What Daly is saying really is more that growth as currently measured (i.e. GDP growth) isn't a good metric and is one that can't go on forever. He's not (in his own word) agains't growth of wealth, but he's rather asking whether GDP growth is the metric to optimize for.
Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth".
Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and the interviewer doesn't seem interested, opting instead to ask questions about cosmology. It's a bizarre interview. His issue seems to be mostly with overconsumption of resources. But instead of creating a sustainable economy that can achieve growth through other areas (increased efficiency, increased use of renewable resources), he instead comes out against any growth and advocates a steady-state economy. But again, no specifics, just vague generalities and digressions into cosmology (arguing that economics should take into account religious questions).
I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
He's saying that growth (GDP) is an absolute measure that is only a sum without any costs. As one economist I can't recall put it "the hero of GDP is a cancer patient going through a costly divorce". GDP measures economic activity, with no consideration of the benefit obtained from that activity.
The interview was pretty bad, I agree. It's not clear what a "steady state economy" would look like, or what measures are held steady.
I do share your gripes with the interviewer. However, I think that Daly’s questions regarding the ultimate end (meaning purpose) of economic growth are worth pondering. Basically what are we trying to achieve through economic growth? Growth for the purpose of growth is kind of meaningless. But if growth is for improving welfare, why isn’t that the focus, rather than GDP numbers? (And if it isn’t for welfare, what is it for?)
That being said, the interviewer then asking “what’s the meaning of life” was really pointless and unnecessarily edgy. I also agree that not trying to come up with any policy proposal is kind of intellectually lazy and has some strong “I’m just the idea guy” vibes.
This kind of topic is where podcasts shine, especially if the host is literate on the topic being discussed. Or even the raw transcript of this interview versus the content that ended up being published.
I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.
I'm not sure increases in efficiency result in increased GDP.
To make that as clear as possible - imagine someone created low priced robots tomorrow that could make all your food, entertain you, build you a house etc etc for the one time fee of $100. They were incredibly efficient, consuming $10 worth of energy every year.
And what would people now do with all their free time?
They'd start to build other stuff. GDP would probably go through the roof, because if you measure the value of all that stuff in "old dollars" it would be incredible. And now in "new dollars" it's a tiny amount, but it also frees up human labor to do all sorts of new stuff, and these "new dollars" are so much more valuable.
Money is a tricky social constructed phenomenon. When there's such a shocking big change to technology as you propose, there has to be something to account for the difference in what it can purchase.
This is true if the change could happen overnight, but in reality that is never what happens. It will take a considerable amount of time to reach this end state where robots are cheap and plentiful. How this will start out is with limited production with high profits on the robots that is eroded over time as production capacity comes online and a stock of robots is built up. This will give the displaced labor time to adjust/pursue other jobs/create new industries to employ the freed up labor. This is why GDP has never fallen off a cliff solely because of technological improvement (and indeed has so far eventually increased with technological improvement).
A surprising amount of modern thought falls victim to the trap of only looking at the shock size and not accounting for the likely adjustment duration (I'm especially looking at you environmentalists talking about sea level rise over a century).
Idk, it seems like one of those things that is hard to predict. Would gdp actually fall off a cliff? There would be a lot of steps that would have to happen along the way. Plus the premise isn’t really rooted in any kind of reality, so it may be a flawed argument to begin with. Just my $0.02
Agreed, except in the current economy they would always go with the highest pricing they can get away with. Capitalism promised “efficiency” with regard to use of resources by always throwing a market mechanism at a problem and assuming the best. In reality, companies realized they could profit a lot more if rules were written in their favour and buying lobbyists/politicians was a bargain. So what “the markets” found was a way to maximise externalities to keep as much profit for themselves as they could (like always). And sadly this obsession for growth and wealth will lead to so much suffering due to all those externalities, especially related to the acceleration the stable climate breakdown.
I think betting on efficiency is essentially the same fallacy that he identifies in the article - that the future will solve the problems we create today.
There’s also the mental exercise one can take of can we make GDP -> inf in a constrained system. Of course not. There are limits. Economics assumes no limits on growth. That’s absurd on the surface. Just like I can’t super saturate sugar into a water solution beyond a certain point, I can’t materially transform the
material provided by the earth into useful economic production irrespective of the earths limits. That seems pretty much vacuously true.
> Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners.
More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave.
Everything you and I buy we buy because the value of what we are buying is worth more to us than the money we give up to pay for it.
> How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
As I showed, society is getting the long end of the stick already.
> More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave.
This was the promise. But all we really have today is cost disease. For every microwave the US also has infrastructural costs that are 10x+ that of other countries and a culture that is being increasingly incentivized to hand over their wealth for short-term, materialistic gains, and goods/services that aren't worth the price being charged.
To say nothing of the fact that in most cases, said microwaves leaves you with lower-quality results concomitant with the time you saved. Which really feels like all of life; we are being sold a bill of plenty that is only paper-thin
Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful.
This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.
Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."
"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."
That sums up his position.
He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years?
The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.
I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]
Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?
Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.
Helium can definitely be used up if we keep putting it in balloons and allowing it to escape into space. Radioisotopes are also used up. Sure, we could transmute radioactive waste back into usable uranium or thorium but that would be a big energy sink, negating the primary use for those minerals. Fossil fuels have the same problem.
this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.
> The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?
we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.
Imagination is not reality. Reality have constraints that can be so complex that can be really hard to imagine. This is why we run simulations on computers when it comes to lets say weather and not do thought experiments only.
I can even give a real life example here. I am from Poland. And at this moment we are facing a coal shortage (which will cause energetic crisis in the winter) while sitting at the same time atop one of the largest coal deposits in the world. No one could imagine this as a possibility a mere year ago.
The answer is now. The 2030s is the decade of peak everything. Production of everything has been growing exponentially, but at a cost that is growing fraster.
From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.
This ignores Services entirely, which are part of GDP..
If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive
Is not growth inevitable? I hear criticisms of it but is it not what happens automatically when there is competition for resources?
I can't really see what the alternative would be. I mean, ideally if you could just agree with everyone in the entire world that no one should strive for something better, we could stay where we are, but reaching such agreement seems impossible.
And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes.
The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
> ... not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich.
riches or wealth, is merely stored up work that could be expended, instead of consumed.
They aren't being paid just for being rich - they are making decisions on how to expend that stored up work to produce _even more_ stored up work for the future. By making that decision wisely, they earn the rewards of the stored up work!
Now imagine that everyone's retirement is tied to the child's growth in height only and the people with most power and influence benefit the most from every additional inch of height.
degrowth is a movement currently and a worthy one.
Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want.
Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead of owning a 3d printer, the neighborhood tool-shed was a warehouse with bikes, tools, a maker space, cleaning supplies, perhaps even ATVs, and riding lawnmowers, etc.
Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once.
You might need an HOA-type fee to pay people to take care of the equipment, etc.
Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact.
Nice to haves:
- Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage.
- Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then. I haven't known a neighbor since the 90s, unless it was from work, school, or a roommate back in college. It might be nice to have potlucks, or cooks from the neighborhood could show off their talents maybe with a tip-hat.
Perhaps some people don't cook much at all, and just prepare quick dinners in the commercial kitchen space for their family, and decide they don't even need much in terms of appliances in their kitchen.
My point is we've been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't and there was a time when you needed something you'd borrow or trade with a neighbor.
So basically: instead of just having what you need, just, like, hope that your neighbour has what you need. Great plan, i also hope that the neighbours are going to always follow me (just in case i'm going to move elsewhere).
"Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once." or just have a garage or a shed for tools.
"Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact." ah yes, the number one reason people get large homes: forget having family or simply enjoying spacious living conditions, i'm storing all of my tools around my house.
"Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage." Good luck proving that the ding on the ATVs fender was done by your neighbour and not you.
"Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then." Why can't you just invite your neighbours to your house?
"... been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't..." or perhaps some of us are conditioned to think that we don't need anything, that everything should be rented/lended by a neighbour and basically make your house into a shed because all you do is store tools anyways.
This is the TechShop business model, and they went out of business :/
I think fundamentally the problem is that we have been operating for a long time in an economic environment where "stuff" is relatively cheap, but land and labour close to population centres are relatively expensive.
