Dr Dan O'Neill is an economist, writer, university lecturer, and co-author of Enough Is Enough. He is Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
This channel has videos from Dr O'Neill's undergraduate and postgraduate courses in ecological economics. The topics of the lectures include sustainability, economic growth, money, human well-being, degrowth, and post-growth economics.
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“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
I have an economics final next week and I have been struggling with this concept all year! This simple video explained it SO well and I am so ready for this final! Thank you so much!!
A great overview of this extremely important field. Blessed to say I will be studying environmental economics and policy in college to hopefully add to this movement
"Let's aggregate historical data and deduce principles from it." - someone who doesn't understand statistics, the scientific method, nor economics Economic data IS historic data. There are too many factors involved to ever have reproduceable data; thus there cannot be logically sound deductions of that data. Real economics has to start from fundamental axioms and make deductions from there.
This misses key economic factors like technological growth and how earth we can harness a lot more than what we do now with nuclear and solar, now there are even sodium batteries. This is the free market at work. But this just falls into economic fixed pie fallacy, but as a whole discipline.
This is profound bullshit.
This is missing key parts of any real economy 1. Capital can be improved, like Americans have been actually been burning less carbon per capita. It cannot be the case that the sum is zero, no real economy works like this. 2.Entropy would be an issue if the earth was not getting new energy and innovations from humans. Otherwise Evolution by natural selection would not work, you're slipping into an economic creationism. The economy under your model is a closed system (save bit of space-junk). But it is still getting more energy from other sources. With nuclear and solar, we will have plenty energy to keep the earth a good habitat for humanity.
Hi Dan, Once again a very insightful explainer video. Speficially, for the synthesis regarding 'interest and the growth imperative' about which I also have a question. You say: "...and if everyone is doing this - taking out loans and having to pay them back (including interest) - then it would seem that the total money supply would have to increase over time. However, this argument assumes that interest payments are somehow taken out of circulation by banks, which they are not." New for me is this part: "this argument assumes that interest payments are somehow taken out of circulation by banks." I'd like to know more about this argument and the usual assumption. Do you have a name/reference? Thanks and keep up the good work!
THIS is why socialism has been demonised. Marx, Chomsky and co saw this coming decades ago but were pilloried and vilified so that corporations could profit instead.
0:11 What do you mean by "social equity"?
Μπράβο Γιώργο! Great interview!
I love this guy!
He said “to say economics has no ideology is its ideology”
I appreciate the concept of population control as well or better than most, but demographic challenges presented by population decline in industrialized countries (or any country, for that matter) can't be so easily ignored. Financial incentives for reproduction exist for powerful, multifaceted reasons and are thus difficult to untangle and/or erase. I am very much on board with what you're doing here, but I do think we have to drill down a lot deeper on questions like these to provide workable solutions for global governments. Like it or not (and I don't like it, ha), these solutions have to be politically palatable to be actionable in the absence of authoritarian regimes...which I suspect most of us can agree that we'd prefer to avoid. That said, this is a great foundation for a lot of people looking for answers (or at least the right questions) on the subject. Thanks for your work.
Clear and useful, thank you! I will cite it in my book.
So, marginal cost is equivalent to total utility?
okay so basically their argument is just: (1) put the money supply under direct democratic control (2) somehow only 'green energy'/similar projects receive increases to money supply?? (3) economy stops growing because money supply is growing slower?? (4) ??? (5) everything is better did I understand?
"Precision is not Accuracy", and wave-particle coordination-identification positioning is subject to the Uncertainty Principle, Absolutely all about the aspect-versions of Singularity-point Lensing Partitioning of Superspin Modulation Mechanism for time duration timing, which is why Euler's e-Pi-i 1-0-infinity sync-duration Unit Circle is a set of Mathematical symbols to precisely self-define thermodynamical real-time superposition Fluxion-Integral Temporal superposition Logarithmic logic. Good presentation, near enough for most practical purposes in Economics and science references to Ecology.
i think it was pretty clear and insightful
Wind is renewable. Sunshine is renewable. Wind turbines and solar panels are about as renewable as a Volkswagon. As they scale, raw material extraction costs more energy, and recycling both costs a lot of energy and fails to fully recover all the materials (see earlier videos on thermodynamics and stock-flow). Furthermore, extraction of materials for these devices, refinement, steel and glass production, transportation to the factory and then to point of use all use oil, not electricity. These devices don't last more than 25 years. How long until THEIR EROI declines below usefulness? I hope Dr. O'Neill addresses this in a future video.
