The Limits To Growth Thesis and ‘World Problematique’ in 2020

The prediction business is tricky. The potential to have your crystal ball go pie shaped and perhaps blow up in your face is pretty high, sometimes even if you’re looking at stuff in the near future. I’m thinking of all the pollsters who predicted a smashing Hillary victory in 2016– until the actual day she lost.

Then there’s one Sylvia Browne, who in her 2008 book End Of Days predicted that “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely”.  In 2020, and actually dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, that has to be a wow.

Nostradamus and Malthus

We have had many other predictions. The one that people will know more of is from Nostradamus, a French astrologer who is credited with predicting, among other things, the French Revolution, Hitler, the atomic bomb, JFK’s assassination, and 9/11.

Then there’s Thomas Malthus, the 18^th century English scholar and economist, who in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) wrote that famine and disease was inevitable, especially among the most needy, because population grew at a higher rate (geometric vs. linear) than food production- leading to a catastrophe in society.

Malthus certainly influenced people over time-notably Charles Darwin and John Maynard Keynes, but he also had critics- notably Karl Marx and David Ricardo. His thinking never quite entered the mainstream.

Limits To Growth

The Limits To Growth (LTG) thesis- was a report commissioned by the Club of Rome – a group of scientists, economists, business leaders and former politicians- to address their ‘predicament of mankind’ or ‘world problematique’.  

Written by a team of MIT researchers, and published in 1972, LTG used computer simulation and a number of variables- ‘accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment’ to ‘predict’ the world in the future.

Focusing on exponential versus linear population growth – shades of Malthus- the LTG authors-  Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, and William Behrens III predicted that,

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity– <but> it is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future—”

Specifically, LTG predicted rising world population until 2030 and then a decline; a decrease in industrial output from 2008, and in food production per capita from 2020; a steady decrease in resource availability (arable land, minerals and fuels) due to deforestation and increased consumption; and, an exponential rise in pollution with associated negative effects on life expectancy.

LTG pointed to a widening gap between rich and poor countries, global warming from increased use of fossil fuels by that exponentially growing population, the harmful effects of fertilizers and DDT to our bodies, and discussed ‘desirable family size’ in light of a country’s Gross National Product (GNP). Note that they were writing in 1972.

LTG also looked at the effect of unchecked growth globally and concluded- very controversially- that without self-imposed limits on population growth and the other variables the world would, in two of their three scenarios ‘overshoot and collapse’ the world’s ‘carrying capacity’ beginning in the 2000’s. 

The one scenario where the world stabilized and didn’t overshoot and collapse required “the number of babies born each year be equal to the expected number of deaths in the population, the addition of technological policies including resource recycling and pollution control devices, increased lifetime of all forms of capital, methods to restore eroded and infertile soil, increased emphasis on food and services rather than on industrial production, and industrial capital investment equal to capital depreciation”.

Criticism of LTG

Well then. You can imagine the hornet’s nest that stirred up- it was still raging away when I was at university in the mid/late 1970’s in England.  LTG was criticized on a number of fronts– by academics, businesspeople, and others.  A lot of it had to with the system dynamics model it used, its assumptions, charges of a deliberate agenda to halt growth, being Malthusian, even the composition of the Club of Rome. LTG hasn’t gone away- its surviving authors published a 30-year update in 2004.

We can certainly poke at the overall quantitative predictions till the cows come home and find them wanting and inaccurate. We can also see the requirement for capital investment to equal depreciation as, well, weird to say the least.

According to the United Nations, the world’s population was about 4 Billion in 1974, 7.8 Billion in 2020 and will rise to 10 Billion by 2057- not exponential growth but still a sharp increase and non-linear pull on resources.

We can criticize LTG for not taking enough stock of technology in the output model but who did in 1970? Nobody predicted that we would have more computing power in an iPhone today than ENIAC- the first computer, which just happened to be 8 feet high, 3 feet deep and 80 feet long.  For that matter, did anyone see the Internet and World Wide Web coming?

We can point to China’s one-child policy, India’s forced sterilization program and the gradual drop in birth rates in the developed world  and wonder whether LTG played a part in these developments.

What can we make of LTG in 2020? 

We can also look at the things LTG got right, at least on a macro/trend level.

There is enough data to confirm that Global Warming is real- sea levels are rising, deforestation continues to accelerate, and arable land continues to decrease.

Fossil fuels still account for ~80% of energy consumption globally, leading to constantly hazardous air quality/pollution in many parts of the world.

We have seen a rise in the availability and use of organic foods (for those who can afford it), and a sharp decrease (in many countries a ban) in the use of DDT- but pesticides and insecticides are still widely used.  

And, as an Oxfam study pointed out, in 2014 “the 85 richest individuals in the world have as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population– the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population–there are 16 billionaires in sub-Saharan Africa living alongside the 358 million people living in extreme poverty”.

All those numbers have almost certainly increased since- for the worse in 2020.

The Call To Action

The Limits To Growth report called, in 1972, for immediate action, “to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future– the state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential— the vast majority of policymakers seems to be actively pursuing goals that are inconsistent with these conclusions”.

We largely failed to heed that call.

As we sit here in 2020, confronting the limits- and effects on the planet and its people- LTG highlighted, it is well past time to give the thesis another good look, and act.

Because the ‘predicament of mankind’ and ‘world problematique’ that the Club of Rome sought to address is even more relevant and urgent in 2020 than it was in 1970.

Writer: Deepak Kamlani

Image: Jason Leung, Unsplash