A trio of economists, Card, Angrist, and Imbens, won the Nobel Prize in 2021 for a natural experiment that showed that a commonly held belief about the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment wasn’t always true. That seems reasonable to me — economics is basically about human psychology, and psychology sometimes gets strange. One strange psychological aspect of some economists, though, is that they have the notion that economics is as robustly mathematical and predictable as physics, and questioning the reliability of economics is heresy. Some economists were furious about an experiment that called their assumptions into question.
Their research didn’t conclude that an increase in the minimum wage would boost employment in every circumstance. Far from it.
But it challenged the view that an increase in the minimum wage would always lead to unemployment.
However, their findings weren’t welcomed by the establishment.
In fact, they sparked an emotional debate in the economics profession.
American economist James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate himself (in 1986), was scathing of the suggestion that a core “law” of economics might not be universal after all.
“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made,” Mr Buchanan told the Wall Street Journal in 1996.
“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.
“Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.
Cool. Keep in mind, Buchanan is defending economics with that statement.
Also worth keeping in mind: Buchanan was a Libertarian with a capital L, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and has been called The Architect of the Radical Right. But as we all know, conservative politics is totally apolitical, so his strong advocacy for ideological interests doesn’t count.
An additional comment: it turns out that considering evidence counter to dogma is the behavior of whores.
“Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
He sounds like a fun guy.
From his Wikipedia page: According to a Washington Post obituarist he was not known for his warm personality, and that even his “staunchest admirers admitted that he was forbidding.”
But, is human choice behaviour “sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made?” I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a lot of sense in human choices, there seems instead to be a great deal of randomness.
I suggest that Buchanan first prove his fundamental assumption, before declaring that there’s a lot of science in economics. He’s certainly not acting like there is: the way to disprove a study is by publishing refuting studies, not by whining.
I am always baffled by people who pretend economics is an exact science that examines a natural phenomenon. All of economics is not natural, it is entirely human-made and humans make it up as they go along.
I get very big “physics envy” energies from that statement. It must really suck for Mr Buchanan to face the reality.
We should not judge people by their physical appearence, but he seems to have been just like what his photo makes me expect.
.
As for human choice behaviour being sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made, that makes me think of Hari Sheldon in the Foundation trilogy. In real life, it is like trying to predict what cats will choose to do in a particular situation.
Economists can’t do mathematics. Most of them doesn’t even understand the difference between stocks and flows.
Cato Institute’s world would end if it turned out treating people well and paying them a decent wage was good for the economy.
I love it when comedians (in Merica, examples would include Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) punctuate the ego of the rich or the powerful or the defenders of status quo.
Economists following the ‘Chicago School’ unquestionably deserve mockery, but they are too much in the background to attract attention.
Instead, we are presented with the spectacle of their disciples trashing whole nations, like when Liz Truss ruined the British economy so quickly her government was literally outlasted by a head of lettuce.
Her predecessor the lying idiot Johnson was also a believer in the inbisible hand of the market fixing everything and I mean everything.
His government did not even bother to organise the building of rest rooms for the truck drivers that had to wait for days before crossing the border at Dover; later, a tory MP that went on a fact-finding mission promptly trod into human excrement. This is an apt symbol for BoJos time in power.
U.Chicago economists are insufferable ideologues. Northwestern economists are scientists trying to muddle along to actually figure out how reality works by using models they know are too simplistic, and then trying to push them to be better. It always confused me how there could be such a different culture just on opposite sides of the same city.
Anyway, this guy was evidently just a simple moron. Water runs uphill all the time: pump it, for example. Econ 101 covers a number of situations that violate this guy’s ideological beliefs, e.g. Jevons Paradox, or the price/demand curves for potatoes in the Irish famine.
The economy is a dynamic system and, like other dynamic systems, requires calculus for modelling. Economics is modelled as a static system using algebra. Current models can only be accurate as a snapshot, not as a movie. To fill the gaps, economists use wishful thinking, pseudoscience, mysticism, correlation = causation, and neoliberal propaganda in varying combinations to achieve the desired end.
Classical economics does not model labour at all because it can’t. Any utterance by an economist that includes labour is mere noise. The signal in there is not about labour, it is a paean to the status quo..
I learnt that economics wasn’t as scientific as it was made out at university. Aiding a friend (who was studying politics and economics) with mathematics in their assignment, they had to consider three “mutually exclusive” economic theories (if one was correct, the other two could never work) with the given data… the problem was the theories given were mathematical equivalent.
Question I’d like to ask him: What would a physicist do if they observed water running uphill under consistent circumstances?
@ birgerjohansson
“As for human choice behaviour being sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made”,
Even if human choice behavior is somewhat rational that does not mean that humans start with the same assumptions or reward systems. A choice that is perfectly ration to me may look insane to you because we have different reward structures.
As David Gaeber wrote, “Economists need to get out more”.
“only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries”
So it is an ideology, then.
“Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”
― John Maynard Keynes
“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” ”
How does a siphon work? What is ‘capillary action’?
“American economist James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate himself (in 1986), was scathing of the suggestion that a core “law” of economics might not be universal after all.”
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith
as an actual scientist I’d have to say this checks out
they dress up ideological assumptions with multivariable calculus (wooooo, scary!) and then memoryhole all their lousy predictions
Buchanan is the chief villain in this excellent book that details how the right wing has been attacking democracy for a very long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Chains
He is in fact a monster.
The physics of water flowing uphill can be easily seen at the coasts when the tides rise and the winds blow. I’m sure some rather tall piles of earth on Bermuda were covered in uphill flowing water just a few hours ago. And when the water is frozen it can be pushed up to the greatest heights. I have personally climbed on snow drifts at over 4,200 meters on the east face of Pikes Peak that were blown over the top (~4,300m) from the west. I’m sure PZ can relate how snow flows over his house to create drifts in Morris during a vigorous Minnesota snowstorm. And is not a house just an artificial hill? So, Buchanan’s pronouncements about physicists are based purely on his suppositions as to what they might say. Not evidence at all.
“So how much is it worth?”
“How much do you think it’s worth?”
Yeah, real scientific – not subjective at all….
“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” Several years ago I visited an irrigation project where water from a mountain river was diverted and channeled down the side of the mountain to supply an irrigation project. At one point the channel carrying the water had to cross a creek. The channel could not be bridged over the creek so the engineers designed and built a siphon to take water under the creek to connect with the channel on the other side. So water flowed uphill.
What has this to do with economics? Because farmers in the valley below no longer relied on seasonal rain which allowed them to plant one rice crop the continuous supply of water allowed them to grow three. What’s more the large retention basin built at the foot of the mountain was stocked with fish providing a brand new industry for the region. Sometimes increasing wages opens up new opportunities such as being able to afford the new washing machine etc., increasing demand for new appliances. Demand can either drive inflation or the economy can respond by increasing supply thus increasing employment and wages and creating even more demand for the billionaire class to rip-off the working class ad for economists to consult their entrails to make their predictions.
Economics, biology.
Different disciplines.
(Too opaque?)
garydargan @ 22
A similar system was used in Fountain, CO to keep water flowing through an irrigation canal that has been in use for over a century when a highway was built that crossed several meters below where the canal was. A mesa was involved, so cutting a notch in the side of it for the highway and routing the water below it was the solution. Fluid dynamics and gravity physics used by engineers to solve an economic development problem economically.
American economics, at least, isn’t about human behavior – it’s a justification for greed. Piketty pointed that out.
It also makes people less moral. https://www.uv.es/sasece/docum2015/Etzioni-2015-Sociological_Forum.pdf
I’ve always thought of economics as a psuedo-science.
Exhibit A : Their belief that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet with finite resources.
I submit that economics is really a subset of the field of behavioral psychology.
It’s a fascinating subset, because it deals with behavior of populations rather than individuals. How a population of individuals comes to a consensus on value and worth is incredibly interesting. The very core of economics is based on how a specific culture assigns value, and that’s also where a lot of the disagreement occur within a culture. A culture can be postulated where if supply doesn’t meet demand, the people who have the lowest need voluntarily give up their demand so those who have the greatest need get the goods. That is, in fact, one of the underlying ideas of Communism, but human brains do not really work that way. Yet…, a non-human brain might.
Economics has nothing to do with anything outside of the culture individuals exist in, so it really fits into the field of behavioral psychology.
StevoR:
What that exhibits is that you don’t understand the distinction between goods and services.
On water going uphill:
Consider a slowly descending course followed by a bowl-like dip and rise whose far lip is lower, after which is more slow descent. Water flowing down this course will accelerate into the bowl-like dip, then coast on momentum up the other side before continuing. This arrangement can occasionally be found in nature.
Consider also communicating vessels, full to above the level of a tube connecting them that angles upward from vessel A to vessel B. If water is added to the top of vessel A, the level in B will rise, and water must have moved upward within the connecting tube for this to occur.
So, those right there are two circumstances where water may move upward without active pumping or suction, though both involve the introduction of more water from some source.
On the minimum wage thing:
It is not necessary for “irrationality” to be involved here, just a simple feedback loop. Raising the minimum wage puts more money in low-earners’ pockets, who have a high marginal propensity to spend. That added money generates increased demand for various goods and services, which in turn raises demand for the labor needed to provision these. The price and the demand for labor have both changed, so it’s not straightforward to predict that the supply will drop (aka more unemployment). Depending on the multiplier effect from the added spending, unemployment may rise, remain level, or even drop.
Toy example: give fast food workers more and they can afford to eat at fast food places more often themselves. If they do so, it might raise demand enough to offset the effect of the minimum wage increase, and fast food businesses might actually hire additional workers, rather than downsize.
On the Chicago School:
Every culture that sustains major inequality has relied on two mechanisms to maintain it. One of these has been “guard labor”. To the extent the cops protect property rights and differentially protect the rich from violent crime while differentially holding the non-rich accountable for both property and violent crime, they are examples of guard labor. Soldiers waging wars in the middle East to keep the petro-dollar system afloat and pipeline routes safe are also guard labor. So is the entire thicket of “intellectual property” lawyers and whole other swathes of the legal profession, and the jurists and prosecutors and police who back up their pronouncements with force, and so are debt collectors and any cops or other thugs who come around to tow or boot your car or throw you out of your home or otherwise “repossess” something due to an unpaid debt.
Some societies rely principally on guard labor: these tend to be vicious police states. Even then, “we the people” invariably outnumber the cops, soldiers, and everyone else; and guard labor is expensive, as they all have to be well paid enough to side with the privileged against the poor rather than the other way around. It behooves the rich oligarchs to find some way to minimize these, as other, labor costs.
