I had heard of it, but had not read it before. I am finding some logical fallacies in their statements, haven't finished it yet.
For instance, "Most people intuitively and correctly reject extrapolations like those shown in table 3, because the results appear ridiculous. It must be recognized, however, that in rejecting extrapolated values, one is also rejecting the assumption that there will be no change in the system"
... no, a valid criticism would be that your model is wrong and should be rejected, and you need a better method for doing extrapolations. Table 3 predicted in 1970 (when it was written) that the Chinese GNP per capita in 2000 would be $100 (it was about $1200 according to the stats I can find online).
GNP is probably not that great a measure, especially nominal GNP. 100 1970 dollars is around 800 2023 dollars. Also the method of GNP/GDP calculation has changed over time, e.g. finance was not counted as productive until 1993.
Edit: The table in The Limits to Growth explicitly states that it predicts real GNP: "* Based on the 1968 dollar with no allowance for inflation."
Your article is a variant on the tiresome "X won't save us" articles that point out, rather boringly, that one single thing isn't enough to lead us into some eco-nirvana.
It gets bonus points for explicitly pointing this out itself at the end of the introduction.
No, the end of the introduction is a friendly and carefully watered down summary of the content: CO2-neutral growth is not happening as claimed, and it is not scientifically sound to claim the opposite.
The paper lines this out in detail, e.g. for the GDP of Denmark.
I'd suggest you read it instead of going in attack mode. And honestly, I find this kind of statement very tiresome, too:
> Your article is a variant on the tiresome "X won't save us" articles that point out, rather boringly, that one single thing isn't enough to lead us into some eco-nirvana.
Information value zero. It seems you refuse to even try and understand the science and the problems.
If you read the article, you'd know that "Green growth is not feasible as the sole strategy to reduce emissions" is basically sugar coating for "Green growth is a lie".
It is sugar coated in an attempt to reach people in power who, just like you, refuse to think about basic facts and instead retreat to partisanship.
And sorry, but another thing I have to add: this is not "my" article, and it does not need "bonus points" by people who obviously haven't read or understood it (based on the absent content in your response and the time you took to write it)
This is a wildly armchair question, but can't we just model human's ability to adapt to change and then as a result determine if technology will be sufficient to save us from impending environmental collapse? I suppose this is a multi-trillion dollar open question...?
We have many examples of us both adapting and failing to adapt, and can therefore say things like "adapts X% of the time", except in those cases the solution has often been "move elsewhere and/or fight other people" which I think isn't useful because it doesn't work so well on a planetary scale unless and until interplanetary travel is as easy as the Mayflower/Plymouth Rock journey.
Might still be useful for general governance just by characterising dangerous parts of the phase space[0] where dragons be so they can be avoided.
[0] how does phase space differ from latent space anyway?
Global peak, falling in many countries, and believed by the International Energy Agency to be Coal's last hurrah ...
For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.
Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.
Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394 Mt in 2026.
Rather than argue for or against its validity it seems more useful to plan to ameliorate likely possible effects. As someone who has retired from the "rat race" and is living on about 1/3 my previous income I know there are plenty of ways to economize and reduce economic, carbon, pollution and other footprints. Homes do not need to be McMansions and much of the reason people buy expensive houses is to get on the price increase spiral bandwagon. Tiny and manufactured homes are good antidotes. Most land can be made productive using permaculture principles that mostly try to build a healthy soil, e.g. Forest holding back the Sahara, Geoff Lawton's enclave in Jordan, etc. Pollution can be reduced by manufacturing for recycling. For example food/beverage packaging and bottles can be made in a form that is easy to reuse for example as stacking flower/vegetable pots. Post your kitchen scraps into the top pot and let worms convert it into compost to supercharge your vegetable garden. Heating and cooling energy requirements can be greatly reduced using 1970s passive solar technology putting thermal mass in your roof or sun-facing wall augmented with electronics to automate blinds. I should add that in my family, my parents had 3 children, who collectively had two grandchildren, and now two great-grandchildren. So there is no growth in our family.
>Passell found the study's simulation to be simplistic while assigning little value to the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. They charged that all LTG simulations ended in collapse, predicting the imminent end of irreplaceable resources. Passell also charged that the entire endeavour was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks.
I looked at the same article and this jumped out at me:
> The World3 model is based on five variables: "population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources. At the time of the study, all these variables were increasing and were assumed to continue to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resources grew only linearly
As we all know, almost all continents have a negative birth rate with the exception of Africa [1]
Large populations such as China with their one child policy, have curtailed their population growth.
We've lost a significant amount of people in Russia/Ukraine, and now Gaza.
In some areas we have limited availability of surface water, and deep aquifers are being tapped in unsustainable manners.
Post-Covid mortality is trending down in many western countries too.
> We've lost a significant amount of people in Russia/Ukraine, and now Gaza.
An estimated 67 million people died in 2022 globally, and 134 million were born. Not to downplay the deaths in these wars, but from a global perspective they don’t move the needle that much.
> We've lost a significant amount of people in Russia/Ukraine, and now Gaza.
There must be this dick and today it's me. Warfare these days is mostly precise. It's no more throwing tanks at a problem but rather precise actions to destroy infrastructure. There is no dehousing strategy to break people's support for war.
