Bitcoin Forum

I've been a long-time critic of the dictum, that economies must always grow (and I'm not (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/092180099600064X) alone (http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/85/beyond-growth-paradigm.html)).

I think this paradigm is a remnant of older ages, when the spanish, portugese, british and whoever where in the process of colonializing the world and a little younger times, when nation-state's economies started competing on a global scale.

Taking a global view, an ever-growing economy cannot work in the long run because of earth's limited resources. I actually think we (at least the "western" people) should scale our consumption (and therefore our non-exporting economies?) down. I think if we don't, this will bite us in the ass big time some day. Also: we are still to a certain extent a role-model for people in developing countries... imagine all the world having energy and resource consumption of a US citizen => doesn't work.

Do we really need all the consumer products we buy en masse each day and throw away the next? Does it make us happier? I'm seeing many articles about studies suggesting otherwise.

So why am I telling you this?

Because I think it's a very nice answer to the many people saying "a deflationary currency cannot work as the main global currency, because it just wont support economic growth".

Is it (a good answer)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIq8jLj5TzU

Whatever your opinions are on growth, everyone is entitled to one, try to avoid the following trap;

The on-going collapse is monetary in nature, not due to any hyped "resources disappearing". Gross mis-allocation of capital due to dysfunctional monetary systems can cause the appearance that some products and resources are becoming scarce while others are in abundance, due to over-production. It is easy to confuse wildly varying prices, due to unstable monetary flows, with the seemingly simpler explanation that resources are disappearing.

Food, clothing, energy and shelter are historically cheaper than they have ever been to produce (measured in a stable basis). If prices seem like they are going up to you, you are probably saving in the wrong 'currency'.

When normal people say "resources", they mean natural resources like timber, fresh water, oil and coal.  They don't mean produced goods like hamburgers, clothing and houses.

You are right. But how many normal normal people do you know that are complaining that they just cannot buy timber, fresh water, oil and coal for love nor money?

The myth that normal people have been sold by the green-socialist lobby is that these "natural resources" are becoming more scarce while the actual goods they need to survive, hamburger, clothes, housing, supposedly produced by these "dwindling resources" are in reality becoming more plentiful and cheaper .... happily for the green-socialist lobby normal people are happy to live with this paradox. It is called cognitive dissonance I think.

Resource scarcity is a convenient myth. Convenient for green-socialist lobby to scare people over to their envy and control driven cause and convenient for the inflationistas who can say "see, prices are going up because resources are dwindling" whilst they rape the monetary system.

Unless you have better explanation of how it is that produced goods that are needed by humanity are becoming more plentiful while "natural resources" are dwindling?

Perhaps your definition of what is a resource needs some refining?

Define resources correctly and go from there. Until that point the argument is ill-defined.

• We need further growth. If you don't grow along, fine with me, but nobody should suggest for others should stop. I'm one of those who want to push ever onward, I see no reason to stop before we have a Dyson Sphere, complete with means to expand to other solar systems. If we stop growing, we will vanish like the dinosaurs on the next cosmic event, and that is not my intention.
• The deflationary concept of Bitcoin doesn't hinder anyone from using it to trade. A frozen Bitcoin does not affect the moving of real-world items until it is spent; this scales down hoarders to a tiny fraction of economic activity.
• If deflation has a disadvantage, it currently is negligible against the problem of fiat currencies: not being able to pay cheaply and quickly across borders.

We require a stable, global currency. Further details are unimportant. I don't even see Bitcoin as a nice design. But it's an option people started to accept that is stable and global, and that makes it superior to everything we have had before.

Still, the actual goal of the whole operation -- in my eyes -- is economic growth. It would be kind of strange to abandon the main point just to prove that some tool can work. Luckily, we need not. ;)

wage slavery -> more technology -> more 'resources', fewer 'sources'

Resources are not limited, my friend, they are produced by capitalists. An economy can be ever-growing so long as specialization, technology, and innovation can continue occurring.

This doesn't prove my point but is a fun anecdote... the known global supply of oil is larger today than it was 10, 50, or 100 years ago. How can this be if we use so much of it? The answer is that innovation and technology allow us to get more out of the ground. Eventually, oil won't even be used and a new energy source will take its place.

