As much as I was glad to see lighting become more efficient, as someone who enjoys seeing the night sky I was worried what the impact of virtually free lighting would be. And indeed, at least in rural Ireland the proliferation of extremely bright uplights which are on all night has not been great for seeing the milky way.
Similarly, I worry that if we ever _do_ get fully self-driving EV's it will only serve to make it comfortable to commute from, say, Yosemite to Mountain View - and who wouldn't want that? Yet I rarely see increased congestion come up in discussions about FSD.
Secondary effects from widespread automobile ownership already removed most of its benefit for most people (typically they're net-negative, in fact) for day-to-day activities. Full self-driving would at least put normal people on similar footing to the few who still gain significant advantage from cars (mostly people who can pay someone else to drive them everywhere). Buuuuut you're right that total time in cars might increase, making things overall worse—you're not exactly free to do anything when you're in a car, even as a passenger.
("Seems impossible, how's that work?" take commuting time and time worked to pay for car, insurance, fuel, and maintenance. Compare worked-time it takes to pay for equivalents on a bicycle, plus bicycle commute time if you removed all the space you drive past that exists only or mainly because of cars [which is... a whole lot when you start analyzing it]. Do same for e.g. the grocery store and other places you regularly visit. You'll probably find that most people in your city—including, perhaps, you—must be losing time to their car, and likely a lot of it, when the point was to get places faster, i.e. to save time. Cars in an environment where lots of people own cars end up being beneficial mainly for the disabled and people who don't have to drive themselves, so can partially reclaim that time for other activities, i.e. the rich. The analysis just gets more lopsided the more complete you try to make it—added healthcare costs, more dedicated time spent exercising to make up for inactivity due to cars, infrastructure costs, et c, there's a lot more time and money that can plausibly be put under the "cost of widespread car ownership" column. And yes, I stole this analysis from Illich—I ran the numbers because it seemed crazy, but he's totally right)
> you're not exactly free to do anything when you're in a car, even as a passenger.
Sure, not anything but if I can be a passenger in the back seat with a driver that's not going to crash, so I don't need to be a second set of eyes for them, or stay awake to help keep them awake, and I can watch a movie or code on my laptop with tethering to my phone, or just take a nap, I could probably put up with a multi-hour commute and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Lighting is simply something that must be regulated, just like everything else that has negative externalities. It’s not that different from noise or other kinds of pollution.
Beijing has huge problems with traffic jams and the CCP has has taken some extreme measures to limit the number of cars there. E.g. they practically don't issue registration numbers for ICE vehicles and there's a queue for EV registration numbers, that currently goes to 2035 (if you join the queue now you'll get a reg number in 2035).
Some cities with heavy traffic in Europe and China have implemented rules, like only cars with even registration numbers are allowed to drive on Mondays.
When this was applied in some European city (Paris?) there was a joke - "The rich got around this by using two cars. The poor got around it by using two number-plates".
An important factor seems to be whether the underlying good or service is of the satiating variety [1] and how quickly does such satiation kick-in.
E.g. producing cheap and plentiful food will increase demand up to a point, but once everybody becomes obese that process stops (and mutates into waste).
If you can generate cheap and plentiful jetpacks, pretty soon the sky will be dark with swarms of human mosquitos criss-crossing the biosphere. But at some point people will have exhausted the time they want to dedicate to this activity.
On the other hand a generic useful good such as low entropy energy that can be repurposed for a wide variety of uses might actually never saturate. That is probably what happened with fossil fuels.
A similar concept is that of induced demand [0]. When cities expand the number of highway lanes, for example, sometimes they find that traffic and congestion actually increase.
The way induced demand is framed sometimes as an argument for not expanding busy roads really bugs me. It's not that adding a new lane to a busy road suddenly creates the demand to drive on it. The "demand" already exists and simply isn't being met by the inadequate infrastructure.
If there's an aquarium at the end of a busy road, and I'm extremely offended by the sight of fish, no amount of added lanes is going to "induce" me to want to get up on a Saturday and drive to the aquarium.
However, if there's a opera house at the end of a busy road and I love the opera and want to go every weekend, inadequate infrastructure can make the experience driving there painful enough that I'll just stay home, but my desire to go there hasn't changed. I'd still love to see the opera and adding enough new lanes will mean I'm able to go.
