So I read the Jesse Ausubel essay that apparently inspired this, and while I'm tempted to dismiss it all as utter unsupported horseshit, that would be unsupported as well. The most I can say that is defensible is that I'm suspicious of it, and here are some random thoughts about reasons why, in no particular order:
It could be clearer throughout, whether he's talking per capita or overall.
Data is selective and ignores resource utilization shifts. Example: In the 1940s crop acreage decoupled from crop yield, he says. Great! Instead it coupled to petroleum and energy, he doesn't say. American farms today are in the business of converting fossil fuels to food. For example, the 1940s are when when cheap internal-combustion tractors started being mass-produced, thanks to all that spare manufacturing capacity left over after the war. There's also a graph where he looks at "every input" into growing corn, even down to the phosphates, while scrupulously avoiding any talk of fuel or energy.
A resource shift of a different kind: efficiency gains in chicken production are due mostly to inhumane factory farm conditions. (Ones to which pork & beef are less amenable, hence chicken outdoes them.)
Wood is no longer used for railroad ties, because we use concrete. Which has its own problems! The point in most of this kind of example is that we stop using A because B comes along to fill the void. Nobody uses paper anymore, but they sure use a lot more lithium than they used to. And so on.
Finally, and speaking of stepping in to fill the void: ctrl-F - "China" - 1 match. The single mention is to refer to it as a developing country, not to acknowledge it as the present-day location of much of the USA's manufacturing.
It might have some teeth though. Maybe there's a point of maximum consumption, beyond which the average person would get overburdened by too much stuff. And maybe we're hitting that, and per capita people aren't wanting more stuff so much as they're wanting roughly the same amount of stuff but cheaper. So maybe we're approaching "peak stuff". This would fuel greater investments into making things more efficiently rather than making more things, which would allow the economy to continue growing until we actually hit "peak stuff", while raw material consumption would be reducing.
We do indeed have too much stuff, but too much stuff being produced. With no sign it's stopping. In fact it's accelerating.
Instead of getting what we need, we're getting what we need, in excess packaging, and having to replace it every year or two as structural components, hinges, gears and bearings are made of plastic. If that's not enough we build far larger and heavier cars, we buy far more food than we eat, fridges and freezers get ever bigger. Clothes that lasted years are now made to wear out after a few months or if lucky, a year and the rubbish bin is now a wheelie bin with 2-3x the volume, and a recycling bin or 3. Today we struggle to get all the crap in the huge bin as it's full. So is the recycling. In 1980 the old school trashcan was rarely filled, except maybe the week after Xmas.
Meanwhile industry is convincing us that some other standard bit of being human is a source of failure and sells a cream, perfume or product to mask it, or a pill or service to avoid it. Or selling us a subscription to some simple thing made complex - e.g. fruit juice, bottled water, coffee pods. Even those of us who still try to be old-school and not buy into every fad, or replace a kitchen because they fancy a new colour, end up buying far more than we did in the 80s or 90s as the world is now built to make it unavoidable.
I'd love to see the merest hint that people are even thinking about not wanting more stuff...
This is all starting to be addressed. France I believe is introducing a law forcing manufacturers to show the expected lifetime of their goods, various laws on packaging are in the works. Yesterday for example Burger King announced they were no longer including plastic toys with their kids meals (could be uk only).
I don't know what country you're from, but this is already happening in western Europe. Slowly, but it is happening.
Yeah and it's not only that. I didn't think it through. We're not at peak stuff ownership either.
If we were, then we'd see wealthy people living in average-size houses. As is, however, wealthy still live in bigger houses, presumably buy more stuff to fill them, than those without the money to do so.
This all implies if/when average income rises, stuff ownership will continue to rise with it.
Jeremy Rifkin discusses how economic growth is tied to energy efficiency and that it changes depending on fuel source. His theory is we have already hit peak efficiency for fossil fuels which is why developed economies can't grow any quicker. You can find out more by watching his talk on Vice's YouTube [0]. Well worth a watch if you haven't already.
