[dredmorbius]

The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth, and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril.

Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Even apparent mavericks such as Thomas Piketty assume that growth will continue interminably (noted in Capital in the Twenty-First Century).

Rather than being a critique of Liu, you've actually written a criticism of those he himself is generally addressing.

[kbenson]

> Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy.

Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems.

Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.

[dredmorbius]

One problem with "grow quickly, then switch", is that it often leads to high-growth institutions, factions, ideologies, and infrastructure.

Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it which are founded on growth. They create development patterns (most especially of urban land use --- the most massive impact of the automobile was on city and suburban landscapes), and consumption patterns.

Once entrenched, those are all exceedingly difficult to dislodge.

I'd argue that China is wrestling with this now, and that a fair bit of the disruption of the past few years (above and beyond exogenous shocks, notably Covid-19) involve this, as the CCP attempts to wrest power back from industrial, financial, and real estate interests.

Some European countries (notably the Netherlands and Amsterdam with its bicycle- and transit-centric transport planning), Japan, and possibly others such as Costa Rica, seem to have followed a lower-growth curve. These may actually find transition more viable.

At the capital of capitalism, the United States, transition faces absolutely massive obstructions in the form of politics, politics-expressed-as-social-values, economic interests, finance, real estate, land use, transportation, building codes (residential, commercial, and industrial), and more. Those are far more significant obstructions than actual technical solutions, and the more illuminating advocates of sustainability that I follow tend to emphasize this.

(I'll list these later, though I'm still waiting for XorNot to cough up. I'll give them a few more hours.)

[kbenson]

I don't deny that it's likely an exceedingly had thing to do, to transition, and that it's likely harder the longer you wait, just that when you're dealing with exponential growth that opting out too early is likely disastrous in it's own way.

I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some stop to exponential growth at some point (but not only because of that). Economic power is somewhat fungible with mitary power, and lack of power in a possible future less stable system of nations could be very problematic.

In short I think the safest and most conservative path for any nation to protect it's future is to take advantage of as much growth as it safely can for as long as it lasts.

Another way to look at is that is the U.S. was to opt out of growth right now, how long would it take for us to become irrelevant on the world stage, and how long after that before we were (and our citizens) negatively impacted by trade deals because of lack of leverage (which is probably a best case scenario of negative possibilities IMO). It's the job of a government to avoid that scenario.

Transitioning is hard, but I'm not sure it's harder than the alternative, depending on how far out we are to it being forced on everyone.

That said, I'd be happy to read whatever info you have on the topic to expand my thinking.

[dredmorbius]

One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint. What the country with a higher nominal GDP growth rate does is ... hit that limit sooner rather than later. We've seen countries go through tremendous growth spurts: the UK ~1800 -- 1914; the US ~1870--1970; post-WWII Japan 1945--1990; the "Asian Tigers" of South Korea (particularly contrasted with the North), Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan 1960-2020; and most significantly of all, China 1990--2020. But each of those eventually hit a wall and saw vastly diminished, or no net GDP growth.

To that extent, "rapid growth" seems largely a matter of "reaching your ultimate potential earlier". And the post-rapid-growth phase turns out to have ... interesting challenges: environment, politics, demographics, and more, many of which emerge after sheer growth alone can no longer paper over conflicts or issues which had been present all along.

There's also of course the argument that GDP doesn't measure actual net wealth or common weal, which is a criticism that dates back to the origins of GDP/GNP, and even its creator, Simon Kuznets. There are numerous alternative measures that are proposed. One aspect I've not seen much addressed is that GDP is largely a tool for managing macroeconomic monetary dynamics, that is, as total monetary exchange grows or shrinks, then the monetary base itself must be adjusted, which is the remit of central banks. Those banks can create or destroy money at will (pursuant to policy goals and prime directives), because money itself is not wealth. The knock-on effects are felt profoundly in asset markets, that is, goods or securities whose principle or significant function is to serve as an inflation-resistant store of wealth: stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, collectables (art, wine, cars, etc.), and the like. Asset value inflation is not itself economic productivity. It may reflect economic productivity (that's at least the fig leaf covering stock markets), but far more often, asset inflation simply follows national and global monetary policy, most especially rising in times of loose money or easy loans (largely equivalent terms). John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 remains an excellent post mortem of one such event. To that extent, measuring GDP growth alone provides distorted view of actual wealth growth, both at the level of individuals (say, median, bottom quintile), and of net national power and stability, though of course how distorted is the stuff of legendary disagreements.

