50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next? | Hacker News Reader

50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next?

clubofrome.org

39 pointskitkat_new37 comments

Dunno about "we", but I learned to recognize self-serving bullshit when I see it, from people who have no concern for my aspirations in particular, and those of humanity in general, only their own, and those of those paying their way with the fruits of your and my labor. Too bad their only aspiration in the end is just that, sticking their heads further up their asses, dragging along as many of the rest of us as they can.

What's next is more of the same, as we've seen over the last few years.

What did we learn? Um, that the book was wrong?

That IS kinda the elephant in the room, isn't it?

> “The battle to feed all of humanity [was] over,” he said in no uncertain terms. Soon hundreds of millions of people would die no matter what emergency measures were adopted. Things were so bad he was even willing to bet England would not exist by the year 2000.

A little humility here would be nice. Ehrlich said certain things would happen; they didn't. He made a bet; he lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

That might be more relevant if Ehrlich was one of the authors of The Limits to Growth.

Did he subscribe to its conclusions, though? Seems to me he did.

Have you read the book? Seems to me you didn't. It's not even 200 pages long, you can probably finish it in an afternoon if you like.

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EDIT: One example, from page 94, that shows that the authors of The Limits of Growth and Ehrlich aren't exactly on the same page:

> Can anything be learned from such a highly aggregated model? Can its output be considered meaningful? In terms of exact predictions, the output is not meaningful. We cannot forecast the precise population of the United States nor the GNP of Brazil nor even the total world food production for the year 2015. The data we have to work with are certainly not sufficient for such forecasts, even if it were our purpose to make them. On the other hand, it is vitally important to gain some understanding of the causes of growth in human society, the limits to growth, and the behavior of our socio-economic systems when the limits are reached.

There are tons of caveats like this throughout the text that make it clear they aren't making precise claims about the future, but attempting to create a complex model and understand how things may turn out and why, the interaction of the various system components. Ehrlich, in contrast, liked to make very precise claims. Like that the 1970s would see hundreds of millions of people starving to death.

EDIT: From page 121, further evidence that you have not read the book if you think that Ehrlich is strongly influenced by it:

> First, we hope that by posing each relationship as a hypothesis, and emphasizing its importance in the total world system, we may generate discussion and research that will eventually improve the data we have to work with. This emphasis is especially important in the areas in which different sectors of the model interact (such as pollution and human lifetime), where interdisciplinary research will be necessary.

Statements like these exist throughout the text. Again, making it clear that the authors are not drawing one particular conclusion. Strongly contrasting with Ehrlich again.

> Have you read the book? Seems to me you didn't. It's not even 200 pages long, you can probably finish it in an afternoon if you like.

Gosh, you know, it's hard to squeeze in more books, what with catching up with my Proust and Kafka and Dostoevsky and all that.

Anyhow, in college I did a simulation of Urban Dynamics, in FORTRAN. Does that count?

There were a whole class of doom-sayers back then. Ehrlich was one of them. He wasn't smart enough to avoid saying things that could be checked, like the others were.

Again, Ehrlich isn't one of the contributors to The Limits to Growth so his views are largely irrelevant when the actual contributors to The Limits to Growth don't agree with his doom-saying (at least as presented in the book, maybe some of them do in other contexts). How hard is this concept for you? That's what I was calling out (from someone who wasn't you), you just want to double down on it for some reason that makes zero sense.

If you want to keep bringing irrelevancies into the conversation, fine. Have the last word after this. If you want to not look like an idiot, take 2-3 hours to read the book or at least 20 minutes to skim it and see that it's not Ehrlich-styled doom-saying.

Great, thanks for the last-word offer. I'll take it. And by the way, ad hominem attacks just make you look like an idiot.

Maybe try admitting that Ehrlich WAS one of the Malthusians of that period, as evidenced by scholarly articles like [1] and [2], which mention him in the same breath.

You are correct that he's not one of the authors. However, [2] says:

This movement, which was a new chapter in the long running dispute between Malthusians and Cornucopians (Desrochers and Hoffbauer, this issue) can be construed as having commenced with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968), and, by many accounts, reached maturity with the publication of The Limits to Growth (1972) and its success and huge circulation.

[1] https://www.condition.org/as95-6.htm

[2] https://ppe.mercatus.org/system/files/JULIAN_AND_THE_LIMITS_...

The book isn't wrong yet. It will be if by 2030 we don't see a decline in food and industrial production.

I think people here mix up "the limit to growth" and "the population bomb", two very different books by different authors, using different methodologies.

