You showed that some people hold an outdated view that economic growth requires using more physical resources. By analogy, I think that some economists in past centuries felt that economic growth was basically agricultural growth, and that any other kind of production wasn't really contributing to the economy. So the accepted view of what's important to the economy has gradually evolved from only food, to only material things, to anything that we value.
Regardless, the goal shouldn't be that we reduce meat space growth. Our goal should obviously be to maximize meat space growth and where we build as many servers and energy etc without also turning the earth into Venus. The degrowth ideology is this thing where they think that the perfect configuration of the world's atoms is however it looked in the year 1990, 2000 or whatever year said degrowther is most nostalgic about. In that sense it's a conservative ideology.
I don't see any reason why we should have a goal of *either* minimizing *or* maximizing meat space growth. Our goal should be maximizing growth of whatever it is that makes human lives worth living, which probably involves *some* meatspace growth. But since the sort of stuff we are calling "meatspace growth" often involves some stresses on the ecosystem, and a lot of human value can be had in cyberspace or whatever, probably the optimum won't be maximizing meatspace growth, or even almost maximizing it while keeping the Earth just below Venus, but rather something else.
I mean the definition of creating value is that we maximize growth up and until the very point at which negative externalities become. I obviously don't know if that point is right below Venus or if it's a long ways away from Venus. The larger point is just to maximize meatspace growth until negative externalities exceed the positive, at which point meatspace growth is over, and we better start thinking about colonizing the solar system next.
Very sensible, but I don't think it's right to focus so much on VR and Meta. I think it's more complete to say "we don't know what will drive future growth".
A sensible economist in 1600 would observe that the economy is over 90 percent agriculture, and conclude that growth (and population) would be strictly limited by the amount of arable land that could be brought into cultivation. He would calculate the amount of arable land that was not yet in cultivation, and derive his limits on economic growth and population from that. This analysis would be wrong for two obvious reasons: improvements in agricultural efficiency were possible (in fact, agricultural output per acre had increased 33 percent just from the implementation of the three-field farming system in the middle ages), and other forms of economic activity such as manufactured goods could grow dramatically without requiring more arable land. Nevertheless, economists like Malthus continued thinking that availability of agricultural land would limit both population and prosperity.
A sensible economist in 1900 would observe that most economic growth made intensive use of iron and steel, and conclude that iron ore deposits would limit world economic growth. He could estimate remaining volume of known iron deposits, allow for future discoveries, and calculate the limits on future world GDP. This analysis would be wrong for at least three reasons: people would become more efficient at converting ore to metal, large-scale recycling of scrap metal would become practical, and future economic activity could rely much less on iron and steel.
Similar analysis has been done with respect to energy, or rare earth elements, and they've been just as wrong. "Limits to growth" calculations are always based on a failure to predict what will constitute future economic growth.
Why even accept the premise that the planet has finite resources? If growth is non entropy, then Earth is literally bombarded with thousands of hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy every day - how else did we get from an empty water planet to the incredibly complex arrangement of carbon that we current live in today
The past light cone is finite, and we only get energy from the past light cone. Though I guess that past light cone grows. But it grows at a bounded rate. So I suppose in the end we get a limit of the asymptotic rate of the growth of energy use and entropy, even if we get no upper bound?
The possibilities are nigh-infinite however only a small subset of these are suitable for humans... just like anything else, there is always a sweet spot.
We love to see GDP going up because we have always seen this as a proxy for a better condition for humans. What if we can raise GDP to infinity but only by breaking that correlation just like the GDP/energy one broke.
It's a good question. For rich countries, GDP and well-being are probably still correlated, but less tightly than for poor countries. We have to wonder if at some level of wealth, the stuff you can buy in formalized markets simply becomes much less important.
I always wonder about this. Some combination of path dependency, optimizing for a local maximum, and human beings being pretty bad at knowing what is going to make them happy/raise their quality of life.. that could combine to take us to a really weird place in a future with extreme abundance.
Yesterday, MS. Frances Haugen, the data scientist that worked at Facebook who uncovered unethical practices at Facebook, testified in front of the EU Parliament (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtQxE3qPCk). She informed us (among other things) that the in-house VR environment will require the installation of additional sensors. She considers that a further invasion of our privacy and a continuation of the global surveillance trends. Did you know that the Facebook AI was designed to detect your views (political or others) and present you with antagonistic posts in order to force you to engage? Her testimony is truly enlightening. It seems that everything in this society is designed to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
The ultimate goal for Facebook is to drive the part of their business that actually generates revenue: Advertising. That's the purpose of the company. Everything else is either to maximise the time people spend on the site viewing advertising, or to create more accurate and individualised behavioral models of the users so that they can be shown more precisely targeted advertising that generates more revenue per impression.
