Peak Stuff: The Dematerialization of the Economy
“As the economy grows, we use a growing amount of resources.” If asked if that statement is true probably the vast majority of people would say that it is. You may find it intuitively obvious. Economic growth = more stuff = more resources.
In a previous essay on the “Getting Better” theme, I showed that pollution is getting better, not worse (and poverty is declining, infant mortality is falling, life expectancy is increasing, everything is safer, and climate-related deaths have fallen over rapidly over the past century.) So, a growing economy can be decoupled from pollution. In “Scarcity or Abundance?” I argued that scarcity is not getting worse. Resources can get less scarce as the economy grows. But surely, a growing economy must use more materials and produce more stuff, right?
No. Not just in theory but in practice economic growth can be decoupled from growth in the amount of “stuff”. The economy can dematerialize. We can find many examples of relative decoupling, where resource use increases more slowly than economic output. But in some of the most advanced economies we are seeing absolute decoupling, where economic growth goes along with shrinking use of resources.
How can this be? In this article, I am going to show that relative and even absolute decoupling are real. I will give plenty of examples and lots of numbers that you can check for yourself. I will look at the diverse ways in which this “dematerialization” of economies takes place and the forces behind it.
Your Swiss Army phone
Let us start with a familiar example: the smartphone. You may remember a scene in the 1978 Superman movie where Clark Kent needs to change into Superman but glances at the new (for the 70s & 80s) cut-off telephone booths that provide no privacy. Today, Kent would not be able to find any phone booths of any kind.
Phone booths are one of the things replaced by mobile phones even before they evolved into smartphones. For all but some professionals the smartphone has replaced the camera and the videocam. We no longer need separate GPS devices like those made by Garmin nor those annoying foldout maps that we wrestled with in the wind.
Depending on your personal habits, your phone may relieve you of the need to own or carry an answering machine, alarm clock, pager, Walkman, Discman, or MP3 Player, calculator, flashlight, handheld gaming device, book or eBook reader, radio, portable audio recorder, TV remote, television, and calendar or personal organizer. A Swiss Army Knife is beaten by today’s phones in terms of versatility. Digitization also means we save space by no longer needing cassettes, LPs, or DVDs, and we no longer need to drive to the video store.
Smartphones can reduce material use by a factor of 300 & standby energy use by a factor of 30.
A 2018 study quantified the reduction in materials and energy from switching to smartphones. Smartphones can reduce material use by a factor of 300 and standby energy use by a factor of 30. The “embodied energy” in the devices is reduced from 1706 kWh to 75 kWh and weight is reduced from 26 kg to 0.1 kg. [Grubler, 2018] The precise numbers might be challenged but the overall direction is pellucid.
Decoupling
Many writers and thinkers have assumed that a growing economy inevitably uses a growing amount of resources and imposes an ever-heavier burden on the environment in terms of pollution. You can see this in a statement from the former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair, Robert Watson, who fears that the “more people we have on the Earth and the richer they are, the more they can demand resources.”
This view is based on assumptions built into models such as IPAT.
IPAT = Human impact (I) on the environment = population size (P) x income or affluence (A) x technology or amount of pollution per dollar of output (T).
You have to love these neat, tight little equations that reduce the incomprehensibly complex nature of the world into a tidy package. This equation drastically and unhelpfully simplifies reality to create a simple model. How the heck do you measure “human impact on the environment” as a single measure? From what perspective? The human? That of some animal. That of the non-conscious Earth? It looks suspiciously like a manifestation of that seductive intellectual disease, scientism.
Eco-pessimists and enemies of growth typically assume that the population will continue to grow rapidly. They also assume that all effects of population growth are bad. They further assume that increasing income or affluence inevitably means more use of resources and increased burden on the environment. Finally, they assume that technology, especially that put into use since World War II, is responsible for environmental degradation.
As is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone who pays attention, rapid population growth is not inevitable. As we have seen in previous blog essays, global population growth peaked in the later 1960s and has been declining since. In all of Eastern Europe, Japan, and some of Western Europe, population is actually shrinking. In many more countries in Europe and elsewhere, population growth has slowed so much that it is on the verge of ending and reversing.
The P in IPAT in the future can be expected to be a smaller number in most countries and in the world as a whole later this century. Another point that is often missed is that larger populations bring not only burdens but benefits. These include larger markets and more innovation – especially when population is more concentrated (urbanized). We have also seen a steady decline in poverty around the world even as population grows.
