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Comment by uhuruity | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a graduate degree in economics: often when people think about 'growth' in a negative light, they're imagining an ever increasing use of resources to produce more output. But the desirable type of growth (in the economic discipline) is generally Total Factor Productivity growth: (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input. This is basically akin to technological progress. As a forum of tech aficionados, I cannot see how this would repel anyone here?

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> (very) roughly speaking, being able to produce more output with the same input

It's not just physical output, though. Ultimately the purpose of all of this economic activity is to meet human needs or wants. But outside of basic subsistence, most human needs and wants can be highly variable in how much physical output can satisfy them. For example, humans have a need/want for movies and music. It used to require a lot more physical output to satisfy those needs (having factories to make tapes, CDs, DVDs) than it does now (pushing bits over the Internet). The real benefit of technological process is not just getting more physical output with the same input; it's figuring out how to satisfy more (in some cases much more) of people's needs and wants without increasing physical output.

The current production system is driven by the need for growth. What you're describing was true maybe until a century ago, until the 1929 crisis. After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side. First it was war, then mass consumerism. Desires are not natural, they are induced and in the same way they are induced (socially, culturally, politically), they can be removed, usually with a higher level of happiness for the people involved.

> The current production system is driven by the need for growth.

I would say our current monetary system is driven by the need for growth. But our current monetary system is a political tool, not an economic tool.

> After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side.

No, what was clear, at least to anyone who hadn't drunk the kool-aid of Keynesian "economics", was that the US government (and other governments weren't much better) was completely clueless about how economics actually worked, and so its interventions were making the depression worse instead of better. (Btw, this was just as true of Hoover's administration as of Roosevelt's.) All of the talk about having to increase "aggregate demand" was just a manifestation of the cluelessness. The real problem was not lack of demand but mismatched supply and demand: the government's messing with the money supply had led to a massive misallocation of resources, so that many things were being produced that nobody wanted and many things that lots of people wanted or needed were not being produced, or not being produced in sufficient quantity. Whenever that happens there will end up being a crisis when the misallocation can no longer be sustained.

What the US government should have done in response to the stock market crash of 1929 was...nothing. That's what the US government did in response to stock market crashes in 1920-1921 and 1987, neither of which led to a prolonged depression or even recession.

> Desires are not natural

Really? My desire for music and movies is not natural? How about my desire to post on a site like this one?

I think you have a very simplistic view of both economics and human desires.

Right, I agree completely. By 'output' I suppose I meant goods and services that provide utility to humans.

People here also can calculate Pearson's coefficient between GDP and energy usage and understand by themselves that this is bullshit and that energy efficiency is less than minor in the grand scheme of things.

And those who did not brush up their math know about the theorical max efficiency of Carnot engines and can evaluate without calculation how much growth must be driven by efficiency increase and how much is driven by energy use increase. I mean, we did increase oil production by roughly 2-3 percent per year. If Carnot engines efficiency had risen as much as growth in the last 50 years, we would have those infinite energy motors...

And there is probably a lot of other way to reach that conclusion without thinking about it. I don't understand why people don't just think about it.

Are you aware of any physical process that operates in that way?

Do you mean, any instance of a technological advancement that has allowed the production of some good or service with less input than would have been required before the advancement? How about computers + the internet? We have access to communications and knowledge access services with input costs far lower than the equivalent services would have cost before these inventions. Or, the invention of the refrigerator? Keeping food cold costs much less than it would have before the fridge was invented.

under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy.

Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.

Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.

This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on.

This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.

Continued here (instead of editing the comment above).

