You showed that some people hold an outdated view that economic growth requires using more physical resources. By analogy, I think that some economists in past centuries felt that economic growth was basically agricultural growth, and that any other kind of production wasn't really contributing to the economy. So the accepted view of what's important to the economy has gradually evolved from only food, to only material things, to anything that we value.
Regardless, the goal shouldn't be that we reduce meat space growth. Our goal should obviously be to maximize meat space growth and where we build as many servers and energy etc without also turning the earth into Venus. The degrowth ideology is this thing where they think that the perfect configuration of the world's atoms is however it looked in the year 1990, 2000 or whatever year said degrowther is most nostalgic about. In that sense it's a conservative ideology.
Very sensible, but I don't think it's right to focus so much on VR and Meta. I think it's more complete to say "we don't know what will drive future growth".
A sensible economist in 1600 would observe that the economy is over 90 percent agriculture, and conclude that growth (and population) would be strictly limited by the amount of arable land that could be brought into cultivation. He would calculate the amount of arable land that was not yet in cultivation, and derive his limits on economic growth and population from that. This analysis would be wrong for two obvious reasons: improvements in agricultural efficiency were possible (in fact, agricultural output per acre had increased 33 percent just from the implementation of the three-field farming system in the middle ages), and other forms of economic activity such as manufactured goods could grow dramatically without requiring more arable land. Nevertheless, economists like Malthus continued thinking that availability of agricultural land would limit both population and prosperity.
A sensible economist in 1900 would observe that most economic growth made intensive use of iron and steel, and conclude that iron ore deposits would limit world economic growth. He could estimate remaining volume of known iron deposits, allow for future discoveries, and calculate the limits on future world GDP. This analysis would be wrong for at least three reasons: people would become more efficient at converting ore to metal, large-scale recycling of scrap metal would become practical, and future economic activity could rely much less on iron and steel.
Similar analysis has been done with respect to energy, or rare earth elements, and they've been just as wrong. "Limits to growth" calculations are always based on a failure to predict what will constitute future economic growth.
Why even accept the premise that the planet has finite resources? If growth is non entropy, then Earth is literally bombarded with thousands of hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy every day - how else did we get from an empty water planet to the incredibly complex arrangement of carbon that we current live in today
We love to see GDP going up because we have always seen this as a proxy for a better condition for humans. What if we can raise GDP to infinity but only by breaking that correlation just like the GDP/energy one broke.
Yesterday, MS. Frances Haugen, the data scientist that worked at Facebook who uncovered unethical practices at Facebook, testified in front of the EU Parliament (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtQxE3qPCk). She informed us (among other things) that the in-house VR environment will require the installation of additional sensors. She considers that a further invasion of our privacy and a continuation of the global surveillance trends. Did you know that the Facebook AI was designed to detect your views (political or others) and present you with antagonistic posts in order to force you to engage? Her testimony is truly enlightening. It seems that everything in this society is designed to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
Just want to point out we didn't see infinite and decoupled economic growth from "virtual environments" on "2-dimensional text, pictures, and videos on screens" because there is an upper bound to peoples preferences of how much of that they'd like to consume. Not sure why 3-D would be any different.
Good discussion on the topic here at https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Economic growth can't reach infinity (or near infinity) unless energy ceases to be a monetary factor in the economy. When that happens, someone can buy all the energy needed (perhaps) and drive the price up again. The conversation about economic growth at a certain rate only works for a growth rate below a certain level and for which energy is some reasonable amount of cost in the economy. This rules out growth to infinity, or quite frankly, hyper-exponential growth. An infinitely growing economy will equal an infinitely growing energy use, that in time, by the laws of physics will burn the planet to a crisp. At described levels of growth and energy use, those dates can be calculated! Don't use infinity as that paints the economic argument into a corner.
I think we do know how much growth is possible. Less than what we've done now: as reflected by the rapid coming apart of a stable Earth system that will lead to loss of cities, agricultural land, forests, coral reefs, and many lives--of humans and other species. So degrowth is a wise approach to preventing a mass die off.
A second point: the metaverse (or at least your simulation) sounds pretty much like the matrix, and a great way of disconnecting ourselves from any understanding of our complete dependence on a living Earth. If you live your life in a simulation, the odds are you aren't going to much care if tropical forests are razed to get at the gallium arsenide below, at least until your city is flooded or there's no more chocolate (real not simulated chocolate) or there's not enough oxygen to sustain human life if we really grow until the very bounds of this finite system. And frankly, this is not a place I would ever want to inhabit, as this is just an extreme version of amusing ourselves to death, as I discuss here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/dear-yuxie-please-count-me-out-of-the-metaverse-future-b24ef45149fc
If you use few resources, you will not be able to make people pay much for that fun, because competition or the character of the services (zero marginal costs) will reduce prices. In many cases services will be for free (Wikipedia, Facebook, Google maps...). This is actually the best thing that can happen for our economic wellbeing. GDP does not capture this type of progress.
