Be careful with consumer durables as metrics! As they become more reliable, people will need to buy fewer of them to maintain the same stock. (All things being equal.) Cars have become a LOT more reliable since 1980. Motor vehicles sold may have been stable since 1980, but the number of US vehicles per capita didn't stabilize until around 2000. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-841-october-6-2014-vehicles-thousand-people-us-vs-other-world-regions
However, this caveat plays nicely with your thesis. Less turnover; less waste.
Thanks for sharing this article John. From the point of view that:
1. The flaws of both growth and degrowth concepts seem fairly clear and unremarkable, and
2. That the current neoliberal system is broken and therefore we need systemic change,
I would be interested in hearing more about where we go from here?
"It’s here that ideas like that of the “circular economy” remain relevant."
Yes, that sort of thing!
For example, how do we make a system where containers are so valuable that they mustn't be thrown away or recycled, but washed and reused? How do we build our quality of life in healthy ways and avoid succumbing to the proliferation of products that make us lazy, anxious, fat, and socially isolated from one another? How do we create an economy that builds common wealth?
GDP is a useless measure of the good of an economy. Prof Phil Lawn’s measure of GPI is far superior & he has tracked measurements of GPI from 1970 to 2016. There is no current data as he needs the research funding to continue it, but despite our Treasurer, Jim Chalmers’ review into alternatives to GDP (to which I wrote a submission promoting GPI), nothing has changed, and no funding for alternatives is available.
The insanity of economists thinking societies can have perpetual growth on a finite planet is irresponsible, irrespectively. Current consumption rates are exhausting our global ecological footprint, which exceeded our biophysical boundaries back in the 1970s and is now over 170%. We need to dial it down and realise that GDP growth is made up of too much financialisation of currency assets, which are non-productive and retain a claim on real resources. This is the form of ongoing economic growth that needs to be curtailed. Giving the non-productive wealthy access to resources, the consumption of which is already exceeding (and damaging) the planetary boundaries. We need sustainable economics and degrowth via better measures of Productive national income as opposed to financialised income.
Hypothesis: as an indicator, GDP gets less accurate over time. Some of the weaknesses of GDP are structural and can’t really be fixed: externalities of pollution, natural capital, the maldistribution of income and wealth. But can’t we use GDP as a second-best welfare indicator, complementing it with additional indicators of these omissions? Not if it can’t deal with the inner rot of growing unreliability on its own terms.
Every year, national income statisticians have to split the observed changes in the value of different forms of production between quantity, quality and inflation. The ideal case is wheat in 1800. The product is the same this year as it was last year, so you can just count the bushels. There is a traded market price you can monitor. So you can value this year’s output at last year’s prices, and the split between real and price change is transparent. Introduce a more complex industrial product like steam locomotives. This year’s engines (say in 1842) are more expensive than those of 1841, but better on various technical dimensions of power, speed, fuel consumption, reliability, etc. These can be measured, but the weighting is subjective and the statisticians have limited resources, so there is uncertainty in the estimate. Since change is incremental, and the 1841 model is still on sale at a reduced price in a competitive market. The uncertainty is manageable – but grows over time as more production looks like locomotives and less like wheat.
Fast-forward to 2024. The production to be measured includes chip mask machines, academic and press articles by John Quiggin, transactions on Brazil’s socialised PIX payments system, smart home assistants, and Taylor Swift megaconcerts.
- ASML’s $380m chip mask machine is sold by a single monopoly supplier to a handful of oligopolistic chipmakers. It is better than the previous model, allowing yet smaller, faster and more energy-frugal chips, though the full specs are both secret and incomprehensible to outsiders. We can only guess how much of the large increase n price is technical progress and how much monopoly profit.
