Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot.
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows
Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago. They can be so because life literally changed Earth’s atmosphere and geology to make it more conducive to more life.
Appeals to nature don’t assist your argument.
> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed
This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.
On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.
Look up reforestation work. It is a light in dark times.
We're inside the first animal created mass desertification project. Reforestation is nonsense.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.
And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?
Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
> Downvoting only proves the point
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.
The US has among the richest citizens in the world, with a high quality of life. You could do worse for modeling, like perhaps your socialist darlings.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
> As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense)
That tells me nothing about your perspective. Your ideology is as identifiable as anyone else's and you have to do politics like anyone else.
> economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping
It's not up to you. Economics has a definition.
> richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Wealth.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate