I’ll propose “slack” as a resource that’s very hard to substitute away from or create more of, and should be conserved.
All the mechanisms you mention for continuing to increase consumption in a limited-resource world are effective, but have a complexity and fragility cost. This carries a small-at-any-time-but-large-in-aggregate risk that some mix of temporary shortages and reconfigurations causes a systemic collapse, undoing much of the efficiencies we’d been forced to implement.
I’ll propose “slack” as a resource that’s very hard to substitute away from or create more of, and should be conserved.
All the mechanisms you mention for continuing to increase consumption in a limited-resource world are effective, but have a complexity and fragility cost. This carries a small-at-any-time-but-large-in-aggregate risk that some mix of temporary shortages and reconfigurations causes a systemic collapse, undoing much of the efficiencies we’d been forced to implement.