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 🙂
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Infinite growth is impossible, but growing a lot from where we currently are ought to be possible, since there are still poor people, and it’s often easier to make poor people richer by growing the economy than it is to persuade rich people to pay more taxes.
Economic growth could represent all kind of things – everyone owning their own boat, or everyone having access to the therapy they need. Being able to replace all fossil fuels with renewables would require building a lot of new stuff (like enough solar panels and batteries to power all the new electric ambulances) – all of which requires a ‘big’ economy.
Zero growth is scary because many countries have probably borrowed a lot of money and are paying interest on it on the assumption that they’ll be able to use economic growth to pay it back. However, in theory we could one day achieve a sustainable economy that doesn’t need to grow to survive.
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