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Sustainability is really the achilles heel of inflationary economics. The Earth is finite. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. When a steady state is re
by api 14y ago
Sustainability is really the achilles heel of inflationary economics. The Earth is finite. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. When a steady state is reached, that's apocalyptic to inflationary money systems since debts all the sudden can never be repaid.
Edit: I don't think space colonization matters here. Sure, it may be possible. But Mars is sufficiently far from Earth and the energy cost of transport sufficiently high that a populated Mars would effectively be an entirely separate economy for everything but intangibles. I don't think a Mars colony would permit Earthly exponential growth to continue, even though Martian exponential growth could occur for quite some time. (Until Mars' own unique limits were reached.)
- vbuterin 14y ago> everything but intangibles So, everything but 90% of the economy in forty years' time?
- makomk 14y agoWhy would you want to repay the debts in the first place?
- alexmat 14y agoIf the interest rate drops.
- Evbn 14y agoPeople will find plenty of ways to kill each other before the Earth's resources are exhausted. We have a billion year energy supply and raw materials are never lost, only converted from one form to more annoying forms.