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Comment by heraclius | Hacker News Reader

It’s not clear how meaningful these measurements are anyway. Consider two years: in the first, 1000 tonnes of wheat are produced, and in the second, 500 tonnes of wheat and 300 of steel. Which year, one asks, is more productive? We can measure everything in wheat-equivalent or steel-equivalent or (commodity-basket)-equivalent (i.e. PPP) but ultimately such calculations are just as arbitrary as reduction to wheat bushels (or carpet kilometres or whatever.) Incommensurability therefore seems to make all this fairly meaningless.

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This is why, as all economists agree, measurements of economic growth are completely arbitrary and the economy hasn't changed in any meaningful way that can be called "growth" since the middle ages.

... Oh, wait, or maybe growth actually can be expressed as a quantifiable concept?

In this case, the author chooses energy as an objective measurement, because all economic transactions must consume energy in order to occur.

But as is pointed out, energy isn’t, because efficiency exists.

I am not denying that the economy has changed in meaningful ways; I am merely denying that we can quantify the overall state of the economy over time such as to enable simple comparisons implicit in concepts like “growth”—and that with the caveat that the problem isn’t too severe over short periods of time.

At least one pretty well-known economist does echo heraclius' point:

"The fact that two incommensurable collections of miscellaneous objects cannot in themselves provide the material for a quantitative analysis need not, of course, prevent us from making approximate statistical comparisons, depending on some broad element of judgment rather than of strict calculation, which may possess significance and validity within certain limits. But the proper place for such things as net real output and the general level of prices lies within the field of historical and statistical description, and their purpose should be to satisfy historical or social curiosity, a purpose for which perfect precision — such as our causal analysis requires, whether or not our knowledge of the actual values of the relevant quantities is complete or exact — is neither usual nor necessary. To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth — a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis."

(J.M. Keynes)

> the author chooses energy

And is thereby begging the question.

Economists value goods using prices.

And economists measure inflation by the prices of goods...

Prices fluctuate a lot, embodied energy and production energy can fluctuate for the same thing too, but trend down until they got the ceiling or whole branch of technology is phased out.

You could take some representative branches of housing to build what is called an energy basket, using similar method used to calculate PPP.

Such rough methods would include communication, transportation, housing, clothing, food, self-expression and a few more mostly timeless needs that haven't changed for many centuries.

The problem is of accurate representative sampling of each category. That gets easier the closer we are to modernity with big data gathering.

The methodology would survive start from before bronze age even, I think.

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