The Limits of The Limits to Growth: Contemplating 1972 predictions of environmental doom, just in...

Reason ^ | April 18, 2012 | Ronald Bailey

[neverdem]

Contemplating 1972 predictions of environmental doom, just in time for Earth Day

Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth, a report to the Club of Rome, was released with great fanfare at a conference at the Smithsonian Institution. The study was based on a computer model developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and designed “to investigate five major trends of global concern—accelerating industrial development, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.” The goal was to use the model to explore the increasingly dire "predicament of mankind." The researchers modestly acknowledged that their model was “like every other model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished.”

Yet even with this caveat, the MIT researchers concluded, “If 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.” With considerable understatement, they added, “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” In other words: a massive population crash in a starving, polluted, depleted world.

The problem, as the MIT researchers saw it, was exponential growth in all five areas of concern that they investigated. Linear growth is additive—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—whereas exponential growth compounds over time—1, 2, 4, 8, 16.

Earlier this month, Smithsonian magazine ran a short item reporting the findings of a 2008 study [PDF] by Australian physicist Graham Turner. According to Turner, an examination of currently available data reveals that that world economy is right on track to collapse by the middle of this century...

[tcrlaf]

I’m old enough to remember when the Left said we were all going to die in the HELL of Global Cooling by 1996...

Every few years or so, it’s a new Enviro-Nazi scam, as the last one gets debunked.

[hinckley buzzard]

This report by the Club of Rome was an inspiration to Jimmuh Carter who sought to prepare Americans for their terminal decline-- much as Obama seeks to strangle American growth and prosperity.

[GonzoGOP]

One thing these Malthusians always miss is that population in industrialized nations is not exponential. In fact in many industrialized nations population is in decline except for immigration. If you want to save the world the best thing you could do would be to eliminate the dictatorships and thugs and get the place industrialized as quickly as possible. Not gonna happen because the Malthusians like the third world just the way it is.

Only a rich nation can afford to be environmentally conscious. A rich nation can set aside land simply for the beauty of it. Poor nations much use every resource available. Rich people with full bellies can worry about saving endangered species, poor starving people put them into the stew pot. Destroy the economies and the ecology goes right along with it. But the greens and the socialists refuse to see it.

[Red Badger]

I remember reading a Sci-Fi story by Arthur C. Clarke that he wrote during that time. In his story, the future Earth was bursting at the seams with a population of 6 Billion people.......We now have almost 7 billion................

[Red Badger]

People in wealthy industrialized nations have leisure time to pursue personal interests and self-fulfillment.

People in poor countries do not have such luxuries, so the have sex...............

[the invisib1e hand]

nonrenewable resources

such as?

[ghost of nixon]

Rich people with full bellies can worry about saving endangered species, poor starving people put them into the stew pot.

LOL! I've seen this personally in the third world - most critters are tasty if you are starving.

[stephenjohnbanker]

” I’m old enough to remember when the Left said we were all going to die in the HELL of Global Cooling by 1996...”

Cover of Time Magazine circa 1975

” The Coming Ice Age”

[Unrepentant VN Vet]

We certainly were not MIT, but one of my grad school projects was running one of those computer-aided End of the World programs.

Our advisor well and truly screwed up, though.

Everybody involved had cut their teeth on computers while wearing uniforms and tended to treat the ‘puter as a tool instead of a bloody oracle.

Well, we did the programming, ran the thing and generated the appropriate ten or so pounds of printout.

Our summary: “If you assume that the world is coming to an end, the computer projections will support that assumption and vice versa. Garbage In, Garbage Out still works.”

(And no, it was never published.)

[Anti-Bubba182]

We are still eating the consequences of this propeller headed horse manure to this day.

[1010RD]

Outstanding story.

[GOPJ]

In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law," wrote Norton. "The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures."

Norton found that the fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children per woman while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility rate of 1.82 children per woman. His results for the rule of law were similar; fertility rates in countries with low respect for the rule of law averaged 4.16 whereas countries with high respect for the rule of law had fertility rates averaging 1.55.

Interesting stuff - thanks for the ping.