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I hope you will consider - both from a biological perspective and an economic one - that catabolism is also possible. Which is to say, depending on your enviro
by rsync 7y ago
I hope you will consider - both from a biological perspective and an economic one - that catabolism is also possible.
Which is to say, depending on your environment, you can create a "better life" (by your definitions) by catabolizing existing resources.
You can't catabolize forever, of course, but it's an immediate and obvious refutation to your claim that "better lives" can only be pursued through growth or war.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoThere isn't a separate thing called catabolism which can increase available value by neither creating nor transferring it. Converting one resource to another at an overall net gain is growth. Converting one resource to another when the original resource was equally or more valuable net doesn't improve lives, it's either completely neutral or net harmful. Note that there are a lot of growth metrics out there that inappropriately fail to account for this, e.g. they measure sale price but not consumer or producer surplus (which are harder to measure because there is no market pricing information available). If someone invents a cheap way to turn farm waste into motor fuel and then suddenly gas is $1/gallon, that's growth -- there is a surplus being created -- even if there is a net reduction in GDP because oil companies are making less money while most of the surplus goes to the consumer. (Though in most cases the reduction in GDP doesn't happen anyway because then consumers have more money in their pockets and spend it on something else.)