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Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Discussions about the economic and financial ramifications of PEAK OIL

Re: When Economic Growth Indicates Failure

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sat 20 Jan 2018, 20:49:31

AdamB wrote:
Nothing can be duller than listening to an economist or other policy expert pontificate endlessly on such metrics as gross domestic product, stock market prices, employment, and consumer confidence. Most of all they talk about GDP: Rising GDP is good; falling GDP is bad. But as a measure of economic activity, GDP is what it says it is: a gross number. It doesn’t measure how money and wealth circulates through a system, what use it is put to, how the rewards of its use are distributed. It just counts how much comes out of the spigot at the end of the pipe. This completely avoids taking into account what may be the most important indicator of economic health: equality. Epidemiological studies demonstrate that equality is essential to a host of physical, mental, and social health outcomes. Societies that are more equal


When Economic Growth Indicates Failure

That is a nice set of rose colored glasses you have on there. In any economy, capitalist or socialist and all those in between or archaic there are winners and losers. The losers are never equal to the winners and to try to make them so always destroys the whole economy.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby EnergyUnlimited » Sun 28 Jan 2018, 08:02:27

Real growth of GDP is rather out of question, regardless of current statististics indicating just that.
However population growth will continue maybe for a decade more or so.
We have entered an era of fatamorganas and mass delusions. Weath is more and more paper wealth.
It will not take long before 95% is well underwater without realizing that.
These will be first line customers of misery and dieoff.
Nevertheless it is time to grab as much money as one can. These may come handy to allow you for a while to watch collapse from a bit more comfortable position even if at the end they won't save you.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 28 Jan 2018, 12:46:10

IOW, there must be Doom?

What if the World actually ended last year, and nobody noticed?

I keep telling you, TEOTWAWKI is a process, not an event. The process started around 1960, and will continue for another few decades. If you are younger than 60 years of age, you have never known a world that is not dying. Which is why it is so difficult for you to notice that it is happening around you.

There may never actually come a time when you actually notice something happening. That does not mean that the World is not ending.

As for timing, my estimate has been declining of late, from on the order of 200 years to on the order of 120 years. The actual range of what I just said is 12-1200 years, because I did not say "on the close order of" 120 years. In spite of anybody's pressing need to know the exact time, the data does not support any closer bounds, because human psychology is a major variable that cannot be modelled, since we do not have a Calculus of Human Behavior.

Slow Crash is happening around you. Some of you sense this and are starting to panic. Not that it matters. There is a tipping point, beyond which the crash happens at an accellerating rate, and it's impossible to halt. That may be in the future or the past, it will only be obvious with the perspective of a few decades. Perhaps for all practical purposes, the World HAS already ended, because there is nothing that anybody - or everybody working to a common purpose - can do about it.

Perhaps, given these facts, the most productive thing that any of us can do is remove our shirts and contemplate the lint in our belly buttons. Hey, the Super Bowl is a week away, and shortly after that, taxes are due again. Reality, what a concept.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 10:41:52

Guns and refugees diversion moved to THREAD

Please reserve comments in this thread for economics not fast crash scenarios. We have dozens of threads for crashes and consequences, a little economics doesn't hurt anyone and if the topic bores you just skip over it.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 13:33:55

FWIW, I really think we are confusing each other with economic terminology. Some of us (myself and perhaps Tanada) studied Economics as undergraduates, although it was a Minor not Major study. Others have backgrounds which steeped them from birth in Marxist nonsense. Even though I studied it, half my Economics courses were related to power plant economics - which I deliberately avoided as a career.

The conventional definition of economic growth is GNP, per capita this and that, and the idea is that each year's figure is larger than the year before. Yet I sense that for many of you, the emphasis on the word "REAL" implies something different than the conventional interpretation of economic growth.

If that's the case, best say so when you post.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 14:35:26

KaiserJeep wrote:FWIW, I really think we are confusing each other with economic terminology. Some of us (myself and perhaps Tanada) studied Economics as undergraduates, although it was a Minor not Major study. Others have backgrounds which steeped them from birth in Marxist nonsense. Even though I studied it, half my Economics courses were related to power plant economics - which I deliberately avoided as a career.

