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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

But because the world must balance the need to eliminate carbon emissions with economic growth

I read this often, and everytime can't help but wonder: must the world really strive for economic growth? Is just stability not enough? Isn't unbridled growth a major cause of the situation we're in now (and not just with respect to climate, but also the wealth of other environmental problesm, even disasters, the earth faces)? Note: these are honest questions. I don't know how econmics really work. Maybe I'm naive, and I perfectly get for some 'more more more' is the key aspect in life. But is that really required?

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Well, it's easy for us to sit here in the developed world and talk about how the world doesn't need growth.

There are billions of people for whom more of the same means more poverty. When everybody in Africa, South America, Asia, heck even the poorer parts of Europe and North America, has access to clean water, food, education, healthcare, safety, justice etc. we can discuss whether we really need growth.

Growth may not be as needed in our parts of the world, but it sure is for a lot of people.

Since 2000, China has gone from a per capital PPP GDP of $3,000, about the same as the US in the 1880s, to $17,000, about the same as the US in the 1960s or 1970s. In the process, it has added 6 gigatons of carbon output, more than the entire US footprint. Carbon output was the way to a modern, decent life for a billion Chinese. India and Africa are still stuck where the US was a century ago (and their carbon output is correspondingly low). Economic development is necessary for them.

Economic growth is what allows _very good things_ like education and healthcare continue to improve, and reach a larger number of people, regardless of what you think of material consumerist goods.

These things have made life way better for average people, in many obvious and non-obvious ways, that aren’t the mere collection of material goods. Infant mortality dropping is one obvious effect, but violent crime also decreases for example, the murder rate a few hundred years ago was orders of magnitude higher than now.

I was curious how the homicide rate has changed over time. It’s true as you claimed that it was substantially higher hundreds of years ago, and has been on a steep drop in modern times:

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

If there is population growth, there must be economic growth, or every new born mouth makes the rest of the world poorer. That tends to turn people on one another.

Zero population growth is now possible; zero growth in resource usage may be compatible with economic growth.

Yes. As others pointed out: without economic growth, population growth makes everyone poorer.

Also, economic growth is not our enemy here (nor is growing energy usage). In fact, properly applied, they're our friends in this problem. The trick is doing more of the helping stuff, and less of the damaging stuff.

I've argued this two days ago, so to not repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897547.

Economic growth is not required for the survival of humanity. Economic growth is just something that wealthy people want so that the can keep or increase their wealth. Again, wealth itself not being vital to the survival of humanity (and many species of animals).

Not many people care about "survival of humanity" in the abstract. What we all care about is not suffering, not dying, and not seeing others suffer and die. And then other things on the Maslov's pyramid. Economic growth is absolutely necessary to achieve that; the default, natural state of humanity is pain and death.

I think the abstraction of humanity as a group of which every human being is part of is something that many people understand. People care about the messages they hear, and most of them still hear a message that says there's no real issue and it's possible to keep living the way they live, and it's possible for everyone to keep living the way they live.

Many people would be okay if the message was: we are all going to have to change the way we live, including the rich.

That's fair. I do too subscribe to the abstraction of humanity as a group.

I guess what I'm saying is that even with climate change, survival of humanity is not at stake. We're unlikely to collapse the climate to the point where no humans can survive anywhere on the planet. What's under threat is survival of our technological civilization, of our ways of life, of our grandchildren. The danger is that a lot of people will suffer greatly and die prematurely, and that the future will only contain more suffering.

"economic growth" just means that we produce more goods and services that people desire, for cheaper.

It it borderline tautological to say that economic growth is "good".

I am not sure how someone can argue against a concept that is almost by definition positive.

> I am not sure how someone can argue against a concept that is almost by definition positive.

People argue against the "more goods" part, on the basis that we have way more stuff than we know what to do with anyway. They're sort of right, but it's throwing baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth also encompasses doing same stuff better, and being more efficient with resource use. From what I've seen, the motivation behind criticism is usually twofold: criticizing greed, and worrying that ever-increasing use will exhaust available resources.

Our enemy might be an economic system based on growth that gives critical political power to groups of people that don't actually care about decreasing carbon emissions.