If you see an economy that is not growing, you will probably find a government that is trying to make it grow.

cue all the libertarians who don't understand even basics about ecology....

i agree that a steady state economy is both desirable and necessary.

i spent too many years arguing politics on other web forums to argue about it here though.

+1 In the Nineteenth Century, Malthusians were fretting about Peak Coal.

The earth give us more energy in one hour than the whole of humanity use in one year. Plus, humanity is becoming more energy efficient over time. The western lifestyle is already transforming into an information lifestyle, rather than a materialistic lifestyle. We will collectively realize that things...are just things. Useful, sometime...but they're just that..things.

We provide and consume information. The rest are just support system for our bodies.

Happiness is just one quality to measure in the life of a human being. Happiness is not everything.

That's nonsense because when there's a growth in the economy, the currency deflate.

.. a tired and jaded political ecologist ... you are ripe for conversion to libertarianism then, welcome!

Ecology does not provide "resources", people value whichever materials from their surroundings that are most efficient to fulfill their needs. Last century it was iron-ore from the ground, this century it is carbon fibre, 2 millenia ago it was tin, next century it maybe matter transmutators. Resource substitution is the missing link in your arguments for the ecosystem protection.

I like a walk in the forest and playing with the animals as much as the next guy.

Awesome quote! So true...

Resources ARE limited period, and REAL science tells us so, no matter what economists want to believe.
If you chop down a tree you have no tree left. You have to wait years for it to grow again, and yet this BASIC thing is not taken into account by our current economic system.
We have built an infinite-growth model based on a finite Earth. Its kind of an anti-economic system, if by economic we mean "economising" resources.

I would recommend watching "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" to the people that are beginning to open their eyes to the truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
It talks about all these problems but the interesting part is when they propose an alternate economic-paradigm not based on money but on resources. It revolves around the idea of calculating all the resources of the earth and then trying to SCIENTIFICALLY distribute them the best way possible. Its the future, if we live to build it.
Its dumb to hope that profit alone will solve all our problems yet we are made into believing it. :-\

Define resources.

REAL scientists define the terms of their arguments.

Its not a good answer, for two reasons:

1. Price deflation does not stop growth. The answer to those people is pointing out that their theories are wrong, as multiple historic evidence show. In fact, inflation stops growth because it creates malinvestments.

2. You are asuming that growing means consuming more resources, but growing can mean consuming less resources. For example, we have today computers that consume less electricity and have more computing power than computers built 5 years ago. We have grown increasing productivity by discovering new technology and has allowed us to have more with less resources.

First: The Federal Reserve system has, as its basic premise, that an elite group of bankers have the power to magically reduce (NEVER increase) the value of my money, even after it is already in my pocket. When they do this, the stolen funds appear magically back in their hands, just like a dollar-bill attached to the end of a fishing reel, and now they are able to spend that money, instead of me.

Clearly this state of things is a benefit to them, but is no benefit to me whatsoever.

Therefore the-powers-that-be have a strong interest in convincing me that this whole situation is somehow for my own good, or at the very least is for some "greater good". They also have an interest in convincing me that the topic is extremely advanced, and boring, and beyond my comprehension.

Therefore I think the deflation argument is a bit of bullshit constructed for that purpose. I look at it similarly to the way some people might claim that the Great Depression was "caused by the gold standard", when in fact the Great Depression was actually caused by the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax, passed 20 years previously, and all of the ensuing financial misallocation that resulted in the years between.

===> "Economic Growth" is the same way... the very phrase is a drug to lull us to sleep while addicting us to prosperity for its own sake. But such prosperity was originally created through respecting individual rights and virtues. What about "economic liberty" and "voluntary association" ... these are what actually produced our prosperity, not "growth," which sounds cancerous.

----

Deflation. Ebb and flow.

