31 ms·

My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

317 points by dlevine 5y ago

dane-pgp 5y ago
> In many ways, this scenario is even gloomier than BAU, and many say that it predicts the dire outcome of allowing climate change to go unchecked. But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly. The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't good models for its influence on / from the economy back in 1972. If the model (even just the updated one) has managed to include some universal physical law that can predict the aggregate of the interactions between the global climate and economy, then that deserves much more attention than the clickbait "societal collapse" prediction.
- brutusborn 5y ago
  Even a sin(x) function can be approximated as a line for small values of x. Potentially the predictions will start to diverge as feedback loops come into effect?
- jandrese 5y ago
  I thought that "pollution" chart showing it dropping off sharply in all scenarios (due either to clean technology or societal collapse) were unlikely. If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should) then it's very hard to get it back out of the air, especially in a short timeframe. So in all cases the pollution line ends up in a steady state at roughly wherever society either weaned itself from fossil fuels or collapsed.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Rather than burn coal to smelt steel beams, we could start opting for more timber frame construction and growing more trees, capturing carbon out of the air and turning it into housing.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      A very rough ballpark estimate is that you'd need to use at least as much timber as we've mined coal. Probably a lot more since coal has a higher carbon content than timber and we've also burned plenty of oil and gas. That's a mind boggling amount of timber.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        They are saying to stop using steel in construction.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should)" There is a caveat. They only consider CO2 from specific sources to be pollution, so we can't just blanket call it pollution. For example, the CO2 I exhale would not be considered pollution, but if it's coming from fossil fuels or even burning trees, then it is. I'm not sure how they handle the natural burning of tree, like wildfires though.
    - DaedPsyker 5y ago
      I am absolutely not a climate scientist but my understanding is c02 from the likes of us isn't a problem as we are naturally part of a cyclical process. Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon. However we are releasing an excess amount that had been trapped and removed from that cyclical process, adding more energy into the system than its natural equilibrium usually takes.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        "Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon." This actually isn't true. They say they burning of trees requires such a long cycle time that the release of CO2 does contribute to global warming. My main point was that this distinction isn't something that people commonly think about. Usually think mercury, sulfur, etc, which are not things we naturally emit.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
https://archive.is/n7wZz https://archive.is/n7wZz
thewarrior 5y ago
I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject. Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.
- Swizec 5y ago
  We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization". But it's not that bad! Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall. Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing? I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... [2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine... [3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century
  - elevenoh 5y ago
    Casual 'almost certainly'... I don't think so. Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
reedjosh 5y ago
Just read the original paper. This synopsis mostly just reiterates what the original paper says and concurs. I personally don't think we're going to see any collapse as drastic as the models predict. People have been predicting collapse forever, but either way, this article doesn't add much to the paper itself.
- klysm 5y ago
  I doubt the strength of arguments that go like “people have been saying X forever, but X hasn't happened yet - therefore not X” because it completely ignores evidence for X over time.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    There are some things that look like X. There are also things that look like "not X". Taking it all in, should your estimation of the probability of X be going up, or down? The problem is, whichever way you answer, someone from the other side can say "You're not taking into account all the evidence". And you can say, "Yes, I am - you aren't!" And things from there go in completely unproductive directions.
- rurp 5y ago
  But people have been right many, many times about other societies collapsing. All groups collapse, it's just a matter of time. Our ability to create existential threats is extremely new in historical terms. We have very little evidence for how they will be managed, but so far the indications are mostly terrible.
  - gmfawcett 5y ago
    You're saying that people have predicted the collapse of societies many, many times? Which ones?
  - drdec 5y ago
    There are always people predicting the end of society just as there are always people predicting a stock market crash. I suspect they have similar levels of success.
premium-gecko 5y ago
The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth: "In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
- tanbog4 5y ago
  I guess if you keep saying the same thing will happen repeatability eventually you'll look like you predicted something. Even a broken (analogue) clock tells the right time twice a day.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    Guy posts relevant information related to OP. Gets downvoted into oblivion. True HN style.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Or it's an ongoing cautionary narrative that we shouldn't take our civilizational accomplishments forgranted, and that government and civic works are ultimately a long chain of development and stewardship which depended on those before to keep going.
  - forz877 5y ago
    The problem is people are expecting the asteroid impact, or the single point where "civilization is collapsed." These aren't helpful and aren't realistic. Even historical societal collapses happen over periods of centuries, often. It's foolish to simply dismiss threats because people make bad predictions. We can already see increases in rare weather events right now, and these have already had significant geopolitical consequences (e.g. Syria).
DoreenMichele 5y ago
With information injected into a system, you can do more with less materially. This is a known fact and the internet is a huge injection of information into the world that is accessible to most people to some degree, making knowledge no longer a privilege of the elites. It is game changing and provides hope for better answers than historical models suggest. Though we do need to work on keeping the quality of info high and on keeping information free as much as possible and that's a constant ongoing battle.
cletus 5y ago
