The second comment on his blog says he's just repeating what Marx said, which is not quite correct but in the right ballpark. People who don't know anything about economics tend to do that.
The "problem" of exponential growth is the belief that it will result in using up all available resources rather than finding more efficient ways to use resources we didn't even know we had. Engines become more efficient, power generation becomes lower cost, food production moves from farms to factories... all of these are good things. We feed the world with far fewer resources today than we did a century ago when many more people were starving, even while we use more resources building smartphones and sending spacecraft out to explore the solar system. We solve problems our ancestors didn't have because they still hadn't solve the problems they faced.
Economically, exponential growth is required to keep the monetary system stable, but in human terms we live in a world where new problems always arise, and require new solutions.
Before Watt and Newcomb we didn't have many problems related to steam power. Before the Wrights getting to the airport was just not an issue for most people. Human invention creates new problems which human invention solves, and that is a treadmill we cannot get off.
Capital markets turn out to be a remarkably good method of funding new solutions, and private enterprise turns out to be a remarkably good way of exploring the landscape of new solutions. No one has ever been able to figure out how to incentive socialist managers to explore that landscape with anything like the same efficiency--particularly given the opportunities they have for corruption--and when you look at how inefficient capitalism is you'll realize that's saying something.
So we continue to press on, while a certain type of person who has been more-or-less loud in the past two hundred years shouts at us that it is all going to end badly Real Soon Now.
Somehow it never does. It could, certainly, but we're centuries away from that. Possibly millennia. In the short term, if the naysayers are so sure of their analysis, I recommend they apply it to the stock market and use their impressive prescience to get rich. It shouldn't be difficult for anyone who has the kind of deep insight into the workings of the world that they claim to have to manage that.
The "problem" of exponential growth is the belief that it will result in using up all available resources rather than finding more efficient ways to use resources we didn't even know we had. Engines become more efficient, power generation becomes lower cost, food production moves from farms to factories... all of these are good things. We feed the world with far fewer resources today than we did a century ago when many more people were starving, even while we use more resources building smartphones and sending spacecraft out to explore the solar system. We solve problems our ancestors didn't have because they still hadn't solve the problems they faced.
Economically, exponential growth is required to keep the monetary system stable, but in human terms we live in a world where new problems always arise, and require new solutions.
Before Watt and Newcomb we didn't have many problems related to steam power. Before the Wrights getting to the airport was just not an issue for most people. Human invention creates new problems which human invention solves, and that is a treadmill we cannot get off.
Capital markets turn out to be a remarkably good method of funding new solutions, and private enterprise turns out to be a remarkably good way of exploring the landscape of new solutions. No one has ever been able to figure out how to incentive socialist managers to explore that landscape with anything like the same efficiency--particularly given the opportunities they have for corruption--and when you look at how inefficient capitalism is you'll realize that's saying something.
So we continue to press on, while a certain type of person who has been more-or-less loud in the past two hundred years shouts at us that it is all going to end badly Real Soon Now.
Somehow it never does. It could, certainly, but we're centuries away from that. Possibly millennia. In the short term, if the naysayers are so sure of their analysis, I recommend they apply it to the stock market and use their impressive prescience to get rich. It shouldn't be difficult for anyone who has the kind of deep insight into the workings of the world that they claim to have to manage that.