I believe it was Paul Romer who was asked at the time to survey the extant literature on growth. His report: there was none.
One aspect seldom considered is the value of life itself.
> If each of us
Therein lies the consideration. Who is important? Who is "us"?
Are the people living important? Are the people not living important?
I.e. would it be a "bad thing" if you did not exist? I presume you think so. Should we think so?
Would it be a bad thing for another person to not exist? What about a future person?
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The value, source, and identity of human life gets very religious/philosophical.
My beliefs include human life having intrinsic value, and I therefore would like there to be as many human lives as possible and for those lives to be good as possible.
You'll notice that my conclusion winds up equivalent to the economics notion of "collective utility" (1 + A) * (1 + B). That is true, but I prefer to think of it not as adding more pennies to a global piggy bank, but in a real altruistic sense of maximizing human experience.
Welcome to current society. Bob is the richest few.
Imagine if we manage to find a way to create small long term ecosystems... then the cancer will spread to the stars and these birther catastrophists will be relieved: we'll go back to 10 birth a woman with 2 babies making it to 40 :D
There is obviously a surplus from combining labor with capital, and an inevitable struggle over allocating it, but I don't understand at all why people ostensibly think it's obviously all rightfully belonging to one or the other.
If I earn a dollar, and then I collect interest on it, then the interest is really a part of my wages that was withheld. It's not extra. Whether anyone is being cheated of the amount of the interest depends on whether I got the dollar honestly, or cheated or stole to get it, but that has nothing to do with the essential nature of labor or capital.
As you say, so what? Is the world economy some kind of deity, that we are here to serve its needs rather than our own? If each of us are the same (1 + B) better off, why do we care whether the global economy grew more or less?
As Edward Abbey said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." If the growth actually leaves people better off, that's a positive. But if it just makes bigger numbers on a page, what's the point?