So two things spring to mind with this and any doom scenario or predictions: 1. People tend to exaggerate such doom. The reasons for this vary. A lot of the time it's unknowing. It could be as simple as assuming a constant function will remain constant beyond normal boundaries. Or that a dynamic function will continue forever. Or it's sometimes disingenuous (eg to promote a particular agenda or simply to gain more attention through alarmism). Whatever the case, I've found it to be a good policy to ignore doom scenarios; and 2. There's a concept I like that I've heard described as "betting with the Mayans". The Mayan calendar "predicted" the end of the world in 2012. There are two approaches you can take with this: you can bet they're right or bet they're wrong. But simple game theory tells you that you should bet that they're wrong. Why? Because if they're right. It doesn't matter. The only thing you "win" is a brief sense of smug superiority as you suffer the same fate as everyone else. So why bother betting on that outcome? So let's take this lens to a polarizing issue like climate change. I personally hold all of the following to be true: 1. Man has clearly had an impact on climate, as in a relatively rapid rise in global temperatures, due to CO2 emissions; 2. It's not clear to me that this is entirely man-made (eg higher Solar output). Of course, this may not even matter one way or the other as we still have to deal with the results; 3. Abrupt climate change isn't as rare as people make out. It's happened a ton of times in the last 100,000 years. They're called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles [1]. This isn't some crackpot fringe publication. This is Nature. 4. At different points in the Earth's history it has been both substantially hotter and colder than it is now; 5. It's likely that climate change is a major contributing factor to what is essentially a mass extinction event that we're undergoing now (most of the rest being human activity and ecosystem destruction). 6. Altruism won't solve carbon emissions. Economics will. Humans are unwilling and incapable of making long term sacrifices for the planet that inconveniences them in any way. 7. I know some reading the above will have an immediate reaction to label me a "denier". That attitude really has no place in scientific discourse. So I just don't believe we'll have runaway heating as some argue. Why? Because the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and despite higher temperatures that hasn't happened. I don't think we can definitively describe all the self-correcting processes that have kept Earth within a habitable band for literally billions of years. But even if I'm wrong, we're screwed anyway because global population won't change and deviate from the current course. So yeah, worrying about a global collapse in 20 years? That's a hard pass. [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
Havoc 5y ago
Why would pollution be exponential?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Because, once electricity is no longer available, and you can't get coal from long distance, people burn wood or trash or dried grass or whatever they can get their hands on. If the alternative is freezing, you don't care about the pollution you're generating.
  - yosito 5y ago
    How much did pollution increase in Texas when the electric grid failed this winter?
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  CO2 pollution would be exponential if it were proportional to energy usage and if energy usage increased linearly with economic development and if economic development were exponential. Fortunately neither of the first two conditions are true. Consider the buried lede in this 2019 article[0] from the Guardian: > But in a positive signal for the future, the [UK's Office for National Statistics ] said both domestic and consumption-based emissions had fallen since the 2008 financial crisis. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g7s-biggest-net-importer-of-co2-emissions-per-capita-says-ons https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g...
pfdietz 5y ago
I remember someone took one of those global models and noticed all the equations were time reversible. So they asked "what does the model 'predict' the past looked like?" And it turned out the model predicted the world population was infinite sometime in the 1800s. :) I have very little faith in any of these models.
- titzer 5y ago
  The beauty of open mathematical models is you can show your work. So show your work. Link? Study? Paper?
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    This was decades ago, I don't have the reference, and it would be on paper not the net anyway. I THINK it may have been in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Models_of_Doom/neaRvwEACAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Models_of_Doom/neaRvwEA...
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Any sources for that? Right now it's just "I have very little faith in these models because I remember someone trying to reverse them and coming up with nonsensical results", probably coupled with "and that is so much more comforting".
- wcoenen 5y ago
  If many different initial conditions can evolve to almost the same state, then reversing time must necessarily blow up small errors/perturbations. It's the same reason why driving with a trailer backwards is more difficult than forward, even though Newtonian mechanics are time reversible.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    I understand they original researchers didn't even validate their models by running them forward from, say, 1600 or 1800. They didn't even try it.
yongjik 5y ago
> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ... This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later. I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."
- iaw 5y ago
  Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely. Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
    - dvt 5y ago
      > Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right. Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether. Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?
      - Klinky 5y ago
        Perhaps the uncouth voting on HN is a further sign of impending societal collapse.
chestertn 5y ago
When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew. Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
- seibelj 5y ago
  The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content. The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end of the world” views that are prevalent everywhere.
  - senkora 5y ago
    Do you have any recommendations on what material to read?
    - runeks 5y ago
      This Wikipedia page on Carl Menger’s “Principles of Economics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Menger_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Menge... says: > Ludwig von Mises called the book the best introduction to the Austrian School of economics
      - evgen 5y ago
        It would also help to read Marx's Das Kapital at the same time, that way you can plough through two equally discredited economic theories and get them out of the way before you move on to actually reading something worthwhile.
lcall 5y ago
There are many problems. But we can be ok.
Isamu 5y ago
Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases? It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever. [edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I have heard soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough. There’s also the possibility of drought and loss of pollinators.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Yeah... I think it's pretty hard to believe a model from the 70's could predict the change on any of those with any accuracy, even less that it can predict the timing. I don't think we could do it now.
  - schiffern 5y ago
    > soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683
  - 5y ago
thedudeabides5 5y ago
Great charts. The fact that “Business as Usual” aka the default has industrial production falling 75% in 20 years tells you all you need to know about this amazing paragon of machine learning and economics
DennisP 5y ago
Models like this are as much about understanding the dynamics as making specific predictions. A key dynamic that impressed me from LtG is that as pollution accumulates, you spend more and more of your resources dealing with the damage, and less making the sort of investments you used to make. But things can still carry on just fine, until suddenly the bottom drops out. Since we're already dealing with significant damage from greenhouse gases, I find that a little disturbing.
ianai 5y ago
