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Focusing on energy inputs instead of resource consumption allows for more generalized approach to the idea of "limits".

A material shovel produced requires energy in form of human operator.

A Simpsons SD requires energy to play from the electric grid.

All energy is traced back to resource consumption it's just a matter of steps involved.

The laws of thermodynamics are inescapable.

Energy is the value added that ultimately creates what we refer to as the economy.

In summary: The "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption. That's that hard wall of the limits on growth.

But even within those examples, the energy use per dollar of value generated varies by large orders of magnitude.

A Simpsons SD card uses a tiny fraction of a watt hour for a half hour of entertainment (valued, in theaters and DVD rentals, at maybe $3-5). Watch the same episode on an old-style CRT TV and you're looking at 50 or so watt-hours.

A Google Search uses about 0.3 watt hours to get you the answer you want. The economic value of it varies based on topic, but if you divide estimated total yearly searches (a couple trillion) by Google's revenue ($257B), you get about $0.12. (Note that at average annual U.S. electricity prices, this electricity costs about 1/300th of a cent, showing the profit involved in turning energy into information retrieval.)

A car commuting to work for an hour consumes about 4 kWh (about 200x a laptop watching the Simpsons, and 12,000x a Google Search), but what's the economic value added? Arguably it's economic value destroyed, compared to if we could just live closer to work, because of the lost time and productivity.

That's why it doesn't really make sense to say that 'the "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption'. There are many things that generate large amounts of dollars and use very little energy, or even save energy. There are also things that destroy dollars and use lots of energy. By equating the two, you gloss over any distinction or ability to make things more efficient.

You can't ignore energy inputs to required processing components. Those servers at Google required energy to build and humans to operate. Maybe that person in the car was driving to Google to fix a server that processes 1 million queries a day. I'd say they value added to get him there was huge.

I'll just ask this:

Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy?

If it's not, then we're just haggling over efficiency.

The answer to your question is "no", but it misses the point. Of course it's not possible to create economic value without using energy, because living requires energy, and dead people don't spend money, except on cemetery plots. However, "haggling over efficiency" is the entire economy. Basically all of the interesting questions are about trade-offs needed to produce goods & services more efficiently.

Of course things take energy; this is so obvious, it’s a straw man.

The question is how closely economic value correlates with raw energy usage. The answer is: they’ve been diverging for years. A Simpsons SD card does not take any more energy to use than an SD card full of Pauly Shore movies. A Mercedes sedan uses about the same amount of energy as a Honda sedan.

> Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy?

Of course. Find a cheaper way to do something. For example, create a motor that is more efficient. It might cost you energy up front, but presumably the reduction in cost would more than make up for the cost (otherwise why would someone do it?)

Agreed.

Unfortunately this leads to the Jevons Paradox [1] where we end right back to increased consumption again.

We can't escape. Economy is energy consumption.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I don't know. US energy consumption has stayed relatively flat over the last twenty years (down if you exclude renewables) despite economic and population growth

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

You can't look at the US alone. The economy is gobal.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-...

I disagree. I think "economy" is more closely associated with energy reduction. If you can produce something with fewer resources (e.g. energy), you're adding value. Sure you get wealthier in the process and you may to choose to consume more goods even at lower energy used per good, but the net effect is not necessarily more energy consumption

Think of the advancements in goods over the years. Most reduced the amount of energy used. From more efficient materials to cell phones replacing TV, camcorder, audio recorder, book, telephone, etc.

It's called de-materialization and its going on even today

https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-i...

There simply has to be limits to this though, because if there were not, the materials would eventually become (relatively) free.

Think of it this way, if the value of output grows too many magnitudes over the inputs, then essentially the input becomes free, which violates intuition, because those resources are scarce. If the resources are free to me, I will buy them all and raise the price.

Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce, or else you realize there is actually a limit to how much value the economy can derive from those resources, but fail to reach the logical conclusion that there is a limit to economic growth.

> Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce

The material in question is ingenuity and creativity. That is the real driver of economic growth, not some material

I don't think the input has to be free or even go down in price. Just create more value. For instance, consider cars. They haven't gotten cheaper despite creating a lot more value. They're just better. More efficient, safer, more reliable, faster, etc. Creating value doesn't necessarily mean pushing prices down.

Yes but as a consequence there are more cars in operation so total energy consumption increases.

https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/US-auto-sa...

I’m not suggesting you can’t add value, but that it grows asymptoticly towards a limit.

Human ingenuity is scarce and even if it wasn’t, I’m allowing for some things to be not scarce in practice, like information and maybe energy someday.

But concrete / metals / something physical will be scarce, and as long as it is, the rest of the economy cannot tend towards infinity. Otherwise, in the far enough future, this scarce thing would be essentially free.

Exactly. Whenever I see an article like this I think about what the world might be like with ubiquitous nuclear power. How long does the oil in the ground suddenly last you if you're not using it in cars, burning it, etc? How much easier is recycling anything when the power to do so is cheap? And so on and so forth.

Nuclear seems like the only way forward.