GDP measures our world today in terms of products of yesterday. Even the question if GDP growths or can growth infinitely is kind of absurd: How many video casettes is a Netflix account? It is impossible to compare products and production over a longer time horizon.
"Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had." More fun?????????????
Enjoyed your thoughts on this Noah! I'm an early adapter for VR and in my own life I'm finding I am spending increasingly on things that enable the "digital world" than the physical world. I keep spending more on digital goods such as high speed internet and wifi connections, good market data for investing and trading. . digital trading signal services, video games, VR HMD and PC upgrades, digital entertainment subscriptions etc. .. . The pandemic pushed society to digitize their lives more rapidly. I'm working from home and hope to eventually make all my income from trading online and creating digital art/content for VR worlds. I already paint and sculpt in VR. . (Vermilion for VR oil painting in a vritual atelier and Adobe Medium for VR sculpting and painting. If you have VR. . tryout the Facebook/Meta Horizons beta. You can actually create your own worlds completely in VR with their tools. Also because of FB logins the people there tend to be more polite and mature than some other VR chats that have become free for all shit-shows.
Its not clear to me whether the divergence between energy consumption and GDP, as depicted in the graph above, takes into account that much of the goods consumed by the USA in recent years have been manufactured in Asia. I readily accept that energy efficiency has contributed to this divergence. However, Vaclav Smil is on record saying that energy efficiency in North America can be improved by quite a margin. I thus wonder whether the rosy picture sketched by the graph isn't due to the offshoring of energy consumption by the USA.
Agree but then where is the Growth ?!? In developed countries we are under 2% for so many years and even China as you wrote yesterday is coming under 10%...
You showed that some people hold an outdated view that economic growth requires using more physical resources. By analogy, I think that some economists in past centuries felt that economic growth was basically agricultural growth, and that any other kind of production wasn't really contributing to the economy. So the accepted view of what's important to the economy has gradually evolved from only food, to only material things, to anything that we value.
Regardless, the goal shouldn't be that we reduce meat space growth. Our goal should obviously be to maximize meat space growth and where we build as many servers and energy etc without also turning the earth into Venus. The degrowth ideology is this thing where they think that the perfect configuration of the world's atoms is however it looked in the year 1990, 2000 or whatever year said degrowther is most nostalgic about. In that sense it's a conservative ideology.
Very sensible, but I don't think it's right to focus so much on VR and Meta. I think it's more complete to say "we don't know what will drive future growth".
A sensible economist in 1600 would observe that the economy is over 90 percent agriculture, and conclude that growth (and population) would be strictly limited by the amount of arable land that could be brought into cultivation. He would calculate the amount of arable land that was not yet in cultivation, and derive his limits on economic growth and population from that. This analysis would be wrong for two obvious reasons: improvements in agricultural efficiency were possible (in fact, agricultural output per acre had increased 33 percent just from the implementation of the three-field farming system in the middle ages), and other forms of economic activity such as manufactured goods could grow dramatically without requiring more arable land. Nevertheless, economists like Malthus continued thinking that availability of agricultural land would limit both population and prosperity.
A sensible economist in 1900 would observe that most economic growth made intensive use of iron and steel, and conclude that iron ore deposits would limit world economic growth. He could estimate remaining volume of known iron deposits, allow for future discoveries, and calculate the limits on future world GDP. This analysis would be wrong for at least three reasons: people would become more efficient at converting ore to metal, large-scale recycling of scrap metal would become practical, and future economic activity could rely much less on iron and steel.
Similar analysis has been done with respect to energy, or rare earth elements, and they've been just as wrong. "Limits to growth" calculations are always based on a failure to predict what will constitute future economic growth.
Why even accept the premise that the planet has finite resources? If growth is non entropy, then Earth is literally bombarded with thousands of hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy every day - how else did we get from an empty water planet to the incredibly complex arrangement of carbon that we current live in today
Meatspace. Yum. :)
We love to see GDP going up because we have always seen this as a proxy for a better condition for humans. What if we can raise GDP to infinity but only by breaking that correlation just like the GDP/energy one broke.
