Thanks, I believe that so-called technological "advance" is already included in the economists' assumption of economic growth.
True, sometimes new technologies increase resource efficiency, but quite often they have opened up new ways of exhausting resources and new ways of polluting (e.g. radioactive waste, or excessive amounts of CO2). For instance, technological "advance" in agriculture and the food system has decreased the EROI (the ratio energy delivered / energy input). To expect further economic growth (that in turn justifies discounting the future, because of decreasing marginal utility) raises some questions - 1) is this economic growth well measured, are the negative externalities and the exhaustion of resources taken into account in GDP accounting? They are not. 2) will "genuine", "clean" technological advance be strong enough to compensate for exhaustion of resources and negative effects like climate change, biodiversity loss, Fukushima-like accidents.... We do not know. Moreover, "compensate" in which units of account? Expectations of economic growth are a matter of faith more than of economic theory. jma ----- Missatge original ----- De: Lou Grinzo <[email protected]> Data: Dijous, Setembre 19, 2013 12:30 pm Assumpte: Re: DICOUNTING AND THE OPTIMIST PARADOX -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