- JQ´s professional journal articles aren’t secret, just incomprehensible to the statisticians. The market in scientific articles is an oligopolistic racket by a handful of publishers exploiting the authors and readers and adding no real value, so that the GDP value is entirely unearned monopoly profits. If you moved the whole business to a public-service model, and run it as a nonprofit coop by university libraries, GDP would go down, though welfare would go up through lower cost of access. This roughly what has happened in Brazil with retail payment transactions, run by the central bank with reduced and price-controlled involvement of the commercial banks. The volume of transactions has not SFIK gone up much, so the benefit is all in lower cos, greater convenience and wider access – reducing GDP, though in theory you could correct by upvaluing the low operating costs in line with the oligopolistic price-gouging of the previous system.
- Smart home assistants, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, are for the moment free, offered by tech giants to make us all dependent on them for daily living. The direct GDP impact is zero for the moment, though the sales of compatible devices (smart speakers and TVs), appliances (washing machines) and services (music streaming) is growing. It’s a disruptive new technology where the past is blank and estimating the rate of technical progress is a lottery.
- Taylor Swift earns a living from music, like Billie Holliday. Can we seriously split the massive increase in GDP income between technical progress and sheer volume? We could say that the services are too different to compare - which means giving up on establishing a long-term trend.
Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are giving priority to “economic growth”. They should be pressed on the question: growth in what? Hypothesis: as an indicator, GDP gets less accurate over time. Some of the weaknesses of GDP are structural and can’t really be fixed: externalities of pollution, natural capital, the maldistribution of income and wealth. But can’t we use GDP as a second-best welfare indicator, complementing it with additional indicators of these omissions? Not if it can’t deal with the inner rot of growing unreliability on its own terms.
Every year, national income statisticians have to split the observed changes in the value of different forms of production between quantity, quality and inflation. The ideal case is wheat in 1800. The product is the same this year as it was last year, so you can just count the bushels. There is a traded market price you can monitor. So you can value this year’s output at last year’s prices, and the split between real and price change is transparent. Introduce a more complex industrial product like steam locomotives. This year’s engines (say in 1842) are more expensive than those of 1841, but better on various technical dimensions of power, speed, fuel consumption, reliability, etc. These can be measured, but the weighting is subjective and the statisticians have limited resources, so there is uncertainty in the estimate. Since change is incremental, and the 1841 model is still on sale at a reduced price in a competitive market. The uncertainty is manageable – but grows over time as more production looks like locomotives and less like wheat.
Fast-forward to 2024. The production to be measured includes chip mask machines, academic and press articles by John Quiggin, transactions on Brazil’s socialised PIX payments system, smart home assistants, and Taylor Swift megaconcerts. These are cherry-picked examples, but the cherry tree has more.
- ASML’s $380m chip mask machine is sold by a single monopoly supplier to a handful of oligopolistic chipmakers. It is better than the previous model, allowing yet smaller, faster and more energy-frugal chips, though the full specs are both secret and incomprehensible to outsiders. We can only guess how much of the large increase in price is technical progress and how much monopoly profit.
- JQ´s professional journal articles aren’t secret, just incomprehensible to the statisticians. The market in scientific articles is an oligopolistic racket by a handful of publishers exploiting the authors and readers and adding no real value, so that the GDP value is entirely unearned monopoly profits. If you moved the whole business to a public-service model, and run it as a nonprofit coop by university libraries, GDP would go down, though welfare would go up through lower cost of access. This roughly what has happened in Brazil with retail payment transactions, run by the central bank with reduced and price-controlled involvement of the commercial banks. The volume of transactions has not SFIK gone up much, so the benefit is all in lower cos, greater convenience and wider access – reducing GDP, though in theory you could correct by upvaluing the low operating costs in line with the oligopolistic price-gouging of the previous system.
- Smart home assistants, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, are for the moment free, offered by tech giants to make us all dependent on them for daily living. The direct GDP impact is zero for the moment, though the sales of compatible devices (smart speakers and TVs), appliances (washing machines) and services (music streaming) is growing. It’s a disruptive new technology where the past is blank and estimating the rate of technical progress is a lottery.
- Taylor Swift earns a living from music, like Billie Holliday. Can we seriously split the massive increase in GDP income between technical progress and sheer volume? We could say that the services are too different to compare - which means giving up on establishing a long-term trend.
Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are giving priority to “economic growth”. They should be pressed on the question: growth in what?
“If we can continue to improve the technology, there’s no real limit to our supply of solar and wind energy.” Is the qualification necessary? Blakers and Jacobson have shown that the WWS trio – wind, water, sun – plus HVDC transmission can economically meet all reasonable demands for electricity as the staple energy carrier, <i>with current technology</i>. In fact one of the trio, flow and pumped hydro, is fully mature and no major technical improvements are on the horizon. Probable echnical improvements elsewhere will of course help the transition through lower costs. The underlying resources in the natural world are unlimited for practical purposes.
To decarbonize steel, cement, shipping and aviation - issues not addressed by the quotation - technology does need to improve, though in all four we are well beyond lab research and into commercial pilot projects addressing growing niche markets like electric ferries in Norway and biofuels on American aircraft carriers.
There is one legitimate exception to the “why worry” proposition, the risk of running out of key raw materials. This reasonable concern is amplified into absurdity by delayists and propagandists with no faith in the ability of market forces and public funding to drive exploration and innovation. Eek, no cobalt or cobalt mined by children! Cobalt is disappearing from batteries. Eek, there won’t be enough rare earth metals for the magnets in wind turbine generators! There are alternative designs without permanent magnets. Eek, there isn’t enough lithium to meet visions of all-electric land transport! Funnily enough, lithium prices have recently crashed from a huge speculative bubble in 2022 and the shares of lithium producers are down. https://www.marketindex.com.au/news/these-lithium-charts-will-shock-you Eek, insatiable growth in microcircuits and solar panels will exhaust the supply of silver for the indispensable connectors! If it does, more abundant copper and exotic graphene (made with difficulty from over-abundant carbon) offer plans B and C.
So yes, keep funding and cheering on better tech, but unless you make a living in the industries concerned, don’t lose sleep over it.
40% of global shipping is transporting fossil fuels, once we cut that use we reduce that shipping obviously. Steel and cement are harder but doable, and batteries will get good enough for flight sooner than you think
“And if “growth” is meaningless, so is “degrowth”. There’s no technological or ecological reason why we can’t have more and more services, from health and education to TikTok videos. And, if we can continue to improve the technology, there’s no real limit to our supply of solar and wind energy. What we need to reduce is the “throughput” of the residual industrial economy, beginning with the extraction of resources and ending with the dumping of waste. It’s here that ideas like that of the “circular economy” remain relevant.”
John, I agree reducing throughput by reducing the extraction of resources and ending the dumping of waste is necessary. Without recycling and reusing of materials throughput will increase. Improving technology to some degree will also increase throughput, but I am not sure if there is a technological fix to deal with the ecological and environmental damage already done by climate change and will get worse, unless we make immediate changes to the way we use resources..
So then, more of the East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet heritage?
The article ignores the post-colonial ~80% of the world. It is over being ignored. It wants and will go all out jointly and severally to have a similar material standard of living. Clearly the West needs to degrow so the rest can grow and have both meet in some sustainable happy middle, and soon.
Services will pass 50 per cent of employment in China quite soon, and have already done so in much of the post-colonial world (Latin America, SE Asia etc). This is a global trend, but I have focused on the countries that are furthest along in this processl
Services aren't things made of stuff. Production of things and stuff for domestic and foreign use continue to rapidly increase even as labour inputs decline with advancing means of industrial production in some sectors.
The weight of GDP has been falling in OECD countries for some time. A $1,000 smartphone weighs 200 grammes or so. ASML's $380m machine for making the masks for microcircuits weighs 165 tonnes, so $2.3m per tonne, and the chip industry does not need many of them. Tickets to Taylor Swift concerts are now usually massless.The picture is less rosy globally as a lot of high-mass production has shifted to China, Bangladesh etc, but they will inevitably follow the same path. There are signs like the H1 fall in Chinese coal production that quality is beginning to beat out quantity there too. ,
Thank you for your article. In 2024 the worldwide production of electricity generated by fossil fuels reached and all time peak. In this light can you explain why you think growth (in the energy industry) is no longer relevant? Are you say industrial capitalism is really finished when both China and India are growing so strongly? See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2024/07/11/does-economic-growth-belong-to-another-age/
But aren't the economies of Australia, China and India closely intertwined? Our extraction industries and their manufacturing industries. How do we de-carbonise when their growth is so dependent on our fossil fuels and our iron?