Deflation argument also fails to take into account all the private credit that will arise organically in any free market, as people serve their own currency needs. Somehow I can't believe that all the money will just disappear and be hoarded out of existence, as we all starve, bereft of our Monsanto food, unless we grant a monopoly over the debt-issuance of our money, as well as spending access to our retirement savings, to a tantacled committee of bankers. But hey, it's a "New Economy" and our policies are expertly-designed to reduce unemployment! Uh-oh, there's a bit of a double-dig recession coming in, a squall, really; consumers just aren't confident enough yet, and businesses just aren't hiring enough yet. But we encourage them to start! And housing is still forecasted to go down for a few more years... Somehow I get the image in my head of Baron Harkonnen flying around in his fat suit, pulling people's heart plugs.

It also seems to me that a long, slow appreciation in the price of gold, over the course of years, will do nothing but enrich its holders. I think everyone is ready for such economic security as our institutions have been unable to provide. Certainly such slow-appreciation must be a stability more desirable than the price fluctuations/manipulations we've seen this past century, under the bankers. Why is Bitcoin any different than gold in that regard?  Isn't this a good thing?

Whenever people have hunger for tangible goods, they will spend money to fill that need. Such is the only reason we have money in the first place, which is itself otherwise worthless. Bitcoin wasn't designed to collapse in a sudden deflation. Perhaps I'll live to eat those words but in my vision, I see crypto-currencies like Bitcoin serving an important "lubricant" role between other forms of value online.

That's true, and actually that's what happened over the past decade or so with the derivatives market.  The problem with private credit, though, is that it acts as a 'dark pool' and distorts the value on the open market.  A currency that fails to capture private credit markets fails to give an accurate view of the real economy.  With the dollar, of course, this was by design, since the derivatives represented a bunch of toxic debt that was hidden from foreign investors.  With Bitcoin, no one need worry about this since there is no government telling us that Bitcoin is the final arbiter of value within any particular region in the first place.


Since deflation is the appreciation of the price of Bitcoin in relation to everything else, Bitcoin wouldn't technically 'collapse'.  The threat of deflation is that it would stop being used as currency.  And the risk of this happening is offset by the fact that Bitcoin can be forked, and built upon, and has several competitors.

What I presume you would call natural resources. The goods nature produce for us to transform and use.

I'm no scientist btw, if that makes you happier. ::)

So you are saying that the notion that water is limited, that oil will deplete and that trees need time to grow is a MYTH?  ???

The thing is the economy is not based on these factors, thats the reason why theres no correlation between natural resources and human production.
Its as simple as saying that the equation is missing variables, so we are getting counter-intuitive and false reasonings. It doesnt matter if theres a million forests or one tree left, the system we built on top will be making paper cheaper and cheaper (maybe not the price of the tree itself, but every other cost tends to drop). Until suddenly theres no more trees left.

Man, you couldn't have picked a worse example to support your argument. Trees are a renewable resource, they are not "limited" (unlike perhaps oil or gold). In fact, the US has more trees today than it did 70 years ago. For every tree that is chopped down today, commercial lumber companies plant 1.x trees, leaving an increasing quantity at all times. Why do they do this? Because it's profitable.

Where are you getting your "REAL" science?

WATER?!?  That's an even worse example than trees. Water is the most plentiful resource on the surface of the planet, and can't even be used up! It doesn't go away, unless we shuttle it off the earth. While clean water is indeed limited to some extent, it's merely a question of "at what price can I obtain clean water." If the government allowed markets to work instead of fixing prices, then as clean water was used the local price of that water would rise, and entrepreneurs would figure out ways to bring new clean water in to make a profit. Desalinization is a great example... roughly 95% of the UAE's water is directly from the ocean. They're in the middle of a desert and have plenty of water.

Water, of all things, is perhaps the most unlimited resource we have. Price is the only factor that's important.

You really need to start thinking globally.

It doesn't matter that USA has more trees because government pay incentives or whatever to replant. Thats local impact, and we all know the real impact of our "standard of living" is being payed by third world countries. I really doubt all timber USA consumes is produced exclusively in the USA. I really doubt you make more profit for replanting trees in the Amazonian because if this were true then we would have more rainforest and not less.
Trees are a renewable source as you call it and I described. So please point out to me in what place capitalism is taking into account this period of "renewability".

About water and as I can read from your post you do comprehend that even a thing as plentiful as clean water is limited, so you are strengthening my point, no matter how bad you think my example was.

