Degrowth and the monkey's paw
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
Is the economy made for man, or man for the economy?
We (collectively, western, industrial, etc) are trapped in the "growth" thinking - the way out of any problem is to grow out of it, which works fairly well until you start hitting the problems caused by growth - which, I'd argue, we are now facing. Carbon emissions, general "stripping large parts of the planet for the mineral goodies under it," etc. And, of course, we've ended up in a debt-based economy that works great, until growth slows down.
It's going to be an interesting ride, and the best suggestions I've seen are to simply get ahead of the curve, and figure out how to live on LESS (Less Energy, Simulation, and Stuff) now, while we still have the resources to make mistakes and figure out the details - because that lower energy future (or, at least, more limits on energy, growth, etc) is coming down the tunnel at a good clip.
I deal with it regularly, since my office is a standalone, off grid power system. I just use less energy, by an order of magnitude or so, in the winter - and I bundle up out here.
I fully expect us as a society to hit the various walls at speed, and have to find some way to do something useful with the various pieces remaining.
But, given that, "working out the useful things one can do beforehand" is useful - because you can afford to screw up, to learn what works well locally, and have the resources to experiment. I'll point to things like "direct solar heating of homes" (solar thermal air collectors) as the sort of thing that take some learning how to build and use effectively, and it's useful to work that out while Home Depot still is tolerably well stocked. And/or to collect supplies ahead of time.
I'm aware it's a pessimistic view, but it's been working just fine for modeling reality.
edit: no techno optimism here... poking around for people's ideas on regular folks relations to state and capital on this issue
Something like "Go Team Star Trek! Humans through the universe!" regardless of the chances of it actually happening?
I think the chances of doing much useful in terms of "long term sustainability and living within our energy budget" went sailing past in the 1980s, so adapting to a lower energy and lower energy reliability future seems wise to me. Though there are certainly useful things that can be done on the path. But I'd be happy with a return to far more local systems of food and energy production, and people adapting to living within the currently available energy at any given point in time. Having "solar days" in the winter like we have snow days is a lot easier than building power systems to deal with a week of heavy inversion at "normal energy use."
Do you see much evidence that suggests otherwise?
Pendulums swing.
Right now we're in the part of the cycle where man is being adapted to the economic system (so the latter). We're in a situation where more and more capital seems to be ending up in fewer hands - the rise of AI seems likely to accelerate that trend and lead to even more income inequality if we're not very careful. The rising tide was supposed to raise all boats, but that doesn't seem to be happening as much anymore as it did earlier.
We've sort of been here before (The Gilded Age) and we were able to get the pendulum to swing back in favor of the workers through mass labor movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - that was a move towards the economy made for man. Will we be able to do that again?
In contrast, today, we have government expenditures at a full third of GDP[1] and progressive taxation (with public calls by elected officials for truly confiscatory levels of taxation), yet real wages (as you point out) are rising a lot slower[2] than in the Gilded Age, and the poverty rate has more or less remained constant for decades[3].
I, too, wonder if we can move towards an economy made for man again.
[0]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14555/w145...
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=8fX
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
[3]: https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/private/pdf/154286/...
[1] starts at 1947; [2] starts at 1979; [3] starts at 1964. None of your sources show that poverty was less of a problem during the Gilded Age (1877 to 1896). I find it very hard to believe the Gilded Age handled poverty better since it predates Social Security and the Great Depression.
Across OECD countries, there appears to be at least a passing correlation between countries that have a higher ratio of government expenditure to GDP (and are at least commonly perceived to have generous government-provided social benefits) and lack of real wage growth over the past two decades[0].
[0]: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=AV_AN_WAGE
I'd like for humanity to keep going until the average Sri Lankan or Congolese can live like the average Texan or Swiss[0] does now, and hopefully until everyone can live in a true post-scarcity world a la Star Trek.
It's all well and good for an individual living in the developed world to freely choose to try and consume less energy, but degrowth as a whole I'm afraid would mean that the global poor stay globally poor.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
What if the average Texan could use 1/2 as much energy as they do now and still have a decent lifestyle? Even a better lifestyle. In a lot of ways cars are not healthy for us, for example. What if we made more of our trips on ebikes, for example? Much less energy use and a bit of exercise. I'm not sure the average Sri Lankan wants to be as obese as the average Texan - similar for rates of diabetes. I think Sri Lankans can do better than the average Texan by keeping their cities walkable (and bikeable) and not putting in a lot of car-centric development which is the norm in Texas.
Absolutely! This would be marvelous, and can happen through technological advances. Imagine if a lifted F-250 could still get 50mpg ;-)
Jokes aside, you are quite right that an abundance material wealth can sometimes go hand in hand with unhealthy lifestyles. Better to die of too much than too little, I suppose; Texas and Sri Lanka actually have life expectancies very close to each other, at 76 years and change, but in those 76 years, the Texan would have had many more opportunities at the pursuit of happiness than the Sri Lankan, enabled by an order of a magnitude higher energy expenditure per capita.
