I think that what people mean, or think they mean, when they say "de-growth" is switching from pure GDP as a metric of standard of living, to a normalized GDP-per capita. Probably GDP per capita divided by hours of labor and also negative externalities like pollution and stuff.
The idea here is that GDP should rise from a rise in productivity, rather than relying on an increase in population or working hours or increased environmental exploitation to achieve growth.
It's annoyingly used in the case of this article to point to economic stagnation and say "look here's the de-growth you wanted". When the whole point is that GDP should be increasing, just not at the expense of the citizens or the planet.
> GDP per capita would effectively give you the same metric
My point is that GDP per capita can increase because of reasons that don't necessarily make your life better. Working longer hours, or even an increase in productivity with a simultaneous increase in inequality, meaning that the per-capita GDP is increasing but income is stagnating.
> unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population.
My point in bringing up population was that our GDP growth can be attributed to population growth, which is likely going to be a logistic curve. So we can't rely on population growth to contribute to GDP.
In contexts where living standards are important, we already talk about stuff like productivity, dollars-per-worker-hour and stuff like that. And in contexts where absolute GDP is important, like international relations, we talk about that instead.
I am sure that's true among economists and sociologists. To the layperson (me), the way I usually hear it from other normies and in media, GDP per capita is the metric that translates to QOL. Unless you are listening to Planet Money or some niche econ-related media. Even then there's a lot of bad economics infotainment that uses GDP in this way.
Economic growth is a euphemism for biosphere destruction. Borrowing your phrase. More truthfully 'economic growth' and biosphere destruction are literally two terms for the exact same physical process. Circular economy stories excluded for the sci-fi fantasies they are, of course.
That's rather wrong, though it's a common enough bit of nonsense slung at the degrowth movement.
In any reasonably modern use of the word, "growth" is defined as "exponential growth" - percent year over year growth. We expect companies to grow by N percent, every year - this is how expectations are phrased. And while it may be a small number, "1% growth, year over year," is still an exponential curve.
The first question that matters is, "Can exponential growth continue forever on a finite planet?" We do live on a finite planet. Pick whatever metric you want and continue exponentially, you will run into limits, eventually. Various physics bloggers have played with this rather extensively over the years. A trivially true statement we don't often consider is, "Anything that can't go on forever will stop at some point."
Combine those two, and exponential growth on a finite planet will stop at some point.
People try to argue around it via "decoupling" or "But asteroids" or various other methods, and some have some effects, but so far, they've either been "one time" sort of gains (various lighting or transportation efficiency gains), or "slowing the rate of the exponential growth" - but not fundamentally changing the problem of it being exponential.
Given that, if you agree with both, there are then two general categories of response to it. The first, and I'd argue the current default, is to kick the can, and assume that someone or something else will fix the problem (or, more practically, that you'll die before it becomes a problem you have to deal with). This means that the collisions with the end of growth will be uncontrolled and generally quite destructive (as "accelerating into the approaching cliff face" tends to be).
The alternative, which is what the degrowth movement argues for, is finding ways to terminate the exponential growth before we hit those walls. Under our current economic systems, that does imply something that looks like a recession/depression, but that's not the goal - that's just a transition from a "must grow" economy to a "steady state" sort of economy in action.
And there's a lot of debate what it looks like, but I'm not convinced it's worth going into the details of that here, now.
So... if you're going to criticize a movement, at least try to understand it first?
These are common enough bit of nonsense slung by the degrowth movement. A 1% economic growth does not at all correspond to 1% increase in resource use. Saying that something can't go on forever is an irrelevant non-argument (just about nothing will 'go on forever'). Even if these had any connection to reality, that still does not suggest steady-state (maybe we'd want to expand and contract based on energy/resource availability?).
In the 70s, the limits movement had measurable arguments - which did not pan out. Apparently their successors response was to renounce all measurement and make an argument about maybe the far far future. If we used that 'logic' in the past we'd still be living in caves.
You opened by saying that you're not proposing economic stagnation, but then wrote several paragraphs arguing for economic stagnation. Human technology isn't a finite resource.
Do you believe that exponential growth can continue forever on a finite {planet, solar system, galaxy, universe}?
If not, then we will eventually have to deal with the problem. We can do it now, or later. Personally, I think "sooner" is better than "later" to deal with it, because I don't see us meaningfully getting off the planet, so maybe let's not trash the place worse.
Human invention isn't, but energy certainly is, and the correlation between "economic growth" and "energy use per capita" is very, very strong. At least some of the "degrowth" has been a result of "financialization services," or the fine art of playing investor games enough times that you end up believing you're immune to things like, say, the 2008 housing crash.
