Unlimited credit is a huge factor in tandem with a market-based economic system that had developed in absence of appropriate pricing mechanisms to accurately account for "externalities". We had runaway dynamics that we called "wealth creation" (note the distinction from value creation) that created money through investments that spurred short-term growth at the expense of long-term stability. You even see this in microcosm in the modern business cycle, but we are beginning to become intimately familiar with the effects of long-term value extraction from the environment, of converting biological and ecological resilience and fecundity into dollars to buy consumer products and research, marketing, production, and distribution of more consumer products.