
"Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact." ah yes, the number one reason people get large homes: forget having family or simply enjoying spacious living conditions, i'm storing all of my tools around my house.
"Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage." Good luck proving that the ding on the ATVs fender was done by your neighbour and not you.
"Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then." Why can't you just invite your neighbours to your house?
"... been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't..." or perhaps some of us are conditioned to think that we don't need anything, that everything should be rented/lended by a neighbour and basically make your house into a shed because all you do is store tools anyways.
> So basically: instead of just having what you need, just, like, hope that your neighbour has what you need. Great plan, i also hope that the neighbours are going to always follow me (just in case i'm going to move elsewhere).
A lot of new neighbors are nice folks. Invite them over for a bbq, and they probably will let you borrow their belt sander or angle grinder. It's a nice way to build community.
I do a fair bit of DIY work, and am a big user of my local public library's tool lending center, where I can borrow everything from a giant table clamp to a wet table saw. It's amazing. Public tool lending libraries have a history going back to the 1940s, and the first was thought to have started in Grosse Pointe, MI [1]
For more expensive stuff (i.e generators, bobcats), there are local tool rental shops.
I still own everyday tools (drills, circular saws, hand tools), but I don't need to maintain/store anything too large.
Or have all your own tools - that has big advantages too, especially if you are constantly using them as part of a hobby or job.
This is the TechShop business model, and they went out of business :/
I think fundamentally the problem is that we have been operating for a long time in an economic environment where "stuff" is relatively cheap, but land and labour close to population centres are relatively expensive.
Very often the cost of the "co-ordination labour" required for sharing exceeds the "use value" of the item to the user. Ensuring the equipment is checked in and out, isn't stolen, people aren't lasering PVC in shared space, doing inventory, answering questions etc all take time.
If you have situations where people are interacting with each other (e.g. forums or same physical space) you will also have community maintenance to deal with (codes of conduct, dealing with problem behaviour and interpersonal conflict etc).
There are also issues around transfer of liability, you need an organisation that is responsible for testing and tagging, ensuring the equipment is in a safe operating condition, that users understand safety procedures - plus the policy/governance to make sure this stuff is happening and the audit tracking to prove it.
These sorts of things all sound like "paper cuts" but together they can easily kill what seems like an obviously good idea.
I am involved in 2 co-operatives (a school and a neighbourhood community centre) and there is a LOT of effort required to stand up and maintain shared capabilities. The legal / admin / compliance burden also only keeps growing.
It's not that it can't be done, but the details matter and it's a lot gnarlier than it looks.
Not to mention the problem of how to acquire the initial capital to buy/make those equipments?
If it is a contribution model, where each member pays (an equal amount, let's say), then each member is incentivized to over-utilize the equipment to maximize their initial investment. This basically leads to the tragedy of the commons.
Private ownership of capital and equipment aligns the owner and the use of that equipment in a way that community ownership doesn't.
It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.
History is replete with fallen civilizations, lost civilizations, and civilizations we barely know exist. There are likely many who rose and fell and who we are wholly unaware of.
So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.
"...we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc." This is literally what the criticized growth-focused system is doing: from recycling waste into new products to carbon-capture technology, sustainable polymers and much more, made and done with private equity.
I feel like this could have been a lot better if it were more concrete.
What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
- Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income?
- At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer?
- A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer?
Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
> The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare.
> The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each
family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work).
The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh.
> What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption.
It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
You got the numbers wrong; I said each family had two earners, and I said they made $125k each and $110k each, deliberately setting up family A to have $230k after childcare and family B to have $220k. Both are clearly comfortable, but family B is apparently working less but at a higher effective hourly rate. With $10k/yr less, less work, and more time with their young child, I think many people would still say family B is coming out ahead.
> GDP measures how much work is produced
But that's not even true. It only seeks to track exchanges where money changed hands. If a childcare center closes and the parents care for their own kids, the same work can be done, but it's not included GDP. If I grow some of my own vegetables from seed which I otherwise might have bought from the grocery store, neither my labor nor the value I derive from that produce contributes to GDP.
> nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
Even without concerns about the income distribution, we know that what people actually value isn't just money, but GDP sums over transactions and ignores plenty of factors that may do as much or more for utility. Any time people choose to retire when they could keep working, or pick a career other than the one that would bring them the greatest expected income, they demonstrate that non-monetary factors can easily outweigh their profit-maximizing drive. But GDP doesn't attempt to measure those other factors.
This sounds outlandish only because we've lived with this system for so long, but it would be entirely reasonable for the BLS or some other body to run monthly or quarterly surveys to get information on changes of those other factors, and though it would be imperfect, we could approach something that looked more like a utility function for real humans. How hard would it be to ask a decently large group of people regularly:
- How satisfied are you with your health? Are you inhibited in doing the things you'd like by illness, injury, disability or aging?
- How secure are you in your housing? In your access to health care? In your ability to feed yourself and your family?
- How stressed are you?
- How happy are you with your relationships with close friends or family?
- Do you feel you have the time and resources to learn and grow in the ways that are important to you?
- Do you regularly engage activities that support finding a flow state?
- Do you find beauty in your environment?
Etc etc. I won't pretend that I know all the questions to ask, or how scores for their answers should be weighted. But _something_ should try to measure, "Are we happy or satisfied in our lives?" and not just "What are we paid?". Kuznets introduced the modern form of G(D|N)P almost 90 years ago, and he recognized its shortcomings then, and I'm frankly disappointed that at some point we didn't get around to at least a serious attempt at replacing it with something better.
Daly makes the case that conventional economics deals with "intermediate" means and ends, such as food production and health/leisure; and that we should instead be more concerned with "ultimate" means and ends.
He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now?
Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
> Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily
The growth talked about in the board rooms is exactly that. More output of commercial goods, more sell, need more people buying these even if it's unnecessary for better life, popup more kids increase population so that sells will always increase, create more wealth for the already billionaires while keeping the minimum wage lowest possible, consume, consume more and more. Anything less than that is a disaster.
None of the growth ever talkes about the ecological collapse it's creating, never will. It's about quarterly report even if it complete destroys the future of all in next decade.
Efficiency isn't a silver bullet. There's a limit to free gains from efficiency - you can't go past 100% efficiency, and even at 100% efficiency, you still need to spend energy to do things. It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.
