[HN Gopher] Can growth continue?
___________________________________________________________________
Can growth continue?
Author : feross
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-05-27 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| _448 wrote:
| > And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material
| resources, but by ideas.
|
| Ideas are an abstract thing. To realise an idea, one needs
| material resources.
|
| The problem has nothing to do with either finite material
| resources or ideas. The problem is what those material resources
| get converted into. What we do is we transform one type of
| material into another during any activity. How we can limit
| ourselves to not transforming these useable material into
| unuseable material is what is the challenge for growth. We should
| only be promoting those ideas that have a better opportunity to
| transform one usable material resource into another usable
| resource without taking much time and without harming the
| ecology.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might
| be the slowdown in population growth... Without more brains to
| push technology forward, progress might stall.
|
| Well you really only need a small number of very talented brains.
| And continuing to grow the global population is probably not the
| most efficient way of getting them.
| alexose wrote:
| You're so right. I _strongly_ dislike the argument put forward
| by Bezos and others (paraphrased, "imagine how many Einsteins
| we would have with a much larger world population"). Completely
| ignoring the billions of human brains that are full of
| scientific potential but forced to spend their efforts trying
| to figure out how to survive.
|
| I find it almost aggressively misanthropic. That most people on
| the planet are basically there to serve an (unchangeable)
| percentage of those who have the luxury of thinking about
| abstract concepts all day.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Do you have any evidence to support your view?
|
| Things like the Pareto principle suggest our ability to do
| science is greatly impacted by raising the total population
| and creating more outliers who do extreme contributions.
| alexose wrote:
| To clarify, my view is that there are billions of people
| who never engage with the scientific establishment because
| they lack the means to do so. Among these are many people
| who might have made tremendous discoveries if they had
| grown up in a more privileged environment.
|
| I might point at the fact that tenure-track professors are
| _25 times_ more likely to have a parent with a PhD than the
| general population
| (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6wjxc). Also, here's a
| good, factual article illustrating my general point:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/537466a
|
| Reading between the lines, I think your view is that the
| valuable contributors (the extreme outliers) will find a
| way to contribute regardless of background. I think that's
| true, to some extent, but less common than we give it
| credit for. I also think that ignores the majority of
| scientists who are not outliers but make important
| discoveries just as a matter of course. Discoveries that
| may inform future breakthroughs.
|
| Anyway, the truth is certainly somewhere in the middle. By
| growing the population of people who might make
| contributions (one way or another), we will increase the
| rate of contributions. I just think it's best from a moral,
| social, and ecological perspective to make the most of the
| minds we already have.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| China has made big progress in building mega
| infrastructures while at the same time aggressively
| pursuing population control strategies. They did so by
| reallocation of people from farming to factories.
|
| It could be argued that building high speed rail isn't same
| as doing science. But it does provide excellent raw
| material for scientific research. I won't be surprised if
| we start seeing scientific breakthroughs from China in next
| few decades.
|
| We have hundreds of millions of people using most of their
| cognitive bandwidth just to survive. Imagine what's
| possible if even a fraction of those stop worrying about
| their survival and start pursuing their curiosity.
| gms7777 wrote:
| In my experience, science is rarely driven by outliers.
| Most scientists are very smart of course, but the majority
| of scientific progress is shaped by slow, steady
| incremental work that builds on top of itself, rather than
| brilliant idea men.
| otikik wrote:
| It's simple. If you don't know when your next meal will be,
| you can't spare a thought in solving cold fusion.
|
| In order to solve problems you don't need "more people".
| You need "more people with good enough living conditions so
| that they can work on solving problems". This doesn't
| necessarily means increasing the total number of people. It
| could go down. As long as enough people went from
| dispossessed to good enough, that would be enough.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might
| stall.
|
| This is utter nonsense. Progress never stalls (except if we
| happen to extinguish ourselves). It did not stall the last
| 10,000+ years despite very low population numbers except in the
| last 300 years. Of course, it might go a bit slower or faster
| depending on demographics.
|
| But that is not important. We already have all the technology
| that could make a decent life possible for everyone on this
| planet. It's more a matter of applying what we already know. Of
| course, better technology might help with that -- as could a
| decrease in population. But if we do not get better in applying
| our knowledge for the benefit of all, we are doomed.
| Leader2light wrote:
| kkfx wrote:
| With confusing growth and evolution / progress? Can't we be
| "richer" without "growth" in the inflationary broad sense?
|
| Surely _change_ is hard, inevitably have issues during the
| change, but change can bring richness without growth, they are
| conceptually distinct things, merged into one by the actual
| model, not by nature.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| The solution to tackling declining population can be by
| generating Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans
| will be smarter and stronger than the current lot due to
| eugenics. CRISPR will make it possible and it's already happening
| in China. The west needs to look at it instead of ramping up
| immigration and importing instability from third world countries.
| bell-cot wrote:
| That sounds pretty cool, if you're writing dystopian sci-fi.
|
| Back in the trenches, I'm thinking that people making "have a
| baby, or not?" decisions will not find "But you could have a
| SuperBaby!" to be a persuasive argument. Without plot armor,
| who's magically making sure that SuperBaby doesn't have some
| grim bugs, which might take a while to manifest? Any good
| reason to think that SuperBaby will need fewer diaper changes
| and less parental resources long-term? Will want to look after
| his or her non-Super "parents" in their old age? Or that the
| currently available version of SuperBaby won't be obsoleted by
| v2.0 in a year or two - with upgrades to v2.0 being "less than
| practical and satisfactory"? Really, it'd be smarter to wait
| until v2.0 comes out...wait until v2.4 comes out...until
| 3.0...wait...still waiting...still waiting...
| wcoenen wrote:
| It may be a bit misleading to say that CRISPR babies are
| "already happening in China". Yes, there was a researcher who
| genetically modified a few babies. (Specifically, to give them
| HIV resistance.) But he received a prison sentence for his
| actions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
| BenoitP wrote:
| In a pond, water lilies multiply each day so as to double in
| size.
|
| It takes 30 days to occupy half the pond.
|
| How much time is left until the pond is full?
|
| ----
|
| In other words: when we'll reach the limits, we won't have a lot
| of time to react.
| pphysch wrote:
| We don't have a steady 100%/day population growth rate, we have
| a 1%/year and falling growth rate.
|
| Your analogy is off by several orders of magnitude, which leads
| to qualitative differences.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| This isn't a great example because most species will experience
| sigmoidal growth, not exponential growth, and consequently not
| suffer catastrophic collapse. As they put pressure on the
| carrying capacity of their environment, the environment pushes
| back effectively and puts pressure on the populations. In most
| systems some sort of stasis is reached (or you get some kind of
| cyclical population trend).
|
| The trouble with humans is, because of ready access to fossil
| fuels and non-renewable energy, we have been able to
| artificially (or maybe more accurately phrased "unsustainably")
| extend beyond the carrying capacity of our ecosystem.
|
| Indigenous populations of the Americas had populations in the
| millions but never risked, at least in North America, systemic
| collapse because they largely lived sustainably.
|
| Ironically it's precisely because Malthus was proven wrong that
| we are in trouble. We have way, way higher energy demands than
| can be reasonably sustained without relying on a non-renewable
| source of energy. This completely disregards the additional
| problem of climate change. This sets us up for a type of
| collapse that is not usually a problem for most species, such
| as your lily pads.
| munk-a wrote:
| Yup, and the crappy news for humanity is that if we're
| expending unsustainable resources to artificially boost our
| population capacity that factor is likely to "correct" with a
| die off.
|
| In our modern world you'd like to think that as rational
| beings we'd be conserving these unsustainable resources to
| fund "important" things - but no, we usually just release
| strategic oil reserves to try and game our political
| system... and we decrease the resource intake to reap short
| term gains.
| nverno wrote:
| If you consider nuclear a renewable source, we could easily
| cover our current costs with it.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Yes, with nuclear energy, we'll be able to provide for
| humanity's needs until the global population is back down
| below 7 billion, which, if things go well, could be reached
| about 100 years from now, and, if things go badly, could be
| reached about 100 minutes from now.
| fleddr wrote:
| Not a single word is wasted on the externalities of growth. What
| it does to nature but also people. Just double down on producing,
| consuming, working.
| ambientenv wrote:
| I watched The Great Simplification [1] last night, and it
| provided some perspective on this question which, until now, I
| had not fully considered in context.
|
| [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
| brodo wrote:
| Most people on the post-growth side of the argument tend to argue
| that outputs (green house gases, toxins) and not inputs are the
| major constraining factor. He should really have addressed that.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| This makes a common error in the direction of a causal arrow:
|
| Technological progress is the _result_ of ready access to fossil
| fuels. That is it is the result of our prosperity _not_ it 's
| cause.
|
| The reason Malthus was wrong was _because_ ready access to
| hydrocarbons made the Haber-Bosch process possible and easily
| scalable. In a world without massive amount of hydrocarbons the
| Haber-Bosch process is never discovered. We know this because
| technological advancement trail energy discovery.
|
| I highly recommend reading through Smil's _Energy and
| Civilization_ to get a better sense of this.
|
| We are like yeast brewing in a giant vat of malted barely, seeing
| a what looks like an infinite amount of energy, expanding well
| beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the vat. Suddenly
| some yeast scientists notice there is a concerning amount of
| alcohol in the atmosphere. Yeast economist point out this is
| nothing to worry about because we have solved every problem in
| the past, so there's nothing to really worry about.
|
| I also can't stand the "look Malthus, Hubert and Jevons were all
| wrong!!!", on the scale of a 200k year species, predicted the
| ended within a few hundred years is pretty accurate. We just have
| trouble thinking beyond the time scale of a few human
| generations.
|
| Finally, whale oil is a terrible example of a transition fuel. We
| stopped using it because we ran out of whales, but so far we've
| never decreased usage of an energy source that was still
| available to us [0]. This is no different than yeast that will
| consume energy filled sugars until the poison themselves. But
| hey, at least we get beer.
|
| 0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio...