Just want to point out we didn't see infinite and decoupled economic growth from "virtual environments" on "2-dimensional text, pictures, and videos on screens" because there is an upper bound to peoples preferences of how much of that they'd like to consume. Not sure why 3-D would be any different.
You underestimate the ability to create demand. You just need a few psychologists with flexible ethics and you can get your users to spend countless hours scrolling through vapid trivia or writing angry comments and speading conspiracy theories.
Good discussion on the topic here at https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Economic growth can't reach infinity (or near infinity) unless energy ceases to be a monetary factor in the economy. When that happens, someone can buy all the energy needed (perhaps) and drive the price up again. The conversation about economic growth at a certain rate only works for a growth rate below a certain level and for which energy is some reasonable amount of cost in the economy. This rules out growth to infinity, or quite frankly, hyper-exponential growth. An infinitely growing economy will equal an infinitely growing energy use, that in time, by the laws of physics will burn the planet to a crisp. At described levels of growth and energy use, those dates can be calculated! Don't use infinity as that paints the economic argument into a corner.
I think we do know how much growth is possible. Less than what we've done now: as reflected by the rapid coming apart of a stable Earth system that will lead to loss of cities, agricultural land, forests, coral reefs, and many lives--of humans and other species. So degrowth is a wise approach to preventing a mass die off.
A second point: the metaverse (or at least your simulation) sounds pretty much like the matrix, and a great way of disconnecting ourselves from any understanding of our complete dependence on a living Earth. If you live your life in a simulation, the odds are you aren't going to much care if tropical forests are razed to get at the gallium arsenide below, at least until your city is flooded or there's no more chocolate (real not simulated chocolate) or there's not enough oxygen to sustain human life if we really grow until the very bounds of this finite system. And frankly, this is not a place I would ever want to inhabit, as this is just an extreme version of amusing ourselves to death, as I discuss here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/dear-yuxie-please-count-me-out-of-the-metaverse-future-b24ef45149fc
I overall really liked this article, but I have an issue with this argument.
“Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had.”
Digital social development is not anywhere close to real life. Tiktok likes aren’t remotely in the same universe as getting laughs in the lunch room or hearing the crowd cheer during a sports game. As humans, we’re wired for physical social contact, and no avatar or AR will recreate the complex chaotic cocktail of hormones from a hug or making your crush smile. If we’re talking reducing cars, I think growing up in a more walkable society would be AMAZING for young people BECAUSE they can have more organic and meaningful real life experience together, more frequently. Not because they’re on their phones all the time
If you use few resources, you will not be able to make people pay much for that fun, because competition or the character of the services (zero marginal costs) will reduce prices. In many cases services will be for free (Wikipedia, Facebook, Google maps...). This is actually the best thing that can happen for our economic wellbeing. GDP does not capture this type of progress.
GDP measures our world today in terms of products of yesterday. Even the question if GDP growths or can growth infinitely is kind of absurd: How many video casettes is a Netflix account? It is impossible to compare products and production over a longer time horizon.
"Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had." More fun?????????????
It's quite possible to have a lot of healthy fun in the digital environment while sitting safely at home. Unfortunately that isn't what is happening right now, because that sort of fun isn't as profitable as algorithmically-driven media tailored to maximize engagement and thus advertising revenue.
Enjoyed your thoughts on this Noah! I'm an early adapter for VR and in my own life I'm finding I am spending increasingly on things that enable the "digital world" than the physical world. I keep spending more on digital goods such as high speed internet and wifi connections, good market data for investing and trading. . digital trading signal services, video games, VR HMD and PC upgrades, digital entertainment subscriptions etc. .. . The pandemic pushed society to digitize their lives more rapidly. I'm working from home and hope to eventually make all my income from trading online and creating digital art/content for VR worlds. I already paint and sculpt in VR. . (Vermilion for VR oil painting in a vritual atelier and Adobe Medium for VR sculpting and painting. If you have VR. . tryout the Facebook/Meta Horizons beta. You can actually create your own worlds completely in VR with their tools. Also because of FB logins the people there tend to be more polite and mature than some other VR chats that have become free for all shit-shows.
You showed that some people hold an outdated view that economic growth requires using more physical resources. By analogy, I think that some economists in past centuries felt that economic growth was basically agricultural growth, and that any other kind of production wasn't really contributing to the economy. So the accepted view of what's important to the economy has gradually evolved from only food, to only material things, to anything that we value.
The physiocrats! Yes, those guys were around, but they were never really dominant.
It kind of was. Freeing people from having to farm was and still is the #1 source of economic growth, by far. See eg https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-agriculture-employment?time=1801..2010
There was other growth, of course, but as it was only applying to a tiny proportion of the workforce, it barely registered.
Well said. You beat me to it.
