The Daily Planet #14: Limits to Growth

Two specters haunt the Anthropocene, both to do with finite resources and endless needs. One specter criticizes the growth part of the story, like this quote from Edward Abbey:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell"

The other specter is Thomas Malthus, whose warnings about collapse haunt us in the opposite direction:

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."

The most famous critique of growth in the 20th century was "Limits to Growth," written by Meadows et. al., with Rockstrom et. al.'s work on Planetary Boundaries as a more recent version.

Today's Daily Planet is a link to an essay about Meadows' book and its aftermath.

The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth

What economists around the world get wrong about the future.