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[-] fireweed@lemmy.world 81 points 4 months ago

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they're just in a more advanced state of "finding out."]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

[-] TokenBoomer@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago
[-] Zacryon@lemmy.wtf 3 points 4 months ago

You can by creating more accounts.

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago

You found the loophole for perpetual growth!

[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

But you’re assuming the type of growth will never change.

  • population growth is not sustainable and we’re past that point, but knowledge growth is
  • resources growth is not sustainable and we’re past that point for many resources, but economies can grow independently of resources
[-] Zacryon@lemmy.wtf 4 points 4 months ago

They literally said:

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible

I don't see how your comment applies to that.

Knowlegde growth may be sustainable, but it is also impossible to grow forever. (Supposing knowlegde is finite, which is, as far as I see it, the case as long as we make the definition of knowledge depend on characteristics like repition-free and new. For example, you could learn the number pi to even longer lenghts forever, but doing that is not necessarily something new to know as it's just a manifestation of a repition which was already discovered.)

I'm intrigued how you would explain that economies could grow independently of resources. From my perspective, it looks a lot like each and every form of economy relies somehow on some form of resource or resources. As resources are finite, economies can't grow forever.

[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

There are already trends showing economic growth disconnected from both resources and energy. Welcome to the service economy

[-] Zacryon@lemmy.wtf 2 points 4 months ago

Service needs workforce performing the service. Workforce are usually human resources. Thereby, limited again. Or did I get it wrong?

[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

We already have many cases where a very small number of humans can manage automated services for millions. It’s extremely scalable

While you could argue the electronics and power are also a resource dependency, it again scales extremely well

this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
229 points (94.9% liked)

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