Very often the cost of the "co-ordination labour" required for sharing exceeds the "use value" of the item to the user. Ensuring the equipment is checked in and out, isn't stolen, people aren't lasering PVC in shared space, doing inventory, answering questions etc all take time.
If you have situations where people are interacting with each other (e.g. forums or same physical space) you will also have community maintenance to deal with (codes of conduct, dealing with problem behaviour and interpersonal conflict etc).
There are also issues around transfer of liability, you need an organisation that is responsible for testing and tagging, ensuring the equipment is in a safe operating condition, that users understand safety procedures - plus the policy/governance to make sure this stuff is happening and the audit tracking to prove it.
These sorts of things all sound like "paper cuts" but together they can easily kill what seems like an obviously good idea.
I am involved in 2 co-operatives (a school and a neighbourhood community centre) and there is a LOT of effort required to stand up and maintain shared capabilities. The legal / admin / compliance burden also only keeps growing.
It's not that it can't be done, but the details matter and it's a lot gnarlier than it looks.
It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.
History is replete with fallen civilizations, lost civilizations, and civilizations we barely know exist. There are likely many who rose and fell and who we are wholly unaware of.
So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.
"...we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc." This is literally what the criticized growth-focused system is doing: from recycling waste into new products to carbon-capture technology, sustainable polymers and much more, made and done with private equity.
I feel like this could have been a lot better if it were more concrete.
What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
- Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income?
- At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer?
- A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer?
Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
> The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare.
> The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each
family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work).
The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh.
> What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption.
It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
You got the numbers wrong; I said each family had two earners, and I said they made $125k each and $110k each, deliberately setting up family A to have $230k after childcare and family B to have $220k. Both are clearly comfortable, but family B is apparently working less but at a higher effective hourly rate. With $10k/yr less, less work, and more time with their young child, I think many people would still say family B is coming out ahead.
> GDP measures how much work is produced
But that's not even true. It only seeks to track exchanges where money changed hands. If a childcare center closes and the parents care for their own kids, the same work can be done, but it's not included GDP. If I grow some of my own vegetables from seed which I otherwise might have bought from the grocery store, neither my labor nor the value I derive from that produce contributes to GDP.
> nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
Even without concerns about the income distribution, we know that what people actually value isn't just money, but GDP sums over transactions and ignores plenty of factors that may do as much or more for utility. Any time people choose to retire when they could keep working, or pick a career other than the one that would bring them the greatest expected income, they demonstrate that non-monetary factors can easily outweigh their profit-maximizing drive. But GDP doesn't attempt to measure those other factors.
This sounds outlandish only because we've lived with this system for so long, but it would be entirely reasonable for the BLS or some other body to run monthly or quarterly surveys to get information on changes of those other factors, and though it would be imperfect, we could approach something that looked more like a utility function for real humans. How hard would it be to ask a decently large group of people regularly:
- How satisfied are you with your health? Are you inhibited in doing the things you'd like by illness, injury, disability or aging?
- How secure are you in your housing? In your access to health care? In your ability to feed yourself and your family?
- How stressed are you?
- How happy are you with your relationships with close friends or family?
- Do you feel you have the time and resources to learn and grow in the ways that are important to you?
- Do you regularly engage activities that support finding a flow state?
- Do you find beauty in your environment?
Etc etc. I won't pretend that I know all the questions to ask, or how scores for their answers should be weighted. But _something_ should try to measure, "Are we happy or satisfied in our lives?" and not just "What are we paid?". Kuznets introduced the modern form of G(D|N)P almost 90 years ago, and he recognized its shortcomings then, and I'm frankly disappointed that at some point we didn't get around to at least a serious attempt at replacing it with something better.
Daly makes the case that conventional economics deals with "intermediate" means and ends, such as food production and health/leisure; and that we should instead be more concerned with "ultimate" means and ends.
He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now?
Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
> Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily
The growth talked about in the board rooms is exactly that. More output of commercial goods, more sell, need more people buying these even if it's unnecessary for better life, popup more kids increase population so that sells will always increase, create more wealth for the already billionaires while keeping the minimum wage lowest possible, consume, consume more and more. Anything less than that is a disaster.
