@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom
What some people may take issue with in regards to the input is that economics often only concerns itself with money, as you hinted at by adding an adjective "market-traded". The input being a unique ecosystem being destroyed or a non-renewable resource cannot be reduced to a monetary valuation though.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom
How can you be sure there are less inputs for a copy of a Bandcamp album or an Amazon Prime subscription than for an equally-priced amount of gasoline? The digital world has a very real physical footprint in terms of materials and energy.
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom We are taking marginal costs here. The overwhelming share of digital goods footprint is at the hardware fabrication and disposal stages.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom
Not only that. Energy is also a very important input, which comes back nicely to the gasoline for a car vs digital subscription example.
It's hard to avoid news like these nowadays:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/21/why-electricity-prices-are-surging-for-us-households.html
or:
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai
Or even a cursory browse of @gerrymcgovern feed will give you a good idea of how much input the digital world requires.
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern You are confounding total and marginal costs here.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
No, I'm arguing that deriving a marginal cost for digital goods is not as straightforward as one could wish. Unless we externalise pretty much everything, which would make your original point about "less inputs" moot.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
To give an example of what I mean:
If 10 more subscribers to Amazon Prime causes Amazon to run an additional server, is that part of their fixed cost or marginal cost of the new subscriptions?
If 10 more people are streaming movies every day causing the ISP to upgrade their routers is that part of their fixed cost or marginal cost of the new subscribers?
Etc.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
While it is obvious that more energy is needed to move a car than to stream an album over the internet, it becomes much less obvious once the whole system is taken into account. Just like roads have costs, so does the internet infrastructure. Storing and streaming data requires data centers, routers, switches and cables that not only need to be constantly powered, but also periodically replaced.
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@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
In fact, diesel-powered trucks visit data centers every day to replace old and broken equipment.
Given all that, can we be sure that $100 of digital goods requires smaller resource input than $100 of gasoline?
Our world becomes increasingly digitized and yet our resource use is only going up. How would you explain that?
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@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
Firstly, because I have recent lifecycle analysis under my eyes. We are talking differences by one or two orders of magnitude, there.
Secondly, the increase of resources consumption at world level is overwhelmingly the effect of development. In the Western world, resource consumption per capita is stable or decreasing in most countries (the US are, as for health, the embarrassing outlier).
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
"We are talking differences by one or two orders of magnitude"
Could you share a link to that research?
"In the Western world, resource consumption per capita is stable or decreasing in most countries."
That is surprising. Is this accounting for trade?
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
For energy use, this chart (not trade adjusted) is a good place to start : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern And this one is trade-adjusted, if I am not mistaken.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
This is energy only, and the claim was about all inputs.
It may be hard to find good estimates from the production side, so we may as well look at the waste side:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-accumulated-in-oceans
Europe went from 2.11m tonnes of plastic waste ending up in the ocean in 2000 to 5.05m tonnes in 2019.
Similarly, according to:
https://globalewaste.org/statistics/continent/europe/2015/
Europe went from 15.6kg of e-waste per capita in 2015 to 17.6kg in 2022.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
I live in Europe and wherever I look I see more *stuff*. There's no way we are using less resource inputs per capita than 20 or even 10 years ago.
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern I think we have little grasp of how inefficient cars were when we were young (I live in France).
A current BMW consumes half as much as a 1990's Ford Sierra.
There has also been bounds in energy efficiency of most home appliances and heating devices.
You'll also notice that there is more stuff, but most of it is so much lighter than it used to be.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
Yes, but there were less cars when I was young. The playground next to my parents' house has been converted into a parking lot. 🙁
The car sizes also changed drastically. Our family of five drove on vacation in Fiat 126p. Now my two parents drive alone in Toyota RAV4.
The lighter stuff may still have a bigger environmental impact / material input. Just ask yourself: how many kilograms of raw materials must be mined to produce a single cell phone?
@jackofalltrades @MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern But what I discovered is: people buy more and more stuff because of two main reasons:
1. Tik Tok was instrumentalized to create another „Status“ society so that so that you have to buy shit to compete with peer pressure
2. Industry sells not finished shit. So you buy it, you discover it’s crap, you buy another one, to try wether that works as expected, and so on.