Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn
Comments
abeppu
abeppu
Also this isn't only a gap about environmental issues. If you pay X for child daycare and work but only make X+taxes, and have a dumb pointless job, GDP says the economy is at least 2X+tax larger than if you took care of your own child during the day (bc your employer paid you and you paid your daycare). This seems dumb at an accounting level, even before we consider that you probably get a greater emotional benefit from being with your child than does the daycare worker.
DANmode
But they’re not measuring nor optimizing for the contentedness of you, or your kids.
They’re measuring money generated for shareholders, they’re measuring tax base.
bluefirebrand
I think the point they were trying to make is that they are measuring and optimizing for the wrong thing
DANmode
I am agreeing with that point,
and providing speculation why it’s unlikely to change.
ixxie
It's just very hard to measure.
On the corporate scale, see the whole carbon / ESG / impact measure ent industry. Lifecycle Analysis, supply chain extrapolation, Bill of Materials analysis.
You only get some relatively crude estimate and a lot of missing data points, whereas economic growth can conveniently assign a dollar value on everything.
I think it only gets worse as you scale up.
maxerickson
As an example, a forest managed for productivity won't really lose value from a harvest.
You'd have to price the conversion of it to that management strategy.
abeppu
But we have a lot of sources of information already available that do not seem to be incorporated into any kind of top-level number that we grade ourselves on.
- when we have an estimate of how many hundreds of billions it costs to rebuild after a hurricane that would not have happened but for climate change, existing economic processes generate that number
- when insurers raise rates throughout a region, this reflects an expectation on the cost of damage, and the change over time reflects the increase in risk we've created
- when a heatwave kills a bunch of people, we already have a range of ways of estimating a monetary value for those lives from insurance, healthcare and liability litigation.
Further ... suppose your elderly relative left you a bunch of jewelry. You don't know how much it's worth and getting it appraised can actually be a bit complicated and doesn't give you complete certainty over value. But it would be _bonkers_ to continually take unappraised jewelry out into the marketplace, liquidate it, and pretend that the whole sales price was _earnings_. After the transaction, you don't have a thing you had before. You didn't know what it was worth initially but that doesn't mean that it was worthless, and you probably got scammed. Yes, measuring the full environmental impact of all our industries is hard, but pretending it's 0 is silly.
tim333
It's kind of an accounting problem. What you really want is human happiness and abundant nature but doing some gardening and playing with the kids may produce happiness but no GDP whereas enlarging a chemicals plant to make even larger SUVs gives much GDP.
Trouble is it's hard to account for that kind of stuff but maybe we could make a flawed but functional accounting thing with AI?
Tade0
A huge part of such stuff is deliberately hidden to avoid getting the government too involved in day to day lives.
Case in point: for a while we had an arrangement with our neighbour that we'll pick up their child from preschool and stay with her until her parents get home and in exchange they would prepare dinner for us.
No money exchanged hands, so no GDP generated, yet everyone's quality of life improved.
tim333
I guess a lot of the 'free market' stuff is also about avoiding too much government involvement. It tends to be a pain the neck when you have to fill tax returns and apply for permits.
goodroot
Mark Carney's book "Values" pitches a system such as this.
In better times, perhaps we have the collective will to try.
amelius
You should also include who is profiting. Is it the wealthiest 1% or is it the entire population.
delegate
When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market.
They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.
Now compare with life in a big modern city.
I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.
Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only.
I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
enoch_r
For millenia, about 50% of children died before reaching adulthood.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
We work less than our counterparts 150 years ago:
https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
Air pollution has decreased over the past few decades (probably much further, just don't have data).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutan...
We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.
It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
keybored
1870 is not a great span of time when OP is comparing to some idyllic village life unencumbered by urbanism. Late 19th century had many people in a “rat race” in the city, like work twelve hour days six or seven days a week in a factory type of dead-end race.
But there was something that happened later:
> For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.
The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.
ponector
While there was a rat race in the city, typical farmlife was more brutal: work from early childhood and then from dawn to dusk. City dwellers had at least one day off per week, while working with animals is a job without holidays.
keybored
That was not what ourworldindata chose (or had the data for) to showcase.
modeless
The lifestyle you describe is very cheap and you can certainly afford it, if you wanted. There are plenty of rural small towns you could choose from. Why not do it if it's what you think you want?
delegate
You can't escape the rat race even if you hide in a cave these days. Life like that is no longer possible, at least not in Europe.
I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives.
But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?
lucianbr
> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better'
> I happen to like my life in the city
Ahh... you struggle to understand why a life you like is considered better than a life you like less, or dislike?
People probably consider it better for the same reasons you like it. It should be obvious.
modeless
> Life like that is no longer possible
Completely false. In fact it wasn't easier back in the day. It was much harder. People back then just had hard lives.
lo_zamoyski
What are these "rat races"? What makes you think you're doing something worthless? Do you really believe everything is worthless? That's preposterous and nihilistic. If what you are doing is worthless, do something that isn't.
Grandiosity and pride may make you feel unsatisfied, but that's a problem with ego. Our culture is big on empty posturing and hollow spectacle. You don't need to buy into it. Humanity is how it is; perpetually flawed and immature. The main thing you need to escape are your own vices. Your vices are what give foolishness and evil their power over you.
While the secondary purpose of a job is the good it produces, the primary purpose is your growth as a human being. The job, like all other aspects of life, is an occasion to work out your virtue and your humanity in the concrete. Measure your existence according to the objective good of the inner life, not against external things.
Do not try to "immanentize the eschaton". Do not try to locate transcendence in the immanent. That's a major source of much misery. People have an intrinsic yearning for transcendence. When it is misdirected, it results in the hedonistic and ultimately fatal and fruitless hunt for the transcendental within the immanent, of "vertical divinity" within "horizontal creation". Some try to simulate transcendence within the immanent with all sorts of silly gimmicks, but predictably, this always fails. One must locate the transcendence where it actually is; everything is death and superstition. Your job is not the right place to look for it.
bovermyer
Leading a slower existence in harmony with nature and community has its trade-offs.
There are so many things to consider. It's a fascinating topic. For example, if you give up access to restaurants in order to live simply, how does that impact your approach to food in general?
How about losing access to a hospital? What changes do you make to prepare for, or respond to, health crises?
The questions I ask above are from one direction, and only a sample. I think they're demonstrative of the kind of wide context a decision like this has, though.
thewebguyd
> if you give up access to restaurants in order to live simply, how does that impact your approach to food in general?
