Limits of Limits to Growth

The fatal flaws in Malthusian thinking

Minister of Doom

You have probably heard of Thomas Malthus. He was the man responsible for economics being saddled with the label “the dismal science”. His 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, made a case for the hopelessness of the battle against hunger and poverty. Based on his survey of history (pre-capitalist, pre-industrial history), Malthus concluded that when the supply of food increases, human population increases faster. Humans cannot exercise self-control and have no way of overcoming this supposedly iron logic.

As he put it, “The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.”

In Malthus’ simple model, food supplies grow arithmetically or linearly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) while the number of people grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16). Left to their own devices, human populations will explode in size. Two forces counter this tendency, which Malthus named “preventive” and “positive” checks. Preventive checks include delays in or avoidance of childbearing, moral restraint, and legislation. (China’s now-abandoned one-child policy being a heavy-handed example of the latter.) Malthus doubted that preventive checks would do the job.

The more powerful positive checks include war, plague, and famine. If people failed to restrict their reproduction through preventive checks then nature would take over. War would erupt as everyone scrambled for scarce resources, plagues would grow from overcrowding, and people would die as food ran out. Malthus, a man active in the Church, said we should facilitate the positive checks.

“To act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality, and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.” [Malthus, 1798]

It’s not hard to see Malthus as a comic book villain. His surname begins with the Latin mal-, meaning evil, bad, or disease. It suggests maliciousness, malignancy, and malintent. While aesthetically fitting, his name actually derives from malthouse, a building in which grains are prepared and stored for use in brewing. At first sight, Malthus might also appear the villain for his explicit opposition to the voices of Enlightenment optimism and progress, such as Condorcet and Godwin.

However, Godwin’s utopia was resonant with the deadly French Revolution, seeing Heaven-on-Earth as coming from radical social change with private property abolished and equality imposed from above by people who are rational, benevolent, and self-sacrificing. The subtitle of the first edition of Malthus’s book makes this opposition clear: Population “as it affects the future improvement of Society, with remarks on the speculation of Mr. Godwin, Mr. Condorcet, and other writers.” (Gunderman, 2021) Malthus understood better than those particular optimists the importance of acknowledging and harnessing self-interest for the benefit of all, rather than relying on the dangerous brew of centralized power and the assumption of self-sacrificing benevolence.

In the imaginary ledger of historical plus and minuses, on the plus side Malthus inspired Charles Darwin in the development of his theory of natural selection. Darwin (and Wallace) saw the work of evolution in the fossil record and comparative anatomy. But how did it get a grip? The Malthusian principle of population entered the picture. In Darwin’s autobiography, he recalls reading Malthus in 1838:

“It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

You can think of what Malthus calls the “principle of population” as a “steady state” theory. Applied to any population of organisms, this principle says the population is always at or near the limit of the food supply. All the food is always being eaten and there is no extra to feed more people. If Condorcet and Godwin were to achieve equality, “distress for want of food would be constantly pressing on all mankind.” In other words, rather than some being relatively impoverished, all would be absolutely impoverished. Malthus changed his mind in later editions, diluting what he wrote about the principle of population until it amounted to nothing.

Although Malthus was correct in opposing Godwinian forms of optimism, his overall and enduring effect has been to instill a desperate, zero-sum mentality in Western culture. The principle of population acts as a prison within which we regard other people as threats to what we have. It distracts us from understanding what we might create, contribute, and trade. It traps us within a pessimistic, enervating, and anti-humanist worldview. As Brendan O’Neill puts it:

“one of the great political conflicts of the modern era was between those who thought mankind had no choice but to live according to nature’s limits, and that he had to modify his behavior and his procreation choices accordingly, and those who believed that mankind might be liberated from these alleged limits through the application of his wisdom, his imagination, his technology and his labor to create a world in which everyone would live free from need. [O’Neill, 2021]

Today, for anyone with open eyes, it is obvious how wrong Malthus was. Global population has increased from around one billion when Malthus published his book to over eight billion today. In the United States, population has multiplied by approximately a factor of 85 over the same time. And yet the percentage of people starving has fallen. For decades, the absolute number of people starving has fallen. Calories per person has been rising along with population size.

