Your "rebuttals" are a prime example of normalcy bias.

Not surprising though, pretty much everyone born in the past 60 years has become accustomed to a ridiculous "normal" that has been built on a fossil fuel house of cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

They're not though.

GC mentioned "total factor productivity", which is not just an assumption that things will stay the same. It's a measure that value (productivity) actually is increasing, all the time.

And the other rebuttals were pointing out flaws with GGC's arguments, none of which relied on "the status quo works".

"None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There are many, many, many limits to leverage."

Yes, of course that is true, but there appears to be no general limit on notional value of derivatives of debt - and when there are limits, they are local to some very particular asset class.

I encourage you to re-watch "The Big Short", or at least the scene where one of the protagonists discovers the 10x or 20x notional value of total housing credit derivatives (and derivatives of derivatives ...).

Although that particular asset class is no longer encumbered in that way, I predict that there is some asset class hiding somewhere that has been levered up in creative ways, just waiting to collapse ...

Corporate debt

Why does TFP always grow? Is the fundamental reasoning that new technologies and efficiency improvements in existing technologies will always occur over time and therefore guarantees this growth?

Essentially yes. Technology improvements (for a very, very broad definition of technology that includes things like Rights) are the only way that wealth is actually created. Everything else is just assets moving along a value curve in time.

people are smart and slowly inevitably figure out ways to do things more efficiently

And this does not and cannot continue indefinitely.

Yes, but we don't know if the limit will be reached in 10 years or 10 billion years.

And while there might certainly be material problems in the future, in terms of "coming up with new ideas", I think we're nowhere near the limit.

"Indefinitely for all given purposes" is better than "technically indefinitely till the end of times"

what do you mean, do you think over time people are going to stop being clever?

Eventually, all the clever innovations will either have smaller and smaller impacts, or will be impossible to implement due to material restrictions. Exponential, infinite growth can not be sustainable.

I mean, once you have a Dyson sphere, sure.

We have a ways to go before then.

Sure, but even beforethen growth will slow down very very significantly, and might go to zero for some for significant periods. Just building a Dyson sphere would probably take a few millenia.

You're assuming we don't make any fundamental discoveries in various fields that allow for an exponential number of new technologies based on those discoveries.

This seems short-sighted, as we've been doing that for most of human history, and honestly I don't think we're very close to unveiling all the mysteries of the universe.

We could start building a Dyson sphere right now. It would just take a long, long, long time given our current understanding of physics and technology. Imagine all the things we might be able to achieve with our understanding of physics in 300 years. Imagine the thing we will discover that will have their own Dyson-sphere equivalents. i.e. things we discover that we know (hypothetically) how do do, they are just not quite in our grasp.

No, I'm projecting it would take millenia even if we start multiple hundreds of years in the future. We absolutely could not even start building a Dyson sphere today, the material constraints are far beyond anything we are capable of.

The reason why I'm saying it would take in the thousands of years, is because of this tautology: If we want to build a Dyson sphere, it means that we are still limited to the energy we can get from Earth. Given the issues that come with extracting a large percentage of the energy received by the Earth, even if we used fusion (due to thermodynamic constraints), the limit of energy used can be placed around 5-10% of the energy Earth receives from the Sun (And that would require extensive geo-engineering). With that sort of energy output, the energy alone required in order to move the material needed for a Dyson sphere from Earth orbit to Sun orbit would take literally millenia, and that's with a combined effort from all of Mankind, which politically completely impossible for the next centuries unless China or some other superpower was able to magically establish true utopic statless communism and win away the rest of the world to establish a world cooperation of sunshine and rainbows magically.

A Dyson sphere would weight around the mass of the Earth. The Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mercury (fly-bys cannot work due the sheer mass knocking out other planets from their orbits, this is actually the magnitude of energy we're talking about). If we could magically make the material necessary appear from Earth gradually, d/v from earth surface to LEO then from LEO to Mercury's orbit or thereabouts via a Hohmann transfer is of around 15 000 m/s. If you take the good old kinetic energy formula, 1/2mv^2, you find that this would require a staggering amount of energy that would take millenia to amass.

So the actual logistics of starting work on a Dyson sphere wasn't really the point of my comment. My only point was that we could make a start, because we grasp the principles – surround the sun with a structure that can capture most of its energy output.

Contrast with the plentitude of natural things we presumably don't understand / know about (unlike the sun) and there is a lot of potential for the future.

That being said, for the construction of a sphere you would presumably not be shipping matter from earth. You'd be towing in matter from asteroid belts and such.

Towing materials from asteroid belts would require almost as much energy, and you would need some sort of megastructure for processing.

What I'm telling you is that there are hard limits that mean that our growth must slow down. There is a hard limit to how much energy we can harness from the earth, and a hard limit for how fast we can avoid this. Progress will have to slow down, a society based on endless exponential growth at short-term significant rates is untenable.

They might run out of things to be clever about, for example (that's assuming your belief in the people actually being clever holds - I have my doubts here.)

When I said "infinite leverage", what I meant was that there is no upper limit to the amount of leverage (debt, or credit) that any one entity can have. There's also no limit on the total amount globally. The US government, for example, can print infinite money and create infinite debt.

Theoretically yes, practically no. So what?

> Yes, because total factor productivity[0] always grows.

Is that true? Has that been true for Zimbabwe née Rhodesia?

What about Britain following the fall of the Roman Empire?

I think the point is that you are developing, it all works. If you are not improving, it clearly doesn't, but that is true regardless of "what the economy is geared for".

If you have a complete meltdown, that's not the growth economy's fault.

I think you’ve chosen the wrong thing to worship.

Not sure I follow.

The distribution of wealth creates a distribution of incentives that behave dynamically. "fixing it at a single point in time" does more than you're saying.

Also, there are a number of asymptotic features of "total factor productivity" that are not favorable. The more oil you burn, the more expensive it is to burn oil.

The most 'always' things I know, are axioms we've agreed upon, such as 1 + 1 = 2 in arithmetic. They are only 'always' so because we've agreed on it, for now.

What incredible discovery enables you to make 'always' claims about the world we're living in?

Fine, change it to "has always" if that makes you feel better. I don't think we've reached the apex of our technological prowess so I assume our productivity will continue to improve, but if you want to make a different assumption feel free to do so

That may well be, but is fair to displace people because their productivity isn't increasing quickly enough?