That makes no sense. Every time an economic activity happens that helps people growth happens.
The simple fact that when someone gets a bicycle, car, washing machine, electricity, plumbing, a phone, or whatever they value and if it helps them take better care of their family (or even themselves), that counts as growth.
The problem is unsustainable growth, ecological destruction, etc. Of course effective measures (carbon tax, emissions regulations, consumer protection/advocacy, right to repair, open patents) are needed to ward off mindless "VC funded" enterprising/consumerism/gadgetism and waste.
"When a measure becomes a goal, it seizes to be a good measure."
But as you say, the problem isn't economic growth in itself, but the fact that our entire (debt-based) economy is predicated on eternal growth. Eventually, every population reaches a steady-state equilibrium with its environment (even an artificial environment such as "the economy"). The hyper-focus on economic growth and our dependence on it causes all kinds of sustainability problems, whether it's ecosystem diversity, climate change, or any similar long-term problems.
As long as we don't have a sustainable economic system, the other problems can't be solved.
Again, this is not what economic growth is. Any efficiency improvement, any self-improvement, anything, is economic growth.
If you don't have economic growth, then tomorrow cannot be better then today. But that is a very different question to "should we cut down more rainforest?"
You've got the cause and effect backwards, and it's exactly what lobbyists for the problem areas want: arguing against economic growth is pretty trivially a bad idea, but they want you speaking in the abstract because it does useful things like not have you saying "the burning of fossil fuels is unsustainable" and "we need to tarrif unsustainably sourced palm oil" because then you're dangerously (to them) close to actually lobbying for an effective solution.
The problem with this whole thread is that economic growth can come from multiple sources. Increases in efficiency are a very positive source of sustainable economic growth with major environmental benefits. Slash and burn farming or strip-mining is temporary economic growth that will leave the future impoverished.
That's why everybody here is talking past each other.
> Well, the people who are still alive are better off.
No, that's not how it works... these "great reset" theories are nice, and might even make some intuitive sense, but the actual years of the plague were (almost) completely lost (especially economically), sure the recovery seems great on a graph, but the graph would have been (in most of the cases) even higher by then. (Yes, indeed the next generation enjoyed better relations with feudal lords, because labor was scarce. But usually - when people are asked whether they would enjoy a bit better wages or keep their relatives and extended family alive, they somehow opt for the altruistic option.)
The fast recovery soon regresses to the mean rate of growth (as dictated by the general technological progress).
The growth was the recovery of the population. the shrinking is not the growth phase, that's the recession. initially there were not enough people to work, to produce, to care for animals, to plant seeds, to harvest, to clean the ditches, to fix roofs, etc.. waste was enormous, crops spoiled, there was no demand and no supply, markets collapsed.
Then a recovering (growing) population meant that the previous level of economic activity was reached.
This is why some misguided people think that war is good, and it's "necessary", and that "we are overdue". But that's a complete fallacy. Those years have been lost. Yes growth was drastic, but that's hardly any consolation. Just like with COVID19. Yes, mRNA and other new vaccine vectors and tech grown a lot, but the whole economy went to shit otherwise. (Even if the recovery was again fast and even somewhat unexpected, because this time states stepped in and provided okay-ish fiscal and great monetary interventions.)
But people wouldn't be cutting down the rainforest if they weren't rewarded for it. If we patch each problem as it comes along, we're spending a lot of political will on the problem.
The human race, consisting of 6+ billion people, can do more then one thing at a time.
The idea of "we need to end economic growth" implies an extremely broad ranging, aggressive, authoritarian imposition on people's freedoms - requiring so much logistics, infrastructure and coordination as to be practically impossible.
Or you know, we could just fund the EPA and BLM, and employ auditors for sustainable sourcing requirements for overseas importers...
If economic growth is something so natural that it needs to be actively suppressed for it not to happen, why do we need aggressive, harmful growth drivers like planned obsolescence or the ever-growing pervasiveness of ads that this thread was originally about?
That's the whole point! We don't! We have to actively fight planned obsolescence and other useless ways of inefficient growth. But due to the short term optimization of states, society, people, and businesses, it's what happens nowadays.
It's a meta-optimization problem. Like the problem of figuring out how to spend our "remaining" carbon budget best to minimize suffering both short and long term.
There's no real hyper focus on growth. There are plenty of important/powerful/influential people who loudly and clearly say that it's just an artificial measure, we must look at the real problems. Health, education, poverty, etc.
Growth mostly comes into contemporary discourse when people talk about investment or when people use it as a swearword.
There's no real dependence on it. Yes central banks target 2% inflation (US Fed uses the PCE deflator), because it is comparatively the easiest/simplest. Targeting "full employment" is just as important. If there would be nothing to improve, build, no one would have any unmet need, nor anyone would trade anything, then sure, we would not see growth nor debt, but for the foreseeable future growth is a useful indicator for how much debt is okay.
The simple fact that when someone gets a bicycle, car, washing machine, electricity, plumbing, a phone, or whatever they value and if it helps them take better care of their family (or even themselves), that counts as growth.
The problem is unsustainable growth, ecological destruction, etc. Of course effective measures (carbon tax, emissions regulations, consumer protection/advocacy, right to repair, open patents) are needed to ward off mindless "VC funded" enterprising/consumerism/gadgetism and waste.