The U.S. economy is growing and using less and less stuff to do so

https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy-and-climate-change

by Anon84 • 7 years ago

379 146 7 years ago

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

I am a bit surprised it took this long to show up really given so many other trends

ehmish• 7 years ago

This seems like it's a natural result of the US economy being concentrated in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, i.e just shuffling money around rather than production.

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

If only it was just shuffling money around. From another post today:

in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the [fossil fuels] industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development. [0]

Also I wonder how much of that "dematerialization" is due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-ox...

sanxiyn3• 7 years ago

Surely some of it is US outsourcing relatively material-heavy manufacturing and concentrating on relatively material-light manufacturing (US manufacturing is up, it's not total outsourcing of manufacturing), but that doesn't explain the case of global dematerialization of paper for example. For the case of, say, substitution of paper book with ebook, dematerialization does seem to be happening.

wallace_f• 7 years ago

That's nice virtue signalling, but at what point would finance's share of US GDP be alarming to you? Should 1 in 10 people really be working to allocate resources?

In another industry, healthcare, people complain passionately about the costs but never about the fact that while technology, efficiencies have improved there has been a 100-fold increase in the number of healthcare administrators per capita. A lot of our economy is just shuffling people and money around -- not actually efficiently allocating resources to produce useful goods and services--oh about that abnormal growth in the people who are supposed to be responsible for that?

WalterBright• 7 years ago

Or computer sectors, where the product is information.

omegaworks• 7 years ago

Or entertainment sectors, where the product is [most frequently digitized] art.

sanxiyn3• 7 years ago

This is not the case. Overall production is not down, and dematerialization can be seen even if you restrict to particular sector that is not finance. OP discusses the case of agriculture for example.

mntmoss• 7 years ago

One of the topics that comes up in article praise for cap & trade, pointing to the success of existing pollution laws.

In practice - last I checked, and I admit to not having followed them closely - I don't think carbon credit schemes have had a big payout just yet. I'm not ready to dismiss them, on the other hand. This might just be because more of the CO2 emissions get exported to the developing world, and so a true ROI has to wait until global economic goals start aligning.

ac29• 7 years ago

US manufacturing output is at a ~30 year high (perhaps an all time high, the data only goes back to 1987): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

squidlogic• 7 years ago

According to this site [0], there actually has been a dip. Here's an excerpt, draw your own conclusions:

"Essentially, with access to a more granular data set than had been publicly available, the economists could see that growth in manufacturing over the decades was almost entirely a result of statistical adjustments for improvement in semiconductor performance."

[0] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/manufacturing-job-loss...

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Not really.

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...

anm89• 7 years ago

I think this is misleading to some degree.

The world produces and consumes vastly more than it did at other points in that period and as a percentage Im guessing the percentage of what we produce to what we consume (ie our self reliance and share of the global production pie) has been steadily decreasing.

Id be interested to see numbers which prove or disprove this.

refurb• 7 years ago

Those are called services and important part of the economy.

glbrew2• 7 years ago

The vast majority of the "FIRE" economic sector is not an important part of the economy. Before neoliberal economic policies and the government handing $10 Trillion + handouts to the FIRE sector, yes, it was important and efficient. Not now though, unfortunately.

DeonPenny4• 7 years ago

US Manufacturing is still the second biggest in the world. Theres just a lot more robots and less people. Also tech moves more than anything as far as tech is a category which it really shouldn't be anymore.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

Part of that is wrong (fertilizer/agriculture is a particular salient example).

And part of it is the article's point: there are now industries that produce information or services that can fully replace some physical goods: If Google Maps saves you from getting lost, you burn less fuel. If financial markets "shuffle around" smartly enough, those 50 metric tons of pork go into McRibs instead of spoiling, etc.

phkahler• 7 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of inflation. Maybe not in the things used to measure it?

collias• 7 years ago

Where are you seeing "a lot of inflation"?

The inflation rate in the US has been pretty low for the past decade or so, relative to history.

Source: https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-inflation-rate-history-by-yea...

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

Health costs have increased a lot since the "Affordable" Care Act came into action... that must count for something.

lotsofpulp• 7 years ago

Healthcare, education, real estate in desirable areas, and taxes. I can also see that I spend more on hotel room nights, restaurant meals, groceries, supplies for my businesses. I don’t know where the inflation stats are coming from, but I’m certainly spending more every year for the same quantity.

legitster• 7 years ago

There was a big moment this decade where metrics like life expectancy and quality of life decoupled from energy consumption. Which is a capitalized Big Deal in economics.

