Thinking about:

three laws in terms of Ginsberg’s Theorem, as a game in which

You can’t win

You can’t break even

You can’t quit

If you start with a big enough pot and you lose very slowly it will seem like you are breaking even. Sometimes the pot even resets and that seems like winning.

Like you said it is all about energy. Except it really isn’t it is also about efficiency. If you have a big pot of energy then it is really about efficiency, how fast do you lose to entropy.

The problem is that compound debt interest accumulates faster than productivity and wages grow, meaning the economy’s debt-to-income and debt-to-GDP ratios become heavier over time. That is where the long term debt cycle comes from, along with painful economic crises during periods of deleveraging.

That does not have to be the case, that is the case only if you borrow too much at too high an interest rate. It is an indication that the borrowed money was not invested efficiently.

Wise investment and managed growth can prevent stagnation or stagnation can just be buying time for the next innovation, the next pot of energy to be invested.

Frittering away that pot of energy on fast losing bets will lead to painful economic crises. We need to bootstrap what is left in our current pot to speed up its replacement with a new pot.

We need to use a little more fossil fuel to make green energy infrastructure that can be used to build more green energy infrastructure so we can retire the fossil fuel infrastructure. Eventually the green energy infrastruture will need to be used to create its replacement. It is still believable that we could expand society off the planet and farther out into the solar system but in the mean time we have to ration the scarce resources we have and use them efficiently.

The alternative is to party like it is the end of the world, bet the whole pot. You have already explained, you can’t win so betting the pot just means you are done.

TEK