Twin_Spoons t1_itr6rtd wrote on October 25, 2022 at 6:28 PM

There are two main drivers of GDP growth: population and technology.

Population is straightforward. GDP measures how much "stuff" we make. The more people, the more stuff. So long as populations continue to grow (which is not guaranteed and somewhat of a different issue from economic growth), this will contribute to GDP growth. You can remove the influence of population by instead considering GDP per person ("capita")

The second driver of GDP growth is technology. As we learn better or more efficient ways to make stuff, or even invent all new categories of stuff to make, we will make it more stuff with less effort. GDP per capita has been growing due to technological advancements pretty much continuously for the entirety of human history (local exceptions like the "Dark Ages" in Europe ignore the Islamic and East Asian worlds, which were doing just fine at the time).

So it's possible that aggregate GDP may fall in the future if populations start shrinking rather than growing. However, we can reasonably expect that we will retain knowledge of all the productive technology we have today - it would take some sort of true cataclysm to undo that - so GDP per capita will only fall if we spend less of our collective time working. We haven't yet gotten to a point where decreases in labor time have outpaced technological innovation - people have generally pursued the higher standard of living rather than increased leisure time - but it's possible in principle.

tky_phoenix t1_itsat5q wrote on October 25, 2022 at 10:53 PM

A good example of this is Japan. They have a shrinking population and in order to keep growing the economy they pushed for more women to go working and elderly to keep working longer. In addition they are trying to slowly allow more foreigners into the country. This is meant to either stabilize or even grow the workforce. At the same time they have to work on digital transformation as their productivity is really low.

FleetAdmiralFader t1_itsv9ak wrote on October 26, 2022 at 1:28 AM

Japan is a wild land of contradictions. The general public considers them some of the most technologically advanced nations and yet they are extremely conservative and resistant to change culturally. It's almost like they create efficiency tools exclusively for export and domestically simply accomplish everything by shear force of will and scale of manpower because god forbid they change an existing process.

tky_phoenix t1_itt0gh4 wrote on October 26, 2022 at 2:08 AM

A lot of it comes from a “no man left behind” mentality. They won’t stop using something if there is still somebody using it. Took them forever to stop good old pager services. On the one hand you have pretty advanced payment methods, super high tech toilets. On the other hand they still use faxes a lot. I worked in a business where global asked us to join their digital marketing campaign to attract customers to events. We had to tell them “sorry, unless you fax the info, you won’t get much traction here” and we were not kidding.

Lastly, Japan is/was great with hardware but they are incredibly bad at software. Their website design is - by European or North American standards - incredibly bad.

MedusasSexyLegHair t1_itscboe wrote on October 25, 2022 at 11:04 PM

One example of where a drop in GDP might increase standard of living would be if we actually used our science and technology to build lasting, durable, repairable things, instead of fast fashion trends and planned obsolescence.

Also if we were to focus more on renewables instead of single-use consumables.

A third might be developing efficient localized production rather than using inefficient long-distance shipping (but that's more difficult since currently it's much easier to produce things efficiently at certain locations and ship them, than to develop efficient localized production).

In such cases, we could produce less, and work less, overall (lower GDP) and yet still have more and live better. That's kind of a path to post-scarcity economy.

But until then, GDP growth is still preferable. Given how consumption-oriented society currently is, a drop in growth or worse a decrease, leads to lower standards of living and unnecessary increases in scarcity.

ReneDeGames t1_itsri8j wrote on October 26, 2022 at 12:59 AM

Long lasting isn't necessarily useful in a fast development environment, computers have roughly doubled in power to cost ever 2 years for decades now, its cheaper in all ways to keep building new computers rather than makes ones that will last.

MedusasSexyLegHair t1_itsz3s3 wrote on October 26, 2022 at 1:57 AM

To some degree. I remember the hot days of the early '90s, when your computer was certainly obsolete by the time you got it home from the store. And each new development opened up new possibilities (multimedia! networking! etc.)

But we're way past the point of diminishing returns on utility there quite awhile back. For typical use - write an email, view a PDF, maybe use a word processor to write an essay or a spreadsheet to calculate your credit card debt - a 98-era computer could do all of that just fine. We don't need 64GB of RAM and a 3.20GHz processor for that. Mostly we only need more speed and space because the software has become so bloated and inefficient - because it can, due to the hardware.

However, as a gamer, new systems are cool. That's why in 2016, I retired my decade-old 2006 PC and built a new one. Six years later, I upgraded the graphics card and added a new M2 SSD for more speed. AAA games run great and the CPU and RAM never come near getting stressed, either from games or my (sometimes sloppy) programming projects and data migrations. I don't foresee any need to upgrade for another 6 years. And I'm a hardcore/heavy user. An average person could probably get 20+ years out of a computer if the software bloat didn't kill it.

Similarly, my new smartphone works about the same as the one I bought in 2013. Sure it has higher specs on paper, but messaging someone on it, or getting directions from Google Maps, is no different than it was back then.

But other things I was thinking about were things like appliances and furniture and stuff. A lot of that stuff used to last a lifetime and pass down to your heirs. Even with electronics, once upon a time, you'd call in a radio repairman if your radio broke down but that'd be ridiculous now since you could buy a new one for the fraction of the price of a repair or upgrade. But why not make it to last? Is radio tech really changing that quickly?