And I don't feel fine. Just read some link Noah Smith had up about a fictional meeting of the minds between an economist an a physicist. The physicist basically talks the economist into accepting that the current level of growth we've known for the last 150 years is unsustainable.
" Unfortunately, exponential economic growth can't continue forever, and here's the physics to explain why. I've actually been aware of this for a long time. As my understanding of the general numbers goes, we've got a century or a century and a half of Twentieth Century level growth left before we start to cook the planet with waste heat; if we slow our rate of growth to half of what we enjoyed in the 20th, we'll have two or three more centuries. If we expand into the solar system, that number will be higher, but one thing is certain; we will not grow at 20th Century rates for the next 1,000 years. (Of course, this is moot, since in a few decades we'll all be robots, right?)"
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/thursday-roundup-4192012.html?showComment=1334936062735#c2144271908829811638
Here the author created an imagined conversation between him a physicist and an economist.
"The conversation recreated here did challenge my own understanding as well. I spent the rest of the evening pondering the question: “Under a model in which GDP is fixed—under conditions of stable energy, stable population, steady-state economy: if we accumulate knowledge, improve the quality of life, and thus create an unambiguously more desirable world within which to live, doesn’t this constitute a form of economic growth?”
"I had to concede that yes—it does. This often falls under the title of “development” rather than “growth.” I ran into the economist the next day and we continued the conversation, wrapping up loose ends that were cut short by the keynote speech. I related to him my still-forming position that yes, we can continue tweaking quality of life under a steady regime. I don’t think I ever would have explicitly thought otherwise, but I did not consider this to be a form of economic growth. One way to frame it is by asking if future people living in a steady-state economy—yet separated by 400 years—would always make the same, obvious trades? Would the future life be objectively better, even for the same energy, same GDP, same income, etc.? If the answer is yes, then the far-future person gets more for their money: more for their energy outlay. Can this continue indefinitely (thousands of years)? Perhaps. Will it be at the 2% per year level (factor of ten better every 100 years)? I doubt that."
"So I can twist my head into thinking of quality of life development in an otherwise steady-state as being a form of indefinite growth. But it’s not your father’s growth. It’s not growing GDP, growing energy use, interest on bank accounts, loans, fractional reserve money, investment. It’s a whole different ballgame, folks. Of that, I am convinced. Big changes await us. An unrecognizable economy. The main lesson for me is that growth is not a “good quantum number,” as physicists will say: it’s not an invariant of our world. Cling to it at your own peril."
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for big changes. But good ones. LOL. See I think that for many people this actually is good news-if they could choose they might even prefer to think that things will finally slow down soon after going at both ends of the candle for so long. Not me though. I don't want to take it slow and smell the tulips. Bummer.
"I got the sense that this economist’s view on growth met some serious challenges during the course of the meal. Maybe he was not putting forth the most coherent arguments that he could have made. But he was very sharp and by all measures seemed to be at the top of his game. I choose to interpret the episode as illuminating a blind spot in traditional economic thinking. There is too little acknowledgement of physical limits, and even the non-compliant nature of humans, who may make choices we might think to be irrational—just to remain independent and unencumbered"
See what I mean? This end is desired.
No comments:
Post a Comment