The conventional definition of economic growth is GNP, per capita this and that, and the idea is that each year's figure is larger than the year before. Yet I sense that for many of you, the emphasis on the word "REAL" implies something different than the conventional interpretation of economic growth.

If that's the case, best say so when you post.


My economics study are the minor portion as related to history (my major) because most of history is actually about trade vs warfare between communities. If you don't understand trade you don't understand history, and its probably why I am such a hard head when it comes to infrastructure. Poor infrastructure = poor trade networks = weakly linked politically and socially = decline and ultimately fall. If you can't trade with your neighbors but they have something you want the temptation is to engage in warfare against them in hopes of taking what you want. Marx and Engels fundamental error was they focused strictly on production and ignored distribution. It doesn't matter how flippin many cast iron skillets your mega factory manufactures in Magnetegorsk when you lack the internal infrastructure to distribute that production over the USSR. Moscow is a rail hub but almost completely ignores the barge capacity potential of the Moskva/Oka/Volga river even today. In the days of the Tsars the river network was the major infrastructure of the Empire because these natural routes were easily accessed. Moscow should have the same kind of river traffic Saint Louis, MO or Baton Rouge, LA. Instead you can look at a sat picture and see just how sparse river traffic is, and the USAF has counted train and truck traffic in and out of the city since the 1960's and compared to any comparably sized western capital it is a mere shadow of what it should be. That being said things are considerably improved from what they were in 1988, but even thirty years later Russia is not a great place to move goods from factory to consumers.

Up until the 1990's the same kind of problems were true in the PRC, but for the last 25 years they have been building infrastructure like crazy. The Chinese government are engineers, once they saw that getting the western nations to shift manufacturing to China required upgrading the infrastructure to bring in the raw materials and ship out the finished goods they jumped in with both feet and have not looked back. Modern China has a much greater resemblance to 1938 Germany than 1988 USSR in terms of understanding how raw material and finished goods must flow to sustain a healthy economy while maintaining an authoritarian state. In a way China had the advantage culturally in that big infrastructure projects have a millennia long tradition in their sphere of existence. For example the 'Grand canal' has linked north and south China across different major east-west river valleys for well over a thousand years in something like its present form, and portions of it date back as much as 2500 ybp. Looking at that success made it a lot easier for the Chinese to understand the fundamental need for infrastructure in a way the USSR never grasped despite its 70 year history. Roads/canals/railroads promote development of low population territory into high productivity territory that trades its excess to neighboring areas for its needs. The USSR had mega-projects like the trans-Siberian Railroad but they never understood the need to build all the feeder lines to cross connect that mega-project with every town and city not directly on the main line. Contrast that with the USA where the first transcontinental Railroad crossed the mostly vacant prairies and eastern slopes of the Rockies. Within 20 years of the main line passing through feeder lines were networking Nebraska and Kansas into the eastern seaboard. The famous cattle drives of the 1870's were from Texas cattlemen herding their livestock to Kansas City where the Longhorns were loaded up on train cars and hauled off to Chicago for slaughter. By the 1890's the rail network reached down into Texas and those long drives were no longer necessary, a short drive put the cattle on the railroad to market. At the same time the rail network also reached the other way extending up into Montana where northern cattle were being ranched in competition to Texas which drove the price of beef down to never before seen levels across the entire USA wherever the railroads reached.

In the 2020's economic growth is entirely possible, but it probably will not be as heavily based on light sweet crude as the 1920-1990 era was. The 2020-2090 period will be different because the energy supplies will be different. While infinite growth is only possible with infinite energy we are a very long way from running out of energy sources to consume in 2018.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 16:17:02

Yes, although I majored in EE, I was in school long enough (two years before the USCG, and 3 years plus Summer semesters after) that I could take minors in History, Economics, and Astronomy.

History is the only thing that I have kept with my whole life, although my name is on a few circuitry patents owned by my employer, I never published a paper in EE but have published repeatedly in the periodicals of the Nantucket Historical Society. I'm wondering whether living on the island will increase or diminish the rate at which I publish.