And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.
It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.
The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.
Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.
> It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.
You can. A great example of technology that produces greater than 100% efficiency is a heat pump. You can actually buy commercial heat pump tank water heaters that are much greater than 100% efficient at turning electricity into hot water. The energy comes from the ambient air, but the Earth has no shortage of heat energy that can be recovered to do useful work.
sure the end result (microprocessor) don't use too much resources, but the process that produces it does. you can keep improving but a point you reach physical and economist limit that you just can't outrun.
the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?
> (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input
It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.
The current production system is driven by the need for growth. What you're describing was true maybe until a century ago, until the 1929 crisis. After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side. First it was war, then mass consumerism. Desires are not natural, they are induced and in the same way they are induced (socially, culturally, politically), they can be removed, usually with a higher level of happiness for the people involved.
> The current production system is driven by the need for growth.
I would say our current monetary system is driven by the need for growth. But our current monetary system is a political tool, not an economic tool.
> After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side.
No, what was clear, at least to anyone who hadn't drunk the kool-aid of Keynesian "economics", was that the US government (and other governments weren't much better) was completely clueless about how economics actually worked, and so its interventions were making the depression worse instead of better. (Btw, this was just as true of Hoover's administration as of Roosevelt's.) All of the talk about having to increase "aggregate demand" was just a manifestation of the cluelessness. The real problem was not lack of demand but mismatched supply and demand: the government's messing with the money supply had led to a massive misallocation of resources, so that many things were being produced that nobody wanted and many things that lots of people wanted or needed were not being produced, or not being produced in sufficient quantity. Whenever that happens there will end up being a crisis when the misallocation can no longer be sustained.
What the US government should have done in response to the stock market crash of 1929 was...nothing. That's what the US government did in response to stock market crashes in 1920-1921 and 1987, neither of which led to a prolonged depression or even recession.
> Desires are not natural
Really? My desire for music and movies is not natural? How about my desire to post on a site like this one?
I think you have a very simplistic view of both economics and human desires.
People here also can calculate Pearson's coefficient between GDP and energy usage and understand by themselves that this is bullshit and that energy efficiency is less than minor in the grand scheme of things.
And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase.
I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...
And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.
Do you mean, any instance of a technological advancement that has allowed the production of some good or service with less input than would have been required before the advancement? How about computers + the internet? We have access to communications and knowledge access services with input costs far lower than the equivalent services would have cost before these inventions. Or, the invention of the refrigerator? Keeping food cold costs much less than it would have before the fridge was invented.
under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy.
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on.
This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.
Continued here (instead of editing the comment above).
The obvious retort here is that the cost of healthcare, education, and housing have all increased dramatically, so even if you’re willing to forego modern toys and conveniences, you still have to work full-time to stay afloat. I think even this is not true. First of all, it’s worth thinking about what people spent their money on 100 years ago. Here’s a typical budget (by share of consumption) for an urban family in 1917:
Food ............................... 41.1
Housing ............................ 26.8
Transportation ..................... 3.1
Clothing ........................... 17.6
Health care ........................ 4.7
Other .............................. 6.7
The first thing you’ll notice is that healthcare and education are not major line items (but food and clothing, both of which are drastically cheaper and more widely available today, are). I think you can basically toss them out. Just by virtue of having access to a modern emergency room you’re miles ahead of anybody living in 1917. As for general health insurance and higher education, you can simply forego them — just as almost everyone did in 1917. If you get seriously ill or injured, you can go to an emergency room and they'll treat you to a standard of care that didn't even exist 100 years ago. And you're opting out, remember, so what do you need a college degree for? That's just another spoke on the hamster wheel we're trying to avoid.
So, housing remains and it’s obviously a bigger factor. A big obstacle here is that you can’t save money by downsizing to a tiny unit, living in an SRO, occupying crowded tenements, or foregoing modern conveniences like hot water and indoor plumbing -- all commonplace in 1920 -- because those options have in the meantime been made illegal. So the government has taken those options from you. For this to work you’re going to have to live in a relatively undesirable region and probably with roommates, if you want to be anywhere near a major city. But this is not impossible, if you're truly convinced that the alternative is unacceptably exploitative.
This is not even close to reality in the US.
Zoning laws and various regulations mean that attempting to live like it is 1920 will eventually get you locked up in jail and your property condemned after you are fined to death. Assuming you can afford any property as our government has allowed corporate and foreign interests as well as excessive immigration to inflate property well past the ability of the average 1920 man to afford.
I addressed this in a comment adjacent to yours and I think it's a good point, but I don't think it's sufficient to explain why most people don't accept a 1920 standard of living in exchange for doing less work. I'd like to see most of those regulations repealed, but I have a hard time believing the result would be a bunch of full-time workers cutting back their hours to live more simply. What people would do, instead, is consume all the resulting productivity gains as quickly as they could.
Say a machine gets installed at work that increases productivity by 20%. In a sane system, you could now work 20% less for the same output, a vast improvement in quality of life.
In reality, you might lose your job. Or if you keep it, you'll work the same hours as before. You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity. Meanwhile, cost of living keeps rising.
You probably can't do every job at 20% speed and expect to keep it. If you're a middle manager at a giant corporation, for example, there is no 1-day-per-week option. It's all or nothing. But that's not all jobs. Any freelance work, obviously, fits the bill. As does restaurant work. (In fact, I know a fair number of people who are (at varying levels of awareness) actively enacting this work-less-and-live-on-less strategy, by hopping along a never-ending string of part-time bartending and server positions.)
The great thing about trying to live like it's 1917 in 2022 is that you still have access to all this 2022 technology to make it happen. A software engineer could pretty clearly choose to do the equivalent of 1-day-per-week's worth of work throughout the year by taking on freelance/consulting projects. Most software engineers don't do this for the simple fact that they'd rather work more and make more.
> You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity.
that's because the source of that productivity wasnt you - it was the invention and capital investment in that machine (which you happen to drive).
In a system which redistributes wealth, you'd get some returns (such as better public services). Under the current system of capitalism, there's not that much redistribution.
You're missing an important part of the equation. That 1920s lifestyle includes lower population density outside of the big cities, food that is organic by default, etc etc. You can't just look at the downsides.
nah, you would end up in jail and most of the supply chain that was there for what you call a "1920's lifestyle" is not there anymore. We criticize this way of living because we are stuck in it.
