When I was a teenager doing GCSE Science we had a guest speaker come in and talk about what I now know to be The Limits to Growth. We were told about peak oil and how oil production doubles every n years and blah blah blah and it sounded pretty convincing at the time. Fortunately I did not pay it much heed, much as I instinctively did not really care about acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer which were the subject of geography lessons around the same time. It was not until years later I found out about the Club of Rome. I still do not know how, exactly, that guest speaker came to be in that science class, but in retrospect it sounds pretty sinister.
I like the band Muse. Their latest 2012 album is called Thermodynamics The 2nd Law and includes the song “Unsustainable”. It is really annoying when the creator of art you enjoy starts spouting crappy nonsense politics. Anyway, the song contains a recording of someone saying:
The fundamental laws of thermodynamics will place fixed limits on technological innovation and human advancement
In an isolated system the entropy can only increase. A species set on endless growth is
Unsustainable
Of course, as someone at genius.com points out, we have the sun, which should last long enough.
I was reminded of all this in an instant messenger chat with Perry Metzger today. He was talking optimistically about solar power. I did a search to check that I was not just imagining that anyone ever took second law arguments about economics seriously. I found a paper.
…we shall examine some challenges which have been made to the limits to growth (Limitationist) position by those criticizing the scope and application of the second law of thermodynamics and we shall in turn defend Limitationism against these criticisms.
Perry M said, “if all else fails, we can always use the hot air produced by leftists as a power source indefinitely.” I shared that link. He replied, “that paper alone, Rob, could power London for a month.”
In the long run, there’s the heat death of the universe. That doesn’t excuse nihilism.
‘Peaks’ are nothing new;
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/9202#.WJ0BaOinzMI
Well i think there are limits to growth, it also depends on how growth is measured. Going from a 5000$ 100mhz CPU to a 1000$ i7 3GHz quad core Laptop seems like negative growth…
I also think that we are ending the phase of low hanging fruit with population increase and essential technology like electricity, construction…
I think the biggest limitations to growth are our senses, our time and will. Most people are happy with what they have after a certain level, our senses/or body limits technology development and entertainment, our time limits what we can do.
Past a certain point (very rapidly reached) growth does not imply the collection of more and more of the same stuff. Rather, breaking that stuff apart and putting it together in new ways that we prefer.
Unless, of course, you have a powerful organizing force at work opposing entropy.
Like the human mind.
Muse should have stuck to ballads.
As John McCarthy said:
“Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.”
“powerful organizing force at work opposing entropy”
Doesn’t help because the organising force will give off heat, so anything humans do increases entropy on net.
The other rob has depressed me. 😛
This is what happens when social scientists hear about concepts in the hard sciences, and think they can apply them to social “science”. Statistics have similar effects.
Human thought and advancement have nothing to do with Thermodynamics, so thas just stupid.
Also, all species are set on endless growth. No species ‘self-sustains’. All living things reproduce at a rate greater than zero-population growth. Then a few, or alot, are eaten or otherwise die before reproducing themselves.
This is just another depressing view. And while human minds do produce alot of heat, have you considered the total entropy-reduction such advances have? The Universe, as built, is pretty wasteful. Ecology too. We already know of several ways to improve efficiency.
We have the Sun…and we currently have the tech to make it last longer than designed. It’ll take awhile and we don’t, yet, have the industrial base..But when it becomes an issue it can be done.
It’s called StarLifting and it can be done with current tech…but alot alot alot alot alot of magnets orbiting the Sun and we’d havta dismantle alot of asteroids for materials.
But not impossible.
Why believe Scientists, who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of advancing human knowledge, who tell you things are impossible? Why Try? We’re All Gonna Die Anyhow?
Folk preaching the Extinction Of The Race, while offering no solutions, and claiming to be the smartest people in the room.
As as for the Heat Death, screw that too. Some theory sais ya can pass thru the center of a naked singularity and survive to enter a new universe. So when that time comes, I’m sure Humanity(or our descendants, or someone) will find a way to rip the Universe a new one.
Life is the only Force in the Universe that defies Entropy. Life Finds A Way is a cheesy quote, but we find it on the bottom of the ocean and inside the hot radioactive water of a nuclear reactor and pretty much everywhere we look closely.
Spare me more hopelessness. It’s just more…Huddle Under The State, We’ll Save You!
“Social Science”: a contradiction in terms.
The “Club of Rome” was big news when I was at Uni in the mid-1970s. The “Limits to Growth” was pretty-much “compulsory reading”.
