I think one of the main problems is that GDP is used as the measure of national prosperity. GDP goes down when people decide to work less. Some kind of net wealth measurement would be much better parameter for a country to try and maximize. Include natural resources and the biosphere in that wealth. In this scheme taking oil from the ground and burning it would likely be a net negative on national wealth while using oil to make carbon fiber for an airplane would be a net positive. Growing a crop that builds the soil instead of depleting might add more to Gross Domestic Wealth than a more "profitable" crop.

When a company produces 1000 cars and pollutes a river in process, this counts as economic growth. When another company spends time, money and resources to clean that river, that also counts as economic growth, even if was just to get natural environment back to its original health. Some food for thought.

This is a great example of how we don't weigh externalities in GDP, why we should, and why we need market based solutions to those externalities. For example, a cap on river pollutants so low the river and wildlife can't be poisoned and each company has to buy rights from the limited pool, or if too expensive, find ways to limit their pollutants.

I once read (from Milton Friedman IIRC) that some european countries passed a law to limit river pollution by requiring companies to have their river water intakes downstream of their outflows. Supposedly this made a huge difference in the amount of pollutants they dumped in the river. That is a simple but limited way of imposing the externality costs on the persons who inflict the damage.

What? You're making a serious stretch there. The profit from the cars contributes directly to GDP, but even if individual people get paid to help clean up the river, where is that money coming from? It's a DRAIN on resources to get the river back to normal, there's no profit. Therefore it's not growth.

I think the point is that the cleanup effort is "on the books" and calculated as part of the gross domestic product.

The issue that people are trying to make is that there are many activities that do contribute to the overall wealth of a country, which don't get counted in the GDP. And there are things that are counted by the GDP which don't contribute to wealth.

GDP is a poor measure of the overall wealth and health of a country.

Right, I agree with you. From the tone of the post, it seemed like the author was justifying the GDP calculation as it's made. Perhaps there was some sarcasm there I didn't detect. But yeah, if we want to count the cost of services produced for, say, digging a giant hole and then subsequently filling in said hole, we may want to rethink our logic. I'm becoming disillusioned with the idea of economics being a valid human science when it can't seem to deal properly with the concept of externalities.

Bhutan have Gross National Happiness (GNH) as their measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

nothing is neither created nor destroyed, by that very law there cannot be a crop that does not take from the soil. If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil.

farmers do add fertilizer and other stuff back to the soil, though we are finding that maybe there is more to the equation. certain methods like tilling are done to kill parasites, etc, but it may also make the soil vulnerable to erosion. luckily engineers and farmers are looking at these things more closely now.

its also important to note this is just 1 study. just 1 region. 1 particular type of trap. there is still lots to know / find out, but I think its wrong to be jumping to huge conclusions just yet.

> If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil.

This is true. However the little-known fact is that healthy soil contains all the "machines" required to break down the abundant insoluble potassium (along with every other necessary element) present in rock particles into plant-soluble fertilizer. This "insoluble pool" contains enough nutrients for literally thousands of years of plant growth, if only the soil life is present to unlock it.

The problem is that tillage kills this soil life, and that dead land now requires the constant import of external fertilizer to grow food. Pesticide and fertilizer application also kills these organisms, which out-compete pest species (as mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515209). Spraying becomes a vicious cycle for the farmer, and a lucrative cycle for their chemical supplier.

In other words, functional soil isn't just an inert "tank" for holding nutrients. It's a two-dimensional factory for converting in-situ rock and air and rain into biomass.

This is all explained much better by soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

> luckily engineers and farmers are looking at these things more closely now.

I would add biologists (including soil scientists, botanists, mycologists, entomologists, ecologists, etc) and indigenous experts to that list.

yes, i mentioned tilling the soil damages it, I just didnt go into an exhaustive list.

True, for some farming elements are removed from the plot of land faster than natural replenishment. These will have to be added back by humans in some way. The main constituents of food, on the other hand, come from the atmosphere. Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, and Nitrogen (with the right plants/bacteria). Soil is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life [1]. This soil is needed for efficient agriculture and certain farming practices increase the amount of soil and other decrease it. Once it is gone, farming stops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil

Why wealthier? Will you be more happy with three cars than with two?

I think a lot of people have a limit to their material needs, when they are more happy catering for their real interests instead of chasing more wealth. It may be a cliché, but probably for a reason.

I think you might have missed the part where being able to work less is one potential result of being wealthier. Will I be more happy with another car? Probably not. Will I be more happy if I work 30 hours a week instead of 40? Probably.

But it's been stuck at 40 for a long time

Why not just say that? The wealth aspect seems distracting.

You may have a limit of how much you need, but your neighbor may get the kick of owning more cars than you. I have a personality disorder which makes me less competitive, so I'm rather sensitive to it.

Is there "growth" without consuming physical resources? If not, we have to accept OP's POV that economic growth is by definition unsustainable.

