Growth, and its counterpart, degrowth, have become hot topics for activists and theoreticians concerned about capitalism's destruction of the world and its people. The idea that we need to move away from an economic system based on accumulation of capital toward one that has a more sustainable relationship with nature is attractive. I have dealt
elsewhere with the degrowth concept, and will produce more on that. But in researching the topic I wanted to read the book that is often seen as the grandparent of these current debates.
The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 and came out of a group of thinkers known as The Club of Rome. It was enormously popular, influential and has spawned a number of updates and similar books in the fifty years since its publication. It is also a theoretical mess.
The book's authors explain that "The team examined the five basic factors that determine, and therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet-population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production". They conclude:
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 research is based on the then, relatively new, idea of computer modelling, something the researchers place great faith in. The computers of the era were of course much less powerful than modern technology, and this naturally limited the scope of the models themselves, nonetheless the team were proud of their achievements:
Since ours is a formal, or mathematical, model it also has two important advantages over mental models. First, every assumption we make is written in a precise form so that it is open to inspection and criticism by all. Second, after the assumptions have been scrutinized, discussed, and revised to agree with our best current knowledge, their implications for the future behavior of the world system can be traced without error by a computer, no matter how complicated they become.
With the development of Computer Science also came cautionary arguments, and one of the best known of these was GIGO - "Garbage In, Garbage Out". In other words, your model is only as good as the data and assumptions that it rests upon. In the case of The Limits to Growth, the problem with the book comes down to the assumptions made in the modelling, and in particular the authors' focus on the two biggest drivers of "growth" in their view - capital and population.
As such the models themselves are not particularly at fault, and tend to show what you might expect. Industrial economies rely on the availability of natural resources and labour, and when these are undermined by shortages or other effects (such as pollution affecting health) the system tends to go into crisis. Much of the book's diagrams consists of models that demonstrate things like this:
Thus population and capital, driven by exponential growth, not only reach their limits, but temporarily shoot beyond them before the rest of the system, with its inherent delays, reacts to stop growth. Pollution generated in exponentially increasing amounts can rise past the danger point, because the danger point is first perceived years after the offending pollution was released. A rapidly growing industrial system can build up a capital base dependent on a given resource and then discover that the exponentially shrinking resource reserves cannot support it. Because of delays in the age structure, a population will continue to grow for as long as 70 years, even after average fertility has dropped below the replacement level (an average of two children for each married couple).
Modern readers might be amused at the old-fashioned diagrams. But readers then were very impressed. The computer outputs proved that a system based on growth would go into crisis and this would have a severe impact on the world unless stringent and urgent action was taken to arrest this growth. Even then, the world hung in the balance.
The data did draw some interesting conclusions. They noted, for instance, that growth increased inequality. That technological innovation was not the answer:
it is sufficient to recognize that no new technology is spontaneous or without cost. The factories and raw materials to produce synthetic food, the equipment and energy to purify sea water must all come from the physical world system.
and the very real limits there were to the system which was "being pushed toward its limit-the depletion of the earth's nonrenewable resources."
So what's the problem? The problem is the model is based on two key drivers of growth "population and capital" (as in, for instance, "we are interested only in the broad behavior modes of the population-capital system."). The authors don't really have a concept of growth as fundamental to the capitalist system - unlike the best degrowth thinkers today. Instead they tend to see capital growth as an offshoot of the system, though their real argument is that everything is derived from population growth. In effect, this makes the book essentially a 1970s computer powered modelling of Malthusianism. There is nothing here to link the problem of (say) unsustainable resource use to an economic system based on the accumulation of capital. It is worth noting here that it is written in the 1970s so the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries also suffer from this problem. The authors' tend to see these as some form of socialist society, but they too were governed by accumulation through their competition with the capitalist west. The authors of The Limits to Growth however don't dwell on these details - rather focusing on growth as being separate to the global economic system.
So the book is essentially Malthusian:
Some pollutants are obviously directly related to population growth (or agricultural activity, which is related to population growth). Others are more closely related to the growth of industry and advances in technology. Most pollutants in the complicated world system are influenced in some way by both the population and the industrialization positive feedback loops.
The problem then is that the authors have no way to argue against growth, because they see it as arising out of the nature of people. They recognise that population growth can level off, but that it won't happen fast enough, and thus see solutions as arising out of restricting population levels and challenging the growth of capital - though how this can happen in a system where capitalists are "compelled" [Marx] to accumulate capital is not addressed at all. In fact, the writers explicitly argue that there will be no fundamental change in their models, what they call the "standard run":
Let us begin by assuming that there will be in the future no great changes in human. values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.
In other words, not only is the data input into the model flawed, the model itself assumes that you cannot change the system. But the problem, as millions of people currently understand, is the system - a system that drives growth. While The Limits to Growth is striking because it identifies that serious thought was given in the 1970s to the looming ecological and resource crisis, its flawed approach failed to identify the problem. Thus a generation of people, including millions of readers, were given an incorrect explanation for the coming crisis. Neo-Malthusianism blamed the masses and diverted attention from the real issue - the accumulation of capital. Here is not the place for me to critique Malthus again, I've done that elsewhere. But while The Limits to Growth has some insights - not least in its critique of what we would now call ecomodernism, or those who put their faith in technological development, its Computer driven Malthusian arguments are of no real use. GIGO.
Related Reviews
Paulson, D'Alisa & Demaria - The Case for Degrowth
Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World
Ehrlich - The Population Bomb
Dorling - Population 10 Billion
Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb