I'm pretty sure this point is just ... uh... wrong:

But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

That is to say, I think that you can't have NOTHING BUT ideas and have the kind of economic growth that matters to humans in human bodies. 

The point of having a word like "natural resources" is to distinguish the subset of resources that really do seem to be physically existing things.

Energy is pretty central example here for me. There are finite calories. If we don't have enough calories then we starve. If we don't have enough calories then we can't move our bodies from place to place. 

In The Machine Stops Forster portrayed a civilization that had turned the knob pretty far in the direction of "high hedonic/humanistic satisfaction per calorie" (also per NEW atom) but they still needed some calories, and also all the atoms that they used to build The Machine in the first place.

Calories seem less substitutable to me than atoms.

Maybe it is hypothetically possible to go really deep into some sort of reversible computing paradigm, but ultimately every thought that is worth thinking before other thoughts needs to be sped up, and that irreversibility will cost energy.

So many people are confused about "wtf happened in 1971?" and one of the really big ones is: we stopped having exponential growth in energy which is a necessary natural resource for prosperity. 

(I think the deep cause of this historical problem, and several other historical problems, is that the government and elites stopped being competent, unified, and benevolent. But that's a separate matter, perhaps, and is harder to show on graphs.)

You offered this graph above but it seems like it cleanly explains how there was justifiable and large optimism in the 1950s and 1960s about the median standard of living because of energy, and then there was a train wreck and now we're living in the ruins of that civilization:

But like... there are obvious mechanisms linking "energy --> wealth --> happiness", and also the large scale structure of the global economy lines up in the way that it probably should, given the obvious mechanisms:

(Image here is taken from Figure 1 of Energetic Limits To Economic Growth.)

So maybe I'm missing something? 

If you see some reason to expect wealth to fall out of the sky based on ONLY some clever idea, that would be good news to me and I would love to be wrong, but my current working theory is that the core thing that has to be true to produce radically good social outcomes is more calories per capita per year.

Ideas are important too in my model... but like... look at the Internet and the funding of the NSF. Ideas are doing fine :-)

But ONE of the important good ideas you need to have (that it seems like we are missing) is, roughly: "Natural resources are necessary inputs into wealth and human flourishing and we should coordinate to do more and better natural resource extraction because doing so will cause more wealth and human flourishing to exist."

I think this idea breaking down in the median voter in the west is a cause of a lot of the sadness of the current global situation (China excepted, because they are correctly focused on ramping up energy for the good of China, like any sane society would and should).

It is kind of tragic because if the opposite of this idea motivates the opposite of correct actions at an aggregate level, then unilaterally sane people might actually be punished by the government, rather than profiting from their unique correctness, and the prospects for our society in general would be quite bleak. It is hard to get the median voter to be right about something where they are already wrong as part of the status quo, and they've been wrong for decades, and their wrongness only hurts "everyone, in the long run" rather than "themselves, in the short run".

This is part of why I'd love to hear that I'm wrong. I think natural material wealth (especially energy sources) cause prosperity.

However, few people seem to explicitly believe this? You seem to not believe it here? And government policy isn't generally organized around the idea that "energy resources are actually super important"... 

If I'm wrong then I get to have more hope, and who wouldn't want some justified hope? Is there some way I'm obviously wrong here? :-)

I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we're in today.

To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4) 
We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion 'ghost' labourers in our society today.

(Back to me)

You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them. 

1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.

You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)

.... aaaand then there's the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.

The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we're all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn't nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don't waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).

And finally, re population:

Demographics, read about them - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697556-the-human-tide

tl;dr Yes, Malthus was 'wrong'. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn't save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour. 

What are your thoughts on This can’t go on?

One could argue that at least some of the growth is not a measurement of increased human satisfaction, but just of Goodheart mismeasurement and nefarious schemes of the wealthy to increase their power at the expense of the common man.  

GDP is a classic example of a measure that has changed meaning over time.  Take the simple example of neighbors who each mow their lawns every week.  It's unmeasured, but valuable enough for them to do it.  Then one neighbor starts to do both lawns, and the other reciprocates with taking care of all the kids during the day.  Also great value, good specialization, improved welfare.  But if they decide to PAY each other for the services, nothing changes about the work performed or value received, but now GDP is up by twice the value exchanged (each pays the other $x, for $2x gdp measurement).

The number of potential molecular compounds, or the number of possible DNA sequences, is astronomical. We have barely begun to explore.

Hate to say it, but most DNA sequences/molecular compounds are probably useless. The Library of Babel is far less than 0.000001% good novels, for instance.

[EDIT: This comment is a bit of a mess, but I haven't figured out yet how to make the reasoning more solid.]

Regarding productivity specifically, it seems relevant that AGI+robotics leads to infinite labor productivity. The reason is that it obsoletes (human) labor, so capital no longer requires any workers to generate output.

Therefore, for there to be any finite limit on labor productivity, it'd need to be the case that AGI+robotics is never developed. That situation, even considered on its own, seems surprising: maybe AGI somehow is physically impossible, or there's some (non-AGI-related) catastrophe leading to permanent collapse of civilization, or even if AGI is physically possible it's somehow not possible to invent it, etc. A lot of those reasons would themselves pose problems for technological progress generally: for example, if a catastrophe prevented inventing AGI, it probably prevented inventing a lot of other advanced technology too.

i think this piece would benefit from a few examples of historic ideas which boosted the labor productivity multiple. it’s not clear to me why ideas aren’t treated as just a specific “type” of capital: if the ideas you’re thinking of are things like “lean manufacturing” or “agile development”, these all originated under existing capital structures and at one time had specific “owners” (like Toyota). we have intellectual property laws, so some of these ideas can be owned: they operate as an enhancement to labor productivity and even require upkeep (depreciation) to maintain: one has to teach these ideas to new workers. so they seem like a form of capital to me.

my suspicion is that these “ideas” are just capital which has escaped any concrete ownership. they’re the accumulation of positive externalities. it’s worth noting that even once these ideas escape ownership, they don’t spread for free: we have schools, mentorship, etc. people will voluntarily participate in the free exchange of ideas (e.g. enthusiast groups), but that doesn’t mean there’s no upkeep in these ideas: it just isn’t financialized. in the end, a new idea displacing an old one doesn’t look all that different from a more efficient (higher output per input) machine displacing a less efficient machine: they’re both labor productivity enhancements which require some capital input to create and maintain.