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162 comments on Olduvai Theory: Toward Re-Equalizing the World Standard of Living - Richard Duncan

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joule on July 3, 2009 - 2:04pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

mcain6925 -

Well, I would agree that if energy prices go up faster than your personal energy consumption goes down, then you are financially worse off than when you started, all other things being equal. I never said we were not on a downward spiral, as I think we definitely are, the only thing in contention being how steep that spiral is.

However, that does not appear to be what the authors of the article are talking about, as the only thing they seem to think matters is this global per capita energy consumption as some sort of a surrogate for standard of living, and that's where I (and apparently a lot of other TODers) think the authors' premise is flawed. I say call this per capita energy consumption something else, but don't call it 'standard of living'.

I also tend to agree that availability of capital (real capital, not the stuff willed into being by the Fed) could very well constitute the limiting factor as to whether or not we will be able to keep things from coming apart at the seams.

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mcain6925 on July 4, 2009 - 6:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Fundamentally, they're referring to something like this:
http://home.comcast.net/~mcain6925/etc/energy.gdp.gif

that relates per-capita GDP and per-capita energy consumption. GDP is not the only thing that goes into standard of living, of course, but there's a relationship. Certainly no one will assert that the average standard of living in the US (the largish circle at the upper right end of the regression line) and the average standard of living in India and China (the two very large circles down and to the left) are comparable. That there are no national economies occupying the upper left portion of this particular space suggests no one knows how to operate a high-GDP economy without high energy consumption (including Japan, which has been fairly fanatical about this for 70 years). Similarly, that there are none occupying the lower right portion suggests no nation has managed to have high energy consumption without correspondingly high GDP.

For the record, I believe that I used 2004 data when I put this together. Data from The Economist's annual world statistics booklet.

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162 comments on Olduvai Theory: Toward Re-Equalizing the World Standard of Living - Richard Duncan

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