This Can’t Go On

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

by rfw300 • 5 years ago

254 258 5 years ago

ehmish3• 5 years ago

I think the thing that this article misses is that per capita growth (the thing that's important for people's experienced life satisfaction) can essentially grow a lot further with fewer atoms under cultivation if you increase density. Humanity probably doesnt have much more area under cultivation than 300 years ago, but it has several orders of magnitude more people. The way i see the future going is less people, but each one is a billionaire. Kind of like how when stars run out of fuel they don't just wither away, but turn into very hot, dense and fast spinning white dwarfs.

AndrewGaspar• 5 years ago

World population in 1700 was 600 million, which is a single order of magnitude.

Kydlaw4• 5 years ago

Thank you for checking, I was dubious too about that claim.

ehmish3• 5 years ago

Yeah probably should have double-checked that, thanks.

You prompted me to double-check my other claim (that land under cultivation didn't increase) and that was wrong too!

According to this it's gone up by about 5x https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

This was accomplished with profligate use of fossil fuel based fertilizer, it’s a trick you can only do once. And nobody produces enough value on their own to become a billionaire, you have to be in a position in an organization where you can skim off the labor of a lot of people.

ehmish3• 5 years ago

I'm thinking if population growth continues to shrink and go negative and automation continues to increase, production will stay constant or even increase, even while population decreases. Which would mean that each individual would get more riches with less work.

iforgetmypass4• 5 years ago

Does HN not have rules against clickbait titles?

Edit:

... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait

quietbritishjim2• 5 years ago

It seems the masses disagree with you, but personally I also find it objectionable. I shouldn't have to click through and increase someone's ad view count just to find out the article is completely irrelevant to me.

iforgetmypass4• 5 years ago

I see this all the time on HN and it's maddening. Every other site I read has rules against clickbait titles.

tempestn4• 5 years ago

I believe the rule is against changing the title to make it more click-baity. (Or for any reason besides necessary shortening.) In this case the title of the original article was used unchanged.

iforgetmypass4• 5 years ago

Wouldn't this be the original article author's problem, not HN readership's?

quietbritishjim2• 5 years ago

... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

tempestn4• 5 years ago

I would argue that the stagnation option is the most likely. After all, the exponential growth in technology and economics is made up of a series of smaller 'S' curves in individual technologies and industries. Each goes through an initial period of slow growth, followed by a rapid expansion, and then a slowing and leveling off of growth. We're already seeing this same pattern on a larger scale with population growth. Certainly a significant drop is possible. I suppose a 'singularity' is conceivable as well. But an S curve, with growth leveling off over time, seems like a good prior. (Of course, it won't be perfectly smooth. Zoomed in, it might end up feeling more like the sawtooth graph.)

iammisc4• 5 years ago

This is silly. For one, large portions of the economy are not built on actual material. For example, take software, an evergrowing segment of the economy.

The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.

Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters. The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe.

The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.

Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material, but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good. For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff.

And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which do not even require material goods proportional with the economic value added.

In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand the economy due to a shortage of atoms.

babelfish2• 5 years ago

Everything you bring up requires mass amounts of energy, which consumes mass amounts of fossil fuels and natural gases, and is not “free”.

dougweltman• 5 years ago

How much energy is stored in the chemical bonds of the materials that make up a camera? Or a Garmin GPS? Or a newspaper?

Kydlaw4• 5 years ago

The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.

But what part of the economy does this represents? Most of the Internet run through ads, whose objective is to sell stuff. The real fallacy is the knowledge economy here. The value of Internet is that it sells physical stuff, not that it makes people smarter or happier.

travisjungroth4• 5 years ago

The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.

You're going the wrong direction. The issue isn't fitting atoms into data. It's fitting data into atoms. You can give every atom a GUID, but you can't give every GUID an atom!

You don't have to put it in terms of economy. Our rate of growth for energy and data are unsustainable. Current growth would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range. So either we go beyond our needs for space and energy or growth slows down. Both of those are a big change from the status quo.

Kydlaw4• 5 years ago

Current growth would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range.

A thousand years is a very optimistic estimate I would say. World3 (which is still on track of its predictions) predicts before 2050, which seems realistic considering the current context.

skybrian• 5 years ago

This doesn’t really apply to housing or congestion of any sort. Space can be recycled but only when you’re not using it. Everyone and everything takes up space. Things like AirBnb only go so far to make cities more efficient. people don’t like getting packed in, so they will pay for more space.

peterburkimsher• 5 years ago

Software is actually very special: it can be an economic good (sold by companies), or service, or given away for free as open-source by volunteers.

A few weeks ago I heard a message about there being 3 major forms of investment: private companies (stocks), governments (bonds) and property (banks).

All these want to show exponential, compounding growth, but that isn't what happens. Stocks follow a business cycle of expand-contract. Governments grow in proportion to tax base, which is related to population. Property has been increasing in price due to the ever-increasing population, but this is likely to plateau soon.

