Thanks for taking the time to write such a large and thorough reply. Unfortunately, there's so much in there and multiple of the things I want to express touch on multiple of the points you made, any reply I make is going to be rambling and possibly hard to consume, but I'll make an attempt.

> One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint.

This is an interesting concept, and depending on what we believe fuels growth is obviously true to a greater or lesser extent (mostly greater, in my opinion). It's obvious that resources fuel growth, and different countries have different kinds and amounts of resources, so those eventually being tapped means loss of at least one fuel of growth. Population also fuels growth, but there are obviously limits there (even if people often can't agree on how and when they will express themselves), such as living space and ability to source food.

At the same time, there are things that fuel growth (in this case whether we're talking about GDP or some more holistic metrics of citizen wealth or well-being) such as new technology, whether it be spurred advances in the hard sciences or soft. Political, organizational and social technologies are not to be underestimated here I think. A change on society that causes a marked decrease in psychological problems such as depression, or increase in happiness in some other way, would be immensely important.

In the end though, the technological changes are probably hard to hoard for the benefit of one nation over the other (even if adoption of something that seems extremely beneficial doesn't often happen on short time frames), so the things that cause growth that are limited resources at likely the important thing to focus on. It seems fairly obvious to me that different nations already have different amounts of these resources or the ability to grow them, and will hit those limits at different times.

In the end though, it may not be what matters, as while there are countries of different relative potential, there's also growth through current relative power. Powerful countries can achieve better terms in trade with others by leveraging that power, so the more powerful you are, and the sooner you can bring that power to bear, the more benefit it brings you. In this way, being economically more powerful than others is itself is a form resource to be tapped for more growth.

> ere is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction.

To be clear, my argument is not necessarily to grow as quickly as possible (I think that's obviously non-optimal given the negative repercussions and the unknown time at which growth becomes capped), but to continue to try to leverage resources into growth when still possible as fast as is safe (which is obciously complex and hard to do and a moving target).

In large I think that means countries should keep doing what they're doing. IU also think ecological sustainability should be more emphasized, but I don't think that is antithetical to what I just said. We should attempt to grow as much as we can, but pay close attention to the consequences and try to minimize the negative ones. Hopefully that means we're also paying attention to any eventual slowing of cessation of a lot of growth drivers and planning for what that entails as we near it.

> My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. ... Invest in infrastructure, healthcare ...

That investment is where I would like to see a lot of the growth funneled into. The quicker we grow in ways which do not exacerbate those problems, the more resources we'll have to put towards solving them. Ultimately, in a perfect world that might mean picking the areas of growth that have the most bang-for-the-buck to leverage that towards actual problems for people (because it's easy to abstract this away to countries and just say let's get more people which will drive more growth), to make individuals happier, because otherwise why are we bothering.

That most of these decisions are made by large machines that often work through emergent behavior that is hard to steer is not lost on me, and I understand most my arguments are academic and ivory tower in nature.

Finally, thanks for including a large supplementary comment of sources. I'll be adding them to the stack of things I should read (but unfortunately rarely allow myself time for). I truly appreciate it.