Maybe my examples were not the best of the world, but that doesn't invalidate my argument. In the best case renewable sources "renew" at a fixed linear rate, yet we consume them in an exponential way. The worst cases are things like oil or coal, that have practically 0 growth, yet we consume them exponentially. You don't need a degree in MATHEMATICS to comprehend that exponential growth in a finite world leads to a failure in the system sooner or later. And i really hope this failure happens before we destroy the earth, so we resource based economy believers can take over and make this world a better place for ALL humans to live in.

As an example of science... "The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
Please point out to me where in your "science" this carrying capacity is taken into account, if at all.

If governments allowed markets to work instead of fixing prices, we would have a great percentage of our GLOBAL population that cannot pay for clean water DIE because of it. Oh wait, this is already happening. Your solution to this particular problem seems to me will make it worse.

I think that's a very interesting point.

Each individual consumes more and more resources, (because of ever increasing economic growth),
and there are more and more individuals (because... humans keep reproducing. Stop having kids, people. Please.).

I think that there is a big difference between natural resources and total wealth. The main reason why the world's wealth is increasing in modern times is not because we're using up more and more resources but because of technology. Technology allows us to get more utility out of the same resources - a computer now is far more useful than a pot made five thousand years ago out of the same raw materials was then; a genetically engineered plant (including selective breeding) produces twenty times the usable food for twice the nutrients and the same amount of effort. While natural resource consumption will inevitably hit the latter half of its S-curve, technological progress will continue and accelerate without any currently visible limit.

This. The only resource we can truly run out of, and be stuffed as a species, is minds for critical thinking.

We create the resources. Until it is desirable and valuable to humans it is an inanimate, worthless, object. When it has utility it becomes a resource. 300 years ago large, untapped oil, gas and uranium deposits were unknown to man and worth nothing. The prized resources from that same era likely have been substituted by better, cheaper, technically superior alternatives and are now worthless again.

Resource scarcity is the same old Malthusian myth that won't die, no matter how many times it is proved wrong. Like Keynesian monetary theories.

So we all agree that humans have reached this point of civlization because of science and technology. From fire to microwave ovens what really solves our problems at the end of the day is technology, not tribalism, feudalism, comunism, capitalism or any other thing. Thats why a RBE is based around science and technology, not money, profit or politics.

I couldn't care less about keynesians or the church, to me its all based around beliefs and faith, not scientific facts. Science has no ego, contrary to beliefs that think they posses the ultimate truth. Science has no room for opinion. You either prove that something is right or wrong or you stfu and play other games.

I dont think you have disproven my "myth" at all. Again, give me facts that scientifically prove that earth's resources renew following an exponential function or will in the future. Prove to me that exponentially consuming oil, for example, will not end with oil depletion.
Your myth, on the contrary, falls under its own weight and it should be evident. What you have is faith. And I know its difficult arguing with people that are not able to question their beliefs. "Its the truth and theres no room for opinion". Who is your leader?

Nature IS a dictatorship. And its the only dictatorship we cannot end no matter how smart we think we are.

You still haven't defined exactly what you mean when you loosely refer to "resources" everywhere in your arguments, so they are based on sand. Not science.

I have already shown, and you haven't refuted, that the actual resources humanity desires is a temporal phenomena that changes with technological advance. It can change quite abruptly, look around at what is happening right here. Domestic scale fusion reactors may come on stream next year.

Are you saying that humanity is going to cease to advance technologically?

Is this what you mean by running out of resources?

As long as we are still leaving the planet in better shape for the next generation than we found it, there is no reason to think the place has become unihabitable for future generations because of "resource depletion". You are conflating pollution and resource extraction if that is what you are erroneously thinking.

We are? :o

Considering the millions of hectares of forest lost each year, extinguishing species, overfishing, etc, I wouldn't say so.

No, see, you don't understand.  As long as we use all of those worthless resources to build needed things like SUVs and strip malls, then we're making the world a better place.

Destruction of forest, extinguishing species, overfishing is a result of the inability to own these resources, not resource scarcity.

In any case, if we ever figure out how to mine asteroid...a single asteroid will be more than all the building, electronics, roads, and all the other material things that's made out of lead, steel, silicon, gold, etc, combined. Gold will cease to be the storage of wealth.