I'm not sure we can assume that. Sri Lankans might have much less loneliness than Texans, for example. Many of components of happiness don't require large expenditures of money or energy. The US has one of the most isolating cultures in the world - and thus high levels of loneliness. For example, many cultures have what the Italians call La passeggiata which is the evening gathering in a piazza (or similar gathering place in other cultures). People stroll around and chat with neighbors and friends in the sunnier parts of the year. It's something that we Americans tend to be envious of - we don't have this. Instead we fight traffic.
But the fact remains that Sri Lankans immigrate to the US while Americans don't immigrate to Sri Lanka. This is true even for developed countries; in 2018, there were 321k Italians living in the US[1], compared to 15k Americans living in Italy[2], meaning a full half percent of Italians gave up la passeggiata to be in America, whereas 0.005% of Americans did the reverse. If people vote with their feet, they are voting for money and energy over happiness.
I do wish the average American had more access to healthy social lives.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-re...
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
People who seek happy social life tend to not immigrate to America, or often return back.
That's mostly a social thing, not a lifestyle thing. Being unemployed in Italy (or really anywhere) is worse than having a decent job basically anywhere else.
Another thing which I missed every time I was in the states or Canada. You can't just chill in a café for hours. You have to keep consuming constantly, otherwise the waiters start pushing you out.
In most parts of the world you don't need to pay to just exist. Of course there's the expectation that you order something. But not that you leave right away.
Does "still have a decent lifestyle" mean "still have just as good (or better) of a lifestyle" or "have a lifestyle that's only somewhat worse"? If the former, then won't basic economics make it happen automatically without needing to involve politics or force anyone to change anything?
Same applies to Sri Lanka; it's a very sunny place.
BTW stationary batteries can be bulkier and heavier than lithium, as long as they are cheaper per kWh stored. Such chemistries exist and are actively developed.
Your argument about the Sri Lankan and the Congolese is actually aligned with the degrowth movement. One of their key points is that economies of the global north should consume less so that the global south (e.g Sri Lanka and Congo) can continue to grow to support a baseline standard of living for their citizens. In other words, rebalancing the global "budget" - assuming the world actually cares to lift this people out of poverty.
What we should consume less of on the absolute scale is non-renewable and non-recyclable resources, like oil, or land (agricultural and otherwise), or hard-to-recycle plastics. Consuming more electricity is fine if we produce it from sunlight or even uranium and the current stockpile of "nuclear waste". Consuming more steel and aluminum is fine since they are about 100% recyclable. Consuming more wood is also relatively fine, as long as we grow even more trees (and we do).
Any proponent of de-growth should spend a few years in countries like Sri Lanka preferably in a village without access to the last 100 years of medical tech, without access to the internet, without modern water treatment.
It feels okay to advocate for degrowth because we notoriously underestimate how much standard of living increases as a result of growth.
There's a correlation between energy expenditure and comfort, but it's less clear to me that there's a correlation between comfort and happiness.
In fact, I tend to think that too much comfort makes us unhappy in some ways. I definitely think Texans are pretty miserable in comparison to Sri Lankans.
> We've done quite well so far.
The state of the planet says otherwise.
> degrowth as a whole I'm afraid would mean that the global poor stay globally poor.
...or the opposite.
If my (literally and proudly to-the-left-of-Castro communist) ex is anything to go by: billionaires.
I am not clear if she's representative in this regard, what with her being an actual communist and all.
They do not need to work to live well, so why do they work at all? A lot of them might say something like "to improve the world" but the fact of the matter is very few of them are willing to actually _spend money_ (i.e. make a loss) on something which can have a massive benefit (to someone else), they will only ever "invest".
So I say it's very nearly tautological that Billionaires are _exactly_ the people focused on making numbers go up, since every decision they make seems to ultimately revolve around making this happen.
Also I am not a conspiracy theorist and I don't really have any beef with the WEF, but I mean growth is one of their stated goals. If there was ever an elite boogeyman driving for growth wouldn't they be the obvious candidate?
https://www.weforum.org/events/the-growth-summit-jobs-and-op...
I am not trying to argue I am trying to genuinely answer your question.
I doubt most people around here have had contact with the beliefs of most mainstream economists. (What economist is mainstream anyway?)
Wanting something to go up for the sake of going up is how outsiders without the same ideological perspective view it. I was literally just trying to answer the question I don't understand why people are so pedantic on here
GDP would be a positive metric but I think it is flawed and also obsolete. I think other metrics like the HDI/IHDI and the Gini coefficient are better ones, in comparison.
Unfortunately this is about as far as "degrowth" gets: "what if we were just cold?" Or worse, hot? How do we enforce this, anyway? Rationing? Taxes on energy? Have you seen what happens to politicians when gas prices go up?
People complain about fast fashion — should we have a tax on clothes? People moan about airplanes — do we want it to be harder to travel?