True, economic growth makes everyone richer. But if we don't find a way to both get economic growth and keep the planet in a liveable state, losing economic growth sounds like a better option than destroying the conditions for human life.

My main fear here is that by fixating on economic growth being bad, we might wind up killing the very engine that gives us technologies to deal with climate change and fix the damage already done. That's why I urge to decompose "economic growth" into pieces, and focus on addressing the parts that are causing trouble.

This is a fair point. But couldn't there be a different engine to technological progress?

Not sure. By their very nature, new technologies improve things, creating economic growth.

Incidentally, I'm not 100% sure whether general economic growth is what powers technological growth directly. I've recently seen arguments suggesting that progress of technology is tied to population growth - which has slowed in the past decades. If this is true, then we're in deep shit - at least until we learn how to convert money into technology instead of researchers into technology. But still, we would neither need economic growth to support population growth to cause technological growth (researchers -> progress), or economic growth to support technological growth directly (money -> progress).

Maybe there's a different economic regime that would let technology to progress and life quality to improve without invoking an explicit concept of "economic growth", but I'm not sure what would that be and whether now is the time to figure it out.

We tend to think of economic growth as a fairly tangible thing with meaning. But, GDP is an industrial era measure. Add up all the shoes, cars & kettles that come out of factories and see if that's growing YoY.

Even then they had to deal with serivices and the other more ethereal parts of the economy (financial services, then and now, are a contraversial element in measuring economies). But, the tagible parts of the economy were big enough that GDP had meaning. If GDP doubled, it meant more food, cars, clothes, steel...

These days, GDP growth, economic growth is a lot more poorly defined. Economists have measures for it, but they can't describe what "GDP doubled" looks like beyond the abstraction used to measure it. It could mean more lawyers/lawsuits/contracts or it could mean more childcare/education. Asking "do we want the economy to grow" is a far less meaningful question than it once was.

To the point in the article though, I do think that we need more energy, not less. In fact, for the future to be futuristic, we need a lot more energy. A side effect of clean energy tech is that we're eploring new paradigms, some with tremendous potential to scale beyond what carbon provided.

Stability is probably much (much) harder to achieve than either growth or decay.

The measures of economic growth are not perfect but even something like improving a product or service is, in a very real sense, economic growth. Are you asking whether every such improvement should be matched with a corresponding degradation?

Personally, if you're happy with your situation, you shouldn't feel compelled to constantly improve it. But then, if you need or want to protect something (e.g. yourself, your family), a certain amount of {slack / profit / extra resources } is necessary to weather unknown future adversity. And a growing capacity to handle such adverse events is as important as the things you wish to protect and preserve.

Growth does not imply consumption of resources. It can simply be technological advances. Finding better cures for cancer is also growth.

Of course mankind would continue without better cures for cancer. But I find it difficult to argue that we shouldn't look for better cures.

But the growth talked is "economic growth"

Curing cancer is also economic growth.

Required implies that there is some kind of divine guidance out there, which there isn't, so I suppose we could force humanity to stick to some stable point and not progress any further.

But economic growth is required in the sense that advancing technology requires economic growth. And advancing the human race requires advancing technology, and so on.

The world's population isn't a single entity, so even if one group decides to not pursue economic growth, others still will. The only way to not fall behind is to keep playing.

All of capitalism is predicated on unending growth. There are some fields of economics that do research into alternative models, but they are niche and unpopular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

No, the world doesn't really need to strive for economic growth. IPhones sales not growing year over year is not a disaster for anyone, really. Same for Amazon market share, and so on. And yet: it is, because the system works this way. Growth is god. It's instilled into DNA of every entity working in the capitalism.

We could stop the growing obsession, redistribute the accumulated wealth to the developing nations (perhaps iPhone sales would grow then?), and live happily ever after. Obviously, it's an utopia that's not going to happen.

And yet, it's the only viable way to achieve the emission targets needed for humans to survive on this planet. It's commonly accepted that the best advice you can give someone who wants to reduce her/his carbon footprint is: "consume less". Well, we need to consume less globally.

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