Though it seems like it might be easier to ship sand for pre-stressed concrete crossties, given that all the materials must necessarily be connected to the rail network.
Also, I wonder why concrete crossties don't use neoprene bearing pads under the rails to reduce the abrasion problem.
Are concrete crossties pre-stressed? It makes sense now I think about it, but I'm just surprised more effort than "pour concrete into a mold" goes into such an unassuming structural member.
I'd guess that poured concrete is not cost-competitive with timber crossties, and pre-stressing is the only way to make them cheaply enough to compete.
This does not take into account materials use in other countries that is in direct relation to the US economy. US is not primarily a resource-extraction economy, and many of its firms do most of their manufacturing overseas. Rarely will a high-tech company buy natural resources directly / from a US source. It won't show up in any of the studies' metrics of 'stuff used'. This objection came up recently in a panel discussion about this study as well.
Yes, it's either disingenuous or incredibly naive to ignore the outsourcing of materials-intensive activities to other countries, the most obvious example being manufacturing. Would our rate of material use look so low if we included the materials used for every retail good sold, regardless of where it was manufactured? I doubt it.
"The USGS tracks, I believe, 72 different materials. I think all, but six-ish of them are now on a downward trend. The biggest exception is actually plastics, but there’s something interesting going on there as well. Overall plastics consumption used to grow even more quickly than the economy did. Plastics are super useful. We use them all over the place. Now, plastics use is still increasing, but it’s increasing more slowly than the overall economy is."
There was a big moment this decade where metrics like life expectancy and quality of life decoupled from energy consumption. Which is a capitalized Big Deal in economics.
If you actually believe that software has the ability to change the world, this is it in action.
Umm, energy use per capita [0] is going up, while the at-birth life expectancy is going down [1] (largely thanks to the opioid epidemic, which is largely a product of a large unemployment trend caused by offshoring and automation of low-education jobs). Is that the point you were making (namely that software has a net negative impact on the world)? I don't know about that.
The problem with that downtrend is it considers one nation alone, and completely ignores that the vast majority of manufacturing went elsewhere. The energy intensive activities became someone else's.
If that is all the energy saved by moving all the heavy industry and manufacturing to the developing world, the overall up trend must be enormous.
The past decade has been flat, and it has increased noticeably since last year. There was a substantial recession about a decade ago that caused a contraction of the US economy which explains the decrease in energy consumption, and we've been recovering steadily. Unless we're going into another recession, the "downtrend" observed over the last recession isn't a predictor of future energy consumption.
On the other hand, as software and frameworks get more complex, they require more compute to run. Software hasn't decoupled economic growth from energy consumption, it has just made the energy consumption harder to see.
Edit: since people are asking for examples, I would have to point to the insane cost of training modern ML models. For instance, according to [1], training a single big NLP model can burn up to 620,000 lbs of CO2.
I say a lot of energy consumption is hidden because it's generally moved to data centres, which by the way use up astronomical amounts of energy [2]
> For instance, according to [1], training a single big NLP model can burn up to 620,000 lbs of CO2.
That's not 'an NLP model', it's one of the largest and baddest NLP models that has to be trained only once and can be reused 1000 times over by fine-tuning on different tasks. The paper was hyperbolising about energy use. The AI labs that can even attempt that kind of things can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
A regular NLP model trains in minutes up to a day on a single GPU, so it uses energy on the level of personal game play. And let's not forget that ML can solve difficult math problems with as little as 1/100 of the energy of classical computing by using smart approximation methods. Neural nets also have a nice degradation effect where you can shrink the net by 20x and lose just a few percentage points of accuracy.
That's why Google's speech recognition and synthesis can now run on a single cell phone instead of a datacenter. And we haven't really started building specialised AI chips that will reduce energy usage even further - we're still using mostly GPUs.
AI workloads actually have a business reason to exist though. Bitcoin/cryptocurrency space is still a novelty filled with armchair investors who still think they can get rich from it.
