Thread by @Noahpinion

1/OK, here's a thread about economic growth, technological progress, environmental sustainability, and political unrest!

2/Lots of people say that GDP growth is killing the planet. That GDP growth naturally consumes more resources, leading to environmental collapse. And that therefore we should give up on the idea of growth.

thinkglobalgreen.org/2018/09/14/gdp…

3/Well, that's not quite right. Growth = growth in standards of living, not in resource use...

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

4/BUT, there is a sense in which the complaint about growth is correct.

Our typical notion of "growth" does not take sustainability into account. And that is a problem.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

5/When we run down stocks of natural resources - aquifers, oil, animal habitats - it shows up as "growth" in our statistics, but it comes at the expense of future living standards.

Someday the bill comes due.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

6/Obviously no economy can last forever - someday the sun will explode.

But when we think about growth, we should think about increases in living standards that can be sustained for many centuries, rather than just a few decades.

7/I thought @tylercowen made this point well in his book "Stubborn Attachments".

amazon.com/Stubborn-Attac…

In some sense, sustainable growth is the only real growth.

8/Once we think of "growth" as sustainable growth, we can think differently about the slowdown in technological progress.

9/Robert Gordon and other technological "stagnationists" think that the technologies of the Industrial Revolution - steam power, electricity, internal combustion engines - were a one-time bonanza of low-hanging fruit that will not be repeated.

amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Amer…

10/But it's possible to see that burst of "productivity growth" as a period of *resource overuse*.

We burned all the cheap oil and coal, dumped pollution into air and water without a care, drained aquifers, leveled forests, and destroyed the topsoil.

It was unsustainable.

11/In some sense, we are now starting to pay the bill for the bonanza of the Industrial Revolution.

The slowdown in "technological progress" came right around the time that rich countries' economies started becoming less resource-intensive.

12/In order to continue that decoupling, we will have to keep innovating. We'll need to invent greener energy technologies and industrial technologies.

techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how…

13/Those technological improvements won't necessarily show up as productivity growth, or GDP growth.

But they will represent real progress and real growth nonetheless, because they will be things that allow us to sustain our current living standards for longer and longer.

14/There's only one problem with this - it might cause unrest in developed countries.

Progress in sustainability is great, but the people who get higher living standards are our children and grandchildren, not us.

For us, improvements in sustainability can feel like stagnation.

15/A shift in focus from increasing resource use to increasing sustainability will result in a period of stagnating living standards - essentially because we're sacrificing the present in order to preserve the future.

brookings.edu/blog/social-mo…

16/And when living standards stop rising, even if sustainability is increasing, it can make people very, very mad.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1040785903201861632

17/Can we shift the direction of technological progress from resource extraction to sustainability without dashing the expectations of developed-country citizens and provoking them to revolution and rage?

That is the key question, and I don't have an answer...

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