This can't go on (2021)
cold-takes.com
cold-takes.com
Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.
Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.
Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and education, but on everything as the price of living in society and are expected to make regular payments?
What is “the size of the economy” and how is it relevant over a thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without knowing this.
Despite the “size of the economy,” skyrocketing, peoples’ lives are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.
I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. In 1923, there were people in Queens who took the train into Manhattan to work at a pharmacy, saving up to buy a radio. Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. The economy is “bigger” but thanks to inflation, does it matter? So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming.
Average hours worked per week was about 25% more than today, with much more of your earnings going to necessity. Your odds of surviving from 18 to retirement age were roughly 50-50. You might not expect to be able to afford to actually retire depending upon your occupation.
> Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today.
A cheap radio in 1923 cost far more than a cheap laptop today. Even more so if we compare to typical wages, and even more so if we compare to disposable income.
> So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming.
Resource intensity per person is far higher than in 1923. See the graph on page 3 of https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf
I, for one, resent that modern medicine has decided to debase phrenology as a science. /s
Maybe for the surviving people 2123 will be ok but the mass death that seems likely before then will suck.
I don't see a way out of a massive redistribution of who lives where, which will come with strife and maybe death.
The good news was that we could seed clouds by just spraying salt water from the ocean. The water would evaporate and the salt would just fall back into the ocean after it seeded more clouds.
A. Playing an incompetent god
B. Playing a competent god
I prefer B.
Not really. Penicillin was ~1930. Ford Air Transport Service was founded in 1925.
Typical people didn't have a whole lot. Indoor plumbing was only starting to become commonplace in the late 1920s. Radio only reached the majority of homes in the 1930s. Only about half of families had a car by 1923.
If you include toilets alone and apartments with shared toilet facilities, the majority was reached a bit earlier-- around 1930, meaning that I judged indoor plumbing was rapidly becoming commonplace in the late 20s.
In 1923, a huge chunk of households still used kerosene lamps as a primary means of lighting (it was a decent percentage in 1940, even).
We have domestic electric refrigerators (since 1927). Cold beer on a hot afternoon.
The development of refrigeration has transformed the world’s economy, and is a good example of how technology can multiply economic growth.
We have not descended back into feudalism; technology hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
It's a very delightful stretch of the imagination to put those two in the same sentence.
Factory (making HVAC) had a truck-sized door open to the elements at all times.
And workplace health and safety has changed a lot since 1923, like you're no longer supposed to use bare hands when threading synthetic wool through a mix of acid and formaldehyde: https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E
I think you could probably back that one up earlier than "100 years ago".
Yet birth can involve medical procedures to protect the life of both child and mother. When and how often we choose to have children is different. We don't need to have as many children (indeed, it is undesirable to have as many children) because of that last point, how and when we die. While the causes of death to the body may be the same, the distribution of those causes is different since we tend to live to an older age.
About 10 years ago, I went to an abandoned cemetary in a remote community. It was quite tragic simply seeing the distribution of those deaths. A great many were infants. A great many more were teens and young adults. Then there were the elders. While we still have deaths at all ages, we don't have as many people dying so young because the in between things, the factors in people's lives that cause them to die at a young age, are not a part of our lives.
We must be careful about over generalizations and trivializing the challenges of past eras.
My whole point is it really depends on the interpretation of fundamentally. I am not advocating for any interpretation in particular.
I thought it was completely uncontroversial. It is the old topic of Parmenides (nothing changes) or Heraclitus (everything is in permanent change).
As for changes:
> For biodiversity loss, the estimated current boundary level of >100 extinctions per million species-years exceeds the space available in the figure.
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m...
I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention recessions and outright deflations.
(Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of per atom in the galaxy as we currently have in total.)
So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something very radical would have to change. (We discover how to teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this galaxy. It turns out that humans really are immaterial souls that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of level of radical-ness.)
Hence, either the growth we are all used to will have to slow dramatically, or some other radical change will have to happen, or both.
None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would invalidate the argument.
(When people talk about economic growth, they never mean growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly. They never mean mere population increase, independent of the wealth of that population. That would be silly.)
It's not clear at all and I certainly don't think that's the case, personally. Dollar numbers went up, population went up (barely - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...). Wealth was extracted and concentrated, not necessarily grown. The wealth was extracted from more primitive foreign economies as the poor of the US became less attractive for labor. The number of fabs/factories that moved out the US is a telling factor.
The middle class of Asia happily became the workhorse of the US. The median quality of life for the planet improved, but that was about technology and efficiency of the systems moving about goods...to the richer countries profiting.
The movie Outsourced was an on-the-nose look at the effect the US had on poorer nations from the 2000s to today.
It seems to me that ...
