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The Limits to Growth (1972)
- monero-xmr 3y agoLimits to Growth is possibly the least accurate book ever widely read. They got absolutely nothing right, and it should be read as an example of how “experts” can get things so entirely incorrect despite their credentials and models.
- api 3y agoToday there’s a new trend of population birth rate collapse doomers that are making the same error of extrapolating trends in complex living systems using math built to understand non-living systems, then freaking out about the results. Different graph slope, same error. They will be wrong too.
- MarkusQ 3y agoNot really. They are basing it on extrapolation of our understanding of humans, not some abstract "non-living systems"; specifically, our present understanding is that as people age (past say forty or so) their chance of dying steadily rises and their chance of producing offspring falls. While this may be overcome with new technology (the same thing that borked the Club of Rome's forecasts), absent any change in the basic facts of human biology the population collapse is inevitable. (For similar reasons, countries that have favored having sons over daughters are in an even worse bind; excess males simply don't increase your rate of child production).
- vlovich123 3y agoBut we know that humans actually have some kind of non obvious feedback mechanism we don’t know how to model whereby too many males in a society cause women to be more likely to be born and vice versa. Stands to reason that the same is true for childbirth (I believe this has been observed in other species quite a lot although not directly in humans yet) - when resources are tight, reproduction slows down until there’s available resources at which point reproduction increases again. These feedback mechanisms would seem to make sense from an evolutionary perspective in terms of making sure the species has a higher chance of survival through various societal and environmental changes. It’s possible we’ve disrupted it of course through technology via birth control but hard to say given that birth control isn’t that new (“new” for women and more effective than ever, but not new). I don’t think a population collapse would mean the end of humanity. Just a prolonged adjustment period to society but we have more people than ever in the world. If the concern is the stability (economic or social) of a given country / power structure then sure - no guarantee any of that survives that but that’s also something we’ve weathered many times in the past (often more violently than what we’ve seen in recent history in the West).
- mildchalupa 3y agoThere is a short window of human fertility. Let's assume you are "smart" and wait until you are out of college. You might start at 22 and have a little over 13 years until it's its considered a geriatric pregnancy. If the economic or social constraints are such that individuals are unwilling to bear children then that is it, you do not get to try again. Today we straddle those in the fertile window with student debt, high rent or an impossible housing market, thus less chose to have children. This is not to say that it's a cataclysm, but it's certainly unsustainable from a societal standpoint.
- vlovich123 3y agoBut those aren’t intractable issues and society will adapt. I think that’s key critique - extrapolation is a problem when you have feedback systems to adjust to changing environmental conditions. Like even if no one has kids for 10 years, we still have new ones being born. If it’s super critical to society you’ll see all sorts of programs and support spring up to encourage people to have larger than today normal families (eg offering free childcare etc). Also, you seem to have dismissed geriatric pregnancies out of hand (not to mention limiting counting pregnancies to specific subgroups for some reason because you view other types of kids as undesirable?) but I don’t see why that’s the case - children born during this time are still children. Fertility levels may be reduced but they still happen. The point is that the claim that we’ll have a species-wide population collapse seems unreal when we have more people on earth than ever and we have lots of children at every age group giving us lots of shots to adjusts to problems. Not to mention tech that extends the fertility age well beyond the limited window you’ve said. There’s a lot of baked in stereotyping it seems like on your end of what “acceptable” children look like that may be worth unpacking more than there being any serious concern about a population collapse.
- imtringued 3y agoIt's not a cataclysm, but it means that for the next few generations, the fertility window of women must increase and the attractiveness of men has to increase. That is going to be a very slow process. There is no way this mechanism is fast enough to prevent any declines predicted until the year 2100.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- teucris 3y agoNothing right at all? From the wiki entry: > In 2015, a calibration of the updated World3-03 model using historical data from 1995 to 2012 to better understand the dynamics of today's economic and resource system was undertaken. The results showed that human society has invested more to abate persistent pollution, increase food productivity and have a more productive service sector however the broad trends within Limits to Growth still held true.
