(Bonus question: how does an economy stops growing? If it’s possible)
EDIT: Thank you all for your help. This is def more helpful and fun than good ol’ lessons.
In: Economics
Imagine you live in a world where the future is no better than the present. Now, ask yourself this: why would you invest in the future?
The short answer is “you wouldn’t”. You’d live entirely for the now.
When that attitude is taken across an entire population, civilization essentially disappears. There’s no reason to build, discover or do much of anything else beyond make it through the day.
So the short answer is that a ‘steady state’ economy is effectively impossible. Without the potential for growth, societies crumble.
What actually happens – and has happened repeatedly throughout history – is that you have a cycle of growth and catastrophe.
The difficulty is that your society has certain finite bounds on what it can support, depending on technology, access to resources, etc. When you start to near that bound, you almost inevitably face a catastrophe of one sort or another that sets you back enough so that you can continue growing.
Over human history, this cycle of growth-and-catastrophe has generally trended upwards. There is inarguably some limit to how far it can trend upwards on a single planet. However, predictions of when this limit will be hit have been so atrociously wrong throughout history that it’s reasonably safe to say that if someone is talking about the problems of constant growth they’re likely incorrect as well.
Latest Answers