[HN Gopher] This can't go on (2021)
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This can't go on (2021)
Author : vikrum
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-08-20 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cold-takes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cold-takes.com)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The galaxy is a big place. We may stagnate a bit, but if we can
| cross the interplanetary threshold, I think it's smooth sailing
| to galactic growth.
| erlich wrote:
| There's always gonna be space when you jack into Zuck's
| metaverse.
| user6723 wrote:
| The singularity approaches, to take your job.
| hyperhello wrote:
| My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic
| growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to
| the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no
| working definition of it at all.
|
| Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the
| same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.
|
| Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite
| people on the planet, which doesn't happen because of birth
| control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.
|
| Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and
| education, but on everything as the price of living in society
| and are expected to make regular payments?
|
| What is "the size of the economy" and how is it relevant over a
| thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without
| knowing this.
| turnsout wrote:
| Came here to post exactly this. If it's just about the amount
| of dollars in the world economy adjusted for inflation, then
| it's just a graph of inflation and population growth.
|
| Despite the "size of the economy," skyrocketing, peoples' lives
| are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Ultimately, even the amount of matter/energy you need to
| store a single instance of a number representing the sum of
| all dollars in the ever-growing economy, will exceed the
| capacity of observable universe...
| duped wrote:
| You can't argue that last point and be taken seriously.
| mejutoco wrote:
| It depends on how much lifting the word fundamentally is
| doing. On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we
| die. Fundamentally the same. On the other extreme we have
| tik tok so the times are fundamentally different.
| konschubert wrote:
| We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet
| airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon.
| turnsout wrote:
| In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air
| travel" and feel just as smug. Jets and the moon landing
| are cool, but they happened closer to 1923 than 2023.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, jets then and jets now are two different things. As
| for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything
| resembling medicine begun to form, and people actually
| started to understand what they're doing. This is one of
| those fields that only begun in the earnest in the last
| 100 years.
| starttoaster wrote:
| > As for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything
| resembling medicine begun to form
|
| I, for one, resent that modern medicine has decided to
| debase phrenology as a science. /s
| boxed wrote:
| And they were RIGHT. Enormously so. In 1823 life was
| absolute shit compared to 1923. And life in 1723 was
| absolute shit compared to 1823.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| But how many people would have actually flown on an
| airplane? What makes lives meaningfully different isn't
| whether a thing exists in the world somewhere; it's
| whether people experience it.
| konschubert wrote:
| I am not feeling smug, I am saying that there has been
| progress in the past 100 years.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah, I guess I'm thinking: although we have the internet
| (neat!), most of western society is still organized
| around getting educated, getting a job and working for a
| living. It was not always this way, and if the OP was
| correct, we might expect that 100 years of explosive
| growth would have dramatically reshaped the structure of
| society. Basically, it hasn't. In 1923, you might have
| supported your family by working in a factory putting
| buttons on coats. Today, you might work in an office
| putting buttons on webpages.
|
| We have not descended back into feudalism; technology
| hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took
| off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
| wussboy wrote:
| > On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die
|
| I think you could probably back that one up earlier than
| "100 years ago".
| rewmie wrote:
| > Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the
| same time, the economy is twice as large without really
| growing.
|
| I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning
| largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even
| acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention
| recessions and outright deflations.
| thomaslord wrote:
| I imagine that economists probably correct for inflation when
| putting this data together. I can't speak for these graphs
| 100%, but I think the real issue we're talking about here is
| not money or people but resources. Resources can be roughly
| mapped to people, with the confounding factor that each person
| consumes a different level of resources. As we approach the
| resource limits of our planet (and potentially nearby planets)
| that confounding factor becomes less relevant, because we
| eventually won't have enough resources available for anyone to
| consume more than they strictly require to stay alive.
| gjm11 wrote:
| I think the claims in the piece are fairly robust to changes in
| the definition of economic growth. That is: for _any_
| reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth", etc.,
| it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some
| sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at
| a few percent per year on average for quite a while, and (2)
| monstrously unlikely that "the economy", meaning in some sense
| the total amount of actual "wealth", can continue to grow at a
| few percent per year on average for, say, the next 10k years.