I fear the day when companies realise that they can make more money for their shareholders by destroying governments and property through starting a war. (c.f. United Fruit Company, but with private space rockets = missiles).

What's a good investment during a war? I believe that philanthropy is the solution.

Schindler invested in his List of employees, rather than some economic instrument. They looked after him during his later years. People will try to protect their own lives, and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway.

Social connections can continue to grow factorially, as the world gets more connected. I think that this is always good, because it promotes peace and understanding among the diverse cultures that exist. I don't know how that can be harnessed economically, and I dislike the advertising model used by private companies to monetise the network. Still, I think that encouraging social connection will create viral growth, and be beneficial to the world.

bumby2• 5 years ago

Software is actually very special: it can be an economic good (sold by companies), or service, or given away for free as open-source by volunteers.

Is it really that special though or are we on HN just trying to feel special?

I can think of plenty of other sectors of the economy that claim could apply towards.

E.g., “Healthcare is actually very special: it can be an economic good (sold by companies), or service, or given away for free by volunteers.”

“Energy is actually very special: it can be an economic good (sold by companies), or service, or given away for free by governments.”

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

No, you haven’t made “ever more money”, you’ve made 45 dollars, and you will have to find a buyer that will pay that much.

Money isn’t magical. You can’t create infinite value out of nothing.

iammisc4• 5 years ago

Money isn’t magical. You can’t create infinite value out of nothing.

It's not 'nothing'. It's something, just sold over and over and over again.

Remember that MV = PQ . Fundamental equation of macroeconomics. The average price of all goods (P) times the total # of goods (Q) is equal to the total amount of money (M) times V, the total number of times a dollar is spent in the time period in question.

You can make the total cost of goods be anything depending on how often that dollar is spent in a year / decade / whatever.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

You can only run so much code with so many electrons. At a certain point, you run out of electrons.

Imagine a world in which there is just one person and the economy is just how big of a number this person can make on a computer.

If there is more than one person or more than one computer - you have less electrons at your disposal - because they're making up other people & computers respectively.

This is obviously very far into the future - but so is 8000 years!

Between 1960 and 1970 - global GDP increased by about ~$1T. That was about the same increase between 2018 and 2019 - even after adjusting for inflation.

That was a low-growth year for the last decade.

In the 1960s we had the entire space race and a lot of the modern computer (including the Internet).

If the trend continues, in another 60 years, we could accomplish about as much in a month. In another 120 years, about as much in a day. In another 120 years, about as much in an hour. Another 180 years, about as much in a minute, and in another 180 years, about as much in a second.

It's hard to argue you haven't hit the singularity at that point - and that's only 660 years away.

8000 years at this current growth rate would be truly unimaginably alien - and I'm not sure why everyone is convinced it could keep growing or would even need to.

If the population keeps growing at current rates - we'd have enough productivity for everyone to have a higher quality of life than Jeff Bezos does today in <700 years - at least, inflation adjusted, the average person on the planet would have >$15Bn in annual income.

dTal7• 5 years ago

The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.

It's not a fallacy as long as economic activity is a proxy for human activity, because humans consume to survive. In your sheet metal example, while it's the same physical aluminum throughout the process, you've hired a team of people (and expended a huge amount of energy, incidentally). Each of those people will take that money and spend it on food, electricity, clothes, and luxuries. All economic activity ultimately boils down to that.

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

GDP only measures the value of goods sold to the final consumer, none of the intermediate sales are counted.

babelfish2• 5 years ago

This is what terrifies me about the FIRE movement.

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

Could you elaborate? I am genuinely interested.

kapp_in_life2• 5 years ago

How do you mean? I'm sure even with flat yields people in that camp will be far better off than the average person since one of the prerequisites is getting assets equal to 20-30x your annual expense

quicklime• 5 years ago

I'm not the grandparent poster, but I share the same thought.

The ~4% SWR for FIRE assumes that we'll see sustained growth in equities markets, because that's what we've seen before. But the data really only goes back to the early 20th century (the data from the "Trinity Study" looked at the period from 1925 to 1995).

I agree with you that people in the FIRE camp will still be far better off than the average person. But to me the terrifying scenario is retiring at 30 and then running out of money at 60 because the 4% rule didn't work out.

Kydlaw4• 5 years ago

I'm surprised the author tackled this topic without mentioning World3 from The Limits to Growth or the heavy reliance of modern, developed societies on fossil fuels? Thus it's a very interesting economical opinion, but without adding the physical aspects (energy consumption) into the reflection, I don't see any interesting result.

perrygeo• 5 years ago

This! In a world where oil discovery, extraction and distribution was ever increasing, betting on a bigger energy pie in the future made sense. All of our macro-economic theories were developed under the naive assumption of an increasing fossil-fueled bonanza.

But in a world of no new oil fields and increasing costs for extraction, we no longer have the ever-growing pie to fund our future financial obligations. Credit looks risky and economic decline seems inevitable based on the energy availability alone.