- XorNot 3y agoWhich makes it a curve fitting exercise. They didn't match anything - they changed all the parameters to match the historical dataset, and then declared that now the future prediction is correct. Give it 20 more years, they can "recalibrate" again and find another imminent collapse: any model with enough free parameters can match any input you like.
- teucris 3y agoUnless I’m misreading the wiki, the deadline of the collapse didn’t change to 20 years further out. The data seem to continue to match the original prediction.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoIf you read "Limits to Growth" as if it were some contemporary influencer or futurist's content, this might indeed be disappointing. But the truth is, "Limits to Growth" is one of the first attempt to articulate the fundamental limits to our strategy as a civilization. It is outlining how fundamentally flawed it is. One might justifiably argue that the quantitative predictions made by the book hinder, or even compromise, the deeper, more important point of it. But the latter was unfortunately correct, and plenty of quantitative data are there to back it up: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoIt's like you're standing on the battlements of your ideology mocking the archers who are just a little out of range. Enjoy thumbing your nose each time they miss. They only have to be right /once/.
- blackbear_ 3y agoNow that you made your case against expert advice, please make your case for inexpert advice.
- archiemckenzie 3y agoPossibly one of the most evil books ever written
- Jtsummers 3y agoHow so?
- archiemckenzie 3y agoSee my other comment: The Limits to Growth (the linked text) led directly to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilization in India. Its supposedly scientific recommendations were adopted by the UN, the World Bank, western aid organizations, and the governments of those countries, with evil consequences. Further reading: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1506469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1506469.stm https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30040790 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30040790
- dang 3y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- archiemckenzie 3y agoFine, I’ll elaborate. The Limits to Growth (the linked text) led directly to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilization in India. Its supposedly scientific recommendations were adopted by the UN, the World Bank, western aid organizations, and the governments of those countries, with evil consequences. For further reading on the ethical implications, see below: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1506469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1506469.stm https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30040790 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30040790
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- vitarnixofntrnt 3y ago[dead]
- shrubble 3y agoI had heard of it, but had not read it before. I am finding some logical fallacies in their statements, haven't finished it yet. For instance, "Most people intuitively and correctly reject extrapolations like those shown in table 3, because the results appear ridiculous. It must be recognized, however, that in rejecting extrapolated values, one is also rejecting the assumption that there will be no change in the system" ... no, a valid criticism would be that your model is wrong and should be rejected, and you need a better method for doing extrapolations. Table 3 predicted in 1970 (when it was written) that the Chinese GNP per capita in 2000 would be $100 (it was about $1200 according to the stats I can find online).
- nroets 3y agoSo there was a chance in the system: China moved to a market economy. Some changes happening in the system right now: Solar power. Coal being used less for energy. Electric cars. Has the correlation between fossil fuels and energy consumption ended (decoupled) ?
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoSaying there are changes in the system is even less useful than saying the sky is blue. There are no system that have zero changes. Only models that don't or can't account for the changes. If one is not humble enough to remember all models are wrong, but some are useful, there is not much we can do.
- SCUSKU 3y agoThis is a wildly armchair question, but can't we just model human's ability to adapt to change and then as a result determine if technology will be sufficient to save us from impending environmental collapse? I suppose this is a multi-trillion dollar open question...?
- ben_w 3y agoI doubt we can model it in a way that is useful. We have many examples of us both adapting and failing to adapt, and can therefore say things like "adapts X% of the time", except in those cases the solution has often been "move elsewhere and/or fight other people" which I think isn't useful because it doesn't work so well on a planetary scale unless and until interplanetary travel is as easy as the Mayflower/Plymouth Rock journey. Might still be useful for general governance just by characterising dangerous parts of the phase space[0] where dragons be so they can be avoided. [0] how does phase space differ from latent space anyway?
- r721 3y ago(2013) Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
- dredmorbius 3y agoIt's actually 1972, as the HN title has since been edited to reflect.
- r721 3y agoI just meant that the linked post was published in 2013 ("Published: June 6th, 2013").
