Is it time to rethink the concept of 'growth' as the foudation of business theory?

Question

How can we continue to grow our production and consumption of goods when there are over 6 billion of us living in a finite space with finite resources?

Will the marketplace find its own solution automatically or do us humans have to intervene and change our ingrained business habits?

If we open up our minds, us humans can do just about anything we want to do, can't we?

Well, since you did ask:

I guess my solution would be to explore the idea of 'enough' instead of constant growth. (ie - make a reasonable amount of profit and then sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor)

We don't need to continually increase our income especially since the endless quest for more and bigger often ends up destroying our habitat and thus our quality of life.

We an coexist with nature, we don't have to destroy it. This may sound obvious to some but the bottom line is that nature is on the ropes because of our human activity.

For example the health of our oceans is an even bigger calamity than global warming and yet noone seems to know this or care.

However, its not just about saving the fish, its OUR habitat that is being threatened by our economic activity.

We're all part of the same global ecosystem and biological needs will always trump economic needs, no matter how many people care more about the heath of their wallet than the health of their bodies.

Answer 1

I didn't think there was any other way to measure the success of market forces.

Answer 2

The antonym of "growth" would probably be something like "destroy".
Since that probably won't work for the future of the marketplace. We have to descibe the marketplace and it's future direction better.
The marketplace finding out solutions automatically seems to imply an equation that can be plugged in in order to find out future events. Whereas, this equation would be worth a fortune, and people market and exploit these same kinds of ideas about plugging in equations, I think the term to define the marketplace as finding the solution for the future would be described as "organically".

Answer 3

In value terms, it is possible for economic growth to proceed indefinitely. In quantity terms, obviously not.

What is your "solution"? That humans will avoid a collapse due to exceeding some ecological carrying capacity? I firmly believe that collapses are not on the table. Ecology matters to our quality of life, not the continuation of that life. And even now we contain our egregious abuses of nature by various means - regulations, fines, tradable permits, both working for and with the market system.