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Technological progress is the result of ready access to
| fossil fuels.
|
| This doesn't account for nations with ready access to fossil
| fuels who don't progress.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Climate change is a political problem, not a technology
| problem.
|
| The technology to move beyond fossil fuels has existed since
| the 1950s. No new inventions are required. If our leaders
| decided today to migrate primary energy to nuclear power
| climate change would be "solved" within 20 years.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > If our leaders decided today to migrate primary energy to
| nuclear power climate change would be "solved" within 20
| years.
|
| I think this is inaccurate for several reasons 1. it takes
| human and financial resources to build a nuclear power
| plants, which most countries don't have 2. using the current
| technologies, uranium would quickly become a limiting factor
| 3. developing new technologies take times. 4. electricity is
| only a small part of the emissions of CO2
|
| > Climate change is a political problem
|
| Yes, this comes from the perpetual growth ideology.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _This makes a common error in the direction of a causal arrow:_
|
| _Technological progress is the result of ready access to
| fossil fuels. That is it is the result of our prosperity not it
| 's cause._
|
| I have also read Smil's _Energy and Civilization_ and I have to
| disagree on the causal arrow direction.
|
| Coal formed ~300 million years ago [1]. Anatomically modern
| humans have existed for more than 200,000 years [2]. Complex
| city-forming civilizations have existed for more than 5,000
| years [3].
|
| Chapter 6 of _Energy and Civilization_ shows the dramatic shift
| in recent centuries: consumption of coal and later other fossil
| fuels underwent explosive growth only after the 18th century.
| This even though coal and oil were known to people thousands of
| years ago [4] [5]. Since people, fossil fuels, and civilization
| have existed in conjunction for several thousands of years, but
| usage of fossil fuels has become significant only in recent
| centuries, I believe that technological development is the
| proximate cause of fossil fuel usage. Once the early Industrial
| Revolution got under way it formed a feedback loop where
| technological exploitation of energy resources drove further
| technological development and energy exploitation. The early,
| inefficient Newcomen steam engine is a good example of this
| loop in action: its first successful application was in pumping
| water out of coal mines, to make more coal accessible [6].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history#Rise_of_civiliza...
|
| [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#Early_h...
|
| [5] https://connect.spe.org/blogs/donatien-
| ishimwe/2014/09/18/hi...
|
| [6]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#In...
| civilized wrote:
| > ...there's really no such thing as a natural resource. All
| resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And
| economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources,
| but by ideas.
|
| Hmm. Let's not forget that we have one planet, and if we fry it,
| there may be no ideas that can bring it back.
| kwindla wrote:
| Related: "Must We Grow" ->
| https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/09/must-we-grow-con...
| human_person wrote:
| So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible.
| But even taking that premiss as correct If you want more brain
| power you don't need more people, you can simply treat the people
| that already exist better. Think of how much brain power is lost
| to poverty and inequality. People who dont have enough money to
| survive, people who are in debt, spend so much mental energy just
| trying to survive. Calculating how much they can afford, how they
| can stretch their money. Its such a waste, when we could just
| provide them with the necessities they need to live a dignified
| life. And then we could see what they created. Sure some people
| make it out, but percentage wise they are the exception that
| proves the rule. Based on what we know about epidemiology, the
| impact of pollution, the impact of prenatal and early childhood
| stress. Just consider how those compound with years of poorly
| funded education in neighborhoods made unstable by the transience
| of poverty. Add in the school to prison pipeline (partially
| fueled by a rise in police officers in schools in response to
| school shootings) and (imo) inevitable substance abuse and think
| about how many brain cells have been destroyed. I dont think I'd
| be able to think deeply in those situations. If brains/ideas are
| our most important resource we are wasting them. On an almost
| unimaginable scale.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Yes. Stephen Jay Gould put this thought very well: "I am,
| somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of
| Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of
| equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and
| sweatshops."
| dustingetz wrote:
| future brainpower though and the value of helping poor people
| is really far out (multiple generations); capitalism can't even
| see past the quarter. people are still too self interested,
| we'd all need to catch religion for it to work
| bjornsing wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But I've come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and
| less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more
| and more as intended.
|
| The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people
| who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to
| avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the
| world.
|
| Or at least that's how I increasingly see it.
| idoh wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how avoiding competition is the root of
| much evil? It is plausible if you mean it as avoiding by
| stifling or suppressing it.
|
| On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly
| construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers).
| The more we can not compete with each other, but rather
| support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.
| smaudet wrote:
| Whenever the incumbent seeks to maintain their position by
| means other than performance - I think the reference is to
| e.g. large companies closing down, in an effort to keep
| revenue streams (think vendor locking, kickbacks, back room
| board deals, nepotism).
|
| There is certainly harm here, but I agree it's not all
| about competition - if the incumbent shares their knowledge
| and resources with others then, while revenue streams might
| go down for, more people will benefit and as a whole
| revenue streams will go up, or at least be distributed more
| fairly.
|
| In a zero sum world, companies either avoiding competition
| or sharing is a burden, in a non zero sum world it is not.
|
| I think ultimately the author is wrong - the idea that
| ideas can endlessly reap, it ignores the physical world -
| there are only so many available acres of land and goods at
| any given time. He dismisses Peak Oil, etc as a
| misunderstanding about the limits, but the reality is there
| are many limits, each one with different consequences as it
| is passed. Thinking the edge of the city is a block away
| and then discovering you were wrong is not proof that there
| is no edge to the city, but it does matter that you have to
| take a car versus walk a block - the limits are still
| there.
|
| Arguments about peak resources should focus on the average
| income pressure a citizen is facing, an infinite number of
| ideas does zip for you if your citizens are too poor or in
| debt to be able to purchase the fruits of your ideas.
| Unless you want to start giving away money at a steadily
| increasing rate...and that has never worked out.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Competition is for losers. Elon Musk isn't competing with
| anyone
| stouset wrote:
| As a counterpoint to this, I'll reference the (absolutely
| incredible) Do the Math blog, by Tom Murphy at UCSD.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
|
| A salient quote from the first article, that I find very
| relevant:
|
| > We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to address
| our problems. Its track record is most impressive... But we have
| to be careful about faith, and periodically reexamine its
| validity or possible limits.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to
| address our problems.
|
| The concern I have, especially WRT climate change, is this: We
| are not tackling climate change.
|
| Yes, we solved ozone shrinkage, looming food shortages, deadly
| air pollution, acid rain (sorta), etc. all with technology. But
| we ACTUALLY tackled those problems; we banned lead gasoline,
| banned CFCs, starting scrubbing sulphur dioxide, improved crop
| yields.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Again, the ozone layer isn't "solved." It's "recovering." Go
| ask any reasonable person in Australia or New Zealand if the
| ozone is 'solved.'
|
| We haven't fixed the problem[1], although I agree there is
| some worthwhile pat-on-the-back for fixing the cause. The
| ozone hole is still there decades later, and will be there
| for decades more.
|
| In New Zealand, they are affected by the extra UV radiation,
| and strong sunblock can be important.
|
| The effect by UV should give us more understanding and
| sympathy for countries that will be drowned by climate
| change, even though our government isn't doing jack shit.
|
| [1] NASA website says "Scientists have already seen the first
| definitive proof of ozone recovery, observing a 20 percent
| decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from
| 2005 to 2016." "Models predict that the Antarctic ozone layer
| will mostly recover by 2040." Also see synthetic image of
| 2021 hole:
| https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/2021-antarctic-
| ozo...
| epistasis wrote:
| The frustrating thing is that we have all the tools to solve
| climate change, today. The only question is choosing to use
| them.
|
| And since we know that these new tools have learning curves
| that are becoming cheaper, we have prettt good estimates that
| the switchover will be a cheaper energy solution than fossil
| fuels, with greater energy independence for more countries,
| leading to fewer wars!
|
| But current fossil fuel suppliers have fantastic political
| control of the US, and they sow seeds of doubt and fear and
| uncertainty in the population, and buy off politicians to
| prevent market solutions from coming to the market. Much less
| the great amount of industrial policy needed to scale what we
| need to scale faster to meet the needs of climate change.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > We are not tackling climate change.
|
| That is absolutely not true. 2 examples in the US: the $7000
| EV tax rebate, 80GW of new renewable energy per year. And the
| US is one of the worst developed nations, Europe and others
| are doing a lot more.
|
| Current estimates are that we are on track for 2.5 degrees C
| of climate change, which would have been 6 degrees if we did
| nothing.
|
| We're doing something. Just not enough.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Sounds about the same trend as in Europe on a smaller
| scale: upper-middle folks get tax benefits associated with
| their Tesla purchases. So they get to pat themselves on the
| back for being able to maintain the same lifestyle as
| before.
|
| Meanwhile the very eco-friendly single-use wooden utensils
| that I last used was Made in China.
|
| Just putting smiley faces on the gas display when it starts
| to drop low.
| jotm wrote:
| Everyone thinks they want something to be done. The simple
| reason why few things are getting done is that it would
| seriously affect people's lives.
|
| Right now, rising prices are a massive boon for the
| environment. Less consumption, more investment in better
| technology.
|
| But people are angry, and at this rate, will start raging. It
| may be quite a turning point, if we're not mostly under
| authoritarian governments by 2030 I'll be happy.
|
| As a collective, we simply do not want to solve climate
| change. Unless it magically does not affect our lives, then
| yeah, [whatever group, just not me] can go for it.
| [deleted]
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Yes, we solved ... looming food shortages
|
| I think we're about to stress test this hypothesis via the
| Ukraine war.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I thought his posts on how many batteries we'd need to convert
| to electric everything while maintaining living standards were
| very interesting.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Is it this one? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-
| sized-battery/
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Yep, that's what I was thinking of. (I think he has a
| couple of other posts along the same lines).
