Treating products as capital goods creates more jobs per unit of material product, because repair, renovation, disassembly, and remanufacturing are more labor-intensive activities than original equipment manufacturing. What seems like an advantage in terms of job creation looks like a disadvantage from the perspective of labor productivity. Instead of being an engine for growth, the Salter Cycle seems likely to operate in reverse by raising prices and reducing demand. However, in addition to reducing material losses, repair, renovation, and remanufacturing reduce the loss of value added to materials by prior production processes. In other words, the spaceship economy reduces capital depreciation.
Depreciation is a real loss to the economy.
But cutting depreciation does not by itself generate growth. One mechanism for doing so is accelerated technological innovation in the service sectors. Examples might be shopping or medical diagnostics via the Internet. At issue is how and over what time period transition to a service economy should occur. We could defer economic redirection toward a service economy to some distant future, when we will be richer and alternative technologies will be less costly to implement.