... in general poor people, and especially poor people in poor countries, don't have all that much wealth to extract, so if rich people in rich countries have become substantially richer in real terms (which seems hard to deny) it's not clear that it can have come from poor people in poor countries;
... poor people in poor countries have in fact been getting richer, not poorer, for the last several decades;
... surely if poor people in the US become less attractive as employees the effect is to make people in "more primitive foreign economies" richer rather than poorer (because those people start taking jobs that would previously have been done by poor people in the US, and miserable though those jobs may be compared with the ones we[1] are lucky enough to have, presumably they're better than the ones they had before because otherwise they wouldn't have taken them);
... the question was about the world economy, not the US economy, and I don't see any particular reason to assume that when a fab or factory moves from the US to somewhere else it makes the world poorer (or for that matter that it makes the world richer).
[1] Meaning "folks on HN in general"; of course there will be exceptions.
There's definitely a case to be made that since somewhere around 1980 most gains have gone disproportionately to richer people. Or for that matter that all the time most gains go disproportionately to richer people. (Which shouldn't be a surprise. Being rich means having more resources to use to make things go the way you want, and most people want to be richer. If at any place and time economic gains aren't going disproportionately to richer people, it's probably because a vigorous effort is being made to make that not happen despite its "natural" tendency to do so.) But, again, it doesn't look to me as if poorer people are generally getting poorer in real terms, and even if they were they don't have enough for the rich to get much richer just by taking from them.
Energy use seems likely to remain a bottleneck? Even if the energy itself became much cheaper, you need to figure out what to do with the heat.
By today's standards, I'd probably agree. But in 100, 200, 500 and certainly 1000 years time, I suspect we'll have quite different ideas of what economic growth looks like.
Further suppose you own one electron. At 5% growth a year in that means that the number of electrons you own will double every 14 years or so.
The total number of electrons in the universe is on the order of 10^80, lg(10^80) = 266.
So in about 4,000 you will own every electron in the universe and need to find another universe to keep this rate of growth going for another 14 years.
Or maxing out their levels in a realistic video game…
Whatever you do, it's not "this" going on.
But even if it was, there's some maximum level of information that can cram into a human brain (regardless of if it's natural or an uploaded consciousness), and if the data rate giving you fulfilling experiences goes up 2% per year, then we go from "half-full" to "overloaded" in 35 years.
This is just the worldwide version of GDP.
This is false. He links to an explanation of what he means by it in the very first footnote. (That link points here, btw: https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth/ )
Except, it isn’t regulating to 2.2, is it? Many countries are already well below 2.2 and more are falling below that level each year. I assume the population implosion will have some affect on the economy.
This is the real problem. The planet have resources to sustain 11 billion people.
Real wages is consistently declining in the West over the last 50 years, as well incentives to raise children. These economies will stagnate, if not spiral negatively, as less consumers leads to lower financial ability to raise new generations.
Not just the west but also China, Japan, South Korea.
The Anglo-Saxons told stories of the Giants who built the aqueducts, because the technology for building them was lost.
If you looked at GDP for Europe, it dived. Completely collapsed. Trade between areas of the former Empire ceased. Barbarians looted cities and destroyed infrastructure.
It took us a few hundred years to recover. But we did recover.
So, couple of points:
1. I don't see this collapse in these smooth graphs with the lines going up and to the right of the last few thousand years.
2. Like most graphs that go up and to the right, it's actually a mess of ups and downs if you zoom in. Progress isn't smooth - it's lumpy and sometimes goes backwards. And it's fractal. There's plenty of space there for things to go down as well as up on a macro scale.
3. We're in an "up" bit of the graph. Both in terms of the last few hundred years, and (zooming out) the last few thousand. That doesn't mean the whole graph always goes up and to the right.
So yes, I agree with TFA that "this can't go on" if "this" is portrayed as a smooth progression from barbarism to TikTok. But I disagree that "this" has been smooth. There have been plenty of downs as well. And so "this" can go on if we agree that the value of "this" can go down as well as up, on a macro scale as well as micro.
[0] The Western Roman Empire at least. The Eastern half carried on for quite a while longer. And arguably the Western half turned itself into a church instead of collapsing. But the point remains.
Do you or anyone here on HN have some good, quantitative references for something like World GDP per capita over all of human history? Obviously that's difficult but it seems as if some rough estimates could be obtained.
I looked in the linked article but didn't see anything quite like what I was looking for. But I might have missed it.
This is the only thing I could find offhand that's what I'm looking for, but I wondered if there's something more peer-reviewed:
https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf
I think the data in there is roughly consistent with the assumptions of the linked post but it's hard to find concrete estimates.
Then there's stuff like this which is what you're pointing out:
https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ355/choi/rankh.htm
It too is what I had always read and learned in history courses but without concrete economic figures.