If congestion increases immediately after new lanes for traffic are added it's probably because the existing demand to travel down that particular road has been being ignored for way too long. As long as you're a fan of allowing people to go to the places they want to visit, then adding new lanes of traffic is a really good idea even when it results in more cars on the road. The goal of the larger road should be to allow more people to get to where they want to be, not to reduce the number of cars using it.
Among the many things people consider when buying a house or choosing a new place to rent, is the commute time to wherever they might need to go.
A suburb with an hour commute from the job is low on most people's list. Here comes a new highway, or new highway lanes, and now it's only 30 minutes. Great, let's move there... along with 20,000 other people and within a couple years the commute is back to an hour.
Busy roads are busy because of existing demand, new demand can be created by new roads/lanes and cause the expanded roads to become busier, but that's a really good thing not a bad one. New roads should be planned/expanded with that in mind because the moment existing demand starts to exceed what the current roads can handle it becomes time to build new roads or expand existing ones again.
Allowing outdated and inadequate infrastructure to make people miserable and hinder a thriving local economy is a terrible idea. Improving and adapting our roadways to meet the needs of a growing community is exactly what we want cities to do. We shouldn't use induced demand as an excuse to neglect that responsibility, we just have to understand the effect so that we can plan for it.
1. the observation that, AFAIK, there are no instances anywhere in the world where adding roads or lanes to roads resulted in over-capacity for the roads
2. your claim that this is because of existing demand that was not previously being met
This would appear to imply that the existing demand - which I'd like to call "implicit demand", because it was not visible via behavior until the roads were expanded - is in fact so large that to meet it would require building a road system of so vast a scope that we clearly would not want it.
Put differently, if building roads merely exposes existing demands, and the 10-100x fold increase in roads over the last, say, century, has not yet met those demands, then we should conclude that it is either impossible to meet those existing demands or will require basically the total destruction of so much land that it will be untenable.
Mostly I think the idea of induced demand should encourage us to increase the availability of transportation in “novel” ways as opposed to just adding more road. You can add more road forever and just get more traffic. If instead you add rail, say, you satisfy demand and avoid a concrete highway hellscape.
I 100% agree. Too often though it's used as an excuse to not update roadways in places where there are zero efforts being made to introduce new public transportation.
It's also worth noting that induced demand exists even for public transportation systems. A single rail line can solve the bandwidth problem for a longer time than a new lane on a highway, but if growth continues you'll still end up needing to add new trains and rail lines or add additional modes of mass transportation.
Induced demand is never a reason to leave the problem of bad infrastructure unaddressed, it's just something we have to take into account as we try to improve things.
There were suggestions (pre-Covid) that the Elizabeth line, which increased east-west capacity in London by some ridiculous figure (over 50% if I recall correctly) could be saturated by induced demand (or if you prefer the realisation of suppressed demand) within six months of opening.
Those also have the same induced demand effect people are talking about. It's just that they can absorb a lot more usage than roads.
Adding a passenger rail is in principle not very different from adding a 10-lane corridor. Including the problems of what those people do to enter or leave it, and the fact that it too can become overloaded.
That said, yes, of course the rail is a much better option.
It is more complicated than this... There is a trade off while going to popular places. An Opera house is a big attraction that you tend to get tickets for so you're willing to spend some extra time in traffic for it... Now lower the time in traffic and suddenly you're deciding to get a meal a nice restaurant in the area too. But people not going to the Opera will also go to that nice restaurant that the travel cost has lowered. And because this is the US and cars are king, each one of us is taking our own set of 4 wheeled transportation. And that transportation needs to park somewhere. And this is where things tend to fall apart quickly. At the end of the day it would be far cheaper and easier for everyone if we were taking public/mass transportation to these busy spots, but because we don't design our lives around this it becomes impossible.
It's also true that once a city finally stops ignoring the inadequate bandwidth of an extremely busy road and expands it, new businesses and attractions may want to be built along that more pleasant road leading to more people wanting to take the road.
I agree entirely that a great public transportation system is a much better solution, but for places that don't have one and aren't going to create one, insisting that induced demand makes expanding roads inappropriate is just... wrong.