Name me a critical input that can't be decarbonised. The EU has cut its of fossil gas quite significantly since 2022, and irreversibly. Australia will still be selling iron ore or pellets in 2030, into a declining market for virgin iron. Gas, not so much.
The US doesn't buy or rely on Saudi oil - they are both exporters and therefore in competition . And it is the US backing the Saudis in geopolitical terms, not vice versa. That's a crazy and immoral policy, driven by the US Israel lobby, but if the US government were willing to break with Israel they could dump the Saudis any time they choose.
Historical niggle: the US alliance with Saudi Arabia dates back to 1944 and FDR's stopover on the way back from Yalta. The Israel lobby did not exist before the founding of the state three years later. There were of course Zionists lobbying the US and other Allied governments, but surely they were focused at the time on the Holocaust, and would have needed supernatural prescience to be thinking about the Saudis.
Why does the change in the things that are produced make the notion of "growth" meaningless? Or is this just a sop to Guardian readers? :)
"Circular economy." If that will help Guardian readers understand externalities and Pigou taxation, mor power to you!
"In the long run, however, GDP is not a useful measure." Something pretty close is needed as the maximand for calculating the optimal trajectory of the tax on net CO2 emissions.
Be careful with consumer durables as metrics! As they become more reliable, people will need to buy fewer of them to maintain the same stock. (All things being equal.) Cars have become a LOT more reliable since 1980. Motor vehicles sold may have been stable since 1980, but the number of US vehicles per capita didn't stabilize until around 2000. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-841-october-6-2014-vehicles-thousand-people-us-vs-other-world-regions
However, this caveat plays nicely with your thesis. Less turnover; less waste.
Good points! I'm dealing with a couple of consumer durable breakdowns at the moment and realising how unusual this is.
Thanks for sharing this article John. From the point of view that:
1. The flaws of both growth and degrowth concepts seem fairly clear and unremarkable, and
2. That the current neoliberal system is broken and therefore we need systemic change,
I would be interested in hearing more about where we go from here?
"It’s here that ideas like that of the “circular economy” remain relevant."
Yes, that sort of thing!
For example, how do we make a system where containers are so valuable that they mustn't be thrown away or recycled, but washed and reused? How do we build our quality of life in healthy ways and avoid succumbing to the proliferation of products that make us lazy, anxious, fat, and socially isolated from one another? How do we create an economy that builds common wealth?
GDP is a useless measure of the good of an economy. Prof Phil Lawn’s measure of GPI is far superior & he has tracked measurements of GPI from 1970 to 2016. There is no current data as he needs the research funding to continue it, but despite our Treasurer, Jim Chalmers’ review into alternatives to GDP (to which I wrote a submission promoting GPI), nothing has changed, and no funding for alternatives is available.
The insanity of economists thinking societies can have perpetual growth on a finite planet is irresponsible, irrespectively. Current consumption rates are exhausting our global ecological footprint, which exceeded our biophysical boundaries back in the 1970s and is now over 170%. We need to dial it down and realise that GDP growth is made up of too much financialisation of currency assets, which are non-productive and retain a claim on real resources. This is the form of ongoing economic growth that needs to be curtailed. Giving the non-productive wealthy access to resources, the consumption of which is already exceeding (and damaging) the planetary boundaries. We need sustainable economics and degrowth via better measures of Productive national income as opposed to financialised income.
Hypothesis: as an indicator, GDP gets less accurate over time. Some of the weaknesses of GDP are structural and can’t really be fixed: externalities of pollution, natural capital, the maldistribution of income and wealth. But can’t we use GDP as a second-best welfare indicator, complementing it with additional indicators of these omissions? Not if it can’t deal with the inner rot of growing unreliability on its own terms.
