Crazy Town: Episode 131. Finding Crazy Town Part 3: Unlimited Limits to Growth

Alex Leff: 
Jason, Jason? Rob, Rob? Asher, Asher? Guys, guys, guys. 

Hello and welcome to Crazy Town, a podcast about the global crisis we face and our modern society's seeming inability to address it. I'm Crazy Town producer, Alex Leff. This is part three of our six part series, Finding Crazy Town. Now, if you're just joining us, here's the sitch. Our Crazy Town hosts, Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller are still missing. Last episode, our investigation led us into the strange world of complexity. We discovered that the more complex our civilization becomes, the harder it is to understand, manage, and even think about. Every answer seemed to uncover three new questions, which I've got to admit, has not been great for the investigation. Our search has been getting larger and larger. We've crossed the high seas of international shipping and navigated the fragilities of complex systems. At this rate, we're going to have to scour every nook and cranny of our global civilization by the summer's end if we want to find them. 
I think it's time we put some limits on our search. I mean, nothing can grow forever, right? Let's think through this rationally. Maybe I've let my emotions get in the way. I've been too distraught over Jason, Rob, and Asher's disappearance. I haven't been using my head. I need to become a lean, mean thinking machine, a cold calculator, someone who looks at the facts and nothing 
but the facts. I need to think like an economist. Yeah, that's good. That sounds right. There was a Crazy Town episode on economists back in the early days. What were they saying about economists? 

Jason Bradford: 
Asher, how are you doing, man? 

Asher Miller: 
Why do you ask? 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, like a Facebook post came out, you were just dissing on economists. Are you okay? Were you mad about something? 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. You mean the one where I said they were the most dangerous people in the world? 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. Yeah. Beyond serial killers and whatever. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, I didn't say that, but - 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah.
Asher Miller: 
Yeah. I'm a little pissed at economists these days. 

Jason Bradford: 
Wow. 

Rob Dietz: 
Well, economists are pretty easy to get pissed at. It's like they forget that the environment actually has an effect on the economy. 

Jason Bradford: 
Or the economy has an effect on the environment. 

Asher Miller: 
It's just an input. I mean, the environment is just a place to get stuff that we can use to produce things. 

Rob Dietz: 
Mostly unlimited stuff. 

Jason Bradford: 
And then just dump our pollution into it. 

Alex Leff: 
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why are they so pissed at economists? Economists are the most rational people out there, right? Jason, Rob, and Asher are mad because economists like economic growth. Who wouldn't like economic growth? And what do they mean economists don't take the environment into consideration? Trees are part of the environment, and trees grow. If natural systems can grow, why is economic growth a problem? 

Rob Dietz: 
Economic growth. We might all want to get on the same page of what that is. So what that means is when your economy is growing every year, the gross domestic product or GDP is increasing in size. And that GDP is just a measure of the dollar value of all the goods and services that get produced in an economy. So it really boils down to how many people do you have and how much are they consuming? So if you're talking about growing the economy, you're either adding to the population or you're adding to the amount that each person consumes or both? 

Jason Bradford: 
Usually both. Yeah, right? Nowadays. 

Asher Miller:
That's what we've been doing. We've been doing both, right? 

Rob Dietz: 
And I should mention that economic growth, it's pitched as you want to grow a certain percentage every year. 3% is often what's thrown out there. So that means exponential growth. 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, it divides three into 70 and that gives you the doubling time, right? 

Rob Dietz: 
Right. Let's stick on that for a sec because that's not a commonly known thing. So that's the rule of thumb. You take 70 - 

Jason Bradford: 
Divide it by the percentage, so 3%. 

Rob Dietz: 
Of annual growth rate. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. So that was 20 something, 22 years, 24 years, three into 70. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Something like 22 and a half years maybe. 

Jason Bradford: 
Okay. Yeah. 

Asher Miller: 
To double. 

Jason Bradford: 
To double. Right. 

Rob Dietz: 
So that means, okay, so if we had 3% growth every 20 plus years, the economy would double in size. 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. Which is incredible to think about. So imagine if we're trying to grow the world economy at 3% right now, add 23 years to 2040 or whatever. We have double the consumption of resources that we do now. I don't think that's even possible anymore. 

Rob Dietz:
Well, and then that's the problem with the whole exponential growth 20 years beyond that, which is not that far. 

Jason Bradford: 
It'd be four times. It'd be four times. Yeah. Right. 

Rob Dietz: 
It's insane. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, we've had periods where growth has actually been much more than that. I mean, China has been growing at close to like 10%. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah, for a clip, right. 

Asher Miller: 
Which is fucking crazy. 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, that means they double their economy in seven years. Can you imagine living through that? I mean, people say China's nuts. 

Asher Miller: 
My son is a little over seven and he's grown more than twice the size in that period of time. So it's clearly achievable. 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, there's an appropriate period of growth. 

Rob Dietz: 
Thankfully, his exponential growth is going to slow down. Otherwise, he'd be like that guy, Robert Wadlow. You guys know him? 

