is to start using more of the resources in the rest of our solar system. — ChatteringMonkey

before the Industrial revolution it wasn't really a thing for the larger part of human history, so presumably we could do without in the future. — ChatteringMonkey

When you say 'stop economic growth' do you mean...
- no increase in GDP?
- no new products, or new products only as replacements?
- a flat rate of change in quality of life (various ways of measuring QoL)?
- zero population growth (ZPG)?
- negative population growth?
- etc. — Bitter Crank

Even in a non-capitalist economy, I am unsure whether zero-economic-growth (ZEG) is possible. Certainly, maximization of growth doesn't have to be the goal of society. But problems arise...

If ZPG is enforced as part of ZEG, this can have very difficult consequences--a mushroom shaped age distribution: Lots of elderly (the cap), not too many care givers (the stem). Japan is or will have problems from low birth rate. So do, and so will other countries. Of course, eventually the problem dies and goes away (that may take...50 years?)

If ZPG is achieved as part of ZEG, one can achieve a chronic shortage of labor. Yes, mechanization, robotics, and automation can compensate for much of that labor, but many tasks will still be done by hand (like, picking raspberries or strawberries). Will there be enough labor to produce the surplus of food in one area needed for sale or donation elsewhere? — Bitter Crank

Some surplus of wealth will be needed to pay for legacy costs: retired nuclear plants have to be looked after and eventually deconstructed. Infrastructure can't be abandoned until it really isn't needed. Highways, for instance, have to be drivable (freight, for instance) until freight is moved entirely by rail (over long distances). Refineries have to be maintained until there is no further need for processed hydrocarbons. Toxic waste sites have to be stabilized and cleaned up. Bad policy (burying garbage) will probably be need to be undone (over time). For one thing, there are a lot of material resources in the waste pits. Forests need to be replanted (that means many billions of trees, not millions.

If ZEG is achieved, will it produce enough resources (food, machinery, energy, etc.) to cover the labor of dealing with legacy costs?

Obviously research into certain areas will need to continue: pharmaceuticals; food and fiber production; energy capture from solar and lunar sources (photovoltaic, wind, wave, hydro); technology to reduce resource use (making fabric out of more readily biodegradable fibre; cotton doesn't degrade quickly), etc. — Bitter Crank

I got Yuval’s first book, but he is a fairly generic sceintific materialist. It was one of those books I read a few chapters from but then regretted having shelled out for. And the problem is, the sole story, the only story, is ‘interstellar’: we’re going to develop hyperdrive and then populate the galaxy. That is what Stephen Hawking was banging the drum about before he died. Problem is it’s not actually do-able - we have our spaceship, suitable for a population of billions, but it’s dangerously over-heating and immediate action is needed. And it requires major attitudinal shifts. — Wayfarer

Chattering Monkey, which Harari book are you referencing? — Bitter Crank

Continual economic expansion wasn't a thing in the centuries preceding the IR. What made it possible was a somewhat stagnant society that had a low level of technology. (The medieval period wasn't the dark ages it was made out to be, but it was economically fairly tame.

How much stagnant society can we stand? — Bitter Crank

Be sure to calculate the cost of fetching useful ore from asteroids before you decide that is a workable solution. — Bitter Crank

But the whole idea of 'prosperity without growth' is contrary to capitalist economics. — Wayfarer

But why do you think it [interstellar travel] is not do-able, from what i've gathered it would be possible even with current technology. — ChatteringMonkey

Because the distances involved are staggeringly enormous. Don’t forget that a ‘light year’ is the distance light travels in a year which is roughly nine and a half trillion km. And interstellar travel talks in multiples of that. The amounts of time - millions of years - and energy involved to traverse such distances put it forever out of reach. I think we’ve been deluded by the popular Star Wars images of Star Wars and so on [Lawrence Krauss published a great book years ago called The Physics of Star Trek which discusses what would be physically required to replicate some of those technologies.]

My view is that the earth is the spaceship, the only one we’ve got, the only one we’ll ever have. See Spaceship Earth — Wayfarer

I'm reading Sapiens right now — ChatteringMonkey

Because the distances involved are staggeringly enormous. Don’t forget that a ‘light year’ is the distance light travels in a year which is roughly nine and a half trillion km. And interstellar travel talks in multiples of that. The amounts of time - millions of years - and energy involved to traverse such distances put it forever out of reach. I think we’ve been deluded by the popular Star Wars images of Star Wars and so on [Lawrence Krauss published a great book years ago called The Physics of Star Trek which discusses what would be physically required to replicate some of those technologies.]

My view is that the earth is the spaceship, the only one we’ve got, the only one we’ll ever have. See Spaceship Earth — Wayfarer

plan B — ChatteringMonkey

Governments historically don't exactly have a good trackrecord of interfering in economics, so it's hard to see how trying to stop economic growth could work. — ChatteringMonkey

What economist seem to more or less agree on too, is that there is a problem with environmental and also social costs being externalised when the economy is left to its own devices. This is where I would try to find effective ways of regulating it. — ChatteringMonkey

Trust me, I think that they could do that.

