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while the question is open if economic growth will continue forever neither resources or population are an issue. The German economy say, has grown by 400% since the 1970s in real terms while the population has stayed stable. Energy use has slightly fallen over the last few decades.

Economic growth is technologically driven and developed economies are at or already past peak resources consumption.

>>Barrin+(OP)
i'm no economist... but didn't externalizing a lot of production offset the missing population growth? So germany just externalized raw material extraction and production but still kept the profits?

>>Barrin+(OP)
More fundamentally I’m not convinced that we are not in a zero sum game as seems to be assumed under all economic theory.

>>ramraj+he
Entropy is inherently a zero sum game. We have a given level of energy reserves and all we do is transform what we have into a different form.

Economists confuse an increase in the extraction rate as some kind of "creating something from nothing" but actually a better analogy is "traveling to previously unreachable places".

>>bitsch+Y4
Germany has also "climbed the value ladder" focusing on production of high-value goods whilst counting on imports to provide for low-value ones.

Some of that is of course classic Ricardian "comparative advantage" of trade. Much is, though, outsourcing high-impact / high-resource / high-effluent production to elsewhere.