I think Moore's law was just about compute capability, not energy consumption. I could be wrong, though. That being said, processors have become more efficient. I think the other poster was saying that our code complexity often expands to fill the voids. Obvious examples are neutral nets, render farms, crypto mining. But then there is the cost of React vs vanilla, electron vs native. Efficient processors don't necessarily mean less energy consumption, though I think in general that had still proven to be true.
I deal with low power microcontrollers. They keep using less and less power while running faster.
Old Z80 based board I first worked on drew 1A at 5V, so 5W. Put your hand on it, it's nice a warm. Current board I'm dicking with draws 8ma at 3V or 0.024W. 200 times less power. But it's 50 to 100 times faster.
Electron/Chrome undid any gains from Moore's Law. A native IRC client takes negligible amount of energy compared to Slack (I can almost double my laptop's battery life by closing Slack and using weechat/irssi instead).
It is quantifiable, but it's not easily attributable. That is, you can tell that e.g. New York used up 104 terawatt-hours in one year[0], but it's harder to tell what this energy was used for - and, given telecommunications, how much of it was used to fulfill services around the world that just happen to be using a data center in New York.
Price isn't good approximation either, as it's pretty much arbitrary - prices are determined by trade, fluctuate all the time. Regular people only see a smoothed-out, low frequency version of that.
--
[0] - 8.6 megapersons living in New York * 12 MWh US average electricity use per person per year.
Maybe there's some misunderstanding here. I'm not saying cost is a good, or even viable, way of quantifying energy consumption.
Since energy suppliers meter their output to apply a price, I'm wondering how hidden costs could exist (unless the software is somehow circumventing or undermining the meters?).
I would think it'd be pretty straight-forward experiment to use software from the late 80s / early 90s for a couple weeks, measure machine energy consumption, then compare with the consumption from a machine running the latest version of everything for two weeks. Next month repeat but also use a processor from the 90s for the first two weeks. Rinse, repeat, extrapolate, apply statistics, &c. Maybe try adjusting for or comparing differences in appliances common then and now.
If software energy costs are somehow hidden, I can only think they're hidden because we're deliberately not choosing to look at them.
We did export significant amounts of production while reducing new infrastructure investment.
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
> Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
A more interesting metric would be calories-harvested over calories-input.
Food per acre has certainly increased. A lot of the increase is through selective breeding, GM crops, and other technological efficiencies, but a lot of it is from increased fertilizer, which is just calories/energy in a different form (fertilizer is just a store of energy -- that's literally why you buy too much of it in bulk and you're put on a fertilizer-bomb watchlist).
You can grow more food per acre by throwing more energy at the problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it more efficiently or sustainably. One way of looking at all the fertilizer runoff, for example, is it is quite literally leaking input energy out of your harvest, decreasing your efficiency.
From an energy standpoint we can extract nitrogen from the atmosphere using solar panels to split hydrogen from water rather than natural gas. Which is similar to how historically we used crop rotation, but requires little land. So while that’s an energy input it’s replaceable without sacrificing much in the way of yields.
IMO, a more interesting metric is nutrients like phosphorous which would be more difficult to acquire once current sources have mined out.
Let’s be clear about what is meant by dirty stuff. Dirty stuff is the children of peasant farmers moving to cities assembling iPhones and buying things like air conditioning and a motorbike for their families.
The upside is that some of the children of peasants are putting a serious dent in world climate problems like Wang Chuanfu who is the founder of BYD.
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
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 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".
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...
I know it's gauche to say so, but the fact that this comment is gray right now says a lot about the community.
How dare you question woke capitalism, Mr. 'api'. We want to be told we're building a better world, and we'll hang anyone who says otherwise. Didn't you see Silicon Valley?
As you accurately notice, the comment was an attack on the article's basic premise.
Yet it took the form of a question. It doesn't even try to support its implied criticism with any data or argument.
As such, it's a cheap shot that doesn't add anything. If you believe someone's work, published in a somewhat reputable outlet (and a book), to be wrong, find something that supports that criticism. Don't just throw out some lame counterargument that anybody reading the headline can come up.
