03-07-2025, 03:57 AM
(03-06-2025, 04:42 PM)bravado Wrote: I don’t agree on that one - growth is always possible. When the last “exploitable” labour pool is used up, everyone will have been chasing efficiency for decades… there’s a reason why we have more food than ever today and only 1% as many agricultural workers as we used to. The future doesn’t have to be zero-sum… the people who lost their job maintaining horse carriages could have had no idea the jobs that were to be created by the upcoming car, but to them the sky would have still been genuinely falling. Same with candlemakers and cobblers and those offices full of engineers with slide rules…
It isn't about people, or freedom or anything. It's about energy and material. Earth is finite, you cannot manufacture infinite consumer goods on infinite land in a finite system. And even if you perceive the future to be service based (which I think is becoming a more and more hollow idea), energy is still a constraining factor, and I'm not even talking about climate change. If we harnessed all the solar energy the planet receives and had no global warming, that would still put a hard upper limit on these things.
And on the consumer end, I think things are also unsustainable. It is getting harder and harder to convince people to want more things. People are more and more unhappy in our world, and this in spite of having more and more things.