Ultimately, if falls on cities to provide people with a way to get to where they want to be and leaving bottlenecks in place makes people miserable and stifles the local economy.
> It's also true that once a city finally stops ignoring the inadequate bandwidth of an extremely busy road and expands it, new businesses and attractions may want to be built along that more pleasant road leading to more people wanting to take the road.
Once you get out of your car, a street with more lanes of traffic is far far less pleasant to be in than a street with less. To use an example from Philadelphia near me, which of these streets would you rather spend time in? Vine Street, with 3 lanes of traffic in each direction and a freeway below in the center median?
You'll notice that most of things on the two lane road are intended for people (shops, banks, churches) unlike the first road where the things are mostly for cars (gas stations, parking lots).
There's nothing wrong with big roads designed primarily for cars that bring people into or away from quieter areas designed primarily for people where they can walk around and shop.
> There's nothing wrong with big roads designed primarily for cars that bring people into or away from quieter areas designed primarily for people where they can walk around and shop.
There is in cities, because there those two things cannot be so neatly separated.
Some historical context here: Vine Street cuts through Chinatown. Prior to its expansion, there were homes and businesses in the space that's now roadway. They were demolished to make way for the car.
The scars of that are still visible today; if you walk through the neighborhood it's clear that Chinatown north of Vine is struggling compared to its counterpart on the south side, and the two sides feel cut off from one another.
And it makes crossing more dangerous. My commute for years involved crossing Vine, and though I sometimes would bike I had to plan my route very carefully because there were few places where doing so would be at all safe.
People live and work on either side of that street. There are senior homes within a few blocks of it.
Oh no, we're going going to stifle the local economy for billions of dollars, and all we have to do is take on 10s to 100s of billion of dollars of debt to avoid it...
This is just turning into a hedonistic treadmill of turning more and more of your space into transportation infrastructure by means of debt.
The point is that automobile infrastructure does not pay for itself; it is too energy-inefficient, too upkeep-inefficient, and too space-inefficient. Cars do not scale.
Right, and I think what you're getting at is that there is a distinction between the generated demand that the new lanes induce, and the latent demand which was already present before the new lanes were added but went unsatisfied.
Adding new lanes to the road allows that latent, pent-up demand to be satisfied--the induced/generated demand is the mechanism of that satisfaction.
>The "demand" already exists and simply isn't being met by the inadequate infrastructure.
the induced demand argument isn't simply that we should never build transportation infrastrucutre, it's that adding a lane to an existing road is a bad way to meet that demand because the traffic that one lane can carry is insufficient to exceed the demand that one lane will induce. yes, the road expansion will be "successful" in that people will use it. but if it was pitched as a way to improve travel times, reduce congestion, or improve safety, that will probably be a failure.
if you're not going to the opera because the road is too busy, and the added lane releases that unmet demand, the road will still be just as busy as before and you still won't get to the opera. everybody else is doing the same math as you, and deciding that if the road isn't too busy they're going to drive. and so the road is always too busy.
The "induced demand" isn't a bad thing. It means more people are getting some utility out of them. The reason why folks bring up "induced demand" is when someone says that roadways should be expanded to reduce commute times. Commute times will often not be reduced: only that more people will be able to commute.
Usually the solution then is not to optimize for road transportation. After a threshold, it makes sense to switch to a more efficient use of land. Essentially, if you added two more lanes to 101, it's still going to take you as long to get to Palo Alto.
Roads are very good things. But they are very costly land-use-wise. So ideally you have lots of roads as a discovery mechanism and then place high-frequency fast transit along the most well-used. Most of America is in regulatory hell, though, so transit is slow and low-frequency, so the road may actually be net better.
I see this happen with cloud services all the time...
Customer has on prem services that they do X operations with, we'll say 10,000 daily as an example. They look at the metrics and moving to cloud for that many operations would be cheaper. But very soon after moving to the cloud and an expandable infrastructure, operational costs explode. Suddenly they are not doing this 10k times a day, they are doing it 20 or 30k times a day. Whereas before before kicking off whatever job they were doing they were careful to ensure it was important and cleaning up mistakes in scripts doing while 1=1 loops because it had a measurable impact, after the backpressure disappeared, they'd do this operation without thinking about the costs.