Specifically, the article uses examples that are unlikely to be outsourced; Paper and cardboard, especially, aren't major inputs to big-hairy-manufacturing.
Fertilizer is an even better case, because it's impossible to outsource its use without also outsourcing agriculture. Agricultural output has obviously been growing steadily. And those statistics are rather reliable because the products are standardised, often need to be reported for various subsidies or regulatory purposes, and are traded on public markets.
Woke(n up) European here. As you predicted, now 'yourbandsucks is grey and 'api is in the clear, and the day here has only just started :).
Also strongly agreed about timezone karma - I would love to see some analysis of how upvotes in discussions like this fluctuate based on which part of the planet is exposed to sun at a given time.
>There was a big moment this decade where metrics like life expectancy and quality of life decoupled from energy consumption.
For most Americans life expectancy and qualify of life are dropping measurably. By your logic we should increase energy consumption to reverse these losses.
> For most Americans life expectancy and qualify of life are dropping measurably.
Half of that is easily demonstrably false. Quality of life for the majority of Americans continues to improve.
The US welfare state has improved considerably in the last 30 to 50 years.
- Homelessness has been slashed by 20-25% in two decades thanks to housing programs the Bush and Obama administrations pursued. Homelessness nationally is sitting near the lowest levels in US history.
- Childhood poverty has collapsed by roughly 45-50% in 40 years.
- The overall poverty rate at 11.8% is near an all-time record low. That figure is lower than in either Canada or France today. In 1960 the poverty rate was 100% higher than it is now.
- The poorest 25% of Americans now get free healthcare, that was not true at all at the supposed peak of US well-being and financial per capita outcomes in the ~1965-1980 time frame. The fact is, the bottom 1/3 are far better off today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. The homelessness and poverty rates demonstrate that.
- The middle class is expanding at the fastest rate since the 1960s. More income as a distribution share is finally beginning to shift from corporate profit to labor.
- For the last several years wages for the bottom 2/3 of labor have been rising dramatically faster than wages for the top 1/3.
- The US savings rate is strong at 8%. Household balance sheets are similarly strong. The share of household income going to debt service costs is near 40-50 year lows.
Several of those are entirely due to a continued resource shift via the rapidly expanding US welfare state and increasing progressive taxation.
As per Wikipedia [0]:
"Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017"
This seems like it's a natural result of the US economy being concentrated in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, i.e just shuffling money around rather than production.
If only it was just shuffling money around. From another post today:
> in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the [fossil fuels] industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development. [0]
Also I wonder how much of that "dematerialization" is due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries.
Surely some of it is US outsourcing relatively material-heavy manufacturing and concentrating on relatively material-light manufacturing (US manufacturing is up, it's not total outsourcing of manufacturing), but that doesn't explain the case of global dematerialization of paper for example. For the case of, say, substitution of paper book with ebook, dematerialization does seem to be happening.
That's nice virtue signalling, but at what point would finance's share of US GDP be alarming to you? Should 1 in 10 people really be working to allocate resources?
In another industry, healthcare, people complain passionately about the costs but never about the fact that while technology, efficiencies have improved there has been a 100-fold increase in the number of healthcare administrators per capita. A lot of our economy is just shuffling people and money around -- not actually efficiently allocating resources to produce useful goods and services--oh about that abnormal growth in the people who are supposed to be responsible for that?
According to this site [0], there actually has been a dip. Here's an excerpt, draw your own conclusions:
"Essentially, with access to a more granular data set than had been publicly available, the economists could see that growth in manufacturing over the decades was almost entirely a result of statistical adjustments for improvement in semiconductor performance."
The world produces and consumes vastly more than it did at other points in that period and as a percentage Im guessing the percentage of what we produce to what we consume (ie our self reliance and share of the global production pie) has been steadily decreasing.
Id be interested to see numbers which prove or disprove this.
