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Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today m

Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Never ending growth is an axiom because population growth is a given. Unless we forcibly control birth rates, that won't go away.
- Attrecomet 2y ago
  And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.
- throwaway5752 2y ago
  Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable. It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Essentially infinite economic growth is possible. Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline. But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows. And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create. Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.
mindslight 2y ago
> Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve. > where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork. [0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.

Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Never ending growth is an axiom because population growth is a given. Unless we forcibly control birth rates, that won't go away.

Attrecomet 2y ago
And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.
throwaway5752 2y ago
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable. It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Essentially infinite economic growth is possible. Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline. But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows. And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create. Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.

mindslight 2y ago

> Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve. > where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork. [0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.