I really liked most of Murphy's posts (and I've been meaning to look at the textbook he wrote based on it). But this one always did strike me as not giving enough credence to decoupling of economic growth from energy usage. I do think his point that energy usage must stop increasing in the next couple centuries is an interesting and important one (partly because I think we really ought to be thinking on that timescale at least, and partly because it has implications for just a few decades out as well). It helps break one out of the mindset that anything that was standard for the past two centuries (like employment) must be standard or get even more entrenched over the next two centuries.
I’d like to point out that the prospect of the kind of “Desire Modification technology” that you talk about is totally speculative. If the economy is really going to keep growing UNTIL everybody in the world undergoes brain surgery to have some amazing computers inserted into their heads, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re talking about hundreds of years of continuing economic growth.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that economists only ever think about the next few decades at most. In my experience, that’s just not true. And if you get to imagine hundreds of years of economic growth, isn’t it just fair to let this Murphy person point out potential problems with that idea?
I’m also skeptical of the idea that humans will eventually “completely satisfy ourselves”. The problem is that the brain gets used to things. It adapts. A junkie has to keep taking larger and larger doses to get the desired effect.
It’s obviously not possible to increase the quantity of digital experiences indefinitely, but it’s certainly possible to keep making digital experiences more and more intense and addictive – which won’t lead to “satisfaction” (let alone happiness), but to humans who’ll need increasingly extreme amounts of stimulation to feel normal.
I remember that guy's blog. I'm no economist but even to me his points (like "economic growth is impossible because refrigerators are already as good as we can make them") seemed hinky.
I don't know that I buy the idea that there's an "all human needs/wants are satisfied" point. I had this problem with the Culture novels. Trillions of regular or near-regular humans live an incredibly luxurious and long-lived post-scarcity life of ease because there's a few dozen super-intelligent AIs that are happy to provide everything they want (and basically keep the humans as smart pets). But the setting has genetic engineering, cyborgization and mind-uploading; what if one of the humans says they want to be an AI god too? It seems to me like most people would probably take the super-intelligence if it could be granted safely and cheaply, and then you're left with a small number of holdout humans living as space Amish, and a whole bunch of super-intelligent AI gods who are back to scarcity economics, but over stuff like whether they should turn a solar system into computronium or keep it for the view, and etc.
You mentioned desire modification, but I think economic competition and on a longer term, natural selection would not favor a group that solves all problems by turning off the part of their brains that considers things problems. I don't know if anything would constrain people to use desire modification only for unfixable problems and not all problems.
(If you weren't aware, "Griffin's Egg" by Michael Swanwick also explores something like D-Mod)
As someone with a political science Ph.D, I confess to feeling just a twinge of schadenfreude. You know, as economists are to political scientists, so physicists are to economists . . .
Nonetheless, Murphy's observations on economics wonderfully reflect the obtuseness of someone who interprets the world through a very distorted lens. And so of course he is wrong.
This reminds me of the great story of Darwin and Lord Kelvin. Darwin, actually -- you know -- looking at the world, gave an estimate suggesting the earth was billions of years old. Kelvin, being a PHYSICIST, said poppycock and declared that the laws of physics made it absolutely clear that the Earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Being the greatest physicist of his age, everyone bowed to him, and Darwin even edited his claim out of later editions.
Too bad, that discovery of a little thing called radioactivity later destroyed the foundation of Kelvin's argument and completely backed up Darwin's claim.
I have much sympathy for the point Murphy wants to make, as badly as he makes it. While it's certainly theoretically possible for economic growth to be entirely immaterial, we're living in a material world, where growth in energy consumption is of course not equal to economic growth but fairly predictably related. And looking back at 2012, it seems obvious that people weren't making decisions with even ten years into the future of climate change in mind. Now there's much more talk, but not really yet any substantive change in behavior.
This might be *the* one time I’m thankful for having taken my first year micro courses. The apocryphal economist assumes that potential output is unlimited. However, that violates an actual assumption used in fixed point theorems used to prove that some equilibrium exists, namely that production sets are compact
I always found rather silly in the post his demand that we limit ourselves to production on Earth in the year 2212. I will gladly grant that dreams of space colonization in the next few decades are vastly overblown. But over the next 200 years? Now that's just silly...
But isn't economics filled with projections about the consequences of climate change ~100 years from now? Why should we pay attention to any of those, based on what you write here?
Good one! I realized as I read this that I had read (and enjoyed and agreed with) Murphy's post several years ago, when my understanding of econ was much weaker. Ah, the innocence of youth.
Local nonsatiation is wrong in that the most valuable human asset is status—and that is a zero sum game.
