[andersonvieira]

You probably live a comfortable life and is mostly satisfied with what you have so you see no need for more growth. Now imagine someone had the means to implement this same idea 200 years ago. We probably wouldn't have water and sewage treatment, fast transportation, modern medicine, electric light and all the appliances that come with it, internet, etc. I find it disingenuous to dismiss all these as trinkets.

This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me.

I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.

[virgilp]

I largely agree with you, with some amendment:

> The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.

The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow?

The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)

[baq]

limits of physics are well known and not about to change in 2, 200 or 20000 years. the current growth trajectory puts us at boiling oceans in about half of a millennium, assuming economic growth is correlated with energy consumption. remember all energy eventually ends up as heat and Earth can't radiate heat away fast enough if we grow too much.

technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.

[raducu]

I think you are being disingenuousby saying 200 years. Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth" in the first world of the last 20 years if we could also revert wars, climate change and destruction of habbitat for the last 20 years. Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.

[virgilp]

Do you also mean AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing, etc?

Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...

[rbrtl]

I think you know OP didn't mean those:

> Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth"

I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes.

Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole.

This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill.

They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs.

Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.

[virgilp]

Oh, but if we take that view - it's basically "rich and healthy is better than poor and sick". D'uh, of course I'd give up all the bad things if I could get more good things in return, who wouldn't?

I think the view that one president screwed you over is a bit myopic... It didn't happen in US, it happened all across the developed world. That shows it's a systemic thing - caused not by some policy, but by global forces. Those millions that came out of poverty did it pretty much at the expense of the western middle class (and yes, this was enabled & encouraged by the rich - who benefited from it; that much is true). It's not just a few people that got richer - many millions got richer. It's just that those millions are not in the developed world.

[edit]PS. I wonder if OP didn't add the "except" after my message... I don't remember seeing it initially (though it's entirely possible that I didn't pay close attention).

[thu2111]

Problem is that view is contradictory.

In the absence of discovering a natural resource bounty, GDP (economic) growth comes from two sources:

1. More people working harder.

2. Better technology.

If you exclude "medical advances and science" you're basically excluding (2) which means the only source of growth is (1). More people working harder. Saying the world can only get better by increasing the number of hours we work is dystopian and doesn't make sense to wish for.

Ultimately, all progress comes through technology.

[rbrtl]

I have no idea where this contradiction is coming from. OP explicitly stated that they would maintain, keep, hold on to, medical advances and science growth... They would trade _other_ growth such as land values, asset inflation etc. to undo the harm done.

And just because I was perusing this earlier today: the UK Government's plan for the future /is/ to have people work for longer[1].

I agree with you. Make no mistake in that. Denying that those who push growth economics seek only to further their own interests, not those of humanity, is a curious and dangerous position in the face of the evidence. This graph[2] shows that since deregulation they have increased their relative gain, at the expense of those worse off. It would be trivial to show that these same people made their money by eroding the welfare of everyone else, environmentally and economically.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/19...

[ClumsyPilot]

Not at all, there are huge efficiencies to be gained from societal change. You could double Russian GDP just by dealing with corruption.

Besides crime, there is- Education, computer literacy, drug problems, etc. Huge swathes of Africa lacks even basic sanitation, many people in US don't have healthcare, the list is endless.

Lastly, there is a difference between science and industry. Case in point: we have the technology for genetic engineering of humans, but we aren't doing that. It could probably increase GDP too.

[zemvpferreira]

That's a big claim you're making. Can't economic growth (AKA inflation) come about from rising asset prices such as houses?

It seems to me that conflating humanity's progress and economic growth is exactly where our problems start.

[thu2111]

This is a pretty common confusion. Economic growth is a growth in what economists call "wealth" (the goods and services around us that add up to our modern lifestyle). The closest approximate metric for this is real-terms GDP, i.e. the value of all goods and services sold added up and then adjusted for inflation. It's not about raw prices, which are distorted by government money creation (these days normally called quantitative easing but it goes via many names).

Progress and wealth creation actually occur when prices fall, not when they rise, even though it may not feel like it if you happen to be the owner of a fixed asset whose price is falling i.e. a house. In a static system if money is printed via the issuance of loans, and that causes house prices to rise whilst the prices of everything else remain stable, then all that's doing is reallocating wealth from non-home owners to homeowners and banks. But it's not actually increasing wealth.

For wealth to increase everyone would need to find it easier to buy things, and the only way to do that is for things to become cheaper in real terms. For instance the smartphone industry has created enormous wealth in the past 20 years. Smartphones got massively cheaper so everyone can have one, and they got massively better. This is what economists mean by wealth creation.

[raducu]

How is a rise in house prices helping the nobler parts of the economy? People spend considerable more of their income on mortgages or rents, leaving a lot less for other less fixed and shorter lived assets. I'd be 1000% satisfied with a 50' house and valuation, leaving me to spend my money on travel, charity, high-tech or just work less, do stuff that really interests me; or spend a lot more on education. How is the education bubble helping the progress of humanity?