I find the 18th and 19th Century whaling industry to be fascinating. The island was at the heart of the major supply of whale oil right up until it was replaced by the inferior product kerosene. The virtually unprecedented concentration of wealth left a real mark on the island, built a narrow guage railroad that lasted only 36 years, destroyed the island's dense primordial hardwood forests (ship building and firewood) and brought about major changes in ocean ecosystems as the great whales were turned into lamp oil. Not to mention the historical incidents from the whaling ship Essex to the USCG lightships and the wreck of the Andrea Doria, which I watched live on B&W TV as a child. (One of my earliest memories, aerial shots of the sinking ocean liner from helicopters and airplanes.)

I'll have to say however that I'm not finding a lot of parallels betwwen whale oil and FF's. Very different economic forces were at work.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby Sys1 » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 16:54:50

Nobody needs to study economy to understand our economic paradigm is nonsense.
We are destroying our biosphere for money. There is nothing more to learn than that regarding economic growth.

In official mainstream economy, When you destroy rainforest for junk food, IT'S GOOD BECAUSE IT MAKES MONEY.
All the oil, gas, coal or whatever non renewable ressources burnt for growth are feeding GDP. THAT'S GOOD!
But nobody counts what was destroyed forever for that. Just because oil, gas and coal were not payed by anyone. It was just here. For free. So we can destroy nature presents for our beloved growth. Our beloved God money.

Studying mainstream pro business economy is basically the same as studying Bible, Coran or whatever religion you can imagine.
It's nothing more than a pilestock of BS.
In order to pass as some kind of science, they invented a Nobel price for economy, they decided that people getting in business school should have more money and power than others. If someone critisize growth, they decided that he must be insulted, mocked or killed.
We on Peak Oil are heretics. Just try to explain the truth to people in their fake candy crush world.
You will be looked as insane.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 18:15:53

Sys1 wrote:-snip-
In official mainstream economy, When you destroy rainforest for junk food, IT'S GOOD BECAUSE IT MAKES MONEY.
All the oil, gas, coal or whatever non renewable ressources burnt for growth are feeding GDP. THAT'S GOOD!
But nobody counts what was destroyed forever for that. Just because oil, gas and coal were not payed by anyone. It was just here. For free. So we can destroy nature presents for our beloved growth. Our beloved God money.
-snip-

Look, those FF's were burned to grow and transport food for humans, to manufacture the goods we need, to run HVAC systems, and the like. They are too precious as energy sources to discount for any reason. Also note that there are recovery costs involved, from multi-million dollar oil well boreholes to mountains of coal that get mined by machinery burning oil. The government also makes huge amounts of money from drilling and mining leases. Definately not free, just cheaper than renewables.

There are presently 195 countries in the world, they all have some form of Capitalism in play, it's the only form of economic system that works. Some of these systems work better than others. There is where you have to be careful, because I suspect that your definition of "good" is unique and not shared by others.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 18:33:42

EnergyUnlimited wrote:Real growth of GDP is rather out of question, regardless of current statististics indicating just that.
However population growth will continue maybe for a decade more or so.
We have entered an era of fatamorganas and mass delusions. Wealth is more and more paper wealth.
.....................

The real wealth of physical assets will continue regardless of the paper value assigned to it. Productive farm land, stands of timber, mines of all sorts, railroads ,ships and barges and the port facilities that serve and connect them, factories,truck fleets, oil drilling rigs, pipe lines, refineries, and chemical plants, and all the rest that are not just a fad or undeveloped idea will always be valuable and count toward the worlds total wealth.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 23:33:35

KaiserJeep wrote:I find the 18th and 19th Century whaling industry to be fascinating. The island was at the heart of the major supply of whale oil right up until it was replaced by the inferior product kerosene. The virtually unprecedented concentration of wealth left a real mark on the island, built a narrow guage railroad that lasted only 36 years, destroyed the island's dense primordial hardwood forests (ship building and firewood) and brought about major changes in ocean ecosystems as the great whales were turned into lamp oil. Not to mention the historical incidents from the whaling ship Essex to the USCG lightships and the wreck of the Andrea Doria, which I watched live on B&W TV as a child. (One of my earliest memories, aerial shots of the sinking ocean liner from helicopters and airplanes.)

I'll have to say however that I'm not finding a lot of parallels between whale oil and FF's. Very different economic forces were at work.


