3 ms·

No they enjoyed 30 years of stable prices and relative happiness. Government pushes a fiction prices must rise so everyone works harder.

• simianparrot 1y ago
  Some people can’t comprehend that the graph can’t go up infinitely
  • mschuster91 1y ago
    It can, if one's definition of "infinity" is "during my lifetime". That's how we get Boomers going on rampant climate change denialism.
    • ChuckMcM 1y ago
      I understand this set of comments is a digression but there is an interesting subtlety here. There is a structural connection between economic activity (in particular 'innovation') and wealth inequality. Economies that are 'stable' and 'unchanging' become stratified and people living in those economies find themselves getting slotted into 'classes' from which they cannot change. Since I tend to be interested in systems, especially emergent ones, this is something I find interesting but recognize that the world generally considers economists more boring than accountants :-). When one discusses the 'graph going up' or 'growth' is that prices? GDP? Employment? Opportunity? I've been in conversations where several different definitions of 'growth' were being used that got confusing because there wasn't an agreement on what the y axis was measuring.
    • supportengineer 1y ago
      The can-kicking limit
    • simianparrot 1y ago
      Most boomers I know don’t deny the climate is changing — they can (quite literally) feel it in their bones. What they’re less convinced about is what to do about it. I agree with those who say we need to do practical preparation for the inevitable consequences rather than try to turn back the clock in a fit of fear and futility. Norway can exit oil today and return its entire population to pre-WW2 poverty and last time I checked the effect on the world’s climate would be a .1% reduction in Co2 emissions, rounded up. Meanwhile nobody, and least not a western country, is going to tell India and China to reverse course back into the obscurity of underdevelopment. So any sane conclusion is that oil will eventually run out, so let’s use it as efficiently as possible to prepare for the inevitable change in climate we’re already seeing, regardless of its cause because it’s an unstoppable object.
  • nradov 1y ago
    Why not? There is no practical limit to human innovation and productivity growth.
    • CursedSilicon 1y ago
      As the saying goes. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet
      • kelipso 1y ago
        As long as you calculate inflation “correctly”, you can have infinite growth lol. It will be fake but you know, line goes up.
      • bluGill 1y ago
        Let me introduction you to asymptotes.
      • nradov 1y ago
        Come on, don't be pedantic. We are so far from hitting any limits on growth imposed by a finite planet as to be effectively unlimited.
        • AlecSchueler 1y ago
          The climate is just about holding together because of our growth rate to date.
      • cman1444 1y ago
        That implies that economic activity is confined to this planet. Even today we can see this doesn't hold true as we already have activity in orbit. Also, economic activity is less and less tied to physical constraints as technology progresses and digitization spreads.
      • ChuckMcM 1y ago
        I want you to think about, for a minute, the notion that you can have a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe :-). From that, you can see that its possible to have more 'dollars' than there are atoms in the universe. Specifically, without defining 'growth' you can't reason about the limits on that growth. The other point that simplified analysis fails to consider is that you are inside the system so as it "grows", it also "changes". If you lived in the 70's with the tales of how we're going to run out of fossil fuels by 2000, looking back you can see how things changed (cars got more efficient, other sources were discovered, etc). My macroeconomics professor had a funny saying that you could take any segment of a sinusoid and use that to extrapolate forward and get the wrong answer about what the waveform was going to do. In my differential equations class we got to see how you could predict some things if you new both the initial conditions and you continued to refine your model. But to predict all things your model needed to take into account all variables and their impact, and it was the unknown variable problem that messed up predictions using that method.