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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

Nah, we need to break the population taboo to escape from the pyramid scheme of 'the economy demands endless growth on a finite planet'

No idea how we do that. Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself (We're starting to wake up to just how fragile our modern 'life support system' of global supply chains is - we really don't want to find out how it handles massive revolutions or widespread war!)

But it's pretty clear that for every child not born (especially in the most wealthy and wasteful parts of the world), that's a whole lot of energy not used, miles not travelled, and meat not eaten.

And if if you expect the next century to be really grim as we feel the full force of uncontrolled climate change, then do you really want to bring kids into the world?

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Suffering is a part of life. I helped bring one child into the world, and one is enough. We’ll help them towards autonomy and emotional maturity (a far better indicator of adulthood than advertisers of luxuries would have us believe).

I’d like to make more space for other life on earth for a more robust, resilient ecosystem. I’m not hung up on my genetics carrying on forever, but I do like the idea of human life carrying on awhile, passing down stories over the next several millennia.

What might it feel like to communicate with and learn from dolphins, whales, elephants, ravens, … fungi, trees? We may not need any technology for that; a culture shift might be enough.

>Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself

I am an entity that has an understanding of capitalism that is 3 planes above the average homo sapiens.

Ok, let's be serious. Capitalism requires endless nominal growth (not real growth) because of the way our currency and debt system works. When there is a shortage of money, people start hoarding it, therefore the money supply must keep growing to meet hoarding demand otherwise people stop using money as a medium of exchange. Fiat is issued via debt. To maintain money supply growth the amount of debt in the system must grow. Thus we get endless debt growth. The easiest solution to deal with this is to just let the population grow forever as young people take on debt voluntarily or they purchase products and the companies take debt instead. If you have a nominally shrinking economy either because of a lack of population growth or a recession then the process has been interrupted. Private money creation via debt cannot keep up with the necessary increase in the money supply. It follows that the government has to take the debt on instead. The government must borrow money and do fiscal stimulus until 2% inflation has been reached at which point the economy is growing nominally again. This does not require real growth. We can go one step further and allow public money creation tied to inflation. 0% debt forever with no monthly payments. At this point debt doesn't matter anymore and we can kick the can down forever without real growth. Technically it isn't even debt at this point, it is just an account with a negative balance that tracks how much public money has been issued.

No it's much simpler. To maximize profits you need real growth, as that maximizes profits. If you don't maximize profits then someone else will and you will lose. This effectively means that capitalism requires infinite growth.

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