This assumes that there's a limit to efficiency. We definitely haven't hit that wall yet.

Theoretical efficiency limits are well known.

The maximum is, of course, 100%. Much as with Amdahl's Law, this imposes a diminishing returns to efficiency over time, and long-term efficiency curves over multiple cycles of technological development exist and are well known within the field. I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization for multiple instances of these . Typically what's seen within any given technology is an asymptotic approach toward limits, punctuated by newly-introduced technologies which boost the potential efficiency to a higher level. Over time, those also asymptotically approach theoretical maxima.

For energy and motive systems, Carnot, Rankine, photovoltaic, and wind energy conversions all have well-known limits. In cases where efficiencies are high (hydroelectric and pumped hydro), the problem of limited potential sources and/or sites (for generation or storage) emerge.

Thermodynamics means the house always wins.

There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards zero as modeling software enables designers to experiment with millions of potential designs with the same energy that it used to take to develop and test one.

Computation is one place where increased efficiencies seem to have only very limited impacts on other process efficiency. There's also been a tremendous tendency for gains to be eroded through additional ancillary compute tasks, as well as malevolent applications.

Where do you see computation having delivered actual real-world increased efficiencies on the same order of magnitude as the increase in compute efficiencies?

From 1960 to present we've seen 60 years of doubling every 3 years, roughly 20 doublings or a millionfold performance increase.

What compute-driven applications have seen 1-million-times efficiency gains?

What overall economic impact (GDP increases) have these created?

Yes, I like to think about something simple like sand: You can build a sand castle with it, a glass bowl, semiconductors, a fiber optic network, or a lot of other things. What we do with resources matters a lot more than the raw materials themselves. We have made tons of improvements, but our utilization of resources is still quite wasteful, and we still have quite a bit to gain.

>> If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so.

Yes, this is obviously the case, but I think people over-estimate how close we are to hitting this limit. It won't happen for thousands of years. We haven't even properly mined the seafloor or the sea itself yet.

But by the time we strip mine the sea floor, or extract from the sea itself, we would've killed every wild living thing out there.

I hope we don't really reach that point, and just reuse and recycle what has already been extracted.

It isn't necessarily the case that all resource extraction necessitates pollution. We often end up with pollution because we don't have enough energy to implement approaches that are more energy-expensive, but pollute less. If we had more energy, perhaps due to cheap fusion, we could extract a lot more resources without necessarily polluting everything.

For instance, if we could afford to heat all discarded outputs up to plasma temperatures, we'd never have to chemically pollute anything. We could easily break the chemicals down to safer variants. Most of the elements are either fairly safe or easy to turn into something safe. But by modern standards that's an insane amount of energy. Possible much more sophisticated nano-/bio-tech could do much better.

If we had more energy and robotics, we could also do things like backfill our strip mines and put the topsoil back on top. We don't do that because it's absurdly expensive, not because mining intrinsically requires that we tear the landscape apart.

But I am aware that I'm talking about making things literally orders of magnitude more expensive than they are now. We couldn't do it now. I'm just saying that the destruction isn't intrinsic to the resource extraction. Even "fossil fuels" would be no big deal if we had tons more energy. We know how to take CO2 out of the air and turn it back into solid forms for long-term storage right now. We just don't have the energy to do it cost-effectively for any current known technique, and we especially can't do it for thermodynamic reasons by trying to use the energy from burned fossil fuels in the first place.

Well re-use and re-cycle are always good, but you would also hope that technology advanced enough to mine the floor of the pacific would be able to do it in an ecologically sensitive way.

I came to make this point, but you said it better. The only other thing I was going to mention is that it's a somewhat predictable miss when Nature takes on economics.

On desires - I would disagree on two fronts. In the first place our capacity to fulfill desires is limited by time and money. In the second, core desires are ultimately few in number, whereas creative abstractions to satisfy them are effectively limitless, but there are diminishing returns. Think overconsumption or addiction. I think where this leaves us is having a large variety of means to satisfy desire, but consumption per individual (not in terms of dollars but stimulation) falls within a range.

As for growth, I think the pandora's box that has been opened is that population (either domestic or abroad) is a necessary component, and natural resources make that possible. On the other hand, a stagnant GDP seems more a crisis for the wealthy than everyone else. The global population is projected to level off in the next 100 years; there will come a point we will have to plan for that. The valid fear is that unlike many historical periods of stagnation and high inequality, this may not be broken up (as it was by war), and ruling classes will have better tools to hold on to wealth and power.

> If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so.

Once we master mining in space we will have limitless resources. I think this decade we’ll see the first attempts.

Space isn’t limitless, it’s just very big.

While it currently looks like the human population will plateau, there is no guarantee of this; if it returns to exponential growth, and if we are limited to the speed of light, then we get exponential demand increasing with polynomial supply.

How much this matters to you depends on if you prefer Total Human Product or Product Per Capita.

But if you care about GDP (i.e. of a nation not of humanity as a whole or average per person), the maximum size of any plausible zone of control for any government is likely to be in the order of a solar system or less, based on the historical precedents of communication lag between empire capitals and outer colonies — exponential growth makes this happen faster than you might otherwise expect.

