This was a grounding piece for me, many of the loosely terms ideas that I had about economic growth and also confusions I ignored (such as confusing about how the pie grows) have been illuminated. Much appreciated!
I like to think of economic growth being about producing more value per unit of human effort. Which ultimately just means people can spend more time doing what they want to do.
In a village where 99/100 people are farmers, there’s not much time to produce things other than food. But if the farmers get more productive (through tech, scientific understanding, etc), then maybe only 80 need to farm while the others work on pottery, medicine, plays, etc.
Whatever your goals are - environmental protection, helping the poor, improving equity - you want the value per unit of human effort to be high so enough people have the time to work on that issue. That only happens with economic growth.
Writing from Seattle as someone who skis a few days a week and has traversed some countries on foot, my perspective is that economic growth, even the base case or whatever case is the one we have, is not best.
Counter perspective to Jacob Brady: in a village where 99/100 people are farmers, there might be no fossil fuels burned, people might be self-sufficient, active, mentally sharp, eat whole foods, steward the land responsibly with small-scale plots, build homes from sustainable materials (mud, cow dung, stones), everyone is equal.
Government builds a road to the village. Everyone is happy. Some make more money, buy cars and tractors, people get medicine, eat processed foods, build homes from cheap building materials, farm cash crops instead of food, get fat, send their kids to schools and the city to look for opportunities, a way of life slowly dies.
I have been to villages whose people thought they won from the road but their descendants definitely did not. I have also been to poor villages that genuinely suck, so I'm not here to romanticize villages. But our economic growth models miss a lot of value.
I imagine you are aware of "Limits to Growth". Claude could write arguments and counterarguments from that perspective, so I won't bother. I'll just say I often feel sad when I am in nature now.
I've now been alive for long enough (and it helps that climate change is accelerating) that I can remember hearing more birds chirping at the start of spring, feeling a truly deep winter snowpack, and digging up more bugs in the dirt. The world does not feel richer to me today than it was.
The math of compounding economic growth applies the same to nature. Exponential resource depletion, pollution accumulation, and ecological degradation follow the same curves, but "Mother nature bats last" as a wise person reminded me this week.
I wouldn't ask that you stop advocating for growth entirely. This piece seems to do real work against misinformed perspectives wanting to replace economic growth with no economic growth. My request is that we replace economic growth with ecological growth, even in NYC, maybe that's more radical
Thanks for reading, Olly! There's a lot to respond to here, so I will do my best. My general response is this: I have a fundamentally different assessment of what is happening to our planet, what humans are doing on it, and what our possibility is. When I look at the world, I do not feel sad like you do, and I wish you saw it my way. I see the limits of human civilization, and the downside trade-offs we make for it, but when I take in the whole, I feel hope and pride. I am glad for the species, and for the Earth. I do not think we are standing idly by while crucial elements of the world are lost. If you detect energy in my response, it is emphatic optimism and hope, not aggression. So, my response:
"My request is that we replace economic growth with ecological growth." I understand this to mean something like "We must take into account that exponentially increasing consumption could eventually cause ecological collapse. Our growth must be sustainable, and not undermine the natural systems it relies upon."
"I've now been alive for long enough (and it helps that climate change is accelerating) that I can remember hearing more birds chirping at the start of spring, feeling a truly deep winter snowpack, and digging up more bugs in the dirt. The world does not feel richer to me today than it was." I've been alive long enough now to see birds come back, oceans and rivers restored, and so much more. I've been alive long enough to remember when the ozone layer's depletion was a big worry, and to see that worry put to rest by human action: (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-continues-healing-in-2024-153523/). We are not living in the world that Rachel Carson imagined in Silent Spring (1962). None of this negates the downside trade-offs of industrialization, but it shows that they are extremely far from a complete picture of humanity's developmental trajectory. I feel fundamentally richer in so many ways.
