An argument in Favor of a Steady State Economy

[amadeus]

Once upon a time there were three girls with ice cream cones. One of them was told that in recessions, she should try to stimulate aggregate demand for ice cream by cutting taxes and increasing government spending. Another was told that she should manipulate the central bank's interest rate to control the rate of inflation. The last girl was told that business cycles occur as a result of easy lending policy on the part of central banks.

 

[amadeus]

What does that mean to you? Just curious.

I could save a lot of that money for my future and retire earlier. If I was making $90k (after taxes) I figure I could save at least $45-50k. The other $10-15k would be spent on other things like a nicer apartment and a car.

Not to question your dream but are you sure it's you alone who's defined your dreams, not influenced in any ways by advertisements & culture.

Of course we are all shaped by culture.

 

[Ironsided]

Sorry, I fell asleep what did you try to say?

 

[El_Machinae]

I haven't been able to watch it since I'm at work, but put simply, how am I ever going to see an increase in my standard of living if economic growth is banned?

You might wanna watch it, there's some wheat in the chaff. One of his major points is that we're using the wrong metric (GDP), when other metrics might be better. That said, the idea that the economic intensity has been improving over time (concomitant with GDP growth), which leads me to believe that we can still get growth even if we deliberately reduce the rates of resource consumption. Yeah, you'd need fiat to do that; because access to various resources can be limited artificially (via government) or via sheer extraction limits.

He does spend some time talking about limiting income and fractional reserve, which I don't really have time for. The wheat is the conversation about changing our popular metrics for recording growth.