That's not even mentioning the externalities of fossil fuel consumption: climate impacts, ocean acidification, mass extinction, etc. make these economic issues even harder. Or is it the other way around? Either way, "this can't go on" and fossil fuels are a central part of the equation.

ravi-delia• 5 years ago

There is every likelihood that we could in principle just keep drilling new oil. Our ability to extract oil at a cost effective rate scales almost exactly with the depletion of easy reserves. The reason we need to switch out is the devastating environmental impact, and only the devastating environmental impact.

kiba• 5 years ago

The externality of fossil fuel consumption by far is the most problematic part of our economy. We have more energy than we ever meet from the sun, nearly all of which is uselessly radiated out into space, never mind what we don't use when sunlights hit our Earth.

bryanlarsen3• 5 years ago

Wind and solar are cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels and are going to be a lot cheaper soon. They're going to fuel a boom we haven't seen since the energy crisis of the seventies.

randallsquared• 5 years ago

Is it not interesting because there's nothing to argue? If the author focused on something from Limits to Growth, it would be possible to argue about whether the world was actually that way. As a logical argument based only on historical trends and physical impossibility, it's a much stronger argument than it would be were it possible to pick holes in the detail.

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

The world3 model is not really something you can use to make predictions- it’s got variables like “resources” with no units. And the conclusion you get from it was programmed into it.

I’d put my money on “steady state” or maybe “steady state but after a contraction due to climate change”, but not due to the world3 model.

rasengan0• 5 years ago

https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37364868 my digital person from the CT camp will intersect with this BAU2 version or ... not

N00bN00b• 5 years ago

Honestly, I can just change what I consider economic growth and the problem immediately goes away. I can make that graph do anything I want, just a matter of convincing enough people to go along with it.

Also:

Why can't this go on?
If this holds up, then 8200 years from now

Alright. Well how about we worry about that in 8100 years?

redisman• 5 years ago

For some perspective, 8000 years ago we were still in the Stone Age.

deviation• 5 years ago

Yeah. I find this post's thought experiment both fascinating contradictory..

8200 years from now (from a biological standard and considering our technological growth) we might barely be human anymore.

We would sooner need to worry about our 6th dimensional energy-blob children getting tattoos before we need to worry about the economy.

jeremyjh4• 5 years ago

The point isn't that physical limits will only be a problem in 8200 years, it is to counter the defective idea that such growth can be sustained indefinitely. We don't have access to all the atoms in the galaxy, and can't even make use of most of the ones we have here on earth. We will hit a wall much, much sooner.

dredmorbius4• 5 years ago

Ultimately an economy has to meet the fundamental physical needs of human beings (at least until we're all Singularitied into Hive Mind Cryostatsis Upload Tanks or equivalent). That's food, clothing, shelter, and the rest of it --- the base of Maslow's Pyramid.

More money can solve some distributional probems, but ultimately not the problem of insufficient production or supply.

The classic "toy economy" example of this is "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp", which looks at the use of cigarette-based currency within a World War II prisoner of war camp.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133

It's not a perfect analogue of a true economy (goods were largely supplied to the camp through the German authorities and Red Cross shipments, there was little actual production or labour). But what was illustrated were both price fluctuations as the currency (cigarettes) increased and decreased in prevalence, subject to an innate destructive demand (habitual smokers). And when the actual supply of goods (food and other items) dried up late in the war, no amount of currency could in fact make the camp economy function.

maerF0x0• 5 years ago

fundamentally all human growth and expansion is in order to satiate desires for dopamine and other feel good chemicals.

It's a relative cycle including what one has recently experienced, combined with observations of relative status (eg, what is your neighbor going through). This is a process whereby the only way to maintain good feelings is to incrementally consume more units of good per unit of dilution (eg time, or density). For example getting more reward experiences in succession -- this is the example of social media + video games. Another example is high fructose corn syrup sweeter per gram...

Until we can get off that treadmill we're going to be more and more consumptive (than both our previous selves, and our peers)

austinl• 5 years ago

While not directly tied to economic growth, one factor this article leaves out is that global human population growth could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100) [1].

In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4, Germany, 1.6). Albeit during COVID, the 2020 TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the last four years in a row [3].

With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...

ronlobo• 5 years ago

I agree. The book "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling is an excellent read about the topic.

Yes, growth in economy and population can go on and will likely result in an S-bend curve in the distant future.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

Hans Rosling's presentation "Don't Panic" (produced by the BBC) is pretty good:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

It's an hour long; really interesting.

api• 5 years ago

Demographic leveling or collapse is in a category I've heard called "demand limits to growth."

Everyone always thinks about supply limits, with some making dire Malthusian prophecies of what happens if we exhaust our resources with runaway growth. I've seen surprisingly little discussion of demand limits.

