This is Asher and I'm here with Jason and Rob guys, if you were to describe this podcast in five words or less, what would you say? I'm going to go with Wile E coyote guzzling gasoline. I'm thinking climate change, diarrhea, hurricane. Are you serious. Maybe I should do this thing on my own. Fine. It's a show about how to stay sane in a world where there's too many people consuming too much stuff and the planet can't take it anymore. You had me at diarrhea.
Yeah.
Caution. If you're allergic to four letter words, you might want to try a different podcast. You guys ever go to the monuments in Washington DC? They're awesome, right? You got the Washington monument, Lincoln Memorial, I all kinds of good stuff. I only go to the civil war confederate heroes' monuments. I saw, I saw Lincoln at night. It was pretty spectacular. Yeah. Well, 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 yeah, ecological economics. The first person you think of is Ronald. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, total environmentalist, right? Yeah. So, uh, it's actually an irony because the EPA is housed in that building poor EPA. 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 the relief of, of Ronald Reagan's head. Uh, it's kind of Nice cause just his head, maybe you got chopped off, but the other one is this quote of Ronald Reagan's, which was completely ironic given the conference that it was at. You want to, you want to know what this study said? Well, let's, let's hear it from Reagan's mouth here. Play this clip.
There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.
Okay, so repeat that for me. He said
there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams. Oh Geez.
I wanna punch Ronnie in the mouth. It's just so stupid. There are no limits, no limits to growth right now. Zero. Right? I can think of a few, but I don't know is that what we're going to get into. Like I, I'd like to it. What can you think of? What do you got? Oh my goodness. Your rabbits in Australia or whatever come on in. The world is full of problems when things grow too big. Um, I, I used to teach an ecology class, right?
And we would do this, uh, we would have did this simple exercise where I would have the students calculate how long it would take for a bacteria.
Um, humans are elephants to equal the mass of the earth, given like their intrinsic creative growth. You know, this bacteria can divide every 20 or 30 minutes and you know, in, in a day or two or three or something, it hits the mass of the planet Earth just from doubling every 20 or 30 something must be limiting those bacteria. Well, that's the thing is that, they always run into limits. So there, there are no limits. He's talking about humans okay, right? We're were exceptional, exceptional.
We have brains. I mean, I'm still growing, see, growing the right way, but I'm trying to shed a few pounds. I think you might be confusing developing and growing. Uh, but let's talk about that a little bit. Like what was Reagan talking about? He's talking about economic growth. And for our listeners out there, uh, they might want to, 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 GDP is just a measure of the dollar value of all the goods and services that get produced in an economy. So, uh, and 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. Usually both.
Yeah. Right now that's what we've been doing. Yeah, I've been doing both. Right. And I should mention that, uh, economic growth, it's, it's pitched as you want to grow a certain percentage every year. 3% is often though what's thrown out there. So that means exponential growth. Like you're, uh, you're, well, it's a divide three into 70, and that gives you the doubling time. Right? So, right. Let's stick on that for a sec because I, that's not a commonly known thing.
So you take that's the rule of film. You take 70 divided by the percentage of 3% of annual growth rate. Yeah. So that was 20 something, 22 years, 24 years, a 3 into 70. Yeah. Some way at 22 and a half years. Okay. Yeah, to double, to double. Right. So that means, okay, so if we had 3% growth every 20 plus years, the economy would double in size. Right. Which is incredible.
Think about, so imagine if we're trying to grow the world economy at 3% right now at 23 years to what it was like 2040, or whatever. We have double the double the consumption of resources that we do now. I don't think that's even possible anymore. Well then you, that's the problem with the whole exponential growth. 20 years beyond that, which is the four times it'd be four times. Right. It's insane. So, 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%. Yeah. For, yeah. For a clip, which is fucking crazy. That means that that means they double their economy in seven years. Can you imagine living through that? I mean people say China is nuts,
My son is a little over seven and he's grown more than, than twice the size. So there's an a quarterly achievable, well there's an appropriate period of growth.
Thankfully his exponential growth is going to slow down. Otherwise he'd be like that guy, uh, Robert Wadlow, you guys know him? Oh yeah. Yeah. You can make book of world records. Did He, is he still the top eight, eight foot 11 is he still the record holder. Do you know he couldn't even dunk a basketball Cause he like hit his elbow on it. Probably smash his forehead against the net.