None of the growth ever talkes about the ecological collapse it's creating, never will. It's about quarterly report even if it complete destroys the future of all in next decade.
Efficiency isn't a silver bullet. There's a limit to free gains from efficiency - you can't go past 100% efficiency, and even at 100% efficiency, you still need to spend energy to do things. It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.
And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.
It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.
The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.
Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.
> It will always take at least 4190 Joules to heat 1 kg of water by 1°C. Even with perfect efficiency, you can never beat that number.
You can. A great example of technology that produces greater than 100% efficiency is a heat pump. You can actually buy commercial heat pump tank water heaters that are much greater than 100% efficient at turning electricity into hot water. The energy comes from the ambient air, but the Earth has no shortage of heat energy that can be recovered to do useful work.
sure the end result (microprocessor) don't use too much resources, but the process that produces it does. you can keep improving but a point you reach physical and economist limit that you just can't outrun.
the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?
> (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input
It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.
The current production system is driven by the need for growth. What you're describing was true maybe until a century ago, until the 1929 crisis. After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side. First it was war, then mass consumerism. Desires are not natural, they are induced and in the same way they are induced (socially, culturally, politically), they can be removed, usually with a higher level of happiness for the people involved.
People here also can calculate Pearson's coefficient between GDP and energy usage and understand by themselves that this is bullshit and that energy efficiency is less than minor in the grand scheme of things.
And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase.
I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...
And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.
Do you mean, any instance of a technological advancement that has allowed the production of some good or service with less input than would have been required before the advancement? How about computers + the internet? We have access to communications and knowledge access services with input costs far lower than the equivalent services would have cost before these inventions. Or, the invention of the refrigerator? Keeping food cold costs much less than it would have before the fridge was invented.
under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy.
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on.
This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.
I am not making a point on whether workers work harder now than they did before. But at the same time, there are clearly ways in which we have had technological advancements that produce goods and services with less input (where 'input' includes natural resources, human labor, etc) than would have been required before these advancements. I used this example in another reply, but (just off the top of my head) computers + internet have allowed abundant knowledge lookup and communication for far less input cost than the services would have required previously.
Generalizing here, there is 'growth due to making people work harder' and 'growth due to inventing stuff that lets us do new things' and whatever your views are on each of these, I think most anti-growth articles ignore the latter.
You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.)
A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.
You’re not even disputing the parents point. More output with the same input doesn’t mean people are working less. It means they’re working the same amount…
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Saying we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a bit silly in my opinion. It's almost like saying we shouldn't invest in solar panels as the sun will eventually explode and won't shine anymore. A lot of GDP growth in developed nations comes from increase in efficiency, not increase in resource usage. Higher agricultural yields from better crops, self-driving cars, more efficient computers; they're all things that have the potential to drive much higher growth than their resource usage. Which I guess in ecological economics would be differentiated as "developments" rather than "growth".
Now I do agree that higher growth doesn't automatically means higher standards of living. Things like automation, while highly efficient, result in most of the gains going to capital owners. How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
The interview was pretty bad, I agree. It's not clear what a "steady state economy" would look like, or what measures are held steady.
That being said, the interviewer then asking “what’s the meaning of life” was really pointless and unnecessarily edgy. I also agree that not trying to come up with any policy proposal is kind of intellectually lazy and has some strong “I’m just the idea guy” vibes.
I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.
To make that as clear as possible - imagine someone created low priced robots tomorrow that could make all your food, entertain you, build you a house etc etc for the one time fee of $100. They were incredibly efficient, consuming $10 worth of energy every year.
GDP would fall off a cliff.
They'd start to build other stuff. GDP would probably go through the roof, because if you measure the value of all that stuff in "old dollars" it would be incredible. And now in "new dollars" it's a tiny amount, but it also frees up human labor to do all sorts of new stuff, and these "new dollars" are so much more valuable.
Money is a tricky social constructed phenomenon. When there's such a shocking big change to technology as you propose, there has to be something to account for the difference in what it can purchase.
A surprising amount of modern thought falls victim to the trap of only looking at the shock size and not accounting for the likely adjustment duration (I'm especially looking at you environmentalists talking about sea level rise over a century).