"Anyone who thinks exponential growth can continue forever is either a madman or an economist"

There is absolutely 'growth' without consuming resources. Economic growth also includes improvements in efficiency, which typically reduce the amount of physical resources used. Also, look at the transition in our lives from physical media to digital media. Digital channels have brought massive growth while reducing the need for paper, CDs, DVDs, etc.

That kind of growth requires constant inventions, rather than occasional inventions to use in existing factories. Also I think efficiency improvements offer diminishing returns (sorry I can't prove it). But there's only so much value you can get from a handful of matter, especially if it has to be cost-effective. At some point you bump into limits of physical properties.

A silly tale I read in an old popular science book: Aliens arrive at the Earth. They make peaceful contact with humans and want to exchange knowledge. They get every single human book ever printed, they drop them on a pile, then... one of them takes a metal rod out of his pocket, and makes a scratch on it somewhere in the middle. THERE, it's archived. All they need is to measure the exact spot where the scratch is made and calculate the ratio of rod below the scratch to the rod above the scratch. The decimal representation of that irrational number encodes entire human knowledge.

There's a hard ceiling on efficiency though. You can't get past (or even near) 100%.

Historically efficiency improvements have lead to such an increase in productivity that the total energy consumption went up anyways.

Hmm, reducing the need for long lasting and easily recyclable paper by replacing it with mostly-plastic stuff (including packaging) that becomes obsolete in less than a decade?

Only up to a point.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

This entire blog (not just this one post), start-to-finish is a sobering look at the limits of our growth.

Imagine an economy in perfect stasis, no growth, no shrinkage, just the same stuff year after year. Now introduce some efficiency improvement, like shaving some weight from a car design, or a computer chip that performs the same computation for less power, or an agricultural technique which requires less land for the same yield. Voilà, growth without consuming additional physical resources.

Of course, this is not our main source of growth at the moment. But surely it could be?

> Of course, this is not our main source of growth at the moment. But surely it could be?

Yeah, but for how long?

Exponential economist meets finite physicist: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

It makes me so happy to finally start seeing others on HN post links from the Do The Math blog. If I could make one website mandatory reading for all policy makers, economists, etc., this would be it.

Well now you're just playing semantic games with the word "growth".

Never mind the details of the economy, population growth is the killer.

As long as the net ecosystem gain per person is negative rather than positive we are accelerating at a wall.

If the original post had said that population growth needed to be stopped, I'd have agreed with it. But that's not what it said.

The whole thrust of that comment and the ensuing conversation is the nature of economic growth. That's not "semantic games," that's a different topic.

I re-read just now and yes, you're right. Sorry about that.

No problem, it happens.

I have thought about that often. The conclusion I have reached is this Earth's way of keeping the population of a species at a natural state - droughts, plagues etc... At first this appears harsh based on our preconceived notions of humanity. Many people will die due the environmental conditions in which they live - regardless of pollution levels.

Earth does not have a bias towards one species, such as political/economic policies will have. Mother Nature's laws determine the strongest/fittest will survive, but our current system puts wealth that leads to power as the strongest.

Switching to a system which does not value materials, money and power over others but focuses strictly living off the land such as the African Tribe will result in a drastically different social construct than we see today.

> the strongest/fittest will survive

Most able to adapt, most responsive to change. Not the strongest / fittest.

It's an extremely important distinction.

Wealth isn't the ultimate strength or source of power. It's #2 on the list behind political power, which is backed up by armies in most cases. Just ask rich people in authoritarian nations who is in charge (in recent times see: China, where rich people are routinely disappeared, or Russia where their wealthiest person was put in a gulag for opposing their dictator; all Russian oligarchs are universally terrified of said dictator).

Does anyone actually question whether Xi Jinping is weaker than Jack Ma? He could disappear Jack Ma tomorrow and nobody would do anything about it. Just look at what has been done to Wang Jianlin, his business is being diced up piece by piece by edict of the State (which arbitrarily cut off bank funding access for his business, forcing Wanda Group to being liquidating its holdings).

Was Sergey Brin more powerful than Barack Obama while Obama was president? The notion is laughable. Obama was not an especially rich man when he took over the Presidency, his power was entirely political in nature.

If you want a convenient example in the West, see what happened when tech companies ran up against the US military in the form of the NSA. They all lost universally across the board. All were forced to comply, or else. If the military didn't get what they wanted up front, they illegally circumvented the front door and tapped the link between data centers anyway. Qwest's CEO was put in prison when he attempted to disobey. Yahoo was threatened with vast fines [1] over trying to resist PRISM (they could trivially destroy any given tech company in this manner). It's clear who has the greatest position of power: the people with the stealth bombers, tanks and FISA court.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/09/feds-yahoo-fine-prism/

True and I agree, but you can't have political power without wealth. It is a catch-22 in my opinion, which came first the chicken or the egg type scenario.

Ultimately of course, when you work less someone else has to work more to sustain you. And what if that person wants to work less? Well someone else has to work more to sustain them. And that person, when they want to work less, ends up in the same position.

