Reddit mentions of Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development

The facts are as I stated them (albeit in a very simplified way, omitting the role of velocity, bank spending etc etc). Any "earnings" which lift you out of aggregate debt exerts the opposite elsewhere in the system; remember your "earnings" itself constitutes money that enters the system as debt at interest. This contradiction is largely why neoclassical orthodoxy typically leaves credit creation out of its macroeconomic models.

Besides mass poverty (its interesting that AI math models of market economies produce the same roughly 80 percent poverty rates - before their collapse - as our own planet as a whole), another result of all this is that over 45 percent of prices we pay are for interest on business loans or other capital costs. Meanwhile, over 50 percent of taxes we pay go to servicing the National Debt and capital costs included in prices the Government pays. In this way, a modern citizen under capitalism loses over 75 percent of their income to covert interest repayments. Most work is thus wasted work, stolen work, which is siphoned directly to the the top of the pyramid (ie the financial sector or those with a monopoly on credit; just last year, 19 of every 20 dollars of new wealth went to the 1 percent). And as the economist Margrit Kennedy established: 80% of the population pays interest to the richest 10%. And within the top 10% bracket the redistribution of wealth continues: the ‘poorer’ 8% pay interest to the richest 1%.

For more see:

http://positivemoney.org/issues/debt/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Growth-Economics-Sustainable-Development/dp/0807047090/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523656444&sr=1-1&keywords=herman+daly

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Energy-Economic-Myths-Institutional-Analytical/dp/1483172155/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

>There is nothing wrong with that, society is based on people being indebted to each other.

Obviously there is very much wrong with that; like any ponzi, it leads to about 20 percent of your planet escaping debt by shunting it upon the poor or future generations. For the rest, they're overworked, preyed upon and stuck at the base of the equivalent of a trophic triangle (or worse; capitalism inherently cannot provide full employment; workers don't earn enough to purchase the goods they produce in aggregate, leading to crises of overproduction, under-consumption, and making mass unemployment unavoidable). More insidiously, it requires ecocidal growth rates (more work equals more energy equals more heat; since records began in the 1650s, to avoid collapse capitalism has required a 2.9 percent exponential increase in energy consumption per year) as production/consumption attempts to keep up with aggregate debts.