>we've ended up in a debt-based economy
If you want to be taken seriously, step one is not adopting Ron Paul's economics rhetoric.
>because that lower energy future (or, at least, more limits on energy, growth, etc) is coming down the tunnel at a good clip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
>Is the economy made for man, or man for the economy?
"The economy" is a description of what people are doing. Do we do things for ourselves, or do we do them for the doing — is this the right question? Is it even a meaningful question?
But I also wouldn't say I'm "cold" out here in the winter, because I dress for the conditions. I'm entirely comfortable out of the wind at 45-50F until the place heats up a bit from my limited energy use and my thermal output (a human is around 100W thermal at rest). Insulating and heating people directly takes a lot less energy than heating entire structures, and radiant heat does a good job of this as well - we should be doing more radiant heat panels in offices in the winter and keep the air a good bit cooler, IMO.
As for debt and interest, I've no idea what of Ron Paul's stuff you think I follow. A debt based economy either grows or defaults, those are pretty much the options as demonstrated by history. It doesn't work well in a degrowth environment, which is a problem that has to be solved (or it will be solved by default).
The economy is a description of what people are doing, but the spirit of the question was, "Are we doing things that align with what we know makes humans happy, healthy, and prosperous, or are we being {driven, influenced, manipulated} to do that which is the most profitable to various well funded corporate entities?" I'll argue we're doing the second, and I could point to a range of areas. But, to keep it short, are people staring at social media feeds endlessly because they want to, or because well paid people have made it their career to find ways to exploit the human brain to keep us doing it, because it's profitable to their companies? I'd argue it's very much the second, and that's an example of "man bending to the whims of the economy," in my (admittedly short) phrase.
It seems like people on both the left and the right (as well as the middle) are coming to this conclusion. There's widespread agreement about the diagnosis, but a huge amount of disagreement about the treatment.
> are people staring at social media feeds endlessly because they want to, or because well paid people have made it their career to find ways to exploit the human brain to keep us doing it, because it's profitable to their companies? I'd argue it's very much the second, and that's an example of "man bending to the whims of the economy," in my (admittedly short) phrase.
Exactly. The billionaire calling himself "a free speech absolutist" just wants to be able to do the manipulating more directly (as well as his competitors in that space).
I don't think Ron Paul is the only one who would call our economy "debt-based". Look at interest rates: when they go up people complain because they can't afford to borrow to buy a house or car - the economy tends to head into recession. That seems to indicate that debt is an important part of the economy.
Like on the whole, people simply won't let it happen. Maybe in a few countries, but the young people in India and the various large countries of Africa aren't going to do with less just because you think it's a good idea.
Is this assuming some kind of breakthrough in fusion power? Or just cheaper solar, wind, tidal power?
ROI on solar is double/triple/quadruple in Italy/Spain/California/Texas/India/Southern China/SE Asia...
The easy answer here is to simply use energy when it's available. I do this in my office. It's a bright, sunny day, and I have a bunch of extra compute rigs doing assorted BOINCy tasks at the moment, though sometimes they do video transcode or other things. When it's a dark winter day, I use a lot less energy.
And before getting too excited about the state of lithium energy storage, grab yourself a copy of Cobalt Red by Kara. It's an exceedingly disturbing read on the state of cobalt mining in DRC.
And then there are alternatives for in place battery storage. They just don't beat lithium-ion given the relative levels of development and current low cost of lithium-ion.
Powerwalls don’t use LFP yet (they use NMC) but other battery vendors use LFP.
This is asked all the time. Google "economy growth reddit" and you'll see a bunch of posts questioning why it's important.
> I deal with it regularly, since my office is a standalone, off grid power system. I just use less energy, by an order of magnitude or so, in the winter - and I bundle up out here.
I mean, yes, on margin for a single person, this reduces overall energy consumption. However, cities are more energy-efficient per capita.
Take a look at the energy expenditure per-capita states by state, and you'll see that the states with the smallest energy expenditure per-capita generally have the largest cities, and the ones with the most energy expenditure are rural states: https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/....
This is a pretty awful way of looking anything up to be honest. Reddit is just a big echo chamber that will mindlessly parrot anything that is the common consensus for the particular subreddit.
What I'm trying to get at is that the original commenter is implying that people rarely question the value of economic growth, but if you google search the term "economic growth" generically, with no prompt on questioning its value, on a popular forum site, you'll see that one of the top questions is questioning its value.
The fundamental problem, IMO, is unintuitive: it’s property rights. Specifically, we have all these complex financial instruments (assets) and have commodified/securitized/priced in many assumptions resulting in a price. Even small changes in those underlying assumptions can hugely affect asset prices and result in some entities losing massive amounts of asset value. This is very upsetting to precisely the people with the most power and influence, who don’t even stand to gain much from things like income redistribution or a reduction in output so we get what you’d expect given that
That’s why we often end up with hugely wasteful things like the military industrial complex, US insurance system, or the grant system in the EU. Once people are extracting huge amounts of value from something, even if everybody else would be better of on average if the thing stopped, it’s hard to stop it.