Mostly void, partially stars...

Limitless resources in theory, but in practice the limits will be set by logistics and therefore planning. It is of little comfort knowing there's a wheat shipment 5 light-minutes out when there's a famine right now.

There are still limits, they are crazy high limits, but still limits. Add enough Mass to the planet and you break the rocket equation (by break I mean fuel required to achieve orbit is grater than the mass of the planet), or we get crushed by the added gravity.

Near limitless chances to really badly screw up, too. If all it takes is one rock hopper to miss the orbital refineries and foundries with a nice hunk of nickel and iron, with an inhabited planet as the backstop..

We're still limited by the constraints of our capabilities.

There is no known engineering path to get there, where you come back with more resources than you spent. Not even if SpaceX Starship works as well as we hope.

Why would the resources need to come back here? Once humanity is able to get out onto large space stations, the economy will be there as well.

Maybe not with Starship, but with the invention of fusion powered rockets you will be able to. Once fusion powered rockets seem possible and huge profits are able to be foretasted, lots of capital and people will be thrown at fusion tech. This is already starting to happen.

The article defines its terms:

Economic growth is typically measured by gross domestic product (GDP). This composite index uses consumer spending, as well as business and government investment, to arrive at a figure for a country’s economic output. Governments have entire departments devoted to ensuring that GDP always points upwards.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00723-1

You're asserting lack of a definition where one does in fact exist. Your assertion is false.

This is not a definition of economic growth, this is a description of how economists derive an indicator to measure it. It’s like saying that space is defined because you can define hot to get a meter

Parent is right, when you add subjective considerations to what growth is the answer is not obviously “yes”. Or rather, it still is because eventually the universe will be devoid of subjective experience, but that’s a later point and higher bar than the physical limits of our current ecosystem

No, really, it is the definition, it is the target, and it is what drives policy and practices.

I'm not arguing that GDP is perfect, that there aren't other options, and that it captures whatever it is that we mean when we speak of overall true macroeconomic wealth.

It is, however, what is meant in economic discussion. The measurement here is the reality so far as policy and theory are concerned.

>There's no obvious upper limit to how many desires could be satiated,

Of course there is: 100%

If all desires are satisfied, there is no growth.

You are assuming the conclusion. If someone can desire 100 heads of lettuce a year. They can also desire (with much less marginal utility) 100,000 heads of lettuce per year if only to bury them back into the ground in which they were grown. This is what is meant by desires are unbounded.

The more you desire the more time you need to check the fulfillment of your desires.

Because every humans time and attention span is limited, his desires are limited too.

That's begging the question. What constitutes 100% of desires, in a fully mature economy?

Who, 200 years ago, even knew how badly they wanted an OLED television? You don't even know what you might want in the economy of 2122 and succeed or fail at satisfying.

I do not believe this is how humans work.

That's how sane humans work.

That's the beauty of consumerism; capitalism constantly invents new desires to be satisfied.

It's deeper than that. How long do people tend to stay happy after they get what they long desired (material or otherwise)?

Especially if their neighbor/co-worker/social peer just got the bigger and better version?

Sounds more like a mental than economical problem.

We could end desire with various combination of drugs, brain surgery, or generic engineering.

This seems dystopian to me.

I don’t know which is less dystopian though, that, or a Malthusian crisis in a K3 civilization, or any of the other ways this can go wrong.

I am hopeful for the future in many ways; this may well be solvable.

No need to go dystopian.

There a difference between desire and greed.

If you are never satisfied you are greedy and should seek mental help, it's the same with being hungry no matter how much you eat.

>If you are never satisfied

That is the human condition though. No matter how much we have we soon get used to it, take it for granted and start looking for more.

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

Such people exist, and enough don’t seek help.

Would you choose to force them to get help, or would you choose to let them consume ever more?

Economics was literally invented by man. It is a social science although economists will deny this even under pain of torture.

And much of economics describes the behavior of psychopaths.

The demonization of Economics is as common amongst the fringe left as the demonization of vaccination is amongst the fringe right.

The fringe of Economics is evil.

Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort are the bad guys

Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort are not economists..

Striving for relative prosperity compared to others seems like an inherent mechanism for human mating rather than capitalism.

Is there an upper limit to bliss?

If you assume bliss is something neurons in the brain need to tell keep telling each other about so that it doesn't naturally fade, you can saturate the physical medium that transports the signal, and there comes a point where being too vigorous breaks the wires

Intuitively, there's a much lower limit to how much bliss I desire. Too much of a good thing sounds like a bad thing, I do not want that :)

It's certainly not limitless, lets say that.

Kerfentanyl, apparently...

until we learn how to reverse entropy, there will always be human desire

What you are talking its called environmental decoupling. Studies suggest that is not possible to have absolute environmental decoupling globally.

Absolute decoupling is when emissions going down while we have economic growth, relative decoupling is when emissions diverge from economic growth. The last one os insufficient for mitigate climate change.

https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

Another good resource is Tim Jackson "Prosperity without Growth".