I'm quite happy to admit (it's kind of self-evident) that criticism is easier than building. It's a known known now that our economy does end in catastrophe - the collapse of ecosystems (on which all life, ours included, depend) is happening apace, is entirely well-documented, and barely starts to be addressed by shifts to renewables. That's mostly limited to power generation, and in any case climate collapse is only one amongst thousands of ecosystem challenges.
Knowing, as we do, that an ever-expanding economy leads to global collapse doesn't imply that we know the fix. I don't. Personally I doubt there is one. I think nothing in H. Sapiens' evolutionary inheritance empowers it with the attributes necessary to manage a global civilisation.
> besides a "holier than thou" vibe.
If you get that vibe from me, that's just my inadequate communication. I'm neither claiming to live better personally (which is anyway just more consumerist narcissism), nor to have a blueprint for a sustainable global civilisation (which would make me a towering genius).
The only claim I'd make here is that I'm not in denial about physical reality (which economists and most business people are).
> And can you blame the poor for wishing for a better life?
The poor aren't the problem. The rich are. Adequate food and shelter could be achieved without trashing our home. Endless expansion of consumption cannot.
> can it really be neurotic when it's the culmination of seven billion individuals actions
It's not. There's such a thing as culture - human 'individual' actions have systemic causes. A culture of ever-increasing consumption is neurotic. It replaces the essential (functioning ecosystems) for the trivial (expanding consumer consumption).
Our world economy can't keep growing. Resources must be extracted and consumed to facilitate the movement of wealth. We must eventually stop, even the gray goo replicators run out of resources once they convert the planet to themselves.
I agree your conclusion is undeniable, but I don't think conceptualising endless growth as mere 'resource' consumption quite captures the danger & tragedy of the physical processes involved.
'Economic'(1) growth, in real physical terms (forget the fake virtual world of the economist), is the transfer of matter and energy from our world's self-sustaining complex systems to crude, temporary, early-stage technological ones. It is the transfer of entropy to the complex evolved systems on which we depend, causing their dynamically stable states, developed over millenia, to break down. These living systems are dying, everywhere on the planet. Our extremely fragile global civilisation will not last long as crises of our home's destruction start to roll in.
Look at the convulsions caused in Europe by the feeblest of mini-crises in 2015. Far more is to come, and the consequences will be expanding waves of ever more intense wars and collapses of what passes for cooperation between nations.
We've allowed the propaganda of endless economic growth, fictionally severed from physics, chemistry, and biology, to be broadcast without challenge by corporate capitalists for too long to pull back now. People believe in it. It is religion (and by far the most dangerous fundamentalism in history). I think it's a done deal now.
(1) scare quotes intended here because the 'economy' is a Platonic fiction cooked up by fluffy-minded business folks & economists to make it seem like money floats, untethered, beyond physical reality. But it doesn't. Reality is coming back to bite them, and, unfortunately, all of us (where "us" includes the more-than-human world)
Knowing, as we do, that an ever-expanding economy leads to global collapse doesn't imply that we know the fix. I don't. Personally I doubt there is one. I think nothing in H. Sapiens' evolutionary inheritance empowers it with the attributes necessary to manage a global civilisation.
> besides a "holier than thou" vibe.
If you get that vibe from me, that's just my inadequate communication. I'm neither claiming to live better personally (which is anyway just more consumerist narcissism), nor to have a blueprint for a sustainable global civilisation (which would make me a towering genius).
The only claim I'd make here is that I'm not in denial about physical reality (which economists and most business people are).
> And can you blame the poor for wishing for a better life?
The poor aren't the problem. The rich are. Adequate food and shelter could be achieved without trashing our home. Endless expansion of consumption cannot.
> can it really be neurotic when it's the culmination of seven billion individuals actions
It's not. There's such a thing as culture - human 'individual' actions have systemic causes. A culture of ever-increasing consumption is neurotic. It replaces the essential (functioning ecosystems) for the trivial (expanding consumer consumption).