PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?

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Speaker 2 This is Planet Money from NPR.

Speaker 2 A few weeks ago, we got this kind of mind-bending question. It was from our friends at Radiolab, which is a show about science and philosophy and, you know, just the sheer joy of curiosity.

Speaker 2 And in this case, they were curious about growth, in particular, economic growth. How could it possibly go on forever? And can too much growth destroy us?

Speaker 2 And in trying to answer their big question, we ended up in some pretty heady and unexpected places. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money.

Speaker 2 I'm Jeff Guo, and today we're doing something a little bit different. We've teamed up with Radiolab, and we're going to try to answer one of the biggest questions that often goes unsaid in economics.

Speaker 2 Here's Latif Nasser from Radiolab to get us started.

Speaker 2 Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser.

Speaker 2 What got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news, the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about.

Speaker 2 What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by, of all people, an astrophysicist.

Speaker 3 So I'm going to sketch what we know about Earth's history, cosmically speaking.

Speaker 2 Her name is Sandra Faber. She goes by Sandy.

Speaker 2 Brilliant scientist. She co-authored the standard model for thinking about how galaxies form.

Speaker 2 She won a National Medal of Science back in 2011.

Speaker 2 And she started the lecture by saying, We have a pretty happy little planet to live on.

Speaker 3 Earth is a good place to live for, let's say, of order 100 million years at least.

Speaker 2 Should be livable for a really, really long time. Okay.
Except

Speaker 2 she goes on to say

Speaker 3 over the last century or so, we've been seeing planet-wide GDP growing exponentially.

Speaker 2 So what she did is she took the average gross domestic product worldwide, and that's a rough measure of economic growth. And that had been growing recently around 3%,

Speaker 2 which for economists is like a happy little growth number.

Speaker 3 You will recognize 1.03, 3% as the whole.

Speaker 2 But Sandra took that 3%.

Speaker 2 And with some quick math, she started to just play it out

Speaker 2 year after year. And in her lecture, she's showing this chart where you can see this curve just shooting up.

Speaker 3 We can see this number is completely ridiculous.

Speaker 2 And she was basically like, look at all that growth. That's eating up Earth's resources.

Speaker 3 A large number here is bad because it means that we want more of that product.

Speaker 2 And so even though Earth should be good for 100 million years,

Speaker 2 we're going to just eat the planet up. We're going to devour the physical, material level of this planet.
We're going to eat it up in more like a couple thousand years.

Speaker 3 And my concern is that we're not talking about this.

Speaker 2 And when I heard that, that was,

Speaker 2 that was, that was breathtaking and

Speaker 2 horrifying. And honestly, like, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that number, 3%.

Speaker 2 It sounds like a specific thing, but also it's kind of abstract and mathy. And I wanted help.
I wanted help to parse this out. Like, how bad is that really? How bad could that possibly be?

Speaker 2 And so I turned to someone whose job it is to literally make sense of this exact kind of thing. Hello.
Hi, how are you doing? Hi, I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Speaker 2 And we had what I felt like was a kind of a roller coaster of a conversation.

Speaker 2 So I'm just going to play it for you right now. Yeah.
Okay. So I am Jeff Guo.
I'm one of the hosts of the Planet Money podcast at NPR. Terrific show.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I guess, what do I do? I talk about economics all day. That's fine.
Oh, my God. I guess that's what I did.

Speaker 2 I need you. I need you to help me.

Speaker 2 It's more than scratch and itch. I need you to help me cure this existential dread that you have now.
That's exactly right. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I guess where I would start is, and, you know, I would hate to contradict a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist. It just sounds like, you know, starting out on dangerous territory there.

Speaker 2 I mean, what you won the National Medal of Science, not the Nobel.

Speaker 2 She's going to, she's going to, it sounds like she's going to win. Okay, yeah, sure, fair.

Speaker 2 But you did ask me to kind of look into what things are we going to run out of. Yes, yes, yes.
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 After the break, can we cure Latif's existential dread? Or did we just make it worse?

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Speaker 2 Okay, Latif, so I looked into your question about growth and stuff that we might run out of, and I found a couple things that people are worried about. Okay, great.

