04-11-12, 07:48 AM | #1 | |
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Public Awakens to Limits of Growth
Capitalism is based on the assumption of growth...
no growth = no capitalism The implications could not be more profound. Quote:
"This year, we have reached the 40th anniversary of the controversial study, "The Limits to Growth," originally conducted in 1972. It was sponsored by the think-tank called the "Club of Rome" and performed by a group of researchers at MIT, led by Dennis Meadows, using the most powerful computers of the time. Using data going back hundreds of years they created a long term model of major global trends taking into account resource depletion, birth and death rates, population growth, pollution, and food per capita (see image)." (...more HERE) -AC_Hacker
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04-12-12, 02:04 AM | #2 | |
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In the vast majority of definitions of capitalism there's nothing that strictly ties it to growth. Just because an economy shrinks (recession) doesn't make it somehow not capitalistic either. The biggest factor tends to be private ownership of the means of production.
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04-12-12, 01:54 PM | #3 | ||
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Quote:
How important is growth to the practice of credit remaining viable? I think it is pretty clear that no growth = no credit and... no credit = no capitalism. Quote:
I'd be interested to see how the 'garbage' assumptions you have identified are affecting the accuracy of the predictions. The computer model was done 40 years ago and now we do have an opportunity to asses it's accuracy. I'd be interested in your ideas. -AC
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04-13-12, 09:10 AM | #4 |
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04-13-12, 10:22 AM | #5 | |||
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Quote:
Capitalism also doesn't require credit. You can have capitalism with credit, or w/o credit. Most capitalist economies tend to have credit, and so do most socialist economies. Credit is a common feature of most economies because it's useful, but it's not a requirement to have capitalism (or anything else). Quote:
One of those was costless substitution. In it they assumed I could turn a lb of potash into a lb of gold or a lb of gasoline at no cost. This leads to every non-renewable resource eventually being funneled into feeding people, which isn't at all possible. There also aren't strictly speaking hard limits to the available resources. They are finite, but who knows how much of what we'll get, ie the guns versus butter curve in economics, except with extraction and processing of something like thousands of non-renewable resources. Quote:
It was a good model insofar as it illustrated in a simple way what could happen, but it wasn't meant to be predictive. It's assumptions are too crude. |
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