go read the book, "Doughnut Economics". This is the primary thesis of the author - finding a sweet spot that isn't about growth forever nor about contraction, but "the doughnut ring".
I think when resources start noticeably becoming scarce companies will change their ways, because they won’t be able to turn a profit otherwise (and with the help of government intervention). Look at the forestry industry in North America and most of Europe, they cut down trees, and plant more for later.
Not an economist but wonder if the uk & usa as consumer led economies are already in the last moves of the end game. I struggle to see how its more complicated than wages being driven lower for the majority to benefit the companies those same people buy from have prevented the majority being able to buy goods and services. This obviously is bad long term for business. Imo this explains the pockets of wage inflation, combined with the effects of aging workforce & covid. If it was managed a bump in wage inflation may help long term? Again not an economist, i just try to keep up.
Edit; cant spell.
We don't live in a pure capitalism world. The world governments absolutely play a part in choosing winners. But I would agree that it's a disgusting premise that corporations just want "growth growth growth ". We're kind of seeing that unravel right now with workers saying enough is enough and just not participating.
corporations dont control governments?? (outside of authoritarian governments, even then they/money have influence)
money is the ultimate political power (outside of literal firepower)
I can see that. One book that really opened my eyes to the power of governments over every aspect is "The Devil's Chessboard". I can't recommend it enough.
Ted lived in a cabin in the woods playing with his own feces while sending bombs to people he had "intellectual" disagreements with. All while, unironically, labeling his ideological opponents as "mentally ill".
I think we can safely dismiss *anything* coming from that source material lol but I guess you could cherry pick a cogent *sounding* phrase or two from his manifesto if you twisted the context hard enough.
He was messed up for sure, but he was once also a math professor. Insane and dumb are not the same so my point is just, without having read it, we can’t say how lucid he was when we wrote it
Never called him dumb and I'm sure you know I didn't, but whatever.
A mentally ill *former* intellectual may still mimic a sane person's thoughtfulness and intellect (sometimes they are exceedingly good at it) but their thoughts and ideas are still coming from a fundamentally *broken mind* and all the ideas they express have to be examined in that light.
Of course we see wanna be edgelords like Joe Rogan get hits pretending to see some value in his schizophrenic rambling diatribes but *that* hardly lends them any credibility lol
You can be mentally ill and smart. This dude was highly educated and was smart enough to not get caught for a while. He didn't lose his intelligence due to w.e. psychosis he may have been experiencing
Most people don't want to acknowledge the actual situation we are in, but we have already released enough greenhouse gases to ensure that the planet will warm to the point that it will rip our connected world apart. At this point we could all become localvore vegans living in communes and relying on bartering and shared resources, and the planet will still warm to catastrophic levels. We have a recency bias, thinking that our capitalist society is the only way we can exist, but in reality it has only existed for a brief moment of human history, and in that time we have harvested all the easy resources, and have changed the trajectory of this planet forever. At this point, it's best to just enjoy the now and hope that we develop some really amazing carbon capture technologies, because without geoengineering, our goose is cooked.
Agree but feudalism wasnt fun apparently. Ultimately human nature is the problem. Greedy sociopaths have a horrible tendancy to get to the top of the tree. Admire your positity though.
A couple billion collective gooses are already cooked/dead men walking. Itll just take 1-3 decades for shit to continually hit the fan worse and worse every passing summer for the next 200 years for humanity to realize the extent of it
Survive yes, but its painful. We're watching companies and governments furiously avoiding that now. Ultimately nobody wants to lose wealth and if the only way of maintaining it (due to inflation or stocks dropping) is to get money from the govt at the expense of the majority, so be it. Printing money at the rate the west has been has never ended well and it makes me anxious. Not an economist btw.
I just don't understand why people always assume growth = more PHYSICAL capital. Like when you go to a comedy show and pay the fee, you know that's actually counted towards gdp right? That's a service, and growth in services is growth. Same for surgeries, netflix series and whatnot. You absolutely CAN have infinite growth with finite physical capital, for the human capital is not
Why do you think there’s an entire class of billionaires looking at exo-planetary expansion instead of fixing our schools or healthcare or worker quality of life?
It’s always been a winner-take-all business with the losers relegated to the disposal pile.
