No, Infinite Growth is not Possible

In my last video about capitalism dying, I took it as a given that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and from there talked about evidence that growth of the real economy is running out and instead all we’re seeing is asset inflation, as companies use their money for stock buybacks to prop up their stock values rather than actually invest in new and improved goods and services and the massive amounts of money poured into the coffers of the ultra wealthy while everyone else gets poorer (via the value of assets increasing faster than the growth of the economy) reaches their marginal propensity to consume and is simply driven back into assets, further inflating their values.

However, many, many people popped up in the comments to “um, actually” that infinite growth is actually totally possible. Really! And if you’re like me you’re surprised at this because the case against infinite growth seems to obvious, but aside from actual evidence that real growth is slowing, I want to take a moment in this video to explore the arguments in favor of just the possibility of infinite growth, seriously examine them, and then explain why I think they’re still wrong.

There are essentially two arguments made in favor of infinite growth—that infinite growth is possible because we live in an infinite universe, and that infinite growth is possible through technological changes that increase efficiency and sustainability.

The infinite universe argument is a bit easier to deal with because there’s not much to it. We may be using up all our oil, farmland, clean water, helium, and rare earth elements but that doesn’t matter because we’re gonna go out of mine asteroids and terraform Mars! Look out, Alpha Centari, here comes capitalism!

Of course, colonizing other planets, and even mining other planets and asteroids, simply isn’t feasible with current levels of technology. Fantasies about colonizing Mars depend on figuring out ways around its thin atmosphere, lack of oxygen, nutrient-deficient soil, low gravity, and freezing climate, not to mention constant radiation exposure on its surface thanks to that thin atmosphere, plus the economics of transporting already-limited supplies from our planet to Mars until it becomes self-sustaining—assuming it could ever be self-sustaining, which is a big “if”.

And terraforming Mars, meaning transforming Mars into an Earth-like planet where we could live comfortably and farm as we do on Earth, is simply impossible with known technology, even if we somehow got past the lack of a magnetosphere to keep the atmosphere from floating off into space.

And people talk about offsetting our resource depletion on Earth with space mining, but currently anyway the costs of launching mining operations into space, assembling them, and bringing the resources safely back to Earth are currently way beyond the value of whatever we’d bring back.

Open white nationalist Elon Musk can dither to the press about dreams of colonizing Mars in hopes of goosing the IPO of his space penis, I mean rocket company, but consider that we haven’t even colonized Antarctica, and that’s way more hospitable than Mars. It’s got a breathable atmosphere and water and Earth gravity and we can get there with supplies in a matter of hours rather than months. In fact, there’s resources buried deep beneath the glaciers and tundra of Antarctica that we don’t touch because they’re too hard to get to. You really think its more feasible to mine an Astroid flying through outer space than a continent you can get to in a few hours on an ordinary airplane? Indeed it’s notable that we talk a lot more about “colonizing Mars” than “colonizing Antarctica”, maybe because Antarctica is close enough that we understand how insanely inhospitable it is.

Even putting aside the notion that we’d be able to exploit these asteroids, moons, and planets before we’ve already destroyed all our forests to raise cows for hamburgers as the planet boils and the seas are turning to acid, the fact remains that any potential off-earth colonization requires a faith in the creation of a huge host of technologies we can barely imagine now before we both run out of what we have here and make this planet inhospitable for human life.

Which brings us firmly to the second, and more salient argument for infinite growth.

The argument goes something like this: yes, there are finite resources, but we’ve come up against limited resources before and found ways around them through technological innovations that radically improved efficiency. For example, in the 19th century, economist Thomas Robert Malthus calculated that at the rate the population of the world was increasing we would soon not be able to make enough food to feed everyone. However, what he didn’t foresee, among other things, was the “green revolution” chiefly driven by the innovation of nitrogenized fertilizer—made with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium—that massively increased crop yields such that we now make more than enough food for all eight billion people on Earth and more (and yet people still starve for some funny reason, but that’s a different topic).

However, the thing about efficiency is that if you use limited resources more efficiently, you can make them last longer, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re limited. Phosphorous and potassium have to be mined, while nitrogen is extracted from the atmosphere using what’s currently a process that involves burning methane—I’m sorry, “natural gas”, as methane has been rebranded. And more importantly, the crops themselves still have to be grown on land, which is limited and we’re already destroying the forests we need to combat global warming for agriculture. Efficiency does not equal sustainability. And so even putting aside the observation from the last video that past performance doesn’t equal future returns, improving efficiency does not by itself give us infinite economic growth. Any consumption of finite resources is definitionally unsustainable—something illustrated by the fact that as I record this the closing of the Straight of Hormuz has caused shortages of nitrogen and phosphate which in turn have caused issues for farming around the world.