If you actually believe that software has the ability to change the world, this is it in action.

api• 7 years ago

Did that actually happen or did we just outsource all the dirty stuff?

coldtea3• 7 years ago

We just outsourced all the dirty stuff.

Retric5• 7 years ago

We did export significant amounts of production while reducing new infrastructure investment.

But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.

PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.

_ptgt• 7 years ago

Both happened, but 1/2 to 2/3 of the difference is due to actual efficiency gains.

Source: recently read The Quest, book which discusses energy in the modern world

jcampbell1• 7 years ago

Let’s be clear about what is meant by dirty stuff. Dirty stuff is the children of peasant farmers moving to cities assembling iPhones and buying things like air conditioning and a motorbike for their families.

The upside is that some of the children of peasants are putting a serious dent in world climate problems like Wang Chuanfu who is the founder of BYD.

yourbandsucks4• 7 years ago

I know it's gauche to say so, but the fact that this comment is gray right now says a lot about the community.

How dare you question woke capitalism, Mr. 'api'. We want to be told we're building a better world, and we'll hang anyone who says otherwise. Didn't you see Silicon Valley?

briga• 7 years ago

On the other hand, as software and frameworks get more complex, they require more compute to run. Software hasn't decoupled economic growth from energy consumption, it has just made the energy consumption harder to see.

Edit: since people are asking for examples, I would have to point to the insane cost of training modern ML models. For instance, according to [1], training a single big NLP model can burn up to 620,000 lbs of CO2.

I say a lot of energy consumption is hidden because it's generally moved to data centres, which by the way use up astronomical amounts of energy [2]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/trends-data-centre-e...

dmitriy_ko• 7 years ago

Moore's law has decreased amount of energy required to run the same code.

alexanderdmitri2• 7 years ago

Could you explain this more? I would think energy use is quantifiable when payed for by metered consumption.

EpicEng• 7 years ago

Software hasn't decoupled economic growth from energy consumption, it has just made the energy consumption harder to see.

You're going to have to explain that one. We can pretty trivially measure energy usage...

0xDEFC0DE• 7 years ago

I think cryptocurrency takes the cake vs. any sane/non-bug thing that frameworks are probably doing. Maybe some AI workloads are in the ballpark?

visarga• 7 years ago

For instance, according to [1], training a single big NLP model can burn up to 620,000 lbs of CO2.

That's not 'an NLP model', it's one of the largest and baddest NLP models that has to be trained only once and can be reused 1000 times over by fine-tuning on different tasks. The paper was hyperbolising about energy use. The AI labs that can even attempt that kind of things can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

A regular NLP model trains in minutes up to a day on a single GPU, so it uses energy on the level of personal game play. And let's not forget that ML can solve difficult math problems with as little as 1/100 of the energy of classical computing by using smart approximation methods. Neural nets also have a nice degradation effect where you can shrink the net by 20x and lose just a few percentage points of accuracy.

That's why Google's speech recognition and synthesis can now run on a single cell phone instead of a datacenter. And we haven't really started building specialised AI chips that will reduce energy usage even further - we're still using mostly GPUs.

ummonk3• 7 years ago

Well given that life expectancy in the US is decreasing now, that decoupling seems to have been short-lived.

modriano2• 7 years ago

Umm, energy use per capita [0] is going up, while the at-birth life expectancy is going down [1] (largely thanks to the opioid epidemic, which is largely a product of a large unemployment trend caused by offshoring and automation of low-education jobs). Is that the point you were making (namely that software has a net negative impact on the world)? I don't know about that.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db328-h.pdf

adventured2• 7 years ago

Umm, energy use per capita [0] is going up

Your own linked data from the EIA says that you're wrong.

Peak energy consumption per capita 1979: 359m btu

Energy consumption per capita 2000: 350m btu

Energy consumption per capita 2007: 335m btu

Energy consumption per capita 2018: 309b btu

That's an extremely clear downtrend over time.

StanislavPetrov• 7 years ago

There was a big moment this decade where metrics like life expectancy and quality of life decoupled from energy consumption.

For most Americans life expectancy and qualify of life are dropping measurably. By your logic we should increase energy consumption to reverse these losses.

adventured2• 7 years ago

For most Americans life expectancy and qualify of life are dropping measurably.

Half of that is easily demonstrably false. Quality of life for the majority of Americans continues to improve.

The US welfare state has improved considerably in the last 30 to 50 years.