Yesterday, MS. Frances Haugen, the data scientist that worked at Facebook who uncovered unethical practices at Facebook, testified in front of the EU Parliament (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtQxE3qPCk). She informed us (among other things) that the in-house VR environment will require the installation of additional sensors. She considers that a further invasion of our privacy and a continuation of the global surveillance trends. Did you know that the Facebook AI was designed to detect your views (political or others) and present you with antagonistic posts in order to force you to engage? Her testimony is truly enlightening. It seems that everything in this society is designed to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
Just want to point out we didn't see infinite and decoupled economic growth from "virtual environments" on "2-dimensional text, pictures, and videos on screens" because there is an upper bound to peoples preferences of how much of that they'd like to consume. Not sure why 3-D would be any different.
Let me just deflate this balloon of nonsense with the following two sources:
Limits to Growth: Of Stuff, Value, and GDP
Https://steadystate.org/limits-to-growth-stuff-value-gdp/
The Self-Sufficient Services Fallacy
https://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/Czech_Self-Sufficient_Services_Fallacy.pdf
And for a fuller version read Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution.
That said, I may find the time to blow this particularly bad balloon out of the water at the Steady State Herald, too.
Good discussion on the topic here at https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Economic growth can't reach infinity (or near infinity) unless energy ceases to be a monetary factor in the economy. When that happens, someone can buy all the energy needed (perhaps) and drive the price up again. The conversation about economic growth at a certain rate only works for a growth rate below a certain level and for which energy is some reasonable amount of cost in the economy. This rules out growth to infinity, or quite frankly, hyper-exponential growth. An infinitely growing economy will equal an infinitely growing energy use, that in time, by the laws of physics will burn the planet to a crisp. At described levels of growth and energy use, those dates can be calculated! Don't use infinity as that paints the economic argument into a corner.
I think we do know how much growth is possible. Less than what we've done now: as reflected by the rapid coming apart of a stable Earth system that will lead to loss of cities, agricultural land, forests, coral reefs, and many lives--of humans and other species. So degrowth is a wise approach to preventing a mass die off.
A second point: the metaverse (or at least your simulation) sounds pretty much like the matrix, and a great way of disconnecting ourselves from any understanding of our complete dependence on a living Earth. If you live your life in a simulation, the odds are you aren't going to much care if tropical forests are razed to get at the gallium arsenide below, at least until your city is flooded or there's no more chocolate (real not simulated chocolate) or there's not enough oxygen to sustain human life if we really grow until the very bounds of this finite system. And frankly, this is not a place I would ever want to inhabit, as this is just an extreme version of amusing ourselves to death, as I discuss here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/dear-yuxie-please-count-me-out-of-the-metaverse-future-b24ef45149fc
If you use few resources, you will not be able to make people pay much for that fun, because competition or the character of the services (zero marginal costs) will reduce prices. In many cases services will be for free (Wikipedia, Facebook, Google maps...). This is actually the best thing that can happen for our economic wellbeing. GDP does not capture this type of progress.
GDP measures our world today in terms of products of yesterday. Even the question if GDP growths or can growth infinitely is kind of absurd: How many video casettes is a Netflix account? It is impossible to compare products and production over a longer time horizon.
"Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had." More fun?????????????
Enjoyed your thoughts on this Noah! I'm an early adapter for VR and in my own life I'm finding I am spending increasingly on things that enable the "digital world" than the physical world. I keep spending more on digital goods such as high speed internet and wifi connections, good market data for investing and trading. . digital trading signal services, video games, VR HMD and PC upgrades, digital entertainment subscriptions etc. .. . The pandemic pushed society to digitize their lives more rapidly. I'm working from home and hope to eventually make all my income from trading online and creating digital art/content for VR worlds. I already paint and sculpt in VR. . (Vermilion for VR oil painting in a vritual atelier and Adobe Medium for VR sculpting and painting. If you have VR. . tryout the Facebook/Meta Horizons beta. You can actually create your own worlds completely in VR with their tools. Also because of FB logins the people there tend to be more polite and mature than some other VR chats that have become free for all shit-shows.
Its not clear to me whether the divergence between energy consumption and GDP, as depicted in the graph above, takes into account that much of the goods consumed by the USA in recent years have been manufactured in Asia. I readily accept that energy efficiency has contributed to this divergence. However, Vaclav Smil is on record saying that energy efficiency in North America can be improved by quite a margin. I thus wonder whether the rosy picture sketched by the graph isn't due to the offshoring of energy consumption by the USA.
Agree but then where is the Growth ?!? In developed countries we are under 2% for so many years and even China as you wrote yesterday is coming under 10%...
Is 0,3% still growth ? 😉