Can’t imagine why………..
Oh, dang, you’re right. Conflating concepts here.
OK, first of all, entropy increases in a “closed” system, not merely an “isolated” one (whatever that means). And the earth isn’t a closed system, so all that heat given off by human brains isn’t a problem. The universe might be closed, but frankly its heat death doesn’t concern me too much.
Second, this is yet one more illustration of economists suffering from physics envy. They delude themselves by thinking that their field is a hard science, subject to fixed rules and reduceable to mathematical formulae. It is neither. Invoking the Second Law in support of neo-Malthusian foolishness is not edifying, but merely cringe-inducing.
Even if the Earth runs low on some elements, we could always create more by using the protons and neutrons and electrons in the plasma in space, given off by the Sun, to make atoms from the ground up, so to speak. We might need to build special space stations to do it, but we could keep things cool with Solar power, and make some of those extra-volatile elements not now found on earth!
And after we’ve used up this Universe, there should be Universes in extra dimensions for us to exploit.
Believing there are limits to growth is one thing.
Believing we are anywhere near those limits is another.
>I like the band Muse. Their latest album is called Thermodynamics and includes the song “Unsustainable”.
Er… You’re talking about their second most recent album, The 2nd Law, released way back in 2012. And the song is called “The 2nd Law: Unsustainable”. And yes, it is embrassing bollocks from an otherwise great band.
“Believing there are limits to growth is one thing.
Believing we are anywhere near those limits is another.”
Even more we don’t even have a way to know what those limits are because they change with cultural attitudes(incl. population level), technology developments that will occur in the future that we can’t even fathom. And of course robots, AI, bionics…
Let’s look at it this way (lucklady is right). How many VHS tapes do I have in my house compared to 15 years ago? I have an old sewing machine table (no sewing machine – that’s what Primark is for) with magic boxes on and TV turns up down the wire or from the dish.
I do have a Blu-Ray drive in my desktop and a portable one for the laptops but I hardly use them. I do buy books but not to read (I have a Kindle) but to cherish. I recall buying Wordsworth Classics because they were cheap but what is the point when they are on Kindle? I do have a recently acquired deluxe four volume slip-case edition of “The Lord of The Rings”.
I am financially better off than I was ten years ago.
I have less physical stuff than I had ten years ago.
And let me state (I am a physics graduate) that with the possible exception of the theories of relativity no conception in physical science is utterly wrong-headedly miss-used than the second law of thermo D.
Basically, unless you know what Josiah Willard Gibbs’ Grand Canonical Ensemble* is you can go fuck yourself in whatever entropic manner you wish.
*Available for birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs…
The left control the culture (including the education system) – it is that brutally simple.
Even the demented maniac left such as the 1960s “Club of Rome” – I have heard them cited (with all seriousness) by “Conservatives”.
By the way – under the Second Law of Thermodynamics everything is doomed REGARDLESS.
It is NOT “if civilisation tries to advance the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will come into play, so we must stay stagnant”, it is “whatever you do things fall apart eventually”.
Actually technological advance and economic growth have got nothing to do with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the intellectuals know this – it is just another excuse for totalitarianism.
And I did say “excuse” and I did say “totalitarianism” – the heirs of Plato, Sir Francis “New Atlantis” Bacon, his servant Thomas Hobbes, J. “13 Departments of State” Bentham, Karl Marx and so on, know exactly what they are doing.
Western Civilisation is not dying a natural death (it is not natural 2nd Law of Thermodynamics death) – Western Civilisation is being murdered.
By the way I don’t care about human brains making heat, I was just trying to point out an error with “powerful organizing force at work opposing entropy”.
Thanks for the corrections, Cal Ford. I’m old now, so 2012 is “latest” enough for me, and I am supposed to get the names of things slightly wrong.
Paul,
Have you never debated a leftie and taken apart their assumptions around reserves and stocks of resources? They might control education, but their issue is that they educate people enough to understand their concepts, so they educate people enough to realise their concepts are wrong (which simply requires pointing out the difference between a reserve and the total of a resource most of the time).
The problem with trying to educate people to believe a science-based fallacy is you have to educate them in science, and that can’t be done as a faith-based subject without people spotting what you are doing. So promoting the Club of Rome nonsense is actually something we want people to do, as it either trains people to think in a way we can easily exploit or it shows them to be propogandists not educators, also easily exploited.