Of course, with fertility rates falling, global population growth has slowed and may soon begin to decline (which, as I explored in “Superman and the Case for Open Borders” is another thing the Right have been freaking out about), and that would reduce the need for food, but it would also reduce or invert economic growth in the business of food production. Which might be good for the planet, but not so great for infinite economic growth.

And so while it’s true that there’s a history of technological improvements pushing past what were once thought to be limits to growth, there isn’t a history of technological improvements, particularly technological improvements under capitalism, to improve things in a sustainable way. Ah, but perhaps as these resources dwindle we’ll move to more reusable and renewable sources. After all, we seem to slowly be getting off fossil fuels maybe, probably not in time to prevent widespread devastation, but look at how cheap those solar panels have gotten! That’s amazing. And that is amazing. But it doesn’t change the fact that the world’s forests are being destroyed because capitalism has decided that the land creates more value for shareholders when used for raising cattle than for being a forest. And we’re not off fossil fuels yet, in fact usage of fossil fuels is still increasing year-on-year in 2026, fully 20 years after the release of the film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award and everyone sagely nodded their heads and went oh yeah this global warming thing really seems to be a problem we should do something about and proceeded to do fuck all. Instead, we’ve been building massive, energy guzzling and air polluting AI data centers that also run through enormous quantities of water which, oh yeah, is a resource that the UN has declared is in a global state of bankruptcy.

In fact, the economics of market capitalism actually incentivize companies away from sustainable production in favor of greater profits. Consider the rise of fast fashion or planned obsolescence, ways of making goods in deliberately cheap and short-lasting ways in order to ensure continued purchases. Computing power may have gotten remarkably cheaper and more advanced over the past few decades, but you buy a computer today knowing that even if the hardware continues to function the company that made it will stop supporting the software within a number of years and even if that computer exactly meets your needs you’ll be expected to get rid of it and get a new one, tossing away with it all those precious rare earth elements and that glued in solid state memory and so on.

Capitalism is not a system built to sustain infinite growth, it’s a system built for short-term growth and long-term waste and devastation, an economic system barreling as fast as it can for a cliff while everyone tuts about how there’s sure this cliff there someone should really do something about at some point.

And honestly, I could stop there, but just for fun let’s keep going and see how the case for infinite economic growth actually gets so much worse than that.

Yes, efficiency has allowed us to push past perceived limits of things like population growth. But efficiency also does another funny thing.

As mentioned, computer technology has advanced at an incredible rate. And computers have not only gotten better, they’ve gotten much cheaper. Today for $15 you can purchase a Raspberry Pi Zero which has dramatically more power than the Apple IIe that my father bought in 1984 for over $3,000. In fact, capitalism’s boosters love to point out that consumer commodities like computers, televisions, microwave ovens, and so on have gotten radically cheaper over the course of their existences thanks to innovation and competition in market capitalism. Of course, the main things we actually need to survive, like housing, have actually gotten more expensive, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.

The thing is there’s a fundamental problem with consumer commodities getting cheaper, and that’s a little thing called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Which, in simple terms, is just the observation that if you have competition in a market where the production of goods is getting more efficient, prices fall and with them profit margins. For example, today you can buy a pocket lighter for 15 cents produced from a factory with mind-boggling automated efficiency that measures profits in the fractions of a cent per unit. Now, this is fine for economic growth as long as the given market itself is growing, but there’s fundamentally only so many pocket lighters that the world can consume.

One solution to this problem is to make it, for example, so everyone not only has a computer, they have a phone with a computer in it, so now you need that too. But once you’ve done that now you need to keep adding more things to keep growing, you need earbuds and watches and so on and this works for a while, but soon you’re trying to shove computers into toasters and lightbulbs and make an “internet of things” and foist VR goggles on everyone and AI features they don’t actually want and on and on, anything to desperately get another product category to keep growing the pie because the amount you can make from computers and phones has been maxed out. And there’s a reason that the “internet-of-things” and VR goggles and so on haven’t caught on the way laptops and smart phones did, and that’s because they just don’t have the same use-value. In fact, Apple Inc, arguably the biggest success story of the smart phone era, very deliberately decided to move into entirely new territory like television production and credit cards and Fitness precisely because its computer and phone business seem to be plateauing and it needed to find new avenues for growth. On top of this, Apple has spent $704 billion in stock buybacks over the last ten years which stokes their stock prices without changing anything about the underlying business, essentially admitting that this was a better use of its money than actually using it to expand their business.

