It's the Latest Thing. Let's Just Call It "Reality." The Era of Growth Ends in Ten Years.

Flashback 50 years. 1972. Boston. MIT.

A study is released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that concludes industrialized civilization will end around the middle of this century.  But that was half a century ago.

You're probably familiar with the giant accounting firm, KPMG.

They dusted off that old MIT/Club of Rome report, updated the numbers, took a look around, and concluded 1) that growth ends within the next decade and 2) our business as usual approach could trigger a global societal collapse by 2040.

The study represents the first time a top analyst working within a mainstream global corporate entity has taken the ‘limits to growth’ model seriously. Its author, Gaya Herrington, is Sustainability and Dynamic System Analysis Lead at KPMG in the United States. However, she decided to undertake the research as a personal project to understand how well the MIT model stood the test of time.

KPMG is not affiliated with the report but, oddly enough, the paper is available on KPMG's web site.

And so, it seems, the madness ends in ten years, maybe less.

It's the inevitable, inescapable result of unrelenting, unsustainable growth. Growth in everything - in population, in consumption and in waste (pollution). Did we really imagine this madness could go on forever?

Think ten years is a long time? It's not.

Now this may piss off a few Liberals but ask yourself if your government believes in business as usual, if it is committed to perpetual exponential growth? The question answers itself. You know that.

This is a timely moment to suggest you check out Andrew Nikiforuk's Southam Lecture delivered at the University of Victoria on November 17.

Nikiforuk opens his remarks with this 2004 quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

"[We] have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than 200 years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels."

We have some hard choices ahead and in the relatively near future. The end of growth that has been the engine of our economy and our politics since, perhaps, the end of WWII will require major change if we're to weather the transition. It will require us to redefine many ideas we've taken for granted for our entire lives.

An article in The New Yorker explores whether we can have prosperity without growth.

After a century in which G.D.P. per person has gone up more than sixfold in the United States, a vigorous debate has arisen about the feasibility and wisdom of creating and consuming ever more stuff, year after year. On the left, increasing alarm about climate change and other environmental threats has given birth to the “degrowth” movement, which calls on advanced countries to embrace zero or even negative G.D.P. growth. “The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, writes in his manifesto, “Degrowth.”“There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.” 

In “Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities,” Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian environmental scientist, complains that economists haven’t grasped “the synergistic functioning of civilization and the biosphere,” yet they “maintain a monopoly on supplying their physically impossible narratives of continuing growth that guide decisions made by national governments and companies.”

In “Good Economics for Hard Times,” two winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, point out that a larger G.D.P. doesn’t necessarily mean a rise in human well-being—especially if it isn’t distributed equitably—and the pursuit of it can sometimes be counterproductive. “Nothing in either our theory or the data proves the highest G.D.P. per capita is generally desirable.”

Banerjee and Duflo also maintain that in advanced countries like the United States the misguided pursuit of economic growth since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has contributed to a rise in inequality, mortality rates, and political polarization. When the benefits of growth are mainly captured by an élite, they warn, social disaster can result.

The article does not put forward solutions, only challenges and the fallout they portend. The next decade is time we don't have to waste. Yet, in the sense of our political and economic orthodoxies, a decade is impossibly brief. That said, we'll find no answers in the leadership of today or tomorrow. We have elevated growth to a religious stature in our political and economic gospels and suggesting we chart a new course would be condemned as heretical.

I pored over the KPMG paper. It's a tough chew for the laity. Maybe it's every statistician's 50 Shades of Grey. There are two points that stand out. The first is that data and observation by those in the know confirm the findings of the 1972 MIT paper. The second is that, while growth as we've known it all our lives, will probably grind to a halt by around 2030 that doesn't mean that societal collapse is inevitable.

The sky could fall but there are ways that might be prevented if - and this is a big "IF" - we want to change direction. We have to reimagine "growth." Growth has to serve a purpose other than production and consumption. Standard of living - how we accumulate stuff - has to yield to quality of living. Growth needs to be channeled into acquiring knowledge to better the individual, the family and the community. "More" has created our greatest problems. It is our real threat.  More needs to yield to better.

Progressivism, largely expunged from our industrial politics of the past several decades, must be restored to a high priority. Things can be done but we don't have the luxury of time. We need new leadership, an order of magnitude better than what we experienced from Chretien, Harper or this Trudeau.