Other possible sources of demand limits include: satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more), diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diminishing impact of new technologies (compare the next CPU density node to jet aircraft or antibiotics), consolidation of functionality into fewer more versatile products (e.g. computers and smart phones eating TVs, tape decks, radios, book shelves, CD collections, etc.), cultural shifts toward simplicity, replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars), etc.

The eternal growth assumption assumes both infinite supply and infinite demand.

TeMPOraL3• 5 years ago

As a civilization, we are good at inducing demand, though. For example:

satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more)

Advertising industry literally exists to mitigate this problem. I don't envision it hitting a limit any time soon.

cultural shifts toward simplicity

This has not happened yet. Our existing "trends" for simplicity and minimalism are just thinly-veiled attempts to get people to buy more shit they don't need (like "simpler" items, to replace the perfectly fine items they already have, or books and videos and conference tickets of minimalism thought leaders).

replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars)

I don't believe this is stable state. EVs are more reliable because they're new. They haven't gone through enough value engineering cycles. The market has a structural incentive to optimize away all quality, until the result is barely fit for advertised function - so I expect that once EVs start dominating, they'll also start breaking at the rate people are used to with ICE cars, because manufacturers will optimize away spare capacity and surplus material of every component.

I think the risk is still dominated by the supply side.

pydry• 5 years ago

Wealth inequality also exhibits a form of demand limit.

Not that there's no demand per se but if there's no spare cash to back it up...

imtringued12• 5 years ago

Pretty much every aging country is seeing the demand side of their economy die. I'd say education increases the minimum standard of living that people expect. If having more children threatens that standard of living they will refuse to have them.

ilaksh• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that people are just going to think my comments here are hyperbole or give me a lecture on how I don't understand economics, but I will say it anyway.

And please read to the end because I believe my opinion is different from the normal sides taken.

Money supply and debt are increasing in ways that are unsustainable in the current system. At the same time, there are reasons that this is being done, and it boils down to the fact that a fixed supply just doesn't work either.

However, I believe that our money is too simple and our global political systems too disorganized continue this way. Essentially, at some point some countries have too many problems and cannot morally tolerate letting other countries produce money and throw debt into a hole while forcing them to live up to their obligations.

If another system that is fair and based on sound cryptocurrency is not put into place, the result within the next few years may be a global war. The first part of this is using blockchains to prevent people from constantly cheating as is the current case. Also, I believe that a fixed supply is absolutely not appropriate, but so is an infinitely expanding supply. But beyond that, I think money needs to become a high technology. So rather than having a few valves that can be turned on or off by lucky people near them, there should be a lot more data involved and more levers. Such as connecting money in some way to real resources. Or regulating use for different purposes in different ways.

soared3• 5 years ago

crypto/blockchain or global war. Not the most nuanced of opinions ;)

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

I’d put my money on stagnate. But, only compared with the exponential growth baseline. You can still have linear growth, and then gradual growth, for quite a while.

The human population is already leveling off. I’d bet any amount of money that, within 50 to 100 years, economic output will also reach some more or less steady state.

ksec• 5 years ago

It is silly to look beyond a hundred years, let alone thousands.

travisjungroth4• 5 years ago

Why? What's "silly" about it? I think the article does the best you can at predicting that far out, which is saying which futures are incompatible with each other. I find meaning in thinking about the future and I like seeing it be done well.

soared3• 5 years ago

It doesn’t make any sense to graph something like gdp or economic output on a scale of thousands of years. The world looks nothing like it did 2000 years ago, and 2000 years from now, by the authors own admission, it will look entirely different.

IMO the graphs the author uses are like graphing something like baking a cake. Y axis is “how much is this thing a cake” and x axis is time. It’s zero pretty much the whole time, then you stick it in the oven and it rapidly becomes a cake. Funny thought experiment I guess, but it provides no value.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

Science fiction would never exist with this attitude and we can read early science fiction and see that much of it was in fact quite correct. The speculation gets us to thinking about what is coming and what we can do to make it better.

paxys• 5 years ago

The author makes the assumption that economic growth has to come from an increase in material output, resources consumed etc. when it can very well be the opposite. "Number of atoms in the universe" has nothing to do with anything, and is just used to (incorrectly) turn their subjective argument into a scientific one.

You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.

jbay8087• 5 years ago

The rebuttal to this is presented in "Exponential Economist vs Finite Physicist": https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.

jimmyed• 5 years ago

Well, it doesn't have to be finite. Imagine if the Chinese get around to generating electricity from hydrogen fusion, we'll all have "infinite" energy

novok• 5 years ago

For now, there is a lot of 'economy' inside making energy usage more efficient. Like the LED bulb vs the incandescent.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

" all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input,"

This is not the issue.

The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no.

The value unlocked from increasing applied intelligence doesn't require commensurately more energy in all cases.

If we figure out a cure for cancer, it'll likely have nothing to do with increased energy usage.

Maybe we figure out how to control simply and cheaply store CO2 in pellets at the bottom of the ocean. Climate changed solved.

