{"id":49429,"date":"2019-11-05T19:44:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T00:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49429"},"modified":"2019-11-05T19:44:59","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T00:44:59","slug":"the-school-of-economics-as-a-suicide-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49429","title":{"rendered":"The school of economics as a suicide academy?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.feasta.org\/2019\/10\/03\/the-school-of-economics-as-a-suicide-academy\/\">The school of economics as a suicide academy?<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u201cAnyone who thinks that economic growth can continue for ever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.\u201d<\/em>&nbsp;Kenneth Boulding<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Limits to Growth Study of 1972<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1972 economists became embroiled in a controversy with a group of systems scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and declared themselves the winners. It became the conventional wisdom that the economists won the argument. This complacent judgement now turns out to be premature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The systems scientists had been commissioned by a group called the Club of Rome to research the impact of economic growth on the ecological system. Their book, published in 1972, was titled \u201cThe Limits to Economic Growth\u201d. It argued that two things would set a constraint on the economic growth process \u2013 an accumulation of pollution and wastes and the depletion of resources. The damage from pollution \u2013 for example from greenhouse gases \u2013 would require the diversion of increasing amounts of resources to mitigate and adapt to increasing difficulties. At the same time depletion \u2013 eg of fossil fuels, oil, gas, minerals and biological resources \u2013 would mean that harder and costlier to access resources would have to be accessed as time went by and that would raise costs and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.postcarbon.org\/program\/limits\/\">choke off growth too<\/a>. (1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Crucially the LtG authors did not say that the Limits to Growth (LtG) constraints would be immediate \u2013 their modelling, done with early computer technology, dated the end of growth, followed by a period of involuntary contraction, in and after the first two decades of the 21st century. Quelle surprise \u2013 in recent years mainstream economists have been puzzling over what they call \u201csecular stagnation\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The school of economics as a suicide academy? \u201cAnyone who thinks that economic growth can continue for ever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.\u201d&nbsp;Kenneth Boulding The Limits to Growth Study of 1972 In 1972 economists became embroiled in a controversy with a group of systems scientists from the Massachusetts Institute [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13101,7042,485,3721],"class_list":["post-49429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-brian-davey","tag-feasta","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49430,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49429\/revisions\/49430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}