I am not making a point on whether workers work harder now than they did before. But at the same time, there are clearly ways in which we have had technological advancements that produce goods and services with less input (where 'input' includes natural resources, human labor, etc) than would have been required before these advancements. I used this example in another reply, but (just off the top of my head) computers + internet have allowed abundant knowledge lookup and communication for far less input cost than the services would have required previously.
Generalizing here, there is 'growth due to making people work harder' and 'growth due to inventing stuff that lets us do new things' and whatever your views are on each of these, I think most anti-growth articles ignore the latter.
You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.)
A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.
You’re not even disputing the parents point. More output with the same input doesn’t mean people are working less. It means they’re working the same amount…
Growth cannot continue forever without either changing the resource landscape (itrasolar / multi-planet / interstellar) OR exhausting resources.
Resource contention... usually wars get fought over that. Sometimes regional, increasingly global, and increasingly against the destruction of the commons. As we see with the rise in energy accumulating in the global weather systems due to changes to the composition of our atmosphere by unchecked industrial side effects and land use in previously ecologically carbon sink regions.
part of the problem is that we're not just moving forward, we're also moving backwards at the same time. as populations get bigger and bigger materials become ever more scarce, as does land (at the least the amount of land that voters are willing to allow to develop). Increasing regulations continue to lower the standard of living: this is especially harmful to shelter needs. so we need growth, just to maintain our standard living, nevermind improve it. What really needs to happen is to deprioritize growth and prioritize standard of living instead by focusing on the cost of shelter, food, water and by extension, transportation, medical insurance and so called "education".
Any helpful new technology, including medicine, is growth. Any advancement of human knowledge is growth. Any durable improvements (pyramids, bridges) are growth. Cultural advancements (art, politics, religion) are growth.
Many of these things are imperfectly represented in GDP growth. GDP also has many other known problems, like calling growth in consumption "growth" without really having a way to determine if it's really a good thing or not.
But we don't want to go to a zero-growth economy where we are just comfortably existing without passing anything to the next generation.
Economic growth does not need to be extractive, nor is it zero sum. A vaccine is worth more than the sum of its parts. So is a bridge.
We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains.
The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.
Economic growth is more than just using finite material resources. It’s technical innovation, labor productivity increase, efficiency improvements due to economies of scale, specialization, efficiently recycling scarce commodities, etc etc
Yes, we obviously need more economic growth, there simply is no alternative.
Serious egyptologists correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Egypt not change at all between 3000 B.C and the Bronze Age collapse almost 1000 years later? Is that where we're headed: perpetual stagnation?
The comparison between an artificial system (an economy) and a natural system (the growth of individuals) is as valid as that between the neurons in our brains and the "neurons" in the neural network, that is, it is wrong.
Senescence and then death do not result from failure to grow, and this is empirically found in any organism. Most fish continue to grow after sexual maturity (indeterminate growth), but still die from natural causes, from the accumulation of damage in their biological systems.
In the course of the organism's life, energy is allocated to different functions; after sexual maturity, in most species energy is spent in directions other than growth, because it is reproduction that determines species' persistence.
It may be interesting to note that in aquaculture, salmon are selected for late sexual maturity so that they can spend more time growing and thus be more valuable to the aquaculturist, who can see their resources going to tissues that can be sold (e.g., meat) and not to tissues (e.g., gonads) that cannot be sold.
Well there is another option: finding a balance and keeping it.
There's nothing wrong with keeping a replacement level population and producing enough goods for everyone, instead of trying to achieve some kind of maximum output while destroying the landscape around as quickly as possible. Doesn't mean improvements can't be made to quality of life despite that.
Or to be a little picky, I think in describing long-run behavior are 3 options:
- diverge to infinity (limitless growth)
- converge to a finite value (perhaps zero)
- oscillate
The accepted dogma today seems to be that we can aim at limitless growth, but that actors like central banks tug at stuff to keep the rate of growth mildly positive most of the time. If one believes we're smart enough to self-regulate to generally growing but dampening our boom/bust cycle, shouldn't we also be able to regulate total consumption to be within some healthy-ish bounds?
Where do you see an obsession with not growing in the world? Some rhetoric? Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs.
> Because there are a fuck ton of actions and power on the side of increasing gdp at all costs.
Like what? The most basic thing you can do to help GDP growth is try to promote families and childbirth, and keep energy prices low. Right now birth rates are plummeting and oil & gas industry has become politicized, and people see the result at the gas pump.
If there's some big heroic effort to actually grow the economy in a real way I'm not seeing it. You see what happened to the last guy that tried to do that. It did not go well for him.
I doubt our human technology will have much effect on any civilization capable of large scale space travel. We would be the equivalent of indigenous people using bows against European muskets and cannons.
I don't understand why you are down voted, you're absolutely right. if growth grinds to a halt and people still want that growth at all cost they will use the same old ways they achieved it before.
and even if 90 out of 100 don't want to the 10/100 will force their hand.
What he is encouraging you to do is ask yourself what you want the Ultimate End to be?
You can't design anything new if the mentality is we can't change.
After this topic gained my attention for the umpteenth time, I have come to believe that the reason that growth remains a very high priority in the face of all the costs is a truly unpleasant justification.
Consider the Soviet Union. During its early development the working day was progressively shortened, reaching seven hours by 1929 [1]. Certainly, many people would consider "working less" a nice alternative to endlessly pursuing growth. But then something funny happens. Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany and the Soviet workday gets longer [2].
The reason that we pursue growth so doggedly is not because we have a collective wish to do so. It's because we are afraid that $Enemy is going to grow faster than we are, for various values of $Enemy. The solution cannot be merely political; it must be geopolitical.
This is why everybody switched to the fiat standard during the world war. If one side can print money infinitely to sustain the war effort, the other side has to do the same or lose on the economic front.
It's actually not that heretical. It's pretty well documented that most of the gains in productivity in manufacturing have been driven by the computer industry, while the rest has largely stagnated.
I don’t buy it. Even before mass adoption of integrated circuits capitalism was on a tear in the 20th century. We had Ford cranking out mass-produced automobiles on assembly lines, prefabricated homes, nuclear energy, advances in medicine and sanitation, advances in aerospace, and so on.
