Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

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All our economical and political systems are based on growth, and it's very hard to sustain growth if you don't have growing resources (energy, mineral, etc) input, innovation and population.

If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently.

I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one.

There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle.

But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.

>All our economic and political systems are based on growth

Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over.

Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.

Also you can adjust the “retirement benefits” to things that are easier to provide than money.

> Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency

That's a beautiful theory that doesn't match what we have put in application during the last century.

In pratice, our systems assume growth, and in fact the planetary resource consumption has just gone up and up. Green energy don't replace fossil fuel, it adds to them. When you give faster transport to people, stats tell us they don't spend less time in transport, they just travel more distance. When we make something cheaper, we don't keep enjoying the difference, we give it to more people. Once everybody has one, we make it disposable so people buy them again. You put computers to use less energy? Nope, people use them to do things they didn't do before, and we use more energy as a whole.

So yes, on a paper, capitalism is tied to efficiency. Practically, that's not reflected in our growth, as capitalism distorts incentive toward growth. And so the periods of capitalism are the periods with the most growth ever in human history. Also, when growth stats go down, the stock market goes down as well.

And even better, if the energy input goes down, the production goes down, and the economic health goes down. Because you need calories for all those machines producing things.

Innovation can't beat physics. At some point, if you want more, you need more resources.

> we use more energy as a whole

False. The US electricity consumption per person has fallen in the last decade. Yet, the grid has revived continuous investments from private companies. It’s the same trend as newspapers, revenue streams require continuous investments and that continues as long as those investments have a net positive result.

It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit. People don’t just drive endlessly when they buy cars that use less energy, they have specific places to go and that’s it.

Efficiency doesn’t drive consumption it changes the economic equation. Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location. But, again once you’re moving them from the perfect farming location there isn’t a reason to make a longer trip after that point.

It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical. Rather than simply consuming more resources endlessly wealthy people shift to artificial scarcity.

> False. The US electricity consumption per person has fallen in the last decade.

I don't have stats for the US, but for the world, the trend is growth until 2016:

https://imgur.com/a/WkaF60w

> It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit.

We invent new ways to consume power every day: video games, bitcoin, air sanitizer, food delivery...

> Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location

That's a good example: before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.

> It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical

I consume more than my father, and he consumes more than my grandfather. The later didn't have a fridge when young, me, I can use a plane several times a year.

There is a huge margin between me and a billionnaire, and everybody wants to live like one.

Here’s US electricity numbers, it’s flat from 2000 to 2008 and then dropped. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

> before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.

But that already happened, so now once mangoes are already being shipped the energy consumption is effectively capped.

Which is my point you seem to be ignoring, you can’t extrapolate to endlessly increasing resources. Yes comparing a subsistence farmer with a billionaire you see a vast increase, but it’s a sub linear increase. What happens if everyone on earth has the lifestyle of a western billionaire, does resource consumption continue to increase or does it stall?

Electricity is not the only energy we consume, you have to see calories as a whole: transport, chemistry, making building, etc.

Also, the US delegated most of the industry in Asia, and the energy consumption moved there.

If you buy an iphone in the US, the energy used to create and ship that iphone doesn't appear on the US consumption, yet it is american.

And of course, any local consumption is affecting the world as a whole.

Imports where a larger share of GDP on 2008 than 2019 so that doesn’t explain away the decrease in energy consumption over the last decade.

US per capita oil consumption peaked in 1980 and recently total consumption has also fallen. Net fossil fuel use per capita is down significantly, which is why our CO2 emissions are dropping. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

> Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently

Musk will make every argument for stability because he won the lottery and wants no more draws, people who are unhappy on the other hand might use some instability because it means a bunch of new draws with high frequency.

It's also the reason why every Senator, Representative, President of every country prioritizes stability.

The population at large might have a different opinion on the matter .

You need people to work in giga factories.

Stability is overrated.

Periods of stability are necessary, but constant stability is undesirable, and idealised. However, unstability means immediate (albeit necessary) pain, which nobody wants to opt in.

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