|
| (Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of
| whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of _per atom in the
| galaxy_ as we currently have _in total_.)
|
| So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something
| _very radical_ would have to change. (We discover how to
| teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different
| universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this
| galaxy. It turns out that humans really _are_ immaterial souls
| that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break
| free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of
| level of radical-ness.)
|
| Hence, _either_ the growth we are all used to will have to slow
| dramatically, _or_ some other radical change will have to
| happen, or both.
|
| None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size
| of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices
| you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would
| invalidate the argument.
|
| (When people talk about economic growth, they _never_ mean
| growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly.
| They _never_ mean mere population increase, independent of the
| wealth of that population. That would be silly.)
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The world can't just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We
| should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows
| or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting
| its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy).
|
| Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could
| do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and
| unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies
| that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.
|
| There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this
| type of thinking.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Good point. Improving efficiency alone can bring increased
| consumption, not less. I think if we think of the world as
| regions it is easy to think of regional collapses while the
| world as a whole keeps growing. We, or at least me, have been
| lucky so far.
| erwald wrote:
| "Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you
| could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing
| waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old
| bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of
| the internet. There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse
| encoded in this type of thinking."
|
| OP was written by the person who co-founded GiveWell[1] to make
| charitable giving more effective, and who while running Open
| Philanthropy oversaw lots of grants to things like innovation
| policy[2], scientific research[3], and land use reform[4].
|
| Anyway, more broadly I think you present a false dilemma. You
| can both prepare for tail risks and also make important
| marginal and efficiency improvements.
|
| [1] https://www.givewell.org/ [2]
| https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/innovation-policy/ [3]
| https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/ [4]
| https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/land-use-reform/
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| > there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of
| growth for even another 10,000 years
|
| Now I'm getting nervous
|
| /s
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have always seen the fundamentals of "growth in the economy" as
| either more efficient use of energy (such as moving from open
| campfire to heath and chimney). But that begs the question "use
| to do what?" And that leads us to "human satisfaction". We
| measure all of this in an entirely anthropomorphic manner.
|
| And so we could "grow" the economy by increasing human welfare -
| we could in theory keep the economy the same "size" but
| distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in
| human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting
| hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is
| a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent's can talk
| of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day.
| Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just
| moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to
| another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to
| "growth".
|
| The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed,
| yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare
| to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but
| maximising human utility
|
| Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and
| education, health and politics that benefit all humankind
|
| We will find more "growth" in socialism than capitalism and more
| happiness in democracy than totalitarianism
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth"
|
| The amount lost by America (if at all) is not equal to the
| Amount gained by China. So it is not re-distribution.
| konschubert wrote:
| > [Growth is] faster than it can be for all that much longer
| (there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of
| growth for even another 10,000 years).
|
| This assume that growth has to involve atoms.
|
| If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature
| superconductor, we don't necessarily need to use more stuff - in
| fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms
| that we needed earlier to build just one.
|
| That is growth, without using more atoms.
| gjm11 wrote:
| The argument isn't "economic growth has to be growth in number
| of atoms".
|
| It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without
| anything happening that today's physics says is downright
| impossible, then at the end of that time humanity will (1)
| still be physically confined to this galaxy and (2) be so
| wealthy that we will have as much wealth as the whole present-
| day economy times the number of atoms at our disposal; hence
| either (a) that growth will slow dramatically, or (b) something
| will happen that today's physics says is downright impossible,
| or (c) some other change will happen that decouples us from our
| component atoms _so radically_ that it 's possible to have a
| whole present-day economy's worth of wealth per atom or more;
| none of these options can reasonably be described as "business
| as usual".
| ben_w wrote:
| So you've made each thing of a single atom, _and yet still used
| every atom_.
|
| 10^86 fundamental particles in the entire observable universe
| is great, until you have 2% compound annual interest for ten
| millennia that's giving you 1.02^10,000 growth factor, which is
| 10^86.