That method is legitimating propaganda from a legitimating priesthood. In times gone by, that has usually been an overtly religious priesthood professing “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” or words to that effect. Kings ruling by diving right, emperors claiming to have the mandate of heaven, and so on and so forth were all legitimating their privileges via a priesthood. Of course, this gives the priesthood in question a lot of power itself — that of kingmaker, no less — and money and prestige to go with that, but it’s often a lot cheaper than guard labor if it convinces most people, not even that “resistance is futile”, but that there is nothing to resist, because the shitty situation they have is actually the best of all possible worlds — off the king and all descends into violent anarchy with roving warlords seizing your entire harvest instead of the taxman claiming 20%, or suchlike, and maybe God will send a flood or a plague or other divine punishment to boot.
In the present, secular-rational age, legitimating the wealth of the plutocrats by claiming they have a divine right to privilege would be a non-starter. Most people would laugh it out of the court of public opinion. So they had to come up with a legitimating priesthood that could clothe itself in a secular-rational guise.
That legitimating priesthood is the aforementioned Chicago School of Economics. The legitimating myth is meritocracy, and the idea that the wealthy deserve it because they are “job creators” (arrant nonsense, of course, it is demand that creates jobs, not plutes).
The bogeyman that replaces anarchy and divine judgment is, of course, Communism, and the supposed parade of horribles that would accompany it: mass poverty and mass starvation (they point to the Soviet Union under Krushchev and China under Mao) as well as loss of freedom. They attack social welfare programs as a) a slippery slope to Communism and b) “inefficient”, using the discredited “trickle down” argument to claim that a lowly minimum wage worker is better off without them (ha!). A key weakness in their argument is that their trickle down claims are empirically falsified and their anti-Communism argument is a straw man that works by presuming that the only possible form of Communism is on the despotic, top-down Soviet model — which wasn’t. Even. Communism. For the workers did not actually control the means of production; the state did, and the workers emphatically did not control the state. Had the Soviet Union had genuine democracy it might have actually been Communist. (And probably still pretty shitty, because central planning on the scale of a whole continent’s economy is a bad idea for reasons entirely unrelated to civil liberties.) Indeed, the so-called “Communist” states (including the still extant North Korea) also were/are oligarchic and used Communist authors and ideals as their legitimating priesthood! (There are also former “Communist” countries that still call themselves that, and might be best described as “pseudo-Communist”, of which the largest is China. These are all oligarchies with some sort of autocracy, a market economy, and a Keynesianesque economic policy closer to Sweden’s than the former Soviet Union’s in nature. Cuba may or may not still have a Soviet-style system; I’m not actually sure. It is, most definitely, also oligarchic and autocratic though.)
The Chicago school of economics was originally a reaction to the ad-hoc nature of previous economics but it became a theology when it insisted that all economics had be reduced to a mathematics. The problem was that the rules defining the mathematics became axioms not because they were shown to be correct but because they created mathematics that could be modeled. Over time, the failure of those models to match reality was explained away as due to extreme values of parameters that made no sense and varied between papers. The even bigger problem was that the Chicago school gained control of the economics journals which meant that nothing not written in that mathematics could be published. It took years before people doing real science in the subject could get their work known. An example is described here, where a real science experiment was done by comparing similar States where one changed the minimum wage and another did not. A lot of modern economics is done with similar “experiments” using identified regional or historical variablity.
@28. John Morales : Can either goods or services actually be “infinite” tho’?
In practice especially as opposed to abstract theory?
Economics is NOT an area I’ve studied much or am remotely expert on but (& ? / because?) it sure don’t make sense to me.
Yes, StevoR.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-industrial_society
My mom (an economics major) absolutely hates it when I point out how regularly economics “truths” absolutely fail to match reality. Like how cutting taxes results in increased government budget shortfalls, not surpluses.
microraptor:
It is quite impressive you know better than your mom about a subject upon which she majored.
(Listen to yourself!)
Your erudition regarding economic policy is, well, as impressive as your schooling of your mum.
“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made,” Mr Buchanan told the Wall Street Journal in 1996.
This presupposition is not only unfounded, it is observably false. Which hypercapitalist whores like Buchanan openly admit when they call it a “presupposition” rather than a “fact” or an “observation.”
“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.
Actually, increases in minimum wage would mean more of the “working poor” have at least a little more money to spend; which means they’re likely to either spend more, or save/invest more; which likely would indeed create more jobs. QEDuh.
microraptor: your mom would have hated my mom (an economics PhD), who spent a huge chunk of her working life pointing out how regularly economics “truths” absolutely fail to match reality — including, but not at all limited to, how cutting taxes results in NONE of the pie-in-the-sky benefits promised. The Chicago School — and ALL of what’s been labelled “conservative economic theory/principles” — were literally made up from nothing to rationalize policies that benefit only the rich.
“Exhibit A : Their belief that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet with finite resources.” To which Morales replies: “What that exhibits is that you don’t understand the distinction between goods and services.”
Okay, John, go ahead and explain how the difference between goods and services gives us infinite growth. We’re waiting…
Raging Bee:
“we” are, are “we”?
Heh.
Basically, resources are limited, services are not.
Value is not a resource.
—
Apparently, my #23 was too gnomic.
To which Raging Bee replies “Okay, John, go ahead and explain how the difference between goods and services gives us infinite growth.”
To which I have replied.
(Like tennis, no? Ball is in your court, RB)
@13 economic incentives are messed up.
“Why are you stockpiling food? You are spending so much more money than you need to and some of it is going to waste!”
“Because every month there’s a huge chance I’ll lose my job and then I won’t be able to afford ANY food for a while!”
You can sometimes see which generation lived through recession. Big freezers, stocked up pantries, just in case shit happens.
@33 that old “theory” that was scratched on a napkin again?
Presumption is that there is an ideal tax rate that maximises tax revenue. You go over it and tax revenue goes down. If that is the case, you should indeed slash taxes. But, if your tax rate is already below “ideal tax rate” then slashing taxes won’t have the effect of increasing tax revenue but the opposite one. Of course, reality is quite a bit more complicated than that. Businesses and billionaires often claim that tax rate is above “ideal” to get tax cuts even when actual data shows it is well below that.
#35 It is definitions of wealth and value you are disagreeing about with John. Money is infinite, actual resources are not. An example of services would be haircutting. There is an actual limit in the real world of how much of that service you can do. But if you ignore that limit, if you find someone willing to pay for service which is not actually accomplished, then there is indeed no limit to growth as measured as money transferred. We have a name for that. Fraud.
“According to this tax report, you had done 60.000 haircuts this month? In this dingy little hair salon which seats one and you are the only employee. That make for one and half haircuts every minute every day for 24 hours for the whole month.”
@StevoR:
The infinite growth thing (actually, infinite exponential growth) is obviously ridiculous. It’s also funny when the supporters of this dumbass idea bring out a future where everyone lives in a matrix (they call it a “virtual reality”) where people can make and produce stuff and innovate completely detached from reality and free from the laws of physics. They are so attached to their dogma that they rather embrace the dystopian world of matrix as a utopia rather than change their beliefs.
@jo1storm:
In the measurement of economic growth, you are supposed to adjust for inflation. So if everyone is paying 10000$ for a haircut, in the real world it means there’s an inflation.
@40 lotharloo
Don’t be going with that real world stuff again, you hear? :) That’s the only infinite growth in reality, price inflation.
But my example wasn’t about inflation, that’s the other side of the coin when measuring wealth and value via money. Not the least being that price might be not that great a measurement of value, worth, wealth, whatever. I was talking about capacity. Because resources are indeed finite, those resources include capacity to do labor and provide a service. Thus the issue with services as infinite growth.
As for my hypothetical example, the answer would be “I was a hairdresser for Lady Gaga, I told her my sob life story, she took pity on me and gifted me a million dollars. I had to put it through the books somehow!” unless it is actual money laundering thing.
One thing to remember when talking about economics and “economists” is that (riffing on something that a professor of mine said many years ago) there are at least four different types of people who are commonly referred to as ‘economists’.
Scientists. These are people doing “economics” as a social science. That is, looking at data, building models, testing them, and so forth. Like most social sciences, ‘economics’ is very difficult, because much of the data is hard to gather or absent, the number of possible relevant factors is enormous, and it is very difficult to pull out the most relevant factors in order to build a model. But the main feature of this sort of ‘economist’ is that they are trying to build models of how the (economic) world works, and in testing them to see which is a better match.
Prognosticators. These are the people that work for financial institutions, governments, and so forth. Often they share some characteristics with the first group, because they are (usually) interested in using good models, but operate under different constraints. That is, they are not involved in “pure” research, but in trying to decide what do do about some problem right now – based upon whatever data and models happen to be available. But (usually), they remain (to some degree) constrained by reality, because making bad choices has bad consequences.
Ideologues. These are the people doing economics based on an ideological foundation. Very often such people masquerade as scientists – they build models, write articles, and so on – but are not so much interested in testing their models against reality to find out if they are adequate as in using models to promote a particular ideology. These are the people that say things like “theory says that can’t happen, so reality must be wrong.”
Pundits. These are the people writing opinion pieces and the like. The relevant feature for this group is that they do not need to be constrained by reality, because by and large no one pays any attention to their failures. It is not uncommon for those in other categories also to function as pundits, but when they do they are forced to perform as pundits, cutting themselves down to the 800-1200 words that an opinion writer is given, or the few soundbites that will show up on television. My view is that I trust pundits more when they are scientists, but even then I recognize that they are likely presenting something that is almost absurdly oversimplified.
@jo1storm:
Okay I see, I wasn’t completely sure where you were going but I agree. However, it is possible for similar services to have vastly different values, e.g., a modern haircut can have higher value than haircuts 100 years ago due to increased sophistication, technology and material, even though it is a similar service that probably takes a similar amount of time as well. But it is not really possible to detach the economic growth completely from the material world in such a way that makes infinite growth in value possible.
I remember reading about this long time ago when Paul Krugman was being a fucking idiot and a badfaith debater. I think this was around time I realized he was not worth my time so I don’t think I kept reading him much longer.
https://www.postcarbon.org/paul-krugman-and-the-limits-of-hubris/
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/slow-steaming-and-the-supposed-limits-to-growth/
lotharloo, here’s a real-world example of value:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/12/ambani-wedding-india-anant-radhika-merchant-mumbai-guests
Your post has no value.
Actually, you can find no value in my post.
Not the same thing.
(See, value is subjective and relative)
[pearls before swine]
Hint, Lotharloo: How many Beyoncés are there, that you can pay to perform for you?
(Why are such people worth more than, say, a street busker?)
—
How much does it cost to hire a band, instead of just playing recorded music?
—
(Yeah, no value, for some)
Here is another post without value:
https://fashionista.com/2023/06/luxury-brands-handbags-scarcity-resale
Luxury goods are weird, no?
The harder they are to get, the more they are worth.
There are brands where you have to spend $$$ just to be able to be in line to be able to pay for the top-shelf stuff.
—
Basically, the demand-supply relationship breaks down for that sort of stuff.
(And for other stuff, like (say) fossil fuels, that get incredible breaks in subsidies and externalities exemptions)
I will reply to arguments and I don’t see an explicit claim you are arguing for.
