[pdonis]

> Our present lifestyle does seem to require constant growth

No, it doesn't. The obvious cause of the huge economic growth over the past 150 years, which is what the author focuses on, is population growth. World population is expected to level off in this century.

The author also assumes, incorrectly, that GDP--money spent on goods and services--is the right measure of overall wealth. It's not. The author even discusses "decoupling", the fact that many types of wealth require little or no physical resources to produce, but fails to realize that the long term outcome of this will not be to raise monetary GDP more and more, but to make monetary GDP less and less of an accurate measure of wealth production.

Finally, the author misunderstands basic economics when he says (p. 25): "A limited life-essential resource will always carry a moderately high value." This is a common misconception. An obvious counterexample is air: air is a limited resource (Earth's atmosphere contains only a finite quantity of it), it is life-essential, but it is free. Why? Because it costs nothing to produce. And if the cost of production of other life-essential resources, like food, were reduced, those things would also become cheaper. (In fact, that has already happened to a large extent in the developed world: over the past 150 years, the fraction of people involved in food production has dropped from about 19 in 20 to about 1 in 20. The main reason food is not much cheaper as a result of this is political: governments artificially manipulate the markets for food, for example by paying farmers not to grow certain crops. This is fixable without any increase at all in our expenditure of physical resources.)

[chordalkeyboard]

> No, it doesn't. The obvious cause of the huge economic growth over the past 150 years, which is what the author focuses on, is population growth. World population is expected to level off in this century.

world population is leveling off because we're approaching many of these limits to growth and that's affecting the enabling factors for continued population growth.

> The author also assumes, incorrectly, that GDP--money spent on goods and services--is the right measure of overall wealth. It's not. The author even discusses "decoupling", the fact that many types of wealth require little or no physical resources to produce, but fails to realize that the long term outcome of this will not be to raise monetary GDP more and more, but to make monetary GDP less and less of an accurate measure of wealth production.

I agree with this.

> "A limited life-essential resource will always carry a moderately high value." This is a common misconception. An obvious counterexample is air: air is a limited resource (Earth's atmosphere contains only a finite quantity of it), it is life-essential, but it is free. Why? Because it costs nothing to produce.

you conflate value and price here. obviously atmosphere is not currently metered. That doesn't mean we don't place a high value on clean air.

> And if the cost of production of other life-essential resources, like food, were reduced, those things would also become cheaper.

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

[pdonis]

> you conflate value and price here

I'm not doing that. I'm pointing out that the author of this paper is doing that. He is assuming that everything of value is captured in the GDP, i.e., in money spent. But as you acknowledge, this is false, and that invalidates his argument.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The Jevons paradox does not say things don't become cheaper when their cost of production is reduced. So it is not an argument against the statement of mine that you were responding to here.

Also, if we are talking about life-essential resources like food (or air), which was what I was talking about in the comment you responded to here, the Jevons paradox is of limited applicability if it applies at all, because demand for such resources is constrained. Even if food were free, people would not eat an unlimited amount of it, any more than they now breathe an unlimited amount of air because air is free. The most important factor driving an increase in total consumption of such resources is population increase, so if population levels off, the resources consumed for these life-essential things will be naturally limited no matter how cheap they become.

[wussboy]

> world population is leveling off because we’re approaching many of these limits to growth

Is it? My understanding is that as economies become richer, healthcare improves, infant mortality decreases and parents reduce their birth rates because they need less children to “hedge their bets”.