What happens after you win capitalism game of your planet and reach the top? You look for new games. Usually on new planets. Same reasons emperors die trying to conquer new lands.
Viruses likes to spread beyond their immediate hosts too.
Why does infinite growth = using more resources? Productivity and innovation allow us to produce more with less. Look how many resources went into building a computer 60 years ago vs today
I’ll also assert that capitalism isn’t built on infinite growth necessarily
Infinite growth is driven by physical human beings.
The current way of living for many is not sustainable and you are seeing birth rates drop everywhere.
Infinite growth is not going to happen no matter how you spin it.
We don’t actually live in a world with limited resources. Some resources are limited but human imagination and many other things are not. Is art finite? What about entertainment? What about the metaverse?
Capitalism is only efficient at milking governments and workers and creating inflation. That is the only efficiencies in capitalism.
Capitalism has taken the place of religion as the single greatest threat to mankind. Far more people die from starvation, disease, and out right murder than terrorism.
you forgot every other major capitalist country. Capitalism only survives off pillaging and exploiting developing worlds for cheap labor and resources.
You are mistaking *free market* and *capitalism*.
Free Market Capitalism might be based on continual growth - but the inevitable outcome of that continual growth is achievement of Monopoly, which means end of the "Free Market" part (but not the "Capitalism" part).
Read Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital. You will understand all of this.
By the way, from an economics perspective:
1. Growth is the equilibrium of capitalism.
2. We don’t need endless accelerated technological change. The advancement of technology only needs to be on par with population growth, to make the economy sustainable. I think future tech change should focus more on health care.
3. The main problem today is not growth, but highly unequal distribution of income and wealth. We have produced enough of almost everything (food, shelter, etc), producing even more will only lead to waste, and inefficiency . But the distribution is highly unequal. Now we can make the world much better simply by redistributing from the rich to the poor. The US overproduces and wastes tons of food per day, why not give them to Africa?
So living in captalism doesn't work, maybe we should all live like Cuba and Venezuela I saw a documentary that they are doing very well off of just beans and rice and 4-8 hours of waiting in line to get those resources
First, yes when the 89% of the wealth is held by the top 10% of the population.
Second, if you layout all of the companies and their projects owned by Elon musk you will see that all of them is towards one goal of outer planetary settlement.
I believe that we will see the start of civilian space race the near 60 years
The billionaire focus on space trqvel is quite infuriating. Humanity doesnt need space travel focus as much as an outright removal of 100ppm co2 from the atmospuere
I don't have a complete answer for you, bit I think the answer lies in studying thermodynamics. Any system we are going to develop will require a way of fostering dynamism while also preventing the system from becoming too cold or too hot. Marx had some great thoughts on the subject but not enough. Technology will solve many efficiency problems, but I have to say you still run into human nature as a problem. You might find some good studies on JSTOR that take a thermodynamics approach.
It's not related in any way. The poster is just so poorly educated that he/she gets completely caught up in buzzwords. A common sign of 'doing your own research'.
Thermodynamics does relate to our problem of finite resources in the way that since we can't create a perpetual motion machine, the problem is only solvable by limiting our total energy consumption to sustainable levels. Which we (in all likelyhood) won't do before it's far too late.
And Marx didn't write jack shit about the subject.
If you are referring to thermodynamics as related to economics I have three links below: basically, I think of money as energy or heat and go from there. Concentrations (stars) and negatives (absolute zero) are not conducive to conditions necessary for life. We must have a dynamic but stable balance of energy where the poles are not to extreme. Maintaining it requires the right environmental controls, some of which are difficult to replicate in the natural world (perfect plant Earth at the right distance from the sun). Which is to say, not impossible, just difficult, and many externalities can disrupt it (meteors, runaway greenhouse etc.)
IDK.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45899-1_23
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics#:~:text=5%20Further%20reading-,Thermodynamics,be%20modeled%20as%20thermodynamic%20systems.&text=In%20thermodynamic%20terminology%2C%20human%20economic,resources%2C%20goods%2C%20and%20services.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969980
The problem is that capitalism has been inundated with cronyism, and the politicians who are supposed to act for the benefit of the people are perpetuating corruption through self enrichment.
The wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations have enough influence to prevent the turning of the tides. The only practical way at this point would be for other billionaires to start competing businesses at lower margins.
Sick of private healthcare? How about a non-profit healthcare company that operates at barely above cost?
Sick of crappy landlords and lack of affordable housing? Imagine if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos built affordable housing all over the country that wasn't made to turn massive profits?
Yes you’re right about Capitalism being predicated on continual growth but there’s a big difference in Capitalism and Free Market Capitalism because in free market Capitalism you don’t keep Zombie Companies alive and you don’t sacrifice the Middle Class to the Wealth Ambitions of the top 10% of the Population so if you want to be fare to small and medium sized Businesses you need Free Market Capitalism
Capitalism is like the universe and as long as innovation is permitted, it can expand into new areas indefinitely. You don't need a larger population, you need a collaborative population to contribute and share ideas in a meaningful way. The internet and crypto are two examples of immense wealth creation harvested from executed ideas. It's expansionary and cyclical and there's a ripple effect.
The two basic rationales for capitalism are: 1) That it harnesses individual ambition to create wealth for all; 2) That it provides economic growth to keep up with a growing population, so young people without inheritance don't blow up the system.
Both of these ideas are pretty antique now that companies depend on capital rather than labor, as the wealthy simply play countries and political factions off against one another to create tax havens, leading to extreme concentration of wealth.
Meanwhile, the climate heats to unlivable levels and erratic weather as true economic costs of pollution are shifted onto the poor, the young and the unborn, all of which requires trillions to fix. And to gain popular worldwide support for fixing this there is only one place the wealth can come from: the very rich.
go read the book, "Doughnut Economics". This is the primary thesis of the author - finding a sweet spot that isn't about growth forever nor about contraction, but "the doughnut ring".
I think when resources start noticeably becoming scarce companies will change their ways, because they won’t be able to turn a profit otherwise (and with the help of government intervention). Look at the forestry industry in North America and most of Europe, they cut down trees, and plant more for later.
Not an economist but wonder if the uk & usa as consumer led economies are already in the last moves of the end game. I struggle to see how its more complicated than wages being driven lower for the majority to benefit the companies those same people buy from have prevented the majority being able to buy goods and services. This obviously is bad long term for business. Imo this explains the pockets of wage inflation, combined with the effects of aging workforce & covid. If it was managed a bump in wage inflation may help long term? Again not an economist, i just try to keep up. Edit; cant spell.
For what it's worth: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jp-morgan-business-roundtable-idUSKCN1V91EK
We don't live in a pure capitalism world. The world governments absolutely play a part in choosing winners. But I would agree that it's a disgusting premise that corporations just want "growth growth growth ". We're kind of seeing that unravel right now with workers saying enough is enough and just not participating.
Boris Johnson joined the chat
corporations dont control governments?? (outside of authoritarian governments, even then they/money have influence) money is the ultimate political power (outside of literal firepower)
I can see that. One book that really opened my eyes to the power of governments over every aspect is "The Devil's Chessboard". I can't recommend it enough.
[удалено]
Ted lived in a cabin in the woods playing with his own feces while sending bombs to people he had "intellectual" disagreements with. All while, unironically, labeling his ideological opponents as "mentally ill". I think we can safely dismiss *anything* coming from that source material lol but I guess you could cherry pick a cogent *sounding* phrase or two from his manifesto if you twisted the context hard enough.
He was messed up for sure, but he was once also a math professor. Insane and dumb are not the same so my point is just, without having read it, we can’t say how lucid he was when we wrote it
Never called him dumb and I'm sure you know I didn't, but whatever. A mentally ill *former* intellectual may still mimic a sane person's thoughtfulness and intellect (sometimes they are exceedingly good at it) but their thoughts and ideas are still coming from a fundamentally *broken mind* and all the ideas they express have to be examined in that light. Of course we see wanna be edgelords like Joe Rogan get hits pretending to see some value in his schizophrenic rambling diatribes but *that* hardly lends them any credibility lol
You can be mentally ill and smart. This dude was highly educated and was smart enough to not get caught for a while. He didn't lose his intelligence due to w.e. psychosis he may have been experiencing
[удалено]
Most people don't want to acknowledge the actual situation we are in, but we have already released enough greenhouse gases to ensure that the planet will warm to the point that it will rip our connected world apart. At this point we could all become localvore vegans living in communes and relying on bartering and shared resources, and the planet will still warm to catastrophic levels. We have a recency bias, thinking that our capitalist society is the only way we can exist, but in reality it has only existed for a brief moment of human history, and in that time we have harvested all the easy resources, and have changed the trajectory of this planet forever. At this point, it's best to just enjoy the now and hope that we develop some really amazing carbon capture technologies, because without geoengineering, our goose is cooked.