Note that below 2.1 on that chart, the human population shrinks.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertil...
Using that influence requires both wealth and power, and both are typically held by a tiny percentage at the top of their societies. Whether they've got a million or a billion people, the total numbers are only meaningful if those people have the wealth to, say, purchase goods.
Otherwise, they are just a production resource for those at the top.
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
This assume that growth has to involve atoms.
If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature superconductor, we don't necessarily need to use more stuff - in fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms that we needed earlier to build just one.
That is growth, without using more atoms.
It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without anything happening that today's physics says is downright impossible, then at the end of that time humanity will (1) still be physically confined to this galaxy and (2) be so wealthy that we will have as much wealth as the whole present-day economy times the number of atoms at our disposal; hence either (a) that growth will slow dramatically, or (b) something will happen that today's physics says is downright impossible, or (c) some other change will happen that decouples us from our component atoms so radically that it's possible to have a whole present-day economy's worth of wealth per atom or more; none of these options can reasonably be described as "business as usual".
10^86 fundamental particles in the entire observable universe is great, until you have 2% compound annual interest for ten millennia that's giving you 1.02^10,000 growth factor, which is 10^86.
Sometimes growth can in fact reduce resource demands.
Growth just means that we learn to do things better.
Prove it.
Every breath you take is 10^24 or so atoms.
> Growth just means that we learn to do things better.
Up to 100%, and no more.
Computers today are better and take fewer atoms to make than 40 years ago.
Still, I should've phrased it better.
Prove that growth can continue when the transistor are made from single atoms as standard.
And just in case you suggest fission, hydrogen atoms.
They aren't consumed, they are being recycled.
Okay, once we found the cure to all illness; and once Physics and Math are fully understood, I agree we will be done.
Maths has the problem that it's apparently possible to prove that for any system there must be statements which are both true and unprovable. (I don't understand how that works).
Physics will always have the question of if anything else might be hiding at a deeper level; however, we get to the point of "we can no longer make stuff from atoms" well before that point.
On the topic of fancy new physics: some time back, when the Alcubierre drive was piquing my interest, I wondered how hard it would be to engineer a Casimir cavity with negative mass. The answer was that (with the photon-only approximation I have to use given I'm a hobbyist not a proper physicist) you can't with any standard particles, as even neutron lasagne can't get close enough to exclude more than the mass of the sheets themselves.
In 100 years at a 2% growth rate we'd have to grow the economy about 7x.
This seems quite do-able. We would need significant technological advancement but this seems to be happening; there is no technological ceiling. We do not need to colonize space to achieve this, even though it would be nice to colonize space and give us another few hundred years of runway.
There's no reason to assume we can't maintain 2% global growth for the duration of our lifetimes. Whatever is after that we'll have to leave for future generations. Sustainability is important. Controlling climate change is important. I expect the world will look quite different in 100 years and at some point we must trust in the future generations.
The article's point, which I fruitlessly tried to support, is that the growth must at some point stop: we're living in a very remarkable era regardless of exactly how long it can go on for.
This doesn't map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are not finite, we can make them up, and have been.
Yes, our technological progress has been increasing exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known, what does that mean for us?
At that point, we'll be able to answer if we're operating in a simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?
Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.
There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking.
OP was written by the person who co-founded GiveWell[1] to make charitable giving more effective, and who while running Open Philanthropy oversaw lots of grants to things like innovation policy[2], scientific research[3], and land use reform[4].
Anyway, more broadly I think you present a false dilemma. You can both prepare for tail risks and also make important marginal and efficiency improvements.
[1] https://www.givewell.org/ [2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/innovation-policy/ [3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/ [4] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/land-use-reform/
In any case, I'm at least suggesting _a_ course of action.
This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you'd have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up.
Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.
Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation.
Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous).
Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing.
-
And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs.
What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which.
GM food is pretty significant, too.
I think he is insane. So is anyone who is in favour of perpetual growth in a finite environment.
Apparently, our political leaders are also in favor of perpetual growth. So is the media.
They should all be locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.
Now I’m getting nervous
/s
This is a thing that has been puzzling me for a while. Isn't "growth by a few percent each year" already exponential?
E.g. if you had a constant economic growth of 1% per year, that would mean that this year's GDP would always be 101% of last year's GDP, which is exponential growth.
So even with a "constant" relative growth rate, the plot of "absolute" GDP over time would eventually become a hockey-stick curve - things would be expected to get weird at some point if the steepness of the curve crosses some threshold.
So let’s say the economy is growing exponentially, some percentage per year. Either we keep using more raw inputs, or we keep increasing the value of those inputs. That is where the 2% growth comes from.
