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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

except for the part of an economic system that requires unending growth

This is such a tired phrase. Like if we had socialism or communism or some other -ism it wouldn't matter.

But that's just not true. The issue is math and the fact that prime age working people (25-55ish) are the ones that, for the most part, make stuff. If you have a shrinking population then the % of the population that makes stuff gets a lot smaller so everyone has to be poorer. No "economic system" can change that.

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  If you have a shrinking population then the % of the population that makes stuff gets a lot smaller so everyone has to be poorer. No "economic system" can change that.

sure, but if people are too exhausted to make the time to have a family (a.k.a nookie) then its maybe worth examining [0] if "constant growth" is societally sustainable

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/japan-m...

Actually making children is by far the least exhausting part of the process.

Something like 0.000000001% of the process.

I don't see what people being exhausted has to do with population growth.

I don't think we even need to settle for reduction. The US economy as measured by GDP and other metrics has surpassed countries with higher pop growth rates, especially since Covid. It does not matter if the % who makes stuff shrinks if productivity goes up.

but hasn't the productivity per worker been steadily climbing for decades, you would think there would be a stable point where that balances out

Only if productivity is flat. If productivity grows faster than the population shrinks you can still have a growing economy with fewer people.

Productivity grown in the service sector (2/3 of the economy) has been just 0.9% annually since 1947: https://aneconomicsense.org/tag/productivity/. It’s pretty much stopped growing over the last couple of decades.

There's always the post-scarcity system where robots make all the stuff and we can all stay home and play video games.

You would still need a fair system that distributes a base amount of resources fairly. If we had that system the current form of capitalism could last much longer (another 80 years).

What about the scifi trope of robots making things? After all the productivity of a single human has been skyrocketing for more than a century now. I do not which -ism that is. Somewhere between socialism and startrekism I guess.

Fun fact, it hasn’t, outside of a handful of sectors: https://aneconomicsense.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/real-val...

Wait. I’m not sure I understand what that chart is supposed to show. Are you suggesting because the GDP is only linearly growing productivity is not increasing?

No, look at the “services and construction” line. That measures output per worker in that sector (2/3 of the economy) since 1947. That’s a measure of productivity per worker. It’s grown at only 0.9% over that time. A big chunk of even that tepid growth is in a handful of areas like finance. In vast swaths of the economy, workers aren’t any more productive today than in 1947. Everything from building houses to caring for kids and old people to serving diners at restaurants, etc. We can make iPhones with fewer workers than ever but the post-scarcity economy is very far away.

I don’t have much of an opinion on the scarcity economy but I think you could read that chart differently. The industries that have listed the longest, agriculture, manufacturing etc have seen explosive productivity growth. So you might predict services are next.

Actually it's estimated gradually redistributing wealth from billionaires and Silicon Valley companies via taxes and stimulus checks to the American people could afford us up to 4 to 5 years of prosperity. So clearly you're wrong, we can change living conditions of mostly everyone through a better economic system.

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