Every year, national income statisticians have to split the observed changes in the value of different forms of production between quantity, quality and inflation. The ideal case is wheat in 1800. The product is the same this year as it was last year, so you can just count the bushels. There is a traded market price you can monitor. So you can value this year’s output at last year’s prices, and the split between real and price change is transparent. Introduce a more complex industrial product like steam locomotives. This year’s engines (say in 1842) are more expensive than those of 1841, but better on various technical dimensions of power, speed, fuel consumption, reliability, etc. These can be measured, but the weighting is subjective and the statisticians have limited resources, so there is uncertainty in the estimate. Since change is incremental, and the 1841 model is still on sale at a reduced price in a competitive market. The uncertainty is manageable – but grows over time as more production looks like locomotives and less like wheat.
Fast-forward to 2024. The production to be measured includes chip mask machines, academic and press articles by John Quiggin, transactions on Brazil’s socialised PIX payments system, smart home assistants, and Taylor Swift megaconcerts.
- ASML’s $380m chip mask machine is sold by a single monopoly supplier to a handful of oligopolistic chipmakers. It is better than the previous model, allowing yet smaller, faster and more energy-frugal chips, though the full specs are both secret and incomprehensible to outsiders. We can only guess how much of the large increase n price is technical progress and how much monopoly profit.
- JQ´s professional journal articles aren’t secret, just incomprehensible to the statisticians. The market in scientific articles is an oligopolistic racket by a handful of publishers exploiting the authors and readers and adding no real value, so that the GDP value is entirely unearned monopoly profits. If you moved the whole business to a public-service model, and run it as a nonprofit coop by university libraries, GDP would go down, though welfare would go up through lower cost of access. This roughly what has happened in Brazil with retail payment transactions, run by the central bank with reduced and price-controlled involvement of the commercial banks. The volume of transactions has not SFIK gone up much, so the benefit is all in lower cos, greater convenience and wider access – reducing GDP, though in theory you could correct by upvaluing the low operating costs in line with the oligopolistic price-gouging of the previous system.
- Smart home assistants, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, are for the moment free, offered by tech giants to make us all dependent on them for daily living. The direct GDP impact is zero for the moment, though the sales of compatible devices (smart speakers and TVs), appliances (washing machines) and services (music streaming) is growing. It’s a disruptive new technology where the past is blank and estimating the rate of technical progress is a lottery.
- Taylor Swift earns a living from music, like Billie Holliday. Can we seriously split the massive increase in GDP income between technical progress and sheer volume? We could say that the services are too different to compare - which means giving up on establishing a long-term trend.
Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are giving priority to “economic growth”. They should be pressed on the question: growth in what? Hypothesis: as an indicator, GDP gets less accurate over time. Some of the weaknesses of GDP are structural and can’t really be fixed: externalities of pollution, natural capital, the maldistribution of income and wealth. But can’t we use GDP as a second-best welfare indicator, complementing it with additional indicators of these omissions? Not if it can’t deal with the inner rot of growing unreliability on its own terms.
Every year, national income statisticians have to split the observed changes in the value of different forms of production between quantity, quality and inflation. The ideal case is wheat in 1800. The product is the same this year as it was last year, so you can just count the bushels. There is a traded market price you can monitor. So you can value this year’s output at last year’s prices, and the split between real and price change is transparent. Introduce a more complex industrial product like steam locomotives. This year’s engines (say in 1842) are more expensive than those of 1841, but better on various technical dimensions of power, speed, fuel consumption, reliability, etc. These can be measured, but the weighting is subjective and the statisticians have limited resources, so there is uncertainty in the estimate. Since change is incremental, and the 1841 model is still on sale at a reduced price in a competitive market. The uncertainty is manageable – but grows over time as more production looks like locomotives and less like wheat.