People love to talk about Whale Oil in the context of resource depletion but the fact of the matter is only the wealthy could afford to burns Whales. The vast bulk of the population used 'spirit lamps' which operated on a mixture of pure alcohol blended with turpentine recovered from charcoal making ovens as a gas. During the US Civil War some teetotalers in Congress convinced President Lincoln to go along with a high tax on Alcohol for the purpose of reducing drinking amongst the troops and encouraging the working class wage slaves in the factories to be more alert and industrious instead of relaxed and happy. They completely ignored the facts that Alcohol was used for a very large variety of industrial processes as well as being about 70% of the blend for the fuel in Spirit Lamps used by those same working class average Americans. As a result the working poor were reduced to using tallow candles for lighting because the fuel for spirit lamps was unaffordable right along with Whale Oil. This created a huge economic incentive for the Petroleum industry to expand production of Coal Oil aka Kerosene. It was originally labeled Coal Oil because in many mines the owners would put a few tons of coal through destructive distillation just like the Charcoal makers who manufactured Turpentine would except the flammable liquid they recovered was the thicker Kerosene. It was called Coal Oil because the more generous mine owners would string up a row of Kerosene lanterns in the mine for lighting in addition to the weak carbide flame hat lights they wore individually. It was discovered in IIRC 1842 that destructive distillation of petroleum resulted in a much larger volume of Kerosene, but before the Alcohol tax was introduced early in the Civil War the only major user of the fuel were coal mines because they had already developed lamps to use it. Olive oil was a major lighting source in Europe but very few trees had been imported and the industry was not established in the USA before the Civil War so once Spirit Lamps fuel was massively taxed and Whale Oil remained always a luxury fuel the poor and middle class were left with one broadly available affordable lighting choice, Kerosene.

Whale oil remained popular with the wealthy for about another generation, which is why whaling almost wiped out all species of large marine mammals. The other little secret was, Whale oil towards the end had a lot of Seal and Walrus oil mixed in to expand the supply, which had a devastating impact on the Seals and Sea Lion species that inhabited Saint George Island and the other islands that circled Antarctica as well as the peninsular area of the continent where they congregated. The thing is they had never been exposed to humans before the Whale oil industry moved in on their territory so they didn't have any instinct to flee. It is said that even today outside of mating season you can walk right up to an Antarctic Sea Lion and shoot it through the head at point blank range because it doesn't recognize humans as predators and will just lay there basking in the sun. They built a whole factory on Saint George island where they would come in for six months of the year slaughtering and processing animals and then sail away when the ice started freezing up.

In truth the Wealthy could have afforded to keep burning sea mammal oil right up through today but along the line it became unfashionable. That is what really saved the sea mammals, whalers would have kept going till they wiped them all out if not for a change in taste in the consumers. This was helped along by the fact that someone, I don't recall whom, discovered that certain very low sulfur crude oils made a relatively odorless Kerosene and that a few drops of perfume could be added to the odorless type to produce a pleasant smell. Naturally the odorless forms of Kerosene were priced higher and were first choice of the wealthy and upper middle class leaving the lower grade smellier brands for the poor and lower middle classes. Part of the attraction for the wealthy of burning Whale Oil had always been the pleasant smell it gave off so once the perfumed Kerosene hit the market at 1/10th the price of Whale oil they finally had an economic incentive. Once one 'Elite' family switched to perfumed Kerosene it set the fashion trend and Whale oil demand dropped like a hot rock tossed between bare hands.

The Whale Oil story irritates me because it gets repeated ad nauseam and accepted as true by people even though the reality is far more complicated and nuanced.

KJ I suspect if you have not read S. M. Stirling's (Island in The Sea Of Time) you would greatly enjoy it. Not very realistic IMO but that doesn't stop it from being a good read on a quiet evening.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 03 Feb 2018, 05:07:14

T, I did read Stirling's SF series and I did enjoy it and indeed it was not so realistic I thought. Generally I do not care for time travel stories, as simply anything becomes possible. However Stirling's "event" of unknown cause for USCGC Eagle made it seem like a natural disaster rather than an HG Wells style "time machine" - a vehicle that a man travels through time on. Aside: the original 1960 George Pal film made use of a "second order" Fresnel Lens from a medium-sized USCG lighthouse beacon to construct the prop time machine, the 2012 remake movie imitated the look with Lucite castings. There is a 3rd order lens (the smallest) on display in the Whaling Museum, from Nantucket's Sankaty Head Lighthouse, very near my former LORAN-C station on 'Sconset Beach. The USCG's latest tech updates include LEDs that much extend the life of batteries used in buoys and lighthouses.