Did you ever end up writing that d-mod story? I can’t find it on Google, though that could only reflect my own incompetence!
ahah Noah I am guessing you would be happy to hear that anytime I meet a degrowth I like citing your old post :)
In France, there is a famous engineer named JM Jancovici that makes these kinds of claims
And it's seriously annoying
Physicists tend to think GDP is a variable like the one they are used to: supposed to describe a given physical reality
But GDP is something created by humans and supposed to describe societies entirely created by humans
Without us gravity will still exist but without human societies, gdp makes no sense
I have the impression that vaclac Smil, another famous physicists, makes the same mistake
I really liked most of Murphy's posts (and I've been meaning to look at the textbook he wrote based on it). But this one always did strike me as not giving enough credence to decoupling of economic growth from energy usage. I do think his point that energy usage must stop increasing in the next couple centuries is an interesting and important one (partly because I think we really ought to be thinking on that timescale at least, and partly because it has implications for just a few decades out as well). It helps break one out of the mindset that anything that was standard for the past two centuries (like employment) must be standard or get even more entrenched over the next two centuries.
Hmm.
I’d like to point out that the prospect of the kind of “Desire Modification technology” that you talk about is totally speculative. If the economy is really going to keep growing UNTIL everybody in the world undergoes brain surgery to have some amazing computers inserted into their heads, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re talking about hundreds of years of continuing economic growth.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that economists only ever think about the next few decades at most. In my experience, that’s just not true. And if you get to imagine hundreds of years of economic growth, isn’t it just fair to let this Murphy person point out potential problems with that idea?
I’m also skeptical of the idea that humans will eventually “completely satisfy ourselves”. The problem is that the brain gets used to things. It adapts. A junkie has to keep taking larger and larger doses to get the desired effect.
It’s obviously not possible to increase the quantity of digital experiences indefinitely, but it’s certainly possible to keep making digital experiences more and more intense and addictive – which won’t lead to “satisfaction” (let alone happiness), but to humans who’ll need increasingly extreme amounts of stimulation to feel normal.
I remember that guy's blog. I'm no economist but even to me his points (like "economic growth is impossible because refrigerators are already as good as we can make them") seemed hinky.
I don't know that I buy the idea that there's an "all human needs/wants are satisfied" point. I had this problem with the Culture novels. Trillions of regular or near-regular humans live an incredibly luxurious and long-lived post-scarcity life of ease because there's a few dozen super-intelligent AIs that are happy to provide everything they want (and basically keep the humans as smart pets). But the setting has genetic engineering, cyborgization and mind-uploading; what if one of the humans says they want to be an AI god too? It seems to me like most people would probably take the super-intelligence if it could be granted safely and cheaply, and then you're left with a small number of holdout humans living as space Amish, and a whole bunch of super-intelligent AI gods who are back to scarcity economics, but over stuff like whether they should turn a solar system into computronium or keep it for the view, and etc.
You mentioned desire modification, but I think economic competition and on a longer term, natural selection would not favor a group that solves all problems by turning off the part of their brains that considers things problems. I don't know if anything would constrain people to use desire modification only for unfixable problems and not all problems.
(If you weren't aware, "Griffin's Egg" by Michael Swanwick also explores something like D-Mod)
As someone with a political science Ph.D, I confess to feeling just a twinge of schadenfreude. You know, as economists are to political scientists, so physicists are to economists . . .
Nonetheless, Murphy's observations on economics wonderfully reflect the obtuseness of someone who interprets the world through a very distorted lens. And so of course he is wrong.
This reminds me of the great story of Darwin and Lord Kelvin. Darwin, actually -- you know -- looking at the world, gave an estimate suggesting the earth was billions of years old. Kelvin, being a PHYSICIST, said poppycock and declared that the laws of physics made it absolutely clear that the Earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Being the greatest physicist of his age, everyone bowed to him, and Darwin even edited his claim out of later editions.
Too bad, that discovery of a little thing called radioactivity later destroyed the foundation of Kelvin's argument and completely backed up Darwin's claim.
http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/content/failed_scientific_clocks/kelvin_cooling.html
Yeah, No economists use long-term time frames. Especially not nobel winning ones when it comes to important things like Climate Change. Oh wait.... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856?journalCode=rglo20
I have much sympathy for the point Murphy wants to make, as badly as he makes it. While it's certainly theoretically possible for economic growth to be entirely immaterial, we're living in a material world, where growth in energy consumption is of course not equal to economic growth but fairly predictably related. And looking back at 2012, it seems obvious that people weren't making decisions with even ten years into the future of climate change in mind. Now there's much more talk, but not really yet any substantive change in behavior.
Our money system is exponentially based..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n70wdU_HDvY&t=1733s
Murphy didn't go anywhere.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
This might be *the* one time I’m thankful for having taken my first year micro courses. The apocryphal economist assumes that potential output is unlimited. However, that violates an actual assumption used in fixed point theorems used to prove that some equilibrium exists, namely that production sets are compact
I always found rather silly in the post his demand that we limit ourselves to production on Earth in the year 2212. I will gladly grant that dreams of space colonization in the next few decades are vastly overblown. But over the next 200 years? Now that's just silly...
But isn't economics filled with projections about the consequences of climate change ~100 years from now? Why should we pay attention to any of those, based on what you write here?
Good one! I realized as I read this that I had read (and enjoyed and agreed with) Murphy's post several years ago, when my understanding of econ was much weaker. Ah, the innocence of youth.