Can growth continue?

https://rootsofprogress.org/can-growth-continue-ignite-talk

by feross • 4 years ago

160 272 4 years ago

rootsofprogress.org

kwindla• 4 years ago

OtomotO• 4 years ago

Sure, a malign tumor grows until the host dies.

Same is true for our glorious, of course unavoidable, an extremely resilient and fair economic system.

There is only black and white, zero and one, locusts capitalism and stalinistic communism...

atlasunshrugged6• 4 years ago

Didn't watch the video but the article was good. I think their mindset is absolutely correct- we should be worrying less about overpopulation than underpopulation and we should be pushing forward trying to make technological progress instead of embracing a degrowth mindset. While it does seem like big ideas are harder to find, I think some incentive shifting (e.g. more focus by corporates on long-term growth through productivity increases and innovation and less on financial chicanery) along with the innovation that comes sometimes with a single new platform (remember all the "Uber for X" products that the iphone enabled) that can help turn the tide. Plus, seems like many more people are concerned with progress, from Cowen to Progress.institute, so hopefully with more focus there will be more results.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 4 years ago

It seems quite obvious to me there is a lot of growth left with information being close to free now - and much of the adult world still being VERY poorly educated.

The current children that replace them will be much more educated due to free information.

I don't see how this doesn't create a huge jump in productivity in the developing world (~50% of the population).

atlasunshrugged6• 4 years ago

Good point, I remember seeing a report a little while ago about literacy rates even in the U.S. and they were surprisingly bad (a quick lookup on Wikipedia shows "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level")

That said, I'm not sure it's a guarantee that kids will be more educated and productive. I spent quite a bit of time in Africa (Kenya and Cameroon for projects, Uganda for holiday) last year and many people are relatively highly educated (e.g. local university degree) but still cannot get work, access to finance to start their own biz and be productive, or as soon as they make some money their business will get taxed (legally or illegally) to death. So other factors beyond education holding folks back, and even if it was just enabled from online learning, I think we'd see much more takeup of MOOCs and the like.

Edit: Grammar

captainbland• 4 years ago

I think a big - maybe huge and insurmountable - barrier to this is the sheer amount of junk attention sinks and outright wrong information on exactly the same medium that the good, free information is on.

slx26• 4 years ago

And yet, at the same time, growth can't continue forever (unless you get into space colonization on artificial habitats and are able to develop that faster than population grows and other stuff we are not going to discuss now).

What happens, as the article indeed points out, is that many things keep breaking, and we keep fixing and repairing and improving and more things fail and stop working and then again we fix and replace them. And so on and so on. The main problem is that people suffers in that process. The system self-regulates, sure. Nature self-regulates all the time through natural selection, evolutionary pressure and competition. That doesn't make it right. We develop medicine because being human is the opposite of accepting the randomness, competition and cruelty of nature. We want to have control, we want people to be happy, we don't want to be exposed to arbitrary tragedy, unfairness, pain.

As I always say, don't confuse the comfort of your boat with the state of the sea. That you are comfortable riding the current wave of pressure doesn't mean no one is suffering. This doesn't mean we should never grow, but it means we should do it responsibly. Saying growth is already responsible because the world keeps self-regulating is just being blind to many of the dynamics of the system.

And ok, one may argue that finding an equilibrium is impossible. That when there are resources available, we will always start taking more and more, growing above our possibilities, taking water until we hit the bottom, dumping shit until it spills. Then pressure and competition kicks in, people fall, people suffer, self-regulation is the way and all is good again. I don't understand.

(sorry for the rant, I understand you may also have concerns about the rate of growth and welfare of people in the process, but I wanted to share this take anyway)

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

As you say, growth, on Earth anyway, is projected to end. We should be planning for it. Instead nations are deferring and deferring by focusing on increased immigration.

stouset6• 4 years ago

As a counterpoint to this, I'll reference the (absolutely incredible) Do the Math blog, by Tom Murphy at UCSD.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

A salient quote from the first article, that I find very relevant:

We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to address our problems. Its track record is most impressive… But we have to be careful about faith, and periodically reexamine its validity or possible limits.

jeffreyrogers5• 4 years ago

I thought his posts on how many batteries we'd need to convert to electric everything while maintaining living standards were very interesting.

atlasunshrugged6• 4 years ago

Is it this one? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

reactjavascript• 4 years ago

The standards have to change, and they may be “less” by some measures, but many people can still have a wonderful existence. Maybe you have to eat more vegetables and less cheeseburgers. Maybe you can’t drive your Suburban seven days a week to Starbucks. Maybe life will slow down and people will enjoy a higher quality of life with family and friends.

epistasis5• 4 years ago

That post makes me distrust all the rest of his analysis. This conclusion in particular:

Rather, the lesson is that we must work within serious constraints to meet future demands.

Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of needs have been proven to not be very useful for scoping the problem. And his proposed solution of nuclear has proven to be infeasible and too expensive.

So what pretends to be an unbiased assessment based on physical principles is revealed to actually be a huge number of assumptions that are not reflective of reality, or useful for thinking about the future.

This is the exact problem that the original post talks about. We are too easily fooled by models that are simple, and wrong, like what dothemath presents.

Ensorceled3• 4 years ago

We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to address our problems.

The concern I have, especially WRT climate change, is this: We are not tackling climate change.

Yes, we solved ozone shrinkage, looming food shortages, deadly air pollution, acid rain (sorta), etc. all with technology. But we ACTUALLY tackled those problems; we banned lead gasoline, banned CFCs, starting scrubbing sulphur dioxide, improved crop yields.

epistasis5• 4 years ago

The frustrating thing is that we have all the tools to solve climate change, today. The only question is choosing to use them.

And since we know that these new tools have learning curves that are becoming cheaper, we have prettt good estimates that the switchover will be a cheaper energy solution than fossil fuels, with greater energy independence for more countries, leading to fewer wars!

But current fossil fuel suppliers have fantastic political control of the US, and they sow seeds of doubt and fear and uncertainty in the population, and buy off politicians to prevent market solutions from coming to the market. Much less the great amount of industrial policy needed to scale what we need to scale faster to meet the needs of climate change.

jotm• 4 years ago

Everyone thinks they want something to be done. The simple reason why few things are getting done is that it would seriously affect people's lives.

Right now, rising prices are a massive boon for the environment. Less consumption, more investment in better technology.

But people are angry, and at this rate, will start raging. It may be quite a turning point, if we're not mostly under authoritarian governments by 2030 I'll be happy.

As a collective, we simply do not want to solve climate change. Unless it magically does not affect our lives, then yeah, [whatever group, just not me] can go for it.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

We are not tackling climate change.

That is absolutely not true. 2 examples in the US: the $7000 EV tax rebate, 80GW of new renewable energy per year. And the US is one of the worst developed nations, Europe and others are doing a lot more.

Current estimates are that we are on track for 2.5 degrees C of climate change, which would have been 6 degrees if we did nothing.

We're doing something. Just not enough.

formerkrogemp2• 4 years ago

Again, the ozone layer isn't "solved." It's "recovering." Go ask any reasonable person in Australia or New Zealand if the ozone is 'solved.'

We haven’t fixed the problem[1], although I agree there is some worthwhile pat-on-the-back for fixing the cause. The ozone hole is still there decades later, and will be there for decades more.

In New Zealand, they are affected by the extra UV radiation, and strong sunblock can be important.

The effect by UV should give us more understanding and sympathy for countries that will be drowned by climate change, even though our government isn't doing jack shit.

[1] NASA website says “Scientists have already seen the first definitive proof of ozone recovery, observing a 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016.” “Models predict that the Antarctic ozone layer will mostly recover by 2040.” Also see synthetic image of 2021 hole: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/2021-antarctic-ozo...

UncleOxidant• 4 years ago

Yes, we solved ... looming food shortages

I think we're about to stress test this hypothesis via the Ukraine war.

sremani• 4 years ago

For continued growth we need to embrace Space both civilian and military. Funding NASA to really get to Mars and a colony on Moon in the long run give the best bang for the buck.