@48
If she is one in a billion talent, then 8. If she is one in a million talent then 8000. Well 7951 according to world population estimates in 2024 :)
All value is subjective therefore infinite growth is possible with finite resources – is that your argument, John?
This is the point where you need to define value, wealth and price and their relationships between each other.
@jo1storm:
There is no point in engaging with a troll like that. He will not commit to an argument. He will not make any explicit claim or argue for any well-defined position. The value in his posts are zero and the reply should therefore be minimal in effort.
@ 52 lotharloo
There is a bit of value in his posts and that value is the same as Beyonce: amusement.
Anyway, the exact fallacy he is committing here is the one of definition. “How does economics explain Beyonce?” is a silly question because the answer is “It doesn’t. Economics as a science doesn’t concern itself with individuals but with populations, the same way biology works with populations and not individual specimens and physics works with global laws not every specific implementation of them”.
The economics as a science would ask a question “Why are there billionaires in society?” and not “Why is so-and-so a billionaire?” because for it every billionaire is interchangeable. Now the answer might be “Its a hyperinflation so everybody is a billionaire.” or it might be “Because of policy failure and we are not taxing them enough.”
jo1storm,
:)
StevoR: “Exhibit A : Their belief that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet with finite resources.”
[a bit of churn]
You: “Economics as a science doesn’t concern itself with individuals but with populations”
—
Here’s another weird thing:
Economics can’t explain that, obviously.
After all, he’s an individual. :)
—
(Isn’t he worth more now than when he had a moment and bought Twitter as a plaything?)
@ 48 Morales
How do you have more value than a bleating sheep?
And if the answer is you don’t can we please exchange you for a bleating sheep preserving our net worth while greatly increasing the readability of the blog?
@jo1storm:
See the above reply: he did not make a claim, he did not make an argument. He’s an absolute waste of time. The guy is a just a typical idiot with a lot of free time.
A bleating sheep can’t mock your brayings, Bob.
The answer is not that I don’t, so bad luck.
—
So… you are an atypical idiot with not much free time, then.
(Heh)
@56 lotharloo and with his answer at #54 he just stopped being amusing. Too bad, I expected so much more from him.
Morales version of “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation”, I really hoped I’d get to read that.
If Economics was a proper science, it wouldn’t need Ostrom’s Law:
I’m still shocked that his exists.
@jo1storm
PZ really needs to ban his ass or give him a warning. He is spamming many threads with vapid and content-free posts. I can’t wait for the sequence 3-4 posts that he is going to make 👇. All devoid of value.
“Always keep them wanting more”
Heh heh heh.
—
@jo1storm
Nope.
You just don’t see the content, and the vapidity is in your lack of perception.
—
@23, I’m noting that maybe econonists know more about economics than biologists.
And with StevoR, I’m noting that “growth” does not mean increase in physical resources.
For example, IP. Intellectual property. Worth anything? Does it have economic value?
(When will we run out of it? Is it a limited resource?)
—
I suppose one must play the man, not the ball, when one doesn’t even see the ball.
Those questions are stupid and irrelevant. The claim is that economical growth, especially exponential growth, cannot happen for a very long time. The argument is that growth is ultimately tied to the material world and physical realities such as energy and/or material use and none of which can be grown to infinity
Right.
Whether IP has any value, and whether it’s a limited resource, is stupid and irrelevant when considering economics.
You sure know your economics, lotharloo!
P.S: This will probably be mentioned but technology is also limited. Energy efficiency can’t be above 100%. Transistors cannot be smaller than an atom. A computation also requires a minimum energy consumption. Data storage also requires a minimum energy and material consumption. With a finite energy and material bounds we are limited to bounded computational, and storage resources which also rules out “infinite growth via IT magic”.
IP is irrelevant to the current discussion which is about infinite growth, Mr Troll, unless you want to actually present an argument. Actually, it reminds me, I still don’t see a fucking argument.
Because it doesn’t take any energy or other resources to create or distribute IP.
One thing about the prophets of this speciality intrigues. Why do economists « do » economics? If they are economic agents like others they teach and publish to maximise their personal interest. Surely then their « science » is otiose.
@#66
But it does. It also requires a lot of energy and other resources to protect it. Or to make it useful. The point is that John doesn’t define value. The closest he comes is to imply that the value is subjective. Presumably, intellectual property that everybody is ready to pay 0$ for is worthless. There are literally billions of patents worldwide, percentage of them that somebody is ready to pay for to use them is less than 1. What John implies (but never states) is that human imagination is endless so if somebody can think of an idea and patent it, then it means that growth is endless as well.
Guess I should have had a /s. Yeah, IP does take energy and resources to extract value out of it. Quite a lot.
Buchanan wasn’t a Chicago economist, he founded the “Virginia school” of economics. Tomato/Tahmahto for any serious policy question, however. He is also the guy who wanted “Democracy in chains” and if you haven’t read Nancy MacLean’s book about him with that title, you absolutely should.
Oh, he was also a guy who really hoped private schools would allow racial segregation to continue in the 1950s. A real scumbag, in other words.
https://altrightorigins.com/2017/08/06/school-vouchers-segregation/
John Morales apparently believes thought, knowledge, information, imagination can exist without a material substrate. Or more likely, he doesn’t actually believe this, but can’t bear to admit he was wrong in claiming that infinite economic growth is possible on a finite planet (it looks as though this claim was made simply to provide an opportunity to sneer at StevoR). Incidentally, his linked Wikipedia’s article on “post-industrial society” does not demonstrate that such growth is possible, nor even attempt to do so.
Here in the untied states (not a typo) economics, especially as portrayed in the main slime news, is the stock market and the ‘big players’ only.
Decades of research and experience has taught my organization that:
The economy for most people is the rampant corporate greedflation that is impoverishing them every day. The talking heads say ‘inflation is down’ without any recognition that that just means that the train is pulling away from us at a slower pace and we still can’t catch it. I doesn’t recognize that most of this nation is living ‘paycheck to paycheck’. They don’t care about the fixed income serfs that are having to choose among food, rent or healthcare.
Economics is not a ‘hard science’. It is a bunch of people guessing and posturing. The ‘fed’ is a corporate whore and their raising interest rates benefits only the banksters and corporations. The stock market is a game where big money players manipulate and use high-speed trading to succeed, while any individual is caught in the backwash.
@44 John Morales wrote: here’s a real-world example of value: . . . The marriage of the son of India’s richest man, the billionaire Mukesh Ambani, to the daughter of a millionaire was never going to be a humble affair.
I reply: All I see there is a billionaire in a country where thousands die of starvation everyday due to the abuse of the immoral billionaire class. I find it repulsive. I see no ‘value’ in such a person and their wasted wealth world. I’m with Bernie Sanders: Billionaires Should Not Exist.
The financial world (‘the economy’) can’t be given any credibility or respect when it exists in a moral vacuum. Yes, I’m implying that the world of banksters and billionaires SUCKS. End of story.
Between this and implying that AI hype is valid, I’m beginning to wonder if John Morales has been bitten by a venture capitalist or something.
@36 & downthread John Morales : I know there’s times I can’t talk here being guilty of it at times myself but you do seem to be a bit of a threadhog here and otherthread. I don’;t thinka ban is warrnated and some of your commenst ar e intresting and provid esome good info and logic and ideas but you might want to tone it down a little I type, speaking as someone who struggles at judging things socially & being neurodivergent myself.
Perhaps for a some things theoretically but in practice? For most businessés, govts, people they list of services theycan recive or offer seems tohave some firm limits onit depending on context at least to me. Could be wrong.
That’s because physicists rarely actually work with water. Roofers know perfectly well that water runs uphill all the time, and they have to take that into account when laying shingles.
Recently saw something in the kind of silliness for companies called, “blue ocean”. Its a buzz word for, “infinite growth”. In practice it means that you should always be looking for a new market. So, what happens if you can’t find anyone willing to buy things from you in a “new market”, or worse, the expense of opening a store some place is such that it stifles that growth? Well, in the first case you simply buy out your competition, creating a bigger and bigger monopoly. In the later case, you just buy them out anyway, then close the store, because its not profitable, and leave hundreds of people without any place to buy their groceries, unless they drive 50 miles to the closest store. You then lie, and claim that having monopolies, including owning the “source” of all your goods, like farms, lets you set lower prices. In reality, this just puts even more, smaller, sources out of business, or puts them in the position of having to sell to you, and you eventually do what has happened since.. hmm. oddly enough, right around when an important election was going on, and triple the prices of goods, then let the politicians blame it all on the guy you want to lose (never mind the fact that every other supposed “economic indicator”, imply that those prices should be going down). Odd of that works…
Basically, resources are limited, services are not.
Really? Where’s this infinite amount of medical service or financial or legal advice they’ve been hiding from the suffering masses?
Value is not a resource.
No, it’s an attribute that is assigned to resources, goods, services and actions (all of which are limited). Your point…?
Between this and implying that AI hype is valid, I’m beginning to wonder if John Morales has been bitten by a venture capitalist or something.
RR, based on other comments of his here and there, he seems to at least lean toward libertarianism. That might explain why he has to come here and defend the fake-ass principles of that fake-ass movement and fake-ass ideology.
I read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, developing somewhat heterodox views on all three. (Long ago: the Vietnam War was still continuing.) I asked my politics professor before Finals whether I should express my own opinions or the conventional view; he said, be yourself, you know this stuff. So I did, and got a terrible grade on those exams.
Meanwhile, I figured Economics was a dead loss for me since I thought they were all full of shit, so I didn’t cram for it and was unsurprised when the questions seemed baffling enough that I didn’t know what answer they wanted, which was not a surprise. So I shrugged my shoulders, wrote whatever seemed sensible and turned in my paper half an hour early. In the pub, I learned that the economists among my cohort had found the questions very difficult, which was news to me of course. They freaked out and got bad grades. I got an A.
Which course I did not deserve. But that’s economics for you. Not great at predictions.
Buchanan wasn’t a Chicago economist, he founded the “Virginia school” of economics…
The “Virginia school?” I hope that doesn’t mean UVA, my alma mater. I really don’t want to have to deny I was ever in Charlottesville…
@Raging Bee: Yes. UVA is where Buchanan established the “Thomas Jefferson Center” in 1957. The center still exists by another name now. You do know that UVA was founded by a slaveholder, right?
More on Buchanan and segregation here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3308162
So I’m a social psychologist that specializes in the self-regulation of decision making (but I’m consultant not a professor). Libertarians have zero understanding of how the world works. Most often the “economists” are the same people who think that Utility Theory is awesome and ignore the reality of Prospect Theory. That is, they are faith-based loons that reject empiricism.
It makes sense that higher minimum wages would boost employment. Below median income (and arguably above it for a ways), people aren’t spending to their full need state let alone to get “luxury” (i.e., nice things to have or things that feel nice) so any cash injection means their spending goes up. When consumer spending goes up, economies expand and for businesses to get a piece of that economy they need more people working for them to keep their share of the market going.