Matt Bellamy does occasionally show a libertarian side, but unfortunately he’s also rather keen on left-wing conspiracy theories.
Confusing invention with innovation and overlooking free market capitalism.
Free market capitalism is the process by which scarcity is turned into abundance. Silicon chips were thick as chips once, now wafer thin because the scarcity of silicon meant price went up with demand, so it was profitable to invest capital to use less of it to produce more chips.
The flawed logic in the ‘unsustainability’ argument is the notion that nothing changes, that we continue to ‘use up’ resources at the current rate whereas we find ways to use less.
Innovation is new ways to use and/or combine existing technologies, not create new technology… so our growth is not limited by technology.
Just look at the two oldest technologies fire and the wheel and how many uses we have found for them!
The Internet uses century old technology: electricity; telephony; computing; wireless.
Shopping on-line is two existing technologies combined, mail order as was, combined with the Internet.
Mankind has an infinite scope to imagine new things to desire and infinite scope to do with what he already has to achieve these desires.
>The flawed logic in the ‘unsustainability’ argument is the notion that nothing changes, that we continue to ‘use up’ resources at the current rate whereas we find ways to use less.
The real flaw in these claims is in fact even more basic than that (and it doesn’t rely on capitalism, the same points apply even if we went Communist).
The fundamental laws of thermodynamics tell us that the Universe will eventually succumb to entropy, where there is no longer any thermodynamic free energy, and processes of the sort that underly bioloy or computing are no longer possible. (This used to be often be called ‘the heat death of the Universe’). But this point could be (and probably will be) billions of years in the future. Before that the fundamental laws place no limits on growth or human achievement or anything of that sort. If we’re talking what’s consistent with the fundamental laws then we could have the whole energy in the Universe to play with for those billions of years, assuming a developed enough technology, and all the materials of the Universe. The second law has nothing to say about that sort of thing, just that one day it will all come to end. It is completely irrelevant to economics, except in the very basic sense that it tells us that all economic systems will one day end. That applies whether we have capitalism, communism, whatever. We’ll all be dead. Being socialist greens won’t make any diffrerence to that.
“Limits to Growth” is based on calculations that start with “if we carry on as we are …”, the world has never, ever, in the entire course of its history, carried on as it was, even the “dark ages” was a time not without Mrs Necessity looking over your shoulder.
The Malthusian argument is like a creationist declaring we couldn’t evolve from apes because there are still apes – it misses the entire point of what “growth” actually is.
Growth comes from change, not stagnation.
There’s that missing arrow in the diagram that feeds the outcome back in itself, that the very notion of scarcity makes innovation to replace what was once scarce (nominally before it gets scarce), its the thing that drives change and creates growth.
However, to be fair on Muse, they’ve managed to achieve considerable growth playing the same old sh*te over and over (and I like their stuff too).
Paul Erlich called to say he’s pretty sure we’re all already dead.
Given that any reference to Keynes should depress one, your reaction is entirely proper, Rob.
On music, if Muse are pissing you off might I suggest Rush or Iron Maiden? The former have (had?) a distinctly libertarian bent while the latter had a marvelous talent for turning the classics into heavy metal songs. I’d love to hear what they could do with Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
I disagree with the fundamental assumption. It doesn’t actually have to be that way.
I have a paper on the subject here.
The short form of the subject is that it’s possible to cheat the Second Law with short lifetime quasi-particles like semiconductor carriers. It’s possible to set up a condition where they’re net created in one material and net destroyed in another. The effect looks like a temperature difference, and energy can be extracted because of it.
It’s a lot of cheating at physics.
@ Dishman
Somebody like Dale Amon would be the proper person to respond but, in his absence, I’ll ask a hungover and under-caffeinated question.
Aren’t you just extracting energy from ambient heat? If so, while your discovery is impressive, surely it’s not so much “bypassing the second law” as using sleight of hand to fool an observer into thinking that you’ve done so.
@ the other rob
Second Law says you can’t extract energy from ambient heat without having a cold side. You could call what I’m doing sleight of hand, in that I’m making it look (to the carriers) like one side is colder than the other.
Actually creating energy would violate the First Law, which isn’t what I’m doing.
But whether or not the second law could be ‘cheated’ or not doesn’t matter, because it says nothing about how much energy will be available to humankind in the next few billion years.
Napolean, Emperor of France, to show how posh he was had a set of aluminium cutlery. It was very expensive back then. I just drank a can of Coke and then chucked it in the bin in on the street. Things change.
