Did that actually happen or did we just outsource all the dirty stuff?
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
A more interesting metric would be calories-harvested over calories-input.
Food per acre has certainly increased. A lot of the increase is through selective breeding, GM crops, and other technological efficiencies, but a lot of it is from increased fertilizer, which is just calories/energy in a different form (fertilizer is just a store of energy -- that's literally why you buy too much of it in bulk and you're put on a fertilizer-bomb watchlist).
You can grow more food per acre by throwing more energy at the problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it more efficiently or sustainably. One way of looking at all the fertilizer runoff, for example, is it is quite literally leaking input energy out of your harvest, decreasing your efficiency.
IMO, a more interesting metric is nutrients like phosphorous which would be more difficult to acquire once current sources have mined out.
The upside is that some of the children of peasants are putting a serious dent in world climate problems like Wang Chuanfu who is the founder of BYD.
Source: recently read The Quest, book which discusses energy in the modern world
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
Do 5 big-$ bank transactions and you contribute to GDP. What was the energy usage? What was the productive output?
Compare say a CRT from 1999 with an LED TV from 2019 and the vastly larger sizes are more than offset via increased efficiency.
You happen to have any links to attempts to disambiguate the two? I definitely don't.
By comparison in constant 2010 dollars global GDP went from 66T (2010) to 82.6T (2018). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.kd
Energy depends a little on the numbers you use BTU etc. However as the mix of services is not really changing very rapidly but the GDP PPP per oil equivalent has been growing quickly the trend is clear: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?end=2...
I think the US economy probably had a bigger than 2% shift just into tech in the last 10 years, let alone if you include broader service-ization as a national goal for decades now.
I guess I'm saying, if our stated goal and the goal of every MBA in the country was to have more money in services.. I thought that happened.
EDIT: rate-limited, appreciate the follow-up on US numbers. Still not liking 2010 as a start-date as I think the relevant changes were before then. Would love to chat more, but hey.
But, I was using global GDP to avoid the outsourcing question.
PS: Using 2010 as the start date as these energy trends are fairly recent. Though I agree comparing say 2018 numbers to say the 1970’s would need to account for more systematic changes.
Hand wave about that all you want.
Hand wave about that all you want.
Plus "quality of life" is subjective. Some people (or some countries/cultures) can think about all kind of crap as essential to their "quality of life".
Hand wave about that all you want too.
A lot of GDP growth is in box-moving, paper shuffling, services, sales and so on, which can be made with "less stuff" (e.g some even completely online).
OTOH, tons of industrial production for US companies, the dirty kind, has been moved to China and co.
Even if the US "manufacture's more units than ever" (and what those units are? If it manufactures more e.g. packaged food than ever, it wouldn't really be as polluting as manufacturing more cars or computers/mobiles, or several other kinds of products, than ever). I'd wager that the more pollutant and messy production has been moved to China / the developing world / etc.
The same way as most of the western "recycled" stuff just goes to the developing world to be pillages for parts and then dumped into landfills and rivers...
How dare you question woke capitalism, Mr. 'api'. We want to be told we're building a better world, and we'll hang anyone who says otherwise. Didn't you see Silicon Valley?
Yet it took the form of a question. It doesn't even try to support its implied criticism with any data or argument.
As such, it's a cheap shot that doesn't add anything. If you believe someone's work, published in a somewhat reputable outlet (and a book), to be wrong, find something that supports that criticism. Don't just throw out some lame counterargument that anybody reading the headline can come up.
Specifically, the article uses examples that are unlikely to be outsourced; Paper and cardboard, especially, aren't major inputs to big-hairy-manufacturing.
Fertilizer is an even better case, because it's impossible to outsource its use without also outsourcing agriculture. Agricultural output has obviously been growing steadily. And those statistics are rather reliable because the products are standardised, often need to be reported for various subsidies or regulatory purposes, and are traded on public markets.
Also strongly agreed about timezone karma - I would love to see some analysis of how upvotes in discussions like this fluctuate based on which part of the planet is exposed to sun at a given time.