There is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction. Instability in the Levant following the mid-2000s has been tied to loss of net-exporter status among oil producers (Syria, Egypt, Libya), as well as food scarcity through both climate-related crop shortages and reduced imports as oil revenues decline. One of the more spectacular cases is the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which underwent a birdshit apocalypse after (briefly) highlighting as the world's richest nation (per capita) after what proved to be a highly limited resource reached its limits. <https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/world/a-pacific-island-na...>

The country's recovered somewhat by entering into the hospitality business. That is, it runs internment camps for the refugees Australia would prefer to pretend don't exist and sends elsewhere: <https://devpolicy.org/nauru-riches-to-rags-to-riches-2021041...>

To the extent that contemporary economies run on the basis of extraction (petroleum, coal, natural gas, minerals, groundwater, topsoil) and sink exhaustion (the ozone layer, heavy metal contamination, greenhouse gasses, plastics and endocrine disruptors, habitat and species disruption, ...), none of which are costed into either market transactions or national wealth/income statistics ... well, we're all on busses headed toward various cliffs, some nearer, some further.

One option is to expend resources on things which presently have relatively low value but would be exceedingly useful in a post-carbon / post-collapse society. That includes basic skills, sustainable practices, sustainable infrastructure, and the social patterns which can effectively utilise these. Keep in mind that this runs directly contrary to market signalling as markets have an overwhelming present-bias in assigning values, as anyone caught holding the bag after a crash can tell you. Potential future utility simply isn't considered, and in general, non-market mechanisms seem to be required to encourage such investments.

(There are other systems which similarly fail to consider long-term value, and it's long been a favourite trope to note the immense ecological contamination and pollution which occurred in the Soviet bloc. However similar desecration was seen both earlier and simultaneously under market systems ... both are poor at delivering ecological equity. Ultimate reforms have tended to emerge through social movements, legislation, and legal recourse, none of which are market-based.)

My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. That is, equity and distribution count for far more than total gross production or consumption. Invest in infrastructure, healthcare (with a strong emphasis on basic access and preventive measures rather than heroic interventions), education, affordable housing, social safety nets, and sustainable development of transport, built infrastructure (at individual building, community, regional and national levels), resource preservation and enhancement (e.g., water, soil, forest, and wildlands cultivation), actual productivity, mitigation of undesired consequences, and the like, and ... I think you might see a path which whilst it might not register on mainstream metrics is actually preferable over the long run.

[kbenson]

Thanks for taking the time to write such a large and thorough reply. Unfortunately, there's so much in there and multiple of the things I want to express touch on multiple of the points you made, any reply I make is going to be rambling and possibly hard to consume, but I'll make an attempt.

> One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint.

This is an interesting concept, and depending on what we believe fuels growth is obviously true to a greater or lesser extent (mostly greater, in my opinion). It's obvious that resources fuel growth, and different countries have different kinds and amounts of resources, so those eventually being tapped means loss of at least one fuel of growth. Population also fuels growth, but there are obviously limits there (even if people often can't agree on how and when they will express themselves), such as living space and ability to source food.

At the same time, there are things that fuel growth (in this case whether we're talking about GDP or some more holistic metrics of citizen wealth or well-being) such as new technology, whether it be spurred advances in the hard sciences or soft. Political, organizational and social technologies are not to be underestimated here I think. A change on society that causes a marked decrease in psychological problems such as depression, or increase in happiness in some other way, would be immensely important.

In the end though, the technological changes are probably hard to hoard for the benefit of one nation over the other (even if adoption of something that seems extremely beneficial doesn't often happen on short time frames), so the things that cause growth that are limited resources at likely the important thing to focus on. It seems fairly obvious to me that different nations already have different amounts of these resources or the ability to grow them, and will hit those limits at different times.

In the end though, it may not be what matters, as while there are countries of different relative potential, there's also growth through current relative power. Powerful countries can achieve better terms in trade with others by leveraging that power, so the more powerful you are, and the sooner you can bring that power to bear, the more benefit it brings you. In this way, being economically more powerful than others is itself is a form resource to be tapped for more growth.

> ere is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction.

To be clear, my argument is not necessarily to grow as quickly as possible (I think that's obviously non-optimal given the negative repercussions and the unknown time at which growth becomes capped), but to continue to try to leverage resources into growth when still possible as fast as is safe (which is obciously complex and hard to do and a moving target).

In large I think that means countries should keep doing what they're doing. IU also think ecological sustainability should be more emphasized, but I don't think that is antithetical to what I just said. We should attempt to grow as much as we can, but pay close attention to the consequences and try to minimize the negative ones. Hopefully that means we're also paying attention to any eventual slowing of cessation of a lot of growth drivers and planning for what that entails as we near it.

> My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. ... Invest in infrastructure, healthcare ...

That investment is where I would like to see a lot of the growth funneled into. The quicker we grow in ways which do not exacerbate those problems, the more resources we'll have to put towards solving them. Ultimately, in a perfect world that might mean picking the areas of growth that have the most bang-for-the-buck to leverage that towards actual problems for people (because it's easy to abstract this away to countries and just say let's get more people which will drive more growth), to make individuals happier, because otherwise why are we bothering.

