Growth Forever

A while back, I’d written about Yuval Noah Harari’s comment from his first book, Sapiens, that capitalism and consumerism are intertwined, that the combo is like the “shark that must swim or suffocate”.

The instinctive reaction of many to that is one of revulsion: why is everyone so greedy? Can’t we just be satisfied with our current comforts and possessions? In his follow-up book, Homo Deus, Harari answers those questions by using India as the example:

-         India’s population is growing at the rate of 1.2% p.a.

-         Simple maths then tells us that unless India’s economy grows by at least the same amount each year, “unemployment will rise, salaries will fall and the average standard of living will decline”.

-         Next comes the kicker: even if India’s population stabilizes, and the middle class is satisfied with its current standard of living, “what should India do about its hundreds of millions of poverty stricken citizens?”

-         If the pie remains the same size, “you can give more to the poor only by taking something from the rich”:

“That will force you to make some very hard choices, and will probably cause a lot of resentment and even violence.”

-         Therefore, the pie needs to keep growing.

All this brings up the next questions, as Harari then points out:

“Can the economy actually keep growing forever? Won’t it eventually run out of resources – and grind to a halt?”

But we’ve heard this many times before. So why haven’t we hit the limit so far?

“Science has provided modernity with the alternative… There are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge. Raw materials and energy are exhaustible – the more the use, the less you have. Knowledge, in contrast, is a growing resource – the more you use, the more you have.”

And so, says Harari:

“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.”

Given that science has helped discover “fresh sources of energy, new kinds of raw material, better machinery and novel production methods” ever so often, who knows what the next-in-line technologies, “nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence” will produce? And who knows what will come after those?

Those who consider the resources of earth as the upper limit, remember we’re already considering mining asteroids for metals. The argument that we’ll run out of resources is hard to believe when we seem to be expanding the scope from earth to the entire visible universe… the only constraints right now seem to be the limit at which we (or our instruments) can travel (aka speed of light) and the risk of our extinction before we manage to colonize other parts of space.