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What’s the point of growth? I’m asking about economies, companies, social security, and all types of organizations. And should GDP growth stop at some point, what are the unintended consequences if such a thing happened?
Malthusian thinking was wrong but it was sound science for the data he had. There’s probably a max carrying capacity for the Earth, unless we find incredible inventions. Another invention like the Haber process just seems unlikely. To me that looks like a future where most countries around the world will stabilize into an economy that treads water without growing nor contracting.
I’ve always heard from big wigs that you either grow or die? But if our future looks more like the countries with low fertility, then at the end of it doesn’t it mean that our our economy needs a new way of functioning.
Well everyone hears stories about Musk or Gates or Bezos or Lebron or Jordan or Kershaw, making astronomical figures. To most Americans that type of inequality is okay because the economy is growing like an amoeba trying things out, that sometimes get unicorn status. Now, if in the future that economic pie becomes nearly constrained, the only level of power left is the communists/technocrats that will divvy up the economic pie.
Income equality is no big deal as long as there’s a rising tide with opportunities for your own lottery ticket.
Too big to fail has morphed to become one of the worst ideas this century. Doesn’t mean they should do nothing, they should’ve kept the system afloat while reforming the system and exposes/charging all the financial decisions those big banks did. Instead we are again stuck in the same system trying to put bandaids on their recklessness.
Remember the movie The Big Short explaining CDOs? Reuters in 2019:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N22B5Q2
Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again? Without all the never ending novel financial instrument inventions—There’s almost zero productive reason that brilliant quants are needed in vast numbers on Wall Street. Unless of course you just want to make as much money as possible.
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I’m sorry for how all over the place this was. I was up all night reading and had a bunch of disparate thoughts that felt quasi-connected. In the morning I’ll clean it up.
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency. Hearing people strawman capitalism as "it requires infinite growth", then equating it to a cancer cell, is one of those braindead arguments on par with "if you don't like gun control, why don't you just move to Somalia???"
Some financial innovations have been good like ETFs, while others have been bad. Careful regulation is better than becoming a Luddite and trying to stop all financial advancements entirely.
I understand natural growth like your population is increasing (be it by new births or immigration) so spending is going up as more people buy more things, there are more workers, there are new products and new businesses, they create new markets and expand into existing ones, and so on.
But there does seem to be an expectation for perpetual growth that seems difficult to reconcile with reality. Company F reported gains in this quarter, but they weren't as much as last quarter and not as much as the market expected, so company F's shares reduce in price even though they still made a profit and are not in danger of going bust. Is it reasonable to expect company F to grow 2% this quarter, 3% next quarter, 4% the quarter after that and so on to infinity? What happens when company F drives all its competitors out of business and is the only remaining business with 100% of the market? And after it expands globally to take over 100% of the entire market for left-handed grape peelers in every nation of the earth, what then? How can it continue to grow?
No, but literally no one expects that of any company. If you want illumination, not straw manning the beliefs you have trouble understanding is a good place to start.
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