You know, I remember, uh, I think every kid from our era was fascinated by the Guinness Book of World Records and he, that he was the page that you turn to first. He's just incredible to see this man who's eight foot 11. Yeah. What were your other favorite pages? The two fat twins or whatever. Dude with the massively long mustache, the fingernails that were really rolled up, those are sick. We all had to stay in favor of court.
You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger was in that, that version is like the most muscled man or something. Right? They do better now. All the steroids, the man who took the most steroids. Right. But getting back to Wadlow like that, that guy, 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? Cause you can't not notice this guy.
And so he started actually touring with Barnum and Bailey 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 know, you think about that you get a blister and you die.
That's what happens when continuous growth is, 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 you know, this person could continue to develop rather than continue to go.
It'd be tall enough that he could actually still make money off of his height.
Yeah, like seven foot seven foot one or is ideal. Right. For its center.
All right. What I'm interested in thinking about it a little bit is where did this fixation of growth even come from? Right. Like have, we've always been trying to grow our economies and growing population. Have we always grown them? And if you sort of look back at the historical record, you sort of realize that it hasn't necessarily been the, the goal of society and we've had periods of growth over time and then periods of contraction.
It wasn't really until, you know, the last relatively recent period in human history that we've just been growing and growing and growing. And it's amazing because it's like, it's so embedded in our consciousness, this idea of growth. You know, I remember this, um, I remember, uh, there's this, this scandal, supposed scandal that happened, I dunno a few years ago called climate gate.
You know, and they supposedly, there are some guys who were climate deniers and they hacked into the email of a climate scientist and um, and they basically, you know, said they found the smoking gun where there are communications and the development of these, these scientific reports that their writing where they claim that they were sort of conflating the numbers. You know what I mean? And it was like, ah, we got cha, you guys are faking this thing. This is not real.
And I remember Bill McKibben, who you know, he's a fellow at Post Carbon Institute and one of the founders of 350.org. Hes really well known as a climate activist and writer when that whole scandal happened and the timing of it was such that it was done right before this, you know, big international meeting to try to get action on climate and uh, you know, he made this comment like, look, there's been so much climate science done, so much study done that you're going to find inconsistencies.
You're going to find this stuff. You know, cause there are mounds and mounds and piles of paper, that could fill a room, right? So you could cherry pick whatever you want. And I was thinking about that because there is nothing, you go into a room that says we can grow the economy forever or population forever on this finite planet. You go into a room and there's like no data to support that at all. But we, we just walk around taking it for granted. Like it's like, uh, like gravity or some other.
Physical law. That's the problem, right? It's, it's wishful thinking. I mean there were, you talked about going back in history, there was a time where growing the economy probably did help with progress, right? That you could have more people working together to solve some problem that we had, but it's not always the case. And we, we just ran with it.
You know, like at some point in history you said, okay, yeah, growth and progress seemed to be going hand in hand, therefore growth forever must be the way to go. And then it's like your kid who's seven or eight can grow for awhile. Growth and progress goes together, but at some point it tapers off and they reach adulthood. Right? But then, then you get these magical statements from, from the Reagans, right. There are no limits to growth. He, he sounds like a Disney character.
You know what's interesting is that if you think culturally, Reagan followed Carter, right. And what was going on with Carter, you know, and that administration
Carter was coming in. Well, first of all, you know, Carter I think was coming in after a period of, I would say maybe the pinnacle of environmental awareness sort of in this country.
And he wasn't necessarily, you'd like the environmental president, although it was something that he was concerned about, but he was dealing with a lot of economic issues and there was concern about energy shortages, you know, and, um, so he was, I think trying to remember, he, he's, he, uh, reduced the speed limit on highways. Right? I'd never do that fucker. God, yeah. You want to guarantee yourself a short, short, political career.
But he tried to speak very honestly about the situation. That was number one though. I have to stay. You want to get booted out office. It's just lower like asleep, lower the speed limit and tell the truth. Right. Two things you should never do. There's a reason none of us ever made it onto our, uh, student council.
But you know, we, I mean, you, you touched on this Rob, like I think that our sort of economic thinking, or it's, they call it the dismal science is not as science, but the, the, the, the field of economics grew up and matured and a period where we actually had pretty remarkable growth. Because of oil. Right?