- Homelessness has been slashed by 20-25% in two decades thanks to housing programs the Bush and Obama administrations pursued. Homelessness nationally is sitting near the lowest levels in US history.

- Childhood poverty has collapsed by roughly 45-50% in 40 years.

- The overall poverty rate at 11.8% is near an all-time record low. That figure is lower than in either Canada or France today. In 1960 the poverty rate was 100% higher than it is now.

- The poorest 25% of Americans now get free healthcare, that was not true at all at the supposed peak of US well-being and financial per capita outcomes in the ~1965-1980 time frame. The fact is, the bottom 1/3 are far better off today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. The homelessness and poverty rates demonstrate that.

- The middle class is expanding at the fastest rate since the 1960s. More income as a distribution share is finally beginning to shift from corporate profit to labor.

- For the last several years wages for the bottom 2/3 of labor have been rising dramatically faster than wages for the top 1/3.

- The US savings rate is strong at 8%. Household balance sheets are similarly strong. The share of household income going to debt service costs is near 40-50 year lows.

Several of those are entirely due to a continued resource shift via the rapidly expanding US welfare state and increasing progressive taxation.

gniv• 7 years ago

Interesting quote from the (long) transcript:

"The USGS tracks, I believe, 72 different materials. I think all, but six-ish of them are now on a downward trend. The biggest exception is actually plastics, but there’s something interesting going on there as well. Overall plastics consumption used to grow even more quickly than the economy did. Plastics are super useful. We use them all over the place. Now, plastics use is still increasing, but it’s increasing more slowly than the overall economy is."

zeofig• 7 years ago

I wonder how long pretending literally nothing is a "growing economy" can continue before something bad happens. I have a feeling I won't have to wonder for long.

thrower123• 7 years ago

If we were really producing nothing, I'd be worried. We produce a shit load of stuff; we just don't use many people to do it.

What to do with all the people is the more pressing problem.

why_only_153• 7 years ago

The point of the economy growing is so that the society as a whole can do more things that it wants, not about using more natural resources. If we can do more things that we want and also use less natural resources, that's what we want, not an omen of something bad.

randyrand• 7 years ago

Could this also be indicative of a bubble?

DeonPenny4• 7 years ago

Quite the opposite. Money is getting more efficient not less

Gibbon13• 7 years ago

If money is getting more efficient why have interest rates been heading into the toilet for 35 years?

sanxiyn3• 7 years ago

You can't actually substitute something with nothing, and conservation laws (of mass, energy, etc) do hold. But in practice, substituting with, say, atmosphere, is almost as good. OP discussed the case of substituting copper network with atmospheric spectrum.

Consider guano: guano use for manufacturing fertilizer is down, because Harber-Bosch process substituted guano nitrogen with atmospheric nitrogen. Atmospheric nitrogen is still a material thing, but it sure does look like dematerialization.

why_only_153• 7 years ago

You can also shift the structure of the things people care about to be things that are easier to make. If people buy less cars and spend more time backpacking across Mexico, that also substitutes something with nothing (or at least less).

teabee892• 7 years ago

Dematerialization is the biggest fallacy in the industry. Data centers need energy to run. Buying the latest servers, network equipments, iPhones and more every year or two, requires an enormous amount of energy. GDP is directly correlated with energy, so there is no sign of change: an economy cannot grow without energy. I wish more people understood the economy from a physics standpoint.

dev_dull• 7 years ago

Also why I believe nuclear power must play a vital role in carbon neutral power generation. Wind and solar is great for homes, but what else can power the steel industry? The duty cycle is enormous.

hasbroslasher• 7 years ago

In theory battery tech can fuel Industry, though the ironic chicken-and-egg of the situation should be clear. Obviously we should invest in updated, safer, more efficient nuclear tech, but the public image is so bad that we might as well use coal and spend extra money on carbon capture

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

Steel and aluminium manufacturing actually are somewhat well-situated to make use of solar and wind power. The energy-intensive processes (i. e. heating metal until it melts) has somewhat flexible timing. So you can heat it up when energy supply is plenty or other demand is low and smooth out the grid.