There’s also of course the global competitiveness problem. As you note we can simply reduce consumption to address that, but the semantics of that at scale are a hard sell in many cases. When it’s demand driven, like central business district coffee shops going out of business because consumers don’t want to shop there anymore due to WFH, it’s not so bad. But if it’s not demand driven, you end up in a situation like the UK is in now where inflation goes haywire and everybody is sad that the economy sucks.
My take is that is terribly often asked that question. And the degrowth-camp have been answering with 'is not really about the economy, it's about [insert your fab quality of life kpi]'
My take - and probably not terribly unique - is that while the traditional political discourse focuses on growth as a goal in itself - we don't measure growth and set growth goals because thats what we want. We want the things that 'they' claim to come with growth. And while economical growth is maybe not the best indicator for how well other things are - in aggregate - it is definitely not the worst one.
Increased efficiency directly addresses the problem you raised.
Creating LED light bulbs that produce the same amount of light at 1/6th the electrical power just freed up 5/6th’s of that power for something else at no net increase in electrical generation.
As for economic growth. The point is to increase material living standards but this isn't the case anymore. We've already peaked, as of 20 years ago in the US. If you take GDP per capita and divide it by any reasonable measure of inflation such as the case shiller housing index, you'll find that our ability to shelter people has decreased for nearly 25 years now and arguably even longer than that. 200 years ago, Henry david thoreaugh was saying people had mortgages of 10 to 15 years which he felt was an extremely long time. Now, it's quite common to have them be 30 years!
Sure, it could be caused by policies pushing money from growth into more sustainable and socially conscious policies, but I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of this.
I suspect the real reason is simply that the economy has pivoted away from innovation and production and into rent seeking. I see quite a lot of evidence of this, one of the biggest being the increasing focus on property investment (existing property rather than construction) and ponzi schemes like crypto.
The degrowth we are seeing isn't due to any deliberate push for degrowth, it's just capitalism eating itself.
The West has a demographic problem, that could be hitting hard and I'm not saying it explains everything, but it's a significant enough issue that it could basically be the whole thing.
China is selling us a ton of stuff very cheaply, which reducees jobs and profits in the West, but does provide surpluses that we don't measure. I mean, just look at photos from 30 years ago: we have way more selection of clothes, electronics. We love our apps and mobile phones. Those are distinctly valuable, but not very profitible on the books.
Definitely there has been a lack of growth and foundation of new industry, and that should be a concern.
For those wondering, GDP matters because wealth tends to make a lot of problems go away. Go to a poor country - they have garbage healthcare because they can't afford it it's that simple. Obviously money is not everything but it's definitely a thing.
We collectively spend a lot of time staring at them, for sure. That the best paid minds of our time have set themselves to finding ways to "improve engagement" endlessly in various ways and dark patterns probably has a lot to do with that, and I'm far from certain that it's good for human... anything, really. Health, sanity, happiness, the works. We've been told that "social media" (which is what a lot of the staring at phone involves) connects us, but study after study demonstrates the exact opposite - that it atomizes us and alienates us, with plenty of follow on impacts on happiness, contentedness, etc. It's a great gig, make people unhappy and then sell their eyeballs to people who want to the sell them the solutions to that problem, but let's not pretend it's more than just seeking more money.
There is certainly a range of things that can be done with more money to spend on a society, but American healthcare being "staggeringly expensive" doesn't also mean it's "the best."
And the demographics in China are arguably more challenging than in the US (and the US is probably better positioned to address the challenges via immigration).
Our #1 'economics' problems is that we do not measure 'consumer surplus'.
If everything all of a sudden cost 1 cent to buy, the GDP would disappear, but the value to each of us would be immense assuming we could figure out a way to divide the surpluses evenly without a war.
Consumer surplus is variable, each of us 'values' things in different ways, but still, it should be on the books.
Inflation measures try to accommodate for that (aka stuff getting better) but it's hard.
My god man, I remember 'before Walmart was everywhere' and you just could not buy 'stuff'.
I remember in the 90's going to a big Walmart and thinking: "I could buy everything I ever needed here" if I didn't care about brand, keeping up with the Jonses. I don't think young people realize how revolutionary it is that we live with a super abundance of stuff. Particularly for working class people, it's changed everything.
We live in an age of material abundance - and now arguably over abundance (a different kind of surplus), and much of our problems are derived from that and how we align our finances.
We have to deal with the real estate problem, and, the massive increase in healthcare. Healthcare will be 40% of the economy in 25 years.
It will be interesting to see how California's approach to this problem plays out. We have had local regulations and NIMBY groups forestall new construction/denser housing, but the state pushed through legislation to forcibly override those local blockers. Incentives should now be aligned for builders to build, but local homeowners will continue to fight against it because their incentives are not aligned.
Eventually, problems do solve themselves. One way or another. It just may not be in the desired way.
