3 ms·

You mean macro-economic plans that rely on exponential expansion don't work?!?

• pas 10y ago
  1-2 percent of growth is pretty steady. For how long? Good question, but there are a lot of things to sell, buy, manufacture, design, implement, create and do before every human desire, hobby, leisure activity, taste and kink is satisfied, catered for and served (as far as ethically possible - oh and without also completely wiping us off the face of the planet). So no problem with exponential if the exponent is rational.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    There are always two boundaries for exponential growth: the amount of desires that can be catered to (as you mentioned), and also the amount of resources available to us. The second one is instructive because you can derive a nice asymptotic bound for it: If you were to conquer space and harvest all available resources on all reachable celestial bodies, your civilization could cover a growing spherical volume of space, bound by the speed of light. That gives a maximally polynomial growth of available resources, O(t^3), assuming an even distribution of resources in space (over cosmic scales). Now observe that every exponential curve (c^t for any c > 1) will outgrow this t^3 behavior eventually. Of course, that still does not solve the question of when this outgrowing eventually happens. But I feel like resource availability (bound also by technological advances in resource mining and recycling) will be a stronger constraint on growth than our ability to sell shiny new things to people.