I know just where you are coming from. I too have marveled at the concept of perpetual positive growth for companies and industries. I can understand it from the perspective of a small or medium sized company trying to get larger. Sure they are going to have many, many consecutive positive quarters if they are well run. But for the multi-national mega-corporations... how can they sustain positive growth numbers in an already saturated market. I think of a company like Coca-Cola. Other than introducing new flavors and continued advertising, how is it likely for them to do better than maintaining their market share. Increasing positive growth to infinity seems a pipe dream for a company like that.
I'm also with you on the modern frugal lifestyle. I have always been a very thrifty person mostly due to how I grew up. But now it is increasingly possible for me to spend less and still enjoy much the same lifestyle as someone who pays more for it. However, I don't see this as the end of the economy, just a shift of the economy as we know it. The only people I know who read actual print newspapers anymore are my parents generation. Consequently, more newspapers are going out of business. And that is ok. It is a shift of resources from an unsustainable business to a newer, more streamlined model. People will still want news and commentary, but now they want it online, in real-time, through websites and blogs. So advertisers shift their dollars to online media. At the same time, companies will have to become more thrifty about how they are doing business too. Sustainable living offers some of the same opportunities for a shift in business. As more people want to generate their own power or grow their own food, there will be successful companies that will help them meet those goals. Solar, wind, and microhydro power companies already exist, though they are on the fringe right now. Maybe the next 10-20 years will see them becoming more mainstream and growing quarter after quarter to take up some of the falling business felt by companies that are getting less business... like oil companies if we are lucky
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One of the comically tragic areas where I see businesses floundering around trying to hang on to an outdated business model is the entertainment industry. For a long, long time, the only way for an artist to get music out or their movie made was to get taken on by a major studio or record label. Promotion, distribution, production, was all handled by the label and they got a cut, sometimes a larger than deserved cut, of the revenue. Now we are in an era when artists can more directly interface with their fans, distribute, produce, and promote on their own if that is what they choose. The response of the recording and movie industry has been just appalling. File lawsuits on people who share files of music, movies, or media rather than focusing on producing top-quality product with content that can't be reproduced at home. The example that comes to mind is not my own... The Dark Knight broke all kind of box office records because people actually wanted to see it, and they wanted to see it on the big screen with the intense sound effects and musical score playing all around them. If you are a movie studio and you produce a crap-fest like Pineapple Express, don't get all pissy if people download it via torrent. Those people wouldn't have gone to see it in the theater anyway. They are basically saying, meh, I'll watch that on a Tuesday night if there isn't anything better to do.