Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fshbbdssbbgdd 1056 days ago
Growth is not a measure of physical resource consumption, it’s a measure of the value of goods and services produced. If you can find a way to make something more valuable out of less raw materials, you can increase growth while decreasing consumption. One example is that computer chips that do the same computation with less silicon and energy are worth more. There might be a limit to this, but it’s not obvious. A bunch of countries already managed to increase economic growth while decreasing CO2 emissions. Maybe in 100 years humanity’s main preoccupation will be competing to tell each other more fashionable jokes while recycling the same physical materials, with economic growth continuing uninterrupted all the while.
1 comments

I don't see how your logic works with a brewery. Would it be a good thing a brewery makes exclusive rare beer that costs infinite dollars a bottle? Or sell an infinitely small drop of beer?

If people could afford that, it's not the beer creating the value.

Value depends on another system and it is relative. So value of something can go up while the world is burning. I think that's what is meant by infinite growth doesn't work. It could work for something, but not everything always.