I think many people would develop a much healthier relationship with food. We live so disconnected from the reality of all the resources and labor it actually takes to bring food to your plate that we've lost appreciation for the interconnected nature of how we live.
Oddly enough, it's the individualist style of home cooking for ourself/only our immediate family that's a departure from the more community-focused lifestyle humans once lived, where cooking and eating involved the entire tribe/community. It was a shared experience.
When people in this thread are nostalgic for a more rural lifestyle or debating rural vs urban, I think that's missing the forest for the trees. What we are really longing for is a sense of community and connection that has been lost. And that community and connection can happen no matter what the actual setting is (urban vs rural). "Where ever you go, there you are."
bovermyer
For me, this is exactly what I'm missing: the community.
If I got stuck in the snow on the farm, I knew there were at least half a dozen people I could call who would come get me out.
tokai
There's even places in Spain or Italy where they will give you the house for free, and possibly even cash to move in. Still with these benefits they are not reversing the decline of the country side.
myrmidon
I'd say that is nowadays almost completely just a direct consequence of general population decline, and not some more specific effect; this just hits rural communities harder because attracting new people is already difficult there (=> most job opportunities are elsewhere), and it is much easier to fall below "viability thresholds" (i.e. too small to sustain a general store) than it is for cities.
I'd argue that the "real" urbanization mostly finished in the 1980s or so, and the "urbanization" we see now is mostly incidental (and happens at lower rates, too).
Tade0
> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into
A population of eight billion, at least three of which live in industrialized regions.
My currently 99yo grandpa was born when there were approximately two billion people. He spent a huge chunk of his childhood running around barefoot.
Whenever he talks about that time I can't help but think this world doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a long time now.
leonidasrup
Running barefoot can feel nice, but in Africa wearing shoes could eliminate significant source of tropical diseases. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/17/h...
ComposedPattern
Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
t-3
That's assuming that city people do the same things as rural people, and the only difference is whether they own a car and a house. City people earn much more money which they spend more freely and use to do more things, which require orders of magnitude more resources, even if they may be slightly more efficient when traveling within city limits (just think about the multiple flights per year every urbanite I know takes, versus the one or two per decade everyone else takes).
MisterTea
I keep hearing this repeated but I have yet to read any proof of it. Might as well be a thoughtless meme.
chocochunks
Detached single family homes use more energy than apartments per resident[1]. You need more sewer pipe, more road, more wiring to service the same number of people living in detached single family homes.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/c&e/pd... (See site energy consumption per household member by housing type on page 2).
bluescrn
It's absolutely the worst place to be in any sort of crisis though, whether it's war, pandemic, rioting, natural disaster.
So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.
And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)
ericmcer
The only justification would be that we are in some liminal space and are living in the confusing period leading up to some tech utopia.
You also can still live in the way your grandparents did. In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city. We are just terrified of uncertainty nowadays. Maybe all the technology and distractions keep us from hitting that tipping point of despair/discomfort that would drive us to take risky actions.
thewebguyd
> In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city
Cheap land is cheap for a reason, even in the middle of nowhere. We aren't in the old days of homesteading. Good chance that cheap land has no utility access and it will cost 10s of thousands to bring it in. Another really good chance you don't own the rights to the water beneath it, and spending $30k+ to dig a well that may not even hit a viable aquifer. The land could be cheap because its rocky, acidic, or maybe its prone to flooding.
What OP is also probably missing is that it's extremely difficult to grow enough calories to sustain a human life for a year. Most "homesteaders" actually still buy most of their calories at the store. Fine so long as your new farm (assuming you even can farm on the cheap land) can turn a profit for you, but now you've just traded one rat race for another.
Point being, the rat race is survival, and there is no escaping it. Happiness has to come from within, moving to the middle of nowhere and starting a farm isn't going to magically make your life better. It will probably actually make it worse.
gzread
I think the city is cool because of the amount of stuff around, even as there's less free space. I think both options should be available.
adrian_b
What you describe also matches exactly my grandparents.
Moreover, I also encounter the same problems in the big city where I work and live.
Hard to be optimistic.
greygoo222
Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.
delegate
The comment was for the article 'Obsession with growth is destroying nature'. Read it. It's not about me personally. In fact, I live a very comfortable life in a beautiful city.
But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another.
What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.
pibaker
> you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle
Revealed preference wins all the time.
See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.
gib444
People from the countryside were forced into cities in Britain as a result of the Enclosure acts, reduced demand for agricultural workers, population rises etc
Revealed preference could just show it was the least bad option in that period
antisthenes
> it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.
2 of these aren't bad things.
1 is a complete non-sequitur
1 is a good recipe for staying active/healthy and non-obese if done in moderation. Farming equipment is an option - you don't have to till 2-3 acres just by hand.
The one thing you neglected to mention (that is a pretty important blocker) is that with farming/country-side living it's pretty hard to leave your kids a legacy outside of leaving them the farm itself, and locking them into the same lifestyle.
Also, hugely increased risks in the 21st century due to global warming.
therealwhytry
simple, boomer brain rot subsidized for the last 50 years via currency debasement that leads our "leaders" to feel it is the only path forward.
that is probably an easy path forward in their mind, as they are on death's door holding the ladder they pulled up behind them.
trgn
boomers didnt want to let go of the welfare state their parents and grandparents had introduced, at the same time they live longer, work less, not nearly had as many kids, and did not effectuate the required productivity growth to offset that.
they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.
emchammer
What welfare state? Do you mean the universal healthcare that they claw away at any cost, like Mitch McConnell onto the podium?
trgn
social security, medicare
SilverElfin
You’re right. Ignore the other comments not recognizing that happiness and health can be had without a constant competition with everyone else. The modern way of life is broken. The old way of lives in many older civilizations are better. We need to stop glorifying our western order and look east.
jeffbee
Depending on how old you are, I might suggest that you were simply not aware of the details of your grandparents' lives at that time. And it just sounds like you have surrounded yourself with assholes in adulthood.
keybored
There’s two hundreds years of social science and experience reports to answer that question.
api
The answer is that most people did not live like what you remember.
For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10.
That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived.
Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing.
But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.
fasterik
This is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature.
Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.
People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week.
Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
epolanski
+1, I think you're spot on.
Albeit I feel like OP was right on something else: his grandparents weren't heavy consumers, but that transcends city vs rural debates.
I see us modern people, except very old folks being extremely heavy consumers.
Sometime I pay attention to my friends and relatives and how much do they consume.
