Republicans shoot down tax on rich

Cutlass said:

But I don't see how we are doomed in the long run. Not in the next 200 years, at any rate.

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This may be a big part of the difficulty, right here. 200 more years isn't "in the long run" for me. As a child, I lived in a town that celebrated its 1200th birthday. Growth can't continue forever, because resources, including energy, are finite. It may well be able to continue for 200 years, with innovation, though I think that is unlikely. But not in the long run. In the really long run, things look bad for the earth when the sun swells into a red giant.

Cutlass said:

In a world where the population will eventually stop growing, and then will decline, do we really need ever more energy, above and beyond what can be gained through efficiency, in order to have improving lives and a growing economy?

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This is another confusing point. If the population is declining, how do we keep the economy growing? I can see how the standard of living could continue to improve, but not how the total economy can grow. Talking about the per-capita economy is different from talking about the total economy. Which are you writing about?

CKS said:

This may be a big part of the difficulty, right here. 200 more years isn't "in the long run" for me. As a child, I lived in a town that celebrated its 1200th birthday. Growth can't continue forever, because resources, including energy, are finite. It may well be able to continue for 200 years, with innovation, though I think that is unlikely. But not in the long run. In the really long run, things look bad for the earth when the sun swells into a red giant.

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Well I suppose I'm just not concerned with the Sol going nova or the heat death of the universe. I figure humans will be extinct billions of years by that time.

This is another confusing point. If the population is declining, how do we keep the economy growing? I can see how the standard of living could continue to improve, but not how the total economy can grow. Talking about the per-capita economy is different from talking about the total economy. Which are you writing about?

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I suppose I mainly am thinking of per capita. And just didn't properly make the distinction. I'm only really concerned about the people i expect to be alive. Not those that I expect to never be born.

CKS said:

Growth can't continue forever, because resources, including energy, are finite. It may well be able to continue for 200 years, with innovation, though I think that is unlikely.

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I will put in a vote of disagreement here. Throughout history, advancing technology has allowed humans to create more and more stuff from the same amount of resources and energy, with no known limit.

BasketCase said:

I will put in a vote of disagreement here. Throughout history, advancing technology has allowed humans to create more and more stuff from the same amount of resources and energy, with no known limit.

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So you did not read peter grimes' links or even his posts?

Insufficient data for meaningful answer.

The only real fallacy in the Malthusian Fallacy is the idea that a theory that is proven wrong for 2 centuries must therefore be fallacious and has therefore been disproven for all time.

The Malthusian theory is that human society cannot grow to exceed it's resources. We've been innovating our way to greater resources and more efficient usage for 200 years and so the catastrophe he predicted has never happened, however this does nothing to logically disprove his idea. Simply to assume that this trend will continue has no logical basis and is itself fallacious.

It's pretty stupid for economists just to dismiss these concerns out of hand imo.

Leoreth said:

So you did not read peter grimes' links or even his posts?

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Of course I did. I disagree with him. Why should anyone assume that reading his posts would lead me to agree with whatever he posted?

brennan said:

The Malthusian theory is that human society cannot grow to exceed it's resources. We've been innovating our way to greater resources and more efficient usage for 200 years and so the catastrophe he predicted has never happened, however this does nothing to logically disprove his idea. Simply to assume that this trend will continue has no logical basis and is itself fallacious.

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True. However, assuming that the trend definitely does have a logical basis is also fallacious.

BasketCase said:

Of course I did. I disagree with him. Why should anyone assume that reading his posts would lead me to agree with whatever he posted?

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It's not an assumption you would agree, more an assumption you would at least acknowledge the argument being made instead of posting a one-liner.

So why is our finite Earth infinite in resource content? Why do the thermodynamic limits of efficiency not apply?

True. However, assuming that the trend definitely does have a logical basis is also fallacious.

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I take it that you mean that assuming the trend will stop has no logical basis. You are right, but no-one basis such fears on mere logic, they base it on analysis of the evidence regarding our use of, and the limits on resources.

