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Comment by henearkr | Hacker News Reader

Sure...

What else could be the conclusion of the... Financial Times?

Opinion columns are not the same as editorials. But anyway, the Financial Times is well able to publish pieces that say "this currently profitable endeavour will blow up in everyone's faces". It's a serious newspaper.

You think that people directly benefitting from saying that growth must be kept positive year over year would say exponential growth isn't a problem? Preposterous.

Right? Capitalism at its core relies on exponential growth, since every investor wants ROI. So acknowledging that exponential growth is a problem would go against the interests of pretty much all financial players.

By the same token, the destruction of the earth is directly against the interests of pretty much all financial players, therefore environmentalism is not a concern because the market will self regulate.

...is the response with the same level of nuance as is present in your comment.

Human incentives are much more complicated than that. The incentives that capitalism creates are much more complicated than that.

> Capitalism at its core relies on exponential growth, since every investor wants ROI

No it doesn't. You can have capitalism in a world where growth is zero or negative, nothing much happens except the world getting slightly worse (a recession).

Criticisms of capitalism on the other hand do rely on BS claims about exponential growth.

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