But we clearly disagree on this matter, and I don't see a point in continuing to go around on it. Time will tell which of us happens to be closer to correct.
Human invention can also have its problems too. While it might not be finite, the risks can be infinite.
For example Nuclear energy and weapons, bio-engineering, AI, genetic modification, fossil fuel based power generation, factory farming and more.
I’d argue they nearly all the technologies on that list are economically driven, or have a an economically driven component. This is dangerous because it means someone will invent potentially harmful shit to keep riding the wave of economics.
> Do you believe that exponential growth can continue forever on a finite {planet, solar system, galaxy, universe}?
Yes, I believe exponential growth can continue forever, for 2 reasons:
- 1) because you assume the universe is finite. This is a very long shot, not supported by mainstream science or theories.
- 2) should the 1st point be eventually disproved and the universe has boundaries, I still do, because growth isn't only hardware. Software growth can leverage the increase gains from hardware (more storage density, lower power requirements etc)
What's more plausible is that the growth rate will eventually tend towards a much lower value when most of the human needs and wants are satiated.
Stagnation is implausible, because even if needs might be finite, wants are not.
> you assume the universe is finite. This is a very long shot, not supported by mainstream science or theories
> Software growth can leverage the increase gains from hardware (more storage density, lower power requirements etc)
You should probably learn some physics if you want to make statements about what's phsyically possible. Whether the universe is finite or not is completely irrelevant. The portion of it humanity can access is finite, thanks to dark energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVoh27gJgME
Of course, even if you reject dark energy, you're still limited by pure geometry and the speed of light. Human resource growth has a hard upper bound proportional to (elapsed time)^3, because of three spatial dimensions and the speed of light. And as we all know, any exponential growth is faster than any polynomial grown, in the long term.
And at the other end, there is a maximum efficiency possible. You cannot work below particular thresholds, thanks to uncertainty.
There is no escape from the fact that exponential growth always ends.
> if you reject dark energy, you're still limited by pure geometry and the speed of light.
I do reject dark energy.
And I'd like to remind you that you have a lot of assumptions baked-in.
To cut in short, if in the worst case there's no spooky-effect-at-a-distance and uncertainty prevents us to go to subatomic levels, and if there are no subspaces, then yes, growth might be limited to the (elapsed time)^3.
That's a lot of ifs, and that'd still be not an argument for degrowth - just for a very large upper ceiling that'd still be compatible with continuous (and large!) growth.
Let's explore the science before making the doomer conclusion we must brace for degrowth, because I see that as an argument driven by ideology, not by science.
That's not an ad hominem attack. Ad hominem would be "you're a crackpot, so everyone should ignore you". That might be true, but it's not the claim I made.
The claim I made is that you should learn some physics, and your response only serves to reinforce that.
And a very large upper bound on exponential growth is still an upper bound. It won't last forever. Once you accept that, you are ready to face the questions of when and how it should end to minimize the damage done by its end.
While I don't have great opinion one way or another, you seem to think that not-mathematically-infinite and functionally-infinite are the same thing. While I don't think that true infinite growth is possible, I do think that proximate infinite growth is possible for an extended period of many centuries. I guess this puts me in the kicking-the-can group.
> For all practical intents and purposes, the finite resources available on this planet and in the universe are more than sufficient, though.
How can we know this is true? Like immediately, sure. But can we keep growing and extracting resources like we do for another thousand years? Ten thousand years?
Like we're already pushing the limit on arable land. It doesn't seem plausible we'll be able to somehow increase crop yields even times to sustain the sort of growth we're projecting. At that point, the entire planet's land area would need to be farmland, even if it is currently desert or mountains or whatever.
Of course it doesn't. But there is no agreement on how close we are to reaching the limits of the finite planet, with degrowth advocates thinking that we're near, at, or past it already, and others thinking that we have a long way to go still before the planet cannot sustain humanity.
I've followed the literature on this at a layperson's level (science feeds, etc). I haven't been seeing any work that disputes the fact that limits are being breached right now. Ecosystems all over the planet are dying, and many planetary systems (notably the climate) are shifting into unstable patterns.
As far as I've seen, there absolutely is broad agreement among scientists about the physical reality at play. But (as usual) soft-headed business and political people ignore what they can't face.
Malthus in the 1800s and Ehrlich in the 60s (and continuing thereafter), both renowned scholars of their times, also thought that limits were being breached right then. The latter thought the crisis was so urgent that he advocated for policies like coercive population control and stopping American aid to "hopeless" countries like India, whose population was growing at a tremendous rate.
As recently as a few years ago, Ehrlich stated that a collapse of civilization is a "near certainty" in the coming decades; never mind the fact that had any of the predictions in his 1968 book come true, there might be only half as many humans now as there actually are.
