Limits to Growth was right about collapse

https://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2025/05/20/limits-to-growth-was-right-about-overshoot-and-collapse-new-data/

by surprisetalk • 1 year ago

90 114 1 year ago

thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com

Do we have references for how correct these type of predictions were in the past about similar claims?

That said, it seems to check out. Everything we do, every technological step forward, is always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system, with the myth of growth locked in place as its central device.

My existential angst definitely didn’t need this read today.

baq5• 1 year ago

Obviously don’t touch the book then. Don’t come anywhere near the Fourth Turning by Howe, too.

camillomiller5• 1 year ago

That seems very US-centric, though, while this analysis is more of a global-scale one, or is it?

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

we do and they aren't accurate, the threat of their accuracy is the same, we've managed.

tbrownaw2• 1 year ago

always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system

How is this relevant, and what does is even mean?

Everything we do, every technological step forward, is always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system, with the myth of growth locked in place as its central device.

Tech advancements and growth are kinda the same things tho. Being static - not growing - implies a lack of change. Tech advancements only spread if your can do cool new things with them.

camillomiller5• 1 year ago

How is this relevant, and what does is even mean?

It is relevant to anything that is remotely "economic". We consider capitalism like fish consider water. I'm only just pointing out that we're all constantly wet, but unlike fish, that's not a condition we depend upon for life.

Qwertious2• 1 year ago

How is this relevant, and what does is even mean?

Some of the most productive research we could possibly do is basic research. But because basic research doesn't directly produce monetizable practical improvements, it doesn't get private funding (besides Bell Labs analogs) and is in practice woefully underfunded.

This is a failure of resource allocation that is attributable directly to capitalism.

I'm not advocating a communist revolution here, just pointing out a downside to capitalism.

eru16• 1 year ago

That said, it seems to check out. Everything we do, every technological step forward, is always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system, with the myth of growth locked in place as its central device.

The communists in the Soviet Union and mainland China also did some science. We also have plenty of folks in research today who are less than favourably disposed to capitalism (and growth).

Do we have references for how correct these type of predictions were in the past about similar claims?

They have always been wrong since before Malthus.

You might like https://fass.nus.edu.sg/ecs/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/...

camillomiller5• 1 year ago

Every time I make a comment that contains the word "capitalism" in a critical way it goes down inevitably bad on Hacker News. There is inevitably a splitting-like reaction, as if the only way to talk about this is "Capitalism good/bad" and therefore "socialism/communism good/bad".

I am NOT anti-capitalistic per se, but I am certainly critical of any view that takes capitalism (any form of it, even the best ones like the Scandinavian versions) and unbridled growth as an unshakable tenet of our present and our future.

In other words, I am luckily not at a Mark Fisher stage.

Thanks for the link.

em500• 1 year ago

The source material is free for anyone to evaluate for themselves: https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collection...

It's not overtly technical or inaccessible, if you're a quick reader it only takes a few hours (probably less than what many people spend on Youtube or other internet feeds daily).

Don't wait for some second hand opinion/summary/rephrasing/interpretation, everyone will have their own bias.

camillomiller5• 1 year ago

I wouldn't have the hybris to think I can judge the choices in designing an economic model, though :D

eru16• 1 year ago

And I had hoped that the Simon-Ehrlich wager would have enlightened people more about how serious to take these doomsayers.

baq5• 1 year ago

I have first read the limits to growth about two decades ago and it left me with a feeling of dread. Technology, if it’s even developed, only takes us so far.

The good things I observe are consistent mispredictions about e.g. solar power and a rather obvious lack of impact of AI robotics, this was hard sci-fi even 10 years ago and it’s a kinda unnoticed trend brewing around the world. The model designers would be considered clowns if they added humanoid robots to the population at any point in the timeline and now I think we can say in the next few years we’ll have to start doing exactly that.

Where does that leave humanity in 2050 is anyone’s guess. Looks like a race towards singularity, because if we don’t get there, we collapse.

dsign2• 1 year ago

> Looks like a race towards singularity, because if we don’t get there, we collapse.

We may get either; at this point the singularity outcome is slightly more probable. The problem is that it won't be a singularity good for (most) people, so from our point of view that outcome also looks like a collapse. The most "regular" collapse on the other hand could let us be and could turn into a good lesson and opportunity; though how so is purely speculative fiction (which I write).

cyberax2• 1 year ago

These kinds of analyses are just pure BS. I remember reading (and believing) them in 2005, about how oil was going to become unaffordably scarce by 2020.

