[ytx]

Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)

[tim333]

There are different kinds of growth. The one needed for the above is growth in GDP which doesn't necessarily need growth in number of people, amount of energy used etc.

[ytx]

Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though).

I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).

So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.

[fennecfoxy]

I think it's certainly true with a fixed population size that technology helps us gain efficiency.

I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc

We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary

The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things.

Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.