As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead. It would be nice to solve some of these problems within our lifetimes.
Stopping growth does not imply achieving affordability on a reasonable timescale. Over several decades, maybe. But letting pain solve problems usually requires more than people realize it will take.
Mayhap the best we can do is ensure supply is more than adequate and wages rise accordingly.
Where this heads is towards unaffordability for those running the basics of society, from sewers and utilities to healthcare and retail and shipping. Which will result in greater dysfunction, even if there is still some level of functionality. The future that California is heading towards is far higher levels of homelessness, in far more areas, even as there is massive wealth. It is towards a more dystopian future.
The example is commonly cited, but it’s irrational (though that doesn’t mean people don’t do it).
Developed denser areas are higher value than sparse rural ones. For example, if the area around your house suddenly became New York and you owned a SFH sized lot in Manhattan, you’d be rich.
There are many nimby groups opposed to construction, but hardly ever have I seen it due to being “I want the value of my house to go up”.
Source: I own a house in the Bay Area and talk to my neighbors about what they think.
Very few NIMBYs will openly admit to wanting to maintain their property values because it's a much less noble sounding cause than "preserving the character of the neighborhood" or whatever.
1. https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334...
2. https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-...
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3867764
When I talk to my neighbors, I just do not get a sense of “oh yeah this dude is actually trying to maximize land value”. I see people just trying to have a decent life and raise a family.
All these comments that allude to “quiet part out loud” or whatever seriously sound like conspiracy theories to me. Call me naive, but the folks in my neighborhood are not a cabal of real estate moguls. Though, yes, some are nimby
Some may be small, all may be worth it, but they do exist.
And straight up cash can make many go away either in the form of reduced taxes, improved services, a new park, etc.
The quiet part nobody wants to say out loud is that the NIMBYs aren't opposed to construction to make their house value go up, it's to keep it from going down. Nobody wants the undeveloped land in their subdivision to get turned into a landfill or chemical processing plant. Nobody wants a collection of SFHs bought up, bulldozed, and replaced by mid-rise apartments that will be part of an "affordable housing project" (which is a euphemism for rent-subsidized government housing). Nobody wants the strip mall down the street replaced with a homeless shelter.
What people don't want is a nice place to live turned into a place where they and their family get exposed to environmental toxins, crime, poverty, and violence. This also has the side-effect of lowering property values, but that's not why anyone cares for the most part, it's that they /LIVE THERE/ and don't want to live near squalor and desperation.
Ideally, for those who believe this, their house is solo on a block and then around it is nothing but parks paid for by other taxpayers.
California has only made a few tiny steps toward allowing construction. They are good steps, don't get me wrong, but there is still a very long way to go before California can even begin to catch up on its decades of under-building.
I mean, every authoritarian knows that urgency, spartanism and desperation only lasts so long in aligning people towards common causes.
It seems to conflate different forms of degrowth, and assumes whatever is happening in the UK recently is the same sort of thing that's always being discussed when degrowth is discussed.
Increasing trade barriers and regulation while holding population constant might result in economic degrowth, but it doesn't necessarily track population degrowth in a healthy or productive way.
I do think that it's interesting to think about some of the questions being raised, but the arguments seem to do a disservice to rigorous discussion of degrowth and the development of solutions to population dilemmas.
If I ever meet a degrowth advocate that can speak with nuance and clarity and can respond to questions enough to allow dialogue, I will be very surprised, and pleased.
The idea here is that GDP should rise from a rise in productivity, rather than relying on an increase in population or working hours or increased environmental exploitation to achieve growth.
It's annoyingly used in the case of this article to point to economic stagnation and say "look here's the de-growth you wanted". When the whole point is that GDP should be increasing, just not at the expense of the citizens or the planet.
My point is that GDP per capita can increase because of reasons that don't necessarily make your life better. Working longer hours, or even an increase in productivity with a simultaneous increase in inequality, meaning that the per-capita GDP is increasing but income is stagnating.
> unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population.
My point in bringing up population was that our GDP growth can be attributed to population growth, which is likely going to be a logistic curve. So we can't rely on population growth to contribute to GDP.
You are underestimating how quickly exponential growth gets out of hand. Take population for example. If we wanted to have 1% annual population growth, in ~12 100 years the volume of humans would be 9 x 10^60 m^3.
If we started expanding into space right now, and we expanded at the speed of light, in 12 100 years we'd have access to 6 x 10^60 m^3, which is not big enough.
Of course by then we may have bioengineered smaller humans. That doesn't help much. It just changes that 12 100 to 12 800.
Or how about energy? If human energy use grows by 1% a year in ~9300 years we will be using 5.3 x 10^59 Joules per year. That's about the same as the amount of energy you would get if the entire mass of the Milky Way galaxy were converted to energy (E=mc^2).
Forget the Milky Way. Let's think big. What if we converted the entire freaking universe--all the observable mass, and all the dark matter, and all the dark energy--into energy for humanity. At 1% annual growth from now we'd be using that much per year in 12 000 years.
