When I was about 15 or 16, a guest speaker came into our science class and talked about the exponential nature of growth and how it wasn’t sustainable. He talked about how ever n years the amount of oil extracted doubled and at some point we’d run out of oil. He equated this with economic growth and concluded that in our lifetimes we would have to work towards an economy that didn’t grow any more.
It was propaganda or indoctrination right there in the classroom and I still get angry about it when I think about it. I wish I could find out who he was. I imagine he worked for some “charity” or other and managed to worm his way into schools on some educational pretense.
Anyway, I wish that way back then I’d had to hand these comments from Dishman on Brian’s Samizdata post about greens and technology:
It seems to me that over time, our wealth has become less and less physical.
Consider a wafer of polycarbonate. I’ve paid anywhere from 3 cents to $4k for a single wafer. Clearly the difference is not justified by the raw material differences between the wafers. It’s the non-physical differences that matter.
Many of us have spent hours in worlds like Norrath or Azeroth, which lack any physical existence, yet their economies are (or have been) larger than some countries.
My car was a significant expenditure for me. Of the purchase cost, less than 10% paid for raw materials. The rest was things like direct labor and even Intellectual Property.
The further we move from subsistence, the less of our economy is physical, and the more we have in non-physical. We call this shift “innovation” and “technology”.
Non-physical wealth does not pollute. Only the physical forms required to manifest it do.
By seeking to stifle innovation and technology, the greens are actually making environmental problems worse.
I think their stated objectives would be better served by seeking to maximize the ratio of non-physical to physical wealth.
The whole “exponential growth” way of looking at things is useful in the short term but useless in the long term. From one year to the next, saying that the economy produced the same thing, but 3% more of it is a reasonable way of looking at things. However, what is actually happening is that the economy is producing goods with 3% more value, and what is being produced is changing from year to year. Over a scale of decades what is being produced is entirely different, so it is not really correct to compound growth over such periods. But we do.
Adjusting the price (of anything) for inflation can also be extremely problematic. Inflation has a monetary aspect related to how much money is in circulation, but the basket of goods you use to measure inflation varies dramatically over decades, making this monetary aspect very hard to separate out.
I think the biggest implication of non-physical wealth is that it is not zero-sum. It can be created or destroyed.
Destroying wealth is easy, ie “Format c:”.
Creating it is a bit more difficult, and is left as an exercise to the reader.
Physical goods can be created and destroyed too. A car factory builds a car: wealth created. I push it off a cliff and smash it to bits. Wealth destroyed.
That wealth is zero sum goes at least back to the invention of agriculture, and probably further.
One of the implications of the zero-sum concept of wealth is that if someone has wealth, they must have taken it away from someone else.
Another implication is that the total of wealth is not reduced by redistributing it. In theory, it could be increased or decreasd by redistribution. I believe that those who veiw redistribution as an objective will almost always reduce the total by their efforts, but I can’t prove it at this point.
I believe I have demonstrated that the zero-sum concept of wealth is false, and that therefore any philosophy which depends on it being true is without basis.
Thanks for the comments, all.
Agree about zero-sum. As for whether redistribution decreases wealth: possibly not. Arguments against redistribution are usually about either efficiency or morality. Morality is easy: if wealth comes from human labour then forced redistribution is slavery.
By efficiency I mean the amount of wealth created from a given amount of labour. Austrian economists have convinced me that redistributing wealth reduces this because centralised decision making does not work.
Of course, redistributionists might disagree about how to measure wealth and therefore efficiency; they probably think having armies of civil servants is a good thing.
Or in other words, it depends whether you’re looking for the best way to make individuals as wealthy as possible (free markets) or the best way to make useless, interfering, prodnose politicians and their friends as wealthy as possible.