Statistically seen, significant without numbers doesn't mean anything anyway. However as we are talking about people, any discussion like that is in danger to enter a terrain of technocracy. Ad an unaffected, we shouldn't lead such a discussion
Precision warfare is a misleading propaganda term used to make people think that we can hit a target and minimize collateral damage to whitewash war crimes and make people accept often illegal and immoral acts of mass murder...
"Precision, outside of the confines of military manufacturers and strategists, has taken on a new meaning that implies exactness with minimal unwanted damage. A focus on the razzle-dazzle of high-tech precise weapons conveniently avoids inconvenient questions about the legality and success of aerial warfare. This adapted usage has been reproduced by mainstream media outlets, especially in the US and UK, with little scrutiny. We are left with the widespread use of a word, fuzzed up and detached from its initial definition, that serves to benefit those in power seeking the extension of their military might overseas.
"
Misleading though the term is, it's much milder than it used to be. The current conflict in Gaza is hard to get propaganda-free figures for, but it's not "everyone", and in Ukraine likewise propaganda makes it hard but the estimates are in the tens to hundreds of thousands.
Disease is much much worse than war, even in the bad old days (WW1 17 million vs Spanish Flu 25-50 million), and today the comparison is with covid: even if Gaza was literally nuked with 100% fatalities, that's 2.4 million people, whereas Covid deaths, according to wikipedia, are:
> 6,988,666 (reported), 18.2–33.5 million (estimated)
Don't think this is only for civilian consumption and mass-media war
propaganda.
Everyone is taken in by technological razzle-dazzle. Especially the
generals and politicians.
That's how a certain country ended up spending an extra £100k per
round to add high precision GPS targeting and guidance to wide
dispersal flechette munitions. Now we can attack a square kilometre,
with an accuracy of 50cm. Perfect for when you need to take out an
enemy column right next to a school sports day, right?
Most of us are taken in by the merest technological puff and bluster,
with words like "precision", "accuracy", "power", "security" having no
common meaning whatsoever. It's why we're in such a mess with privacy,
cybersecurity and the like, because those in charge are good at
comparing numbers but haven't the least idea what they're talking
about at the most fundamental conceptual level.
"Precision" only means a little in densely populated areas, and there's not even a pretence at precision in the artillery exchanges taking place in Ukraine.
Not really sure why you'd make that point when you could argue with considerably more force that the number of people being bombed in both conflicts is a rounding error in terms of global population modelling.
> In 2023, the parameters of the World3 model were recalibrated using empirical data up to 2022. This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business-as-usual scenario of the Limits to Growth standard run.
There are some people who claim there could be no democracy without growth, because without new economic opportunities, the only way to get ahead in life, is by taking from others, which leads to violence and tyranny. I find it a compelling argument.
Besides, I cannot imagine a world without growth that is not a regressive dystopian society. What would even be the point of life in such a world?
It is very sad that people believe in this. Why is growth needed to prevent a regressive dystopian society?
The weird thing is, material needs of humans don't have to rise exponentially. And I don't think that people in rich countries today are exponentially happier than say 50 years ago, because of their increased material consumption.
Neither do I think that it should be needed to allow limitless accumulation of wealth...
But well, that all might sound like radical ideas already, for whatever reason.
So merry Christmas, fellow HNers, may you enjoy growth and prosperity
>It is very sad that people believe in this. Why is growth needed to prevent a regressive dystopian society?
How are we deciding what gets made and for whom? Does democracy get to decide if you deserve a new car? Does a bureaucracy get to decide?
Lets cover an economic concept quickly, given options, people will trend towards rational self interest. If two people agree to a deal voluntarily, they must each believe that trade increases their subjective well being.
In a market system, people can aquire goods and services in proportion to the value they create for others. It isnt decided from way on high, it is the product of a complex social system and the choices we make in it. Since we can assume that people will trend towards their rational self interest, the economy will grow simply as a byproduct of the individuals involved having their needs met.
To have degrowth, I have to question what measures are required to so disrupt the natural order of markets. Now, there are ways, you could use the law to restrict peoples options both legally and economically, but that is dystopian and regressive. Any governing body given the power to decide what goods and services others are entitled to, are violating those individuals human rights to things like free association and autonomy, and are guarenteed to be captured by entrenched interests.
If you just think people are too wasteful and careless, I agree, but I think you need to dig a bit deeper at why people are acting this way. You cant effectively save dollars for the future, and the stock market is a casino; I think people waste because the concept of saving has been turned into a charade. I'll lose it gambling on an auto industry that looks ready for bankruptcy, or lose it when my short position gets blown out by a bailout, and itll be worthless when I need it if its in the bank, so ill buy a new $300 couch and plan to replace it in a couple years.
> To have degrowth, I have to question what measures are required to so disrupt the natural order of markets. Now, there are ways, you could use the law to restrict peoples options both legally and economically, but that is dystopian and regressive. Any governing body given the power to decide what goods and services others are entitled to, are violating those individuals human rights to things like free association and autonomy
Who owns natural resources? Is it a god-given freedom to pollute the environment and damage other people's lives?
Also:
> I think people waste because the concept of saving has been turned into a charade. I'll lose it gambling on an auto industry that looks ready for bankruptcy, or lose it when my short position gets blown out by a bailout, and itll be worthless when I need it if its in the bank, so ill buy a new $300 couch and plan to replace it in a couple years.
This doesn't sound as if you believe in a non-dystopian free market.
> Does democracy get to decide if you deserve a new car?
