There are two main drivers of GDP growth: population and technology.

Population is straightforward. GDP measures how much "stuff" we make. The more people, the more stuff. So long as populations continue to grow (which is not guaranteed and somewhat of a different issue from economic growth), this will contribute to GDP growth. You can remove the influence of population by instead considering GDP per person ("capita")

The second driver of GDP growth is technology. As we learn better or more efficient ways to make stuff, or even invent all new categories of stuff to make, we will make it more stuff with less effort. GDP per capita has been growing due to technological advancements pretty much continuously for the entirety of human history (local exceptions like the "Dark Ages" in Europe ignore the Islamic and East Asian worlds, which were doing just fine at the time).

So it's possible that aggregate GDP may fall in the future if populations start shrinking rather than growing. However, we can reasonably expect that we will retain knowledge of all the productive technology we have today - it would take some sort of true cataclysm to undo that - so GDP per capita will only fall if we spend less of our collective time working. We haven't yet gotten to a point where decreases in labor time have outpaced technological innovation - people have generally pursued the higher standard of living rather than increased leisure time - but it's possible in principle.

There is no guarantee of GDP (a proxy and not always accurate measure of progress) growth in any particular locality over any particular period of time.

In very broad terms though:

a) populations are still increasing. More people implies more resources to do things. It also implies more people needing goods and services like food, shelter etc.

b) education and healthcare is generally improving. Healthier and more educated populations are expected to be more productive and for longer

c) technological progress and deployment is increasingly global. More efficient and better utilization of resources will generally increase output for a given amount of input

In short, although unlimited growth is not sustainable, there is not any good reason to believe humanity has peaked in terms of producing goods and services. Of course wars, pandemics, asteroid strikes and devastating changes to the environment might one day cause that but that is far beyond anyone's ability to predict.

In the long long term, of course, not even the sun is expected to live forever, so there is probably an end-point to humanity's survival on this planet.

I don't know how to get to the five year old level on this... sorry

Classical economics expects growth, forever. Many scientists have complained that this is absurd, and untested, and unprovable, given the laws of thermodynamics and a finite planet. Indeed any observer can see today that our population requirements are bumping up against resource limits and global warming.

Ancient empires grew until they exhausted local resources and then collapsed (OK its much more complicated than that, but still they did).

There is a small minority of economists who examine no-growth and slow-growth, but I don't think they are much heard. I would say they look to something like ecological balance as a sustainable model. The advantages of growth are obvious, but the opposite in a growth-based economy, recession/depression/deflation, are disastrous. Ironically no-growth might make it impossible to get to climate resilience and survival.

increasing GDP means economy produces more, which means increasing quality of life, even despite increasing population. Most people consider that beneficial.

Periodic economic downturns might be beneficial in the sense that they kill off the old and inefficient companies, and enable newer and more advanced companies to replace them, which strengthens the growth in the long term.

Modern macroeconomic controllers generally try to extend the periods of growth, and minimize both depth and duration of downturns. I do not think anybody among them expects uninterrupted growth forever.

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There's a lot in the equation, and much of it is not resolved. There used to be the idea that housing prices would never fall, and then 2009 happened. Our economy and workforce still hasn't adjusted to the fact that technology has increased productivity significantly, and yet we work MORE rather than LESS. There's a lot of momentum in the workforce that doesn't get resolved until a major event or uprising.

The reason growth is positive for a country is thst growth allows current work to be more valuable then past work. The work done today is more efficient, more valuable then the work done 50 years ago. This is reflected in growth. Now, try to see the opposite case. Let's say what you are doing today is less valuable then what your parents did 50 years ago. Would you be doing it? Or would you move on to do something else? This can be seen, for example, in service jobs. When a sector doesn't grow significantly enough, people will no longer want to be associated with it. They won't want to work in it (dead end job), they don't won't to invest in it (no return on investment) and they don't want to buy the products and services (same old, we allready have this, it's becoming boring) which leads to the sector declining steadily.