US Manufacturing is still the second biggest in the world. Theres just a lot more robots and less people. Also tech moves more than anything as far as tech is a category which it really shouldn't be anymore.
This is not the case. Overall production is not down, and dematerialization can be seen even if you restrict to particular sector that is not finance. OP discusses the case of agriculture for example.
One of the topics that comes up in article praise for cap & trade, pointing to the success of existing pollution laws.
In practice - last I checked, and I admit to not having followed them closely - I don't think carbon credit schemes have had a big payout just yet. I'm not ready to dismiss them, on the other hand. This might just be because more of the CO2 emissions get exported to the developing world, and so a true ROI has to wait until global economic goals start aligning.
Part of that is wrong (fertilizer/agriculture is a particular salient example).
And part of it is the article's point: there are now industries that produce information or services that can fully replace some physical goods: If Google Maps saves you from getting lost, you burn less fuel. If financial markets "shuffle around" smartly enough, those 50 metric tons of pork go into McRibs instead of spoiling, etc.
The vast majority of the "FIRE" economic sector is not an important part of the economy. Before neoliberal economic policies and the government handing $10 Trillion + handouts to the FIRE sector, yes, it was important and efficient. Not now though, unfortunately.
Increasing efficiency is different than lowering total waste. People push for efficiency thinking it will lower total waste, but you can easily increase efficiency and increase total waste.
In the physical environment, total waste is our biggest concern. Our economies are more efficient than ever, but we're also producing more total waste than ever.
They work well side-by-side. If recycling made the overall per-item cost lower, businesses would have been implementing it by themselves a long time ago; paying for the recycling of every piece of plastic is more expensive than creating a new piece and then dumping it, which is why they haven't. So you can get a reduction by mandating full recycling for all plastic (new or previously recycled, of course). The important thing is making sure the producers are paying, rather than getting subsided.
I believe in the power of software, but also wonder how much of this growth is due to financial engineering (specifically debt being bought and sold at varying interest rates)?
The point is that it keeps adding up year after year. Sure we could use less plastic and still the series of partial sums converges to a really large number.
This is not sustainable. Elephants in Africa. Insects and birds. Desertification. Deforestation. Brazil chopped down the size of Hong Kong in a few weeks. Plastic in the oceans. CO2 PPM is on a steady rise. Permafrost is melting. And we are saying what?
> Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.).[1] Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.
Wait, things are not as bad as has been crammed down our throats for years? Imagine my surprise. But, yet many armchair doomsayers will still only find the negative. Yes, this isn't perfect. But neither am I. Or you. Peace
This can easily be reversed. What exactly is being measured as growth if it does not result in more stuff being consumed and produced?
Growth measures aren't usually linked to soft outcomes (eg, happiness, moral fulfilment, access to basic needs, etc) because they are too hard to measure. Growth measures aren't linked to stuff produced (thesis of article).
We're measuring something. Probably some sort of technological advancement. Does it make sense to call it growth? If resources Energy per capita is dropping; I would call that contraction rather than growth. I like having access to stuff.
If your car gets twice the mpg and you’re consuming half as much gas do you consider that a bad thing? You’re deriving the same amount of utility at half the resource cost.
Yeah, but that isn't growth. Growth is my car gets twice the mpg and I now have a petrol heater on cold nights. Or I drive twice as far. My lifestyle staying the same from one week to the next is stagnation even if I'm using less resources.
This is an appeal to Jeveron's paradox. If efficiencies increase, growth looks like getting much more output. Getting the same output when efficiencies increase doesn't signal growth.
I suspect the disconnect is people think that "good" and "growth" mean the same thing. That isn't a real link. The situation doesn't look like it is growing, even if it is good.
Your savings on gasoline would be put in banks which would create growth by reinventment. Also while your car getting twice the mpg may not open up new possibilities for you, it could make a huge difference for people and businesses and nations where cost of transportation is significant.
"Dematerialization" is a term that is not very commonly used.