In a way, yes! What use is a car without car infrastructure? And also, apart from the indirect subsidies that make sure that we make more cars than anybody needs, and to perpetuate a need for more cars, there are direct subsidies to the industry, for buyers and makers of cars alike. Bad example.
Car traffic is much more heavily subsidized than public transport, especially when you start to factor in the beloved "externalities".
> In a market system, people can aquire goods and services in proportion to the value they create for others. It isnt decided from way on high, it is the product of a complex social system and the choices we make in it
Who decides if you are allowed to make goods and services by exploiting natural resources and polluting the environment?
Honestly, "market failure" and "externalities" are well-known concepts to economists. We just collectively decide to close our eyes.
>Is it a god-given freedom to pollute the environment and damage other people's lives?
No, those people should be taken to court or private arbitration for violating whoevers property or rights were violated. If I have land I dont want it poisoned because there is an opportunity cost; people dont poison their own land, they poison others if they can get away with it, which is why most environmental catastrophes (flint, derailed chemical trains, pipeline bombings, nuclear war) occur as a result of government action, they have immense protection from legal accountability.
>This doesn't sound as if you believe in a non-dystopian free market.
What makes you say that? The free market exists anywhere there isnt something to stop it. If someone needs a cheap couch, I can at once see that 2 things are possible simultaneously, that the cheap couch is their best available option and should be available, and that their buying decisions might have been different if they had a better vehicle for saving their wealth. The non-dystopian future is the one where the cheap couch is available, but people also have a reasonable ability to save for something nicer that might last longer. Where the free market isnt, is in sanctions, central banking, bailouts, taxation, and government regulation, hopefully that clarifies things.
>In a way, yes! What use is a car without car infrastructure?...
There were cars and roads before there were taxes and subsidies to support them, if there is a market demand for cars and infastructure then it will be built. Simple equation, will I pay for a car and roads, call it an investment, so that I can get to work, and make even more money? Yes, that would be a good way to spend the money I have. See, you can hold a vote and remove those from public spending, but I still have an incentive to pay for these items, in fact id prefer it that way.
>Who decides if you are allowed to make goods and services by exploiting natural resources and polluting the environment?
Yes, great question, in fact the same one I framed to you. Are you going to vote to stop me from using my own legally and freely traded property to produce something? What if we vote to take your stuff, not everybodies, just yours. What if we vote that you are inconvenient to the rest of us? I imagine that will not end well for minority populations, is there anything we cant do if we vote for it?
>Honestly, "market failure" and "externalities" are well-known concepts to economists.
Could you unpack the term marlet failure? I dont think you quite understand what that term means; setting a price floor for lizard tails with the intention of exterminating them from your city would (has) lead to a market failure, there would (are) be more lizards than ever as breeders harvest their tales, and government wearhouses would (did) overflow with useless lizard tails.
Sorry, but your reply does not sound like you you want to engage in good faith argument.
Market failure: has many forms, but physical damage or physical resources not represented by fiscal value are one example.
Monopolies and naïve price policies are others.
I am very well aware that this term covers a wide range of situations, including your example. You seem to insist on constraining it to your private definition.
I feel you don't quite understand what that term encompasses.
> > Who owns natural resources?
> Whoever legally owns them.
That is a non-answer.
Frankly, I don't feel that you even try to understand what you are talking about.
If you'd like to educate yourself, here's an explanation how externalities relate to market failure:
> Neoclassical economists long ago recognized that the inefficiencies associated with technical externalities constitute a form of “market failure.” Private market–based decision making fails to yield efficient outcomes from a general welfare perspective
Whoever legally owns them, again. I buy a plot of land from someone else in a voluntary arrangement, its mine, because the ownership transferred from them to me with the agreement.
>Private market–based decision making fails to yield efficient outcomes from a general welfare perspective
I asked for an example. The IMF has no room to criticize private capital as having inefficient outcomes for the general welfare, considering how brutal the conditions are in countries that face restructuring, as opposed to the power of markets lifting a billion people out of poverty. Look at the time-price of goods, its very clear what affect government intervention has over your ability to aquire goods.
"Externalities are among the main reasons governments intervene in the economic sphere." - IMF
Absolutely true though, Ill give them that, government intervention is a function for externalizing the cost of buying votes with new spending plans.
> Absolutely true though, Ill give them that, government intervention is a function for externalizing the cost of buying votes with new spending plans.
Again, that is not a logical argument, it is not even politics, it is dishonest propaganda. An insult to even economists.
Its a joke. You dont respect the field of economics but cite the IMF, have you heard of restructuring? You dont seem to understand the basic premises of property rights, you cant provide an example of a market failure actually occuring in absence of government intervention (you probably could have googled a response thats worthy of arguement), you cant even define the line between "pollution" and inflicting that pollution on others without consent. You simultaneously treat economics like its a cult for greedy people, and something that can be rigidly calculable by the omniscient government.