My suspicion is that skepticism has morphed into denialism in general. We’re seemingly at a point where any assertion will get attacked so many times that eventually even chimps on keyboards would come up with a reasonably credible (seeming) critique despite having no deep knowledge of the original point or underlying system.
weenas88sbaw 5y ago
Economists have predicted 69 of the 8 societal collapses in history isn’t that the common sarcastic quote for these type of articles?
karaterobot 5y ago
Have there been many economic models that predicted macro things like food production and industrial output 70+ years into the future that have proven to be reliable?
InternetPerson 5y ago
It's time to shoot fish in a barrel again, everybody! Can you find something wrong with this analysis? If so, then please comment!!
rglover 5y ago
It will never cease to amaze me how much faith is placed in models and predictions.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
We need a cabal of Billionaires to get it into their head that the world is ending unless they do something drastic. That will save us. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a...
- smt88 5y ago
  I remember reading that Peter Thiel bought land in New Zealand as a huge against a societal collapse that he predicted and/or was attempting to hasten. The scary thing is that many billionaires are wealthy enough to pull it off.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    If Alex is right, some of these guys are in a death cult. After confirmation of Epstein Island and video of them literally burning OWL effigies in the forest at their secret meetings. Who knows anymore what is going on.
  - smt88 5y ago
    hedge against*
cjohnson318 5y ago
I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot of modern democratic republics are about 200 years old, or less, but we keep thinking to ourselves, "this civilization will be different". I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.
- pksebben 5y ago
  it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.
  - rewgs 5y ago
    Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage. The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find? And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows... And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond? I could go on. That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Is it annoying that people keep submitting "paywalled" Medium URLs to HN. This one is a re-cycled story first available from other sites that do not try to annoy readers into signing up.^1 Wonder if Dana Levine made some coin from Medium by submitting her medium.com hosted blog post URL to HN and hitting the front page. 1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicat... Here is Herrington's analysis: https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/yale-publication.pdf https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y... Further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/mineral-resource-fossil-fuel-depletion-terraform-earth-collapse-civilisation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/scientists-limits-to-growth-vindicated-investment-transition-circular-economy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j... Also this press release video (no background music) re: the report to the Club of Rome released as a paperback titled "Extracted" that is referenced in the article. The "tech" industry relies heavily on minerals extraction. It is alleged by the author that 10% of the world's energy production is consumed by minerals extraction. How much of that comes from fossil fuels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avCD5JVekE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avCD5JVekE
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  I agree, Medium is pretty annoying to use as a reader. And for some strange reason, it doesn't work with Firefox's "reader view". I don't understand why people keep using this platform.
ggm 5y ago
I was interested the article (and commentary here) makes no mention of either Ehrlich, or Simon, or the bet[1] Because it was pretty contemporary, and I think influenced how people revised their thinking (at least in public) about the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
swader999 5y ago
Doom scrolled about halfway down. I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the esoteric commentary when we have a real life example of this happening right now in South Africa.
- anonleb4 5y ago
  There are countless examples all around the world as we speak, but some people, mostly "occidentals", are stuck in bubbles full of assumptions and theories. Maybe it's denial, as mentioned.
- makomk 5y ago
  Most people who've heard about what's happening in South Africa probably know that they've had major problems for pretty much their entire existence as a country which lead to this. (There's been an unfortunate tendency for the western left to pretend those problems don't exist for stupid political reasons, but that's not unusual.)
rockmartin 5y ago
Fucking idiot who wrote Limits to growth gave the globalists reason to depopulate the world, which is happening as we speak. That’s the purpose of the covid injection.
omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
According the the wiki article, world3 is too general to be realistic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 > But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168
- mrpopo 5y ago
  Yes, world3 is meant as a simulation exercise that is sometimes taken too seriously. But even its critics consider that the conclusions of the model are valid. Here is the continuation of your quote: > He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem: Only the widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy—all you need to know in this case is how to execute the equation y=x*e^{rt} prevents most of the people from dismissing the idea of sustainable growth at healthy rates as an oxymoronic stupidity whose pursuit is, unfortunately, infinitely more tragic than comic. After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues.[7]:338–339
  - omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
    That's also trivial. Continuous growth of anything tangible in a finite system will eventually hit constraints of that system.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    No, lots of critics of the model (like me) consider the conclusions of the model to be invalid. It's inherent in the nature of validity actually - a fraudulent model like World3 cannot be said to be "valid" even if a few of its vague prognostications end up in the right general area. Any definition of validity that allowed such a thing would also have to apply to fortune tellers, who often say things that seem directionally accurate but whose methods are of course not "valid".
jinguang 5y ago
现实的变量因素太多的。不起眼的因素可能成为决定因素；自我觉得重要的因素，在疫情的现实下也变成无足轻重了。所以这类预测噱头大于实际。不过我觉得资本主义社会崩溃的概率更大。
gcanyon 5y ago
The article says that the various predictions are equally good fits because they don't diverge much by 2020. If in 1972 researchers came up with multiple models that all predicted pretty much the same thing over fifty years, but then wildly diverge over the subsequent fifty years, that alone is problematic. Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest. Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline. There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.
animanoir 5y ago
Basically all studies say that Capitalism is killing us.
scottfr 5y ago
Here's an interactive implementation of the World3 model: https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/The-World3-Model-Classic-World-Simulation https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/The-World3-Model-Class...
jollybean 5y ago
