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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstand "growth" as wall-street profits. The world GDP today is $80T. If you divide that by world's working population (which is ~65% of total population), you will arrive at about $9/hr wage rate for average human. The growth is the improvement in value of time for an average human being. This is obviously very broad view because returns are extremely unevenly distributed but when GDP grows, many people benefit by having their standard of life elevated by that little bump. Continuous growth is what led to dramatic reduction in massive poverty in India and China compared to 1970s and now also starting to take place in Africa. There is most definitely need for continuous growth.

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What's interesting is that you don't follow your own reasoning to it's almost completely Marxist end: continuous growth is only necessary _because of_ the extremely uneven distribution of wealth, and it follows that the need for continuous growth is then _exacerbated_ by the continuous increase in income disparity.

"(...) Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened. Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly. The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen 90 years ago".[1]

[1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

No, the need for growth is not related to uneven distribution. You can have perfectly even distribution of a really unproductive economy and everyone will be just as poor.

If we want to get enough food, shelter, and medicine for the population of the world to just not be in the brink of starvation, homelessness and death from simple diseases, we need more economic growth.

The economic output of a society is independent of the wealth distribution mechanisms. We wouldn’t magically gain all of the output we needed by just switching to socialism.

A simple example is a workforce building houses without tools and a workforce building houses with tools. The latter will have more economic output than the former and will be better for society overall, regardless of what share of the profits the workers get.

My interpretation of the parent was that there is some hypothetical point at which basic needs (whatever they are) of all humans are satisfied and additional growth is about more comfort/less work. At that point one could in principle stop with growth. And with very skewed distribution, this hypothetical point is way further into the future than with even distribution.

> And with very skewed distribution, this hypothetical point is way further into the future than with even distribution.

Yeah, but this is very different from saying growth is only necessary because of uneven wealth.

> and it follows that the need for continuous growth is then _exacerbated_ by the continuous increase in income disparity.

Not necessarily, not only is growth not bound to income disparity; once people's basic needs are meet (health care, minimum living benefits while out of job), the disparity is no longer a humanitarian issue.

More yet, what today goes to middle class in most developed and developing countries used to be the best upper class could get. There is a lot that can be done, of course, but the general state of humanity is on an upwards trend with economy.

Income disparity and need for continuous growth are not strictly dependent on each other. Assume that everyone was given exactly equal portion of global GDP. This will still end up everyone at $9/hr. While this might be above poverty line, no one would be able to afford virtually any expensive technological advances. The bottom line is that current total world GDP is not sufficient to experience full technological advances by all humans which calls for further growth.

> When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery.

- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

No, that reasoning would hold only if the total amount of resources to divide between people would be static. That is not the case and so growth is good.

That sounds like "trickle down economy". I.E. the idea that when the top capital experiences growth it manifests in growth for working and poor people.

While it does to some degree, it's rather debunked as I understand it.

At the current rate 9$/hr on average for Africa would mean a massive increase in standard of living, so you could achieve the same goal you imply by better distribution of wealth without growth (though that has it's own problems).

What I'm trying to say is that continuous growth isn't necessary to improve standard of living.

Besides history has shown us that growth isn't continuous, rather it's cyclic with a general upward trend.

It's more like humanity is playing a growth-sum game. If growth is positive then people can improve their lot without reducing someone else's, which creates all sorts of scenarios where it's rational to cooperate, making things better for everyone. If growth is at or below zero, then people have no incentive to work together except to defeat other people.

I like the theory, but I'm curious how climate change as a prisoners dilemma would play into your hypothesis. Optimizing finance rather than the environmental externality... Maybe we just don't see how it's in our best interest to cooperate?

Hmm... "Disregard externalities" as a form of defecting?

No I mean we need to focus on negative externalities like environmental impacts.

Let's say you had a version of the prisoner's dilemma where 7 billion people had to cooperate for the highest payoff to occur. Would you cooperate?

This is probably the most insight comment that I've seen on HN all year. Thank you.

These days, Africans might have no running water but they have mobile phones. Sounds like a (slight) increase in the standard of living. Definitely "trickle down", maybe not "economy" but at least "technology" (which is what ultimately counts on the long run - we don't care who was rich in Ancient Greece, but we do care about their technology).

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