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I'm going to check that out. It certainly seems like he identified the heck out of our problem. Possibly our biggest problem in a sense, since it affects so man

I'm going to check that out. It certainly seems like he identified the heck out of our problem. Possibly our biggest problem in a sense, since it affects so many other things (our response to climate change, etc) As much as people thought Limits to Growth was about the 1970s in the 1970s, Limits to Growth predicted things were likely to go to hell between 2020-2050, maybe 2070 if we maximized our coping strategies. I'll be interested to why he feels this is the particular half century where it all goes to hell. It's not as if the problem of "technocrats vs. the will of the people" is exactly a new tension. When is the last time that a single common person could really understand everything required for society-level decision making? Back in days when we lived in small packs of hunter-gatherers, and pretty much everybody in the cave could use a spear and knew which berries were okay to eat? That's not to say I doubt his conclusion.

PaulHoule 3y ago
The Limits to Growth is this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth which is not by Habermas but came out around a year before Legitimation Crisis and you’d better believe the “Club of Rome” that signed off on that book was circled by all sorts of allegations. Those guys ran a computer model of coupled differential calculations the simulated a race between technology and population being able to make problems vs solve problems and in various scenarios resource depletion, pollution and insufficient food production eventually result in a system crash. Insofar as something is predicted to occur in a certain time that is an outcome of the model which is: (a) very sample, but (b) run many different times with different parameters (e.g. if you double the supply of natural resources the crisis breaks later but the fundamental picture doesn’t change.) The thing was people were really inclined to think the world was going to hell in the 1970s, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush_(song) and many people who heard about Limits to Growth probably thought it was predicting an imminent crash and not something their great grandchildren would be living through.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Thank you so much.

PaulHoule 3y ago

The Limits to Growth is this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth which is not by Habermas but came out around a year before Legitimation Crisis and you’d better believe the “Club of Rome” that signed off on that book was circled by all sorts of allegations. Those guys ran a computer model of coupled differential calculations the simulated a race between technology and population being able to make problems vs solve problems and in various scenarios resource depletion, pollution and insufficient food production eventually result in a system crash. Insofar as something is predicted to occur in a certain time that is an outcome of the model which is: (a) very sample, but (b) run many different times with different parameters (e.g. if you double the supply of natural resources the crisis breaks later but the fundamental picture doesn’t change.) The thing was people were really inclined to think the world was going to hell in the 1970s, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush_(song) and many people who heard about Limits to Growth probably thought it was predicting an imminent crash and not something their great grandchildren would be living through.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Thank you so much.