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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.
There is no 'point' to growth, *growth is an inevitable consequence of human psychology and social dynamics *.
Social status and acceptance among peers and romantic interests is an innate human desire (and indeed among just about every species which exhibits social behaviour). Status is often afforded to those with a lot of wealth (to the point the term socio-economic status usually means just, well, economic status), wealth is a great facilitator of all sorts of things and lifestyles, which makes it attractive. However a quirk of human psychology is that we assign status in a local, relative way. The private envies the sergeant, not the general. This has implications for what any given individual considers wealthy and worth assigning status to.
We accumulate possessions over the course of our lives and when we die we bequeath our possessions to the next generation. The amount of wealth in the world increases constantly. However status is in limited supply, always. Even though I have a level of material wealth that vastly surpasses my grandparents, my wealth is only average for my time and place and so I am afforded no more status than they were because of it.
What I'm trying to convey is that there is no fixed level of wealth that is considered to be 'enough', nor will there ever be. If there was we would surely have passed it by now. People's wants and desires are limitless. As long as one person can get an edge in their choice of friends and partners and lifestyles by having more to offer than the next man then he will seek out a way to increase his rate of resource acquisition at a rate faster than those around him, i.e growth. The picture you paint of the wider economy is simply the manifestation of this dynamic.
Growth doesn't just mean producing things at an ever faster rate either. Improvements in efficiency and the reduction of waste are also forms of economic growth. Switching from fossil fuels to green energy is economic growth, faster internet speeds are economic growth, new medical breakthroughs are economic growth.
Consider for a moment what it would mean if there was no growth. There would be no innovation and no improvement in our day-to-day lives, you could not reasonably hope for a better standard of living for your children. You would live stuck in the same era of technology in perpetuity. Would you prefer that economic growth had stopped in 2000? 1500? 1000 BC? 1 million BC? Do you not think tomorrow will be brighter than today?
I think people who advocate 'degrowth' are rallying against mindless consumerism (honestly from those I've talked to, who are uniformly upper-middle class, this seems to derive from a sense of moral superiority to those who don't share their beliefs, in their eyes consumerism is a kind of lower-class vulgarity) and have a concern that unrestricted growth threatens the Earth in an irresponsible pollution-of-the-commons way, which is a valid concern. But I fear they are deeply misguided in their assessment of the situation and push for policies that are not compatible with human psychology on a fundamental level. Our only hope is that responsible stewardship from our governments (lol) can curb the worst excesses of humanity's insatiable desire for status before it poses an extensional threat.
I've heard a few people suggest that perhaps if we were to adopt a kind of ascetic lifestyle we could circumvent issues surrounding growth. I think this is a trap though. Part of what makes an ascetic lifestyle tolerable is that, ironically, it affords its practitioners a degree of status. The problem is that once everyone is an ascetic hermit its no longer impressive, status is relative remember, and we circle back around again to where we were.
I kind of went on a bit of a ramble with this post but I hope I got myself across, even if I didn't connect specifically with everything you described about too-big-to-fail and CDO's and so forth. Ultimately it is status, the whole way down.
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