Economic output is just a number, it's how we value the stuff we trade among one another.

scythe• 5 years ago

As a physicist I find this to be a trite argument. You can easily get to 'finite' simply by arguing that the number of digits required to represent a number cannot exceed the number of atoms in the Universe. That's a ridiculously loose bound, but it's still finite.

The practical question is will our lives be recognizable to someone alive today when we do hit a ceiling? The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live. If the limits come in some unimaginable future, what good does it do to worry about it now?

There are plenty of problems that we can foresee in the near to medium term. The finitude of the Earth is not yet an issue.

AlexCoventry• 5 years ago

That's not a sensible limit to worry about, at this stage, unless there's some reason to believe that economic growth is doubly exponential.

manwe1502• 5 years ago

Space is cold and big. We can theoretically sink near infinite heat there (generally in the form of radiation of wavelengths not readily absorbed by anything in the atmosphere).

cryptonector8• 5 years ago

We're very far from exceeding the limits of available energy on Earth. Between enormous reserves of carbon (the U.S. has an insane amount of natural gas in proven reserves), nuclear, and solar, we're good for a long time. Of course, I am considering that negative population growth is baked into the world population pyramid, which means that we'll see some slowing of energy demand growth in a couple of decades. I think most people would be very happy with 15-20KWh/day, which is roughly what Americans are used to.

lordnacho2• 5 years ago

Isn't this like bringing up the Shannon limit when discussing broadband speeds?

Or the speed of light when discussing train speeds?

They're real but aren't we miles away? Genuinely curious. Just seems to me that economic organisation hasn't come anywhere near what physics allows.

rambojazz• 5 years ago

So in other words economy can grow until we have optimized the usage of energy.

worik2• 5 years ago

This is a tired old argument.

Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.

It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2

AstralStorm12• 5 years ago

For now. The sink analogy does not quite work, they're closer to empty containers that you fill with gas, which get harder to fill above certain pressure and can even explode.

dTal7• 5 years ago

I would suggest that the increased throughput comes from the technological advance. We're getting ever more efficient at converting energy and raw materials into stuff we want. That means it's cheaper. That means we do it more.

And yeah, "the economy" includes services as well as goods. But services are performed by humans, and humans need to eat and live in houses and wear clothes etc.

schnable2• 5 years ago

Right, I don't get what atoms have to do with it at all. Today, I can buy an iPhone for $1000 that's a phone, camera, encyclopedia, game console and more and more. Just 30 years ago this would have required a lot more atoms (including energy input, I suspect) and a lot more money.

syops• 5 years ago

I’m guessing here but it seems to me the idea is that each atom can hold a finite amount of information and information storage requires energy. An economy requires information and storage of information (not necessarily permanently for each transaction). So it seems to me that the ‘economy’ is limited in size by being proportional to the number of atoms we’ll be able to have access to.

jeremyjh4• 5 years ago

So do you think we'll have the technology someday (pretty soon actually) to build all the smartphones on earth with less than one atom?

dTal7• 5 years ago

Consider Jevon's Paradox. Yes, we're more efficient at turning materials into products, but that just means we do it more, and the net consumption goes up. Did you replace your camera, encyclopedia, game console etc every few years, 30 years ago? Do you think we're mining less?

komali2• 5 years ago

I agree, and I'm not even clear on what "grow" means. Like, literally increase global GDP? Increase some measure of productivity? Because already there's all sorts of contradictions in our society's "advancement."

Productivity is increasing, but wages are decreasing.

Country net worth is increasing, but happiness is decreasing.

Etc.

When I read these kinds of posts, I think about "stagnate." It feels like an inherently negative word. I know that most people value a constantly improving technology, but as my OP says, technology can "improve" while, say, net worth or GDP "stagnates." Even leaving that to the side, I don't feel like "stagnated" technological advancement is inherently bad. It's just a value many of us hold.

Not to get primitivist, but, humans really were just eating berries and vibing for a really long time. I don't think we should "return to monkey," but if we get to the point where we figure out that we can't really defeat death, it might then become time for society to instead start thinking about living the way a cancer patient with a deadline does: how can we find meaning, knowing the end is inevitable? Sure yeah meaning could be still trying to advance, but given that current modes of technological advancement often involve capitalist exploitation and general misery (which isn't REQUIRED but we seem to be really big fans of it cause we keep doing it), perhaps we could decide to let go and just live happily with "technological stagnation."

jeremyjh4• 5 years ago

The kind of stagnation we're talking about could accelerate inequality to the point that the french revolution looks like a rowdy ska scene.

CryptoPunk2• 5 years ago

>Productivity is increasing, but wages are decreasing.

Wages have increased more in the last 30 years than at any time in history:

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...

ttiurani2• 5 years ago

OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here. Your argument – a very common one and very influential in today's society – however is purely theoretical. As John O'Neil points out:

"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."

If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 5 years ago

Most US states grew their GDP while shrinking emissions from 2005 to 2017: https://www.wri.org/insights/ranking-41-us-states-decoupling...