Increasing income and wealth and advancing technology can and increasingly do lead to less impact on the environment and even decreased resource use, as we will see below.
The more modest but still important version of the dematerialization thesis is that of relative decoupling: Environmental effects and resource use grow at a rate slower than population or income. We see this happen when agricultural yields grow and when efficiency reduces the amount of energy used per unit of output. Figure 1 illustrates this across four regions, including globally. [See Figure 1]
Figure 1. Recent trends in real GDP, total energy use and total material use for China, Germany, OECD and the World. [Ward, et. al, 2016]
The more dramatic and remarkable version of the dematerialization thesis is that of absolute decoupling: Even if population and consumption increase, the environmental and resource impacts decline.
We are seeing this happening in countries including the USA, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Even twenty years ago one researcher found that “the value of GDP per pound [USA] rose from $3.64 in 1977 to $7.96 in 2000.” As Bailey puts it: “…what people want is not more oil, steel, concrete, plastic, newspapers, and so forth. What they want is heating, cooling, housing, information, communication, and entertainment. How those services get to them is immaterial.”
This decoupling of increased consumption from resources and environmental impact can be achieved in several ways – dematerialization takes several forms.
Forms of dematerialization
You can categorize the forms of dematerialization in multiple ways. Wikipedia, for instance, cites a source using three categories: Optimize, digitize, and servitize. McAfee [2019] groups dematerialization into four: slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. As companies seek to maintain and expand their profit margins, they figure out ways of using fewer resources.
They may slim by using less of a particular material. Aluminum cans use less metal (25% less for soft drinks and 50% less for food cans). You might recall a scene in Jaws (1975) where Captain Quint intimidates Hooper by crushing a beer can with one hand – a feat far less impressive today.
Farmers are producing bigger harvests with less fertilizer, land, and water. Magnet makers are using fewer rare earth metals. The weight of an average car has fallen by 25% since the 1970s. Communications satellites provide another example: Telstar 1 in 1962 “could handle 600 telephone calls simultaneously. Modern Intelsat satellites can handle 120,000 calls and 3 TV channels at the same time.” [Bailey 2001]
Companies may also swap by replacing one resource with another. Consider how US coal consumption fell as fracking took off. If we committed to nuclear energy, we could cut back usage of both coal and natural gas. A kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains about 2-3 million times as much energy as the same mass of coal.
Another path is to optimize by making better use of existing materials. McAfee notes that improving CNW’s railcar utilization from 5% to 10% would halve the company’s stock of 30-ton cars. Commercial airlines have optimized by improving their load factors. The percentage of seats occupied on flights has risen from 56% in 1971 to over 81% today.
The final path is to evaporate by replacing some materials with nothing. My smartphone example illustrates this.
Metals
In the United States, there has been a peak then a decline in the consumption of metals, as shown by McAfee. [McAfee, 2019, p.79] Looking at the five most important metals, we can see a reduction not just in annual consumption per capita but a reduction in the total weight of these metals used annually. In other words, all five most important metals in the USA are “post-peak.” Peak metal was around 2000. According to the US Geological Survey:
Copper consumption peaked around 2000 and continued to go down through 2020. Copper consumption fell more than 40% from its peak.
Aluminum: Consumption down more than 32% from its peak.
Nickel: Consumption has been up and down but has fallen since 2017.
Steel: In 2015, US steel consumption was down more than 15% from its high in 2000.
Gold: Consumption was about the same in 2000 as in 1970. Since 2000, it has continued to decrease.
The figure below shows the reduction in the amount of iron ore and pig iron consumed in the United States. A similar reduction is evident for chromium and fluorspar along with much more drastic reductions for sodium sulfate, cadmium, thorium, and asbestos.
Steel has increasingly been replaced with aluminum and its alloys. Cars weigh 30% less than they did sixty years ago. As Smil notes, falling quantities of ore, coal, fluxing materials, and total energy have been used to produce a ton of hot metal, and rising conversion efficiencies in foundries along with the universal adoption of continuous casting mean that steelmaking requires less energy and material.
