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Why would you care about economic growth in absolute terms instead of productivity per person?
Because wealth isn’t evenly spread and those that beat this drum are on the wealthy end of the spectrum.
(People beating the growth-growth-growth drum are also typically on the rich end of the spectrum btw).
Is the idea that technological improvements are tied to _increasing_ population somehow? What's the mechanism there? Being only slightly facetious, but if everyone had no more than one child, that leaves a lot more time in which to invent stuff. And true, over time there will be fewer people doing the inventing, but a world with ~a billion people in it still managed to invent flight, and one with billions fewer than…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but one would then assume that in the age of automation, our productivity rates would be skyrocketing. It seems that that hasn't been the trend after the great recession [1]. Not to say that it couldn't change, but seems to me like there's some kind of narrative violation going on where "thought leaders" preach about automation, yet we can't see it in the statistics. Edit: Although, there's also a change that w…
Productivity by automation is constrained by the available energy, also economic growth could already be limited by the lack of availale energy. https://energyeconomicgrowth.org/sites/eeg.opml.co.uk/files/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because wealth isn’t evenly spread and those that beat this drum are on the wealthy end of the spectrum.
Those seem like orthogonal problems to me. (People beating the growth-growth-growth drum are also typically on the rich end of the spectrum btw).
Or, I think I've heard it said better, "If the purpose of life isn't 'maximizing shareholder value', we're fucked".
Why would you care about economic growth in absolute terms instead of productivity per person?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those seem like orthogonal problems to me. (People beating the growth-growth-growth drum are also typically on the rich end of the spectrum btw).
Seems like we could have some other metrics that could also be relevant to our happiness here on Earth? Nah. Or, I think I've heard it said better, "If the purpose of life isn't 'maximizing shareholder value', we're fucked".