Who pays when the economy turns down

The issue is not limits to growth so much as the cyclical vs linear character of that growth. The issue of cycles – business cycles, feast and famine – is a matter of insurance and how to manage processes, which is to say how to allocate risk in the management of those processes. 

The question of welfare efficiency and optimality is not how to allocate between principals during upturns when there is abundance. The real question of Pareto optimality is who pays when the economy turns down, how is the sacrifice shared or not shared, what is the order of seniority of the re-payment, how much social debt is operating in the economic system and who pays for the mistakes? 

It's in the downturns that we get the measure of the solidarity or lack thereof of the society. We have ways of sharing the burden when it comes to war-time. We agree on the ugliness of war profiteering. We should agree on there not being abundance during war-time when members of the society are losing their lives. We need ways of sharing the lesser burden of scarcity and loss during economic downturns, during famines. 

That's what sheviit provides. It makes regular the processes of famine. It puts the general economic order on a regular diet. Those distributions of insurance and risk and the bearing of loss are the strongest policy considerations the economic planners need to address.