E.g. I spent 5 days with my mother in December at my grandmas and I've noticed that she just bought stuff non-stop, but her metric is money, not "stuff".
So, e.g., she bought a new pillow for my grandma even though my grandma didn't need/want one (she doesn't use it), bought plenty of plastic toys for her own dog, bought a set of new dishes just because the old ones were old, changed her worn phone leather case for a new one, bought plenty of Christmas lights because she didn't want to dig for the old ones she couldn't quickly find, bought some kind of table hook for purses for herself and her friends, etc, etc.
At the end of the week she didn't even spend 250 euros (her metric), so she doesn't realizes, yet, the amount of borderline useless stuff she bought was major and her ecological impact quite huge, especially for how little to none the payoff or utility is.
I had colleagues in my office, back when I was in the office, that just had Amazon packages coming every single day...And here's a smartphone holder, here's some gadget that keeps your mouse cord, here's a yet a new pedal for the drums, here's a set of pens, here's a rubber duck to talk to when debugging, etc, etc.
I mean, I have even a difficult time pointing out that there's something wrong with any of those items per se in isolation, but when it's a lifestyle of non-stop consistent consumerism I think the trend is worrying.
There's so many things that are so cheap nowadays that it's hard to say "why not?", yet they feed into this endless life style that's toxic for the planet but feeds this neverending more more and more.
joquarky
Chuck Palahniuk has a few words on this.
627467
> Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
Cities are all the things you describe, including the myopic perspective and the inflexibility on display in this quote.
And thats why city states - which is what effectively those you describe are - eventually collapse into "dark ages" and future generation of people can't understand why
jeffbee
Yeah, but unfortunately false nostalgia for subsistence farming is widespread and has traction in the discourse. I guess it's probably because every American who ever suffered from that lifestyle is dead, in other words the same reason that it is now increasingly popular to die from measles.
In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".
bovermyer
Farming is harder than people who haven't done it think, and surviving on the production of only your family's property is really, really hard. Source: I grew up in very rural areas, and I've seen what it entails. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression in a farming community on a homestead.
However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.
It's possible to put a little effort into gardening, share with your community, and massively reduce the overall cost of food while still having free time.
interiorchurch
> However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.
The gradient is where you start to consume a lot of carbon unnecessarily.
api
It’s an extremely privileged kind of nostalgia. Only the wealthy can romanticize poverty.
The solution to nostalgia for farming is for people to try it.
I used to live in Asheville NC years ago. There were a lot of hippie back to the land types that came there to find themselves. It’s that kind of place. Sometimes they’d decide to become farmers. This usually lasted at best one year. Sometimes it lasted weeks.
jeffbee
There's a book about being the child of back-to-the-land hippies called "Against the Country" that I enjoyed and recommend to all who might be tempted.
api
Some of the groups around Asheville were "eco villages" that could get rather culty, including the kinds of high control abuses that occur in cults. All groups weren't like this but I recall hearing some crazy stories involving shaming people into giving money to the group (while the higher ups are "more equal" than everyone else) and sexual exploitation.
There was one case where the group leader/organizer ran away with a bunch of cash, and one or two people tried to sue but they'd set up some kind of shell company structure and had conned people into signing things that made it hard to sue or press criminal charges. I think they also left the other members on the hook for a property lease, since the things they'd been conned into signing did that too. It looked a lot like an explicit long con targeting the hippie trust fund kids that would come around. Sex abuse too apparently.
I heard more than one story that mentioned members of the Hells Angels, at least allegedly.
This is another aspect of small insular communities in the good old days that the trads and anarcho-primitivists (left-trads) don't talk about. It still happens in small communities today, but a lot less due to the presence of larger scale nation states with laws and law enforcement. If the sheriff in your tiny rural town rapes you, you could try to bring charges at the state level or at least sue. Worst case you can move, and with a global money system you can sell your home and take the cash with you. Without that larger context, there is no recourse. If your local tribal chief, town sheriff, or cult leader wants to take your stuff, pressure you into polygamy, or rape your kids, there's nothing you can do about it. Back to nature!
tigerlily
> eat 20 different types of cuisine
The city I live in, this can be 20 different variations on onions and garlic, and cabbage passes as salad.
delegate
But you do realize that all the positives are mostly hedonistic ?
Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.
I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.
All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.
We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.
bryanlarsen
Sure, the positives for urban life are hedonistic. The point is that the positives for rural life are also hedonistic, just less recognizably so.
jeffbee
Don't project the emptiness of your existence on the rest of us. Cities are the only reason we have orchestras and ballets, vibrant sports leagues, and other things central to family life. I do not want my kids to have to live in a "village" too small to field a brass quintet.
ghurtado
> Don't project the emptiness of your existence
The irony of such an unnecessarily hostile opening line is ... Absolute cinema
(It's ok if you don't get it, Jeff. This comment is for other people)
gib444
> but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
This is so so true
Many villages in England it takes min 2 generations to begin being accepted as a proper local
casey2
That's only because cities outsource their carbon intensive activities. There is no "divide" here. It's one planet and focusing on the wrong categories has destroyed your ability to reason.
fasterik
That's simply not true. The per capita emissions account for things that are produced outside of cities like food. The primary sources of emissions from individual human activities are food, energy production, and transportation. High density areas are more efficient at providing people's heating and transportation needs. As far as I know, people in cities don't eat more food than people in other areas, if you control for income/standard of living.
chocochunks
It's not only because cities outsource carbon intensive activities. Sure, there's some of that with farming, mining, etc. that must be done elsewhere. But there's also lots of savings from things like residents walking/biking/using public transit instead of driving, living in more efficient apartments, etc. The suburbs are pretty wasteful, they don't generate anything unique and they just waste more resources.
t-3
Suburbs are still mostly urban, it's right there in the name. Rural != suburban.
greygoo222
As someone who is sensitive to noise, rural areas bother me far more than urban ones. Traffic is low-frequency and only rarely annoying, but the few times I have lived in rural areas or gone camping, I have been woken up repeatedly by the horrific screeching of birds. Louder, shriller, less predictable than any city noise.
There are birds in cities too, and they are annoying, but they are thankfully drowned out by the cars.
lich_king
[flagged]
ghurtado
> If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world.
Could you break down the logic that leads you to this conclusion?
Im sure it's deeper than "if cities disappeared right now, a lot of people would disappear with them"
lich_king
Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accommodate 8 billion is that the majority of them live in high-density settlements and that food is grown on an industrial scale elsewhere.
izzydata
This is obviously not a reversible trend. People having close proximity to one another, creating economies of scale where everyone does what they are best at instead of everyone doing everything for themselves is what allows big cities to be possible.
