Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
Welfare and growth go hand in hand. The more material resources available, the better off people tend to be.
Perhaps people would be happier to work less hours, but that would require them to also be happy with less material wealth since everyone working less equates to there being less stuff available.
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This is the reality I am trying to find the solution for. Right now welfare for those of the bottom 70% depends on exponential growth of the human endeavor in order to get enough scraps trickling down to survive. As does the debt based economic system. But there is a limit to growth on a finite planet. Growth is tied to energy almost 1:1. And is also highly correlated to material throughput. And we have already used much of the affordable, low entropy, minerals, soil, water. and energy resources. With no regard for those that will come after us having anything at all left even just 300 years from now. Let alone 300,000 years from now. There is an end to growth. And we are fast approaching it. Which will make our current social system obsolete.
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We have two choices: Bend back down over the coming decades using the remainder of our current energy wealth to build what we really need for a system where everyone can be happy with less stuff (USA and rich country lifestyles will have to eventually reduce material and energy throughput by something like 90%). Or, just continue on with business as usual until we break over the top into a cascading descent into Mad Max. It has already started.
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Buckminster Fuller realized we were reliant on fossil energy slaves to prop up civilization in 1930. Donella Meadows showed us there were limits to growth in 1971 with computer models showing peaks at 2020-2040. 1970 Georgescu- Roegen started publishing about the need for a steady state economic model. Which Herman Daly and others continued from 1980. Current contemporaries like Jason Hickel, Daniel Christian Wahl and 1,000's of others are now laying out a new social system that can replace this obsolete, growth based and consumptive current one.