Another way to see this is to look at the “steel intensity” of the economy over time. This is measured in kilograms per dollar of value produced. “Using constant GDP values adjusted for inflation and expressed in constant 2009$... the steel intensity of the US economy fell from 37 kg/$ in 1929 to […] 6.7 kg/$ in 2013.” [Smil, 2016]
Even if you adjust apparent domestic consumption numbers for indirectly traded steel-intensive products, you see considerable declines in the absolute numbers. The relative causes vary between countries but include product redesigns and substitution with lighter or cheaper alternatives (mostly aluminum and plastics). In Germany and Japan, less need for building construction also results from static or declining populations.
Peak paper, recovering forests
For years after personal computers appeared, people jeered futurists who forecast the end of paper. It took a few years, but those futurists have been increasingly vindicated. The United States reached peak paper in 1990. Paper usage has been falling ever since even as the population has continued to grow. According to McAfee, “Humanity as a whole probably reached peak paper in 2013.” UK researcher Chris Goodall found that paper and board consumption in the UK fell 18% in the decade to 2011. [Pearce, 2011]
Most people probably believe that, in the USA and in Europe, we are losing forest area. The data on the four timber products lumber, plywood and veneer, pulp products, and fuel show that this has not been the case for some time. During the last century, a clear trend of relative dematerialization revealed itself. The number of Americans multiplied by 3.5 during the century while US GDP grew nearly fivefold. As Jesse Ausubel points out:
Had timber consumption risen in constant proportion, Americans would have consumed about 16 times as much timber each year in the 1990s as in 1900, rather than the 1.7 times they actually consumed.
The historical depletion of wood reversed during the last century. The volume of wood on American timberland rose by 36% in the second half of the century. This is partly because the average American consumes much less timber compared to someone in 1900, and partly because millers and foresters became more efficient. You will not hear about it in the news, but many previously cleared areas – such as in New England and the upper Great Lakes states – have regenerated. [Ausubel, 2000]
In a 2015 paper, Ausubel says that foresters talk of a “forest transition” when a country stops losing forested area and starts gaining it. France was the first country, entering forest transition in 1830. Even as the population of France has doubled, so have French forests. As Ausubel puts it: “In other words, forest loss decoupled from population.” The United States attained its forest transition around 1950 if you measure by growing stock. Measured by area, the transition was around 1900.
Peak commodities
Over the last twenty years or so, Jesse Ausubel in the USA and Chris Goodall in the UK have been tracking signs of dematerialization. In 2011, Goodall found that the amount of physical stuff consumed in the UK had fallen to the level in 1989. That trend has continued since. The country has been consuming less water, building materials, paper, food, cars (automobiles), fertilizers, textiles, and even energy. [Goodall, 2011a; 2011b; 2013; 2014; 2016]
Similar trends are forming across Europe, with reductions in household energy consumption in France, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The use of cars has fallen not just in the UK but also in Germany, Japan, France, Australia, and Sweden.
Following up in 2014 on his 2011 paper, Goodall wrote: “Recent data support the ‘Peak Stuff’ hypothesis and suggest that economic growth in advanced countries does not increase the use of material extracted from the soil or earth’s crust.” In a 2016 update, Goodall wrote:
Controversial in 2011, it’s now accepted that energy use is also falling across most of the OECD countries and Britain’s requirements continue to fall 1-2% a year, even as the economy continues to perform relatively well. Our aggregate use of materials is continuing to fall, as is also the case in the EU as a whole.
Ausubel had noticed that Americans were consuming less per capita. Apart from farmland and timber, he also noticed that use of plastic peaked around 1990. More interestingly, he saw that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important components of an economy, such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. This reversal in use of materials since around 1970 surprised him and intrigued him enough to get together with colleagues to thoroughly examine other trends in the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010. [Ausubel, 2000, 2008, 2015]
Of the 100 commodities, the researchers found that 36 had peaked in absolute use and another 53 commodities had peaked relative to the size of the economy but were still growing in total. Most of those “now seem poised to fall”. At the time of this study, only 11 of the 100 commodities were still growing in both relative and absolute use. In the case of nine basic commodities, absolute use was flat or falling for about 20 years. [Figure 3]
Figure 3: Use of nine basic commodities in the United States from 1900-2010. Uses five-year moving average. Data source: USGS National Minerals Information Center (2013).