| delocalized wrote:
| Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't really
| understand the author's focus on monetary value here. The
| question I would be asking is: how is the capability of the
| individual changing? There is little point in comparing the value
| of a journey by horse four hundred years ago to the same journey
| by aeroplane today. To reduce each to a numerical value feels
| like a conflation that makes this argument deeply flawed at
| minimum.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| The world will be dominated by populations either poor or
| religious.[1]
|
| Note that below 2.1 on that chart, the human population shrinks.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-
| fertil...
| kibwen wrote:
| In raw numbers (which is what I assume you mean, given that you
| linked to a fertility chart), the world is already dominated by
| populations that are religious and wealth-poor, and this has
| been true on a global scale for the entirety of recorded
| history. You appear to just be saying that it will be business
| as usual?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Or is just voicing the apparently unnerving idea that those
| groups will achieve power & influence in proportion to their
| numbers.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Not without wealth, they won't. The individual, without
| some means to exert their influence, cannot expend it over
| distance.
|
| Using that influence requires both wealth and power, and
| both are typically held by a tiny percentage at the top of
| their societies. Whether they've got a million or a billion
| people, the total numbers are only meaningful if those
| people have the wealth to, say, purchase goods.
|
| Otherwise, they are just a production resource for those at
| the top.
| [deleted]
| thepangolino wrote:
| [dead]
| xwowsersx wrote:
| August 2021
| louwrentius wrote:
| HN 2021 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053649
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think economic growth is the wrong metric to be measuring as it
| is a number which we ourselves have created, and if we say today
| there are 10 trillion and tomorrow there are 1,000 trillion it
| doesn't REALLY change anything.
|
| This doesn't map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars
| in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are
| not finite, we can make them up, and have been.
|
| Yes, our technological progress has been increasing
| exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to
| knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known,
| what does that mean for us?
|
| At that point, we'll be able to answer if we're operating in a
| simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?
| rco8786 wrote:
| I don't really understand the "atoms in the universe" argument.
| That has nothing to do with the size of an economy. We don't need
| an atom to represent every "bit" of an economy.
| swid wrote:
| It's a poor way of phrasing things, but think like this - there
| are certain physical inputs to the economy. Ores, power, water,
| stuff like that. That stuff is processed into stuff of greater
| value, and that adds value to the economy. We can also increase
| the value by extracting more raw inputs.
|
| So let's say the economy is growing exponentially, some
| percentage per year. Either we keep using more raw inputs, or
| we keep increasing the value of those inputs. That is where the
| 2% growth comes from.
|
| If we don't add new inputs, and exponential growth continues,
| the outputs will grow to such great value that the raw
| materials are relatively worthless. But that seems wrong to me
| - if the physical materials are worthless, someone could buy
| them all and corner the market and charge whatever they want.
| It can only happen if scarcity is completely eliminated.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Economic growth is strongly correlated with energy usage.
| Energy requires atoms.
| konschubert wrote:
| > A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from
| energy use, even if we take offshored production into account
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling
| rvbissell wrote:
| Their point was that -- since there are a finite number of
| atoms in the universe-- it is a given that there exists some
| upper-bound on growth.
|
| They are intentionally calling attention to that absurd extreme
| as a rhetoric device, not out of a belief that that's when
| we'll hit the wall. (It's a safe bet they believe will hit the
| wall much much much sooner.)
| zuhayeer wrote:
| The limiting factor isn't atoms, it's always been knowledge.
| Before we knew what coal was capable of, it was just a rock.
| Knowledge unlocks abundance with the limited resources we
| have.
| dsizzle wrote:
| 100%. To take it a step further -- we can also find more
| efficient forms of energy (e.g. nuclear energy), and get
| more energy / economic growth while using _fewer_ atoms.
| konschubert wrote:
| You can have growth without using more material or more
| energy.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yeah, you can get more efficient up to a point. What does
| that buy you, maybe another factor of 10?