Economists usually talk the resource intensity of production and consumption. You can divide the concept into material intensity and energy intensity. If you use them as a start of your search you find more Resource productivity is also more commonly used term.
There is evidence of a relative decoupling in resource extraction from global economic growth. In developed economies this is clearly happening.
>Global extraction of material resources continues to grow, but there are signs of decoupling from global economic growth. G8 countries‘ resource productivity has been improving , their material intensity decreased by more than 47% between 1980 and 2008 and their annual per capita material consumption declined from nearly 20 tonnes to less than 18 tonnes. Over the same period, OECD economies have reduced their material intensity by 42% and their per capita
consumption declined by 1.5% to 17.6 t.
There is negative relation between total factor productivity and material and energy intensity per unit of GDP. When productivity increases, most of the value is created buy other means than using materials and energy.
The catch is "per GDP". Per capita material consumption in OECD countries remains unsustainable. Developed nations produce their high living standard more efficiently but the living standard is so high that resource usage in absolute terms per capita extremely high.
You can't actually substitute something with nothing, and conservation laws (of mass, energy, etc) do hold. But in practice, substituting with, say, atmosphere, is almost as good. OP discussed the case of substituting copper network with atmospheric spectrum.
Consider guano: guano use for manufacturing fertilizer is down, because Harber-Bosch process substituted guano nitrogen with atmospheric nitrogen. Atmospheric nitrogen is still a material thing, but it sure does look like dematerialization.
You can also shift the structure of the things people care about to be things that are easier to make. If people buy less cars and spend more time backpacking across Mexico, that also substitutes something with nothing (or at least less).
I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Bernanke's "global savings glut" or Larry Summer's "secular stagnation?" It seems you may not need as much money to make money?
I tried asking about this on /r/AskEconomics and it seems that some still believe that more savings is better, based on the Solow model.
Massive misallocation of resource mainly from the financial crisis into bad financial products. But if you look around the rate of technological development and the amount of money to start one of those ventures it's only been failing
Glad to hear this merely because is has positive downstream effects. No need to beat one's chest, just maybe a moment to reflect on humility and figure out how to continue the trend.
The article cites low-tech raw resources like timber, paper, nickel, and gold (okay this can be hiigh-tech) being used less in advanced economies. What about ones like rare earth minerals used in high-tech? It would have been nice for the article to touch on that. I would love if someone could find that information. A quick Google search didn't yield much.
The author does mention the energy usage rate is leveling out. Not believing this, I did a basic search on electricity usage and it does appear to be true: https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co.... I did not check total energy usage though (petrol, natural gas, etc.)
This confirms my belief that has been derided a bit here on HN. That is, I believe Capitalism one-day, in the far distant future, will end or at the least mitigate resource scarcity. When Capitalism achieves that, it in effect nearly goes away or is at least greatly reduced. Humanity will then reap the benefits of abundance. Hopefully moving beyond Capitalism, thanks to Capitalism.
Healthcare, education, real estate in desirable areas, and taxes. I can also see that I spend more on hotel room nights, restaurant meals, groceries, supplies for my businesses. I don’t know where the inflation stats are coming from, but I’m certainly spending more every year for the same quantity.
I wonder how much the averages bring that down. Healthcare is up across the board, but real estate may not be up much if at all in non-growing areas. Wages just aren't growing I think.
A large fraction of the population lives in growing areas, so the rising cost of real estate in growing areas is an extremely important factor, and on average it's been rising faster than wages for decades.
I wonder how long pretending literally nothing is a "growing economy" can continue before something bad happens. I have a feeling I won't have to wonder for long.
The point of the economy growing is so that the society as a whole can do more things that it wants, not about using more natural resources. If we can do more things that we want and also use less natural resources, that's what we want, not an omen of something bad.
This story is an example of why "mainstream media" (The big 4 outlets) need to have all of their major and minor publications banned from this site going forward or be reduced to being allowed to post 1 or 2 articles per week, tops.
