New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Was that it in terms of economic growth?

Ask HN: Was that it in terms of economic growth?
2 by ManuelKiessling | 5 comments on Hacker News.
There’s a thought that crossed my mind recently, of which I’d love to learn the HN community’s opinions. I’m heavily (50% of net worth) invested in broad EFTs in the classical “buy-and-hold/get-rich-slow” scheme. There are many dimensions to the discussions around this approach, but the one aspect that nailed it for me at the end of the day was: “in the long run, the world economy always grows”. But some days ago I thought: “What if that’s it? If that’s the level of economy the planet could reach, and it’s downhill from here for many, many decades? What if we have used up the fossil fuels we can use up without killing ourselves, if that’s all the sand we could use to build our buildings, if that’s the fertilizer we were able to produce, if that’s all the rare earths we could find to build the technologies for our renewables – but mainly, what if that is the amount of energy we could produce/harvest, and we simply cannot make the economy any larger?“ I mean, with all the inflation and stuff – maybe we are simply running out of everything…?

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