GDP increasingly represents abstract activities, stuff that barely has any physical presence. For that reason, there's no physical reason that those activities it should ever really hit a limit. Watching four Netflix movies doesn't cost anyone that much more than watching two.

Demand may hit limits before supply does. Economists assume this isn't true but we don't really know.

Whether there's growth or not is really more about planning how we're going to set up governments to run. A government over the same land for a non-growth society looks very different from one in which there is growth.

One thing that caused the Great Depression was a decline in the supply of money relative to what it "should" have been. That caused deflation.

In that case, there was unnecessary material hardship purely because of basically an error. We live with the memory of the Depression and try to avoid that.

There's at least two different issues in your question:

- the economic cycle (regular repeating of periods of growth and recession) is caused mostly by debt; when interest rates are low the economy can grow on credit, but as the amount of debt grows so does the risk for lenders, who will in turn demand higher interest rates if they are to take on more credit, which slows down the economy until risk goes back down, repeat. In this sense, recessions are "beneficial" in that they are needed adjustments to over-leverage.

- Since the industrial revolution there has been a long term growth trend driven by technological innovation, basically improvements in our ability to do more with less, even once you cancel out the short-term debt-driven booms and busts. Economists tend to project this trend into the future indefinitely, but - and this is just my opinion - future innovation is not guaranteed, and the period since the industrial revolution is a giant anomaly in the larger historical context. It is true though that our societies absolutely require this type of growth; without it, the only way for any business to succeed is at the expense of some other business.

No reasonable economists claims that GDP will grow steadily but there are good reasons to think it will grow over the long term.

GDP is the total output of a population. There are basically two ways it can change; you can change the number of people or you can change the output of those people.

In the long run, populations go up. People have been talking about variations of the Malthusian trap for centuries but the world population has increased by nearly 100x since then and growth seems to be accelerating rather than slowing down.

Individual productivity also seems to be on a firm upward trajectory. This is primarily driven by technological advances. A modern combine can harvest 200,000 pounds of corn an hour, that's about a 2000x improvement over working by hand. I have a 3-d printer on my desk that can build arbitrary shaped objects in a few hours rather than taking months to build prototypes. And we're all aware of the blistering rate at which electronics improve. There's no obvious reason to think this technological advance will slow down any time soon.

An other factor in individual output is hours worked. That's gone up a little but nowhere near as much. A few people are able to sustain 80 hour weeks but most people work 27-50 hours per week There's a lot of opposition to working 60+ hours per week and many people argue that we shouldn't even be working 40 hours per week but very few adults reasonably expect to work less than 20 hours per week. So we're unlikely to get much productivity reduction out of change in hours worked.

Is this desirable? Absolutely. Increased output means that we can get more of the things we want and need. For many people on earth that still means basic things like food, clothing and shelter. Many others require things like improved transportation, healthcare and childcare. Even the rich have desires that they can't meet yet.

The bigger questions are if we can support sustainable growth and how we distribute that increased output. If we could get infinite economic growth with no pollution, resource depletion or other externalizations it's hard to imagine why we wouldn't but that's not the real world. We absolutely have to deal with these issues. Either we deal with them preemptively or we wait until we're forced to deal with the effects after the fact. It looks like we're on a course to do a little of both. Resource distribution is also a very difficult problem. Nobody has proposed a system that everybody agrees with. We'll probably keep trying new systems indefinitely in the vain hope that we can find such a system.

GDP measures economic activity, not the actual 'health' of the economy or how well people are living or how financially secure they are on average.

It's not really the best economic indicator, but its the one everyone points to.

Here's the thing about extrapolating trends: it requires that things are in the future- as they were in the past. In short time periods (1 year, 5 years, etc) things generally change slowly enough that the trendline often holds (i.e., the near term future usually looks a lot like the recent past). But as you start talking about things like the timeline of an empire/civilization (measured in decades and hundreds of years) things tend to be less stable and more chaotic rendering that trendline useless.

GDP has to grow so the market grows so the ownership class keeps getting richer.

This then becomes a general message of "GDP will always grow" because if people believe it might not, or won't, it doens't.

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