> The argument against your view is that human desire is not fixed, but expands with the development of every new frontier of consumption. The more we can produce, the more we want. Should we let that process run indefinitely?
The problem is that we are not inherently given the opportunity to make that decision for other people. It's one thing to speak theoretically about this process of exogenous desires forming anew with every novel discovery. It's quite another thing to tell people "no more inventions or creative labor, society is wealthy enough."
> The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.
I agree with (almost) all of this and if you are serious about the above, I humbly suggest investigating the connection between time preference and interest rates.
> There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.
I agree that this is problematic at best and likely to be catastrophic.