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Interesting article, thanks! Yeah, the move to electrify
| everything will have absolutely tremendous resource
| impacts-- I have been doing quite a bit of critical
| mineral policy work in the last ~6 months in the U.S. and
| the mining co's I talk to are all saying that the world
| needs to wake up and quick to just how many minerals need
| to be pulled out of the ground and that it'll take a
| whole of world collaboration to do it. Right now wealthy
| countries seem to prefer to let extraction happen in the
| developing world and processing in China because it's
| dirty and environmentally fraught, but something will
| break sooner or later because the demand is just
| astronomical. Maybe new mixtures will catch on (e.g. more
| high-end car manufacturers moving to LFP because of
| issues with the cobalt supply chain despite lower
| performance) but there's still going to be a lot of rocks
| that need to be dug out of the ground (or from space but
| no legacy mining co I've talked to believes that's
| realistic).
| epistasis wrote:
| That post makes me distrust all the rest of his analysis.
| This conclusion in particular:
|
| > Rather, the lesson is that we must work within serious
| constraints to meet future demands.
|
| Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of needs
| have been proven to not be very useful for scoping the
| problem. And his proposed solution of nuclear has proven to
| be infeasible and too expensive.
|
| So what pretends to be an unbiased assessment based on
| physical principles is revealed to actually be a huge number
| of assumptions that are not reflective of reality, or useful
| for thinking about the future.
|
| This is the exact problem that the original post talks about.
| We are too easily fooled by models that are simple, and
| wrong, like what dothemath presents.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| If you've done a calculation like his I'm interested in
| reading it. It is hard to evaluate your argument against
| his since you've made no quantifiable claims.
| epistasis wrote:
| My point is the same as the original article.
| Calculations like this, of single routes, are pointless
| and mislead rather than inform. But it's an intellectual
| honeypot, because it _seems_ interesting.
|
| The paths of possible technology are a huge high
| dimensional space, but let's think of simplify it to a
| map of geographic space. He's taking out a telescope,
| pointing in a single direction, and sees a Cliff really
| really far off, and says "well I guess there are physical
| limits!" Which of course. But that's not interesting,
| what's interesting are which path are out there, and to
| explore that you have to point the telescope in lots of
| directions, or even better yet, start exploring territory
| by moving around. It might be that there's a hikable path
| right next to the cliff that you didn't see because of
| the narrow view of the telescope.
|
| And those alternate paths are what the original article
| is all about. We didn't run out of food. Technology
| changes, and we become far more efficient and productive.
| And pretending that there's a physical limit somewhere
| without bothering to peak around is a classic way that we
| trick ourselves about the future.
| stouset wrote:
| > My point is the same as the original article.
| Calculations like this, of single routes, are pointless
| and mislead rather than inform. But it's an intellectual
| honeypot, because it seems interesting.
|
| He doesn't calculate single narrow routes. In fact that's
| almost entirely opposite the purpose of his articles,
| which is to take a step back and look at things from a
| very broad perspective: what's the scale of our energy
| use, what's the scale needed to replace it with something
| else, and what are some back-of-the-envelope calculations
| we can do to get an intuitive grasp of the problem?
|
| It's essentially applying fermi estimation to the
| problem, which I think most people would agree is far
| from what you're accusing.
|
| > We didn't run out of food.
|
| This was never claimed?
|
| > Technology changes, and we become far more efficient
| and productive.
|
| This is addressed, particularly in the second article
| linked, which itself is a highly-summarized form of his
| entire position.
|
| > And pretending that there's a physical limit somewhere
| without bothering to peak around is a classic way that we
| trick ourselves about the future.
|
| There's no pretending. There are real physical and
| thermodynamic limits that physicists currently know no
| way to circumvent, and that we have increasingly
| convincing reasons to believe are fundamental. Pretending
| these _don 't exist_ is a classic way that we trick
| ourselves about the future.
| stouset wrote:
| > Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of
| needs have been proven to not be very useful for scoping
| the problem. And his proposed solution of nuclear has
| proven to be infeasible and too expensive.
|
| Care to elaborate?
| scythe wrote:
| You're not alone. That article was the reason I stopped
| considering him a reasonable source.
|
| >I'll use lead-acid batteries as a baseline. Why? Because
| lead-acid batteries are the cheapest way to store
| electricity today.
|
| That wasn't even true when the article was written. Pumped
| hydro has always been cheaper than batteries, and unless
| we've made some big improvements since I last checked the
| news, it still is.
|
| >And lead is a common element, being the endpoint of the
| alpha-decay chain of heavy elements like uranium and
| thorium.
|
| What's really incredible is that a _physicist_ would make
| this argument. Lead is _not_ common, and anyone with even a
| superficial familiarity with the process of stellar
| nucleosynthesis can easily explain why. A zinc nucleus
| needs to capture around 150 neutrons to produce a lead
| nucleus. All heavy elements are rare on a cosmic scale:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_ele
| m...
|
| But the other glaring hole in the analysis is the _lack of
| reference to prior work_. Japan had already developed a
| grid energy storage system based on sodium-sulfur batteries
| in the 1980s [1]. I would expect a serious analysis to
| consider the _existing_ state of the art.
|
| These mistakes don't strike me as arising from a lack of
| competence, but rather from a desire to inflate the
| apparent strength of the conclusions.
|
| 1: https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111
| /j.1...
| stouset wrote:
| I believe you're ignoring the overall point of the
| article, which is not that lead-acid batteries
| specifically are unworkable.
|
| > Rather, the lesson is that we must work within serious
| constraints to meet future demands. We can't just scale
| up the current go-to solution for renewable energy
| storage--we are yet again fresh out of silver bullet
| solutions. More generally, large scale energy storage is
| not a solved problem. We should be careful not to
| trivialize the problem, which tends to reduce the
| imperative to work like mad on establishing adequate
| capabilities in time (requires decades of fore-thought
| and planning).
|
| He further goes on to discuss gravitational storage
| (e.g., hydroelectric dams and pumped storage), kinetic
| storage (e.g., flywheels), spring storage (e.g.,
| compressed air), and chemical storage (e.g., batteries,
| fuel cells).
|
| Again, the point is:
|
| > With the exception of the feeble gravitational storage
| example, each of the ideas presented here are technically
| challenging, expensive, and sometimes dangerous.
|
| And further, to contrast them to the miraculous gift that
| fossil fuels have been:
|
| > A short digression to contrast the miraculous energy
| density in fossil fuels: our 3 days of electricity
| storage at 30 kWh/day requires just 12 gallons of
| gasoline (1.6 cubic feet; 45 liters) burned in a 20%
| efficient generator (it seems like the other 80% is
| noise!). The Earth's battery--a one-time gift to us--
| turns out to be vastly superior to any of these other
| "solutions" in terms of energy density and long-term
| storage, measured in millions of years. It will be sorely
| missed when it's gone.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/got-storage-how-hard-
| can-...
| scythe wrote:
| > I believe you're ignoring the overall point of the
| article, which is not that lead-acid batteries
| specifically are unworkable.
|
| Right, the point of the article is that storage is
| unworkable, and lead-acid batteries are used therein as a
| straw-man. You underestimate how much time I've spent
| studying this, and how many times I've read that
| absolutely infuriating article.
|
| >He further goes on to discuss gravitational storage
| (e.g., hydroelectric dams and pumped storage), kinetic
| storage (e.g., flywheels), spring storage (e.g.,
| compressed air), and chemical storage (e.g., batteries,
| fuel cells).
|
| But he does _not_ discuss the most significant _existing_
| application of batteries for grid storage. So when he
| says this:
|
| >We can't just scale up the current go-to solution for
| renewable energy storage
|
| He hasn't even considered it! Granted, Na-S currently
| lags way behind Li-anything in costs, but that's a
| result, mostly, of innovation aimed at cars.
| g_sch wrote:
| Is pumped hydro really able to scale to a significant
| level where it can provide enough energy storage for a
| national (or even state/regional) grid? I was always
| under the impression that pumped hydro was indeed
| awesome, very cost-effective, etc. but could only be
| developed in places with very specific geographies. After
| all, you have to somehow place two reservoirs near each
| other with a significant elevation difference. Isn't this
| the limit that governs pumped hydro as a storage
| technology?
| scythe wrote:
| >Isn't this the limit that governs pumped hydro as a
| storage technology?
|
| I was nitpicking there, yes. Pumped hydro has an "asking
| if we [could/should]?" problem: extensive use of pumped
| hydro would be devastating to ecosystems. There are a
| number of "clever" strategies, such as allowing the lower
| reservoir to be the ocean:
|
| https://municipalwaterleader.com/implementing-oceanuss-
| pumpe...
|
| but I did not intend for that sentence to be read as
| advocating widespread uptake of pumped hydro. It's
| convenient in certain places, and it can fill in gaps for
| communities in need, but it comes with a big cost not
| measured in dollars. And the use of saltwater makes this
| problem much worse.
| stouset wrote:
| Tom Murphy covered this in the series as well. While
| there are absolutely cases where pumped hydro is
| extremely effective (e.g., Dinorwig Power Station), the
| inherent problem is that it requires need very specific
| geological features. Unsurprisingly, we've hit much of
| the good low-hanging fruit, so future projects will be
| less efficient in terms of capacity per dollar invested.
| And also unsurprisingly, these features are not evenly
| geographically spaced around the globe.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
| reactjavascript wrote:
| The standards have to change, and they may be "less" by some
| measures, but many people can still have a wonderful
| existence. Maybe you have to eat more vegetables and less
| cheeseburgers. Maybe you can't drive your Suburban seven days
| a week to Starbucks. Maybe life will slow down and people
| will enjoy a higher quality of life with family and friends.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Maybe we upload our consciousness to computers and live in
| a simulated world that takes far less energy than our
| current one and is heaven for everybody. But I think the
| bigger question is less for whom? Right now it seems like
| it'll disproportionately affect the poor in the developing
| world who are least able to transition and whose
| populations are least responsible for climate impacts from
| historical growth. I wouldn't mind personally driving less
| (actually, haven't owned a car in a decade and walk most
| places), but I think in the end the people who will be
| punished are the poor who will have higher AC prices during
| summers, gas prices to go to work, etc.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Now, that's a problem for another time. But note that in five
| minutes we've gone from worrying about overpopulation to
| underpopulation. That's because we've traded a scarcity mindset,
| where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset,
| where it is limited only by our ingenuity.
|
| Just a motivational speech.
| Gatsky wrote:
| If you take it to the extreme, human growth will be limited by
| physical laws. There was an interesting paper where they
| calculated that growth would eventually slow to a crawl because
| we saturate the region of the universe we can reasonably reach
| without faster than light travel.
| sremani wrote:
| For continued growth we need to embrace Space both civilian and
| military. Funding NASA to really get to Mars and a colony on Moon
| in the long run give the best bang for the buck.
|
| Longevity would help but will also ossify the institutions. There
| is a reason why the mindshare in the corridors of power view the
| world as if it is 1991, they are too damn old and do not
| acknowledge the new realities.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Could you help me understand the argument for longevity helping
| growth? I'm generally a fan (after all, I don't have a
| deathwish) but it's not clear to me how longer lifespans would
| lead to more productivity. I could theoretically see a scenario
| where as we continue getting more specialized we spend
| increasingly spend the first ~40+ years of our life in
| education (although hopefully new methods can speed learning
| rates) and then the next 40 years working and having longer
| productive lives would be better, but do people contribute
| significantly more in their last years than the rest of their
| careers?
| sfink wrote:
| My guess is that increasing life expectancy would retard
| (economic) growth, increasing the proportion of life that is
| healthy without changing life expectancy would improve
| growth, "longevity" can refer to one or both of those, and if
| you do both at the same time it's hard to predict the
| effects.
|
| It seems like we'd be better off if we could evolve out of
| the need for growth, or at least the sort of growth that
| depends on limited external resources. That's tough to do
| because the most ravenous consumers tend to win out and be
| selected for, so even if you have a movement of people who
| are more efficient with resources (resources per unit of
| well-being), they'll tend to be shunted aside by the
| greediest segment of the population. More efficient bacteria
| can win out, but only if the inefficient greedy subset is
| made to be affected by the resource constraints.