Has humanity's scientific prowess improved so much since then that today's predictions are that much more accurate? Perhaps, but considering that we haven't put another man on the moon since then, maybe not. There's a growing problem in science of fake papers[0] due to the "publish or perish" nature of academia; it points to at least some level of incentive for there to be "a broad agreement among scientists" about the state of things, for career and funding purposes if nothing else.
In the meantime, the "physical reality at play" is such that the number of deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters today is about one-third that of 50 years ago. That's not one-third of the rate; that's one-third in absolute number of deaths, despite the human population having literally doubled over that time. We can attribute this to a higher capacity for developing countries to deal with disasters due to their growing material wealth.
As usual, high-minded visionaries never let a crisis go to waste. Remember that Al Gore's Nashville house uses about 200k kWh a year (about 20x the average American house); Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry routinely flies aboard his own private jet; and Martha's Vineyard, supposedly being literally eaten away today[2], is home to the Obamas' 30-acre, 11-and-three-quarter-million-dollar property.
"But Malthus!" might be persuasive to people unfamiliar with science and/or history, but (being neither), it just makes me sigh. Another pointless repeated diversionary trope. And as for Gore - your weird obsession with celebrities illuminates nothing.
Not a single person (I mean that quite literally) familiar with the actual, hands-on, empirical work going on in the field by tens of thousands of real scientists in thousands of research institutions private and public alike in a couple of hundred nations covering every ecosystem on the planet is in doubt that the living world is in deep peril.
Neither is anyone who has ever lived for any period outside of a well-protected urban area. My region has been swept with an unprecedented sequence of floods and fires over the last few years. Two almost total destructions by flood in 2022 alone. We will never again have permanent road & telecoms infrastructure (it is routinely destroyed). And that's just the most obvious surface. Anyone familiar with the flora, fauna, and water systems here knows that the ecosystems are in an advanced state of collapse. That's repeated over almost the entirety of the globe.
Forget historical culture wars. Just survey contemporary, real-world, empirical science. I'm not going to cherry-pick a few irrelevant links from a google scurry like you have done. You need to do a bit of homework. You just look daft without it. Get over your fear and have a good, clear-sighted look at reality. You'll probably feel better.
Yeah, but hear me out, what if we just happen to invent a more efficient Haber process maybe it will require negative energy input! Or invent some magic super cure that will re-stabilize the declining ecosystems and restore all the things we don't like to think about, like soil health. It's going to come any day now and we should just ignore the possibility that it might not, because that would be personally inconvenient! There's no chances for another dust bowl with increasing temperatures and food demands.
You must be a communist that wants to destroy people's quality of life! You couldn't possibly just want the de-growth of wasteful production to a circular and more sustainable economy; you must just want to destroy the economy itself!! You hate poor countries maybe you should try living in one so I can keep burning 20 liters of gasoline to get to work every day. It can't be that you want to make the QoL more equal for everyone on the globe.
Plus we can just kill the majority of life on Earth, we'll just genetically modify replacements anyway, it can't be that hard, we're HUMANS and HISTORY shows us that we'll be fine from all the other times where we were at about >40% land use for agriculture and facing melting icecaps! My friend loves to ride their motorcycle without a helmet, it hasn't hurt them yet. (what do you mean "survivorship bias?") Besides everything that has spent million of years evolving into its niche will be able to adapt in the next ~100 years so as to not break the ecosystem it exists in.
Unfortunately your satire is mainstream thinking amongst much of the SV/HN set. Business/economic/tech "hardheadedness" is just millennial Protestantism in another guise. So many of our secular disguises are religious in origin - "progress", "sovereignty", etc. Unthinking inheritances of a prescientific age.
In some ways the physical-reality-averse 'realists' are even less solidaristic than your satire suggests. "Humans", you would think, rationally includes the vast numbers of climate refugees (millions now, hundreds of millions in decades to come) - yet somehow I suspect they will not be welcomed with open arms by techno-'realists' when their islands and lowlands go permanently under. When one-third of Pakistan was recently underwater I didn't hear loud assertions of human solidarity from them.
Yeah, I'd be lying if I said I didn't model it after a few of the comments I read here. It was quite disappointing reading the article which made no real points other than a strawmen to jerk off their ego only to then come to the comments to see a bunch of people who seemed to think it was so profound.
It's actually quite sad how techbros ruin the perception of legitimately useful technology because they're too dumb to try and figure out how to use it beyond a "How can I make a quick buck with this and be the next FAANG, I'm going to be the next Elon Musk brooooooooooo." Then when their half baked attempt at monetization flops they burn the public's perception and make it harder to fund other things. They also seem to think they "understand the science" and that anything can be managed with it while refusing to acknowledge that the body of unknown knowledge exceeds what we do know, and even what we do know is mostly rough approximations that fall apart when you try and stretch them beyond their narrow scope.