That most of these decisions are made by large machines that often work through emergent behavior that is hard to steer is not lost on me, and I understand most my arguments are academic and ivory tower in nature.

Finally, thanks for including a large supplementary comment of sources. I'll be adding them to the stack of things I should read (but unfortunately rarely allow myself time for). I truly appreciate it.

[dredmorbius]

I do tend to throw a lot out, and try to limit myself. I'll stick to the first point here, with some further expansion on my thinking.

The first time I'd run into the notion that high metabolic systems burn out faster was reading Asimov's book on black holes, The Collapsing Universe, when I was a young boy, and learning that the hotter and brighter a star, the shorter its life. The very largest known star, CY Canis Majoris, is a red supergiant, near the end of its life, and is thought to have formed 8.2 Mya, roughly the same time h. sapiens and chimpanzees diverged on the evolutionary tree. Contrast the birth of our own Sun at about 4.5 Bya.

The notion that human civilisations might be somewhat akin to stars, burning through their metabolic and resource foundations, has a symmetry to this concept, though there are more confounding factors to cultures than there are to starts, where metallicity, mass, and the presence or absence of stellar companions are about the only relevant factors affecting lifespan.

The idea that civilisations are bounded by limits and that growth only reaches those limits more quickly also punches some gaping holes in the notion of long-termism, which argues for maximal growth and growth rates. That makes sense if ultimate growth and all stages along the pathway are both unlimited. If, however, there are both local and global maxima, that is, ceilings to growth and sustainability, and most especially if reaching those limits is a high-risk event, then rather than argue for maximal growth at all times, a more reserved approach is called for.

The question of two species or cultures competing for the same resources is another point, and it's been raised several times in this thread. I'd look to actual ecosystems where fast- and slow-growing species (including r/K selection theory: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>) exist. If the slower-growing species is also the more resilient for other reasons, then its slow growth need not be an ultimate handicap. That of course isn't a given, but depends very much on both the fitness landscape (selective pressure) and specific species adaptations. Human cultures are not identical to biological species, though they share some resemblances. Most especially, cultures are malleable, individuals can move between cultures, and the practices and knowledge of cultures can be shared, adopted, and transmitted to a much greater extent than biological species' genetic code is.

(I'd also like to make as painfully clear as I can that I am NOT equating "human culture" with any specific ethnic or geneological line, but rather the knowledge, practices, language, geographical distribution, and activities of groups of people, whether of common or diverse ancestry. Rather I'm focusing on both as persistent patterns which share the characteristics of inheritance, variability, and selection, and are thus evolutionary phenomena.)

As discussed in another comment, alliances matter far more for cultural protection than measures of wealth (collective or per-capita GDP, say): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37400918>.

I'm not saying that national capability as expressed in defensive capabilities doesn't matter at all, but suggest that it matters far less than one might generally think. Even at times where marauding empires were fashionable, the empires they created rarely survived long: Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, and Hitler all made tremendous conquests, but in three of those four instances, lost control within a few years, decades at the outside. Rome itself held at maximum extent with no peer in capabilities for a few centuries.

Common interest and fraternal bonds seem far more effective than military might. Certainly less costly. And one could argue that both Pax Romana and Pax Americana were based more on economic than military factors.

On the 2nd and 3rd points: Certain forms of growth, most especially those based on fossil fuels, must end in the very near future to avoid absolute catastrophe. The political and economic opposition to this remains strong, unfortunately. As for channeling growth into basic infrastructure and safety nets, amen!

Glad you're getting something from this.

[dredmorbius]

On sources: I'm highly partial to the work of William Ophuls who's been writing on this topic for a half century. His PhD thesis was published in 1977 as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (with an update in the early 1990s). That largely lays out the problematique, both in terms of resources and political dynamics. The book's old enough that many of its own projections can be tested, and I think these hold out exceptionally well, particularly in highlighting the (then future) rise of China as a global economic, political, and military force. Ophuls has gone on to suggest at least the framework of solutions, most especially in Plato's Revenge (2009), though that remains fairly high level. What really makes Ophuls's works tremendously valuable is his bibliographic notes which are comprehensive and, to use a favourite word of his, synoptic. The note for Ecology in particular covers much of the previous several decades' literature on growth and perspectives from both optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints, and Ophuls is exceedingly fair in considering both. I've gone back to many of those sources myself (Maddox, Kahn, Simon) to compare notes. I've actually typed out the note from Plato's Revenge, which captures a sense of his practice, though that focuses more on recent and political topics: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607050023/https://old.reddi...>. In that sense, Ophuls is an excellent entry point into the literature as a whole. He has a website at <http://www.ophuls.org/William_Ophuls/Home.html> though in various states of disrepair.

