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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if in the future we will look back on history and understand that what is happening with Japan is just a natural result of transitioning to a no-growth economy.

In the USA, everything is set up to require growth, or we get collapse. Except for family owned businesses that tend to take a long term view and also modern decentralized 'limited profit' companies (even better if their charters use blockchain tech), all big business requires growth as does our government.

I know I am asking for a lot, but I would like to see a non-growth (or cyclical growth) mindset become the new normal. This would require new ideas about currency, the benefits of small local businesses over global businesses, etc.

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Well, it's hard to argue that this is non-growth rather than negative-growth masquerading as non-growth. There is a very strong argument that many corps in Japan should've given way to market forces and died out, but they are instead kept on life-support as a form of social welfare.

One has to wonder what the rationale for all of this is -- what are they afraid of? If they are suddenly left to their own devices, are these people going to starve to death? Has no-one ever been faced with the prospect of having to find a new job?

Many nations on Earth are being confronted with the notion that larger and larger sections of their society are now unemployable, and they are all handling it differently. Japan seems to have been confronted with this sooner than anybody else and they are choosing to keep their businesses afloat under the assumption that they will not institute deep and painful budget cuts, specifically slashing the employment workforce. And it looks like Japanese corps are cooperating.

It's ironically Keynesian only without the potential benefits, because most of the money is lost on play acting make-work and not on productive activity.

Even more ironically, it's practically nationalisation by the back door.

>Many nations on Earth are being confronted with the notion that larger and larger sections of their society are now unemployable

People are not unemployable. The problem is more that the current system isn't smart enough to work out how they can be usefully employed.

Every country in the world has a huge amount of work that could be done - infrastructure improvement, education, housing improvement, art and culture, even software and startups.

But the current value system deems most of these activities "uneconomic" because funding them would decrease the short-term net worth of a small number of very wealthy individuals.

It's a nonsense reason, but it's going to be a problem until the value system becomes intelligent enough to plan rationally for the medium and long term.

Aside from 'benevolent dictatorships', maybe even questioning those as well, has the 'value system' EVER been that intelligent?

>One has to wonder what the rationale for all of this is -- what are they afraid of? If they are suddenly left to their own devices, are these people going to starve to death? Has no-one ever been faced with the prospect of having to find a new job?

Practically. A little perspective on Japanese culture might help to answer this question.

The Japanese value company loyalty, tradition, and conformity. They have more than 21,000 companies that are more than a hundred years old. [0] From a 'pure market' perspective, most of these companies should have given way to market forces, yes, but Japan is deeply averse to what that entails for individual workers.

[0]https://www.tofugu.com/japan/oldest-businesses-in-japan/

For an explanation of why the Japanese government keeps kicking the can down the road instead of facing their problems directly I recommend the book "Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan" by Alex Kerr. It was published in 2002 but nothing has really changed.

http://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809039432

Simple arithmetic shows that nothing can grow exponentially forever, just google for a lecture on exponential growth by the late Dr. Albert Bartlett of CU.

What bewilders me is the mass denial. Sooner or later inflation and GDP growth have to stop, and reverse, even.

And the world will not end - there will still be startups and investment opportunities, stocks and commodity prices will go up and down, the only difference being that overall we will see the major indexes flat or declining, and that will be just fine.

The sooner the population at large recognizes that this is the future, the smoother will the transition to this new state of affairs be. The longer we hang on to this naive notion of perpetual growth, the more devastating will be the day it ends.

Edit: Link to find the Bartlett video: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=albert+bartlett+exponen...

There could still be gains in productivity.

Except the universe seems to be infinite, so yes, the economy can grow exponentially forever. Even within current physics, it's possible to put billions of habitable Earths in our solar system, by importing mass and energy from other systems. There's A LOT of empty space.

Given interstellar distances, the annual rate of growth would be small, but still positive.

Even if the universe is infinite, it's impossible to interact or even perceive anything beyond our lightcone. Within that finite (albeit vast) region of space is a finite amount of matter and energy which is constantly and irrevocably subject to entropy, and will eventually be torn apart and decohere with the heat death of the universe.

So... no. In literally no way known to physics can anything other than spacetime itself grow exponentially forever, and even that may not necessarily be the case.

That's not proven physics, just speculation. There are no answers at this point, especially regarding end of the universe.

Also, infinite universe is not necessarily the same thing as a growing one.

For all we know all we see could be some local quirk of spacetime or whatever that creates a weird projection. I would at least wait for a return data from a probe in nearby star system's before accepting that yes, that's probably how it actually is, at least in our larger neighborhood.

Unless the laws of thermodynamics and the speed of light are wrong, there is only a finite region of spacetime with a finite amount of energy that we will ever be able to interact with. Infinite expansion would require expending infinite energy, and that's just not possible. Not even "proven physics" supports an argument that an economy can "grow exponentially, forever."

There are an awful lot of people that would like to increase their consumption. Don't expect them to fondly embrace a non growth mindset.

(It's not just people that can't stand life without a yacht either, it's people that want a newer vehicle or a house in a nicer area or more meat or more proactive healthcare or ...)

I think a lot of people would be happy with slow but steady growth instead of the up and down of the last years/decades.

You mean slow to no growth, when inflation is taken into account. The truth of the matter is Demographics being what they are especially in places like Japan, going forward growth is impossible

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