Anyone who knows me knows I am a lifelong aviation enthusiast (that’s the mild version). They’ll also know that I hate flying due to the general rigmarole. I can honestly say I have enjoyed one flight in my life and that was in a DH Tiger Moth. I got the stick and pedals for a bit. That was cool and I looked like Biggles! But getting on a Boeing or Airbus is just a drag. There is no glam like in the good ol’ days. Having said that it means I can go anywhere I want really and that is payback for the grimanacious ordeal of modern flight.
Having said that the days of flying boats and whicker seats and white-gloved stewards were not all that. Due to the low altitudes that, say, a Shorts Empire flying boat operated at it was entirely possible to go seamlessly from being air-sick to sea-sick.
In a sense the whole point of science is to make reliable predictions about the future. “If I build a bridge in this way it won’t fall down”, “If a fire a satellite to this height and accelerate it to this speed it will attain orbit”, etc. The hallmark is science is its ability to make accurate predictions.
The “Limits of Growth” made a number of predictions, none of which came true. The new version of “Limits of Growth”, called “Global Warming” has learned its lesson and carefully avoids making verifiable predictions. It is all gobbledygook nonsense designed to centralize power.
“But,” they say, “the consequences if it is true are so dreadful we have to do something.” So firstly, the consequences are not dire at all. There are no consequences that can’t just be dealt with if and when they come up, and some of the consequences are actually quite delightful. And second, the consequences of an Alien invasion would be pretty severe to, but we don’t seem to be making much progress on that, do we?
Fraser, to your point, the inability to make accurate predictions (other than trivial ones, in the most narrow of cases) is precisely why economics isn’t a “science”. It’s certainly a field worthy of study, as is every other aspect of human psychology, but the error (hubris) of its practitioners is to conflate that with hard science. As is evidenced by the article linked in the OP and its ilk.
@Laird
I think it is worth clarifying that caveat of yours. The truth is Economics is really two entirely distinct studies. Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are not at all the same study and require entirely different tools. Microeconomics is an excellent predictor: raise the price people buy less, monopoly pricing tops out with alternative goods, minimum wages cause unemployment etc. Micoeconomics is an extremely useful science that is used all the time to make good solid business decisions.
Macroeconomics is a completely different thing. It may well be that Macroeconomics has NEVER in its history made a correct prediction (aside from stopped clocks of course.) It is almost laughable to hear the prognistications of macro-economists telling us what is going to happen the day after their previous prediction was proved cataclysmically wrong. I’m pretty sure the day after Ehrlich wrote Simon a check for losing their wager that he was back on CNN spouting his next prognostication with the certainty of a physicist assuring us that there really is gravity on the moon. One need only look recently at the assurances that we had that Britain would crash after Brexit, or America would crash after Trump’s election, and then the next day those same fools back on TV shamelessly telling us what is going to happen next! “DJIA can’t sustain 20,000!” “Expect a huge bear market!” To be an economist (which almost always means macro-economist) I think the primary attributes you need are a fancy suit and a lot of chutzpah.
One of the challenges I think today, and the reason people toss around the word “science” so much, is that they want to attach the hard won reputation of hard science such as chemistry, physics and physiology (and I might add, microeconomics), to their own opinion ridden, unreliable nonsense. “Science” gives them a glow of reliability that they simply haven’t earned. “Falisfiable” and “repeatable” seem to have become dirty words.
No, thanks to the Ninth Circuit.
bobby b
> No, thanks to the Ninth Circuit.
That isn’t quite what I meant, but funny comment nonetheless.
The current Erlich-camp line is that he was correct in both The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion, but that his prognostications warned us all in time and we altered our behavior enough so that doomsday has been put off.
This is exactly what we’ll be hearing from the climate change crew in the coming years as the earth enters the next cooling phase – that, thank goodness, we listened to their warnings and adjusted our behavior sufficiently to keep the warming from killing us, and we should be properly grateful to them for our lives.
Fraser, I absolutely agree with you on your excoriation of macroeconomics. But I think you ascribe too much predictive power (too much “science-ness”) to microeconomics. Yes, raising prices generally results in fewer sales. But there is no quantifiable mathematical relationship between the two. You can’t say “If we raise the price by $1 per unit it will results in x fewer sales”. There are too many other factors to consider; under the right circumstances a price increase might result in no reduction (or sometimes even an increase) in unit sales. The supply-demand curve is a good means of illustrating a concept, but that’s as far as it goes. Microeconomics is indeed extremely useful, but it is not strictly predictive, and certainly not quantifiable in the sense that its practitioners would have you believe.
