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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism is not the pursuit of continuous growth, either.

GDP and GDP growth are the universal metrics by which every major international organization judges and ranks economies. IMF voting is literally determined by your GDP.

There are no other metrics that are remotely commonly used to determine real international policies. Every nation on earth is in explicit competition with every other to grow faster because of this. These policies are prescriptions by capitalist countries that weren't like this before and likely wouldn't be after.

It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.

GDP doesn’t mean growth. A country going through an economic contraction still has a massive GDP. There are no IMF policies that favor growth rates, just the raw GDP.

> It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.

Capitalism requires no such thing. It’s human reproduction and striving for better conditions that requires economic expansion. That doesn’t change under socialism/communism/whatever.

Finally, GDP growth does not imply anything about carbon production. Some of the biggest growth sectors going forward are entirely about clean energy.

I said GDP and GDP growth, and if two countries are competing on GDP, the mechanism by which they compete is growth.

I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?

tl,dr; You may have a really good idea, but your presentation is distracting people from the idea.

I think you are incorrectly characterizing capitalism, and people are off-put by the inaccuracy and it's implication that property must be taken from people. Capitalism is simple: it is an economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by private citizens and operated for profit (the definition of profit is not always making lots of money). Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of the startup and tech economy is based squarely on private ownership of the means of production (i.e. companies). GDP and the focus on GDP growth is somewhat exclusive of whatever ism your country's economy is based on.

It doesn't drive for endless growth. It drives for endless improvements in efficiency, which are theoretically finite, but practically infinite.

A good example of this is agriculture. We have less of that precious Iowan topsoil than we did 100 years ago, but crop yields are higher than ever. That's what capitalism is.

Capitalism isn't about endless growth, it's about growing as quickly as possible. The dark ages have their name for a reason. We simply did not have a societal model that rewarded improving ourselves. We were simply stuck in the status quo. The Renaissance was purely about changing this mode of thinking on a societal level and capitalism is the most effective way of rewarding growth. Communism tends to fall behind because the system is built around people willing to accept their current life as is. If we for some reason end up in a situation where we have done everything that is possible capitalism will cease to provide growth beyond inflation.

Capitalism rewards efficiency with market share. During contraction of an industry, efficient producers should be scaling down slowly while others collapse. We may think it depends on growth, but that’s because we put it to work sustaining an exploding population for several generations.

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