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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run.

But more importantly I see some reasonable degrowth arguments as advocating an end to consumerism. To no longer measure the wealth of a country by the extend of it's material consumption and financial transactions. We are optimizing the wrong thing. Imagine a world with a basic income, where someone who just likes to cut hair decides to cut hair for other people as long as they get to be creative while doing it. This would lower the GDP and nominally be degrowth, but not because the scope and range of possible human activities has decreased.

We have coupled status to consumption, money and being productive. I believe that this has become the overwhelming function of much economic activity. Otherwise it's not rationally understandable why people would opt to work 70 hours a week, barely know their kids, in order to make sure they can afford things they don't really need.

I don't really see the article(s) linked contradicting this line of thought in the degrowth community.

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> Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run.

Besides being a fundamentally politically charged statement, I see no good argument on why not, so I'm sure you're ready to present some evidence behind that.

Where you're completely right is that fundamental exponential resource usage is not sustainable.

But in fact, OP makes a pretty convincing argument that resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth (in fact, exponentially so).

Adding the exponentially growing level of automation and still-dropping cost-effective renewables into the mix (as well as their synergetic effect on each other), it's a rationally following thought that energy will be almost-free in the near future.

With an exponential growth of external (solar) energy into the system, it's not far off to channel this energy into GDP to sustain the growth.

Just one example: Water problem. There's a drinking water shortage everywhere but if you look at the globe from orbit, you see the planet does not have a water shortage.

In fact, it's just an energy shortage of desalinating that water. Bring that almost-free water to the deserts around the equator and you're in fact creating resources.

I think the idea of degrowth is a fundamental error. It's only when the ecological finally gets economical when you convince the naysayers as well.

Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a problem with our limited amounts of desalination.

Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited.

If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.

It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly believing in a possibility of managing those and be better off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently rising anyway, so we're synergetic.

We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.

Free energy isn’t a thing. There’s a cost to building it. Mining absolutely wrecks environments.

And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.

The universe is finite, it's very big but finite. All growth eventually hits limits. Exponential growth hits the limits in logarithmic time. The question is just whether this brings the time scale to time scales that humans can and should care about.

It's also a straw-man to imply that degrowth advocates want to eliminate all development. Nobody I know (but I am not that well read in the field, maybe it's just my pocket) is talking about stopping technological research, or science, or cultural growth. It's about the subset of human activities that are today labelled as economic.

economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my own

Have you never done anything for anyone without being paid for it?

I believe the fundamental model of having money and passing it around, and thereby acknowledging that we do things for each other is absolutely fantastic. But the secondary effects absolutely swamp the primary purpose by now.

I can do things for other people, but I can also run ad campaigns, or engineer the culture in such a way that they will desire what I can produce. Desires are not a preexisting thing that a disinterested economic system is more and more efficiently satisfying. The desires are shaped by the wider social system of which the economic system and its intrinsic logic is a core part.

If desires aren’t a preexisting thing, then why did trade happen in the ancient and mediaeval world?

I don't understand why you think it implies trade shouldn't have happened. Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires?

Either way, I more precisely should have said "fixed pre-existing thing". Obviously there are some needs and desires rooted in biology and probably, somewhere in the incomprehensible depth of time, these kick-started things. However, as fun as it is to speculate about pre-history, it's largely irrelevant to the conversation. There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives.

As an aside: Humans seem to have a great need to pretend that their cultural constructs, whether gods or status symbols or desires or gender roles, are objective aspects of the universe. This does seem to be a very deep need... But the fact that this is a fallacy doesn't imply that there isn't also a rich tapestry of objective truths, and a subtle interaction between the two.

> There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives.

Status seeking would likely be the biological imperative. Of course the specific desire is going to be culturally dependent.

> Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires?

I assume that desires are not created but rather channelled or cultivated within their cultural context based on what's available. Sure, someone with a new product is going to use advertising to try and influence consumers to buy their product. But this assumes their product is something consumers would desire, or something that can be associated with something consumers desire, such as status or convenience.

So this last paragraph to me encapsulates the base fallacy that permeates our society when it comes to analyzing the economy. You exactly assume that there are fixed desires and needs and that this is merely "directed" or shifted around by culture. You think of it as a base real thing that advertisers try to influence, rather than something created from whole cloth.

This assumption does not stand up to scrutiny in my opinion. History shows otherwise.

People go to die in holy war to impress, or serve their country. This is not biologically sensible. And yet they did.