And thats why degrowth suddenly makes sense. If we want to maintain such a huge economy while all these materials are finite, we need to conjure up more of the finite materials and/or increase circularity of the materials. As the first is impossible and the second only feasible to some degree, the logical conclusion is that the extent of the current economy is unsustainable, ergo needs to shrink.
Let's see if I got this right. Neoclassical capital and labor are fund-service resources, while raw materials inventory and finished goods inventory are stock-flow resources. A company naturally uses different accounting methods for each. Dividing it up that way, if a company wishes to cut costs, it should reduce incoming raw materials before laying off labor. If a resource can be identified first as a fund-service type, then we have to ask if it is excludable or rival to determine whether to manage it as a public good or to privatize it. Sometimes there is a gray area where a formerly non-excludable, nonrival resource can be made excludable and/or rival for the purpose of privatization. An example might be seeds. Formerly, they were non-excludable because anyone with physical access to a seed producing plant could gather some seeds, and non-rival, though maybe congestible, in that one farmer gathering seeds didn't prevent the next farmer from gathering them. "Green Revolution" industry, such a Monsanto, made seeds excludable by patenting them and made them rival by making the resulting crop plants sterile, thus allowing it to privatize seeds. Did I get it?
Absolutely informative! Thank you for sharing.
Brilliant discussion and insight on Degrowth. Dr. Kallis
Degrowth is a marketing scam that tries to manipulate people into adopting socialism.
No degrowth but full collapse are possible within the current monetary system. Good luck.
Love of God = Love of Man. This is the path of virtue. Without virtue and virtuous leaders and society the “system” is irrelevant.
Much resonates. The issue is where do we find these angles to determine “fair” and “efficient” allocation of resources? Everyone thinks they would do what is right and just if they only had the ring of gyges
The laws of economic thermodynamics 101: You can't win; The best you can do is draw; The game is rigged; You can't get out of the game; It's a long game!
The idea of our economy being a system has not been explained. In thinking about it, the social business part of it is clearly a system with the entropic features so described above. This does not get us very far until one realizes that the natural resources which are low entropy, get transmitted into a mixture of even lower entropy produce plus some higher entropy ones continuously by our productive activities. But because we do not all have equal rights for access to these resources, our productivity becomes varied and those who own these resources have an advantage over those who merely have the right to use some of them as tenants and as hired employees, in the situation where the lower entropy produce is sold. Surely it would be more socially just if we all had equal rights and benefits from these resources and the control of high entropy waste were properly allocated.
Regarding the possibility of Sovereign money, surely we are already half way there in that every time the Gov't spends it creates new money, eg it tells the BoE to pay the NHS £1bn, this is effectively created on overdraft anew, it's not spent out of tax money. The gov't then balances its books by deducting any tax it got in today and "borrows" the balance, by accepting savings from my pension fund, or by me buying more premium bonds, thus withdrawing money from circulation, but it doesn't need to do that, thus going the whole way.
Plz keep going…. Great content 😊
The Spirit Level? I thought that book was largely conjecture and opinion? The statistics were shaky.
Who said the statistics are shaky? It's well-established that greater inequality causes more social dysfunctions, and this relationship is inevitable because it pushes more people into poverty that the number of wealthy people it makes richer, and the individual and social losses at the bottom end of the income curve are much worse than the gains achieved by moving someone from $150K a year to $160K a year.
@@karlwheatley1244 My statistics professor said so. We read the book in our multivariate course as an example of what not to do when interpreting statistics. It went way too far in using data to justify their moral goals, without robust proof of a relationship between the two.