While integrated circuits are great and clearly driving large parts of the economy, they aren’t the “source” of our economic success, but actually the latest manifestation of a long line of advances that have come out of a well functioning economic system.
You can clearly see this distinction in fields like software engineering, where theoretically every country in the world is on an equal playing field, but the US still dominates. It’s because the economic system in the US is superior, and less capitalistic systems are not as good at driving innovation.
Without peaceful growth, eventually there will be military growth [expansion by the means of military violence].
Op is right that our Earth is limited and cannot grow indefinitely. Sometimes it will be followed by redistribution of growth, so that someone will continue to grow, while others will experience radical negative growth
“I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it.” - Dune
because you only need a few people not wanting that (ie people with a mindset somewhat similar to: I'd rather see people suffer than cooperate and compromise resulting in having less share of resources) for the rest to not matter.
that 'stable' state is unstable (in the control theory sense of the word).
Because humans are hardcoded for maximising personal gain. There will always be someone who will not accept stability and escalate at a different level.
Encouraging stagnation among the easily impressionable English-speaking audiences of the economically successful nations i see. Good luck convincing certain Asian countries that they should stop their growth in the name of the "steady-state economy" just because.
It's amusing how he goes from "...You can do fantastic computations now with a small material base in the computer..." to criticizing the concept of GDP ("We really don’t know that the standard is going up.") contradicting himself so quickly. The standard doesn't go up, but i sure like me my computer!
"...Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer?..." increasing costs of what exactly? Manufacturing? Materials? Servicing? Marketing? Privately held assets? State corporation stocks? The cost of a pint at your local bar?
The interviewer isn't any better. "... to accept the idea of having “enough” and that constraining the ability to pursue “more” is a good thing. Those ideas are basically anathema to modern Western society ..." completely CLUELESS take that implies that the ideas of striving for wealth, growth, luxurious consumption and people wanting things are exclusive to Western countries, but then you read about "Making ecological room" and it becomes clear what is the exact point of all that fancy talk.
But back to the economist:
"My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas. Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me." wink-wink
With all due respect to academia, i don't think that ignoring the harsh reality of how people behave, attempting to lightly enforce a feeling of guilt upon the society thanks to which the academia has the privelege to just "...put out some ideas" is responsible at all. I sure hope that this is just a one off case of a bad interview.
Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise.
The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime. And the hopes that if they get lucky enough with the market they can retire early (or at all). This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual. Also the rich have a massive incentive for everyone to "invest" (cough) and drive prices up, because the rich benefit insanely more by market movements than a standard person does.
Maybe the system will explode in our lifetime, maybe not. But all this insanity focus of growth, profits, etc with no genuine regard to real social issues (providing basic stability to people whether it be healthcare, housing, food, childcare) is so sick I can barely even think about it. And there's almost nothing to do about it- that's the way things currently "work" and it seems insurmountable to do anything about it.
For thousands of years of our existence, progress was very slow and sometimes we went in reverse in some regions.
Economic growth plus innovation resulted in progress and pulled the 99% who were not wealthy out of utter subsistence poverty over the last few hundred years.
Also, we cannot grow forever (unless we figure out how to colonize other planets). We have to figure out how to live in a worldwide demographic "Japan" zero to negative pop growth, decline and be comfortable and work with it. New generations don't have to be richer than the last. We can achieve some maintainable level of comfort and be okay with that.
Of course the assumption of growth underpins most modern societies, as far as I know, but we will have to find a new model for a new reality.
> New generations don't have to be richer than the last. We can achieve some maintainable level of comfort and be okay with that.
I think 1950s USA middle-class was probably comfortable enough, certainly it was far far from "utter subsistence poverty" -- if the entire world population can live at 1950s USA middle-class levels, without destroying the ecology that sustains us, we should count ourselves lucky (it's not clear we can).
Note that was without computers, cell phones. It was much more expensive clothing you'd keep until it wore out. Maybe only one car per family (or less) with more public transportation. Fewer airplane flights. Etc.
I think we can agree that we have resource limitations (whether it be livable space or ploughable land).
Modern economies work on the premise of growing markets. Whether creating new markets or taking over old markets. With a steady state or shrinking population, you can value add and you can innovate, but there are no new "China market(s)" to expand into. If growth were not fundamental, then companies would not look to expand beyond their borders (whether local, regional, national or international).
How would companies in modern economies survive if they should predict shrinking markets? Consumerism buys you some time (you need the iPhone umpteenth), at some point a hammer is good enough --with corner-case exceptions.
I don’t agree that there are absolute resource restrictions.
Matter doesn’t become a resource unless it’s economically useful. 5 kilotons of cadmium may or not be a resource depending on your business.
The world is full of ex resources we haven’t exhausted. There’s no shortage of bat guano or saltpeter. Mercury used to be vital, now it’s value is usually negative.
There’s plenty of raw matter that’s useless now that will he extremely valuable in the future. And will eventually have awkward afterlife as an ex-resource. Like bat guano.
> Economic growth isn’t dependent on a certain amount of mass, energy, or entropy.
It is though, you might be making the same mass and energy more efficient on a dollar terms, but there is an upper limit and that upper limit is dictated by entropy. There are only so many things that matters on Earth can do under the current physics. We're not that close but not too far away either.
We can financially grow forever even in a negative population growth, so long that inflation continues and "imaginary" growth counts towards growth. You can add more and more hype to products and let novelty take over "real" price to keep economies bloating, and to keep ahead of competitors as well by circumventing price rigidity. It's a horrible thing that cause wealth concentration because hype is easier to create for resourceful, but the point is, it's reality than possibility.
I think they aim to say that ancients weren't dumb dullards. Which I don't think people are saying they were so. We're saying that to get where we are took as long as it took humanity to get where we are (Outside of some fabulous thinking that there existed "modern" historical societies that disappeared).
When Hobbes said life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' he was referring to life outside of the outcast's society.
The author of that article would not know a steelman if it hit them in the face.
The "conventional account" of human history they describe is one that I personally have never heard espoused and I am not quite sure if anyone really ever believed.
I think I would prefer to read the general source material, I find professional "essayists" often tiresome to read.
Retiring off of investment into the economy in return for a piece of the growth is a very happy situation for everyone involved. Companies get access to capital. Retirees get money to live off of. Capital is allocated to those who can make the most value in return.