- dredmorbius 3y agoTrue, though I'd go by the date of the material it's specifically referencing, which is the 1972 book.
- bmitc 3y agoAs a note, updates were published in 1992 and 2004.
- Dig1t 3y agoFrom the wiki entry: >Passell found the study's simulation to be simplistic while assigning little value to the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. They charged that all LTG simulations ended in collapse, predicting the imminent end of irreplaceable resources. Passell also charged that the entire endeavour was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks.
- teucris 3y agoAnd then later in the wiki entry: > In 2023, the parameters of the World3 model were recalibrated using empirical data up to 2022. This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business-as-usual scenario of the Limits to Growth standard run.
- OrvalWintermute 3y agoI looked at the same article and this jumped out at me: > The World3 model is based on five variables: "population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources. At the time of the study, all these variables were increasing and were assumed to continue to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resources grew only linearly As we all know, almost all continents have a negative birth rate with the exception of Africa [1] Large populations such as China with their one child policy, have curtailed their population growth. We've lost a significant amount of people in Russia/Ukraine, and now Gaza. In some areas we have limited availability of surface water, and deep aquifers are being tapped in unsustainable manners. Post-Covid mortality is trending down in many western countries too. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
- roschdal 3y agoThe universe is infinite, so there are no limits.
- Pat_Murph 3y agoGood joke
- imtringued 3y agoIf the universe is infinite then you are a more likely to be a disembodied Boltzmann brain thinking that you have posted a Hackernews comment about the universe being infinite than being a human brain in a human body evolved on a terrestrial planet with limited growth, because that chain of events is far less likely than a spontaneously formed brain.
- ganzuul 3y agoThat's only an artefact of the extended Church-Turing thesis. And you only need about 1000 bits to encode a perceptron so that universe is actually teeming with intelligence anyway.
- bmitc 3y agoI don't think the current models suggest the universe is infinite. As far as I understand, there is a finite amount of atoms supposed. Also, there are very clear examples of physical limits to growth. For example, gravity and its interaction with the other forces prevents animals, buildings, trees, stars, etc. from growing too big. What happens if they grow too big? Collapse.
- tunesmith 3y agoYou can play with the actual model here: http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html (github here: https://github.com/bit-player/limits https://github.com/bit-player/limits) It appears sensitive to that "output consumed" fraction, which I don't understand.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model with Empirical Data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089144 - May 2023 (1 comment) The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32686659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32686659 - Sept 2022 (1 comment) 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32685777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32685777 - Sept 2022 (37 comments) Fifty years on from The Limits to Growth what did we learn and what’s next? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32314912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32314912 - Aug 2022 (2 comments) Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951751 - July 2021 (9 comments) Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838112 - July 2021 (1 comment) World3: Modeling Limits to Growth. A Detailed World Forecaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049500 - Aug 2020 (1 comment) The Limits to Growth (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18516544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18516544 - Nov 2018 (1 comment) The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15913420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15913420 - Dec 2017 (55 comments) Another Look at "The Limits to Growth" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802811 - April 2012 (34 comments)
- briantakita 3y agoThis work, essentially Malthus 2.0, is yet another lesson of how the unknown unknowns often defeat the most dire & most optimistic linear projections.
- RecycledEle 3y agoBefore you decide whether "Limits to Growth" is credible, please read just the first chapter from Dr. Robert Zubrin's "Merchants of Despair." IMO, "Merchants of Despair" is the most important book of the 21st Century so far. Dr. Zubrin points out that every person is given a mith to eat and a pair of hands to work and a brain to invent.
- bmitc 3y agoDeforestation, climate change, habitat loss, extinctions, toxification of the ocean, pollution, microplastics, etc. are not part of some radical environmentalism, are not pseudoscience, and not some tenets of some cult. They are quantifiable things that have happened, and all of them are due to this obsession with growth. The author wants to explore and terraform Mars. Just think about that for a second: denies the effects of humans on Earth and wants to terraform a dead, lifeless planet that is a harbinger of what Earth could look like and is physically incapable of hosting the life that it likely once did. Does that make sense as a strategy?
