Comment by Geee
8 hours ago
Is this a joke? Growth is caused by consumer demand, and answering to it in the best way possible. It's not an 'obsession' of the capitalist businesses or countries. Capitalism is simply an algorithm which tries to allocate resources such that a growing demand can be answered, and that everyone has their needs satisfied.
There are plenty of people who don't have enough food, enough housing, or other basic needs. The only way to solve this is growth. People in developing countries upgrading their lifestyle to modern standards is a huge source of growth. Are you saying that all these people should stop their obsession with growth?
Edit:
I've got to add that it's true that economic policies of countries are 'obsessed' with GDP growth. It's a problem of central planning, not markets.
Inflationary monetary policies are specifically designed to accelerate consumption, and as a consequence a lot of economic activity is allocated serving this fake demand, resulting in cancerous growth, i.e. consumption for the sake of consumption, while in real terms people are poorer than before.
I think the intention here is to capture and spend more time respecting the negative externalities that are associated with growth.
Sure, externalities should be priced somehow, and this is the core problem, but demanding or forcing people to limit consumption is wrong.
Businesses need, or at the very least strongly want, to increase profits. There’s not like there’s any end to that supposed algorithm. And it gets harder and harder as time goes on.
And as usual the cart is put before the horse. Businesses just don’t answer to consumer demand. They very strongly set the terms for it. And if consumer demands go down? That’s what the marketing industry is for. To create new demands.
Some Hank Hill person isn’t the one who designed e.g. America to be car dependent. The car lobby did. But typically Hank Hill gets blamed when he chooses to live two hours from his workplace because home prices are too high, taking the bus takes twice as long and train does not exist so he uses a car to commute, and he consumes beer in his freetime to unwind from the job he chooses to work at, and he isn’t great at recycling. (This might have deviated a little from the real-life Hank Hill.)
A lot of growth activity in businesses is zero sum, if it isn't increasing the efficiency of production. Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
Total productivity of the world is number_of_people * productivity_of_human. There's growth whenever these terms grow. People want to produce at least as much as they want to consume. So, growth is caused by more people being born, or people adopting more efficient methods of production, up to a limit where their all needs are met.
> Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
I would never suggest ex nihilo demand. There’s always some seed.[1]
Women back in the day didn’t smoke. Untapped market. A marketing campaign convinced a lot of women that smoking was something that liberated women did.
I’d say convincing people that replacing clean air with carginogenic fumes gets pretty close to a manufactured want.
[1] For cigarettes: maybe stress relief from nicotine.