I'm sure all of this was inevitable as there likely hasn't ever been a time where humans were not getting together to form communities when it was beneficial to do so.
t0bia_s
So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?
You don't need to. Fertility rate per woman in wealthy countries decreases every year.
Growth is natural, overconsumption is not.
ishouldstayaway
> Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children?
Oh give me a break. Developed countries have had below-replacement fertility rates for decades.
If your goal is to reduce birth rates, we do the things that we already know do that naturally: comprehensive, fact-based sex ed; cheap and easy access to contraceptives; social safety nets and support; etc etc etc.
It's not a mystery and it's not even difficult. You don't need to jump to straight to abhorrent crimes against humanity.
philipallstar
> European Union members have signed off on a report that warns focusing on unchecked economic growth is contributing to the destruction of global biodiversity
It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.
ZenoArrow
> It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.
All of them.
You can see recent stats (from 2025) on GDP growth here, all the handful of countries with negative growth are outside the EU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
You may be confusing fast growth with unchecked growth. If you see sustained YoY growth of a couple of percent this can quickly accelerate over many years. For example, 2% growth means doubling the size in 35 years. This has a notable impact on the natural world, as the economic system is linked to our material reality.
creddit
If you're going to quibble about OP's implied definition of "unchecked economic growth", then you should at least provide a better one that isn't just "economic growth".
ZenoArrow
The "unchecked" in unchecked economic growth just refers to the fact that no one is applying the brakes to this growth, i.e. it's being allowed to continue uninterrupted. This is only a problem when you understand the downsides of continuing with business as usual (mainly linked to the damage to the natural world).
pas
growth especially in the EU pretty much decoupled from environmental load
graemep
According to your link the EU's growth rate is just 0.7% so only 25% growth in 35 years, and some of that will come from things that have little or no impact on nature, or reduce the impact on nature. For example, replacing a coal power plant with solar adds to GDP but reduces pollution.
ZenoArrow
> reduce the impact on nature
Less bad is not the same as good. For example, electricity from solar panels is less bad than electricity from fossil fuels but there's considerable disruption to the natural world to produce them, not least of which involves mining for raw materials. In the same vein, we're nowhere near reducing pollution to safe levels or even reducing our overall pollution, all we've managed so far is a reduction in the rate of growth of fossil fuel use, it's still going up YoY.
pas
while all true the population will shrink in less than a hundred years, consumption patterns are changing as economic surplus gets used to increase efficiency (from electric cars to simply having good insulation and a FIR camera to check, and so on), and hopefully land use patterns will also change (as lab-grown meat and other alternative proteins help to transition to a less cruel way to get meat, and that will require a lot less land to grow feed for animals)
sure, no guarantee that we cannot (and won't) fuck it up, but it's not hopeless
eliaspro
It's not so much about which countries actually grow that much right now, but which mindset underpins the political and medial discourse, trying to get those countries "back on track for continuous growth" or whether there's some realization, that infinite growth as fundamental principle just isn't what we all should be aiming for anymore.
anon84873628
GDP or net trade won't tell the important part of the story here. Does the EU import any soy, sugar, coffee, cacao, beef, minerals, etc? Then it is at least contributing to the development pressure on sensitive ecosystems.
To be fair, the EUDR is at least an attempt to begin addressing this problem, though it was poorly executed and has been delayed.
boringg
They already destroyed all of their forest natural resources a long time ago. Maybe they are trying to warn north america of their own mistakes.
s_dev
This breaks my heart about Ireland. I concede it's not possible to reforest the entire Ireland and have a competitive dairy and beef industry but restoring some of our wetlands and forests should be a goal that's taken seriously. We're at the point of getting 'cheap' talk from politicians.
Ireland has the climate to support the entire island covered in Atlantic rain-forests. People already agree Ireland is a pretty country, can you imagine how glorious it would be to have rolling hills covered in trees.
selectodude
We stopped deforesting the US in 1920. We have more forest here than we did 100 years ago.
Arubis
We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.
h2zizzle
Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling.
There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.
gnerd00
Actual facts on the ground do not fit neatly into a one-liner, especially stable forests; this sentence is meant as a one-liner to win bar arguments.
source: current graduate research papers in forestry
0xffff2
Could you maybe give us the 4-5 liner version then?
Arubis
Certainly that's not how the Europeans started out interacting with north America's natural resource. Mostly they treated it like the US does oil deposits now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Policy
boringg
Are you trying to argue that Europe hasn't decimated their forests?
pfdietz
Europe's tree cover is increasing.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
boringg
Tree cover != forests. That is movement in the right direction though!
pfdietz
Ah, the No True Scotch Pine argument.
1718627440
Didn't that already happen in the middle ages?
carlosjobim
Northern Europe has been completely reforested, and has a forest cover which is larger than ever before. Because of the switch from wood heating to electric heating. Forest products remain one of the largest exports.
As for central Europe, yes they need to reforest their own countries before they go flying all around the world screaming about the Amazon, while drinking the finest champagne.
awongh
The lie of Europe is that they get to launder their environmental and humanitarian responsibility through other countries. If not for their amazing growth then for the maintenance of their current lifestyles.
Sometimes just through simply getting raw materials and finished goods from the third world or china in the open market, then still claim to be "green".
Or also directly from neighbors; Looking the other way when buying Russian natural gas, or Germany buying nuclear energy from France, etc.
Or the worst, paying Libya to sweep their refugee problems under the rug.
627467
You forgot to mention the part where EU model is to export demographic deficit which is "purchased" by the young generations of other countries stiffling their growth and displacing the dwindling younger european generations.
"Dont buy cheap tshirts from bangladesh just bring its youth in" is apparently morally superior model
DemocracyFTW2
Sparing no expense to slam the EU for 'lagging behind' whenever possible, right?
The quoted phrase does not say Europe or parts of it are experiencing unchecked economic growth, it "warns [that] [a focus on] unchecked economic growth" is problematic, wherever it is the case.
kruffalon
It would be nice if this meant anything.
My old cynic, grumpy mind can't see this as anything but virtue signaling. I would be overjoyed to be wrong.
One corner stone of the EU is the 4 freedoms[0] that among other things denies public institutions the ability to look at anything besides the monetary cost when deciding who to contract for anything.
And as JIT[1] no longer only applies to goods but also to people noone has people working for them anymore, but contract everything out.