- RecycledEle 3y agoI will repeat this because people want to launch off-topic attacks: The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP. The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of. Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased. Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.
- bmitc 3y agoWhat off-topic attacks? I was replying to your off-topic comment and attack on the credibility and myth of the posted book. I didn't make any attack. I simply pointed out a strange strategy that is a bit circular. If that author claims that there are no limits to growth, then why, exactly, do we need to terraform and mine an entire other planet? Do you not see the conflict there? > that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. It can scale, but at the expense of tons of other things, and history indeed shows us that that's the case. The so-called Third Agricultural Revolution has shown us that quite explicitly. And prove what wrong? I don't know what you're claiming or its relevance. If you're talking about per-capita GDP, I regret to inform you that wealth inequality and disparity is at an all-time high. So increasing the GDP has in fact correlated with a decrease in standard in living for the vast majority of people, relatively speaking. If we take a look at raw numbers, there are more people starving today than there were people alive approximately 200 hundred years ago. Maybe the percentage of total population has changed, in either direction, but the point is that that is an absolute increase in the amount of suffering not offset by the number of people not suffering. So like I said, you can bounce around these facts, and they are facts, all you want with a technocratic lens, but the data is quite clear that growth has led to a myriad of issues. Ignoring these issues and trends shows a huge misunderstanding of dynamic and complex systems. If there are issues with the methods in The Limits of Growth, that's fine, but at least they attempted to model these things. Pointing fingers at people trying to understand the direction we are heading is not productive. I invite you to look at even simple things, like carpet. Approximately 95% of all carpet made heads to the landfill. Think about that for a second. We literally use up materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. just to dump it all in a landfill. And that's "just" carpet. It's the very definition of pointless.
- RecycledEle 3y agoQ: If sea levels are going to rise, why did Al Gore retire to an ocean front home? A: Sea levels are not going to rise, and Al Gore knows it. He was and is a fraud.
- Geisterde 3y agoWe should have a ticker for how many days HN can go without this being posted, its been 2 whole weeks since I've seen it, great going gang. I want to know who gets to live in the utopia, and who has the misfortune of not being important enough. Surely poor people have got to go, theres just so many of them, in so many countries; they cant afford sustainability goals, calm down, we arent going to kill them, theyll go away on their own as the price of heating your home or eating goes up. The old have spent their best years, and have become a burden on the healthcare and welfare system, its probably most humane to poison them. Anyone with dangerous views will obviously ruin our new democracy, I think we could leverage the judicial system to disenfranchise them, it worked for the blacks. Was that distressing to read? What do you think degrowth looks like, exactly?
- moritzwarhier 3y agoThis is a very bleak and cynical way of discrediting people who - as opposed to you - try to find a way to actually improve the situation of humans. > Surely poor people have got to go, theres just so many of them, in so many countries; they cant afford sustainability goals, calm down, we arent going to kill them, theyll go away on their own as the price of heating your home or eating goes up. 20% of the world's population is responsible for the consumption of 80% of the planet's resources. The richest 10 percent of U.S. households are responsible for 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Oh and life expcetancy and health of the average American are declining, while the economy is growing. Why is that?
- Geisterde 3y agoAnd where do you think those rich people go? Do you think the average person in america is going to accept the arguement that they are over consuming when you throw roadblocks designed to economically disenfranchise them? Im pretty sure you will find that people dont care what you think, they are going to do what they need to for #1, war, plunder, slavery. Rich people even more, they have wealth, they have power, any policy enacted they are going to have in place carve outs for themselves, because they own the politicians. What do you think you can accomplish by pointing these numbers out? The groups you describe arent going to take anything sitting down, all you are going to get is hightened political animosity, identitarian hatred, and desruction. Is that what improving the situation sounds like to you?