And nuclear energy is simply too expensive. I know it hurts that some people were maybe too afraid of it in the past, but that's no longer the argument. It loses not just to un-subsidised wind and solar now, but even to natural gas + planting trees to offset carbon.

unnouinceput• 7 years ago

But the point McAfee is trying to do is that it requires less materials to do so. Yeah, energy consumption is on the rise, but instead of burning xx tons of coals to generate 1GWh like it did 50 years ago, it does so by using 10% of that coal. Advances in technologies allowed us to do that. In plus you cannot deny we do have a momentum to use more and more technologies involved in renewable then in fossils. I agree we are not quite there yet, but is way better then it was in the late 80's, beginning of 90's when the ozone layer hole was at its biggest.

abstractbarista• 7 years ago

Energy != Stuff. Renewable sources are rising. We'll be OK.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

The term you're looking for is "energy intensity". And, indeed, it's going down: https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+intensity&client=safa...:

We're deriving more useful output with less or at least flattening (material and energy) input.

I wish more people understood economics from an economics standpoint.

teabee892• 7 years ago

I know about energy intensity, and yes it is going down, but not by enough to compensate the growth of consumption, which is the fallacy i'm pointing out. It has another name: Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Ancalagon• 7 years ago

I believe in the power of software, but also wonder how much of this growth is due to financial engineering (specifically debt being bought and sold at varying interest rates)?

skybrian• 7 years ago

I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Bernanke's "global savings glut" or Larry Summer's "secular stagnation?" It seems you may not need as much money to make money?

I tried asking about this on /r/AskEconomics and it seems that some still believe that more savings is better, based on the Solow model.

m463• 7 years ago

There's a theory that "the solution to pollution is economic growth"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...

It is controversial (and I'm uncertain about it personally)

goldenkey• 7 years ago

Are we just exporting the pollution?

spodek• 7 years ago

Increasing efficiency is different than lowering total waste. People push for efficiency thinking it will lower total waste, but you can easily increase efficiency and increase total waste.

In the physical environment, total waste is our biggest concern. Our economies are more efficient than ever, but we're also producing more total waste than ever.

We have to focus on lowering total waste. I talked about this in my podcast episode 183: "Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic." https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-environment/episod...

glbrew2• 7 years ago

"Jevon's Paradox"

lioeters• 7 years ago

Thanks for the reference, today I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

icebraining• 7 years ago

They work well side-by-side. If recycling made the overall per-item cost lower, businesses would have been implementing it by themselves a long time ago; paying for the recycling of every piece of plastic is more expensive than creating a new piece and then dumping it, which is why they haven't. So you can get a reduction by mandating full recycling for all plastic (new or previously recycled, of course). The important thing is making sure the producers are paying, rather than getting subsided.

dkural• 7 years ago

This does not take into account materials use in other countries that is in direct relation to the US economy. US is not primarily a resource-extraction economy, and many of its firms do most of their manufacturing overseas. Rarely will a high-tech company buy natural resources directly / from a US source. It won't show up in any of the studies' metrics of 'stuff used'. This objection came up recently in a panel discussion about this study as well.

vannevar• 7 years ago

Yes, it's either disingenuous or incredibly naive to ignore the outsourcing of materials-intensive activities to other countries, the most obvious example being manufacturing. Would our rate of material use look so low if we included the materials used for every retail good sold, regardless of where it was manufactured? I doubt it.

roenxi2• 7 years ago

This can easily be reversed. What exactly is being measured as growth if it does not result in more stuff being consumed and produced?

Growth measures aren't usually linked to soft outcomes (eg, happiness, moral fulfilment, access to basic needs, etc) because they are too hard to measure. Growth measures aren't linked to stuff produced (thesis of article).

We're measuring something. Probably some sort of technological advancement. Does it make sense to call it growth? If resources Energy per capita is dropping; I would call that contraction rather than growth. I like having access to stuff.

esoterica• 7 years ago

If your car gets twice the mpg and you’re consuming half as much gas do you consider that a bad thing? You’re deriving the same amount of utility at half the resource cost.

roenxi2• 7 years ago

Yeah, but that isn't growth. Growth is my car gets twice the mpg and I now have a petrol heater on cold nights. Or I drive twice as far. My lifestyle staying the same from one week to the next is stagnation even if I'm using less resources.

This is an appeal to Jeveron's paradox. If efficiencies increase, growth looks like getting much more output. Getting the same output when efficiencies increase doesn't signal growth.

I suspect the disconnect is people think that "good" and "growth" mean the same thing. That isn't a real link. The situation doesn't look like it is growing, even if it is good.

rdiddly• 7 years ago

So I read the Jesse Ausubel essay that apparently inspired this, and while I'm tempted to dismiss it all as utter unsupported horseshit, that would be unsupported as well. The most I can say that is defensible is that I'm suspicious of it, and here are some random thoughts about reasons why, in no particular order:

It could be clearer throughout, whether he's talking per capita or overall.