Retiring off of pensions is a zero sum game. Companies charge more to pay pensioners. Customers don't get any additional value, they just pay higher costs for the same goods and services. Owners get lower returns from the company. Retirees are stuck on fixed income, which is devastating during an inflationary period.
Right but the world is a bigger place than that of capital, customers, investors, and companies. That's the problem. As an example, there are trees, which is a class of thing that doesn't fit into any of those above categories. And even worse it doesn't really work, it just works maybe amortized over time for people who start far enough ahead.
For the government to redistribute real productive capacity and resources to the elderly, they first have to exist. The demographic crisis already means the elderly are going to need quite a bit relative to what we can produce; without growth things would be even tighter.
> Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise.
The problem here is that there's no grand conspiracy to pursue growth. People make the individual decision to pursue growth because of the individual benefits.
But the point is that this privileges a small percentage of the population with outsized political sway so the net effect is the same. People acting in their own interests doesn’t make the end result objectively correct or stop us rethinking incentives.
Frankly the only other currently implemented alternative is state funded pensions, which instead of the market rely on an ever expanding population of workers paying their taxes to fund it and is not exactly better.
In countries where population growth levelled off it seems to have recently resulted in raising of the retirement age ever higher. It's basically a state run ponzi scheme. I frankly wish we had a tax free investing account option available instead.
Yeah we don't get that one nor Roth IRA in most of Europe. Afaik it's only a USA thing (though on second thought I do think pensions are optional in the UK so they may have a similar system).
The main difference between this and a 401k is that the money you pay into it isn't yours and doesn't affect what you get in the end, only your work years fed into some chart determine that. The taxes go directly to current payouts as it would be in a literal ponzi scheme.
I live in Argentina where the government took over pensioner funds and gave away millions of pensions to people who have never worked in a formal job, and therefore never put a penny into a pension fund. The result is that almost every pensioner earns peanuts regardless of how much they worked or how much they gave to the pension fund, and almost every pensioner earns half the poverty line basket.
Guaranteeing financial security to anyone is impossible.
The typical counter-argument to complaints about the impossibility of endless growth is that growth/gdp are usually sufficiently vaguely defined that it is possible to go on forever – there isn’t any fundamental relationship between growth and resource use.
I don’t really understand your last paragraph; it feels to me like it is written from a very American perspective. There seem to exist countries that achieve economic growth while having sane healthcare, childcare, etc, and it feels clear to me that U.S. issues are more related to the current local optimum the political system has come to rest in than to some obsession with growth. So what is the argument here about growth? Is it that the other countries don’t actually have growth or that they don’t actually provide stability on social issues or what?
> governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual
One can argue for a well-fare state that provides all guarantees one wants.
But you're flipping the issue here. First, you have a risk of not aging. But most people are inevitably going to age and retire. This risk is inherent to the individual. Now we can offload that risk to the government (please, it's not the other way around), but it's going to have costs. And I think offloading it to the government is even riskier, because governments make stupid decisions and are subject to massive corruption.
> And there's almost nothing to do about it- that's the way things currently "work" and it seems insurmountable to do anything about it.
A small handful of the super-rich have already pointed out the only thing "we" can do about it: revolution. Inequality that continues for too long leads to overthrow. The rich get eaten, the poor become a rabble, monarchy/autocracy/totalitarianism eventually returns, and the cycle starts over. That's where we're headed. The funny thing is, our social ills might be the cause before our economic ones are.
> This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual.
The growth obsession phenomenon also happens in countries which demonstrably put more effort into caring about the elderly and the poor. They still get left behind, albeit at marginally lower rates than in a country like the US.
It's the juiced economic statistics and obsession paper growth that's the core problem, not necessarily "rich people have influence"
> The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime.
Not really, half retired Americans live off Social Security alone, and another big chunk I'm guessing a quarter rely on it. Many others have property, business or keep working. I'm guessing its about 10-20% of Americans really have enough 401k savings to live off.
I don't know much about details of the USA Social Security model, however from what I recall doesn't it effectively require continued economic growth to plausibly be able to pay out what it should without significantly raising the starting age to decrease the number of years it pays out?
There is definitely a problem with people living longer and bulge of baby boomers. There are alternatives to fund this such as raising taxes or debt, but yes likely people will have to work longer if they keep living longer.
You can have endless growth as long as productivity is increasing faster than population loss. Increasing productivity needs technological advancement. Alternatively we can stem the tide of population loss by having humans live longer, or by waiting for the current generation of non-breeders to die off allowing the breeders’ children to reproduce. Likely they are more genetically predisposed to reproduction.
I don't think it's obvious. Growth and innovation go hand and hand. A tug of war between capitalism and socialism is essential for a healthy society that can solve exciting problems via markets. It's not perfect, but the growth model keeps society agile, with many options via startups and market competition. It gives us the toolbelt to solve complex problems quickly. It's challenging to start up industries and maintain the plumbing to combat world problems when we have non-innovative, non-incentivized markets. It's apparent that I'm rattling off some generalizations.
I didn't say VS, I said a tug of war. Meaning they pull at each other, and play with each other well. Growth and government stability via policy, keeping each other in balance. Too much socialism leads to a central authority with too much power, too much capitalism leads to monopolies with too much power. And yes there is more than capitalism and socialism. But the author was OP was focused on growth and socialist policies.
I don't know any socialists that want to completely disassemble capitalism. I do know several capitalists that want to completely disassemble socialism, or at least greviously wound it at any opportunity.
I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to “the system” but the extradorinaiy price increases in homes were caused by boomers printing an unprecedented amount of money for themselves and lowering interest rates.
If history repeats itself, real estate valuations should revert to a long term mean which would make homes somewhat more affordable. There are some early indications that this is happening.
The problem is when a civilization stops providing ways for its inhabitants to keep winning inside of it, the civilization collapses. In Western civilization, if there is no growth, how will you motivate people to keep working? The only thing left is to steal from the people who already have things.
We have two options; intentionally iterate away from this society or it will collapse for SOME reason; bigotry, environment catastrophe…
Physical laws do not give a fuck about our philosophy. Accept figurative death, cowards.
Steal from people who intentionally changed the rules to deflate our wealth. The laws and their interpretation are no accident.
What this debate is is deference to the elderly or the youth.