Asher Miller: 
Oh yeah. Yeah. 

Jason Bradford: 
Guinness book of World Records. 

Rob Dietz: 
There was something wrong with his pituitary gland. It's actually a really sad story because he was this really well-liked person and he was a celebrity, right? Because you can't not notice this guy. And so he started actually touring with Barnum and Bailey or the Circus and he started
going to parades and stuff. And he ended up dying really young at the age of 22 because he was in a parade and he used to wear leg braces. And one of them rubbed his ankle and he got a blister and the blister went septic and his heart just couldn't pump blood to his extremities well enough to heal stuff like that. So you think about that, you get a blister and you die. That's what happens when continuous growth is pushing the limits of the system. And of course, now that we figured out what was causing that was a problem with the pituitary gland that medically we stopped that growth so that this person could continue to develop rather than continue to grow. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, we want him to be tall enough that he could actually still make money off of his height. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah, like seven foot, seven foot one is ideal for a center? 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. Yeah. For basketball. Yeah. 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. 

Rob Dietz: 
Well, when I was thinking about the problems that we have with economists, it reminded me of something that happened way back, like kindergarten. I wanted to share with you guys - 

Jason Bradford: 
Let's do this. Let's share. 

Rob Dietz: 
This story of the three musketeers. Okay? 

Asher Miller: 
That's from before when you were a kid. That's Alexandro Dumas. 

Rob Dietz: 
Well, you even used the French accent there. That's impressive. 

Asher Miller: 
I'm one of those hoitey toitey west countries. 

Rob Dietz: 
I though his name was dumbass. No, so the three musketeers, it's almost like the three of us. It was me and my two best buddies. People used to call us that. And we used to play games all the time, sports, whatever, stick ball in the street, which based on our car culture episode, you can't do that anymore. But we would get together all the time and play these games. And one of
the three musketeers, his name was Scott, he was probably, I guess I'd call him a bit more competitive than the other two of us. What used to happen is he would quit when he would start losing in a game. We'd be playing a game, he'd fall behind and be like, "Eh, I quit." And he'd go home. 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh that's childish. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah, I know. 

Asher Miller: 
He was a child. 

Rob Dietz: 
A stupid childish child. Yeah. And so me and the other musketeer, David, we were getting pretty upset by this. So anyway, me and David were like, "What are we going to do with this guy?" And we decided, alright, that's it. If he quits another time, we're banning him. So we go to play a game and he falls behind and quits. And we're like, "Alright, that's it. We're not playing with you for a week." 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh man. 

Asher Miller: 
At that age a week is like a lifetime. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Huge punishment. And he got really upset and maybe rightfully so. And he went home and he complained to his dad. He's like, "Those guys aren't letting me play anymore." And his dad came to talk with us and we told him what happened. And he was like, "Yeah, that seems about right. That seems fair. Good work you guys." 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh, that's a good parent. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Yeah. And so Scott did his time for that week. 

Asher Miller: 
Oh, you guys stuck with it. 

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Yeah. We stayed with it. And then after the week, everything was back. He learned how to deal with the game not going his way, or at least put aside some of the emotion and was able to play. And we all had a better time going forward. And what I realized from this is we gave him very direct feedback. If you're going to act this way, this is what's going to happen. 

Jason Bradford: 
Consequences. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. And we even had enforcement from above, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
Authority. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Scott's dad coming in and backing us up on that decision. And this is where the economists are completely lacking. They don't have any sort of feedback in their models. And so when an economist says something outrageous, it's because they don't understand what's feeding into whatever it is they're spewing. 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh my gosh. 

Asher Miller: 
I guess I would say they don't have feedback from outside of their own little system, right? Because I think economists get rewarded for whatever theories or tinkering that they might do on a policy level if they see a direct impact within the economic system. Jobs grew, unemployment went down, the GDP went up, whatever it is. But they're not getting feedback from outside that system. They only care about those specific things. That's 

Rob Dietz: 
Right. But I think that's what's weird is even little kids can get that, oh, this thing affects that thing. 

Asher Miller: 
Right. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. But economists seem to have this crazy blind spot about it. 

Alex Leff: 
But how could economists be blind to reality? They're always talking so seriously and wear those fancy suits and ties. Seemed pretty legitimate to me. I thought they would have been perfect to help us find the Crazy Town guys. But if economists are only looking at their very
narrow models that can't take the environment around them into consideration, then maybe they're not the best role models for us in our search. It reminds me of a joke my grandpa used to tell. So this couple sees a man searching under a streetlight looking for something. They ask him if he lost something and he says, "Yeah, my keys." So then the couple asks, "Well, where'd you lose them?" "Over there in the bushes. "Then why are you looking under the streetlight? Because this is where the light is. Maybe economists are searching under the streetlight even though their keys are in the bushes. 
They're studying the things that fit neatly inside their models instead of the nuanced world outside them, which means if we want to find Jason, Rob, and Asher, then we've got to be more aware of the environment around us than the average economist would be. But maybe that's our clue. If we want to find what we're looking for, we shouldn't look where economists are pointing. We should look at what they're missing. 

