This Can’t Go On

The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.

Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.

It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2

Productivity is increasing, but wages are decreasing.

Country net worth is increasing, but happiness is decreasing.

Etc.

When I read these kinds of posts, I think about "stagnate." It feels like an inherently negative word. I know that most people value a constantly improving technology, but as my OP says, technology can "improve" while, say, net worth or GDP "stagnates." Even leaving that to the side, I don't feel like "stagnated" technological advancement is inherently bad. It's just a value many of us hold.

Not to get primitivist, but, humans really were just eating berries and vibing for a really long time. I don't think we should "return to monkey," but if we get to the point where we figure out that we can't really defeat death, it might then become time for society to instead start thinking about living the way a cancer patient with a deadline does: how can we find meaning, knowing the end is inevitable? Sure yeah meaning could be still trying to advance, but given that current modes of technological advancement often involve capitalist exploitation and general misery (which isn't REQUIRED but we seem to be really big fans of it cause we keep doing it), perhaps we could decide to let go and just live happily with "technological stagnation."

"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."

If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.

The economy ultimately comes from material goods. The digital economy is only a facade built on that substrate. And it's already pushing its limits, which is why everyone, from FAANG companies to the guy selling some digital asset online, is pushing to sell something or another as hard as they can, with all the conviction and integrity of a snake oil salesman.

If a bit of data could be stored in a single hydrogen atom, after 1000 years of 1.03 growth 1e9 kg of hydrogen would be required (starting from 100 zetabytes today). After 2000 years you're at 1e21 kg, more or less the mass of the moon. For completeness, after 2700 we'd need the mass of the solar system in hydrogen atoms.

I agree with the article that there is a fundamental limit to growth. If I had to guess, the first limit will be the number of humans on the planet, followed by the black body radiation rate of the earth needed to stop our gizmos from overheating.

Yes, growth in economy and population can go on and will likely result in an S-bend curve in the distant future.

Everyone always thinks about supply limits, with some making dire Malthusian prophecies of what happens if we exhaust our resources with runaway growth. I've seen surprisingly little discussion of demand limits.

Other possible sources of demand limits include: satiation (people just feeling satisfied and not wanting much more), diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diminishing impact of new technologies (compare the next CPU density node to jet aircraft or antibiotics), consolidation of functionality into fewer more versatile products (e.g. computers and smart phones eating TVs, tape decks, radios, book shelves, CD collections, etc.), cultural shifts toward simplicity, replacement of complex labor-intensive technology with simple low-maintenance technology (e.g. EVs have 1/10th the moving parts of typical ICE cars), etc.

The eternal growth assumption assumes both infinite supply and infinite demand.

But what part of the economy does this represents? Most of the Internet run through ads, whose objective is to sell stuff. The real fallacy is the knowledge economy here. The value of Internet is that it sells physical stuff, not that it makes people smarter or happier.

You're going the wrong direction. The issue isn't fitting atoms into data. It's fitting data into atoms. You can give every atom a GUID, but you can't give every GUID an atom!

You don't have to put it in terms of economy. Our rate of growth for energy and data are unsustainable. Current growth would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range. So either we go beyond our needs for space and energy or growth slows down. Both of those are a big change from the status quo.

A few weeks ago I heard a message about there being 3 major forms of investment: private companies (stocks), governments (bonds) and property (banks).

All these want to show exponential, compounding growth, but that isn't what happens. Stocks follow a business cycle of expand-contract. Governments grow in proportion to tax base, which is related to population. Property has been increasing in price due to the ever-increasing population, but this is likely to plateau soon.

I fear the day when companies realise that they can make more money for their shareholders by destroying governments and property through starting a war. (c.f. United Fruit Company, but with private space rockets = missiles).

What's a good investment during a war? I believe that philanthropy is the solution.

Schindler invested in his List of employees, rather than some economic instrument. They looked after him during his later years. People will try to protect their own lives, and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway.

Social connections can continue to grow factorially, as the world gets more connected. I think that this is always good, because it promotes peace and understanding among the diverse cultures that exist. I don't know how that can be harnessed economically, and I dislike the advertising model used by private companies to monetise the network. Still, I think that encouraging social connection will create viral growth, and be beneficial to the world.

Money isn’t magical. You can’t create infinite value out of nothing.