Assuming our population don't grow like rabbits and our hunger for resources don't grow like rabbits, it might be the all things that we will ever need for building anything.

The next question is how do we get enough energy? Do we get it from nuclear power on earth or absorb energy from the sun?

This is getting pointless and has implications far greater than the topic of the post suggest.

"actual resources humanity desires is a temporal phenomena that changes with technological advance" Actual "superfluous" resources you mean. Silk and gold, now its Nike and Apple. Thats what this growth is all about.
Another piece of the puzzle, our best friend energy! Since we began producing energy with oil and coal we haven't changed that much. And that was a long time ago. Exponential consumption of a limited resource = fail. And technology does have alternatives but they are not profitable so the problem is unresolved. The paradigm even goes against technological advance.
Unquestionable human needs: food, water, shelter, love... they have not changed and will never change. Without them we DIE. Yet we don't provide food nor water nor shelter for each and every member of our species. Yet we built a society where crime, depression, obsession, stress, suicides... are growing decade after decade. Where our idea of love is getting a 300$ present at christmas.

Thats one valid distinction between resources. Needed for survival and others. We are not even granting the survival of three fucking fourths our species. And you are wrong. Pollution = destroying the earth = not having even the basic resources.

Humanity won't stop advancing technologically, and i dont mean that by resources. Thats what i think being human is about. But we could stall, it has happened before, and i think thats where were headed because of our unsustainable economic paradigm.
Egypt was building pyramids 2000 a.c. and that level of technology was lost for millennia. Look at the middle-ages. Read about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism "Its time of construction is now estimated between 150 and 100 BC.[4] The degree of mechanical sophistication is comparable to a 19th century Swiss clock."

Open your scope. Open your mind. Really. Watch the film i posted before. If you can make your mind around the fact that our way of thinking depends on education and culture you can skip directly to Chapter II at 00:42 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w#t=42m10s
Chapter III is a proposed solution to our problems.

Not inability to own resources. Its the system that demands profit while theres no profit in preserving the earth.

Our population grows like rabbits. Our hunger for resources grow like rabbits but not directly because of what would be expected: population, but because 1/4 of the world needs more and more and more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png

About the asteroid. We don't even go to the fucking moon anymore because now its not a penis race and its not profitable. And your alarm clock could now be reprogrammed to guide us there.

About the energy, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
There are three stages of civilization and we are not even in stage 1... the direction is clear.

Nobody figures out how to own school fishes, so everyone compete for the remaining fishes. It's a tradegy of the commons situation.


It is a transportation problem, not a resource allocation problem. Not enough infrastructure, no market institutions, no speculators, etc.

/me points to SpaceX.

Well this is just a huge emotive rant that is not going solve anything, let alone define the problem more succinctly.

Have you defined what a resource is yet? I don't think I've seen the answer to this in your writings thus far, yet you use the term everywhere.

You seem to keep sliding around that point and back into the doom and gloom is nigh stuff.

If you dont know what a word means theres a thing called dictionaries. But i know you know what i mean and that you are deliberately playing dumb in desperate hope my reasoning can be rejected.

Well, according to mother_of_another's argument, something will be invented (http://prometheusfusionperfection.com), or something we already have (solar) improved enough, before the resources we currently use for energy production will be depleted. (if we continue in this manner without new/better technology, these natural resources will be used up at some point, according to ender's argument)

Now just because in the past it has been the case that we always shifted our technology in time, this doesn't, in my mind, allow us to stand by and just assume this will be the case in the future.

If we fail this and humans are extinct, the question of wether or not we left a "better" planet, is not one we can answer, because life after us might have a wholly different set of values and judge that diffently. But that's not the point.

I'm not really sure any more about my original point, but I'm still of the opinion that we as western citizens should reduce exploiting both nature and other people in order to protect our outrageous wealth and become even more obese and unhappy.

I have a feeling (for wholly unscientific reasons), that bitcoin might play a role in this process.

On a positive note, a solar power plant that works 24h a day is going to be built in Nevada. (It stores energy as heat, by using molten salt. That's why it also works during the night).
http://blogs.forbes.com/toddwoody/2011/05/19/obama-administration-grants-737-million-for-a-247-solar-power-plant/ (http://blogs.forbes.com/toddwoody/2011/05/19/obama-administration-grants-737-million-for-a-247-solar-power-plant/)
We'll see how it turns out.

