Everyone with any form of savings wants numbers to go up. Everyone who wants to retire wants numbers to go up. The financial industry is just doing what their customers want, and anyone with net-positive wealth is a customer.

The problem is they can't forever. The Earth is not infinitely large and there is not infinite demand. Even if we did settle the Moon or Mars, it probably wouldn't make a huge difference to the terrestrial economy because of the distances involved. We'd just have founded another economy out there that would follow its own growth and maturation curve.

I think this is why you see such an outright panic right now about birth rates. If people don't have more and more kids, number can't go up. I'm predicting -- to the extent that it's not already here -- the emergence of something I'm calling authoritarian natalism. The government will try to more or less force people to have kids, probably by taking away womens' rights and/or taxing people who are childless. It won't work, but it will be attempted in some places.

Eventually the financial industry as we know it will collapse. It's inevitable. A major political question of the 21st century might be how much pain we inflict on ourselves in an attempt to save it.

I know a lot of people will cheer for that, but it will also likely mean the end of low to zero risk compound interest on savings and the end of retirement among other things. I don't expect retirement as an institution or widespread practice to survive much longer than 20-30 more years.

Doesn’t this analogy break down inasmuch as offshoring eventually worked?