Economic theory might not recognize limits to growth, but actual businesses sure do. Which is why so many businesses instead of being able to release new products and services to capture new markets are instead desperate to create platform monopolies where they can enshittifying the products and services they already have in order to squeeze ever more money from workers and customers.

Now, of course you can still expand a business by finding new customers, by the population itself growing and/or the existing population getting wealthier and therefore having more money to spend. That’s just more people who need computers and lighters and things! And the population has grown dramatically since the onset of industrialism, with global population tripling in the 20th century alone, and many developing countries indeed getting wealthier, particularly China in the last fifty years or so, and thus providing new customers and workers and economic growth. But as mentioned, fertility has been declining globally, and even if it wasn’t even the current population cannot be sustainably supported at current levels of consumption. It seems unlikely we’re going to be getting another tripling of global population, and unless technology becomes radically more sustainable radically quickly, even the current levels of population are causing massive ecological problems and shortages. Yeah, I think the likelihood capitalism’s gonna be putting cities on Mars seems pretty remote, guys. It’s like we’re trying to add rooms to a house that’s currently on fire.

And even that is putting aside the fact that our current economic system can’t support everyone having enough wealth to buy all the things that they want anyway. A number of things illustrate this, but to pick just one, the economics idea of the “non-accelerating rate of unemployment” or NAIRU says that our system must maintain an unemployment rate of around 5-6% in order to stave off inflation, which, frankly, is another moral indictment of our current economic system. Capitalism simply requires a reserve of exploitable labor in order to function properly, which means there’s just a limit to how rich the poorest people in society can be allowed get, and thus a further limit on total economic growth in a given population beyond just the maximum marginal propensity to consume.

But, believe it or not, the case for infinite growth actually still gets worse.

As mentioned, prices fall in some sectors while others seem to have a tendency to rise—specifically things like health care, housing, and education. Now if you ask Epstein-class tech bro ghouls like Mark Andreessen why this is, they’ll tell you the problem is government regulation, and bring up things like the US government limiting slots for physicianswhich limits the number of doctors in the country and thus drives up the cost for doctors, or the government subsidizing housing through affordable housing initiatives that limit the market-rate housing supply and make market rate housing more expensive. (We’ll forget for a second that the fact that the government needs to fund residency slots for doctors in the first place, which is why they limit the slots, is an indictment of the idea that the free market solves all problems—the free market could fund more residencies on its own, but it doesn’t for some funny reason.)

However, at a high level this argument doesn’t really track. While the US government limiting the number doctors is a problem, other high-income countries have universal, government-funded health care and as a result their citizens pay less for health care and get better outcomes than Americans Likewise, while its true that affordable housing takes up units from market rate housing, as I’ve mentioned many times the fundamental problem is the fact that housing is seen as an investment that must increase in value faster than inflation, which is why the people who own market-rate housing fight tooth and nail against building more housing which, you know, would also bring down the cost of market-rate housing. Meanwhile, places like Vienna and Singapore where good quality public housing is used by nearly everyone have much more affordable housing than major cities in developed nations elsewhere. Once again, giving the problem over to the government rather than markets actually makes costs go down, not up. Likewise there are plenty of things whose prices have gone up without the government being involved at all, like motor vehicle repair or full service meals (meaning restaurants). {Go Meta video 14:38}

But this is all the same song and dance the billionaires have been doing for decades to roll back taxes on the wealthy and regulations on their businesses, because what they really want isn’t a more affordable system for everyone, but more money for themselves.

The major cause of these industries not being able to efficiency their ways to lower costs is something known as Baumol’s Cost Disease, as noted in a 1965 paper by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen called “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems” and further explored in a 1993 paper by Baumol called “Health Care, Education and the Cost Disease: A Looming Crisis for Public Choice”. Some things can have costs go down thanks to efficiencies, but other things simply have fixed costs that can’t be reduced, and these usually revolve around labor costs. A live performance of a string quartet by definition needs at least four people. And a live string quartet isn’t something that can be outsourced to some country where labor costs are lower—the whole point of a live performance is that the four people are there in front of you. Likewise, for education you need a teacher, and the push in recent decades has actually been to improve education with smaller class sizes, which only increases the number of teachers needed. The tech brained might dream of a world where children are taught by AI with little actual human intervention, but I think I speak for most parents when I say that’s a horrific idea given that AIs have been known to lie constantly and do things like encourage kids to commit suicide. And likewise for medicine, as it’s gotten more sophisticated it’s required more people not fewer, with a huge proliferation of procedures and treatments resulting in people living longer than ever before, and therefore needing even more medical care.