When agriculture was invented around 12000 years ago growth picked up, with the population doubling around every 1000 years. That lasted until around 5000 years ago, when the population was around 100 million. There wasn't much grown for the next couple thousand years.
Around 3000 years ago growth picked up and the population tripled by 2000 years ago. It slowed again until around the industrial revolution and then picked up quite a bit. The world population growth rate went from around 0.1% per year before the industrial revolution to around 0.6%.
The 20th century brought many developments that allowed for even more growth. That allowed the growth rate to hit around 2.24% in 1964. It's been declining since then, dropping to a little below 1% a couple years ago.
It's been pretty much the same pattern since we became Homo sapiens. When there is an increase in available resources or we get new technology that lets us better utilize resources we can have a relatively short period of exponential growth until we reach the limits of those resources and then growth slows or stops.
With the industrial revolution and then the developments in the 20th century we were able to have about a century of sustained high growth, but we're reaching the end of that expansion and the growth rate is declining.
We'll almost surely have more breakthroughs that allow for growth increases, but some people want to plan based on the assumption that we'll have such breakthroughs often enough that we can count on high growth indefinitely.
The point of the galaxy-straining limit calculation is that the past pattern of periods of exponential growth being followed by declining growth is something inherent in exponential growth. It's not something that can be escaped by finding new places to settle or more efficient ways to use existing resources. Thus, we should be planning on the recent period of exponential growth ending rather than becoming depending on exponential growth continuing indefinitely.
And of course, growth may hop onto other planets.
As far as I've seen, there absolutely is broad agreement among scientists about the physical reality at play. But (as usual) soft-headed business and political people ignore what they can't face.
As recently as a few years ago, Ehrlich stated that a collapse of civilization is a "near certainty" in the coming decades; never mind the fact that had any of the predictions in his 1968 book come true, there might be only half as many humans now as there actually are.
Has humanity's scientific prowess improved so much since then that today's predictions are that much more accurate? Perhaps, but considering that we haven't put another man on the moon since then, maybe not. There's a growing problem in science of fake papers[0] due to the "publish or perish" nature of academia; it points to at least some level of incentive for there to be "a broad agreement among scientists" about the state of things, for career and funding purposes if nothing else.
In the meantime, the "physical reality at play" is such that the number of deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters today is about one-third that of 50 years ago. That's not one-third of the rate; that's one-third in absolute number of deaths, despite the human population having literally doubled over that time. We can attribute this to a higher capacity for developing countries to deal with disasters due to their growing material wealth.
As usual, high-minded visionaries never let a crisis go to waste. Remember that Al Gore's Nashville house uses about 200k kWh a year (about 20x the average American house); Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry routinely flies aboard his own private jet; and Martha's Vineyard, supposedly being literally eaten away today[2], is home to the Obamas' 30-acre, 11-and-three-quarter-million-dollar property.
[0]: https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-pape...
[1]: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/weather-relate...
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/business-climate-environment-and-...
Not a single person (I mean that quite literally) familiar with the actual, hands-on, empirical work going on in the field by tens of thousands of real scientists in thousands of research institutions private and public alike in a couple of hundred nations covering every ecosystem on the planet is in doubt that the living world is in deep peril.
Neither is anyone who has ever lived for any period outside of a well-protected urban area. My region has been swept with an unprecedented sequence of floods and fires over the last few years. Two almost total destructions by flood in 2022 alone. We will never again have permanent road & telecoms infrastructure (it is routinely destroyed). And that's just the most obvious surface. Anyone familiar with the flora, fauna, and water systems here knows that the ecosystems are in an advanced state of collapse. That's repeated over almost the entirety of the globe.
Forget historical culture wars. Just survey contemporary, real-world, empirical science. I'm not going to cherry-pick a few irrelevant links from a google scurry like you have done. You need to do a bit of homework. You just look daft without it. Get over your fear and have a good, clear-sighted look at reality. You'll probably feel better.
You must be a communist that wants to destroy people's quality of life! You couldn't possibly just want the de-growth of wasteful production to a circular and more sustainable economy; you must just want to destroy the economy itself!! You hate poor countries maybe you should try living in one so I can keep burning 20 liters of gasoline to get to work every day. It can't be that you want to make the QoL more equal for everyone on the globe.
Plus we can just kill the majority of life on Earth, we'll just genetically modify replacements anyway, it can't be that hard, we're HUMANS and HISTORY shows us that we'll be fine from all the other times where we were at about >40% land use for agriculture and facing melting icecaps! My friend loves to ride their motorcycle without a helmet, it hasn't hurt them yet. (what do you mean "survivorship bias?") Besides everything that has spent million of years evolving into its niche will be able to adapt in the next ~100 years so as to not break the ecosystem it exists in.
