Is the world going to shit?

Per capita emissions in the US and other western nations are declining even when you account for production shifted to other countries

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-...

I don't truly see the "no one knows how to do anything end to end". This is somewhat true - but I don't know if 500 years ago the same person necessarily knew how to work with bronze and to raise cattle and to preserve foods for the winter. Perhaps it seems easier since there was less things, but there was also a lot less ability to move around and learn about things so I'm not so sure.

Ultimately it seems like the absolute worst case scenario is that a shock causes a partial collapse of western society to the point where people are very poor and not able to use technology we take for granted, but this is pretty close to what an honest degrowther sees as the best case scenario. If you want to experience life as it existed before modern technology there are plenty of places in the world that moreorless still live as they did hundreds of years ago - and it would only be romanticizing them so say they dont have their own very severe issues that are objectively worse than what we have.

I am a firm believer that the world has always being going to shit.

It's called change and accepting that has made life much more bearable.

While change is increasingly happening faster, the changes are (mostly) smaller. We're in one of the longest periods of “peace time“ and threat of war/death continue to decrease (while not evenly distributed that's not a reason to lose hope).

I think it will be organic. I’ve severely curtailed my discretionary spending. The restaurants suck now, bad service and low quality food for a high price. Bars are barely open during adult hours, many being closed at 8 or 9pm. Theaters, concerts, and sporting events seem to run on a skeleton crew of people that are clueless.

It’s time to walk the walk. Plenty of people have a doomer mindset about the future. Prepare now. Commit yourself to an ascetic lifestyle and you won’t be disappointed.

But I doubt many will voluntarily live this way. It’s just like everybody upset about the climate, but none of them have installed solar and geothermal on their home.

We're in a period of really bad leadership of the major world powers. It's like the runup to WWI, which was probably peak stupid.

Technically, things are looking pretty good. Energy is a problem only in the near term. Solar, wind, and batteries are so cheap that massive deployment is happening for purely economic reasons. Population is leveling off. Computing is in good shape.

This is a very dangerous narrative, for some reason popular nowadays — the scarcity mindset, the story of “limited resources”.

If you go back 5000 years ago you’ll see there’s only so many people the planet can feed.

The actual fact is that people _create_ resources when they cooperate (this is why now our planet can afford so many people that ancient would never imagine possible).

It’s not about the technology but about good vs evil beliefs.

Which lead to actions.

Please spread good constructive beliefs, not scary destructive ones.

> there's no way of our GDP keeps growing indefinitely while reducing our ecological footprint.

Yes there is. We are vastly ineffecient with our use of energy. Fusion power, better use of solar, wind, geothermal power, better energy storage. The amount of solar hitting the Earth every day is several orders of magnitude larger than what is needed to run society at our current level. There is no shortage of energy, only our ability to make use of it.

Obviously nothing grows indefinitely. Eventually the sun will go supernova and consume the solar system. For an amount of energy needed to sustain human life comfortably, there is more than enough.

The degrowthers would have us go back to living in grass huts and dying in droves from diseases we have long since eradicated. It is not a way forward. It is species suicide.

Regarding technology as a savior—it isn’t, but it can help.

Steve Jobs described the computer as “a bicycle for the mind”. Bicycle technology allows a human to move faster than a cheetah (https://www.travelwriter.nl/english-blog-faster-than-a-cheet...). Computers help people think and compute faster than an organic brain. However, the human must *choose* to use the technology. That’s a social choice. Human problems are social problems. I do believe we have adequate technology to bring the world into an age of prosperity. But it will only happen if we choose, as a society, to do it.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think giving up technology to pursue a low tech / no tech society would be helpful. Often, low tech solutions actually make things worse when applied at scale with as many people as we have.

I do. But when that makes me sad I think of the following bit from The Chronicles of Riddick:

Imam: "Have you heard anything I've said?"

Riddick: "You said it's all circling the drain, the whole universe. Right?"

Imam: "That's right."

Riddick: "Had to end sometime."

I just came from the beach where there were many smiling and happy families....so I'm gonna say no.

What does building end to end even mean? If i go to china and ask a factory work if they know how to produce the semiconductor in the iPhone they’re assembling will they know? If I go to any major city and ask someone to grow me wheat or corn can they do it successfully? Different people specialize in different things. Maybe a fullstack developer is what you're looking for lmao. This isn’t the medieval times the world and the tools we use are complex we’re not making swords anymore even back then then moat blacksmiths didn’t mine for minerals.

