In biology you'd call that a cancer; in predator-prey dynamics it's the thing that happens at breakneck speed before the inevitable crash. It's so dumb. But talk about degrowth or alternative economic models and you've suddenly conversationally untouchable.
Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.
That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.
Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.
On the one side, there are masses of people who need to work, but the economy does not really have useful things for them to do. The basics are handled by a small number of people running combines in Iowa. If there's a steel mill, it's overseen by one guy who pushes a button.
On the other side, there are stockpiles of capital that are looking for a place to sit. That want desperately to outpace inflation.
In the middle, you have people who can create convincing-looking Potemkin companies. On the one hand, they provide employment to the many people who need it. On the other, they create investment opportunities for the people with the money.
The ideas are generally hare-brained, but like options contracts they have theta -- "maybe it'll work in the future?" -- so you can (a) sell shares/contracts without intrinsic value, and (b) keep rolling your contracts/grifts forward, "extend and pretend" style. It's all about hope that never materializes.
It's frustrating to me how frantically people work, and how useless the activity is, particularly when there are serious problems happening at the same time (global warming, housing crisis). Yet for some reason (to do with money), people can't work on their problems directly. For an individual, the solution to the housing crisis isn't to go out and build a house; it's to join a venture-backed startup that can convince SoftBank to give you enough money to convince the one remaining 50-year-old contractor to build you a house. Before long, all the activity is in those VC-backed startups, and none of the problems are getting solved at all.
Lets instead look at natural/living systems. If you imagine you have a new kind of plant that has no predators and no diseases that affect it, you can imagine it may spread "like a weed". But in any ecosystem you cannot imagine impeded growth will last forever, even if there is plenty of fertile soil to grow in. Animals and insects eventually adapt to feed of the abundant source of energy the plant has created. Illness and disease spread in monocultures.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. The handful of VCs could be perfect angels and it would be just a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people that are not VCs and will not ever have massive amounts of money, yet want more and realize they may be able to get it if they grift off the ecosystem.
I was in a strong anti-establishment, anti-capitalist phase, but I really respected this professor and the material he taught, because I felt like I was empowered by the material.
One day after class, I waited for 30 mins in a line to ask him how X% GDP growth etc. year-over-year was a sustainable goal. Being a young man with a lot of testosterone, I phrased it in a really edgy way, something like "Wouldn't you call something that grows forever a cancer?"
His response was that he had a strong belief that economic growth could reflect the growth and implementation of ideas, of new technologies and efforts that globally improve life. I don't remember it super well, but I do recall that he was emphasizing that while the curve had a material impact on people's lives, it would not necessarily require consumption of scarce resources or other damaging, difficult-to-reverse decisions that caused harm. (We were mostly using oil extraction as an example of a finite resource that had a tight relationship with economic growth.)
I liked his answer, but I didn't feel it was very likely. Decades later, I still think this mindset is damaging, but having volunteered a lot more in the public sphere, I can see how a lack of growth also causes huge problems.
The problem is that most economists do not actually have a good “grounded” model of productivity and growth — they are lost in their own abstractions (GDP and what not).
The pernicious side effects of growth are symptomatic of the underlying problem which is market failure — and despite pockets of work (Eg. Stiglitz, etc) economics as a whole is not yet emotionally ready to wake up to the situation.