Well, really, yeah, it's driven by energy and this abundance of like the short term abundance of a, of a supply of magical energy that we're able to harness and turn that into consumption of resources and get people to buy shit. And, and so they, you're born into that just like someone who's born into wealth and they feel like they earned it, you know, like they're born into that. And I think it's some sort of feel like that is normal. Right?
So, so it kinda makes sense that we might think, oh, well not only has this work so far, it's going to continue to work, you know, sort of indefinitely in the future.
It pisses me off. It's like, okay. I think it's the problem of scale, like you're saying during the development of economics of economic theories. Okay. Which, 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. Like I remember watching, I can Mark McGuire hit a home run in Cardinal Stadium, right? 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, you know, second off his bat, you would think there would new limits. Yeah, that ball is still in orbit, isn't it? In orbit. But that's the thing it's scale. in a whole big bag of steroids as well. Exactly. But there's no, 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 it's a very ability to grow and they're just different scales of, of, of the, of change here you're just talking crazy. You know where Reagan got a lot of this stuff from was from a a business professor named Julian Simon. Cause you guys remember that dog, whatever, whatever Simon says we do, this is going to hurt. So 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 we're just the greatest. Uh,
well, remember Reagan said there are no limits to human innovation.
That's right. Well, yeah, growth and progress. So in this book that Julian Simon wrote, the ultimate, the ultimate resource, he had this quote where he said, we have in our hands now, well, actually, uh, in our libraries, the technology to feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever growing population for the next 7 billion years. Now, I don't, 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 7 million years.
So did he ever take high school math. I don't know. But, but then the, uh, 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 7 million,
by the way 1% a year would be a disappointment to most economists and politicians, right?
Yeah. So he did this way back in 1998 and uh, 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. The universe is huge. I mean, he said it would only take, it would only take 17,000 years to get to the number of atoms in the universe, not 7 million, let alone 7 billion. Right, right. And this is the kind of stuff that Reagan based Julian Simon maybe wasn't so great on math like me.
But here's the thing though here's the thing These are the people who we elect, who he put in charge of policy. I mean, does anyone nowadays really have full faith and confidence in elected officials and policy makers? I mean, in 2018. Oh 100% you're always right. What kind of question is that, but you know, you want to be in 2018 of course you can be in the year 18. Um, I don't know. I'm just flabbergasted by this. Well, okay, so a little bit of a saving grace.
There are some economists and other kinds of professors who actually took a physics class who knows something about energy and they've, uh, they're actually saying, we need to change. We need to prepare for a post growth society.
Yeah. I mean there's, there's people doing it now. There was a recent meeting that happened in, in, in Brussels, right. Where there, what 238 economists who all signed on to basically say, academics not all economists, not all of them. Um, and they, they basically called for, you know, getting rid of GDP as a measurement of our, of our wellbeing. Right. We need to, we need to track and measure
different things. Pursuing GDP at all costs, GDP growth at all costs is destroying us and the planet. I think one of them was Dan O'Neill who Rob knows pretty well, wrote a book with him. Yeah. Yeah. Dan was the, I think he was the lead on that. And yeah, I worked real closely with Dan right in the book, Enough is Enough. So, uh, yeah, most of what I learned, I learned from him, you know, because I don't know anything.
Well, I hate to be a cynic about this, but like this is not new and no offense Rob, the book that you and Dan wrote wasn't necessarily, you know, completely virgin territory. No, no, no. It was not, in fact, it was not at all. Um, our own thinking and we just rated stuff that's been around for a long time. What came out in 1972 does anyone remember? I did. I came out of my mother's father 1972. We don't, we don't really want to hear about 1972 limits to growth. Right, right.
So for those listening who aren't familiar with this, limits to growth was a study that was done by these MIT researchers. They're contracted by a group called the Club of Rome to basically try to answer this question of like, if, if you sort of extrapolated the trajectory we're on, you know, what would happen. And they, I think they actually developed the first computer model, um, at least that I'm aware of.
And they kind of plugged in this data, you know, 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? Yeah. And even if they tweak certain things, you know, you certain you at a certain point run up against your limit, the limits of being able to continue to grow and um, and their standard run scenario, we're kind of tracking that.
You know they updated it in 1992 and then I think there was another publication in 2004 and in the last few years another research group kind of like looked at it again and said, Gosh, they're on this sort of business as usual trajectory that was done in '72. You know, I think there are two things that are fascinating about, I mean, one is that they were systems analysts.
