Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shikadi | Hacker News Reader

Why do people believe this? The earth has limited resources

why do you believe wealth or value is limited by natural resources? That hasn't been the case for a very long time. I'd say the limiting factor on wealth is smart, productive people's time (given we are in the information age, and the bottleneck for value creation is specialized humans, not raw resources).

So you think smart, productive people's time is infinite? People require resources to live

The earth having limited resources is just the inverse of the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Eventually we'll hit that limit [1] but the idea that its going to happen soon is undefended. The issue right now for growth is that we can't mine the earth's resources fast enough right not that we've used it up.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

Its hilarious how often people who bring up "the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" also believe in the free market being capable of solving any- and everything. Claiming breathlessly that the efficient market hypothesis is true while also stating the market can be irrationally/inefficiently allocated longer than someone who knows better can remain solvent. Efficiency is not usually tied to irrational behavior.

"Can" is the key word in that quote. It's possible, but not necessarily likely. There's no contradiction.

Efficiency of markets is like the Law of Large Numbers. But it's possible to get n consecutive coin flips that come up heads.

In this context, I'm strictly arguing there isn't a problem that needs to be solved. While there is a limit on resources, we haven't reached that limit nor will we in the short term. So, even if the market is using our current resources inefficiently it doesn't matter because there's an excess of supply (in a raw materials aspect, sure there's a chip shortage but the earth didn't run out of sand).

Constant growth is not the same as infinite growth. Constant growth is the state of the economy now, believing in infinite growth is believing it can continue this way forever

One explanation is technological progress. You can imagine if we were to figure out a good way to make space travel cheaper, for example, we'd no longer be limited to earth's limited resources. Of course, in the _long long_ term, entropy increase and indeed we do run out of the ability to grow or even maintain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com