On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 20:41:00 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

The question is how you make capitalism work without growth. This is a very
old question that's been bantered around for at least a century. There are
current books on the subject if you're interested.

As with many other things I'm way behind in the thinking about this, but
when I was a student, the answer to the question of how you have capitalism
without growth was, you don't. The g/s/l crowd mostly promotes a form of
socialist birthday cake with capitalist icing on top.
------------------
Continued growth is only a problem when the organizations
involved become fixated on it. There appears to be no intrinsic
reason that Capitalism and/or "the free market" [these are not
the same] can't exist in a mature or static economy.

As one of the other posters observed, there is no basic reason we
do not have a 32 hour work week as some countries such as France
have gone to as a way of sharing the productivity gains of the
last few decades.

Unfortunately, "planned obsolescence" in the sense of Packard's
"The Waste Makers" seems to have taken hold in many industries,
as a high tech version of hiring people to go out and throw
bricks through windows so the glass factories and glazers will
have employment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/packard.html
http://books.google.com/books?as_aut...r-navigational

FWIW -- The increasingly shoddy construction of new houses and
other buildings indicates that many of these will not last the
life of a 30 year mortgage.