Tacit ageism against the future or well reasoned action against the past.
Gramps; you had a good run. Bye.
Edit: I have an MSc in elastic structures, used to work in high powered switching equipment. I understand rates of change in high energy systems like a planets climate. This is not an emotional argument from a place of ignorance.
You don't need growth in zero-sum areas or areas that would make us face environmental collapse for people to want to survive and see their needs met.
Perishable goods still exist. People will still work to create perishable goods to consume. They will still change cultures and create solutions in areas where the game is not (pseudo-)zero-sum.
You also can't grow everything forever, as real estate is showing. If your concern is people stealing, that's an obvious target.
Many if not most philosophies and religions arise precisely to answer this very question. It's possible to live happily and healthily without growth.
People will always work because work needs to be done. Food, shelter, power, all of it requires active work by people. No stealing necessary. The laissez-faire rhetoric of "no growth, nobody to work" is exactly the problem mindset this economist is trying to address.
"Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise." which implies that the interviewer and the economist are acting in good faith and are not financially motivated to push certain ideas.
"The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime." ah so trade and supply/demand that are moved by "standard persons" = rich people, ah yes.
"This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual." great idea, have people at governments mercy and build a voter block that is going to put the tick where they're going to be told to for some of that extra pension plan dough.
"...the rich benefit insanely more by market movements than a standard person does..." while also contributing the most tax revenue...
"The latest government data show that in 2018, the top 1% of income earners—those who earned more than $540,000—earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earned 48% of the income and paid 71% of federal income taxes."
https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...
Nice of you to imply that only "the rich" can buy/sell assets, especially in a post-Gamestop world.
Now, add VAT to income taxes, and change the referential. Top 1% gives back X% of their income as taxes, top10% gives back Y%. If Y>X, you have inequality issues.
"Inequality" in percentage but not the actual revenue. Not sure what is the point of adding VAT though. "The rich" does not pay it i presume, just like "average people" are free of capital gains taxes (lmao).
I don't think economists use terms like 'growth' in a very consistent manner.
For example: trees are constantly growing in a forest, and trees are also constantly dying, but the overall population size (number of trees in a forest) remains generally stable, in the absence of major changes in climate and animal predation of trees (such as clear-cutting forests).
A lot of uses of growth in economics appear to be related to growth of rates, not growth of something like mass. For example, carbon flows through grasslands at a greater rate than it does in forests; the carbon in a grassland was in the atmosphere at most a few years ago while a tree in a forest can be several hundred years old. The rate at which money flows through an economy (less misers, basically, mean higher transactions) is linked to economic growth.
However, growth in terms of growth of the number of buildings in a city and numbers of humans in a city, that's absolutely tied to the amount of arable land each human needs for food production, so obviously that's not an open-ended system, and in particular, if there's not enough water then the land isn't arable.
Again, if a city of fixed size improves the average quality of life for its inhabitants, then that's a kind of economic growth, isn't it? Even if resource use (in terms of conservation of mass and energy) is fixed, you can still have economic improvements within that steady-state system, can't you?
> Even if resource use (in terms of conservation of mass and energy) is fixed, you can still have economic improvements within that steady-state system, can't you?
Sure, technical innovations and efficiency improvements to get more for less is also economic growth. And therefore by definition not steady-state.
I also don't understand how they take into account innovation. A carrot was a carrot 1000 years ago, and is a carrot today. While the production of carrots certainly have increased manyfold between then and now, we also have innovations whose value we can't quantify in numbers but certainly are indicators of growth. What is the value of toothpaste compared with no toothpaste, and how much growth did the invention of toothpaste account for? While no number can be reliably given, it should account for some growth. If we halt growth, we halt progress.
Carrots are a bad example, as they have also improved dramatically via innovation: cultivation and breeding. A carrot like those grown a millennium ago are barely recognizable compared to the beautiful orange giants we can all get at the grocery store for a few cents apiece. Heck, the entire species was only domesticated 1100 years ago.
>What is the value of toothpaste compared with no toothpaste
As best I can tell, very little. It might have some value as a fluoride delivery system, but:
"The cumulative evidence for this systematic review demonstrates that there is moderate certainty that toothbrushing with a dentifrice does not provide an added effect for the mechanical removal of dental plaque."
I haven't used toothpaste for about a decade. I find brushing with plain water to be highly effective, and I drink a lot of tea so I don't think I need any additional fluoride. I think the most underrated factor is toothbrush wear; a fresh toothbrush leaves my teeth feeling noticeably cleaner with the same effort compared to a worn toothbrush.
Who buys your carrots? Once you are capable of selling a carrot to every person on earth, how do you increase your sales?
No matter how cheap and easy it may be to produce carrots, there’s a limit to how many may be sold (and its less than “to every person on earth”).
And ever increasing money spent on carrots is what our growth economy is built upon.
The analogy goes further, when you're technologically capable of producing carrots in the billions, where does the money go? Specifically, how much of it goes into the hands of people who don't own companies, and their investors (aka the 99% of the population)?
It's not really as bad as you think within the field of economics. If you were to major in economics, you would be taught that there is no single or multiple perfect measures of growth or innovation. It's important to have multiple metrics, understand their pros and cons. It's also important to have active research advancing the current state of understanding and not believe everything is settled theory.
Once growth ends, the pie isn't growing. Pie not growing means the focus becomes dividing the pie. Dividing the pie means endless infighting, politics, and anger in a society. This may work in certain societies, but it will never work in America.
Second, a growth-oriented society will naturally outgrow and overtake a non-growth oriented society, by definition. Societies choosing low growth will fall to the side.
Third, you need an outlet for people in society who are entrepreneurial. Steve Jobs starting Apple is the exact same mindset as a punk kid spraying grafitti on a billboard. It's just a different implementation ambition and rule breaking. If you impose a non-growth mindset on society, what will all the glorified "crazy ones" [1] do? Nothing good.
Is America not already there? Living in the southeast I literally see people in Home Depot buying garden tools wearing Proud Boys shirts. Every week brings a new mass shooting, several states equate the abortion of a 10-year-old rape victim with homicide, and the Texas GOP is now officially trying to abolish the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet America is one of the most rabidly pro-growth nations in the world.