This is currently playing out with solar panels. They get cheaper and you need fewer for the same production, which increases demand and that continues the cycle.
Just pointing this out cause the example linked is coal (bad) but it also works for things that are generally thought of as good.
I guess the implicit point the poster was getting at (and there always seems to be one when people post wikipedia articles on HN) is that the massive increases in compute efficiency (ops per watt) have lead to massively increased power consumption, often in pointless applications like crypto mining
When I first learned about Jevons Paradox, I thought of what a colleague once told me: "I believe that low-power neuromorphic chips is one way computational neuroscience can help use less fossil fuels by reducing the power consumption of AI". Because of the paradox, I now believe that the effect would rather be to make small AI devices more widespread instead, with no impact on total power consumption.
At the end of the day Earth has a thermodynamic budget in order not to experience run away heating. Moving to things like fusion may delay the global warming caused by carbon, but our hunger for more energy will eventually lead to energy use beyond what we can radiate away.
Hopefully, 1, we get to the point we have to worry about that. And 2, we'll have cheap and easy access to space where we can move entropy intensive processes away from the planet.
I enjoy how the game Factorio makes paradoxes like this clear and obvious. In Factorio, when you replace your coal-driven power infrastructure with a big array of solar panels and batteries, pollution (which attracts bugs in the game) falls temporarily, but then other polluters more than replace the original pollution. The only solution in the game is to keep going and figure out how to do better.
During my early graduate school days, I recall being fascinated by these paradoxes caused by wealth and substitution effects.
It's a big deal! We become more efficient with something, and the reduction in demand results in more utilization due to low costs in some cases. It's a major consideration for environmental and humanitarian policy.
> I recall being fascinated by these paradoxes caused by wealth and substitution effects
For your intellectual safety, just be sure to exclude "population growth" from your list of effects. People really really seem to hate it when anybody points that one out.
If history is any guide, they'll strawman your "-ism" until even the most general observations about feedback loops and population become twisted into a freakishly specific (and easily dismissed) reinterpretation. Even today, most people think that historical increases in food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis.
> Even today, most people think that historical increases in food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis.
No, what disproves the Malthusian thesis is the simple fact that this...
"humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living"
...is not what we actually observe. Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth. The people on Earth who have the highest standard of living also have the lowest birth rates.
> "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living"
Is this quote directly from Malthus? Or did you copy a second-hand source, for which I already warned about ubiquitous phenomenon of erasure-by-mass-strawmanning?
> Once people are able to have a high standard of living, as they do in the developed world, they start using more abundance for that instead of for population growth.
And so far, the only way people are able to have a high standard of living is by making other people far away (or not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of living.
This is the inconvenient truth of "development." After you finish Malthus, maybe check out Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
In effect, our low population growth is only possibly because we're "exporting" high population growth to the poor colonial satellite nations we rely on.
That book is a fine illustration of misgovernment and how it prevents people in underdeveloped countries from creating wealth. (And, btw, plenty of the misgovernment is in the US and other developed countries, not just the underdeveloped countries.)
What it isn't is a demonstration that any of that misgovernment is necessary in order for people in the US and other developed countries to create wealth. If all such people were thrown in jail for life tomorrow, wealth creation in the US and other developed countries would go on just fine. In fact it would probably improve, since shutting down the misgovernment would include doing it in the US, where it also impedes wealth creation.
> so far, the only way people are able to have a high standard of living is by making other people far away (or not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of living.
No, this is not correct. People in the US creating wealth does not at all prevent people in other places from creating wealth, including places from which the US imports resources. Nor does wealth creation in the US require a low standard of living in other countries.
The primary cause of low standard of living is misgovernment. People who are poor are poor because the governments of their countries steal everything, so no one has an incentive to create wealth, and the world community in general allows this misgovernment to continue, and even rewards the corrupt governments (Robert Mugabe was applauded at the UN's world food summit years ago at the same time his people were starving because he and his cronies were stealing all the food for themselves or to sell abroad on the black market). This could be fixed without changing wealth creation in developed countries at all.
> No, this is not correct. People in the US creating wealth does not at all prevent people in other places from creating wealth, including places from which the US imports resources. Nor does wealth creation in the US require a low standard of living in other countries.