Right before the fracking revolution happened.

If you look at earlier estimates, we were supposed to have 20 billion people on Earth now.

also seems to be peaking right about now indicating that despite continuous growth in the global population, we are experiencing declining global food production.

The per-capita caloric supply is growing: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply

baq5• 1 year ago

The analysis assumes resources are finite and exponential growth is impossible, then makes educated guesses at how some quantities interact. Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?

cyberax2• 1 year ago

Well, _eventually_ the growth might stop.

But the growth doesn't automatically mean that it happens because of the resource use increase. Growth often results in technologies that use _less_ resources: cars and lighting are prime examples.

Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?

I'm arguing that predicting the exact point where the growth limits are reached is impossible. Especially when it's not due to something fundamental like the Sun's total energy output multiplied by the lowest possible entropy increase quantum.

eru16• 1 year ago

We are sitting on a giant pile of matter, and we get a steady stream of fresh energy from the sun everyday.

Yes, resources are technically finite, but we are a long way away from that mattering.

Until then, there's a limit on how cheap we can get our resources---and human ingenuity is chipping away on that. But scarcely a limit on the absolute amount of resources.

Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?

The model didn't predict anything correctly. Fracking is just something on top of people's minds now, but the model didn't take the green revolution into account, when that was already underway when they formulated it.

thereisnospork• 1 year ago

These kinds of analyses are just pure BS

At risk of speaking for the parent, I think that sentence sums it up. Specious is the fancier word for it.

These 'analyses' take a myopic view of a complex buffered system and well beyond the predictive power of the analysis.

Kind of like saying $MSFT went up 1pct today, so by this time next year it will be up 365% and in a decade its exponential growth will collapse the economy.

For a recent non-contrived example, projections of electric vehicle ownership haven't exactly followed expectations.

csomar2• 1 year ago

Resources are potentially infinite and that's ignoring that we are consuming a non-perceptible amount in the visible universe. We are a long way from consuming anything.

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

about how oil was going to become unaffordably scarce by 2020. right before the fracking revolution happened.

and before that the same thing happened. you can find books in the library from the 70's saying the same thing about oil by the year 2000

all that's happened is that commodity economics kick in. the scarcity of oil prompts people to pay more for the oil. the higher price of oil makes investors realize they can write larger checks to people aiming to explore for oil in harder to reach places with expensive machinery, to make enough to pay back the investors.

which is why deep sea expeditions took off, which is why fracking took off

the trend is likely to continue

this is what occurs in some other commodity markets as well

adastra225• 1 year ago

That book from the 70's was Limits to Growth.

csomar2• 1 year ago

There can be various ways to approach this:

- We are collapsing but it is not the dramatic collapse everyone is expecting it to be. If population "slowly" declines consistently, eventually, there will be too few people. If you have a 2 million year graph, this era will look like a sharp spike for a very short time.

- We are adapting but fracking prevented that from happening in the West and other places. Because China didn't have that luxury, they had to push through solar energy. This provides hope that the exponential growth will continue as energy is abundant around us.

So there you have it. I can see arguments to each side of the coin and am not sure which way it'll play.

_Algernon_• 1 year ago

Looking at all of human history, these kinds of analyses being wrong is the anomaly. Humans were riding the edge of a Malthusian catastrophe through most of history and that didn't really change until the industrial revolution — at least for some of us.

It is naïve to think that this can't happen again.

Nasrudith• 1 year ago

That sounds more like Malthusianism is a memetic fixation based upon past collective trauma than an assessment of actual conditions. It isn't anything rational, just an Idée fixe

The assessment should change with the industrial revolution, specialization to allow understanding, and great increase of power availability. This isn't even like the Bronze Age collapse.

daedrdev• 1 year ago

Given the impact of a global pandemic and global trade war both events which cause a slight downtick in many of these graphs but are entirely random or not destined to happen, I doubt the conclusions of this post.

Nevermark• 1 year ago

If there were not negative externalities being subsidized, i.e. perversely encouraged, then growth would always be good.

The problem with economic growth into negative sum gold mines, is not only the immediate and cumulative damage so far, but that all that damage is what funds and incentivizes existing and new actors to compound the damage.