Obviously I haven't read the report/document so maybe there are some political steps that the signees are binding themselves to take towards a non-growth-at-all-cost system but I really doubt it.
-----
yoyohello13
You know? These days I actually prefer virtue signalling to the trend of not having any virtues at all and being proud of it.
JoelMcCracken
I do think there are absolutely instances of people virtue signaling.
But, after observing society over the last few years, I've come to think that people who _whine_ about virtue signaling are so full of vice that they cannot possibly believe someone _else_ isn't also as base as they are.
Its all such a shame. It seems like society has no ability to have reasonable, sensible conversation. I really wonder how the enlightenment even _happened_.
rTX5CMRXIfFG
Do you know that about everyone who is virtue signalling, or are you just assuming that to be a blanket truth about everyone? I don’t think you can ever know the extent to which someone is actually trying, even if imperfect because some things just aren’t within individual control.
kruffalon
Very good point!
I agree, you're absolutely right.
I'm just kind of old, tired, grumpy and sad about the state of the world and my low capacity to influence the general direction or even small local things.
lstodd
At least accepting that one lacks virtue is intellectually honest and saves resources otherwise wasted on deceitful proclamations of nonexistent and imaginary virtues. It's not like anything was meant to be done either way.
yoyohello13
Pretending to be good at least may influence/shame other people in to actually being good. When everyone is just rolling around in the muck there is no incentive to be better.
Schmerika
> When everyone is just rolling around in the muck there is no incentive to be better.
There have been many celebrated and uncelebrated people throughout history, known for their tremendous insight and wisdom, who all say the same thing about virtue: It's better, by far, to be a good person with fuck-all than a pos with billions.
* "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" - JC
* "The one who lives a hundred years immoral and uncontrolled is not worth as much as one who lives a single day virtuous and meditative." - Buddha
* "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor" - Seneca
* "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself." - Marcus Aurelius
Etc. And that timeless fact doesn't change no matter where or when or who you are; or how many people are "rolling around in the muck".
It's not even an especially hidden fact. It's awful sad that grown-ass adults can look at people like Musk or Gates or Trump or the Manosphere shitlings and think, wow, those look like happy content people.
slibhb
Degrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it.
One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.
The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.
scoofy
Economic growth just means "providing food, homes, and jobs to people who are alive."
The degrowthers also presume that growth requires some sort of nasty fuel source. Almost some sort of religiosity that believes that anything good must also create some effectively equal amount of bad. Anyone who cares about solar knows that a solar-battery future is effectively 99% recyclable.
M95D
Earth is limited. Resources are limited. You can't recycle to infinity. Each time you recycle something, the material recovered is worse than before. Steel is weaker, plastic has impurities and is not clear/transparent, paper isn't white and it contaminates the printers with dust, etc. To keep maintaining quality, fresh material must always be added to the recycled one. Everything we dig out of the Earth is non-renewable. (not in the next million years or so...)
The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources. No more oil, no more uranium, no more iron, no more copper, no more lithium. If we don't degrow voluntarily, then we degrow involuntarily and that's usually sudden and it's called a crash. With no resources, what comes next is dark ages, very dark and loooong dark ages this time. Without steel it we'll go back stone age most probably. I won't live to see it, our children won't live to see it, but unless we all nuke each other over some oil fields or something, someone will live to see it.
Degrowth will extend our present good times. Growth will shorten it.
scoofy
>You can't recycle to infinity.
The lifespan of the earth is not infinite, pretending it is is foolish. We have about 5 billion years on earth before it will be consumed by the sun. Presuming an infinite earth creates a very obvious, simple, and wrong conclusion about something that is actually very difficult problem.
>The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources.
The point of renewable resources -- like solar -- is exactly that they are renewable or effectively infinite.
M95D
Continue your argument. Don't stop at solar. In the next 5 billion years we must leave. How do you propose we do that if we focus on fast fashion and changing cars every 2 years?
scoofy
I’m skeptical how much those things are contributing to the end of society. My main concern is GHGs, after that, these behaviors are wasteful, yes, but the vast majority of the limited resources can be recaptured.
rTX5CMRXIfFG
You’re not really addressing the obvious though: that at the rate that we are consuming and polluting the earth, we could be pushing ourselves into extinction faster than the sun could just naturally swallow up the earth. I don’t think anyone is debating this eventual death of our star, but our astronomers would very much like to live long enough for us to find another home planet and develop the technology to get there.
scoofy
I mean, I’m advocating for renewable resources… that doesn’t me arbitrarily stopping consumption. It means reorienting consumption to being responsible.
Mechanized farming, for example, prevents famine because it’s wildly more efficient than subsistence farming. Arbitrary “degrowth” does not address the fact that consumption isn’t arbitrary.
M95D
Most consumption is arbitrary.
ericmcer
What are we trying to achieve as a species?
If we can't answer that question then we can't really judge our actions effectively. If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos. All of reality is just entropy and mindless cruelty except for humanity.
Viewed in that lens we almost have a duty to expand before some cosmic event obliterates us. Granted we are expanding in a moronic way and our goal seems to be to make plastic trash for people to mindlessly run through, but still, It would be nice if politicians occasionally stepped back from the narrow view and thought about what was at stake.
jstanley
> What are we trying to achieve as a species?
How often can a group of even 3 people come up with one thing that they're trying to achieve? You're not going to get consensus on what the goal is for humanity.
> If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos.
That doesn't follow at all!
And even if it did, why stop at the species level? If humanity being the most intelligent species makes humanity the only source of order, does Terence Tao being the most intelligent human make Terence Tao the only source of order?
akramachamarei
> why stop at the species level?
The stop isn't made at the species level, but at the intelligence gap. The gap between Tao and a random uneducated, malnourished human is nothing compared to that between the latter and any other animal known to science, or of course to the stones and flame occupying the rest of space.
rTX5CMRXIfFG
Well, any group of 3 people would easily agree on one thing: that they are all just trying to survive. Now, if only what we’re doing to nature is actually killing us…
rapht
That is the right question to ask. My temptation is to respond "Obsession with nature is destroying humanity's prospects." Now what?
Jordan-117
What prospects does humanity have without nature, exactly? Even ignoring the moral and aesthetic value, it underpins not just the economy but the ability to survive on this planet. If the biosphere collapses then civilization will rapidly follow.
pjmlp
Of course, the MBAs pushing for growth missed on physics class that it is impossible for everyone to growth expontentially.
graemep
Maybe they know about Malthus saying the same thing and being proven wrong?
We have had millennia of exponential growth. Slower in the past, and positive over the long term for a long time (since the bronze age collapse at a global level?).
