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Let's talk growth, baby #13 BTC teacher in Fiat Madland
746 sats \ 8 comments \ @Shugard 13 Dec alter_native

Let's talk growth, baby

Today's economics lesson should be about growth and why it matters.
So I started very lazy with a round of questions. What do you know about growth, where did you hear about it. Do you know any examples of growth in the economy or society?
The answers took us down a rabbit hole I was not prepared for.
"Yes, we know a lot about growth, we just had the topic in geography today".
My brain was confused. What is growth in geography? Mountains, land masses?
But no, they were talking about society.
Strictly speaking, they were talking about mathematical growth.
Their bullet points were as follows:
  • Too many people are being born, and there is a population explosion, which leads to all sorts of problems, such as:
  • Not enough space (space for houses, infrastructure, cities)
  • Not enough kindergartens or schools to take care of them, so there will be a crisis of education in knowledge and morals.
  • Not enough food, so we will have to get more farms, which will harm the environment.
  • Not enough jobs for all the new people, leading to more unemployment and therefore more crime.
  • More plundering of the planet's resources and extreme environmental problems.
  • The only good thing is that we get more taxes when there are more people, so we could offset some of these problems with tax money.
  • If there are more people, we need more money (i.e. if there are only 100 people and 100 units of money, we need more money if there are 120 people, otherwise we all get poorer, so we need inflation).

The Nail in My Heart

The last bullet point was one nail too many in my heart. One of the kids noticed and asked, "Isn't that right? Or do you think it is wrong?"
I replied, "No worries, I think they are all wrong."
That was too much for these kids on a Friday right before the weekend.
One said, "Mr. Shugard, we cannot take this anymore, this is too much. We learn in school X only to come to your classes to be taught that X is wrong and Y is right, but you are the only one who says Y is right."
That's when the official part of my plan went downhill. I knew I would never achieve the goal of this class if I could not correct some things beforehand.
The kids are allowed to question everything I do, and they know they have the right to get proof from me. If they think I am talking bullshit, I have to explain and prove why it is not.
I really love this arrangement! It puts a lot of work on me, but gives the kids the best shit test there is.
Great, now I'm sitting here with too much work to do for the weekend, just to add some extra work and work on the stats and numbers to make a comprehensive case next week.
But let me give you all a glimpse of what I think is wrong here and what I have told you so far today:

Smith vs Malthus

These two ideas clash and do not work together. The world gets better with growth, not worse!
A quick reality check:
Are too many people being born? We are platooning. Birth rates are plummeting in rich countries and slowing in developing countrie
Not enough space There is no more room to build homes and buildings, right? Not at all! We are building in the air!
Book recommendation coming:
Not enough kindergartens or schools to take care of them. Average years of schooling are going up, not down!
Not enough food We have more food than ever, the last problem is about the distribution, not the production!
Not enough jobs More people, more jobs! Unemployment is falling
More plundering of the planet's resources We need less resources per person and we are finding substitutes all the time. I need some good charts, if you can provide some!
The only good thing is that we get more taxes Sure, because the government uses it well, right? right?
If there are more people, we need more money. Because we all remember the time when the US population exploded by ~40% in 2020.
Feedback on how to address this misconception is very welcome! Also sources, material and graphics! Looking at you @denlillaapan!
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251 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan 13 Dec
edit: ok, this got long. Soz
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  1. For somebody approaching growth and the environment (=_reality) from a climate change/nature/geography/resource-use point of view, I'd start with Andrew McAfee's More from Less. (self-promotion, here's my review of the book).
It's a little dated (2019) so there exist better and updated figures ofc, but on the upside google tells me the book exists in German: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Mehr-aus-weniger-%C3%BCberraschende-Geschichte/dp/3421048460 If nothing else, I stole a couple of graphs (and probably McAfee has made them available via MIT too) that you can use.
  1. there are plenty of resources(!) showing energy use and resource extraction in relation to GDP. Either those things are positively correlated, like with energy use (=read, fossil fuels). There's a chapter in Deaton's book too about it (The Great Escape), but perhaps more on happiness/well-being -- don't recall.
Goods and services do not miraculously appear on store shelves or in Amazon warehouses. Energy is used along with other inputs to transform natural resources into goods and services. It is not surprising therefore that there is a general positive relationship between energy use per capita and GDP per capita. (Boston University, "Visualizing Energy", https://visualizingenergy.org/what-is-the-relationship-between-energy-use-and-economic-output/)
...or we get more economic bang for our resource bucks:
In 2023, global energy consumption increased at a slower rate than the global GDP (+2.2% and around +3%, respectively) (Enerdata, which I believe used to be the widely used BP Statistical Review of World Energy)
  1. I would use the widely compiled and aggregated numbers and charts in Superabundance.
Just reading the intro chapters there make it abundantly(!) clear that economic growth and standards of living increase with resource use -- that is, Malthus has been wrong for two-hundred years. Or listen to any of Elon's population takes recently: we need more people, not fewer.
  1. For a clash-of-visions take here, I'd go with Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.
Tons of interviews online (highly recommend the Freakonomics ones). Doesn't look like it exists in German, but there probably is a high-profile German magazine take on it.
  1. oh, yes exercise for the Stackers too: land use.
Look up Hannah Ritchie's graphs, and have the class _calculate out the amount of arable/livable land in the world, and what portion of them are currently used for what.
If you come to the conclusion that we, somehow, don't have enough land you failed both math and basic humanity.
Tl;dr -- kids, tell those other teachers to ROYALLY FUCK OFF. They are uneducated imbeciles, don't pay attention to them.
Now, perhaps Mr. @Shugard is trying to fool you -- who knows? Then don't trust, but go freakin verify.
Keep an open mind that it COULD BE that all these schmucks are wrong about something, big or small.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Shugard OP 13 Dec
tell those other teachers to ROYALLY FUCK OFF.
This is the advice I'm going to give out of context :D Take the 100 sats for reminding me that I have "More from Less" on my bookshelf!
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52 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 13 Dec
Their problem here is one of epistemic and/or education. They've learned to respect "authority" and accept what the wise authority tells them as capital-t Truth.
What they're learning is that a) the world is complicated and has competing sets of info/emphasis, b) some men are screwballs and/or intentionally try to pull a fast one on you.
One said, "Mr. Shugard, we cannot take this anymore, this is too much. We learn in school X only to come to your classes to be taught that X is wrong and Y is right, but you are the only one who says Y is right."
Correct, friends. You're learning what "schooling" and even "society" is -- a bunch of contradictory pieces of information (some irrelevant, some important) that you now have to make sense of. Enjoy.
I'll shove some graphs and resources in another comment
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @DesertDave 14 Dec
I thought population growth was declining?
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Shugard OP 14 Dec
It is! But the other teachers claim that we will soon have overpopulation.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @DesertDave 14 Dec
I feel like this is a tough thing to verify. We tend to rely on others to tell us how the world is working and changing. But in my own experience, people aren't having kids the way they used to. I barely see pregnant woman anymore. I think the idea, we always need to grow and expand makes no sense. With better technology and Bitcoin actually having pure incentives, while allowing people to store wealth over time, we should be able to work way less. We waste so much energy as it is. And Bitcoin will help us get efficient with our work. And I see so many abandoned buildings everywhere. Why would we need to build more? Of course I am way out of my lane on this and completely unqualified to talk about it. That's just my intuition. I'm clueless.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Shugard OP 14 Dec
That's one of my explanations for it: #781298 There is mud, but it's too much to fit into one post.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DesertDave 14 Dec
I know what I observe and that's about it. And I am grateful other people much smarter than me are having discussions here.
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