I used to think this way. I guess it is possible, in the long-term, that we might see some kind of social collapse due to a tragedy-of-the-commons driven depletion of some critical resource.

But I see no evidence this is close. Humans are flourishing more than ever before. And in the places that humans aren't flourishing, this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion. Moreover, stalling birthrates obviate any kind of Malthusian concerns for at least a generation or so.

People have been predicting resource-driven collapses for a long time now, since the Club of Rome and Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth in the 70s. I haven't read Geoffrey West but it looks like he is in the same camp. A lot of very smart modelers and game theoreticians have come up with models predicting collapse. But they've been wrong so far when pressed to make falsifiable predictions (see the Simon-Erlich wager). And beyond falsifiable predictions, more empirical and less theoretical work also seems to show that models of resource-depletion and collapse are too simple to map on to what actually happens. See for example, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, about how societies around the world and through history have successfully managed common-pool resources.

So Im not worried about resource-depletion-driven collapse.

I think the thing that people miscalculate is that resource-depletion-driven collapse happens once. Everything the happens prior to the collapse is largely irrelevant, irrespective of how nice life was prior to the collapse.

Ultimately we live in a world of physical limits. Current society is predicated upon exponential growth, it is literally unsustainable by definition.

>Current society is predicated upon exponential growth

Is it though? There is no law in economics that I’m aware of that bars steady state. Exponential growth seems to be nothing more that a (possibly shortsighted) preference

Can you name a modern society that doesn't aim to maintain positive economic growth year on year?

Economic growth doesn't necessarily mean increased resource consumption, especially when you take into account services. For example, Having more doctors and fewer unemployed people improves your GDP, but doesn't require more food to feed more people

Your response is resource blind, and is part of the problem why we're in the predicament we're in. Think of the amount of resources that a doctor consumes in the services they provide, from all the medical equipment to the medicines and other devices that they administer to their patients.

Take a minute to imagine more medical doctors without more resources. It is pretty easy

There is an important distinction between using resources more efficiently and requiring more resources.

My point is that we may not be using resources to efficiently raise quality of life. Just adding more resources to that problem seems to ironically be blind to the process and goal.

I don't think you even need to make an efficiency argument.

A more doctors can provide more benefit even if you gave them no medical devices and medicine. They can answer questions, diagnose, triage, ect.

There is a whole class of knowledge services in the economy that can scale without consuming more resources. Therapists, musicians, architects, educators, home-decoration consultants, ect.

I think that is an efficiency argument. Whether time or knowledge, the resource doesn’t go away. It just gets placed into a more useful direction. The distinction is how the utility is measured. They later point is that sometimes that definition of utility function can sometimes maximize economic measures while turning a blind eye to societal ones. I’d argue the former puts the cart before the horse, I.e., the economy should serve society and not ur other way around

Oh, I certainly agree there is an efficiency opportunity as well, I was just saying that it isn't strictly necessary to improve resource efficiency to have growth.

How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution? It could be even better by having them share fixed resources, but that isn't strictly necessary to see benefit and economic growth (medical advice still adds value).

I don't have much to say about your second point, except that you can prioritize any measures you want. Growth of those measures, economic or social, are not bound by resource consumption.

I think most reasonable people would agree that economic growth for its own sake isn't important. Its value is simply as an imperfect approximation of other things that society does value.

>How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution?

Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.

And I agree with your last point. The mail issue I’m bringing up is that economic growth, as traditionally defined, is a blunt tool at best to measure what we really care about: quality of life. I think there is a good argument that there is marginal utility past a certain point, if not outright negative impacts. We confuse the measure for the target.

>Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.

Yes, it is a more productive use of human human capital and time.

I think that time is a different resource than the parent poster was talking about when they spoke of resource-depletion-driven collapse, physical limits, and unsustainable growth.

I take that to mean they think physical material consumption must always go up if we want economic growth. This is why I tried to point out that economic growth can include many things that don't need raw materials.

I feel like this comment misses the point. It’s begging the question.

It’s like pointing to people who are constantly trying to increase their salary as evidence that increasing your salary is necessary. When the measure becomes the target it ceases to be a good measure.

To answer your question directly, Japan has had roughly the same GDP for nearly 30 years.

