If your future economic prospects require ever increasing consumption then surely there's a problem; resources are finite.
If we need more people consuming more and more stuff (that mostly gets put in landfill within a couple of years) then we're completely screwed. We need to start restructuring our way of life to accommodate the need to conserve resources, for one, and the need to support a basic standard of living for all people (across the world) for another.
Instead of encouraging increased consumption we need to be levying massive taxes against disposable items, requiring all goods to be largely recyclable, requiring the ability to repair before production can be licensed.
> If your future economic prospects require ever increasing consumption then surely there's a problem; resources are finite.
Yeah, that's the inherent contradiction of capitalism. But unless someone comes along with a different system we're probably stuck with that for a while.
Depends on what that 'consumption' consists of. We could have an economy of eternal growth in art, scholarship, mathematics, music, and software. The main input there is human thought.
>an economy of eternal growth in art, scholarship, mathematics, music, and software //
They're all production with minimal consumption agree; they hardly summarise current human activity though. They don't require [many] raw materials beyond energy and humans but nevertheless they do tend to still use some non-renewable resources.
This is also wrong. You just have to switch what to produce and to whom. There are many starving people in the world, and quite a lot new medicals to invent and so on.