Compound. Compound. That doesn't stop easily.

Whether that is fossil fuel, plastic or surveillance/manipulation media. (None of which I have an ideological issue with, if they are taxed or pay for the harm they do, each market would quickly find N new and clever ways to substitute, avoid or mitigate the damage.)

Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition is very very bad.

But the problem isn't "growth".

eru16• 1 year ago

If there were not negative externalities being subsidized, i.e. perversely encouraged, then growth would always be good.

That's a good start, but it's a bit more complicated.

Reasonable people can disagree what counts as a positive vs negative externality. Eg if you like to be warm, perhaps you see global warming as positive externality. (Really silly example, but you can come up with better ones.)

Also reasonable people can disagree about discounting rates. If current interest rates are very high, it can be economically rational to cut down a forest completely to get lots of lumber now, but severely damage long running production. If discounting rates are very low, then you'd leave the forest standing.

If you internalise externalities, the problem becomes less extreme, but sufficiently large differences in discounting rates will still make it surface.

Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition very very bad.

Why single out large corporations? If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.

eightysixfour2• 1 year ago

Why single out large corporations? If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.

Having been in consulting for a long time, for many of these companies, let’s just say reasonable people can disagree with this.

atoav6• 1 year ago

Reasonable people can disagree what counts as a positive vs negative externality. Eg if you like to be warm, perhaps you see global warming as positive externality.

I know this was just an example (and you said you weren't entirely happy with it), but the thing about externalities is that yeah someone may like it warm, but just because the damage doesn't happen where you are, doesn't mean it does not happen.

E.g. I could totally argue that I like draining that old oil from my car into the river next door since the river flows by and will carry the dirt away from my house. I externalize the pollution I'd have to deal with to the environment where other people live. Just because that cost is not affecting me in regards to that individual act, does not mean I didn't produce it.

Or to stay with the climate example: Yeah someone might like it warmer, but do they also like rising sea levels, more extreme wheather events, draught, higher food prices, climate migration, the cultural changes it brings and/or the violence coming from trying to prevent it? And what when the temperature is reached that they no longer like? Climate systems have multiple decades of lag, so when they decide to stop the tanker moves on, and on, and on.

Externalities are called that because they have to be paid by someone or something eventually. And not pricing them in is how you get neighbours who start to throw their dirt onto your lawn.

yodsanklai• 1 year ago

growth would always be good.

I think the point of the book is that perpetual growth is physically impossible with bounded resources.

eru16• 1 year ago

We are sitting on a giant ball of matter and we are getting plenty of fresh sunlight 24/7. It'll be a long while until physical impossibilities kick in, even without going into space.

adastra225• 1 year ago

I'm sorry but I cannot take this article seriously. Limits to Growth (and The Population Bomb) were and remain so utterly wrong in almost every detail. Like, crazy wrong. Predicting exponentially increasing costs and decreasing resources, when in fact we have experienced the exact opposite: available resources increasing exponentially and costs plummeting. Limits to Growth predicted foot shortages and population collapse around now. Instead we have a global obesity epidemic.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-paul-ehrlich-got-everythin...

What is remarkable about Limits is that anyone still takes it seriously. I struggle to think of a model that has been so thoroughly discredited as Limits to Growth has been. Jim Cramer's stock predictions, maybe.

heisenbit• 1 year ago

Exponentially increasing resources is at odds with observed persistent increase of extraction costs (in terms of energy) of oil.

alwa• 1 year ago

I mean… and then there’s solar:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...

adastra225• 1 year ago

Extraction costs continue to drop in the net: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon–Ehrlich_wager

atoav6• 1 year ago

Explain to me like an five year old how you expect the end game of those exponentially increasing resources on a finite planet.

Maybe I am not seeing a thing that I am seeing, but the logistical function is pretty well explored. If you want infinite growth you need infinite resources and thus an infinite world. Our world is not infinite last time I checked.