|
| To address that, I'll make a modest proposal: find a valley
| somewhere and get all of the people most driven by external
| accumulation to move there. Make them compete with each
| other, creating ever more ostentatious and expensive ways for
| them to demonstrate their superiority. Create cultural
| barriers to moving anywhere else, except for people who are
| willing to let go of the rat race. Let nature run its course.
| Speed it up by seeding the population with a gender imbalance
| and cultural pressures to maintain or magnify that imbalance,
| so that breeding opportunities are limited. This will produce
| a lot of churn and waste in the process, so make sure there's
| a sandy substrate to allow for good drainage. That last part
| got a bit metaphorical, and would be even more so if I
| referred to this valley's sand by one of its principal
| components: silicon.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Notably this article doesn't mention water, and doesn't discuss
| land much other than a single line about Malthus and farmland.
| Then there's this assertion:
|
| > "But the deeper reason is that there's really no such thing as
| a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a
| product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven,
| not by material resources, but by ideas."
|
| Arable land - i.e. topsoil - is not a product of technology, it's
| a product of geology and biology, namely the erosion of rocks and
| the accumulation of biomass. Yes, one can indeed make an
| artificial soil-like system (hydroponics), but this in turn
| requires raw materials (typically clay pebbles, plastic pots,
| plastic pipes, plus a complete nutrient mixture of simple
| chemicals) which are in turn made from limited material
| resources.
|
| Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in the
| absence of water, human populations do not grow. Just look at a
| population density map of the United States - note how few people
| live in the desert zones. Again, there are technological
| approaches: desalinate ocean water, pump it to the desert, and
| grow food hydroponically. This requires an investment of material
| resources and energy.
|
| I get this feeling that economimsts who makes these claims about
| infinite growth have simply never studied the conservation of
| energy, or the conservation of mass. Every source I've looked at
| puts the minimal land area for food production for one human at
| about two hectares with traditional agriculture, and maybe half
| that with modern industrial double cropping methods. US farmland
| is about 166 million hectares, so that sort of fits, as the US
| population is about 330 million; exports of food also appear to
| match imports of food so that's a wash.
|
| So clearly there are limits on the growth of the human population
| on a finite planet. If the question is, "can you have infinite
| economic growth with a fixed human population", well, whatever
| discipline makes claims like that is one entirely divorced from
| physical reality. Inflation maybe?
| munk-a wrote:
| While the world has numerous issues that need to be solved - I
| think we've, for the time being, been able to classify
| exhaustion of materials as a problem we won't have to deal with
| for a long time.
|
| The earth has a lot of matter in it - it is absurdly massive -
| technological advances in replicating necessary raw resources
| (and your topsoil one is particularly good to demonstrate this)
| have pushed us from looking at an absolute limit to instead
| viewing the perpetual creation of new components as a steadily
| rising economic burden.
|
| One raw resource that is actually quickly depleting is river
| sand for concrete - our current consumption trends are
| extremely scary here and some governments (CoughIndiaCough) are
| doing an absolutely terrible job at properly enforcing
| externality costs on extraction leading to mass habitat
| destruction. But, if we suddenly found ourselves without easy
| access to rough river sand we do have alternative construction
| materials including processed wood in various forms that can be
| extremely resilient.
|
| I don't really like the wording of the article in defining all
| resources as artificial - but the natural components driving
| the economy are quite abundant.
| marvin wrote:
| > Similarly, fresh water is a limited natural resource, and in
| the absence of water, human populations do not grow
|
| This isn't really true any longer. Desalinating seawater costs
| about $1 per 1000 liters. You need a relatively prosperous
| country to be able to afford that, of course, but an
| industrialized economy with reasonable levels of corruption is
| perfectly capable of desalinating enough water to make
| civilization work.
|
| It's practically tautological that there's limits to population
| size in a finite world, and that growth cannot be infinite in a
| finite universe. But I think people often frame this question
| the wrong way. It's a bit of a straw man.
|
| Economic growth is proportional to the amount of problems
| solved that humans care about. And the cost of the solution, of
| course, in terms of human effort. It isn't necessarily
| proportional to the amount of physical resources consumed or
| bound. It's a reasonable assumption that there's generally a
| positive correlation, but the function and coefficients don't
| have to be linear. That leaves a _lot_ of headroom.
|
| People should rather think about infinite (arbitrary!!)
| economic growth in terms of what can be done to make the lives
| of humans better, on average. Even in the Western world, we are
| so far away from the hedonistic limits that it's ridiculous.
| It's trivial to imagine a world with no illness, perfect
| health, indefinite lifespan, very high freedom and low
| repression, no seriously bothersome and mandatory chores for
| anyone and so on. What can be done to get closer to such a
| world? So much.
|
| The limit isn't defined by how polluting our cars can be, or
| how much beef we're able to produce. Many of these arguments
| collapse into the completely unimaginative.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| "Desalinating seawater costs about $1 per 1000 liters..."
|
| Ah... so if I'm in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and have
| no water, but I do have a dollar in my pocket, someone will
| deliver me 1000 liters of water, sourced from desalination of
| Pacific Ocean water? How much energy will that take?
| peterweyand0 wrote:
| The author uses several analogies which are rather cutesy, but
| doesn't address the main issue in a salient way.
|
| All consumption comes from some combination of raw resources and
| the addition of technological input. In real prices, as the cost
| of raw resources increases over time, this means that
| technological innovation is _not_ making up for how much of those
| resources are being consumed as compared to the population as a
| whole.
|
| At it's most basic we can calculate the rate of change as the
| amount of time it takes the average worker to buy a gallon of
| water or food and shelter for a single person. These are
| resources that aren't substitute-able, and are required for life.
| Other costs are rather nebulous (how much does a college
| education cost and what does this say about society now versus
| how much technological innovation is necessary for the
| continuation of the species)?
|
| So then the question then becomes, does the real rate of return
| for any particular company or the stock market as a whole assume
| that a potential future exists in which that real rate of return
| is actually possible to exist?
|
| Let's assume, in a model as simplistic as possible, that there is
| one stock (or market) that represents all of the world's
| companies that has a real rate of return of 2.5 percent per annum
| that is compounded once per year. As a sum total of world wide
| growth this would seem rather modest. The worldwide initial
| capital we'll assume is $100.
|
| So the growth rate is given by A = P(100 + r/n)^(nt) which would
| be in our case (for an investment of 100 dollars) -
|
| 100x(1.025^10) = $128.
|
| So for the real capital stock of $100 to increase to a real
| capital stock of $128 some combination of things must happen -
| the amount of capital stock in terms of raw resources must
| increase in real terms and the amount of technology must increase
| in order to make the use of these inputs more efficiently.
|
| If technology remains constant then there must be an increase of
| 28% over ten years of capital. If capital remains constant then
| technology must make the current use of capital 28% more
| efficient.
|
| Compound return over time is concerning in the long run, and hand
| waving it away is either ignorant at best or disingenuous at
| worst.
|
| And capitalism is still the best distribution system we have come
| up with. Most of the world is working with a single overall
| social model, because it has been so successful, and we don't
| have a backup that's been shown to work in practice. My concern
| isn't in favor of Das Kapital or Marxism - who owns the product
| of labor and historicism over labor rights isn't as concerning as
| compound interest over all.
|
| Most economists I've worked with don't seem to think that this is
| a problem or that technology will magically free market a utopian
| future of plenty for all. This is an article of faith.
| havblue wrote:
| While this article discusses the macro benefits of maintaining
| population growth, the reasons for the birth dropoff in developed
| countries is microeconomic. Kids are expensive to raise and it's
| hard for two parents to have successful careers with kids. Even
| after the one child policy ended, China's birthrate is still
| declining.
| pphysch wrote:
| Growth is and will continue to hit the limits of the domain,
| until the domain is expanded.
|
| The principles of Western capitalism that drove growth for
| centuries are less and less reliable, so we need to adapt our
| principles.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Sure, a malign tumor grows until the host dies.
|
| Same is true for our glorious, of course unavoidable, an
| extremely resilient and fair economic system.
|
| There is only black and white, zero and one, locusts capitalism
| and stalinistic communism...
|
| /s
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Didn't watch the video but the article was good. I think their
| mindset is absolutely correct- we should be worrying less about
| overpopulation than underpopulation and we should be pushing
| forward trying to make technological progress instead of
| embracing a degrowth mindset. While it does seem like big ideas
| are harder to find, I think some incentive shifting (e.g. more
| focus by corporates on long-term growth through productivity
| increases and innovation and less on financial chicanery) along
| with the innovation that comes sometimes with a single new
| platform (remember all the "Uber for X" products that the iphone
| enabled) that can help turn the tide. Plus, seems like many more
| people are concerned with progress, from Cowen to
| Progress.institute, so hopefully with more focus there will be
| more results.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It seems quite obvious to me there is a lot of growth left with
| information being close to free now - and much of the adult
| world still being VERY poorly educated.
|
| The current children that replace them will be much more
| educated due to free information.
|
| I don't see how this doesn't create a huge jump in productivity
| in the developing world (~50% of the population).