Jason Bradford: 
I've got a story. I was a little older than you. I wasn't five or six or whatever it was. I was like 30, 31 or something like that. Yeah. I think this is around 2002. I had this research group that I had put together. We were people from around the U.S. We had someone from Japan. We had people from the UK and Europe. We had some people from South America. 

Rob Dietz: 
It was very worldly. 

Jason Bradford: 
It was very worldly. And we were looking at the relationship between global climate change and biodiverse ecosystems in the Andes, specifically Manu National Park in Peru. We were interested in how the birds and the trees would move up slope as the climate warmed, let's say. But this all, of course, ties into how much carbon we're emitting because we're burning fuels. And so to pull this all together, I started to read the literature on what's called the integrated assessment models, which the ultimate for this is the intergovernmental panel on climate change or the IPCC. 

Asher Miller: 
That's the big international climate body, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
So I'm trying to learn like, well, how do these integrated assessment models work? Because we're kind of doing a miniature version of this in this national park in Peru, and I wanted to kind of just have a bigger picture. I was a narrow kind of biology PhD guy and I wanted to study this and I wanted to understand how to pull these threads together. So I read an IPCC report. I just said, I'm going to read this. 

Rob Dietz: 
That's a pretty insane thing to do.


Asher Miller: 
Yeah. You and 12 other people have done that. 

Jason Bradford: 
Exactly. 

Asher Miller: 
An entire report. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Yeah. And what was interesting was that I got very disturbed by it. Now you think, oh, you got disturbed because it presented a very bleak portrait of the future. True. 

Rob Dietz: 
But you already probably knew that. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Yeah. 

Rob Dietz: 
The pessimist that you are. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. No, it wasn't just that. It was that it didn't add up. It made absolutely no sense. I'm reading this report from this body that is renowned in this world of scientific community that comes together and produces these things. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. They won the Nobel Prize in science, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going, I don't get this. 

Asher Miller: 
What didn't you get? 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh man, this is. Well, okay. 

Rob Dietz: 
Jason's having a little traumatic - 

Asher Miller:
Flashback. 

Rob Dietz: 
Flashback. Carry on. 

Jason: 
How do I explain this? It's so basically it's this vision of the future. It's saying, here's how we're gonna develop our economy and our society throughout the twenty-first century. 

Asher: 
They're basically scenarios of assumptions that they're making, right? 

Jason: 
Yeah. Here's what the world looks like over the next several decades. And then what's tied to that is how many emissions of carbon, you know, go into the air because of how much fuel we're burning. Right. And so they're numbered, you know, there's 2.6, 4.5, 6, 8.5, and these have to do with how much additional watts per meter squared of heat is trapped onto the earth. 

Rob: 
That's assuming we're gonna do a lot more stuff in society. That means you're gonna burn more fuel and you're gonna trap more heat, more watts per square meters. Am I getting this right? 

Jason: 
Yeah, and there's a mix of say, okay, we do this with coal, we do this more with nuclear, or we have more renewables. You know, they have different ways in which the energy mix evolves. Let me give you a quote from the latest report, which is similar to what the older reports were like. But before - 

Asher: 
Yeah. 

Rob: 
Okay, so you're basically trying to make us, all of us, as disturbed as you are. That's the point. Okay, yeah, go lay it on us. 

Jason Bradford: 
"Throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill health in many regions, and especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change. High confidence. Health impacts include greater likelihood of injury and death due to more intense heat waves and fires." 

Asher Miller: 
High confidence.


Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. "Increased risk from foodborne and waterborne diseases and a loss of work capacity and reduced labor productivity in vulnerable populations. High confidence." It keeps going. "Risk of undernutrition in poor regions will increase. High confidence." 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah, this is our laugh so you don't cry moment 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. 

Asher Miller: 
We are confident that we are fucked. 

Jason Bradford: 
This is just one paragraph. It goes on. "Risks from vector-borne diseases are projected to generally increase with warming due to the extension of the infection area and season, despite reductions in some areas that become too hot for disease factors. Medium confidence." The mosquitoes die. 

Rob Dietz: 
The mosquitoes all - They actually explode. They pop like popcorn. 

Asher Miller: 
We'd have a lot more disease except the mosquitoes can't even survive this. 

Jason Bradford: 
Exactly. 

Rob Dietz: 
That's a new product. Orville Redenbacher selling mosquito pop. 

Jason Bradford: 
Okay. Okay. Okay. It goes on. This is just one paragraph. 

Rob Dietz: 
Make it stop, please. 

Jason Bradford: 
"Globally, the magnitude and severity of negative impacts will increasingly outweigh positive impacts. High confidence." 

Asher Miller: 
High confidence.


Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Yeah. "By 2,100 for RCP 8.5." 


Asher Miller: 
That's basically the warmest. The warmest. The warmest scenario they have.. 