> The book isn't wrong yet. It will be if by 2030 we don't see a decline in food and industrial production.

Could this be why our Western governments are so hell-bent on destroying our economies? “We can not let The Book be wrong! The Prophecy must be fulfilled, and it is our sacred duty to ensure that it will!”

Also that people believe things because those things are simple and appeal to their own sense of paranoia, aggression and laziness, not because those things are accurate or realistic.

we learned that it's incredibly hard to model changes in complex systems over time and especially to anticipate disruptive technological change. Systems science is an attractive strategy for modeling at fixed points in time, and is a fantastic way of thinking about problems. However it has not fully delivered on its promises for accurate predictions or solutions.

There is no limit to growth. Innovation is unlimited. Space seems to be unlimited, too.

Yes growth is unlimited. When we finish growing we can always fight another world war and rebuild. Infinite growth!

Who cares about human well-being anyway!

In the end, we're all dead.

Where do you think human well-being comes from?

Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. It's antithetical to human well-being, too. If using some humans as objects increases profits, their well-being is, well, irrelevant.

> If using some humans as objects increases profits, their well-being is, well, irrelevant.

Do you think it's a necessity to use some humans as objects in order to achieve growth?

You might find "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist" an interesting read.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

We've managed to kick the can down the road, just like with Y2K, so we imagine the problem wasn't real, and didn't learn anything as a society.

Stating the obvious:

We didn't learn shit, we're an energy blind society that believes globalization and the status quo are here to stay, and the pandemic was just an anomaly. We'll be getting back to normal soon. The kind of society that trusts economists and believe that anything is possible, if there's money to be made doing it.

My bet is that Peter Zeihan[1], Nate Hagens[2], and Daniel Schmachtenberger[3] are far better guides to the future than most. If we manage to avoid Nuclear War, the world is about to undergo deglobalization, and this will in turn have massive economic consequences.

[1] https://zeihan.com/meet-peter-zeihan/

[2] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/about

[3] https://civilizationemerging.com/about/

I was 11 in 1972 when "Limits" came out. There was a huge stink about it, what we would identify as a moral panic today. The book must have been widely disparaged for an 11 year old to notice.

Julian Simon learned a different set of lessons.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/no-limits-to-growth

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/edb-29-up...

Why do people fetishise growth? Cancer is growth. How about measuring things that actually matter? Health, happiness, freedom etc.?

There are no limits to growth provided technology continues to increase productivity. If we were stuck with the same output, then productivity would scale linearly with the working age population, and in a shrinking-population world our quality of life would decrease.

Luckily it takes less people to make the same goods and services, year after year, enabling humanity to continue to prosper. This will continue forever barring some authoritarian government that artificially limits human ingenuity and work output.

Yeah who knew the solution to increased productivity was to have more, not to work less.

Would you prefer not to get to decide?

You mean to get to decide to escape the prisoners dilemma that forces us to grow even if there is no benefit to it beyond patching up a broken system?

Did you forget a /s? This comment reads like satire.

And yet the basic tenets of security (shelter, access to transport, simple healthcare, nutrition) require an ever growing amount of labour for the majority of population.

Having rich people move to throwing away two phones a year and driving around 9 tonne electric SUVs only means there's more pollution to deal with. It doesn't make the lives of the majority better.

Plus most of the "innovation" in the west involved outsourcing all the manufacturing and pollution to places with cheap labour and lax environmental and labour laws.

Technology can only improve our productivity so much. I'd argue that the last time technology really improved our productivity was in the mid 70s to early 80s, with the nuclear push and real improvement in efficiency of Carnot machines, with another wave in the 90s whis some of those improvement reaching the smaller models (IE car motors).

All the rest of our productivity growth is only energy usage.

Most of our growth was population growth assuming the country in question was able to overcome structural problems that keep developing countries poor. If every human couple has three children growth is infinite, if you count economic activity of the offspring as economic demand of the parent then suddenly human wants and needs are infinite.

Isn't it strange that we are massaging everything to fit the axioms which are starting to sound more and more like religious beliefs and anyone who is making inconvenient statements is called a heretic?

If you tell the longtermists about the population shrinking then their galaxy conquest plans no longer become the obvious conclusion of humanity but rather just a preferred vision of the future for a bunch of people who want to elevate themselves.

Technology this...

Growth that...

Profit here, profit there...

Meanwhile most people bust their asses working absolutely soulless jobs while the quality of life decreases and the wealth inequalities increase

But yes, the stock market is up and we never sold so much useless shit on amazon so I guess we're gucci

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