We thought we would hit 'peak oil' in the 1980's but then we learned to drill in deep water. When we learned to make fuel from Oilsands, the world's reserves tripled. When we learned to drill sideways, it grew. When we learned how to make more efficient use of the tapping, it grew. This notion of 'finite resources' is a very bad constraint. Obviously there are limits but we adapt quickly. If we decided to use 1980's style Nuclear Reactors - we could power the world for 10 000 years using known reserves. And it would be clean. Trees? We grow them. Metal? We recycle. Even soil we are starting to figure out sustainably. There are very few hard limits we're facing on that front. Chocolate and Cork might run in short supply but that means we kind spend our folly money on 'pure chocolate' as a delicacy instead of NFT's and we just can't have proper wine corks. 'Societal Collapse' won't come from resource extraction, it will come from warring ideologues in a population of materially satiated plebes who have too much time on their hands and so they argue over the meaning of words until someone tries and actual coup and it comes apart from there.
tomcooks 5y ago
"To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in." Why keep things behind walled gardens, if you write them for others to read? Thanks to those who shared the archive link.
zug_zug 5y ago
Everyone: We were wrong about peak oil! Models aren't always right! Me: Couldn't our models be wrong in the wrong direction? Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).
- ivalm 5y ago
  But interventions can also cause societal collapse. If you don’t know what you are doing don’t do anything since action can be worse than inaction.
  - Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
    That just seems like a generally bad advice. It's true that we can't know everything but we usually kinda know something and from that we can act.
keiferski 5y ago
Not giving an opinion on the model itself, I do find it interesting how many of these cultural narratives of collapse and Armageddon are almost directly from older religious traditions. Specifically, Christianity in the Western World. The parallels become increasingly obvious if you dig deeper into the theology; everything is present, from climate “sinners” to apocalyptic scenarios in which everything collapses into a ball of fire, unless we repent and change our ways. Again, not saying that these predictions are wrong or overly inaccurate. But even if many people in the Western world are not “religious” today, they inevitably seem to fall into these same thought patterns. I have noticed that this approach is not shared by many other non-Western countries, who absolutely recognize the dangers facing global society from climate, political polarization, etc. yet lack the “apocalypse” culture points. I worry if Western culture has a self-reinforcing obsession with the collapse narrative, to its own detriment.
- native_samples 5y ago
  I think you're right but it's not exclusively a religious issue. Karl Marx was famously obsessed with an apocalyptic end-of-days style vision in which the sinners would be punished and the pure elevated above. At the same time he wasn't a big fan of (other) religions.
  - keiferski 5y ago
    True, but Nietzsche would say that socialism and subsequently Marx are consequences of Christianity. So it’s still operating in the same worldview, if unconsciously.
- rini17 5y ago
  The collapse of civilization happened in various ways many times already, no wonder it's present globally in the unconscious. Doubt it's a specialty of West.
  - keiferski 5y ago
    Perhaps, but I think the moralistic approach to it is definitely a Western phenomenon.
melomal 5y ago
1. We are so awful at predictions. 2. Tech predictions live and die by hype cycles (which gets a nice little write up in this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-... where the author reviews 20 years of hype cycles, what has come of them etc)
coldtea 5y ago
Let me guess the take: either (a) it will all be fixed at the last minute (even if we're beyond that), by some advanced alien tech we've yet to discover (because humans are so ingenius and nothing can halt progress), (b) it's not an issue, la-la-la hands in the ears.
Proven 5y ago
This is globalist nonsense. Population growth is not a problem. What will collapse is be socialist societies and countries.
aww_dang 5y ago
>The original study and subsequent research was funded by the Club of Rome, a European organization focused on solving the larger problems facing humanity. Ah yes, our benevolent overlords who have selflessly offered themselves up as our technocratic central planners. Such premises should at least inspire mild curiosity or skepticism from readers. Counter point: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ >The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second." ... >Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."
conjectures 5y ago
Wow, actually slightly shocked how seriously this model seems to be taken or, at least, how sticky it is. Coefficients, dynamics, number of entities involved, stationarity. There are so many unknowns and so many reasons to believe incomplete understanding could scupper predictions... I know everyone likes to believe themselves to be a good Fermi estimator. But trying to model the world beyond 2050 when the weather a month from now is a hard problem. Well, let's say it's Quixotic at best. Which makes me think the model isn't actually under discussion here, it's just all our priors about how much we fancy technology as a solution or not etc.
- deleted 5y ago
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dgdosen 5y ago
The first thing I wondered about these comments is how often "Peak Oil" would be mentioned. There has been no peak oil related crash. I think the world's economy and markets are now resilient enough to safely say 'peak oil' will never be a cause for the collapse of civilization. Rising energy prices will just usher out the age of fossil fuels faster. I now wonder what happens when (if?) we get to 'net 0' (which hasn't been mentioned in these comments). If we can reach a point of unlimited, renewable, clean energy that's (almost) too cheap to meter, that just upends any model because it'll zero out factors that are parts of or 'limits' in those models. - Lack of fresh water: solved by free/clean energy (desalinization) - Lack of adequate food supply: solved by free/clean energy (fertilizer production) - Lack of resources: potentially solved by free/clean energy (asteroid farming? recycling?) It's hard to imagine a problem that unlimited, clean energy won't help solve. The question is, can we get to net zero?
- dd36 5y ago
  Net negative.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  How would we ever get there? The cost to build and maintain powerplants is expensive - whether it's solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear. This cost needs to be amortized over the life of the plant. It's hard to imagine this getting to less than $0.05 / kWh. Construction costs alone make Nuclear Energy cost ~$0.08 / kWh even in China where construction is relatively cheap. Even if we get Fusion energy, AFAIK it's unlikely the construction will be substantially cheaper. Obviously if anything was free - people would abuse it. You would need to build endless powerplants (which cost money) to provide free energy for people to launch rockets and mine asteroids and produce fertilizer and desalinate water...
  - dgdosen 5y ago
    Would a Kardashev Type 1 civilization have too many powerplants? If we can get to net zero first, that would affect your model's calculation that we would require endless power plants.
guscost 5y ago
> The 1972 paper dealt with a system dynamics computer model named World3 That’s an incredibly dumb idea, seriously? These are the people who have been advising our leaders?
svrourke 5y ago
MIT should create a galactic encyclopedia to preserve human knowledge for future generations after the collapse and perhaps a group or "Foundation" to maintain it. Get ready boys the mule is coming.
drallison 5y ago
Dynamic models are useful ways to explore complex systems. For example: Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay Ecological Economics 101, 90--102 Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay, GR Asrar, AJ Busalacchi, RF Cahalan, ... National Science Review 3 (4), 470--494
teslaberry 5y ago
just print more 0% perpetual debt, i mean money. print more money, that will solve the problem of establishing arms length trust between people. it always does.

