[jinfiesto]

I used to think this, but I've come around somewhat. The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening. Obviously no kind of exponential growth is sustainable, even at a low rate. The best minds are getting sucked into this at least partly because the work is necessary to keep the economic wheels spinning. If we give up on having an average % of yearly growth, we're committing to living in an economy that's a zero or negative sum game.

So yes, we are stagnating scientifically, but it's not necessarily for no reason. The longer we keep running the economy as is, the more smart people are going to have to be allocated to figuring out how to keep up with the exponential growth our system demands. Unfortunately, no one seems to have cracked steady-state economics, so it looks like we'll be doing this for the foreseeable future...

Additionally, I don't know how we're supposed to keep up with this absurd need for exponential growth without leaning hard on technology (at least if we presume we don't want to wreck the planet more.) I feel like big tech is actually doing something important with regard to growing the economy disproportionately with the physical resources they consume.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening.

That isn't really a thing. The 3% growth aligns closely with population growth (including immigration), and that's where it really comes from. If the average company makes widgets and the population grows by 3% then they hire 3% more people and sell 3% more widgets to 3% more customers, and the company is worth 3% more.

The unsustainable thing is really unlimited population growth, but steady state populations don't require some kind of cataclysm. They work a little differently, in particular people have to on average work longer before they retire because there are fewer working people to support them in retirement, but it's hardly mass starvation and nuclear war. And even the drawbacks are offset by things like automation -- not as good as both automation and population growth, but still probably not worse than your grandfather had it.

The real problem is that there is no iron law that says people have to spend their working hours on pie-growing activities like automation and honest medical research instead of pie-stealing activities like adtech and patent trolling, so if we have rules and institutions that make the latter more profitable, that's what we get.

[dane-pgp]

Is it really unthinkable that a fixed population could each year turn a finite set of resources into a set of resources that is 3% more valuable?

If a tree falls in a forest, and someone turns it into some chairs, while planting at least one tree in its place, then that has made the economy more valuable (assuming there are people who want the chairs, and that leaving the fallen tree in place would be less valuable than having newly planted ones).

Zero percent growth means that every time someone creates something valuable out of less valuable materials, there has to be an equivalent amount of value destroyed somewhere. I suppose that entropy takes care of the destruction, to some extent, but it seems arbitrary to try to limit value creation to precisely match that level.

[jinfiesto]

Completely agree with the last paragraph. The economy is tilted way too far towards incentivizing value extraction instead of incentivizing value creation.

Don't know that I agree with some of the previous stuff though. Even if we assume a steady state population, if the economy doesn't grow every year, we're playing a zero or negative sum game literally by definition.

RE your second paragraph, I both agree and disagree. As far as I can see (at least the US system) is predicated on ~4-7% economic growth being the way that people systematically grow relatively small savings into a large nest egg for retirement (not that this appears to be working particularly well, see your comments on pie stealing.) If we assumed a steady state for the population and economy, I don't see how people working for average salaries can set enough aside for retirement (without pushing themselves to a pretty low standard of living) without the benefit of ~4-7% compounding.

I have a developer's salary, so I could probably put away a couple million cash before my retirement even without the benefit of compound interest paid by economic growth. That's not the norm, or even the average though. Participating in society/the economy has to be an attractive enough proposition to incentivize people to do it, or bad social problems start popping up. In a steady state system, I don't see how we can make an offer more attractive than "Enjoy your subsistence lifestyle up to retirement, so you can have barely enough to have a subsistence level lifestyle in retirement."