Why does our Economy necessitate growth
809 sats \ 4 comments \ @Stacktoshi42 11 Oct 2023 bitcoin
Can someone explain to me like I am a five year old, why our monetary system and our whole economy is so dependent on growth? What is the take of Austrian economics on this?
Some one close to me asked me this and this is per se the perfect opportunity for an orange pill 💊 but I had a hard time phrasing it well
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 11 Oct 2023
The "economy" isn't dependent on growth per se, our monetary policy is. If we're not constantly consuming and printing more money (fueling the ponzi) then the economy collapses.
This notion of constant "growth" refers to markets always going up over time "growing", but that's just a result of excess money printing. In reality, the economy has been stagnant, running an upstream battle for decades against fiat.
https://i.imgur.com/BFSDypt.png
Accounting for M2, spy has flatlined since the GFC
We've plateaud economically speaking until we fix the money. Our advances across all industries wont translate to a better quality of life for the world until monetary policy gets fixed. It'll just keep getting siphoned to the top at the expense of the rest of us until then.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitSapien 12 Oct 2023
We're dependent on growth because we have debts to repay i guess. If we don't grow how will the debts be repaid? They need us on this hamster wheel.
Bitcoin flips this on it's head where we get growth in purchasing power as the economy grows.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 11 Oct 2023
There are a group of people constantly robbing everyone of their money. If the world stopped growing, the people being robbed would notice they are suddenly getting poorer. Instead if they are robbed such that the rate at which they are being robbed is slightly less than the growth rate of the world, they will not notice the robbery taking place since their standard of living will go sideways and slightly up on the net (though in reality, due to many complex factors, the actual lived experience may in many practical ways deteriorate even while they can purchase more every year).
I have a website, https://civilizationmetrics.org that shows the actual growth, much to the chagrin of bitcoiners who fail to understand bitcoin without facile memes, but it is currently down since I'm dealing with migrating from google domains to cloudfare and having some issues with that.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @NeuroNinja 11 Oct 2023
The only reason that I can think of is because we humans; as a species are innately greedy. And our greediness has no limit when it comes to power and money.
Today, we all use more utilities than required and spend more money than actually required. Some examples are -
  • We don't need the processing power we have currently in our hands in form of smartphones, we certainly don't need titanium in our phones
  • We don't need concrete everywhere in our cities. Just planting thick trees along sidewalks would do wonders
  • We don't need our housing materials to be made of all unfriendly materials, plastic, laminations, glass, marbles, stones etc.
  • Ohhh and, billionaires and govts funding space programs when manual scavenging is still a problem in this world. Think about hunger, war, poverty, illiteracy, poor health among others. It just breaks my heart.
  • Plastic bottles hahahh, omg. Who had thought of selling water inside plastic?
the list will go on and on if we carefully examine the things we use on daily basis and things we discard without even paying heed to repair it.
So, ultimately the economic growth we are seeing currently is net-negative growth for humanity IMO
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