The desperate need for continuous growth will be the downfall of our species.
Any system that intentionally pays out significantly more than people pay in is going to have sustainability problems.
It's so bad with the California pension systems that they're facing immenant collapse, despite being in an economy with the highest growth rate in human history.
Creating an unsustainable pension system solves nothing. The only real solution is to root out the causes of unsustainable cost of living and address them. But doing that is far more difficult than just giving out "free" money, and gets almost no recognition from voters.
This is already true, we’re seeing the worst wealth inequality since the gilded age. The benefits of growth are increasingly being captured by the wealthy.
To your point, if the minimum wage in a lot of areas is $15, then why aren’t there any decent houses selling for $30k anymore like they were back in the 50’s? $15/hr is quite wealthy by those standards but it is becoming pretty poor nowadays.
The problem with wealth is that we tend to measure it by the concrete dollar amount in our bank account and not the purchasing power it represents.
And that would show up as an improvement in GDP growth, because unless you banned private businesses, there's always going to be some people (business owners, independent contractors) working more than 20 hours, so they'd produce more than before, which would show up in GDP.
The main problem is that caring about the environment becomes a competitive disadvantage to your business when your competitor doesn’t care and is willing to do anything to get ahead. Sometimes it’s fine if you’re a luxury brand trying incorporate sustainability into your brand, but that matters less in a B2B context.
The “bad” money inevitably beats the “good” money.
“Bad” money works to circumvent society altogether and is not interesting in participating in a societally-driven dialogue about what’s ethical and what’s not. If it did, there would be no dark money or influencing-peddling in the system.
This is where various checks and balances are vital and society needs to constantly remind its young people that ends do not justify the means. Something we are definitely losing these days.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Because people mean different things by this. Do you mean it in the "the economy should keep becoming bigger" sense or "human experience should keep getting better" sense? Or do you think it's the same thing?
So probably they mean someone opposed to people like that.
If we dramatically change our lifestyles and industry for the sake of the environment, we would still, at current population numbers, have a huge, negative impact on the environment. Especially once more countries join the developed world.
It's a fantasy to think we can sprinkle some solar and sustainable farming on our societies, and the environment will be just fine as the human population triples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen...
Also, population growth rates vary a lot by country. Many countries have a negative growth rate, whether due to birth rates or immigration rates. I think Canada's birth rate is almost as low as Japan's, but Canada allows a lot of immigration and Japan allows less.