This rather underlines my point. The Malthusian position is not based on logic or rhetoric, but on facts. It was never proven wrong in principle, just to be wrong for the time it was originally postulated and a surprising amount of time afterward. An analogy I recently read was of the boy who cried wolf. Malthus cried wolf a long time ago and his successors have cried wolf as well. The wolf never showed up. The villagers now seem to believe that this is conclusive proof that wolves do not exist.

I'm not an economist, but I've always suspected that as our population increases, technological advancement will cause a steady increase in unemployment. Human workers will become less relevant in every industry until we finally reach a tipping point at which we will have to decide as a society what to do next.

Do we re-jig our economic philosophies to account for a non-existent middle class, or do we settle for less efficient industry in the interest of keeping people working?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can see a future where employment opportunities are available for only a very tiny percentage of the population.

Puck Nutty said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can see a future where employment opportunities are available for only a very tiny percentage of the population.

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Give'em 40 acres and a mule?

Farm Boy said:

Give'em 40 acres and a mule?

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How many meals can a family of 4 get out of a mule?

Puck Nutty said:

I'm not an economist, but I've always suspected that as our population increases, technological advancement will cause a steady increase in unemployment. Human workers will become less relevant in every industry until we finally reach a tipping point at which we will have to decide as a society what to do next.

Do we re-jig our economic philosophies to account for a non-existent middle class, or do we settle for less efficient industry in the interest of keeping people working?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can see a future where employment opportunities are available for only a very tiny percentage of the population.

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That hasn't exactly happened, because for capitalism to work enough people need to be employed, so we find jobs for them. Service jobs etc. Still there is pressure to put more people out of work with technology. What it should do is reduce the workweek, but that never happens with technology in our system.

Puck Nutty said:

How many meals can a family of 4 get out of a mule?

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A lot, potentially. Eating the mule is a bad idea. If you are lucky you can get 40 acres of row crops out of the mule minus whatever acreage you need to feed the mule/farmstead/garden. It wouldn't be fun, but you could subsistence farm off that, barring bad weather/drought/the mule dies/whatever. Then you need outside help or you are probably done.

BasketCase said:

Of course I did. I disagree with him. Why should anyone assume that reading his posts would lead me to agree with whatever he posted?

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All I'm assuming is that if you did read his posts and disagree with him, you would engage his arguments and try to refute them instead of pointlessly declaring your opinion that was already addressed in this post.

But yes, your opinion has been noted, I hope you allow the debate to continue now.

Farm Boy said:

Give'em 40 acres and a mule?

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Nah, three acres and a cow should do it

Antilogic said:

So why is our finite Earth infinite in resource content? Why do the thermodynamic limits of efficiency not apply?

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It's not. That's not what I said. I said, advancing technology allows us to produce more stuff from the SAME amount of resources.

Also, I never said there was NO limit, I said there was no KNOWN limit. Obviously there has to be a finite limit somewhere on how much we can have--but we don't know what it is.

Leoreth said:

All I'm assuming is that if you did read his posts and disagree with him, you would engage his arguments and try to refute them

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Don't make that assumption. And I'm not just addressing you; that's a general rule for everybody, a rule I follow myself. If someone else doesn't try to refute another member's stuff, there are multiple reasons. Maybe they have a tennis game in ten minutes. Maybe they want to track down an info source or something. Maybe they just don't want to bother starting another argument in a thread that already has lots of that. It's entirely normal for a poster to say "I disagree with X" and not explain why.

BasketCase said:

It's not. That's not what I said. I said, advancing technology allows us to produce more stuff from the SAME amount of resources.

Also, I never said there was NO limit, I said there was no KNOWN limit. Obviously there has to be a finite limit somewhere on how much we can have--but we don't know what it is.

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That's why I had the second clause. I'd argue we can hazard a pretty good guess as to what the limits are: the rate at which the sun delivers energy to the Earth. All energy on this planet is ultimately solar.

The second clause I find more interesting--we keep saying we can improve efficiency of production, but there is a hard limit on that improvement. We've taken a lot of low-hanging fruit already, from an efficiency perspective. It only gets harder from here, and to make it more problematic no practical device can ever achieve 100% efficiency or even a fraction of that due to entropy (see Carnot efficiency for an example).

