He's wrong, there is no Ponzi scheme at all. Let me explain...
First of all, we have limited resources. The resources we absolutely need, for example, food and water, however, exist in enough quantity for all the people that currently exist (otherwise they would die).
The second layer of resources, for example, metal to build cars, crude oil for energy, also exist in enough quantity for now.
The exchange between basic needs and not-so-basic needs is irrelevant of the price that we are actually paying for them, because there is enough for everyone.
So the economy is built on the most important part of all - human labour. When I program, I expend labour, and though nothing gets added or removed from the world, I can still exchange the time I spent for a basic need like food.
This debt he is talking about is debt of human labour, and even if you wipe it out completely, the worst that has happened is that people wasted their time, and they will not get paid for it. There is no real destruction of the most basic needs.
If for example, we were destroying farmland to produce in excess right now, and we know this will make the farmland completely useless in the future, then this is a scheme that will collapse. But we're not doing that in any significant quantity.
Furthemore, we don't need to conserve things that are not finished yet. For example, let's imagine that we are going to run out of iron in 100 years. Obviously, this will be problematic, but 10 years before it happens, the price of iron is going to skyrocket, because we know of the impending scarcity. And there are lots of materials we can use to replace iron. Same with oil.
There is no ponzi scheme. People are paying for an easier life, and they are paying other people to make life easier for them.
First of all, we have limited resources. The resources we absolutely need, for example, food and water, however, exist in enough quantity for all the people that currently exist (otherwise they would die)
Err, people _do_ die because they don't have enough food. That's not to say that we _could_ have enough food to feed the world, but famine is a real issue in some parts of the world.
If for example, we were destroying farmland to produce in excess right now, and we know this will make the farmland completely useless in the future, then this is a scheme that will collapse. But we're not doing that in any significant quantity.
There are many who believe this is the case (see Wendell Berry, for example).
People don't die because we don't have enough food. If there were not enough food, those people would survive a week or so, and would be long dead.
People are dying because they are restricted from moving to areas with enough food. They are not dying because we lack food in the world.
Be very careful with this line of argumentation, because the surface scratching articles in papers are different from what the reality of the situation in the world is.
I agree, with one caveat: I'm not sure I see a difference between having enough food but not having access to it v. not having enough food. People are still dying, whether quickly or slowly.
An issue is that we live in areas that cannot locally sustain a population, thus relying on a supply system to survive.
Is it that people die because there isn't enough food or because the people don't have access to enough food? How many people experience a lack of food because of political issues rather than total-food-supply issues?
We are sitting on a huge ball of matter orbiting around an even huger source of low-enough-entropy energy. We are not running out of stuff anytime soon.
(Oil and animal/plant species may become quite scarce, though.)
First of all, we have limited resources. The resources we absolutely need, for example, food and water, however, exist in enough quantity for all the people that currently exist (otherwise they would die).
The second layer of resources, for example, metal to build cars, crude oil for energy, also exist in enough quantity for now.
The exchange between basic needs and not-so-basic needs is irrelevant of the price that we are actually paying for them, because there is enough for everyone.
So the economy is built on the most important part of all - human labour. When I program, I expend labour, and though nothing gets added or removed from the world, I can still exchange the time I spent for a basic need like food.
This debt he is talking about is debt of human labour, and even if you wipe it out completely, the worst that has happened is that people wasted their time, and they will not get paid for it. There is no real destruction of the most basic needs.
If for example, we were destroying farmland to produce in excess right now, and we know this will make the farmland completely useless in the future, then this is a scheme that will collapse. But we're not doing that in any significant quantity.
Furthemore, we don't need to conserve things that are not finished yet. For example, let's imagine that we are going to run out of iron in 100 years. Obviously, this will be problematic, but 10 years before it happens, the price of iron is going to skyrocket, because we know of the impending scarcity. And there are lots of materials we can use to replace iron. Same with oil.
There is no ponzi scheme. People are paying for an easier life, and they are paying other people to make life easier for them.