| rvbissell wrote:
| Ultimately, economic growth is driven by population
| growth.[0] And also, there is a feedback loop where
| population growth is encouraged by economic growth. Since
| people require material and energy input, and there is a
| limit to both on this planet,[1] economic growth is
| expected to flatten once the population outstrips the
| Earth's resources.
|
| [0] There is also the growth that comes in spurts from
| technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized
| across the entire ranges of years that follow them when
| assessing the resultant growth. IMO, such technological
| innovations are akin to data compression, increasing
| entropy. Over the loooong haul, I'd expect such spurts to
| have diminishing returns (just like compressing a
| compressed file has diminishing returns.)
|
| [1] I guess expanding our reach beyond Earth would be one
| of those 'spurts'.
|
| EDIT: fixed a word
| andrewjl wrote:
| > There is also the growth that comes in spurts from
| technological innovations. Those spurts should be
| amortized across the entire ranges of years that follow
| them when assessing the resultant growth.
|
| Technological spurts ultimately drive productivity and
| the latter in turn drives growth. Why do these spurts
| need to be amortized across longer periods of time?
| Especially when many have compounding effects?
| zuhayeer wrote:
| This feels like the modern equivalent of Malthusian theory. Many
| people have had similar thoughts throughout much of history, but
| human prosperity has always prevailed. Knowledge is infinite, and
| as long as there is new knowledge to seek, things are never going
| to stagnate or be over. Atoms have never been the limiting
| factor, it's been knowledge on what to do with them.
|
| Knowledge makes the existence of resources infinite:
| https://nav.al/infinite-resources
|
| Pessimism seems like an intellectually serious position:
| https://nav.al/pessimism
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It certainly can't be _infinite_. It might be a really big
| limit. It might be asymptotically approached, and never
| reached. But even very big combinatorial numbers are not to be
| confused with infinity.
|
| If there is _no limit_ to prosperity, it follows that not only
| do you not run out of atoms, you also don 't run out of _ways
| to rearrange those atoms_ that you prefer to earlier
| arrangements. In that case there is no configuration of the
| universe that is ultimately the most preferable, which must
| mean that you have exploitable cyclic preferences.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I read both pieces in full, and honestly can't bring myself to
| see them as anything more than very shallow examples of exactly
| the logical fallacies that the original article points out.
|
| > Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite
|
| > We're going to keep creating new knowledge and new resources
|
| What does the author mean by "resources"? If this means natural
| resources, is there a historical precedent for humans "creating
| resources"?
|
| Does the job of a software developer "create resources" or
| consume them? Does it consume more resources than selling food
| at a deli?
|
| As far as I know, the best we can hope for from technology is
|
| a) rebasing processes onto natural resources which are not yet
| depleted or less scarce, using technological advancement. I'm
| all for research into new energy sources, but no advancement so
| far has magically disabled the laws of ecology and
| thermondynamics. You can probably see the destruction around
| you if you are not rich enough to contribute a disproportionate
| amount or live as a "caveman"/hermit/Walden...
|
| b) using natural resources more sustainably and less of them
|
| Also:
|
| > Entrepreneurs are inherently optimistic because they get
| rewarded for being optimistic. As you were saying,
| intellectuals get rewarded for being pessimistic. So there is
| incentive bias. [...]
|
| > But entrepreneurs get feedback from nature and free markets,
| which I believe are much more realistic feedback mechanisms.
|
| Entrepreneurs get feedback from nature? This reads like satire
| to me. Yes, when resources are depletes, entrepreneurs notice.
| Otherwise, their incentive is to maximize the transformation of
| common ("free") goods into wealth/capital/whatever.
|
| Yes, entrepreneurs have some incentive to use resources (be ir
| workers, clean water, land or raw materials) efficiently.
|
| This is intentionally not the same word as "sustainably".
| Efficiency is mostly governed by laws and scarcity.
|
| The quoted article talks about timescales longer than 200 years
| for very good reason.
|
| The links you posted sound like ivory-tower magical thinking to
| me.
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