This should be impossible according to the Malthusian population principle. Malthus did not foresee advances in agricultural technology, most starkly realized in the “green revolution”. Unsurprisingly, Malthus did not expect the introduction of contraceptives and did not expect the self-restraint exercised by people who have chosen to limit births to improve their standard of living. People have responded to fewer infant deaths by having fewer children. Wealthier countries tend to have fewer births, not more.

Malthus’ limitationist view of human well-being was exceedingly simple. Later versions have at least given the appearance of greater sophistication, wrapping themselves in the metal cloak of the computer.

From System Dynamics to Limits to Growth, 1972

The method of ‘system dynamics’ was proposed in 1953 by John von Neumann. This enabled the complicated interaction of variables to be handled by a computer and the outcome determined. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, system dynamics was restricted to corporate and managerial problems. Jay Forrester became a professor at the new MIT School of Management in 1956. His work with managers at General Electric led to his 1961 book, Industrial Dynamics. An acquaintance with the former mayor of Boston led to conversations about how system dynamics might be used to tackle the problems of cities. The result of the Collins-Forrester collaboration was a book titled Urban Dynamics. 

In 1970, Forrester was invited to a meeting of the portentously named Club of Rome, an organization devoted to solving what its members describe as the “predicament of mankind”. Their worldview anticipated a global crisis due to the demands being placed on the earth’s carrying capacity and its capacity for disposing of pollutants by the world’s growing population. Of course, Forrester was convinced that system dynamics could help with the Club’s mission. The second iteration of the resulting model, named WORLD2, was published in his 1973 book, World Dynamics. This model explored interrelationships between world population, industrial production, pollution, resources, and food.

Given the Club of Rome’s remit, perhaps unsurprisingly the model showed a collapse of the world socioeconomic system sometime during the twenty-first century, if steps were not taken to lessen the demands on the earth’s carrying capacity. In World Dynamics, Forrester wrote: “The Malthusian thesis has been true and at work at all times.” Forrester called for a radical transformation of minds and societies, with wealth to be distributed (by force) equally.

The third version of the Malthusian model, WORLD3, was used by one of Forrester’s graduate students, Dennis Meadows, and resulted in the infamous 1972 book, Limits to Growth. World3 explored past and future relations among population, capital, agricultural production, natural resources, and pollution. There was no mention of technological level, institutional factors, economics, policies, or innovation. The model consisted of 100 variables and 80 fixed parameters.

The report was launched with much fanfare at a widely reported conference in February 1972. The introductory blurb tells us:

“A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea, and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory.”

“This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will not come gradually, but with awesome suddenness, with no way of stopping it.” Limits project leader Meadows, told Time: “All growth projections end in collapse.”

Or, as Ronald Bailey put it in his excellent critical study: “Billions of people will die horribly in a massive famine and/or epidemic bringing about the collapse of civilization sometime during the next century.” [Bailey, 1993.] Limits’ prophecy foresaw Four Horsemen of the New Age Apocalypse: depletion of nonrenewable resources, decline of food supplies, pollution, and overcrowding. There was no room for hope. If one limit didn’t kill growth, another would. The message has been sustained since. From their 2004 update: In other words, “a few decades into the twenty-first century” (Limits 2004:170) things happen that can be described as a “collapse” or “vast human misery.”

Context and reactions

The timing of the book’s release was impeccable. By 1972, the sense of technological optimism had been largely crushed, economies were stagnating with rising unemployment and inflation, and the Vietnam War was a disastrous failure. The book sold millions of copies, boosted by the temporary success of the Arab oil embargo.

Rachel Carson had done much to set the new tone with her 1962 book Silent Spring which heightened fears about pollution – and caused massive death by leading to the banning of DDT – and launched the modern environmental movement. This was also just a few years after Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (covered in a previous essay), and two years after the deeply pessimistic first Earth Day in 1970.

As Bjorn Lomborg notes, “The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level.” [Lomborg, 2013]

The Club of Rome used the release of Limits to Growth as a public relations exercise, launching it with a press conference organized by public-relations firm Charles Kytle Associates and financed by the Xerox Corporation. The story of the hype, along with harsh criticism, appeared in Science a week after the book’s release.

