Stopping Growing

APPLE COMPUTER has lowered its latest earnings estimates for the first quarter of 2019, for the first time in sixteen years. Speculation is that slow I phones sales in China, which provides twenty percent of Apple's business, precipitated this action. This triggered a ten percent fall in Apple stock prices, which triggered a decline in tech sector stock prices, which triggered a sharp decline in the stock market composite index. All this in less than a single business day. All this because some Chinese teenagers didn't get hat they wanted for Christmas, or whatever they call it. This is what the term "causal connection" was made for, to the extent that economics is a science, not an art, nor voodoo. Clearly the world has reached the state of near complete connectedness, rendering such things as tariff barriers and trade wars nearly obsolete, if not entirely so. With sustained global economic growth at even the staggering rate of one percent per, compounded, (Einstein said that compound interest is the world's greatest invention, although arguably it isn't an "invention", but merely natural math) soon all twelve or fifteen billion of us will be happily ensconced in the middle class, and it'll be time to stop growing, assuming we wish to avoid filling the known universe with people and consumer commodities. It will eventually be time to stop capitalism's magnificent march towards great prosperity for the few and desperate poverty for the many, and leave room in the universe for empty space, and to finally admit that redistribution of wealth is not the world's greatest evil, but is instead harmless, easy to implement, and desirable. Humanity will have no more scarcity, and thus no need for cut throat economic competition, individually, internationally, or globally. We will put an end to class warfare and our copies of "The Wealth of Nations" and "Das kapital" can gather dust on the bookshelf of history. Capitalism, having accomplished its purpose, wealth for all, can give way to soothing, sedentary socialism, the economics of stability, sustainability, and satisfaction. John Maynard Keynes, who may have come closer to getting it right than anybody else, asked the key question" at what point do we stop the growth? He foresaw, and its hard to imagine anyone not foreseeing this, that economic growth, currently the world's most practiced religion, would eventually have to stop, from sheer necessity. Unless, of course, the human species expands into space, at which point all bets are off, and we can restart the engine of ever increasing prosperity, and the good folks at Apple can once again concern themselves with whether teenagers in new markets are successful in getting what they want from the old folks on those special gift giving occasions.