> an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally contradictory to finite planetary boundaries

This is a stupid premise. People illiterate in both physics and economics seem to think that economic growth is bound by the laws of thermodynamics.

This is easily proven false by contradiction:

Let's say you have a few 2x4s and nails, by rearranging them into a chair you've created economic value. No extra raw materials were required to get from the planks of wood to the chair but value was created anyway. Find a better use for the wood and nails than a chair and we have economic growth.

Our technology and all that was accelerated/amplified thereby exceeded our socio-cultural development as a species by a lot.

We won’t learn without catastrophe, and it’s anyone’s guess what will be learned from that.

The book, Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker makes the opposite argument that over time, life is getting better. It tracks various aspects of human life throughout history with research, statistics, and graphs that tell a different story.

1. No. People are getting dumber at (IIRC) about 0.6 IQ points per 10 years. Obviously this is going to make society and technology worse. It's like every month that something breaks around the house and I can't find somebody who knows how it works. Tech support used to be tolerable but now it's useless.

2. I don't know what you mean by "collapse", but yes it's a belief. "Tech will save us" is one of the (IIRC) 3 textbook responses to the climate change narrative.

3. IDK it looks like Western Europe is de-industrializing, we'll see how much this winter but I'm hearing about large industries shutting down in response to fuel prices. They're definitely not trying to prevent panic, just trying to maintain hypernormalization.

4. They are and you can go outside and you can find them. You don't hear about it on the internet because the internet is run by multinational corporations selling you products made many thousands of miles from where you live.

4.1 Technology is a force multiplier - people with more technology are better at conquering their rivals. I think this is mentioned in Industrial Society and it's future.

People are naturally averse at recognising issues which require them to take actions that might impact, however slightly, the lifestyle that they have grown used to. They will prefer to dig their head in the sand and keep driving towards much bigger problems rather than take moderately inconvenient action now.

This is a behavioural/psychological flaw that prevents necessary action from being taken.

I have two daughters, and when I look at history, I am pretty glad they are born in the last couple of years and not 100 or 50 years ago.

> there's no way of our GDP keeps growing indefinitely while reducing our ecological footprint.

Not necessarily. For exmaple, if I recite a poem to you for a dollar and you sing to me a song for a dollar, GDP increases without changing the ecological footprint.

And even if the ecological footprint per capita is growing, we might be able to reduce the overall ecological footprint in a few decades, when earth's population is declining. It depends on the ratio between the two tendencies.

I am not sure if that will really be the case, but it is a possibility.

The iPhone 12 is smaller than the iPhone 11. Does anybody think that it is worse for that reason?

If you buy a Ford Lightning instead of a gasoline truck and fuel it with solar power, you might use 50 tons or so less gasoline. Is that worse?

We're a community mostly built on software. A new game may provide massive entertainment on a very minimal footprint.

Sure the population cannot grow indefinitely, but it is predicted to stabilize soon.

The economy can grow indefinitely. Dollars are just bits in a computer, and so is a large fraction of our economy.

GDP doesn’t need to grow indefinitely. It measures industrial output, but not wealth or prosperity. Here are economists whose perspectives you may find offer a way out of the trap it feels like we’re in:

Mariana Mazzucato (https://marianamazzucato.com) talks about the spectrum of models capitalism can take in this interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prof-g-show-with-s....

“Betterness” by Umair Haque talks about the need for metrics that augment GDP by serving as indicators of wealth: https://store.hbr.org/product/betterness-economics-for-human... (also available on Amazon, iBooks, etc.).

The David Graeber Institute (https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/) has done a lot of work to explore how we allocate labor to tasks. The book “Bullshit Jobs” is a worthwhile overview of the Institute’s research.

Edit: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker (not an economist) is another look at progress. While Pinker acknowledges it’s possible to be born during a local minima, the book charts how things continue to improve for people across many metrics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

A good summary on Hickel: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/against-hickelism

"Very few people know how to build/grow anything end to end. Consumerism appears to be the only way to live in the West right now (with it, a shared feeling of powerlessness)." I recommend you read the Unabomber manifesto. It's much the same sentiment. And I don't mean it in a reductio ad hitlerum type of way. I've read the thing and hey, the motivational part of it is reasonable. It's not wrong. It makes sense. However, the conclusion I draw is that we need to acquiesce to the fact that complex, (seemingly?) fragile systems built on increasing specialization make us uncomfortable, and do them anyway; in practice, they work much better.