Asserted without evidence.
Also asserted in the face of almost utter contradiction with the historical record.
It is true that someone in the US "creating wealth" by baking delicious cakes does not stop someone in a country with lithium reserves from creating wealth through mining.
But it is not true that someone the US "creating wealth" by using cheap local labor, corruption and impenetrable market access to mine that same lithium is not interfering with local wealth development.
> The primary cause of low standard of living is misgovernment.
This is absurdly myopic. Countries with low standards of living generally have GDP levels low enough that even distributing it evenly would not move them noticeably out of the classification. People in the world who are poor are poor because (a) other people have taken resources the poor might have used to improve their own conditions (b) other people have created barriers (social, civic, physical, cultural) to poor people accumulating wealth (c) other people in the world have a vested interest in there being poor people.
Some of that is tied up with governments, some of it is not. Rich, selfish greedy people exist under all forms of government, though some forms of government deal with them more effectively in terms of neutering their ability to negatively impact a lot of people.
Point is, don't entrust any second-hand source to paraphrase Malthus. They have pretty much universally been twisted into unrecognizably distorted strawmen.
As I said, this is one of the historically verified perils of going against the intellectual grain. Even if you're right, your opponents will rewrite history (including your own thesis!) to make you "wrong" in the end.
> Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest birthrates.
Hard to say this isn't merely an unstable temporary intermediate state. Low birthrate populations (by definition) are replaced by high birthrate populations, per evolution. Various and growing migrant crises worldwide seem to bear this out.
The usual "solution" offered is that eventually 100% of nations will become "developed." This is probably fantasy anyway, but it's not even clear if this is a biophysical possibility. Thus far, the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries (this is another thing people really really don't like when you point it out :-D).
> the only way "developed" countries have been able to support their existence is by systemic organized theft of resources from the "developing" countries
No, this is not correct. The way developed countries support a high standard of living is by creating enormous amounts of wealth. That wealth wasn't taken from anywhere; it did not exist before the developed countries created it.
Again, this may or may not be a transient condition...
Currently we create a lot of wealth, but that wealth is highly pinned on farming lots of actual labor of to places with high population/cheap labor and keeping the expensive labor here.
If we are unable to convert those jobs to automated tasks before the standards of living increase in those high population/poor countries then we are going to have a big problem, because there will not be anyone to farm that work off to cheaply (as we see with China starting to purchase cheaper labor from African countries). There will be a massive bout of stagflation at some point.
It's quite true that wealth creation is not guaranteed, and that there are many ways of messing it up.
That does not change the fact that wealth is created; there is not a fixed pool of wealth on the planet that will never change. There is nothing impossible about creating enough wealth to give everyone on the planet a first world standard of living. That doesn't mean it is guaranteed to happen; but it does mean it can happen.
Shmaybe, but if you look into it, it sure looks like the "wealth creation" in the West falls primarily into one of the following categories:
- Accounting tricks - e.g. most software-created wealth is here, and it's increasingly apparent that it doesn't improve productivity, but rather diffuse the work so it's hard to track, resulting only in "mysterious", "unexplained" drop of productivity overall;
- Use of natural resource - that one has always been a source of wealth, because it's an actual input to the economy;
- Population growth - i.e. the other fundamental input to the economy;
- Outsourcing approximately all manufacturing to countries with cheap labor and low safety and environmental standards.
I'm sure there's plenty of honest-to-$deity pie growing, but can't think of a single example right now. Agricultural efficiency improvement maybe?
> I'm sure there's plenty of honest-to-$deity pie growing, but can't think of a single example right now.
You must be joking. The US produces a huge quantity of genuine goods and services every year. You buy groceries, right? That's wealth creation. You have electricity in your home, right? (Otherwise how would you be able to post here?) That's wealth creation. You buy clothes, household goods, etc.? I could go on and on. And since we're here on HN, how about all of the software that is created and updated by US programmers? All of that is wealth creation too.
Of course none of this vast amount of wealth creation makes the news, because it's all "dog bites man" so the media isn't interested in it. They'd rather talk about the crooks and the parasites because that's what captures eyeballs. But that doesn't mean wealth creation isn't happening.
