How would status violate lns? That sounds like a perfect candidate for lns: no matter how respected you are by others, you want to be respected just a little more
It depends. For mating, it’s discrete, for elected office or “Most Likely” also, but it’s true that there are areas where it’s not, and multiple hierarchies at play. The rank that gets you into Harvard might not get you a date or spot on the team.
Good point. Which species of cultural capital will be valuable is very context specific (and frequency dependent); channeling Bourdieu here, what winds up making a difference in the distinction being pursued depends on the prevailing composition of capitals and rules of the game in the field (social space) in which it's being deployed.
I really liked most of Murphy's posts (and I've been meaning to look at the textbook he wrote based on it). But this one always did strike me as not giving enough credence to decoupling of economic growth from energy usage. I do think his point that energy usage must stop increasing in the next couple centuries is an interesting and important one (partly because I think we really ought to be thinking on that timescale at least, and partly because it has implications for just a few decades out as well). It helps break one out of the mindset that anything that was standard for the past two centuries (like employment) must be standard or get even more entrenched over the next two centuries.
I’d like to point out that the prospect of the kind of “Desire Modification technology” that you talk about is totally speculative. If the economy is really going to keep growing UNTIL everybody in the world undergoes brain surgery to have some amazing computers inserted into their heads, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re talking about hundreds of years of continuing economic growth.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that economists only ever think about the next few decades at most. In my experience, that’s just not true. And if you get to imagine hundreds of years of economic growth, isn’t it just fair to let this Murphy person point out potential problems with that idea?
I’m also skeptical of the idea that humans will eventually “completely satisfy ourselves”. The problem is that the brain gets used to things. It adapts. A junkie has to keep taking larger and larger doses to get the desired effect.
It’s obviously not possible to increase the quantity of digital experiences indefinitely, but it’s certainly possible to keep making digital experiences more and more intense and addictive – which won’t lead to “satisfaction” (let alone happiness), but to humans who’ll need increasingly extreme amounts of stimulation to feel normal.
I remember that guy's blog. I'm no economist but even to me his points (like "economic growth is impossible because refrigerators are already as good as we can make them") seemed hinky.
I don't know that I buy the idea that there's an "all human needs/wants are satisfied" point. I had this problem with the Culture novels. Trillions of regular or near-regular humans live an incredibly luxurious and long-lived post-scarcity life of ease because there's a few dozen super-intelligent AIs that are happy to provide everything they want (and basically keep the humans as smart pets). But the setting has genetic engineering, cyborgization and mind-uploading; what if one of the humans says they want to be an AI god too? It seems to me like most people would probably take the super-intelligence if it could be granted safely and cheaply, and then you're left with a small number of holdout humans living as space Amish, and a whole bunch of super-intelligent AI gods who are back to scarcity economics, but over stuff like whether they should turn a solar system into computronium or keep it for the view, and etc.
You mentioned desire modification, but I think economic competition and on a longer term, natural selection would not favor a group that solves all problems by turning off the part of their brains that considers things problems. I don't know if anything would constrain people to use desire modification only for unfixable problems and not all problems.
(If you weren't aware, "Griffin's Egg" by Michael Swanwick also explores something like D-Mod)
As someone with a political science Ph.D, I confess to feeling just a twinge of schadenfreude. You know, as economists are to political scientists, so physicists are to economists . . .
Nonetheless, Murphy's observations on economics wonderfully reflect the obtuseness of someone who interprets the world through a very distorted lens. And so of course he is wrong.
This reminds me of the great story of Darwin and Lord Kelvin. Darwin, actually -- you know -- looking at the world, gave an estimate suggesting the earth was billions of years old. Kelvin, being a PHYSICIST, said poppycock and declared that the laws of physics made it absolutely clear that the Earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Being the greatest physicist of his age, everyone bowed to him, and Darwin even edited his claim out of later editions.
Too bad, that discovery of a little thing called radioactivity later destroyed the foundation of Kelvin's argument and completely backed up Darwin's claim.
He gets a faux Nobel for thinking we should target 5C rise in temperature. That is on par with murdering some 6 billion or so people and you idiots give him an award. You put Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot to shame.
Also, that paper went through peer review in 2018. None of the points had been corrected as of then and I seriously doubt they have been since. But even if they were the damage that did for decades is worth throwing Nordhouse in the Hague not the Nobel Awards room.
