Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted.<p>There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. The article's example of lighter buildings is what I view as the same category, something blogger Yves Smith terms 'crapification.' We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large.<p>The other trend is money supply; One of the chief problems leading to the 2008 financial crisis was that much more credit had been extended than could ever be paid back by those to whom it was loaned. The 'solution' was to have central banks 'pay back' the loans that never should've been made. That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth. I'd like to see an analysis of 'economic growth' where the contributions of resources and credit are accounted for separately.
From the article: <i>It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment.</i><p>Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves.<p>One of the consistently annoying things, for me, in science reporting is the extrapolation of a given set of ratios out to some point where the result is very click-baity. The systems guy in me has experience that all exponential trends are s-curves, and so I feel that one must at least acknowledge that fact in your reporting. I understand it, it means that the predicted outcome might not happen at all, but it is important to the story.<p>So economists do the same thing, they take some ratio of numbers that seem to be tracking the 'size' of the economy and then run that trend out 50, 100, 500 years. It really doesn't matter, but what is important, and this article and other papers on de-materialization have demonstrated, is that neither the economic growth rate, or the relationship between that growth rate and some other factor, are ever really constant. Thus any point that depends on them being constant for more than a decade or so, is really stretching it.<p>Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) demonstrated in a clear and convincing way.<p>[1] "Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends" -- <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" rel="nofollow">https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027375?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...</a>
Some people say growth can't happen forever, and all growth comes at environmental cost, but that simply isn't true. I can create digital goods and services which people buy, and this increases GDP, and it doesn't hurt the environment and is indeed economic growth in the realest sense. I can even give massages all day, and this also doesn't destroy the environment.
It really only makes sense to understand the world economy as a whole. On this scale, consumption (e.g. steel production or oil consumption) continue to grow [1,2]. Americans are in the fortunate position of selling services (e.g. finance, advertising, information management) and consuming finished products from the rest of the world, but the American economy should not be considered a closed system.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=INTL.44-1-AFRC-QBTU.A&vo=0&v=H&start=1980&end=2016" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?vs=IN...</a>
This reads to me mostly as the US importing more, so the increased material use doesn't show in statistics. The article also mentions increase in use of plastics.<p>One thing I'm curious about though - how come energy use stopped being correlated with economic growth? That's new.
Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing.
I wonder what this will look like in a renewable energy world where the cost of energy on the margin drops to the the small operating cost + the principal/interest on the capital expenditure.<p>We might actually see a reduction in GDP in that case, especially if coupled with ever increasing production efficiency for energy consuming processes.<p>In that case, we might have to re-evaluate how we define "success" to be less weighted for GDP, or include the reduction in fossil fuel externalities in the definition.<p>Could be be best race-to-the-bottom ever.
Considering how much of the economy is derivatives, options, and futures trading, this isn't exactly a surprise.<p>I'm no economist but the fact that we're using less of the most fundamental resources available despite a growing population doesn't seem like improving efficiency in aggregate, it just seems like decreasing activity masked by the inflated aggregated metrics about the 'economy'. A lot of money moves around nowadays and relatively little of it is actually put toward something "real", instead being diverted to quant firms' operational costs and their employees' bank accounts.
I didn’t see it addressed in the article so I’ll slip on my tinfoil hat for a moment...<p>Could this be related to growing income and wealth inequality? Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes. Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food.<p>The article notes 1970 as the critical turning point, which is the same year Piketty identifies in his book Capital as the inequality turning point in the U.S. and Europe
I think the subtext here is obvious to people on HN, but isn't this because so much value is generated using electrons on increasingly efficient computer systems?
A parallel to this concept is that of "decontenting" a product. Nissan did this in the 1980s and 1990s to the Maxima to keep prices in line with the Camry and Accord.<p>See <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decontent</a>
Does this relate to the buyback-debt cycle of companies? [0]<p>[0]. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasingly-using-debt-to-repurchase-stocks.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin...</a>
Physics > Economics<p>The Do The Math blog by Caltech-trained UCSD astrophysicist Tom Murphy is the best resource in this area.<p>In particular the posts<p>- Galactic Scale Energy <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy" rel="nofollow">https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy</a><p>- Can Economic Growth Last? <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last" rel="nofollow">https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last</a><p>- The dinner conversation with an economist on this topic <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist" rel="nofollow">https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist</a>
Related to this, he's made a whole slew of longbet predictions on us consumimg less of these resources.<p><a href="http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/" rel="nofollow">http://longbets.org/user/amcafee/</a>
Moving an economy from real things to services and ideas begs many questions, not the least of which is "what does price even mean" because the cost/price nexus had some meaning with real goods, but has almost no meaning with services and ideas.<p>A perfect cure for age related death is worth so much, it probably has undefined value. A TV show as a bitstream is worth nothing (bits ephemerally have no value), can be infinitely copied, and yet IPR law defines its value as a function of the lock on the disney vault.
I had a friend who was gloomy about resource extraction one time. I comforted him by saying there are few limits on the number of masseuses and story tellers we need.<p>As we get better and better at producing the necessities, we'll desire more luxuries, some of which are experiences.<p>Glad to see it confirmed in the numbers.
I would like to know how much of American dematerialization is just exporting materialization to China. They make our stuff, we import it. Does that count as materials consumed by Americans? Note that they mention the great reversal starting in 1970. Nixon went to China in 1972.
The a16z podcast recently had an interesting episode featuring the author of this article. It discussed the divergence of the GDP + energy usage curves as well as some of the other stuff in his book.<p><a href="https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-technology-progress-more-from-less/" rel="nofollow">https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-techn...</a>
With information age I'd assume those things with more predictive logistics and transparency would get more efficient. We should add in data transported too in these metrics and I'd guess the correlation would become more obvious.
I'm no gold bug, but, looking at the graphs in the article, it's interesting how GDP decouples from resource use around the same time that the US went off of the gold standard.
Andrew McAfee did an interview last week w/ Sam Harris [1] that was a fun listen if you are interested in a conversational understanding before reading his book.<p>[1] <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/" rel="nofollow">https://samharris.org/podcasts/170-great-uncoupling/</a>
Capitalism at work, saving the environment.<p>Increasing profits necessitates reducing one's demand for supply. Using less steel, paper, fertilizer, and energy to achieve same/better results while tautologically using less resources is indeed good all around (mostly).
"Good news! We’re getting more while using less."<p>Or maybe we just haven't accounted for inflation and the rampant advent of landlords and landlord-like start ups which consumes greater and greater slices of the consumer's money.
Because there is no growth! It's just the multiplujillion dollars The Fed plucked from thin air that make it seem so.<p>Anyone with half a brain knows that something is fucky.
Growth for who? Interestingly the words poverty, austerity, unemployment, education and health cuts are all missing from this "economics" article. There has been a single trend since Capitalism began centuries ago - the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. Yield curve's looking good today dear, we're being evicted, but damn it looks good.
This seems to be the flip side of designing things to be no more durable than necessary. With the highly regulated exception of cars, the profit motive is driving companies to use the least amount of material, whether it’s a washing machine made of stamped metal or a tissue-thin plastic bag.<p>On the other hand, well-meaning socialist interventions are driving additional environmental impacts, as people buy “reusable” bags or higher-CO₂-impact paper bags instead of changing their behavior the proper way.