Nothing theoretical about it.

amelius• 5 years ago

OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here.

If we know anything about the economy, it's that past trends are a bad predictor of the future.

coldtea2• 5 years ago

Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.

The economy ultimately comes from material goods. The digital economy is only a facade built on that substrate. And it's already pushing its limits, which is why everyone, from FAANG companies to the guy selling some digital asset online, is pushing to sell something or another as hard as they can, with all the conviction and integrity of a snake oil salesman.

0xfaded• 5 years ago

Replace atoms with bits of quantum information and you'll get a more or less equivalent upper limit. Even if your economy is 100% information based, you still need to store/transmit that information.

If a bit of data could be stored in a single hydrogen atom, after 1000 years of 1.03 growth 1e9 kg of hydrogen would be required (starting from 100 zetabytes today). After 2000 years you're at 1e21 kg, more or less the mass of the moon. For completeness, after 2700 we'd need the mass of the solar system in hydrogen atoms.

I agree with the article that there is a fundamental limit to growth. If I had to guess, the first limit will be the number of humans on the planet, followed by the black body radiation rate of the earth needed to stop our gizmos from overheating.

robertwt7• 5 years ago

This is actually interesting.

I think tech era has redefined the way people value a company? It is not based on the P/e ratio anymore, people keep buying stocks from companies that are not even making money yet. Basically most people are betting their money based on trust that these tech companies are going viral one day.

Either way, i'm not an economist so maybe that's just a high level or me being dumb

fallingfrog9• 5 years ago

No, you’re not dumb, it’s a bubble.

If I write you an iou for a million dollars, and you write me an iou for a million dollars, we can both be millionaires, and if everyone does that for everyone else, then we can all be millionaires, but only until too many people try to trade those IOU’s for something real at the same time.

NovemberWhiskey• 5 years ago

No; if we write each other IOUs for a million dollars, our net worth remains the same, right?

nostrademons3• 5 years ago

That describes inflation, not a bubble, unless you mean a bubble in $USD.

If I then go to trade my million-dollar IOU for a house that now costs a million dollars because everybody has a million, that's a price increase. More dollars in circulation means higher prices for everything, which is inflation.

A bubble would be if I went to go buy a house and then found that your IOU was good for nothing and you didn't actually have a million dollars to give me. This was the situation in 2009 but doesn't appear to be the situation today.

AstralStorm12• 5 years ago

A few other possibilities are:

- edge of punctuated equilibrium: we reach a Kardashev level and getting through it requires major breakthrough again - would produce a flattening increasing sigmoid zigzag

- slow catastrophe pending resource depletion outstripping rate of innovation or travel, very slowly reversing progress

- singularity immediately halting the progress - flat horizontal line - the Accelerando situation

- potential speciation or technological fragmentation where it stops to be useful to talk about a single progress

bottled_poe• 5 years ago

The market for information is practically infinite and this resource isn't limited along the axes presented in the article. Not sure what else to say.

mbfg2• 5 years ago

does anyone really think that humanity will be here in 200 years? 500 years? I think that's a real stretch. There are 100 ways we will go extinct, and we don't care about any of them.

TchoBeer• 5 years ago

I get that, but we survived the world wars and the cold war, so I hold out some hope.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

For me the question isn't if there will be warm bodies around, but if they will have agency, dignity, a longing for justice and a capability for empathy, plus a lot of other things at least I associate with humans being human, rather than appendages of machinery that accumulates power without any use for it other than accumulating more power.

mbfg2• 5 years ago

yes. but we were far less capable of killing ourselves then. The further we go, the more easily we will find it to kill ourselves.

imtringued12• 5 years ago

We might lose billions on the way but I don't really see why humanity wouldn't survive with 10 million people alive in 500 years assuming extinction level natural disasters.

worik2• 5 years ago

This has been known to everybody but economists since at least 1972

cratermoon4• 5 years ago

lootsauce• 5 years ago

Some economic thoughts I always bring up in such discussions.

- There is much economic activity that comes from increasing inefficiency, think cost disease, this is a feature not a bug in a system straining to maintain full employment at all costs that is increasingly managed in a top-down manner

- queueing theory probably explains most monetary policy, as inflation gas pedal is feathered to make historically large debts look like speed bumps in the rear view they do the same to buying power but the inverse to assets, keeping this process slow enough but not too slow probably has something to do with avg human lifespan

- no empire lasts forever and usually exhaust their hinterland expansion efforts for various reasons ultimately debasing the currency to mfg more growth while the fundamental drivers are long gone, what is the hinterland for our empire and how much more of it can we exploit?

- During the Black Plague something like 1/3 of Europe died off, this gave rise to a new wealthy class of inheritors laying some foundations for the Renaissance, we are on the edge of a historic population decline as birth rates plunge across the world, will we see a similar effect, or does this only work when lives are cut short?