McAfee made a similar finding: “Of the 72 resources tracked by the USGS, only six are not yet post-peak.” [McAfee, 2019: 82-83] Gemstones accounted for the great majority of these pre-peak resources. Setting aside ornamental stones, “more than 90 percent of total 2015 resource spending in America was on post-peak materials.” The one notable non-gem exception is plastic. For several decades, plastic use grew faster than the economy. In recent years, that pattern has reversed and growth in plastic has been lower than growth in GDP.
In other words, despite the growing population of the United States, the intensity of use of resources has begun to fall. A large majority are growing more slowly than GDP and nine basic commodities have been flat or falling in total for around 20 years.
Fertilizers, water, crop acreage
Does Arizona use more or less water today (population 7.3 million) compared to 1960 (when the population was around 1.3 million)? The answer seems obvious. It must be a trick question! No trick but the answer will probably surprise almost everyone: Less. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR), the state used about 7.1 million acre-feet of fresh water in 1957, compared to 7.0 million acre-feet today. [Nicla, 2019]
It is not just Arizona. In the United States as a whole, even as crop tonnage has quadrupled since the 1970s, the amount of water and fertilizer used has fallen. In the 1970s, experts predicted increasing water use until 2000 but that is not what happened. Even as the USA grew by 80 million people, water use remained the same. US Geological Survey data shows that water use in 2010 has fallen below the amount used in 1970. Domestic water use in most advanced countries has also declined modestly.
The massive increase in crop tonnage over the last 50 years has been accompanied by a reduction in agricultural area from 472 million to 390 million hectares by the 2010s. Improvements in agricultural productivity have gone hand-in-hand with reductions in acreage also in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia.
Energy: The key to everything
Energy is a scarce resource in the sense that our access to it is limited at any time. But in the long run energy is essentially limitless. We might naturally assume that even if we are using less material we surely are using more energy. The reality is more complicated.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, total U.S. energy consumption per capita has decreased since the 1970s. Annual per capita energy consumption was relatively flat from the late-1980s through 2000 and has generally decreased each year since then. In 2020, U.S. per capita energy consumption dropped to its lowest since 1964, mainly because of economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, per capita energy consumption was about 4% higher than in 2020, but it was 3% lower than in 2022.
Primary energy consumption in the United States has moved up and down since 1998 but peaked in 2007 at 97 exajoules (97 quintillion joules). In 2019, the number had decreased to 94.65 exajoules. Despite population growth, energy consumption is now about the same or slightly lower than in 2000. [Sönnichsen, 2022] The population has grown in that time meaning that that energy per capita has declined. Indeed, energy use per capita in the US in 2023 was about the same as 1965 and has been trending down since 2000.
U.S. energy consumption per dollar of GDP declined nearly every year since 1949.
Global energy consumption continues to grow, but it does seem to be slowing — averaging around 1% to 2% per year. As you would expect, energy consumption is rising in countries with quickly rising incomes and growing populations. In wealthier countries energy consumption is falling.
In the United Kingdom, primary energy consumption is now lower than it was in 1965! (Despite the population growing from 54.3 million to 69.2 million.) Electricity demand in the UK is the lowest it has been since 1990 (and continues to fall by 1-2% annually).
In the United Kingdom, primary energy consumption is now lower than it was in 1965!
Energy use has stayed steady or declined in other countries such as Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Across Europe, household energy consumption in 2009 was 9% below the 2000 level. The decline was 15% in France, Sweden, and The Netherlands. These results remain even when you adjust for trade, that is, goods manufactured elsewhere and imported (and the converse). For the EU as a whole energy consumption in 2023 was about the same as in 1983.
Energy use per person is growing in India and China but has been falling for 20+ years in the USA, Canada, and EU.
By 2050, the EIA sees decreasing energy intensity in OECD countries. Energy intensity measures the energy efficiency of an economy. It tells us how much energy is needed for each unit of output. OECD countries are trending toward lower energy intensities.
Even if energy use globally were to continue to rise, the amount of material resources needed to generate it could fall. In 2024, we are finally seeing a long-overdue reawakening of interest in nuclear power (fission, although new results in fusion are also promising). Consider that one kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains as much energy as 2-3 million times as much coal.
One kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains as much energy as 2-3 million times as much coal.
Is the flatlining of electricity consumption a good or bad thing? To the extent that it is due to greater efficiency it is good. To the extent that it is due to economic decline it is bad. Abundant affordable energy enables dematerialization.