317 points by dlevine 5y ago

> In many ways, this scenario is even gloomier than BAU, and many say that it predicts the dire outcome of allowing climate change to go unchecked. But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly. The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't good models for its influence on / from the economy back in 1972. If the model (even just the updated one) has managed to include some universal physical law that can predict the aggregate of the interactions between the global climate and economy, then that deserves much more attention than the clickbait "societal collapse" prediction.

brutusborn 5y ago
Even a sin(x) function can be approximated as a line for small values of x. Potentially the predictions will start to diverge as feedback loops come into effect?
jandrese 5y ago
I thought that "pollution" chart showing it dropping off sharply in all scenarios (due either to clean technology or societal collapse) were unlikely. If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should) then it's very hard to get it back out of the air, especially in a short timeframe. So in all cases the pollution line ends up in a steady state at roughly wherever society either weaned itself from fossil fuels or collapsed.
- asdff 5y ago
  Rather than burn coal to smelt steel beams, we could start opting for more timber frame construction and growing more trees, capturing carbon out of the air and turning it into housing.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    A very rough ballpark estimate is that you'd need to use at least as much timber as we've mined coal. Probably a lot more since coal has a higher carbon content than timber and we've also burned plenty of oil and gas. That's a mind boggling amount of timber.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      They are saying to stop using steel in construction.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should)" There is a caveat. They only consider CO2 from specific sources to be pollution, so we can't just blanket call it pollution. For example, the CO2 I exhale would not be considered pollution, but if it's coming from fossil fuels or even burning trees, then it is. I'm not sure how they handle the natural burning of tree, like wildfires though.
  - DaedPsyker 5y ago
    I am absolutely not a climate scientist but my understanding is c02 from the likes of us isn't a problem as we are naturally part of a cyclical process. Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon. However we are releasing an excess amount that had been trapped and removed from that cyclical process, adding more energy into the system than its natural equilibrium usually takes.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      "Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon." This actually isn't true. They say they burning of trees requires such a long cycle time that the release of CO2 does contribute to global warming. My main point was that this distinction isn't something that people commonly think about. Usually think mercury, sulfur, etc, which are not things we naturally emit.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

https://archive.is/n7wZz https://archive.is/n7wZz

thewarrior 5y ago

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject. Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.

Swizec 5y ago
We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization". But it's not that bad! Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall. Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing? I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... [2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine... [3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Casual 'almost certainly'... I don't think so. Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?

reedjosh 5y ago

Just read the original paper. This synopsis mostly just reiterates what the original paper says and concurs. I personally don't think we're going to see any collapse as drastic as the models predict. People have been predicting collapse forever, but either way, this article doesn't add much to the paper itself.

klysm 5y ago
I doubt the strength of arguments that go like “people have been saying X forever, but X hasn't happened yet - therefore not X” because it completely ignores evidence for X over time.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  There are some things that look like X. There are also things that look like "not X". Taking it all in, should your estimation of the probability of X be going up, or down? The problem is, whichever way you answer, someone from the other side can say "You're not taking into account all the evidence". And you can say, "Yes, I am - you aren't!" And things from there go in completely unproductive directions.
rurp 5y ago
But people have been right many, many times about other societies collapsing. All groups collapse, it's just a matter of time. Our ability to create existential threats is extremely new in historical terms. We have very little evidence for how they will be managed, but so far the indications are mostly terrible.
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  You're saying that people have predicted the collapse of societies many, many times? Which ones?
- drdec 5y ago
  There are always people predicting the end of society just as there are always people predicting a stock market crash. I suspect they have similar levels of success.

premium-gecko 5y ago

The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth: "In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

tanbog4 5y ago
I guess if you keep saying the same thing will happen repeatability eventually you'll look like you predicted something. Even a broken (analogue) clock tells the right time twice a day.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  Guy posts relevant information related to OP. Gets downvoted into oblivion. True HN style.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Or it's an ongoing cautionary narrative that we shouldn't take our civilizational accomplishments forgranted, and that government and civic works are ultimately a long chain of development and stewardship which depended on those before to keep going.
- forz877 5y ago
  The problem is people are expecting the asteroid impact, or the single point where "civilization is collapsed." These aren't helpful and aren't realistic. Even historical societal collapses happen over periods of centuries, often. It's foolish to simply dismiss threats because people make bad predictions. We can already see increases in rare weather events right now, and these have already had significant geopolitical consequences (e.g. Syria).

DoreenMichele 5y ago

With information injected into a system, you can do more with less materially. This is a known fact and the internet is a huge injection of information into the world that is accessible to most people to some degree, making knowledge no longer a privilege of the elites. It is game changing and provides hope for better answers than historical models suggest. Though we do need to work on keeping the quality of info high and on keeping information free as much as possible and that's a constant ongoing battle.