@@visicircle Thanks for your reply. The book was really for a general audience, so I don't expect it to provide the detail that would make your statistics professor happy. I'm a senior university professor too, and I would agree they could have explained the underlying causal mechanisms better, but there's actually a solid list of mechanisms (more poverty, more unequal [and less adequate] services, expenditure cascades, social status pressures, various psychological mechanisms, power differentials and political corruption) that guarantee that societies with higher income and wealth inequality will be more dysfunctional. Some of these are proven through experimental research--you can create social dysfunction with depressing speed in groups just by increasing wealth and power inequalities. Others are simply built into the relationships between the income distribution and human well-being--greater inequality pushes more people into poverty, and the decline in well-being for $5K less income for a person making $20,000 a year is far greater than the gain in wellbeing for someone making $100K a year getting $5K more a year. Specifically, the income-wellbeing slopes steeply upward for people under and around the poverty line, but above $75K a year, incremental gains in income yield very little (and diminishing) gains in well being. Moreover, in very unequal societies, the super-rich are better able to use their wealth and political power to their advantage (but in ways that leave most others worse off--cuts in food benefits, low-income housing, education). Their newer book, The Inner Level, is supposed to have strengthened their arguments, but whether it does or not, there's lots of research to back their main conclusion. I'm actually writing a book in which a pivotal conclusion of the book is that it's impossible to have healthy and just (or sustainable) societies with high levels of income/wealth inequality. Take care.
thank you so much!
It's hard to escape the notion that a lot of academic buzzwords such as degrowth and sustainability simply equate to reductionism and deprivation. No one can successfully argue that there should not be limits, it's just that there is no way to rationally set delimiters . Then the whole thing devolves into endless admonitions and activism followed by doomsday scenarios. How, for example, can growth be set in reverse without creating an economic recession or worse? Who makes the determination that it is time to reverse course? We do know that government intervention has caused recessionary results in the past. That in turn gives rise to laissez faire arguments that economies are best left to manage themselves. Then we get treated to babble about the lack of equality and the need to go back to interventionism. I could have predicted that the equality psychobabble would quickly follow along. It seems that is the desired end goal of ecological economics.
Can anyone define the point at which we have too much growth? Does Degrowth mean deprivation for all? Anyway you slice it there is no way you can plot these levels without central control which means authoritarian dictation. When do we know when we have reached a saturation point on consumerism and impose controls? This guy equivocates every time he is asked for a definition. Degrowth is a fancy bullshit word for socialism which means rapid reduction to poverty.
Yup. Socialism all dressed up in a new fancy ecological ribbon.
We barely make enough money to pay our bills private and public. Where is the money for universal basic income supposed to come from in countries in a bad fiscal situation?
Fantastic. Good explanation
When you study advertising the three human weaknesses of greed fear and laziness are exploited. These need to be overcome in your new paradigm. How do you propose a solution?
He is describing a world based on a higher consciousness and awareness.
He is describing socialism.
ANOTHER ISSUE: At 7:55 the author writes "real wealth can only grow according to physical laws". What laws exactly are referred to as "physical laws"? I think that this reference to "physical laws" is not contextually meaningful. A more reasonable statement would be "non-financial wealth is the result of owning tangible assets". References to "physical laws" (without the specifics) is not helpful in explaining economic concepts.