And I do know about the "Limits of Growth." (1972) I think its model is fundamentally flawed, that "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon (1981) is an effective rebuttal, and that the book is far too pessimistic about what growth can deliver. The flaws of LoG come across most easily when reading its section on agriculture:
- "Figure 10 shows that, even with the optimistic assumption that all possible land is utilized, there will still be a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capita land requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today" (51). Population kept going up, but land requirements did not.
- "There has been an overwhelming excess of potentially arable land for all of history, and now, within 30 years (or about one population doubling time), there may be a sudden and serious shortage" (51). This book was written in 1972, so "30 years" was 2002. Not only was there no danger of a shortage, but we have moved further away from that possibility.
- "A second lesson to be learned from figure 10 is that precise numerical assumptions about the limits of the earth are unimportant when viewed against the inexorable progress of exponential growth" (51). I think this line is indicative of the whole flawed approach of the book. It equates to "even if our particular model forecasts are wrong, they are nonetheless inevitable at some point because of mathematics." Well, not only are their particular forecasts often wrong, but so is their math.
They make the very "grow the pie" mistake I discuss in the article, which means their math is wrong. They have an essentially accumulative view of consumption, not a developmental view. As economic growth increases, resource usage develops, it does not simply increase in the way their models show. We can get more for less, and we do all the time. We also discover *new* resources all the time, and new ways of doing things. I don't think LoG takes the power of this process remotely seriously enough, and that this is a critical intellectual limitation of the piece.
And, at the end of the day, it does not even consider that human economic growth will move, and is already increasingly moving, off world.
Even if one agreed with the view of LoG (which I don't), their essential argument is that the world is a physically limited thing, and it cannot sustain exponential consumption of that physicality from a physical or ecological view. Again, I don't equate economic growth to an accumulative increase in consumption like the book essentially does--I view economic growth as a developmental increase. But also: humans are not limited to the world. The development of Starship and the growth of a space economy (the economics of which I discuss here: https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/spacex-starship-erie-canal) is an example of human ingenuity that the book does not even contemplate. But it is happening! I do not mean to say "we can always get a new Earth," or anything like that. More that "the human ecology" is a system that is larger than Earth, even as it principally centers it. LoG does not have a correct view of what human ecology is.
I'll close with this:
"The math of compounding economic growth applies the same to nature. Exponential resource depletion, pollution accumulation, and ecological degradation follow the same curves, but 'Mother nature bats last' as a wise person reminded me this week."
I do not agree with this. It is an accumulative view of economic growth and consumption, not a developmental one. And it glides over the increasing mountain of counterexamples, some of which I point to above (reforestation, agricultural land use, and more). Compounding *developmental* economic growth, which humanity seems to be experiencing, follows trend curves that restore ecologies, and give us more tools to pursue the things we find valuable. The book Limits of Growth was written in 1972, right before many of the negative trend lines it assesses promptly fell. But the people living in that time had many reasons to be concerned. But we tackled those concerns head on in law and culture. I believe we are doing the same today, and that is why I have a fundamentally optimistic view of where we are headed. People remember their fears, they remember the negative trade-offs--but they often forget their alleviation. And so world models often default to pessimism without work.
I fundamentally agree with Our World in Data's approach to thinking about human society: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
And while I do agree that Mother Nature bats last, in that the physical systems of the world will act how they will act independent of our wishes, I prefer the formulation from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this response Daniel! I can feel the energy of your optimism and got excited enough to spin an entire blog post out of my response. Hope that you enjoy and any further dissent is welcome.
This was a grounding piece for me, many of the loosely terms ideas that I had about economic growth and also confusions I ignored (such as confusing about how the pie grows) have been illuminated. Much appreciated!
🫡
This was generative to me. Will share some thoughts as they crystallize.
I like to think of economic growth being about producing more value per unit of human effort. Which ultimately just means people can spend more time doing what they want to do.
In a village where 99/100 people are farmers, there’s not much time to produce things other than food. But if the farmers get more productive (through tech, scientific understanding, etc), then maybe only 80 need to farm while the others work on pottery, medicine, plays, etc.