Four years after the publication of Limits, it was disavowed by its sponsors, the Club of Rome. The Club said that the conclusions of that first report are not correct and that they purposely misled the public in order to “awaken” public concern. The Club reversed its position and got behind team growth. According to Time, the Club’s strategy was to jolt people out from the comfortable idea that growth could continue indefinitely. This reversal was ignored. Having frightened everyone, they could tell us the true truth in the mission of this elite to transform the global economy.

Although the about-face was not widely reported, criticism was plentiful. Limits sparked a thunderous criticism from economists. Most of them either saw in it numerous technical errors or rejected its approach and assumptions. They also criticized it for disclosing so little of what the authors did, making close inspection impossible.

John Maddox, then editor of Nature, called the book “sinister”, and Economic Nobelist Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden dismissed it as “pretentious nonsense”. One MIT professor said “What they’re doing is providing simple-minded answers for simple-minded people who are scared to death. And that’s a dangerous thing… This messianic impulse is what disturbs me.”

In an April 2, 1972, article in the New York Times, Peter Passell and two co-authors described Limits as “an empty and misleading work ... best summarized ... as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out.” (Or “Malthus in, Malthus out.”) Passell found the study’s computer model to be simplistic while the entire approach underestimated the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. In his view, the entire endeavor was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks.

A team at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit published their review of the structure and assumptions of the models used and published their findings in Models of Doom [Cole, 1975]. They showed that the forecasts of the world’s future are highly sensitive to a few unduly pessimistic key assumptions. They also found that the Malthusian bias of the Meadows’ team’s models failed to accurately reflect reality and that their methods, data, and predictions were faulty. Then the Sussex team tested the MIT team’s models over the 1850-1900 period, the models generated collapse patterns that never occurred.

Also shortly after the publication of Limits, mathematicians Vermeulen and De Jongh analyzed the world model and found it to be “very sensitive to small parameter variations” and having “dubious assumptions and approximations”. “By changing three parameters by 10% each in 1975 the world population collapse predicted by the model is averted.” [Vermeulen, 1976] So, how did the model work and what did it say?

The guts of the model

The World3 model was built to start in the year 1900 using historically available data and then generate trend lines up to the year 2100 showing increases or decreases among population, industrial output per capita, food per capita, “nonrenewable” natural resources, and pollution based on varying assumptions. Trends from 1900 to 1970 were based on available data and then projections made for the following 130 years. The “standard run” of the model assumes “that there will be in the future no great changes in human values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.” [Limits, 123]

Although the resource base in 1970 is about 95 percent of its 1900 value, “it declines dramatically thereafter, as population and industrial output continue to grow. The behavior mode of the system shown in figure 35 is clearly that of overshoot and collapse. In this run the collapse occurs because of nonrenewable resource depletion.” Food, industrial output, and population grow exponentially until the shrinking resources force growth to slow. Population and pollution continue to increase for a time, but the former is ended by an increase in the death rate due to decreased food and medical services.

The authors say that the exact timing is not meaningful to due uncertainties and aggregation, it is significant

“that growth is stopped well before the year 2100. We have tried in every doubtful case to make the most optimistic estimate of unknown quantities, and we have also ignored discontinuous events such as wars or epidemics, which might act to bring an end to growth even sooner than our model would indicate.”

So, the real world will turn out worse than the model suggests! The next run doubles assumed resources (even though they think the original assumption was optimistic) but produces a similar outcome.

If you look at the graph on p. 124 (reproduced above), it clearly shows population growth going up at a constant or accelerating rate as of 2021, with pollution going up at an accelerating pace, and resources clearly plummeting. All of these are wrong. It shows food per capita going down, which is also wrong. In the discussion, the authors note that population growth after 1970 goes up – exactly the opposite of what happened in the real world between 1972 and the present. Okay, but that’s only the standard run. What about the others?

I will spare you, dear reader, from detailing all the modifications to the standard run. The book looks at 12 scenarios. After the standard run comes a group of six “technological scenarios”. These assume new advances in technology or that society would increase the amount of resources available (especially energy), increase agricultural productivity, reduce pollution, or limit population growth. The final set of five “stabilization” scenarios consider what the model says would happen if either population growth, or industrial output, were stabilized.

