Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

I believe GP meant "human ingenuity" is the "resource" making this "vast ocean" in which we swim. I think that because I've seen this phrasing before.

Of course it makes absolutely no sense to put "human ingenuity" in the same category as oil, metals or fertile land. It's just a way for entrepreneurs to justify their entrepreneurship.

I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc.

Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel.

The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need.

As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style.

Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.

This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too:

The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to:

(1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.!

(2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...)

A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"...

So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).

The idea is roughly that the remaining resources (that purchasers save by paying half as much, and you save due to being more efficient) would be used to produce something else that previously didn't exist, so the total amount of "stuff"/"product" produced would be greater. Now, you might wonder if X was saved, but then X was spent on something else, doesn't GDP remain the same? No, because GDP is supposed to capture extra output, so GDP calculations would (try to) factor in the fact that you can now get more widgets per unit money. The is not easy to do, but is attempted, so GDP today for instance tries to capture the fact $1000 of computer buys way more "compute" than $1000 of computer did 30 years ago.

Now, what if you did nothing with the extra money saved from being more efficient, and the widget purchasers did nothing with the money saved from it being cheaper (maybe they put it under their bed, or burned it)? This will still (in theory) show up in GDP because it reduces the money supply, hence increases the value of money, essentially transferring purchasing power from the money burner to the other people in the economy, which they could then use to produce more things than previously.

Ya, I should have explained that more clearly.

Basically my thinking is:

- There are going to be certain luxury goods whose supply is limited.

- I framed it in terms of hobbies in order to point out that in many cases "luxury goods" aren't just frivolous comforts but are instead things that people need to achieve meaningful personal goals.

(Also, on a completely off topic note: that's really interesting to hear about sailboats. I'm going to have look into how much they would cost to own and maintain in my area!)