Traditional economists tend not to be very smart people or at least unable to think flexibly. My favorite is how they seem to hide their results behind wonky, hard-to-follow analyses that only look at one variable at a time and go, “see! I told that [social good] causes [negative outcome].” Their “model” obfuscates that they made some biased choices.
I think it is worth pointing why these “Chicago” economists are wrong even on their own theoretical grounds. It is because the simplified model they is incomplete and the necessary conditions for the model to work are not met.
The model is incomplete because it ignores that all prices have two effects a substitution effect and an income effect that work in opposite directions. Neoclassical economists always ignore the income effect and act as though the income effect doesn’t exist.
The necessary conditions that are not met are because the minimum wage market is not a normal market. If employers are paying the minimum wage it is because the market never clears (otherwise they would be paying more). And wages are only a small part of the costs of minimum wage employers, but a large part of the income of minimum wage employees, which combined with high transaction costs for both parties mean there is a massive power discrepancy in negotiations.
I think it is worth pointing why these “Chicago” economists are wrong even on their own theoretical grounds. It is because the simplified model they is incomplete and the necessary conditions for the model to work are not met.
The model is incomplete because it ignores that all prices have two effects a substitution effect and an income effect that work in opposite directions. Neoclassical economists always ignore the income effect and act as though the income effect doesn’t exist.
The necessary conditions that are not met are because the minimum wage market is not a normal market. If employers are paying the minimum wage it is because the market never clears (otherwise they would be paying more). And wages are only a small part of the costs of minimum wage employers, but a large part of the income of minimum wage employees, which combined with high transaction costs for both parties mean there is a massive power discrepancy in negotiations.
I think it is worth pointing why these “Chicago” economists are wrong even on their own theoretical grounds. It is because the simplified model they is incomplete and the necessary conditions for the model to work are not met.
The model is incomplete because it ignores that all prices have two effects a substitution effect and an income effect that work in opposite directions. Neoclassical economists always ignore the income effect and act as though the income effect doesn’t exist.
The necessary conditions that are not met are because the minimum wage market is not a normal market. If employers are paying the minimum wage it is because the market never clears (otherwise they would be paying more). And wages are only a small part of the costs of minimum wage employers, but a large part of the income of minimum wage employees, which combined with high transaction costs for both parties mean there is a massive power discrepancy in negotiations.
The real problem with “economic theory” is that it frequently treats everything as independent variables, and they’re not. For example, Morales’s glib “resources are limited, services are not” assumes (all of which, BTW, are demonstrably counterfactual as to at least some segments of society):
• Services (however they are defined) have no dependence whatsoever upon resource availability. Counterexample: The “service” of providing medical care has a vast underlying web of resources, ranging from “office facilities” to “equipment” to “consumables like bandages.”
• Creation of IP is a service that is unlimited. Counterexample: All of the resources necessary to build, test, and exploit a more-efficient energy storage system for transportation.
• There is no friction or translation cost between different forms of capital, either just “inside” of resources or services, or between them, or involving labor. Counterexample: Every securities market ever conceived, all of which depend upon arbitraging low-friction/translation-cost paths that are not generally available.
• Exploitation of either resources or services, in the broadest sense of “exploitation,” does not itself operate to restrict nonconsumed resources or services. Counterexample: The Cuyahoga River.
The fundamental problem is that economics at best posits that Maxwell’s Daemon is real and costless (contra Szilard’s demonstration otherwise, which is three quarters of a century old). That’s what the “invisible hand” and “teh magic of teh markets” are, and the math to so demonstrate is within reach of anyone who has taken statistical mechanics. One need not even solve any Hermitians! And that’s before the messiness of nonuniform behavior, the funhouse mirror effect of the Rawlsian original position (often dismissed as “that’s just the endowment effect, and we can model it”), and the systemic and behavioral distinctions between symbiotes and parasites.
There’s no single field of knowledge that explains everything, or that is even self-sufficient without artificial boundary conditions that seldom resemble nature. The pretense of economics otherwise is perhaps its greatest failing. Economics is a tool that can be used to understand, and even predict, some limited-scope circumstances within defined boundary conditions — rather similar to “Newtonian mechanics,” “the germ theory of disease,” and “Mendelian genetics.” The fundamental problem is that it’s trivially easy to describe real systems outside of those boundary conditions that do not behave consistently with any of those theoretical constructs.
doctorcorey @82, that is really interesting, and so is your field. I would really like your advice on the “Why??” of some people I know.
Someone (more than one, actually) once tried to explain to me how the stock market works. I’m of average intelligence, but I just could not understand it, no matter what they tried.
Later, it became necessary that I know at least something, and I realized why it was so difficult for me to learn. It’s because there’s nothing to learn.
I think it is worth pointing why these “Chicago” economists are wrong even on their own theoretical grounds. It is because the simplified model they is incomplete and the necessary conditions for the model to work are not met.
Part of the reason for that is the treatment of economics as a separate-and-distinct field of study — which then fails because purely economic models can’t deal with all the non-economic externalities. It wasn’t always like this. People used to refer to something called “political economy” (Marx’s magnum opus, Capital, was subtitled “A Critique of Political Economy.”) “The Economy” was not treated as a separate entity, it was part of broader civil society and political governance. It was only recently that anti-regulation “free enterprise” fundamentalists and ideological libertarians started treating “The Economy” as some sort of semi-divine magical machine that would make all our wealth-distribution and resource-allocations for us, if only we puny low-class people and the leaders we elect would stop trying to constrain and regulate it and second-guess its superior wisdom with our subjective beliefs about what what we need and how best to get it.
This is also why economics is so overtly amoral: it’s the job of civil society and political leadership to apply moral standards to our actions, NOT what we tend to call “The Economy.” This is why economic principles describe (or pretend to describe) a “rational” decision-making process that ignores moral principles and even rejects moral principles (and the enforcement of said principles via regulation) as interfering in “rational” economic function.
In which I am entertained by the antics of economists
Oh yeah, that guy in your photo looks like a barrel of laughs! More fun than an infinite number of monkeys typing The Wealth of Nations!
The linked article does touch on the social aspects to economics. I know one economist who favors the capitalist Chicago school, but he is a misogynistic ass who also thinksAtlas Shrugged is a good book.
I had to force myself to finish it for educational purposes, but my interpretation was it was boring, nothing ever happened except lots of men whining at great length (the speech was 40 pages!!) about how entitled they were.
Huh, imagine that. Humans aren’t numbers.
Artor @76:
Damn right! There should be subjects called something like ‘fluid dynamics’, maybe with particular attention to phenomena we might call, oh I don’t know, ‘capillary action’ or something like that. Silly physicists.
Gosh, there’s even a picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action#/media/File:Capillary_flow_brick.jpg
Growth in services is ultimately limited by one of two things:
The resources available to implement the services.
The number of people and the amount of time they have available to use the services.
That’s even if you could keep coming up with new services that people would use ad infinitum, which is doubtful.
Ah well, perhaps if it’s not me saying it:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120515/infinite-economic-growth-finite-planet-possible.asp
And KG apparently does not understand the concept of economic growth at hand.
I see. It’s apparent, but unlikely, and the non-apparent thing is more likely.
KG apparently thinks in terms of my sneering at people, rather than addressing what those people wrote quite directly. KG writes about me and my beliefs and my purposes in the third person to the audience, I respond to StevoR about what StevoR wrote.
But I can do the third person thing, too.
(I can also do the imputing of motivations and so forth, but I’m not that weak)
Tacitus:
Yeah, but not all services are fungible.
For example, the service provided by Beyoncé is worth more than the service provided by, say, a street busker. We know this because it costs a lot more.
(How many buskers would it take to equal the cost of her performance fee?)
Music is a product, not a service. The difference in cost between a street busker and a Concert isn’t the relevant factor. All things are not equal.
Beyonce is replaceable. If she died in a plane crash a day before the wedding, she would have been replaced by a different star. You still need to define price, value and wealth and relationships between those terms.
And paying for the service of that different star would still have to cost a shitload, lest it not be obvious that it’s for a display of conspicous consumption.
The point I’m making remains the same: one Beyoncé costs a lot more to hire than a street busker, but their physical requirements are basically the same.
Two people, but one costs a shitload more than the other to hire, though they probably mass about the same and consume roughly the same resources. One person’s worth, in each case.
Same substance, different value.
Nope. You may think I need to, but I really don’t.
—
Look, this whole sidetrack is because StevoR opined economics is a pseudoscience on the basis of a misconception. Perhaps ask him first, since I was responding to him.
You actually really do. Do me a favor and define them for me. Add a definition of “cost” for good measure. Because right now you sound incoherent.
jo1storm
Wut? What do weddings have to do with it?
Beyoncé is not replaceable in either of those scenarios.
Jay-Z would have noticed if his bride was anyone other than Beyoncé, just as her fans would not be happy with a different artist.
It’s arguable that Beyoncé herself is the product at a Beyoncé Concert.
Cancellation, grief, and refunds for tickets would be the outcome of her untimely death.
As someone with an undergraduate degree in economics who went into finance after undergrad, I have a dog in this race.
Economics is political philosophy (or theology, if you’d rather).
Real world experience brought this home to me sharply in my first real job. I was a financial analyst, and repeatedly saw executives make decisions based on non-economic factors rather than economic ones. The assumption that there’s a ‘rational economic man’ is so ridiculous it’s farcical.
Even more intractable is the problem that knowledge of a theory of behavior will change that behavior. There actually are groups that mostly behave like economics’ so-called ‘rational man’; economists and MBAs. The rest of us are mainly normally ‘irrational’.
Those things, and the fact that economists are unwilling to abandon foundational assumptions that are clearly false, made me conclude that economics wasn’t a science. It instead seems to be a philosophical attempt at justifying the money-centered economic system we have. Like Pangloss, the economists are trying to justify our current social structure as ‘the best of all possible worlds’, so that we accept it, not struggle to change it.
@100 Tethys
Please read comment #44.
Look, this whole sidetrack is because StevoR opined economics is a pseudoscience on the basis of a misconception. Perhaps ask him first, since I was responding to him.
And you responded poorly and incoherently. That’s not StevoR’s fault, even if he was wrong (and offhand, I’m not sure he was).
Also, John, the article you cite doesn’t show that infinite growth is possible. At most, it only says we can (and MUST) find ways to reuse our resources, pollute less, and get more use/value out of whatever resources are available. That’s not infinite growth, though it might lead to infinite sustainability in a zero-population-growth situation.
@101 daulnay
Homo economicus, the worst cryptid of them all! Doesn’t exist but influences so many lives!
how do we block this Morales idiot
I am sick of scrolling through his ill-informed arrogance to get to the real comments
Heh. Nope. I addressed one point.
I could have noted that economists don’t actually claim infinite growth is possible.
