I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
Yes, because total factor productivity[0] always grows.
> infinite leverage
None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There are many, many, many limits to leverage.
> and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example).
Also not true... if the value of living in SF increases, it makes perfect sense that land in SF is also more valuable
> It works, until it doesn't.
That's not really a falsifiable assertion.
> I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
Notwithstanding all the faults in the arguments above, how does distributing wealth arbitrarily at a single point in time ("real correction") solve any of the issues you present?
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Also, there are a number of asymptotic features of "total factor productivity" that are not favorable. The more oil you burn, the more expensive it is to burn oil.
Is that true? Has that been true for Zimbabwe née Rhodesia?
What about Britain following the fall of the Roman Empire?
If you have a complete meltdown, that's not the growth economy's fault.
What incredible discovery enables you to make 'always' claims about the world we're living in?
We have a ways to go before then.
This seems short-sighted, as we've been doing that for most of human history, and honestly I don't think we're very close to unveiling all the mysteries of the universe.
We could start building a Dyson sphere right now. It would just take a long, long, long time given our current understanding of physics and technology. Imagine all the things we might be able to achieve with our understanding of physics in 300 years. Imagine the thing we will discover that will have their own Dyson-sphere equivalents. i.e. things we discover that we know (hypothetically) how do do, they are just not quite in our grasp.
The reason why I'm saying it would take in the thousands of years, is because of this tautology: If we want to build a Dyson sphere, it means that we are still limited to the energy we can get from Earth. Given the issues that come with extracting a large percentage of the energy received by the Earth, even if we used fusion (due to thermodynamic constraints), the limit of energy used can be placed around 5-10% of the energy Earth receives from the Sun (And that would require extensive geo-engineering). With that sort of energy output, the energy alone required in order to move the material needed for a Dyson sphere from Earth orbit to Sun orbit would take literally millenia, and that's with a combined effort from all of Mankind, which politically completely impossible for the next centuries unless China or some other superpower was able to magically establish true utopic statless communism and win away the rest of the world to establish a world cooperation of sunshine and rainbows magically.
A Dyson sphere would weight around the mass of the Earth. The Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mercury (fly-bys cannot work due the sheer mass knocking out other planets from their orbits, this is actually the magnitude of energy we're talking about). If we could magically make the material necessary appear from Earth gradually, d/v from earth surface to LEO then from LEO to Mercury's orbit or thereabouts via a Hohmann transfer is of around 15 000 m/s. If you take the good old kinetic energy formula, 1/2mv^2, you find that this would require a staggering amount of energy that would take millenia to amass.
Contrast with the plentitude of natural things we presumably don't understand / know about (unlike the sun) and there is a lot of potential for the future.
That being said, for the construction of a sphere you would presumably not be shipping matter from earth. You'd be towing in matter from asteroid belts and such.
What I'm telling you is that there are hard limits that mean that our growth must slow down. There is a hard limit to how much energy we can harness from the earth, and a hard limit for how fast we can avoid this. Progress will have to slow down, a society based on endless exponential growth at short-term significant rates is untenable.
And while there might certainly be material problems in the future, in terms of "coming up with new ideas", I think we're nowhere near the limit.
Yes, of course that is true, but there appears to be no general limit on notional value of derivatives of debt - and when there are limits, they are local to some very particular asset class.
I encourage you to re-watch "The Big Short", or at least the scene where one of the protagonists discovers the 10x or 20x notional value of total housing credit derivatives (and derivatives of derivatives ...).
Although that particular asset class is no longer encumbered in that way, I predict that there is some asset class hiding somewhere that has been levered up in creative ways, just waiting to collapse ...
Not surprising though, pretty much everyone born in the past 60 years has become accustomed to a ridiculous "normal" that has been built on a fossil fuel house of cards.
GC mentioned "total factor productivity", which is not just an assumption that things will stay the same. It's a measure that value (productivity) actually is increasing, all the time.
And the other rebuttals were pointing out flaws with GGC's arguments, none of which relied on "the status quo works".