After considering the first two groups of model runs, the authors tell us that their world model: “has led us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” The authors then go on the attack the green revolution for “increasing inequality.”

To achieve a scenario that avoids collapse and remains stable through the 21^st century, population must somehow be stabilized by “setting” it equal to the birth rate in 1975. The investment rate also must be “stabilized”. Starting in 1975, resource consumption must be cut to a quarter of its 1970 value (which was much lower than that of today), essentially condemning the vast majority to poverty. The economic preferences of “society” are “shifted” from goods to services. Pollution per unit of production is cut by 75% from 1975 levels. To counter the “rather low value of food per capita”, capital is “diverted” to food production at whatever cost, but this leads to rapid soil depletion. Resource depletion and pollution is also decreased by attempts to increase the average lifetime of industrial capital.

I’ve put terms such as “setting”, “stabilized”, and “shifted” in quotations marks to draw attention to these seemingly innocuous words. The authors are saying that, to avoid collapse and achieve a future that’s sustainable for a few decades (but ultimately doomed), nine policies must be enforced on everyone, throughout the world, over the decades without let up. All of these policies require coercion and centralized control.

To avoid collapse – at least in this century – the model tells us we will have to shrink the population drastically from today’s level. We will have to reduce global life expectancy to just under 70 years. Global income per capita can never be allowed to rise above half the level in 1972 USA. Those who say the critics of Limits misrepresent it because not all runs quickly lead to collapse are being disingenuous. The models assert that we can only avoid collapse through the current century by keeping everyone poor and hungry.

Despite that, in the following century collapse will still happen, say the models. We can only trade off time against misery. Or, as the authors delicately put it, “The longer a society prefers to maintain the state of equilibrium, the lower the rates and levels must be.” On the bright side, we can choose whether civilization collapses from excessive pollution, lack of resources, or lack of people. So, that’s nice.

The fatal errors in Limits

Here’s one resource that is not scarce: Good critiques of Limits. Elodie Vieille Blanchard (2010) identifies four major critiques made between 1973 and 1992. A study from The Science Policy Research Unit of Sussex University argued that the assumptions underlying the Limits model were excessively pessimistic. Eminent futurist Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute argued that Limits underestimated technology’s role in mitigating resource depletion. Scholars at the Bariloche Foundation in Argentina made a similar case but also argued that pollution is easier to control than assumed in Limits.

The Nobel Prize winning economist William Nordhaus argued that Limits failed to comprehend the role played by prices in regulating the use of resources. He also agreed with critics that Limits had undervalued the role of technology in solving problems of pollution and of potential resource scarcity. Impending scarcity leads to higher prices and provokes people to search for substitutes and to improve technologies used to exploit natural resources.

One of the best and most accessible critiques is in chapter 4, “The Depletion Myth” of Ronald Bailey’s Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (1993). Bailey notes that, “Like all depletionists, Forrester assumed that natural resources are a fixed quantity.” This echoes a point made, among others, by economist Julian Simon. Simon pointed out that “Dennis Meadows predictably went wrong by using the known-reserves concept.” Meadows estimated that the global supply of aluminum would be exhausted in 49 years (i.e., in 2021!), despite aluminum being the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust.

A related error was to make no allowance for technological progress in the standard run (and insufficient allowance in other simulations). Simon also pointed out that Meadows looked only at high-grade bauxite when lower grades are far more abundant. The affordability of aluminum has gotten better, not worse, in the decades since. You can find trend data at the Human Progress website.

Bailey argues that no exhaustible resource is essential or irreplaceable. The price mechanism not only spurs investment in discovering new reserves of a resource, it also stimulates conservation and substitution. A deeper point that the limitationists or depletionists fail to grasp is that what counts as a resource changes over time. The shipbuilding industry relied primarily on wood until the 1800s. People had started worrying that wood would run out back in the 1500s. Instead, boats were made of iron and steel, and then wood became plentiful again.

