>I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.
I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
We need to get smarter about the damage our progress does though. I am not saying we need to stop looking to better our lives. But the life we have now is at great cost to the environment and indeed our own species. The electronic gadget abundance specifically comes at a great human cost to those in third world countries. To say nothing of the environmental cost.
More like "growth-economy with massive hidden externalized costs" - from the obvious like pollution and climate disruption, to subtle ones like economic pato-incentives that distort markets and prevent them from doing their jobs...
> Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
Yeah, but we're long past that state. A cave man can safely externalize stuff like recycling, and even most of food production to NATURE. We can't.
I love growth-economy per se, but our current brand of it is messed up, and markets don't seem to be good enough at pricing all the nasty externalities. We need to invent quickly some extra devices that price this stuff in at a global scale (doing it per country CAN'T work!) IF we want to keep our beloved growth-economy!
Otherwise we'll default to the crappy solutions of ducktape-enviro-socialism + state-capitalism + islands of "free" markets here and there, dragging ourselves through a new f dark age from war to war...
I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves