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Comment by CrimsonChapulin | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with infinite growth? The only people that tell you it is unsustainable are those 8th grade math nerds.

I agree with you, it seems like we are living in an era with global growth accelerators but no one to tell people it is impossible to keep increasing profits forever regardless of how many markets you can be a leader for.

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Your kind of thought process will seem amusing and quaint in the future and I don’t think it’s just 8th grade math nerd thinking. The math says we have existed in a very unique century historically with regard to economic growth.

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

Even maintaining current economic growth would mean a 10x by 2100, which is absurd in a world expected to stop population growth by then.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...

how can there be infinite growth with limited resources?

maybe i'm one of those 8th grade math nerds.

Disruption, synergy, blue ocean thinking, vertical integration, blockchain, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax advantages, bunkers

a lot of limitedness currently is artificially generated. such as restaurants/groceries/farmers constantly binning unimaginable amounts of food

A large amount is finite. Less of a large amount is also finite but does not make the initial large amount infinite retroactively.

"Everything changes but nothing is lost."

There are unlimited resources.

vast quantities of bullshit

Growth is not a measure of physical resource consumption, it’s a measure of the value of goods and services produced. If you can find a way to make something more valuable out of less raw materials, you can increase growth while decreasing consumption. One example is that computer chips that do the same computation with less silicon and energy are worth more. There might be a limit to this, but it’s not obvious. A bunch of countries already managed to increase economic growth while decreasing CO2 emissions. Maybe in 100 years humanity’s main preoccupation will be competing to tell each other more fashionable jokes while recycling the same physical materials, with economic growth continuing uninterrupted all the while.

I don't see how your logic works with a brewery. Would it be a good thing a brewery makes exclusive rare beer that costs infinite dollars a bottle? Or sell an infinitely small drop of beer?

If people could afford that, it's not the beer creating the value.

Value depends on another system and it is relative. So value of something can go up while the world is burning. I think that's what is meant by infinite growth doesn't work. It could work for something, but not everything always.

Economic growth is not purely extractive of natural resources. If a new invention of better performing clippers allows me to cut twice the hair as a barber, I've doubled my economic value without any change in resources.

Human ingenuity has not yet found its bound.

A handful of sand on the beach becomes silicon transistors becomes AI models becomes miracle drug.

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