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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The vast majority of economic growth comes not from faster or wider-scale extraction/consumption of scarce resources like wood or coal, but from innovations that make production more efficient.
The first agricultural societies supported relatively tiny populations. Even if they farmed the entire Earth, they would not be able to support the current human population, or even a fraction of it. What changed? Innovation. Crop rotation, pesticides, combine harvesters, genetic modification, etc. We now support a population that is larger than it ever has been on *less* land (and far less labor) than we farmed 100 years ago.[Edit: I fact-checked myself too late. Cropland has increased 50% over the last century, not bad for 400% increase in population]
The tendency for economic expansion is often conceptualized as humans looking at [thing] and asking “What if we used twice as much?” when it’s really humans looking at [thing] and asking “How can we do the same with half as much?” In both cases, we end up with double the production, which registers as economic growth, but in only in the first does our appetite for [thing] actually increase.
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