Although I don’t disagree with your conclusion that growth must eventually slow, I think the limits of growth are much further off. I have some scattered thoughts on this, so maybe we can figure out what’s going on if I just write them out.
The way I think of value being generated in an economy is by doing an activity I’d describe as pumping against gradients. Like, why does something have value? Because people are willing to pay for it because it would be more expensive to get it themselves (expense here to be demarcated by whatever units are meaningful to a person).
Another way to put this is that it’s trading an asset for generating less local entropy.
Now eventually we could imagine a universally connected economy where local entropy = global entropy and the only thing of value is producing less entropy to do something someone cares about than would otherwise have been required. Like, I’d pay $X entropy bucks to generate Y fewer bits of entropy. But at some point it seems like we’d reach some theoretical limit on how little entropy could be used to produce the thing I care about, and this would result in a bottoming out of growth.
Growth would still happen, mind you, just that now the derivative of growth is flat.
As the universe approaches heath death, though, presumably the derivative would turn negative as we use up the remaining free energy and approach contraction.
This seems probably a long ways off, but hopefully we get there.
Although I don’t disagree with your conclusion that growth must eventually slow, I think the limits of growth are much further off. I have some scattered thoughts on this, so maybe we can figure out what’s going on if I just write them out.
The way I think of value being generated in an economy is by doing an activity I’d describe as pumping against gradients. Like, why does something have value? Because people are willing to pay for it because it would be more expensive to get it themselves (expense here to be demarcated by whatever units are meaningful to a person).
Another way to put this is that it’s trading an asset for generating less local entropy.
Now eventually we could imagine a universally connected economy where local entropy = global entropy and the only thing of value is producing less entropy to do something someone cares about than would otherwise have been required. Like, I’d pay $X entropy bucks to generate Y fewer bits of entropy. But at some point it seems like we’d reach some theoretical limit on how little entropy could be used to produce the thing I care about, and this would result in a bottoming out of growth.
Growth would still happen, mind you, just that now the derivative of growth is flat.
As the universe approaches heath death, though, presumably the derivative would turn negative as we use up the remaining free energy and approach contraction.
This seems probably a long ways off, but hopefully we get there.