The obvious retort here is that the cost of healthcare, education, and housing have all increased dramatically, so even if you’re willing to forego modern toys and conveniences, you still have to work full-time to stay afloat. I think even this is not true. First of all, it’s worth thinking about what people spent their money on 100 years ago. Here’s a typical budget (by share of consumption) for an urban family in 1917:

  Food ............................... 41.1 
  Housing ............................ 26.8 
  Transportation ..................... 3.1 
  Clothing ........................... 17.6 
  Health care ........................ 4.7 
  Other .............................. 6.7

Source (Table 3): https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf

The first thing you’ll notice is that healthcare and education are not major line items (but food and clothing, both of which are drastically cheaper and more widely available today, are). I think you can basically toss them out. Just by virtue of having access to a modern emergency room you’re miles ahead of anybody living in 1917. As for general health insurance and higher education, you can simply forego them — just as almost everyone did in 1917. If you get seriously ill or injured, you can go to an emergency room and they'll treat you to a standard of care that didn't even exist 100 years ago. And you're opting out, remember, so what do you need a college degree for? That's just another spoke on the hamster wheel we're trying to avoid.

So, housing remains and it’s obviously a bigger factor. A big obstacle here is that you can’t save money by downsizing to a tiny unit, living in an SRO, occupying crowded tenements, or foregoing modern conveniences like hot water and indoor plumbing -- all commonplace in 1920 -- because those options have in the meantime been made illegal. So the government has taken those options from you. For this to work you’re going to have to live in a relatively undesirable region and probably with roommates, if you want to be anywhere near a major city. But this is not impossible, if you're truly convinced that the alternative is unacceptably exploitative.

This is not even close to reality in the US. Zoning laws and various regulations mean that attempting to live like it is 1920 will eventually get you locked up in jail and your property condemned after you are fined to death. Assuming you can afford any property as our government has allowed corporate and foreign interests as well as excessive immigration to inflate property well past the ability of the average 1920 man to afford.

I addressed this in a comment adjacent to yours and I think it's a good point, but I don't think it's sufficient to explain why most people don't accept a 1920 standard of living in exchange for doing less work. I'd like to see most of those regulations repealed, but I have a hard time believing the result would be a bunch of full-time workers cutting back their hours to live more simply. What people would do, instead, is consume all the resulting productivity gains as quickly as they could.

nah, you would end up in jail and most of the supply chain that was there for what you call a "1920's lifestyle" is not there anymore. We criticize this way of living because we are stuck in it.

You're missing an important part of the equation. That 1920s lifestyle includes lower population density outside of the big cities, food that is organic by default, etc etc. You can't just look at the downsides.

That's not how it works at all.

Say a machine gets installed at work that increases productivity by 20%. In a sane system, you could now work 20% less for the same output, a vast improvement in quality of life.

In reality, you might lose your job. Or if you keep it, you'll work the same hours as before. You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity. Meanwhile, cost of living keeps rising.

You probably can't do every job at 20% speed and expect to keep it. If you're a middle manager at a giant corporation, for example, there is no 1-day-per-week option. It's all or nothing. But that's not all jobs. Any freelance work, obviously, fits the bill. As does restaurant work. (In fact, I know a fair number of people who are (at varying levels of awareness) actively enacting this work-less-and-live-on-less strategy, by hopping along a never-ending string of part-time bartending and server positions.)

The great thing about trying to live like it's 1917 in 2022 is that you still have access to all this 2022 technology to make it happen. A software engineer could pretty clearly choose to do the equivalent of 1-day-per-week's worth of work throughout the year by taking on freelance/consulting projects. Most software engineers don't do this for the simple fact that they'd rather work more and make more.

> You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity.

that's because the source of that productivity wasnt you - it was the invention and capital investment in that machine (which you happen to drive).

In a system which redistributes wealth, you'd get some returns (such as better public services). Under the current system of capitalism, there's not that much redistribution.

You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.)

A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.

You’re not even disputing the parents point. More output with the same input doesn’t mean people are working less. It means they’re working the same amount…

For more stuff..

I am not making a point on whether workers work harder now than they did before. But at the same time, there are clearly ways in which we have had technological advancements that produce goods and services with less input (where 'input' includes natural resources, human labor, etc) than would have been required before these advancements. I used this example in another reply, but (just off the top of my head) computers + internet have allowed abundant knowledge lookup and communication for far less input cost than the services would have required previously.

Generalizing here, there is 'growth due to making people work harder' and 'growth due to inventing stuff that lets us do new things' and whatever your views are on each of these, I think most anti-growth articles ignore the latter.

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