I was reading an article on renewable energy sources and I ran across “Economic growth hinges on cheap energy.” I assume this is an economic truism, one of the many that seriously need to be questioned, so . . . I proceed.
Is Economic Growth Necessary? In our recent history, the human population has grown at an ever increasing rate (see graph).

At the right side of the graph we have demonstrated exponential growth characteristics and it is a mathematical truism that a system of finite resources cannot support exponential growth for very long.
It should be obvious, if there are more people there are increased demands for food, shelter, energy and other commodities. So, a call for “economic growth” is supported by population growth.
Is Population Growth Necessary? The first statistic I saw in school for the population of the U.S. was 140 million people. That stat was clearly out-of-date as are all data in school textbooks, but the current population of the U.S. is 332,403,650 (actually a projection for what the population was to be (and now was) on January 1st of this year. So, the US population has doubled in that time and is expected to double again in the next 75 years. The population doubling time is slowing but not fast enough to save us from economic and political collapse scenarios.
Imagine if the number of cars made in the U.S. this last year were made to serve that lower population of my youth. We would have car lots full of cars that couldn’t be and wouldn’t be sold. Our economic output is linked to our population.
At some point, the population of the U.S. must stop expanding. What will happen then? The answer is we do not know but there is what economists call a “natural experiment” running right now: Japan. Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, when the population peaked at 128.5 million. The United Nations currently projects that Japan’s population will fall below 100 million around 2050, but the faster-than-expected decline in fertility may mean that Japan reaches that threshold ahead of schedule.
The effects of this transition to some new future population mix is that older Japanese are a greater segment of the population than ever before, with fewer people of working age to support government efforts to provide for the elderly. You can imagine or research more of the problems they are dealing with. Our problem is they haven’t yet come out of their population decline and stabilized, so the “natural experiment” in reducing a country’s population is not yet complete.
So, clearly, continued exponential growth of a country’s population leads to ruin, and seeking a lower population level for the future is fraught with uncertainty.
So, Again Is Economic Growth Necessary? The only answer is maybe yes, maybe no.
Consider the scenario in which a “cheap energy revolution” occurs. This may be something as obvious as an electrical energy storage solution, thus making solar and wind energies more practical (they are already cheaper than fossil fuel generated electricity) or maybe a re-envisioned nuclear power plant, like a thorium reactor or even a fusion energy reactor becomes feasible. And then energy would be cheap, really cheap. If economic growth is only limited by energy costs, we might be in really trouble. The first rule of dealing with runaway freight trains is to stop feeding them fuel. Stoking more fuel in would make our problems worse, not better.
Right now, it may be true that “Economic Growth Hinges On Cheap Energy” but if energy actually became really cheap, another commodity would become the determinant of economic growth. Cars can’t be made without steel and other raw materials. Foods need land to be grown on, and water to make them grow. Meat animals depend upon crops, like we do, even if grass fed.
And if we maintain our commitment to the capitalism we seem addicted to, economic growth is cooked into the system. No politician will get anywhere without a commitment to “growing the economy.”
But, what if for each one percent of population growth we became one percent more efficient in creating and distributing food and energy. Our electric grid is a Frankenstein’s monster of a twentieth century creation that is near collapse. A better system would waste much less and therefore require less energy fed into it. There are people who say we cannot afford to do this. They are stupid in the extreme. Business people know that equipment upgrades are always based upon increases in future returns. An upgraded electric grid would pay for itself in short order.
We also waste a lot of food, a lot. There are savings galore to be had in our food production facilities. But anyone who thinks we can solve our problems through efficiency mongering is fooling themselves.
What we need are fewer human beings. China tried to solve its population problem and now has a near zero population growth rate, so we might learn something from them. And, Japan is doing its thing.
It seems that we need to be doing . . . everything to increase the efficiencies of our economies but our primary focus needs to be on limiting and rolling back human populations.
Of course, our billionaires are looking to colonize Mars. Maybe we should spook them (The IRS is coming for your wealth! Boo!) and get them to all relocate. They cannot take their wealth with them, so we will have that to use more sensibly once they are gone.
Philosophical Confusions
Tags: Beginner's Mind, enlightenment, religious indoctrination
Note I was tempted to write a “Confusions say . . .” joke but I did not. S
I ran across a quote from one of my favorite books (from my past, I hardly remember it now, many thousands of books later). Here it is:
Shunryu Suzuki wrote in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”
This statement was in support of the cultivation of a beginner’s mind and I think it is, in fact, a turning away from enlightenment rather than a turning toward it. Allow me to explain.
Anyone who has spent serious time with the very young has experienced their massive creativity. They see animals in clouds, they see imaginary friends/animals, etc. And having “beginner’s minds” they distract themselves repeatedly: “Look a horsey!” “Can I have a cookie?” “They are trying to steal my toys!”
Yes, those with beginner’s minds see a great many “possibilities” but most are off task and distractions rather than being helpful. A similar miscomprehension notes how children seem to learn faster/more. Even if they do, and I doubt it, they are learning to tie their shoes and turn off the lights when leaving a room, not more complicated tasks.
Experts face another set of problems entire. Possessing a great deal of knowledge, experts also see a great many possibilities, most of which are on task, and because of their experience, they usually gravitate to a train of thinking that is likely to be successful, giving the appearance that they see only a few possibilities. I used to teach my students that they will recognize their own mastery of topics when they gravitate to lines of thinking that result in correct answers (and this requires practice, practice, practice, the same that is required to reach Carnegie Hall).
A recent study of recall addressed why it appeared that old people took longer to recall things than young people. The researchers could think of no physical reason why this might be so. So they did a study and their only conclusion was that in all likelihood, old people took longer to recall facts because they had much larger stores of facts in long-term memory to sift through. This is like the expert’s minds seeing “fewer possibilities” miscomprehension, which is a false conclusion based upon a natural tendency to gravitate toward things that will work.
Turning back to my point that cultivating a mind like a beginner is not a step forward but a step back. Beginners are gullible, beginners are less discerning, etc. This is why religions target the young for their proselytizing. We should instead be studying how this “inclination to pursue lines of thought that will be successful” works.
The trap for experts has always been that that tendency can block off more novel approaches to problems. The well used channels of thoughts become ruts that are nor easily escaped. This is why Einstein extolled being able to think as a child would, with wonder and awe, but he was not recommending a steady diet of such thinking.
All of these may be moot points as our society seems to be turning away from experts and returning to a simpler societal “beginner’s mind,” more easily gulled by those who desire to manipulate us.
Note For those of you confused by the reference to Carnegie Hall, it comes from an old joke. It goes like this: Someone asked a cabbie “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” and the cabbie pondered a bit and replied “Practice, practice, practice.”