There is nothing I can say that will convince you if you dont have a basic understanding of economics, but here, its christmas. Subjective value, marginal utility, time preference, supply and demand, greshams law, specialization, price signals, revealed preference; those are principles and laws in economics because they are true regardless of how anyone feels about them, and if you understand them then it becomes immediately obvious why the wealth of a market based society will always grow absent things like war. People like nice things, people will trade for those nice things, and according to subjective value theorem that trade increases the wealth of both parties, because they both had to value the thing they traded for more than the thing they traded away, or they wouldnt have traded at all. If you let people vote themselves ownership over someone elses nice things they will, if politicians realize this then they will promise to redistribute those nice things from their owner to those who voted for them. Whatever the economic system is, everyone is self interested, sometimes people value the psychic profit of good will more than the material wealth; for the vast majority of the world, that choice equates to starvation, its a privilege usually only relatively wealthy people engage in. The government levies taxes and extends fiduciary credit for the money you are required to pay taxes in, and if you dont pay up then they will lock you in a cage, that is extortion, they have not entered a voluntary agreement, instead they initiate violence against peaceful people to intimidate everyone else into compliance, thats immoral. When resources are freely traded they flow to the highest bidder, they are the highest bidder because they create the most value, we know they create the most value for because people are willingly trading their goods and services to aquire the product (this is in the ERE, which markets always trend towards, its not necessarily the case at every moment, it is always the case directionally); its about what the consumer wants, people, you, me, we can all say we dont like amazon, but the decisions people actually make, also known as revealed preference, tell a different story. When individuals are free to take in the price signals and perform economic calculation, you are leveraging the whole of society in all its discrete facets to find the most efficient outcome; when the government is responsible, they have qualitative deficiencies compared to their free market counterparts, namely they have nothing at stake (or much worse and far more often, their incentives are corrupt), and they lack the granular price signals that an individual or business would have.
The government is by its nature immoral and inefficient, and market based societies will always trend towards growth. There is more to say on what drives interest rates, marginal utility, economies and diseconomies of scale, but thats all the christmas spirit I have for the day.
Oh, heres a perfect example by the way. The government decides to subsidize corn production, where sugar would generally be in a product its now more economical to use high fructose corn syrup because the price signals are distorted. A market failure, caused by government, with the negative effects of poisoning the population and degrading the soil quality of american farmland.
There are way too many spherical cows in your comment, you should just have taken the merry Christmas from parent and enjoyed it.
Humans don't trade only because of their self interest. There is no natural order of the market. There are already rules in every society restricting freedom of individual, even in places we consider free. Most people savings aren't tied to the stock market.
>Humans don't trade only because of their self interest.
Rational self interest is an economic term, and yes they do, even if psychic profit is the only one they aquire, they still value that over whatever they traded away, otherwise they wouldnt have willingly traded.
>There is no natural order of the market.
So, if we dont coax the market along it will just be chaos? What do you mean? Companies develop a product people are willing to pay for, so they purchase resources and hire employees to create and sell it. Thats order, sometimes another company comes along and outcompetes them, thats still order.
>There are already rules in every society restricting freedom of individual, even in places we consider free
I am well aware, I wouldnt consider them free.
>Most people savings aren't tied to the stock market.
Most people dont have savings at all, most people cant save for a $500 emergency. Whats your point?
Are you one of these idealists who thinks that if only free markets existed we could maximize well being, and governments’ main function is to get in the way of that?
I wouldnt call it idealism to say that markets are the most efficient means for organizing resources, I would call it something thats been discovered over the course of centuries of economic study on the matter.
I dont think its anyones main function to be in the way, I think there is a lot of money to be made if you can restrict economic alternatives and funnel that business to yourself.
Society - with brief exceptions - lived with almost no growth for most of its existence. Since around the 1800s, the utilization of fossil fuels and industrialization, we have been living in such an exception. Eventually, things will revert back to the mean. In the meantime, the higher our society rises and the more it overconsumes the harder the adjustment will be.
Life has undergone multiple large scale evolutionary shifts. Did it revert to the mean? Were multicellularity, photosynthesis, or sexual reproduction fads or blips?
Obviously fossil fuel use must be a blip, but non-fossil sources have achieved exponential takeoff.
This could be a new normal, with humans possibly being joined by synthetic AI lifeforms soon. This would represent a giant shift toward neural cognitive intelligent life as a dominant process in the ecosystem, a change similar in magnitude to the birth of eukaryotes or the Cambrian explosion.
Or it could all blow up and fail. I do not have a time machine or clairvoyance. I’m just pointing out that one cannot make definite statements about what complex evolving systems will do, and many very unprecedented weird things have already happened in the history of life.
But our current world hinges on future growth. You must rewind the clock pretty far back to see what kind of society it could be, even with today's tech.
If cancer could be anthropomorphized, you'd have to imagine this is what it would sound like. The point of life in such a world would be the same as in any other; there would still be none, and people would still overlay on that whatever they wanted; the same as they do now.
Japan is a pristine example of that claim, the lack of growth and the inflation induced in a vein attempt to manufacture growth has been a sad comedy of national suicide.
Japan remaining politically cohesive at this time will be a footnote in the history books in the chapter right before "Yield curve control collapses", and the chapter will read "Interest payments on public sector debts increased as investor sentiment collapsed and the japanese government had to introduce crippling austerity measures to meet its obligations".
We have already seen the central bank there increase its interest rate targets because no one will buy the lower interest rate bonds. They are trapped under >250% debt to gdp, how do you think that gets paid off?
But that’s not what’s predicted by the proposed model. That’s just vanilla “why growth is useful,” not “without growth your democracy will fail because of zero sum competition.”
I think the original comment can be summarized by this quote "without new economic opportunities, the only way to get ahead in life, is by taking from others, which leads to violence and tyranny".
To which you responded that japan is empirical evidence against that. To which I replied it is a good example to the contrary. Now you are saying 2 things
1. thats not the model
2. I have only explained why growth is useful, not why its necessary.
To 1, I agree, I totally reject this model, this is a curve fitting excercise, not real science and not real economics.