In this context, I'm really proud of my ancestral homeland (mainland China), who in 40 years lifted a billion people from abject poverty through economic growth. Yes, there's significant problems magnified by that, but to paraphrase a popular saying, a full person has a million problems and a starving person has one.
Sure, growth with negative externalities have negative side effects and we definitely should talk about that, but that's a separate discussion and focus than "don't grow".
I totally agree with your leverage aspect and aligning value to utility, and I think that's a very positive avenue of discussion. Let's talk about that instead.
We can disagree about where, when, and how to stop growth. We cannot disagree that it must stop at some point, and that the tyranny of exponential growth means that you will hit this moment frighteningly fast even when you appeared to have plenty of legroom. With a growth rate of even 1.5%, you can be using less than 10% of the resources available to you, and yet you will hit a hard wall at a minimum within 200 years. And even this is a fantasy, as resources, land, and energy are always utilized in decreasing order of ease of access.
Not to mention human ingenuity when people get desperate. WWI / WWII saw Germany produce coffee from acorns, oil from coal, and Fanta from vegetable scraps, ensuring a rise in industrial production during 1944 under arduous circumstances. We don't operate at 100% efficiency and we can most definitely increase that number by double digit, maybe even triple digit percentages. Take meat, a horrible source of energy inefficiency. Lab grown meats, meat substitutes grown from vertical farms, even eating different kinds of meats (cricket powder protein bars aren't bad and have a more or less 1:1 energy input:output ratio) result in increased efficiency savings. This is a matter of economics.
Anti-growth simply isn't feasible from a domestic or foreign policy standpoint. There is no way you will convince any significant politician, and by extension his/her voting bloc, that there must be an end to growth. You can't religion or dictator your way out of this either, since it goes against the very essence of human nature.
Finite supply exists even if population growth declines. Finite supply exists even if population declines. Finite supply exists even if it’s untenable from a policy perspective. The expectation of continued unending exponential growth baked into our economic system will run up against the actual limits of what the Earth is capable of providing.
Again, this should not be controversial. Playing games about population growth is simply dodging the fact that even given a population of two humans, any greater-than-one exponent on economic activity will end. The logistic curve exists precisely because of this fact.
It’s not just that it’s difficult, from any meaningful angle it requires us to have completely misunderstood the relevant physics. If your argument relies on us discovering that all of known physics isn’t just off a bit or needing of refinement, but is completely misguided… well, that’s your prerogative I suppose.
Even if you hypothesize a space-colonizing human race, that does nothing for the people who are still stuck on Earth with Earth’s finite resources.
Growth is just as much about increasing efficiency. If you continue to chop down the same amount of sustainable wood year after year, but figure out how to do it at half the price (e.g. because robots), that's 100% growth.
Indeed, look at the huge growth in the services industry over the past several decades. That's not using up extra land, energy, etc.
Now growth can involve using up more resources, or it can not, or it can be a mix. But the problem you seem to have is with resource consumption, not with economic growth generally.
At the end of the day, our access to energy is finite. And not simply from a perspective of resources. We are literally a few hundred years shy[1] of heating the Earth to uninhabitable levels from a pure thermodynamics perspective (e.g., entirely ignoring global warming from greenhouse gases, and considering Earth as a simple blackbody radiator).
If you somehow believe that we can have unlimited economic output from finite energy and finite resources on this planet I’m not sure there’s any point in me continuing to debate an argument rooted in magical thinking.
[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Why not? If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all.
Economic efficiency has nothing to do with energy efficiency, it's entirely about the efficiency of human inputs.
In fact, a significant amount of economic growth comes from learning how to accomplish the same tasks with less energy -- more fuel-efficient cars, lightbulbs, and so on.
Energy and thermodynamics have absolutely nothing to do with it.
There's no magical thinking here. You're just confused that you think economic growth requires greater energy usage. It doesn't. And I don't know where you've gotten the idea that it does.
And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.