Whatever your goals are - environmental protection, helping the poor, improving equity - you want the value per unit of human effort to be high so enough people have the time to work on that issue. That only happens with economic growth.
Writing from Seattle as someone who skis a few days a week and has traversed some countries on foot, my perspective is that economic growth, even the base case or whatever case is the one we have, is not best.
Counter perspective to Jacob Brady: in a village where 99/100 people are farmers, there might be no fossil fuels burned, people might be self-sufficient, active, mentally sharp, eat whole foods, steward the land responsibly with small-scale plots, build homes from sustainable materials (mud, cow dung, stones), everyone is equal.
Government builds a road to the village. Everyone is happy. Some make more money, buy cars and tractors, people get medicine, eat processed foods, build homes from cheap building materials, farm cash crops instead of food, get fat, send their kids to schools and the city to look for opportunities, a way of life slowly dies.
I have been to villages whose people thought they won from the road but their descendants definitely did not. I have also been to poor villages that genuinely suck, so I'm not here to romanticize villages. But our economic growth models miss a lot of value.
I imagine you are aware of "Limits to Growth". Claude could write arguments and counterarguments from that perspective, so I won't bother. I'll just say I often feel sad when I am in nature now.
I've now been alive for long enough (and it helps that climate change is accelerating) that I can remember hearing more birds chirping at the start of spring, feeling a truly deep winter snowpack, and digging up more bugs in the dirt. The world does not feel richer to me today than it was.
The math of compounding economic growth applies the same to nature. Exponential resource depletion, pollution accumulation, and ecological degradation follow the same curves, but "Mother nature bats last" as a wise person reminded me this week.
I wouldn't ask that you stop advocating for growth entirely. This piece seems to do real work against misinformed perspectives wanting to replace economic growth with no economic growth. My request is that we replace economic growth with ecological growth, even in NYC, maybe that's more radical
Thanks for reading, Olly! There's a lot to respond to here, so I will do my best. My general response is this: I have a fundamentally different assessment of what is happening to our planet, what humans are doing on it, and what our possibility is. When I look at the world, I do not feel sad like you do, and I wish you saw it my way. I see the limits of human civilization, and the downside trade-offs we make for it, but when I take in the whole, I feel hope and pride. I am glad for the species, and for the Earth. I do not think we are standing idly by while crucial elements of the world are lost. If you detect energy in my response, it is emphatic optimism and hope, not aggression. So, my response:
"My request is that we replace economic growth with ecological growth." I understand this to mean something like "We must take into account that exponentially increasing consumption could eventually cause ecological collapse. Our growth must be sustainable, and not undermine the natural systems it relies upon."
If that's what you mean, I agree with this. I also think that's how human economic growth is trending as a byproduct of increasing wealth--we can afford to have both modern civilization, and ecological health overall. While many parts of the Earth show societies moving through a puberty of industrialization, many of them also show a matured industrialization that is very different. In the United States, the amount of farmland under cultivation is falling (https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-land-in-farms-in-the-us-since-2000/), fertilizer use has been flat and slightly falling since about 1980 (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=89569), and agricultural productivity continues to climb (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productivity-in-the-united-states/productivity-growth-in-us-agriculture). Around the world, rates of deforestation have been plunging since the 1980s (https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation), and show no signs of moving off trend. In New York City, our air is tremendously cleaner than it was a few decades ago, dolphins and whales have returned to the Hudson and East River, many ecosystems are being restored and are healthily growing now (e.g., https://www.billionoysterproject.org/), and there is more tree cover than ever (we are an actively growing urban forest, https://www.nylcv.org/news/policy-means-people-nycs-urban-forest-plan).
"I've now been alive for long enough (and it helps that climate change is accelerating) that I can remember hearing more birds chirping at the start of spring, feeling a truly deep winter snowpack, and digging up more bugs in the dirt. The world does not feel richer to me today than it was." I've been alive long enough now to see birds come back, oceans and rivers restored, and so much more. I've been alive long enough to remember when the ozone layer's depletion was a big worry, and to see that worry put to rest by human action: (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-continues-healing-in-2024-153523/). We are not living in the world that Rachel Carson imagined in Silent Spring (1962). None of this negates the downside trade-offs of industrialization, but it shows that they are extremely far from a complete picture of humanity's developmental trajectory. I feel fundamentally richer in so many ways.
