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Comment by kgwgk | Hacker News Reader

> I think the article was saying development is GDP stagnation but increasing quality nonetheless

I don't know what the article is trying to say, really. It talks about "improving the quality of life" but I'm not sure if that includes factors that are already considered in GDP calculations (https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/papers/P2006-6_0.pdf) or it's about immaterial quality of life improvements (more hapiness or whatever).

> But growth as defined there, with static energy, I can't imagine right now.

Say you have a factory producing 1000 widgets per day and you improve the efficiency of the process and now you produce 1100 widgets per day using the same quantities of labour, raw materials and energy. Don't you agree that this is growth?

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Cool link, thanks I'll read it.

I'm not actually sure right now. Somehow I think that if you make those extra widgets without using more energy, then the extra people who buy and use those extra widgets will end up using more energy in doing so, and their extra purchase and use will, however incrementally, grow the economy as a whole a tiny bit, which will use that much extra energy.

So if it's growth, then it can't be static energy.

But somehow also I think that you can have static energy and not call it growth, but development, or something else like someone said before (maybe you).

What's development? I don't know. But maybe it's something like we produce 1000 widgets with more intricate decorations on them. And use no more energy doing so.

I grant that it's pretty confusing. And that's how it seems to me right now.

Thanks

The economy is a complex system, the only way to be sure that when you change something somewhere the energy consumption will remain constant is to put a constraint on it. You could set quotas, increase/decrese taxes to drive it to the desired targets, etc.

Imagine the system is at equilibrium at a certain output and energy usage and you discover a device than increases efficiency in the use of energy by 10%. The system could produce the same output as before using 10% less energy. But the new equilibrium won't be the same output at 10% less energy consumption, because some resources will be freed in the energy generation sector and the price of energy will go down resulting in some activities that were not economically viable before becoming viable. Maybe desalting sea water was too expensive before, but with lower energy prices and higher efficiency it does make sense, for example. You will have an increase in output but whether the new energy consumption is below or above the original level depends on the details. The latter is more likely, I guess.

Thank you for explaining / taking me through that. I totally agree that it's in the details.

My factory now makes the same amount of sneakers but uses less energy, and I have more profit which I can spend on more things, maybe making new markets viable. And in the macro picture, that extra energy, lower prices, makes some things become viable. And what happens from there regarding energy depends on the details. Very interesting and good, semi-detailed discussion.

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