Speaker 2 And I just did some very rough back-of-the-envelope math. Like, this is so totally not precisely.
My favorite kind of math. My favorite kind of micro.

Speaker 2 I love it. Okay.
So

Speaker 2 I don't know what should we start with. Copper? Yeah, that's a big deal.
Copper's a big deal, right? Very big deal.

Speaker 2 So if you look at copper consumption over the past century since the Industrial Revolution, you know, our demand for copper has grown about 3% every year. Okay.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, in recent years, we've consumed about 26, 27 million tons a year of copper. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So if you just, you know, extrapolate that out, if you just assume copper is going to keep growing at 3% every single year, right? Fair. Fair assumption.

Speaker 2 I looked up how much copper people think we have, according to geologists, what we know is out there and could theoretically get to.

Speaker 2 And that number right now is five to six billion tons okay it's not nothing but we're using it pretty quickly and if you just assume that that this number is going to keep growing at three percent a year yeah yeah sure it would take about maybe another 70 years and then no more copper that's it seventy years 70 years 70 okay so that sounds terrible it's true it's true that's assuming of course that you know we do keep consuming copper at that point using copper and needing copper the same way that we are yeah yeah sure t minus 70.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No copper.
Nobody. No copper.
Okay. Okay.
So then what, but then, so that's this seems to point exactly to Sandy Faber's point, right? It's true. It's true.
It's true. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you want to do another one? Oh, that's the end of it? I thought you were going to be like, but there's a giant, there's a copper thing that we're going to... No, there's no but.
That's it.

Speaker 2 It's just like, yeah, she's right about copper. Okay, but there's a but there is a butt coming up.
There's a butt. Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Speaker 2 You want to go through more of them before we get to the butt? Is that the idea? Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, next one.
Okay, next one. Okay, so another one I looked into is sand.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah, which seems like there should be a ton of that. Seems like there should be so much of it.
Yeah. And you know the reason why we need sand, right? And why? Why do we need sand? For concrete.

Speaker 2 Ah.

Speaker 2 So it's actually so important that we don't know how much we're using. Oh my God.
Like we're using so much. We just, we actually don't know.

Speaker 2 But like ballpark estimates, we're using maybe 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. Okay, that sounds like a lot.
I don't even know. I can't even visualize that.
I don't know. It's a lot.

Speaker 2 Right. And I couldn't even find how much sand and gravel there is in the world.
Like nobody actually knows. Okay.
This is one of those numbers where it's like, uh-huh.

Speaker 2 But we're doing like back of the envelope math here, right? Right. Right.

Speaker 2 So I was like, well, if we don't know how much sand and gravel there is in the world, surely we know how much rock there is in the world, right? Totally, totally, totally.

Speaker 2 So I looked it up, and according to geologists, the Earth's crust, all of the Earth's crust, contains maybe like 23 quintillion tons of rock and stuff. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 2 But it does seem like

Speaker 2 the whole point of sand is that it's like teeny tiny.

Speaker 2 It would take a lot of energy to turn that rock into sand. It would.
But assuming that we're able to do that, right? Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 Assuming that we're going to use sand, that we're going to use sand and gravel at a rate that grows by 3%

Speaker 2 every year,

Speaker 2 year after year after year. Yeah.
It would take about... Do you want to guess how long it would take to deplete the entire Earth's crust?

Speaker 2 Wait, so a quintillion, based on the growth rate and the uses now, I would imagine

Speaker 2 this one is not on Sandra Faber's side. I'm going to guess this one is like way, way, way far from now.
Like, like, this is going to be like a million years or something. Five to six hundred years.

Speaker 2 That seems so short again.

Speaker 2 That is way shorter for the whole crust. I know.
Oh, my God. That's not like it's long, but it's not that long.
Like, that's like, that is nuts. All right.
I got a couple more.

Speaker 2 It's just making me more and more existentially worried. Okay, but

Speaker 2 I felt. That's how I felt

Speaker 2 when I started on this journey. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 2 I got a couple more.

