Pops wrote:kublikhan wrote:Total GDP growth over a decade or two might be described as static. But there could still be significant fluctuations with individual players in the economy.
I think this is what throws a lot of folks. Capitalism is all about competition, and even more the outright destruction of capital. Rather than an ever growing "More," Marx wrote that capital must periodically be destroyed before business can return to profitability, I'm sure that was a critique of capitalism but it is nonetheless true that there are business cycles with periodic over investment where productive capacity needs to be reduced before anyone can make a profit. There is no rule that says that the return to productivity will cause growth. In fact in a static or shrinking economy (lacking fossil fueled surpluses) it likely won't.
Here from a short paper at http://akliman.squarespace.com/crisis-intervention/This is because the destruction of capital restores profitability; without enough destruction of it, profitability will remain too low. Yet policymakers, unwilling to allow capital to be destroyed to a sufficient degree, have repeatedly chosen to “manage” the relative stagnation by encouraging excessive expansion of debt. This artificially boosts profitability and economic growth, but in an unsustainable manner, and it leads to repeated debt crises. The present crisis is the most serious and acute of these. Policymakers are responding to the crisis by once again papering over bad debts with more debt, this time to an unprecedented degree.
We also tend to think that creative destruction means the newer, faster, more autonomous, processor-controled item, or lately the killer app. My thought is that situation may reverse and the newest, latest may be slower, manual, human controlled instead and paving the way for a different kind of creativity.
Capitalism doesn't require "more" only if it involves solely money. Thus, capital is destroyed and profitability can take place again. With that, "more" isn't needed, as capital and profitability essentially involves numbers in hard drives.
However, for most people, capitalism is essentially based on availability of energy and material resources, especially for many who earn the equivalent of only a few dollars a day. Although they are affected by fallout from financial speculation, they still need money to buy and sell necessities, and what is usually seen as insignificant by the upper 15 pct of the world's population they consider very important.
This explains why even though global GDP growth rate has been static, global GDP continues to grow, why money supply rises steadily, and why energy and material resource consumption rise as well. Put simply, there are growing numbers of people, and there are also growing numbers of people who work to have more of their basic needs met. There is no way to meet those needs solely through financing.
That's why "more" is needed.
In addition, what we imagine should take place (such as manual labor) has actually been taking place in some ways for many people worldwide, and that's because most people are poor. The irony is that many of them dream of moving to service industries (or even working in rich countries), including finance, as these provide much better levels of income. On top of that, several of their basic needs, such as access to health care, etc., are based on much more extensive infrastructure which is funded by the same financial industries that are currently experiencing difficulties.
With that mindset then growth is not necessary, just profit for personal/family survival and equipment depreciation. However that assumption comes with one very important crucial caveat (which you seem willing to ignore): that is our fiat-fractional reserve system money creation is dependent on bank loans ie GROWTH. 
