Assuming steady exponential curves over hundreds of years always results in nonsense. Going backwards you find out energy consumption doesn’t fit that model. For example the US total electricity consumption over the last 20 years should have gone up by 1-1.023^20 = 57.6% when it’s almost flat over that timeframe. Efficiency gains matter, as we don’t want to heat our homes to unlimited temperatures jump a comfortable one.
Globally rather than an exponential curve instead the global quality of life keeps rising as more people enjoy the benefits of modern technology like AC and tablets, but the number of people isn’t continually increasing. Birth rates keep declining so in the short term its populations catching up to increased lifespans.
It is not assuming that steady exponential curves will continue. The argument is that exponential growth cannot and so will not continue.
But then you run into other problems. Can an economy like ours—which is wholly predicated upon unbounded exponential growth—continue indefinitely when energy use is effectively capped? Yes, there are efficiency gains and productivity gains to be made. Yes, our population growth is slowing and fill eventually flatline or even decline. Those will extend the length of time before we fully exhaust Earth's energy budget. Growth will end, and likely on a significantly shorter timescale than recorded history.
> which is wholly predicated upon unbounded exponential growth
The economy does not require and is not predicated upon unbounded exponential growth.
Do not confuse economic activity growing where growth is easy, as a mandate for growth to work at all.
Companies that can no longer grow but can keep profits by keeping prices above costs can continue indefinitely. But ultimately the economic represents the activity of human workers aided by technology.
If everyone is working and there's no technological help to be had then the economy can no longer expand... but in this model of the world everyone is gainfully employed and doing something, and that can resolve in many different ways of setting cost (of labor and technology) and price (of goods and services).
> which is wholly predicated upon unbounded exponential growth
This is a false assumption. The economy is based on doing what people want. If people suddenly want glow in the dark kitchens someone will ramp up production of glow in the dark paint and take customers from companies that didn’t follow the trend. That’s the feedback mechanism keeping the economy functioning.
Growth at the micro level and growth at the macro level aren’t the same thing.
A series of fads are not responsible for the economic growth we've experienced as a civilization for the last 2,000 years.
What you are describing is not economic growth, but a steady-state economy. Money will still change hands, but we'll capped in the total amount of energy that can be expended towards production. That is going to require an enormous change in the way the economy functions.
Stagnation, growth, and shrinking have been commonplace over the last 2,000 years. “Countries” have taken hundreds of years to regain economic peaks without being destroyed.
Overall population growth hides how minimal the per capita growth has actually been. If you assume ~1$/day as subsistence level 2,000 years ago then we’re talking something like 0.2% annual growth with the vast majority of that being very recent. But even that’s overstating things based on how the modern economy values hand crafted goods.
We are not talking about an individual city or country having stagnation.
We are talking about the entire planet, as a whole, transitioning to a fully steady-state economy for the entirety of the planet’s future. If you that is anything like what any modern industrialized civilization has experienced or been built around, you are out of your mind.
This is not just idle musing. I encourage you to do some reading about the arguments being made before assuming they can just be hand-waved away.
> We are talking about the entire planet, as a whole, transitioning to a fully steady-state economy for the entirety of the planet’s future. If you that is anything like what any modern industrialized civilization has experienced or been built around, you are out of your mind.
No we’re not, just recently COVID saw a global drop. The Great Depression and WWII saw a significant decline in the global economy. The idea that such issues are forever behind humanity is laughably absurd.
I’m aware of people writing about such things, but their arguments are no more accurate than the quite recent worrying about overpopulation.
You are describing events that lasted for a handful of years and comparing them with a total and indefinitely-sustained global halting of economic growth.
Energy growth is physically bounded and so must stop (on a surprisingly near timescale). Economic growth can continue for a bit with efficiency improvements and other blood-from-a-stone extraction, but is ultimately bounded by energy growth so also must stop soon thereafter. For quite literally forever.
I'm not sure how to continue this discussion if you cannot understand how fundamentally unlike one-another these two situations are.
Such events aren’t singular and lifetimes are finite. WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, and the Spanish Flu hit one after another.
However if dips aren’t problematic long term why would stagnation at the peak? What’s being described isn’t a problem but an idealized state impossible to realize.
Globally rather than an exponential curve instead the global quality of life keeps rising as more people enjoy the benefits of modern technology like AC and tablets, but the number of people isn’t continually increasing. Birth rates keep declining so in the short term its populations catching up to increased lifespans.