This is what I mean with decoupling. You can of course claim that this is just a strong version of status seeking being channelled, or you can invent another base desire that you think is biologically sensible and that the wish to die in war is just a cultivated version of. But your "base desires" don't have any explanatory value at that point. They don't survive Occam's Razor. They only serve to satisfy your psychological need that the things you care about are _real_.

desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any exponential progression gets absurd on a surprisingly short time scale.

In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's referring to being in the second half, without recognising the absurdity of pretending something is growing exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of whatever is still rare.

> Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run.

Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc… an iPhone requires far less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible.

We don’t need to work more or consume more things unless we either give up on innovation or if we think innovation is not possible because we have reached a knowledge boundary. The former would be a silly decision to make, the latter is an assumption that should be demonstrated.

Some (a lot?) of economic activity seems to be self-serving, not making our lives better (and sometimes making them worse). The lockdowns demonstrated that very well. For example: social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us less social); 'influencers'; a good chunk of the hospitality industry; anything to do with crypto.

Very often, free alternatives / those not involving 3rd parties, simpler living, are better for us overall. But if more expensive options are available, we are pressured to take them so that we are not left behind / feel like we fit in / have a social life.

Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will.

> social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us less social)

People in a lot of places literally couldn't socialise physically for much of the last 18 months, surely social media must have helped?

Like one can argue that it's a cure worse than the diseases, but it's difficult to say that it's entirely useless.

It is worse than useless. You do not need social media to call someone - on phone or on video, to send an email, organize an online game, chat on whatever messenger (Why do we need a new one every few months?) or even send a snail mail letter. Even an old-style message board is better for social interactions than social media.

> Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will.

If this were true, your innovating competitors will lose money. There’s a discussion to be had on bad innovations (such as almost everything related to the so-called “attention economy), but they are a drop in the ocean.

There are a lot of reasons to get the newest phone with the best features, and many of those reasons are not wholesome ones.

For example, my iPhone 6 is getting obsolete just because it would not get latest iOS updates. Many apps are no longer supporting the old OS version. Yet these apps are not video games requiring the latest hardware - they are simply glorified web pages. There is no objective reason for why the phone could not run them.

> Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc… an iPhone requires far less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible.

In the debate, this is called decoupling, meaning the decoupling of rising material and/or energy consumption with economic growth.

The problem is that absolute decoupling couldn't been shown anywhere, when looking at actual empirical data. This is a pretty exhaustive summary of current research about this: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

Is this really true? All those objects are fairly low tech, between the lifetime of a torch or calculator which is way longer than the one of an iphone and the simpler production process behind it, I wouldn't be surprised that producing an iphone requires more materials, generates more defects for one working device and requires an way more complex supply chain.

This is discussed at length here : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... and in the comments.

The very fact that my iPhone is lighter than my father’s calculator, should say something at least about raw materials.

Similarly, my bicycle is lighter than my father's horse.

Mass alone does not tell the whole story.

I'm actually curious, which one DOES take more resources all up? And what do you count as a resource? ie. the bicycle would take far more coal and iron ore (neither of which the horse needs) but the horse would use up far more water and otherwise edible grains.

There's actually more to take into account to push the subject a lot. The human on a bicycle also needs food and water to move the bicycle. Which is the more efficient at converting those resources into movement and in which scenario ?

The horse also generates more power than a human on a bicycle.

The horse does not need improved roads the way most bicycles do, and is more reliable off road than most mountain bikes.

Lots of food for thought here.

A horse also needs food and shelter and they poop. An early argument in favor of cars over horses were that cars didn’t leave fecal matter everywhere in cities.

An electric bike does not need to be fed with crops.

And it also requires much less energy and maintenance to be produced and operated. Growth.

First, that might just mean that you live at a higher altitude than your father, but I guess you meant mass.

Then, it might just mean that your father's calculator use material of higher density.

More seriously. when building something, there's a lot more material than what comes in the final product: - the scrap generated by the by the manufacturing process. The more elements, the more it's going to be. - the number of defects, for every parts of the device (for some parts it will be extremely low, for some it would be quite higher, but there's always some). Granted, some defects can be re-purposed, but it's not always the case - The raw materials to actually manufacture (like water) - The average number of repairs required over a lifetime (replacing the screen on a iphone is quite frequent) - The materials required to build the supply chain that can build such devices. - The materials required to generate the energy required to build the factories.

And there's plenty of other things to take into account. In the end it's not about the volume of raw material as such, that doesn't mean much as it is. It's for each material, to take into consideration if it's renewable, what's the impact of extracting it and many other questions.