cletus 5y ago

So two things spring to mind with this and any doom scenario or predictions: 1. People tend to exaggerate such doom. The reasons for this vary. A lot of the time it's unknowing. It could be as simple as assuming a constant function will remain constant beyond normal boundaries. Or that a dynamic function will continue forever. Or it's sometimes disingenuous (eg to promote a particular agenda or simply to gain more attention through alarmism). Whatever the case, I've found it to be a good policy to ignore doom scenarios; and 2. There's a concept I like that I've heard described as "betting with the Mayans". The Mayan calendar "predicted" the end of the world in 2012. There are two approaches you can take with this: you can bet they're right or bet they're wrong. But simple game theory tells you that you should bet that they're wrong. Why? Because if they're right. It doesn't matter. The only thing you "win" is a brief sense of smug superiority as you suffer the same fate as everyone else. So why bother betting on that outcome? So let's take this lens to a polarizing issue like climate change. I personally hold all of the following to be true: 1. Man has clearly had an impact on climate, as in a relatively rapid rise in global temperatures, due to CO2 emissions; 2. It's not clear to me that this is entirely man-made (eg higher Solar output). Of course, this may not even matter one way or the other as we still have to deal with the results; 3. Abrupt climate change isn't as rare as people make out. It's happened a ton of times in the last 100,000 years. They're called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles [1]. This isn't some crackpot fringe publication. This is Nature. 4. At different points in the Earth's history it has been both substantially hotter and colder than it is now; 5. It's likely that climate change is a major contributing factor to what is essentially a mass extinction event that we're undergoing now (most of the rest being human activity and ecosystem destruction). 6. Altruism won't solve carbon emissions. Economics will. Humans are unwilling and incapable of making long term sacrifices for the planet that inconveniences them in any way. 7. I know some reading the above will have an immediate reaction to label me a "denier". That attitude really has no place in scientific discourse. So I just don't believe we'll have runaway heating as some argue. Why? Because the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and despite higher temperatures that hasn't happened. I don't think we can definitively describe all the self-correcting processes that have kept Earth within a habitable band for literally billions of years. But even if I'm wrong, we're screwed anyway because global population won't change and deviate from the current course. So yeah, worrying about a global collapse in 20 years? That's a hard pass. [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

Havoc 5y ago

Why would pollution be exponential?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Because, once electricity is no longer available, and you can't get coal from long distance, people burn wood or trash or dried grass or whatever they can get their hands on. If the alternative is freezing, you don't care about the pollution you're generating.
- yosito 5y ago
  How much did pollution increase in Texas when the electric grid failed this winter?
dane-pgp 5y ago
CO2 pollution would be exponential if it were proportional to energy usage and if energy usage increased linearly with economic development and if economic development were exponential. Fortunately neither of the first two conditions are true. Consider the buried lede in this 2019 article[0] from the Guardian: > But in a positive signal for the future, the [UK's Office for National Statistics ] said both domestic and consumption-based emissions had fallen since the 2008 financial crisis. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g7s-biggest-net-importer-of-co2-emissions-per-capita-says-ons https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g...

pfdietz 5y ago

I remember someone took one of those global models and noticed all the equations were time reversible. So they asked "what does the model 'predict' the past looked like?" And it turned out the model predicted the world population was infinite sometime in the 1800s. :) I have very little faith in any of these models.

titzer 5y ago
The beauty of open mathematical models is you can show your work. So show your work. Link? Study? Paper?
- pfdietz 5y ago
  This was decades ago, I don't have the reference, and it would be on paper not the net anyway. I THINK it may have been in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Models_of_Doom/neaRvwEACAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Models_of_Doom/neaRvwEA...
anyfoo 5y ago
Any sources for that? Right now it's just "I have very little faith in these models because I remember someone trying to reverse them and coming up with nonsensical results", probably coupled with "and that is so much more comforting".
wcoenen 5y ago
If many different initial conditions can evolve to almost the same state, then reversing time must necessarily blow up small errors/perturbations. It's the same reason why driving with a trailer backwards is more difficult than forward, even though Newtonian mechanics are time reversible.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  I understand they original researchers didn't even validate their models by running them forward from, say, 1600 or 1800. They didn't even try it.

yongjik 5y ago

> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ... This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later. I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."

iaw 5y ago
Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely. Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.
- yongjik 5y ago
  Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
  - dvt 5y ago
    > Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right. Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether. Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?
    - Klinky 5y ago
      Perhaps the uncouth voting on HN is a further sign of impending societal collapse.

chestertn 5y ago

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew. Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.

seibelj 5y ago
The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content. The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end of the world” views that are prevalent everywhere.
- senkora 5y ago
  Do you have any recommendations on what material to read?
  - runeks 5y ago
    This Wikipedia page on Carl Menger’s “Principles of Economics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Menger_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Menge... says: > Ludwig von Mises called the book the best introduction to the Austrian School of economics
    - evgen 5y ago
      It would also help to read Marx's Das Kapital at the same time, that way you can plough through two equally discredited economic theories and get them out of the way before you move on to actually reading something worthwhile.

lcall 5y ago

There are many problems. But we can be ok.

Isamu 5y ago

Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases? It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever. [edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.

twobitshifter 5y ago
I have heard soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough. There’s also the possibility of drought and loss of pollinators.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Yeah... I think it's pretty hard to believe a model from the 70's could predict the change on any of those with any accuracy, even less that it can predict the timing. I don't think we could do it now.
- schiffern 5y ago
  > soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683
- 5y ago

thedudeabides5 5y ago

Great charts. The fact that “Business as Usual” aka the default has industrial production falling 75% in 20 years tells you all you need to know about this amazing paragon of machine learning and economics

DennisP 5y ago

Models like this are as much about understanding the dynamics as making specific predictions. A key dynamic that impressed me from LtG is that as pollution accumulates, you spend more and more of your resources dealing with the damage, and less making the sort of investments you used to make. But things can still carry on just fine, until suddenly the bottom drops out. Since we're already dealing with significant damage from greenhouse gases, I find that a little disturbing.

ianai 5y ago

My suspicion is that skepticism has morphed into denialism in general. We’re seemingly at a point where any assertion will get attacked so many times that eventually even chimps on keyboards would come up with a reasonably credible (seeming) critique despite having no deep knowledge of the original point or underlying system.

weenas88sbaw 5y ago

Economists have predicted 69 of the 8 societal collapses in history isn’t that the common sarcastic quote for these type of articles?

karaterobot 5y ago

Have there been many economic models that predicted macro things like food production and industrial output 70+ years into the future that have proven to be reliable?

