"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."
If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.
Nothing theoretical about it.
Find the sources for these from for example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...
Edit. Here specifically on decoupling:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
CO2 is totally diffuse in atmosphere and the climate change is global. Outsourcing pollution has no effect on this issue. And the fact is, global CO2 emissions are at an all time high year after year.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
“Taken as a collective, developed countries are found to be outsourcing emissions to developed economies; however, this is largely due to the U.S. and China”
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290111...
It has the effect that it makes it worse, because goods have to travel longer distances.
Note: I'm not entirely convinced economic growth depends on population growth, but historically that has been the case in most countries that haven't exhausted their windfall natural resources like oil and have healthy export markets.
There's a limit to the physical quantity of non-virtual goods you can eat, as well. If you switch from eating a $3 burger to a $100 steak with the same nutritional content, that contributes to economic growth with no change in resource consumption.
Plus, the $100 steak is more environmentally expensive too, even if lab grown.
There are signs that the energy-lite economy growing isn't as useful to people as the old energy-connected one.
Having a country offer their own currency as the global reserve currency was stupid to begin with. It's no surprise that it will have to end one day.
You can do whatever you want to entropy if you ignore stuff going on to a connected external system.
If we know anything about the economy, it's that past trends are a bad predictor of the future.
The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.
Or the speed of light when discussing train speeds?
They're real but aren't we miles away? Genuinely curious. Just seems to me that economic organisation hasn't come anywhere near what physics allows.
The significance of the argument is that once everyone accepts that a seemingly-unstoppable exponential growth trend can be halted by far-off limit A, you can start to have productive discussions about whether it can also be halted by more relevant limits B and C. Sometimes the hard part is just getting past the point that an exponential trend ever need stop for any reason.
The practical question is will our lives be recognizable to someone alive today when we do hit a ceiling? The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live. If the limits come in some unimaginable future, what good does it do to worry about it now?
There are plenty of problems that we can foresee in the near to medium term. The finitude of the Earth is not yet an issue.
Serendipitously, Karel Capek's "R.U.R.", the book which popularised the concepts both of robots and of androids, was first published in 1921, 100 years ago this year.
I dunno. I think people from 100 years ago could likely imagine our current lifestyle just fine.
I mean, some of them are still alive, even, and many were involved in making our current lifestyle.
We're not going to run out of atoms. We're definitely on course to running out of stability in our current configuration.
Ask a Malthusian. They see war, famine, disaster. The utter hopelessness of being a Malthusian, or having to hope for a culling or something.
'640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' - Bill Gates (apocryphal, apparently he never said this)
When the Jones' are using their energy-sucking teleporter to travel instantly to work and taking summer vacations to the Moon, when their kitchen is fitted with exotic self-cleaning metamaterials and they tolerate no natural discomfort in their lives, I would think that their neighbors would not be caught dead one step behind them. You can achieve happiness with less - but you can achieve happiness today with much less than your number as well, and most people measure themselves against their neighbors, not some theoretical absolute level of energy usage.
Energy consumption in the developed world tends to increase.
According to OurWorldInData[0] the number is closer to 220 kWH/capita/day, although it does show the usage as stable or even declining over the last decade.
According to the US Energy Information Administration[1] total energy usage seems to have increased. That particular chart stops at 2009, but this tool[2] using their data shows 1. stable usage since ~2007 and 2. roughly 10% increase since 1995, and a 3-fold increase since the start of the data in 1950. By a long time, did you mean since 2007?
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10
[2]: http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/HTML5/climate_change_historical...
But there is a limit.
Current growth rates need an exponential increase in resources.
Even if we -after some technological singularity- could expand a sphere of influence that brings everything in the expanding bubble to complete subatomic level of control, this would mean at most sustainable cubic growth (available resources are growing cubically).
Not exponential growth.
World population is stabilizing, and, indeed, going to decrease. Now what.
I think his main most valuable point is that the status quo can't - and that stands.
Personally chasing constant growth doesn't sound like what we need to be aiming at anyway.
It would be saner to be engineering some long term stable state that we adjust as soon as new potentials become available.
Like aiming at a fixed upper limit maximum human population on earth with an acceptable minimal standard of life as opposed to letting blind growth search out the natural feedback loops instead.
This actually makes me lean towards saying that the economist is right, money is arbitrary anyway so if the argument is actually that the economy can increase forever I see no reason that can't happen physically. It's not real, it can't be real in the future and it's barely real now.
Our money system does need endless growth just to function properly but it only needs endless nominal growth. If inflation is high enough then real interest rates are negative. No need for real growth.
See also: 2000-watt society
I believe heat pollution would only become an issue once we start using several orders of magnitude more energy than we do now.
At least some of the proof of work crypto currency fanboys certainly have their greedy little eyes on it though.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/study-environmental-ben...
I think this is easy enough to find though... maybe they just don't know how to find this stuff.
This is not the issue.
