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Comment by logicchains

3 years ago

Growth doesn't require more resources. If your barber finds a way to cut your hair 10% faster, that shows up in GDP growth. Increasing efficiency leads to increased GDP.

But there is still a limit that will be reached. If a barber cuts your hair in 0 seconds, there is no more room to improve.

> If your barber finds a way to cut your hair 10% faster, that shows up in GDP growth.

No it doesn't. He'd need to profit from that effeciency first. Idle time is not reported in GDP

How about industrie, craftsmanship and farming? Can they “grow” over a certain period of time while the required resources doesn’t?

  • Yes, of course. The quantity and quality of the output can certainly grow for a given resource input -- obviously with physical limits but we haven't generally reached those. It's possible to breed higher-yielding crops, design more efficient industrial processes, to craft with less waste, etc, and these have all been vastly improved over the past few centuries.

    The problem is that these industries have also been growing by increasing resource consumption along with output, to a level that isn't sustainable (even without more growth) beyond this century or so.