Speaker 2 Okay, great. Love it.
I gotta pull up my spreadsheet. I'm gonna talk about lithium.
Okay, great. Good one.
Good one.

Speaker 2 And lithium, you imagine there are like those giant deserts filled with those like sand flats or whatever, right? Yeah, in Bolivia.

Speaker 2 In Bolivia, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay. So this one will be again, like, I think this one,

Speaker 2 I feel like there's gonna be a curveball in here where you're like, no, no, no, we have enough, not enough for, you know, for millions of years. Anyway, okay, keep going.
Okay, hang on. Let me see.

Speaker 2 Let me pull up my.

Speaker 2 Where did my notes notes go on this?

Speaker 2 I can't wait when we have to fact check all of this.

Speaker 2 Okay, lithium. So we are using about

Speaker 2 190,000, 200,000 tons of lithium every year. Right.
That's kind of. Okay, so that's like in that's in phones, electric cars, da-da-da-da.
Yeah, batteries. Batteries is the big one for lithium.

Speaker 2 Very important. Lithium consumption, of course, has been exploding.

Speaker 2 So over the past decade, lithium has been growing. Do you want to guess how much it's been growing? What, like

Speaker 2 5% or 10% or 10%? On average, around 20%.

Speaker 2 Okay, wow. Okay.
Wow. So we need a lot of, and we need a lot more lithium.
Which is good, which is good. Which means like more electric cars, more da-da-da-da, right?

Speaker 2 More recyclable batteries and stuff. That's great.
Yeah. So geologists think that of all the lithium that we know is out there, there's probably like 105 million tons of it out there.

Speaker 2 That sounds a lot less than the sand you're like, this doesn't sound, this is going to get worrying. Okay, keep going.
Right.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, if you do this all the, you know, the same math, and you just, if you assume, if you just assume, just, you know, for the sake of argument, it's only going to grow at 3% a year, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, sure. We'd probably run out of lithium around

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 March. I feel like you're going to say, like, I feel like you're going to say, like, so soon.
Okay, tomorrow.

Speaker 2 About 100 years. Okay, 100 years again.
It's not bad. No, it is bad.
It's bad, Jack.

Speaker 2 It's bad.

Speaker 2 We need that. Like, we're going to need that later for even better stuff.
It's true. Okay, keep going.

Speaker 2 I'll do one more. I'll do one more, which is, this is a big one.
Oil.

Speaker 2 Really scary one. Yeah.
But hopefully we're weaning off of this one. So maybe this one is a different

Speaker 2 like it's going in the opposite direction. Hopefully.
Doesn't seem like it's really happening yet. Oh, God.
But, but. I don't think you have had a single piece of good news here.

Speaker 2 Just wait for it. Okay, all right.

Speaker 2 So if you look at oil, right?

Speaker 2 How much do we consume every year? About 37 billion barrels of oil

Speaker 2 as a world. How much is left? Probably 1.6 trillion barrels.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So it's not.
That's a lot. It's a lot, but it's maybe less.
It's less than I thought. So another way to say 1.6 trillion is 1,600 billion.
Right, right. So 37 billion a year.

Speaker 2 We have about 1,600 billion barrels left out there. Yeah, when you say it like that, it sounds

Speaker 2 quite alarming. Not great.

Speaker 2 So, you know, if you do the math again, exponential growth, there's a lot of things. Well, we do want to use less of it anyway.
Right, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm ambivalent about this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 About 28 years.

Speaker 2 No way. That is nothing.

Speaker 2 2052 might be the day we run out of oil. Wow.
Maybe, maybe. I was worried about when Sandra Sandra Faber said we had thousands of years and you're like, you are, you are taking me even

Speaker 2 an order of magnitude less in that.

Speaker 2 Maybe decades? Yeah. So I started to get, you know, a little nervous.
And so I

Speaker 2 thought, well, like, what happened in the past? You know, like, when we were overexploiting some resource and it looked like it was going to run out.

Speaker 2 And when I looked into it, there's this funny thing that happens.

Speaker 2 And so just for example, let me tell you a story.

Speaker 2 Please. It's about medieval England.
Okay. So it's the 1400s.

