songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the
stated intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3%
PA IIRC. I think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.


But get back to the main point. Governments and financial institutions
acknowledge the system produces crap outcomes if growth is not in the 'good'
range and they do all in their power to keep it there. Do you acknowledge
that capitalism produces unacceptible outcomes if growth is not maintained?

as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.


If by entrenched interests you mean governments that don't want to see
rioting in the streets as either goods are not available due to depression
or money has no value due to hyperinflation then I agree. I also agree that
these economic and fiscal levers are of limited value.



Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is
'bad'. They have accepted that the people want higher standards of
living (or at least as high as they have now) and that living
standards are inextricably linked to growth. There are plenty of
examples to support this where very fast growth or economic
shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer.

Let's not get too sidetracked here.

so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.


There is much more to it than weak businesses going under in bad times. But
let's stick to the point.



Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion
across the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased
population and found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of
course technology fuelled this expansion by enabling faster
extraction, transport and utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.

There are three things wrong with this:

1) The assumption that market forces will eventually result in a
satisfactory new equilibrium

This is a blue-sky imagination product. Either you have to show that
capitalism with zero growth will continue without ultrahigh unemployment or
that a new system that doesn't produce unemployment with zero growth will
evolve. You have done neither.

2) The assumption that the transition will be gradual and orderly

The booms and busts of the last 200 years give the lie to this. If anything
the global economy is less stable than individual economies. Shocks
propagate through the system at light speed now. Once real limits to
resources become apparent prices will rise very quickly, whole sectors that
work on thin margins will go belly-up very quickly. The adjustment is not
going to be pretty.

3) The assumption that it will happen soon enough to allow orderly
transition away from dependence on diminishing resources.

We see as plain as day with the climate change issue people will stick to
the old ways until the bitter end. They will not prepare in time for a new
future. They will waste time, deny, continue to exploit limited resources
until the last. The concept of finite resources that limit growth and
require a whole new way of thinking is not one that people want to believe -
therefore they don't - therefore they will not prepare for it.



Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require
materials. Thus as it currently works the system must continue to
extract fuel, metals, fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever
increasing rate. Many of these resources are limited and will be
consumed sooner or later. Thus, the present system embodies the
seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


Hopeless optimism based on nothing but faith in economics which have
repeatedly been shown to be no better than voodoo. It isn't a matter of
deciding what brand of conflakes to buy, it's take everything you know and
rely on and turn it upside down. We are talking about changes that are way
outside the scope of anything in the past happening much more quickly all
over the world.



The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where
maintaining a standard of living does not require constant growth,
ie the two are decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


Profit shmoffit. We are not talking about keeping the investors happy at
the AGM. Back to the main point. How do you maintain constant economic
growth without matching growth in resources? You are just hand-waving the
issue away.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that
climate change isn't real or that science and technology will save
us. The fact that the core system was developed and succeeded in an
environment that no longer exists, and can only continue to succeed
when those conditions exist is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.


In the long term possibly so. But saying that there is no scientific or
technical constraint on growth but energy does not tell us how to organise
humanity and its commerce to achieve this condition.


the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.


songbird

You have done nothing to show me that system will repair itself and that it
will happen in good time. The system is facing the biggest changes in
history and you just assume that the way it works in economics 101 text book
will be just dandy. This is no better than those who say there is no
problem because God put the world here for mankind to exploit and He
wouldn't lie so all is right.

How do you decouple economic growth from resource growth? So far you
haven't given any indication that you know how or that you can show that it
isn't necessary.

David