The concept of growth is much misunderstood popularly with the various unsustainable growth memes. Growth isn't just more raw resources and finished goods but also development which makes things more efficient.

Importantly even if the goal is more environmental sustainability it isn't the enemy. Apply growth in productivity and less land is needed for production and more can be preserved. NYC has more value from Central Park than say the area as a gold mine now.

The automation job losses are themselves a sign of it - keeping the same number of employees and adding even more capacity would be wasteful.

To go without growth is to surrender entirely and doom oneself to decline. If everyone is working towards something and not experiencing growth by definition something is wrong - that level of effort should lead to improvement over time even if they are just a chain of masters, journeymen, and apprentices.

The cycles are a result of phantom growth from phantom values - even if the production is real returns may diminish more than expected.

Cycles arise in any complex/dynamic system. It's natural. Managing it should be natural too. Applying dampening on the amplitudes would help. That's basically the mandate of central banks.

Growth is the consequence of population growth and technological progress and the process of specialization (comparative advantages). All three are in pretty much full force, so it's not just growth because greed.

(sorry for double posting :| )

The business cycle isn't really a cycle. It's a fractal, chaotic system.

A cycle is predictable, a chaotic system is not.

I purposefully haven't said periodicity or something else (maybe I should have added a bit more detail anyway.) The ebb and flow, the up and down the cycling is known, but when and its magnitude is not.

Sure it's chaotic and it probably has scale-free (self-similar or fractional-dimensional) properties at certain regimes, but on the large scale it's pretty well approximated by dynamic systems. (See the micro founded macro models used by central banks.)

Of course, we're getting better at modeling both micro and macro behavior of economies. (The caveat is that the economy also evolves so old models usually get less and less accurate, so job security for econometricians.)

In medicine you'd call that cancer, so, yeah... Maybe we need something more sustainable than growth for the sake of growth.

Also if we're globally maxed out, I think an economy is 'temporal zero sum', if that makes sense: you grow now by borrowing but pay back in the next recession?

Totally not an economist though.

The beauty of free markets (not sure if I'd call it capitalism) is that even if you're resource zero-sum, free markets can still experience growth, by seeking more efficient redistribution of those resources given individual preferences.

Once the best allocation of currently existing ressources have been implemented, then there would no longer be any growth.

The demand is dynamic though. Even if you have right now an ideal implementation for resource allocation that won't necessarily match future demand.

It seems far fetched to assume that people's preferences will change just in the right way that there is always increasing welfare from the same basket of goods.

As I understand it, free markets determine preferences based on price. However, the price someone can buy something for includes both their desire to pay and their ability to pay. Therefore, I'm not sure that price is always a good metric for allocating resources.

Do resource zero-sum, free markets still reliably experience growth from the perspective of someone who doesn't view price as a good measurement of value?

If so that would potentially be useful because it could allow more progressive leaning and more libertarian leaning people to find some common ground.

If you pay for something it means that your value for the money is less than the value of the satisfaction you believe you will get out of it. Money does not magically create an equivalence class of value across all items of the same price.

People ignore the idea "let's not have growth" because it's a bad idea. Here's a quick two-question quiz to determine whether you're in favor of economic growth:

- Do you believe wealth and income should be distributed equitably around the world?

- Do you want to live on more than USD 17.3k per annum?

If you answered "yes" to both of these questions, then congratulations! You're in favor of economic growth. The average global income per capita is USD 17.3k per annum. If that number goes up, we call that "growth". That is the definition of growth.

Of course you can get into population control, but if the alternative to growth is China-style population control -- necessarily more severe than just handing out birth control -- then bring on the economic crises, I say.

This is a false dichotomy.

This argument refers to developed nations, not Somalia. You could achieve 1,000% growth by stopping war crimes.

Once you restrict you analysis to functioning countries, for example OEDC, you are probably looking at $40k+

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

If the "functioning countries" stay the same while the rest of the world catches up, the net result is -- drum roll, please -- growth! On a global scale! In fact, that would correspond to a global GDP growth of about 300%, or about 47 years at the current global GDP growth rate of 3%.