I haven't checked their precise model and whether the timelines it predicts are sound, but the general idea of a logistic function describing the general dynamics as a rough ballpark model still stands. In reality of course we will have more stepped saturation effects, until a new resource pool is found, maybe outside of planet earth etc. But the saturation region of that more complicated stepped function would still translate to untold suffering. Unless you see a different end game.

flyinglizard2• 1 year ago

The world’s population growth is slowing (from 2% annually in the 70’s to about 0.9% today), and it seems to me like we are very far from exhausting planetary resources. It’s like the predictions about “Peak Oil” being wrong time and time again, and in fact today we have larger reserves than ever before despite a century of extraction (3x what we had in 1970). We’ll be off oil (as an energy source) long before it runs out.

adastra225• 1 year ago

We aren't even using 0.000000001% of the atoms in the Earth's crust, and the Universe is a lot larger than just the Earth.

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

It is often stated that exponential growth in the economic sense necessarily requires exponential resource use. But I don't see why.

Our use of resources changes. We used to care about coal production - it is now niche and in no way a choke point. We're on our way off oil, in fact if you believe green transformation maximalists, we may soon have a abundance of energy. Alongside population growth, we had a huge increase in farm yields, so that eg in Europe the use of agricultural land is actually decreasing.

In 1890s, IIRC, it was predicted that Paris' growth will inevitably stagnate around 1920s as the capacity to remove horse dung (from carriages etc) will reach a critical point. Turns out we just obsoleted horses instead.

HDThoreaun2• 1 year ago

The only true limiter to growth is energy. We are nowhere close to utilizing all the energy we can get our hands on. No one is saying there are no limits to growth on earth, the question is just when those limits will appear.

dachworker• 1 year ago

Politically, we need economic growth. It is what made us "civilized". Before we had ample economic growth, the human ambition to get more wealth and power used to mean, to go to war and take all that your neighbour has. And people should not make the mistake of believing we are somehow not exactly the same people we were 100 or even 1000 years ago. People today, are still killing each other over land, for example.

So yes, the energy/climate crisis should be taken seriously, but proposing a utopia that ditches one of the major constraints on our way of life is no solution.

dsign2• 1 year ago

What utopia? Material scarcity is certainly not one. Agree with the rest.

I however have hopes for the future. Our society is still locked in and "end of history" mentality that makes most of us believe that economically and socially we have reached the end of the road and that all that is left are minor tunings. The next "collapse" or "big" crisis, that can come from anywhere (not necessarily be a purely economic thing), may shake that belief from us.

jay_kyburz• 1 year ago

The article suggested we are facing a collapse because some resources will be exhausted, but I missed what resources there are talking about? As far as I'm aware there is still heaps of everything.

I don't think we should be digging everything out of the ground we can, but I don't here anybody saying we are about to run out of anything.

pyrale2• 1 year ago

If we look further, we wouldn’t be the first species that disappears for failing to adapt.

Your "we can’t change" logic gives us only one future, that of bacteries caught in the great oxidation event.

js8• 1 year ago

"It is what made us "civilized"."

Not true, it was technology what civilized us (and jury is still out), not growth. Yes, if people are not hungry or sick, spend time doing meaningful work, can talk to others and generally enjoy life, they're less likely to be violent.

But you don't need growth (use more resources and produce more material goods) for that. We can already technologically attain that state for everyone on the planet.

Despite these technological marvels, there are still people who pronounce BS about how we have to compete for resources in order to survive. But (thanks to technology) it hasn't been true since at least 1960s.

eru16• 1 year ago

For something saner, you might like reading https://fass.nus.edu.sg/ecs/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/...

If Not Malthusian, Then Why?
This paper shows that merely the Malthusian mechanism cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Technological improvement in luxury production, if faster than improvement in subsistence production, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that the balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. A tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong tendency of growth. The theory reexplains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Song. It also suggests a new perspective on the Industrial Revolution.

pyrale2• 1 year ago

Saner how? I don’t see any way where reducing the current environmental knowledge we have to a form of malthusianism is sane.

eru16• 1 year ago

Alas, I'm afraid I didn't explain this well.

The paper I linked to is just the opposite of Malthusianism.

The original submitted article is dressed up Malthusianism.