To 2, in a sense you are correct. There is something waiting under the surface to strike any country of today should they decide degrowth is the policy, should they not decide to print it off for another day.
See, all the dollars in the economy, the dollars in your wallet, and in your bank account, were created through the issuance of debt, such as home loans and government debt. Those debts have interest rates, meaning for every dollar in existence there is a multiple owed to the great abyss of currency being taken out of circulation when those debts are paid. If our monetary system doesnt continually increase the amount of debt in the system, eventually all the dollars would seemingly vanish from the system and we would still have debt that there were never enough dollars to pay for. There is the death of all your modern monies should degrowth be the objective, democracy or otherwise.
Now, the monetary system doesnt need to be that way, money could be a commodity that doesnt come with these strings attached. You might even find that the worlds largest polluters cease their operations immediately if that were ever to come true, I dont think the Pentagon would have the same incentive to invade oil rich middle eastern countries if they didnt have their precious petrodollar to defend.
Could a democracy work, with degrowth, and without the pitfalls caused by implimenting the credit theory of money? Sure, just start killing everyone, because for the first time in generations people would have a money that routes around attempts to inhibit growth, what else can you do at that point?
What is going on with this website? A bunch of graphs with red arrows pointing to 1971, but what's the point being made? "wage productivity gap is increasing"? "we are consuming too much chicken"? "we're not giving out enough physics degrees"?
Not to mention that many of these charts use nominal instead of real numbers, rendering them entirely useless.
The Limits to Growth (the linked text) led directly to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilization in India. Its supposedly scientific recommendations were adopted by the UN, the World Bank, western aid organizations, and the governments of those countries, with evil consequences.
For further reading on the ethical implications, see below:
Yes, this is a much better (for HN) comment. The one point I'd still make is that the word 'evil' in a comment like this is a bit of a jump to internet-drama and that detracts from the information you're providing. It's better to use more neutral language and let the reader draw their own conclusions. (I'm not saying evil doesn't exist—just making a point about internet thread dynamics.)
Linking the book The Limits to Growth and its message to the effects of the one-child policy is tenuous at best. The evolution of China in the 20th century is incredibly complex, and the effects of a single policy ocurring over decades cannot be directly caused by a single book.
The Limits to Growth (the linked text) led directly to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilization in India. Its supposedly scientific recommendations were adopted by the UN, the World Bank, western aid organizations, and the governments of those countries, with evil consequences.
I don't think the current models suggest the universe is infinite. As far as I understand, there is a finite amount of atoms supposed.
Also, there are very clear examples of physical limits to growth. For example, gravity and its interaction with the other forces prevents animals, buildings, trees, stars, etc. from growing too big. What happens if they grow too big? Collapse.
The observable universe is finite for the simple reason that its age is finite and the speed of causality (light speed) is finite. However, the observable universe is an artificial partitioning based on our specific (and arbitrary) location in space-time. It doesn’t have an implication on the universe as a whole.
Of course, in the context of this thread, the fact that only a finite subset of the universe is accessible to us is very relevant.
Why? That's not how most models of practical computing work. If you don't need infinite precision you can do with a lot less and break loops/recursions.
That just means that you can't realize infinite precision, infinite length, or infinite time. That's fine, and is probably correct. Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher (2006) talks about it, but large parts of the book are "wrong" (in the same way Occam's razor is wrong, not the same way the flat Earth is wrong). I'd say almost all of it is fixable though, so it's useful. I'd look out for the parts on the multiple worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics (no better than modern version of the Copenhagen interpretation, unless you think wave function collapse is a physical event that has a cause), gives more respect to Wolfram's cellular automata ideas than it should (it should give almost no respect at all), and accepts evidential decision theory more than it should. Sabine Hossenfelder and modern causal decision theorists would have problems with it, but it's a good introduction for people who think human brains are magical and/or better than computers.
The universe is expanding at an exponential rate, which means our future light cone will contain fewer and fewer matter. For all practical purposes, the observable and accessible universe is thus continuously shrinking. While the universe may indeed be infinite, that fact is of no help here.
If the universe is infinite then you are a more likely to be a disembodied Boltzmann brain thinking that you have posted a Hackernews comment about the universe being infinite than being a human brain in a human body evolved on a terrestrial planet with limited growth, because that chain of events is far less likely than a spontaneously formed brain.
That's only an artefact of the extended Church-Turing thesis. And you only need about 1000 bits to encode a perceptron so that universe is actually teeming with intelligence anyway.
Gödel’s rotating universe presupposes that space is empty. Even if it could be made to work with a universe containing matter, it would just mean that everything repeats identically over and over. That’s effectively more akin to a finite-in-time universe.
Deforestation, climate change, habitat loss, extinctions, toxification of the ocean, pollution, microplastics, etc. are not part of some radical environmentalism, are not pseudoscience, and not some tenets of some cult. They are quantifiable things that have happened, and all of them are due to this obsession with growth.
The author wants to explore and terraform Mars. Just think about that for a second: denies the effects of humans on Earth and wants to terraform a dead, lifeless planet that is a harbinger of what Earth could look like and is physically incapable of hosting the life that it likely once did. Does that make sense as a strategy?
