The U.S. economy is growing and using less and less stuff to do so
hbr.org
hbr.org
It could be clearer throughout, whether he's talking per capita or overall.
Data is selective and ignores resource utilization shifts. Example: In the 1940s crop acreage decoupled from crop yield, he says. Great! Instead it coupled to petroleum and energy, he doesn't say. American farms today are in the business of converting fossil fuels to food. For example, the 1940s are when when cheap internal-combustion tractors started being mass-produced, thanks to all that spare manufacturing capacity left over after the war. There's also a graph where he looks at "every input" into growing corn, even down to the phosphates, while scrupulously avoiding any talk of fuel or energy.
A resource shift of a different kind: efficiency gains in chicken production are due mostly to inhumane factory farm conditions. (Ones to which pork & beef are less amenable, hence chicken outdoes them.)
Wood is no longer used for railroad ties, because we use concrete. Which has its own problems! The point in most of this kind of example is that we stop using A because B comes along to fill the void. Nobody uses paper anymore, but they sure use a lot more lithium than they used to. And so on.
Finally, and speaking of stepping in to fill the void: ctrl-F - "China" - 1 match. The single mention is to refer to it as a developing country, not to acknowledge it as the present-day location of much of the USA's manufacturing.
Is that true? Anyone have numbers/research on sand that’s good?
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...
Also, I wonder why concrete crossties don't use neoprene bearing pads under the rails to reduce the abrasion problem.
We do indeed have too much stuff, but too much stuff being produced. With no sign it's stopping. In fact it's accelerating.
Instead of getting what we need, we're getting what we need, in excess packaging, and having to replace it every year or two as structural components, hinges, gears and bearings are made of plastic. If that's not enough we build far larger and heavier cars, we buy far more food than we eat, fridges and freezers get ever bigger. Clothes that lasted years are now made to wear out after a few months or if lucky, a year and the rubbish bin is now a wheelie bin with 2-3x the volume, and a recycling bin or 3. Today we struggle to get all the crap in the huge bin as it's full. So is the recycling. In 1980 the old school trashcan was rarely filled, except maybe the week after Xmas.
Meanwhile industry is convincing us that some other standard bit of being human is a source of failure and sells a cream, perfume or product to mask it, or a pill or service to avoid it. Or selling us a subscription to some simple thing made complex - e.g. fruit juice, bottled water, coffee pods. Even those of us who still try to be old-school and not buy into every fad, or replace a kitchen because they fancy a new colour, end up buying far more than we did in the 80s or 90s as the world is now built to make it unavoidable.
I'd love to see the merest hint that people are even thinking about not wanting more stuff...
I don't know what country you're from, but this is already happening in western Europe. Slowly, but it is happening.
If we were, then we'd see wealthy people living in average-size houses. As is, however, wealthy still live in bigger houses, presumably buy more stuff to fill them, than those without the money to do so.
This all implies if/when average income rises, stuff ownership will continue to rise with it.
What do you mean these serfs cant pay $2,000/ month for a studio apartment while earning minimum wage?
Note that historically, this sort of behavior on behalf of markets has preceeded revolutions - from Irish Independence to Mao's Communist Revolution.
We can stop it, if we work NOW to make the economy actually distribute goods and services.
"The USGS tracks, I believe, 72 different materials. I think all, but six-ish of them are now on a downward trend. The biggest exception is actually plastics, but there’s something interesting going on there as well. Overall plastics consumption used to grow even more quickly than the economy did. Plastics are super useful. We use them all over the place. Now, plastics use is still increasing, but it’s increasing more slowly than the overall economy is."
If you actually believe that software has the ability to change the world, this is it in action.
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
Do 5 big-$ bank transactions and you contribute to GDP. What was the energy usage? What was the productive output?
Compare say a CRT from 1999 with an LED TV from 2019 and the vastly larger sizes are more than offset via increased efficiency.
You happen to have any links to attempts to disambiguate the two? I definitely don't.
By comparison in constant 2010 dollars global GDP went from 66T (2010) to 82.6T (2018). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.kd
Energy depends a little on the numbers you use BTU etc. However as the mix of services is not really changing very rapidly but the GDP PPP per oil equivalent has been growing quickly the trend is clear: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?end=2...
I think the US economy probably had a bigger than 2% shift just into tech in the last 10 years, let alone if you include broader service-ization as a national goal for decades now.
I guess I'm saying, if our stated goal and the goal of every MBA in the country was to have more money in services.. I thought that happened.
EDIT: rate-limited, appreciate the follow-up on US numbers. Still not liking 2010 as a start-date as I think the relevant changes were before then. Would love to chat more, but hey.
