Limits to Growth and Exponential Feminists

“Look, man, do I look like an ichthyologist to you?  Big damn bugs, all right?  The size of my fist.  The size of a peanut butter and banana sandwich.  What do I know?  I got a growth. . . .” – Bubba Ho Tep

Zombies or Mad Max®. 

When my older brother, also (really) named John Wilder, (my parents didn’t want to have to call two names when they called us for dinner) came back from college one year, he brought back a large number of textbooks.  Most of the books were exceedingly dull, written by exceedingly dull college professors about business.  I’m not sure what a college professor would know about business, since if they were any good at business they’d have one, not teach it.  Honestly, I have no idea why you’d want to get a college degree in “business” at all, unless it was because you like spending $20,000 a year to drink beer and go rock climbing with college girls wearing skimpy outfits . . .

Oh, that’s why you get a degree in business and take six years to get it.  Never mind.

But one of my brother’s textbooks caught my eye, a copy of Limits to Growth.  It was a dog-eared paperback with a bright yellow sticker on matte black background proclaiming it, “USED.”  Knowing my brother’s interest in subjects like economics and the fate of society, the only way that particular textbook was USED was as a doorstop or beer coaster.  I’m surprised that Limits to Growth was being used as a textbook, since my brother was going to school at a community college on a competitive mixed doubles checkers scholarship, and actually teaching something to a student athlete at a community college can cause the college to lose its accreditation, I’ve been told.

Limits to Growth was a book based on a computer model back when a 2006 Blackberry® had ten times as much computing power as a the computer they used.  The study came out in 1972, when, for whatever reason, the entire world mood started to get gloomy.  Here is a book cover from a novel published that same year:

Yes, Ma Wilder bought this for me (at my insistence) when I was about 12.  It was a little gloomier than Harry Potter® or Captain Underpants™.

This particular computer model used by the authors was one that purported to take a bunch of inputs and determine future economic growth and population.  Because computers are magic, I guess.

Spoiler alert!  The results were not good.

Well, this is one solution for overpopulation . . .

You can fiddle with the model yourself over here (LINK).  I played with it a few times and, like an amateur knitter gladiating against Spartacus at the Coliseum™ on Ladies Night (two for one Buffalo wings!) I kept losing.  I guess my inability to make the computer model turn out well means billions of you are going to have to die and civilization will collapse.  Sorry.  Bright side?  Buffalo wings.

The one fault I have with the model is that most of the “solutions” that drive longer human civilization timelines or stability involve state control and a general shared misery of technological standstill.  Oh, and almost all of the solutions had to be implemented back in 1972 for them to be useful.

The cure was to stop economic progress, to live in a world that’s much like Cuba – stuck in the 1950’s with oppressive government limiting actions of individuals, up to and including mandatory beards and licensing of new children.  I say “was” because, in the terms of the authors of the original study, it’s too late now to avoid a population growing beyond the capacity of the Earth to provide for it (overshoot) which inevitably leads to a collapse in population.

Normally I am skeptical of model runs.  Reality has a way of pointing out all of the things we really don’t know when we place too much faith in models.  And yet . . . exponential growth is, well, exponential.  Let me illustrate with a story you’ve probably heard before:

You can smell the cats through the computer monitor.

If your town has angry feminists with unnaturally-colored hair in it, and they double in number every day, and you know on day 30 that the town will be overrun with feminists, how many much of the town will be overrun on day 29?

Half.  I won’t mansplain that.  But on day 28, only a quarter of the town will smell like cat-loving harpy.  On day 27, only 12.5%.

Oops.  I guess I mansplained that.  But the human brain is not wired out of the box to understand exponentials.  Thousands of years have taught us that people don’t double in height during a day, that the number of villagers don’t double in a month.  But after we study it long enough, we realize the power of exponential growth.  If the number of pageviews on this blog increased like they did on a consistent basis, by the year 2026 I’ll have almost 22 billion pageviews a day.  Heck, some blogs go a whole year and don’t get that many pageviews.

Okay, that really won’t happen.  I’d be lucky to have everyone on Earth visit just once a day.

We’ve been stuck with the exponential growth of humanity.  Al Bartlett (R.I.P.) was a professor of physics at the University of Colorado who lectured a lot about exponential growth.  His website remains up here (LINK).  His conclusion is that, given finite resources, infinite growth isn’t possible.  A guy named Thomas Malthus came to that same conclusion in 1798, but his website was on Myspace® and is down now.

Malthus has been for now, wrong, with respect to Western Civilization.  Technological progress has increased the carrying capacity of Earth and (generally) increased the standard of living of the vast majority when compared to 1798.  At least for now.  As we look at civilizations in the past, from the Romans to the Mayans to Easter Island (and others), all collapsed due to unchecked growth.

So, maybe Bartlett, Malthus, and the Club of Rome will win in the end.  But until then, I guess 20 year olds will spend six years getting business degrees for the beer and the babes.  Might as well enjoy the decline . . . .