Longevity would help but will also ossify the institutions. There is a reason why the mindshare in the corridors of power view the world as if it is 1991, they are too damn old and do not acknowledge the new realities.

atlasunshrugged6• 4 years ago

Could you help me understand the argument for longevity helping growth? I'm generally a fan (after all, I don't have a deathwish) but it's not clear to me how longer lifespans would lead to more productivity. I could theoretically see a scenario where as we continue getting more specialized we spend increasingly spend the first ~40+ years of our life in education (although hopefully new methods can speed learning rates) and then the next 40 years working and having longer productive lives would be better, but do people contribute significantly more in their last years than the rest of their careers?

sfink2• 4 years ago

My guess is that increasing life expectancy would retard (economic) growth, increasing the proportion of life that is healthy without changing life expectancy would improve growth, "longevity" can refer to one or both of those, and if you do both at the same time it's hard to predict the effects.

It seems like we'd be better off if we could evolve out of the need for growth, or at least the sort of growth that depends on limited external resources. That's tough to do because the most ravenous consumers tend to win out and be selected for, so even if you have a movement of people who are more efficient with resources (resources per unit of well-being), they'll tend to be shunted aside by the greediest segment of the population. More efficient bacteria can win out, but only if the inefficient greedy subset is made to be affected by the resource constraints.

To address that, I'll make a modest proposal: find a valley somewhere and get all of the people most driven by external accumulation to move there. Make them compete with each other, creating ever more ostentatious and expensive ways for them to demonstrate their superiority. Create cultural barriers to moving anywhere else, except for people who are willing to let go of the rat race. Let nature run its course. Speed it up by seeding the population with a gender imbalance and cultural pressures to maintain or magnify that imbalance, so that breeding opportunities are limited. This will produce a lot of churn and waste in the process, so make sure there's a sandy substrate to allow for good drainage. That last part got a bit metaphorical, and would be even more so if I referred to this valley's sand by one of its principal components: silicon.

candiddevmike3• 4 years ago

I think what's holding back growth is inequality and the 40 hour work week. Imagine how much economic activity would be generated by fixing those things.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

Be careful. Fixing inequality could be helpful. "Fixing" it may be disastrous.

Remember that political changes often don't do what the label says.

candiddevmike3• 4 years ago

Indeed, we need a New Deal, not a Final Solution.

avgcorrection9• 4 years ago

You’re speaking in code.

Something more concrete and non-code: Americans could start by redistributing some of the money belonging to people who earn 100K or more a year.

fennecfoxen• 4 years ago

Indeed! The economy might grow significantly if people worked longer hours!!

what do you mean that's not what you meant at all

javert6• 4 years ago

The idea that government management of the economy can do better than private management and allocation of capital is utterly preposterous. This has been proven many times over by 20th century history, and is also immediately obvious if you've ever been to the DMV. Or if you know anything about the inner workings of a complex modern state apparatus, such as the US federal government. You might as well be calling the sky red.

(And I know that's what you're advocating from a different comment you just made about the New Deal.)

In a free market, the best allocators of resources are rewarded with more resources to continue allocating; the worse allocators are punished by losing their capacity to allocate. This is called capitalism.

Contrast that to a system where goverment eliminates inequality: Government allocates resources, meaning the worst people, people who are best at graft and pull, are rewarded. This is a disaster. We can already see this happening in the US. One egregious offender is the Dept. of Homeland Security which is siphoning off more and more national resources and growing like a cancer. The university system (which is in reality Federally managed) is an egregious offender. The medical system (which is Federally managed but run for profit through graft) is an egregious offender.

The latter system---the system of "government management," where the government doesn't let people receive unequal rewards for unequal success---is a path straight to the butcher's block.

GeneralMayhem2• 4 years ago

The idea that private management and allocation of capital can do better than government management of the economy is utterly preposterous. This has been proven many times over by 21st century history, and is also immediately obvious if you've ever been to the airport. Or if you know anything about the inner workings of a complex modern commercial apparatus, such as any investment bank, or Enron.

My local DMV provides dramatically better customer service than most private companies I've interacted with lately. Government entities are also required to at least pretend to account for efficiency, whereas private companies have an unknown - but known to be massive - amount of waste, corruption, and outright fraud.

In any case, nobody is seriously advocating for a full socialist/government-planned economy. Looking at basic workers' rights and throwing a fit about OMG SOCIALISM is such a ludicrous level of libertarian delusion it borders on self-parody. In reality, it is very well known - by psychology, by statistics, and by empiricism - that societies that don't allow the most powerful to make unchecked decisions based on their current level of resources do better than those who do.

There are a few pretty obvious reasons why this is true. First, "currently having resources" is not a good indicator of skill in resource allocation. Second, there are problems of misaligned value functions - what is "efficient" for one actor may be extremely inefficient for society as a whole, requiring action by a government (or some equivalently collective entity) to properly account for externalities. Third, mismatched negotiating power (because employees must agree to some employment or else starve) mean that even those actually party to any given agreement might not be maximizing their own resource allocation by doing so. And fourth (not finally, but finally off the top of my head), there are problems of diversification in the face of uncertainty - resource-havers can take maximum-expected-value actions even when they have low probability of payoff (e.g., risky business ventures that will pay off 10x 20% of the time but go bankrupt the other 80% of the time), because they can afford to make those bets enough times to even out the variance; non-resource-havers must settle for lower-expected-value but lower-variance options, which limits their success even with perfectly skillful allocation.

smolder2• 4 years ago

Government management of the economy can do better than private management. Private management can do better than government management. The idea that either thing has been disproven is what is preposterous. These mechanisms don't predict success or failure by themselves.

austinl• 4 years ago

It's interesting to consider that the total global human population could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100). Global population growth rate has already peaked at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped to 1.1%. [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, South Korea, 0.81). 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...

vidarh2• 4 years ago

More than just the most developed industrialised countries too. India has just reached replacement and is set to start declining in a few decades. And China ditched the one child policy years ago and are now pushing for more in a bid to prevent a crash landing after they dropped below years ago - currently they're maybe ~20 years from starting to see population decline unless they soften immigration rules.

It's going to take a long time before this change sinks in for people who are still used to worrying about overpopulation, outside of the fringe groups panicking over "white replacement".

BlargMcLarg6• 4 years ago

A lot of people aren't worried about overpopulation in a vacuum. They are worried about overpopulation along with the rise of personal consumption and potential competition (read: perceived zero-sum games). The job market is already ridiculously competitive. Rent and homes are already crazy, partially due to so many people insisting on living alone and many countries still not having adapted to an increasingly more individualistic society.

Telling them "it'll cool off in 20 years" is about the equivalent of telling them "yeah the problems we have now will continue another 20 years, deal with it".

62951413• 4 years ago

Peter Zeihan has a few fascinating presentations on the subject (youtube.com/watch?v=l0CQsifJrMc is representative) choke-full of facts and trend lines.

dredmorbius6• 4 years ago

Linkified: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=l0CQsifJrMc

jeffreyrogers5• 4 years ago

In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth... Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains. And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the most efficient way of getting them.

alexose2• 4 years ago

You're so right. I strongly dislike the argument put forward by Bezos and others (paraphrased, "imagine how many Einsteins we would have with a much larger world population"). Completely ignoring the billions of human brains that are full of scientific potential but forced to spend their efforts trying to figure out how to survive.

I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable) percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about abstract concepts all day.

zmgsabst6• 4 years ago

Do you have any evidence to support your view?

Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do science is greatly impacted by raising the total population and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.

titzer2• 4 years ago

Not to mention that Einstein had a fairly stable, stress-free job that paid the bills and even allowed him some extra time to moonlight his ideas with various friends from the university and work on his doctorate. These same people want to pay people as little as possible and make them work as hard as possible, cut the social safety nets, not pay for national infrastructure like healthcare, education, and transportation, and retreat to their $250 million mansions--of which Bezos himself could afford one thousand--and fuck off to space. Tell us more about all those latent Einsteins, oh exalted one!

bojangleslover• 4 years ago

I'm tired of this doom and gloom. Things have never been better for the average person globally. Someone in relative poverty today lives better than even the wealthiest people a few hundred years ago.

BenoitP• 4 years ago

In a pond, water lilies multiply each day so as to double in size.

It takes 30 days to occupy half the pond.

How much time is left until the pond is full?