But, I was using global GDP to avoid the outsourcing question.
PS: Using 2010 as the start date as these energy trends are fairly recent. Though I agree comparing say 2018 numbers to say the 1970’s would need to account for more systematic changes.
Hand wave about that all you want.
Hand wave about that all you want.
Plus "quality of life" is subjective. Some people (or some countries/cultures) can think about all kind of crap as essential to their "quality of life".
Hand wave about that all you want too.
A lot of GDP growth is in box-moving, paper shuffling, services, sales and so on, which can be made with "less stuff" (e.g some even completely online).
OTOH, tons of industrial production for US companies, the dirty kind, has been moved to China and co.
Even if the US "manufacture's more units than ever" (and what those units are? If it manufactures more e.g. packaged food than ever, it wouldn't really be as polluting as manufacturing more cars or computers/mobiles, or several other kinds of products, than ever). I'd wager that the more pollutant and messy production has been moved to China / the developing world / etc.
The same way as most of the western "recycled" stuff just goes to the developing world to be pillages for parts and then dumped into landfills and rivers...
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
A more interesting metric would be calories-harvested over calories-input.
Food per acre has certainly increased. A lot of the increase is through selective breeding, GM crops, and other technological efficiencies, but a lot of it is from increased fertilizer, which is just calories/energy in a different form (fertilizer is just a store of energy -- that's literally why you buy too much of it in bulk and you're put on a fertilizer-bomb watchlist).
You can grow more food per acre by throwing more energy at the problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it more efficiently or sustainably. One way of looking at all the fertilizer runoff, for example, is it is quite literally leaking input energy out of your harvest, decreasing your efficiency.
IMO, a more interesting metric is nutrients like phosphorous which would be more difficult to acquire once current sources have mined out.
Source: recently read The Quest, book which discusses energy in the modern world
The upside is that some of the children of peasants are putting a serious dent in world climate problems like Wang Chuanfu who is the founder of BYD.
How dare you question woke capitalism, Mr. 'api'. We want to be told we're building a better world, and we'll hang anyone who says otherwise. Didn't you see Silicon Valley?
Yet it took the form of a question. It doesn't even try to support its implied criticism with any data or argument.
As such, it's a cheap shot that doesn't add anything. If you believe someone's work, published in a somewhat reputable outlet (and a book), to be wrong, find something that supports that criticism. Don't just throw out some lame counterargument that anybody reading the headline can come up.
Specifically, the article uses examples that are unlikely to be outsourced; Paper and cardboard, especially, aren't major inputs to big-hairy-manufacturing.
Fertilizer is an even better case, because it's impossible to outsource its use without also outsourcing agriculture. Agricultural output has obviously been growing steadily. And those statistics are rather reliable because the products are standardised, often need to be reported for various subsidies or regulatory purposes, and are traded on public markets.
Also strongly agreed about timezone karma - I would love to see some analysis of how upvotes in discussions like this fluctuate based on which part of the planet is exposed to sun at a given time.
Edit: since people are asking for examples, I would have to point to the insane cost of training modern ML models. For instance, according to [1], training a single big NLP model can burn up to 620,000 lbs of CO2.
I say a lot of energy consumption is hidden because it's generally moved to data centres, which by the way use up astronomical amounts of energy [2]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/trends-data-centre-e...
Old Z80 based board I first worked on drew 1A at 5V, so 5W. Put your hand on it, it's nice a warm. Current board I'm dicking with draws 8ma at 3V or 0.024W. 200 times less power. But it's 50 to 100 times faster.
Price isn't good approximation either, as it's pretty much arbitrary - prices are determined by trade, fluctuate all the time. Regular people only see a smoothed-out, low frequency version of that.
--
[0] - 8.6 megapersons living in New York * 12 MWh US average electricity use per person per year.
Since energy suppliers meter their output to apply a price, I'm wondering how hidden costs could exist (unless the software is somehow circumventing or undermining the meters?).
I would think it'd be pretty straight-forward experiment to use software from the late 80s / early 90s for a couple weeks, measure machine energy consumption, then compare with the consumption from a machine running the latest version of everything for two weeks. Next month repeat but also use a processor from the 90s for the first two weeks. Rinse, repeat, extrapolate, apply statistics, &c. Maybe try adjusting for or comparing differences in appliances common then and now.
If software energy costs are somehow hidden, I can only think they're hidden because we're deliberately not choosing to look at them.
You're going to have to explain that one. We can pretty trivially measure energy usage...
Fortnite? Minecraft? AirBnB? Google? Android? iOS?
If it’s trivial, what are the numbers and what’s your confidence in them?