There’s also the mental exercise one can take of can we make GDP -> inf in a constrained system. Of course not. There are limits. Economics assumes no limits on growth. That’s absurd on the surface. Just like I can’t super saturate sugar into a water solution beyond a certain point, I can’t materially transform the material provided by the earth into useful economic production irrespective of the earths limits. That seems pretty much vacuously true.
Hence his point.
More goes to society. You don't see it because it is spread thinly. Think of how nice it is to have a microwave, for example. The value of my time saved is far more valuable to me than what I paid for the microwave.
Everything you and I buy we buy because the value of what we are buying is worth more to us than the money we give up to pay for it.
> How society should deal with this is another interesting question.
As I showed, society is getting the long end of the stick already.
This was the promise. But all we really have today is cost disease. For every microwave the US also has infrastructural costs that are 10x+ that of other countries and a culture that is being increasingly incentivized to hand over their wealth for short-term, materialistic gains, and goods/services that aren't worth the price being charged.
To say nothing of the fact that in most cases, said microwaves leaves you with lower-quality results concomitant with the time you saved. Which really feels like all of life; we are being sold a bill of plenty that is only paper-thin
That is not true. When you exclude housing, capital's share of national income has slightly decreased over the last century (see Figure 3):
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
Non-housing capital grows primarily through greater automation.
This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.
Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."
"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."
That sums up his position.
He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources? Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
[3] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]
Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?
Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.
[0] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Energy-Discussion.html
No, it's just an economist talking. He's just saying that the sun's energy cannot be depleted faster, while mineral resources can.
Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms.
Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.
this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.
we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.
I can even give a real life example here. I am from Poland. And at this moment we are facing a coal shortage (which will cause energetic crisis in the winter) while sitting at the same time atop one of the largest coal deposits in the world. No one could imagine this as a possibility a mere year ago.
From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.
I still vividly remember "peak oil" in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive
And let's say instead we change direction to reshape society, to become more ecological, more sustainable etc. That will require innovation, labor, capital etc. That is also a kind of growth! Like a child stops growing in height at some point, but continues to evolve intellectually etc.
Yes, but not one that benefits from investment, which is how rich people get paid for being rich. Rich people want very, very, very much to be paid for being rich. Since a dollar is a vote, this concern completely dominates our political and cultural thought processes.
The tricky part is that retirement funds use exactly the same mechanism, so those of us with retirement accounts have incentives to keep quiet. The wheels won't come off the cart to Ponzi town until a minority of people are net asset holders, but that's well on its way to happening. Exciting times!
riches or wealth, is merely stored up work that could be expended, instead of consumed.
They aren't being paid just for being rich - they are making decisions on how to expend that stored up work to produce _even more_ stored up work for the future. By making that decision wisely, they earn the rewards of the stored up work!
Answer this question : How many common things around your house do you use weekly, monthly or maybe a few times per year? How many other houses on the block have the same things? How much waste went into allowing you the comfort of using that when you want.
Would it be much less comfortable to have to "check it out" from a neighborhood tool-shed? What about instead of owning a 3d printer, the neighborhood tool-shed was a warehouse with bikes, tools, a maker space, cleaning supplies, perhaps even ATVs, and riding lawnmowers, etc.
Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once.
You might need an HOA-type fee to pay people to take care of the equipment, etc.
Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact.
Nice to haves:
- Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage.
- Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then. I haven't known a neighbor since the 90s, unless it was from work, school, or a roommate back in college. It might be nice to have potlucks, or cooks from the neighborhood could show off their talents maybe with a tip-hat.
Perhaps some people don't cook much at all, and just prepare quick dinners in the commercial kitchen space for their family, and decide they don't even need much in terms of appliances in their kitchen.
My point is we've been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't and there was a time when you needed something you'd borrow or trade with a neighbor.
"Sure you'd have to logically create 'centers' around town close enough to walk, or have a neighbor maybe deliver if you're elderly or something, but there's convenience in having more options if you don't have a specific tool and only need it once." or just have a garage or a shed for tools.
