Ultimately, economic growth is driven by population growth.[0] And also, there is a feedback loop where population growth is encouraged by economic growth. Since people require material and energy input, and there is a limit to both on this planet,[1] economic growth is expected to flatten once the population outstrips the Earth's resources.

[0] There is also the growth that comes in spurts from technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized across the entire regions of years that follow them when assessing the resultant growth. IMO, such technological innovations are akin to data compression, increasing entropy. Over the loooong hall, I'd expect such spurts to have diminishing returns (just like compressing a compressed file has diminishing returns.)

[1] I guess expanding our reach beyond Earth would be one of those 'spurts'.

> There is also the growth that comes in spurts from technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized across the entire ranges of years that follow them when assessing the resultant growth.

Technological spurts ultimately drive productivity and the latter in turn drives growth. Why do these spurts need to be amortized across longer periods of time? Especially when many have compounding effects?

I didn't think that particular point of mine through, well enough. I think you're right, I should have removed it before replying.

All good, was just curious.

Yeah, you can get more efficient up to a point. What does that buy you, maybe another factor of 10?