Of course, the problem here is that predominantly these are essential goods. Increasing costs of things like medicine, education, and housing might be good for profit margins, but they’re bad for things like having a healthy, educated, and not-homeless society. Of course, because we need these things, their costs can go up a lot more than things that we can do without and choose not to buy, with the result that people end up mired in enormous mortgages, medical debt, and student debt, which is great for the banks but less great for everyone else. At the same time, there’s still limits, particularly if the population declines and housing costs force more and more into shared housing and homelessness or even fleeing to more affordable countries, there’s only so long developers and landlords can let homes stay vacant before they start bringing prices down, even with the algorithmic pricing strategies and attempts at price fixing they’ve been resorting to. It’s hard to see how medical care in the US can continue to get shittier and more expensive before the demands for universal public health care—which a majority of Americans already support—become too loud.

And, as we’ve seen, if the costs of these things do start to actually decrease, those decreases will bring with it decreases in profits, and thus decreases in economic growth.

In short every which way you look, economic growth has limits.

Another factor that get’s brought up a lot in this discussion is the idea of the “Veblen good”. A Veblen good is something that’s expensive in order to be expensive. Which is to say, it’s something you buy because it’s expensive. Like you buy a Rolex watch because you want to show off that you can afford a Rolex watch and you want to feel like you’re the kind of person who wears a Rolex. It doesn’t actually tell time better than a Swatch or whatever, it’s basically a kind of jewelry, an example of conspicuous consumption. And there’s lots of things like this, people aspiring to be the type of person who own a Lambo or a yacht or a private jet, and then on top of that people aspiring to own the more expensive yacht or the more expensive private jet. (And yes these things do have uses, but they’re also things people buy to show off that they have a lot of money.)

But as mentioned, the economic principle of the marginal propensity to consume basically pokes a hole in the idea of the growth of Veblen goods happening infinitely. Billionaires literally have more money than they can possibly spend in their lifetimes, and once they’re done buying their yachts and jets and private islands and presidents, they still have more left over which they have nothing to do with but pour into assets causing asset inflation as I discussed in the last video.

And unlike computers and smart phones, most Veblen goods are designed such that they can become heirlooms you can pass down to your grandchildren. Luxury clothes are the opposite of fast fashion.

Further, and perhaps most importantly, Veblen goods tend to function on scarcity—gold and jewels are valuable because they’re in limited supplies. And so even beyond the limits of production of these finite resources, the market for any given Veblen good can only grow so much before it’s not scarce anymore—if everyone had Rolex watches, Rolex watches would cease to be a symbol of status.

Thus the amount of growth you can expect from Veblen goods is also fundamentally constrained.

There’s a video by the often-wrong channel Economics Explained that exposes I think a lot of the problems with the discourse around infinite growth. And this is aside from him citing the old saw that socialism means government control over the economy when it doesn’t, but I already talked about that at great length before. In discussing the case for infinite growth he accurately states that our current system of production is doing very bad things to the Earth’s environment and our ability to live on it safely. But then he says that it’s unfair of the wealthy countries who’ve done most of the environmental damage to expect developing countries to limit their development for the sake of the environment. Of course, the first obvious response to this is that we could, for example, limit the growth of developed economies first while the developing world catches up, and also help those developing economies to grow in more sustainable ways, as China is already doing for itself with its focus on developing renewable energy. The complaint of “unfairness” is just a way of handwaving away the problem without really addressing it.

Moreover, it also ignores the fact that what’s actually unfair is that eight people now own more than 50% of the rest of the planet and maybe, just maybe, instead of developing economies getting their wealth through economic growth they could do it by taking that money being hoarded at the top and redistributing it, which wouldn’t require growing the economy at all, merely changing who benefits from the economy we already have. And if you say this is unsustainable you’re thinking too small—you could for example confiscate not merely the wealth of the 0.1% but the businesses owned by them and redistribute ownership of those businesses as stock to developing nations or their workers organizations or whatever, there’s a thousand creative ways we could redistribute not just wealth but the means of production themselves in order to redistribute power without relying on growth. But of course growing the economies of the developed world through wealth redistribution from the rich world is functionally beyond the pale when everything is owned and controlled by billionaires who’ve devoted much of their resources to ensuring that “socialism” is a dirty word and that people don’t understand that absurd wealth inequality fundamentally undermines democracy and that if the wealth of the rich grows faster than the economy—which it has—everyone else is necessarily getting poorer.