(And there's no way there could be things we haven't accounted for that would accelerate issues... https://phys.org/news/2023-05-rapid-ice-greenland.html) (And millions of people being displaced won't lead to billions of people being disrupted or any wars over the remaining viable land and affect the economy, right? Wait war is usually good for the economy, maybe we can spin this climate catastrophe as a positive thing!)
The sickening part is that if this experiment in egotistical anthropocentrism goes horrifically sideways I know we're just going to be stuck listening to "How could we have known this would happen?! Why are you even focused on that, you should be worried about your survival!" from those in their yachts and those still deluded to believe it was a good idea, over and over again until you die from a marauder, hunger, thirst, or a brain aneurysm from listening to them.
> how techbros ruin the perception of legitimately useful technology
Well said - that really is key. Fortunately or not (depending on your values), it's just a given that if there's a means out of the crisis (who knows?), tech just is going to be a major part of the plan.
I don't think this was necessarily true, say, 40 years or so ago. It might have been possible then to put economies on slower burns (pun intended), and concentrate on social/political/ethical adjustments, wealth redistribution, urban redesign etc.
But there's isn't time for long-term solutions now. Short/medium-term emergency survival is going to require massive tech deployments. But if they're going to work, the direction needs to be determined by rational considerations, not neurotic and childish billionaire egos.
Having said that, I don't think it's going to happen. A crash is more likely at this late stage.
> The space of possible future human technologies is effectively infinite, to say nothing of extraplanetary resources.
You are underestimating how quickly exponential growth gets out of hand. Take population for example. If we wanted to have 1% annual population growth, in ~12 100 years the volume of humans would be 9 x 10^60 m^3.
If we started expanding into space right now, and we expanded at the speed of light, in 12 100 years we'd have access to 6 x 10^60 m^3, which is not big enough.
Of course by then we may have bioengineered smaller humans. That doesn't help much. It just changes that 12 100 to 12 800.
Or how about energy? If human energy use grows by 1% a year in ~9300 years we will be using 5.3 x 10^59 Joules per year. That's about the same as the amount of energy you would get if the entire mass of the Milky Way galaxy were converted to energy (E=mc^2).
Forget the Milky Way. Let's think big. What if we converted the entire freaking universe--all the observable mass, and all the dark matter, and all the dark energy--into energy for humanity. At 1% annual growth from now we'd be using that much per year in 12 000 years.
If human civilization has been growing exponentially for a while, how have we not already hit these enormous galaxy-straining limits? The total number of humans still easily fits on just the Earth alone.
We haven't been growing exponentially for very long. Before agriculture was invented there wasn't much growth at all. We were limited by how much hunter-gatherers could hunt and gather. Growth happened when people expanded to some new territory, and that was limited by poor transportation options.
When agriculture was invented around 12000 years ago growth picked up, with the population doubling around every 1000 years. That lasted until around 5000 years ago, when the population was around 100 million. There wasn't much grown for the next couple thousand years.
Around 3000 years ago growth picked up and the population tripled by 2000 years ago. It slowed again until around the industrial revolution and then picked up quite a bit. The world population growth rate went from around 0.1% per year before the industrial revolution to around 0.6%.
The 20th century brought many developments that allowed for even more growth. That allowed the growth rate to hit around 2.24% in 1964. It's been declining since then, dropping to a little below 1% a couple years ago.
It's been pretty much the same pattern since we became Homo sapiens. When there is an increase in available resources or we get new technology that lets us better utilize resources we can have a relatively short period of exponential growth until we reach the limits of those resources and then growth slows or stops.
With the industrial revolution and then the developments in the 20th century we were able to have about a century of sustained high growth, but we're reaching the end of that expansion and the growth rate is declining.
We'll almost surely have more breakthroughs that allow for growth increases, but some people want to plan based on the assumption that we'll have such breakthroughs often enough that we can count on high growth indefinitely.
The point of the galaxy-straining limit calculation is that the past pattern of periods of exponential growth being followed by declining growth is something inherent in exponential growth. It's not something that can be escaped by finding new places to settle or more efficient ways to use existing resources. Thus, we should be planning on the recent period of exponential growth ending rather than becoming depending on exponential growth continuing indefinitely.
Biological life is based on perpetual growth. Yet it has persisted for thousands of millions of years.
I think you will have difficulty coming up for a definition of "growth" in humanity such that it makes sense for the argument you are trying to make. At least, I hav been searching for somebody to define what they mean by "growth" and have only gotten very vague platitudes such that the definition is y useful for basing further reasoning.