I will repeat this because people want to launch off-topic attacks:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
What off-topic attacks? I was replying to your off-topic comment and attack on the credibility and myth of the posted book. I didn't make any attack. I simply pointed out a strange strategy that is a bit circular. If that author claims that there are no limits to growth, then why, exactly, do we need to terraform and mine an entire other planet? Do you not see the conflict there?
> that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case.
It can scale, but at the expense of tons of other things, and history indeed shows us that that's the case. The so-called Third Agricultural Revolution has shown us that quite explicitly.
And prove what wrong? I don't know what you're claiming or its relevance. If you're talking about per-capita GDP, I regret to inform you that wealth inequality and disparity is at an all-time high. So increasing the GDP has in fact correlated with a decrease in standard in living for the vast majority of people, relatively speaking.
If we take a look at raw numbers, there are more people starving today than there were people alive approximately 200 hundred years ago. Maybe the percentage of total population has changed, in either direction, but the point is that that is an absolute increase in the amount of suffering not offset by the number of people not suffering.
So like I said, you can bounce around these facts, and they are facts, all you want with a technocratic lens, but the data is quite clear that growth has led to a myriad of issues. Ignoring these issues and trends shows a huge misunderstanding of dynamic and complex systems. If there are issues with the methods in The Limits of Growth, that's fine, but at least they attempted to model these things. Pointing fingers at people trying to understand the direction we are heading is not productive.
I invite you to look at even simple things, like carpet. Approximately 95% of all carpet made heads to the landfill. Think about that for a second. We literally use up materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. just to dump it all in a landfill. And that's "just" carpet. It's the very definition of pointless.
The off-topic attacks are: Deforestation, climate change, habitat loss, extinctions, toxification of the ocean, pollution, microplastics, etc.
I should have call these "red herrings." All the off-topic nonsense distracts from the obvious fact that as population density rises, per-capita GDP also rises. This has been true for 99% of all human history. Denying this by claiming that overpopulation is a problem is absurd. If a hypothesis is contradicted by almost all of recorded history, then only a crazy person believes that.
> I was replying to your off-topic comment and attack on the credibility and myth of the posted book.
I meant to say the book makes claims that are contradicted by all of human history (like food production not being able to scale to match the population, and a higher population leading to lower per-capita GDP.) That is an attack on an argument, not an ad hominem attack on a person.
> If that author claims that there are no limits to growth, then why, exactly, do we need to terraform and mine an entire other planet?
I would say there are no hard limits to growth; there are no limits we can not overcome. Part of how we achieve may be to terraform and mine many other planets.
> Do you not see the conflict there?
I do not see a conflict between saying we can grow and this is one way we can grow.
This discussion reminds me of my once telling a student "You can achieve anything you want to achieve" and their replying "But that takes hard work, so how and I supposed to achieve it?"
>> that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd.
> History shows us that that is not the case.
Please show me a few times in history when an increasing population led to a decrease in per-capita GDP, or when a decreasing population led to an increase in per-capita GDP.
I mean times we have records of, not things made up by people digging in the ground. We have written records going back thousands of years. They show that increasing population and increasing population density lead to increasing per-capita GDP and a decreasing percentage of each person's wealth being spent on food.
> It can scale, but at the expense of tons of other things, and history indeed shows us that that's the case.
Are you saying we can grow at the expense of other things? I believe everything comes at some price. That's called trade-offs.
Please show me examples of whatever it is you are referring to.
> The so-called Third Agricultural Revolution has shown us that quite explicitly.
You are referring to the "Green Revolution." I'm no expert on that. I have relatives in the dairy farming industry who laugh at the dumb city people who pay them to do things in a "green" way. They take the money and mock the environmentalists. I'm not an expert in this field, but it reminds me of Reason TV's "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9XhnH7vVh_...
> And prove what wrong? I don't know what you're claiming or its relevance.
Please prove the following wrong:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
> If you're talking about per-capita GDP, I regret to inform you that wealth inequality and disparity is at an all-time high. So increasing the GDP has in fact correlated with a decrease in standard in living for the vast majority of people, relatively speaking.
Another red herring. I never discussed the distribution of wealth. I said:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
> If we take a look at raw numbers, there are more people starving today than there were people alive approximately 200 hundred years ago. Maybe the percentage of total population has changed, in either direction, but the point is that that is an absolute increase in the amount of suffering not offset by the number of people not suffering.
This argument makes no sense to me.
We can easily feed the world's people given the amount of food we produce. We can easily increase the amount of food we produce if we wish to spend the money.
> So like I said, you can bounce around these facts, and they are facts, all you want with a technocratic lens, but the data is quite clear that growth has led to a myriad of issues.
Let me repeat:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
This is all I am arguing. You can throw up silly things about income inequality and some obscure type of pollution that I have never noticed, but anyone who denies the facts I listed above denies reality.
> Ignoring these issues and trends shows a huge misunderstanding of dynamic and complex systems.
The trends are that increasing population makes each person more wealthy.
> If there are issues with the methods in The Limits of Growth, that's fine, but at least they attempted to model these things.
Their models claimed we would all be starving by the year 2000. Their models failed. Their models were cited as the reason to deny over a billion people access to a modern lifestyle. That's called "genocide."
> Pointing fingers at people trying to understand the direction we are heading is not productive.
I agree. Chart population density vs. per-capital GDP and stop pointing fingers.
> I invite you to look at even simple things, like carpet. Approximately 95% of all carpet made heads to the landfill. Think about that for a second.
This is another red herring.