Aziell• 1 year ago

I used to think Limits to Growth was too pessimistic. But over time, it feels like the trends it described are quietly happening. Not all the predictions were accurate, but the overall feeling was right . We do seem to be getting closer to boundaries we don’t really want to face.

imtringued• 1 year ago

The thing about logistic growth is that getting the growth rate wrong merely shifts the timeline, it doesn't change the destination.

justlikereddit2• 1 year ago

The difference between the bus showing up to take me to work every morning at 7:30 and showing up in the year 4025 have a significance that only a doomer would try to minimize

eru16• 1 year ago

The book was wrong about nearly everything. Your takeaway is very weird. But I'm happy to sell you some beachfront property or a nice bridge in New York.

dachris2• 1 year ago

I also share this kind of existential angst. The future is unknown - yes, such a scenario might come true. As might nuclear war, a truly deadly pandemic etc. And yes, there is too little done to mitigate the potential impact. And lots of unknowns.

However - don't let it drag you down. Think about what you can do, personally, as a person that has agency, to mitigate the potential effects for you, for your family, for your community.

And the answer for me, personally, is the same as for many other of these issues - stay in good health both physically and mentally, keep in touch with the people around you, have a buffer (financially, resources, time), raise awareness of the potential impact. And don't be a doomer, acknowledge that you might be wrong - because you would have been (up to now).

bvxm9• 1 year ago

Dont to raise awareness. Thats just a mindless mantra that benefits the attention economy. Its rakes in cash when everyones threat perception and anxiety is elevated.

The fact is there are things people are not capable of doing anything about. See Theory of Bounded Rationality - you cant push school kids to solve quantum field equations. There is a limit and a cost to over loading people with complexity.

dachris2• 1 year ago

Thanks for the pointer to bounded rationality, and the well-chosen words "are not capable of doing anything about". Yes, the doomer attention economy and also most media in general constantly bombard you with useless information, making decision-making very hard. What's the most important concern? The likely collapse of the pension system (here in Western Europe)? The war in Ukraine? Climate change? Trade wars? Pick you poison.

I'd add to the "mental health" recommendation to go low on such information, as it is mostly noise and non-actionable.

Awareness that in the long term, the tides might change, doesn't fall for me into this category. It's just a basic fact of life that it easily forgotten in the busyness of day.

michaelhoney• 1 year ago

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

The recommendations being universal, reminds me of the Platonic form of "the Good".

lucumo• 1 year ago

I don't get it.

As I understand the article:

1. There was a model in 1972.

2. That model predicts collapse in the mid 2020s.

3. A new group has recalibrated the model with modern data.

4. The model still predicts collapse.

How does that support the title that the model is right about collapse? To support that you need verification against the real world or against a trusted model.

omnimus• 1 year ago

I guess we can simply wait few years…

eru16• 1 year ago

Yes. My simple prediction: no collapse, business as usual.

Perhaps the climate will get a bit warmer and that will be expensive to deal with and there will be some human and natural tragedies. But by and large people will deal and there won't be any collapse.

Vasbarlog• 1 year ago

There's a great 3-part podcast series about Limits to Growth https://tippingpoint-podcast.com

I have also transcribed the whole podcast here: https://tohippo.com/tipping-point-the-true-story-of-the-limi...

johanneskanybal3• 1 year ago

How can you ”update” the model in 2025 yet not take ai or the collapse of american democracy and global trust into account?

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

"Limits to Modelling" would be a good name for a rebuttal.

johanneskanybal3• 1 year ago

Sure, I agree but usually around here there's some inteligent discussions so someone just accepting this without taking this into consideration seems weird. Pretty sure we can make food production more efficient and that it won't hinder human development..

psalaun• 1 year ago

I guess IA is factored in Meadows quote about technology able to push the limit farther for a while but make the fall harder?

Say that IA allow us to squeeze the additional juice from the torn lemon for five more decades, given the toll that it may have on our ability to think by ourselves, the bulk of people may have troubles coming up with 19th century tech and rely on good ol' donkeys for producing food and materials instead of what we would currently see as low tech solutions, when the shit will hit the proverbial fan

johanneskanybal3• 1 year ago

If you mean AI when you sai IA I think it's bigger than this. It's ironic at the point of time where it definitly starts to outperform humans in most regards we have maybe the most failing governance in modern history. I don't expect humans to be presidents in 10 years.

Qwertious2• 1 year ago

Neither of those two things have mature economic datasets showing their effects - the collapse of american democracy has only majorly affected the economy very recently, and AI is still mostly promises and hasn't brought in the trillions of profits it's promised yet.

baq5• 1 year ago

The end goal of AI isn’t the trillions made getting there, it’s to make those trillions meaningless. What’s the point of money if machines do literally everything better than humans?

marcus_holmes2• 1 year ago

They also have an interesting caveat. This is that the way the World3 model works is a through a set of connections that exist within an environment of growth. In an environment of decline, they are likely to reconfigure themselves in different ways.