The more precisely you want to model the distribution, the more you can come up with all sorts of little technicalities. For example, if the rest of the world catches up to the developed countries without significant efficiency gains in many technologies, the environment is extremely screwed. We could go back and forth for days.

The question as posed was: does the world need to grow? The answer is a resounding yes.

You conflate them again! Do you even pay attention to he point I am making?

A developed economy should be stable, not collapse in on itself, if there is a period of no growth. It is disingenuous to try and prove your point by averaging out your income and economic issues with starving kids in Somalia!

Environment is already screwed. It's impossible to counterbalance consumption damage with increase in efficiency because you obviously can't have 300% efficiency.

Electric motor and generator are >90% efficient, most relevant technologies are ~50% and having diminishing returns.

> - Do you want to live on more than USD 17.3k per annum?

By itself this is meaningless. What does it buy where you are? Most places that’s more than enough to live comfortably.

Anyway, money is only useful to decide who starves.

>Most places that’s more than enough to live comfortably.

“Comfortably” is certainly a matter of opinion. But that 17.3k is a purchasing-power parity average, targeted at HN’s largely rich-country leadership. The nominal average income per person in the world is 11.4k.

http://m.statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-gdp-capita...

So we have taken the usual cost of living adjustments into account, and the question is, do you want to live on the equivalent of 17.3k per capita US relative to the cost of living in most of the US — somewhere like, say, Pittsburgh?

It’s difficult to try and frame this. The price of any goods with constrained supply (higher education, housing and land) tend to increase to meet people’s ability to pay.

It might make more sense to think in terms of a carbon budget if we are thinking about sustainability.

The major issue with this isn’t growth, it’s landlords and medical care having irrationally high prices based around a return on a good that should have no profit. Fuck growth.

The more accurate question is do you want to live with whatever goods can currently be bought with USD 17k in the US today?

I’m not seeing the productivity gains anyway, buddy, I work for minimum wage and you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Growth doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reach the people.

Yes, indeed. But growth does matter if it reaches the people, which is scythe's point.

Right, so growth in its current state is a wealth vacuum distributing wealth from high impact places to low impact places. I don’t see how that works as an argument for MORE growth.

Then we should have more growth _and_ a better distribution of the gains from growth. But merely better distribution without growth leaves us in the USD17k scenario.

The original comment point is that there is that growth is needed (but not sufficient) if one wants both conditions he pointed out to happen - which is most people.

Generally yes, but you've ignored another possibility: lower cost of living such that 17.3k per annum is plenty of money to live on. This is the positive promise of automation - technology advancements could, in theory, push marginal costs for most goods toward zero over time. If these cost savings are passed on to consumers, cost of living should drop accordingly as well. This has only somewhat happened to date because the big winners of productivity increases have been the wealthy/owners of capital.

The problem, of course, is when we talk about things that cannot be produced, like land.

>but you've ignored another possibility: lower cost of living such that 17.3k per annum is plenty of money to live on.

No, that's also growth. A lower "cost" of living requires some reconfiguration of "stuff" in the world so that it provides more utility, i.e., more "value", than it does currently, which we understand to be an increase because it is not currently providing that amount of utility -- i.e., providing for living. That would mean that the total amount of "value" has grown, even if we refer to it using smaller amounts of currency.

I think some people interpret "growth" to mean growth in physical things, like energy consumption or the amount of railroads, but growth also includes psychological variables like satisfaction and physiological variables like health. The world absolutely needs growth. You can't get around that by rewording the question.

Ok, I thought we were talking about economics and thus economic growth. If you want to get into intangible things like general well-being then it's a different discussion entirely.

In your automation story, is there the same amount of goods that produced right now (but with less labor) or more goods?

Same goods, less labor. Growth in goods output is not required.

Which goes back to scythe's point: is USD 17k (with US prices) enough to live on, even if we do not have to work? If yes, we do not need growth; if it would be better to have more, then we need growth.

While I hope we can design alternative systems and sustainable, circular economies, the desire for growth may be a hardwired part of the human condition.

Despite all good intentions, the hedonic treadmill is real.

