In middle school I learned about imports and exports and, as a suburban kid, I realized that I didn't know anyone who made physical products, and wondered, how can we have nice things without making things in return? Then i found out it was all exploitation and it always has been
Why the economy must always grow. It didn't make sense to me why growth was seen as necessary for a company to be successful, why wouldn't it be fine to stay at a constant output with constant profits? Or even just break even after everyone has been paid?
And why do we as a whole society depend on increasing output every year?
For example, why is it important that we make more and more cars every year, surely at some point everyone has a car, and we've reached the fabled equilibrium? My economics teacher didn't have any answers beyond "Well wouldn't you want your company to grow so you make more money?", and I didn't have the tools to dig into the real reasons, even though I could already see that capitalist growth has no endgame.
Learning some basic marxist analysis of the economy finally made it click, both why everyone is desperate for growth, and why this makes the economy eat itself.
This is probably the most simple, undeniable axiomatic truths around the sustainability of capitalism. You just can't grow forever on a bounded planet, and yet capitalism needs to always grow.
I find that you can get even the libbiest of libs to accept this contradiction. What they do with it is up to them of course, but it's one of those truths that is very powerful, because of how simple it is.
Oh that one was a big one for me. Why did the trajectory of every company need to be a parabola? Couldn't it just plateau at some point?
imagine if cars were made to be reliable, and had cheap, interchangeable parts, instead of pushing for everyone to get a new one every 4 years
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