Limits to Growth
6 years, 1 month, 25 days, 19 hours
26 May 2023
It is the conversation that societies generally don’t have, perhaps because humans are by nature aspirational and wired to always want more and better, or perhaps it still feels a long way off.
It’s the conversation about growth and the simple logical fact that we can’t keep having it.
The intellectual underpinning is the 1972 Limits to Growth study. It projected scenarios of population growth and resource consumption, and concluded that if we carried on as we were, we would, within 100 years, run out of the ability to grow and be forced into a reverse in population and living standards. It also showed potential for positive outcomes. A couple of years ago a then KPMG colleague, Gaya Herrington, hit headlines round the world for her study which placed modern data against the original Limits to Growth projections, and concluded we were still on track for disaster.
My point is not that we need to do a lot more a lot faster to save the world from carbon-emissions-induced climatic collapse. It is that even if we veer away from that catastrophe, we still end up with a limit to growth and at some point in the next couple of generations humanity will have to get used to an absolute ceiling on what they can divide between them, inducing either Buddhist nirvana or an endless war over how the cake is divided.
If this feels unreal it is because all of humanity before us has not had to accept this constraint. Most individuals in early civilisations supposedly didn’t have the luxury of worrying about more because just living was good enough. But from the invention of money we have been on a constant treadmill of more, which is absolutely embedded in the way the world works, from governments chasing GDP growth, to companies chasing profit growth to most individuals wanting more of everything, however much they’ve already got.
As we approach the end of this century, if we haven’t killed the liveability of the planet first, humanity reaches an interesting point in its maturity. The global population is forecast to reach a plateau, and then gradually decline. We can envisage and model now what it would take to properly feed a planet of 10 billion people, in sustainable perpetuity. And what it would take to have the energy, clean water, transport, housing, healthcare, education, and leisure needs of all these people sustainably met. And what would be a good quality of life for everyone, that can endure from one generation to the next, and doesn’t require us to kill our own planet or start to exploit another. Isn’t that the ultimate definition of what we should be aiming for?