The Debt Bomb | Art Berman
What if everything we’ve been taught about economics—about value, money, and growth—is fundamentally backwards? What if our projections for the future aren’t just optimistic, but delusional, because they ignore what money and debt really are and what they ultimately depend on? For the past 75 years,...
A constant 2% economic growth rate implies that we expect the world economy in 2100 to be 350 times as large as the economy of today.
That means it roughly doubles every decade remaining in the century.
Insofar as prices or costs can go up, there seems to be no limit to growth.
Insofar as we have real physical resources and production increasing, I have a hard time imagining we can meaningfully double production one time.
For example, I can't imagine a world with twice the built infrastructure we have now. (Houses, roads, power dams, airports, schools, etc). Seems impossible.
If growth has ended or is ending soon, it makes you wonder how long governments will be able to try to print their way out of stagnation before the whole system becomes irrelevant and comical.
A constant 2% economic growth rate implies that we expect the world economy in 2100 to be 350 times as large as the economy of today.
Check your arithmetic. 100%*ln(2)/(2%/year)=34.66 years to double. 75 years until 2100, so by then the economy would be 2^(75/34.66)=4.48 times as large, not 350.
As physicist Tom Murphy points out, we'd eventually need all the energy in the galaxy
We are hitting the absolute peaks of fossil fuels in possibly as little as a decade from now also. The current arrangements are only possible with a constantly high energy throughput. There's considerable limits right now on how much growth can be achieved. And there are more things than ever competing for energy consumption too - including the rise of AI (which is causing energy consumption to soar again after ~2 decades of being flat in Western countries).