I think Noah's blind faith in Techno Optimism is just as likely to get us all killed as Nordhouse's 3rd grade level ability to read published scientific research. And it might very well all be besides the point because we may have already hit cascading tipping points. But literally the last thing anyone needs to do is just sit back and relax because solar panels got cheaper. Which, by the way, is a trend that will be reversing thanks to us sanctioning China and Xinjiang where essentially all silicon for PV is made.
I have much sympathy for the point Murphy wants to make, as badly as he makes it. While it's certainly theoretically possible for economic growth to be entirely immaterial, we're living in a material world, where growth in energy consumption is of course not equal to economic growth but fairly predictably related. And looking back at 2012, it seems obvious that people weren't making decisions with even ten years into the future of climate change in mind. Now there's much more talk, but not really yet any substantive change in behavior.
Seems to me that everyone wants to refight the 1970s. The relationship between economic growth, growth in produced value, and energy consumption is not direct. Energy consumption is associated with climate gas emissions, an obvious ill that reduces value for almost everyone.
But this line of argument goes beyond that fossil fuel is bad, but that energy consumption in itself is bad. Our civilisation since the beginning has been energy constrained, so that when we got access to greater reservoirs of energy, our economies grew quickly. The more energy, the more growth. One school in the 1970s claimed that we would run out of oil soon. Another contemporary school claimed that we would soon have fusion power and "free energy", usually combined with a very expansionist philosophy, bigger, faster, stronger. Rocketships to other stars and the like. Neither school's prediction turned out very well.
This line of argument is a rebuttal not to the burning of oil and gas, but to the second school. Only problem is that this school is closed, and its proponents have retired. Nobody has any hope of "free energy" in their lifetime anymore.
Question: Does Jeff Bezos use more energy than Oprah Winfrey? I suspect the answer is no. Yes Amazon consumes more energy than Winfrey's media businesses, but as individuals?
I suspect Winfrey has a chef who makes a very good dinner for her each night, and she eats it in a dining room with a $5M painting on the wall. I suspect Bezos does as well, although he may have a $100M painting on his wall. In terms of money wealth, Bezos is an order of magnitude bigger than Oprah, but the oven used to cook his dinner doesn't get any hotter than the 350 or 400 degrees needed for whatever is getting cooked. In fact, it may not be surprising if the oven used in both houses is exactly the same!
I suspect there is a satiation point in human behavior. At some point human consumption desires are satiated and additional money is simply hoarded into savings. You can say 'investments' but at the upper scale the investment is not like a 401K, a vehicle to shift consumption from high earning years to low earning ones, but simply for the sake of investment.
Even if there isn't, though, there is a hard biological limit on inputs to human consumption. You only have so many taste buds, your eyes can only focus on so many things in a second, your ears can only hear so many sounds. At some point you will have 24 hours a day with every sense input being occupied and at that point there is no more consumption you can do. Leave aside things like if you eat every moment of your life, your life is likely to be cut so short that your total food consumption is probably going to be less than someone who behaves a bit normal.
Even so, there's clearly a break between energy and consumption. The moment you are chewing on food every moment of your life, additional energy put into food production is of no interest to you since you literally can't eat anymore.
Regarding energy use, Bezos has a yacht the size of a cruise ship, and a rocket company that is still basically a personal hobby. Nevertheless, I take your point.
Fair enough, but 24 hours a day the yacht is doing what? It is either sitting there or it's being used by hundreds of people. Same for the rocket company. You can only personally consume energy around you.
I suppose a single man could just burn energy. Insist on flying into orbit once a day just for the sake of burning lots of fuel. But I think most days Bezos just looks at screens like you and I do. :)
I think growth and energy consumption are in practice quite closely related. Yes, energy efficiency of production is improving. Elite personal service doesn't need to consume any more energy than minimum-wage personal service. But generally growth and energy consumption go hand in hand. Especially since it's global growth that matters to this discussion, and there is still a big pool of people out there eager to get their first cars and home appliances.
Perhaps no one except Oliver Stone still believes in a future of free harmless fusion energy. But everyone still acts as if they do. Even last summer's horrendous west coast wildfires haven't changed that. All we're doing politically is making empty declarations of intentions to somehow do something about emissions at some point down the road.
I already answered that one way. Another way is that that flattening has been accompanied by a growing imbalance in the energy intensivity of imports versus exports and by growing personal energy consumption of people outside the US and Europe who pay for it with exports to the US and Europe.
Energy use per capita in rich countries is falling even when you account for energy used to produce imported goods. We just keep getting more energy efficient. Natural gas and renewables are much more energy efficient than coal. Our cars get a lot more miles to the gallon and will get even more efficient as we switch to electric. Zoom meetings use a lot less energy than flying or driving to a meeting.