"degrowth seems like our only way out" Degrowth is not a way out. We know very well how humanity functions in the low-growth conditions; when the pie is fixed or growing only slowly, whatever it is, one's only way to improve one's lot is at the expense of someone else. That doesn't tend towards communitarian utopia - that tends towards things like feudalism - the way to improve your lot is to get more land, and you will never give up the land you have voluntarily because there's no growth, so there's nothing better to be had in exchange. So the only way to get more productive assets is to take them from someone.

"Is believing technology will save us from climate collapse really that, a belief? Believing this would mean society should keep doing its thing for a tiny tiny chance of getting a free "get out of jail" card (i.e. decoupling is not a fable after all)." Is believing in "climate collapse" really that, a belief? "The largest impact of climate change is that it could wipe off up to 18% of GDP off the worldwide economy by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 3.2°C, the Swiss Re Institute warns." IFCC numbers are even lower although the ones I could find claim they might be an understatement. World GDP has recently been growing by 2.5-3.3% a year. So, if it went down 18% from current values, we'd be all the way back to the apocalyptic hellscape of about 2015.

I'm not sure I understand the "Degrowth" premise. It appears to equate economic expansion with resource consumption or population growth. Economic expansion can lead to resource consumption when consuming that resource is what's valued. If everybody valued less-consumptive products and services where they are currently value more-consumptive products and services, then the resulting increase in variety of good and services would be an expansion to the economy, would it not?

The world has been going to shit for the past 2,500 years. The ancient Greeks were the first ones to notice it. That seems like a long time ago to us because we're human and have short lifespans but in the larger scheme of things it was only a moment ago. Thing is, civilization as we know it may completely collapse in the next moment - but that could be another 2,500 years from now!

These are great references. Thanks for putting this together and I agree with your assessment. Logically it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Destructive human activity in the past tended to be isolated but the rise of industrial society and machinery has made local human activity a global problem (industrial societies produce a lot of CO2 and there is no way around this).

On top of this there is also the problem of an economic model that incentivizes ransacking natural resources in order to turn it into profits. That's probably the main reason there is a lot of pushback to degrowth philosophies because it requires a fundamentally new way of measuring economic activity and value. No economic models properly account for biospheric destruction and resource depletion from human economic activity so almost all existing economic thinking is completely useless for addressing the current crisis.

All the pie in sky solutions to the current crisis assume we solve the problem of limited energy resources and then use this newly abundant source of energy to terraform the planet and fix the problems created by industrial activity. I'm calling it pie in the sky because I have seen no real concerted effort to actually make this happen. The timelines for fusion reactors make no sense and will not be ready in time to address the impending ecological disasters. Almost every other technical solution is equally nonsensical, e.g. AGI.

Right now the US doesn't actually have any upward movement in GDP, so who knows... the journey might have already begun.

"Fruit flies and yeast in a bottle are embarked upon suicidal endeavors. They can’t help it. They don’t know any better, lacking the cognitive equipment to 'know' anything at all.

"Human beings, we are told, are different.... But history teaches us that all too often, human beings simply refuse to apply [what they know] and, like the mindless fruit flies, march blindly into oblivion. [Recent examples follow.] [0]"

[0] https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/09/20/fruit-flies-in-a...

It's not that we're doing nothing. But we're doing too little too late. Human lives a century from now will be much more limited because of this failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

1798 book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...

"Degrowth" is unlikely to ever happen. It just isn't popular. And people against things like combating climate change tend to use degrowthers as a useful tool to win arguments.

"Deprofiting" would be much more likely to have a chance.

Don't be afraid of the degrowth, but of what makes more than necessary, essential. Not enough is being done regarding what is causing the climate change, and we are affecting most areas in a very complex and interconnected system. And that will cause instability and maybe reaching conditions that we or what we depend on are not prepared to deal with.

And even if the problem was seen and alerted on since last century, little significant advances were done to stop it. Degrowth, decarbonization of economy, carbon capture, changes on we deal with energy, transport and more are required changes to try to avoid the worst consequences, and time is running out.