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Good point, I remember seeing a report a little while ago
| about literacy rates even in the U.S. and they were
| surprisingly bad (a quick lookup on Wikipedia shows
| "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults
| in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade
| level")
|
| That said, I'm not sure it's a guarantee that kids will be
| more educated and productive. I spent quite a bit of time in
| Africa (Kenya and Cameroon for projects, Uganda for holiday)
| last year and many people are relatively highly educated
| (e.g. local university degree) but still cannot get work,
| access to finance to start their own biz and be productive,
| or as soon as they make some money their business will get
| taxed (legally or illegally) to death. So other factors
| beyond education holding folks back, and even if it was just
| enabled from online learning, I think we'd see much more
| takeup of MOOCs and the like.
|
| Edit: Grammar
| captainbland wrote:
| I think a big - maybe huge and insurmountable - barrier to
| this is the sheer amount of junk attention sinks and outright
| wrong information on exactly the same medium that the good,
| free information is on.
| stouset wrote:
| I remember being naive and thinking the Internet would
| solve the issue of spreading high-quality information far
| and wide. What I (and I think many others) completely
| neglected to realize was that it also made misinformation
| exponentially easier to spread.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Misinformation is not making people worse programmers or
| worse engineers or worse doctors or worse lawyers at the
| same rate (or higher) that good information is making
| more people better.
|
| Misinformation is mostly affecting a relatively small
| portion (~10%) of the population that is predisposed to
| believe conspiracy.
|
| It's not like your BiL who thinks Lizard People are
| running the world would've won the Nobel prize in Physics
| if it weren't for that Facebook post by your aunt that
| rotted his brain.
|
| Information as a whole is good (so far).
| stickfigure wrote:
| I think the misinformation risks are overstated. Qanon-
| ers are a tiny part of the population. Even antivaxers
| are a distinct minority. Good information wins out, even
| if the process is not perfect.
| esrauch wrote:
| Are there more Qanon-ers or Coursera users though? Even
| if the risks are overstated (which I'm not sure about) it
| seems like the amount of quality learning happening
| online rounds to zero. Even narrowly, I'm not sure that
| more true information about vaccines is spread online
| than false information, partly because I think it's
| actually pretty low amount of true information being
| spread.
|
| Ten years ago there was a lot of optimism that moocs
| we're going to bring education to the masses, make
| $40k/year tuition entirely obsolete, but that seems to
| basically have entirely failed.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This would be more comforting if Qanon-ers weren't
| getting elected to congress. And a small number of anti-
| vaxers is more than enough to undermine herd immunity.
|
| The anti-vaxxer case is quite illuminating actually
| because anti-vax sentiment has seemingly only _increased_
| as the internet has become more popular. Good information
| does not win out in all cases.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > And a small number of anti-vaxers is more than enough
| to undermine herd immunity.
|
| Why? The vaccine isn't very effective in preventing
| transmission of Omicron (only ~40%).
|
| Anti-vaxxers are not the thing preventing Covid from
| ending at this point.
|
| I mean - sure, with a different virus where the vaccine
| is close to 100% effective at preventing transmission or
| the R0 is not much higher than 1.
|
| But not with this virus.
|
| Why are anti-vaxxers getting elected to congress any
| worse than people who believe in Lizard People getting
| elected to congress?
| slx26 wrote:
| And yet, at the same time, growth can't continue forever
| (unless you get into space colonization on artificial habitats
| and are able to develop that faster than population grows and
| other stuff we are not going to discuss now).
|
| What happens, as the article indeed points out, is that many
| things keep breaking, and we keep fixing and repairing and
| improving and more things fail and stop working and then again
| we fix and replace them. And so on and so on. The main problem
| is that people suffers in that process. The system self-
| regulates, sure. Nature self-regulates all the time through
| natural selection, evolutionary pressure and competition. That
| doesn't make it right. We develop medicine because being human
| is the opposite of accepting the randomness, competition and
| cruelty of nature. We want to have control, we want people to
| be happy, we don't want to be exposed to arbitrary tragedy,
| unfairness, pain.
|
| As I always say, don't confuse the comfort of your boat with
| the state of the sea. That you are comfortable riding the
| current wave of pressure doesn't mean no one is suffering. This
| doesn't mean we should never grow, but it means we should do it
| responsibly. Saying growth is already responsible because the
| world keeps self-regulating is just being blind to many of the
| dynamics of the system.
|
| And ok, one may argue that finding an equilibrium is
| impossible. That when there are resources available, we will
| always start taking more and more, growing above our
| possibilities, taking water until we hit the bottom, dumping
| shit until it spills. Then pressure and competition kicks in,
| people fall, people suffer, self-regulation is the way and all
| is good again. I don't understand.
|
| (sorry for the rant, I understand you may also have concerns
| about the rate of growth and welfare of people in the process,
| but I wanted to share this take anyway)
| slothtrop wrote:
| As you say, growth, on Earth anyway, is projected to end. We
| should be planning for it. Instead nations are deferring and
| deferring by focusing on increased immigration.
| jgon wrote:
| Everytime I read one of these articles I get the feeling that I'm
| reading a report from the village elders that people have never
| been fuller or more prosperous now that we've consumed all our
| seed corn. We just need to keep eating all the corn we can, and
| let's not worry about winter because our priests (engineers) tell
| us they'll probably find a way around it. I don't know, maybe its
| the background environment that I've spent my whole life growing
| up in, but every time I read this I'm always left asking what it
| is that I don't know/can't see, especially when it comes to the
| billionaire class.
|
| Do they have access to different reports that suggest global
| warming won't be as devastating as the scientific consensus
| broadly predicts? Is it nihilism/sociopathy, aka I'll be dead by
| the time it gets bad and I can't feel any sort of connection/care
| for my offspring, let alone my fellow humans? At the risk of
| memeing, is there a project to build Elysium going on that us
| plebs don't know about and that's what SpaceX/Blue Origin is all
| about? I just find it hard to square what the current message is
| wrt to global warming, a message that appears highly credible to
| my lay understanding, with the behaviour of the people who have
| the power to help nudge the direction our society is headed. Does
| anyone else get this, or have thoughts on it? I am genuinely
| asking here, because I can't resolve the contradiction and it
| weighs on me.
| sfink wrote:
| The Elysium is already here, it's just less separate than you
| imagine. The $100M and billionaire classes are quite good at
| wresting a higher standard of living for themselves, and
| naturally select for those who feel separate from and superior
| to the unwashed masses. They're not thinking they'll be dead by
| the time it matters, they are concerned about their offspring,
| they just know that their offspring won't be the ones
| suffering.
|
| Large disruptions always create opportunities for a limited
| subset of people to do even _better_ at the cost of everyone
| else doing much worse. The billionaire class is doing
| everything in their control to be in that elite subset, and so
| far they 've been quite successful at that and there really
| isn't any reason in sight as to why their approach is going to
| fail any time soon.
|
| Elysium is made out of people who live among us for as long as
| it is advantageous to them to do so, who can pay reputation
| consultants to keep the mobs with pitchforks away, who are
| pouring their money and influence into promoting a culture that
| makes everyone feel like the elite deserve their exalted
| positions and that if you don't feel that way, you're at risk
| of losing your chance of getting up there to be with them. And
| making us feel like that chance is real, it's just a breakout
| app away, and you'd better keep playing the game or you'll be
| driven into medical bankruptcy and your kids will get shot at
| school.
| jgon wrote:
| I kind of hear you, but honestly I have to question even
| that? If it is less separate than I can imagine how does that
| work in the face of catastrophic global warming? It was one
| thing when elites could pull the strings in one nation,
| knowing if things go real they go just hop on a private jet,
| but global warming is just that, global. Everyone is going to
| feel the consequences, and that's not even talking about
| other resources such as food, raw materials, etc. You can't
| just have a bunker in New Zealand, unless you also plan to
| just live in the bunker for years and years? I guess what I
| am trying to say is that Elysium is plausible because it's
| literally "up there". Riding out the second half of this
| century _on earth_ seems waaaaaay different to me.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Global warming has a lot of mixed bias messaging.
|
| Scientists claim the earth is warming
|
| News organisations gain more traction on fear-based claims
| regardless of motive
|
| Politicians need to express their utmost urgency on whatever
| the above mentions
|
| And yet there's no actual consensus on a realistic action plan.
| Like preventing a homocide before it happens. What point is
| there in preventing something that might not actually prevent
| anything but make it worse. To carry on like nothing's
| happening is the most rational choice. Like the food shortage
| that didn't happen.
|
| Best to wait and see what crisis is most real and most urgent
| to prevent
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think what's holding back growth is inequality and the 40 hour
| work week. Imagine how much economic activity would be generated
| by fixing those things.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Be careful. Fixing inequality could be helpful. "Fixing" it may
| be disastrous.
|
| Remember that political changes often don't do what the label
| says.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| You're speaking in code.
|
| Something more concrete and non-code: Americans could start
| by redistributing some of the money belonging to people who
| earn 100K or more a year.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Indeed, we need a New Deal, not a Final Solution.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Indeed! The economy might grow significantly if people worked
| longer hours!!
|
| _what do you mean that 's not what you meant at all_
| javert wrote:
| The idea that government management of the economy can do
| better than private management and allocation of capital is
| utterly preposterous. This has been proven many times over by
| 20th century history, and is also immediately obvious if you've
| ever been to the DMV. Or if you know anything about the inner
| workings of a complex modern state apparatus, such as the US
| federal government. You might as well be calling the sky red.
|
| (And I know that's what you're advocating from a different
| comment you just made about the New Deal.)
|
| In a free market, the best allocators of resources are rewarded
| with more resources to continue allocating; the worse
| allocators are punished by losing their capacity to allocate.
| This is called capitalism.
|
| Contrast that to a system where goverment eliminates
| inequality: Government allocates resources, meaning the worst
| people, people who are best at graft and pull, are rewarded.
| This is a disaster. We can already see this happening in the
| US. One egregious offender is the Dept. of Homeland Security
| which is siphoning off more and more national resources and
| growing like a cancer. The university system (which is in
| reality Federally managed) is an egregious offender. The
| medical system (which is Federally managed but run for profit
| through graft) is an egregious offender.
|
| The latter system---the system of "government management,"
| where the government doesn't _let_ people receive unequal
| rewards for unequal success---is a path straight to the butcher
| 's block.
| smolder wrote:
| Government management of the economy _can_ do better than
| private management. Private management _can_ do better than
| government management. The idea that either thing has been
| disproven is what is preposterous. These mechanisms don 't
| predict success or failure by themselves.
| javert wrote:
| The free economy self-regulates. That's why it works. What
| I mean is, people won't buy your good or service if it
| sucks, or a better one is available. Companies that are
| mismanaged lose out to their competitors and go out of
| business. Any weakness or rot is self-contained.
|
| The government doesn't have a mechanism to self-regulate.
| Democracy was supposed to regulate the government, and
| probably can in small societies, or perhaps if formulated
| the correct way. American democracy definitely doesn't
| regulate government, and it doesn't self-regulate, so it's
| a system that's out of control.
|
| You see the same mechanisms (plus others) in many societies
| in the 20th century. I don't see any evidence or reason to
| think the government can manage the economy. And a big part
| of the causal explanation is what I've stated above.
| Another is that the government isn't omniscient; it doesn't
| have enough information. Market solutions don't need to be
| omniscient and price serves to carry information.
|
| As an aside, fun fact: Did you know that in the US, price
| controls are used by a government committee to set the
| price of the _fundamental_ good, which is the US dollar?
| That does a lot to disrupt price as a signal of
| information. People think in the US we don 't have
| government price fixing, and they are wrong. (I use the US
| as a pet example but I guess the above is basically true
| everywhere.)