Basic thermodynamics?
> If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all.
I'm not talking about human effort. Price is related to energy input. And there's only so efficient you can get at chopping down that tree.
> And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.
It is not misleading, you simply misunderstand the impact. Again, there's only so efficient you can become in any system. And we're already shockingly close to optimum in many of our systems. Getting closer and closer to those optimums is obviously possible, but it's ever-diminishing returns.
The problem is there is growth that solely exists to feed the capitalist Leviathan vs growth that is actually giving people what they want, and they are hard to disentangle under capitalism. You could the first is trying to disguse itself.
Nobody says that outright, but that is what would have happened if their arguments had been translated into policy in the 1970s. And it is what would happen to poor countries today, if anti-growth arguments were adopted today.
Bacteria in a sealed jar will continue to multiply until they've consumed all the available nutrients, at which point their population collapses. If you constantly add a trickle of nutrients to the jar, this behavior still happens, just with violent yo-yo'ing between collapse and growth until an eventual steady-state is reached.
We can argue whether or not we've exceeded the replenishment rate We can argue how far it's reasonable to go past this point if effects won't be felt for thousands of years. But there is simply no argument to be made that we can continue growing endlessly and exponentially past the replenishment rate of the ecosystem we live in.
Personally, I think we're well past the replenishment rate. Our ecological impact is causing systemic collapse in multiple areas: our climate is warming past dangerous thresholds, our oceans are acidifying and being depleted at an alarming rate, our oceans are rising at an accelerating rate, and we're experiencing unprecedented rates of of extinction of both animal and plant life. We're running out of sand (to make concrete with) for fuck's sake.
On top of this, at current rates of energy growth, we'll literally cook the Earth within two or three hundred years[1]. And I'm not talking about greenhouse gases: just from a raw thermodynamics perspective. Put enough energy capacity on Earth and it will eventually take the form of waste heat. Even in the complete absence of carbon dioxide, the only way for that heat to escape Earth is by being radiated into space. And there's only so fast a perfect blackbody with the surface area of the Earth can get rid of that heat. Even if the Earth were a perfect radiator (it isn't), this[2] is what our future looks like.
[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
[2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tmp-10...
You've fulfilled all of your material needs and now you're in the self-actualization phase of the hierarchy of needs. It took decades of economic growth driven by other people to get your society to the point where people like you care more about fulfillment in their profession rather than food security.
Some people are still subsistence farmers and they need a lot of economic growth to get to the point where they can worry about fulfillment in their professions and taking their pets for a recreational walk.
Why should you get to benefit from the economic growth in your own society while telling others they don't get to have that?
Unfortunately as most people here are probably aware, throwing money at a problem doesn't always result in a viable solution. As more and more of the low hanging fruit of technological advancement gets picked we may be in for some interesting times.
Unfortunately capitalism's need for infinite growth is nigh unstoppable and it always finds a path. If there aren't enough startups, technological advances, or similar we see things like private militaries, Banana Wars, buying elections, private prisons, over leveraging, etc. Capitalism has to have an outlet and we are at its mercy in that sense.
The government seems dead set on making sure the "unable" part never happens. And people are dead set on always willing.
If the government would stop trying to manipulate every market, this maybe wouldn't happen. The Islamic empire was insanely successful for a longer period of time than the US empire has been around, and the Islamic Empire had truly free markets.
For anyone interested, Debt: The First 5000 Years is a fascinating examination of this topic.
What makes you say the Islamic empire had free markets? From the book?
One of the main ideas (of the Empire, not necessarily the religion) was that gold coinage came from God so that people could easily trade. Instead of everyone acquiring all the skills necessary for sustenance (farming, tool building, carpentry, etc) -- they could become masters of a few skills and trade the fruits of their skills in the open market. The idea was that doing so, humans could advance much faster. This was sort of God's secret sauce. So interfering with the market was like interfering with God. It was a no no.
