&gt; <i>How is optimized production different from efficiency?</i><p>Erm, this is a well known general trade off. Driving 55mph vs 80mph on the highway - the former uses less fuel for the same distance, the latter gets you further in the same amount of time.<p>&gt; <i>How is growth unsustainable?</i><p>If something is growing, eventually it becomes constrained by some sort of limit. If the expectation is that it is continually growing, hitting a limit means that it has &quot;failed&quot;. Both of these general juxtapositions are quite common, so your picking apart of them seems quite defensive rather than understanding.<p>&gt; <i>Keynesianism has nothing to do with private debt or private spending habits, nor weekly work hours ... I don&#x27;t know why Keynes would have anything to do with this.</i><p>Which is it - are you sure Keynesianism has nothing to do with them, or do you not know?<p>When interest rates are low (or nonexistant, like the past 6 years), people are discouraged from saving in cash. If they have a significant surplus, they budget month to month and put the surplus into opaque long-term &quot;investments&quot; (retirement fund at the wall st casino, etc). They don&#x27;t perceive the cash value and treat the account like a lock box, so they base their spending power on monthly income rather than savings. Their utility curve remains fixed (they <i>need</i> that monthly income), giving them less bargaining power with employers so their wages remain low.<p>&gt; <i>An economy without growth is by definition zero-sum ... that someone must lose for another to gain?</i><p>Zero-sum is an awfully strong term, given that we&#x27;re talking about production rates. Durable goods stick around - if a person receives 1 house&#x2F;yr for a single year, and then someone else receives that 1 house&#x2F;yr instead, are you really going to characterize this as &quot;zero-sum&quot; ?<p>In general, it seems that you&#x27;re conflating production with the integral of production. This is a general theme of Keynesianism, given that it is explicitly about maximizing <i>output</i> by maximizing <i>work</i>. Given that the major economic phenomenon of our time is robots taking over historically human work, we should probably rethink this goal.<p>My point regarding deflation is that what happens in the tech sector is just a more pronounced version of what should be happening everywhere. Prices may rise in the short term (eg a discontinuity from depleting a source of a natural resource), but in general market competition should cause all prices to be trending down in the long term.