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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis
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To: carranza2 who wrote (23694)10/21/2009 8:01:25 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön  Read Replies (5) of 71406
 
it is improbable as a matter of mathematics to assume that any economy, including the global one, can maintain continuous growth.

this reminds me of how, if you had like one gold coin seven hundred years ago and received 1% interest, you'd have like 500 quadrillion dollars or something now, IOW you'd have more wealth than the entire world.

of course the world's wealth 700 yrs ago was greater than a single gold coin. this means real growth has been well below 1%. in fact it is normally very slight. just this huge explosion starting around 1820 or so.

we live in a very bizarre point in human history:

"Over the first two million years of human history, population growth did not greatly exceed 0.001% per year. After the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, the rate of population growth increased to approximately 0.036% per year, and in the first century A.D., to 0.056% per year. After 1750 the growth rate climbed to 0.5% per year, passing 1% only in the early twentieth century."
efficientfrontier.com

this chart really sums it up:



the cruel imperatives of the exponential function mean that growth will slow or go negative because the 'stuff' and energy required to fuel it are ultimately limited

i agree with what you are saying, but imo it will be discounted as Malthusian nonsense (see the above chapter and book) until it is too late.

what you describe is a serious problem our world is not ready to face. instead they square the circle through a kind of magical thinking which assumes technology will always save the day.
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