Groceries definitely get counted in the same bucket as "natural resources" — the term "primary sector" is the usual term to encompass all extraction & production of raw materials, including farming, logging, fishing, forestry and mining.
Electricity overall isn't much of a "growth" sector, as the total hasn't changed much in developed nations in recent decades, only the sources:
> Groceries definitely get counted in the same bucket as "natural resources"
Really? You can just go pick groceries out of the ground in your backyard without any processing whatsoever? Because that's what "natural resources" means.
Groceries in your grocery store have gone through a huge supply chain to get there from the point where they are "natural resources". That supply chain is wealth creation.
> isn't much of a "growth" sector
Wealth creation is not the same thing as "growth"; it's much broader. For example, electricity that was produced and used yesterday is no good to you today. More of it needs to be produced because what was produced before got used up. That is wealth creation. Much wealth creation has to happen simply to make up for the wealth that gets used every day to support our lives. That doesn't mean it isn't wealth creation.
> if the new stuff is PV imported from China, it's not really western nations doing the wealth creation
Sure it is. Goods in China are no good to you in the US. Shipping goods across the world is wealth creation.
If you want to argue that maybe we shouldn't trust goods from China, I have no problem with that. But that's a different discussion.
> these are increasingly outsourced
Or automated. That's true. It still doesn't mean these things aren't wealth creation. Trade is wealth creation.
> these are accounting tricks
No, they aren't. Producing software that meets people's needs is wealth creation. (You appear to agree with that.)
> Really? You can just go pick groceries out of the ground in your backyard without any processing whatsoever? Because that's what "natural resources" means.
First: That's what a vegetable garden is, my parents had one. I also enjoy picking fruits off blackberry bushes, and those things are invasive weeds that grow basically everywhere in both city and countryside.
> Goods in China are no good to you in the US. Shipping goods across the world is wealth creation.
I'm not denying that shipping is on the service-goods continuum.
It's also: (1) not much of developed economies (~5% of USA for all logistics combined, including local transport); (2) not necessarily supplied by the western economies that receive the goods (where does the line get drawn? It's not as clear-cut as, say, looking at who owns the logistics firm); (3) useless in the absence of things to ship; (4) historically speaking, when desirable goods exist but cannot be shipped, the customers move.
> Or automated. That's true. It still doesn't mean these things aren't wealth creation. Trade is wealth creation.
Then you agree with, or are overlooking, the specific caveat "in the West" that was in TeMPOraL's comment?
> That's what a vegetable garden is, my parents had one.
Did you get all your groceries that way? What about people who don't have vegetable gardens? You were claiming that all groceries are "natural resources". That claim is obviously false. If all you are saying now is that some groceries can be thought of as natural resources, since some people grow some of their own groceries, of course that's true, but it's a much, much weaker statement than the claim of yours that I objected to.
> Your statement exceeds the requirement to be in the primary sector of the economy
So what? That has nothing to do with what I was saying. Not to mention that such definitions are arbitrary anyway.
> I'm not denying that shipping is on the service-goods continuum.
I'm talking about wealth creation. If you agree that shipping is wealth creation, good.
> It's also: (1) not much of developed economies (~5% of USA for all logistics combined, including local transport); (2) not necessarily supplied by the western economies that receive the goods (where does the line get drawn? It's not as clear-cut as, say, looking at who owns the logistics firm); (3) useless in the absence of things to ship; (4) historically speaking, when desirable goods exist but cannot be shipped, the customers move.
None of these contradict anything I was saying. (See further comment below about "western".)
> Then you agree with, or are overlooking, the specific caveat "in the West" that was in TeMPOraL's comment?
Neither. First, "Western" countries trading with "non-Western" countries gives wealth to both, not just to the "Western" countries. (For example, a "Western" firm paying a "non-Western" firm to ship goods to the "West" creates wealth for both.) Second, you do know that "Western" countries trade with other "Western" countries, right?
I mean, I can click a button on a computer, and boom, you're a billionaire. But if I do it for everyone, without the corresponding increase in production of things that are wanted then inflation explodes.
Some things like software don't have to follow these inflationary paradigms, but things like land definitely do. This is what I'm warning about that we're running on borrowed time with cheap labor unless we replace it with automation. All your 'wealth' will quickly disappear in inflation.