----

In other words: when we'll reach the limits, we won't have a lot of time to react.

pphysch2• 4 years ago

We don't have a steady 100%/day population growth rate, we have a 1%/year and falling growth rate.

Your analogy is off by several orders of magnitude, which leads to qualitative differences.

time_to_smile2• 4 years ago

This isn't a great example because most species will experience sigmoidal growth, not exponential growth, and consequently not suffer catastrophic collapse. As they put pressure on the carrying capacity of their environment, the environment pushes back effectively and puts pressure on the populations. In most systems some sort of stasis is reached (or you get some kind of cyclical population trend).

The trouble with humans is, because of ready access to fossil fuels and non-renewable energy, we have been able to artificially (or maybe more accurately phrased "unsustainably") extend beyond the carrying capacity of our ecosystem.

Indigenous populations of the Americas had populations in the millions but never risked, at least in North America, systemic collapse because they largely lived sustainably.

Ironically it's precisely because Malthus was proven wrong that we are in trouble. We have way, way higher energy demands than can be reasonably sustained without relying on a non-renewable source of energy. This completely disregards the additional problem of climate change. This sets us up for a type of collapse that is not usually a problem for most species, such as your lily pads.

nverno• 4 years ago

If you consider nuclear a renewable source, we could easily cover our current costs with it.

munk-a6• 4 years ago

Yup, and the crappy news for humanity is that if we're expending unsustainable resources to artificially boost our population capacity that factor is likely to "correct" with a die off.

In our modern world you'd like to think that as rational beings we'd be conserving these unsustainable resources to fund "important" things - but no, we usually just release strategic oil reserves to try and game our political system... and we decrease the resource intake to reap short term gains.

time_to_smile2• 4 years ago

This makes a common error in the direction of a causal arrow:

Technological progress is the result of ready access to fossil fuels. That is it is the result of our prosperity not it's cause.

The reason Malthus was wrong was because ready access to hydrocarbons made the Haber-Bosch process possible and easily scalable. In a world without massive amount of hydrocarbons the Haber-Bosch process is never discovered. We know this because technological advancement trail energy discovery.

I highly recommend reading through Smil's Energy and Civilization to get a better sense of this.

We are like yeast brewing in a giant vat of malted barely, seeing a what looks like an infinite amount of energy, expanding well beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the vat. Suddenly some yeast scientists notice there is a concerning amount of alcohol in the atmosphere. Yeast economist point out this is nothing to worry about because we have solved every problem in the past, so there's nothing to really worry about.

I also can't stand the "look Malthus, Hubert and Jevons were all wrong!!!", on the scale of a 200k year species, predicted the ended within a few hundred years is pretty accurate. We just have trouble thinking beyond the time scale of a few human generations.

Finally, whale oil is a terrible example of a transition fuel. We stopped using it because we ran out of whales, but so far we've never decreased usage of an energy source that was still available to us [0]. This is no different than yeast that will consume energy filled sugars until the poison themselves. But hey, at least we get beer.

0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

Technological progress is the result of ready access to fossil fuels.

This doesn't account for nations with ready access to fossil fuels who don't progress.

danny_codes• 4 years ago

Climate change is a political problem, not a technology problem.

The technology to move beyond fossil fuels has existed since the 1950s. No new inventions are required. If our leaders decided today to migrate primary energy to nuclear power climate change would be "solved" within 20 years.

yodsanklai2• 4 years ago

If our leaders decided today to migrate primary energy to nuclear power climate change would be "solved" within 20 years.

I think this is inaccurate for several reasons 1. it takes human and financial resources to build a nuclear power plants, which most countries don't have 2. using the current technologies, uranium would quickly become a limiting factor 3. developing new technologies take times. 4. electricity is only a small part of the emissions of CO2

Climate change is a political problem

Yes, this comes from the perpetual growth ideology.

philipkglass• 4 years ago

This makes a common error in the direction of a causal arrow:

Technological progress is the result of ready access to fossil fuels. That is it is the result of our prosperity not it's cause.

I have also read Smil's Energy and Civilization and I have to disagree on the causal arrow direction.

Coal formed ~300 million years ago [1]. Anatomically modern humans have existed for more than 200,000 years [2]. Complex city-forming civilizations have existed for more than 5,000 years [3].

Chapter 6 of Energy and Civilization shows the dramatic shift in recent centuries: consumption of coal and later other fossil fuels underwent explosive growth only after the 18th century. This even though coal and oil were known to people thousands of years ago [4] [5]. Since people, fossil fuels, and civilization have existed in conjunction for several thousands of years, but usage of fossil fuels has become significant only in recent centuries, I believe that technological development is the proximate cause of fossil fuel usage. Once the early Industrial Revolution got under way it formed a feedback loop where technological exploitation of energy resources drove further technological development and energy exploitation. The early, inefficient Newcomen steam engine is a good example of this loop in action: its first successful application was in pumping water out of coal mines, to make more coal accessible [6].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history#Rise_of_civiliza...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#Early_h...

[5] https://connect.spe.org/blogs/donatien-ishimwe/2014/09/18/hi...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#In...

havblue• 4 years ago

While this article discusses the macro benefits of maintaining population growth, the reasons for the birth dropoff in developed countries is microeconomic. Kids are expensive to raise and it's hard for two parents to have successful careers with kids. Even after the one child policy ended, China's birthrate is still declining.

pphysch2• 4 years ago

Growth is and will continue to hit the limits of the domain, until the domain is expanded.

The principles of Western capitalism that drove growth for centuries are less and less reliable, so we need to adapt our principles.

jgon2• 4 years ago

Everytime I read one of these articles I get the feeling that I'm reading a report from the village elders that people have never been fuller or more prosperous now that we've consumed all our seed corn. We just need to keep eating all the corn we can, and let's not worry about winter because our priests (engineers) tell us they'll probably find a way around it. I don't know, maybe its the background environment that I've spent my whole life growing up in, but every time I read this I'm always left asking what it is that I don't know/can't see, especially when it comes to the billionaire class.

Do they have access to different reports that suggest global warming won't be as devastating as the scientific consensus broadly predicts? Is it nihilism/sociopathy, aka I'll be dead by the time it gets bad and I can't feel any sort of connection/care for my offspring, let alone my fellow humans? At the risk of memeing, is there a project to build Elysium going on that us plebs don't know about and that's what SpaceX/Blue Origin is all about? I just find it hard to square what the current message is wrt to global warming, a message that appears highly credible to my lay understanding, with the behaviour of the people who have the power to help nudge the direction our society is headed. Does anyone else get this, or have thoughts on it? I am genuinely asking here, because I can't resolve the contradiction and it weighs on me.

sfink2• 4 years ago

The Elysium is already here, it's just less separate than you imagine. The $100M and billionaire classes are quite good at wresting a higher standard of living for themselves, and naturally select for those who feel separate from and superior to the unwashed masses. They're not thinking they'll be dead by the time it matters, they are concerned about their offspring, they just know that their offspring won't be the ones suffering.

Large disruptions always create opportunities for a limited subset of people to do even better at the cost of everyone else doing much worse. The billionaire class is doing everything in their control to be in that elite subset, and so far they've been quite successful at that and there really isn't any reason in sight as to why their approach is going to fail any time soon.

Elysium is made out of people who live among us for as long as it is advantageous to them to do so, who can pay reputation consultants to keep the mobs with pitchforks away, who are pouring their money and influence into promoting a culture that makes everyone feel like the elite deserve their exalted positions and that if you don't feel that way, you're at risk of losing your chance of getting up there to be with them. And making us feel like that chance is real, it's just a breakout app away, and you'd better keep playing the game or you'll be driven into medical bankruptcy and your kids will get shot at school.

jgon2• 4 years ago

I kind of hear you, but honestly I have to question even that? If it is less separate than I can imagine how does that work in the face of catastrophic global warming? It was one thing when elites could pull the strings in one nation, knowing if things go real they go just hop on a private jet, but global warming is just that, global. Everyone is going to feel the consequences, and that's not even talking about other resources such as food, raw materials, etc. You can't just have a bunker in New Zealand, unless you also plan to just live in the bunker for years and years? I guess what I am trying to say is that Elysium is plausible because it's literally "up there". Riding out the second half of this century on earth seems waaaaaay different to me.