Data is selective and ignores resource utilization shifts. Example: In the 1940s crop acreage decoupled from crop yield, he says. Great! Instead it coupled to petroleum and energy, he doesn't say. American farms today are in the business of converting fossil fuels to food. For example, the 1940s are when when cheap internal-combustion tractors started being mass-produced, thanks to all that spare manufacturing capacity left over after the war. There's also a graph where he looks at "every input" into growing corn, even down to the phosphates, while scrupulously avoiding any talk of fuel or energy.

A resource shift of a different kind: efficiency gains in chicken production are due mostly to inhumane factory farm conditions. (Ones to which pork & beef are less amenable, hence chicken outdoes them.)

Wood is no longer used for railroad ties, because we use concrete. Which has its own problems! The point in most of this kind of example is that we stop using A because B comes along to fill the void. Nobody uses paper anymore, but they sure use a lot more lithium than they used to. And so on.

Finally, and speaking of stepping in to fill the void: ctrl-F - "China" - 1 match. The single mention is to refer to it as a developing country, not to acknowledge it as the present-day location of much of the USA's manufacturing.

thedudeabides5• 7 years ago

Re concrete, I’ve been hearing a lot that we are running out of sand (the kind we make glass out of and the kind we make concrete out of).

Is that true? Anyone have numbers/research on sand that’s good?

mdorazio• 7 years ago

Depends who you mean by "we". Seems there are regional shortages [1], but the US only hits supply constraints occasionally.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...

imtringued• 7 years ago

There is an abundance of sand away from the construction sites but transportation is too expensive so regional suppliers are preferred.

daxfohl3• 7 years ago

It might have some teeth though. Maybe there's a point of maximum consumption, beyond which the average person would get overburdened by too much stuff. And maybe we're hitting that, and per capita people aren't wanting more stuff so much as they're wanting roughly the same amount of stuff but cheaper. So maybe we're approaching "peak stuff". This would fuel greater investments into making things more efficiently rather than making more things, which would allow the economy to continue growing until we actually hit "peak stuff", while raw material consumption would be reducing.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

Nice idea, doesn't match reality though.

We do indeed have too much stuff, but too much stuff being produced. With no sign it's stopping. In fact it's accelerating.

Instead of getting what we need, we're getting what we need, in excess packaging, and having to replace it every year or two as structural components, hinges, gears and bearings are made of plastic. If that's not enough we build far larger and heavier cars, we buy far more food than we eat, fridges and freezers get ever bigger. Clothes that lasted years are now made to wear out after a few months or if lucky, a year and the rubbish bin is now a wheelie bin with 2-3x the volume, and a recycling bin or 3. Today we struggle to get all the crap in the huge bin as it's full. So is the recycling. In 1980 the old school trashcan was rarely filled, except maybe the week after Xmas.

Meanwhile industry is convincing us that some other standard bit of being human is a source of failure and sells a cream, perfume or product to mask it, or a pill or service to avoid it. Or selling us a subscription to some simple thing made complex - e.g. fruit juice, bottled water, coffee pods. Even those of us who still try to be old-school and not buy into every fad, or replace a kitchen because they fancy a new colour, end up buying far more than we did in the 80s or 90s as the world is now built to make it unavoidable.

I'd love to see the merest hint that people are even thinking about not wanting more stuff...

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

Jeremy Rifkin discusses how economic growth is tied to energy efficiency and that it changes depending on fuel source. His theory is we have already hit peak efficiency for fossil fuels which is why developed economies can't grow any quicker. You can find out more by watching his talk on Vice's YouTube [0]. Well worth a watch if you haven't already.

[0] https://youtu.be/QX3M8Ka9vUA

pizzazzaro• 7 years ago

The inciting article fails to mention the financialization of our ecomony - lets make more money for having money!

What do you mean these serfs cant pay $2,000/ month for a studio apartment while earning minimum wage?

Note that historically, this sort of behavior on behalf of markets has preceeded revolutions - from Irish Independence to Mao's Communist Revolution.

We can stop it, if we work NOW to make the economy actually distribute goods and services.

samirillian• 7 years ago

Yeah, it feelsl like one more thinkpiece on how we can definitely have our cake and eat it too.

exabrial• 7 years ago

Glad to hear this merely because is has positive downstream effects. No need to beat one's chest, just maybe a moment to reflect on humility and figure out how to continue the trend.

systematical• 7 years ago

The article cites low-tech raw resources like timber, paper, nickel, and gold (okay this can be hiigh-tech) being used less in advanced economies. What about ones like rare earth minerals used in high-tech? It would have been nice for the article to touch on that. I would love if someone could find that information. A quick Google search didn't yield much.