This is not true. A total collapse can happen many times, and there can be innumerable reaource-driven collapses of societies or even civilizations.

What is conjectures in this thread is that it hasn't happened yet (debatable) but that doesn't mean it can only happen one more time.

You're conflating two separate things. Yes, society can collapse multiple times. Yes, there can be innumerable resource-driven collapses. These are given.

What I'm referring to is the literal running out of the necessary resources to progress modern society in the same way that we have up until now. This is also a given. Take oil for example, and think of the vast amounts of plastic we rely on, which we currently have no equivalent alternative.

Of course, this is only relevant to modern society. This is not to say that humans cannot exist in a pre-modern society. It just won't be pleasant.

What is your opinion on industrial pollution?

My opinion? I think it sucks. PM2.5 kills. CO2 is causing climate change.

But living in a world with industrial pollution is better than living in a pre-industrial world.

The issue is not resource depletion, but more how we f* the planet by producing / consuming too much (heating it and killing biodiversity in miscellaneous other ways).

> Humans are flourishing more than ever before

Quantify that (yes, I'm serious).

> this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion

You've missed the point if you think this is about resource depletion. There is an abundance of resources. It's the process of extracting them and refining them that is killing life on this planet (it's not just about humans).

> Quantify that

Population, Kardashev scale, literacy rates, child mortality rates, sexual equality, the very definition of poverty, per-capita frequency of violent death, great-power war frequency, vaccine and medical sophistication, education rates, patent filings…

It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to see us as being in anything but a golden age. Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have.

> Population

Projected to stop growing this decade and go down, with many fist world countries staring the barrel of socioeconomic collapse due to lack of new births to grow into the workforce to sustain the outsized outgoing aging population, while developing nations are seeing population booms that they cannot sustain as a result of many of the easily extracted resources already being plundered or polluted (Fish, Clean water).

So many of the countries that are losing are projected to soon start losing population (To name some big ones, Japan, South Korea, China countries and if US immigration faulters, USA as well) and face a demographic retirement crisis, while many of the countries that are projected to (keep) gain(ing) are doing so without the access to resources to acquire them.

You need blinders to look at the current population demographic and think "Yeah, this everybody is flourishing, this is going to work out great"

> Kardashev Scale

Not taking this seriously I see as we don't even rank, We're over 5 orders of magnitude from the first threshold, so it's not even like it's close. So a meaningless suggestion.

> literacy rates

No argument there, but if basic human literacy is "flourishing" to you I see the bar you've set and I've set for "Flourishing" are as stark as "Alive" and "Dead".

> sexual equality

Those rose tinted glasses are polarized as fuck

> the very definition of poverty

The goalposts they keep moving so that less people than ever qualify so as to appear as poverty rates have largely remained stable instead of ballooning 3 fold in the US as they slowly squeeze the middle class out? Yeah. Real Flourishing.

> per-capita frequency of violent death

Fair point here too, Has been on a general decline in the 2000's, and too soon to say anything about the 2020's. The first thing you've listed I'd agree as actually "Flourishing".

> great-power war frequency

You mean the continuous Great Power Proxy struggles that have killed millions with regularity across the world, forcing non-great powers to suffer the evils of war while those great powers sit back in comfort and throw shit at each other on twitter/TV/Newspapers? Yeah. Really flourishing. That MAD policy was a reaaaal step forward for life on Earth.

> vaccine and medical sophistication

Hey, another one you slam dunked.

> education rates

You seem to keep repeating the mistake at looking at averages of people that are just "educated" and not looking at the level of education. More people recieve AN Education today than ever before, even as a percentage of population, true, on a global scale. However, general performance across the board has been on the decline, as have academic and journalistic standards and integrity. From China to the US, the education systems are doing a worse and worse job of educating people, despite churning out more white papers and degrees than ever.

> patent filings

lol no. This is like measuring a mobile phone platforms app stores success by how many apps it has. If it has 100,000 shitty flappy bird clones, but no weather, social media, entertainment, finance, or other very common tools, that doesn't mean it's good or flourishing. People flooding the Patent office with bullshit just to compete on "Patents filed" is Cold War era childish oneupsmanship. Quantity is Not Quality.

> Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have

Yes, and their wringing their hands because they're losing it. It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to look at everything they HAVE and assume it'll just continue being that way.