I remember reading “limits to growth” in highschool and taking it seriously: though since many of the predictions of disaster were in the past and hadn’t happened, I assumed technological advance had narrowly staved it off somehow. Sometime in undergrad I was trawling the library and discovered a book written by someone that specifically refuted it point by point – it wasn’t even good predictive work in its own time using an “if trends continue” approach.
Some amusing things about thermodynamics:
The 2nd Law: Irreversibility is the root of all evil.
But … entropy is subjective. Irreversibility is an illusion due to our incomplete knowledge of the state of the universe. (Granted, it is a very persistent one that we engineers have to deal with.)
All the fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric (reversible).
As for the universe: Every second, (from our perspective, along our lightcone) another light-second worth of pre-galactic stuff peels off of the giant ball of opaque plasma that would be hotter than the surface of the sun, except for the fact that it is receding from us at nearly the speed of light (redshifted to 5ish K) Calling something likely infinite in extent a “closed system” might be a misnomer.
What doesn’t help is that most governments’ financial policies encourage meaningless growth based on malinvestment. Get to sound money and we’ll see things stabilize to natural innovation-led growth in no time. Probably more stable world population too.
I dunno: I think there *is* a danger. 7-ish billion people could never have existed on the Earth if we were attempting to sustain ourselves by hunting and gathering – the amount of territory it takes to support someone in that mode of life is very large. We would have exhausted our soil and burnable surface vegetation trying to sustain that many people with bronze age farming technology and wood-fueled power. (There were periods of Greek history when they deforested their peninsula.)
There is a race between our population on the one hand, and technology and capitalization on the other hand. As long as our rate of progress in technology, and rate of growth in productive tools/capital-equipment/etc remains roughly proportional to the population, it is a race we can win. If either of these things are stymied, then we’ll overshoot the ability to sustain our current population. Life will become cheap, wages will fall below the level that people can survive on, and you’ll see the sort of turmoil that we are getting hints of these days: Massive movements of people that no one wants and die offs.
We need energy, and we need real-world physical industry (chemical plants, farms, smelters, that sort of thing – not Tofflerian ‘symbol manipulation’) if we want to sustain arbitrarily large populations. Given these, raw materials and territory are not the economically constraining limits on mankind. (Ideally, the only thing we would have to ‘economize’ and trade on is intelligent human attention.) But if we lose those, we can run into Malthusian limits.
@Laird, thanks for your feedback, and I agree with some hesitation. I think my point was the microeconomics is actually a useful tool (in terms of controlling economic outcomes) whereas macroeconomics is a big shell game.
It is certainly true that there is no simple mathematical relationship between price and quantity, and all you can capture are general trends, but that is extremely useful and predictive, and again something people use all the time. To say that other factors play into it is of course true, but it is also true that hammers fall to the ground differently depending on whether you conduct the experiment on the earth or the moon. Obviously you have to consider all the factors. To give a more concrete example, if you fire a gun physics can in theory tell you exactly where the bullet will hit the target. However, practically speaking there are so many uncontrolled variables that they best it can do is tell you approximately where it will hit the target. Micro is very much like that.
But I would offer to you this consideration. In the blessed world wide web people do experiments on pricing all the time. They do alpha beta tests to determine the relationship between price and sales and optimize their price that way. So economics is a science where falsifiable, repeatable experimentation takes place regularly, and the results are extremely useful and profitable.
I’m not trying to say that micro is as hard a science as physics or chemistry. Clearly it is softer. But it is categorically different than macro, the two categories being “useful” and “not useful.”
Of course you could argue that macro is “useful” in the political economy (as opposed to the actual financial economy) and you might be right. Bullshit from these guys gets politicians elected all the time. Look at the justifications going round for the abject failure of Obama’s economic policies if you doubt this…
Fraser, I accept your qualification of the previous point.
I go much further and to be very contrarian regarding the definition of growth. Growth is what? Is the current definition of growth valid?
If products last longer, lets say double their durability then there is less production and less selling and that means less growth. Is that bad? If everyone has most products they which then there is less growth. Currently PC(computer) selling is decreasing, people can do some of the functions with a tablet.
“Growth is what?”
Growth is when a smaller number and percentage of the global population suffers hunger. Today, somewhere between 10 to 15% are hungry.