Technological advance allows growth that is far higher than increases in resource usage. We often do the same thing on far lower resources than it used to take - sometimes far better.
pjmlp
The people at the layoffs side when growth doesn't meet the exponential quarter targets, or destroyed villages to build a few hotel chains that deplet water banks for their golf fields, haven't noticed it.
graemep
A real problem, but a different one. Bad decisions, bad government, bad distribution of resources. It does not alter the underlying trend which is better for the vast majority of people.
pjmlp
Only when that vast majority is synonymous with the upper class driving their Ferraris into work, or heli-taxis.
graemep
Almost everywhere in the world the standard of living of the average person is far higher than it was a hundred years ago, when it was far higher than it was 500 years ago, when it was far higher than it was a thousand years ago.
pjmlp
Thankfully, until it got messed up with MBA folks destroying society, and the planet, with late stage capitalism to meet those quarter targets.
Aurornis
> impossible for everyone to growth expontentially.
Where is the population growing exponentially?
pjmlp
What have MBAs to do with population?
canadiantim
Or biology class to learn that resources grow linearly (arithmetically) but populations grow geometrically (exponentially). So it is possible for everyone to grow exponentially, it's just not sustainable and generally leads to mass famine, disease or war.
Aurornis
Yet population growth is slowing while our access to resources is growing rapidly.
Human population growth is not exponential. That’s so obvious that it’s hard to take anything about this argument seriously.
Biology isn’t a good proxy for society-scale economic changes.
disconcision
we had nearly 2 centuries of roughly exponential growth. ended in the 60s but not everyone got the memo
pfdietz
Is "roughly exponential growth" being used as a synonym for "growth"?
Exponential is used as a scare word. It's not just growth, it's exponential growth! Run and scream in fright! Because if you don't do what I say you must do, we are exponentially doomed. Dooooomed!
Aurornis
I've done enough computer science work to be afraid of exponential growth.
disconcision
i can't speak for everyone, but in the above assertion am using 'roughly exponential' to mean that world population between say 1880 and 1960 followed a curve that is, roughly, exponential, in the technical sense. much of the discourse 50 years ago, e.g. the population bomb, was predicated on this observation.
pfdietz
Rough is doing heavy lifting there, so much so that I suggest it doesn't have any meaning except to say the population was growing. The growth from 1980 to 1960 certainly was not exponential: the percentage growth per year was all over the place, varying on the same time scale as the doubling time (or even faster).
https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...
I suspect it's not a coincidence that the population bomb scare occurred right after the collapse of European colonialism, although teasing out the causation could be interesting.
tehjoker
This is the malthusian argument, and in a vacuum it sounds right but didn’t account for decreasing family size with wealth and the ability of the economy to just barely eke out something like a percent or two of surplus.
In China, the one child policy, for better or worse, was instituted to ensure that gains from industrialization were not eaten up immediately, leaving no surplus for quality of life and reinvestment.
malthus had a point but it is not destiny and the real world reflects that. his was an avoidable trap
now if we can gain control over capitalism we can save the earth
MyHonestOpinon
we can save our children/grandchildren from a lot of pain an suffering. The earth will be here long after we are gone.
zelphirkalt
MBA think: This is my job. All good, as long as _we_ have it good.
boxed
Obviously it's an S curve yes, but we are so far from living in an Ian M. Banks Culture novel that we don't have to worry for probably a million years. Anti-growth people are ideologues with bad imagination and some pseudo-religious hate of humanity driving their political trend.
GolfPopper
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair
Gagarin1917
MBA’s have a goal for growth.
That doesn’t mean it will happen.
Lots of companies fail or shrink.
Also, it’s not an MBA/capitalism thing. Every socialist leader throughout history promised more growth, they just thought it should be more equitable. Ever heard of Five Year Plans? They’re still going on in places around the world.
Having a goal for growth is a global phenomenon across all economic systems. If you feel like this is a problem, then it’s much larger than any one job type or even any one economic system.
pjmlp
Indeed, and when it doesn't happen, the others pay for their failure, while they get a bonus package.
paganel
The opposite of what you’re saying was considered ludicrous and conspiracy theory-like until not long ago on forums like this one or on Reddit. Just go to almost any post involving Hans Rosling (especially just pre-2016, post-GFC but pre-Trump) and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Arubis
Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ (https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses.
Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read.
But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
pfdietz
Back when LtG came out, there was a study of the limits imposed by resource availability. The conclusion was that, to first approximation, the only resource that we had to worry about was energy. Fossil fuels would have to go, but everything else was either available in effectively unlimited amounts or could be substituted with things that were. An example of the latter was mercury -- effectively all previous uses have been replaced with better substitutes (because of toxicity issues, not shortage of the element.)
Pollution also has to be worried about, but there's nothing in a non-fossil fuel powered world that would prevent the current world population from enjoying prosperity indefinitely. There are ultimate limits to energy use on Earth from direct thermal pollution but the world could enjoy US levels of wealth without great trouble.
The exponential process one should be most concerned about today is exponential decline in population.
projektfu
When is the world population expected to decline? Or are you talking about a specific country?
layer8
Before the end of the century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
pfdietz
I'm talking about the entire world.
Almost everywhere, the total fertility rate is well below replacement (which is around 2.1). UN estimates that say global population will peak around 2084; they assume global TFR increases back to 1.6, but there is no evidence for this assumption, so global population will likely peak sooner. Every first world country will be in population decline by 2050; some already are.
There's something about global civilization that's acting like a kind of human pesticide. People just aren't having kids, and this is getting worse, not better.
projektfu
So it seems there is a median projection of mild decline way in the future. There are also reasonably probable scenarios that show no decline, or more precipitous decline. However, they generally agree that there will be at least 1 billion more people in the world, most likely 2 billion, and possibly more.
What is the real risk of the Earth eventually going back toward having 8 billion people after reaching 10 billion? Why is this "the exponential process one should be most concerned about today"?
pfdietz
The real risk is the TFR never rises and population drops until complex society cannot be maintained. Or perhaps some weird minority with higher TFR takes over the world, what I call the "Amish Scenario".
projektfu
Are you talking mainly about demographics? Like not enough working age people and too many older people?
whimsicalism
about 50-60 years iirc
myrmidon
Looking at this somewhat critically, did the predictions not turn out to be completely incorrect?
Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve.
In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions.
Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper.
I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition.
