The Oil Drum

I have great difficulty in imagining one in which we mange to continue expanding the production of everything (including, I presume people) for ever.

I agree that such a scenario is beyond unlikely.

The rate of population increase has been going down for quite a while - both as a percentage of current population and in raw millions per year. Indeed, the UN projects world population will peak at 9.2B in 2075, and the cessation of population growth will mean that only per-capita factors can drive increased consumption.

Some of that will happen, but - as the last few decades in Germany suggests - eventually people's consumption levels will saturate and stabilize. There's no particular reason why consumption rates of anything should increase indefinitely - like I said, that kind of thing tend to follow a slow-fast-slow curve that eventually approaches an asymptote.

A lack of growth in consumption of resources doesn't imply a lack of economic growth, as mentioned previously. A lack of growth in consumption of goods, though, might - economics is the study of allocating scarce resources to competing uses. If resources aren't scarce, then the notion of "the economy" is not entirely well-defined. Some fiction looks at that kind of scenario, though, and what might occupy humanity's time and energy. "Star Trek", oddly enough, is probably the best-known example.

Honesty must compel you to admit that all previous civilizations we know of have collapsed and that there is no particular reason to expect our society to be different.

Not at all.

First, I don't agree that all previous civilizations have collapsed, and I think that's either an ethnocentric or naive view. Some groups of Australian aborigines have oral records going back - literally - tens of thousands of years, as confirmed by references to geographic features that are not present anymore but can be determined to have been present at the time. I haven't seen particular evidence that they've "collapsed", unless you'd prefer to say they don't count as civilized.

Similarly, many of the native groups in North America were destroyed by conquest rather than collapse. That may represent (one of the) potential differences between our current (global) situation and previous (isolated) civilizations, which is that there's (a) a broad-based desire for peace, and (b) nobody "outside" our current civilization to come in and knock it over.

Indeed, the claim that every prior situation has "collapsed" is far from obvious, and needs to be backed up before it's taken seriously. And remember that universally-quantified claims ("for all") are not demonstrated by anecdotal evidence; merely claiming this or that civilization collapsed does not show that all of them did.

If you would like the claim that "all prior civilizations collapsed" to be taken at all seriously outside of the doomer community, you'll need to examine much less favourable cases than Easter Island. What about China, for example - it's been trucking along pretty well for a couple thousand years, despite periodic civil wars. Or Iceland - it has the oldest continually-sitting parliament in the world (the Althing), meaning it's had governmental continuity since it was settled a thousand years ago.

If honesty was going to compel me to say anything, it would compel me to note that either you have a very restrictive definition of "civilization", or that you simply haven't thought about whether your claim is true - and that I strongly suspect the latter.