Speaker 2 Okay. It's like medieval England.
It's the 1400s. And this amazing new technology has just arrived on the shores of Yoldie, England.
And it is this new way of making iron. Okay.

Speaker 2 It's called the blast furnace.

Speaker 2 So just like very briefly, like before the blast furnace, you kind of had these backyard ovens basically where you kind of baked the iron ore to make the iron and they were like super inefficient and really slow and not great.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 But this blast furnace, the scientific innovation was that if you blew air onto the fire, you could get it really hot and then you could get it so hot that you could just melt the iron and it was amazing.

Speaker 2 Got it. And this like revolutionized iron making.
So these blast furnaces, they're these huge 20-foot tall stone towers.

Speaker 2 You would have these giant bellows at the bottom bottom blowing. I was just imagining the bellows.
I was just imagining the bellows. Okay, cool.
Okay. So that's the key innovation here.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And medieval England, iron was so precious, so important. You needed it for plows and spades or shoes, pots, kettles, nails, hammers, yeah, whatever.

Speaker 2 And so now you had this technology that you could make, these blast furnaces, they could make a ton of iron a day. A ton, a literal ton.
A literal ton, which is like just unprecedented. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The problem with all of this is what was the fuel that went into this blast furnace? And at the time, it was charcoal. Which is, which is, charcoal is made out of wood.
Is that right? No. Yes.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes. So this was a very good.
So they're like slurping down forests, basically. Yes.
Yes. Just picture the English countryside, right?

Speaker 2 You've got these blast furnaces sending up these huge plumes of smoke, and then everyone's just chopping down trees as fast as they can to feed these giant blast furnaces. It's, it's,

Speaker 2 and it makes people really concerned, yeah, like really concerned. They're like, oh my god, where are the trees going?

Speaker 2 But it got so bad that by the late 1500s, you have parliament banning new iron mills from starting up in different places.

Speaker 2 They're like, we cannot do this, we just cannot deal with this because we have one tree left, and uh,

Speaker 2 we can't, we gotta save the tree, we gotta save the trees, the tree, yeah, yeah, yeah. You even have Queen Elizabeth I,

Speaker 2 not the second, the first,

Speaker 2 right? You have Queen Queen Elizabeth I.

Speaker 2 She is issuing royal edicts saying, no more charcoal making in my royal forests. Like, we just can't, we can't do this anymore.
But

Speaker 2 then something happened. Okay.

Speaker 2 So in 1709, this English guy named Abraham Darby, he figured out how to use a different kind of fuel. So not charcoal.
So maybe you want to guess what he figured out. Oil, probably, right? Coal.

Speaker 2 He figured out coal, yes. He figured out you can use this sort of modified coal to run these blast furnaces.
And this changed everything. I'm not exaggerating.
The iron industry took off.

Speaker 2 This led to the Industrial Revolution. We

Speaker 2 avoided the problem. We avoided the shortage.
And it's not an isolated example. This is a pattern that comes up.

Speaker 2 We did this with whales when we stopped using whale oil for lamps and started using kerosene. We did this with rubber.
We started making synthetic rubber instead of getting all our rubber from trees.

Speaker 2 It's happened over and over again where we have stood at the edge of the cliff where it looked like, oh, crap, if we keep doing what we're doing, we are going to run out of some precious resource.

Speaker 2 Right. And then somehow, at the last minute, catastrophe is averted.

Speaker 2 I mean, this has happened so often. I feel like we should give it a name.
I know, I was going to say, do economists have some kind of like wonky name for this?

Speaker 2 Not that I could find, so I'm going to take the opportunity

Speaker 2 to give this a name. Jeff, it is yours.
Yours is a name. Okay, please.

Speaker 2 I think we should call this the Malthusian swerve.

Speaker 2 Swerve, Malthusian. Server swerve.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And why that? Because remember,

Speaker 2 do you remember Thomas Malthus? Yeah, and if I remember, his whole thing was like...

Speaker 2 No, you tell me what his whole thing was like. Yeah, so he was this famous English philosopher philosopher type.

Speaker 2 He lived, you know, in the, he grew up in the 1700s,

Speaker 2 pretty much around the time that coal was taking over England. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. So he was seeing a lot of this happen.