Elon Musk is a billionaire, who cares about his opinion on anything but making money? There are academic fields full of people who investigate the myriad problems of American (and, more generally, capitalist) societies. To ignore them all simply because you think entrepreneurs are “punk rock” is entirely unscientific. Of course Elon wants growth, his entire life is dedicated to it and he serves to gain the most if it occurs, regardless of its consequences for everyone else.
Can you please edit swipes like that out of your HN comments? They degrade discussion, break the site guidelines, and aren't needed. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
But couldn't a finite system be configured and reconfigured in such a large number of ways that to all intents and purposes the possibilities are infinite? What if "growth" is about creating better and better knowledge of how to configure the system in more and more valuable ways?
This is pretty funny as people have been calling for some kind of human-caused apocalypse since forever.
It must be human nature for some to believe such things. To see ourselves as inherently sinful, wicked, separate from nature and deserving of punishment.
Climate alarmism has become a religion of sorts for many. Giving them maybe something to believe, maybe some purpose. At least something to talk about.
There are countless other religious sects that also believe judgement day is “right around the corner”.
You could build a big Mars settlement and that would have its own economy but how much would that add growth to Earth? Transit times are long and the cost to move goods is high for fundamental physical reasons, leaving intangibles as the only thing that could trade in really high volume.
I doubt an increase in software or media from Mars could compensate for limits to growth on Earth.
On a side note: I suspect that demand limits to growth from stabilizing or falling population and decreasing marginal utility of goods and services (“saturation”) will be as significant as limiters of growth as supply side limits.
It seems like services, information, tech are all huge contributors to modern growth beyond just "raw physical" goods. Seems like it could have a substantial impact on Earth, especially when you consider innovations.
Imagine having high billions-trillions of people and millions working on a given innovation or line of research or whatever.
if we cared about higher levels of innovation or research, we don't need to have a trillion babies. we just need to educate the ones we have already, and give them the opportunity to do that kind of work.
We need both. Nurture is not the entire factor, there are also genetic fluctuations over intelligence. Higher population increases the proportion we expect with that.
Yes, but, critically we cannot access those resources yet. Will be gain that ability before we poison the biosphere to the point where extinction is inevitable?
Were I a betting man I'd bet against us, given our current trajectory.
When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.
You better get used to higher taxes when you're of working age. And you better get used to reduced Social Security payments. Because these things rely on growth.
You better get used to a flat stock market. If you want to live off your investments when you're old -- you're going to have to save a whole lot more.
Growth helps governments inflate away their (very large) debts. In a static economy, this won't work -- so you better get ready to pay off all that money our government has borrowed.
People are not "obsessed" with growth -- growth is built into our economy in a fundamental way -- and ending growth would be extremely painful to regular people.
The pandemic made it clear that elites are ok with mass death and debilitation. It may not be a conspiracy, but people in power simply don’t care. So the logical conclusion is that a lot of the most vulnerable people are going to perish, the hardier ones will hobble by in filthy conditions like what you see in old age homes today (but there will be a gun around if they wanna quickly end their misery).
Structural change on a massive scale is required to change the status quo.
I really wish posters on HN would be forced to specify who they are talking about when they say "the elites" because it's often so vague as to be meaningless grandstanding and allows people to engage in goalpost shifting.
No one can even have a meaningful interaction with this comment. It's also trivial to come up with 'elites' who were not okay with mass death and debilitation.
Yeah, elites really feel like a sort of “Schroedinger’s enemy”. If people oppose the argument you can claim that they’re standing up for billionaires who don’t care about them and don’t need their support. If the reception is friendly it might turn out that the “elites” are actually middle class college activists who are “elite” because they went to college.
Like, some people’s definitions are so warped that a millionaire small business owner (think someone who owns a successful downtown restaurant in a mid-sized city) is “the common man” while an artist who works at a coffee shop and lives in a rundown studio apartment is somehow “elite”.
Elite pretty much means anyone with political and economic power. Politicians, billionaires, lobbyists, CEOs, etc. It's not a particularly fuzzy honorific.
Of course they dont like all the negative attention so sometimes they will try to designate elites as "anybody with a college degree" as one of many means of rhetorically disguising their power. For example, the economist does here:
I think the WEF (World Economic Forum) is who I think of when I think of "the elites.". They have Xi Jinping give key notes and most recently had Henry Kissinger debate Soros over what to do with Ukraine at their annual private jet fueled get together in Davos. Many major government leaders like Trudeau are listed on their website as "WEF Young Global Leaders.". Vladimir Putin was even in there, but his page got deleted when the Ukraine war started.
I struggled through Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset." Klaus talks about Degrowth as a future economic model. He also talks about the Doughnut which is the gap between abject poverty and the limits of the Earth's resources as determined by earth system scientists that everyone must live between. He also says that workers will not be advantaged due to large numbers of them dying during COVID as they were advantaged after the bubonic plague because they will be replaced with automation. I'll say that none of their programs and goals would be benefited by there being more people around.
Elite is a loosely formed group of individuals that has a lot of influence on culture and government. There's concentration everywhere you look.
For instance there's 6 companies that control almost all of media [0]. There are 10 companies that own nearly all global food products [1]. Look at ETFs and you'll see they own the majority of all stocks (on behalf of others), but they exert a lot of influence on corporate governance. If you look at the board of directors of any of these firms, you'll see the same people and more importantly the same general thinking.
There really aren't any firebrands or unconventional thinkers, so when someone like Musk came around and wanted to wield control over a tiny sliver of the media, people were freaking out. Think about it, even the former president voiced concern[2]. If you look at political donations of the major influential orgs, they're all highly skewed to D [3]. In fact, if you do donate ($534) to R at a large org (Goldman), you'll risk having some editor in the NYT choose to publish your name and donation which could get you fired [4]. You have to admit, something is weird.
Everywhere you look you'll see the same kind of people saying the same ideas. It's not so much that it's centrally organized. It's just that you wouldn't ascend in any of these organizations without holding completely orthodox views on the topic-du-jur.
but elite's aren't really the ones calling the shots. Everytime I investigate some political issue, no matter how disgusting or crazy the idea (housing issues, transportation, prop 13, zoning/building regulations, etc, etc), you'll find huge swaths of the voting population that agree with what's going on. Politicians are mainly just responding to voter demand, as it turns out. If anything, the issue is the voting masses. And, it seems to be like that at all levels of government, from federal, to state to city, all way down to my insane HOA (not technically govt I know).
