Science Forums 2

[Eclipse Now]

Yes, I get the subjectivity of the stock market and it bugs me.

But that's another issue.

My question is this: does the very means by which we create money create a demand that the future economy be bigger?

We buy a house worth $400 grand but the repayments over the life of the loan might be worth $800 grand. Where does the extra $400 grand come from if everywhere and everyone is doing the same thing? Why, that money is also loaned into existence, because ALL money is loaned into existence, with interest.


So what we have is a small toddler's wading pool's worth of money in the system, but the debt on that, the expectation of new money on the current money, is an Olympic swimming pool. That means that the future must be bigger than today, period.

That means that we have an unsustainable money system, because exponential growth in a finite system will one day hit the limits... and given we are about to hit our first big limits (the volumes at which oil, natural gas, coal, and metals can be extracted... all peaking in the next few decades starting with oil very, very soon), then isn't it time we invented a financial system that rewarded STABILITY? Why on earth do we always celebrate the economy growing by 2% a year? That means it has to go up by a factor of 4 times in one human lifetime!

Would it really end civilisation if we kept the economy at, say, last July? Does it HAVE to grow? Will we lose our lives if we froze economic growth at a certain percent?

If we don't decide how to do this soon, nature will do it for us.