The mathematical realities of economic growth

[macdoc]

Because something is done a certain way does not mean it can only be done that way.

Frontier mentality presupposes endless new horizons and resources.

That got over run several times in human history.

Capital is just a resource like labour and materials. The portion of the economic spectrum it currently occupies is unwarranted and under regulated.

When you are given a charter by the governnent to magnify your capital up to 30 times you would think it might come with a certain level of social responsibility in return for such a glowing privilege.

It hasn't and doesn't.

Human society has really little choice in the matter - it must move to sustainable or become a generalized Ethopian level of life style.
Doing so in a managed way as some economies are attempting ( Sweden getting to carbon neutral for instance ) will ease the transition.

Others will hit a wall.

[pErvinalia]

Capitalism is based on endless growth but it is growth which is not substrate dependant. You can buy and sell software/music and other creative stuff which would grow the economy without needing any untoward material consumption. Where some folks go wrong is to imagine it is all about stuff. Then they are often closet Marxists.

Of course it is about stuff, you clown. Resource use is increasing, despite efficiency increases. The majority of the world is yet to have the "stuff" we take for granted here in the first world. And what happens when we ascend to your fantasy utopia and everyone has everything they need and miraculously don't need more stuff? That stuff breaks and needs to be replaced. Yet another one who hasn't read the article in the OP.

[pErvinalia]

Capitalism is based on endless growth

Completely unwarranted assumption

There are many steady state situations that employ capital and require no growth or expansion to be successful and use capital as a business component

I don't see how this is possible. Capitalism relies on investment and return on investment. Where ever there are greater returns to be had, capital will move there and cause growth. Profit motive without growth doesn't even make sense.

[Hermit]

Because something is done a certain way does not mean it can only be done that way.

Frontier mentality presupposes endless new horizons and resources.

That got over run several times in human history.

Quite so, and nothing would make me happier than my prognostication being proved wrong by what will actually have happened.

You may enjoy the story about The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. The "exhaust" of horses turned out to be a bit of a problem, particularly in big cities where 100,000 or more of them were required to take care of transport needs. Nobody could think of a method that would adequately cope with removing their manure. In 1890 New York wasn't dealing with the 1000 tons of it that its horses dropped in its streets every day. Dire predictions were made that the problem could only get worse. In 1894 a London writer calculated that, given the city's growth rate, every street will be buried in 9 feet of horse shit. In 1896 the first ever international urban planning conference was convened. It was scheduled to last for ten days, but unable to even propose a single possible solution, its participants decided to go back home after three. The problem was truly insoluble.

Ten years before the conference Karl Benz patented the first horseless carriage. It's production run, however, only amounted to 25 units, and that took seven years. The first model was also incredibly modest and primitive by today’s standards. The engine produced less than one horsepower. There was no carburetor. Petrol was supplied via evaporation through rags. Top speed? About 10 km/h. Oh, and it didn't have a steering wheel. The extremely modest specifications of the Motorwagen, in conjunction with the fact that assembly line production lay several decades in the future made it quite understandable that neither the participants at the urban planning conference nor anybody else who had ever thought about the horse manure problem had the faintest clue about how it might eventually be solved.

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 serves as an amusing (in retrospect) and instructive textbook example of limitations of predictions. And yet, I cannot see how existing, innovative technologies that are capable of eventually enabling us to live comfortably and sustainably so, can be implemented on a scale sufficient to ward off the next lot of shit that is about to hit us – depletion of non-renewable resources. At best they will become effective in the real world some time after a period of painful belt tightening, economic, social and political upheaval and all the chaos and disasters associated with billions of people having to resort to any method in their attempts to survive in an environment of critical and extreme scarcities. At worst those technologies will be lost in the mists of time because our shortsighted plundering of the planet’s resources in an unsustainable manner resulted in hitting the reset button on human civilisation.