> you'll find huge swaths of the voting population that agree with what's going on
Did those huge swaths of the voting population that agree existed before the issue became political, or did they spring up after?
To see what I mean, look at abortion. Anti-abortion stance was not common for evangelicals until 1980s; if anything, most of them saw it as some kind of crypto-Catholicism. The rapid swing in public opinion was manufactured. It doesn't make those voters any less real, of course - but the point is that those votes don't guide policy in this model, they're merely a stick to beat your opponents with.
I don't know. There are some huge disconnects between what you see in media and popular opinion. Consider newspaper endorsements of the former guy. There was 10. One was the National Enquirer, another was owned by his son in law, and another is the official newspaper of the KKK. This was a candidate that ended up winning the election (although lost popular vote, but not by that much). There's a big disconnect if 99% of publications are on one side while the country is split 50-50.
50% is still a LOT of people. the point is, It's not like policy decisions are made in favor of like less than 5% of the population.
Just as a crazy example, here in CA shelter is one of the biggest issues. I was shocked to discover that local politicians were bragging about how much housing development they were blocking. that tells you nearly half or more of the population is in support of that.
i haven't seen any polls on it specifically but I wouldn't be surprised if it was close to half the population. my point is, you'd be surpised at what the majority is in favor of.
of course, they'll say otherwise, but look at how people vote.
> who they are talking about when they say "the elites" b
Not the OP but I understand as "the elites" the people who hold the reins of power in the West (I don't know that much about the Chinese or Indian elites, to be honest). That would be multi-billionaires, some national-level politicians, the higher-ups of some supra-state entities (things like the World Bank, the IMF, even the European Union), some recognisable "artists" who are used mostly for propaganda material (think Hollywood actors like Matthew McConaughey, Di Caprio and the like) and last but definitely not least, members of the defence and security apparatus (even though I have lately started having my doubts about anyone higher-up at the Pentagon or at NATO actually thinking for himself). Ah, I had forgotten, also some media people, too many to name, the most recent that comes to mind is this marvellous Guardian journo named Simon Tisdall that just this weekend had proposed that the West should attack Russia [1] so that we'd all get, well, blasted by nuclear strikes. But the journos are mostly tools, truth be told.
We are likely considered 'the elites' by wage labor. Even though neither one of us have made a hundred million.
There exist many working class people who wanted to get back to normal (polling demonstrates this), or at the very least wanted policies that tried to keep schools open. They also believe the things you're saying make you one of the elites. It's also easier for 'established elites' to want perpetual work-from-home since they're in work that best positions them to experience little economic pain doing that. It might even be somewhat elitist to dismiss this POV.
When looking at class we would be called the archaic term bourgeoisie. We can live comfortably and buy things we want, but are not part of the elites (noblesse) who have privileges and influence beyond money. We should define new terms to clarify the class strata.
>The pandemic made it clear that elites are ok with mass death and debilitation
I don't know what elites you have in mind but the average Spring Break attendee seemed to be significantly more okay with an uncontrolled pandemic than Bill Gates
the few members of the political elite who were okay with it usually happened to be put in their positions of power by the not-so-very-elite section of our democratic electorate.
I see your Bill Gates and raise Musk, Murdoch and whichever billionaire is in meat-packing plants who were all against shutdowns. Let's be honest, (today's) Gates is an outlier among billionaires.
Severe pandemics are actually really bad for elites, since large scale death increases the value of employees. See e.g. "The Great Leveler" by Scheidel.
No more massive scale anything. We can not manage societies like that.
If you feel they should have shut down more and harder to save lives you are categorically wrong. It would never have worked in any degree of severity and has caused such damage as to have pushed us to disaster.
The vaccines are nothing more than a redistribution of wealth to big pharma, wealth that many of us can not afford. I work and earn what should be a good salary yet I own nothing.
I will not be locked in my house again by the government or anyone else, you will have to kill me.
I’ve had this sickness of growth in my early twenties. Rushed into a startup, burnt through 7 figures of VC money. Then took an other shot at it, but slower growth and no VC money. Bootstrapped that company and got acquired. Then started an agency [1] where we get to design B2B software products for a variety of startups. We are keeping it small on purpose and growth is never discussed. The focus is to do work we love with amazing teams of engineers and entrepreneurs. Accidentally we’re generating more money than in my previous ventures, even with a clear cap on growth. It just adds to our runway and makes working every day more fun and fulfilling.
In practice I find that people who bemoan our "obsession with growth" or some such generally fall into one or more of the following buckets:
- Wish they lived in a world we do not live in, such as one without violence or one where people were happy with what they have and do not strive for more.
- Actually want growth, but the kind of growth where the things that grow are the things they like and the things they don't like go away.
- Have a feeling or rationale that existing wealth and output can be easily redistributed, leading to a state of global contentment we would not need to improve on.
You have provided no reason to believe any of your claims apply to the economist in question.
I can say “I find people who defend our obsession with growth tend to be benefit heavily from our racist status quo, and would prefer for it to continue”.
Well I didn't think I needed to spell it out since he spends most of the interview explicitly stating my second and third points.
But if I must:
- Daly points out that GDP growth != welfare growth. In fact, growing GDP has negative externalities that might decrease aggregate welfare. By reducing GDP growth in wealthy countries he argues we might open up resources for developing economies to grow. This reduces to something like: Daly thinks GDP growth is worth it in poor places but thinks the costs associated with GDP growth in rich economies outweigh the benefits. This is my second point explicitly: he wants growth, but only the type he likes and not the type he doesn't.
- Daly talks about richer countries needing to make "ecological room" for poor countries to grow. What he means is that the growth of richer countries requires the use of natural resources that could otherwise be used to fill the more basic needs of poorer countries. Weird zero sum-ism aside, this is essentially my third point, that we can redistribute wealth/outputs (technically inputs, but let's not split hairs) to reach a state of stable global contentment.
I have no way of knowing if your statement was entirely rhetorical or not, but indeed, I have both benefitted significantly from our imperfect status quo and I wish for something like it to continue.
Over a billion humans have been lifted from extreme poverty since 1990 [0]. I like that. I want more of that. Thats not to say I would like for our system to remain totally unchanged, however. You and I probably agree on a lot.