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| The idea that private management and allocation of capital
| can do better than government management of the economy is
| utterly preposterous. This has been proven many times over by
| 21st century history, and is also immediately obvious if
| you've ever been to the airport. Or if you know anything
| about the inner workings of a complex modern commercial
| apparatus, such as any investment bank, or Enron.
|
| My local DMV provides dramatically better customer service
| than most private companies I've interacted with lately.
| Government entities are also required to at least pretend to
| account for efficiency, whereas private companies have an
| unknown - but known to be massive - amount of waste,
| corruption, and outright fraud.
|
| In any case, nobody is seriously advocating for a full
| socialist/government-planned economy. Looking at basic
| workers' rights and throwing a fit about OMG SOCIALISM is
| such a ludicrous level of libertarian delusion it borders on
| self-parody. In reality, it is very well known - by
| psychology, by statistics, and by empiricism - that societies
| that don't allow the most powerful to make unchecked
| decisions based on their current level of resources do better
| than those who do.
|
| There are a few pretty obvious reasons why this is true.
| First, "currently having resources" is not a good indicator
| of skill in resource allocation. Second, there are problems
| of misaligned value functions - what is "efficient" for one
| actor may be extremely inefficient for society as a whole,
| requiring action by a government (or some equivalently
| collective entity) to properly account for externalities.
| Third, mismatched negotiating power (because employees _must_
| agree to some employment or else starve) mean that even those
| actually party to any given agreement might not be maximizing
| their own resource allocation by doing so. And fourth (not
| finally, but finally off the top of my head), there are
| problems of diversification in the face of uncertainty -
| resource-havers can take maximum-expected-value actions even
| when they have low probability of payoff (e.g., risky
| business ventures that will pay off 10x 20% of the time but
| go bankrupt the other 80% of the time), because they can
| afford to make those bets enough times to even out the
| variance; non-resource-havers must settle for lower-expected-
| value but lower-variance options, which limits their success
| even with perfectly skillful allocation.
| javert wrote:
| I just wanted to say, I really don't appreciate the sarcasm
| in the first couple of paragraphs. Anybody can take
| someone's comment and negate each of the sentences. It's
| only clever and cute if the new version is kind of self-
| evidently true or somehow insightful. In this case, it's
| not.
|
| You're also setting up a straw man with the comment about
| workers' rights. A call for the government to "fix
| inequality" with something like the New Deal is not a call
| for workers' rights. It's implicitly a call for the
| government to run much more of the economy than it already
| does. There is no other way to achieve the stated objective
| in the stated way.
|
| Playing the old "fit about socialism" card is not
| impressive. I never used the word "socialism" because it's
| a slippery word that leads to low quality discussion. It's
| beside the point. Is _every_ argument against government
| management magically defeated by the "OMG SOCIALISM"
| sarcasm that left wing people always trot out like this?
|
| Also, probably needless to say, I disagree with your
| analysis.
|
| edit: I will respond to the following:
|
| > In reality, it is very well known - by psychology, by
| statistics, and by empiricism - that societies that don't
| allow the most powerful to make unchecked decisions based
| on their current level of resources do better than those
| who do.
|
| That's simply not true that this is "very well known." And
| you are conflating political power (which is what we call
| "power") with economic power (which isn't what we normally
| call "power"). The power of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is
| limited mostly to doing good or just losing their money.
| That has nothing to do with the power weilded by, say, the
| Dept. of Homeland Security, or the American medical
| insurance industry (which gets its power through regulatory
| graft backed by political power and ultimately force).
| Forceful power, i.e. "power," is just not comparable to the
| "power" one gets by voluntarily trading with others.
|
| It's silly to say your non sequitur is "well known" by
| "psychology" or "statistics" (what do those have to do with
| it, anyway) or "empiricism." That's nothing like my saying
| that something is "well known" to history. 20th century
| history is straightforward and direct (and relevant) in a
| way that psychology and statistics are not. We have _tried_
| big government management many times and it always _fails_.
| Look at the many communist countries that actually stayed
| communist (i.e. China doesn 't count, but it's a shit show
| anyway). Look at fascist-nationalist command economies like
| the Nazis and today's Russians. Those societies and
| economies evidently do not work. (I would add, look at the
| outcome of the New Deal, but that is more nuanced.) There
| is no way a psychology paper could have that kind of
| evidentiary power.
| idontpost wrote:
| You really drank the fascist koolaid.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I just wanted to say, I really don't appreciate the
| sarcasm in the first couple of paragraphs. Anybody can
| take someone's comment and negate each of the sentences.
| It's only clever and cute if the new version is kind of
| self-evidently true or somehow insightful. In this case,
| it's not.
|
| When you say it: just spitting facts, being no-nonsense.
|
| When someone else uses the same device to say the
| opposite: vile sarcasm which is not on-point or even
| funny since it is obviously false (you hold the opposite
| opinion so of course it is: it is self-evident).
| javert wrote:
| A comment that negates each sentence of what it's
| responding to is not using the "same device." It's being
| sarcastic.
|
| Using the "same device" would be saying, "I think the
| opposite is self-evident..." and then elaborating.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I think the opposite is self-evident. The idea that
| private management and allocation of capital can do
| better than government management of the economy is
| ridiculous. This has been proven many times over by post-
| industrial history, and is also immediately obvious if
| you've ever been to the airport. Or if you know anything
| about the inner workings of a complex modern commercial
| apparatus, such as any investment bank, or Enron.
|
| ---
|
| Sarcasm is when you repeat something without negating it,
| but indicating that you really think the opposite
| (negation). Saying "private sector management doesn't
| work" and meaning it is not sarcasm.
| atq2119 wrote:
| I can understand that it feels unpleasant to be on the
| receiving end of a response like that. But here's the
| thing: the negation really _is_ self-evident as much as
| the original was. Native trust in "the free market" or
| private allocation of capital can be just as bad as
| native trust in government allocation of the same.
| javert wrote:
| If someone thinks the negation of each sentence is self-
| evident, a good response is "I think the opposite is
| self-evident." No sarcasm necessary.
| solatic wrote:
| The free market is pretty phenomenal at ensuring that
| technological growth will continue until we hit theoretical
| limits.
|
| Shortages cause price increases. Price increases make it more
| economical to pay up-front costs to develop technology whose per-
| unit costs permit extracting a profit compared to competitors who
| are not as technologically advanced, who die out and are replaced
| by new competitors who buy the technology off-the-shelf and
| reduce the price further in second-mover advantage, back down to
| the now-lower per-unit cost. Eventually demand develops to the
| point where there is a persistent shortage again and the cycle
| repeats.
|
| The question is, what are the theoretical limits?
|
| Will we run out of oxygen? Unlikely, the CO2 we breathe out can
| be recycled back into oxygen. Water? Also unlikely, for similar
| reasons. Food? With hydroponics, we're no longer limited by the
| amount of land we have, and it's renewable. Energy? The Sahara is
| a vast, untapped source of solar electricity which we haven't
| tapped because a) transmission lines are too expensive and b)
| security is too expensive. When energy costs rise enough to make
| those costs economical, the free market will get the underlying
| infrastructure built, and then we're good to go.
|
| So yeah, growth will continue.
| honkler wrote:
| why didn't the great god progress save many of the past fallen
| civilizations? were they running out of Oxygen?
| solatic wrote:
| Growth doesn't mean that nothing dies. Individual people die,
| individual businesses go out of business, and yes,
| civilizations are conquered. That doesn't mean that growth
| isn't happening on a higher/macro level.
|
| If you want to pick a civilization whose gifts weren't
| subsumed into a larger, still growing civilization, you'd
| have to pick, what, Atlantis? A myth? OK then.
| astine wrote:
| Most past civilizations didn't fail due to a single resource
| collapse. Also, most of them didn't have free-markets
| oriented around innovation.
| RobertoG wrote:
| Markets are not oriented around innovation but around
| profit.
|
| Innovation can eventually be produced, but it's an
| accidental sub-product. Innovation it's not the metric that
| markets are optimizing.
| mordae wrote:
| This. Go read Walkaway from Cory Doctorow for a nice
| perspective on "growth".
| slothtrop wrote:
| Relevant question: why did they fall?
| vkou wrote:
| Because this time it's different, and we can safely expect
| that yet-to-be-invented technologies will save us.
| honkler wrote:
| just one more app!
| softcactus wrote:
| Can it continue? Sure. Theoretically we could all be hooked up to
| computers that slow our perception of reality and allow us to
| create 2x the digital commodities we could normally in our
| lifetime. This would technically count as "growth". But I think
| the actual question is flawed to begin with. Why do we need
| infinite growth? Do we really need 3% economic growth per year ad
| infinitum? Why is that our metric for optimization? Why don't
| choose something else to optimize on like human happiness or
| fulfillment or freedom?
| smaudet wrote:
| Because the world is a ponzii scheme, where we don't pay people
| for their time but for the going market rate.
|
| If you keep a stable population and pay people based upon life
| expectations * skill, no one would need a retirement account.
|
| But those with pull want to sit on their hands and do nothing,
| and throw around large sums of money, hence the ponzi scheme.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Because it is tied to population growth and productivity:
|
| The optimal number of children is 2.1, for offspring to replace
| parents
|
| [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/fertility-rate
|
| When there is no population growth, no inflation or economic
| growth:
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJis2K6B8Q
|
| You might think that worldwide and US has <2.1%, but technology
| amplifies productivity, so it is not a 1-1 ratio
|
| [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-
| population/#:~:text=Popu....
|
| [4] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/popu...
| austinl wrote:
| It's interesting to consider that the total global human
| population could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more
| likely around 2100). Global population growth rate has _already
| peaked_ at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped to 1.1%. [1].
|
| In the last 60 years, total fertility rate has dropped from 5 to
| 2.5 [2], and most industrialized nations are hovering right
| around replacement rate of 2.1 or actively shrinking (Japan, 1.4,
| Germany, 1.6, South Korea, 0.81). Albeit during COVID, the 2020
| TFR in the United States was only 1.64, and has declined for the
| last four years in a row [3].
|
| With technology, I'd still expect the overall "size of the
| economy" to grow, but it will be interesting to see how growth is
| affected by substantial changes in demography that play out over
| the next 100-200 years (if only I could stick around to watch!).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate [3]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/us-birthrate-falls-cov...
| vidarh wrote:
| More than just the most developed industrialised countries too.
| _India_ has just reached replacement and is set to start
| declining in a few decades. And China ditched the one child
| policy years ago and are now pushing for more in a bid to
| prevent a crash landing after they dropped below years ago -
| currently they 're maybe ~20 years from starting to see
| population decline unless they soften immigration rules.
|
| It's going to take a _long_ time before this change sinks in
| for people who are still used to worrying about overpopulation,
| outside of the fringe groups panicking over "white
| replacement".