But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).
tsoukase
This ship has sailed. The environment is destined to be destroyed sooner or later. It's just not at this generation so hardly anybody in charge is worried. Except the growth problem that cannot be solved, inequality is another fact. Sure I pollute with my yearly 10MWh of home heating + 10 for my car, but someone pollutes in multiple times that with his yacht and jet. Let's start by converting him before we all revert back to middle ages.
bluescrn
May not be a problem if the trend continues that wealthy/high-consumption cultures choose to stop reproducing?
TulliusCicero
Birth rates are dropping across the board. It's not just the wealthy countries.
Zigurd
In the abstract we have to pick one crisis or the other, but the real world is messy. Global warming has momentum, and so does population despite what look like reliable projections of population decline in many places. In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
bojan
> In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
See William Gibson's concept of Jackpot.
modo_mario
That started in my country 75 years ago.
Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
TulliusCicero
> Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
That'll only be feasible for so long, since birth rates are dropping pretty much everywhere.
ZenoArrow
Not really. If economic activity with a material basis increases faster than the reproduction rate decreases, you'll still see an overall increase in resource extraction.
morgengold
I do not know how policymakers should act on that if poor people want to consume like the rich ones and rich people do not want to give up even an inch of their wealth.
alexfromapex
I would argue that actually political corruption is destroying nature because there would not be an obsession with growth if executives did not have so much leverage to make workers desperate for jobs because they're so underpaid.
lanfeust6
This ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption.
By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make it impossible for developing countries to improve their quality of life. People aren't immigrating to the U.S. for the healthcare. We can easily qualify why it represents a "better life": houses, vehicles, abundance of food, goods and conveniences, public infrastructure and services, etc.
Global population growth rate for it's part is poised to stagnate. There's no question of "infinite growth", nor is it relied upon.
ch4s3
These arguments all fell like they're warning that we'll all be drowning in horse manure and running out of guano in 5 years. Likening economic growth to the growth of organisms in a petri dish is the wrong model entirely. We are all the time finding new uses for things and moving on from old ways of powering society. It on;y looks static if you're quite myopic.
lm28469
Meanwhile we observe a 75% collapse of wildlife world wide since 1970, but yeah sure we are constantly finding new "things"! Amazing!
ch4s3
Most of this is in developing nations where people are expanding agriculture into wild areas rather than implementing innovations in more intensive agriculture. Developed nations are currently increasing forest cover and wild land. You're demonstrating the EXACT myopia I'm referring to.
lm28469
Ah, we're holding it wrong I guess. It starts to sound a lot like the very strong "we never really actually tried real communism" argument.
ch4s3
Not at all. I'm arguing that the deployment of new processes and technology is uneven and takes time to permeate the global economy. You can see the progress in a lot of places, it's just not everywhere yet. Many countries are still operating the mid 20th century tech stack, or in many cases earlier iterations. There's a lot of work that could be done on clear land registries for example that would alleviate a lot of deforestation. Slash and burn agriculture doesn't happen in developed economies, and is a solvable problem.
lm28469
I earn less than my grandparents adjusted for inflation (they quit school at 18, I have a master's degree in computer science), my peers can't afford housing anymore, people don't have kids because it's too expensive, I'm expected to retire 10+ years later than them too, and that's in western Europe where we got plenty of this "innovation" and "technology", weekly working hours are expected to go up, public services are decreasing in quality.
So what gives? Where is all the good stuff? Is it this new macbook I can buy for 599?
ch4s3
Yeah European welfare states fucked up by pinning retirement payouts to an assumption of a growing labor force, and doubly fucked up by shackling their energy needs to Russian gas. What you have in Europe are sclerotic states with declining capacity. Vote better.
jagged-chisel
> We are all the time finding new uses for things and moving on from old ways of powering society.
Can you provide some examples? With the "all the time" phrasing, something recent would be preferred. All I see for a couple decades is new schemes to further enrich those with money at the expense of those without money.
ch4s3
Sure, we're rapidly expanding battery technology alongside solar and wind which changes the calculus with respect to the externalities of power generation. Many industrial processes have moved from coal to LNG which is safer/cleaner to produce and creates less air pollution and emits less CO2 when burned.
As I mentioned in another comment, agriculture has become incredibly efficient in the broader west and China. We grow far more on far less land and this has involved all sort of innovations. New biotech promises even more gains. We're on the cusp of cereal crops being engineered to fix nitrogen which would dramatically reduce fertilizer use.
Mass timber is another cool example.
simgt
People are emigrating to the U.S because of decades of soft power and propaganda, and mostly to make money to send to their families or head back after a couple years.
On all the metrics that actually matter to quality of life (ie. not sqm of mowed grass per person or avg height of SUV bonnet), the EU rates higher than the US.
lanfeust6
Remind me, what's money for again?
If people cared about mere subsistence, they wouldn't move to the U.S. They like everything that comes with greater income. You can't divorce that from metrics tracking quality of life.
Europe has a better safety net, but basically anywhere in the West is an improvement over their origin countries for the most part. And consider: the first choice for those interested in North America is not Canada, it's the U.S. The earning potential is higher, and immigrants work hard. They mostly don't care that there's a lesser social safety net.
lm28469
> see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution
I love how people keep using the "it was worse during the industrial evolution" argument as a gotcha for every environmental and societal issues... no shit my dude, really? even in the middle of the "dark ages" we didn't send 8 years old kids down mines for 10+ hours a day or make people work 12 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week... WW2 era Poland was literally a better place to live in than England during the industrial revolution
They had 0 smog and 0 pollution before all these innovations, we had 200 years of insane innovations and smog/pollution is now consistently in the top 5 leading causes of deaths every single year, you scaled it from like 5 cities in England to the entire planet
greygoo222
Pollution is not in the "top 5 leading causes of death" unless you count all deaths caused by diseases that are exacerbated by pollution as caused by pollution.
lanfeust6
> I love how people keep using the "it was worse during the industrial evolution" argument as a gotcha for every environmental and societal issue
Maybe you think I'm saying something I'm not.
> They had 0 smog and 0 pollution before all these innovations
That's not true. Man-made ecological disasters go back a long ways, but they did not scale up as much until the population growth exploded following the invention of ammonia and the industrial revolution. Until then, 80% of people worked the land. If you understand the reasons behind the deadly plagues that decimated numbers in middle-age Europe, it was clearly not pollution-free.
With technological progress, and policy, total emissions are falling in developed countries despite growing population. They were still growing rapidly in China until recent years where fossil fuel use has plateaued.