Speaker 2 And he's famous for predicting that humanity's growth would hit a limit, that, you know, populations would grow faster than we could provide food for them, right?

Speaker 2 And so the future of humanity was to be limited and trapped by our own lack of resources, and that everybody would just be miserable, and sad, and poor, and hungry forever.

Speaker 2 He does not sound like he would have been fun at parties. Yeah, yeah, he's a real bummer.
But maybe what he's more famous for is that none of that happened.

Speaker 2 The reason that Malthus' prophecy didn't come true

Speaker 2 is due to what I would say is the most important Malthusian swerve of all time. Okay.

Speaker 2 And this one is fertilizer. Right.
Right? Well, it was like the Green Revolution or whatever, right? Is that right? The fertilizer revolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I don't know if you want to hear the guano story. Please, I love the guano story.
We can do it. I know the guano story, but I love the guano story, and I want to hear you tell that.

Speaker 2 Okay, let's do it together then. Yeah.
So like the most, so like, so this is like the 1800s, a little bit after Malthus' time.

Speaker 2 In the 1800s, Europeans are starting to realize you can really supercharge food production if you use better fertilizer. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 And specifically, there's this one fertilizer that indigenous people in South America were using that was amazing. Guano.
Guano. Which is basically just bird poop.
Yeah. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So, so basically, you would have all these seabirds and they would poop on these rocky islands and coastlines along South America. And the poop would just accumulate.

Speaker 2 So, so, so the Europeans, so like in the 1800s, the Europeans are importing hundreds and thousands of tons. They're literally fighting wars over control of these guano islands.

Speaker 2 Like Spain is getting into wars with Peru and Chile. Yeah.
Like just as to who gets to seize the poop islands. Right.
And but the problem is

Speaker 2 we were using guano way faster than the birds could, you know, make the guano. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then in the 1900s, in the early 1900s, some German chemists figured out a way to

Speaker 2 basically make synthetic guano. They invented an industrial process to literally pull

Speaker 2 nitrogen. Yeah, that's like the key ingredient in guano.
Right, right, right. Pull it out of the air and make synthetic fertilizer.
And that is, that is on the order of a like alchemy discovery.

Speaker 2 Like that is like this thing that is super abundant in the air all around us. It is literally the majority of the air, but it was unusable.
And then there was a hack.

Speaker 2 where we then figured out how to make it usable. That seems like

Speaker 2 a miraculous technological breakthrough. Yeah, it's a miraculous story.
And it is like maybe one of the best examples of this thing that I'm going to call the Malthusian swerve. Swerve.
I like it.

Speaker 2 I like it.

Speaker 2 And so the swerve is like, it's like, when you say swerve, I'm picturing like, it's like

Speaker 2 a car about to collide into a cliff and then right at the last second,

Speaker 2 swerves out of the way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Malthus is driving the car thinking that, of course, we're going to hit the cliff. And then some really, it's like the passenger who then just

Speaker 2 like yanks the steering wheel. Yeah.
Like, nope, not going to happen. Yeah.
Right at the last second, we figured it out. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And if you look at human history, this is a pattern that happens over and over again.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 find this

Speaker 2 somewhat

Speaker 2 of a relief.

Speaker 2 It is sort of encouraging, but it also seems like

Speaker 2 there's so much drama here.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there might be a time where we can't swerve in time. Like, what happens if and when we can't swerve in time? And also, I would argue, sometimes the swerves.

Speaker 2 Sometimes we swerve right into another cliff. So, for example,

Speaker 2 the example you talked about, from charcoal to coal, which is great for the trees, except after a while, it's also bad for the trees, right?

Speaker 2 Like, it's like global rising temperatures lead to wildfires, lead to trees not able to grow where they once were able to grow. Like, it's like we're

Speaker 2 bought ourselves more time. Fair.
Right? We've bought ourselves more time. But then we just always use that time to step on the gas to the next thing, right?

Speaker 2 And then maybe when we do swerve, then we swerve into something worse, something that causes, you know, war, exploitation, or, or just messes up the planet in a way that you, that is unswerve backable from.

