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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

This pre-supposes a pretty radical (yet normalized nowadays) economic philosophy: that growth per se is good.

A more nuanced approach would be to value and triage lending opportunities according to how much they contribute to the heating up of the economy, and how much opportunity for future sustainability they provide.

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I'll ask then. What happens to an organism when it stops growing?

It's an exponential process and there are really only 2 states except for an infinitesimally small space between.

Most biological processes that apply to organisms aren't exponential, they're logistic. Which means when they stop growing, they're at steady state.

The only "natural" organism that grows without attempting a quasi-stable, dynamic equilibrium with its environment is cancer. The exponential processes you refer to are not "natural" in the general sense and only represent the barest, simplest models.

We had thousands of years of economic equillibrium. It was a pretty rough time.

I don't know about you, but I didn't start dying at 20.

You did. It's just taking a long time.

i'd probably be a lot healthier if i'd stopped growing about 20 years ago

Good thing we live in an environment with infinite carrying capacity and natural resources, I could see things getting pretty dicey otherwise

With technological improvement, new exploration and the infinite span of the universe, i don't see why the carrying capacity isn't infinite.

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