There are only two groups of people who believe in infinite growth: mainstream economists and people awaiting the arrival of the Kurzweilian “singularity”, when the merger of biological and nonbiological entities will create immortal software-based humans.
Economists’ expectations are more modest but most standard forecasts of gross domestic product do not see economies following the trajectories of all living organisms: rapid, then slower growth, followed by a plateau and eventually some sort of demise.
Kenneth Boulding, who headed the American Economic Association in 1968, offered a pungent take on this point of view: “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”