Out_of_Characte• 4 years ago

Global warming has a lot of mixed bias messaging.

Scientists claim the earth is warming

News organisations gain more traction on fear-based claims regardless of motive

Politicians need to express their utmost urgency on whatever the above mentions

And yet there's no actual consensus on a realistic action plan. Like preventing a homocide before it happens. What point is there in preventing something that might not actually prevent anything but make it worse. To carry on like nothing's happening is the most rational choice. Like the food shortage that didn't happen.

Best to wait and see what crisis is most real and most urgent to prevent

solatic2• 4 years ago

The free market is pretty phenomenal at ensuring that technological growth will continue until we hit theoretical limits.

Shortages cause price increases. Price increases make it more economical to pay up-front costs to develop technology whose per-unit costs permit extracting a profit compared to competitors who are not as technologically advanced, who die out and are replaced by new competitors who buy the technology off-the-shelf and reduce the price further in second-mover advantage, back down to the now-lower per-unit cost. Eventually demand develops to the point where there is a persistent shortage again and the cycle repeats.

The question is, what are the theoretical limits?

Will we run out of oxygen? Unlikely, the CO2 we breathe out can be recycled back into oxygen. Water? Also unlikely, for similar reasons. Food? With hydroponics, we're no longer limited by the amount of land we have, and it's renewable. Energy? The Sahara is a vast, untapped source of solar electricity which we haven't tapped because a) transmission lines are too expensive and b) security is too expensive. When energy costs rise enough to make those costs economical, the free market will get the underlying infrastructure built, and then we're good to go.

So yeah, growth will continue.

honkler2• 4 years ago

why didn't the great god progress save many of the past fallen civilizations? were they running out of Oxygen?

vkou• 4 years ago

Because this time it's different, and we can safely expect that yet-to-be-invented technologies will save us.

astine• 4 years ago

Most past civilizations didn't fail due to a single resource collapse. Also, most of them didn't have free-markets oriented around innovation.

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

Relevant question: why did they fall?

solatic2• 4 years ago

Growth doesn't mean that nothing dies. Individual people die, individual businesses go out of business, and yes, civilizations are conquered. That doesn't mean that growth isn't happening on a higher/macro level.

If you want to pick a civilization whose gifts weren't subsumed into a larger, still growing civilization, you'd have to pick, what, Atlantis? A myth? OK then.

SuoDuanDao4• 4 years ago

Progress requires failure, and learning from it.

mcone• 4 years ago

We are currently funded by donors including Patrick and John Collison

This message brought to you by individuals who have a vested interest in seeing growth continue.

cm2012• 4 years ago

Everyone on earth has a vested interest in seeing growth continue, whether they know that or not.

SuoDuanDao4• 4 years ago

Most people know that, but a subset of us doesn't think it's an achievable goal and that trying to achieve it would be harmful.

Isamu• 4 years ago

there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

I think this bears repeating. It is counterintuitive and maybe even repulsive to some people.

snowwrestler3• 4 years ago

At the end, the author says:

In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth. Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

It should be noted that the vast majority of human brains do not today get the opportunity to work with ideas or push technology forward. Many people don’t even get enough to eat or drink.

We have a loooong way to go on the basics of organizing human society before we need to worry about the intellectual constraint of total population size.

dgs_sgd2• 4 years ago

You don't have to wait until the entire world has this opportunity before ringing the alarm. If population growth is going down in the areas where the ideas are worked on, namely the developed world, which it is, we should still worry.

snowwrestler3• 4 years ago

No we shouldn’t, because “the developed world” is not a fixed thing. We can make the entire world developed.

brokencode2• 4 years ago

That’s one of many reasons why it’s important to keep on investing in underdeveloped countries. There’s no reason why people there couldn’t contribute in the same ways that people in more developed countries contribute.

And immigration is a good way to help keep the population of developed countries growing. There really isn’t any reason why we can’t tap into the incredible human resources available in the world if we try.

a4isms5• 4 years ago

If only there was a way to get more people into the developed world without people in the developed world creating new people twenty+ years at a time...

The secret to America's success has always been immigration, whether by violent colonialism, accepting of refugees from persecution or war, or inviting talented people to become citizens.

zmgsabst6• 4 years ago

I think that’s wrong:

The fraction of humanity in poverty has dropped as our population has grown — because those larger, more capable nations have more means to feed themselves and greater wealth to care for the poor.

A stall in population growth or a population decline runs a serious risk that our standards of living regress and those conditions worsen.

We need to maintain our growth to impact the issues you care about:

More people -> More wealth -> Less hunger

BlargMcLarg6• 4 years ago

Poverty alone doesn't mean getting your brains to do brain stuff.

Most devs don't live in poverty, but most devs also aren't doing innovative work. They spend their limited intellectual stamina trying to make the boss richer, not modeling out a cancer detection algorithm.

RyEgswuCsn• 4 years ago

My pessimistic and perhaps over-simplistic view is that growth is largely enabled by modern-day's squeezing of every last drop of people's disposable income. As the population becomes poorer in general (due to lack of breakthroughs in fundamental science and productivity, growing and aging population, widening inequality, etc.), the growth may eventually slowdown.

jwagenet• 4 years ago

I think the limiting factor is traditionally considered the lack of new productive (physical) labor, not necessarily lack of new brains.

erispoe• 4 years ago

Automation shifts productive labor to intellectual labor. A century ago value productive labor was probable 99%+ physical labor, but it's probably now much less.

deltaonefour• 4 years ago

This is optimistic. Consider the fact that the physical limits on growth cannot be moved or surpassed no matter the amount of brain power thrown at it.

For example. The speed of light. How much brain power do you need to surpass that speed? Many limits are actual limits and if you think anything can be achieved just by surpassing it with technology, then I think you're not looking at the problem realistically.

If you look at the amount of progress for the last 3 decades we are literally in the same place. Still driving cars and riding trains. The only area with massive progress is IT, but every other technology (including IT itself) looks like it's hitting some sort of hump in the curve. This is despite the increasing normalization of IQ scores across the world. On average, A person with 100 IQ today would have a higher IQ then the past.

Something like fusion which is the biggest technology changer I see on the horizon still requires targeted a huge amount of government effort and resources to achieve. Such ventures are less likely to arrive purely out of the commercial sphere.

streetcat1• 4 years ago

The article is missing a crucial point.

Not only do we need more brains, but we also need robust knowledge transfers between generations (between current and new brains). I.e. for new brains to be effective, they must start from the point that the old brains stopped.

As I see it the opposite process is at play. For example, cloud computing decrease the need to understand hardware/os. Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.

zmgsabst6• 4 years ago

Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge accumulation pipeline.

This is why Boeing can’t build planes anymore:

They decided midcareer engineers were too expensive and their crop of senior engineers are aging out — so they no longer have the expertise necessary, due to outsourcing and not supporting their young employees.

aeternum• 4 years ago

Another way to look at this is just as an optimization problem. We found a good local optimum and it became too costly to search further.

In the early days of aerospace, the search space was mostly unknown and there were tons of companies investing R&D in a wide variety of designs. Huge amounts of human capital were invested, and as in all things, some designs worked, some didn't. Many companies went bankrupt.

Eventually we find some good designs and the risk/reward of searching the space further just doesn't make sense. Only recently with improved tech and ML/AI + simulation has the cost to search been reduced enough that it makes economic sense to try again.

munk-a6• 4 years ago

I enjoy the freedom to have a closet full of extremely finely tailored clothes (going by the 1800s standards) I'm practically living the millionaire's dream from that era... but never in my life have I learned how to operate a flying shuttle loom - some information is specialized and doesn't need widespread knowing.

When I went to uni (and I'm only 35 so I'm not talking about the 80s) we learned about low level data structures, I took a course in relational algebra, operating system design, assembly language - these were necessary (imo) broadening exercises that have enabled me to better understand how to make things work performantly at a high level. Now a company may only need one or two folks like me with a passion for algorithm design among a dev team of fifty - but we don't all need formal training in every little thing.