Resources never “run out”. As Julian Simon argued in The Ultimate Resource [Simon, 1998], human ingenuity creates new resources as required from the raw materials of the universe. We will never run out of copper because its price will increase as it becomes scarcer, stimulating the discovery of more deposits, more recycling, new methods that use less of it, and better substitutes.

Bailey notes that

“Forrester’s model assumes that ‘as crowding rises toward five times the present population, the death rate is taken to rise ever more steeply and to reach three times the present rate, for a crowding ratio of 5.’ However, countries that are already well beyond Forrester’s crowding ratio of 5 show no increase in their death rates.”

On the contrary, their deaths rate continue to fall.

Pollution plays a major role in Limits. If we aren’t stopped by the other limits, the model says we will choke to death on our own wastes and emissions. The World3 model contradicts the observed facts. As population has grown in the USA and other developed countries, the most dangerous air pollutants have declined. Following the development curve, US water pollution worsened until 1960 but then improved. We see the same pattern around the world.

Bailey notes Forrester’s strange assumption that as capital investment increases, pollution must also increase. Capital investment can reduce pollution as in the cases of wastewater treatment, sulfur-removing scrubbers on electricity generation plants, and improvements in mining and drilling.

Bailey asks:

“How could Forrester, the Meadowses, and the Club of Rome be so far off? One answer is that the computer model was designed to confirm what its designers already believed.” As others have shown, the assumptions of the model were tuned to produce the desired outputs. This and similar models share the false assumption of diminishing returns: Additional people who must work and live with the original fixed supply of land and capital implies less income for each person. As Simon, again, explains: This ignores “the contribution of additional people to technological advance through the creation of knowledge and through economies of scale.” [Simon, 1998, 478]

Another issue with the model is that the authors stack the deck by letting some things grow exponentially and others not. In all models, population, capital, and pollution grow exponentially, but technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are allowed to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments.

As several critics including Peter Vajk have observed, the model “assumes that the Earth is a closed system, and that throughout this century and the next, the only material and energy resources available for human use will be those of the planet Earth.” [Vajk, 1978] Using a framework paralleling that of Limits, Jeremy Rifkin’s 1980 book, Entropy: A New World View, made the same mistake. You can’t argue for limits by invoking the second law of Thermodynamics because the Earth is not a closed system.

Adrian Berry’s boundary-stretching 1974 book, The Next Ten Thousand Years, poked holes in vital elements of the World3 model. Remarkably, pollution was undefined and represented by a single variable in every model. “How was this pollution measured? By the density of smog over Los Angeles? By the number of discarded beer cans found each year in a given district? By the surface area of marine oil slicks in latitude and longitude such-and-such?” [Berry, 1974]

Resources, like pollution, are lumped together in a single undefined variable. Since “resources” covers an enormous range of known and yet-unknown quantities, how can any sensible claim be made that resources would run out by a certain date? “A Club of Rome model written in 1900 would surely have predicted that civilization would collapse long before 1976.” In 1900, no one knew of the use of uranium or nuclear energy. We knew nothing of plastics, stainless steel, the use of titanium, nor such techniques as welding and superconductivity.

The authors of Limits projected the exhaustion of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc by 2013. In reality, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Bjorn Lomborg pointed out the 98% drop in consumption of mercury along with a 90% decline in price thanks to technological innovations. [Lomborg, 2013] Since 1946, new discoveries and new technologies have increased supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc more than consumption.

Rather than running out in the early 1990s, oil and natural gas reserves are larger than they were in 1970 despite increased consumption. Shale gas alone has vastly increased gas resources in the US. Canada has potentially record-breaking reserves. The only threat to resources comes from ill-advised energy policies enforced by governments. While Limits sees collapse ahead, even the far-from-cheery Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

All the trends are in a direction exactly contrary to that projected by Limits. That’s true of population growth, food supply, malnourishment, and pollution. Despite the abject failure of Limits to reflect reality, the mindset it embodies is still shaping the thinking of both the “elite” and the public.

