Many Liberal Western democracies no longer even pretend to try to balance their deficits or pay down their debts. The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP. i.e. Expand the economy and the debt shrinks in relative terms.

This relies on endless growth. Reduced fertility rates and shrinking populations are where this strategy goes horribly wrong. If you borrow to stimulate growth and the population/economy instead shrink, debt spirals out of control.

This is why politicians of all stripes in countries like Canada are so happy to welcome (skilled and/or wealthy) immigrants. If you can't expand your population with native births, you do it with immigration so that endless growth can continue.

You might think that countries able to attract immigration are going to be able to continue expanding their economies and avoid the harsh realities of paying down their debts. However, the global economy is so tightly and complexly interwoven that a blow to one influential country's economy will be felt elsewhere. e.g. China is one country that, for obvious reasons, does not attract immigration. When their population starts to shrink, what will be the impact on the economies of countries like Canada?

Our world order is predicated on endless growth, but we're going to have to figure out how to adapt to long-term global recession.

Money by itself is completely useless.

Imagine two countries. One country puts itself into massive debt building old folks homes and training people to work in them. The other closes their old folks homes to pay down the debt.

Then a few years later, there is a massive need for old folks homes. Which country can afford to pay for them and which can't? The country with massive debt can keep printing money to pay for the old folks homes, but since supply and demand match, they don't have inflation and things are fine. The country with the balanced budget but no old folks homes sees massive inflation because you can't magic old folks homes out of thin air -- it takes time to build them and to train workers. In the mean time because supply and demand are imbalanced the price goes up.

To paraphrase a famous Keynes quote about WW2 -- if you can do something and are willing to prioritize it over everything else you can do, you can afford it no matter how expensive it is. If you don't have the capacity to do something then you can't afford it no matter how much money you have.

> The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP

This is all that is necessary to create a deflationary environment. It means that there are fewer dollars floating around per point of GDP.

Remember that a large portion of government debt in Western countries, particularly Japan, is owed to itself. That's right, the vast majority of the "massive debt" that Japan has, is held by the Bank of Japan. And a lot of their debt is at a rate of 0%. So most of it is essentially "fake debt", they could wipe it out at the stroke of a pen. The only consequence would be on inflation, and Japan is perhaps the only country in the world that doesn't have an inflation problem.

You don't necessarily reach death spiral when you fail to stimulate economic/population growth, you still can make it up in productivity gains and if productivity outpaces population size loss, the net result is positive for the economy.

Also, in the event of China losing its preeminent rank in the global economy, another country/union will eventually fill its former role. Yeah, the transition might not be fast and smooth but the degree of built-in resilience in the global system will manage to get us through these unfavorable events.

For one specific (but large) example, lots and lots of older people in these countries rely on economic growth to ensure that their savings/investment can pay for their retirement, since if economic growth stops they'll be far from wealthy, won't really be able to retire and this will create problems both for them and the general social structure.

As in, even "life as usual" is conditional on at least some economic growth continuing for decades; and even in wealthy countries most people does not consider themselves wealthy enough and will not be satisfied with the idea of things not getting better; they'll definitely throw out any politician who promises keeping status quo in favor of politicians who promise that economy will grow.

Yes, our current total reliance on growth has this nasty self-perpetuating quality that will make the transistion to a post-growth economy rather tricky. Since infinite growth isn't possible, we're going to have to grapple with these issues eventually.

Economic busts do happen by the way. The notion that we have always an uninterrupted economic growth is not backed with evidence.

These older people enjoyed a lot of saved time and money when they were younger by not having children. They ate their cake, I don't see why they get to steal the next generation's so they can have it too.

They might be wealthy for now but should economic growth stagnates for some time and then when the bust phases come and the economy takes a hit and the gross output starts to contract, the wealth gets to shrink over time and voila now you're officially poor.

In other words, the positive economic growth mindset is a proactive strategy adopted for the rainy days not some sinister scheme to fleece the masses of their earnings.

Weird that they skipped an incredibly obvious option #5: make it easier for first-world people to form families and afford kids.

This seems be a prevailing sentiment on hackernews.

It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good. This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.

These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.

> It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society

> it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all

> honesty, treating people fairly, working hard

> all three [branches of government] become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people

> Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not

This is a wild response to me. I don't see where I suggested (or suggested giving up) any of these things.