I could have noted that capitalism, not economics, is what’s predicated upon endless growth.
Any other number of tacks were possible.
I chose to note that not all things that have value are physical things.
Not that keeping it simple has helped, has it?
You actually got pretty close @38: “#35 It is definitions of wealth and value you are disagreeing about with John.”
(But then you reverted to form)
felixd:
I make unreal comments. Got it.
(At least I am not sick)
reads #44
Ah, context. Thanks.
Weddings in multiple cultures are occasions for a one time ostentious display as a form of communal blessing.
Indian weddings are generally multi-day long lavish affairs, even if you can’t afford to hire Beyoncé to provide the music at the reception.
Economics is entirely dependent on social factors. Max Weber wrote about it quite a bit, though I’ve no idea how much modern economics follows Weber.
@106 John
Still vaiting for you to define value, wealth, price and costs. And relationships between those terms.
There ya go, felixd.
I’ll not respond to him, to prevent one more comment responding to someone who is directly addressing me. For you. Get well soon.
(Wouldn’t want to fill the thread with responses to people talking to or about me, would I?)
#110
Good job doing just that. I am waiting for you to define those since comment #51.
Are you unwilling or unable to do that?
“which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made”
Assuming Buchanan meant to say “rational,” this presupposition makes no sense. Rational behavior may not be predictable in practice, because the actors may follow a strategy that is too complex for the observer to understand or apply. Conversely, irrational behavior may be highly predictable; e.g.,”sex sells” even when sex is not the actual product.
And if Buchanan meant to say “relational,” that also makes no sense because relational models of choice tend to involve a large number of causal factors. It’s not just “wage goes up, employment goes down.”
… says the guy who, much evidence indicates, is always keeping them wanting less.
Tethys@89:
Who broke the news to him that Atlas Shrugged was written by a woman? :)
daulnay@101:
That’s pretty much my own conclusion, as noted in comment 29.
jo1storm, I do like your perseverance.
See? Persistent needling.
That’s what happens, felixd.
That’s one reason why you became sick; because people persist in trying to engage me, and I’m O so polite by routinely responding to them.
(I know, I know. Always blame the retaliator, not the initiator)
—
Anyway, since you are so demanding, jo1storm, a reward:
Isn’t the topic the antics of economists?
Well, then.
I define them the same way as economists do, for the purpose of your question.
(There you go; can hardly get more direct and specific than that, can I?)
(I see BB is doing the chaotic walk towards the strange attractor, too)
BB, I was being sardonic; it was a very direct response to your “I expected so much more from him.”
See, when you post into this thread purely to say to the audience that “I expected so much more from him.”, I get to make a jocular gibe with due allusion.
(I do like my bespoke retorts)
—
(See what I mean, felixd?)
#114
I’ll need names now, because there is disagreement in definitions, that’s why I asked.
You really have no idea what you’re talking about, don’t you?
Economics is a social science.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics
(I wonder whether someone is gonna deride that on the basis that it’s Wikipedia — thus this parenthetical addendum)
(See what I mean, felixd?)
You need names to know how economists define the things you listed?
(You do know you are on the internet, no?)
No. You really have no idea what you’re talking about.
—
I mean, it’s obvious what’s going on, and it’s obvious you aren’t actually trying to discuss stuff.
<clickety-click>
https://atanasdzhingarov.com/cost-price-value-and-worth-whats-the-difference-and-why-should-you-care/
#118
I was actually trying to discuss stuff but you have no idea what you are talking about and are all over the place.
Are you sure you want Atanas Dzhingarov to be the economist you are using for your definitions? Because you have just disproven your own arguments if so.
Have I?
Do elaborate.
(See what I mean, felixd?)
#120 As Raging Bee has written to you in comment #103 you should really read the articles you link to before you link to them.
So do it now and read your comments. You’ll see for yourself, its quite obvious.
@ Bekenstein Bound #113
Economics wasn’t supposed to be that way but was found itself as ideal ideological tool to justify all sorts of things. It became a priesthood the moment it got close to ruling class. Sorry.
(See what I mean, felixd?)
Heh.
(You’re quite sure I’ve provided an argument?)
—
I do like your perseverance, but.
So. Let’s squeeze a little more juice.
I note I was amused by your rhetorical question:
“Are you sure you want Atanas Dzhingarov to be the economist you are using for your definitions?”
From that I can infer that
(a) you concede those are indeed definitions; and
(b) you think different economists use different definitions; so
it follows that you think
(c) there is no common definition of those things in economics.
Notice I didn’t include your implicit claim that Atanas Dzhingarov is the economist I should not be using for my definitions, from which it also follows that you think you know what my argument may be.
Care to adumbrate what you perceive my putative argument to be, given you think you know it well enough to know that Atanas Dzhingarov is the economist I should not be using for my definitions?
—
PS
“It became a priesthood the moment it got close to ruling class”.
Economists are a priesthood, you assert.
(Is that worse than a pseudo-science, as StevoR claimed?)
@86. garnetstar :
I’ve seen it said by someone – here or elesewhere I forget exactly where & paraphrasing from memory here – that the stock market is just a measure of rich people’s feelings.
That struck me as prettty accurate. There’s also, I think, an excellent discussion of how the stock market is a nonsense and house of cards built upon pretty much nothing reasonable in ben Elton’s Stark novel. See :
https://theconversation.com/the-earth-was-dying-killed-by-the-pursuit-of-money-rereading-ben-eltons-stark-as-prophecy-147256
@John Morales : Is #78 ragibng Bee correct when he typed :
Are you a liberatarian and, if so, why?
^ PS. Raging Bee that is obvs. I usually cut & paste nymns tomake sure Iget them right, sigh.
^ PS. Raging Bee that is obvs. I usually cut & paste nymns tomake sure Iget them right, sigh.
@#123
Read my comment #51 again. Is that your argument?
@#124 StevoR
To me, stock market is socially acceptable gambling for extremely rich. They don’t say “He has a gambling addiction” for those people, they say “He plays stock markets like a fiddle”.
Using resources is finite.
The arguments about services is a confusion caused by the ambiguous colloquialism”infinite growth”.
Robert Kiyosaki started it in the 80s as I recall, and then it was aimed squarely at corporations polluting and extracting. Of particular concern was damage to the biosphere caused by this.
A new catch phrase is required to disambiguate.
StevoR,
Nope. Not even slightly.
Best approximation, I basically practice enlightened self-interest, and don’t have rules, only guidelines.
What I think is best, basically, given my knowledge-set and life experience.
It’s not really an ideology.
That sort of thing is for other people.
Call it “Johannism”, if you want.
But no.
Not an altruist, and most certainly not a libertarian.
BTW, this very claim is revealing:
It’s explaining an imaginary thing.
People, for some reason, so very often imagine that because I dispute some claim, I am perforce endorsing the contrary. Then they seek to have me expound on why I endorse the opposite of whatever claim I dispute. There’s a perfect example of that in this very thread.
(Such a low-level mistake!)
Best approximation, I basically practice enlightened self-interest, and don’t have rules, only guidelines. What I think is best, basically, given my knowledge-set and life experience. It’s not really an ideology. That sort of thing is for other people.
That sounds like how I’ve heard lots of libertarians describe themselves. Especially the “I’m enlightened, everyone else is ideological” bit. John may not really be a libertarian, but he still sounds like one. “Ideology is bad!” is how libertarians have been pretending to be superior and apart from both “left” and “right,” “liberals” and “conservatives,” “Communists” and “Fascists.”
And I gotta say that whole “ideology is for others”/”I refuse to be pigeonholed” shtick sounds like — like many libertarians when they’re called out — he’s trying to avoid owning up to what/who he actually is. If someone were to ask me if, say, I was a Communist, I’d most likely say something like “No, I’m more of a Social-Democrat, in that I support a democratic form of government that takes an active role in governing society and institutions in general, not just individual behavior…” etc. etc. so people get a better idea of what I am beyond just a “Who, ME?!” denial of the suggestion.
I know I’m sounding paranoid and prejudiced here, and I apologize if I’ve really mistaken John’s beliefs/ideology/whatever he wants to call them. But in my defense, I’m responding to patterns I’ve been seeing since about 1978. If you want to call me “prejudiced,” I’d say that rather than “pre-judging” certain people and movements, I’m acting on valid judgments made about them long ago that have yet to be reversed or overturned.
(See what I did there, John? THAT’S how you quibble!)
You really should become aware of the principles of E-prime.
Anyway.
—
Time for a sabbatical, for PZ’s sake.
People, for some reason, so very often imagine that because I dispute some claim, I am perforce endorsing the contrary.
Well, you might avoid that problem, at least in some cases, by stating what you DO endorse, instead of just disputing others’ claims.
Weddings in Indian culture are very important and people spend a non-negligible fraction of their wealth on them and this billionaire asshole is probably spending a smaller fraction than most poor Indians, given how absurdly rich he is. So given that this scumbag has managed to suck off a significant percentage of the total wealth of everyone in his country, he will spend an astronomical amount on vanity. It is an example of wealth inequality and not a fucking argument for the proposition that economic growth can continue forever to infinity.
@ 129 Morales
Lol. How very Randian.
@ 132
What about the rest of us! X-D
Anyway, best idea you’ve had in years and don’t hurry back.
So this guy hasn’t heard of Australia then and how we raise the minimum wage every year and unemployment isn’t affected by the raise (despite what all the business groups claim might happen)? Or any other country which has a minimum wage that is indexed or raised based on some metric?
Has this guy ever left the US and did his head explode when he did?
That reminds me of what an economist once said, IIRC it was Robert Reich.
Loonytarian capitalism has a drop dead feature.
When all the money flows to the ultra rich oligarchy as income inequality increases, the capitalistic system just stops.
Because the vast majority of people don’t have money to buy anything.
No sales=no income
That is why income inequality and ultra-rich oligarchies are bad for the economy.
The other fallacy of some US economists that we see all the time is Supply Side economics.
Supply Side economics is the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves. If you cut taxes, that increases economic activity, which is taxed. Those additional taxes make up for the losses produced by…cutting taxes in the beginning.
This is an example of a positive feedback loop.
It has been tried many times.
It almost never works in reality.
Reagan tried it and it failed.
Brownback in Kansas tried it and it failed spectacularly and almost wrecked Kansas.
Trump supposedly tried it and once again, it failed.
The Trump Federal budgets produced a huge amount of our current National debt.
It has gotten to the point that the GOP etc.. know that it doesn’t work.
They just pretend whenever they want to cut taxes for the corporations and ultra rich oligarchies.
When it inevitably doesn’t work, they then…cut Federal government services to make up for it.
it becomes a way to channel yet again, more money to the upper income classes.
@ ^ raven : Reckon pretty much the exact same things can be said about “Trickle down” theory economics too. Indeed, these might actually be the same things under different names perhaps?