Speaker 2 I mean, yes, that is all totally right. It is a mess.

Speaker 2 But, you know, to help us unpack it, I think we should talk about a swerve that we are in the middle of right now.

Speaker 2 Actually, first we're going to swerve to break, but only for a minute. Then we'll swerve back and step on the gas directly towards a currently oncoming cliff.

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Speaker 2 So we have been talking about a couple historical examples of this

Speaker 2 thing I'm calling the Malthusian swerve, where it looks like society is about to run out of some resource, but at the last minute, some new resource or idea or innovation comes along and saves the day.

Speaker 2 And when I was looking into this, I was like, okay,

Speaker 2 is there a more recent example? Is there an example of a Malthusian swerve that happened just in the last couple of years? And you know what? There is one.

Speaker 2 Oil. Oh, we're in the middle of the Malthusian oil.
We are, yes. Remember, do you remember like in the 80s and 90s, all of the talk about peak oil? Yeah.
Do you remember?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and even before that, like, I think in the 70s and stuff, like, it's like that, we keep, we keep having having this conversation over and over again, peak oil.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So you have you have people, you have geologists, distinguished geologists saying, warning us that, you know, we're going to run out of oil, that we're going to reach peak oil very soon, and that's the thing.

Speaker 2 Well, you just told me, you just said it in 52 years or whatever. Like, you just said it.

Speaker 2 Same thing, yeah. Yeah.
Well, back in the 1990s, they were saying it's going to happen in the 2000s. They were saying, oh, crap, like, we're going to start running out in the year like 2000 something.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And if you look at oil production, like, yeah, it does, especially in the U.S., yeah, it does kind of start to slow down in the 2000s.

Speaker 2 A lot of people were wondering about what are we going to do? How are we going to adapt? How are we going to move away from oil?

Speaker 2 And if you look at the chart, you'll see the oil production, it goes, it kind of starts to dip. in the 2000s and then it starts to rise again more and more and more.

Speaker 2 There's a swerve. And that was caused by the fracking revolution.
But is that a a swerve?

Speaker 2 Like, I mean, if we're now we just found another way to get more fossil fuels, like, is that even really a swerve? That feels like a, we swerved and swerved right back in the same direction.

Speaker 2 I, I, I, that is one way to think about it. The way I think about it is, like, it's a mini swerve, you know, like, oh, crap, we're running into the cliff.
We can't find any alternatives.

Speaker 2 But we did find a way to get a little bit more oil out of the ground in the meantime. But, but, but in a way, running out of oil isn't even necessarily the problem here.

Speaker 2 The problem is the thing it's doing for everything else. It's true.
The problem with fossil fuels, it's not that we're going to run out of them. We have too much of them.

Speaker 2 It's too easy to go and find oil in the ground. It's too easy.
We have a problem that's not, it's not a scarcity problem. It's an anti-scarcity problem, right?

Speaker 2 And then we burn them, and then there's these horrible side effects for the environment, and then the world's getting hotter, and wildfires are popping up. Like, that's the problem.

Speaker 2 It's a much harder sell, though. It's a much harder sell to tell people, we have too much of this thing that's going to hurt you, as opposed to we have not enough of this thing.
So take care of it.

Speaker 2 Yes. That is the key thing here, I think.
Like, you look at how these Malthusian swerves, if we're going to call it that, how they happen. I love it.
I love it. Keep doing it.

Speaker 2 How did they happen, right?

Speaker 2 And it was people who were motivated by the terror of we're going to crash into this giant problem

Speaker 2 in so many years, and we need to figure out. Necessity is the mother of invention kind of thing.
Yeah. Desperation is the inventor's best friend yeah yeah right

Speaker 2 and you you look at how an economy works and I'm saying this is the the ideal way to operate but an economy works through incentives it's one of those things where the more you use the less you have the less you have the higher the price the higher the price then all of a sudden new pockets of that resource that would have been too expensive before to get uh now become unlocked yeah exactly or also

Speaker 2 we might try to innovate, right? Like now there's an incentive to invent something newer, cheaper, better than what we had before. Like I would bring up the example of like lithium, right?