Come back when you can show some data to back up such a radical assertion. Be sure to account for example for the coal power being used to bake solar panels.
But it falls a lot after that. It takes a lot of energy for someone to get a car. It takes double the energy to give a person a 2nd car, but most people do not own two cars and have little interest in doing so (I'm counting married couples here as two people). Ditto for a 3rd car. Even when a person owns 2 or 3 cars, they only drive one at a time so the energy used by cars #2 and #3 is a lot less since they will spend most of the time sitting in the garage.
This might be *the* one time I’m thankful for having taken my first year micro courses. The apocryphal economist assumes that potential output is unlimited. However, that violates an actual assumption used in fixed point theorems used to prove that some equilibrium exists, namely that production sets are compact
I always found rather silly in the post his demand that we limit ourselves to production on Earth in the year 2212. I will gladly grant that dreams of space colonization in the next few decades are vastly overblown. But over the next 200 years? Now that's just silly...
But isn't economics filled with projections about the consequences of climate change ~100 years from now? Why should we pay attention to any of those, based on what you write here?
Good one! I realized as I read this that I had read (and enjoyed and agreed with) Murphy's post several years ago, when my understanding of econ was much weaker. Ah, the innocence of youth.
Local nonsatiation is wrong in that the most valuable human asset is status—and that is a zero sum game.
How would status violate lns? That sounds like a perfect candidate for lns: no matter how respected you are by others, you want to be respected just a little more
Status based on ranking. First in your class, most desirable mate, racking and stacking status.
Is it a discrete commodity, though? The distance between the first and second most respected person can vary
“First among equals” has a different ring than “his majesty”
It depends. For mating, it’s discrete, for elected office or “Most Likely” also, but it’s true that there are areas where it’s not, and multiple hierarchies at play. The rank that gets you into Harvard might not get you a date or spot on the team.
Good point. Which species of cultural capital will be valuable is very context specific (and frequency dependent); channeling Bourdieu here, what winds up making a difference in the distinction being pursued depends on the prevailing composition of capitals and rules of the game in the field (social space) in which it's being deployed.
Did you ever end up writing that d-mod story? I can’t find it on Google, though that could only reflect my own incompetence!
I sadly did not!
ahah Noah I am guessing you would be happy to hear that anytime I meet a degrowth I like citing your old post :)
In France, there is a famous engineer named JM Jancovici that makes these kinds of claims
And it's seriously annoying
Physicists tend to think GDP is a variable like the one they are used to: supposed to describe a given physical reality
But GDP is something created by humans and supposed to describe societies entirely created by humans
Without us gravity will still exist but without human societies, gdp makes no sense
I have the impression that vaclac Smil, another famous physicists, makes the same mistake
I really liked most of Murphy's posts (and I've been meaning to look at the textbook he wrote based on it). But this one always did strike me as not giving enough credence to decoupling of economic growth from energy usage. I do think his point that energy usage must stop increasing in the next couple centuries is an interesting and important one (partly because I think we really ought to be thinking on that timescale at least, and partly because it has implications for just a few decades out as well). It helps break one out of the mindset that anything that was standard for the past two centuries (like employment) must be standard or get even more entrenched over the next two centuries.
Hmm.
I’d like to point out that the prospect of the kind of “Desire Modification technology” that you talk about is totally speculative. If the economy is really going to keep growing UNTIL everybody in the world undergoes brain surgery to have some amazing computers inserted into their heads, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re talking about hundreds of years of continuing economic growth.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that economists only ever think about the next few decades at most. In my experience, that’s just not true. And if you get to imagine hundreds of years of economic growth, isn’t it just fair to let this Murphy person point out potential problems with that idea?
I’m also skeptical of the idea that humans will eventually “completely satisfy ourselves”. The problem is that the brain gets used to things. It adapts. A junkie has to keep taking larger and larger doses to get the desired effect.
It’s obviously not possible to increase the quantity of digital experiences indefinitely, but it’s certainly possible to keep making digital experiences more and more intense and addictive – which won’t lead to “satisfaction” (let alone happiness), but to humans who’ll need increasingly extreme amounts of stimulation to feel normal.
I remember that guy's blog. I'm no economist but even to me his points (like "economic growth is impossible because refrigerators are already as good as we can make them") seemed hinky.