"Now that you don't need your own tools, lawn mower, 3d printer, printer, atv, weed whacker, you find you could've done without even having a garage, maybe we can start building smaller homes that are cheaper to heat or cool and with less environmental impact." ah yes, the number one reason people get large homes: forget having family or simply enjoying spacious living conditions, i'm storing all of my tools around my house.
"Some sort of share/rental thing maybe for the atv's, and boat/rv storage." Good luck proving that the ding on the ATVs fender was done by your neighbour and not you.
"Commercial kitchens and space for community get together's, I grew up in the 80s and we knew our neighbors back then." Why can't you just invite your neighbours to your house?
"... been conditioned to think we all need to own so much shit, when really we don't..." or perhaps some of us are conditioned to think that we don't need anything, that everything should be rented/lended by a neighbour and basically make your house into a shed because all you do is store tools anyways.
I think fundamentally the problem is that we have been operating for a long time in an economic environment where "stuff" is relatively cheap, but land and labour close to population centres are relatively expensive.
Very often the cost of the "co-ordination labour" required for sharing exceeds the "use value" of the item to the user. Ensuring the equipment is checked in and out, isn't stolen, people aren't lasering PVC in shared space, doing inventory, answering questions etc all take time.
If you have situations where people are interacting with each other (e.g. forums or same physical space) you will also have community maintenance to deal with (codes of conduct, dealing with problem behaviour and interpersonal conflict etc).
There are also issues around transfer of liability, you need an organisation that is responsible for testing and tagging, ensuring the equipment is in a safe operating condition, that users understand safety procedures - plus the policy/governance to make sure this stuff is happening and the audit tracking to prove it.
These sorts of things all sound like "paper cuts" but together they can easily kill what seems like an obviously good idea.
I am involved in 2 co-operatives (a school and a neighbourhood community centre) and there is a LOT of effort required to stand up and maintain shared capabilities. The legal / admin / compliance burden also only keeps growing.
It's not that it can't be done, but the details matter and it's a lot gnarlier than it looks.
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So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.
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What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
- Consider two families A and B, each with two earners and a small child. The parents of family A both work full time, earning $125k each, and they spend $20k/yr on childcare. The parents of family B each work part time, earn $110k per year each, and together with help from one grandparent are able to care for their small child, and spend more hours together. Family A contributes more to GDP than family B, but are they better off? Or are the benefits of seeing more of their child's early years greater than the difference in income?
- At the onset of a recession, a company forecasts that its business will shrink; they will both need less labor, and need to reduce payroll. They offer to allow their employees to choose to work part time with a prorated decrease in compensation. Employee A and B are initially paid the same. A supports a family and wants to continue working at 100%. B is single, chooses to work at 60% for the next year, and spends the extra time on hobbies and spending more time with friends/family. Is B really "poorer"? Or for the right life circumstances, is working less and enjoying leisure more richer?
- A country grows its GDP over a 40 year period, but increases in the costs of housing, education, and healthcare are much sharper than wage growth. The older generation could feed and house (buy!) a family on a single income. A college student could pay for their housing and education by working part time. The younger generation can work full time at minimum wage and not afford rent on a 1BD apt, and it can take decades to pay for university. Is the country richer?
Never mind the very long term resource and physical limits on growth -- are we already at a point where striving for growth has failed to make most of us better off?
family B is better off, at least financially, because they earn more after taking away child-care costs (and also somehow they have free labour from a grandparent). Family A earns $125k-$20k=$105k for full time work, where as family B earns $110k (for part time work).
The comparison isn't really apples to apples tbh.
> What's wrong with wanting GDP growth?
nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
GDP measures how much work is produced, not how much benefit the people obtain from said work, nor how much residual wealth remains after consumption.
It's _often_ the case that GDP growth is associated with increasing quality of life, but there's no such guarantee from just GDP growth. Quality of life improves from political and societal improvements, which GDP growth is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
You got the numbers wrong; I said each family had two earners, and I said they made $125k each and $110k each, deliberately setting up family A to have $230k after childcare and family B to have $220k. Both are clearly comfortable, but family B is apparently working less but at a higher effective hourly rate. With $10k/yr less, less work, and more time with their young child, I think many people would still say family B is coming out ahead.
> GDP measures how much work is produced
But that's not even true. It only seeks to track exchanges where money changed hands. If a childcare center closes and the parents care for their own kids, the same work can be done, but it's not included GDP. If I grow some of my own vegetables from seed which I otherwise might have bought from the grocery store, neither my labor nor the value I derive from that produce contributes to GDP.
> nothing is wrong - the problem with framing it this way is the underlying assumption of equity of distribution of the increased wealth.
Even without concerns about the income distribution, we know that what people actually value isn't just money, but GDP sums over transactions and ignores plenty of factors that may do as much or more for utility. Any time people choose to retire when they could keep working, or pick a career other than the one that would bring them the greatest expected income, they demonstrate that non-monetary factors can easily outweigh their profit-maximizing drive. But GDP doesn't attempt to measure those other factors.
This sounds outlandish only because we've lived with this system for so long, but it would be entirely reasonable for the BLS or some other body to run monthly or quarterly surveys to get information on changes of those other factors, and though it would be imperfect, we could approach something that looked more like a utility function for real humans. How hard would it be to ask a decently large group of people regularly:
- How satisfied are you with your health? Are you inhibited in doing the things you'd like by illness, injury, disability or aging?
- How secure are you in your housing? In your access to health care? In your ability to feed yourself and your family?
- How stressed are you?
- How happy are you with your relationships with close friends or family?
- Do you feel you have the time and resources to learn and grow in the ways that are important to you?
- Do you regularly engage activities that support finding a flow state?
- Do you find beauty in your environment?
Etc etc. I won't pretend that I know all the questions to ask, or how scores for their answers should be weighted. But _something_ should try to measure, "Are we happy or satisfied in our lives?" and not just "What are we paid?". Kuznets introduced the modern form of G(D|N)P almost 90 years ago, and he recognized its shortcomings then, and I'm frankly disappointed that at some point we didn't get around to at least a serious attempt at replacing it with something better.
He explains that "ultimate means" are necessarily constrained by entropy. He equivocates on what the ultimate ends are, but professes his own Christian belief in a creator [sic]. Unfortunately, he ends his argument by doing the very thing of which he accuses his non-religious counterparts -- accusing them of sticking up their noses at religious people, and positing a ridiculous straw-man: "They look down their noses at religious people who say there’s a creator: That’s unscientific. What’s the scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
Otherwise, I'm on-board with sustainable living. I think our current economic model is doomed, and our ancestors will suffer for our excess. Accounting for ecological cost and implementing tariffs for those countries that don't seems like a reasonable step.
Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?
The growth talked about in the board rooms is exactly that. More output of commercial goods, more sell, need more people buying these even if it's unnecessary for better life, popup more kids increase population so that sells will always increase, create more wealth for the already billionaires while keeping the minimum wage lowest possible, consume, consume more and more. Anything less than that is a disaster.
None of the growth ever talkes about the ecological collapse it's creating, never will. It's about quarterly report even if it complete destroys the future of all in next decade.
And the closer we get to 100% efficiency, it gets asymptotically more difficult to improve efficiency. Look at the average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US. Going from 12.5 MPG in the 1970s to 25 MPG today was "easy". Going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG will be extremely difficult. Going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG is nigh on impossible.
It gets even more depressing when you realize we have to double efficiencies every time the world doubles its population just to tread water and keep everyone with the same quality of life, while also having no additional effect to the environment.
The world's population is doubling every 60 years. I doubt we can keep doubling efficiencies for even the next 60 years.
Realistically, if we want to create a sustainable world economy, the world is going to have to undergo a massive shift to greener technologies than we're using now, and either the quality of life or the population across the world is going to have to decrease dramatically.
You can. A great example of technology that produces greater than 100% efficiency is a heat pump. You can actually buy commercial heat pump tank water heaters that are much greater than 100% efficient at turning electricity into hot water. The energy comes from the ambient air, but the Earth has no shortage of heat energy that can be recovered to do useful work.
the second thing economist usually talk about a growth in profit, and that can't always go up.
It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.
And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase. I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...
And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.
Generalizing here, there is 'growth due to making people work harder' and 'growth due to inventing stuff that lets us do new things' and whatever your views are on each of these, I think most anti-growth articles ignore the latter.
A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.