One could argue that they manipulated the market by banning usury (interest bearing loans). However, before the Islamic Empire, interest was usually VERY high -- 60%+ per year was common. Debt was so cost prohibitive that the constant need for debt Jubilees was its own problem.
It's unclear how the Islamic Empire financed all these merchants without interest bearing loans. I'd love to learn more about how that worked.
I do agree that some regulation is necessary, which is a form of manipulation.
If you're referring to monopolies, for example, the government could regulate anti-trust without -- say -- artificially setting treasury yields (interest rates) and corporate bond yields.
The religion seems to have evolved considerably from the early Islamic Empire. Which is common. Every major religion seems to have undergone several major metamorphoses.
The Coranic prescriptions about usury and other economic activities are incredibly clearly written.
The only conclusion is that there is no reason to believe that it was in any way different to today, and a lot of reasons to believe the restrictions on free trade are even higher than in the modern Islamic world.
In Japan, house prices commonly depreciate. I don't see any evidence their economy is unaffected by that fact.
Maybe that's why their homelessness per capita is almost 57 times lower than the States'.
> Homelessness grew noticeably more widespread in Japanese society since the collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble across the 1990s, and the resulting "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation. This has resulted in higher unemployment, a contributing factor towards potential homelessness.[1]
National economies are complicated, and the connection between high (or continually-appreciating) housing prices and homelessness doesn't always run the direction that a naive model assumes it does.
On the other hand, there's a lot of Americans on their nth mortgage, though so any policy aimed at driving housing prices down would have to factor that in.
I hear this a lot. As far as i know it's not actually true. Is there anything specific in orthodox economic theory that requires never-ending growth?
> I hear this a lot. As far as i know it's not actually true. Is there anything specific in orthodox economic theory that requires never-ending growth?
I think a charitable interpretation of this claim is: people's planning (which is usually limited to the short term, when it happens at all) typically assumes the optimistic case.
This is certainly true for everyone who lives paycheck to paycheck.
It's also true for companies who survive on a revolving line of credit to fund longterm operations.
The only real physical limit to productivity is our energy input. When we create things, we use energy and time to turn raw materials into useful stuff. Today most of our energy comes from the plants we eat (ie the sun) and from the ground. But we are not close to using even a small fraction of the energy that the sun gives us, so there is still lots of room to grow.
Thus, growth must always exist for the current system to continue.
Why?
This doesn't sound obviously true to me. Imagine an economy in perpetual long-term stasis, with zero inflation. There's a company which has a factory which turns a profit, because it makes useful stuff. Every ten years, they need to replace the factory. So they take out a loan, and pay it off, with interest, over ten years. The lender earns interest with positive real value from this. Is there anything in this story which is impossible? Is there a theoretical reason a world like that couldn't exist?
Let's expand on the example of your factory. Say that you have a factory, that needs to be replaced in ten years. Why would you take out a loan over ten years with substantial interest, when you can simply save up over ten years to buy another factory? Since there is zero inflation, this is incredibly better for you. And so, there is no reason for you to take a loan; and you won't take out a loan. For an economic transaction to happen, it needs to be in the interest of both party, and in a no-growth economy taking out a loan is either in the interest of the lender or the debtor, but never both, on average, for a given lending policy. This is not the case when there is growth, which is why we have banks, whereas we didn't really have any kind of lending infrastructure in times were growth was of or near zero.
The only people that might want a loan are people that don't have enough capital to get started, but in a zero-growth economy you cannot expect that they will be able to repay you, so you won't lend to them, and if you do lend to them expecting that they will not pay you back that will be at astronomical interest rates and will essentially be usury.
This bit is true, but we should remember that no one wants to give up anything, rich or poor. That's human nature.
ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce, police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or you can't participate in the system.
I think that’s the real problem. Work should be rewarded and not just owning things.
The goal of human existence is not and should not be "gainful employment".
Automation vs working is a different axis than rewarding capital vs working. They are both good discussions to have, though.
