Topic: : - page 7. (Read 12716 times)

uh ok you said "The Fed did not ease."  You didn't say, the Fed sent signals today..

Of course they didn't ease today..  You can say that everyday, but the only day it's relevant is when they have a meeting.. The next one is June 19-20..

The Fed didn't have a meeting...

go on...

I've never been totally comfortable with my grasp of money markets and yield curves and such, in part because I've never played around with them.  But I understand what you are saying here and it makes a lot of sense.  And sucks.  Someone made the point that what we moving fairly rapidly into is a 1% vs. a .01% world, and whoever it was was probably right.  Throw some trinkets (new cars, big screen TV's, etc) at the 99% and they'll stay mostly content.  It doesn't even take that in most of the world outside of the West.  But in a non-growth environment I don't think that there will be enough excess to even allow for trinkets.  Bulltet-proof boot?  Ya, probably.  Cost of doing business.


I never figured that the Chinese would be happy to slave away making tennis shoes for me forever even if it were the key to unlimited status quo.  Even if the fruits of their labor were more evenly spread about the globe it never struck me as a likely perpetual motion machine to keep the globe in blissful abundance.

As for Africa, I am guessing that the competitive gang-rape can (and will) render her quite repulsive within a timeframe measured in years.

As I have said before, I believe that at some level it all gets back to very basic thermodynamics in the end.  Measuring energy input and distributing it over a population.  And again, I suspect that the results of us humans running out of energy will be a startling mirror of bacteria running out of nutrients in a petri dish.  Environmental contamination, warfare, and death for all but those individuals who have some sort of an advantage or an extraordinary level of luck.  I suspect we'll see this type of misery before we figure out nuclear fusion.

Thanks, Notme !
-----------------------------
About "finite" supply of "fossil fuel" :
"
It's a start ,because crude ISN'T fossil,but a natural product of planet earth , a high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide ,two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust. This continuous reaction occurs at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure, as well as centrifugal acceleration from the earth’s rotation, causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields. Oil is still being produced in great abundance, is a sustainable resource and right now there is a GLUT..

Further is the related CO2 story a HOAX.we need more of this life bringing gas ,not less,but we as humans can't do anything.

Every price [of oil] above 50 USD is FRAUD."

This quote was taken from
http://www.marketwatch.com/community/doubledutch/comments/story, page 20

Doubledutch is very smart guy, and i believe, that he have read this stuff
in some scientific magazine ...

With a stable supply and a stable environment, gold does phenomenally well as money. The same applies to crypto-currencies, especially static-supply variants like Bitcoin that can do well in both growth and post-growth economies. In a relatively static growth system, it would be very difficult for wealth disparities to arise, and any disruptions would spread quickly until they become normalized.


Yes. Although redistribution may be more likely to occur in a market-force capacity because of that increased mobility.


Growth potential is still effectively unlimited.

The mechanism leading to re-distribution (downward) would be the that the 'pressure' I talked about would build to the point that it is more difficult to retain and there would be explosive failures.  In a growing system everyone can 'have more.'  In a static or shrinking system this is not possible.  It may be that the 'haves' would be willing to 'have less' in the interest of self preservation, but history doesn't argue for this.  The haves are at least as prone to the old tragedy-of-the-(not-so)-commons as any other group.

I personally am totally down with the 'local community currency' idea.  Accounting has always been an issue with such things (as have laws) and this is one reason why crypto-accounting systems hold such a draw for me.

@Fuzzy

Nanorobots will completely solve the problem of Earth pollution
say 50 years from now  

I am not kidding.

To me it means increasing pressure for re-distribution of wealth.  This pressure is quite moderated in a growing system by letting some of the excess trickle down.  Absent that things could become quite ugly.

Gold and 'the one true crypto-currency' both fail miserably in such an environment.  Both for the masses, and most likely for those who managed to win (or be born with) all the chips since they are in constant danger of ending up on meat-hooks in the town square and it will come to pass on occasion (absent and unfortunate de-population event.)

Giving the majority an option to freely select a currency solution which happens to be working for them strikes me as a pretty good solution in that the 1% either has to make it work for everyone, or everyone selects a different solution and the 1% join the 99%.  I'm all about the freedom to choose.

But, despite this, it does seem like eternal growth is possible if you do the things you suggest such as investment in education, efficiency etc (which I forgot to implicitly state myself and agree with). Without increases in efficiency then growth will of course consume too many resources no matter where that growth happens. As you suggest, growth isn't just about consumption, it's also about reducing the consumption and changing to non-resource consumption, yet whenever growth is mentioned in an economic sense it's about 'doing more with more' not about 'doing the same with less', but they're both still forms of growth.