Fast-forward to 2024. The production to be measured includes chip mask machines, academic and press articles by John Quiggin, transactions on Brazil’s socialised PIX payments system, smart home assistants, and Taylor Swift megaconcerts. These are cherry-picked examples, but the cherry tree has more.
- ASML’s $380m chip mask machine is sold by a single monopoly supplier to a handful of oligopolistic chipmakers. It is better than the previous model, allowing yet smaller, faster and more energy-frugal chips, though the full specs are both secret and incomprehensible to outsiders. We can only guess how much of the large increase in price is technical progress and how much monopoly profit.
- JQ´s professional journal articles aren’t secret, just incomprehensible to the statisticians. The market in scientific articles is an oligopolistic racket by a handful of publishers exploiting the authors and readers and adding no real value, so that the GDP value is entirely unearned monopoly profits. If you moved the whole business to a public-service model, and run it as a nonprofit coop by university libraries, GDP would go down, though welfare would go up through lower cost of access. This roughly what has happened in Brazil with retail payment transactions, run by the central bank with reduced and price-controlled involvement of the commercial banks. The volume of transactions has not SFIK gone up much, so the benefit is all in lower cos, greater convenience and wider access – reducing GDP, though in theory you could correct by upvaluing the low operating costs in line with the oligopolistic price-gouging of the previous system.
- Smart home assistants, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, are for the moment free, offered by tech giants to make us all dependent on them for daily living. The direct GDP impact is zero for the moment, though the sales of compatible devices (smart speakers and TVs), appliances (washing machines) and services (music streaming) is growing. It’s a disruptive new technology where the past is blank and estimating the rate of technical progress is a lottery.
- Taylor Swift earns a living from music, like Billie Holliday. Can we seriously split the massive increase in GDP income between technical progress and sheer volume? We could say that the services are too different to compare - which means giving up on establishing a long-term trend.
Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are giving priority to “economic growth”. They should be pressed on the question: growth in what?
“If we can continue to improve the technology, there’s no real limit to our supply of solar and wind energy.” Is the qualification necessary? Blakers and Jacobson have shown that the WWS trio – wind, water, sun – plus HVDC transmission can economically meet all reasonable demands for electricity as the staple energy carrier, <i>with current technology</i>. In fact one of the trio, flow and pumped hydro, is fully mature and no major technical improvements are on the horizon. Probable echnical improvements elsewhere will of course help the transition through lower costs. The underlying resources in the natural world are unlimited for practical purposes.
To decarbonize steel, cement, shipping and aviation - issues not addressed by the quotation - technology does need to improve, though in all four we are well beyond lab research and into commercial pilot projects addressing growing niche markets like electric ferries in Norway and biofuels on American aircraft carriers.
There is one legitimate exception to the “why worry” proposition, the risk of running out of key raw materials. This reasonable concern is amplified into absurdity by delayists and propagandists with no faith in the ability of market forces and public funding to drive exploration and innovation. Eek, no cobalt or cobalt mined by children! Cobalt is disappearing from batteries. Eek, there won’t be enough rare earth metals for the magnets in wind turbine generators! There are alternative designs without permanent magnets. Eek, there isn’t enough lithium to meet visions of all-electric land transport! Funnily enough, lithium prices have recently crashed from a huge speculative bubble in 2022 and the shares of lithium producers are down. https://www.marketindex.com.au/news/these-lithium-charts-will-shock-you Eek, insatiable growth in microcircuits and solar panels will exhaust the supply of silver for the indispensable connectors! If it does, more abundant copper and exotic graphene (made with difficulty from over-abundant carbon) offer plans B and C.
So yes, keep funding and cheering on better tech, but unless you make a living in the industries concerned, don’t lose sleep over it.
40% of global shipping is transporting fossil fuels, once we cut that use we reduce that shipping obviously. Steel and cement are harder but doable, and batteries will get good enough for flight sooner than you think
“And if “growth” is meaningless, so is “degrowth”. There’s no technological or ecological reason why we can’t have more and more services, from health and education to TikTok videos. And, if we can continue to improve the technology, there’s no real limit to our supply of solar and wind energy. What we need to reduce is the “throughput” of the residual industrial economy, beginning with the extraction of resources and ending with the dumping of waste. It’s here that ideas like that of the “circular economy” remain relevant.”