The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no.
The value unlocked from increasing applied intelligence doesn't require commensurately more energy in all cases.
If we figure out a cure for cancer, it'll likely have nothing to do with increased energy usage.
Maybe we figure out how to control simply and cheaply store CO2 in pellets at the bottom of the ocean. Climate changed solved.
Economic output is just a number, it's how we value the stuff we trade among one another.
So essentially at some point the economy becomes unmanageable and unstable by pure lag. Earlier than that, by human reaction time and decision failures.
HFT is already riding on speed of light distance differences. If you grow the economy even more (in number of actors), the costs become exponentially higher.
And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce than electricity and time lag.
It does not cost more in 'communication' to convey a better idea.
Moreover, communications cost is marginal, so even in an very theoretical scenario in which 'more economic activity requires more communication' - it's not applicable.
"And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce "
Again this is completely false.
Education, Entertainment, Legal Services, Financial Services, R&D - i.e. 'Services' are the 'Real Economy'.
The 'Value Add' provided by applied intelligence is considerably greater than the raw, natural resources economy.
Well… yes, maybe we’ll figure out. But I hope you understand that’s a risky bet ? Climate change CAN be stopped rapidly. But it can’t be reversed (on centuries scale). So each catastrophe frequency increase, each heat record, each impact of the acidification of oceans that happen year after years is here to stay for centuries, at least.
I sincerely hope your CO2 pellets are for today, because if they are not, we will need another plan. And the only working one we have as of today is to stop burning fossil fuels.
The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply energy became arbitrarily cheap, while being scarce and finite. That means someone could buy the whole supply and wipe out their competitors. That contradicts it being arbitrarily cheap, so energy would be a limiting factor.
For example, let's choose something expensive sounding -- platinum. 170 tons per year of production, at $30 million per ton. $5B will let you corner the market for the year. Yet it doesn't happen, for a wide variety of reasons.
Perhaps a world where platinum jewelry is all that is bought and sold. Jewelers improve in skill and the jewelrt becomes ever more intricate and elaborate, such that its value grows ever higher than the raw platinum it's made from.
In such a world, there might be no limit on the jeweler's craft, but could the price of platinum really become arbitrarily small? As time goes on, first the world's greatest jeweler could afford the whole supply, but then even a second rate jeweler, and then eventually anybody could perhaps afford to buy all the raw platinum.
B: Platinum is much easier to corner than energy would be, since platinum mining is limited to a very few number of active minutes. Energy production is quite distributed.
“When the materials point at the sky, the infrared rays can pass straight through the atmosphere and into space. That effectively links the materials to an inexhaustible heat sink, into which they can keep dumping heat without it coming back.”
I agree with jbay808 on the impracticality, but note that in context, I am responding to the question of whether it would be harder to remove the heat than to generate it. Both obviously quickly become impracticable if we expect exponential increases.
Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.
It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2
And yeah, "the economy" includes services as well as goods. But services are performed by humans, and humans need to eat and live in houses and wear clothes etc.
See: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=atoms+in+a+18+grams+of...
We're not running short of atoms.
If a bit of data could be stored in a single hydrogen atom, after 1000 years of 1.03 growth 1e9 kg of hydrogen would be required (starting from 100 zetabytes today). After 2000 years you're at 1e21 kg, more or less the mass of the moon. For completeness, after 2700 we'd need the mass of the solar system in hydrogen atoms.
I agree with the article that there is a fundamental limit to growth. If I had to guess, the first limit will be the number of humans on the planet, followed by the black body radiation rate of the earth needed to stop our gizmos from overheating.
The economy ultimately comes from material goods. The digital economy is only a facade built on that substrate. And it's already pushing its limits, which is why everyone, from FAANG companies to the guy selling some digital asset online, is pushing to sell something or another as hard as they can, with all the conviction and integrity of a snake oil salesman.
Productivity is increasing, but wages are decreasing.
Country net worth is increasing, but happiness is decreasing.
Etc.
When I read these kinds of posts, I think about "stagnate." It feels like an inherently negative word. I know that most people value a constantly improving technology, but as my OP says, technology can "improve" while, say, net worth or GDP "stagnates." Even leaving that to the side, I don't feel like "stagnated" technological advancement is inherently bad. It's just a value many of us hold.
Not to get primitivist, but, humans really were just eating berries and vibing for a really long time. I don't think we should "return to monkey," but if we get to the point where we figure out that we can't really defeat death, it might then become time for society to instead start thinking about living the way a cancer patient with a deadline does: how can we find meaning, knowing the end is inevitable? Sure yeah meaning could be still trying to advance, but given that current modes of technological advancement often involve capitalist exploitation and general misery (which isn't REQUIRED but we seem to be really big fans of it cause we keep doing it), perhaps we could decide to let go and just live happily with "technological stagnation."
Wages have increased more in the last 30 years than at any time in history:
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-source...
You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.