Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
Energy is a critical quantity in multiple subfields of economy including environmental economy where it's a core issue.
> He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
So lower standards of living.
Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(
Back in the early 2000's when I saw Pres. Bush on the TV, he would say something like, "... and they hate our way of life" and I assumed that had to do with our secular way of having different religions around or something.
As I get older, I realize that he was talking about the above quote.
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.
> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.
...
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources.
In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
Sure. Link in population and living standards and you start to get a toy model that dispels the notion that all growth must be about consumption. (A palette of iPhones represents growth from mainframes of equal mass and energy consumption.)
We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
Straw man. Nobody argues this.
> sustained economic growth
Is it really such an unreasonable reading?
It's reasonable but unnecessarily reductive. Particulalry when TFA is linked above.
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.
This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
Note that industrialized countries without colonial empires ended up at least as rich as the big European colonial powers.
I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
he's probably grasping to "research" from before the 30s, if even that, expect to ignore elites and focus on average country gdp nonsense.
Circumstancial evidence includes:
1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.
2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.
Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.
"Our hypothesis is that Atlantic trade—the opening of the sea routes to the New World, Africa, and Asia and the building of colonial empires—contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1850, not only through direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional change."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/jr_AERAtla...
Where has he argued the opposite?
We didn't steal that wealth from Africa, in part because Africa had very little wealth.
I don't have a great link laying out this in more detail, but I know Johan Norberg has written and talked a fair amount about this.
Looking to the future, I'd prefer colonialism not be considered a lucrative strategy (though the thesis doesn't deny that colonialism was profitable for specific interest groups - just that those groups were a small part of the newly industrializing economies, and that the nation-level balance sheet gained little from their pillaging, compared to the costs of empire-maintenance).
Since you don't offer any evidence for this scenario, I can't really refute it :)
But note that 90% of Africa didn't even get colonized before 1884. That was over a century into the Industrial Revolution era, during which Western Europe had roughly doubled it's population and tripled their GDP.
I don't interpret the OP comment as restricted to Africa - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda in Spanish colonies.
I won't write an essay about it, but note that (1) Russia and Africa both have enormous natural resources and are very poor, and (2) Hong Kong and Singapore have no natural resources and are very rich.
This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.
Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.
There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.
Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.
The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".
> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.
> What racist and xenophobic BS.
A much clearer head.