Ophuls's political-ecological approach is being carried on by Thomas Homer-Dixon: <https://homerdixon.com/writing/>

There are other authors: Bill McKibben's Eaarth (sic), Joel Magnusonn's The Approaching Great Transformation, the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, all of which I have to hand. Vaclav Smil has written his own damned library on resources and sustainability from a technical perspective, largely looking backwards though with some forward-looking elements. I particularly recommend Energy in World History (1992, 2019) and Energy and Civilization (2017). Energy Transitions (2016) tackles the specific question of converting to a sustainable-energy path: <Energy Transitions>. And there's a long list of other Smil publications.

Kate Rayworth's Doughnut Economics is another prescriptive work looking at ways forward. <https://www.kateraworth.com/>

The original Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens) remains relevant, and is freely available online: <https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-availabl...>. I strongly recommend reading primary sources over hot takes, interpretations, and commentaries. It's also helpful to remember that LtG served not as a prescription but as an alarm: there's a clear problem and we've got to wake up to it. Sadly, more than 50 years onward, that alarm continues to be ignored by many (including within this thread).

The now-defunct Worldwatch Institute published an annual State of the World publication which was an anthology of articles on sustainability generally, from 1984--2017, and give an excellent sense of the breadth and progress of thinking on these topics. Those are mostly available via the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/search?query=worldwatch+institute+state+...>

Worldwatch's founder, Lester R. Brown, has written numerous books, his latest covers this topic, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy <http://www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/market_forces_dri...>

Looking at the energy picture alone, there's David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which breaks down the technical picture, with a focus on Britain though applicable elsewhere, clearly and soberly. Freely available online: <http://www.withouthotair.com/>

That's just skimming the top of a huge literature. There are a tremendous number of different viewpoints, of topics and approaches, and of course disagreement. Contrary to the assertions of some, however, there are specific and actionable recommendations to be found. Looking into the bibliographies and notes of the works listed should launch you further in whatever direction you care to explore.

[theskypirate]

Japan essentially reached full stagnation in the 90's and has continued to stagnate to the present day. Transition simply happens and society adjusts.

[dredmorbius]

That's part of it.

Japan also consciously entered on a relatively lower-energy path than the US, largely through energy and vehicle taxation and licencing practices, though there were others. That's not to say Japan doesn't have a large number of automobiles, or a strong automobile sector. It does.

But domestic autos tend to be smaller than those made for export elsewhere, there's a tremendous domestic transit system (famously the Shinkansen), and Japan's electronics industry (with hits and misses) was the result of a deliberate government-directed policy toward more efficient resource utilisation over simply mass consumption.

Not perfectly achieved, by any means, but a contrast to policies elsewhere.

[2358452]

> Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.

I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructive and planet-destroying way. The sooner nations realize this, the better.

[kbenson]

It's entirely relevant when your country can't control is own future, as that will extend to its citizens. Just because we're in a relatively stable period of history with regards to one nation seeking to conquer another (somewhat bucked by Russia) doesn't mean that will necessarily persist.

A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.

[dredmorbius]

The question of stability is an interesting one.

There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.

Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.

The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.

And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:

  State     GDP EU rank   GDP/capita (WW)
  -----     -----------   ---------------
  Albania:           40              101
  Belgium:           12               18
  Bulgaria:          26               73
  Canada:           n/a              n/a
  Croatia:           29               54
  Czechia:           19               37
  Denmark:           16                9
  Estonia:           35               38
  Finland:           18               15
  France:             3               21
  Germany:            1               16
  Greece:            22               39
  Hungary:           24               51
  Iceland:           37                6
  Italy:              4               25
  Latvia:            34               50
  Lithuania:         30               44
  Luxembourg:        27                1
  Montenegro:        46               75
  the Netherlands:   7                12
  North Macedonia:   42               92
  Norway:            13                3
  Poland:            10               49
  Romania:           17               55
  Slovakia:          25               45
  Slovenia:          31               34
  Spain:              6               29
  Turkey:             8               53
  United Kingdom:     2               22
  United States:     n/a             n/a

Notes:

- I've listed the North American members, but omitted their GDP as these are not European states.)

- EU rank is 1--50 inclusive.

- GDP/capita rank is 1--134 within Europe, based on global IMF rankings of 192 states worldwide.

Sources:

- GDP overall: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

- GDP/capita: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

Takeaway: Alliances trump GDP or per-capita income.

[kbenson]

Yes, but my worry is that what looks like a trend is but a small part of a larger cycle. We've seen what happens when complex political alliances fail with WWI (even if they were more a web than an overarching umbrella), and Ukraine problem was not just that it was unaligned, but that it was choosing to align itself.