Falling pollutants
I continue to be surprised by how many smart people believe that pollution is getting worse in the USA. In reality, we have seen a decoupling of economic growth from pollution – not just in a relative sense but an absolute reduction in pollution. We can see this clearly by looking at measures of air pollution.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), these are the changes in major pollutants from 1980 to 2018:
Carbon monoxide down 73%
Lead down 99%
Nitrogen oxides down 62%
Compounds from automobile exhaust associated with ozone down 55%
Sulfur dioxide down 90%
Particulates down 61%
Between 1970 and 2017, the combined emissions of six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO, and Pb) dropped by 73%. Aggregate emissions fell 74% from 1970-2018. [EPA, 2018] The trend follows a standard pattern in many countries. Pollutants grew along with population and economic output until the economy reached a certain level of wealth and technology. As Americans continued to become wealthier, a preference for clean air led to continuing reductions in pollutants. The same is true of many other developed countries.
Figure 5: Change in emissions compared to growth, population, miles driven, and GDP, 1970-2018. Source: Statistica.
If you consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant or a problem, note that countries including the USA, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and many others have reduced emissions while increasing GDP. This remains true if we correct for trade. Total CO2 emissions in the USA in 2020 were the lowest since 1986. Per capita US CO2 emissions in 2020 were the lowest since 1949 and lower than 1916. The United Kingdom and Sweden have managed even more impressive reductions. Germany’s CO2 emissions per person in 2020 were the lowest since 1950 and similar to the amount in 1912. [Our World in Data, 2020]
Causes of dematerialization
What are the forces driving dematerialization? As McAfee argues, we can first of all dismiss the CRIB strategies: Consume less, Recycle, Impose limits, Back to the land. We have not shrunk our economies. Recycling may have the opposite of the intended effect. When a resource is recycled its price tends to go down because more of it is left. When a resource is cheaper we tend to consume more of it. Rather than going back to the land, we have been doing the opposite. This is good because we put less pressure on the environment and use fewer resources due to greater efficiency.
The two main and interrelated forces leading to dematerialization are capitalism and technology. By “capitalism” I mean a broad term encompassing societies with profit-seeking companies, strong property rights and contract enforcement, free entry and competition in markets, voluntary exchange, and a high degree of private ownership of property. By this definition, all rich countries today are capitalist. Poorer countries lack these qualities. Much of their economy may be centrally controlled. They may make it hard to start a business, reducing free market entry and competition. Laws may be poorly or inconsistently enforced.
Profit-seeking firms aim to satisfy the boundless wants of people. What people want are goods and services. They do not inherently care how much material they are made of. Profit-seeking firms will always tend to look for more efficient means of providing for wants and needs. To do otherwise would be to ignore an opportunity to profit. Increased profits will be temporary as other firms adopt the innovations and improvements in efficiency. The race then continues as new efficiencies are sought out.
In the pursuit of innovation and efficiency, firms drive technological progress. Government regulation and central direction are not needed and typically get in the way. Markets communicate needs and wants through price signals in a decentralized way that no centralized body can manage. This is not just due to a lack of sufficient computer power. Without markets, accurate information about preferences cannot be gathered and implicit values cannot be made explicit. The inability of a centralized agency to foresee innovations makes it essential to allow and enable markets to create and reinforce incentives to innovate. [Lavoie, 2016]
Since “capitalism” in the sense defined here depends on multiple factors, the term can apply to economies that may look quite different. Economic freedom and competitiveness are needed to spur innovation and ultimately dematerialization but these can be measured in various ways. Some people are confused about Scandinavian countries, having the impression that they are socialist or on the socialist end of the capitalism spectrum. Those countries may have larger tax-funded “social safety nets” than the USA but also often have fewer regulations and less central planning.
Although measures of economic freedom differ in their metrics, they usually reveal a similar picture. The two most-referenced economic freedom indexes are compiled by the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Both give high scores to Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Australia, Estonia, and Ireland. They both give very low scores to Democratic Republic of Congo, Algeria, Republic of Congo, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Venezuela. [Fraser Institute, 2022; Heritage Foundation, 2022.]
Many studies of these relationships have found that countries with higher and improving economic freedom strongly tend to grow faster and generate higher levels of GDP per person. [Figure 6] Economic freedom also correlates with the income share of the poorest 10%, income earned by the poorest 10%, life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty, and other measures of well-being.
Figure 6: Economic Freedom and Income per Capita.