I’ve heard an even worse idea, also referred to as supply side economics: If you have a supply, there will be a demand. One of the things I point out when this comes up is that landfill in Arizona (?) full of Atari E.T. cartridges.
Rebecca: American Exceptionalism dictates that we Americans cannot, should not, and must not pay any attention to any other country’s experience in our policymaking decisions. “America’s special genius,” as St. Ronald put it.
I know I’m sounding facetious there, but this is yet another real and longstanding line of bullshit underpinning the long-running scam that is “conservative” econo-religious doctrine.
I’ve heard an even worse idea, also referred to as supply side economics: If you have a supply, there will be a demand.
The way I’ve heard it is: businessmen and producers (“Makers of Things” as some Randroids put it) make rational choices in deciding what to make, how to make it, etc.; and what they choose to make is, pretty much by definition, what the consumers want or need. It’s basically a way to give “suppliers” all the credit for being “leaders,” and minimizing “demanders” (i.e., consumers) as sheeple whose opinions/demands aren’t worth consideration.
John morales@93,94
Your link @93 does not even attempt to show that infinite economc growth is possible on a finite planet. Try reading it again. Of course I understand that economic growth does not necessarily mean using more resources. Nevertheless, a finite planet only permits a finite amount of computation (whether in brains or artificial systems) to produce new ways of doing things, and indeed, a finite number of ways in which the atoms it consists of can be arranged. Even if one goes through every possible such arrangement, ending up with that in which “the total value of the domestic production of all goods and services”* is at a maximum, that is still a finite process. So no, infinite economc growth is not possible on a finite planet, and wouldn’t be, even if the planet was going to last forever, which it isn’t.
*There are of course problems in this concept, since “value” is ill-defined, but that doesn’t affect the argument.
@KG: Indeed. And Morales should know this already, since he has previously indicated recognition of the concept alluded to by my ‘nym …
“we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
“He sounds like a fun guy”
I dunno about that. This is one old whore who really doesn’t want to follow that guy’s camp.
A note on the “infinite growth on a finite planet” quote…
There are a number of different interpretations of this claim. The most obvious is “one cannot consume an infinite amount of a finite resource”. This is of course true – but it is trivially true, and therefore not particularly interesting, except as a reminder that one should be concerned with how much resources one is consuming. I believe that this was its original intent.
But a more general claim, such as “one cannot have infinite growth in a finite system” is not (or at least not necessarily) true. For example, in mathematics there are an infinite number of rational numbers between 0 and 1, and thus one can have an infinitely growing series that never exceeds the (finite) space between 0 and 1.
Thus, for certain non-physical things “infinite” growth is not necessarily a problem. For example, we can have – effectively(1) – infinitely growing knowledge without causing any logical problems for a “finite” system (such as a planet). Such is also true of economic ‘growth’ – as it is usually measured, that is, in units of value. Because dollars (as an example) are a notional thing (rather than a physical one), there is no logical problem if the number of dollars grows – effectively(1) – infinitely.
More concretely, one can infinitely use finite resources if that use does not consume them. For example, the total amount of most elements (oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) available on the planet does not change (much) over millions of years. Yet we humans, as well as plants and other animals, can continue to use them – effectively(1) – infinitely, even limiting ourselves to our finite planet.
Further, our planet is not a closed system. Energy, for example, comes from outside. That means that – at least until we build a Dyson sphere and capture all of the energy provided by the sun – we can continue to grow our use of energy, if we can capture it.
(1) Of course these are not truly ‘infinite’. At some point some thousands of millions of years from now the sun will die, and at some point many more thousands of millions of years after that the universe itself will likely end in some way (or surrender to entropy). Nonetheless, it seems safe to say that these things are “effectively” infinite, at least on human timescales – or even the timescale of the human species.
Finally, at the most basic level, no one – even robber barons or uber-capitalists – is particularly interested in using infinite resources. Yes, many things are used wastefully, or thoughtlessly as if they were infinite, and that is a problem; indeed the one the reasonable interpretation of the quote addresses. That is: attend to your resources use and don’t waste them. But the quote is not some sort of logical stopper that one can throw out whenever anyone talks about ‘growth’.
Such is also true of economic ‘growth’ – as it is usually measured, that is, in units of value. Because dollars (as an example) are a notional thing (rather than a physical one), there is no logical problem if the number of dollars grows – effectively(1) – infinitely.
I dunno if this is what you call a “logical problem,” but there is a problem here, in that the more dollars you create, the less “value” each dollar has; so that more dollars won’t necessarily give anyone more of the value those dollars represent — especially when the supply of dollars grows much faster than the supply of goods and services they’re used to pay for (which of course is limited, so printing more money after those limits have been reached creates no new growth or value at all, just inflation).
Also, it’s really not possible to have infinite growth in the supply of dollars, because, as someone said above, notional things can’t really exist without a material substrate. There’s only limited amounts of metal to mint coins, limited amounts of paper and ink to print paper money, and limited IT storage and processing capacity for govcoins or other e-currency.
RagingBee@147:
“there is a problem here, in that the more dollars you create, the less “value” each dollar has; so that more dollars won’t necessarily give anyone more of the value those dollars represent — especially when the supply of dollars grows much faster than the supply of goods and services”.
Not necessarily. Remember that ‘value’ is also notional. If the supply of dollars (or any kind of money) grows faster than the value of what it can be exchanged for, then the relative value of dollars declines. But the value of what one exchanges dollars for is not in any way directly tied to the “supply” of things for which one exchanges dollars. Indeed, the value of things can increase with a decrease in the supply thereof.
“There’s only limited amounts of metal to mint coins, limited amounts of paper and ink to print paper money, and limited IT storage and processing capacity for govcoins or other e-currency.”
The amount of money already has more or less no relation to these things. For example, already, less than 1% of all “dollars” exist in any physical form, nor even as “govcoins or other e-currency”. The rest exist as numbers in ledgers or other representations of numbers of dollars. And one can record representations of arbitrarily large numbers with nothing more than pencil and paper. Of course, at some point it may become more trouble than it is worth to deal with absurdly large numbers of dollars, but a) we are so far away from that point that presenting it as a current problem is just silly(1); and b) there are solutions to that problem if we were ever to face it.
(1) Making the number of dollars – as in the examples above – effectively infinite. We can represent (ie: write down on a piece of paper) the number of atoms in the universe, so representing large numbers of dollars in computer memory is not an actual problem we are likely to face… ever.
Can we stop referring to it as the “Nobel Prize”. It’s the “Swedish National Bank’s Prize for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. It was invented in 1969 and hooked on to the real Nobel Prizes to try to create the illusion that Economics is a scientific subject on the same level as Physics or Medicine. If they’d linked it to the Nobel Prize for Literature, that might be more accurate, since the Literature Prize deals with fiction.
Not necessarily. Remember that ‘value’ is also notional.
Yes, necessarily. Value may be “notional,” but it’s still an attribute assigned to real goods, services and actions. So any sort of “value” that increases independent of any change in goods, services or actions, is purely imaginary and unreal.
But the value of what one exchanges dollars for is not in any way directly tied to the “supply” of things for which one exchanges dollars. Indeed, the value of things can increase with a decrease in the supply thereof.
The second of those two sentences contradicts the first — because the first is false. Value is tied to the supply of things, as well as to other material circumstances; so even though it’s considered “notional,” it’s still firmly based on real things and events.
idontknowwhyibother@146,
Nor do I.
No, we can’t, because knowledge has to be instantiated in some physical form.
RagingBee@150:
“Yes, necessarily. Value may be “notional,” but it’s still an attribute assigned to real goods, services and actions. So any sort of “value” that increases independent of any change in goods, services or actions, is purely imaginary and unreal.”
But your claim is emprically false. The value attributed even to “real goods” can (and does!) change independently of the amount of “real goods”. The value of some object may change from X today to X+y (or X-y) tomorrow, without any change in that object.
You may choose to say that this makes such value “imaginary and unreal”, but it is just the case that “value” is something we attribute to things, and not a property of the things themselves. Which is another way of saying that “value” is notional.
GB: But the value of what one exchanges dollars for is not in any way directly tied to the “supply” of things for which one exchanges dollars. Indeed, the value of things can increase with a decrease in the supply thereof.
RB: “The second of those two sentences contradicts the first — because the first is false. Value is tied to the supply of things, as well as to other material circumstances; so even though it’s considered “notional,” it’s still firmly based on real things and events.”
No, it does not. Read carefully: what I wrote was “directly tied” – which is something like “increase in value” iff “increase in things” (not: “there is some connection between value and valued things” – which is true, but uninteresting and insufficient to prove that one must have more things to have more value). As I note above, this is quite plainly not true. Yes, in some cases an increase in ‘stuff’ will result in an increase in value – but in others the opposite, and a decrease in ‘stuff’ will result in an increase in value (and in still others value will change independently of the amount of ‘stuff’).
KG@151:
GB: For example, we can have – effectively(1) – infinitely growing knowledge without causing any logical problems for a “finite” system
“No, we can’t, because knowledge has to be instantiated in some physical form.”
Yes we can. You seem to have missed my very first example.
To be sure, I don’t know if we can have “infinite knowledge” (indeed, I am unsure if such a term is even meaningful), but that wasn’t my claim. I referred to “infinitely growing knowledge”. And, of course, I qualified that as “effectively”. It is possible that at some point in the far distant future we reach a point at which we are unable to learn any more. But we are currently so far away from that point that worrying about it is like worrying about the death of the sun.
Or do you think that we should give up on trying to learn and know things because we can never have “infinite” knowledge?
You may choose to say that this makes such value “imaginary and unreal”, but it is just the case that “value” is something we attribute to things, and not a property of the things themselves. Which is another way of saying that “value” is notional.
Yes, but none of this means that “value” can keep growing indefinitely if there’s no growth in whatever is being “valued,” and still be a meaningful concept in any sort of real-world calculation or decision-making. If material resources, goods and services are finite, then its value will be finite. And if growth in the former is limited, then growth in the latter will be limited as well.
RagingBee@154:
“Yes, but none of this means that “value” can keep growing indefinitely if there’s no growth in whatever is being “valued,” and still be a meaningful concept in any sort of real-world calculation or decision-making. If material resources, goods and services are finite, then its value will be finite. And if growth in the former is limited, then growth in the latter will be limited as well.”
Yes, it does. Similar to the above, I don’t know that value can ever be ‘infinite’ (and, again, I’m not sure that ‘infinite value’ is even a meaningful term), but value can continue growing indefinitely even given a finite amount of ‘stuff’ being valued.
To be clear: this is not a claim that such will or must occur. My own view is that at some point we will end up revising our sense of ‘value’ and we won’t think about it the same way. If we get to “fully automated gay space communism”, for example, then much of how we think about the ‘value’ of things will change.
But there is nothing that makes indefinitely increasing value within a finite world impossible.