Regardless, the goal shouldn't be that we reduce meat space growth. Our goal should obviously be to maximize meat space growth and where we build as many servers and energy etc without also turning the earth into Venus. The degrowth ideology is this thing where they think that the perfect configuration of the world's atoms is however it looked in the year 1990, 2000 or whatever year said degrowther is most nostalgic about. In that sense it's a conservative ideology.
I don't see any reason why we should have a goal of *either* minimizing *or* maximizing meat space growth. Our goal should be maximizing growth of whatever it is that makes human lives worth living, which probably involves *some* meatspace growth. But since the sort of stuff we are calling "meatspace growth" often involves some stresses on the ecosystem, and a lot of human value can be had in cyberspace or whatever, probably the optimum won't be maximizing meatspace growth, or even almost maximizing it while keeping the Earth just below Venus, but rather something else.
I mean the definition of creating value is that we maximize growth up and until the very point at which negative externalities become. I obviously don't know if that point is right below Venus or if it's a long ways away from Venus. The larger point is just to maximize meatspace growth until negative externalities exceed the positive, at which point meatspace growth is over, and we better start thinking about colonizing the solar system next.
Gosh, sorry for typo.... "up and until the very point at which negative externalities become larger than the benefits of growth"
Very sensible, but I don't think it's right to focus so much on VR and Meta. I think it's more complete to say "we don't know what will drive future growth".
A sensible economist in 1600 would observe that the economy is over 90 percent agriculture, and conclude that growth (and population) would be strictly limited by the amount of arable land that could be brought into cultivation. He would calculate the amount of arable land that was not yet in cultivation, and derive his limits on economic growth and population from that. This analysis would be wrong for two obvious reasons: improvements in agricultural efficiency were possible (in fact, agricultural output per acre had increased 33 percent just from the implementation of the three-field farming system in the middle ages), and other forms of economic activity such as manufactured goods could grow dramatically without requiring more arable land. Nevertheless, economists like Malthus continued thinking that availability of agricultural land would limit both population and prosperity.
A sensible economist in 1900 would observe that most economic growth made intensive use of iron and steel, and conclude that iron ore deposits would limit world economic growth. He could estimate remaining volume of known iron deposits, allow for future discoveries, and calculate the limits on future world GDP. This analysis would be wrong for at least three reasons: people would become more efficient at converting ore to metal, large-scale recycling of scrap metal would become practical, and future economic activity could rely much less on iron and steel.
Similar analysis has been done with respect to energy, or rare earth elements, and they've been just as wrong. "Limits to growth" calculations are always based on a failure to predict what will constitute future economic growth.
Why even accept the premise that the planet has finite resources? If growth is non entropy, then Earth is literally bombarded with thousands of hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy every day - how else did we get from an empty water planet to the incredibly complex arrangement of carbon that we current live in today
The amount of energy hitting Earth is finite. The amount of energy in the entire universe is finite.
Well no, the universe is probably infinite...
The past light cone is finite, and we only get energy from the past light cone. Though I guess that past light cone grows. But it grows at a bounded rate. So I suppose in the end we get a limit of the asymptotic rate of the growth of energy use and entropy, even if we get no upper bound?
The *observable* universe is finite, though.
And it's shrinking...
The possibilities are nigh-infinite however only a small subset of these are suitable for humans... just like anything else, there is always a sweet spot.
Meatspace. Yum. :)
We love to see GDP going up because we have always seen this as a proxy for a better condition for humans. What if we can raise GDP to infinity but only by breaking that correlation just like the GDP/energy one broke.
It's a good question. For rich countries, GDP and well-being are probably still correlated, but less tightly than for poor countries. We have to wonder if at some level of wealth, the stuff you can buy in formalized markets simply becomes much less important.
I always wonder about this. Some combination of path dependency, optimizing for a local maximum, and human beings being pretty bad at knowing what is going to make them happy/raise their quality of life.. that could combine to take us to a really weird place in a future with extreme abundance.
Yesterday, MS. Frances Haugen, the data scientist that worked at Facebook who uncovered unethical practices at Facebook, testified in front of the EU Parliament (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtQxE3qPCk). She informed us (among other things) that the in-house VR environment will require the installation of additional sensors. She considers that a further invasion of our privacy and a continuation of the global surveillance trends. Did you know that the Facebook AI was designed to detect your views (political or others) and present you with antagonistic posts in order to force you to engage? Her testimony is truly enlightening. It seems that everything in this society is designed to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
I must add, the AI goal is for the Facebook users to engage with the platform, to write posts in other words.
The ultimate goal for Facebook is to drive the part of their business that actually generates revenue: Advertising. That's the purpose of the company. Everything else is either to maximise the time people spend on the site viewing advertising, or to create more accurate and individualised behavioral models of the users so that they can be shown more precisely targeted advertising that generates more revenue per impression.