/s if you couldn't tell
In some ways the physical-reality-averse 'realists' are even less solidaristic than your satire suggests. "Humans", you would think, rationally includes the vast numbers of climate refugees (millions now, hundreds of millions in decades to come) - yet somehow I suspect they will not be welcomed with open arms by techno-'realists' when their islands and lowlands go permanently under. When one-third of Pakistan was recently underwater I didn't hear loud assertions of human solidarity from them.
You're right, it's basically manifest destiny 2.0.
It's actually quite sad how techbros ruin the perception of legitimately useful technology because they're too dumb to try and figure out how to use it beyond a "How can I make a quick buck with this and be the next FAANG, I'm going to be the next Elon Musk brooooooooooo." Then when their half baked attempt at monetization flops they burn the public's perception and make it harder to fund other things. They also seem to think they "understand the science" and that anything can be managed with it while refusing to acknowledge that the body of unknown knowledge exceeds what we do know, and even what we do know is mostly rough approximations that fall apart when you try and stretch them beyond their narrow scope.
(And there's no way there could be things we haven't accounted for that would accelerate issues... https://phys.org/news/2023-05-rapid-ice-greenland.html) (And millions of people being displaced won't lead to billions of people being disrupted or any wars over the remaining viable land and affect the economy, right? Wait war is usually good for the economy, maybe we can spin this climate catastrophe as a positive thing!)
The sickening part is that if this experiment in egotistical anthropocentrism goes horrifically sideways I know we're just going to be stuck listening to "How could we have known this would happen?! Why are you even focused on that, you should be worried about your survival!" from those in their yachts and those still deluded to believe it was a good idea, over and over again until you die from a marauder, hunger, thirst, or a brain aneurysm from listening to them.
Well said - that really is key. Fortunately or not (depending on your values), it's just a given that if there's a means out of the crisis (who knows?), tech just is going to be a major part of the plan.
I don't think this was necessarily true, say, 40 years or so ago. It might have been possible then to put economies on slower burns (pun intended), and concentrate on social/political/ethical adjustments, wealth redistribution, urban redesign etc.
But there's isn't time for long-term solutions now. Short/medium-term emergency survival is going to require massive tech deployments. But if they're going to work, the direction needs to be determined by rational considerations, not neurotic and childish billionaire egos.
Having said that, I don't think it's going to happen. A crash is more likely at this late stage.
For all practical intents and purposes, the finite resources available on this planet and in the universe are more than sufficient, though.
How can we know this is true? Like immediately, sure. But can we keep growing and extracting resources like we do for another thousand years? Ten thousand years?
Like we're already pushing the limit on arable land. It doesn't seem plausible we'll be able to somehow increase crop yields even times to sustain the sort of growth we're projecting. At that point, the entire planet's land area would need to be farmland, even if it is currently desert or mountains or whatever.
I think you will have difficulty coming up for a definition of "growth" in humanity such that it makes sense for the argument you are trying to make. At least, I hav been searching for somebody to define what they mean by "growth" and have only gotten very vague platitudes such that the definition is y useful for basing further reasoning.
In any reasonably modern use of the word, "growth" is defined as "exponential growth" - percent year over year growth. We expect companies to grow by N percent, every year - this is how expectations are phrased. And while it may be a small number, "1% growth, year over year," is still an exponential curve.
The first question that matters is, "Can exponential growth continue forever on a finite planet?" We do live on a finite planet. Pick whatever metric you want and continue exponentially, you will run into limits, eventually. Various physics bloggers have played with this rather extensively over the years. A trivially true statement we don't often consider is, "Anything that can't go on forever will stop at some point."
Combine those two, and exponential growth on a finite planet will stop at some point.
People try to argue around it via "decoupling" or "But asteroids" or various other methods, and some have some effects, but so far, they've either been "one time" sort of gains (various lighting or transportation efficiency gains), or "slowing the rate of the exponential growth" - but not fundamentally changing the problem of it being exponential.
Given that, if you agree with both, there are then two general categories of response to it. The first, and I'd argue the current default, is to kick the can, and assume that someone or something else will fix the problem (or, more practically, that you'll die before it becomes a problem you have to deal with). This means that the collisions with the end of growth will be uncontrolled and generally quite destructive (as "accelerating into the approaching cliff face" tends to be).
The alternative, which is what the degrowth movement argues for, is finding ways to terminate the exponential growth before we hit those walls. Under our current economic systems, that does imply something that looks like a recession/depression, but that's not the goal - that's just a transition from a "must grow" economy to a "steady state" sort of economy in action.
And there's a lot of debate what it looks like, but I'm not convinced it's worth going into the details of that here, now.
So... if you're going to criticize a movement, at least try to understand it first?
If not, then we will eventually have to deal with the problem. We can do it now, or later. Personally, I think "sooner" is better than "later" to deal with it, because I don't see us meaningfully getting off the planet, so maybe let's not trash the place worse.
But we clearly disagree on this matter, and I don't see a point in continuing to go around on it. Time will tell which of us happens to be closer to correct.