You may not know this but you live in the richest, healthiest, freest period of human history. Economic growth is a moral imperative even so because there are still over a billion people living in desperate poverty. If we didn’t care about people outside the OECD, sure we could go to lotus eating but there’s still widespread malnutrition in much of South Asia and they’re doing better than large parts of Africa. Things have been getting better on every continent but Africa in terms of standard of living and health span since WW2 but things can still get better again. Even Africa is a success by any historic standards. There’s a lot less war and starvation than you’d expect from a continent with ~0 GDP per capita growth.

Growth is a moral imperative. Every human deserves a decent standard of living.

OP was arguing against continuous growth in already wealthy areas (often by exploiting those not wealthy), not against growth in Africa.

The only parts of the world that qualify as wealthy are Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. There’s a lot more of the world than Africa that’s far from rich, if not so poor that lack of calories probably isn’t a worry. A per capita income like China or Thailand is an improvement over the natural condition but is still not good enough.

Richest, yes.

Healthiest, it depends. Obesity and metabolic diseases are at their record highs. That's not health. You can medicate those patients to survive, but that's not health. Go to any street and count all the people who would lose their breath after walking three flights of stairs. This is a major civilizational regression and we don't seem to be attacking it at all.

Freest, really? How do you measure this? Certainly there is more rules to comply with than ever before, you are unlikely to be aware of all of them [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

Growth per capita is what matters for your point, not overall growth of an ever increasing number of people.

Because the market is competitive. If you lean back, you don't stay wealthy...

Is that definitely true? You might end up not as wealthy as some others, but do you actually lose your wealth?

Yes you really do lose your wealth. Managing wealth is an active and very difficult thing. People all around the world are trying to steal your wealth and they are super motivated to do it. Everyday there is someone saying "you have to buy this next big thing - give me your money." This is how the luxury market works.

Even if you were very frugal and stuck your money in the bank you would lose that money to inflation. Even if you were smart and put it in real estate or Bitcoin or something else you still have to manage it and manage yourself to not make mistakes with it. Managing wealth is a very hard problem.

And we are actually talking about at a country level here - if a powerful country doesn't innovate and continue growing they become england. Then eventually a bigger more powerful country like china eats them if they don't have powerful friends.

Ask Detroit if they lost wealth when US auto manufacturers become uncompetitive.

The consumerism/industrialism train cannot stop, only crash.

If it doesn't accelerate fast enough the bandits catch up and cut you up into sewer oil streetfood.

...what?

I'm genuinely confused, who are the bandits in this analogy?

> Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.

Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable". Without constant growth, capitalism eventually fails. Unless you're for abandoning capitalism, you can't abandon the focus on growth.

I am for abandoning the focus on growth, and therefore also abandoning capitalism, but there are lots of people who don't want to abandon capitalism, a lot of them the same people who hold a lot of power and connections already, so it's a uphill fight.

This isn't true. Check Japan with its near zero growth. Nothing about capitalism suggests you can't have a steady state economy.

Of course, if you want the latest health care advances, new housing and other things, that costs more money, so growth helps pay for those things that otherwise would be unaffordable.

>By 2018, only one such company (Toyota) remains in the top 50. Many Japanese companies replaced a large part of their workforce with temporary workers, who had little job security and fewer benefits. As of 2009, these non-traditional employees made up more than a third of the labor force. For the wider Japanese workforce, wages have stagnated. From their peak in 1997, real wages have since fallen around 13% —an unprecedented number among developed nations. -Wikipedia on the Lost Decade (1990-2???)

Of course wages will stagnate, that’s entirely expected. And of course your industries will be eclipsed.

But are you arguing their lot has gotten worse in an absolute sense? Or just a relative sense?

"Real wages have fallen 13%" - that sounds like a pretty substantial drop in living standards to me.

Got to get them a slightly bigger phone every four years so they don't launch rotten fruit at your yacht.

And no, capitalism does not require constant growth. The very specific subset of capitalism we practice does. Imagine a small world, an isolated island with strictly limited resources. You could easily run that on a form of capitalism, just with some corrective controls against certain tipover states.

Perhaps some very "purity"-focused form of capitalism would inevitably be in the growth-requiring subset, but nobody really does pure capitalism. A lot of people like to pretend they do, but that's just that: pretension, or fooling themselves.

> Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable".

Also because there are lots of significant debts around (at country/state/corporate/personal levels) that for sure will not be ever repayed if there's not a growth (or jubilee) mecanism somewhere.

But indeed, "growth" depends on how you define it, on what you value, what equivalences you define.