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Comment by devnulloverflow | Hacker News Reader

Globally, the energy used per unit of GDP has dropped, although the energy used in total has increased.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...

That seems to imply a shift of GDP towards non-productive financial/tech products as much as it implies productive environments being more green.

Do 5 big-$ bank transactions and you contribute to GDP. What was the energy usage? What was the productive output?

It depends what you mean about bank transactions. Buying $1 billion of stocks does not increase GDP. If I do an IPO, then the big-$ bank transaction I do when I pay a bank to manage it does increase GDP, because I paid them for a service. The productive output is the advice that was given, the service that was rendered. These kinds of services are clearly useful (people pay for them) but don't cost a lot of energy.

That’s not a major factor. Winglet’s and other aerodynamic improvements are just one example where energy efficiency directly reduces energy usage per GDP. Improving car MPG averages has real impact.

Compare say a CRT from 1999 with an LED TV from 2019 and the vastly larger sizes are more than offset via increased efficiency.

I'm not doubting you on the fact that gains exist, but I also think it's a slam dunk that non-material products are a much bigger chunk of GDP than before.

You happen to have any links to attempts to disambiguate the two? I definitely don't.

Services as percentage of total GDP has not been changing much. They where 63.2% of Global GDP in 2010 and 65.0% of global GDP in 2018. http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/4.2

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...

Really appreciate the numbers, but we have a global vs national discrepancy and I was thinking longer term than 2010. The current globalist transformation started in the 90s, it's noticeable on curves of manufacturing employment and efficiency.

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.

Ok, the US is a little more dramatic it was 76.2% services in 2010 and 77.4% in 2018.

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.

If it improves quality of life it is productive.

Hand wave about that all you want.

And if it doesn't? Money can happily flow in circles without doing anything productive and, depending on the accounting used, it can prop up GDP.

If it ends with a destroyed environment and billions affected it's not.

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.

Which is orthogonal I think.

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...

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