Imparting the knowledge of how to learn, along with those pieces of basic information we deem critical, can be enough.

formerkrogemp2• 4 years ago

Robust knowledge transfers between generations sounds nice, but the older people are retiring in droves and younger people aren't replacing them quickly enough. We just get a bunch of newbloods that don't get the chance to learn from old hands who will get paid less than them due to labor shortages. It is too bad we treat people like shit in this country. Consider, if you would the situation of nurses in America. We have record nursing school enrollment, high rates of turnover, increasing rates of violence against medical professionals, and levels of burnout that should give everyone pause.

Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises. Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies. More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you and see how many openings they have. Especially for security. The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are facing record shortages of labor.

Who'd you rather have treating your loved ones? The nurses with decades of practical experience, or the nursing school graduates who will quit after 3 years of burn out and stress? We're starting to treat nurses as badly as we do teachers. What do we expect to happen? This is just one industry as well. A few fun links for your perusal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/04/19/new-survey...

https://www.ajc.com/pulse/survey-shows-90-of-nurses-consider...

https://www.benefitnews.com/news/nurses-are-planning-to-quit... https://www.aacnnursing.org/News-Information/News/View/Artic....

benstrumental2• 4 years ago

The post focuses on countering the strawman-like argument that resource shortages are the primary threat with overpopulation. However, it is overwhelmingly clear that climate change is the biggest threat related to overpopulation, unless we are able to get carbon emissions per capita below 0 globally.

rr8082• 4 years ago

Meh. Climate change is devastating for huge chunks of the planet. But the population of the hottest parts could easily move to cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely populated.

benstrumental2• 4 years ago

But the population of the hottest parts could easily move to cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely populated.

I would not describe relocating billions of people hundreds to thousands of miles north, often across country borders, as easy.

This article contains some stories of a few climate refugees of today:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...

jbotz• 4 years ago

And in a very real sense AGW is a resource shortage problem... the natural resource that's being depleted here is the natural carbon cycle that that kept CO2 levels fairly stable and gave us temperatures at the near optimal levels they were at during the time that civilization developed. We are "depleting" this resource by overloading it with excess CO2 and by destroying natural carbon sinks.

Natural resources aren't limited to materials, natural processes also qualify. So it is also with fresh water... we won't "run out" of water, but we are exceeding the water-recycling capacities of the biosphere and thus this absolutely essential natural resource is becoming quite scarce in a lot of places. Theoretically you can replace it with artificial processes (desalination, treating contaminated water, etc) but to do that on a scale that can replace that natural water cycle is completely beyond our technology for now.

brodo• 4 years ago

Most people on the post-growth side of the argument tend to argue that outputs (green house gases, toxins) and not inputs are the major constraining factor. He should really have addressed that.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

Notably this article doesn't mention water, and doesn't discuss land much other than a single line about Malthus and farmland. Then there's this assertion:

"But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas."

Arable land - i.e. topsoil - is not a product of technology, it's a product of geology and biology, namely the erosion of rocks and the accumulation of biomass. Yes, one can indeed make an artificial soil-like system (hydroponics), but this in turn requires raw materials (typically clay pebbles, plastic pots, plastic pipes, plus a complete nutrient mixture of simple chemicals) which are in turn made from limited material resources.

Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow. Just look at a population density map of the United States - note how few people live in the desert zones. Again, there are technological approaches: desalinate ocean water, pump it to the desert, and grow food hydroponically. This requires an investment of material resources and energy.

I get this feeling that economimsts who makes these claims about infinite growth have simply never studied the conservation of energy, or the conservation of mass. Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods. US farmland is about 166 million hectares, so that sort of fits, as the US population is about 330 million; exports of food also appear to match imports of food so that's a wash.

So clearly there are limits on the growth of the human population on a finite planet. If the question is, "can you have infinite economic growth with a fixed human population", well, whatever discipline makes claims like that is one entirely divorced from physical reality. Inflation maybe?

munk-a6• 4 years ago

While the world has numerous issues that need to be solved - I think we've, for the time being, been able to classify exhaustion of materials as a problem we won't have to deal with for a long time.

The earth has a lot of matter in it - it is absurdly massive - technological advances in replicating necessary raw resources (and your topsoil one is particularly good to demonstrate this) have pushed us from looking at an absolute limit to instead viewing the perpetual creation of new components as a steadily rising economic burden.

One raw resource that is actually quickly depleting is river sand for concrete - our current consumption trends are extremely scary here and some governments (CoughIndiaCough) are doing an absolutely terrible job at properly enforcing externality costs on extraction leading to mass habitat destruction. But, if we suddenly found ourselves without easy access to rough river sand we do have alternative construction materials including processed wood in various forms that can be extremely resilient.

I don't really like the wording of the article in defining all resources as artificial - but the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant.

walleeee3• 4 years ago

the natural components driving the economy are quite abundant

defined narrowly, yes, most of them, but consider ecosystem services as equally important economic inputs and the picture looks very different

on this view things like stable weather patterns etc are also natural components driving the economy, and we are rapidly rendering this and many others scarce

marvin2• 4 years ago

Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the absence of water, human populations do not grow

This isn't really true any longer. Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters. You need a relatively prosperous country to be able to afford that, of course, but an industrialized economy with reasonable levels of corruption is perfectly capable of desalinating enough water to make civilization work.

It's practically tautological that there's limits to population size in a finite world, and that growth cannot be infinite in a finite universe. But I think people often frame this question the wrong way. It's a bit of a straw man.

Economic growth is proportional to the amount of problems solved that humans care about. And the cost of the solution, of course, in terms of human effort. It isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of physical resources consumed or bound. It's a reasonable assumption that there's generally a positive correlation, but the function and coefficients don't have to be linear. That leaves a lot of headroom.

People should rather think about infinite (arbitrary!!) economic growth in terms of what can be done to make the lives of humans better, on average. Even in the Western world, we are so far away from the hedonistic limits that it's ridiculous. It's trivial to imagine a world with no illness, perfect health, indefinite lifespan, very high freedom and low repression, no seriously bothersome and mandatory chores for anyone and so on. What can be done to get closer to such a world? So much.

The limit isn't defined by how polluting our cars can be, or how much beef we're able to produce. Many of these arguments collapse into the completely unimaginative.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

"Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters..."

Ah... so if I'm in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and have no water, but I do have a dollar in my pocket, someone will deliver me 1000 liters of water, sourced from desalination of Pacific Ocean water? How much energy will that take?

heymijo• 4 years ago

Are the externalities of desalinating seawater priced into that cost?

When it comes to resources, humanity doesn't have much a track record of doing so.

vineyardmike2• 4 years ago

Every source I've looked at puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half that with modern industrial double cropping methods.

You yourself said that technology doubled the output with the same input.

The whole articles point is that tech enables us to get more from what we have, to support growth. Maybe enough smart Americans will find a way to double it again, so the US can support 660M people with our 166 Hectares. Maybe then we’ll support 1.2B after a new invention!

Maybe they’ll discover a way to grow plants with salt water allowing use of the ocean while saving the freshwater. Maybe then they’ll find a way to make hydroponics less material intense, and they’ll build floating farms on the ocean, giving us more “land”. Given enough smart people, there’s so much more room for growth. That’s the point. We’re not at the breaking point yet.

_448• 4 years ago

And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

Ideas are an abstract thing. To realise an idea, one needs material resources.

The problem has nothing to do with either finite material resources or ideas. The problem is what those material resources get converted into. What we do is we transform one type of material into another during any activity. How we can limit ourselves to not transforming these useable material into unuseable material is what is the challenge for growth. We should only be promoting those ideas that have a better opportunity to transform one usable material resource into another usable resource without taking much time and without harming the ecology.

danans• 4 years ago

We should only be promoting those ideas that have a better opportunity to transform one usable material resource into another usable resource without taking much time and without harming the ecology.

This is quite insightful. Biological systems have this characteristic. It uses the circular conversion of resources as a way to channel energy into whatever is useful for it.

Humans beings, as a type of biology do this, but have for a few centuries been converting a useful material (fossil hydrocarbons) into a comparatively useless material (C02) at rate faster than the ecosystem can reabsorb it.

