desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any exponential progression gets absurd on a surp

desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any exponential progression gets absurd on a surprisingly short time scale. In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's referring to being in the second half, without recognising the absurdity of pretending something is growing exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of whatever is still rare.