For example Nuclear energy and weapons, bio-engineering, AI, genetic modification, fossil fuel based power generation, factory farming and more.
I’d argue they nearly all the technologies on that list are economically driven, or have a an economically driven component. This is dangerous because it means someone will invent potentially harmful shit to keep riding the wave of economics.
Yes, I believe exponential growth can continue forever, for 2 reasons:
- 1) because you assume the universe is finite. This is a very long shot, not supported by mainstream science or theories.
- 2) should the 1st point be eventually disproved and the universe has boundaries, I still do, because growth isn't only hardware. Software growth can leverage the increase gains from hardware (more storage density, lower power requirements etc)
What's more plausible is that the growth rate will eventually tend towards a much lower value when most of the human needs and wants are satiated.
Stagnation is implausible, because even if needs might be finite, wants are not.
What's totally implausible is degrowth.
Unending limitless growth has not.
> Software growth can leverage the increase gains from hardware (more storage density, lower power requirements etc)
You should probably learn some physics if you want to make statements about what's phsyically possible. Whether the universe is finite or not is completely irrelevant. The portion of it humanity can access is finite, thanks to dark energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVoh27gJgME
Of course, even if you reject dark energy, you're still limited by pure geometry and the speed of light. Human resource growth has a hard upper bound proportional to (elapsed time)^3, because of three spatial dimensions and the speed of light. And as we all know, any exponential growth is faster than any polynomial grown, in the long term.
And at the other end, there is a maximum efficiency possible. You cannot work below particular thresholds, thanks to uncertainty.
There is no escape from the fact that exponential growth always ends.
FYI, ad hominem are not nice
> if you reject dark energy, you're still limited by pure geometry and the speed of light.
I do reject dark energy.
And I'd like to remind you that you have a lot of assumptions baked-in.
To cut in short, if in the worst case there's no spooky-effect-at-a-distance and uncertainty prevents us to go to subatomic levels, and if there are no subspaces, then yes, growth might be limited to the (elapsed time)^3.
That's a lot of ifs, and that'd still be not an argument for degrowth - just for a very large upper ceiling that'd still be compatible with continuous (and large!) growth.
Let's explore the science before making the doomer conclusion we must brace for degrowth, because I see that as an argument driven by ideology, not by science.
The claim I made is that you should learn some physics, and your response only serves to reinforce that.
And a very large upper bound on exponential growth is still an upper bound. It won't last forever. Once you accept that, you are ready to face the questions of when and how it should end to minimize the damage done by its end.
You are stuck in ideology (assuming growth is damaging) and you keep being rude, so there's no point in trying to talk to you.
Yes, because money is infinite thanks to it being a social construct.
In the 70s, the limits movement had measurable arguments - which did not pan out. Apparently their successors response was to renounce all measurement and make an argument about maybe the far far future. If we used that 'logic' in the past we'd still be living in caves.
I agree that our political undercurrents suggest an inchoate inability to actually change things. Stuffs all fucked up - for lack of a better way of putting it - and we don't know how to get into a sustainable situation. We've gotten by on growth for years because we could, and now we have to actually figure it out.
This is called entropy. All things towards tend toward disorder unless energy is applied upon. Insofar as degrowth advocates want to limit humanity's harnessing of energy, I find it very difficult to support their position.
The combination of smugness and gaslighting makes me genuinely angry.
I genuinely didn't expect the next phase of climate change denial to be trying to rewrite history to blame environmentalists for stopping progress.
Instead, the accusation is that ostensibly "environmental" groups are prioritizing "human enjoyment of green environments" over actual ecosystem preservation and climate action.
This is a trend for all the environmental groups that have not updated strategy since the 1970s. Preserving our current economy, our current system, means certain ecocide. Yet these groups are entirely set up to preserve the status quo, rather than accelerating drastic change to the economy and human systems.
In my local town, this manifests as aged people advocating to stop the construction of a building that could house 100 people, because 3 urban trees would be cut down, while at the same time accepting that those 100 people will not be putting pressure on housing in further away, more sensitive areas, where housing will result in hundreds of trees being cut down. In short, they are preserving their view, preserving existing human structures, instead of allowing the needs to humans to be met with the lowest environmental impact.
This is also manifesting as people blocking newel student housing on campus, using "environmental" laws, even though the result is that these same students must now commute long distances at much much higher environments costs than being able to live on campus.
Perhaps the CPRE and RSPB are different than what's going on in the US. But here in the US, the backwards "environmental groups cause more damage locally than even Murdoch or Koch, and do it hypocritically. To me, this makes them villains greater than Koch and Murdoch, at least in local action.
POSIWID. The Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea is not judged by its name but by its actions. So be it for the environmentalists and their ilk.
If you fail at X and succeed at not X, you're a Not X organization. Sure, I know I know it's the corporations. But you did act as well, and you always succeeded at not X and failed at X. That makes you a Not X Organization. What you win at is what you are.