Likewise, Economics Explains says its “unfair” to force people to accept the “status quo” instead of growth, but of course ending economic growth does not mean everything would stay the same and nothing would improve. This is all predicated on the idea that the only way to improve things for people is to grow the economy, which is the kind of “capitalist realism” that tells you we have to do things this way because no other way is possible. But of course other ways are possible, this is just an absolutely myopic and capitalist view of what change and improvement consists of.

He also says that human nature means we have insatiable desires for acquiring ever more stuff, which is also a narrow, capitalistic, and myopic view of human nature, when humans of course existed for thousands and thousands of years before ever bothering to develop anything resembling a modern economy, and even once civilization had formed, the economy was relatively static for most of recorded history.

He also points out that material productivity (meaning efficiency) is increasing, but it’s not increasing fast enough. And so, the solution he offers is that we really need to “pay attention” to this metric and {clip} “give it the same weight as we give raw GDP for example, [and] we will naturally enact policies that promote material productivity, reelect governments that promote material productivity growth, and all the while we will be pursuing limitless growth in a finite world.” But putting aside this rather naive idea (and people say socialists are naive) that simply “giving the same weight to material productivity as GDP” will miraculously result in the election of governments that will promote it, given that past elections have taught us that rational economic decisions don’t seem to be what drive elections, and indeed the billionaires who buy our elections seem much more interested in cementing their power through tax cuts and regulation rollbacks than they do about funding candidates who want to do things like save the planet or have anything resembling sustainability. Moreover, the graph that he uses shows the US, Europe, and Canada increasing in material productivity, which ignores the fact that these increases in material productivity are born on the back of those Western nations offshoring all their messy production to China and other countries. This is just intellectually dishonest.

To sum things up, there is a maximum humans can possibly consume and thus spend, which fundamentally limits economic growth to population growth, and global population growth is actually on track to decline and declines further with industrialization and wealth, and further is already at fundamentally unsustainable levels. Efficiency improvements can make finite resources last longer, but doesn’t obviate the need for them entirely, and capitalism is not a system designed for creating sustainable systems and growth. In any case, efficiency also drives costs and profits lower, which further limits economic growth.

But fundamentally the notion of infinite growth serves to bolster a vision of capitalism as an inevitably expanding machine, a kind of deity whose magical powers will miraculously solve all our problems via its invisible hand without us having to devote ourselves to any more pressing problem than how we personally can earn as much as humanly possible. Don’t worry about ecological destruction and finite resources, human ingenuity will solve them, somehow, eventually, we don’t know how, but it will, and on top of that it will deliver us to the stars where humanity can continue consuming and spending and economically growing forever and ever! Trust me, bro!

And this of course all bucks against the kind of sustainable development even Economics Explained suggests, muchless the far more pressing problems of wealth inequality and redistribution. Instead, it frames the limits of growth as something we simply can’t tackle because it’s so “unfair” to the developing world, its “unfair” to people who want more than the status quo, despite the fact that “fairness” is hardly something that comes into the picture in an economic system where some people are born into billions while others are born into dire poverty.

People routinely say socialists are naive and believe in unrealistic, utopian fantasies, but if you think that and then turn around and imagine infinite economic growth taking us to Mars or Vulcan or whatever, then I’m not sure if these words mean what you think they mean.

And fundamentally, even if infinite growth were possible, surely you must allow for the possibility that maybe it isn’t, that maybe, just maybe, we should actually plan for the eventuality that growth falters and have some kind of fallback strategy for how to manage an economy without relying on growth instead of just waiting for some new invention to save us before the rapacious consumption of resources destroys our planet or uses up the necessary resources we have. But as I said in the last video, the reason we can’t do that, the reason it’s basically unthinkable to both our political and Epstein classes (who are often the same people) is because economic growth is necessary to produce new wealth. Without economic growth, you can only increase the wealth of most people by redistributing it from those who already have it. Which is the one thing the wealthy who command the economy can’t abide. And so they must continue to spread the gospel of infinite growth and shun anyone who suggests anything else is possible. Because the rich would rather see the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

And that’s it, thanks! Don’t forget to like and subscribe. You can support this project for as little as $1 at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield and get exclusive author’s notes and other exclusive content. Thanks to all my Patrons, you mean more to me than you can know and help keep this project going. Thanks!

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No, Infinite Growth is not Possible

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