Now emissions are growing because other East Asian countries are getting rich, e.g. India, Vietnam. Fortunately they are not missing a beat taking advantage of renewables either.
analog8374
To be fair, nature has an obsession with growth too.
One solution to our social maladies is a kind totalitarian dictator with total surveillance.
Geee
Is this a joke? Growth is caused by consumer demand, and answering to it in the best way possible. It's not an 'obsession' of the capitalist businesses or countries. Capitalism is simply an algorithm which tries to allocate resources such that a growing demand can be answered, and that everyone has their needs satisfied.
There are plenty of people who don't have enough food, enough housing, or other basic needs. The only way to solve this is growth. People in developing countries upgrading their lifestyle to modern standards is a huge source of growth. Are you saying that all these people should stop their obsession with growth?
Edit:
I've got to add that it's true that economic policies of countries are 'obsessed' with GDP growth. It's a problem of central planning, not markets.
Inflationary monetary policies are specifically designed to accelerate consumption, and as a consequence a lot of economic activity is allocated serving this fake demand, resulting in cancerous growth, i.e. consumption for the sake of consumption, while in real terms people are poorer than before.
gnarlouse
I think the intention here is to capture and spend more time respecting the negative externalities that are associated with growth.
Geee
Sure, externalities should be priced somehow, and this is the core problem, but demanding or forcing people to limit consumption is wrong.
gnarlouse
I mean, doesn't that fall out of pricing externalities sort of naturally? What's the difference if you're told all new cars cost $500k, vs being told not to buy a new car? You can't reasonably afford it either way.
Geee
Yes, prices would limit consumption of stuff that has externalities priced in, but also push producers to reduce their externalities, if they're littering the world with poisons etc. It's not $500K, but something reasonable like $5K (for cars) which reduces demand.
keybored
Businesses need, or at the very least strongly want, to increase profits. There’s not like there’s any end to that supposed algorithm. And it gets harder and harder as time goes on.
And as usual the cart is put before the horse. Businesses just don’t answer to consumer demand. They very strongly set the terms for it. And if consumer demands go down? That’s what the marketing industry is for. To create new demands.
Some Hank Hill person isn’t the one who designed e.g. America to be car dependent. The car lobby did. But typically Hank Hill gets blamed when he chooses to live two hours from his workplace because home prices are too high, taking the bus takes twice as long and train does not exist so he uses a car to commute, and he consumes beer in his freetime to unwind from the job he chooses to work at, and he isn’t great at recycling. (This might have deviated a little from the real-life Hank Hill.)
Geee
A lot of growth activity in businesses is zero sum, if it isn't increasing the efficiency of production. Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
Total productivity of the world is number_of_people * productivity_of_human. There's growth whenever these terms grow. People want to produce at least as much as they want to consume. So, growth is caused by more people being born, or people adopting more efficient methods of production, up to a limit where their all needs are met.
keybored
> Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
I would never suggest ex nihilo demand. There’s always some seed.[1]
Women back in the day didn’t smoke. Untapped market. A marketing campaign convinced a lot of women that smoking was something that liberated women did.
I’d say convincing people that replacing clean air with carginogenic fumes gets pretty close to a manufactured want.
[1] For cigarettes: maybe stress relief from nicotine.
malka1986
too late anyway.
good luck to all of you.
baggy_trough
Growth is what makes us rich enough to afford expensive environmental mitigation.
Tepix
It hasn't worked with nuclear waste, has it?
It's not working for corals either. The rest of them will be dead in 10 or 15 years. And they are the ecosystem for 25% of the Ocean's species.
When is this expensive environmental mitigation going to turn the tide around?
boxed
> It hasn't worked with nuclear waste, has it?
You mean the nuclear waste that we banned companies from using as nuclear fuel for modern reactors? I think you will find that regulation actually stopped us from solving this problem.
> It's not working for corals either.
Imagine if we had much more nuclear power so we didn't produce enormous amounts of CO2! The corals would be in a much better position.
The "environmental movement" has been an anti-nuclear power movement that doesn't care about the environment since the beginning sadly. They've managed to harm the environment more than all nuclear accidents by several orders of magnitude.
pfdietz
> You mean the nuclear waste that we banned companies from using as nuclear fuel for modern reactors?
There is no need to ban this because it (and reprocessing in general) is economically idiotic. It would be like saying government bans prevent companies from setting money on fire.
Dry cask storage is a quite acceptable and economical way to deal with nuclear waste. The demand that something permanent be done immediately reflects a desire to use waste as a lever against nuclear energy. Nuclear fans would do well not to fall into this trap and think immediate reprocessing is necessary or desirable.
boxed
Sure, it's fine, but we've ALSO effectively banned research into reactor types that use "nuclear waste" as fuel. In Sweden it's not even effectively, we had laws on the books until quite recently that banned nuclear research.
pfdietz
> effectively banned
This simply isn't true. Not as much may have been invested in said research, but that's more a reflection of the lack of a business case for such things. They are not a magical panacea to all of nuclear's woes.
Your logic reminds me of people who confuse consumer preference with boycotts.
triceratops
Growth is also why we need expensive environmental mitigation.
On balance I still like growth and would rather have it than not. But let's be honest about it.
everdrive
"Bacterial obsession with growth is destroying the ecosystem in the petri dish, scientists warn."
pfdietz
This sort of analogy should have died with Paul Ehrlich.
mcs5280
Yes, but we have to think of the shareholders
pfdietz
Countries that fail to compete trying to hold back the winners.
thewebguyd
That attitude is exactly what they are warning about, and is what is going to destroy us all.
triceratops
Compare the forest cover of Haiti and the Dominican Republic - two countries on the same island. Then compare their GDPs, life expectancy, infant mortality and any other indicator of economic and social wellness.
glemmaPaul
Who are the winners if we are going to "produce" ourselves into abyss?
streetfighter64
Destroying the environment more efficiently is the opposite of being a winner. Are laws against scamming and dealing drugs also "holding back the winners"? I mean, scammers and drug dealers do get rich, so if that's all that matters to you I guess they're winners.
thawawaycold
Asinine comments such at these is the reason why we have countries having to sound an alarm in the first place
I don't have any deep background in econ, but do we not need to switch from talking about GDP to talking about a version of Net Domestic Product where "net" includes:
- changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest)
- amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from other activity (e.g. if my pollution gets into your groundwater, you paying to remediate the pollution isn't "value created")
I.e. growth of _actual net value_ still sounds like a good thing to pursue but we let our politicians run around doing anything to maximize GDP without talking about what the "gross" is hiding.