Rob Dietz: 
Wait, so that means - Is 8.5 meaning? That's not degrees of warming. 

Jason Bradford: 
No, that's the additional watts per meter square added. 

Asher Miller: 
But it's not quite 8.5 degrees Celsius warming, but it's up there. 

Rob Dietz: 
5 or 6 or something. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. It's like five or six. "The combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year is expected to compromise common human activities, including growing food and working outdoors. High confidence." 

Asher Miller: 
Breathing. 

Jason Bradford: 
Exactly. 

Alex Leff: 
Oof. This is pretty bleak. I'm starting to understand why economists might not want to look at the consequences of our actions after all. It's not very fun, but at least we're not listening to economists anymore. This is the realm of science for God's sakes. Surely climate scientists of all people will have a better grasp on the big picture. 

Rob Dietz: 
Okay. It's dire. 

Jason Bradford: 
It's dire. 

Rob Dietz: 
But what does this have to do with economics?


Jason Bradford: 
Okay. It sounds really bad. And I'm really worried, right? But then I'm confused because all this entire report, everything is a world that's wealthier. So if you read back earlier chapters, the scenario being played out here is that this is a world in which there's much more consumption. There's much more food available. There's much more consumer goods available. There's much better housing stock available. There's much better healthcare available. Everything is wonderful. In other words, like I said, it's like we're all driving to the shopping mall and having a great life. And then later chapters, it reads like this. It doesn't make any sense. 

Rob Dietz: 
No feedback. 

Jason Bradford: 
There's no feedback. 

Asher Miller: 
These models are like the RCPs, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathways. 

Asher Miller: 
These are climate models and looking at the impacts of warming at different levels. And there's a lot of feedback in those models - 

Jason Bradford: 
Within the models. 

Asher Miller: 
Within the climate system. But where there's this kind of line drawn is saying that all this stuff about the socioeconomic system, we don't know. That's not our bailiwick. That's some other territory of expertise. We just have to defer there. So they operate by basically taking these SSPs, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
Shared socioeconomic pathways. 

Asher Miller: 
At face value. And the SSPs are kind of made up by economists, right? 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. At this point, that's right.


Asher Miller: 
And those economists have this vision in their mind that there's going to continue to be economic growth, energy demand growth, material progress, all these things that are going to continue to go on, in fact, must go on. And so these climate scientists are sort of saying, well, okay, what's the impact of these things on the climate system if we do that? But never questioning, well, shit, if the climate changes significantly, you were just talking about reading in that quote, well some labor's actually going to be hard to do, right? Going outside, maybe not a good idea. 

Rob Dietz: 
Growing food, I believe you mentioned. 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh yeah. I mean, there's giant floods. There's an increase in disease. There's the crashing of agricultural production. It just increases in landslides. 

Asher Miller: 
So there's no feedback coming back. 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. That all has a cost. 

Asher Miller: 
And that gets to what I think you were saying, Rob, and that is that within the field of economics, it seems like there's not an openness or an inquiry to trying to get feedback from outside of the economic system to sort of understand. 

Rob Dietz: 
Very, very stuck in this one worldview. 

Alex Leff: 
Dang it. Even the International Panel on Climate Change is taking economists' assumptions at face value. They're basically helping the man find his keys under the streetlight because that's where the light is. Is there anyone that can help us incorporate the realities of our environment? 

Jason Bradford: 
There's no fricking feedback. And I'm this young researcher. I'm like 31 or something or 32 at the time. I'm kind of new in academia, recent PhD grad, and I'm going outside of my normal area of expertise. And I've got this friend at UC Davis where I was, and I have lunch with him. This guy was a Dartmouth grad and then a Harvard grad and smart guy, Cam. And I confess my confusion. I'm like, "What's going on?" I kind of explained what I just said. Is there something wrong with my understanding here? The climate change impacts sound just terrible, but apparently the economy just keeps humming along. It doesn't make any sense.


Rob Dietz: 
It's got to be like anti-perspirant sales, right? From all the extra sweat. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Yeah. And Cam, what was fascinating was that this was the perfect friend to have at that time. Guess who Cam knew really well and personally? 

Rob Dietz: 
Yoda. 

Jason Bradford: 
Almost. Donella Meadows. 

Asher Miller: 
Oh, really? 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah, I'm not kidding. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, okay. So for folks listening, who's Donella Meadows? 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, she was one of the original authors of the Limits to Growth Study. And she was a professor at Dartmouth at the time that Cam was an undergrad. And he actually lived in this big farmhouse that she had. So she had students living at her house and they would all have dinner together and talk about stuff. 

Asher Miller: 
She's become very well known. She's since passed away, but is very well known for her work. Limits of Growth was a study that was done by these MIT researchers. They were contracted by a group called the Club of Rome to basically try to answer this question of if you sort of extrapolated the trajectory we're on, what would happen? And they kind of plugged in this data looking at inputs like resources and population and pollution. And they sort of try to model out these different pathways of what would happen. And as the title explains, there are limits, right? And even if they tweak certain things, you at a certain point run up against your limit, the limits of being able to continue to grow. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. I mean, amazing. Here I happen to have this friend who lived with Donella Meadows. I'm coming to him going, "Is there something wrong with me?" And he goes, "No." 