And I do know about the "Limits of Growth." (1972) I think its model is fundamentally flawed, that "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon (1981) is an effective rebuttal, and that the book is far too pessimistic about what growth can deliver. The flaws of LoG come across most easily when reading its section on agriculture:
- "Figure 10 shows that, even with the optimistic assumption that all possible land is utilized, there will still be a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capita land requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today" (51). Population kept going up, but land requirements did not.
- "There has been an overwhelming excess of potentially arable land for all of history, and now, within 30 years (or about one population doubling time), there may be a sudden and serious shortage" (51). This book was written in 1972, so "30 years" was 2002. Not only was there no danger of a shortage, but we have moved further away from that possibility.
- "A second lesson to be learned from figure 10 is that precise numerical assumptions about the limits of the earth are unimportant when viewed against the inexorable progress of exponential growth" (51). I think this line is indicative of the whole flawed approach of the book. It equates to "even if our particular model forecasts are wrong, they are nonetheless inevitable at some point because of mathematics." Well, not only are their particular forecasts often wrong, but so is their math.
They make the very "grow the pie" mistake I discuss in the article, which means their math is wrong. They have an essentially accumulative view of consumption, not a developmental view. As economic growth increases, resource usage develops, it does not simply increase in the way their models show. We can get more for less, and we do all the time. We also discover *new* resources all the time, and new ways of doing things. I don't think LoG takes the power of this process remotely seriously enough, and that this is a critical intellectual limitation of the piece.
And, at the end of the day, it does not even consider that human economic growth will move, and is already increasingly moving, off world.
Even if one agreed with the view of LoG (which I don't), their essential argument is that the world is a physically limited thing, and it cannot sustain exponential consumption of that physicality from a physical or ecological view. Again, I don't equate economic growth to an accumulative increase in consumption like the book essentially does--I view economic growth as a developmental increase. But also: humans are not limited to the world. The development of Starship and the growth of a space economy (the economics of which I discuss here: https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/spacex-starship-erie-canal) is an example of human ingenuity that the book does not even contemplate. But it is happening! I do not mean to say "we can always get a new Earth," or anything like that. More that "the human ecology" is a system that is larger than Earth, even as it principally centers it. LoG does not have a correct view of what human ecology is.
I'll close with this:
"The math of compounding economic growth applies the same to nature. Exponential resource depletion, pollution accumulation, and ecological degradation follow the same curves, but 'Mother nature bats last' as a wise person reminded me this week."
I do not agree with this. It is an accumulative view of economic growth and consumption, not a developmental one. And it glides over the increasing mountain of counterexamples, some of which I point to above (reforestation, agricultural land use, and more). Compounding *developmental* economic growth, which humanity seems to be experiencing, follows trend curves that restore ecologies, and give us more tools to pursue the things we find valuable. The book Limits of Growth was written in 1972, right before many of the negative trend lines it assesses promptly fell. But the people living in that time had many reasons to be concerned. But we tackled those concerns head on in law and culture. I believe we are doing the same today, and that is why I have a fundamentally optimistic view of where we are headed. People remember their fears, they remember the negative trade-offs--but they often forget their alleviation. And so world models often default to pessimism without work.
I fundamentally agree with Our World in Data's approach to thinking about human society: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible." (https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better)
And while I do agree that Mother Nature bats last, in that the physical systems of the world will act how they will act independent of our wishes, I prefer the formulation from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this response Daniel! I can feel the energy of your optimism and got excited enough to spin an entire blog post out of my response. Hope that you enjoy and any further dissent is welcome.
https://irunearth.substack.com/p/ecological-damage-is-the-best
Best,
Olly