So, yes, technological progress and innovation are good.
Wasting resources, however, should be avoided.

I question the whole notion of happiness as the ultimate goal of humanity.

Meanwhile, our obesity is caused by evolutionary maladapation. We now live in a world of extremely rich nutrient, but our body still carve fats, sugar, and carbohydrate to the detriment of our health.

As the world become more prosperous, we will face widespread obesity.

I'm not going to write much, but the OP misunderstands the meaning of economic growth.

Economic growth doesn't mean consuming more Earth resources and throwing things away.

It means satisfying people needs and wishes (demands) more and better, and that must take the existent amount of resources (offer) into consideration. Basically economic growth means improving people's life, in what concern the access to scarce resources.

Well, unfortunately, GDP only measures what is produced.
Meaning that if you destroy things, that will not be taken into account. But when they get rebuilt, that counts, and increases the GDP.
So, destroying things actually increases the GDP.

I'm quite aware of the dictionary word. I was asking how you define it because your arguments do not follow on the dictionary basis.

This is demonstrably false. Let me demonstrably it for you:

Electricity is a renewable resource. Mankind has increased electricity exponentially.

Or another example, Dubai is a city that grew out of the sand within 15 years. Population exploded and with it the demand for clean water exploded. Your theory would state that it'd be impossible for Dubai to grow exponentially, because it would run out of water - water being produced only in a "linear" fashion.

But of course, Dubai doesn't care about your theory. The solution was simply to build more desalination plants, thus increasing clean water exponentially along with population.

Man creates the resources it needs. We make clean water. We grow trees. We find new energy when old sources run dry. If we can't do these things, prices rise and alternatives are found.

Your concerns about "deforestation" etc have to do with a lack of private property enforcement, and thus you see a tragedy of the commons. Protect private property and resource issues are null.

Most electricity is created using coal.  Coal is not renewable on non-geologic timeframes.  It is expected to last only another few hundred years.


Dubai went bankrupt in the housing crash, and had to be bailed out by it's neighbor Abu Dhabi, which owns the energy resources necessary to run desalination plants.

They aren't profitable because we have plenty of coal. If/when coal becomes scarce, alternatives will be profitable, as long as there is demand for energy.

Oh, you're talking about GDP growth then... GDP is indeed a dangerous statistic, and politicians desires to maximize it no matter what produce stupid behaviors as you point out.
Just a correction, I believe GDP actually measures what is consumed, not what is produced. If something is produced but saved instead of consumed, I don't think it enters the GDP.

LOL so we only have another few hundred years to find alternatives to coal?  Yikes we're doomed!

The fact that Dubai's government needed a huge loan from Abu Dhabi doesn't invalidate my point. Abu Dhabi experienced similar growth and the clean water/desalination issue is the same there. The point is that resources can be and are produced to meet the needs of humanity.

Economic growth is a vaporous term used as a euphemism for market agitation of chickens with their heads cut off. The only thing that needs to grow is the power of the people to make decisions that benefit their communities and states.

Money is supposed to be used when you can't find the means to engage the resources available to you. It's not supposed to replace the plumbing of society.

The economy can grow until we know everything about everything and all mass and energy in the universe is allocated to the being capable of reason that values it the highest and used for the highest possible value for said being.

What economics growth means is simply that we do more with less. Less resources and labour are needed to maintain the same standard of living when we have growth, this is quite beneficial to the environment and everyone in the economy. This ofcourse also frees resources and time that can be utilized elsewhere increasing the standard of living, but it is up to you if you wanna do that or not...

I quite don't fit the phrase "we do more with less".
The part of reducing the labour force needed I can see, machines are more profitable than humans by a wide margin. We have been able to mechanize agriculture and industry so people in the first world now quasi-entirely work on the service sector (not sure if thats the correct english term).
That thought leads me to a paradox though, when we have robots taking over the one working sector that is left. So, in a future all-automated world the only work to do would be to design robots (if they don't just design themselves). So no people working = no salaries = no consumption. Am I missing something or from this perspective the paradigm is also doomed in the long run?