There are many ways like starting a civil war or simply adapting the economic policy of Venezuela, just to name a few examples. In Venezuela they have been successfull in getting the economic growth rate to be less than -10%. So it's totally possible. Likely the Syrian government has achieved even a bigger decrease in GDP growth than Venezuela as they have deliberately pushed masses of their own citizens into exile. — ssu

The biggest problem in our time is that the procedure of making regulations, laws and governmental supervision has been basically taken over lobbyists, which push a very narrow agenda of their employers. These employers, mainly big corporations but also other pressure groups, do not think that it's there duty to push anything else than their narrow self-centered agenda. They (the employers of lobbyists) can just assume that the politicians would further the agenda of the voters as they have been elected by the people. But once the system is taken over by lobbyists, it doesn't function so anymore. — ssu

I guess it goes so that the more affluent a society is and the more solid institutions it has, the more is the environment and other 'externalities' are taken into account. Assuming the voters do favour saving the environment. — ssu

Higher population numbers have a greater chance of surviving the next catastrophe, so no, we should not arrest economic/technological growth.

Economic growth can lead to the emergence of novel problems, but at the same time it generally solves others. It is conceivable that economic growth could create a problem so large that it exterminates all or most human life, but this is an unlikely risk.

The cost of holding ourselves in economic stasis is that when environmental changes eventually come we will have less wealth and fewer numbers capable of adapting (we will be less capable of change). Nature has caused us to always want more, which motivates us to constantly expand. This is decidedly a better strategy than seeking homeostasis because homeostatic societies are less robust in the long run. The change and adaptation that growth allows and entails (its value to our survival and prosperity) seems to outweigh the risk of creating novel problems (else I reckon greed would not be so ubiquitous of a human imperative). — VagabondSpectre

Nature has caused us to always want more, which motivates us to constantly expand. — VagabondSpectre

Nature has caused us to always want more, which motivates us to constantly expand. This is decidedly a better strategy than seeking homeostasis because homeostatic societies are less robust in the long run. The change and adaptation that growth allows and entails (its value to our survival and prosperity) seems to outweigh the risk of creating novel problems (else I reckon greed would not be so ubiquitous of a human imperative). — VagabondSpectre

For instance the agrarian revolution may have been better in terms of prosperity, but consensus among historians seems to be that the agrarian worker was worse off than the hunter gatherer in terms of quality of live. — ChatteringMonkey

Likewise it's doubtfull that technological innovations and economic growth will translate into better quality of life for the majority of people. For instance, given the current economical dynamics, chances are that technlogical innovations like AI will make more people obsolete for the economic proces, and will concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the few owners of the means of production. — ChatteringMonkey

Also I think one shouldn't overestimate our ability to handle increasingly powerfull technologies. We are still only monkeys with a slightly bigger brain in the end. So either we will make mistakes and bad things will happen, or we delegate more and more to computer algorithms and AI and then we lose control over the whole thing. I don't really like any of these options — ChatteringMonkey

I think this is still up for debate. We have lived for millenia as hunter gatherers not changing a whole lot in our way of live. Maybe something did change in our genome, but we might also still be as good as genetically identical. The latter would indicate that our continual expansion is more a matter of particular circumstances and revolution in ideas. — ChatteringMonkey

You might be on to something.

Let's make a thought experiment: Let's assume that a similar economic boom that has happened in Asia would also happen finally in Africa. This growth would lead to the global eradication of absolute povetry and this would cause the fertility rate drop everywhere to 2 or lower. This would mean that we would be facing quite soon 'Peak population' and then the global population would start decreasing. Some estimates put this happen even in this Century as early as 2055, other estimates put it to happen in the 2100s. The peak is estimated to be from 8+ to 11 billion people. Now, once that happens an homeostasis (or I would call an economic equilibrium) is in itself an objective. We would basically need that growth strategy by other means as the global population is getting older and smaller. It's simple math: just to produce the similar amount of GDP with a decreasing population, the per capita GDP growth has to increase. A problem for our great grandchildren and later generations — ssu

Actually that is not the consensus. The objectively measurable metrics like health and lifespan improved when we made the switch to agrarianism. There was a period of time when we were still figuring agriculture out (we had nutritional deficits before we got it right) but in very short order we have surpassed hunter-gatherers in the above metrics.

"Quality of life" in terms of happiness doesn't favor hunter-gatherers either. It turns out that humans are generally happy whether they're plowing fields or climbing trees for nourishment. The main difference is that the hunter-gatherers die much younger. — VagabondSpectre

Those millennia spent under the green canopy wern't unchanging. During that time human groups were growing, shrinking, dispersing, congregating, warring, making peace, discovering technology and forgetting it too; human groups were being formed and dying off in an environment of harsh selection. It's not that all human groups lived the same as ancient hunter gatherers, it's that those groups which tended not to behave like typical hunter gatherers (egalitarian nomads), tended to die out. In other words, it's not that we were unchanging, it's that the environment tended to kill off all deviation thanks to our then primitive survival strategies and infrastructure. — VagabondSpectre

We've had nukes since the 40's, and we havn't managed to fuck that up yet, so I'm actually pretty confident that we can handle AI...

We're not that stupid you know... — VagabondSpectre