[ChrisLomont]

>Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players.

It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

>So what? Make co-op financing better,

There are plenty of ESOP companies. If they consistently did well enough, then the excess capital they generate could be used to start more employee owned companies.

That this doesn't happen perhaps points to an inefficiency in this process for company creation. Perhaps simply having workers is not enough to drive the economy. It shouldn't be a surprise that when an investor takes a risk to allocate capital to a fledgling company, that the investor would expect a return for resulting growth.

Creating companies without investment is possible, but likely less capable overall.

>That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

Nothing is a meritocracy - everyone has luck and genetics. Income correlates both with IQ and hours worked, and I suspect most would consider the latter factor merit, and some consider the former merit too.

But wealth, correlating with many things one can control, is also not simply a random variable completely detached from merit.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html

[viklove]

> It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing? Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?

[edanm]

> Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing?

I mean, I guess the strict answer to the first question is "no", but the answer to the second question is - it can keep growing for so long that it really doesn't matter.

There's no real reason to think that we've reached the end of innovation - we keep innovating, we keep finding ways to squeeze more stuff out of less material and labor - the economy keeps growing.

There are people that argue that innovation has slowed down - but I don't think everyone agrees, and even if they do, the mechanism is not well understood. And most importantly, even if it slowed down, it doesn't mean that innovation stopped.

> Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?

Well it depends on what the change is and what our goals are. Most people who want the "economic system" changed have, I think, different goals than the ones who want it kept the same (e.g. what is more important - growth or equality? There are real, honest debates one can have about this, but if people land on different sides of this, obviously they may want different changes enacted).

[ChrisLomont]

> Can it keep growing forever?

Why not? Can people keep adding value to things? Only once there is no possible to add value to anything would an economy have to stop growing. I suppose in some heat death of the universe scenarios, this may happen, but we’ve got billions of years before even our local sun destroys earth, and I suspect mankind will have changed significantly if we make it that far.

Why do you imply economies cannot grow for the long term foreseeable future?