I don't know that I buy the idea that there's an "all human needs/wants are satisfied" point. I had this problem with the Culture novels. Trillions of regular or near-regular humans live an incredibly luxurious and long-lived post-scarcity life of ease because there's a few dozen super-intelligent AIs that are happy to provide everything they want (and basically keep the humans as smart pets). But the setting has genetic engineering, cyborgization and mind-uploading; what if one of the humans says they want to be an AI god too? It seems to me like most people would probably take the super-intelligence if it could be granted safely and cheaply, and then you're left with a small number of holdout humans living as space Amish, and a whole bunch of super-intelligent AI gods who are back to scarcity economics, but over stuff like whether they should turn a solar system into computronium or keep it for the view, and etc.
You mentioned desire modification, but I think economic competition and on a longer term, natural selection would not favor a group that solves all problems by turning off the part of their brains that considers things problems. I don't know if anything would constrain people to use desire modification only for unfixable problems and not all problems.
(If you weren't aware, "Griffin's Egg" by Michael Swanwick also explores something like D-Mod)
As someone with a political science Ph.D, I confess to feeling just a twinge of schadenfreude. You know, as economists are to political scientists, so physicists are to economists . . .
Nonetheless, Murphy's observations on economics wonderfully reflect the obtuseness of someone who interprets the world through a very distorted lens. And so of course he is wrong.
This reminds me of the great story of Darwin and Lord Kelvin. Darwin, actually -- you know -- looking at the world, gave an estimate suggesting the earth was billions of years old. Kelvin, being a PHYSICIST, said poppycock and declared that the laws of physics made it absolutely clear that the Earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Being the greatest physicist of his age, everyone bowed to him, and Darwin even edited his claim out of later editions.
Too bad, that discovery of a little thing called radioactivity later destroyed the foundation of Kelvin's argument and completely backed up Darwin's claim.
http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/content/failed_scientific_clocks/kelvin_cooling.html
Yeah, No economists use long-term time frames. Especially not nobel winning ones when it comes to important things like Climate Change. Oh wait.... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856?journalCode=rglo20
He gets a faux Nobel for thinking we should target 5C rise in temperature. That is on par with murdering some 6 billion or so people and you idiots give him an award. You put Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot to shame.
I think Keen is a bit bad faith, all of these has been corrected
and anyway I think noah has been pretty angry with bad climate science papers in a previous post and that's not the point of this one
Also, that paper went through peer review in 2018. None of the points had been corrected as of then and I seriously doubt they have been since. But even if they were the damage that did for decades is worth throwing Nordhouse in the Hague not the Nobel Awards room.
I think Noah's blind faith in Techno Optimism is just as likely to get us all killed as Nordhouse's 3rd grade level ability to read published scientific research. And it might very well all be besides the point because we may have already hit cascading tipping points. But literally the last thing anyone needs to do is just sit back and relax because solar panels got cheaper. Which, by the way, is a trend that will be reversing thanks to us sanctioning China and Xinjiang where essentially all silicon for PV is made.
I think noah has not blind faith in tech optimism
and depicturing tech optimism as a "dont worry be happy tech will save us" still amaze me
I think it's the opposite,
- we can act to accelerate tech improvements
-once tech is there, we have more political options
so no, tech optimism is NOT complacency
I have much sympathy for the point Murphy wants to make, as badly as he makes it. While it's certainly theoretically possible for economic growth to be entirely immaterial, we're living in a material world, where growth in energy consumption is of course not equal to economic growth but fairly predictably related. And looking back at 2012, it seems obvious that people weren't making decisions with even ten years into the future of climate change in mind. Now there's much more talk, but not really yet any substantive change in behavior.
I'll write more about degrowth in general, soon.
Seems to me that everyone wants to refight the 1970s. The relationship between economic growth, growth in produced value, and energy consumption is not direct. Energy consumption is associated with climate gas emissions, an obvious ill that reduces value for almost everyone.
But this line of argument goes beyond that fossil fuel is bad, but that energy consumption in itself is bad. Our civilisation since the beginning has been energy constrained, so that when we got access to greater reservoirs of energy, our economies grew quickly. The more energy, the more growth. One school in the 1970s claimed that we would run out of oil soon. Another contemporary school claimed that we would soon have fusion power and "free energy", usually combined with a very expansionist philosophy, bigger, faster, stronger. Rocketships to other stars and the like. Neither school's prediction turned out very well.
This line of argument is a rebuttal not to the burning of oil and gas, but to the second school. Only problem is that this school is closed, and its proponents have retired. Nobody has any hope of "free energy" in their lifetime anymore.