Clewza313• 5 years ago

At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor. The Industrial Revolution kicked off because we learned how to harness steam powered by wood and coal, and how long "this can go on" is going to depend on how well we can manage the transition off fossil fuels into renewables, not just on a 1:1 replacement basis, but catering to increased future demand.

jeremyjh4• 5 years ago

Yes, but renewables would only give us a chance to see growth plateau without our civilization disintegrating. The point the article makes is the year over year multiple-percent economic growth is impossible, and the limiting factor becomes the number of atoms in the galaxy on a timescale shorter than human civilization's total history.

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

The other part is increasing knowledge, which allows us to use energy more efficiently. This could theoretically allow continued growth with the same amount of energy.

dTal7• 5 years ago

More efficiency just means more consumption. Every year our technology has grown more efficient, and every year we use more energy.

gumby• 5 years ago

At the end of the day "this" (economic growth) is powered by using energy to multiply the impact of human labor.

That's just a restatement of the Victorian/Marxist model of industrial labor.

The actual reality is that energy intensity of the OECD economies has been dropping for decades. As well attested in several sources such as, say, EIA data.

I'm a big fan of energy consumption BTW, and think it should increase significantly on a per capita basis, especially in poorer regions (though not from fossil sources). I just have been following this particular statistic for years and see that growth is not proportional to energy consumption.

chmod600• 5 years ago

"But I don't think [stagnation is] the most likely future."

Why not? Thomas Malthus predicted[1] that population would explode and collapse, but it didn't... and it looks like it's stabilizing.

The author should be wary of making the same mistake.

Come to think about it, a high tech and stable economy could be a very nice place to live. It could also be a totalitarian dystopia, depending on exactly how things play out. But one can at least imagine it working out well.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

gpsx• 5 years ago

I think stagnation, or at least a change through successively smaller exponential regimes, should be the base case. I'm bullish on our future tech prospects and I know we have the entire universe from which to draw resources. But for all the real world cases of exponential growth, I think they are all limited.

And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.

jrm4• 5 years ago

What does "the economy" count, precisely, and furthermore why do we believe that it is likely that whatever "the economy" counts is going to continue to be an important thing to count?

sanxiyn• 5 years ago

If economy is not an important thing to count in the future, that is a strong case for This (status quo) Can't Go On.

cryptonector8• 5 years ago

Yes, exponential growth cannot continue forever. Fortunately exponential shrinkage of the population is baked into the world' populate pyramid. As for economics, we can still get wealthier on a per-capita basis by generating more and higher quality activity per-person, though at some point one does expect decreasing returns.

alphachloride• 5 years ago

The number of atoms on earth has remained the same, more or less, over the last 5000 years. The size of the economy, as the author charts, has increased many fold.

So why does he then expect the number of atoms on earth and outside to be pertinent to the size of the economy into the future?

I think the article contradicts itself.

tempestn4• 5 years ago

The number of atoms on earth in the past isn't relevant because we were not close to exhausting the earth's resources in the past. The author is demonstrating that if this rate of growth were continue in the future, eventually we would run up into physical limitations; the idea that we could sustain a whole present day earth's worth of activity for each individual atom in the galaxy seems more than a little unlikely. Of course, there would certainly be other bottlenecks hit first; looking at atoms in the galaxy is just a clear-cut way to show that there is almost certainly a limit to growth somewhere, and that even in that extreme case we would hit it in a short time frame, relatively speaking.

seventytwo• 5 years ago

There are likely fewer than 10^70 atoms in our galaxy, which we would not be able to travel beyond within the 8200-year time frame.

This offers an interesting upper bound on growth, being that our energy consumption couldn’t possibly outpace our ability to travel (at the speed of light) to obtain new sources of energy. (Of course assuming no FTL tech or and no way of generating energy without interacting with matter).

For example, consider we’ve learned to harness 100% of the sun’s output, and we’re looking to double what we can harness. The next nearest star is at least 4ly away, so the doubling time is at least 4 years. To double again, we now need to find two additional stars, each with their own travel limitations. This doesn’t include overhead, like the time it takes to build a dyson sphere or collect the raw materials to do so.

perl4ever• 5 years ago

Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"

SeriousM• 5 years ago

A little sidetrack question: why are news headlines 90% in the wrong case? Because of the language "Go" and this platform I have to rephrase some headlines with "go" in it a couple of times until it's kinda clear what the content might be.

pope_meat• 5 years ago

Infinite economic growth is possible, heat death of the universe be damned.

dredmorbius4• 5 years ago

</s>

imtringued12• 5 years ago

What if we find a way to create more universes? The power of interest...

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

Does the graph account for GDP per capita?

Seems like the population graph would similarly take a big uptick from historical norms and it's fairly well studied that it is reaching a steady state now.

So, do we need the same GDP growth with the same or less amount of people to be/feel richer?

imtringued12• 5 years ago

If there are two humans left in the economy would one end the other's life to get that final doubling?

randomsearch• 5 years ago

What I learnt from the comments here is that this is a highly emotional subject and many people are making strong assertions without the strong evidence to back up their claims - on both sides.