> I can click a button on a computer, and boom, you're a billionaire.
So you work for the Federal Reserve? They're the ones who are allowed to print money. (Which, as you note, will cause inflation if we don't increase the production of goods and services. But even if we do, it is still a transfer of buying power from those who don't get the newly printed money to those who do. Which means from everyone who isn't a financial institution, to financial institutions. Which is why the financial institutions lobbied to get the Federal Reserve created in the first place.)
> things like land definitely do
I'm not sure what you mean by "inflationary paradigm". Land is one of the few things of economic interest that (a) actually does have a finite, limited supply, and (b) can't be replaced by other substitutes for important uses. But that has nothing to do with inflation. It would be the same if the money supply were fixed forever.
> we're running on borrowed time with cheap labor unless we replace it with automation
Which will happen (in fact it has already been happening for decades now) due to natural economic incentives as labor becomes more expensive (which I agree will happen over time as more people gain access to a higher standard of living). The biggest obstacle to it continuing to happen is, as I said, misgovernment.
How do you define wealth? From first principles, wealth is just the accumulation of resources used for production: oil, gas, water, lumber, minerals. The next abstraction would be the accumulation of productive labor from these resources: buildings, vehicles, electronics, materials.
How many of these things are the wealthiest nations net exporters of — or at least breakeven on, eg they produce enough for self-sustenance?
> The basic economic definition is that wealth is possibilities: the wealthier you are, the more things it is possible for you to choose to do.
Never heard of that definition, most definitely not as a basic economic definition. Where did you hear it?
Anyways, if we use your definition of wealth then we must definitely define what "possibilities" in this context mean. To me it seems that there is far less wealth today than in the past. The only possibility for me right now is to sell my time to someone else so that I could ensure my survival. I can't grow my own food since I don't have the money for it. Can't move since I don't have money for it... you get the picture. It seems, by your definition, I'm poor as any man has ever been.
If by "possibilities" you meant how many different beers they have on offer in my local pub then I'm one of the wealthiest people in the world.
I've given it in an unusual phrasing, but what I've said is equivalent to what you will find in, say, David Friedman's Price Theory.
> we must definitely define what "possibilities" in this context mean. To me it seems that there is far less wealth today than in the past.
Nonsense. To give just one example: say you get a bacterial infection. A century ago your only option was to drink fluids, rest, and hope your immune system could fight it off--which in lots of cases it couldn't. Today you can get antibiotics. As a result of advances like this (and others like vaccinations for common diseases), the death rate from disease is vastly lower today than in the past, because of all the possibilities for fighting disease that exist today that didn't exist then. That is a huge amount of wealth creation.
To give another example: say your family lives across the country and you want to visit them. A century ago you could take a train that would take about a week to get there. Today you can get in an airplane and be there in a few hours. As a result, there are many more possibilities for events, from business meetings to family gatherings, that simply could not have taken place at all in the past. That is wealth creation.
For one more quick example, the discussion we are having now could not have taken place a few decades ago, nor could billions like it. That is wealth creation.
We tend to forget such things because we take our current level of wealth for granted and don't stop to think about the vast number of possibilities open to us that were not open to our ancestors. But they're there, and they represent wealth.
> by your definition, I'm poor as any man has ever been
No, you (and I) are far richer than the vast majority of humans who have ever lived. See above.
He literally did. Read him. Malthus foresaw and mentioned the possibility of improved farming techniques. After all, it's not like improvements in farming hadn't happened before!
In reply to this predictable objection, Malthus..... well, I suppose you'll just have to read it to find out. :)
thank you for linking to source material, but I don't think it's very useful to reply with teasers expecting us to read a book to understand one tightly constrained topic of conversation/debate.
Someone already answered that he in fact did foresee developments in food production but that is totally irrelevant to hist point which is: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man"
I was introduced to this concept when working with Intel on a business deal. This seemed to be a guiding principle in our discussions as well as an ethos a lot of the Intel Capital had strong belief in.
Similarly, I worry that if we ever _do_ get fully self-driving EV's it will only serve to make it comfortable to commute from, say, Yosemite to Mountain View - and who wouldn't want that? Yet I rarely see increased congestion come up in discussions about FSD.