Speaker 2 Now there is so much money. And if you can invent a battery that doesn't need lithium, you will like, I don't know, win the Nobel Prize, right?

Speaker 2 Like you will like, there is a lot of energy and motivation to solve that problem. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And if we were all just going to be like, well, we just, we don't need that much lithium because we're just going to conserve it and recycle it and we're not going to grow, then what's the point of trying to make anything more efficient or better?

Speaker 2 There's no incentive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it just, it feels like a, like a trap, like, and an especially capitalist kind of a trap where the only thing that will inspire us to innovate or to swerve, to use your word, um, is the immediate danger of the cliff.

Speaker 2 Like, like, like, like, I mean, we're, we're talking about resources and economics, GDP, and blah, blah, blah. But really, this is all like a head game.

Speaker 2 It's like all like people's minds work in this this very specific way. And long-term thinking is so hard for us.

Speaker 2 And it's like we've got this system that leans into a thing that is already a problem with us and the way we think. It's like we're just going to use it as long as it's there.

Speaker 2 And when it starts to almost not be there, we'll figure out something else. Yeah.
Right. How do we get people to actually do the thing that is in the long-term interests of everybody?

Speaker 2 Do you like, is the solution to have like some intergalactic Queen Elizabeth come down and say, no, no, no, no, no, guys, you're using way too much oil. You gotta stop.
You gotta stop.

Speaker 2 You gotta put a pause on it, right? Is it that?

Speaker 2 Or is it sort of we're all left to our own devices and some combination of the free market and also government leaders worrying about this thing hash out some kind of

Speaker 2 compromise? That's kind of what we're stuck in right now.

Speaker 2 But like, we're also smart enough to can't we figure out a system where we don't have to just drive into the cliff and swerve at the last minute every time, you know? Yeah. If this was your

Speaker 2 car, and there was, I mean, this is such a weird analogy.

Speaker 2 There's only one car and you, whoever is in the driver's seat, really, it's all of us, but whoever's in the driver's seat keeps driving pedal to the metal, accelerating faster and faster at cliffs.

Speaker 2 Yes. You would take their keys away.
You'd be like, sorry, this, you are not fit to drive. It's scary.
Yeah, I don't know. Why do we keep doing that then?

Speaker 2 Like, do you think growth growth is inevitable? Do you think growth is good? What do you, after all of this, what is your take on growth in particular?

Speaker 2 I think that growth is,

Speaker 2 maybe we should talk about what growth even is. Like, there are always going to be parts of the economy that we point at, and we're going to say, that's bad growth.
We don't want that.

Speaker 2 But growth is not just us burning a lot of fossil fuels and polluting the planet, right? Growth can be good.

Speaker 2 Like, growth could be starting a new business, mentoring kids, inventing a new kind of medicine that saves lives. That is also growth.

Speaker 2 And so for me, I guess it's hard for me to say that growth is bad. And maybe it's because I've just been too economics pilled.

Speaker 2 But when people say the word growth to me, I think of a country like China. You know, China's economy grew so fast that it lifted 800 million people out of poverty.
Incredible. Right.

Speaker 2 It's like hard to say that.

Speaker 2 Impossible seeming. Yeah.
It's hard to say that's bad. That's funny.
That was probably the population of the entire Earth in Malchus, right? Right? Yeah. And that's amazing.
And so I think it's about

Speaker 2 figuring out

Speaker 2 specific things that we can do to be smarter about it, to make it less harmful. But I don't know.
Yeah, I agree with that. Like we, we all have needs, and there are increasingly more of us.

Speaker 2 But I do think that taking, like, I still am sort of struck by the Sandy Faber's, like, stone-cold, like, zoom-out.

Speaker 2 There's nothing that's wrong about that logic either. She just has a seemingly a different priority than most economists, which is like she's thinking

Speaker 2 at a different scale. Yeah.

Speaker 5 We have been given the gift of cosmic time. We have hundreds of millions of years, if not another billion years, but we have not solved the problem of combining human nature with living in abundance.

Speaker 2 So I should tell you, we actually ended up up talking to Sandy Faber.

