Eino Kenttä wrote:
One of the things that I always wonder when people talk about economic growth is precisely that: what's the point? If the economy could somehow be made to keep growing indefinitely, there would logically come a time when everyone spends 100% of their time simultaneously both producing and consuming goods and services, preferably as many as possible at the same time, and never doing anything that doesn't contribute to the growth of GDP. But who'd want an existence like that? Wouldn't it be extremely stressful, every time it seems like your needs and wants might be fulfilled, to have to come up with some new ones? Yes, I think it would.
Of course, it could be that I'm missing something, but I can just not see the point of pushing that line in that diagram upwards for ever. Even if it was somehow physically possible.
The point you are missing is productivity. People producing at least some types of goods are showing such huge increases in their productivity that the average number of hours people need to work actually decreases. The video I posted up above some time back makes the point one way. In like 1800 a certain amount of work would buy buy 1 lb of sugar and now the same work would buy something like 250 pounds of sugar.(go watch the video for the real numbers)
Or lets take an example. 50 years ago my parents chopped corn for silage for roughly 6 weeks. We had 7 operators to do it. (chopper driver, pile packer and 5 trucks) A guy down the road had a contractor in and chopped silage this year. His pile was 10X to 20X bigger than my parents pile ever was. He did it in less than 5 days total with 6 operators.(chopper driver, 2 pile packers steady with one of the truck drivers stopping to pack with a 3rd tractor at times when they got behind, and 3 trucks). Back then we started harvest before the crop was finished growing and kept harvesting well after the optimal point on the other end. Our corn was 6 to 8 feet high. Modern silage corn the is 12 to 16 feet tall. Modern crop most of it is harvested while it is in its prime. Bigger silage piles mean less waste because the skin of the pile increases as the square of dimension but volume increases as the cube. In nearly every way things have improved. The major difference is no one farm can afford the equipment and so must contract it out.
As for ever increasing wants on the other end, won't those come naturally? And they might not be a complicated as you think. They might come in the form of durability, or self heating home, or redundancy or comfort. Cell phones with internet access is one that is fairly universally desired that didn't exist 50 years ago to even want. For example on my immediate wants list is an infrared camera for diagnostics. The neat addition to it would be built into a cell phone which is an available technology that is coming down in price. It should make me both more productive and capable of fixing more things. Another on my wants lists is vacuum insulated windows. Taking window glass from a bit over R 3 to potentially R 13 or even R 20. Would bring the house closer to self heating and cooling and reduce needs. Even if it is not your immediate want it could be society's want. But the societal list might include things like photo-chromic and thermal-chromic pavement for area heat control. (exists but not cost effectively yet) Another might be long buckey molecules to make buckey cables with, for making space elevator cables. This one is still wishful thinking but would be one of the first major steps involved in importing major metals from space so we don't have to do the environmental damage of mining them here. More metals, more corrosion resistant metals at cheaper prices would result in greater durability and potentially greater cost effectiveness economy wide.