You may like the work of Kate Raworth at Oxford though.

In economics growth is a natural consequence of technological progress. And that doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon.

The big applied questions is how to manage the cyclicality - that arises in any dynamic system anyhow.

I would argue the real question is sustainability. The universe is finite.

Right, the concern is not unfounded, but maybe a bit counterproductive without context. There are many resources we already exploit very inefficiently, and the sustainability of those is a real worry, but the general carrying capacity of Earth and the solar system is really really vastly huge, we just do very dumb things to ourselves economically speaking. (This is of course the coordination problem, and it's hard, as human behavior is what it is.)

Last I heard it was expanding -- and the expansion was accelerating.

When we looked at the most empty spot we could find with the best camera ever built, we saw more universe than we could even have imagined.

Earth, ok, that's somewhat finite. Yet we're literally barely scratching its surface.

You can have growth without unnatural cyclic crises. Focus om the deeper causes of artificial crises (those without actual resource shocks).

The problem that I would see is that since wealth tends to be passed on to future generations, without growth it would be difficult for those who currently are not wealthy to ever become wealthy.

This is maybe a similar point, but it also seems to me that the without growth we would need to come up with some alternative to 401ks in order to allow people to build wealth.

Simple non-growth-based capitalist endeavor that I've been daydreaming about (setting up a supermarket as an example):

The goal of Supermarket(SM) is to provide products to customers and a stable occupation for those working in the system, not to maximize profit. SM will only sell to subscribed members.

Whenever someone buys something, they pay only the cost of the product, and the purchase is recorded. At the end of each month, SM has to balance its finances: costs have to be equalized with income. We will charge our members an additional % over whatever they bought for this month, just as much as it's needed to balance the books. The more customers we have and the more volume we moved, the less % everyone has to pay.

This way, instead of customers paying a predetermined % margin for each product, they pay as little as it's needed to keep things going. They don't pay for anyone's profit.

Here's a perspective shift. Profit is just a term for the owners' wages. Grocery store revenue paid to anyone, employee or owner, are all at risk of not "closing the loop". Thus, profit is not the problem, though concentrating it at the top does usually slow the flow.

The real equalization problem involves everyone.

Except for the cost equalization, this looks like co-op supermarkets. They seem to work pretty well where I live but the focus on low cost means sometimes they don't have a lot of variety.

I wonder if a government could make this work at the national level, in multiple industries.

Whats the incentive for government to get food, water, energy, education and shelter right?

If we're missing any one of the five, we have insecurity and chaos usually ensues.

That environment appears to be the soup du jour that allows lobbyist and others to do their bidding and force/sneak in their agendas.

I think it was mentioned, but cycling thru calamity (the business cycle) with F,W,E,E and S until they hit their metrics is becoming a predictable sh!t show.

Sound like an interesting twist in co-OP comoany

It sounds precisely like a grocery co-op. Are these not common where you live?

https://www.moneycrashers.com/food-coop-costs-benefits-drawb...

The two largest grocery chains in Switzerland are both cooperatives (they together represent ~70% of retail):

- Coop (that's the name) has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)

- Migros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros

Not in my corner of the world unfortunately

cycles naturally arise from self righting forced. like a boat rocking back and forth, the economy grows too fast and swings back. is that so bad?

That doesn’t seem true.

There has been quite a history of interventionist policies.

I don't know, ask someone whose kid can't get medical treatment because they lost their job in a downturn.

This is a non sequitur, and unnecessarily inflammatory besides. Capitalism is totally compatible with a robust social safety net.

Or ask the hundreds of millions who died under socialist and communist systems.

Or ask the hundreds of millions or more who are no longer poor thanks to capitalism.

Edit: typo

I think it would be more correct to say that we have cyclical crises because of debt, which is a function of growth.

Cycles arise in any complex/dynamic system. It's natural. Managing it should be natural too. Applying dampening on the amplitudes would help. That's basically the mandate of central banks.

Growth is the consequence of population growth and technological progress and the process of specialization (comparative advantages). All three are in pretty much full force, so it's not just growth because greed.