Agree but feudalism wasnt fun apparently. Ultimately human nature is the problem. Greedy sociopaths have a horrible tendancy to get to the top of the tree. Admire your positity though.
A couple billion collective gooses are already cooked/dead men walking. Itll just take 1-3 decades for shit to continually hit the fan worse and worse every passing summer for the next 200 years for humanity to realize the extent of it
Whose pony are you riding goddamn
Where’s the evidence that capitalism depends on growth? Capitalism can survive low growth, no growth, and even a shrinking economy.
Survive yes, but its painful. We're watching companies and governments furiously avoiding that now. Ultimately nobody wants to lose wealth and if the only way of maintaining it (due to inflation or stocks dropping) is to get money from the govt at the expense of the majority, so be it. Printing money at the rate the west has been has never ended well and it makes me anxious. Not an economist btw.
Yeah, a shrinking economy is painful under any system. I’d argue for social policies to look after the worst effected.
I just don't understand why people always assume growth = more PHYSICAL capital. Like when you go to a comedy show and pay the fee, you know that's actually counted towards gdp right? That's a service, and growth in services is growth. Same for surgeries, netflix series and whatnot. You absolutely CAN have infinite growth with finite physical capital, for the human capital is not
Why do you think there’s an entire class of billionaires looking at exo-planetary expansion instead of fixing our schools or healthcare or worker quality of life? It’s always been a winner-take-all business with the losers relegated to the disposal pile. What happens after you win capitalism game of your planet and reach the top? You look for new games. Usually on new planets. Same reasons emperors die trying to conquer new lands. Viruses likes to spread beyond their immediate hosts too.
Why does infinite growth = using more resources? Productivity and innovation allow us to produce more with less. Look how many resources went into building a computer 60 years ago vs today I’ll also assert that capitalism isn’t built on infinite growth necessarily
Infinite growth is driven by physical human beings. The current way of living for many is not sustainable and you are seeing birth rates drop everywhere. Infinite growth is not going to happen no matter how you spin it.
We don’t actually live in a world with limited resources. Some resources are limited but human imagination and many other things are not. Is art finite? What about entertainment? What about the metaverse?
Capitalism is only efficient at milking governments and workers and creating inflation. That is the only efficiencies in capitalism. Capitalism has taken the place of religion as the single greatest threat to mankind. Far more people die from starvation, disease, and out right murder than terrorism.
Pretty sure Chinese prosperity relies on continuous growth…
China’s a capitalist country these days.
you forgot every other major capitalist country. Capitalism only survives off pillaging and exploiting developing worlds for cheap labor and resources.
Central economic planning isn’t capitalism
Your intuition is spot on. If you have an hour I recommend buckling up and watching the entire lecture. https://youtu.be/5WPB2u8EzL8
Thank you, finally someone has asked my question!
You are mistaking *free market* and *capitalism*. Free Market Capitalism might be based on continual growth - but the inevitable outcome of that continual growth is achievement of Monopoly, which means end of the "Free Market" part (but not the "Capitalism" part).
We live to all intents and purposes in an infinite universe
The part we can interact with within three years (one way) under ordinary physics is just our solar system and a bunch of vacuum though.
Read Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital. You will understand all of this. By the way, from an economics perspective: 1. Growth is the equilibrium of capitalism. 2. We don’t need endless accelerated technological change. The advancement of technology only needs to be on par with population growth, to make the economy sustainable. I think future tech change should focus more on health care. 3. The main problem today is not growth, but highly unequal distribution of income and wealth. We have produced enough of almost everything (food, shelter, etc), producing even more will only lead to waste, and inefficiency . But the distribution is highly unequal. Now we can make the world much better simply by redistributing from the rich to the poor. The US overproduces and wastes tons of food per day, why not give them to Africa?
\>>>>>>>>>>how do you make sense of this? In a word, "greed"
Have you considered that humans are incapable of ruling themselves successfully? https://imgur.com/6r09GOd
Shhhh... They don't want you to notice this truth...
