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I'll try to make some specific points and keep it short
Originally Posted by eugmac
His point boils down to this: our population grows exponentially, our energy needs grow exponentially,
The exponential function is only one small part of the story, and it breaks down in many areas of social and economic dynamics. I really don't know how to explain, so I won't really try. But I'll just say that the point demonstrates why treating the finite like it's infinite is false, and that the exponential function is somewhat symptomatic, not causal, to a lot of social problems
and we rely on a financial system that REQUIRES exponential growth of money supply and credit to prevent its utter collapse.
Maybe somewhat. It's more along the lines that this paradigm requires certain growth factors in order for this paradigm to work. Changing this wouldn't mean collapse. If it did, Japan would have already collapsed. In fact, we all would have
The way I understand it, the current trillions of US debt and endless money printing is not a coincidence - it's an inevitability of its system design.
True, but I also think the reasons are probably different. The debt is more about the extraction of wealth from the US economy and sending it overseas and into rich peoples' coffers. The debt is really the story of pillaging the US by Walmart and Goldman Sachs and Koch Industries, and how this depresses wages, which raises the need for consumer credit and government subsidies. The corporatocracy is really just welfare for the executives on the backs of the laborers.
Realizing that evidence points to our being past the peak on the peak energy bell curve,
Yes, this is pretty bad. We are now, and will be for most of the rest of our lives, stuck in an energy plateau cycle where the economy improves, then energy costs go up, then the economy worsens, then energy costs drop again, reapply until conservation and different sources of energy drop enough that growth is not energy intensive enough to cost more as demand goes up. This will not change for a very, very long time. It's possible we will experience some years, maybe a decade of anemic to decent growth, but it will still be nothing to shake a stick at
and monetary policy which demands endless growth = far from putting on the brakes, we're putting the pedal to the metal as we drive towards a cliff...
Monetary policy is not the problem, it's mainly just symptomatic. We can grow the money supply as much as we want without obstructing purchasing power as long as it's not too rapid and distributed correctly. Even in our current paradigm of slowly stealing from the poor and middle with monetary policy, it's a small part of the story, and cannot induce things like hyperinflation or monetary collapse
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