The question is how we can return to something like the previous equilibrium where we rebuild our modern lifestyles around energy "springs" - aka energy storage and release mechanisms - that absorb and release it to do useful work for us, alleviating the need to burn and release long fossilized energy to achieve that.

walleeee3• 4 years ago

good points

also related to circular economics is the principle that tools should be easy to supersede when we discover undesirable side effects or invent new techniques

we build software to be easy to refactor, we might benefit from building societies and technologies with this in mind as well

an atmosphere full of carbon is not easy to deprecate, nor are pervasive hydrocarbon infrastructure, urban areas designed around the automobile, etc

before we deploy something at scale it may be wise to have some idea how to gracefully roll it back or put something else in its place

frontman1988• 4 years ago

The solution to tackling declining population can be by generating Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans will be smarter and stronger than the current lot due to eugenics. CRISPR will make it possible and it's already happening in China. The west needs to look at it instead of ramping up immigration and importing instability from third world countries.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

That sounds pretty cool, if you're writing dystopian sci-fi.

Back in the trenches, I'm thinking that people making "have a baby, or not?" decisions will not find "But you could have a SuperBaby!" to be a persuasive argument. Without plot armor, who's magically making sure that SuperBaby doesn't have some grim bugs, which might take a while to manifest? Any good reason to think that SuperBaby will need fewer diaper changes and less parental resources long-term? Will want to look after his or her non-Super "parents" in their old age? Or that the currently available version of SuperBaby won't be obsoleted by v2.0 in a year or two - with upgrades to v2.0 being "less than practical and satisfactory"? Really, it'd be smarter to wait until v2.0 comes out...wait until v2.4 comes out...until 3.0...wait...still waiting...still waiting...

wcoenen• 4 years ago

It may be a bit misleading to say that CRISPR babies are "already happening in China". Yes, there was a researcher who genetically modified a few babies. (Specifically, to give them HIV resistance.) But he received a prison sentence for his actions.

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

peterweyand0• 4 years ago

The author uses several analogies which are rather cutesy, but doesn't address the main issue in a salient way.

All consumption comes from some combination of raw resources and the addition of technological input. In real prices, as the cost of raw resources increases over time, this means that technological innovation is not making up for how much of those resources are being consumed as compared to the population as a whole.

At it's most basic we can calculate the rate of change as the amount of time it takes the average worker to buy a gallon of water or food and shelter for a single person. These are resources that aren't substitute-able, and are required for life. Other costs are rather nebulous (how much does a college education cost and what does this say about society now versus how much technological innovation is necessary for the continuation of the species)?

So then the question then becomes, does the real rate of return for any particular company or the stock market as a whole assume that a potential future exists in which that real rate of return is actually possible to exist?

Let's assume, in a model as simplistic as possible, that there is one stock (or market) that represents all of the world's companies that has a real rate of return of 2.5 percent per annum that is compounded once per year. As a sum total of world wide growth this would seem rather modest. The worldwide initial capital we'll assume is $100.

So the growth rate is given by A = P(100 + r/n)^(nt) which would be in our case (for an investment of 100 dollars) -

100x(1.025^10) = $128.

So for the real capital stock of $100 to increase to a real capital stock of $128 some combination of things must happen - the amount of capital stock in terms of raw resources must increase in real terms and the amount of technology must increase in order to make the use of these inputs more efficiently.

If technology remains constant then there must be an increase of 28% over ten years of capital. If capital remains constant then technology must make the current use of capital 28% more efficient.

Compound return over time is concerning in the long run, and hand waving it away is either ignorant at best or disingenuous at worst.

And capitalism is still the best distribution system we have come up with. Most of the world is working with a single overall social model, because it has been so successful, and we don't have a backup that's been shown to work in practice. My concern isn't in favor of Das Kapital or Marxism - who owns the product of labor and historicism over labor rights isn't as concerning as compound interest over all.

Most economists I've worked with don't seem to think that this is a problem or that technology will magically free market a utopian future of plenty for all. This is an article of faith.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

The answer is yes for now. We can continue to grow. We are in the process of creating a whole new virtual world which will expand the economic possibilities. Even if natural resources become scarce, we have a whole new virtual world explore and develop. The real limit to growth is population. Population growth is coming to halt in the next 50 years and that will dictate our growth capabilities then.

kkfx• 4 years ago

With confusing growth and evolution / progress? Can't we be "richer" without "growth" in the inflationary broad sense?

Surely change is hard, inevitably have issues during the change, but change can bring richness without growth, they are conceptually distinct things, merged into one by the actual model, not by nature.

smaddox2• 4 years ago

Well, if our energy use continues to grow at the current rate, we'll boil the oceans in about 450 years, so I would say no.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

rnd33• 4 years ago

What a ridiculous article... everyone understands that exponential growth cannot continue forever. The bigger and more interesting question is what the life of an average human looks like when growth inevitable slows down, and how fast we can get there.

Because the assumption that we will grow our energy use indefinitely is flawed. Energy use has diminishing returns, eventually we'll run out of useful work we want to perform. At least in terms of material wealth and comfort.

There's probably also major opportunities for energy savings that extends this timeframe greatly. Incandescent -> LED lights have reduced energy consumption by a factor of 10. Technology improvements in just the last 5 years have halved the energy consumption of air conditioners.

smaddox2• 4 years ago

everyone understands that exponential growth cannot continue forever

Everyone understands? Why do you believe that? As far as I can tell, most people, especially economists, think it can.

If population continues to grow exponentially (it likely won't), I see no reason to think our energy use would not continue to grow exponentially.

Efficiency improvements are linear, not exponential. They cannot compensate for exponential growth in population.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

This is utter nonsense. Progress never stalls (except if we happen to extinguish ourselves). It did not stall the last 10,000+ years despite very low population numbers except in the last 300 years. Of course, it might go a bit slower or faster depending on demographics.

But that is not important. We already have all the technology that could make a decent life possible for everyone on this planet. It's more a matter of applying what we already know. Of course, better technology might help with that -- as could a decrease in population. But if we do not get better in applying our knowledge for the benefit of all, we are doomed.

ambientenv• 4 years ago

I watched The Great Simplification [1] last night, and it provided some perspective on this question which, until now, I had not fully considered in context.

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/

human_person• 4 years ago

So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. But even taking that premiss as correct If you want more brain power you don't need more people, you can simply treat the people that already exist better. Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. People who dont have enough money to survive, people who are in debt, spend so much mental energy just trying to survive. Calculating how much they can afford, how they can stretch their money. Its such a waste, when we could just provide them with the necessities they need to live a dignified life. And then we could see what they created. Sure some people make it out, but percentage wise they are the exception that proves the rule. Based on what we know about epidemiology, the impact of pollution, the impact of prenatal and early childhood stress. Just consider how those compound with years of poorly funded education in neighborhoods made unstable by the transience of poverty. Add in the school to prison pipeline (partially fueled by a rise in police officers in schools in response to school shootings) and (imo) inevitable substance abuse and think about how many brain cells have been destroyed. I dont think I'd be able to think deeply in those situations. If brains/ideas are our most important resource we are wasting them. On an almost unimaginable scale.

bjornsing• 4 years ago

I agree.

But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended.

The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world.

Or at least that’s how I increasingly see it.

idoh• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on how avoiding competition is the root of much evil? It is plausible if you mean it as avoiding by stifling or suppressing it.

On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers). The more we can not compete with each other, but rather support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.

paulsutter2• 4 years ago

Competition is for losers. Elon Musk isn’t competing with anyone

pyrale2• 4 years ago

People are right to want to avoid competition. The issue is that in a system that pushes competition hard on individuals, the only way to avoid it is to prevent accomplishment.

The fundamental issue is that our system is built in such a way that one person's accomplishment is another person's loss.

jerojero• 4 years ago

I've always found the argument for competition rather funny. It seems as though most of us have grown up, not necessarily but at least with the idea, of the "loving family" in mind.

That in order for a child to grow and achieve their full potential they have to be loved and supported by everyone in their family; this means brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, etc.

How is it that the way we structure the core social organisation in our grand societies is so at odds with the way we structure the broader structures? Not only that, but if you look at a classroom; what is the best for children? Encouraging hyper competition or collaboration between classmates? What is the best inside a business, collaboration or competition? What is the best for our governments, collaboration between the different branches or competition?

It seems as though everywhere we look at, we go "yes, people in an organisation have to collaborate with other!" from families to governments... yet... an organisation of organisations (a society) is in turn better served through competition?