The author does mention the energy usage rate is leveling out. Not believing this, I did a basic search on electricity usage and it does appear to be true: https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co.... I did not check total energy usage though (petrol, natural gas, etc.)

This confirms my belief that has been derided a bit here on HN. That is, I believe Capitalism one-day, in the far distant future, will end or at the least mitigate resource scarcity. When Capitalism achieves that, it in effect nearly goes away or is at least greatly reduced. Humanity will then reap the benefits of abundance. Hopefully moving beyond Capitalism, thanks to Capitalism.

EGreg• 7 years ago

The point is that it keeps adding up year after year. Sure we could use less plastic and still the series of partial sums converges to a really large number.

This is not sustainable. Elephants in Africa. Insects and birds. Desertification. Deforestation. Brazil chopped down the size of Hong Kong in a few weeks. Plastic in the oceans. CO2 PPM is on a steady rise. Permafrost is melting. And we are saying what?

oyebenny• 7 years ago

Is this some shill HN implant article? lol

pteredactyl• 7 years ago

Wait, things are not as bad as has been crammed down our throats for years? Imagine my surprise. But, yet many armchair doomsayers will still only find the negative. Yes, this isn't perfect. But neither am I. Or you. Peace

TheBobinator• 7 years ago

This story is an example of why "mainstream media" (The big 4 outlets) need to have all of their major and minor publications banned from this site going forward or be reduced to being allowed to post 1 or 2 articles per week, tops.

When I come to HN, I come here to learn about some cool doohickey someone is working on or a study that someone published about a different approach to security. I come here to learn about a bitcoin heist or something novel and new and most importantly, to learn from the comments. Lots of interesting people here with interesting views to contribute.

I don't come here to read about MIT flamebait; there's no in-depth study to read, no conclusions to draw, just a re-hash of CPI numbers which are at best horribly inaccurate, aside from the name, this might as well be a short novel. Worse, we're re-hashing something that's already there; CPI Numbers. This article is utter trite and a total and complete waste of time.

Then, the entire community begins discussing this Trite, which lets be honest, there's some interesting studies and observations in the comments but at the end of the day, the discussion has no direction or conclusion and that is dangerous because it invites an scopeless conversation. We should be talking about how this professors study is or is not accurate or interesting sidebars, which is useful to the professor for feedback and to the reader for coming to a conclusion, not talking in generalities and in circles because someone at a Big 4 wants to stay "relevant" and thinks getting the geeks talking to each other about their topic is a good way to do that.

Leave the trite where it belongs; on CNN or NYT or on any big 4 publication.

nabla9• 7 years ago

"Dematerialization" is a term that is not very commonly used.

Economists usually talk the resource intensity of production and consumption. You can divide the concept into material intensity and energy intensity. If you use them as a start of your search you find more Resource productivity is also more commonly used term.

There is evidence of a relative decoupling in resource extraction from global economic growth. In developed economies this is clearly happening.

Resource Productivity in the G8 and the OECD https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/47944428.pdf

Global extraction of material resources continues to grow, but there are signs of decoupling from global economic growth. G8 countries‘ resource productivity has been improving , their material intensity decreased by more than 47% between 1980 and 2008 and their annual per capita material consumption declined from nearly 20 tonnes to less than 18 tonnes. Over the same period, OECD economies have reduced their material intensity by 42% and their per capita consumption declined by 1.5% to 17.6 t.

OECD library has "Green Growth Indicators 2017" https://www.oecd.org/environment/green-growth-indicators-201...

OECD "Global Material Resources Outlook to 2060" https://www.oecd.org/environment/waste/highlights-global-mat...

There is negative relation between total factor productivity and material and energy intensity per unit of GDP. When productivity increases, most of the value is created buy other means than using materials and energy.

The catch is "per GDP". Per capita material consumption in OECD countries remains unsustainable. Developed nations produce their high living standard more efficiently but the living standard is so high that resource usage in absolute terms per capita extremely high.

jhoechtl• 7 years ago

Which in turn means that more and more of the benefit gets accumulated at the top.

ozim• 7 years ago

This is the thing that those doomsday prophets talking about next economic downturn don't take into account.

Whole virtual goods economy that is not visible.

carapace• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.).[1] Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.

The U.S. economy is growing and using less and less stuff to do so

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