Rob Dietz: 
He goes, "Yes, and."


Jason Bradford: 
He goes, "Oh, geez." And he starts saying, "Jason, have you ever heard of Limits to Growth?" "No. ""Do you know who Herman Daly is?" "No. "And he just starts listing all this literature. And he goes - 

Rob Dietz: 
Sorry. You're about to be thrown down the rabbit hole. We're renaming you Alice. 

Asher Miller: 
You made the mistake of asking a question. 

Jason Bradford: 
So that was sort of my introduction to this. But it came from this tension, this unresolved tension between them reading this giant report and being this young scientist and going, how can I question this? And so I kind of summarized, I had three big problems. There was no feedback that linked the climate change damage to the socioeconomic progress that the narratives of these economic models assumed. They all assumed there were unlimited resources that we could just keep expanding the human enterprise. There was no alternative narrative that said, what if we used less and tried to live appropriately to prevent all this damage? 

Alex Leff: 
Okay, great. We're on the right track. Well, I don't mean as a society. I mean us. We finally have a lead. Environmental scientist Donella Meadows sounds like the perfect person to help us do this. And her famous Limits to Growth study was a big deal back in the day. I'm sure that made its way to the highest realms of power and before no time was sitting on the president's desk to take immediate responsible action. Who was the president back then again? 

Rob Dietz: 
I got to tell you this quick story about a monument I saw in DC. I was there for a conference on ecological economics and the environment. And we were of course having this meeting in the Ronald Reagan building because - 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah, ecological economics. The first person you think of is Ronald. 

Rob Dietz: 
Oh yeah. Yeah. Total environmentalist, right? Yeah. But so in the main foyer where our conference had the big gathering space, there's these two monuments, these big stone deals that are pinned up on the wall. One is just a relief of Ronald Reagan's head. It's kind of nice because just his head, maybe it got chopped off. But the other one is this quote of Ronald Reagan's, which was completely ironic given the conference that I was at. You want to know what this thing said? Well, let's hear it from Reagan's mouth. Here, play this clip.
Ronal Reagan: 
There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams. 

Asher Miller: 
Okay. So repeat that for me. 

Rob Dietz: 
He said, "There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams." 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh geez. 

Asher Miller: 
There are no limits. 

Rob Dietz: 
No limits to growth. Zero. 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. Well, I can think of a few, but - 

Rob Dietz: 
What do you got? 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh my goodness. I used to teach an ecology class. I would do the simple exercise where I would have the students calculate how long it would take for a bacteria, humans or elephants to equal the mass of the earth given their intrinsic rate of growth. These bacteria can divide every 20 or 30 minutes in a day or two or three or something. It hits the mass of the planet earth just from doubling every - 

Rob Dietz: 
Something must be limiting those bacteria. , 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, that's the thing is that they always run into limits. So there's - 

Rob Dietz: 
But there are no limits. 

Asher Miller: 
He's talking about humans. Okay?


Jason Bradford: 
We're exceptional. We're exceptional. 

Asher Miller: 
We're different. 

Jason Bradford: 
We have brains. 

Alex Leff: 
That's so weird. Why would our government not believe there were any limits to growth? Did the economists get to them too? 

Asher Miller: 
What I'm interested in thinking about a little bit is, where did this fixation on growth even come from? I think that our sort of economic thinking, the field of economics grew up and matured in a period where we actually had pretty remarkable growth. 

Jason Bradford: 
Because of oil. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, really, yeah. It's driven by energy and this abundance of the short-term abundance of a supply of magical energy that we were able to harness and turn that into consumption of resources and get people to buy shit. And you're born into that. Just like someone is born into wealth and they feel like they earned it. They're born into that. 

Jason Bradford: 
They think it's normal. 

Asher Miller: 
They sort of feel like that is normal. So it kind of makes sense that we might think, oh, well, not only has this worked so far, it's going to continue to work sort of indefinitely in the future. 

Jason Bradford: 
It pisses me off. It's like, okay, I think it's a problem of scale, like you're saying. During the development of economics, of economic theories, which in the 19th and 20th century was industrial revolution time, tremendous growth potential because of fossil fuels. I kind of think of it as a trajectory. I remember watching Mark McGuire hit a home run in Cardinal Stadium. The ball would go up for a while and then it would start coming down. But if all you did was extrapolate from the first second off his bat, you wouldn't think there were no limits. 

Rob Dietz:
Yeah, that ball's still in orbit, isn't it? 

Jason Bradford: 
It's still in orbit. But there's no perspective on that. There are physical laws related to a baseball in flight and there are physical laws related to economy and its ability to grow. And they're just different scales of change. 