That's not 'an NLP model', it's one of the largest and baddest NLP models that has to be trained only once and can be reused 1000 times over by fine-tuning on different tasks. The paper was hyperbolising about energy use. The AI labs that can even attempt that kind of things can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
A regular NLP model trains in minutes up to a day on a single GPU, so it uses energy on the level of personal game play. And let's not forget that ML can solve difficult math problems with as little as 1/100 of the energy of classical computing by using smart approximation methods. Neural nets also have a nice degradation effect where you can shrink the net by 20x and lose just a few percentage points of accuracy.
That's why Google's speech recognition and synthesis can now run on a single cell phone instead of a datacenter. And we haven't really started building specialised AI chips that will reduce energy usage even further - we're still using mostly GPUs.
Can it? I thought it still sent out input to the cloud for processing?
[0] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
Your own linked data from the EIA says that you're wrong.
Peak energy consumption per capita 1979: 359m btu
Energy consumption per capita 2000: 350m btu
Energy consumption per capita 2007: 335m btu
Energy consumption per capita 2018: 309b btu
That's an extremely clear downtrend over time.
If that is all the energy saved by moving all the heavy industry and manufacturing to the developing world, the overall up trend must be enormous.
For most Americans life expectancy and qualify of life are dropping measurably. By your logic we should increase energy consumption to reverse these losses.
Half of that is easily demonstrably false. Quality of life for the majority of Americans continues to improve.
The US welfare state has improved considerably in the last 30 to 50 years.
- Homelessness has been slashed by 20-25% in two decades thanks to housing programs the Bush and Obama administrations pursued. Homelessness nationally is sitting near the lowest levels in US history.
- Childhood poverty has collapsed by roughly 45-50% in 40 years.
- The overall poverty rate at 11.8% is near an all-time record low. That figure is lower than in either Canada or France today. In 1960 the poverty rate was 100% higher than it is now.
- The poorest 25% of Americans now get free healthcare, that was not true at all at the supposed peak of US well-being and financial per capita outcomes in the ~1965-1980 time frame. The fact is, the bottom 1/3 are far better off today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. The homelessness and poverty rates demonstrate that.
- The middle class is expanding at the fastest rate since the 1960s. More income as a distribution share is finally beginning to shift from corporate profit to labor.
- For the last several years wages for the bottom 2/3 of labor have been rising dramatically faster than wages for the top 1/3.
- The US savings rate is strong at 8%. Household balance sheets are similarly strong. The share of household income going to debt service costs is near 40-50 year lows.
Several of those are entirely due to a continued resource shift via the rapidly expanding US welfare state and increasing progressive taxation.
You can't just flat out lie if you want to be effective at propaganda.
As per Wikipedia [0]: "Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017"
So flat out lie?
> in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the [fossil fuels] industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development. [0]
Also I wonder how much of that "dematerialization" is due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-ox...
In another industry, healthcare, people complain passionately about the costs but never about the fact that while technology, efficiencies have improved there has been a 100-fold increase in the number of healthcare administrators per capita. A lot of our economy is just shuffling people and money around -- not actually efficiently allocating resources to produce useful goods and services--oh about that abnormal growth in the people who are supposed to be responsible for that?
In practice - last I checked, and I admit to not having followed them closely - I don't think carbon credit schemes have had a big payout just yet. I'm not ready to dismiss them, on the other hand. This might just be because more of the CO2 emissions get exported to the developing world, and so a true ROI has to wait until global economic goals start aligning.
"Essentially, with access to a more granular data set than had been publicly available, the economists could see that growth in manufacturing over the decades was almost entirely a result of statistical adjustments for improvement in semiconductor performance."
[0] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/manufacturing-job-loss...
Notable: Bullshit jobs still contribute to GDP.
The world produces and consumes vastly more than it did at other points in that period and as a percentage Im guessing the percentage of what we produce to what we consume (ie our self reliance and share of the global production pie) has been steadily decreasing.
Id be interested to see numbers which prove or disprove this.
And part of it is the article's point: there are now industries that produce information or services that can fully replace some physical goods: If Google Maps saves you from getting lost, you burn less fuel. If financial markets "shuffle around" smartly enough, those 50 metric tons of pork go into McRibs instead of spoiling, etc.
In the physical environment, total waste is our biggest concern. Our economies are more efficient than ever, but we're also producing more total waste than ever.
We have to focus on lowering total waste. I talked about this in my podcast episode 183: "Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic." https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-environment/episod...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...
It is controversial (and I'm uncertain about it personally)
This is not sustainable. Elephants in Africa. Insects and birds. Desertification. Deforestation. Brazil chopped down the size of Hong Kong in a few weeks. Plastic in the oceans. CO2 PPM is on a steady rise. Permafrost is melting. And we are saying what?
> Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.).[1] Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.
Growth measures aren't usually linked to soft outcomes (eg, happiness, moral fulfilment, access to basic needs, etc) because they are too hard to measure. Growth measures aren't linked to stuff produced (thesis of article).
We're measuring something. Probably some sort of technological advancement. Does it make sense to call it growth? If resources Energy per capita is dropping; I would call that contraction rather than growth. I like having access to stuff.
This is an appeal to Jeveron's paradox. If efficiencies increase, growth looks like getting much more output. Getting the same output when efficiencies increase doesn't signal growth.
I suspect the disconnect is people think that "good" and "growth" mean the same thing. That isn't a real link. The situation doesn't look like it is growing, even if it is good.
Economists usually talk the resource intensity of production and consumption. You can divide the concept into material intensity and energy intensity. If you use them as a start of your search you find more Resource productivity is also more commonly used term.
There is evidence of a relative decoupling in resource extraction from global economic growth. In developed economies this is clearly happening.
Resource Productivity in the G8 and the OECD https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/47944428.pdf
>Global extraction of material resources continues to grow, but there are signs of decoupling from global economic growth. G8 countries‘ resource productivity has been improving , their material intensity decreased by more than 47% between 1980 and 2008 and their annual per capita material consumption declined from nearly 20 tonnes to less than 18 tonnes. Over the same period, OECD economies have reduced their material intensity by 42% and their per capita consumption declined by 1.5% to 17.6 t.
OECD library has "Green Growth Indicators 2017" https://www.oecd.org/environment/green-growth-indicators-201...
OECD "Global Material Resources Outlook to 2060" https://www.oecd.org/environment/waste/highlights-global-mat...
There is negative relation between total factor productivity and material and energy intensity per unit of GDP. When productivity increases, most of the value is created buy other means than using materials and energy.
The catch is "per GDP". Per capita material consumption in OECD countries remains unsustainable. Developed nations produce their high living standard more efficiently but the living standard is so high that resource usage in absolute terms per capita extremely high.
Consider guano: guano use for manufacturing fertilizer is down, because Harber-Bosch process substituted guano nitrogen with atmospheric nitrogen. Atmospheric nitrogen is still a material thing, but it sure does look like dematerialization.
I tried asking about this on /r/AskEconomics and it seems that some still believe that more savings is better, based on the Solow model.
Whole virtual goods economy that is not visible.
The author does mention the energy usage rate is leveling out. Not believing this, I did a basic search on electricity usage and it does appear to be true: https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co.... I did not check total energy usage though (petrol, natural gas, etc.)
This confirms my belief that has been derided a bit here on HN. That is, I believe Capitalism one-day, in the far distant future, will end or at the least mitigate resource scarcity. When Capitalism achieves that, it in effect nearly goes away or is at least greatly reduced. Humanity will then reap the benefits of abundance. Hopefully moving beyond Capitalism, thanks to Capitalism.
The inflation rate in the US has been pretty low for the past decade or so, relative to history.
Source: https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-inflation-rate-history-by-yea...
We haven’t been getting raises because the healthcare sector has been absorbing them.
What to do with all the people is the more pressing problem.
When I come to HN, I come here to learn about some cool doohickey someone is working on or a study that someone published about a different approach to security. I come here to learn about a bitcoin heist or something novel and new and most importantly, to learn from the comments. Lots of interesting people here with interesting views to contribute.
I don't come here to read about MIT flamebait; there's no in-depth study to read, no conclusions to draw, just a re-hash of CPI numbers which are at best horribly inaccurate, aside from the name, this might as well be a short novel. Worse, we're re-hashing something that's already there; CPI Numbers. This article is utter trite and a total and complete waste of time.
Then, the entire community begins discussing this Trite, which lets be honest, there's some interesting studies and observations in the comments but at the end of the day, the discussion has no direction or conclusion and that is dangerous because it invites an scopeless conversation. We should be talking about how this professors study is or is not accurate or interesting sidebars, which is useful to the professor for feedback and to the reader for coming to a conclusion, not talking in generalities and in circles because someone at a Big 4 wants to stay "relevant" and thinks getting the geeks talking to each other about their topic is a good way to do that.
Leave the trite where it belongs; on CNN or NYT or on any big 4 publication.
And nuclear energy is simply too expensive. I know it hurts that some people were maybe too afraid of it in the past, but that's no longer the argument. It loses not just to un-subsidised wind and solar now, but even to natural gas + planting trees to offset carbon.
We're deriving more useful output with less or at least flattening (material and energy) input.
I wish more people understood economics from an economics standpoint.