Again, nothing you’ve said means that “value” can grow indefinitely when there’s no change in the nature or quantity of stuff being valued. The only way that can happen is if someone discovers a new way to use something, which would then change the valuation of that something and whatever new goods or services are provided as a result. But that’s not INDEFINITE growth in value, just a relatively sudden one-time change as a result of a single discovery — which may, or may not, lead to other discoveries or inventions in the near future.
RagingBee@155
And nothing you have said shows that value (in units of exchange) cannot grow indefinitely.
Again: it is an observed fact that the value of things can change even “when there’s no change in the nature or quantity of stuff being valued”. Basing your argument on a claim that is plainly false is not a way to be successful.
And yet again, I do not claim that this will or must happen, only that it is possible.
No I didn’t. It just doesn’t prove what you claim it does: the fact that there are an infinite number of rational numbers between 0 and 1 simply not imply that knowledge can grow indefinitely in a finite system – if you cliam otherwise, then set out the reasoning that leads from premise to conclusion. And incidentally, sticking “effectively” in front of “infinite” makes your whole schtick incoherent: either something is finite, or it’s infinite. Also, you haven’t said, unless I missed it, what you mean by “value”: exchange value or use value? (I suspect you don’t even know the difference, but you can easily prove me wrong.)
Aren’t we also assuming that the amount of information in the universe is infinite, and that human minds have an infinite capacity to absorb it?
But more practically, you’re talking about “effectively infinite” money. If everyone can afford to buy a mega-yacht, is that an overall good or a catastrophe? Who’s building these yachts? Maybe what counts here is wealth relative to the wealth of others, and we’re all just clawing our way up a column of limited resources, with a few people at the top spurring us on with promises that we can all be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
PZ Myers@159:
“Aren’t we also assuming that the amount of information in the universe is infinite, and that human minds have an infinite capacity to absorb it?”
Well, I am not. I don’t know that the amount of information in the universe is infinite, and assume that human minds do not have an infinite capacity.
But I do think that we are capable of learning a great deal more than we have learned so far, and that we can continue to learn effectively indefinitely. Again, “effectively”, because – while I believe that we can learn much much more, there may come a time in the distant future where we cannot – and also because at some point the universe is likely to end (or cease to be conducive to learning), meaning that it is extraordinarily unlikely that our knowledge can ever be infinite. And on the other side, we have no way of knowing how much we will be capable of learning and knowing five or ten thousand years from now.
“But more practically, you’re talking about “effectively infinite” money. If everyone can afford to buy a mega-yacht, is that an overall good or a catastrophe? Who’s building these yachts? Maybe what counts here is wealth relative to the wealth of others, and we’re all just clawing our way up a column of limited resources, with a few people at the top spurring us on with promises that we can all be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.”
It is important, I think, to remember the difference between “infinitely” (or indefinitely) growing (of money, or value, or knowledge, or whatever) and somehow having “infinite” amounts of these things. Of course, one cannot have an infinite amount of X within a finite system (arguably one cannot have an infinite amount of X even within an infinite system). But even within a finite system, one’s X (for at least certain kinds of X) can continue to grow indefinitely.
Obviously this does not apply to everything. Everyone cannot have a mega-yacht. There aren’t enough materials to build one for everyone nor enough people to build them. Of course there are limits to the amount of ‘stuff’ that we can have. But lots of “growth” – even “economic growth” is not made up by growth of ‘stuff’. Further – at least in my experience – most people do not want to be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Yes, many people would like to have more money – enough to not worry about it – but most people do not even desire an infinite amount of ‘stuff’.
KG@158:
“No I didn’t. It just doesn’t prove what you claim it does: the fact that there are an infinite number of rational numbers between 0 and 1 simply not imply that knowledge can grow indefinitely in a finite system – if you cliam otherwise, then set out the reasoning that leads from premise to conclusion. And incidentally, sticking “effectively” in front of “infinite” makes your whole schtick incoherent: either something is finite, or it’s infinite. Also, you haven’t said, unless I missed it, what you mean by “value”: exchange value or use value? (I suspect you don’t even know the difference, but you can easily prove me wrong.)”
Yes, it is true that the existence of an infinite series within a finite interval does not prove that knowledge can grow indefinitely for finite minds. But it does prove that the claim “you can’t have infinite growth in a finite system” is false. And thus that it cannot be used to prove that knowledge cannot grow indefinitely. And thus, if your claim is that knowledge cannot grow indefinitely, then you need to show your argument.
As already pointed out, saying “effectively” is simply recognizing reality. We do not know that anything empirical is actually ‘infinite’. At some point we (human beings) will be no more; at some point our planet will be no more. At some point things end, and if we no longer exist, than our knowledge cannot continue to grow.
But this is an empirical question, not a logical one. As I noted earlier, it may turn out that at some point in the future we discover that we cannot learn any more. At some point it may come to pass that we no longer think about things in terms monetary value, “money” is no longer something we use or care about, and if we continue to think about economic growth we think about it in some completely different way.
All of these are interesting, but they are things that we will have to work out, empirically, in the world. They are not problems to be solved by pure logic. And claims like “you can’t have infinite growth in a finite system!” are not only wrong, but do nothing at all to solve – or even illuminate – the problems that we face.
idontknowwhyIbother@161,
That depends on the interpretation of “infinite growth”. That can mean either “growth that never stops” or “growth that will exceed any finite limit”. It clearly could not disprove the the claim if interpreted in the second sense.
It also depends on the dubious interpretation of an abstract mathematical object as a “system”. If you were to actually require that each term in a sequence of numbers between 0 and 1, where each term is larger than the preceding term, is represented in physical form, you would eventually run out of storage – even if you threw away all but the last term – because the amount of storage required would show infinite growth in the second sense. And it is this requirement for unlimited storage that places a limit on the growth of knowledge. Whatever your means of storage and coding for knowledge, a finite number of atoms will only provide a finite number of possible arrangements, so even if all these somehow count as expressing a state of knowledge, they will run out.
So the best thing to do is to abandon claims that infinite increase in anything empirical is possible. Which John Morales, for example, appears unwilling to do.
I note that you have not attempted to say what you mean by “value” in any other than monetary terms. But the existence of inflation makes is quite obvious that economic growth cannot be measured in such terms except in the short run (and only sometimes then) when changes in what a certain amount of a given currency can buy can be neglected or allowed for.
Yes, it is true that the existence of an infinite series within a finite interval does not prove that knowledge can grow indefinitely for finite minds. But it does prove that the claim “you can’t have infinite growth in a finite system” is false.
It proves absolutely nothing of the sort: your conclusion has absolutely no connection to the premise AT ALL. “Growth” isn’t even the same thing as “infinite series in a finite interval.” There’s no logical or categorical connection between these two things.
Seriously, I have no idea why you’re so intent on flogging this idea of “infinite/indefinite/unlimited growth”, when it’s so obviously empirically false and based on such lame nonsensical reasoning. We can’t even have indefinite or unlimited growth — let alone “infinite” growth — BEFORE we reach the limits of material resources; so what could possibly make you think we could have it after we’ve reached those limits?
Math and physics are not on idontknowwhyibother’s side.
First: the planet and its immediate environs can, according to sound research into quantum physics, assume only a finite number of distinct states (even though that number is astronomical).
Second: we posit some kind of “value function” mapping those states onto some totally-ordered set, say, the real numbers. Some assignation of an order-comparable valuation number to each possible state of the world.
Since that set of possible states is finite, it follows that the set of possible valuations is also finite. A finite subset of the real numbers has a supremum. One (or several) of the possible states-of-the-world has this valuation.
Assuming that changes keep being made to the state of the world to states with higher valuations, since the set of these states is finite the sequence of such states must eventually terminate (or start repeating previously visited states, or something similar). The corresponding sequence of valuations therefore cannot be monotonic increasing: some maximum will be hit after finitely many steps, less than or equal to the supremum noted in the previous paragraph, after which only equal and lower valuations will occur (or the sequence will stop there).
The valuation therefore cannot grow forever, not even given an unlimited input of energy and an unlimited heatsink bordering the system (which would themselves be unphysical, given what we know of thermodynamics).
The only potential loophole here would be to keep redefining the valuation function itself to ascribe ever higher values to the same states-of-the-world; but such is meaningless. Worse, it doesn’t even work because the brains ascribing the valuations are themselves a part of these states-of-the-world and can ultimately only take on finitely many internal states themselves. Of states-of-the-world with brains with particular value-number assignments for states-of-the-world there is still a maximum over all the (astronomically many, still finite) possible combinations. How-valuable-the-world-seems-to-the-brain-currently-valuing-it-the-most will itself be a number that goes through a finite sequence and then stops, or begins repeating. It can’t be monotonic increasing.
A mirage of endless improvement can be sustained by psychological manipulation: picture a world-state A with a brain in it that would prefer B to A, in which state that brain would prefer C to B, in which state that brain would prefer A to C. If the world keeps cycling through states A, B, C, A, B, C, A … indefinitely, every step “seems like an improvement at the time”. But from the outside nothing is happening; it’s just stuck in a rut. This “infinite growth” is strictly illusory. It’s “the grass is always greener” combined with a lot of fence-hopping that ultimately leads to nowhere new.
KG@162
‘That depends on the interpretation of “infinite growth”. That can mean either “growth that never stops” or “growth that will exceed any finite limit”. It clearly could not disprove the the claim if interpreted in the second sense.’
Even if we take your definition, then if I say that the economy is growing, or that our knowledge is growing, then what is this supposed ‘finite limit’? Be specific. If there is some ‘finite limit’, then show that it will be reached before the sun goes out – or else recognize that it is irrelevant to any actual growth in our economy or knowledge.
The same applies to your statements about ‘physical form’ and ‘storage’. If in our mathematical system we were to grow each year by one increment, when will we “run out of storage”? If this does not happen before the sun goes out, then it isn’t anything that we need concern ourselves with.
And this, as I have already suggested, is the point of saying “essentially infinite”. Even if there is some ‘limit’, then it is of no relevance to our existence if it is one that we will never reach.
One interpretation of the original claim is that “we cannot consume an infinite amount of a finite resource”. This is, of course, plainly true. But it is also true that “we cannot consume an infinite amount of an infinite resource”. This is because we are finite, and can never consume an infinite amount of anything. Of course, it is also true that we cannot consume more of some resource than we have. But this is trivially true and has nothing to do with arguments about ‘infinite’ growth. It is also irrelevant to things that are not consumption goods, such as growth in value, knowlefge, etc.
GB: As already pointed out, saying “effectively” is simply recognizing reality. We do not know that anything empirical is actually ‘infinite’.
“So the best thing to do is to abandon claims that infinite increase in anything empirical is possible. Which John Morales, for example, appears unwilling to do.”
I am not John Morales, so what he chooses to do is irrelevant.
If you mean to say that there is not an infinite amount of ‘stuff’ in the universe, then that is probably true. (There are theories that suggest that it could be false, but they are speculative.) Or if you mean that there is not an infinite amount of ‘stuff’ on the planet Earth, then that is also true (essentially – remembering that the planet is not a closed system – but also the previous).
