The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [21]
1. Speeding up. Time really gets compressed toward the end of the exponential phase of growth.
2. Turning the corner. This is a very real and extremely important event in systems with limits.
3. More than double. Each doubling equals more than all of the prior ones combined.
This information is going to be especially critical when we talk about the idea that our economy, our money system, and all of our associated institutions are fundamentally predicated on exponential growth. As we’ll see, it’s not just any type of growth that our money system requires, but exponential growth.
Up until recently, that has been a fine and workable model, but once we introduce the idea of resource limits into our collective story of growth (in other words, once we know just how big is the stadium in which we’re all sitting), we quickly discover some serious flaws in our current narrative. It turns out that the economy does not exist in a vacuum, and it does not have the power to create reality. The economy is really just a reflection of our access to abundant energy and other concentrated resources that we can transform into useful products and services. As long as those resources can continue to be extracted from the earth in ever-increasing quantities, then our economic model is safe and sound. And that is where the trouble in this story begins.
1 Some use “the Rule of 72,” which is more accurate in some circumstances, but less easy to calculate in our heads, so we’ll stick to 70 for now, as it is perfectly accurate for our purposes.
CHAPTER 6
An Inconvenient Lie
The Truth about Growth
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
Unless we are careful, we might accidentally pursue growth when what we really are seeking is prosperity. The problem is that prosperity has so often accompanied growth that it has become easy to confuse the two.
Growth appears to solve many problems. Growth creates jobs and adds new money to strained government coffers. At the same time that growth occurs, new opportunities often arise. Growth is so central to our economic models and thinking that many economists will, with completely straight faces, refer to recessions as periods of “negative growth.” If that doesn’t reveal a bias toward growth, I don’t know what does. It’s impossible to listen to a presidential press conference on the economy without hearing about growth and how important it is that we create more of it. Economic growth is unquestionably assumed to be desirable, and that’s pretty much all there is to the story.
Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
—Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993)1
The type of growth upon which our economy depends, exponential growth, is completely unsustainable and will therefore someday stop. Nothing can grow forever, at least nothing that consumes finite resources to fuel its growth. It is my view that this shift to no growth or even negative growth (to use that odd economic term) will happen within the next 20 years, although a transition could happen much sooner, if it didn’t already begin in 2008. Whenever it happens to occur, it will be destructive to wealth and unpleasant for most people. This means that the paradigm of economic growth, along with its presumed necessity and even desirability, needs to be hauled out into the bright light of day and carefully examined.
The imperative for growth is only very rarely questioned, and it’s usually reported in the news as though it were just another necessary component of life. So few people ever question the importance of economic growth that it has become culturally elevated to the same top tier of the winner’s podium as other “essentials” such as supermarkets and gasoline stations. From this, we might be led to conclude that economic growth is truly an essential feature of our economic landscape.