In the meantime it seems society is getting skewed towards benefiting owners over people who work. The news celebrates rising stock markets and rising housing prices. We celebrate “job creators”. The Fed responds when the stock market goes down but just shrugs when real wages for most people are stagnating or even going down . Investment income is taxed favorably over income from work.
Companies claim they are run solely for the owners (shareholders). Why not make workers also stakeholders that need to considered?
Work in cities is "highly rewarded" through high salaries (obviously). High house prices is (part of) how work in cities is _taxed_, which is pretty much the exact opposite of rewarding.
'Redistribution' is inherently unfair, and in a global world it will only cause capital flight.
This is a peculiar, and unsubstantiated assertion. I certainly wouldn't consider this an axiom in any discussion about economic policy. Can you explain a little more?
Or are you just saying that you believe that redistribution is unfair?
(It probably wasn't, but no records from that long ago exist so we can pretend.)
So if redistribution is “unfair” it’s only to counteract the inherent unfairness of the current system.
Increases wealth for a few. Studies have shown that technology is not actually making us more productive in the past 10+ years.
> In order to keep growing
Who says we need to keep growing? We have enough mouths to feed on this planet already.
> 'Redistribution' is inherently unfair
There is no such thing as “inherently” fair or unfair. Did anyone “earn” a wealthy upbringing? Did anyone “earn” their genetic advantages? Outcomes are a result of one’s nature and nurture, neither of which are under one’s control. Anything you have is a gift from the universe, and you will either share your gifts or not.
“If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today” - Mark Zuckerberg
“I think about the amount of human potential that is being wasted by people that are not doing what they want to do. I think about how great it would be to undo that. And that’s really powerful to me.” - Sam Altman
“People who fall by the wayside, through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity.” - Warren Buffett
> and in a global world it will only cause capital flight
“Only” would imply that everyone with capital has the same opinion as you, but it doesn’t sound like you understand how people with capital actually think.
Here in the UK we have a bit of a different history on this that has pushed British conservatism in a more centrist direction. The first and second world wars were existential crises for us that stretched our economies and society to near breaking point. Millions of Britons were called up, worked in munitions factories, or volunteered in public services and the Land Army. It was a concerted effort across all levels of society. A major problem in the first war was so many draftees were unfit for service due to poor health and nutrition, this created a consensus that a coordinated system of social support and health care was essential for national security if nothing else.
So over here, it’s not really about redistribution. Sure there are plenty of socialists over here who are committed redistributionists, sure. Socialism is entrenched in Europe in a way it really isn’t in the US. But even among the majority of conservatives over here, history has shown us the its in the national interest to have a population that is well nourished, healthy and has a basic education that makes them fit to work, and serve if it comes to that.
Seems like a noble goal, no?
Humans want better lives. More living space, more free time, faster cars, whatever. Humans will not stop wanting this for as long as there are humans. There are two ways to get it.
One is creating more stuff. This is growth.
The other is taking somebody else's stuff. This is war.
Growth is better.
But zoning restrictions that inflate housing prices? That's not growth, it constrains growth, which implies...
Tell the people who don't that growth isn't necessary and see if they're happy for you to have that but not them.
Which is to say, depending on your environment, you can create a "better life" (by your definitions) by catabolizing existing resources.
You can't catabolize forever, of course, but it's an immediate and obvious refutation to your claim that "better lives" can only be pursued through growth or war.
Converting one resource to another at an overall net gain is growth. Converting one resource to another when the original resource was equally or more valuable net doesn't improve lives, it's either completely neutral or net harmful.
Note that there are a lot of growth metrics out there that inappropriately fail to account for this, e.g. they measure sale price but not consumer or producer surplus (which are harder to measure because there is no market pricing information available). If someone invents a cheap way to turn farm waste into motor fuel and then suddenly gas is $1/gallon, that's growth -- there is a surplus being created -- even if there is a net reduction in GDP because oil companies are making less money while most of the surplus goes to the consumer. (Though in most cases the reduction in GDP doesn't happen anyway because then consumers have more money in their pockets and spend it on something else.)