I assume that Dan refers to laws of Thermodynamics, as explained here: kzread.info/dash/bejne/mmp3ztxxdLTcec4.html
ISSUES: The presentation is very good, but there are problems at 7:43 where the author makes the claim that money does not obey the laws of thermodynamics (i.e. money can grow without limit). These are "throw away comments" and reflect the poor handling of thermodynamics in ecological economics. To begin, nothing in the classical universe disobeys the laws of thermodynamics, including fiat money creation. Fiat money is essentially an information system and ledger that records the supply and ownership of fiat money. There are innumerable other information systems, such as mobile phone numbers, that also have this property. But we do not say that mobile phone numbers disobey the laws of thermodynamics. The issue here is that the supply of fiat money is non-conserved. It is not appropriate to say that it breaks the laws of thermodynamics. Moreover, the actual issue of information is not associated with the first law (conservation of energy/mass) but rather it is associated with the 2nd law, through a relationship between information and energy - otherwise known as the "Landauer's principle" (see Wikiepdia). So to be technically correct, 1 bit of information is always associated with a certain minimum amount of energy. These technical details have nothing to do with fiat money in the practical sense. In conclusion, the reference to the laws of thermodynamics is not contextually meaningful. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
ISSUES: The presentation is very good in providing a summary, but there are a couple of major anomalies in the presentation that are common in ecological economics. The first anomaly is that the economy is described as an "open system" but how can this be formalised in terms of the boundary's location in X,Y,Z and time? Indeed, nobody has so far defined the actual location of the "open system boundary" for the economy, and this indicates a lack of formalism. The other issue and problem is related to the first problem - and this is the highly subjective use of the term "entropy". Ecological economists frequently use the term "entropy" to describe the consumption of low-entropy resources and production of high-entropy waste. In order to provide a true formalism around the use of entropy, there needs to be the delineation of the system boundary and a recognition that the "observer" is not objective because the observer in this case is defining what kind of matter is a "resource" and what kind of mater is "not a resource". This biased worldview is not explained by ecological economists and they assume that entropy can refer to whatever material they want without defining a true system boundary and the information context that is of a social origin. Entropy as a concept does not in itself differentiate between different material types and so the term "entropy" is being used out of context. Entropy (as originally defined) does not have a social context, and so the relationship between the observer and the boundary needs to be explicitly defined so that the observer is *outside* the system boundary. This problem is linked to the absence of a true system boundary when referring to "resources". Furthermore, the breakdown of resources can be physical and mechanical, and this can be explained using probabilities that are not manifesting at the atomic or molecular level - and thus this mechanical dispersion is not "entropy". This misunderstanding is related to the messy office metaphor in the video. The messy office is not an example of "entropy" because it is just a metaphor. These problems have troubled the field of ecological economics ever since the time Georgescu-Roegen tried to include entropy in economics. His ideas were rejected by physicists, and these problems have not been resolved and ecological economists have failed to address them still. This is one reason why ecological economics has not progressed very far in the past 30 years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen
Its communism, Jim. Nature Grow and wilts by using and overusing resources until they self correct, so let economies grow and wilt in a self correction as well. Don't intervene. Stop feeling the need to intervene. You talk about bottom up, but as an individual you'll give me no choice to opt out from your organized poverty. You'll turn every area into a jail with prohibition of movement above certain quota. It's also not necessary.
This is interesting. The only but .. and it’s a big but is getting most consumers to say hey I don’t want this ..
I think communism failed catastrophically because its centralisation of power inevitably lead to authoritarianism. How would the degrowth revolution be co-ordinated except through centres of power?
what does any of this have to do with the origin of price
Not much. Price is a reflection of the combination of the costs of the use of the 3 (Adam Smithian) factors needed to produce something, namely Land, Labor and Durable Capital Goods. The monetary returns for these 3 are Rent, Wages and Dividends on investment. Most economists today seem to think that Rent and Dividends are part of the same activity because the landowner is also a capitalist. This can be true but the specific activities they do in the production make them separate entities.
SOS... necesitamos un cambio en nuestra sociedad en todo el mundo, no necesitamos crecimiento económico, no necesitamos todos los alimentos que se ofrecen en los supermercados, no necesitamos múltiples ejércitos, solo necesitamos uno para reprimir todas las guerras. ¿No necesitamos viajar por todo el mundo? No necesitamos minar bosques y mares vírgenes. No necesitamos riqueza, mira al monje shaolin. Podemos tener un cielo sobre la tierra y aun así explorar el universo por dentro y por fuera. Sigue esto y todo estará bien. Guardián verde
You con conveniently, or shall I say, idealogically biasedly, leave out nuclear energy! With its high energy density, low requirements in resources, and high EROI, as well as on-demand availability, which doesn’t require storage and related conversion losses, it’s THE energy of the future, while “green” apostles destroy nature with the destructive and resource intensive expansion of so-called “renewables”. kzread.info/dash/bejne/ioissrydla7Al7A.html
Amazing! That you very much for this inspiring series!
Economic Calculation in a Natural Law / RBE, Peter Joseph, The Zeitgeist Movement, Berlin kzread.info/dash/bejne/fW16pqunlZqzadI.html
Degrowth? Just communist backdoor