Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/healing-the-metabolic-rift/37636/ en-us Design Observer Group 2013-02-10T23:12:10-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 More immediately, i think there's an important point in Kuhn's work that elucidates the timing of cultural evolution - basically, groups of people don't change their minds until the adamant old codgers die of old age and stop spouting off about their ardent beliefs. i forget where i saw that bit of wisdom, but Kuhn alludes to it in chapter 9 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that due to the stability-seeking nature of political institutions they tend to reach a state of crisis and a subsequent lack of agreed-upon order as a necessary interim between two paradigms. And he's not talking about a crisis like the European debt crisis, but one more like a world war or maybe the middle ages, i think. I salute you, John, for trying to figure this thing out, but the transition to the new paradigm just isn't gonna happen in a few years. it'll take at least a few decades more just to convince all nations that winning the GDP/arms war against their neighbors isn't really winning.]]> http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/healing-the-metabolic-rift/37636/#comments 2013-02-10T23:12:10-05:00
To your conclusion that "economic growth is not fighting physical limits, but rather the limits of our conception of value" - an obvious answer could be: well, we'll find out soon enough.

The power of Murphy's narrative - which is of course difficult for for an economist to understand - is that all "services", however intangible they may appear to the person using them, have a physical component: the yoga teacher needs her mat; my laptop runs on power that is nuclear generated; that sort of thing.

I'm not *arguing* that perpetual growth is impossible; I'm only repeating what the so-far immutable laws of mathematics and physics tell us all.





]]> http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/healing-the-metabolic-rift/37636/#comments 2013-01-29T08:47:15-05:00
As we reach the saturation of energy-efficiency and (hopefully) have scaled back to a sustainable level of absolute consumption of resources, services (which are derogatorily called "fluffy stuff" in the post) will comprise the entirety of economic growth. The author argues that this would challenging...

I'm sure this is very difficult for a physicist to understand, but the price of a service in such an economy is totally unanchored to any measurable physical quantities, meaning that growth in a service economy is a completely subjective marker of value we get out of interacting with one another.

The author's point about farmers' pay (along with all producers of necessary tangible goods) dropping precipitously exposes another fundamental misunderstanding. Everyone would transition to providing services along with goods. There would be no purchasing of goods without a "value added" component. We're basically there already in the Rich World. Food and other goods (including energy) would not be arbitrarily cheap, because along with it, you would be paying for what is known as a "value added" component, meaning something non-physical that has value simple because you want it or it makes you happy.

Once you recognize the economic function of "value added" and the arbitrary pricing of intangible services, you realize that economic growth is not fighting physical limits, but rather the limits of our conception of value.

If we can get our energy and resources consumption under control, economic growth will be limited, in a very real and immediate sense, by our ability to increase the value which we derive from interacting with one another.

This doesn't mean it is possible, but it does require an entirely different argument.
]]> http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/healing-the-metabolic-rift/37636/#comments 2013-01-20T15:23:18-05:00