If we don’t add new inputs, and exponential growth continues, the outputs will grow to such great value that the raw materials are relatively worthless. But that seems wrong to me - if the physical materials are worthless, someone could buy them all and corner the market and charge whatever they want. It can only happen if scarcity is completely eliminated.
I’m very curious to see how that plays out long term.
They are intentionally calling attention to that absurd extreme as a rhetoric device, not out of a belief that that's when we'll hit the wall. (It's a safe bet they believe will hit the wall much much much sooner.)
[0] There is also the growth that comes in spurts from technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized across the entire ranges of years that follow them when assessing the resultant growth. IMO, such technological innovations are akin to data compression, increasing entropy. Over the loooong haul, I'd expect such spurts to have diminishing returns (just like compressing a compressed file has diminishing returns.)
[1] I guess expanding our reach beyond Earth would be one of those 'spurts'.
EDIT: fixed a word
Technological spurts ultimately drive productivity and the latter in turn drives growth. Why do these spurts need to be amortized across longer periods of time? Especially when many have compounding effects?
The fact that such a limit obviously exists contradicts the notion of infinite growth, regardless of how large that limit appears. The power of exponentiation ensures that this limit is practically within reach.
If the premise of infinite growth is wrong, then we should be thinking of alternatives sooner rather than later. That was my takeaway from the article.
That said, we can indeed refine say our software to some extent. But it's important to keep in mind software has significant limitations as well, and complexity theory gives lower bounds on problems of practical relevance. We might get a few percent faster (in terms of number of operations) sorting algorithms (and merge sort), for instance, but no more, at least for random inputs.
I think less clear are say quality of life or new experiences afforded by new media, new novels, new games, new ways of seeing things. I think there is indeed significant improvement to be had, but also we probably shouldn't get carried away this is some kind of infinity: all things are limited when it comes to a life. I do think simply lifting everyone to a good condition (mostly emotional and basic needs) has a very surprising and large coefficient of gain.
What probably matters more than the number of atoms is the useful work that can employed in order to arrange those atoms in useful configurations.
The upper limit of economic growth is probably limited by the amount of computation that can be done before the end of the universe.
The economy grows by either converting more atoms, or changing the value of the in/output.
Obviously "sustaining more people" requires proportionally more atoms, so exponentially growing population implies exponential economic growth.
What happens in the constant population assumption is an open question.
It could be that our rate of atom conversion also becomes constant/decline. We might become more efficient and grow the economy by increasing the value of the atoms we convert. The economy might cease growing altogether because we reach a technological plateau and need satiety.
But it's also possible that we'll decouple demand from the capitas, and find whole new ways and reasons to increase atom conversion.
And so we could "grow" the economy by increasing human welfare - we could in theory keep the economy the same "size" but distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent's can talk of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day. Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth".
The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed, yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but maximising human utility
Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and education, health and politics that benefit all humankind
We will find more "growth" in socialism than capitalism and more happiness in democracy than totalitarianism
The amount lost by America (if at all) is not equal to the Amount gained by China. So it is not re-distribution.
It is delusional to think otherwise. We need to act as if this is our only home.
Knowledge makes the existence of resources infinite: https://nav.al/infinite-resources
Pessimism seems like an intellectually serious position: https://nav.al/pessimism
If there is no limit to prosperity, it follows that not only do you not run out of atoms, you also don't run out of ways to rearrange those atoms that you prefer to earlier arrangements. In that case there is no configuration of the universe that is ultimately the most preferable, which must mean that you have exploitable cyclic preferences.
> [..] this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
"Knowledge is infinite" means nothing. Things not stagnating or being over also means nothing, that description would fit any nightmarish scenario, too.
We are destroying the habitats of species at such a rate, we barely have begun exploring the ocean and we will never even know what is already lost for good. Knowledge. We know that inequality is rising at increasing pace, that people starve, that for the first time, future generations have less to look forward to than previous ones... what more do we need to know to do something with that all knowledge? Or is the knowledge what to do with the knowledge some kind of cherry on top reserved for last?
While some say "knowledge" and what a fascinating adventure it all is, I just hear "numbness" and "alienation". Collecting gimmicky factoids about the world at best, factoids about man-made concepts at worst, while not seeing the woods for all the trees. You say pessimism, I say toxic positivity, now what?
I found a fridge magnet in form of the Hebrew letter Shin recently, and because I had time to pass I read some stuff about it, including this:
> When the shin is representative of the intellectual dimension, the three lines stand for the three intellectual faculties of the Sefiros: the right line being Chochmah, the flash of an idea; the left line being Binah, understanding; and the centerline Daas, application of knowledge.
-- https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/137093/jewish...
Knowledge without understanding is worse than no knowledge in my opinion, and without application, even understanding is worse than no understanding. Or as MLK put it:
> Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.