I often see statements in the news from economists saying things like “only 0.2% growth reported, which might have bad effects on the economy”. In my eyes infinite growth is simply impossible when we have finite resources, or is that a misconception from my part?
Edit: thank you for all the detailed an in-depth answers! Learned a lot of new things 🙂
In: 96
Think in more abstract terms. People exchange goods (including non-durable goods, services, labor) when both parties think they’ll be better off, so usually the more exchange, the better. We can measure that in terms of something easily quantifiable like money, and find out that this month, after all sorts of exchanges of all kinds, people’s amount of stuff grew 1.3% on average, or the amount of money exchanged grew 0.6%, etc.
There doesn’t need to be any more goods in existence, merely redistributing existing goods to people who want them more can cause growth (up to a point). This might seem counterintuitive, but consider that such redistribution is not random – people in the state after redistribution has happened don’t want to go back, but people before want the redistribution to happen.
Finally, not all production is like farming or carpentry. Some new goods don’t need you to consume a lot of finite resources (time, energy, specific matter, human attention) to be transformed into way more valuable goods. For example, one person can write an e-book for 10000 people to enjoy, and the only costs are very tiny storage and energy costs, infrastructure maintenance costs, author’s time costs, search costs etc. while the benefits are worth it (many people eagerly pay 5 dollars for a book, sometimes even when they know how to pirate them). Once we have enough books that you’d only pay 1/10000th of the sub-cent amounts it takes to deliver one person a book, and only for the very best books, that’s when growth stops.
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