• fireweed@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

    For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

    In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      But you’re assuming the type of growth will never change.

      • population growth is not sustainable and we’re past that point, but knowledge growth is
      • resources growth is not sustainable and we’re past that point for many resources, but economies can grow independently of resources
      • Zacryon@lemmy.wtf
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        4 months ago

        They literally said:

        Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible

        I don’t see how your comment applies to that.

        Knowlegde growth may be sustainable, but it is also impossible to grow forever. (Supposing knowlegde is finite, which is, as far as I see it, the case as long as we make the definition of knowledge depend on characteristics like repition-free and new. For example, you could learn the number pi to even longer lenghts forever, but doing that is not necessarily something new to know as it’s just a manifestation of a repition which was already discovered.)

        I’m intrigued how you would explain that economies could grow independently of resources. From my perspective, it looks a lot like each and every form of economy relies somehow on some form of resource or resources. As resources are finite, economies can’t grow forever.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          There are already trends showing economic growth disconnected from both resources and energy. Welcome to the service economy

          • Zacryon@lemmy.wtf
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            4 months ago

            Service needs workforce performing the service. Workforce are usually human resources. Thereby, limited again. Or did I get it wrong?

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              We already have many cases where a very small number of humans can manage automated services for millions. It’s extremely scalable

              While you could argue the electronics and power are also a resource dependency, it again scales extremely well