As recession looks more and more likely, you can't open a paper without reading about our "economic slowdown." I've been thinking about the horrible specter of "slowdown" lately, and have come to a certain conclusion.

Is economic slowdown really that bad of a thing? Furthermore, isn't the idea that an economy can constantly grow a fundamentally unsustainable fantasy? Growth is the primary goal of nations: success is measured by annual GPD, and every nation is expected to expand. But what is the ultimate goal of all this? Unlimited economic growth complete with unlimited consumption of resources? (after all, resources are the fuel for growth) This is a paradigm that I've often found troubling reading The Economist and other major publications on the topic: while growth is what every nation strives for, economies can't keep growing exponentially. This could only happen if we had unlimited resources. I believe that the fundamentalist view of the economy (that growth is always good and necessary), much like its corollary in religion, is rooted in earlier times when modern knowledge of the world was incomplete. Until we grasped scientifically that the world is billions of years old, what was to keep us from thinking it's just 6,000? Similarly, economic fundamentalism is rooted in a time when resources indeed must have looked inexhaustible. But we stand at a critical juncture: our human population has more than doubled in the last fifty years; we as a species already consume 84 million barrels of oil a day; etc. (I am planning more in-depth posts on this topic in the future) In other words, we can't keep this up. The economic fundamentalist model has to give.

Please share your thoughts on this: is unlimited economic growth a sustainable concept?