Rob Dietz: 
Now you're just talking crazy. See, you know where Reagan got a lot of this stuff from was from a business professor named Julian Simon. He wrote this book called "The Ultimate Resource." And of course the ultimate resource is the vaunted human mind because people never do anything stupid. We're just the greatest. 

Asher Miller: 
Well, remember Reagan said, "There are no limits to human innovation," right? 

Rob Dietz: 
That's right. Well, yeah, growth and progress. So in this book that Julian Simon wrote, "The Ultimate Resource," he had this quote where he said, "We have in our hands now," well actually in our libraries, "the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever growing population for the next seven billion years." Now, I don't think he understood how big a billion was, but he later kind of retracted that and said, "Oh no, no, I meant to say seven million years." 

Jason Bradford: 
Did he ever take high school math? 

Rob Dietz: 
I don't know. But then the kind of humble physicist, Albert Bartlett, did a total take down on Simon. He actually ran the math on growing the population at 1% a year over seven million years. 

Asher Miller: 
Which by the way, 1% a year would be a disappointment to most economists and politicians, right? 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. So he did this way back in 1998, and with that much growth, you'd get a population of 2.3 times 10 raised to the power of 30,410, which is way bigger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. 

Jason Bradford: 
The universe is huge. 

Rob Dietz:
I mean, he said it would only take 17,000 years to get to the number of atoms in the universe. 

Jason Bradford: 
Not seven million. 

Rob Dietz: 
Not seven million, let alone seven billion. And this is the kind of stuff that Reagan based - 

Asher Miller: 
Well, Julian Simon maybe wasn't so great on math. 

Jason Bradford: 
But here's the thing though. Here's the thing. These are the people who we elect, who we put in charge of policy. I'm just flabbergasted by this. 

Asher Miller: 
I think part of it is, and this is what Julian Simon was doing, and I think what Reagan was talking about, he was talking progress, but I think a lot of people point to human ingenuity or innovation. And they say that there aren't limits to that. And so, we'll somehow figure out a way to deal with 
these physical limits. We're going to get more efficient. We're going to substitute resources. If we deplete one resource, we'll get another one. 

Jason Bradford: 
Well, so the limits of growth modeled all of that. They said, "What if we got more efficient? What if we substituted? What if we had technical innovation that allowed us to do blah, blah, blah?" Everything you're talking about, they thought about it in '72 and they said, "Let's throw that into the computer model." 

Asher Miller: 
Even most environmentalists don't really understand the exponential - 

Jason Bradford: 
The function. right. 

Asher Miller: 
The function. And so they think that substitution is totally achievable. 

Jason Bradford: 
What I think is going on is that in some ways, there's actually this structural lock imperative for growth in the systems that we have in place. Unless you can accept that there's a structural barrier that you have to get around those somehow. 

Rob Dietz:
I think you're exactly right. Why would a Reagan or a Simon say, "Let's keep growing the economy forever." It's because the way we built the economy, the way it's structured, it relies on growth right now. So you would have to have an entirely different sort of economy that didn't need to grow in order to function. And so there's things about our economy that have to have that growth. One example is that all of our money is created as debt, which - 

Jason Bradford: 
With interest. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Basically banks issue money into the economy expecting to be paid more later. 

Jason Bradford: 
Right. Principle and interest. 

Rob Dietz: 
Right. So you have to have growth in order to have that money supply increase. There's other things too. There's this whole notion a lot of us have of we can get something for nothing. If I invest money in the stock market or I buy a house and I don't do anything to it, I can suddenly sell it for more a few years down the road. 

Jason Bradford: 
All the retirement funds are depending on that exact issue right there. 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if the psychology is so much that I can get something for nothing. I think that it's the only avenue that people are offered for envisioning a retirement, that is you work your ass off for decades and you don't necessarily get compensated well enough that if you saved and squirreled away your money, without it growing, that you could live off of it when you retired. 

Jason Bradford: 
Well that's a convenience though of those. You can keep wages down if people are expecting - 

Asher Miller: 
That's exactly right. 

Jason Bradford: 
They're going to be able to invest and save it. 

Asher Miller: 
And that's a structural thing, which has to do with the fact that the wealth and wealth generation isn't distributed equally. So people can work a shitty job if the company sets up a 401k for them and they stick their money, or they have a pension. We don't bear any of those, but you stick
your money in the market and you just wait. It's going to double every seven years or whatever the hell it is. 

Rob Dietz: 
But that's a structure of the economy right now that we're all invested in. 

Jason Bradford: 
If you're a corporate executive, you have legal imperatives for profit. And there's a lot of pressure from the public markets to keep expanding. 

Alex Leff: 
Okay. So it's not just that economists and politicians like growth. It's that the entire economic system is based on growth. But if growth is leading to problems like climate change, surely then people in power will recognize we kind of have an issue here. 