I'd be extremely happy with the education + costs of 50 years ago, or just online education -- I'm not talking about content, but delivery and costs.

It boggles my mind that people don't see it for what it is -- the feudal lords are back and they take a lot more of your production just so you stay alive.

They are not helping humanity(except for some benevolent ones) progress, they 99% help themselves.

[scottlocklin]

Has there been some enormous breakthrough in any of these things "AI, space flight, genome research, evolution of computing" in the last 20 years? Pretty sure there hasn't been! I mean, Pentiums are faster I guess! Not as different as people seem to think though. Otherwise; nothingburgers for anybody's real world experience. Space flight has arguably gotten worse in the West over the last 20.

Environment has gotten obviously shittier since then; looks like a good trade to me!

[bryanlarsen]

AI: has become actually useful over the last 20 years. Of course if you only use it for adtech and arbitrage the world doesn't see much benefit.

genome research: CRISPR etc.

space flight: reusability is a massive game changer. The Falcon 9 once they start reliably catching the fairings is about 90% reusable. The Falcon 9 makes things like constellations of 12,000 satellites feasible. The Starship is planning on 100% reusability which will reduce costs a futher couple of orders of magnitude. Elon is talking about sending 1000 Starships to Mars every 2 years in about a decade, and people are starting to learn that Elon might not be as crazy as people originally thought...

Environment: not so obviously shittier. For example, tree coverage has increased by 7% in the last 35 years. In general local environments in developed countries have gotten a lot cleaner. The global environment on the other hand suffers a massive tragedy of the commons type problem so it overshadows massively local improvements. So yes, you can say the environment has gotten worse, but it isn't "obviously" so.

[scottlocklin]

I work in machine learning: your statement is questionable -it worked fine 20 years ago. DL is nowhere near the "breakthrough" people act like it is; the actual real world applications of it that non mentats might use appear to be the null set. And yeah, I don't count the corporate propaganda material about "autonomous cars" or whatever to be evidence to the contrary.

Genome research: so far a big nothing burger. Zero impacts on average people's daily lives. The entirety of genome research results on the real world seems to be enabling people to eat more sugar without dying.

Space flight reusability: dude, where's my space shuttle? Falcoln 9 isn't reusable when using its actual cargo capacity, and isn't cost effective when it is reusable; no game changer there. Neat trick though and it certainly looked cool.

Environment getting better: citations needed. Doom porn abounds at the very least. Maybe they're all lying about melting polar caps, plastic in the oceans and insane levels of chemicals in the eco system.

[virgilp]

Where by "worked fine" you mean it couldn't tell a cat from a swan. Nowadays speech to text actually works, translation is actually usable, iPad unlocks with your face etc. Did you put in any effort to remember what it looked like 20 years ago, before saying "it worked fine"?

[andersonvieira]

It is not disingenuous to think long term because of how growth compounds over time. Imagine average growth is 2% a year and we cap it to 1%. In 20 years the difference would be 48% vs 22% total growth, which may not sound bad. But in 200 years, it would be 5150% vs 632%, and it would only get larger.

[raducu]

Not so sure about the real growth after you add central bank induced asset price inflation or just the heavily skewed basic inflation central banks like to post every year.

I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the said growth is really just asset price inflation -- just let people overburden themselves with debt and a house costing 50000$ now costs 300000$ -- not just any house, EVERY house -- boom, you have huge "growth" and "wealth".

EDIT: I meant that it is disingenuous to look at 200 years because huge REAL advances have indeed taken place since then.

I'm totally against the financialization that has happened in the last 40-50 years, which is really 90% of the growth that has actually happened.

I mean, don't you think there's something deeply wrong and worrying with the fact that the financial industry is 80% of US GDP?

[_2d30]

> Oh, and by "growth" I mean the insane asset price inflation and concentration wealth, strengthening of the military-industrial complex, monopolisation by corporations, too big to fail banks and financial institutions.

Well if we are just totally changing what growth means...

[raducu]

Listen -- if 0.5% of people see real economic growth of 10000% and the rest see negative growth after inflation, even if on paper, on average we have positive growth, the overall result is NEGATIVE if you ask me.

Just check real wage growth in the western world, after inflation it is stagnant or negative in the last decades; add in hugely inflated housing prices, education prices, and it is very clearly a big NEGATIVE outcome for the average person; this is only offset a bit by women entering the workforce, now you have 2 slaves instead of 1.

Yeah, the developing world might fare better -- for now -- as they are much cheaper then workers in the developed world, but the same trap awaits them, the same asset price inflation, education costs and so on is happening in the developing world, it's not fully our turn yet, but the writing is on the wall.

[amylene]

The wars of the past 20 years have been much less damaging than the previous wars. I actually think the last 20 years has been an improvement.