Similar arguments were made during our agrarian period, there's only so much farmable land so there is a limit on population and growth. Productivity gains and innovation remove that issue.
Surely sooner or later as we run out of resources (and destroy the planet enough) we have to move away from the idea of growth and toward sustainability. These are mutually exclusive goals.
Unlimited resources,
No, but technology can overcome any perceived resource shortage. Think of the discovery of fertilizer by the Germans around the same time that people were claiming there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone. People still claim that, but we can even foresee the technological changes coming to fix that - genetic engineering of crops, mass produced, lab grown nutrition, insects for protein, on and on.
GDP isn't just physical goods produced it includes services which make up a large portion of the GDP of most advanced countries. These don't inherently require resources beyond energy and people's time so GDP can continue to grow.
But GDP isn't a natural resource, it is an artificial number extracted from insanely complex valuation of fiat currency, debt, policy, and subjective worth, all of which are subject to geopolitics and whims.
I completely agree that nature eventually puts an end to exponential growth, but I don't see how it puts an end to exponential wealth.
these statements don't need to be mixed. GDP is bad because a hurricane raises GDP because you have to build a bunch of shit that got destroyed again. this is totally independent of resources and growth.
the split between quality of life and gdp and these variously with resource consumption is the issue.
