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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

Is there "growth" without consuming physical resources? If not, we have to accept OP's POV that economic growth is by definition unsustainable.

"Anyone who thinks exponential growth can continue forever is either a madman or an economist"

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There is absolutely 'growth' without consuming resources. Economic growth also includes improvements in efficiency, which typically reduce the amount of physical resources used. Also, look at the transition in our lives from physical media to digital media. Digital channels have brought massive growth while reducing the need for paper, CDs, DVDs, etc.

That kind of growth requires constant inventions, rather than occasional inventions to use in existing factories. Also I think efficiency improvements offer diminishing returns (sorry I can't prove it). But there's only so much value you can get from a handful of matter, especially if it has to be cost-effective. At some point you bump into limits of physical properties.

A silly tale I read in an old popular science book: Aliens arrive at the Earth. They make peaceful contact with humans and want to exchange knowledge. They get every single human book ever printed, they drop them on a pile, then... one of them takes a metal rod out of his pocket, and makes a scratch on it somewhere in the middle. THERE, it's archived. All they need is to measure the exact spot where the scratch is made and calculate the ratio of rod below the scratch to the rod above the scratch. The decimal representation of that irrational number encodes entire human knowledge.

There's a hard ceiling on efficiency though. You can't get past (or even near) 100%.

Historically efficiency improvements have lead to such an increase in productivity that the total energy consumption went up anyways.

Hmm, reducing the need for long lasting and easily recyclable paper by replacing it with mostly-plastic stuff (including packaging) that becomes obsolete in less than a decade?

Only up to a point.

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

This entire blog (not just this one post), start-to-finish is a sobering look at the limits of our growth.

Imagine an economy in perfect stasis, no growth, no shrinkage, just the same stuff year after year. Now introduce some efficiency improvement, like shaving some weight from a car design, or a computer chip that performs the same computation for less power, or an agricultural technique which requires less land for the same yield. Voilà, growth without consuming additional physical resources.

Of course, this is not our main source of growth at the moment. But surely it could be?

> Of course, this is not our main source of growth at the moment. But surely it could be?

Yeah, but for how long?

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

It makes me so happy to finally start seeing others on HN post links from the Do The Math blog. If I could make one website mandatory reading for all policy makers, economists, etc., this would be it.

Well now you're just playing semantic games with the word "growth".

Never mind the details of the economy, population growth is the killer.

As long as the net ecosystem gain per person is negative rather than positive we are accelerating at a wall.

If the original post had said that population growth needed to be stopped, I'd have agreed with it. But that's not what it said.

The whole thrust of that comment and the ensuing conversation is the nature of economic growth. That's not "semantic games," that's a different topic.

I re-read just now and yes, you're right. Sorry about that.

No problem, it happens.

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