It seems like the optimal economic strategy, assuming finite resources, is to optimize your use of resources. Then, there is a complementary defense strategy, which is to monitor other civilizations so that they don't get the drop on you. This might also include acquiring resource pools for future use, or simply to deny them to adversaries, but it doesn't mean you need to burn through them as quickly as you can.
An economy that first maximised, then second optimised, would beat an economy that first optimised, then second maximised, because the latter would have nowhere to expand.
An economy that optimised and maximised would beat an economy that only optimised.
I mean, this discussion is absurd, of course, since we seem to be operating under the assumption that the problem of how to do civilization can be solved with a half-dozen variables or so. But, even within that simplistic framework, the approach being laid out by you two is pretty daft IMO.
How about, an economy that achieves hegemony, and then continuously optimizes, increases resource consumption as appropriate and only to the extent that such consumption is sustainable (over some reasonable planning horizon anyway), and seeks out and destroys rival upstart economies that are a threat to it (especially when they have an unsustainable model of resource consumption), will tend to be successful and stay successful.
(An interesting model is Norway's oil – they're maximising in the sense of getting all the oil out from under the sea, but they're stashing most of the profits away as a rainy-day fund, which puts the country on very secure footing for about the next hundred years or so. You might call that 'maximising without consuming', or 'camping'.)
I think the future of the human race depends on finding a better answer to this whole question, but I think accepting that pillagers beat conservers in a lot of cases is a necessary step to finding something better.
(I don't think we actually disagree; we seem to be arguing different points.)
Compared to not being around anymore before the lights go out ? I'd say that, yes, it's the more comfortable situation. But you're being dramatic, there's plently of places in nature where you can observe how this actually happens. It's almost never the case that resources fully run out, so some people/places will survive. And it may take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but they will recover from that, as unlikely as that seems.
Population explosion, like humans are experiencing now, is followed by ... a die-off. Not by an extinction. If humans are different, that will be the first exception to the rule in 4 billion years.
> How about, an economy that achieves hegemony, ... and seeks out and destroys rival upstart economies that are a threat to it
Of course the key here is that you attack BEFORE the other guys become a threat. Most species in fact do that, in combination with maximizing resource usage. In fact, that's what they use the resources for, to a large extent.
Now there's plenty of economies currently around. Are you saying we should attack all of them right now ? Watch out, China !
Of course, if we don't, maximizing resource usage will be what "naturally" happens. Resource stewardship is a tactic that's trivially defeatable by a single bad actor, so that won't be what happens.
One caveat does exist. This is a law like the second law of thermodynamics. On the whole, you can't avoid this, as that would be similar to creating a perpetuum mobile. But keep in mind that there is no such thing as a law that states nothing can remain in motion for a very, very long time. The longer the timeframe you look at in the future, the better the odds we'll be maximizing resource usage. But similar to perpetuum mobile, even relatively long-term exceptions can happen, and in fact, happen often (a big misunderstanding people have about large-scale random/chaotic processes : situations don't repeat and the future does not look like the past at all). But it will always come back to the rule.
I wonder why we see this so much in political discussions. You think we have a choice. The only choice we really have is death now, or death later. You'll find that humans got were they are by choosing death later.
The only civilization we're stealing resources from does not exist yet because it's in the future. We have one global civilization that is pooling a single resource base via highly liquid trade. There might be civil war between factions, but don't think a real resource war can occur under the current environment. Now, might we split into an 'eastern empire' and a 'western empire' like the Romans did? Quite Possible.
If you start using energy to bond complex molecules, you are using energy, but the energy is getting trapped in chemical bonds. You can easily achieve 3% YoY energy use growth without any ocean boiling in the predictable time horizon.
If you use the energy to finally expand away from Earth, then clearly you can achieve 3% energy usage growth with no ill effects whatsoever.
In the end, the fact of the matter is that civilization evolution is very highly correlated to the ability to manipulate energy, and consequentially to the amount of energy used globally. Locking ourselves out of increasing energy usage is paramount to locking ourselves out of pie-in-the-sky projects such as planet terraforming.
Oh, but complexity is just another word for ignorance. There's a reason that mankind didn't learn to fly by mimicking birds -- it's because you don't solve a complex problem by mimicking complexity.
Complexity is not a useful way to think about problem solving. Nobody solves complex problems.
1) optimizing resource usage
2) maximizing resource usage
(it's easy to see why some others are suboptimal, e.g. minimizing resource usage)
From a long term perspective (ie. which of these guarantees you'll survive and doesn't provide another player with an easy way to destroy you). Other way of putting this question, which is the Nash-equilibrium answer ?
The answer is : 2.
(Is it pareto-efficient ? yes !)
In other words, no matter how good it sounds to conserve resources, it's a mistake. If a civilization did that, either it would get run over by another civilization, or, if it came to that extreme, by evolution itself.
So this is not a bug, it's a feature.