Regarding technical solutions, inventions and so on, I try to not solve with just technology what is an organizational or administrative problem. Not dealing with the core problem will eventually kick back in a bad way.

It seems to me that each generation reaches a stage where it dawns on them that they are living in a unique time, unparalleled in history, a truly momentous occasion. Now, I was in diapers when the first Earth Day occurred, so I have a bit of a longer perspective on this. During that time, a number of intelligent, well-thought-out projections were made by people with impeccable credentials -- all based on global consumption and growth patterns which were evident to all. This article [0] collected many of the predictions. Here is an example:

'Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [from 1970] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”' (ibid)

I love science and I do agree mankind (specifically commercial activity since the Industrial Revolution) has caused climate change. I'm happy that government regulations have (for instance) cleaned the toxic NO2 smog many of our cities suffered with 50 years ago. But my view is that it's "a bridge too far" to succumb to the temptation to imagine that we have "now" arrived at a critical inflection point which creates a moment of destiny for mankind.

In fact, people are taking action and pushing back. Only last year, a costly, multi-year project to construct a water desalination plant in California was rejected based on its potential impact to marine life. [1] So, my overall point is that the posted premise is flawed due to the fact that there is no such thing as "infinite expansion of the economy". Political regimes come and go and with them some progress toward smarter growth is made here, some protections get tossed out there. It's a tug-of-war, not a steam-roll by the pro-growthers. And importantly: over-stating the case that "now is the time!" when we must radically alter the order of things to prevent catastrophe has, in my opinion, only created a harmful sense of fatigue on the ears of many reasonable people who live long enough to notice that the predicted dire consequences were, to put it benevolently, prematurely announced.

[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...

If you really want to scare yourself, read:

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William R. Catton

I wonder how virtual economies fit into paradigm of infinite economical expansion.

No. Every century had its challenges and circuses.

Yes

(1) I'd encourage you to look at Jason Hickel's sources/bibliography closely before taking him too seriously. When he has numbers, they're from very biased sources that make too many assumptions from a place of extreme technological/economic conservatism.

This isn't necessarily done consciously - the scientists who often make these predictions, like all scientists, have a very high standards for what facts are. While this is good for creating sound science, it's bad for predicting the direction of tech/econ development because this method essentially always fails because it's overly rearward looking, using a mix of linear progress lines to predict what ends up being an exponential process.

See this chart for an example of this happening with solar deployment:https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...

(2) On decoupling, it looks like advanced economies are doing this, but the problem is the rest are still going through the CO2 expansionary phase.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling

(3) My main issue with Hickel's work is that his proposal (and other degrowthers) is actually less likely to lead to carbon reductions than the green growth scenario. Namely, you're never going to convince those countries to slow growth enough, so your time is best spent figuring out better green growth or things like geoengineering.

(4) It seems like the degrowthers are more shouting into the void because they actually also have anti-capitalist sentiments (in addition to there environmental ones) which aren't going well. I really recommend Leigh Phillips' book: "Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff" for a defense of green growth from the Left.

https://www.amazon.com/Austerity-Ecology-Collapse-Porn-Addic...

(5) On preppers, crazy news, etc. I think we're going through a very real systemic inflection point similar to how the Industrial Revolution in Europe led to capitalism and liberalization of governments. The same types of forces are at play, putting pressure on our whole social structure and even to the global ecology itself.

Add to this, the collapse of meaning-making structures like family, community, religion, etc. and you have a machine that converts external stress into personal stress - even if you're personally doing fine. Like all those rich preppers.

(6) Long story short: Hang in there! We are probably going to go through some crazy shit in the coming years because of recession, political upheaval, wars, etc., but remember that even throughout all of humanity's worst times, most of us survived and in the moment mostly lived decent lives.

We may need to temper our expectations and be okay with a little rough living, but we are human fucking beings god dammit! and we were built to resilient in the face of crazy odds, and we made it this far!!!

Maintain your optimism and dreams personally. Focus on what you can actually control and who/what matters most to you. Life is too short for constant worry, and if it should pass that our world does end, take solace in that, no matter what we do, we're all dead in the end. So enjoy this life while you've got it.

Good luck stranger and godspeed!