- dachworker 3y agoThere are some people who claim there could be no democracy without growth, because without new economic opportunities, the only way to get ahead in life, is by taking from others, which leads to violence and tyranny. I find it a compelling argument. Besides, I cannot imagine a world without growth that is not a regressive dystopian society. What would even be the point of life in such a world?
- timeon 3y agoThis just speaks about your morals.
- hotpotamus 3y agoIf cancer could be anthropomorphized, you'd have to imagine this is what it would sound like. The point of life in such a world would be the same as in any other; there would still be none, and people would still overlay on that whatever they wanted; the same as they do now.
- noiv 3y agogrowth and economic opportunities have only some overlap...
- moritzwarhier 3y agoIt is very sad that people believe in this. Why is growth needed to prevent a regressive dystopian society? The weird thing is, material needs of humans don't have to rise exponentially. And I don't think that people in rich countries today are exponentially happier than say 50 years ago, because of their increased material consumption. Neither do I think that it should be needed to allow limitless accumulation of wealth... But well, that all might sound like radical ideas already, for whatever reason. So merry Christmas, fellow HNers, may you enjoy growth and prosperity
- Geisterde 3y ago>It is very sad that people believe in this. Why is growth needed to prevent a regressive dystopian society? How are we deciding what gets made and for whom? Does democracy get to decide if you deserve a new car? Does a bureaucracy get to decide? Lets cover an economic concept quickly, given options, people will trend towards rational self interest. If two people agree to a deal voluntarily, they must each believe that trade increases their subjective well being. In a market system, people can aquire goods and services in proportion to the value they create for others. It isnt decided from way on high, it is the product of a complex social system and the choices we make in it. Since we can assume that people will trend towards their rational self interest, the economy will grow simply as a byproduct of the individuals involved having their needs met. To have degrowth, I have to question what measures are required to so disrupt the natural order of markets. Now, there are ways, you could use the law to restrict peoples options both legally and economically, but that is dystopian and regressive. Any governing body given the power to decide what goods and services others are entitled to, are violating those individuals human rights to things like free association and autonomy, and are guarenteed to be captured by entrenched interests. If you just think people are too wasteful and careless, I agree, but I think you need to dig a bit deeper at why people are acting this way. You cant effectively save dollars for the future, and the stock market is a casino; I think people waste because the concept of saving has been turned into a charade. I'll lose it gambling on an auto industry that looks ready for bankruptcy, or lose it when my short position gets blown out by a bailout, and itll be worthless when I need it if its in the bank, so ill buy a new $300 couch and plan to replace it in a couple years.
- throwuwu 3y agoOne of the causes for this https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Those names should live in infamy
- clippyplz 3y agoWhat is going on with this website? A bunch of graphs with red arrows pointing to 1971, but what's the point being made? "wage productivity gap is increasing"? "we are consuming too much chicken"? "we're not giving out enough physics degrees"? Not to mention that many of these charts use nominal instead of real numbers, rendering them entirely useless.
- dave333 3y agoRather than argue for or against its validity it seems more useful to plan to ameliorate likely possible effects. As someone who has retired from the "rat race" and is living on about 1/3 my previous income I know there are plenty of ways to economize and reduce economic, carbon, pollution and other footprints. Homes do not need to be McMansions and much of the reason people buy expensive houses is to get on the price increase spiral bandwagon. Tiny and manufactured homes are good antidotes. Most land can be made productive using permaculture principles that mostly try to build a healthy soil, e.g. Forest holding back the Sahara, Geoff Lawton's enclave in Jordan, etc. Pollution can be reduced by manufacturing for recycling. For example food/beverage packaging and bottles can be made in a form that is easy to reuse for example as stacking flower/vegetable pots. Post your kitchen scraps into the top pot and let worms convert it into compost to supercharge your vegetable garden. Heating and cooling energy requirements can be greatly reduced using 1970s passive solar technology putting thermal mass in your roof or sun-facing wall augmented with electronics to automate blinds. I should add that in my family, my parents had 3 children, who collectively had two grandchildren, and now two great-grandchildren. So there is no growth in our family.