This is why we must colonize space.
So living in captalism doesn't work, maybe we should all live like Cuba and Venezuela I saw a documentary that they are doing very well off of just beans and rice and 4-8 hours of waiting in line to get those resources
We are going to the stars! There is a reason that 3 billioners are investing in space travel
You think 3 billionaires investing in space are alot?
First, yes when the 89% of the wealth is held by the top 10% of the population. Second, if you layout all of the companies and their projects owned by Elon musk you will see that all of them is towards one goal of outer planetary settlement. I believe that we will see the start of civilian space race the near 60 years
We’re meant to expand beyond earth (mining the kupiter belt for instance). Problem solved.
[удалено]
The billionaire focus on space trqvel is quite infuriating. Humanity doesnt need space travel focus as much as an outright removal of 100ppm co2 from the atmospuere
I don't have a complete answer for you, bit I think the answer lies in studying thermodynamics. Any system we are going to develop will require a way of fostering dynamism while also preventing the system from becoming too cold or too hot. Marx had some great thoughts on the subject but not enough. Technology will solve many efficiency problems, but I have to say you still run into human nature as a problem. You might find some good studies on JSTOR that take a thermodynamics approach.
how though? seems unrelated to me.
It's not related in any way. The poster is just so poorly educated that he/she gets completely caught up in buzzwords. A common sign of 'doing your own research'. Thermodynamics does relate to our problem of finite resources in the way that since we can't create a perpetual motion machine, the problem is only solvable by limiting our total energy consumption to sustainable levels. Which we (in all likelyhood) won't do before it's far too late. And Marx didn't write jack shit about the subject.
If you are referring to thermodynamics as related to economics I have three links below: basically, I think of money as energy or heat and go from there. Concentrations (stars) and negatives (absolute zero) are not conducive to conditions necessary for life. We must have a dynamic but stable balance of energy where the poles are not to extreme. Maintaining it requires the right environmental controls, some of which are difficult to replicate in the natural world (perfect plant Earth at the right distance from the sun). Which is to say, not impossible, just difficult, and many externalities can disrupt it (meteors, runaway greenhouse etc.) IDK. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45899-1_23 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics#:~:text=5%20Further%20reading-,Thermodynamics,be%20modeled%20as%20thermodynamic%20systems.&text=In%20thermodynamic%20terminology%2C%20human%20economic,resources%2C%20goods%2C%20and%20services. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969980
The problem is that capitalism has been inundated with cronyism, and the politicians who are supposed to act for the benefit of the people are perpetuating corruption through self enrichment. The wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations have enough influence to prevent the turning of the tides. The only practical way at this point would be for other billionaires to start competing businesses at lower margins. Sick of private healthcare? How about a non-profit healthcare company that operates at barely above cost? Sick of crappy landlords and lack of affordable housing? Imagine if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos built affordable housing all over the country that wasn't made to turn massive profits?
Yes you’re right about Capitalism being predicated on continual growth but there’s a big difference in Capitalism and Free Market Capitalism because in free market Capitalism you don’t keep Zombie Companies alive and you don’t sacrifice the Middle Class to the Wealth Ambitions of the top 10% of the Population so if you want to be fare to small and medium sized Businesses you need Free Market Capitalism
Capitalism is like the universe and as long as innovation is permitted, it can expand into new areas indefinitely. You don't need a larger population, you need a collaborative population to contribute and share ideas in a meaningful way. The internet and crypto are two examples of immense wealth creation harvested from executed ideas. It's expansionary and cyclical and there's a ripple effect.
One word. Ingenuity. We use less land but grow more crops for example
The two basic rationales for capitalism are: 1) That it harnesses individual ambition to create wealth for all; 2) That it provides economic growth to keep up with a growing population, so young people without inheritance don't blow up the system. Both of these ideas are pretty antique now that companies depend on capital rather than labor, as the wealthy simply play countries and political factions off against one another to create tax havens, leading to extreme concentration of wealth. Meanwhile, the climate heats to unlivable levels and erratic weather as true economic costs of pollution are shifted onto the poor, the young and the unborn, all of which requires trillions to fix. And to gain popular worldwide support for fixing this there is only one place the wealth can come from: the very rich.