How sure are we that the trends we see during periods of somewhat large economic growth (on average, overall for most nations) will continue when that environment is not the same? As more and more countries enter the end/modernity stage of economic bootstrapping (and China and India did), what pressure does that out on nations already at that level?

More than NATO I think trade agreements keep the world together (and drive membership of NATO) as codependency might as well be formalized. If some of that codependency goes away, and countries decide to protect and encourage local sectors (which might be more feasible in a low growth environment, I'm not sure), do the other relationships stay the same?

I'm not claiming to have answers, but I do have a lot of questions and see a whole lot of unknowns.

[dredmorbius]

Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

How the global political landscape might change in a post-growth world is the stuff of thousands of speculative fiction and cinema plots.

You're looking outward at multinational alliances based on today's (mostly) nation-states. Another consideration is how those states themselves might fare. It strikes me as quite possible that larger states (the US, China, India, Indonesia) might well fragment, and even mid-sized powers (Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico) could splinter. The political situation in the US has been described as a "cold civil war" for some years (see: <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-wa...>). Russia has been fighting to retain or regain ceded Soviet territories since the mid-1990s. There are separatist movements of various shades in Spain (Catalonia, Basque region), Belgium (Waloonia), the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland), Canada (Quebec), India (multiple), Indonesia (multiple), Israel (Palestine), the Philippines (multiple), just as a list of more developed and stable nations. (I'm omitting Africa entirely, a huge list of itself, most of the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, largely as those deviate from the Western / OECD conditions fairly markedly.) China is of course unified, but has ethnic strife (Uygers and Tibetians), reintegrated regions (Hong Kong), and contested territories (Taiwain, Arunachal Pradesh, South China Sea, ...).

There've been outright separations: Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Balkans gonna Balkanize...). And reunifications, most especially of Germany.

The map of Europe has hardly been constant, and even as recently as the mid-19th century is largely unrecognisable today: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=P9YnYRk8_kE>

Another factor to consider is that the same trends which would likely lead to degrowth will also make massive military campaigns far less viable. This affects not just the field of battle, but the entire logistical pipeline as well as the capability to build and resupply weapons, vehicles, ships, and ammunition. I'm reminded that the introduction of the sweet potato to New Zealand utterly reshaped that region's tribal landscape: the cultures with potatoes could march and campaign further than those without. (If I recall, this is discussed in one of Jared Diamond's books.) More recently, introduction of muskets to the Maori led to another technological-superiority disruption: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars>. Reintroduction of horses and the introduction of firearms to Native American cultures had similar effects.

Other thoughts:

- NATO exists not only as a bulwark against the USSR / Russia, but to protect access to Middle East oil and gas on which Europe depends in the extreme. Falling significance of both could alter that calculus.

- International shipping relies on safe seas and ports. Transoceanic trade blossomed under the British Navy and has flourished under American naval protection. Piracy exists only in small backwaters now (notably Somalia, though small-craft boardings are not unheard of particularly in central and Latin America, and S.E. Asia), and overt shows of force are not exceedingly common, but there are regular patrols off the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden, that I'm aware of. Rogue states including Iran and North Korea have attacked or commandeered vessels. Much as with shooting down commercial airliners, this is immensely disruptive to trade, and can result both in wide diversions of shipping routes and cessation of trade to unfriendly ports. Submarine warfare by both Axis and Allied forces was devastating during WWII, and both costs and countermeasures were extensive. NATO plays a role here as well.

[xg15]

I think there is one escape from this, basically confining more and more "growth" to artificial numbers on paper (or in a DB).

Cryptocurrencies are kind of going in that direction, where the "value" that is reported as economic growth doesn't correspond to any kind of real-world matter or activity, but is simply assigned to some specific group of bits.

I can kind of believe that this virtual kind of growth could continue a long time without boiling the planet, but of course that doesn't make things less absurd, as the "value" would represent nothing objectively useful and would have to be maintained artificially - either through scarcity mechanisms like PoW etc, or through locked-down devices and ecosystems.

So that kind of "growth" could go on forever without burning the planet but would probably be a step back for civilization.

[dredmorbius]

The problem with this, or any other hypothetical "decoupled growth" argument is that, well, it's purely hypothetical.

There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies, which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, and hence induces greater demand). And there are instances of outsourced resource utilisation (both in terms of inputs and of waste sinks), most notably that of China which has committed tremendous domestic resources and incurred immense environmental insult in providing "cheap goods" (that is: goods lacking fully-costed externality impacts) to developed countries.

But there's nary a trace of actual empirical evidence of substantive decoupling in the real world. Much handwaving and could-be's, however.

[snowwrestler]

It’s only hypothetical in that the future hasn’t arrived yet. Most predictions are hypothetical by that criteria.

We know the economy is decoupled from physical limits because we have built it to be that way. If you go to my bank right now, they are not going to have a physical pile of valuable objects there which is my account balance. They have a computer that stores numbers, and obviously it needs energy to operate, but it doesn’t cost 10x energy to store 10,000 instead of 1,000 in the database entry for my account balance.