When I come to HN, I come here to learn about some cool doohickey someone is working on or a study that someone published about a different approach to security. I come here to learn about a bitcoin heist or something novel and new and most importantly, to learn from the comments. Lots of interesting people here with interesting views to contribute.
I don't come here to read about MIT flamebait; there's no in-depth study to read, no conclusions to draw, just a re-hash of CPI numbers which are at best horribly inaccurate, aside from the name, this might as well be a short novel. Worse, we're re-hashing something that's already there; CPI Numbers. This article is utter trite and a total and complete waste of time.
Then, the entire community begins discussing this Trite, which lets be honest, there's some interesting studies and observations in the comments but at the end of the day, the discussion has no direction or conclusion and that is dangerous because it invites an scopeless conversation. We should be talking about how this professors study is or is not accurate or interesting sidebars, which is useful to the professor for feedback and to the reader for coming to a conclusion, not talking in generalities and in circles because someone at a Big 4 wants to stay "relevant" and thinks getting the geeks talking to each other about their topic is a good way to do that.
Leave the trite where it belongs; on CNN or NYT or on any big 4 publication.
Dematerialization is the biggest fallacy in the industry. Data centers need energy to run. Buying the latest servers, network equipments, iPhones and more every year or two, requires an enormous amount of energy. GDP is directly correlated with energy, so there is no sign of change: an economy cannot grow without energy. I wish more people understood the economy from a physics standpoint.
I know about energy intensity, and yes it is going down, but not by enough to compensate the growth of consumption, which is the fallacy i'm pointing out. It has another name: Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
But the point McAfee is trying to do is that it requires less materials to do so. Yeah, energy consumption is on the rise, but instead of burning xx tons of coals to generate 1GWh like it did 50 years ago, it does so by using 10% of that coal. Advances in technologies allowed us to do that. In plus you cannot deny we do have a momentum to use more and more technologies involved in renewable then in fossils. I agree we are not quite there yet, but is way better then it was in the late 80's, beginning of 90's when the ozone layer hole was at its biggest.
Also why I believe nuclear power must play a vital role in carbon neutral power generation. Wind and solar is great for homes, but what else can power the steel industry? The duty cycle is enormous.
Steel and aluminium manufacturing actually are somewhat well-situated to make use of solar and wind power. The energy-intensive processes (i. e. heating metal until it melts) has somewhat flexible timing. So you can heat it up when energy supply is plenty or other demand is low and smooth out the grid.
And nuclear energy is simply too expensive. I know it hurts that some people were maybe too afraid of it in the past, but that's no longer the argument. It loses not just to un-subsidised wind and solar now, but even to natural gas + planting trees to offset carbon.
In theory battery tech can fuel Industry, though the ironic chicken-and-egg of the situation should be clear. Obviously we should invest in updated, safer, more efficient nuclear tech, but the public image is so bad that we might as well use coal and spend extra money on carbon capture
It could be clearer throughout, whether he's talking per capita or overall.
Data is selective and ignores resource utilization shifts. Example: In the 1940s crop acreage decoupled from crop yield, he says. Great! Instead it coupled to petroleum and energy, he doesn't say. American farms today are in the business of converting fossil fuels to food. For example, the 1940s are when when cheap internal-combustion tractors started being mass-produced, thanks to all that spare manufacturing capacity left over after the war. There's also a graph where he looks at "every input" into growing corn, even down to the phosphates, while scrupulously avoiding any talk of fuel or energy.
A resource shift of a different kind: efficiency gains in chicken production are due mostly to inhumane factory farm conditions. (Ones to which pork & beef are less amenable, hence chicken outdoes them.)
Wood is no longer used for railroad ties, because we use concrete. Which has its own problems! The point in most of this kind of example is that we stop using A because B comes along to fill the void. Nobody uses paper anymore, but they sure use a lot more lithium than they used to. And so on.
Finally, and speaking of stepping in to fill the void: ctrl-F - "China" - 1 match. The single mention is to refer to it as a developing country, not to acknowledge it as the present-day location of much of the USA's manufacturing.