Regulations are often credited with reducing the environmental impact of production. If so, they might also contribute to dematerialization. However, regulations that compel reductions in use of specific resources or in generation of pollutants have costs and side-effects. Regulations have no basis in the preferences expressed in markets and so typically have high costs and unintended consequences.
McAfee’s discussion of “responsive government” as a major driver of dematerialization has two major shortcomings. The first is the failure to consider the costs and side-effects of regulations and centrally issued commands. The other, as Adler notes, is the failure to recognize that improvements in environmental measures start before regulation.
In most cases, it is only when a trend is already underway that regulation is imposed. For instance, the trend toward reduction in pollution started before the EPA. In the seven years before the Clean Air Act, the level of ambient sulfur dioxide fell by 58% in New York. China started doing much better at restraining its carbon dioxide emissions after abandoning communism. [Bailey & Tupy, 2020, p.115]
The future of dematerialization
Will dematerialization continue in the more economically advanced economies? Will dematerialization emerge as other countries become wealthier and more technologically advanced?
Even if the trend does not continue or spread to other countries, we face no shortage of resources – as I have argued in previous essays. We will eventually tap resources in our solar system outside of Earth beginning with the Moon and asteroids. The asteroid belt is estimated to contain $700 quintillion worth of resources. The Davida asteroid is estimated to contain $27 quintillion of platinum, iron, nickel, and other precious metals. That is $27,000,000,000,000,000,000. [Maxey, 2017; Yarlagadda, 2022]
We may not find it necessary or economical to mine the asteroids for a long time if relative and absolute dematerialization continue. Dematerialization does look like an almost inevitable trend – an outcome of the environmental Kuznets curve. [Agarwal, 2022] Named after Simon Kuznets, this curve suggests initial industrialization is a “cheap and dirty” phase where resources are used inefficiently and pollution is extensive but, as a certain level of income is reached, resources are used more efficiently and pollution is reduced. (The original Kuznets curve expressed a similar trend in economic inequality.)
Chris Goodall believes that dematerialization may be accelerating. GDP and resource use are moving beyond relative decoupling to growth with reductions in total material and energy use. Jesse Ausubel notes that it is still the early days, “but Goodall’s paper is potentially very significant, and jibes with our work and expectations on dematerialization.”
Markets and technological progress are enabling us to tread more lightly on the planet rather than using it up at an accelerating pace. As Adler puts it, “The Malthusian “limits to growth” have not merely been delayed or forestalled; they have been transcended.
Looking further into the future, we might also factor in the effects of nanotechnology in whatever forms it takes. The ability to control matter on the atomic level would make reuse and recycling drastically more advanced than it is today. If we move more of our business and personal activity to virtual environments (as these begin to rival physical reality in their richness), fewer physical resources will be needed, with the possible exception of energy to run the computers.
A previous essay compared the reality of improvements in life with people’s mistakenly gloomy beliefs. Another essay argued that resources are far less scarce than most people think, especially when you understand scarcity in terms of affordability. A third article looked at the flaws in the influential Limits to Growth. The current article summarizes some of the evidence showing another way in which resource scarcity is being pushed back.
If we are revived from cryopreservation decades from now, we need not worry that we will inevitably return to a world of poverty, pollution, and desperate scarcity. Far from inevitable, a dark future is unlikely. It is possible because the governments of the world might manage to completely block economic and technological progress. Let us not let that happen.
Coda: Bucky Fuller and ephemeralization
Perhaps the first person to write about dematerialization was Buckminster Fuller, systems theorist, writer, designer, and inventor (1895-1983), although he called it “ephemeralization”, a term he coined in 1927 and discussed in his book, Seven Chains to the Moon. [Fuller 1938] One of Fuller’s inventions – the geodesic dome – provides an example of ephemeralization. Compared to standard approaches, the geodesic dome used less material, was lighter, and supported heavier loads.
Fuller used the term to mean the ability of advancing technology to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” According to Fuller, ephemeralization “is the number one economic surprise of world man.” The concept referred to increasing efficiency in output of products and services while requiring less effort, time, and resources. Despite finite resources, ephemeralization would result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population. Fuller used the example of Washington Carver’s assembly line (as used by Henry Ford). Another example is the evolution of bridges. Fuller saw ephemeralization as inevitably affecting all of human development.
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Thanks, Adam. Coming from you that recommendation means a lot.
Another outstanding article.