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| A lot of people aren't worried about overpopulation in a
| vacuum. They are worried about overpopulation along with the
| rise of personal consumption and potential competition (read:
| perceived zero-sum games). The job market is already
| ridiculously competitive. Rent and homes are already crazy,
| partially due to so many people insisting on living alone and
| many countries still not having adapted to an increasingly
| more individualistic society.
|
| Telling them "it'll cool off in 20 years" is about the
| equivalent of telling them "yeah the problems we have now
| will continue another 20 years, deal with it".
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of people - _most_ of the ones I end up arguing about
| overpopulation with in fact - _are_ worried about it
| because they think growth is still heading for the skies
| and are arguing about it from a resource depletion and
| environmental angle.
|
| I can't recall the last time I came across the arguments
| you put forward, and I've hardly ever discussed this with
| someone expressing worry about overpopulation who has
| argued the problem is just that it's not flattening out
| fast enough. In fact, I often face people who insist I'm
| wrong when I point out projections show us heading for
| population decline.
|
| I'm not suggesting people believing what you're saying
| don't exist, but in my experience at least they're not the
| ones yelling loudest about overpopulation.
|
| That said, with respect to people worrying about it not
| flattening out fast enough, we'd face far worse problems if
| it rates started declining faster. We're already seeing
| pressure for higher pension ages to offset the coming
| decline in a working age population in many countries.
| Pressure for higher tax rates, longer hours, later pensions
| will come in short order if the demographic shift happens
| fast enough, and it will be massive unpopular.
| mcone wrote:
| > We are currently funded by donors including Patrick and John
| Collison
|
| This message brought to you by individuals who have a vested
| interest in seeing growth continue.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Everyone on earth has a vested interest in seeing growth
| continue, whether they know that or not.
| smaddox wrote:
| Well, if our energy use continues to grow at the current rate,
| we'll boil the oceans in about 450 years, so I would say no.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
| rnd33 wrote:
| What a ridiculous article... everyone understands that
| exponential growth cannot continue forever. The bigger and more
| interesting question is what the life of an average human looks
| like when growth inevitable slows down, and how fast we can get
| there.
|
| Because the assumption that we will grow our energy use
| indefinitely is flawed. Energy use has diminishing returns,
| eventually we'll run out of useful work we want to perform. At
| least in terms of material wealth and comfort.
|
| There's probably also major opportunities for energy savings
| that extends this timeframe greatly. Incandescent -> LED lights
| have reduced energy consumption by a factor of 10. Technology
| improvements in just the last 5 years have halved the energy
| consumption of air conditioners.
| smaddox wrote:
| > everyone understands that exponential growth cannot
| continue forever
|
| Everyone understands? Why do you believe that? As far as I
| can tell, most people, especially economists, think it can.
|
| If population continues to grow exponentially (it likely
| won't), I see no reason to think our energy use would not
| continue to grow exponentially.
|
| Efficiency improvements are linear, not exponential. They
| cannot compensate for exponential growth in population.
| Isamu wrote:
| >there's really no such thing as a natural resource. All
| resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And
| economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources,
| but by ideas.
|
| I think this bears repeating. It is counterintuitive and maybe
| even repulsive to some people.
| [deleted]
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| The answer is yes for now. We can continue to grow. We are in the
| process of creating a whole new virtual world which will expand
| the economic possibilities. Even if natural resources become
| scarce, we have a whole new virtual world explore and develop.
| The real limit to growth is population. Population growth is
| coming to halt in the next 50 years and that will dictate our
| growth capabilities then.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| At the end, the author says:
|
| > In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might
| be the slowdown in population growth. Without more brains to push
| technology forward, progress might stall.
|
| It should be noted that the vast majority of human brains do not
| today get the opportunity to work with ideas or push technology
| forward. Many people don't even get enough to _eat or drink_.
|
| We have a loooong way to go on the basics of organizing human
| society before we need to worry about the intellectual constraint
| of total population size.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| You don't have to wait until the entire world has this
| opportunity before ringing the alarm. If population growth is
| going down in the areas where the ideas _are_ worked on, namely
| the developed world, which it is, we should still worry.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| No we shouldn't, because "the developed world" is not a fixed
| thing. We can make the entire world developed.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| But who'll work the sweatshops then?
| munk-a wrote:
| Nobody. Who ever said sweatshops were a necessary part of
| a functioning economy?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| If only we could have developed some machine that are
| good at doing repetitive work. One can only dream. /S
|
| But yeah, I get your point. The fact that we still rely
| on sweatshop imports proves there's something wrong with
| our society.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| I agree with you. But development doesn't happen overnight
| and it's the people who control the ideas and technology
| that have the power to develop the rest of the world. And
| if that population growth is in decline at the same time
| it's needed to push development forward, isn't that cause
| for concern?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's not a cause for concern. The rate of population
| growth in highly developed areas can be turned up or down
| simply by admitting or denying immigrants.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Only if you assume that the developed world has some
| special sauce that requires you being born here to work.
| brokencode wrote:
| That's one of many reasons why it's important to keep on
| investing in underdeveloped countries. There's no reason why
| people there couldn't contribute in the same ways that people
| in more developed countries contribute.
|
| And immigration is a good way to help keep the population of
| developed countries growing. There really isn't any reason
| why we can't tap into the incredible human resources
| available in the world if we try.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| There's two problems with that argument:
|
| 1. "People in developed nations don't breed due to stress,
| but meh we can just replace them" is a monstrous way to
| think.
|
| 2. You can't import people as replacements above a certain
| rate, because it's the culture of the developed nation
| which causes the success -- and without maintaining that
| culture, the benefits cease.
| a4isms wrote:
| Citation needed for both of your claims, especially the
| second. What do you mean "it's the culture?" There are
| democracies everywhere, white people everywhere,
| protestants everywhere, people speak English everywhere,
| what is magically special about "the culture" that makes
| America a powerhouse of innovation?
|
| How do you know it doesn't have a lot to do with having
| two oceans to protect it, and bunch of things that
| happened 400 years ago to federalize it and create what
| amounts to a massive economic union?
|
| How do you know it isn't one of those things where a
| little bit of growth magnifies over time if not disrupted
| by war, just as what makes SF special is that a little
| bit of growth started there, and the concentration of
| intellectual and financial capital attracted more
| intellectual and financial capital?
|
| Both of those explanations have nothing to do with a
| hand-wavey claim of "the culture."
|
| And what do you mean that immigration is "a monstrous
| suggestion?" It sounds an awful lot like you're equating
| high rates of immigration with genocide. What on Earth is
| "monstrous" about immigrants? And why is that monstrous,
| but gentrification of SF by techies not monstrous?
|
| Really, this comes across as generic nativism.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Pretty sure the "monstrous" part is trying to denounce
| the idea of "humans are tools, if these peasants won't do
| what I want, I'll make them compete with peasants from a
| different country".
|
| I do think discouraging thinking of humans as resources
| is a good thing, even if this has the potential side-
| effect of making things more difficult for immigrants.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > Pretty sure the "monstrous" part is trying to denounce
| the idea
|
| An idea which was not present in the comment originally
| replied to, but OK.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| You could say the same for others interpreting it in the
| most villainous way possible. Since original commenter
| has yet to respond, maybe giving a different perspective
| to their comment keeps it from being interpreted as a
| vote for Aryanism. Until said elaboration.
| a4isms wrote:
| > I do think discouraging thinking of humans as resources
| is a good thing
|
| I agree with that. There's a famous rant by a Canadian
| comic/media personality where he quotes a government
| slogan "People are our most precious resource" and points
| out that Canada's approach to "resources" is to clearcut
| timber and strip-mine minerals.
|
| But we're talking about having enough population to
| maintain an economy of ideas. If we're talking about
| "There aren't enough people willing to work as flesh-
| robots in Amazon's warehouses, or if there are, they
| refuse to work in those conditions so we need desperate
| replacements from other countries" there's a whole
| different conversation to have, and it isn't really about
| declining populations, it's about things like living
| wages, labour standards, unionization, and recognition
| that the end-game is not competing with immigrants, it's
| competing with automation.
| munk-a wrote:
| Who is the person you're quoting? I'd like to give it a
| listen.
|
| Considering Canada's history with Uranium mining I'm
| surprised that they didn't bring that into the fold as
| well - it's a delicate subject since a large amount of
| the costs of unsafe Uranium mining were born out by
| indigenous peoples, but for how few actual mines there
| were a lot of people have died from health complications.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| We already have enough population to maintain said
| economy of ideas, it's more about maximizing the
| population beyond the bare necessity.
|
| Companies have actively been trying to make intellectual
| and/or creative work streamlined so they can reduce risk
| factors and swap out the old cog for the new one. They
| benefit from the increased competition so long as we
| don't unite against the status quo, which is also why
| automation is a potential disaster if we don't rethink
| our ways.
|
| This is not to fight against skilled immigrants making an
| effort to keep things at peace while carving out their
| place, no. But we've seen this scenario unfold a few
| times now with different things, and it turns out
| companies tend to be the main benefactors at the cost of
| everyone else already in the market, and quite a few
| people entering the market. That cost should be
| transferred to the richest people, not to the working
| class with less and less breathing room to spare. Both
| have to be tackled at the same time.
| munk-a wrote:
| That second point seems really shakey to me. As someone
| who has immigrated into a new country I'd highlight that
| the cost to do so is high enough (as a young person) that
| I was very careful to choose a country that was in line
| with my personal priorities.
|
| Can you explain what you specifically mean by culture if
| it differs from an alignment of personal with social
| priorities?
| brokencode wrote:
| 1. You think people in developed countries don't have
| kids because they're too stressed? I'd think it more
| stressful to live in extreme poverty as many do in other
| parts of the world. I don't think you've done any
| homework on this one.
|
| 2. This has been a popular theory among the far-right and
| white nationalists lately. But I'd be interested to see
| any evidence that immigration has a negative effect on
| society, because it sounds fundamentally racist and wrong
| to me.
| a4isms wrote:
| _If only there was a way to get more people into the
| developed world without people in the developed world
| creating new people twenty+ years at a time..._
|
| The secret to America's success has always been immigration,
| whether by violent colonialism, accepting of refugees from
| persecution or war, or inviting talented people to become
| citizens.
| anamax wrote:
| > The secret to America's success has always been
| immigration,
|
| Actually, no. Every few decades, American has mostly shut-
| down immigration for a few decades. The last opening was in
| 1965.
