This can't go on (2021)

My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all.<p>Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.<p>Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.<p>Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and education, but on everything as the price of living in society and are expected to make regular payments?<p>What is “the size of the economy” and how is it relevant over a thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without knowing this.

HN 2021 discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28053649">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28053649</a>

At the end of the Roman Empire [0] a lot of technology was lost, a lot of Europe went backwards in terms of the progress we see. A lot of people died. There was even a climate catastrophe [1].<p>The Anglo-Saxons told stories of the Giants who built the aqueducts, because the technology for building them was lost.<p>If you looked at GDP for Europe, it dived. Completely collapsed. Trade between areas of the former Empire ceased. Barbarians looted cities and destroyed infrastructure.<p>It took us a few hundred years to recover. But we did recover.<p>So, couple of points:<p>1. I don&#x27;t see this collapse in these smooth graphs with the lines going up and to the right of the last few thousand years.<p>2. Like most graphs that go up and to the right, it&#x27;s actually a mess of ups and downs if you zoom in. Progress isn&#x27;t smooth - it&#x27;s lumpy and sometimes goes backwards. And it&#x27;s fractal. There&#x27;s plenty of space there for things to go down as well as up on a macro scale.<p>3. We&#x27;re in an &quot;up&quot; bit of the graph. Both in terms of the last few hundred years, and (zooming out) the last few thousand. That doesn&#x27;t mean the whole graph always goes up and to the right.<p>So yes, I agree with TFA that &quot;this can&#x27;t go on&quot; if &quot;this&quot; is portrayed as a smooth progression from barbarism to TikTok. But I disagree that &quot;this&quot; has been smooth. There have been plenty of downs as well. And so &quot;this&quot; can go on if we agree that the value of &quot;this&quot; can go down as well as up, on a macro scale as well as micro.<p>[0] The Western Roman Empire at least. The Eastern half carried on for quite a while longer. And arguably the Western half turned itself into a church instead of collapsing. But the point remains.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Volcanic_winter_of_536" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Volcanic_winter_of_536</a>

The world will be dominated by populations either poor or religious.[1]<p>Note that below 2.1 on that chart, the human population shrinks.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;children-per-woman-fertil...</a>

In 1972, the Club of Rome published their seminal report, “Limits to Growth”, which basically concluded the same thing - this can’t go on - and put an outer limit of around 2100 as to when this system will hit the wall (my words).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clubofrome.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;the-limits-to-growth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clubofrome.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;the-limits-to-growth&#x2F;</a>

Maybe there&#x27;s something I&#x27;m missing, but I don&#x27;t really understand the author&#x27;s focus on monetary value here. The question I would be asking is: how is the capability of the individual changing? There is little point in comparing the value of a journey by horse four hundred years ago to the same journey by aeroplane today. To reduce each to a numerical value feels like a conflation that makes this argument deeply flawed at minimum.

How do you even make a meaningful comparison to the &quot;size of the economy&quot;? What was the price of an air conditioner in 1850? Effectively infinite, it didn&#x27;t exist. Clothing used to take hundreds of man-hours to make and clean and repair and it&#x27;s almost disposable today. There&#x27;s so much more like that. If the economy is &quot;bigger&quot; in some sense, it&#x27;s not just that there&#x27;s more activity going on, but there are also entirely new types of activities that weren&#x27;t even possible before. It has nothing to do with the number of atoms available.

&gt; [Growth is] faster than it can be for all that much longer (there aren&#x27;t enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years).<p>This assume that growth has to involve atoms.<p>If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature superconductor, we don&#x27;t necessarily need to use more stuff - in fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms that we needed earlier to build just one.<p>That is growth, without using more atoms.

I think economic growth is the wrong metric to be measuring as it is a number which we ourselves have created, and if we say today there are 10 trillion and tomorrow there are 1,000 trillion it doesn&#x27;t REALLY change anything.<p>This doesn&#x27;t map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are not finite, we can make them up, and have been.<p>Yes, our technological progress has been increasing exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known, what does that mean for us?<p>At that point, we&#x27;ll be able to answer if we&#x27;re operating in a simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?

&gt; The world can&#x27;t just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy).<p>Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.<p>There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking.

&gt; It’s hard to make a simple chart of how fast science and technology are advancing, the same way we can make a chart for economic growth. But I think that if we could, it would present a broadly similar picture as the economic growth chart.<p>This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you&#x27;d have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up.<p>Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.

Every time my CEO speaks in an all-staff meeting, the subject is growth. Growth is the main theme and entire substance of the meeting.<p>I think he is insane. So is anyone who is in favour of perpetual growth in a finite environment.<p>Apparently, our political leaders are also in favor of perpetual growth. So is the media.<p>They should all be locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

&gt; there aren&#x27;t enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years<p>Now I’m getting nervous<p>&#x2F;s

&gt; <i>We&#x27;re used to the world economy growing a few percent per year. This has been the case for many generations.</i><p>This is a thing that has been puzzling me for a while. Isn&#x27;t &quot;growth by a few percent each year&quot; already exponential?<p>E.g. if you had a constant economic growth of 1% per year, that would mean that this year&#x27;s GDP would always be 101% of last year&#x27;s GDP, which is exponential growth.<p>So even with a &quot;constant&quot; relative growth rate, the plot of &quot;absolute&quot; GDP over time would eventually become a hockey-stick curve - things would be expected to get weird at some point if the steepness of the curve crosses some threshold.

I don’t really understand the “atoms in the universe” argument. That has nothing to do with the size of an economy. We don’t need an atom to represent every “bit” of an economy.

I have always seen the fundamentals of &quot;growth in the economy&quot; as either more efficient use of energy (such as moving from open campfire to heath and chimney). But that begs the question &quot;use to do what?&quot; And that leads us to &quot;human satisfaction&quot;. We measure all of this in an entirely anthropomorphic manner.<p>And so we could &quot;grow&quot; the economy by increasing human welfare - we could in theory keep the economy the same &quot;size&quot; but distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent&#x27;s can talk of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day. Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to &quot;growth&quot;.<p>The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed, yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but maximising human utility<p>Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and education, health and politics that benefit all humankind<p>We will find more &quot;growth&quot; in socialism than capitalism and more happiness in democracy than totalitarianism

The galaxy is a big place. We may stagnate a bit, but if we can cross the interplanetary threshold, I think it&#x27;s smooth sailing to galactic growth.

August 2021

The singularity approaches, to take your job.

There&#x27;s always gonna be space when you jack into Zuck&#x27;s metaverse.

This feels like the modern equivalent of Malthusian theory. Many people have had similar thoughts throughout much of history, but human prosperity has always prevailed. Knowledge is infinite, and as long as there is new knowledge to seek, things are never going to stagnate or be over. Atoms have never been the limiting factor, it&#x27;s been knowledge on what to do with them.<p>Knowledge makes the existence of resources infinite: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nav.al&#x2F;infinite-resources" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nav.al&#x2F;infinite-resources</a><p>Pessimism seems like an intellectually serious position: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nav.al&#x2F;pessimism" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nav.al&#x2F;pessimism</a>

The rothschilds already said that we are going to pay several years ago. Pandemics, refugees, natural disasters. They will ruthlessly use any of these to their advantage. And it is these bloodlines that need to be wiped from the human race.