The growth ultimately comes from the sun (not pictured)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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"yeah but we won't run out in my lifetime, and I can horde enough so my children never have to work, so everything is fine." - capitalists.
Après moi, le déluge
This is essentially the argument that Thomas Malthus (economist) made in the 1800's. And he had a point!
In his time, history had shown that the entire output of a country/state was people's productivity times some function of land and labour. Meaning you could increase the output of a country by making people more productive (limited), or increasing the land available (limited), or by increasing the labour available (also limited). Therefore, there was a hard limit on how much output a country could have. And therefore we were fucked because population increases exponentially but output only increases linearly and has limits.
I think this is similar to your lego analogy: the pieces (land, labour) are limited, therefore the output is also limited.
Then the capitalist revolution happened and once the capitalist-style legal framework was in place which allowed the ownership of capital, countries' outputs broke from the historical trend. We realized that a different function better described the output of a country. Rather than land, the correct thing to look at was capital. So the new function was people's productivity times some function of land and capital (hence, capitalism).
And unlike land, capital is, in fact, unlimited. Someone might build a factory on the land, and owning the factory, he/she has incentive to improve the factory. "How much you can improve the factory" is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore the output is also unlimited. This equation better described the growth in output that people were seeing in reality (GDP is an attempt to measure this), which has been growing exponentially ever since.
So... we're not fucked? Well, it remains to be seen! We've certainly avoided being fucked so far! The standard of living of the average person on Earth has increased by a lot since Malthus.
Of course, this has come with negative externalities (pollution). We're still seeing infinite growth riiiiiight up until we go extinct. The trick is to keep the infinite growth without going extinct!
EDIT: spelling correction
I think the issue is that natural resources are limited, and even virtual things still require real energy. Online spaces are hosted on physical servers, machine learning uses real CPU computing power, and so on. And we're increasingly using more and more energy and natural resources to facilitate our civilization.
Arguably, we've already fucked the climate and the biosphere. We're literally in a middle of a mass extinction right now, and the climate is breaking down in front of our eyes. It's entirely possible that we've already kicked off feedback loops, such as methane burp, that are beyond our ability to control. As you say, the growth will likely continue until we start seeing very rapid collapse as we hit the limits of our biosphere.
Yes, natural resources are limited, but that doesn't mean that capital is limited. What I mean is that: yes, we're using more energy as a civilization, but thanks to the investment of capital, we're also expanding our ability to produce more energy at the same time. And "how much energy our civilization is capable of producing" can increase infinitely.
Yeah, the problem of pollution is certainly an existential threat. But I don't think it's fair to say that the type of threat is "we're running out of resources". We're not running out of anything, we're just producing too much atmospheric carbon!
My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it's like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.
And yes we absolutely are running out of easily accessible resources that have sustained the current growth. Getting further resources is becoming increasingly more difficult and energy intensive. We're also running out of things like fertilizer, dealing with topsoil erosion, and increasingly unstable climate that's threatening our food production. I don't think people appreciate just how fragile our whole civilization is.
My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it’s like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.
Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:
Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we've taken something which previously wasn't considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There's no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.
Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I'll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it's less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.
These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren't limited. There's enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.
Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion.
let me introduce you to the Jevons paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And this is a pretty good read on the state of food production with lots of mainstream sources to what's currently happening, it's a pretty sobering read https://collapsesurvivalsite.com/reasons-theres-going-to-be-a-global-famine/
I keep making better and better sculptures out of the Lego bricks. The value of each successive one is higher as I increase in talent. Have I ever achieved the pinnacle artistic expression even with finite resources?
This us why developed nations have service based economies. Physical resources aren't a constraint.
Developed nations have service based economies because large corporations moved industry to cheaper labour markets. What the west now has is largely just a fake economy that doesn't produce anything of actual value.
remember that some of us live in developing countries and deserve to see our countries developed someday.
Global capitalism has largely stood in the way of such development because corporations from rich western countries plunder the Global South.
Your assuming there is only one way that will forever exist, our application of how we use our resources are infinite. Creating scarcity and less resources making people poorer is not development.
If we bioengineered the perfect wood AT LEAST theres an abundance of carbon to make structures with.
Get space legos
Thorium.
This analogy doesn't really stand. The reason we haven't run out of oil and gas as predicted since the '70s because this panic drove energy prices up. The price rise allowed companies to figure our how to dig further, or find other ways to extract valuable resources. The price increase also forced other companies to figure out how these resources could be used more efficiently. We don't have infinite resources, but we are really creative on how to find alternatives to solve a problem.
I'm sorry but your example shows that we don't solve shit. We search for new ways to get even more of the limited resources. We don't search for solutions, but for ways to keep making easy money. We as in the most powerfull companies.
How does "companies finding better ways to use said resouces more efficiently" not address your problem? Diesel (with all it's flaws) was a reaction to use oil more efficiently. Hibrid cars were a reaction to pollute less. Electric cars the same. I'm pretty sure atomic cars will be a thing in my lifetime. All these are attempts to use scarce resources more efficiently. Whichever solves the issue the best will be adopted by everyone.
Efficiency is good, but as long as things don't have 100% efficiency (which is impossible for everything besides heaters) it is still a question of limited resources.
Cars of any kind are not sustainable for every person to own and use, no matter what kind of energy source is used. This applies to a lot of areas. The wrong things get deliberately called the problem, so when companies fix these problems people are happy to buy the new products. But the new products are still part of the real problem. Don't defend companies
What is the real problem?
The real problem is pride and greed. The wish for unlimited gains in an limited universe. But to be less abstract and more specific, it depends on the topic. I described a template, not a specific problem. Not every problem is easy to spot, but in transportation for example it is personal transportation via cars.
The picture is short a few pieces?
A more fitting analogy would be if right now all the LEGO factories would stop producing, and you start building the largest LEGO building imaginable from scratch. You might be able to get all the pieces together at one point, but the Sun would explode first. (added for dramatic effect) The difficulity is getting the pieces from all the places in the world. Even from under the sea.
You talk about alternatives yet none of your examples are of alternative solutions
Totally get the point and generally agree. To play devil's advocate though, what about intellectual property and artistic works? Is that theoretically an infinite or near infinite good? Or at least an unending one. Also space! Maybe we can eventually become grey goo, consuming the entire galaxy to propagate more things to consume the entire galaxy. Fun!
Time, energy, labor, etc are the blocks
In that case if the blocks aren't physical or natural resources only the analogy starts to fall apart a bit, since you'd have to consider productivity and what we define as being more productive. The computer or plow or any of a number of innovation would have created blocks that weren't there before. Hard to anticipate the future. I do think our definitions of growth, value and productivity are major issues. In the end the economy and society has to transition to growth being defined as progress toward true sustainability, or at least the closest thing to it that can be achieved on a finite world that will eventually end no matter what is done on am absurd enough time scale.
Sadly we don't have the luxury of "maybe eventually" when we have already been seeing our world dying for decades at an ever increasing pace.
It's kinda like being on a slowly sinking ship and hoping eventually you'll learn to fly, rather than getting into the bloody emergency vessel.
You misunderstand me, I agree, just trying to generate discussion. I think the grey goo consuming the universe is the horrible hellish end result of infinite growth and a good argument that at some point moderation, priorities, and a "good enough" need to be declared. Also maybe thinking instead of growth about transformation, that innovation and newness doesn't always have to mean ever increasing consumption. What "blocks" could be exchanged for other new and interesting "blocks" instead possibly. How could the blocks be better arranged?
I'll let George Lucas answer that one for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWqvaMEFIdI
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