John, I agree reducing throughput by reducing the extraction of resources and ending the dumping of waste is necessary. Without recycling and reusing of materials throughput will increase. Improving technology to some degree will also increase throughput, but I am not sure if there is a technological fix to deal with the ecological and environmental damage already done by climate change and will get worse, unless we make immediate changes to the way we use resources..
So then, more of the East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet heritage?
The article ignores the post-colonial ~80% of the world. It is over being ignored. It wants and will go all out jointly and severally to have a similar material standard of living. Clearly the West needs to degrow so the rest can grow and have both meet in some sustainable happy middle, and soon.
the global south will be able to increase their standard of living without the huge use of fossil fuels that the west used
Services will pass 50 per cent of employment in China quite soon, and have already done so in much of the post-colonial world (Latin America, SE Asia etc). This is a global trend, but I have focused on the countries that are furthest along in this processl
Services aren't things made of stuff. Production of things and stuff for domestic and foreign use continue to rapidly increase even as labour inputs decline with advancing means of industrial production in some sectors.
The weight of GDP has been falling in OECD countries for some time. A $1,000 smartphone weighs 200 grammes or so. ASML's $380m machine for making the masks for microcircuits weighs 165 tonnes, so $2.3m per tonne, and the chip industry does not need many of them. Tickets to Taylor Swift concerts are now usually massless.The picture is less rosy globally as a lot of high-mass production has shifted to China, Bangladesh etc, but they will inevitably follow the same path. There are signs like the H1 fall in Chinese coal production that quality is beginning to beat out quantity there too. ,
Thank you for your article. In 2024 the worldwide production of electricity generated by fossil fuels reached and all time peak. In this light can you explain why you think growth (in the energy industry) is no longer relevant? Are you say industrial capitalism is really finished when both China and India are growing so strongly? See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2024/07/11/does-economic-growth-belong-to-another-age/
The article was about Australia, industrial economy still has a way to run in China (maybe also India, though they may just jump to services).
But aren't the economies of Australia, China and India closely intertwined? Our extraction industries and their manufacturing industries. How do we de-carbonise when their growth is so dependent on our fossil fuels and our iron?
Name me a critical input that can't be decarbonised. The EU has cut its of fossil gas quite significantly since 2022, and irreversibly. Australia will still be selling iron ore or pellets in 2030, into a declining market for virgin iron. Gas, not so much.
The US$ can't decarbonise while it is backed by Saudi oil.
The US doesn't buy or rely on Saudi oil - they are both exporters and therefore in competition . And it is the US backing the Saudis in geopolitical terms, not vice versa. That's a crazy and immoral policy, driven by the US Israel lobby, but if the US government were willing to break with Israel they could dump the Saudis any time they choose.
Historical niggle: the US alliance with Saudi Arabia dates back to 1944 and FDR's stopover on the way back from Yalta. The Israel lobby did not exist before the founding of the state three years later. There were of course Zionists lobbying the US and other Allied governments, but surely they were focused at the time on the Holocaust, and would have needed supernatural prescience to be thinking about the Saudis.
Saudi Arabia agrees to price its oil exports exclusively in U.S. dollars, ensuring a steady global demand for the currency.
BTW You are right about the immorality of the US WRT Israel. See https://priceofoil.org/2024/03/14/new-research-exposes-countries-and-companies-supplying-the-oil-fueling-palestinian-genocide/
Why does the change in the things that are produced make the notion of "growth" meaningless? Or is this just a sop to Guardian readers? :)
"Circular economy." If that will help Guardian readers understand externalities and Pigou taxation, mor power to you!
"In the long run, however, GDP is not a useful measure." Something pretty close is needed as the maximand for calculating the optimal trajectory of the tax on net CO2 emissions.