For a few years? Whoop-de-doo. Anything can outperform anything over the course of a few years. Remember internet stocks, etc?
That’s not to say that Australia’s economy (or anyone else’s) is going to collapse. But saying Australia’s social net won’t prove to be a drag on the economy in the long run because its economy outperformed the US over a few years isn’t a viable argument.
Homeless in Finland… That doesn’t sound like much fun, especially in winter.
Huh? forever as in FOREVER? Pretty soon on a relative scale your going to be limited by 10^80 particles contained in the universe and the E=mc^2 not to mention the fact that entrophy is going to bite you on the ass far sooner.
Its naive in the extreme to think that technological advancement is a given. Pretty soon, everything hits a natural limit.
I must agree. The technological advancements in human society worldwide between, say, 400 A.D. and 1300 A.D. were negligable. And there have been other similar times of technological stagnation stetching back into prehistory. In fact, Europe actually went backward for significant parts of the 400-1300 span, something that could happen again.
The wave of technological innovation that started with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution is still going, and seems to have been accelerating in the past 150 years, but there is nothing “inevitable” about it.
Not only that, but scientific innovation is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Eventually, all the innovations that are easy, practical, and forseeable will have already been made. It is quite possible at that point that human society will exist in the aforementioned stable state for an indefinite period; centures, or even millenia. This cycle has already occurred several times. There is no reason to think it won’t hapen again.