Imagine a world in which there is just one person and the economy is just how big of a number this person can make on a computer.

If there is more than one person or more than one computer - you have less electrons at your disposal - because they're making up other people & computers respectively.

This is obviously very far into the future - but so is 8000 years!

Between 1960 and 1970 - global GDP increased by about ~$1T. That was about the same increase between 2018 and 2019 - even after adjusting for inflation.

That was a low-growth year for the last decade.

In the 1960s we had the entire space race and a lot of the modern computer (including the Internet).

If the trend continues, in another 60 years, we could accomplish about as much in a month. In another 120 years, about as much in a day. In another 120 years, about as much in an hour. Another 180 years, about as much in a minute, and in another 180 years, about as much in a second.

It's hard to argue you haven't hit the singularity at that point - and that's only 660 years away.

8000 years at this current growth rate would be truly unimaginably alien - and I'm not sure why everyone is convinced it could keep growing or would even need to.

If the population keeps growing at current rates - we'd have enough productivity for everyone to have a higher quality of life than Jeff Bezos does today in <700 years - at least, inflation adjusted, the average person on the planet would have >$15Bn in annual income.

It's not a fallacy as long as economic activity is a proxy for human activity, because humans consume to survive. In your sheet metal example, while it's the same physical aluminum throughout the process, you've hired a team of people (and expended a huge amount of energy, incidentally). Each of those people will take that money and spend it on food, electricity, clothes, and luxuries. All economic activity ultimately boils down to that.

That's just a restatement of the Victorian/Marxist model of industrial labor.

The actual reality is that energy intensity of the OECD economies has been dropping for decades. As well attested in several sources such as, say, EIA data.

I'm a big fan of energy consumption BTW, and think it should increase significantly on a per capita basis, especially in poorer regions (though not from fossil sources). I just have been following this particular statistic for years and see that growth is not proportional to energy consumption.

More money can solve some distributional probems, but ultimately not the problem of insufficient production or supply.

The classic "toy economy" example of this is "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp", which looks at the use of cigarette-based currency within a World War II prisoner of war camp.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133

It's not a perfect analogue of a true economy (goods were largely supplied to the camp through the German authorities and Red Cross shipments, there was little actual production or labour). But what was illustrated were both price fluctuations as the currency (cigarettes) increased and decreased in prevalence, subject to an innate destructive demand (habitual smokers). And when the actual supply of goods (food and other items) dried up late in the war, no amount of currency could in fact make the camp economy function.

But in a world of no new oil fields and increasing costs for extraction, we no longer have the ever-growing pie to fund our future financial obligations. Credit looks risky and economic decline seems inevitable based on the energy availability alone.

That's not even mentioning the externalities of fossil fuel consumption: climate impacts, ocean acidification, mass extinction, etc. make these economic issues even harder. Or is it the other way around? Either way, "this can't go on" and fossil fuels are a central part of the equation.

I’d put my money on “steady state” or maybe “steady state but after a contraction due to climate change”, but not due to the world3 model.

And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.

"Economic growth" as measured by numbers moving around is just a proxy for what we really care about, which is increased availability of goods and services. Goods and services necessarily entail resource expenditure. If you're just moving numbers without any actual physical effect, you don't really have an "economy" to speak of.

If I write you an iou for a million dollars, and you write me an iou for a million dollars, we can both be millionaires, and if everyone does that for everyone else, then we can all be millionaires, but only until too many people try to trade those IOU’s for something real at the same time.

I mean, I'm not optimist, but I'm aware that my doom and gloom about how stupid and irrational we are is just a gut feeling.

Yes, we're squarely out of the easily comprehensible by naive human wetware regime. But then we should recognize that instead of doubling down and giving in to the fear coming of an even primal faculty.

The "this can't go on" chart has a very simple solution. This can go on because very easily, because we're still burning fossil fuels, and every time we switch to a healthier alternative that chart goes up. And we are furiously trying to switch, not necessarily everybody, but ask anyone who lives in cities who doesn't want less smog, who doesn't want less noise pollution, etc. And that graph is also going up because people are moving to cities en masse. (See the real estate prices all around the most desirable living places, but urbanization is happening everywhere else too.) People who live in cities simply by participating in a more productive economy make that chart go up again.

Sure going on like this forever is impossible. But a collapse is not the only alternative.