>I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita
Why? They are correlated and so are reasonable metric to gauge progress when starting from a subsistence economy (as all economies in the world began). At some point, this may be less true when you hit a energy generation ceiling and you start 'optimizing' and trying to do more with the same amount .. but again, we're not there yet so it's a good metric today, and especially for developing economies.
Put another way, you show me GDP per capita or per capita Energy use and I can get a reasonable ballpark for the other as well as a measure for the wealth of that nation.
The range is so wide though. Look at a particular narrow band of the GDP per capita and see how wide the energy consumption per capita is for even a very narrow slice of GDP per capita. The dispersion gets even wider as you get up towards the high end of the GDP axis.
The author asserts that we should see 5x GDP/c if we had 5x power usage per person and their own graph shows that that's not the case because it's a flawed assumption that ignores increases in efficiency and transitions away from energy intensive manufacturing to service based.
The best evidence for that is that the GDP/c didn't fall off when we fell off the HA curve. In fact I took the GDP per capita and Energy consumption per capita data from world data bank and the ratio between the per capita GDP vs the per capita energy consumption has been going up steadily since we stopped following the HA curve.
Between 1960 and 1970 the ratio between GDP and Energy Consumption per capita was essentially static at .74 then after 1970 the ratio begins to increase showing we're producing more per unit of consumed energy at a nearly linear rate. By 2014 which is the last year they had the Electric power per capita data the ratio was all the way up to 4.2. Eyeballing it the relationship is almost perfectly linear each year we get a little better at producing GDP for each kWh we consume.
I even redid the calculation based on raw energy use in kg oil equivalents and it gets even more drastic. 1960 to 1970 it goes from .53 to .69 GDP/kg oil equivalent [0]. Then after 1970 the rate increases quite distinctly going from .69 to 1.58 in 1980, 3.11 in 1990, 4.5 in 2000, and 6.79 in 2010.
It's pretty clear from the data that we're getting better at producing things with the same amount of energy. It's an assumption that simply making more power would increase the amount of things made.
This always makes me uncomfortable though. How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another? I pay you to mow my lawn and you pay me to mow your lawn. Are we creating GDP?
Very true and you quickly get into a very command economy style argument about what should be produced. Ultimately we have the system we have and wasted or scammy products generally eventually die. Look at things like NFTs they were an extremely brief blip it turns out because people quickly saturated the ability of crypto early adopters to inflate values with their funny money. Some scams last longer like Thomas Kincade 'paintings' but trying to sort through the economic data to throw those out is just not possible.
> How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another?
It will show up as decrease in exports because other countries (or societies or tribes or whatever you want to call them) will want less of what your country is selling.
Which then shows up as decreasing purchasing power for things that you do want from other countries (i.e. you getting poorer).
Luckily for the US, that does not seem to be the case given the resilience of the purchasing power of the USD.
Why? They are correlated and so are reasonable metric to gauge progress when starting from a subsistence economy (as all economies in the world began). At some point, this may be less true when you hit a energy generation ceiling and you start 'optimizing' and trying to do more with the same amount .. but again, we're not there yet so it's a good metric today, and especially for developing economies.
Put another way, you show me GDP per capita or per capita Energy use and I can get a reasonable ballpark for the other as well as a measure for the wealth of that nation.