[dredmorbius]

Qing Dynasty China had "decoupled" its currency from specie by way of the first paper-based currency I'm aware of. See: Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China 1000-1700 (1996).

But that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with decoupling the actual economy from its physical foundations. Long after Qing, China remained fundamentally dependent on rice and wheat harvests (and suffered tremendous population losses, as much as 8 million deaths) many centuries later.

The wealth-tracking representation has been decoupled from any substance with intrinsic value, but the economy has not.

Put another way: you could have a monetary system in which currency was entirely backed in precious gold and silver, and introduce huge quantities of same to your economy ... without increasing the actual wealth of the nation by Adam Smith's definition, "annual produce and labour of the nation". This was precisely the situation Spain found itself in following its conquest of the Americas and importation of vast quantities of South American gold and silver.

[snowwrestler]

> The wealth-tracking representation has been decoupled from any substance with intrinsic value, but the economy has not.

If you insist on measuring the economy solely in terms of "substances with intrinsic value," you will find the limit of economic growth at approximately the limit of those substances. However this is begging the question because it's not the only way (and not the currently accepted way) of measuring economies.

Anyway, it's not just the representation, wealth itself is increasingly nonphysical and hypothetical. For example not only is my $1,000 bank account just a database entry, my database entry is most likely offset by about $900 in loans to other people. So my saved cash is actually about 90% claims on future payments by other people. Or look at stocks; at a P/E of around 20 currently, 95% of the value of my SP500 index fund is hypothetical. And of course the whole point of a bond is future payments.

Market-winning behaviors are also becoming less physically correlated. Did Barbie take 5x as much energy as The Flash to make or present? Does a 3 bedroom row house in San Francisco use 5x as much energy as a similar house in Detroit? Does Apple use 3x as much energy as Amazon? Does it take twice as much energy to make a Mercedes C class as a Honda Accord? There are tons of examples like this. Rice and wheat harvests are a pretty small part of modern economies now.

Look, I agree that a certain level of energy usage is required to enable economic activity. If we were to cut our energy use too much, we would limit or perhaps crash the economy. People need food, clothes, shelter, plumbing, communications, etc. I'm just saying: that is not equivalent to proving that future economic growth is bounded by energy usage. One does not logically follow from the other.

[dredmorbius]

If you insist on measuring the economy solely in terms of "substances with intrinsic value" ...

I don't, and specifically pointed out precisely an instance where money was not grounded in material goods. However that is a red herring as money is not wealth but is instead a measure of wealth. My own theory is that the reason many monetary systems have been based on specie or some similar intrinsically valuable material has to do not with coupling/decoupling of production to physical inputs, but to trust. That is, when you have a money-issuing authority imbued with high trust, the need for metal-backed currency disappears. "Seigniorage" is then a measure of trust in the money-issuing authority, and fiat currency (with effectively infinite seniorage) implies complete trust.

(The concern that such authorities occasionally abuse their trust, and/or run up against circumstances in which deflating the currency becomes a financial and economic necessity, is a separate issue. That problem isn't limited to fiat currencies, however, as the devaluation of specie-based currency such as the Roman denarius illustrates.)

The relationship between economic output and material inputs, specifically energy inputs, has been identified by several authors, in particular Steve Keen and Robert U. Ayres, "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production":

Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.

<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...>

As Keen and Ayres note, including energy along with capital and labour in the Cobb-Douglas production function accounts for virtually all of the "Solow Residual", the amount of productivity not accounted for by capital or labour, and which was previously attributed to "total factor productivity". Keen & Ayres reduce that almost entirely to energy input.

Your sojourn into prices as opposed to wealth creation (in the real economic sense, rather than the somewhat more familiar, but irrelevent in this case, financial sense) is yet another red herring. Asset prices are not intrinsically grounded in production costs, particularly for price-inelastic goods such as real estate. Rather than being defined by costs of production, they're defined by surplus value, and following the theory of rents first expressed by David Ricardo, the seller will tend to accrue surplus consumer value of such assets. That is, real estate prices rise to match the income potential of that location.

Information-heavy good such as luxury brands (Apple, Mercedes), entertainment (cinema), are based on a combination of manipulating tastes (advertising and marketing, reputation), constraining supply (particularly in real estate), and in competition for a limited resources (cinema screenings vs. cinema audiences). Note that in the case of cinema, costs of production are independent of viewings, so the industry is very interested in both total budget and ticket sales. But individual ticket prices tend to be relatively uniform across titles, what varies instead are the number of butts in seats. (This varies somewhat: Imax theatres may claim higher prices, but again, this tends to be across all titles, and matinee or off-peak screenings may offer lower prices, but again, uniformly for titles.)