I think it’s undeniable that iPhone uses less materials than all the objects it replaces combined, even if it consumes more materials and pollutes more than a 1970s programmable calculator (and I’m not too sure about that), it certainly requires less resources than a calculator plus a mobile phone plus a stereo plus blablabla

It's not undeniable at all, you made an assertion without any base. This is far from being obvious, there's way too much things to take into consideration to be able to make such claim out of thin air.

well, have you considered how much material is used for producing that iPhone? have you got an idea of how much water is used for that tshirt you probably wearing right now?

Lots of material would go into the production of all the tools it replaces. A programmable calculator, a mobile phone a GameBoy, a music player, my mother’s cook books, etc… combined will likely require more raw materials.

Not entirely true.

It really doesn’t matter if whatever is created is better or just more of the same.

New things will require more things.

I highly recommend reading Rich Gold’s excellent book The Plenitude:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude

If you make better things, say a car that costs half of its predecessors then all else being equal you have halved your economic output. The reality is that we use that efficiency to buy more so the price stays the same but cars are twice as big and we buy many more of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible.

Such growth is anything but exponential. In fact, it's logarithmic.

Maybe, I have a degree in economics, but I’m a software developer and not an economist. I’d say that if innovations are built on top of other innovations and if we get occasional breakthroughs, the process may be approximated with an exponential. Otherwise, even logarithmic growth tends to infinity, not to de-growth.

you probably ignore the amount of raw materials needed to produce your iPhone (not what actually ends up in the product itself). No, that's not an argument. The only argument is that you can keep growing by not selling anything material at all, like insurances, but with finite, actually soon degrowing population, how would you even think of doing it?

i love my headphone jack on my 6s, its very innovative. talk about ioc.

If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand.

I think if you correctly account for all the materials required to support every last stage of process from dirt, ore and sand all the way to the finished iPhone, the result would be awe-inspiring and dismaying.

> If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand.

What a silly assertion. The mere fact you can't create something easily does not mean it does not necessitate less resources to build. The support system an supply chain is huge, but the resources it uses could be quite small if you divide by the number of units produced.

Even so, there are many tools that a smartphone replaces that would have needed in the past a full product just to do a single thing. It can replace a PC, a game console, a tv, a flashlight, a calculator, tons of books, measuring instruments, keys. Many many things that have now moved into one small device. Maybe the resources for a torch are not more than for a iPhone, but adding all the functions it fills, surely, it is more resource efficient than the past alternatives.

Your latter point is good. That kind of consolidation of purpose is really handy, indeed I think it's the future of resource management. We can work out how to efficiently use these things.

Former point? No. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum, or form a CPU-ready silicon wafer? Wood for torches grows out of the ground. You don't seem to have any idea of supply chain infrastructure, and it matters. There's a fairly close mapping between the amount of infrastructure involved, and the cost of the thing (Veblen goods aside). You can buy a flammable stick fairly cheaply, but buying a smartphone really does not wind up being the cost of the raw materials or even close… and this is because you're not looking at the infrastructure costs of producing the final result.

Sorry, you're way off base. Smart technological stuff is really cool in its own right, but it's mind-bogglingly wasteful by 'degrowth' standards.

Follow up, since I don't think I defined this clearly enough:

How many torches do you have to burn, to repeatedly melt, refine, cast, machine etc. just the aluminum alone from your aluminum-cased device?

Let's do the math. Embodied energy for aluminum is apparently at 211 GJ per tonne[1] whereas wood has a caloric value of 19.2 GJ/tonne dry matter [2], but let's say our wood has 50% moisture -> 9.6GJ/tonne => embodied energy at about 1/22 ratio

An iPhone 12 has 164 g, of which 24% is aluminum. [4] => ~39.36g of aluminum in one. Ergo, your, presumably wood torch, would have to weigh 865g in order to be able to have the same embodied energy as an iPhone.

Of course, this is highly simplified and silly and full of wonky napkin math, but at least I expect we're in the same order of magnitude range for the estimation.

Regardless, doing the math, it is lower than I expected. Also, the greatest issue I took with your claim that "If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand." -> that sentence makes no sense and fails to prove your point. Maybe the point is correct, but it is NOT proven in any way by that sentence. I don't even have a stance on the torch/iPhone comparison (although the effort I expended on the napkin math might show otherwise, that was just a fun little exercise for me)

And the wider point is that inovation might be better for the environment than lack of innovation. I am convinced that if we could move to a sustainable world if everything we bought would be higher quality and had more thought in it, abeit more expensive. The consolidation of purpose, as you nicely phrased it is one of the critical components that work for this "techstenance".

