Thinking the Unthinkable

The era of ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption is over, done, finished, for good.  Only charlatans, fools and the willfully blind, claim to believe otherwise.

            So too is the exponential growth of technology which is running up against the finite amount of wisdom so far accumulated by the sciences.  There will be further refinements, no doubt, as the last few pieces of the puzzle of the material universe fall into place, but no more big game-changing great leaps, as there were, for example, with the harnessing of fire, the invention of moveable type, the development of steam power, or even, most recently, the emergence of the digital.

            Both phenomena are only blips on the timeline of human history in any case.  We have spent countless millennia living in static economic environments, making little or no technical progress.  The past three hundred years or so have been an anomaly.

            Thomas Malthus was right.  Economic growth in the long term is now out of the question. In a world in which the human population grows faster than the economy there will always be a looser for every winner.  Moreover, the losers will naturally suspect the winners of taking unfair advantage, if not of outright racketeering, and in most cases they will be right.  As world population peaks about midway through the present century, in the face of the inevitable competition for food, water and fuel, the losers will also be largely dead.

            The economic order is neither just nor sustainable.  Everywhere the globalizing free market squeezes the middle class, enriches small elites and broadens the membership of the excluded.  At current rates of consumption and population growth, global economic collapse is imminent.  Do the math.  It’s time to begin thinking the hitherto unthinkable.