3% annual economic growth in unsustainable

"The burden of proof is on you, because you are proving that economic growth is unsustainable. I must prove that an economy can grow indefinitely (within reason)." So I guess that BoP is on both of us then. As you state- "burden of proof is on you" and "I must prove". 1. a. Con's first argument, or rather rebuttal against an argument I never made, is that you don't need a growing population to have economic growth. What about extreme cases though? What if a piece of the nation seceded or a civil war broke it in two? What if terrorists nuked a major city? (This is possible. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu...) Sometimes it's possible for population growth to be bad too. If a nation were to have a 3% growth in GDP annually there would be a lot of immigration, often illegal immigration. Since immigrants are willing to take lower wages, illegal immigrants often aren't even paid minimum wage, wages for all laborers will go down, thus reducing GDP. (This is happening in the U.S. now. http://cis.org...) I would like to see con refute all these scenarios in his final round. I don't think he can. b. He then states that increased utilization of resources are not needed to maintain growth. He gives statistics about the internet economy, and says that an internet based economy could grow by 17%. How though, could an economy be based solely on the internet? I'm going to assume that by this he means that his nation won't quickly be out of resources, but I fail to see how having your resource based economy shrink in comparison to the rest would be better than running out after 800, instead of 400 years, would be better. Neither is good for sustainability. 2. We are not debating if it is ethical, but rather if it is sustainable. If you mean that we won't kill ourselves by ruining the environment then I guess I can assume we are talking about 100's or 1000's of years. (This means you can't rule out extreme cases like I gave above. In these time frames something like them will happen. 3. I am a bit confused by this equation. Resources and population are shown to be important factors, but in your first contention you said that you couldn't, and didn't have to, rely on either. What makes technology so much more reliable? Is it impossible for technology not to get better. The unfortunate thing for you is that your only argument contradicts one of your rebuttals. (Your first "argument" to be specific.) So now you have no arguments. (Debate ethics state that you can't introduce new arguments in the last round.) Or, you have no rebuttal against my new arguments, which I expect to be quite the kicker to find something new to attack with, but I'll get to those later. The final blow to this argument is that technology can take away jobs (http://www.economist.com...) the economy may figure out a new way to employ people, historically it has, but you are still left with a dilemma. If you don't improve technology then the economy will stagnate, but if you do there will be times when the economy takes a dive. This is unsustainable. You're d**ned if you do you're d**ned if you don't. So I present my new argument. You can't rely on a steadily increasing population and/or a limitless supply of resources to fuel economic growth. Good luck.