Failure to Learn

In the 1992 follow-up, Beyond The Limits, the authors maintain that Limits was right and only got the dates wrong. This would be like the authors of Dow 36,000 saying that he only got the dates wrong since the Dow crossed the 36,000 line 20 years after he predicted that it would. That’s unfair to Glassman and Hassett. They at least got the direction of the Dow right. Limits got the direction wrong for almost all measures. Suppose a weather forecaster asked not to be judged wrong because the snowstorm that they forecast for tomorrow was off by four months.

The thirty-year up to Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 2004, and two subsequent modelling studies in 2008 and 2014 from the University of Melbourne concluded that the world is tracking on Limits to Growth’s ‘standard run’ projection. The work, led by Swedish and Icelandic teams, concluded that most of the resources they studied had either already reached peak production or will do so within the next 50 years. Coal production will peak in around 2015-20 and ‘peak energy’ around the same period.

How could they make these claims with a straight face? Historical and current data show that the model was wrong, and their forecasts are already wrong. The coal claim is readily dismissed, as shown in this graph.

In a stunning display of motivated reasoning, a 2020 report published by consulting firm KPMG used updated data to defend the methods and conclusions of Limits. [Herrington, 2020] Herrington (first name, “Gaya”) claims that the BAU2 and CT scenarios best match the data since 1972. BAU is “business as usual 2”. This is same as the standard run but with a doubling of the natural resources. CT is not defined but is an updated version of Limits’s sixth scenario, “World model with ‘unlimited’ resources, pollution controls, and increased agricultural productivity.

This claims the BAU2 and CT scenarios best match the data. BAU2 still shows a collapse, but industrial output doesn’t start falling until about 2035, although food peaks around 2025, and “pollution” continues to rise. The latter doesn’t sound bad, but the model run found pollution skyrocketing, industrial output per capita, food per capita, and population crashing.

The 2020 update has all the problems of the 1972 version. The original Limits was grossly oversimplistic. As we have seen, for example, it has a single factor called “pollution” that pretended to represent something meaningful. In the new version, pollution apparently means carbon dioxide plus plastic. This is not an improvement.

Herrington compounds the errors of Limits by arguing that things are actually “considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections”. As you might guess, this is because there is no wailing and crying in the 1972 report about climate change (or “climate crisis”), ocean acidification, and other panics of the day. Herrington has not learned from the last half century and is doubling down with error.

I have to say that I found the 2020 report and some of the other research for this article discouraging. Motivated cognition turns up frequently among those claiming that the thoroughly disproven and discredited Limits may have been wrong about the dates but was essentially correct. “Oops, the math was a bit off. Let’s do use the same assumptions and do it again.” This is the same kind of apocalyptic mindset seen in religious predictions of the end of the world. Faith comes before theory, and theory shapes the evidence.

California preacher Harold Camping first predicted Judgment Day for September 6, 1994. When it didn’t happen, he rescheduled the end of the world for September 29 and then to October 2. Not one to be discouraged, in 2005 Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ for May 21, 2011 with millions dying daily until the final end on October 21, 2011. This was of a piece with other serial failed doomsayers, such as the Millerites. They even had a term for it: The Great Disappointment.

These endlessly repeated prophecies of doom are not merely amusing mistakes. They cause us to “obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.” [Lomborg, 2013] These dramatic scenarios pull our attention away from the real threats to life and wellbeing. Poverty immiserates and kills huge numbers while around 15 million people per year die of easily curable diseases. The solution to this suffering and death is economic growth. Yet the policies proposed to counter the imagined crisis scenarios destroy wealth and slow economic growth.

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References

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Berry, Adrian, The Next Ten Thousand Years. Jonathan Cape, 1974.

Barnett, Harold J., and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability. Resource for the Future, and John Hopkins University Press, 1963.

Blanchard, Elodie Vieille, “Modelling the Future: An Overview of the ‘Limits to Growth’ Debate.” Centaurus 52:91−116, 2010.

Cole, H.S.D., and Christopher Freeman, et al., Models of Doom: A Critique of the Limits to Growth. Universe Books, 1975.

Forrester, Jay, 1973. World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

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Worrall, Eric, “Claim: 1972 Club of Rome End of World Prediction Still on Track, Thanks to Climate Change.” Wattsupwiththat, July 26, 2021.