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Comment by henry2023 | Hacker News Reader

henry2023

World government debt went from 5T at the beginning of the XXI century to about 305T today. Is this sustainable?

Isn't this the same discussion of infinite growth versus the ceiling of finite resources.

It is logically not possible might take 20 years or 700 years but eventually a ceiling is reached.

Growth doesn't require more resources. If your barber finds a way to cut your hair 10% faster, that shows up in GDP growth. Increasing efficiency leads to increased GDP.

But there is still a limit that will be reached. If a barber cuts your hair in 0 seconds, there is no more room to improve.

> If your barber finds a way to cut your hair 10% faster, that shows up in GDP growth.

No it doesn't. He'd need to profit from that effeciency first. Idle time is not reported in GDP

How about industrie, craftsmanship and farming? Can they “grow” over a certain period of time while the required resources doesn’t?

Yes, of course. The quantity and quality of the output can certainly grow for a given resource input -- obviously with physical limits but we haven't generally reached those. It's possible to breed higher-yielding crops, design more efficient industrial processes, to craft with less waste, etc, and these have all been vastly improved over the past few centuries.

The problem is that these industries have also been growing by increasing resource consumption along with output, to a level that isn't sustainable (even without more growth) beyond this century or so.

Thinking in nominal values is rookie mistake.

You must think in terms of ratios, or not think at all. Debt-to-GDP ratio is a good measure that takes into an account most other variables like changes in population, productivity etc.

Well, world debt went from 5T to 305T while world GDP went from 33T to 96T in the same period

As ratio we went from to 16.5% to 317%.

Same question. Is this sustainable?

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