[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.