&gt; To paint a caricature: they almost seem to say &quot;We had 100 people and 50 ingots of iron and we produced 200 forks and 30 novels. If we&#x27;d have 50 people and 25 ingots of iron, we&#x27;d only produce 100 forks and 15 novels.&quot; Which is retarded.<p>If you want to beat a strawman, be my guest. You can even get to call it retarded, it wont care. But to follow with your example.<p>If you start with 100 people + 50 ingots of iron -&gt; 200 forks + 30 novels. Then you cut your inputs by half:<p>1. If you want the magic fairy of science to come and sprinkle its progress dust on the ingots so you can keep the same production as before... I am going be calling you something much more offensive than &#x27;retarded&#x27;. Most people around here have firts hand experience of how that kind of paralogic results at the end (ahem, Deathmarch).<p>2. If you value forks badly enough, you might get to produce maybe 120, not the 100 expected, but neither the 200 demanded. You will be able to do this by cutting on the novel writers and put them to figure out better fork designs and more efficient manufacturing projects. You will end up with like 3 novels instead of the expected 15, but probably 10 out of those were going to be crap anyways, so you did not miss much. The best creatives just have to go and express their creativity regardless of financial gain.<p>3. If you want to push your luck and build 150+ forks, you will succeed in the short term, but then you will face a fork crisis a few years down the road. You cannot apply infinite brain power to make infinitely better physical stuff. If you have only so much iron ore, and you try to make too many forks out of it, the material will be spread too thin and it will break under tenssion. Now your overworked 99 fork makers (1 recognized novellist, 2 moonlighting authors) will have to design a second process to refurbish the broken, low-quality forks, diverting valuable time and resources from making brand new forks.<p>So, do not dismiss those theories out of hand. You don&#x27;t have to agree 100% with what they say, but give&#x27;em the benefit of doubt and analyse them before making any judgements.<p>The issue with the crowd that hangs around this &quot;finite growth&quot; thing is another matter. I think they do a diservice to the theories they claim to support by crying &quot;Wolf! Wolf!&quot; like in the old fable.