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Comment by Brybry | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is true for all of us, possibly not even for most people in the US.

I know plenty of people who took lower paying jobs because they valued other things more than "growth": quality of life, family, passion, etc.

I know people who have enough to meet their needs and are not actively working towards having more.

People who retire by "aging in place" who do not care about the value of their home because they have no intention of selling it while they're alive.

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I think this is somewhat naive. The growth mindset pervades the entire economy, and virtually everyone's interests are bound into it one way or another.

Yes, of course there are people who prioritize lifestyle over chasing money. No one will debate that. But if those people's retirement plans are dependent on a 401k or drawing payments from a pension fund and not just cash savings, then they are amongst the growth-obsessed shareholders, whether they realize it or not.

Yup, this was the point I was trying to make, and you made it much better.

I think 99.9% of people have good intentions. But so much of everything we do depends on growth without us even realizing it.

To add on to this, unbridled capitalism also leads to more goods and services affordable for the average consumer. This makes the idea of taking a lower paying job appealing because you can still live a fairly comfortable life.

Is it unbridled that accomplishes that? Before regulations and unions people worked more hours per week, even children, and were exploited to a criminal degree. Mostly the profits went to capital owners. Collective assets like the environment suffered. Progress was certainly made and highly visible, yet at great cost.

> Mostly the profits went to capital owners

probably not the best example, today this is much worse vs. during the early days of the Industrial Revolution

> more goods and services affordable for the average consumer

The one key missing ingredient for this is competition. Without competition there is just a monopoly/cartel, leading to rent seeking behavior and products/services with too low quality and too high prices.

> The growth mindset pervades the entire economy, and virtually everyone's interests are bound into it one way or another.

I agree with this but I think gkoberger's post was maybe edited?

I believe the post I originally responded to was worded in a way that implied everyone individually was purposefully embracing a growth mindset (or I misunderstood).

There's certainly no way to escape that all retirement systems in the US are based on growth. Even social security seems to rely on making more from interest than from taxes.

I think one of the challenges is that if a society gets richer around you, and you don’t, then normal services get more expensive as people demand higher salaries to do the same things, and houses get more expensive.

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