InternetPerson 5y ago

It's time to shoot fish in a barrel again, everybody! Can you find something wrong with this analysis? If so, then please comment!!

rglover 5y ago

It will never cease to amaze me how much faith is placed in models and predictions.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

We need a cabal of Billionaires to get it into their head that the world is ending unless they do something drastic. That will save us. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a...

smt88 5y ago
I remember reading that Peter Thiel bought land in New Zealand as a huge against a societal collapse that he predicted and/or was attempting to hasten. The scary thing is that many billionaires are wealthy enough to pull it off.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  If Alex is right, some of these guys are in a death cult. After confirmation of Epstein Island and video of them literally burning OWL effigies in the forest at their secret meetings. Who knows anymore what is going on.
- smt88 5y ago
  hedge against*

cjohnson318 5y ago

I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot of modern democratic republics are about 200 years old, or less, but we keep thinking to ourselves, "this civilization will be different". I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.

pksebben 5y ago
it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.
- rewgs 5y ago
  Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage. The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find? And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows... And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond? I could go on. That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Is it annoying that people keep submitting "paywalled" Medium URLs to HN. This one is a re-cycled story first available from other sites that do not try to annoy readers into signing up.^1 Wonder if Dana Levine made some coin from Medium by submitting her medium.com hosted blog post URL to HN and hitting the front page. 1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicat... Here is Herrington's analysis: https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/yale-publication.pdf https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y... Further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/mineral-resource-fossil-fuel-depletion-terraform-earth-collapse-civilisation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/scientists-limits-to-growth-vindicated-investment-transition-circular-economy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j... Also this press release video (no background music) re: the report to the Club of Rome released as a paperback titled "Extracted" that is referenced in the article. The "tech" industry relies heavily on minerals extraction. It is alleged by the author that 10% of the world's energy production is consumed by minerals extraction. How much of that comes from fossil fuels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avCD5JVekE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avCD5JVekE

AYBABTME 5y ago
I agree, Medium is pretty annoying to use as a reader. And for some strange reason, it doesn't work with Firefox's "reader view". I don't understand why people keep using this platform.

ggm 5y ago

I was interested the article (and commentary here) makes no mention of either Ehrlich, or Simon, or the bet[1] Because it was pretty contemporary, and I think influenced how people revised their thinking (at least in public) about the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

swader999 5y ago

Doom scrolled about halfway down. I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the esoteric commentary when we have a real life example of this happening right now in South Africa.

anonleb4 5y ago
There are countless examples all around the world as we speak, but some people, mostly "occidentals", are stuck in bubbles full of assumptions and theories. Maybe it's denial, as mentioned.
makomk 5y ago
Most people who've heard about what's happening in South Africa probably know that they've had major problems for pretty much their entire existence as a country which lead to this. (There's been an unfortunate tendency for the western left to pretend those problems don't exist for stupid political reasons, but that's not unusual.)

rockmartin 5y ago

Fucking idiot who wrote Limits to growth gave the globalists reason to depopulate the world, which is happening as we speak. That’s the purpose of the covid injection.

omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago

According the the wiki article, world3 is too general to be realistic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 > But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168

mrpopo 5y ago
Yes, world3 is meant as a simulation exercise that is sometimes taken too seriously. But even its critics consider that the conclusions of the model are valid. Here is the continuation of your quote: > He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem: Only the widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy—all you need to know in this case is how to execute the equation y=x*e^{rt} prevents most of the people from dismissing the idea of sustainable growth at healthy rates as an oxymoronic stupidity whose pursuit is, unfortunately, infinitely more tragic than comic. After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues.[7]:338–339
- omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
  That's also trivial. Continuous growth of anything tangible in a finite system will eventually hit constraints of that system.
- native_samples 5y ago
  No, lots of critics of the model (like me) consider the conclusions of the model to be invalid. It's inherent in the nature of validity actually - a fraudulent model like World3 cannot be said to be "valid" even if a few of its vague prognostications end up in the right general area. Any definition of validity that allowed such a thing would also have to apply to fortune tellers, who often say things that seem directionally accurate but whose methods are of course not "valid".

jinguang 5y ago

现实的变量因素太多的。不起眼的因素可能成为决定因素；自我觉得重要的因素，在疫情的现实下也变成无足轻重了。所以这类预测噱头大于实际。不过我觉得资本主义社会崩溃的概率更大。

gcanyon 5y ago

The article says that the various predictions are equally good fits because they don't diverge much by 2020. If in 1972 researchers came up with multiple models that all predicted pretty much the same thing over fifty years, but then wildly diverge over the subsequent fifty years, that alone is problematic. Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest. Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline. There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.

animanoir 5y ago

Basically all studies say that Capitalism is killing us.

scottfr 5y ago

Here's an interactive implementation of the World3 model: https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/The-World3-Model-Classic-World-Simulation https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/The-World3-Model-Class...

jollybean 5y ago

We thought we would hit 'peak oil' in the 1980's but then we learned to drill in deep water. When we learned to make fuel from Oilsands, the world's reserves tripled. When we learned to drill sideways, it grew. When we learned how to make more efficient use of the tapping, it grew. This notion of 'finite resources' is a very bad constraint. Obviously there are limits but we adapt quickly. If we decided to use 1980's style Nuclear Reactors - we could power the world for 10 000 years using known reserves. And it would be clean. Trees? We grow them. Metal? We recycle. Even soil we are starting to figure out sustainably. There are very few hard limits we're facing on that front. Chocolate and Cork might run in short supply but that means we kind spend our folly money on 'pure chocolate' as a delicacy instead of NFT's and we just can't have proper wine corks. 'Societal Collapse' won't come from resource extraction, it will come from warring ideologues in a population of materially satiated plebes who have too much time on their hands and so they argue over the meaning of words until someone tries and actual coup and it comes apart from there.

tomcooks 5y ago

"To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in." Why keep things behind walled gardens, if you write them for others to read? Thanks to those who shared the archive link.

