  All economies require physical resource consumption to grow and maintain
their structure. The modern economy is additionally characterized by private
debt. The Human and Resources with MONEY (HARMONEY) economic growth model links
these features using a stock and flow consistent framework in physical and
monetary units. Via an updated version, we explore the interdependence of
growth and three major structural metrics of an economy. First, we show that
relative decoupling of gross domestic product (GDP) from resource consumption
is an expected pattern that occurs because of physical limits to growth, not a
response to avoid physical limits. While an increase in resource efficiency of
operating capital does increase the level of relative decoupling, so does a
change in pricing from one based on full costs to one based only on marginal
costs that neglects depreciation and interest payments leading to higher debt
ratios. Second, if assuming full labor bargaining power for wages, when a
previously-growing economy reaches peak resource extraction and GDP, wages
remain high but profits and debt decline to zero. By removing bargaining power,
profits can remain positive at the expense of declining wages. Third, the
distribution of intermediate transactions within the input-output table of the
model follows the same temporal pattern as in the post-World War II U.S.
economy. These results indicate that the HARMONEY framework enables realistic
investigation of interdependent structural change and trade-offs between
economic distribution, size, and resources consumption.