“I note that you have not attempted to say what you mean by “value” in any other than monetary terms. But the existence of inflation makes is quite obvious that economic growth cannot be measured in such terms except in the short run (and only sometimes then) when changes in what a certain amount of a given currency can buy can be neglected or allowed for.”
From the beginning I have talked about ‘value’ in relation to economic growth. From my fist comment here: “economic ‘growth’ – as it is usually measured, that is, in units of value”. That is, for those Marxists among us, ‘exchange-value’ rather that ‘use-value’. (I note that this should have been obvious to anyone who recognizes the distinction.) While I would not deny that ‘use-value’ can be a useful concept in some cases, it is unfortunately, useless in examining things like ‘economic growth’, because we have no way to measure ‘use-value’.
I have no idea what you are intend by “the existence of inflation makes is quite obvious that economic growth cannot be measured in [monetary] terms”. It is so measured, which seems to be a demonstration that it can be. If you want to claim otherwise, then you need an argument rather than a bare assertion.
RagingBee@163:
“It proves absolutely nothing of the sort: your conclusion has absolutely no connection to the premise AT ALL. “Growth” isn’t even the same thing as “infinite series in a finite interval.” There’s no logical or categorical connection between these two things.”
The set of rational numbers between 0 and 1 is infinite, and as such grows infinitely larger as one approaches 1, without ever reaching 1. Thus, its “growth” is infinite within a finite system.
If you have some specific or unique concept of ‘growth’ that you are using, then it would be helpful for you to spell it out.
“Seriously, I have no idea why you’re so intent on flogging this idea of “infinite/indefinite/unlimited growth”, when it’s so obviously empirically false and based on such lame nonsensical reasoning. We can’t even have indefinite or unlimited growth — let alone “infinite” growth — BEFORE we reach the limits of material resources; so what could possibly make you think we could have it after we’ve reached those limits?”
I believe that I already explained why in a previous comment, but perhaps I should explain in more detail.
In my view, “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet” is a form of ‘motte-and-bailey’ statement. It is open to a significant number of different interpretations, some of which are almost certainly true, and others of which are almost certainly false, or at least very highly questionable.
For example (and I have noted this before), if one means “one cannot consume more resources that one has”, then it is quite plainly true. It is also trivial and not particularly interesting, except as a reminder to not waste resources.
At the other extreme, it can be taken to mean “one cannot have infinite growth (in anything, including non-physical things), and therefore growth is bad”. As I have pointed out previously, this claim is plainly not true in at least some instances, and (at least) not plainly true nor relevant in many others.
Thus, as I said in a previous comment, I object to the claim because it does not solve, nor even illuminate, the real problems we face.
Berkenstein Bound@164
“First: the planet and its immediate environs can, according to sound research into quantum physics, assume only a finite number of distinct states (even though that number is astronomical).”
First question: will this “astronomical” number of states be exhausted before the death of the sun?
If not, then why should we care about this ‘limit’?
idontknowwhyibother@167:
What are “non-physical things”?
His first mistake is to assume humans are rational. I’m guessing his other mistake is to believe that humans can think in the long term
The set of rational numbers between 0 and 1 is infinite, and as such grows infinitely larger as one approaches 1, without ever reaching 1. Thus, its “growth” is infinite within a finite system.
There’s no “growth” going on here: all those numbers in that set are pre-existing. (Oh, and I’m sure you meant “real numbers,” not “rational numbers.” The former are a greater order of infinity than the latter.) And that infinite number of numbers isn’t connected to any thing that can grow either indefinitely or infinitely.
In my view, “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet” is a form of ‘motte-and-bailey’ statement. It is open to a significant number of different interpretations…
That’s not really what “motte and bailey” means.
…At the other extreme, it can be taken to mean “one cannot have infinite growth (in anything, including non-physical things), and therefore growth is bad”.
Who’s been making that claim? Certainly no one here. It’s kind of a non-sequitur really.
Berkenstein Bound@169
What are “non-physical things”?
Are you commenting without reading the discussion? As already noted, this is things like money, value, knowledge, and so forth, all of which are conceptual, rather than physical.
BTW, Berkenstein Bound, do you plan to answer my previous question?
RagingBee@171:
(GB): The set of rational numbers between 0 and 1 is infinite, and as such grows infinitely larger as one approaches 1, without ever reaching 1. Thus, its “growth” is infinite within a finite system.
There’s no “growth” going on here: all those numbers in that set are pre-existing. (Oh, and I’m sure you meant “real numbers,” not “rational numbers.” The former are a greater order of infinity than the latter.) And that infinite number of numbers isn’t connected to any thing that can grow either indefinitely or infinitely.
Whether we are talking about real or rational numbers is irrelevant to the point. Yes, the reals have a greater cardinality than the rationals, but both can infinitely increase in the space between 0 and 1. I don’t know what you are trying to say in your first sentence. Do you have some idiosyncratic definition of ‘grow’ where ‘increase’ does not count as ‘growth’?
GB: In my view, “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet” is a form of ‘motte-and-bailey’ statement. It is open to a significant number of different interpretations…
That’s not really what “motte and bailey” means.
Did I claim that it is? My comment is (at most) a partial definition of ‘motte-and-bailey’. I assumed that I did not need to define it for this audience. (Your comment indicates that I was correct, but you want to find something to complain about, for reasons that are not clear.)
GB: …At the other extreme, it can be taken to mean “one cannot have infinite growth (in anything, including non-physical things), and therefore growth is bad”.
Who’s been making that claim? Certainly no one here. It’s kind of a non-sequitur really.
‘Degrowth’ers do. I assume you have heard of them?
NB: this sort of strange and inconsequential nitpicking often indicates that someone has run out of actual argument. I don’t know if that is true here, but I would encourage you to engage on substance instead.
If there were no dollar bills, no coins, no bank vaults, no bank computers, no cash registers, no other computers or so much as an abacus or a slide rule, and no brains, could money still exist? Or knowledge, or value, at all?
Berkenstein Bound@175
If there were no dollar bills, no coins, no bank vaults, no bank computers, no cash registers, no other computers or so much as an abacus or a slide rule, and no brains, could money still exist? Or knowledge, or value, at all?
If there were no universe, would numbers and concepts still exist? I have no idea, and I think that the ontological status of such things is a matter of purest speculation.
Fortunately, we don’t need to answer that for the purpose of this discussion, because we have brains, and paper, and computers, and various other things that can represent non-physical (or ‘notional’ / ‘conceptual’) things that are not themselves physical. Further, though there might be limits to what we can represent or know, so far as we can tell, we are not in a position even to guess what those limits might be – let alone how we might reach them. So why are they relevant to us?
It’s the same as your earlier comment. Yes, it is true that the planet’s lifetime is finite, and that thus there is but a finite number of possible states that the planet could occupy within that lifetime.
But why is this something of concern, particularly given the large number of real and immediate problems we face? Unless you are more interested in navel-gazing than in the real world. Channel Alvy Singer if you’d like, but remember that it was a joke.
The point, which still doesn’t seem to be penetrating for some reason, is that these supposed “non-physical things” are all tied to some kind of physical substrate within which they exist, and those physical substrates are finite, and the magnitudes and variety of “non-physical” things that can be represented in them are correspondingly finite.
Further, though there might be limits to what we can represent or know, so far as we can tell, we are not in a position even to guess what those limits might be – let alone how we might reach them. So why are they relevant to us?
You tell us — you’re the one flogging that nonsensical BS about infinite/indefinite/unlimited growth long after Morales gave it up. So why did you bother? Oh wait, you don’t know why you bother. Never mind.
I don’t know what you are trying to say in your first sentence.
That’s on you, it’s not really a complicated a sentence, and the words aren’t that big either.
Your comment indicates that I was correct…
No, it really doesn’t; but go ahead and tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.
‘Degrowth’ers do. I assume you have heard of them?
No, I haven’t — so why are they relevant? Do you need to somehow get back at them for not agreeing with some vague fantasy of unlimited growth that you’ve taken it on yourself to defend?
NB: this sort of strange and inconsequential nitpicking often indicates that someone has run out of actual argument. I don’t know if that is true here, but I would encourage you to engage on substance instead.
The purpose of the nitpicking is to show that your logic is crap and your “substance” is vaporware.
In my view, “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet” is … open to a significant number of different interpretations…
Okay, so show us at least one interpretation of that statement that makes it both meaningful and true.
Sorry, I wish to reword my comment #180 to say: “It doesn’t matter how many interpretations there are, or which one you choose, if you can’t show any example of where we CAN have “infinite growth on a finite planet.”
The latter part of this thread is a gruelling demonstration that non-mathematicians should have no business talking about infinity.
Berkenstein Bound@177
The point, which still doesn’t seem to be penetrating for some reason, is that these supposed “non-physical things” are all tied to some kind of physical substrate within which they exist, and those physical substrates are finite, and the magnitudes and variety of “non-physical” things that can be represented in them are correspondingly finite.
Saying this in response to my comment that “there might be limits to what we can represent or know” suggests to me that – in addition to refusing to answer my questions – you aren’t really reading what I’m writing.
So I choose to disengage.
RagingBee@179
GB: I don’t know what you are trying to say in your first sentence.
That’s on you, it’s not really a complicated a sentence, and the words aren’t that big either.
Ok, then. I’m not sure what game you are trying to play, but it is not conversation or discussion.
So, again, I will choose to disengage.
Sheesh, this discussion about infinity ha sbeen going on forever.
(Apt that.)
@IDK: So, you admit that there is no possibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.
Excellent. We can move on, then.
Maybe he needs some time to figure out why he bothers…
Berkenstein Bound@186 and RagingBee@187
Enjoy whatever game it is that you are playing. I’m out.
That’s the third time you’ve come here to say you were leaving. I’d rated your flounce a “4”, but now it’s downgraded to “1”.
How can we tell you
How much we miss you
When you won’t go away?
Just as a note (should anyone care), I did not say I was “leaving”. Indeed, I enjoy reading most of what PZ writes, and many of the comments here. Rather, I choose not to attempt to engage in a discussion with people who are engaging in some other activity, as that seems to me a waste of time.
[If I am at a party and someone is being unpleasant in one corner, that doesn’t mean I am going to leave; it just means that I will not try to talk to them.]
Why would you attend a party only to stand in one corner and talk to yourself, though? I don’t think people ordinarily do that even if they aren’t being unpleasant …
…I choose not to attempt to engage in a discussion with people who are engaging in some other activity…
“Some other activity?” Please. We’ve been showing how all your arguments are bullshit, and all you can do is pretend you have no clue what we’re saying or doing. Are you really that dishonest, or are you really that incapable of understanding what we’ve been saying? Offhand, I’m guessing it’s the former: if you really didn’t have a clue what we’re talking about, you’d have given up on this place long ago.