zug_zug 5y ago

Everyone: We were wrong about peak oil! Models aren't always right! Me: Couldn't our models be wrong in the wrong direction? Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).

ivalm 5y ago
But interventions can also cause societal collapse. If you don’t know what you are doing don’t do anything since action can be worse than inaction.
- Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
  That just seems like a generally bad advice. It's true that we can't know everything but we usually kinda know something and from that we can act.

keiferski 5y ago

Not giving an opinion on the model itself, I do find it interesting how many of these cultural narratives of collapse and Armageddon are almost directly from older religious traditions. Specifically, Christianity in the Western World. The parallels become increasingly obvious if you dig deeper into the theology; everything is present, from climate “sinners” to apocalyptic scenarios in which everything collapses into a ball of fire, unless we repent and change our ways. Again, not saying that these predictions are wrong or overly inaccurate. But even if many people in the Western world are not “religious” today, they inevitably seem to fall into these same thought patterns. I have noticed that this approach is not shared by many other non-Western countries, who absolutely recognize the dangers facing global society from climate, political polarization, etc. yet lack the “apocalypse” culture points. I worry if Western culture has a self-reinforcing obsession with the collapse narrative, to its own detriment.

native_samples 5y ago
I think you're right but it's not exclusively a religious issue. Karl Marx was famously obsessed with an apocalyptic end-of-days style vision in which the sinners would be punished and the pure elevated above. At the same time he wasn't a big fan of (other) religions.
- keiferski 5y ago
  True, but Nietzsche would say that socialism and subsequently Marx are consequences of Christianity. So it’s still operating in the same worldview, if unconsciously.
rini17 5y ago
The collapse of civilization happened in various ways many times already, no wonder it's present globally in the unconscious. Doubt it's a specialty of West.
- keiferski 5y ago
  Perhaps, but I think the moralistic approach to it is definitely a Western phenomenon.

melomal 5y ago

1. We are so awful at predictions. 2. Tech predictions live and die by hype cycles (which gets a nice little write up in this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-... where the author reviews 20 years of hype cycles, what has come of them etc)

coldtea 5y ago

Let me guess the take: either (a) it will all be fixed at the last minute (even if we're beyond that), by some advanced alien tech we've yet to discover (because humans are so ingenius and nothing can halt progress), (b) it's not an issue, la-la-la hands in the ears.

Proven 5y ago

This is globalist nonsense. Population growth is not a problem. What will collapse is be socialist societies and countries.

aww_dang 5y ago

>The original study and subsequent research was funded by the Club of Rome, a European organization focused on solving the larger problems facing humanity. Ah yes, our benevolent overlords who have selflessly offered themselves up as our technocratic central planners. Such premises should at least inspire mild curiosity or skepticism from readers. Counter point: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ >The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second." ... >Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."

conjectures 5y ago

Wow, actually slightly shocked how seriously this model seems to be taken or, at least, how sticky it is. Coefficients, dynamics, number of entities involved, stationarity. There are so many unknowns and so many reasons to believe incomplete understanding could scupper predictions... I know everyone likes to believe themselves to be a good Fermi estimator. But trying to model the world beyond 2050 when the weather a month from now is a hard problem. Well, let's say it's Quixotic at best. Which makes me think the model isn't actually under discussion here, it's just all our priors about how much we fancy technology as a solution or not etc.

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dgdosen 5y ago

The first thing I wondered about these comments is how often "Peak Oil" would be mentioned. There has been no peak oil related crash. I think the world's economy and markets are now resilient enough to safely say 'peak oil' will never be a cause for the collapse of civilization. Rising energy prices will just usher out the age of fossil fuels faster. I now wonder what happens when (if?) we get to 'net 0' (which hasn't been mentioned in these comments). If we can reach a point of unlimited, renewable, clean energy that's (almost) too cheap to meter, that just upends any model because it'll zero out factors that are parts of or 'limits' in those models. - Lack of fresh water: solved by free/clean energy (desalinization) - Lack of adequate food supply: solved by free/clean energy (fertilizer production) - Lack of resources: potentially solved by free/clean energy (asteroid farming? recycling?) It's hard to imagine a problem that unlimited, clean energy won't help solve. The question is, can we get to net zero?

dd36 5y ago
Net negative.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
How would we ever get there? The cost to build and maintain powerplants is expensive - whether it's solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear. This cost needs to be amortized over the life of the plant. It's hard to imagine this getting to less than $0.05 / kWh. Construction costs alone make Nuclear Energy cost ~$0.08 / kWh even in China where construction is relatively cheap. Even if we get Fusion energy, AFAIK it's unlikely the construction will be substantially cheaper. Obviously if anything was free - people would abuse it. You would need to build endless powerplants (which cost money) to provide free energy for people to launch rockets and mine asteroids and produce fertilizer and desalinate water...
- dgdosen 5y ago
  Would a Kardashev Type 1 civilization have too many powerplants? If we can get to net zero first, that would affect your model's calculation that we would require endless power plants.

guscost 5y ago

> The 1972 paper dealt with a system dynamics computer model named World3 That’s an incredibly dumb idea, seriously? These are the people who have been advising our leaders?

svrourke 5y ago

MIT should create a galactic encyclopedia to preserve human knowledge for future generations after the collapse and perhaps a group or "Foundation" to maintain it. Get ready boys the mule is coming.

drallison 5y ago

Dynamic models are useful ways to explore complex systems. For example: Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay Ecological Economics 101, 90--102 Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay, GR Asrar, AJ Busalacchi, RF Cahalan, ... National Science Review 3 (4), 470--494

teslaberry 5y ago

just print more 0% perpetual debt, i mean money. print more money, that will solve the problem of establishing arms length trust between people. it always does.