Rice and wheat, as well as oil, gas, and coal, are commodity goods, not assets in the sense of real estate and gold. They're subject to supply and demand, but prices are determined by the marginal or surplus producer, depending on market circumstances. Where demand is less than total production capacity, the surplus producer, that is, the producer who can choose to sell more or less product at will, determines price based on their own production quotas. From 1931--1972, this was the United States, managed through the US Department of Interior (via "certificates of clearance")[1] and the Texas Railroad Commission (through drilling and production quotas)[2]. Since 1973, control has effectively resided with Saudi Arabia, as the US passed domestic peak oil and no longer had surplus production capacity.

Where demand exceeds production capacity, it is the marginal producer of oil, that is, the one whose costs just allow operating profit at the present market price.[3] As market prices rise and fall, those marginal producers enter and leave the market, literally turning on or off well pumps, with the cost of running the pump often dominating their own production costs of their "stripper wells".[4]

Because fuels, and foods, literally power the rest of the economy, as prices for either rise, there is less profitable activity to be undertaken by utilising them. If we express national productivity in terms of $GDP/barrel-oil, there is a range of roughly $300--400 at the low end to ~$3000 at the high end, with the US coming in at about $1,200/bbl of GDP.[5] If oil costs $50/bbl, then that is $1,150 of net productivity per barrel. Should the price rise to $100, the productivity falls to $1,100. The US can afford this reasonably well. A country netting only $250 profit at $50/bbl however falls to $200, or a loss of 25% of economic productivity. (India and China were at about this mark.)

The low price of food and energy masks their true value to the economy, because it is precisely the differential in price and output which is what determines the scale of the rest of the economy. Take away fuels and foods, and you'll find that total productivity falls by far more than the previous total exchange value of those goods.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See Daniel Yergin, The Prize, (1992), particularly chapter 13.

2. Yes, the Texas Railroad Commission controlled global production of oil. Because Texas.

3. Or, in cases, not even profit but cover non-fixed costs, and thus encourage the producer to operate at a net loss.

4. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripper_well>

5. As of ~2015 when I last looked at this.

[XorNot]

Conversely the people who argue against growth never have any answers they want to elaborate on. They have "well we can't have endless growth" and that's where the conversation stops.

They never want to examine the consequences of that thought (no growth means we're into a zero-sum game) or whether they think we're even plausibly close to the limit (instead they want to have a proxy argument about environmental damage or global warming, and are very uninterested in any specific solutions to their go to examples - i.e. "we can't possibly stop emitting CO2 from power generation, we must simply use less power!").

[salawat]

...No crap it's a zero-sum game! We've been screaming it from the bloody rooftops while economists and charlatans have gone on and on chasing alpha, instead of really focusing on breaching the most critical breakthroughs we need. Near limitless clean power, closed cycle industrial processes, and bloody innovations in either transport, agri-husbandry, or medicine.

But no.

War. War, real estate, and more pretend finance for finance sake. Either that or mass producing the tools of tyranny.

[XorNot]

You have just given a list of achievable technologies which would allow growth within the current resource constraints. What do you think "new energy sources" are if not economic growth?

[bliteben]

At some point unlimited growth would mean the heat death of earth. Remember all used energy no matter how green the source emits heat.

Even stars have limits to their energy. If you don't believe in limits then you aren't accepting physical reality.

[kbenson]

The optimal strategy now for unlimited growth and some future limit on growth bei g hit when there are competitors are likely the same. Take advantage of it as much as possibly for as long as possibly.

Given two countries where one lints it's economic growth and the other doesn't, if they're given another few hundred years before a limit is hit, which one is in a better place to respond when that limit is hit? Does the country that minutes itself even still exist as it did, or was it taken over by a stronger one (whether economically, militarily or culturally)?

[dredmorbius]

I'd really like to see you point to specific instances of this.

I could point to any number of examples refuting this, but really prefer you lay your cards on the table first.

[XorNot]

I mean you're doing that right now. You seem to believe we can't have infinite growth. Okay...and? Do you have anything more to add other then a mathematical reductio ad absurdum talking about 1000 year timespans? What tangible actions and economic model do you believe this should inform in the next 5 to 10 years, which you as a citizen of a democracy have some role in choosing and advocating for?

[dredmorbius]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386474>

Again: I have sources. You?

I'm reading this as you don't.

[dredmorbius]

Again, I'd really like to know who specifically you are referring to with "the people who argue against growth never have any answers they want to elaborate on".

I've mentioned numerous specific examples refuting that here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399144>

[snowwrestler]

Constant percentage economic growth is possible indefinitely because the economy is made up.

It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.

[Turskarama]

If you want to define growth as cash, then sure. If you want to define it by tangible output, then not so much.

[snowwrestler]

The economy is measured in money.