More free time implies translating productivity gains into less time working, rather than the current economic policy of pushing everyone into working full time such that productivity gains just create more waste.
If Alice and Bob want to buy the same house as Carol and Dave and nobody works full time but Alice and Bob currently have more money, Alice and Bob get the house. But Carol and Dave can get the house by each taking a full time job. Until Alice and Bob do the same thing, and then you're back to square one except that now everybody has to work full time.
The solution is obviously to build a second house so they can each have one instead of being locked into a bidding war that requires everybody to run faster just to stay where they were. Which is growth. Elimination of artificial scarcity enables growth. Artificial scarcity is a method of war/theft and its prevalence is the source of the trouble.
Even eliminating banks entirely wouldn't fix it, because if Carol and Dave could pay the equivalent of the higher mortgage payment in rent every month by taking full time jobs, a rich landlord would pay the higher price for the house and then rent it to them, which means they would still get to live in the house by both working full time, until Alice and Bob do the same.
The only real way out of it is to have two houses for two households so they don't both have to bid on the same one.
And sure any individual loan done by a bank can also be done by a well capitalized landlord, but the difference is in the quantity of money being newly created and funneled into housing. You can't take out a securitized loan to buy groceries, but everything that can be financialized shoots up. Even non-scarce manufactured goods like cars.
I agree that increasing the supply of housing is a good thing. But you're never going to get rid of positional goods - few want to live in a tiny apartment their entire life. So our solutions aren't a matter of either/or.
That requires having enough income to pay more than the minimum payment each month, which isn't really compatible with working less. And to the extent that this is helpful in allowing people to work less after the house is paid off, it would just tend to increase housing prices by a corresponding amount as long as there are still constraints on increasing the housing supply, because people would just bid them up by the amount that it's worth it to be able to do that.
> You can't take out a securitized loan to buy groceries, but everything that can be financialized shoots up. Even non-scarce manufactured goods like cars.
That's not necessarily the same thing though.
Suppose you can afford a $300 car payment and interest rates are such that a $300 payment translates to a $20,000 car. Then interest rates go down such that you can get the same car for a lower payment or a $30,000 car for the same payment.
Some people are going to choose the better car over the lower payment. That kind of looks like the same cars getting more expensive even if it's really people buying better, more expensive cars. Especially confusing when they're the same vehicle models but the later model years had a bunch of premium features added to them because the manufacturers noticed hardly anybody was buying the ones without them.
> I agree that increasing the supply of housing is a good thing. But you're never going to get rid of positional goods - few want to live in a tiny apartment their entire life.
You can't get rid of positional goods but you can move them up-market so they aren't necessities anymore.
Living in a tiny apartment with a long commute is terrible. People will be willing to work full time for many years to avoid it. But if you build a large number of normal sized houses or condos a reasonable distance from where people work, so that they cost the same as tiny far away apartments currently do, would people be so willing to give up years of their lives just to avoid living there instead of the giant mansion you could then get with two full time salaries?
Affluent people would then live in the giant mansions because they can afford it, and it would still be a positional good in that respect, but that doesn't detract from the dramatic improvement it would be over the status quo.
By contrast, it really doesn't matter what you to do interest rates, if building new housing is prohibited then the number of people who get to live in satisfactory housing is dictated by the amount of such housing that currently exists. Which makes everybody a lot more inclined to do whatever it takes not to be the ones stuck in the crappy housing.
There will be no redistribution, that's a fairy tale. There will only be evaporation.
It ends in the next 8-14 years. First time event where retiring class > working class. Population growth assumed to be equal or higher for every subsequent generation back 50 years ago.
Wait until those surplus programs stop becoming surplus. If you look now and think inequality is bad now, wait, it gets a lot worst.
How would a correction lead to redistribution?
Corrections hurt the poor more than the rich. For the rich, a correction is a great time to invest. For the poor, it is a time of unemployment and despair.
[Citation needed]. That's a pipe dream. Human nature remains constant.