How to Win a Nobel Prize in Economics (Part 1): Economic Growth without Growth

I've said before that Confucians can contribute to economics. The world will listen if you have a nice credential like a Nobel prize in economics. Once you have your prize, people might listen when you tell them there is morality in economics.

If you are a Confucian and studying economics, I suggest you go for the gold: win a Nobel prize. I suggest you might follow in the footsteps of Herbert Simon: study at the University of Chicago and propose something obvious as a new idea.

Have you ever heard the joke, "when all else fails, lower your standards"? Simon got the Nobel Prize in Economics for calling that "satisficing." I'm not joking! Check the web links.

Here is an obvious problem that has not been solved: Describe how one achieves steady economic growth without population growth.

Look at how the American economy is run: it assumes a continuously growing population. Picture yourself with a baby diaper factory. If there are more babies born this year than last year, then you can sell more product this year. If the population growth goes to zero, then so does your growth, unless you take away sales from another manufacturer.

Warren Buffet was in a panel discussion after the broadcast of the I.O.U.S.A. movie. Buffet said that the pie was always growing. That's what he was talking about: the economy grows because the population grows. This is the foundation of the world's economic system.

But the population growth in some European countries has turned to zero or gone negative (a shrinking population). Some European countries have avoided economic innovation by importing people from the Middle-East to fuel their population and economic growth. The American Ruling Class has done the same, flooding the country with immigrants and telling the American people to embrace diversity.

The science fiction writer Robert Silverberg wrote, "The World Inside," describing a world culture with over-population. Science fiction writers might find an extremely crowded world an interesting subject for fiction, but the world's resources are finite and cannot support infinite population growth. This is just a fact.

Want a Nobel Prize? Here's a Noble Prize in Economics just waiting to be picked up: describe how we can have a continuously growing economy without population growth.

Robert Canright

In 2012 I had an idea on how we can have a continuously growing economy without population growth:
Economic Growth Without Population Increase Sunday, April 8, 2012
Here are my previous posts on economics in this blog
December 23, 2007: Confucianism and Economics
January 18, 2008: More on Economics and Confucianism
May 30, 2008: Confucianism, Economics and Finance