Just want to point out we didn't see infinite and decoupled economic growth from "virtual environments" on "2-dimensional text, pictures, and videos on screens" because there is an upper bound to peoples preferences of how much of that they'd like to consume. Not sure why 3-D would be any different.
You underestimate the ability to create demand. You just need a few psychologists with flexible ethics and you can get your users to spend countless hours scrolling through vapid trivia or writing angry comments and speading conspiracy theories.
Let me just deflate this balloon of nonsense with the following two sources:
Limits to Growth: Of Stuff, Value, and GDP
Https://steadystate.org/limits-to-growth-stuff-value-gdp/
The Self-Sufficient Services Fallacy
https://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/Czech_Self-Sufficient_Services_Fallacy.pdf
And for a fuller version read Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution.
That said, I may find the time to blow this particularly bad balloon out of the water at the Steady State Herald, too.
Good discussion on the topic here at https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Economic growth can't reach infinity (or near infinity) unless energy ceases to be a monetary factor in the economy. When that happens, someone can buy all the energy needed (perhaps) and drive the price up again. The conversation about economic growth at a certain rate only works for a growth rate below a certain level and for which energy is some reasonable amount of cost in the economy. This rules out growth to infinity, or quite frankly, hyper-exponential growth. An infinitely growing economy will equal an infinitely growing energy use, that in time, by the laws of physics will burn the planet to a crisp. At described levels of growth and energy use, those dates can be calculated! Don't use infinity as that paints the economic argument into a corner.
I think we do know how much growth is possible. Less than what we've done now: as reflected by the rapid coming apart of a stable Earth system that will lead to loss of cities, agricultural land, forests, coral reefs, and many lives--of humans and other species. So degrowth is a wise approach to preventing a mass die off.
A second point: the metaverse (or at least your simulation) sounds pretty much like the matrix, and a great way of disconnecting ourselves from any understanding of our complete dependence on a living Earth. If you live your life in a simulation, the odds are you aren't going to much care if tropical forests are razed to get at the gallium arsenide below, at least until your city is flooded or there's no more chocolate (real not simulated chocolate) or there's not enough oxygen to sustain human life if we really grow until the very bounds of this finite system. And frankly, this is not a place I would ever want to inhabit, as this is just an extreme version of amusing ourselves to death, as I discuss here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/dear-yuxie-please-count-me-out-of-the-metaverse-future-b24ef45149fc
I wonder what he plans to eat. Meta-food? And what will he drink? Meta-water?
I overall really liked this article, but I have an issue with this argument.
“Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had.”
Digital social development is not anywhere close to real life. Tiktok likes aren’t remotely in the same universe as getting laughs in the lunch room or hearing the crowd cheer during a sports game. As humans, we’re wired for physical social contact, and no avatar or AR will recreate the complex chaotic cocktail of hormones from a hug or making your crush smile. If we’re talking reducing cars, I think growing up in a more walkable society would be AMAZING for young people BECAUSE they can have more organic and meaningful real life experience together, more frequently. Not because they’re on their phones all the time
If you use few resources, you will not be able to make people pay much for that fun, because competition or the character of the services (zero marginal costs) will reduce prices. In many cases services will be for free (Wikipedia, Facebook, Google maps...). This is actually the best thing that can happen for our economic wellbeing. GDP does not capture this type of progress.
GDP measures our world today in terms of products of yesterday. Even the question if GDP growths or can growth infinitely is kind of absurd: How many video casettes is a Netflix account? It is impossible to compare products and production over a longer time horizon.
"Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had." More fun?????????????
Well I don't want to go back to the world of American Graffiti!
Yeah, this tuned me out. I don’t think there’s any world where this is real. The hyper digitalization is making teens miserable.
It's quite possible to have a lot of healthy fun in the digital environment while sitting safely at home. Unfortunately that isn't what is happening right now, because that sort of fun isn't as profitable as algorithmically-driven media tailored to maximize engagement and thus advertising revenue.
Enjoyed your thoughts on this Noah! I'm an early adapter for VR and in my own life I'm finding I am spending increasingly on things that enable the "digital world" than the physical world. I keep spending more on digital goods such as high speed internet and wifi connections, good market data for investing and trading. . digital trading signal services, video games, VR HMD and PC upgrades, digital entertainment subscriptions etc. .. . The pandemic pushed society to digitize their lives more rapidly. I'm working from home and hope to eventually make all my income from trading online and creating digital art/content for VR worlds. I already paint and sculpt in VR. . (Vermilion for VR oil painting in a vritual atelier and Adobe Medium for VR sculpting and painting. If you have VR. . tryout the Facebook/Meta Horizons beta. You can actually create your own worlds completely in VR with their tools. Also because of FB logins the people there tend to be more polite and mature than some other VR chats that have become free for all shit-shows.