Rob Dietz: 
The Secretary General of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, that's the OECD, one of the kind of prestigious along with the World Bank and your federal banks of the nations. This is one of your big - 

Jason Bradford: 
The major developed nations in the world are members. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. And this is all about how we progress or grow economically together. Right. So the Secretary General of that group, the OECD recently said, "We believe that it's possible to tackle climate change and grow the economy. Our bottom line is that green and growth are compatible. We can and must have them together." 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh my God. 

Asher Miller: 
I think the key word there is must, right? He feels the must. 

Jason Bradford: 
He feels the structural impairment. 

Asher Miller: 
He's hoping they can. Yeah. 

Rob Dietz:
Well and you look at one side of that is green, meaning that we don't warm our climate to the point that we go extinct. That's based on physics. That's how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere. There's nothing to say about that. 

Asher Miller: 
And by the way, there are limits to those things. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yes. Well . . . 

Jason Bradford: 
Looking at demographic information. There are so many people who are going to retire in this timeframe and they're going to require a pension system and we're going to have to replace infrastructure as a government around the world. So we're going to require this much available to fix roads and bridges. And they don't have a clue of how to do it without growth is a problem. 


Asher Miller: 
Every institution needs it. I mean, the government needs it because they need increased revenues from taxes. And those increased taxes are only going to come from increased growth and income. W 

Rob Dietz: 
Well this is the point is that we've got to figure that out. We've got to figure out how to have an economy that does not require growth because to say we have to have both green and growth is just fantasy. 

Jason Bradford: 
It's fantasy. So the problem is then if you're stuck on the growth, you can't actually think past it at all. 

Asher Miller: 
There's something lacking here in terms of the feedback dynamics. How do they assume that everything's going to be rosy over here in the economy? Do you know what I mean? When the physical planet that we're depending upon is falling apart. That's one thing. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. No food, plenty of shopping. 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. And the other is thinking about the fact that if we keep growing our material throughput and consuming more energy, we're basically going to put ourselves on a path where we can't even exist on this planet anymore. So they're wrestling with this. I think the difference is that there hasn't been a lot of public conversation about it because people are scared to -


Jason Bradford: 
Reputational risk. 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. They're worried about their reputation or they defer to people they think must know better. 

Jason Bradford: 
That's what I was scared of. I was 30, in my early 30s. I'm a young scientist. I'm going, "I can't question this. I'm going to get in trouble. I'll never get a job." 

Rob Dietz: 
Well and look at you now. It's horrible. 

Jason Bradford: 
I just married well. 

Asher Miller: 
No job. Pariah, 

Rob Dietz: 
Let this be a cautionary tale for all who question. 

Alex Leff: 
Let me see if I've got this straight. Our economy depends on unlimited growth, but unlimited growth is what's causing environmental catastrophes like climate change. So fully addressing climate change would mean restructuring our entire economy. Sheesh, that sounds harder than finding Jason, Rob, and share. 

Asher Miller: 
What I think is actually taking Reagan's statement. And he said there are no limits to growth or human progress. Those two things have been conflated, progress and growth. We see them as interchangeable, synonymous, mutually dependent, whatever you want to say. And I actually think it's the opposite. At this point, we've actually hit the limits. We're seeing that right now. We're seeing that. And in fact, if you look at economic growth, we've seen that it's taken an incredible amount of intervention into the economic system to try to grow it. And it's not been benefiting everybody. 

Jason Bradford: 
Pushing on a string, they say. 

Asher Miller: 
That system itself is wobbly at best. And then clearly the planet is trying to tell us, "Whoa, you're going to continue on this path. You're going to get bitch slapped pretty hard." And so I think it's
because we've tied these two concepts together. Now, if we let them go and we said, "Actually, growth is the thing that's inhibiting our progress." 

Jason Bradford: 
It is, right. 

Asher Miller: 
Just like, what's the 8'11" guy? 

Jason Bradford: 
Robert. 

Rob Dietz: 
Robert Wadlow. 

Asher Miller: 
Right. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. 

Asher Miller: 
Growth was inhibiting his progress. So if we could let that go, I know that sound kumbaya because we actually have to take that attitude and actually make structural, difficult structural changes to our institutions, our monetary policy, all these things as a result of that. But I think that that's the mind shift that needs to happen. 

Rob Dietz: 
That is clearly the first thing. I agree. That's the first thing that's got to happen is that let's let go of this, we must have growth. And then you can start looking at things to do. So there's this - 

Jason Bradford: 
Then the innovation can take off. That's a crazy thing. I want people to be innovative - 

Asher Miller: 
Within limits. 

Jason Bradford: 
Within the context of these limits. And then let's see what can happen. But if you ignore those limits, then you're going to be an idiot. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to be innovative when you're dead.


Asher Miller: 
I remember I heard about this study where they looked at behavior of children in terms of how they explored the world when their backyard was fenced in or not fenced in. So maybe these were farm kids or whatever, and their backyard went out into farms. It's a little similar to your property here, Jason, over here. But you actually have a fence there. 

Jason Bradford: 
Okay. 

Asher Miller: 
And what they found was that the kids who had a fence actually explored virtually the entire area of their backyard, no matter how big it was. The kids that didn't have a fence stuck really close to the back door. 