They actually looked at feedback, they looked at the connections between what was going on in the economy and what happens in the environment, which is something you don't get when you're in a standard economics course or all of your training as an economist. It's new or not you, you had a major in accounting or economics, right? Yeah. I don't recall ever touching the limits to growth in any conversation. Uh, I don't know. Somehow I got past that, but good job.
But the other thing that's amazing about it is the, the assassination job that was done on that whole, on the limits to growth on the people that worked on it. Carter, Jimmy Carter, he was a proponent of what was in there. It was a very much a, an orchestrated,
we got to take these people down so that we can keep growing the economy because that's what we are. That's what we're all about. And I think we have to, you know, be interesting to talk to people who kind of lived through that moment. You know, we're all born around that time, but, uh, we were still developing and growing ourselves at that time. I said there were no limits to what you said because you didn't want to have to go to bed. Right. There are no limits. Elmo told me.
But you know, they, um, there's this period in the early seventies where, you know, environmental movement really, I think they learned from the civil rights movement. They stepped up and they were demanding action on protecting the environment, protecting watersheds and forests and all those things. And you know, the first Earth Day, right, was that 1970.
I mean, they had like 10 million people marching in the street, which I don't know what the the population in the United States was at the time, but it was 4 million. It's pretty amazing. There's a lot of pollution created by all those 6 million people coming in for, to participate in the marching. Um, so, uh, but it was a significant percentage of the population. People were mobilized on this stuff. Right. And then limits to growth comes out and population bomb comes out.
You know, there's a lot of conversations. Silent Spring was before that. That was a huge conversation about sort of the, hey, they're actually are limits to us dumping our waste and you know, into our rivers and, and uh, and there's a real impact on the environment from our behavior. This is before I think climate change even was like Nixon signed the EPA. I mean Nixon in some ways was the most progressive you actually look at at, at policy. That was tons of things came in around that time.
Clean Water Act, the Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act. It was like the golden age of putting in check the, but then there's a reaction row that, right. So the reaction that is attacking the, the authors of limits to growth. I remember I asked my dad, who you know, was born in 45 is a baby boomer, a part of that whole generation. And I asked him, you know, had he ever heard of this thing and I mentioned Club of Rome, it's like, oh yeah, those guys, they were discredited.
I've heard that even from like academic biologists. I mean, if you haven't read it necessarily and you've just heard the, the story around it, you think, oh, I'm not going to bother with that. I mean the the propaganda is incredible. You read it and you go, uh, yeah, no doubt reasonable. Right? And yet there is an aura around it that was wrong. And that's why I find absolutely fascinating that that was able to be able to create that. And it's, and it's persisted, right?
So we, so it's fantastic that there's this, this group of academics, you know, that are demanding thinking differently about what our economic goals are. Of course it's in Europe, you know, so in here, in the United, that's a much harder sell here in the good old US of A, but this is, you know, 45 years after the publication of limits to growth, you know, came out. And I don't know that we've gone much further in terms of people's understanding, or questioning of these things.
And I think part of it is, and this is what Julian Simon was doing it, I think what Reagan was talking about, he was talking progress. But I think a lot of people point to human ingenuity or innovation, you know, and they say that there aren't limits to that. Right? And so Wilson Mau figure out a way to deal with these physical limits. You know, we're going to get more efficient and we're going to substitute resources. If we, if we deplete one resource, we'll get another one.
Well, so the limits to growth modeled all of that, they were, they said, what if we got more efficient? What if we substituted one, if we had technical innovation that allows it to blah, blah, blah, everything you're talking about, they thought about in 72 and they said, let's throw that into the computer.
Even most environmentalists don't really understand the exponential now the function function. And so they think that substitution is totally achievable.
Well what I think is going on, it's that in some ways, okay, that there's actually the structural lock in an imperative for growth in the systems that we have in place and somehow in, unless you can, unless you can accept that there's a structural barrier and that you can't, you have to get around those somehow you won't move. I, that's why I think these European folks are going to probably try to talk about the, Rob, you're, you're better at this, you wrote it.
You wrote a book that dealt with this to some extent, so I think you're exactly right. Like 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, 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, there's things about our economy that have to have that growth.
