scale. Instead of redeploying finished goods, we recombine raw materials. We aren't creating something from nothing. And growth is not so free that it needs no cost at all. It still needs depreciation plowback. Net investment would mean any in addition. The charts and tables, as I read them, show a steady stroke of deprecation plowback paying for all innovation, embodied or disembodied, that copes as best it can with
good times or bad.
The steady stroke metaphor, showing how cost (the steady stroke) and growth (against the shoreline) could be desynchronized, explains the possibility of free growth. It does not explain why the record shows no other kind. My best guess as an explanation would look to biology. The biological imperative shapes our tastes and behaviors for lineage survival in some sense of family or population or species. Other species crowd their niches. They cannot gain by consumption restraint for the two excellent reasons that there is no consumption to spare and no niche space if
there were.
Ricardo, Malthus and West all warned against rote replication in economies already developed. We must create means to make more from less. I suspect that we are up against that wall more or less continually. Innovation pushes the wall back when genius and happenstance are at their best, and helps us survive the rest of the time. It costs the same either way. Consumption sacrifice is sacrifice to gods who work
their will heedless of it.
My implication that we have no consumption to spare could mislead. Rather we have none safe to spend. All creatures hold back reserves against adversity. Economies usually carry more capital, producing more consumption, than they need for now. It is a rainy day fund to be drawn down in lean times and built back in plush ones. Many nations invaded capital to keep up consumption during the world wars and world depression between, and reversed course since. But we would be
fools to spend it for return over time when the next crisis might come tomorrow.
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