And the stronger point, related to the iPhone specifically is that

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-aluminium-7245

[2] http://www.woodenergy.ie/frequentlyaskedquestions/

[3] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_12-10509.php

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-metal-in-an-iphone-...

Agreed. I think there are a lot of policy makers who have a LOT of trouble coping with the idea that humans aren't primarily rational actors contributing to a self-regulating market system in all things…

People seek consumption, money, and power. There's no real self-regulating mechanism for any of these things, as far as the drives of the humans that manifest those outcomes. We don't automatically have an 'enough' meter. As such, we don't manage ourselves well, and it falls to larger systems to identify these losses and mitigate them… which is always contentious.

I always feel these 'actually exponential growth is good' arguments end up resting on suspicious grounds. They fall into the category of moral arguments, where the moral is 'I should not have to examine or curtail my own whims'.

> Imagine a world…where someone who just likes to cut hair decides to cut hair for other people as long as they get to be creative while doing it.

It sounds wonderful. Here’s the problem. Most people don’t want a creative hair cut. Most people want the same boring haircut everybody else has. And they need it now, not when you’re feeling “inspired” or “creative.”

A world where nobody is incentivized to provide value to others aside from “creative satisfaction,” is a world where nobody provides value to others.

Whether or not you agree with all the things people buy, the fact is, most people buy most things because they find them useful (the top GDP-contributing activities are rooted in things like food, water, housing, transportation, clothing, etc.)

Ending consumerism, means the end of people doing useful things for each other.

This includes all the peaceful global cooperation between countries that is a byproduct of a consumer driven global economy.

I don’t think changing the mindset of countries with nuclear weapons from optimistic growth to pessimistic scarcity is going to have the positive outcomes you think it will.

Unfortunately, when humans fight over scarce things, they tend to kill each other.

> Whether or not you agree with all the things people buy, the fact is, most people buy most things because they find them useful

This requires a loose definition of "useful" which includes status signalling, satisfying an impulse to buy things, and so on, to the point it's tautological; every action is useful. I would not attribute the bulk of consumer spending to an expectation of usefulness, otherwise. Among the useful things, people still spend extra to buy pleasure foods, pleasure clothes, pleasure housing, pleasure transportation.

> Ending consumerism, means the end of people doing useful things for each other.

I think if you look at how consumerism is defined, it's apparent we can have the exchange of goods and services without it. Economic systems can exist without consumerism, and existed before it.

Which societies are those? Feudal ones where the nobles are the only ones consuming and everyone else is subsisting? Or the ancient ones like Rome where there is a large amount of slave labor?

Or native american tribes, other pre-industrial subsistence economies. Slavery isn't at all required. A post-scarcity star trek kind of society wouldn't qualify as consumerist. A modern commune, whether you think it's a good idea or not, and whether you think they 'work' in practice or not, absolutely could exist without consumerism and without slavery. It's silly to think what we've got going is the only way to live. Even within our system, not everyone lives a consumerist lifestyle, some are ascetic.

People are evolutionary agents. Cultures/states/corporations/memes are evolutionary agents. Evolutionary agents inherently compete. Competition drives both progress and inefficiency. The sort of society where someone "who just likes to cut hair decides to cut hair for other people", at useful frequencies, is sadly fundamentally impossible unless you lobotomize everyone and install a hegemonic overlord meme-complex.

Link to the ol' Economist meets a Physicist conversation: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

"The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."

Fundamentally there isn't any exponential growth and has never been any. And it would violate the laws of thermodynamics.

We have S curves. Lots of them. We're seeing the slowdown of the semiconductor industry S curve now. But we get new S curves in the beginning phases all the time. That's why we keep having so great growth.

But de-growth is just a weird concept. Why would we need it? What does it even mean? Would we burn all the books so we become ignorant about technology? I hope not!

I assume it means letting the economy run at the highest sustainable level, rather than insisting on a certain velocity of progress.

There is this S-curve of the amount of newly starting S-curves where we are going to see a slowdown...

World with basic income might create a class of people, who will demand to increase it (because why not, people who are not working and will be given some money for this will have a lot of time to organize themselves in some kind of strange union), if this group will be large enough it will soon find a political party that will absorb such group.

However to give away money, you need to get them from somewhere, basic income means that work will be taxed more heavily. At some point this will break economy and, in less optimistic scenario, lead to social unrest or takeover of the power by some ultra populist party - we have already seen in the history how helping the poor, discriminated "class" typically ends.

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