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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

There are no limits to growth provided technology continues to increase productivity. If we were stuck with the same output, then productivity would scale linearly with the working age population, and in a shrinking-population world our quality of life would decrease.

Luckily it takes less people to make the same goods and services, year after year, enabling humanity to continue to prosper. This will continue forever barring some authoritarian government that artificially limits human ingenuity and work output.

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Technology can only improve our productivity so much. I'd argue that the last time technology really improved our productivity was in the mid 70s to early 80s, with the nuclear push and real improvement in efficiency of Carnot machines, with another wave in the 90s whis some of those improvement reaching the smaller models (IE car motors).

All the rest of our productivity growth is only energy usage.

Most of our growth was population growth assuming the country in question was able to overcome structural problems that keep developing countries poor. If every human couple has three children growth is infinite, if you count economic activity of the offspring as economic demand of the parent then suddenly human wants and needs are infinite.

Isn't it strange that we are massaging everything to fit the axioms which are starting to sound more and more like religious beliefs and anyone who is making inconvenient statements is called a heretic?

If you tell the longtermists about the population shrinking then their galaxy conquest plans no longer become the obvious conclusion of humanity but rather just a preferred vision of the future for a bunch of people who want to elevate themselves.

And yet the basic tenets of security (shelter, access to transport, simple healthcare, nutrition) require an ever growing amount of labour for the majority of population.

Having rich people move to throwing away two phones a year and driving around 9 tonne electric SUVs only means there's more pollution to deal with. It doesn't make the lives of the majority better.

Plus most of the "innovation" in the west involved outsourcing all the manufacturing and pollution to places with cheap labour and lax environmental and labour laws.

Yeah who knew the solution to increased productivity was to have more, not to work less.

Would you prefer not to get to decide?

You mean to get to decide to escape the prisoners dilemma that forces us to grow even if there is no benefit to it beyond patching up a broken system?

Technology this...

Growth that...

Profit here, profit there...

Meanwhile most people bust their asses working absolutely soulless jobs while the quality of life decreases and the wealth inequalities increase

But yes, the stock market is up and we never sold so much useless shit on amazon so I guess we're gucci

Did you forget a /s? This comment reads like satire.

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