If people from both sides could recommend books to read on this subject, I'd appreciate that more than the offhand comments.

Specifically: it would be great to reach a consensus on a few books that argue the case that the economy relies on finite and nearly exhausted resources, and a few books that argue that technological advances will greatly increase the capacity of economic growth.

RandomLensman• 5 years ago

As interesting as these topics are for an extended dinner table conversation, they actually move the focus away from the hard work necessarily to create "progress".

Yes, we could worry about running out of atoms in the universe sometime in the future, but why not put that effort in developing broad spectrum antivirals instead?

code_duck• 5 years ago

I don't really think anyone is expecting economic growth to continue in a straight line for 8,000 or 2,500 years.

wazoox3• 5 years ago

Food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration

https://stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundarie...

We're most probably heading towards collapse real soon now (for some undetermined value of "soon" between a few months and a few decades). Of course, this is to be received with strong rejection in the HN techno-optimist bubble :)

pas2• 5 years ago

What's your model of this? What data do you base this on? What the quantitative value of "most probably"? What's a collapse?

I mean, I'm not optimist, but I'm aware that my doom and gloom about how stupid and irrational we are is just a gut feeling.

Yes, we're squarely out of the easily comprehensible by naive human wetware regime. But then we should recognize that instead of doubling down and giving in to the fear coming of an even primal faculty.

The "this can't go on" chart has a very simple solution. This can go on because very easily, because we're still burning fossil fuels, and every time we switch to a healthier alternative that chart goes up. And we are furiously trying to switch, not necessarily everybody, but ask anyone who lives in cities who doesn't want less smog, who doesn't want less noise pollution, etc. And that graph is also going up because people are moving to cities en masse. (See the real estate prices all around the most desirable living places, but urbanization is happening everywhere else too.) People who live in cities simply by participating in a more productive economy make that chart go up again.

Sure going on like this forever is impossible. But a collapse is not the only alternative.

wazoox3• 5 years ago

Did you check my links? "Collapse" may have several definitions; generally for a complex society or ecosystem it's a rapid simplification, reduction of exchanges and population.

Here is our situation: as you may have heard, every year around August we reach the "Overshoot day". That means that we use more resources (even renewable ones) than the Earth can produce (its carrying capacity), i.e. we're actually "mining" renewables resources such as oceans, soil, forests, etc. That means that the quantity of renewable resources globally available tends to go down while our resource usage still goes up.

At some point, our resource usage WILL fall down UNDER the line of globally available renewable resources. The longer we wait, the LOWER we will need to back down.

See https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/over-carry.html for a relatively detailed explanation and real-life examples.

Also I don't really get where you're going with your fossil fuels example. We switched from renewables to fossil fuels back in the 18 and 19th centuries because they're so much denser, easier to use and powerful than renewables. They enabled the "great acceleration" by providing almost limitless energy, and doing without them is a tremendous, unprecedented effort.

Human history is about getting better energy sources: our ancestors got bigger brains by eating meat (more energy). Then they invented fire (more energy) to make their food more digestible (more energy). Later on they invented agriculture (more energy), then burned forests for more energy, and switched to peat and coal by lack of wood (more energy), then oil and gas and nuclear (still more energy). Notice that we never "switched" from an energy source to another: we piled them up. Coal usage nowadays is higher than it ever was during the 19th and 20th centuries. See https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/energie_gra...

For the very first time in 300 000 years, we'll have to go from a dense, easy to transport and store energy sources to more diffuse, harder to transport and store ones. We'll have to go from an incredible abundance to relative (or maybe not so relative) scarcity. It's literally an unprecedented challenge, particularly at the global scale we're talking about.

choeger2• 5 years ago

The obvious counter argument is that economic growth is not measured in any physically stable form. If it was, then yes, there would be a limit.

But if we measure economic growth in the amount of money that moves across the globe in a defined time interval, there is not necessarily any limit.

The interesting question is whether we are willing to accept that physical goods will stop getting cheaper at some point. We seem to accept this when it comes to real estate so I assume we will also accept it when it comes to cars and computers some day.

dTal7• 5 years ago

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14

"Economic growth" as measured by numbers moving around is just a proxy for what we really care about, which is increased availability of goods and services. Goods and services necessarily entail resource expenditure. If you're just moving numbers without any actual physical effect, you don't really have an "economy" to speak of.

choeger2• 5 years ago

That is obviously true but not an argument for a limit. Availability of goods and services could grow logarithmically while prices could grow exponentially, you'd still see linear nominal economic growth.

garbagecoder• 5 years ago

omg someone read Malthus!

Mistletoe• 5 years ago

I expected more intelligent discussion of this from HN. I’m quite disappointed. Every comment dismisses what he is saying and I guess that is what we should expect from a culture that doesn’t realize how bizarrely different and unsustainable their era is.

This Can’t Go On

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