It depends if there is an assumption that to provide better service requires more energy. Right now, I think it does, but with the right attention, it's possible to provide better service with equal or less energy than before, which would facilitate eternal growth. As you say, we are certainly not heading this way by way of policy, but perhaps we'll figure it out ourselves before too long...

As for charging more for the same service ($200 for a $20 manicure), that's not really 'growth of the economy' that's just growth of the monetary system. There's a very distinct difference between the value of something and the cost of something. I'm talking about eternal growth in the value of an economy, regardless of the relative cost associated. I imagine people generally consider growth to be reflected in 'the awesomeness of sports cars' rather than 'the cost of sports cars' (substitute 'features' with 'awesomeness' and 'family car' for 'sports car' if it pleases you more)

It all depends how you define growth, which I have not yet seen a reasonable definition in this thread.

So.... less fast cars, more hookers.

On the exponential growth thing... I have often wondered but never reached any conclusions about whether you can have economic growth forever (exponential or not). My gut feeling is no, but I will pose some questions that cause me indecision:

Can you have continual growth in services?

The thing with services is, you don't just need more people to provide more service. You can also have growth in quality of service. In this sense, it would seem possible for eternal growth to not only be possible, but a part of the human condition to always improve.

I think we're not going to move from a growth-based economy to a 'stable' economy, but rather from a product-heavy economy to a service-heavy economy. This will better facilitate the 'endless growth' that seems so desirable.

But as I say, I'm still really undecided on this issue.

I respectfully disagree here :
IMHO the biggest challenge for future "powers that be" will be
" How to deal with huge crowds of bored people, that does not need to work
 for food and shelter ?!? "
-------------------------------------------------------------

@notme
No, something prevents me from this
Maybe they block all russian IPs or ...

I suppose very top-secret info there  

I do know about the fact that mathematically
ANY exponential growth is unsustainable longterm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/business/energy-environment/us-slaps-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html

For Ukigo: http://www.yrral.net/phys-vs-econ.txt

Sorry for my burnt English 

I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity

Very interesting, can I get a source on that?

I bet my bitcoins it'll be a food shortage problem, considering we're eroding and poisoning the very bottom of the food chain. You can desalinate water with sun power, but people don't live very long if all they have to eat is processed garbage.

The mistake in the "exponential economic growth is impossible" is assuming that growth of an economy is the same as growth in resource use.

For example; it used to be that gold plating on computer boards was 200nm thick.  Now it's more like 2nm.  For exactly the same resource use the economy can have grown by 100 times.

The resources needed to make a computer in the 1960s were enormous, just in terms of weight.  Now we regularly carry around miniature computers that can lap 1960s computers and yet weigh hardly anything.  The computer in my pocket, in fact, is more powerful than the desktop computer I owned 10 years ago and yet uses a tenth of the resources needed to build it.

Farmland is more productive per acre than it has ever been.  The power needed to light our houses is shrinking rapidly.  Our televisions are bigger and brighter, and yet weigh less and use less power.  There is no reason to suppose that this process won't continue, eventually resulting in the energy use per person dropping, but economic growth continuing.  As resources become scarce, the economic incentive to find cheaper alternatives increases.  We can already see this happening -- as the price of fossil fuels is increasing, the relative cost of solar panels is coming down (so much so that the US has enacted import restrictions on Chinese panels (morons) to protect their overpriced domestic producers) while at the same time huge efforts are being made to increase their efficiency.  Solar panels are just an example, fusion, biofuels, and recycling are all industries becoming more and more viable as energy demand goes up and fossil fuel supply goes down.

Population growth rates drop the richer the population becomes.  You can't simultaneously argue that energy use per capita will go up while claiming the population that is currently poor will remain poor.  As the third world gets richer, they will use more energy per capita but birth rates will go down (just as they have in the developed world).

The physicist was arguing with a bad economist.  Further, the physicist was bad too (invoking thermodynamics in a non-closed system like the Earth was pretty bad form; and is exactly the trick that the creationists try and pull); arguing that thermodynamics means we'll boil while completely ignoring the fact that the likely source of any future energy will be the Sun's rays -- which fall on the Earth regardless of whether we use them to power our electric coffee pots or not.  Finally, he limits his admittance of efficiency improvements to small refinements; that's not how it happens.  What actually happens is a technological leap (thermionic valves to transistors for example) that completely changes the game -- he admits that but then completely ignores the implications.

Growth can, counter-intuitively, equal less resource use.  It is the fact that resources become more expensive as the demand for them rises that is driving this more efficient use.  

Have you been able to access the article yet?