I don't think you understand what those numbers mean. It is not true that 95% of carpet is manufactured, and then heads to a landfill without ever being used.
Carpet must be a rugged thing to be used like it is, so it is hard to tear apart to recycle. The threads in carpet are small and very durable, so they are hard to recycle. This is why most carpet is laid down, used for decades, then eventually sent to a landfill.
> We literally use up materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. just to dump it all in a landfill. And that's "just" carpet. It's the very definition of pointless.
No, we do not. We use materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. to have nice floors that keep our feet warm so we do not spend as much heating our homes or suffering on cold tile. That's a reasonable thing to do in an industrial society.
I'm happy to elaborate some more, but first, please, graph the written-down, recorded population in any area over a few centuries and then plot it against their per-capita GDP in that area.
> Dr. Zubrin points out that every person is given a mith to eat and a pair of hands to work and a brain to invent.
I haven't read that book, but if that's the content of the first chapter, I'm not sure how this relates to the very real environmental problems caused by economic growth?
You are making this into the question of "who is credible", and honestly "Merchants of despair" sounds like a pretty baseless ad hominem attack.
So if that book brought you new insights that make you consider it "the most important book of the 21st Century so far", what exactly are these insights?
Maybe someone should write a book and call it "Merchants of false hope, deception and magical thinking - brought to you by exponential economic growth".
I will repeat this because people want to launch off-topic attacks:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
I’ve never seen so many trees die as I did this past summer. I live in South Texas where it used to be uncomfortably hot and has become more dangerous in the last decade; I never saw so many dead animals on the road as I did this last summer either.
I didn’t need a merchant to sell me despair; just looking around and feeling the air is all that was needed.
I will repeat this because people want to launch off-topic attacks:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
Does Dr Zubrin actually have any model that can be peer reviewed?
If yes, what are the model's predictions?
How well have the predictions from the book (11 years ago) matched the changes that have been observed over the past 11 years?
Curious mind wants to know.
.
.
.
Ok, I have not read that book, but according to reviews:
...
On “global warming”: Contrary to environmentalists, Zubrin holds that global warming is far from calamitous. Although he thinks global warming is real, he considers it to be of negligible effect; to the extent that it exists, he says, it is beneficial.
...
Does this track the past 11 years? Maybe someone should ask him what he thinks acount it now?
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair.
I see a lot of silly criticisms in this thread. I want to point out the one point Dr. Zubrin makes brilliantly: Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
I will not address other silly straw-man arguments.
I will repeat this because people want to launch off-topic attacks:
The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.
The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.
Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.
Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
Limits to Growth is possibly the least accurate book ever widely read. They got absolutely nothing right, and it should be read as an example of how “experts” can get things so entirely incorrect despite their credentials and models.
If you read "Limits to Growth" as if it were some contemporary influencer or futurist's content, this might indeed be disappointing. But the truth is, "Limits to Growth" is one of the first attempt to articulate the fundamental limits to our strategy as a civilization. It is outlining how fundamentally flawed it is.
One might justifiably argue that the quantitative predictions made by the book hinder, or even compromise, the deeper, more important point of it. But the latter was unfortunately correct, and plenty of quantitative data are there to back it up: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8.
> In 2015, a calibration of the updated World3-03 model using historical data from 1995 to 2012 to better understand the dynamics of today's economic and resource system was undertaken. The results showed that human society has invested more to abate persistent pollution, increase food productivity and have a more productive service sector however the broad trends within Limits to Growth still held true.
Which makes it a curve fitting exercise. They didn't match anything - they changed all the parameters to match the historical dataset, and then declared that now the future prediction is correct.
Give it 20 more years, they can "recalibrate" again and find another imminent collapse: any model with enough free parameters can match any input you like.
Unless I’m misreading the wiki, the deadline of the collapse didn’t change to 20 years further out. The data seem to continue to match the original prediction.
It's like you're standing on the battlements of your ideology mocking
the archers who are just a little out of range. Enjoy thumbing your
nose each time they miss. They only have to be right /once/.
Today there’s a new trend of population birth rate collapse doomers that are making the same error of extrapolating trends in complex living systems using math built to understand non-living systems, then freaking out about the results. Different graph slope, same error. They will be wrong too.
Not really. They are basing it on extrapolation of our understanding of humans, not some abstract "non-living systems"; specifically, our present understanding is that as people age (past say forty or so) their chance of dying steadily rises and their chance of producing offspring falls. While this may be overcome with new technology (the same thing that borked the Club of Rome's forecasts), absent any change in the basic facts of human biology the population collapse is inevitable.
(For similar reasons, countries that have favored having sons over daughters are in an even worse bind; excess males simply don't increase your rate of child production).
But we know that humans actually have some kind of non obvious feedback mechanism we don’t know how to model whereby too many males in a society cause women to be more likely to be born and vice versa. Stands to reason that the same is true for childbirth (I believe this has been observed in other species quite a lot although not directly in humans yet) - when resources are tight, reproduction slows down until there’s available resources at which point reproduction increases again. These feedback mechanisms would seem to make sense from an evolutionary perspective in terms of making sure the species has a higher chance of survival through various societal and environmental changes. It’s possible we’ve disrupted it of course through technology via birth control but hard to say given that birth control isn’t that new (“new” for women and more effective than ever, but not new).
