Is there anything good about being "conservative?"

In these terms, trade functions just like technology. For much of human history, maybe this was more important than actual technology!

I see your point, but it’s a hard ask. Up until the last century or so, the only reason that you’d ever worry about negative population growth was a major disaster: war, famine, epidemic, that kind of thing. Even now after a good century-plus of rising standard of living and medical advances, most places in the world have positive population growth and those that don’t are only slightly negative. So it’s understandable that the vast majority of thought on the subject still focuses on population growth as an important ingredient of economic growth.

Having said that, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! My gut take is that the only way you’re going to start working on the problem of sustainable economics with minimal or no population growth is to start measuring things beyond production. Just about everything we do in economics today is based on producing more…both physical goods and services…and doing it faster/cheaper/more efficiently. I don’t think you’re ever going to get a sustainable economic model that always wants “more” without population growth…you can do it for a while with technology and efficiency improvements but eventually there’s just no use for that extra production. Instead, we’re going to need to start considering other things than production volume. Social capital? Cultural value? Improvements to the environment (instead of destruction)? And other such concepts. Our definition of economic improvement will have to consider those things, not just production growth, if we want to work in a stable population framework.

What both things create is time for people. Less time spent on mundane work, more time spent on more valuable work. Creating more value.

Kind…of. It creates more work per person available. By and large this means we have increased our quality of life. We certainly have more goods and services available than in the past, but i’m. it so sure we have. ore free time other than in the darkest days of the industrial age. If you leave home at 6am and get home at 7pm, you might well be driving a very nice car and live in a very nice neighborhood and take a very nice 2 weeks off a year. I’m not sure if we’ve gained more time though.

Trade increase the possibility of efficiency. OTOH it also enables \ encouraged greater consumption. Can we increase growth without increasing consumption?

Well, I’m not sure how exactly you are measuring “return”. From your example cases in the private sector, where you are taking about taking out a loan to invest in the business, the return comes in the form of profit. Which you eventually use to pay off that debt. You can’t just take it a loan every year, forever. Lenders eventually stop lending to you.

For federal debt, the return presumably would come in the form of GDP growth, which would translate into increased tax revenues, thus reducing the need to borrow as much in the future. But if you are not only not going into a budget surplus, but continuing to run a deficit, then you aren’t really being profitable. If your debt is stable compared to your GDP, then it’s fine. But that’s not the case. Our debt is growing as a percentage of our GDP.

Now, if you want, you could argue that this is preferable to some alternative where any cut to spending it increase in taxation would slow gdp growth such that you would actually lose money compared to the status quo, but that implies that your current system is entirely unsustainable and will eventually collapse.

Bear in mind, this doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to cut spending (although really, you almost certainly do need to), you could find another way to increase revenues, such as achieving economic growth or increasing taxes. Unfortunately, those two things sometimes inversely affect each other, depending on how the taxes are structured.

The problem I see with this as an argument against immigration is that it isn’t an argument against immigration. For the US, a population of 800m would mean that the US had achieved the population density that e.g. France has today. Hardly a calamity.

From a global perspective, immigration is irrelevant to population levels, except in the sense that people moving from poor countries to richer ones will probably increase global population over the long run.

Setting aside immigration, perpetual growth does seem impossible, but as problems go it seems very far away compared to the alternatives. You could argue that health care and nutrition will increase population growth which will eventually lead to a problem of this kind, but anyone who says we should avert the problem by foregoing health care and nutrition is not going to find many takers. This is a very long-term problem, and as Keynes said, in the long term we are all dead.

That said, I would also be interested in seeing more attention paid to some kind of steady-state economics, but I’m not at all expecting that to happen. Growth is the means and the rationale by which people transfer wealth from others to themselves. It has ever been so, and I don’t expect human nature to change so dramatically anytime soon.

GDP growth is fine, since that’s (presumably) the thing the debt is being used to increase.

If it’s not then yes, you’re right, there’s a problem. But that’s very different from your earlier statements I took issue with.

Why? I mean, okay, maybe an individual lender as a person, but a market would have no problem with perpetually issuing loans to a country.

I assume you mean worsen the GDP/debt ratio when you say ‘lose money’, and sure. It could also be the economy has suffered a terrible shock and needs time to recover, or private enterprise is refusing to invest for some reason, or investments take time to pay off, etc.

Judging from western birth rates, the best way to get the world population to a steady-state appears to be peace, prosperity, and easy-access to contraception. I’m willing to give that a shot before panicking about it.

You could argue that health care and nutrition will increase population growth which will eventually lead to a problem of this kind, but anyone who says we should avert the problem by foregoing health care and nutrition is not going to find many takers. This is a very long-term problem, and as Keynes said, in the long term we are all dead.

I took an Intro to Sustainability course, and now I am here to share my vast knowledge. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it turns out that once people have decent health care and education population growth falls to approximately zero. It’s weird, but it is a curve that has been seen in every country that has developed over the last 100 years. You have an initial population bump as more kids survive and people see that they don’t need to have 6 kids in order to have 3 survive to adulthood. And after that initial bump the population levels out. There are other factors that affect the curve (women’s rights, education, education for women, economic situation, maternal support policies, religion, etc.), but the main part is giving people decent health care and giving women a modicum of rights/education. That’s why population growth is basically zero in the developed world, and all the real population growth is happening in 3rd world countries. If you really want to control population, the answer seems to be to develop these countries as quickly as possible.

This is just not how economics works for immortal entities. A human can’t keep taking loans because eventually their ability to pay it back is weakened by old age and reduced income. A company can do so as long as the company has valuable products and markets. The thing that kills the company isn’t the debt, but the loss of profitability. A country doesn’t even have that problem - as long as they are borrowing their own currency they can just pay the debt by fiat, creating new money to make it go away. And the interest payments aren’t just evaporating, they are increasing economic activity.

Put another way, inflation will eventually erase any amount of debt, the only way to have current debt saddle a country with undue burden is to have deflation. Printing money to pay off debt creates more inflation, though, so you can just fix the debt problem while combatting deflation like the Fed did with private debt during the Great Recession.

This has other consequences, though, beyond satisfying lenders.

I think you know this, but I want to be clear so @Timex doesn’t get the wrong idea. Deficit spending is sometimes the right thing to do, and sometimes the wrong thing to do.

As tempting as it is to analogize national finance to personal finance, it nearly always produces the wrong answer. That said, if you have a more or less guaranteed income, and you want to borrow 4% of your income annually in perpetuity, and you have a good credit record and a demonstrated capability to make the payments so that you are always in good standing, and you pay enough so that you’re not overwhelmed by the interest payments, but still carry a large debt proportional to your income, I’m pretty sure you’ll find a lender who’s willing to take you on. Isn’t that basically the credit card business?

Pretty much, though I’m not sure how easy it is for a 92 year old, with a six-month lifespan due to terminal illness, to score a cheap line of credit!

Well, I’m 57 and unemployed, and they’re standing in line to give me free moneys.

Max out your Amex before you go, that’s what I say.

Yes, that actually makes sense. Thanks for pointing it out!

I don’t know if it’s ever been tried. You remind me of one of the counter-intuitive results of making things more energy/fuel efficient: energy/fuel usage doesn’t go always go down, and sometimes goes up.

Right, it creates inflation. Except artificial inflation is probably a good thing in a zero-growth or negative-growth scenario, because a lot of the economy relies on inflation, from the amount of debt individuals take on to the typical policy around salaries and raises.

Don’t we measure growth now by basically measuring consumption? I’m not sure how we would increase what we call ‘growth’ without increasing consumption.