Limits to Growth was right about collapse
114 comments
·May 30, 2025Nevermark
eru
> If there were not negative externalities being subsidized, i.e. perversely encouraged, then growth would always be good.
That's a good start, but it's a bit more complicated.
Reasonable people can disagree what counts as a positive vs negative externality. Eg if you like to be warm, perhaps you see global warming as positive externality. (Really silly example, but you can come up with better ones.)
Also reasonable people can disagree about discounting rates. If current interest rates are very high, it can be economically rational to cut down a forest completely to get lots of lumber now, but severely damage long running production. If discounting rates are very low, then you'd leave the forest standing.
If you internalise externalities, the problem becomes less extreme, but sufficiently large differences in discounting rates will still make it surface.
> Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition very very bad.
Why single out large corporations? If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.
eightysixfour
> Why single out large corporations? If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.
Having been in consulting for a long time, for many of these companies, let’s just say reasonable people can disagree with this.
eru
I'm not saying that large multinationals are better than you think. I'm saying that the other actors (small companies, governments, private individuals, NGOs, etc) ain't any better, and many of them are worse.
Have a look at what used to be the Aral Sea for an example.
atoav
> Reasonable people can disagree what counts as a positive vs negative externality. Eg if you like to be warm, perhaps you see global warming as positive externality.
I know this was just an example (and you said you weren't entirely happy with it), but the thing about externalities is that yeah someone may like it warm, but just because the damage doesn't happen where you are, doesn't mean it does not happen.
E.g. I could totally argue that I like draining that old oil from my car into the river next door since the river flows by and will carry the dirt away from my house. I externalize the pollution I'd have to deal with to the environment where other people live. Just because that cost is not affecting me in regards to that individual act, does not mean I didn't produce it.
Or to stay with the climate example: Yeah someone might like it warmer, but do they also like rising sea levels, more extreme wheather events, draught, higher food prices, climate migration, the cultural changes it brings and/or the violence coming from trying to prevent it? And what when the temperature is reached that they no longer like? Climate systems have multiple decades of lag, so when they decide to stop the tanker moves on, and on, and on.
Externalities are called that because they have to be paid by someone or something eventually. And not pricing them in is how you get neighbours who start to throw their dirt onto your lawn.
eru
I agree that you can get a handle on the specific problem I pointed out with externalities this way.
However, there are two more hurdles:
- First, you need to define what counts as the status quo, ie what do you measure externalities against? (But this is more of a problem in theory than in practice, I suspect.)
- Second, you need to explain why Coasian bargaining isn't enough. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
yodsanklai
> growth would always be good.
I think the point of the book is that perpetual growth is physically impossible with bounded resources.
eru
We are sitting on a giant ball of matter and we are getting plenty of fresh sunlight 24/7. It'll be a long while until physical impossibilities kick in, even without going into space.
null
baq
I have first read the limits to growth about two decades ago and it left me with a feeling of dread. Technology, if it’s even developed, only takes us so far.
The good things I observe are consistent mispredictions about e.g. solar power and a rather obvious lack of impact of AI robotics, this was hard sci-fi even 10 years ago and it’s a kinda unnoticed trend brewing around the world. The model designers would be considered clowns if they added humanoid robots to the population at any point in the timeline and now I think we can say in the next few years we’ll have to start doing exactly that.
Where does that leave humanity in 2050 is anyone’s guess. Looks like a race towards singularity, because if we don’t get there, we collapse.
dsign
>> Looks like a race towards singularity, because if we don’t get there, we collapse.
We may get either; at this point the singularity outcome is slightly more probable. The problem is that it won't be a singularity good for (most) people, so from our point of view that outcome also looks like a collapse. The most "regular" collapse on the other hand could let us be and could turn into a good lesson and opportunity; though how so is purely speculative fiction (which I write).
marcus_holmes
> They also have an interesting caveat. This is that the way the World3 model works is a through a set of connections that exist within an environment of growth. In an environment of decline, they are likely to reconfigure themselves in different ways.
This is the key insight, I think.
I was an interested follower of the Peak Oil stuff 20 years ago. Everything they said was true. But everything they predicted was wrong. As the economics of the oil business shifted, new forms of production became profitable and came online. The economy didn't collapse, life went on more or less normally.
