Same old tired nonsense some of my (denser) economics lecturers used to spout. The idea that "ideas" can make up for a lack of resources is an old one. It hol

Same old tired nonsense some of my (denser) economics lecturers used to spout. The idea that "ideas" can make up for a lack of resources is an old one. It holds for a while, if we ignore the overflowing sinks. The economy is a physical system where resources flow from low to high entropic states. What we do with that flow is a useful application of technology in a long term view. Simply increasing those flows (moving from biomass -> coal -> oil -> nuclear) is not useful in the log term. In the short term economic growth is the result. In the medium term (as many societies have discovered) it leads to collapse. As the "sinks" (where the high entropic waste ends up) over flow society gets less and less tenable. Then it collapses. The pattern has repeated many times. But: This time is different.