This is the key insight, I think.

I was an interested follower of the Peak Oil stuff 20 years ago. Everything they said was true. But everything they predicted was wrong. As the economics of the oil business shifted, new forms of production became profitable and came online. The economy didn't collapse, life went on more or less normally.

Economies work on curves and trade-offs. As one thing declines, another ascends. As one solution to a given problem stops working, another one becomes viable. The whole continues more or less undisturbed.

It's notable that ecologists are discovering this; there are novel ecosystems [0] arising as the environment changes. The new arises as the old declines, and there's never a point at which anything "collapses" as such.

[0] https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/novel-ecosy...

creer2• 1 year ago

Peak Oil [...] Everything they said was true.

I feel even some of the premises were wrong: The root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve" - nothing earth-shattering there. But it seems to be there was an assumption that the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil. And that's not even true. In the case of fracking, once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult or expensive.

"Next oil is more difficult than previous oil" was, still is, an incorrect assumption. It feels obvious for current production simply because economically it makes sense to exploit cheaper oil first. But even that is not true because politically it makes sense to reserve safer oil for later. And longer term, unknown oil may be simpler: probably unknown-tech oil but maybe simply undiscovered oil.

marcus_holmes2• 1 year ago

Yeah, as it turns out fracking wasn't that difficult. But it took the industry some effort to find that out, effort that it didn't want to spend until it had to.

The same may be true for a whole bunch of things - we don't do them now because that's not how we do things, and it'll take some effort and risk to try a new way. We have a local optimum that we're happy with until the environment changes and we have to discover another one.

So possibly the assumption wasn't even "next oil is more difficult" but just "current oil is good enough". If you're making vast bank with the current process, why change?

Which is the thing with growth collapsing. What works now won't work in the future, but that doesn't mean that nothing works in the future. There might be better ways of running an economy as we stop relying on growth to make everything work.

schnitzelstoat• 1 year ago

There is no collapse though. People are having less children (or even no children at all) mostly by choice and it seems the concern will be the smaller workforce of the future rather than any problems of overpopulation.

We also have loads of cards left to play like fully deploying nuclear energy, GMOs etc. that would ease the environmental impact but are not used due to political reasons.

amai• 1 year ago

Has anyone ever done a sensivity analysis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_analysis ) on the world3 model?

How does the model react to small changes in the starting values? Is collapse an attractor of the model that cannot be avoided independent of the starting values? Then the question would be, how realistic is a model that predicts collapse independent of starting values?

creer2• 1 year ago

Good questions. The ideas of "limits to growth" (small l) are fascinating and important. And the initial report and book "Limits to growth" should of course not be the end of the discussion (and it's not). Even if (as is likely - it seems to me - just because it's too easy to get this wrong) that research was completely wrong, it's still an interesting research direction.

In the case of Peak Oil, the root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve - nothing earth-shattering there". But "peak oil" - the meme - completely mis-estimates where we were on the curve of how large the reservoir is. That the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil is not even true (see fracking - once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult.)

There are more aspects like that:

GDP: GDP is itself an evolving measure, and not necessarily the right measure.

Population: population trends have changed at dramatic rates. Not necessarily a great thing, but it seems to me more dramatic changes than anyone expected. When mankind wants to change population trends, it can.

Solar, wind, batteries: I personally feel that lots of money was put into solar too early - before the engineering was really there - wastefully then. But there is no avoiding the dramatic change in the energy landscape in a ridiculously short period. Same here then: when mankind wants to change its energy mix, it can. without shutting down, it goes without saying.

Population again: It used to be that growth of a country was equated to population growth (bounded by population growth), plus a little productivity. Globalisation threw a wrench in there. And current developments (ex-hype AI) may be about the entire relevance of population (with of course lots of space to agree or disagree - that's not the point, the point is that the question is raised.)

And all these changes were not exactly happening in a rational manner. Lots of random ideas get thrown at the wall, by one government or another, at taxpayer expense (the one lasting aspect), and the next ones by the next shift. And yet, dramatic change is achieved. It would be nice if it was more rational.

Limits to Growth was right about collapse

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