Jason Bradford: 
Oh, that's weird. 

Asher Miller: 
Because for them, in a sense, having a boundary allowed them to feel like they could explore. Oh, interesting. And to your point, I think, Jason, that if we said, okay, well, let's be creative within these limits. We've got to cap CO2 emissions. We've got to cap economic activity. What do we do with that? And it changes the ballgame, and it does provide a huge opportunity for thinking more innovatively about how we tackle these things. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah. And one opportunity that we already know a lot about is the whole issue of equality. So there was this economist, Henry Wallach, he lived from 1914 to 1988, and he was this real prominent economist, head of the U.S. Central Bank. He said, "Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth, there is hope. And that makes large income differentials tolerable." This gets back to what you were saying, Asher, about how, yeah, if you have growth, you don't have to pay people. So well, guess what? The reverse is also true for that. If you have greater equality of income, that's a substitute for growth. And it's a real positive way forward. One of these innovations we could really work toward if we agree that there are limits to growth. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. Anymore? 

Asher Miller: 
Well, it makes me think of what you had said about Robert Kennedy, right? That was in '68. You were saying, what was the quote? The GDP measures everything except that which is worthwhile. 

Rob Dietz:
That which makes life worthwhile or worth living. 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. And I would say in terms of the things that we need, we do need politicians that are going to be brave. They obviously have to be educated about this thing because they've been steeped like every student of economics that goes to university every year in a mindset that's totally sending us in the wrong direction. But they also have to have courage to stand up and say, "We're measuring the wrong things." I think there's been a lot of private conversations. I'm not a climate scientist. I'm not in the room necessarily for all those conversations, but I certainly, just in my work, have come across and spoken with folks who also feel like, wait, there's this disconnect happening here in two ways. One is - 

Rob Dietz: 
Well and there are economists out there, and Herman Daly is one of them who do think in terms of systems, do think of feedback, do put the lessons from Donnella Meadows and others into their analysis of the economy. And the Herman Dalys of the world, the ecological economists have proposed that we make a transition to a steady state economy that's a stable economy at a size that we can manage. 

Jason Bradford: 
Yeah. So there's some economists, they're rare, the ecological economist. 

Rob Dietz: 
Yeah, you don't get that stuff in any economics program in any college. 

Asher Miller: 
What percentage of economists are schooled in ecological economy. 

Rob Dietz: 
It's negative. 

Asher Miller: 
Yeah. It's a steady state of zero. 

Jason Bradford: 
But that's what I want. I want the creative thinking of economists to turn towards, how do we use less? How do we hold this together? Get rid of the idea of growth and figure out how to hold the system together without breaking. And that takes thinking outside of the box. 

Alex Leff: 
Jason's right. Maybe that's been my problem all along. I've been searching all over the world, expanding and expanding the investigation. I need limits. Then we can get creative because it's not like they could be anywhere. Where's somewhere they may have actually gone?


Rob Dietz: 
You know, we've talked about in the Crazy Town sense that when you know what's happening environmentally and socially and you go talk to your friends and family, they'll think you're crazy. And Jason, you've said, you've gotta take that slow because you don't want to ruin your personal relationships with people. But, I do think you want to ruin your relationships with economists. 

Asher Miller: 
I think I already have. 

Rob Dietz: 
If you have any connection, you're in college, you know somebody in this profession, go ahead and ask them, flood their inboxes, how can we have infinite growth on a finite planet? Why are we pushing this when we know we're headed towards climate armageddon with it? Ask them in 
print. Make comments on their comments. Just find out, can we have an economic framework that avoids killing the planet? 

Asher Miller: 
I think you're absolutely in the sense that, and I wouldn't even say push the economists in your life, or the ones that are in public life that you come across. It's anyone who takes at face value what the field of economics, the conventional field of neo-economics which is the dominant worldview that we live in right now. So ask your politicians. Why are you listening to these economists? 

Rob Dietz: 
You take this back to my story, the three musketeers, back to the cul-de-sac where we were playing. It's like the people in charge are giving Nobel Prizes to these guys. So rather than shunning them, and they need to be shunned and moved in a different direction, they're being rewarded. And so I think, it has to start, as you're saying, from people calling them out. Until they understand that. 

Asher Miller: 
They should be fucking villified. 

Alex Leff: 
Well, maybe that's our clue. Whenever we find an economist making an outrageous claim, maybe Jason, Rob and Asher won't be too far. We need to look wherever the dominant worldview starts to crack. Whenever someone says growth can continue forever and that gross is progress, that might just be where we find them, annoying the crap out of everyone and asking uncomfortable questions. So our search isn't just about finding three missing podcast hosts. It's about finding the assumptions our culture never thinks to question. That's where we'll have to look next time. Good work here, team. We'll meet here in two weeks. And remember, if you lost your keys in the bushes, don't go looking under the streetlight.


Melody Travers: 
That's our show. Thank you for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much-needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.