This reminds me of the phrase "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail".

> Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes

One implication of the above statement would be that everyone is now buying less and yet somehow the economy is growing? Those two ideas aren't strictly necessarily opposed to one another but it certainly doesn't seem like a good place to start. The economy could only be growing through investment if this were the case.

> Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food.

Is there any junk food that isn't composed of organic matter primarily? Most "junk" food in the US that I can think of is corn based which would of course still require fertilizer...

This is actually what I was thinking, but I live in opioid infested flyover country, so my mind always goes there.

Not many people out here buying new cars, or washers and dryers, or even homes right now. And then in the other world I live in, tech, people not only do all that, but they also fly to Greek Islands for vacations. It's really kind of bi-polar right now. At least around here it is.

The raw ingredients required for junk food require massive amounts of fertilizer (soy, corn, wheat, sugarcane).

I don’t know enough about economics, nearly enough, in fact I’ve decided after listening to an economics podcast for the past month (still working through the backlog) that I’m essentially a know-nothing today.

That said, I have some questions if there’s an economics know-something around here, because there might be an alternative explanation than just a rise in inequality. For one thing, to maintain the standard of equality/inequality that exists today, I would think even the richest would need something to dump their money into. Right now that seems to be the United States economy, mostly, and a few fairly solid foreign markets, Japan, the EU, Hong Kong, Britain, and for the less risk averse, there’s also the PRC and various developing economies. Mostly the US is where you get your safest ROI.

So a massive growth in investment, would seem to also suggest a massive growth in the financial services market. Not to mention the massive amounts of money sloshing around throughout the Bay Area. At the end of the day, you still need bankers handling all the transactions.

And that’s just it, the United States today, near as I can tell and certainly this is what I was taught and the dogma of today, is a services-based economy. Banking, health care, government, etc, not to mention the usual suspects among tech: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Microsoft, Netflix, etc.

Now between them, there’s a lot of products getting designed, and built, and shipped, and sold. Computers, phones, and I’m sure even the cars drivers use for fares and deliveries are consuming a fair amount more resources than your average car. In providing their services, they are charging a premium, and in return you get convenience. If you use AWS or Azure, you’re still using something tangible and real, you just don’t own the infrastructure. But the people that do are benefitting from economies of scale large enough that there are ultimately fewer servers and data center than there otherwise would be if all of their customers bought their own. So in a real sense, it really does seem like more value is being created with less resources that way.

So now that whoever is reading this knows where I’m coming from, here is my question to economics know-somethings (fair warning, my jargon might even be off or used incorrectly): does our economic shift away from agriculture and manufacturing towards a service and information-centric economy have a possible causal effect on our ability to grow the economy with seemingly fewer resources? If so, is there one part of the services sector which seemingly has an outsized influence in decreasing our resource use while growing the economy, be it financial or tech or something else?

Seriously, thanks in advance.

There is a factor. The energy it takes to melt metal is hard to get around. The US manufactures more than we are given credit for, and there have been improvements in efficiency, but it is still energy intensive and hard to get around it. Thus services are a factor in that they need less energy.

Other factors:

Things last longer. (when there isn't planned obsolesce) We have learned to make things higher quality, so even when we make something the energy cost to replace it latter is deferred a little.

The miles people drive isn't increasing. Something as somehow got people to drive more and more each year. Services is probably a factor in that: why drive to X when you can stay home... (walking - or even driving someplace closer count as staying home)

It is really hard to know which factors are important though.

In the 1970es the usd is also delinked from the price of gold. This allows for rampant inflation which should be filtered out from the growth figures but maybe it is not quite the case ...