As for your impression of the costs of various grades of whale oil, I beg to differ, they were priced very differently. Nantucket's Whaling Museum should be a destination for you if ever on the island. The docent-lead tour includes an actual comparison of lamp oils where they light oil lamps and measure both light output and allow you to sniff the effluvia. The fragrant oil you mention is the highest quality grade, from the sonar organ in the bulbous head of a Sperm Whale. The blubber derived Sperm Whale oil had a far less pleasant aroma, the other great whales produced lesser grades of oil also from rendered blubber. The latter part of the age of oil was dominated by diesel-powered whaling ships with ice-rated steel hulls to venture into polar waters that would sink wooden sailing vessels. These 20th Century whalers had explosive harpoons and a fleet of a half dozen or more accompanied a factory ship that butchered whale carcasses into oil and frozen meat. It was the early 20th Century that did the most damage to whale populations, and harvested not only the marine mammals you mentioned but many species of lesser whales and dolphins. This oil from mixed sources in fact reeks.

The highest grade of sperm whale oil was $1.50 or so a gallon on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but there were lesser whale oils that - almost - competed with petroleum kerosene. There were even food grade whale oils, and a brand of margerine that did in fact compete well with butter - "oleomargerine", a mixture of vegetable and whale oils. There was also aviation-grade whale oil hydraulic fluids and even an automatic transmission fluid specified by Ford which contained whale oil. Finally, NASA still has a specification for an extremely high quality lubricant for space machinery which is 100% sperm whale head oil (it's $5,000/oz.). Then whale populations crashed and the industry died, except for the Japanese and Norwegians that still take whales in the 21st Century, as seen on the Animal Planet network's "Whale Warrior" series.

I have a rather complete collection of History books from Nantucket, as well as binders of the last few decades of Nantucket Historical Society periodical pubs, because the wife's GrandMother was one of the Whaling Museum docents 30 years ago. If the topic interests you I could make up a list. Very few such books are available in online versions, I'm afraid.
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Re: Is REAL Economic Growth Possible?

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 03 Feb 2018, 13:05:01

KaiserJeep wrote:
Sys1 wrote:-snip-
In official mainstream economy, When you destroy rainforest for junk food, IT'S GOOD BECAUSE IT MAKES MONEY.
All the oil, gas, coal or whatever non renewable ressources burnt for growth are feeding GDP. THAT'S GOOD!
But nobody counts what was destroyed forever for that. Just because oil, gas and coal were not payed by anyone. It was just here. For free. So we can destroy nature presents for our beloved growth. Our beloved God money.
-snip-

Look, those FF's were burned to grow and transport food for humans, to manufacture the goods we need, to run HVAC systems, and the like. They are too precious as energy sources to discount for any reason. Also note that there are recovery costs involved, from multi-million dollar oil well boreholes to mountains of coal that get mined by machinery burning oil. The government also makes huge amounts of money from drilling and mining leases. Definately not free, just cheaper than renewables.

There are presently 195 countries in the world, they all have some form of Capitalism in play, it's the only form of economic system that works. Some of these systems work better than others. There is where you have to be careful, because I suspect that your definition of "good" is unique and not shared by others.

I think the bottom line is what is :"Good" now, will not be good in the future. And by good we can define as leaving the Earth as a bona fide planet that can support complex life. The degree and extent that we are forceing the disintegration of life support systems and the depletion of resources will make Earth virtually uninhabitable by complex creatures currently alive like us. So, the definition of good should not be so narrow as to include all the frivolous activities and pursuits humans currently engage in and that is reflected in the lifestyles of some. And also not so narrow to simply cater to the fate of the current crop of humans and animals without care of future life.
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