I don’t think a population collapse would mean the end of humanity. Just a prolonged adjustment period to society but we have more people than ever in the world. If the concern is the stability (economic or social) of a given country / power structure then sure - no guarantee any of that survives that but that’s also something we’ve weathered many times in the past (often more violently than what we’ve seen in recent history in the West).
There is a short window of human fertility. Let's assume you are "smart" and wait until you are out of college. You might start at 22 and have a little over 13 years until it's its considered a geriatric pregnancy.
If the economic or social constraints are such that individuals are unwilling to bear children then that is it, you do not get to try again.
Today we straddle those in the fertile window with student debt, high rent or an impossible housing market, thus less chose to have children.
This is not to say that it's a cataclysm, but it's certainly unsustainable from a societal standpoint.
But those aren’t intractable issues and society will adapt. I think that’s key critique - extrapolation is a problem when you have feedback systems to adjust to changing environmental conditions. Like even if no one has kids for 10 years, we still have new ones being born. If it’s super critical to society you’ll see all sorts of programs and support spring up to encourage people to have larger than today normal families (eg offering free childcare etc). Also, you seem to have dismissed geriatric pregnancies out of hand (not to mention limiting counting pregnancies to specific subgroups for some reason because you view other types of kids as undesirable?) but I don’t see why that’s the case - children born during this time are still children. Fertility levels may be reduced but they still happen.
The point is that the claim that we’ll have a species-wide population collapse seems unreal when we have more people on earth than ever and we have lots of children at every age group giving us lots of shots to adjusts to problems. Not to mention tech that extends the fertility age well beyond the limited window you’ve said.
There’s a lot of baked in stereotyping it seems like on your end of what “acceptable” children look like that may be worth unpacking more than there being any serious concern about a population collapse.
Economic and social constraints? By world metrics we cant even see the horizon of economic limits at the commodity level, production is seemingly hyperbolic. The economic constraints that you feel have next to nothing to do with what it actually costs to furnish a modern first world life for you. Maybe you are actually feeling your currency being steadily debased for decades, maybe you are actually feeling a top marginal tax rate ~37%, maybe you feel the loss of gainful employment due to trade agreements, but thats all political.
It's not a cataclysm, but it means that for the next few generations, the fertility window of women must increase and the attractiveness of men has to increase. That is going to be a very slow process. There is no way this mechanism is fast enough to prevent any declines predicted until the year 2100.
So on the one hand you're objecting to "extrapolation" and on the other you're claiming that hypothesizing feedback mechanisms we don't know how to model, that have not been observed in humans, and so far as I know don't even exist should be fair game?
Look at Japan[1] -- roughly two thirds of their population is over than child bearing age, so even if the remaining third starting having babies at the replacement rate, their population will continue to diminish for decades. But of course their fertility rate in nowhere near replacement[2] and even the UN doesn't expect it to be that high in the foreseeable future.
Will the Japanese population disappear? A declining population isn’t the absolute end of the world. Human population has ebbed and flowed throughout time. What I’m saying is that we’re at 0 risk of a world wide population collapse.
Also the feedback mechanism for sex selection isn’t some hypothetical thing I invented. Look up Trivers-Willard hypothesis. Whether there’s a similar social pressure mechanism that determines how many offspring someone has I don’t know, but it’s silly to rule it completely out of hand when we know that social pressure between people do impact number of children.
We should have a ticker for how many days HN can go without this being posted, its been 2 whole weeks since I've seen it, great going gang.
I want to know who gets to live in the utopia, and who has the misfortune of not being important enough. Surely poor people have got to go, theres just so many of them, in so many countries; they cant afford sustainability goals, calm down, we arent going to kill them, theyll go away on their own as the price of heating your home or eating goes up. The old have spent their best years, and have become a burden on the healthcare and welfare system, its probably most humane to poison them. Anyone with dangerous views will obviously ruin our new democracy, I think we could leverage the judicial system to disenfranchise them, it worked for the blacks.
Was that distressing to read? What do you think degrowth looks like, exactly?
This is a very bleak and cynical way of discrediting people who - as opposed to you - try to find a way to actually improve the situation of humans.
> Surely poor people have got to go, theres just so many of them, in so many countries; they cant afford sustainability goals, calm down, we arent going to kill them, theyll go away on their own as the price of heating your home or eating goes up.
20% of the world's population is responsible for the consumption of 80% of the planet's resources.
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households are responsible for 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Oh and life expcetancy and health of the average American are declining, while the economy is growing. Why is that?
And where do you think those rich people go? Do you think the average person in america is going to accept the arguement that they are over consuming when you throw roadblocks designed to economically disenfranchise them? Im pretty sure you will find that people dont care what you think, they are going to do what they need to for #1, war, plunder, slavery. Rich people even more, they have wealth, they have power, any policy enacted they are going to have in place carve outs for themselves, because they own the politicians.
What do you think you can accomplish by pointing these numbers out? The groups you describe arent going to take anything sitting down, all you are going to get is hightened political animosity, identitarian hatred, and desruction. Is that what improving the situation sounds like to you?
For instance, "Most people intuitively and correctly reject extrapolations like those shown in table 3, because the results appear ridiculous. It must be recognized, however, that in rejecting extrapolated values, one is also rejecting the assumption that there will be no change in the system"
... no, a valid criticism would be that your model is wrong and should be rejected, and you need a better method for doing extrapolations. Table 3 predicted in 1970 (when it was written) that the Chinese GNP per capita in 2000 would be $100 (it was about $1200 according to the stats I can find online).