We developed these massive societies to overcome the need for competition, but sometimes I feel like this ethos is being turned against us and that some people want us to return to a state of being where everyone is out for themselves in a cruel world that is filled with dangers. And I don't understand why.

libraryofbabel• 4 years ago

Yes. Stephen Jay Gould put this thought very well: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

moffkalast3• 4 years ago

On the other hand (outside of a handful of exceptions) major tech advances are usually made by multiple people at the same time that have access to a similar set of starting information, usually resulting in patent wars and other kinds of disagreements of who was first to figure out something by days or months. And that was already commonplace more than century ago.

The bottom line is with nearly 8 billion people alive there is no such thing as an original thought anymore and everyone is replaceable. So as a consolation even if these people died and continue to die it may not matter much in the grand scheme of things.

more_corn• 4 years ago

To say nothing of Einstein’a child born out of wedlock (to a mother who was Einsteins equal) because his family wouldn’t allow him to marry and lost to history. Now think of all the brilliant minds who by accident of birth are never afforded the opportunity of education. Now think of all the regular people who could contribute at a higher level with an bit of training.

Our biggest obstacle, and our greatest opportunity for advancement (and the continued growth our system requires) is the fact that opportunity is not available to all. The good news is that the problem is so vast there are parts of it everywhere. Every one of us can pick it up and help.

closeparen• 4 years ago

And that is exactly why you need growth. In a more primitive society the subsistence farming and basic low-value manufacturing are all there is. As technology and capitalism ascend to greater heights you start to get more opportunities for creativity and ingenuity, and enough excess to create the leisure for more high-minded pursuits.

dustingetz• 4 years ago

future brainpower though and the value of helping poor people is really far out (multiple generations); capitalism can’t even see past the quarter. people are still too self interested, we’d all need to catch religion for it to work

sinenomine2• 4 years ago

Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality.

How much exactly? Do you have an estimate?

A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion.

Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding). What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it. People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye.

1. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101....

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z

3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/

4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114

5. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-s...

rilezg• 4 years ago

That is many big words to be so blind. A big brain does not make a person immune to poverty or war. If a person does not believe maximizing economic growth (as measured by GDP and/or the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) is the most holy of missions, then I suppose their genetics are just too impure.

I am not a serious wrestler, but I do not want the government instituting genetic programs as a final solution to a perfect society.

maybelsyrup• 4 years ago

People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all.

It's great to read comments like these because it's one of the rare times when these people go mask-off and just tell you that they're eugenicists. Kudos for honesty.

Genetics and race-science cannot be separated, as they were forged in the same (American) fire [1][2]. The role of the former in supporting the latter never goes away; it just changes forms. For every phrenology that's utterly falsified, there's an "omg but what about polygenic risk scores!?" that pops up in its place [3]. Intelligence scores, IQ, psychometrics? Same thing: willing and enthusiastic handmaidens of selective breeding and strengthening the gene pool. Forced sterilization came soon after (60-70k people in the US).

Don't let these guys fool you: there's no "debate" about intelligence and heredity, or really any behavioral genetics, only a reactionary moral and political project: find the vulnerable, the poor, and the sick, and grind'em into dust.

Meanwhile:

and willingness to look truth in the eye.

Mask on or off, this is a constant: "I'm a brave teller of hard truths in a world intent on hiding from them." You wonder if they'd really be exempt from their own "programs of genetic improvement."

1. https://archive.ph/eILU7

2. https://books.google.com/books/about/War_Against_the_Weak.ht...

3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-021-00961-5

dredmorbius6• 4 years ago

And yet, it seems that one of the first casualties of mass communications is intelligent thought.

Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.

Simple aggregation does not work for brains. Message assessment and discrimination are expensive.

coldtea• 4 years ago

So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible.

People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy.

It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...

avgcorrection9• 4 years ago

Now, that’s a problem for another time. But note that in five minutes we’ve gone from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation. That’s because we’ve traded a scarcity mindset, where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset, where it is limited only by our ingenuity.

Just a motivational speech.

moffkalast3• 4 years ago

I think that's also something that will be eventually be irrelevant.

Right now it's standard for productivity of a person to be the driver or benchmark of an economy, but once you can automate a process so completely that there is no human involved in it then you can scale infinitely regardless of population, even if it stagnates or decreases.

Raw resources aren't a exactly limited thing in the solar system, not on our scales anyway.

fleddr• 4 years ago

Not a single word is wasted on the externalities of growth. What it does to nature but also people. Just double down on producing, consuming, working.

Gatsky• 4 years ago

If you take it to the extreme, human growth will be limited by physical laws. There was an interesting paper where they calculated that growth would eventually slow to a crawl because we saturate the region of the universe we can reasonably reach without faster than light travel.

softcactus3• 4 years ago

Can it continue? Sure. Theoretically we could all be hooked up to computers that slow our perception of reality and allow us to create 2x the digital commodities we could normally in our lifetime. This would technically count as "growth". But I think the actual question is flawed to begin with. Why do we need infinite growth? Do we really need 3% economic growth per year ad infinitum? Why is that our metric for optimization? Why don't choose something else to optimize on like human happiness or fulfillment or freedom?

smaudet2• 4 years ago

Because the world is a ponzii scheme, where we don't pay people for their time but for the going market rate.

If you keep a stable population and pay people based upon life expectations * skill, no one would need a retirement account.

But those with pull want to sit on their hands and do nothing, and throw around large sums of money, hence the ponzi scheme.

mgh22• 4 years ago

Because it is tied to population growth and productivity:

The optimal number of children is 2.1, for offspring to replace parents

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/fertility-rate

When there is no population growth, no inflation or economic growth:

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJis2K6B8Q

You might think that worldwide and US has <2.1%, but technology amplifies productivity, so it is not a 1-1 ratio

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=Popu....

[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

softcactus3• 4 years ago

This still doesn't really address the why

yodsanklai2• 4 years ago

Malthus was wrong isn't an argument.

But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

That sounds far-stretched. The climate isn't an artificial resource, it's very natural and messing it up is going to seriously hinder growth. The fossil fuels that drove our growth for two centuries aren't artificial either, nor are they idea.

The limits to growth is still valid today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth There's no scenario in which growth is perpetual.

If people want to argue about perpetual growth, they should come with numbers based on known estimates of the resource available today. Otherwise, it's just faith and holds no scientific value.

PostOnce• 4 years ago

The fossil fuels are pumped out (and refined) with billions (and billions...) of dollars of high tech machinery based on complex ideas, though, rather than just being natural pools of gasoline you drive your car up to.

dredmorbius6• 4 years ago

There were pools of gasoline (or at least light sweet crude) you could roll up to, at one time.

Those turned out to be scarce and limited, and were used up quickly.

titzer2• 4 years ago

Just to take computing as an example analogy: the problem is that some physical limits are close at hand, like the heat dissipation possible per square or cubic centimeter, which constrains processor improvements more today than say, 30 years ago, and some limits are far away, like the number of bits that can stored per unit of volume given the inherent quantum noise, which is an enormous number of bits in a tiny space, and we are nowhere near close to this limit. So we can reasonably assume a long growth trajectory for storage density but a short and slow growth trajectory in compute.

Malthus wasn't really wrong, we just pushed back the boundaries farther than what he imagined. For example, there was a lot more farmland available than he thought or calculated; we grew up to and past that. We also increased yields per acre roughly 4x in the 20th century. There's no realistic 4x happening for that again; in fact, soil quality has been depleted to the point that yields are flat or even falling. (plus climate change supercharges weather patterns and lots of crops are lost). Though his words were clunky, he was basically saying that exponential growth will outstrip polynomial growth in the end. And that's inescapable.

Some resources on Earth are in tight supply, like helium and lithium, and others are super abundant, like uranium and water (though fresh water is tight!). But they are all limited and eventually the "ideas" we keep coming up to utilize them better will be no substitute.

civilized• 4 years ago

...there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

Hmm. Let's not forget that we have one planet, and if we fry it, there may be no ideas that can bring it back.

nathanaldensr• 4 years ago

In a system with finite energy and resources--the real world--infinite anything is impossible.

Banana699• 4 years ago

I'm fundamentally anti-growth for reasons that short-circuits the whole " -'Oh nooo the Resources are running out' --'But Technology is getting better and better'" quagmire.