Question: Does Jeff Bezos use more energy than Oprah Winfrey? I suspect the answer is no. Yes Amazon consumes more energy than Winfrey's media businesses, but as individuals?
I suspect Winfrey has a chef who makes a very good dinner for her each night, and she eats it in a dining room with a $5M painting on the wall. I suspect Bezos does as well, although he may have a $100M painting on his wall. In terms of money wealth, Bezos is an order of magnitude bigger than Oprah, but the oven used to cook his dinner doesn't get any hotter than the 350 or 400 degrees needed for whatever is getting cooked. In fact, it may not be surprising if the oven used in both houses is exactly the same!
I suspect there is a satiation point in human behavior. At some point human consumption desires are satiated and additional money is simply hoarded into savings. You can say 'investments' but at the upper scale the investment is not like a 401K, a vehicle to shift consumption from high earning years to low earning ones, but simply for the sake of investment.
Even if there isn't, though, there is a hard biological limit on inputs to human consumption. You only have so many taste buds, your eyes can only focus on so many things in a second, your ears can only hear so many sounds. At some point you will have 24 hours a day with every sense input being occupied and at that point there is no more consumption you can do. Leave aside things like if you eat every moment of your life, your life is likely to be cut so short that your total food consumption is probably going to be less than someone who behaves a bit normal.
Even so, there's clearly a break between energy and consumption. The moment you are chewing on food every moment of your life, additional energy put into food production is of no interest to you since you literally can't eat anymore.
Regarding energy use, Bezos has a yacht the size of a cruise ship, and a rocket company that is still basically a personal hobby. Nevertheless, I take your point.
Fair enough, but 24 hours a day the yacht is doing what? It is either sitting there or it's being used by hundreds of people. Same for the rocket company. You can only personally consume energy around you.
I suppose a single man could just burn energy. Insist on flying into orbit once a day just for the sake of burning lots of fuel. But I think most days Bezos just looks at screens like you and I do. :)
I think growth and energy consumption are in practice quite closely related. Yes, energy efficiency of production is improving. Elite personal service doesn't need to consume any more energy than minimum-wage personal service. But generally growth and energy consumption go hand in hand. Especially since it's global growth that matters to this discussion, and there is still a big pool of people out there eager to get their first cars and home appliances.
Perhaps no one except Oliver Stone still believes in a future of free harmless fusion energy. But everyone still acts as if they do. Even last summer's horrendous west coast wildfires haven't changed that. All we're doing politically is making empty declarations of intentions to somehow do something about emissions at some point down the road.
Energy consumption in the US and Europe has been flat or falling for decades while the economy keeps growing.
I already answered that one way. Another way is that that flattening has been accompanied by a growing imbalance in the energy intensivity of imports versus exports and by growing personal energy consumption of people outside the US and Europe who pay for it with exports to the US and Europe.
Energy use per capita in rich countries is falling even when you account for energy used to produce imported goods. We just keep getting more energy efficient. Natural gas and renewables are much more energy efficient than coal. Our cars get a lot more miles to the gallon and will get even more efficient as we switch to electric. Zoom meetings use a lot less energy than flying or driving to a meeting.
Come back when you can show some data to back up such a radical assertion. Be sure to account for example for the coal power being used to bake solar panels.
But it falls a lot after that. It takes a lot of energy for someone to get a car. It takes double the energy to give a person a 2nd car, but most people do not own two cars and have little interest in doing so (I'm counting married couples here as two people). Ditto for a 3rd car. Even when a person owns 2 or 3 cars, they only drive one at a time so the energy used by cars #2 and #3 is a lot less since they will spend most of the time sitting in the garage.
Our money system is exponentially based..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n70wdU_HDvY&t=1733s
Murphy didn't go anywhere.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
This might be *the* one time I’m thankful for having taken my first year micro courses. The apocryphal economist assumes that potential output is unlimited. However, that violates an actual assumption used in fixed point theorems used to prove that some equilibrium exists, namely that production sets are compact
I always found rather silly in the post his demand that we limit ourselves to production on Earth in the year 2212. I will gladly grant that dreams of space colonization in the next few decades are vastly overblown. But over the next 200 years? Now that's just silly...
But isn't economics filled with projections about the consequences of climate change ~100 years from now? Why should we pay attention to any of those, based on what you write here?
Good one! I realized as I read this that I had read (and enjoyed and agreed with) Murphy's post several years ago, when my understanding of econ was much weaker. Ah, the innocence of youth.