Economies work on curves and trade-offs. As one thing declines, another ascends. As one solution to a given problem stops working, another one becomes viable. The whole continues more or less undisturbed.
It's notable that ecologists are discovering this; there are novel ecosystems [0] arising as the environment changes. The new arises as the old declines, and there's never a point at which anything "collapses" as such.
[0] https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/novel-ecosy...
dachworker
Politically, we need economic growth. It is what made us "civilized". Before we had ample economic growth, the human ambition to get more wealth and power used to mean, to go to war and take all that your neighbour has. And people should not make the mistake of believing we are somehow not exactly the same people we were 100 or even 1000 years ago. People today, are still killing each other over land, for example.
So yes, the energy/climate crisis should be taken seriously, but proposing a utopia that ditches one of the major constraints on our way of life is no solution.
js8
"It is what made us "civilized"."
Not true, it was technology what civilized us (and jury is still out), not growth. Yes, if people are not hungry or sick, spend time doing meaningful work, can talk to others and generally enjoy life, they're less likely to be violent.
But you don't need growth (use more resources and produce more material goods) for that. We can already technologically attain that state for everyone on the planet.
Despite these technological marvels, there are still people who pronounce BS about how we have to compete for resources in order to survive. But (thanks to technology) it hasn't been true since at least 1960s.
dachworker
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js8
I get what you're saying but I disagree. You're talking about people who ask others to go to war, not people who actually decide to be violent. Of course some people get bored being well-off by indulging in violence but most people don't.
southernplaces7
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dsign
What utopia? Material scarcity is certainly not one. Agree with the rest.
I however have hopes for the future. Our society is still locked in and "end of history" mentality that makes most of us believe that economically and socially we have reached the end of the road and that all that is left are minor tunings. The next "collapse" or "big" crisis, that can come from anywhere (not necessarily be a purely economic thing), may shake that belief from us.
jay_kyburz
The article suggested we are facing a collapse because some resources will be exhausted, but I missed what resources there are talking about? As far as I'm aware there is still heaps of everything.
I don't think we should be digging everything out of the ground we can, but I don't here anybody saying we are about to run out of anything.
padjo
It’s been said about helium and fossil fuels pretty regularly for the last 20 years.
st-keller
Availability of nutrition rich soil to grow stuff is one thing - google some facts about fertilizers and the resources they are made of. Clean water is also not a thing you can take for granted.
pyrale
If we look further, we wouldn’t be the first species that disappears for failing to adapt.
Your "we can’t change" logic gives us only one future, that of bacteries caught in the great oxidation event.
dachris
I also share this kind of existential angst. The future is unknown - yes, such a scenario might come true. As might nuclear war, a truly deadly pandemic etc. And yes, there is too little done to mitigate the potential impact. And lots of unknowns.
However - don't let it drag you down. Think about what you can do, personally, as a person that has agency, to mitigate the potential effects for you, for your family, for your community.
And the answer for me, personally, is the same as for many other of these issues - stay in good health both physically and mentally, keep in touch with the people around you, have a buffer (financially, resources, time), raise awareness of the potential impact. And don't be a doomer, acknowledge that you might be wrong - because you would have been (up to now).
bvxm9
Dont to raise awareness. Thats just a mindless mantra that benefits the attention economy. Its rakes in cash when everyones threat perception and anxiety is elevated.
The fact is there are things people are not capable of doing anything about. See Theory of Bounded Rationality - you cant push school kids to solve quantum field equations. There is a limit and a cost to over loading people with complexity.
dachris
Thanks for the pointer to bounded rationality, and the well-chosen words "are not capable of doing anything about". Yes, the doomer attention economy and also most media in general constantly bombard you with useless information, making decision-making very hard. What's the most important concern? The likely collapse of the pension system (here in Western Europe)? The war in Ukraine? Climate change? Trade wars? Pick you poison.
I'd add to the "mental health" recommendation to go low on such information, as it is mostly noise and non-actionable.
Awareness that in the long term, the tides might change, doesn't fall for me into this category. It's just a basic fact of life that it easily forgotten in the busyness of day.
michaelhoney
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
HPsquared
The recommendations being universal, reminds me of the Platonic form of "the Good".
lucumo
I don't get it.