| [deleted]
| cseleborg wrote:
| Not just America. Europe, and other civilisations in the
| past, always benefited from immigration.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think that's wrong:
|
| The fraction of humanity in poverty has dropped as our
| population has grown -- because those larger, more capable
| nations have more means to feed themselves and greater wealth
| to care for the poor.
|
| A stall in population growth or a population decline runs a
| serious risk that our standards of living regress and those
| conditions worsen.
|
| We need to maintain our growth to impact the issues you care
| about:
|
| More people -> More wealth -> Less hunger
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Poverty alone doesn't mean getting your brains to do brain
| stuff.
|
| Most devs don't live in poverty, but most devs also aren't
| doing innovative work. They spend their limited intellectual
| stamina trying to make the boss richer, not modeling out a
| cancer detection algorithm.
| californical wrote:
| But even working on a simple CRUD app can push an industry
| forward. There is so much more incremental progress to be
| made, which pushes the economy upwards, than just the "big
| name" hot ideas (like cancer).
|
| There are still so many low hanging fruit that even simple
| technology can improve
| taneq wrote:
| This is what so many techie people don't get. The end
| user doesn't give a FUCK if you're 100% memory safe or
| you use a RESTful API or your app is HIJINX(TM) COMPLIANT
| or whatever. They want a button they can click which
| fixes their problem. If you give them that, then they
| win, so you win.
|
| 99% of the actual, serious, important problems right now
| are really really simple and have really dumb simple
| solutions. Not always the exactly optimal solution but
| there's one there that will do 90% of what anyone cares
| about, which we can do right now, but haven't yet.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Yes, a lot of "simple CRUD apps" can push an industry
| forward. A lot of simple stuff can also devolve into
| downright predatory practices which, despite making
| money, are anything but progress in the grander scheme of
| things. There's also the argument tons of "simple CRUD
| apps" exist because of a focus on the short term, rather
| than the long term. Or they exist to fill a "perceived
| hole" which is really just bureaucracy being bureaucracy.
|
| To name a different example, management has absolutely
| exploded. It's arguable whether this explosion has freed
| up brains more, or instead sucked up brain power.
| Meanwhile, most management jobs do pay well, to the point
| it's hard to consider a manager living in poverty.
| Personally, I believe we could easily slash management in
| half, permanently destroying those jobs and the
| accompanied bureaucracy to free up the brains, but that
| would result in those individuals having to compete for
| different jobs, maybe even less desirable jobs which put
| them back into poverty.
|
| Regardless, the point is poverty and freeing up brains
| for innovation aren't necessarily correlated or even
| causal. They can even be negatively correlated. Solving
| poverty isn't the only requirement to free up brains, if
| that is a societal goal. That's all.
| taneq wrote:
| Devil's advocate: You're begging the question that "making
| the boss richer" doesn't also equal "doing innovative
| work".
| 300bps wrote:
| _Most devs...spend their limited intellectual stamina
| trying to make the boss richer_
|
| I think it's great that devs have a choice. They can work
| at a company and have a relatively steady paycheck with
| benefits or they can make more and go off on their own and
| assume more risk.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Presumably they make their boss richer by providing value
| to someone paying their boss. Sure, some industries are
| probably parasitic or primarily extractive but the whole
| main idea of capitalism is than it can drive improvements
| for consumers, and for the people of a lot of countries
| this has largely panned out?
| deltaonefour wrote:
| This is optimistic. Consider the fact that the physical limits
| on growth cannot be moved or surpassed no matter the amount of
| brain power thrown at it.
|
| For example. The speed of light. How much brain power do you
| need to surpass that speed? Many limits are actual limits and
| if you think anything can be achieved just by surpassing it
| with technology, then I think you're not looking at the problem
| realistically.
|
| If you look at the amount of progress for the last 3 decades we
| are literally in the same place. Still driving cars and riding
| trains. The only area with massive progress is IT, but every
| other technology (including IT itself) looks like it's hitting
| some sort of hump in the curve. This is despite the increasing
| normalization of IQ scores across the world. On average, A
| person with 100 IQ today would have a higher IQ then the past.
|
| Something like fusion which is the biggest technology changer I
| see on the horizon still requires targeted a huge amount of
| government effort and resources to achieve. Such ventures are
| less likely to arrive purely out of the commercial sphere.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| My pessimistic and perhaps over-simplistic view is that growth
| is largely enabled by modern-day's squeezing of every last drop
| of people's disposable income. As the population becomes poorer
| in general (due to lack of breakthroughs in fundamental science
| and productivity, growing and aging population, widening
| inequality, etc.), the growth may eventually slowdown.
| jwagenet wrote:
| I think the limiting factor is traditionally considered the
| lack of new productive (physical) labor, not necessarily lack
| of new brains.
| erispoe wrote:
| Automation shifts productive labor to intellectual labor. A
| century ago value productive labor was probable 99%+ physical
| labor, but it's probably now much less.
| streetcat1 wrote:
| The article is missing a crucial point.
|
| Not only do we need more brains, but we also need robust
| knowledge transfers between generations (between current and new
| brains). I.e. for new brains to be effective, they must start
| from the point that the old brains stopped.
|
| As I see it the opposite process is at play. For example, cloud
| computing decrease the need to understand hardware/os. Or,
| outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge
| accumulation pipeline.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > Or, outsourcing remove new brains from entering the knowledge
| accumulation pipeline.
|
| This is why Boeing can't build planes anymore:
|
| They decided midcareer engineers were too expensive and their
| crop of senior engineers are aging out -- so they no longer
| have the expertise necessary, due to outsourcing and not
| supporting their young employees.
| aeternum wrote:
| Another way to look at this is just as an optimization
| problem. We found a good local optimum and it became too
| costly to search further.
|
| In the early days of aerospace, the search space was mostly
| unknown and there were tons of companies investing R&D in a
| wide variety of designs. Huge amounts of human capital were
| invested, and as in all things, some designs worked, some
| didn't. Many companies went bankrupt.
|
| Eventually we find some good designs and the risk/reward of
| searching the space further just doesn't make sense. Only
| recently with improved tech and ML/AI + simulation has the
| cost to search been reduced enough that it makes economic
| sense to try again.
| munk-a wrote:
| I enjoy the freedom to have a closet full of extremely finely
| tailored clothes (going by the 1800s standards) I'm practically
| living the millionaire's dream from that era... but never in my
| life have I learned how to operate a flying shuttle loom - some
| information is specialized and doesn't need widespread knowing.
|
| When I went to uni (and I'm only 35 so I'm not talking about
| the 80s) we learned about low level data structures, I took a
| course in relational algebra, operating system design, assembly
| language - these were necessary (imo) broadening exercises that
| have enabled me to better understand how to make things work
| performantly at a high level. Now a company may only need one
| or two folks like me with a passion for algorithm design among
| a dev team of fifty - but we don't all need formal training in
| every little thing.
|
| Imparting the knowledge of how to learn, along with those
| pieces of basic information we deem critical, can be enough.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Robust knowledge transfers between generations sounds nice, but
| the older people are retiring in droves and younger people
| aren't replacing them quickly enough. We just get a bunch of
| newbloods that don't get the chance to learn from old hands who
| will get paid less than them due to labor shortages. It is too
| bad we treat people like shit in this country. Consider, if you
| would the situation of nurses in America. We have record
| nursing school enrollment, high rates of turnover, increasing
| rates of violence against medical professionals, and levels of
| burnout that should give everyone pause.
|
| Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises.
| Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates
| even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't
| report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies.
| More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting
| their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or
| don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun
| little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you
| and see how many openings they have. Especially for security.
| The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they
| have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation
| techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are
| facing record shortages of labor.
|
| Who'd you rather have treating your loved ones? The nurses with
| decades of practical experience, or the nursing school
| graduates who will quit after 3 years of burn out and stress?
| We're starting to treat nurses as badly as we do teachers. What
| do we expect to happen? This is just one industry as well. A
| few fun links for your perusal.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/04/19/new-survey...
|
| https://www.ajc.com/pulse/survey-shows-90-of-nurses-consider...
|
| https://www.benefitnews.com/news/nurses-are-planning-to-quit...
| https://www.aacnnursing.org/News-
| Information/News/View/Artic....
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| In a system with finite energy and resources--the real world--
| infinite _anything_ is impossible.
| benstrumental wrote:
| The post focuses on countering the strawman-like argument that
| resource shortages are the primary threat with overpopulation.
| However, it is overwhelmingly clear that climate change is the
| biggest threat related to overpopulation, unless we are able to
| get carbon emissions per capita below 0 globally.
| rr808 wrote:
| Meh. Climate change is devastating for huge chunks of the
| planet. But the population of the hottest parts could easily
| move to cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely
| populated.
| benstrumental wrote:
| >But the population of the hottest parts could easily move to
| cooler parts of the world, most of which are sparsely
| populated.
|
| I would not describe relocating billions of people hundreds
| to thousands of miles north, often across country borders, as
| easy.
|
| This article contains some stories of a few climate refugees
| of today:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim.
| ..
| rr808 wrote:
| I cant see the article but yes it isn't easy to be a
| refugee right now. However I'd think places like Siberia
| would actually be much better with 100 million poor people
| from India who could build cities from scratch (over
| decades of course).
| jbotz wrote:
| And in a very real sense AGW _is_ a resource shortage
| problem... the natural resource that 's being depleted here is
| the natural carbon cycle that that kept CO2 levels fairly
| stable and gave us temperatures at the near optimal levels they
| were at during the time that civilization developed. We are
| "depleting" this resource by overloading it with excess CO2 and
| by destroying natural carbon sinks.
|
| Natural resources aren't limited to materials, natural
| processes also qualify. So it is also with fresh water... we
| won't "run out" of water, but we are exceeding the water-
| recycling capacities of the biosphere and thus this absolutely
| essential natural resource is becoming quite scarce in a lot of
| places. Theoretically you can replace it with artificial
| processes (desalination, treating contaminated water, etc) but
| to do that on a scale that can replace that natural water cycle
| is completely beyond our technology for now.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Malthus was wrong isn't an argument.
|
| > But the deeper reason is that there's really no such thing as a
| natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a
| product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven,
| not by material resources, but by ideas.
|
| That sounds far-stretched. The climate isn't an artificial
| resource, it's very natural and messing it up is going to
| seriously hinder growth. The fossil fuels that drove our growth
| for two centuries aren't artificial either, nor are they idea.
|
| The limits to growth is still valid today:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth There's no
| scenario in which growth is perpetual.
|
| If people want to argue about perpetual growth, they should come
| with numbers based on known estimates of the resource available
| today. Otherwise, it's just faith and holds no scientific value.
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