Antilogic said:

That's why I had the second clause. I'd argue we can hazard a pretty good guess as to what the limits are: the rate at which the sun delivers energy to the Earth.

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Which is six thousand times greater than the human race is currently using.

Antilogic said:

All energy on this planet is ultimately solar.

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Not true. To start: the human race is, as I just said, using only one-six-thousandth of the energy the Sun provides the Earth. A fraction of the rest (not all of it, to be sure) is stored. Generally at an unknown rate, too. It's very likely the Earth is currently accumulating and storing more energy than we humans are using up.

To finish: where did the Sun get its energy from......? From the Sun?? Nope. From elsewhere. Specifically, exploded detritus from other stars. Similarly, the energy contained in fission and fusion substances such as hydrogen and uranium doesn't come from our Sun, either. The answer is no. The amount of energy to be found on and within Earth is not limited to that which the Sun provides.

Antilogic said:

The second clause I find more interesting--we keep saying we can improve efficiency of production, but there is a hard limit on that improvement. We've taken a lot of low-hanging fruit already, from an efficiency perspective. It only gets harder from here, and to make it more problematic no practical device can ever achieve 100% efficiency or even a fraction of that due to entropy (see Carnot efficiency for an example).

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It's not just the efficiency of a mechanical device. It's the efficiency of labor, the usage of land, the speed of a computer. Since the dawn of civilization, the amount of land a person needs to get enough food to survive, has shrunk by a factor of more than a thousand. Skyscrapers allow us to house thousands of people on a plot of land that once supported only a dozen. Since I bought my first 386, computers have become about a thousand times more powerful--while the cost has shrunk by four-fifths.

BasketCase said:

Which is six thousand times greater than the human race is currently using.

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A limit that is seemingly far away is still a limit, good sir.

Not true. To start: the human race is, as I just said, using only one-six-thousandth of the energy the Sun provides the Earth. A fraction of the rest (not all of it, to be sure) is stored. Generally at an unknown rate, too. It's very likely the Earth is currently accumulating and storing more energy than we humans are using up.

To finish: where did the Sun get its energy from......? From the Sun?? Nope. From elsewhere. Specifically, exploded detritus from other stars. Similarly, the energy contained in fission and fusion substances such as hydrogen and uranium doesn't come from our Sun, either. The answer is no. The amount of energy to be found on and within Earth is not limited to that which the Sun provides.

It's not just the efficiency of a mechanical device. It's the efficiency of labor, the usage of land, the speed of a computer. Since the dawn of civilization, the amount of land a person needs to get enough food to survive, has shrunk by a factor of more than a thousand. Skyscrapers allow us to house thousands of people on a plot of land that once supported only a dozen. Since I bought my first 386, computers have become about a thousand times more powerful--while the cost has shrunk by four-fifths.

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I love it when you refute yourself in your response. If we are to count fission/fusion as self-generated energy, then yes, the sun's energy radiated to Earth came from the sun. Cue smiley: . Fission/fusion as a whole is an interesting case, but one technology is always 20 years away and the other--well, I don't have a fission-powered car. And that fuel source is limited too, based on the amount of radioactive materials on Earth. Hence, my original statement is still true.

Look at this from a mass/energy balance perspective: the only significant input is from the sun, and if the Earth consumes more energy than that (read, not just humanity, but every other species as well), then it is depleting the built-up reserve. Any reasonable definition of sustainability would require the output to be less than the input. When non-negligible interstellar commerce at least looks feasible, I'll consider extending the analysis to include neighboring systems.

So, I brought up conversion factors, which you also seem interested in. Does anyone want to humor me with a calculator of the amount of energy invested in producing a barrel of oil, and comparing that to the efficiency we get out of it? You'd have to take into account it started as an organism (there's the solar energy source!), all that pressure over millions of years, etc. Although it is energy-dense, that fuel can only be inefficiently produced and is not renewable on any realistic time scale.