Human brains and social structures were never meant to operate at the scale of city civilizations. We were never meant to be more than 1000 monkey living in the same social unit. 10000 is already pushing it hard. By the time we reached 50000 or 100000 in a single social unit, we were already lost. I can't emphasize enough how much evil in recorded human history was due to us applying puny human social structures and concepts to social units several hundreds of times larger than they evolved to handle. What we're doing is fundamentally ugly, and clueless. I hate what we term "Civilization", I hate how we came to live in amorphous masses of millions, how we go to war in millions, how we do everything in millions.

We reinvented ants and bees, with vastly worse algorithms and data structures.

Instead of asking oneself "Can growth continue?", one must ask oneself, for fucking once, "SHOULD growth continue?". Should you add that one last nameless billion of souls to the log? Should you stretch the already meaningless primate social protocols beyond meaninglessness yet again by running it against larger and larger input? Should you keep putting more and more monkeys in the ever more claustrophobic jungle, seeing just how much more they can keep getting more irrelevant and expendable?

Before asking if you can, ask if you should.

worik5• 4 years ago

Same old tired nonsense some of my (denser) economics lecturers used to spout.

The idea that "ideas" can make up for a lack of resources is an old one. It holds for a while, if we ignore the overflowing sinks.

The economy is a physical system where resources flow from low to high entropic states. What we do with that flow is a useful application of technology in a long term view. Simply increasing those flows (moving from biomass -> coal -> oil -> nuclear) is not useful in the log term. In the short term economic growth is the result. In the medium term (as many societies have discovered) it leads to collapse.

As the "sinks" (where the high entropic waste ends up) over flow society gets less and less tenable. Then it collapses.

The pattern has repeated many times.

But: This time is different.

worik5• 4 years ago

It is completely untrue that "growth can continue", for even the foreseeable future. On that we mostly agree, that Jason Crawford is wrong.

That said economic growth is not a bad thing everywhere.

Many parts of the world need economic growth (along with social development - democracy is what I recommend, but the Chinese have other ideas, still social development)

The technologies used will be better than in the past, and there needs to be a target, a place where the growth slows to a stop (looking at you Manhattan) and lives are enriched in other ways than increasing consumption.

But many many places absolutely require economic growth. Just not most of us!

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

Let me clarify the seemingly weird "all resources are artificial" with an example:

Until ~150 years ago oil was a fairly useless sticky substance you sometimes encountered in nature.

Then the internal combustion engine was invented, which made oil a hugely valuable resource.

Another example among many: Lithium has recently become a very valuable resource because of advances in battery technology.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Resources are in the eye of the beholder.

seibelj• 4 years ago

This is the (accurate) subjective theory of value. Individuals ascribe value to things and that is the only reason something has value.

This is in contrast to the (incorrect) labor theory of value so popular with left wing economists.

davidivadavid• 4 years ago

This is honestly kind of a midwit take, though. They're "artifical" in the sense that nothing is inherently a resource until it's involved in a process where it's transformed into something we want. But it's certain still physical and limited in some way. That it's "artificial" doesn't mean we can conjure up resources out of thin air at will.

dredmorbius6• 4 years ago

Oil being valuable did not create oil.

Oil being valuable in China does not endow China with ample reserves of oil.

Demand does not create supply.

And humans are consuming oil at 5 million times the rate at which it was created.

Moreover, what made oil a viable resource was a chain of inventions and capabilities --- pipe for well casings and transportation, which require Bessemer steel, which required iron ore, coal, and massive transportation capabilities. The underlying drilling technology was thousands of years old (used for drilling for salt in China). Further metallurgical capabilities were required for automobile engines (a light, powerful power plant), which also, coincidentally, solved the heavier-than-air powered flight problem at virtually the same instant.

Even coal use emerged contingent on other technologies. Coal was known for a long time, but was challenging to transport. The US relied on wood --- most often locally available --- rather than coal, which require expensive overland transport.

Why the Industrial Revolution occurred in England is among the great confounding questions of all time. I'd argue that it was a mix of factors:

- A politically-stable island nation spared foreign invasion for well over a millennium. As with Japan, Hawaii, Madagascar, and New Zealand.

- An island country with abundant transportation both on surrounding seas and with many inland rivers through modest terrain. Already, Britain distinguishes herself from most contenders.

- An abundance of natural resources in the form of coal, literally falling out of cliffs onto the strand initially. Volcanic islands which lack the multi-hundred-million year geological history to form such resources can stand down: Japan, New Zealand, Hawaii.

- A developed polity of broadly shared power, also generally permitting free inquiry. Though the invention of steam power still largely required being remote from centres of power, and occurred in Scotland, not England.

- Ample food and ready applications for steam power, even in modest quantities. By 1800, there were about 500 steam engines, most producing a modest 5--10 horsepower (3-7 kW) throughout the country. These were low-pressure systems with power on the vacuum condenser stroke, not under high-pressure steam, due to James Watt's control of patents and refusal to permit high-pressure engines being developed. (That process began in the US and France, outside the scope of UK patents).

By the late 19th century, England had an advanced industrial, metallurgical, and financial system, as well as a large navy it was looking to convert to oil, all of which lead to it becoming a leading developer of foreign oil reserves in the middle east. (I cannot recommend Daniel Yergin's book The Prize highly enough. I disagree strongly with the author's views concerning oil's future, he is however an outstanding historian of its past.)

Lithium, similarly, is useful now thanks to a convergence of factors, though those might well prove short-lived. An automobile is at heart quite basic and requires a small number of distinct materials. An electric vehicle requires a large portion of the available periodic table, as well as abundant energy. I'm rooting for EVs. I'm not sanguine they will have a long or widespread application.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

Growth is strongly linked to population which is stabilizing or falling in many regions. It is quite possible that this line of inquiry is already irrelevant.

boplicity• 4 years ago

That graph of oil output is terrifying. Instead, it is greeted with optimism. Yikes!

What is, oil, anyways?

In essence, it is solar energy generated (via plant life) over millions and millions of years. Of course cashing in on that stored energy can cause massive "economic output." It's not just human "ingenuity," though. It really is the incredible amount of sunlight converted, over mind-boggling numbers of years, that made it possible. And we're burning right through it, consequences be damned. We'll figure it out, right, because we figured out how to burn oil! Right!? #@$#@$)(

dredmorbius6• 4 years ago

See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", which quantifies this.

Humans burn through petroleum at 5 million times the rate at which it accumulated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28214230

https://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505

PDF: https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...

mchusma• 4 years ago

I think this article fails to grasp the scale of growth that can occur. If we disassemble mercury, and make it into conservatively the landmass of 28,000 Earths. This is a tiny example of the projects we can undertake.

If we play the next millennium right, everything about the humans of today can seem tiny by scale.

https://www.upgradingoptimism.com/p/disassembling-mercury?s=...

joshlk• 4 years ago

The argument is lead by a common misconception. Growth comes from only new resources but in reality it also comes from efficiency gains. And efficiency gains are not limited.

everdrive• 4 years ago

I've always been confused by growth arguments. Population and carrying capacity of the earth has always been one such argument. Are we near the carrying capacity now? Are we nowhere close to it? Have we already exceeded it? These are harder questions than people think, as technological and societal improvements can seriously modify this number. Thomas Malthus has been famously mocked for supposing that we had serious carrying capacity problems, only to be completely scooped by the agricultural revolution.

But, even if we agree that we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the earth, there must be some number which does exceed it. And so growth cannot continue forever. And in that time, what do we do? How do we back off growth without ruin? Why wait for that higher number? Why not learn how to back off growth earlier than the highest possible limit?

These are questions which I don't often see addressed when people discuss growth, stagnation, and the health of nations.

apienx• 4 years ago

Short answer is no (thermodynamics of course, but if you want to get whimsy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...).

Long(er) answer is that the pace of growth experiences periods of acceleration/slowdown. On the grand scheme of things, we're still carried by the momentum of the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, socialism, and a lack of conviction from the enlightened few are the main headwinds at the moment. The cosmos is practically limitless in terms of energy and resources. But we won't be able to transform those into useful work within the current societal and political frameworks. Too many idiots with voting rights and too few smart folks in decision-making roles.

Can growth continue?

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