It's not really sustainable.

When you work less it doesn't automatically mean someone has to work for you. Each time a more efficient method is discovered, you could - in theory - work less to accomplish just as much. The trouble is, I think, that capitalist business owners respond by tightening the screws. I guess the idea is "why should my employees work less ? I will have less money than my pal business owner." If he doesn't tighten the screws, he will lose competition to another company.

Is it growth you want (presumably capital/resource-based), or the things you associate with that growth? eg. Self-improvement (personal growth), stability, security, happiness, leisure...?

> Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan.

Reminds me of this quote: "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

Exponential growth as we’ve become used to is fundamentally limited, whether we like that fact or not. We simply cannot expand exponentially into a finite supply of resources indefinitely, and in doing so we appear to have rapidly surpassed our planet’s ability to support that growth.

Growth does not necessarily need more planet. The same amount of natural resources produces a lot more wealth today than it did a thousand years ago. The style and amount of growth we've seen in the past couple of centuries uses up more and more, but that doesn't have to be the only way.

It doesn't have to be that way ? What else could people compete for ? Facebook likes ? So far, almost all wealth is material in nature. As for digital rewards, data-centers and other computer infrastructure needs constant input of energy. Human population is growing, humans love to copulate and take pride in having children. We need bigger and bigger internets for bigger facebooks.

> humans love to copulate and take pride in having children.

Developed countries are actually experiencing a population decline. As people get wealthier they tend to have fewer children, in some places less than 2 (replacement level).

"All wealth is material in nature" ignores centuries of intellectual property.

> Developed countries are actually experiencing a population decline.

Japan left aside, all developed countries populations are growing. It has been 20 years that half of those countries are supposed to experience a population decline and it does not happen. At worst a handful stagnate. Even Germany is at its record high. France exploded each of the forecasts which promised its population decline, so the next ones are revised upwards and then exploded again.

Most wealth is material, but that doesn't mean you need ever more material for ever more wealth. The obvious common example is electronics. Shrink a computer or smartphone to use half the materials while otherwise maintaining the same capabilities, and you've increased the amount of wealth it represents.

Raw materials aren't worth much. We mostly pay for the arrangement of matter, not the matter itself. A person who owns a few dozen tons of lumber and plastic and metal is not equally wealthy to a person who owns a house of similar mass. The average human today is far better off than a few centuries ago, not because the average human has more material, but because they have access to material that's better arranged.

Population growth is one thing that needs to be limited. People need space. But there's no inherent requirement for economic growth to be the same. We "just" need to grow through more efficient use of natural resources rather than through greater use.

You bring up many good points, but I don’t think you need to accept the main point of the original post:

>Most wealth is material...

The wealth/value of the companies that control the intellectual property that the world relies on, are at least as valuable as the companies that control the materials we rely on. Microsoft was maybe the first company to grow huge that didn’t rely on control of oil/railroads/etc for its wealth and there are plenty others. I don’t see that trend reversing - as you said we mostly pay for the arrangement of matter, not the matter itself.

This is unnecessarily argumentative and intentionally misses the point of the response.

Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.

The economy is a dissipative system.

It consumes energy/creates entropy to sustain itself. In its current state it already consumes more than the earth/sun can supply. Having it grow even more means consuming ever more energy (fossil and nuclear fuel is finite, the sun light is constant), and generating ever more entropy (i.e. pollution, heat, and ecosystems destruction).

Edit: also, improvements in efficiency have historically lead to a global increase in energy consumption because of the growth they spurred, and you can't get past 100%.

The sun can supply an awful lot of power. Humans use something like 10 or 20 terawatts of power (constantly), the sun smacks the earth with ~100 petawatts of power.

Given how destructive we are at 20 TW, I don't want to see what will happen when we consume more.

Does your estimation take into account the energy absorbed by the plans we farm?

No, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

We spend a lot of that sun on meat and other livestock products though:

https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agricultur...

(the numbers in the second figure)

Thanks

About 40% of NPP.

https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....

Human energy consumption isn’t anywhere close to what the sun supplies. We just don’t capture much of it.

Life is a dissipative system too. It consumes energy and generates entropy. This can’t go on forever, but I wouldn’t take that as an argument against life.

But life had up to now evolved to function at a sustainable level.

It can't go on forever indeed there's a thing called the heat death of the universe, but it is sufficiently far in the future that I don't care about it.

The shit that happens now means that my kids won't be able to have children in good conscience (I already feel sorry for them for the mess I put them in).

Discussions of "sustainable" are, to me, disingenuous and incomplete, because nobody ever wants to confront the root issue: population size. Really, no ecological practice is "sustainable" in the face of ever-increasing population size. If we could achieve stability and predictability in the size and scope of the human species, then we can find truly sustainable practices. Without that, it's just a buzz word.

Food limits how far the population can grow anyway.

AFAIK the energy consumption (and thus the pollution) for the benefit of developed nations far outweighs the one that benefits the poorer ones whose population increases.