The part about reducing the resource consumption. How do you make a chair with less wood? You just can "spawn" matter. How do you produce more energy with fewer fuel, whatever the fuel used is?

"A UN environment panel said the world cannot sustain the tearaway rate of use of minerals, ores and fossil and plant fuels. It called on governments to "decouple" economic growth from natural resource consumption.
With the world population expected to hit 9.3 billion by 2050 and developing nations becoming more prosperous, the report warned "the prospect of much higher resource consumption levels is far beyond what is likely sustainable.""

"Total world resource use has risen from about six billion tons in 1900 to 49 billion tons in 2000 and has already gone up to an estimated 59 billion tons now."
source: http://wires.univision.com/english/article/2011-05-12/global-resource-consumption-to-triple

So the UN thinks economic growth and natural resource consumption are indeed coupled. Not only that, resource consumption has effectively rocketed since 1900.

The UN is yet another example of a failed organ of centralised control and propaganda.

If it serves your purpose to seek doom in the future you will find it since the future is unpredictable, particularly further out than 5 days.

You're missing the fact that individuals can own and control capital such as robots.  Of course their governments and vested interests will prevent them, so the paradigm is doomed in the long run.

So this is exactly what people was saying when farming was mechanized, then there was industry, then that was mechanized, then there was the service sector.

If we get that level of mechanization you won't have to work more then like an hour a month to maintain your current standard of living anyway cause it will be that cheap. Also there will always be new ways to provide benefit to other people and earn some income.
Also no consumption is not a bad thing, it would create tremendous wealth extremely fast if all production in society was dedicated to capital goods and technological development.



Compare the amount of resources that go into a car today and 20 years ago. It is way way less and the car is still much better. You can make the chair from something else and use less resource value if wood should get expensive. Fuels can also be replaced but there is plenty of room to get more energy from the same fuel in most kinds of energy production. Internal combustion engines have a 70% waste ratio or what is...


And they are a bunch of inbred sociapathic retards that don't understand economics.

As a resource gets scarcer the price go up and a technological solution to either use less of it, recycle it or find an alternative resources will be found. Forcing such development to happen faster then the market would drive it is however a tremendous waste of capital.

It is pointless arguing with the guy on this one ... I tried.

He doesn't understand RESOURCE SUBSTITUTION THEORY (google it) or even understand how to define what a resource is.

There appears to be a whole sector of society brainwashed with this greenie-socialist doom and gloom propaganda .... sad but true.

Understanding something is not the same as agreeing with it.

If you believe that hot dogs are a good substitute for free-range chicken, then by all means, eat hot dogs.  Just don't expect the rest of us to follow suit.  And don't expect us to pay for your health care.  Expect us to laugh at you as you die of organ failure or heart attack.

Especially don't expect us to allow you to force your beliefs onto others through overpopulation, arbitrage, and inter-generational debt-slavery.

Actually, I substituted free range chicken for free range duck when it became affordable. Duck fat is high in Omega-good-for-ya-whatchits and tastes better too ... mmmm, mmm. The problems you allude to are either non-existent myths spread to fog the debate around monetary mismanagement or try to scare you to give up your freedoms. Do the math if you dare.

Resource substitution, its lets you live like only the kings from yesteryear could have imagined! Get some now!

Edit: Also I enjoy baked salmon from the father of all resources, a farm. If you have ever farmed you will know what I'm talking about.

I hate you. Now I'm craving duck.

Yeah, well where I'm from, the "kings of yesteryear" basically just followed around a bunch of cows, and cut out a prime rib whenever they got hungry.  Farming is savagery compared to that.  Wake me up when "resource substitution" has caught up.

I would call "doing more with less" just "increase of efficiency".

What if we merely produce more with more? By your definition that would not be "economic growth"

That doesn't fit.

We can't produce X more with X more, unless there is under-utilization. Which only happens if there are political barriers to production and trade but not in a free-market. In particular there is a under-utilization of labour cause of minimum wage laws creating a bottleneck.

We can of course create X more with Y more (where X > Y) which is usually how growth is used, but that is also more with less...

That's what I meant. X > oldX, Y > oldY. how is that "also more with less"?