For what it's worth: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

Researchers must try to resolve a dispute on the best way to use and care for Earth’s resources.

For what it's worth: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument D41586-022-00723-1_20223656

For what it's worth: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument D41586-022-00723-1_20223656

Fifty years ago this month, the System Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge had a stark message for the world: continued economic and population growth would deplete Earth’s resources and lead to global economic collapse by 2070. This finding was from their 200-page book The Limits to Growth, one of the first modelling studies to forecast the environmental and social impacts of industrialization.

For its time, this was a shocking forecast, and it did not go down well. Nature called the study “another whiff of doomsday” (see Nature 236, 47–49; 1972). It was near-heresy, even in research circles, to suggest that some of the foundations of industrial civilization — mining coal, making steel, drilling for oil and spraying crops with fertilizers — might cause lasting damage. Research leaders accepted that industry pollutes air and water, but considered such damage reversible. Those trained in a pre-computing age were also sceptical of modelling, and advocated that technology would come to the planet’s rescue. Zoologist Solly Zuckerman, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said: “Whatever computers may say about the future, there is nothing in the past which gives any credence whatever to the view that human ingenuity cannot in time circumvent material human difficulties.”

But the study’s lead author, Donella Meadows, and her colleagues stood firm, pointing out that ecological and economic stability would be possible if action were taken early. Limits was instrumental to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme, also in 1972. Overall, more than 30 million copies of the book have been sold.

.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00723-1

For what it's worth: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

For what it's worth: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps' Laissez-faire Free Trade Zone