As I understand the article:
1. There was a model in 1972.
2. That model predicts collapse in the mid 2020s.
3. A new group has recalibrated the model with modern data.
4. The model still predicts collapse.
How does that support the title that the model is right about collapse? To support that you need verification against the real world or against a trusted model.
omnimus
I guess we can simply wait few years…
eru
Yes. My simple prediction: no collapse, business as usual.
Perhaps the climate will get a bit warmer and that will be expensive to deal with and there will be some human and natural tragedies. But by and large people will deal and there won't be any collapse.
Vasbarlog
[dead]
amai
Has anyone ever done a sensivity analysis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_analysis ) on the world3 model?
How does the model react to small changes in the starting values? Is collapse an attractor of the model that cannot be avoided independent of the starting values? Then the question would be, how realistic is a model that predicts collapse independent of starting values?
Aziell
I used to think Limits to Growth was too pessimistic. But over time, it feels like the trends it described are quietly happening. Not all the predictions were accurate, but the overall feeling was right . We do seem to be getting closer to boundaries we don’t really want to face.
eru
The book was wrong about nearly everything. Your takeaway is very weird. But I'm happy to sell you some beachfront property or a nice bridge in New York.
imtringued
The thing about logistic growth is that getting the growth rate wrong merely shifts the timeline, it doesn't change the destination.
justlikereddit
The difference between the bus showing up to take me to work every morning at 7:30 and showing up in the year 4025 have a significance that only a doomer would try to minimize
schnitzelstoat
There is no collapse though. People are having less children (or even no children at all) mostly by choice and it seems the concern will be the smaller workforce of the future rather than any problems of overpopulation.
We also have loads of cards left to play like fully deploying nuclear energy, GMOs etc. that would ease the environmental impact but are not used due to political reasons.
eru
For something saner, you might like reading https://fass.nus.edu.sg/ecs/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/...
> If Not Malthusian, Then Why?
> This paper shows that merely the Malthusian mechanism cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Technological improvement in luxury production, if faster than improvement in subsistence production, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that the balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. A tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong tendency of growth. The theory reexplains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Song. It also suggests a new perspective on the Industrial Revolution.
johanneskanybal
How can you ”update” the model in 2025 yet not take ai or the collapse of american democracy and global trust into account?
psalaun
I guess IA is factored in Meadows quote about technology able to push the limit farther for a while but make the fall harder?
Say that IA allow us to squeeze the additional juice from the torn lemon for five more decades, given the toll that it may have on our ability to think by ourselves, the bulk of people may have troubles coming up with 19th century tech and rely on good ol' donkeys for producing food and materials instead of what we would currently see as low tech solutions, when the shit will hit the proverbial fan
johanneskanybal
If you mean AI when you sai IA I think it's bigger than this. It's ironic at the point of time where it definitly starts to outperform humans in most regards we have maybe the most failing governance in modern history. I don't expect humans to be presidents in 10 years.
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Qwertious
Neither of those two things have mature economic datasets showing their effects - the collapse of american democracy has only majorly affected the economy very recently, and AI is still mostly promises and hasn't brought in the trillions of profits it's promised yet.
baq
The end goal of AI isn’t the trillions made getting there, it’s to make those trillions meaningless. What’s the point of money if machines do literally everything better than humans?
HPsquared
"Limits to Modelling" would be a good name for a rebuttal.
johanneskanybal
Sure, I agree but usually around here there's some inteligent discussions so someone just accepting this without taking this into consideration seems weird. Pretty sure we can make food production more efficient and that it won't hinder human development..
daedrdev
Given the impact of a global pandemic and global trade war both events which cause a slight downtick in many of these graphs but are entirely random or not destined to happen, I doubt the conclusions of this post.
If there were not negative externalities being subsidized, i.e. perversely encouraged, then growth would always be good.
The problem with economic growth into negative sum gold mines, is not only the immediate and cumulative damage so far, but that all that damage is what funds and incentivizes existing and new actors to compound the damage.
Compound. Compound. That doesn't stop easily.
Whether that is fossil fuel, plastic or surveillance/manipulation media. (None of which I have an ideological issue with, if they are taxed or pay for the harm they do, each market would quickly find N new and clever ways to substitute, avoid or mitigate the damage.)
Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition is very very bad.
But the problem isn't "growth".