Speaker 5 My cosmic point of view at this moment is to try to figure out how people will live the best possible life on Earth after cheap energy has passed away.

Speaker 2 And telling her about your Malthusian swerve idea.

Speaker 5 Where is the next swerve?

Speaker 5 That's the thing. That's the thing.
Specifically with regard to energy.

Speaker 2 And it sounds like. And the thing that she was most concerned about was that energy is just so wrapped up in all these different parts of our lives, basically, everything we do.

Speaker 2 And it has these huge effects on the environment.

Speaker 2 She says we're actually dealing with a bunch of different cliffs and a bunch of different kinds of cliffs all at the same time.

Speaker 5 Some people call it the polycrisis and some people call it the metacrisis.

Speaker 2 Basically, we're facing a crisis of crises.

Speaker 5 A crisis of crises. Yeah.
So every time we think of one of these possible swerves, I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue them, but they leave a large fraction.

Speaker 5 Everyone leaves a gigantic fraction of the problem unsolved.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I would say a huge issue for a long-term happy human history in the future is having a more mature picture of wealth, how it should be managed, and how growth should be managed.

Speaker 2 I think Sandy and I, we're totally in agreement about what we want for the world, for the future.

Speaker 2 It's just about how we get there.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 can I give you my silly galaxy brain way of thinking about all of this? Yeah, please, please. So you're talking about like, why can't we, this is, you know, the Earth is our home.

Speaker 2 So why can't we all, you know, get together and take care of it

Speaker 2 and cooperate and all of that, right?

Speaker 2 And if you're just a household of like a couple people, you have a relationship.

Speaker 2 If you're just a village, you like know everybody, you, you know, you can help each other out, give each other things, all of that.

Speaker 2 But when, when you get bigger and bigger, when you get to the scale of countries and like the world, right? It's very hard to get people to cooperate. It's very, very hard.

Speaker 2 Everybody has different opinions. No one's going to agree.
Everybody's going to have different motives.

Speaker 2 And what an economy is, is a way of turning all of that, of organizing us at a global scale into something productive. And obviously, you know, the economy is not perfect.

Speaker 2 There are all kinds of problems we didn't even have the time to talk about today.

Speaker 2 But when it comes to dealing with issues of scarcity, like running out of some resource, markets are a tool that, you know, historically have kind of worked, even if it's been super messy and dramatic and swervy and may have created way bigger problems down the road.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that the economy is the answer right, but it does give me a little bit of hope that the economy finds a way most of the time, hopefully. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 Are we talking about a swerve away from resources? Or should we really be talking about a swerve away from a certain kind of thinking or a certain kind of economy or

Speaker 2 just thinking about growth in general?

Speaker 2 It's true, you're right, that an economy is a way to organize a globe, but like, but maybe we need to be acting more like a household

Speaker 2 because we only have this one house.

Speaker 2 If you can figure out a way to do that, they will give you a Nobel Prize like on the spot. I guarantee people.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you, Jeff. I don't know if you exactly chased away my existential dread, but I appreciate you sort of holding my hand through it.
It's all we have in the end, each other. That's right.

Speaker 2 That was my conversation with the ferociously curious and thoughtful Lativ Nasser over at Radiolab. We are huge fans of their podcast.

Speaker 2 They tackle all these big questions and little questions with so much joy and wonder. They just did an episode on other kinds of growth.
So like, can fingertips grow back?

Speaker 2 Or how do you grow the biggest pumpkin in the world?

Speaker 2 Though I gotta add, my favorite episode of theirs recently has to do with this weird quirk in the law where you can kind of plead guilty and not guilty at the same time.

Speaker 2 It's really weird, and it has to do with, spoiler, the economics of justice.

Speaker 2 Anyway, a big thanks to the Radiolab team, Pat Walters and Soren Wheeler, who edited and produced this conversation, Natalie Middleton, who fact-checked it.

Speaker 2 They're running a version of this episode in their feed. Our version was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Jang and Alex Goldmark.
And a special thanks to Jennifer Brandell. I'm Jeff Guo.

Speaker 2 This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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