We did export significant amounts of production while reducing new infrastructure investment.
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
> Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
A more interesting metric would be calories-harvested over calories-input.
Food per acre has certainly increased. A lot of the increase is through selective breeding, GM crops, and other technological efficiencies, but a lot of it is from increased fertilizer, which is just calories/energy in a different form (fertilizer is just a store of energy -- that's literally why you buy too much of it in bulk and you're put on a fertilizer-bomb watchlist).
You can grow more food per acre by throwing more energy at the problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it more efficiently or sustainably. One way of looking at all the fertilizer runoff, for example, is it is quite literally leaking input energy out of your harvest, decreasing your efficiency.
From an energy standpoint we can extract nitrogen from the atmosphere using solar panels to split hydrogen from water rather than natural gas. Which is similar to how historically we used crop rotation, but requires little land. So while that’s an energy input it’s replaceable without sacrificing much in the way of yields.
IMO, a more interesting metric is nutrients like phosphorous which would be more difficult to acquire once current sources have mined out.
Let’s be clear about what is meant by dirty stuff. Dirty stuff is the children of peasant farmers moving to cities assembling iPhones and buying things like air conditioning and a motorbike for their families.
The upside is that some of the children of peasants are putting a serious dent in world climate problems like Wang Chuanfu who is the founder of BYD.
It depends what you mean about bank transactions. Buying $1 billion of stocks does not increase GDP. If I do an IPO, then the big-$ bank transaction I do when I pay a bank to manage it does increase GDP, because I paid them for a service. The productive output is the advice that was given, the service that was rendered. These kinds of services are clearly useful (people pay for them) but don't cost a lot of energy.
That’s not a major factor. Winglet’s and other aerodynamic improvements are just one example where energy efficiency directly reduces energy usage per GDP. Improving car MPG averages has real impact.
Compare say a CRT from 1999 with an LED TV from 2019 and the vastly larger sizes are more than offset via increased efficiency.
I'm not doubting you on the fact that gains exist, but I also think it's a slam dunk that non-material products are a much bigger chunk of GDP than before.
You happen to have any links to attempts to disambiguate the two? I definitely don't.
Services as percentage of total GDP has not been changing much. They where 63.2% of Global GDP in 2010 and 65.0% of global GDP in 2018. http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/4.2
Energy depends a little on the numbers you use BTU etc. However as the mix of services is not really changing very rapidly but the GDP PPP per oil equivalent has been growing quickly the trend is clear: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?end=2...
Really appreciate the numbers, but we have a global vs national discrepancy and I was thinking longer term than 2010. The current globalist transformation started in the 90s, it's noticeable on curves of manufacturing employment and efficiency.
I think the US economy probably had a bigger than 2% shift just into tech in the last 10 years, let alone if you include broader service-ization as a national goal for decades now.
I guess I'm saying, if our stated goal and the goal of every MBA in the country was to have more money in services.. I thought that happened.
EDIT: rate-limited, appreciate the follow-up on US numbers. Still not liking 2010 as a start-date as I think the relevant changes were before then. Would love to chat more, but hey.
Ok, the US is a little more dramatic it was 76.2% services in 2010 and 77.4% in 2018.
But, I was using global GDP to avoid the outsourcing question.
PS: Using 2010 as the start date as these energy trends are fairly recent. Though I agree comparing say 2018 numbers to say the 1970’s would need to account for more systematic changes.
If it ends with a destroyed environment and billions affected it's not.
Hand wave about that all you want.
Plus "quality of life" is subjective. Some people (or some countries/cultures) can think about all kind of crap as essential to their "quality of life".
A lot of GDP growth is in box-moving, paper shuffling, services, sales and so on, which can be made with "less stuff" (e.g some even completely online).
OTOH, tons of industrial production for US companies, the dirty kind, has been moved to China and co.
Even if the US "manufacture's more units than ever" (and what those units are? If it manufactures more e.g. packaged food than ever, it wouldn't really be as polluting as manufacturing more cars or computers/mobiles, or several other kinds of products, than ever). I'd wager that the more pollutant and messy production has been moved to China / the developing world / etc.
The same way as most of the western "recycled" stuff just goes to the developing world to be pillages for parts and then dumped into landfills and rivers...
I know it's gauche to say so, but the fact that this comment is gray right now says a lot about the community.
How dare you question woke capitalism, Mr. 'api'. We want to be told we're building a better world, and we'll hang anyone who says otherwise. Didn't you see Silicon Valley?
As you accurately notice, the comment was an attack on the article's basic premise.
Yet it took the form of a question. It doesn't even try to support its implied criticism with any data or argument.
As such, it's a cheap shot that doesn't add anything. If you believe someone's work, published in a somewhat reputable outlet (and a book), to be wrong, find something that supports that criticism. Don't just throw out some lame counterargument that anybody reading the headline can come up.
Specifically, the article uses examples that are unlikely to be outsourced; Paper and cardboard, especially, aren't major inputs to big-hairy-manufacturing.
Fertilizer is an even better case, because it's impossible to outsource its use without also outsourcing agriculture. Agricultural output has obviously been growing steadily. And those statistics are rather reliable because the products are standardised, often need to be reported for various subsidies or regulatory purposes, and are traded on public markets.
Woke(n up) European here. As you predicted, now 'yourbandsucks is grey and 'api is in the clear, and the day here has only just started :).
Also strongly agreed about timezone karma - I would love to see some analysis of how upvotes in discussions like this fluctuate based on which part of the planet is exposed to sun at a given time.