[Turskarama]

"Real GDP", which is the one usually reported on, is already adjusted for inflation and is usually reported as a percentage (i.e. it is unitless).

What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.

[snowwrestler]

Growth rates are expressed as percentages. The underlying value, GDP, is measured in money.

[Turskarama]

Yes, but I'm trying to tell you that doesn't matter. GDP is measured in money, but growth is measured as a percentage so it's unitless.

[dredmorbius]

Money is itself a measure.

Money is a measure of wealth, it is not wealth itself. Much as a ruler is a measure of length, not length itself.

The ability to measure 1,000 km does not equate to the capacity to travel 1,000 km.

The ability to measure a hectare of land does not equate to the possession of a hectare of land.

The ability to measure a year's worth of labour productivity, or industrial output, does not equate to the realisation of a year's worth of productivity.

And financial units absent the goods and services that they can access ... are worthless.

[snowwrestler]

Money is a measure now.

For most of human history, money was itself physical wealth, or constrained in proportion to physical wealth. Which in turn constrained the maximum value of any good or service it could buy.

Now goods and services can grow as valuable as we ever want them to be. They can even be imaginary. That's how a few thousand smart people at Apple who produce nothing physical can be considered nearly 6x the value of ExxonMobil and the tremendous amounts of land and resources it controls.

[dredmorbius]

Since definitions are social constructs, an absolutely unambiguous definition is impossible, but for practical purposes and argument here I'll posit that money is definitionally representative of value rather than value itself.

There are commodity monies, where some underlying commodity serves as money. However that relationship is often symbolic rather than strict. One classic instance is in the 1945 paper "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford, which describes the goods-and-services economy which emerged largely around the "currency" of cigarette packs amongst Allied prisoners within Axis prisoner of war camps during World War II. The paper illustrates both the capabilities and limitations of currencies in effecting trade (a surplus of cigarettes with a surfeit of actual goods ... means there's no effective economy), as well as the dual role of cigarettes as having utility (at least to some prisoners) in addition to their exchange value. Highly worthwhile reading:

<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133>

I've addressed the nature of money as a commodity grounded in trust in this earlier comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389020>

More generally, I've found it useful to think of money as the commodity of most universal demand. That is, whatever else it is you have, a sufficient quantity of money is preferable. Where fiat or coined money isn't available, this often becomes some commodity: grain, hides, shells, raw gold (or silver or copper), nails, cattle, etc.

William Stanley Jevons identified a properties of money as utility and value, portability, indestructability, homogeneity, divisibility, stability of value, and cognisability. Of those, I differ with him on utility and value, as we have fiat currencies and accounts notations of no intrinsic value themselves, rather utility and value are the inverse of trust in the money-issuing authority. "Seignorage" in specie is then a measure of trust, and fiat currency effectively has infinite trust.

William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange Chapter 5: <https://archive.org/details/cu31924013816172>

In your Apple example: what Apple produces is a future stream of profits, and systems which provide utility to purchasers of those systems. Apple is actually a poor choice to illustrate your argument as contrasted with a pure-play software or information provider (say: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or Disney) in that Apple is fundamentally a hardware producer, and their business model is actually predicated on physical products (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro, etc., and increasingly the chips which power those devices: <https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/>).

The notion that immaterial production is economic is far older than the modern Internet economy. Any service, starting with unskilled labour, is immaterial in a similar sense.

And the value of more abstract economic activity is actually grounded in primary productivity, a distinction that goes back to at least the Physiocrats and Quesnay's Tableau Économique. More recent variants include Clark & Kennessey's multi-sectoral classification:

- Primary Activities: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Mining

- Secondary Activities: Construction; Manufacturing

- Tertiary Activities: Transportation, electric, gas and sanitary services; Wholesale trade; Retail trade

- Quatenary Activities: Finance, insurance, and real estate; Services; Public administration

Zoltan Kenessey "The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Sectors of the Economy" (1987) DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987.tb00680.x. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987....>

Every activity beyond primary is based on the consumer surplus value and energetic potential of the primary activities. Absent ag, forestry, fishing, and mining, you'll have no Apples.

More: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612141005/https://old.reddi...>

[dredmorbius]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386222>

[felipeerias]

> Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy.

As a forecast which may or may not happen? Yes.

As an actual outcome that has been decided a priori? No, not at all. Only planned economies tried to do that.

[slt2021]

it is possible to have exponential growth with a brief period of financial crash/recession, when prices reset to previous bottoms and exponential growth continues (boom&bust cycle).

so far it has been the case with human economics across all countries/economies. yes some shareholders will be zeroed out during recession, but others will continue on the growth journey

[dredmorbius]

That's known as a boom-bust cycle.

It's common in finance and population ecology. See, e.g., lynx-hare population dynamics.