One example is that our, all of our money is created as debt. Which with interest. Yeah. Basically banks issue money into the economy expecting to be paid more later principal and interest. Right. So it, you have to have growth in order to have that money supply increase. Uh, there's other things too. There's um, this whole notion a lot of us have of, we can get something for nothing.
Uh, like 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, although retirement funds are depending on that exact
issue right there. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if the psychology so much 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 know, you work your ass off for decades. Right. And you don't necessarily get compensated well enough that if you, you know, saved and squirreled away your money without it growing that you could live off of it. You know, when retired. That's a convenience though of those.
You can keep wages down if people are expecting, they're going to be able to invest in say, and that's a structural thing. It has to do with the fact that that the wealth and wealth generation isn't distributed equally, right?
So people can can work a shitty job if they get, the company sets up a 401k for them and they stick their money or they have a pension and we don't have 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.
But that's a, that's a structure of the economy right now that we're all invested in. Right, because you, you, if you put money into a mutual fund or stocks or some kind of retirement account and you're expecting that to grow exponentially, I mean, what, something like 8% a year averaged out is what the stock market has grown at. So,
well they, they say, but if it's actually hasn't really performed that well, you know, historically over, over long term. But
I buy low and sell high though. You do. Yeah. Yeah. How many do you gotta teach me your tricks? I'd do the opposite. You do not teach me Richard Wright and I worked for a nonprofit to you. You are real smart. Well then I think there's legal stuff like that. Like if you're, if you're, uh, if you're a corporate executive, right? You have legal imperatives for, for profit and there's a lot of pressure from, from, you know, the public markets to keep expanding, to keep growing your share. Exactly.
That's the only way you're going to get it, right.
Equity for people because they think they're going to be able to grow that equity. Right,
right, right. Well, and you can see how that plays out among corporations that were, that were originally built for social purposes or, or you know, that, that had environmental or, or socially conscientious things built into their structure. Most of those companies end up getting bought, you know, like a Ben and Jerry's got bought by Unilever or Whole Foods, which was on a crazy growth path anyway, ends up getting bought by Amazon. Right. Or, um,
and if you're in the public market, you could just get hostile takeover.
Yeah. You know what my favorite was? You know, that, uh, that outfit Burt's Bees, you know, they're sort of like natural trolling. They got bought by Clorox I think those bees are now very sad right there. Chlorinated bees. Yeah. Well, is there any penetration like in terms of the context of policy makers and an economists, politicians to the idea that we can't keep growing the economy forever? I do see, I mean, they're signed with these academics in Europe. It's very fringe still.
I mean, this is, so let's, let's talk about the mainstream again. You know, we're, we're going back to the mid eighties, uh, you know, the time of leg warmers and feathered hair. Wonderful time wonderful time. Yeah, don't start singing Cyndi Lauper songs. Okay, let's go, you know, fast forward to now the head of the Secretary General of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
That's the OECD uh, one of the, you know, kind of prestigious along with the World Bank and, and your, your, uh, federal, uh, banks of the nations. This is, this is one of your big, the major developed nations in the world are members. Yeah. And the, and this is all about how do we progress or grow economically together. Right? So, so the secretary of general Secretary General of that group, the OECD recently said, we believe that it is 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. Oh my God. I like, first of all the, the, the guy says, our bottom line is, so there he goes with the financial spreadsheet. analogy. I think the keyword there is must, right? He feels the must. He feels the structural and hoping that can, when you look one side of that is green, meaning that we don't a warm our climate to the point that we go extinct. That's based on physics.
That's a, that's how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere. There's nothing to say about that. It's so, and by the way, there are limits to those things. Yes. So, uh, the other side is we must have growth. Why? Because we want it, you know, he's looking at like I have that he's like a demographic information.
Like there, there are so many people who are going to retire in this timeframe and they're going to require a pension system and, and we're going to have to have replace of infrastructure as a government around the world. So we're going to require to have this much available to, to fix roads and bridges. And I mean, they're just looking at this, I mean I think they're looking at these things saying, well they don't have, they don't have a clue of how to do it without growth is a problem.
Every institution needs it. I mean the government needs it because they need an increased revenues from taxes and those, those increased taxes are only going to come from increased growth and income.
Well, this is the point is that we've got to figure that out, right? We've got to figure out how to have an economy that does not require growth, because to say we are, we have to have both green and growth is just fantasy. It's fantasy. So the problem is then if you're stuck on the growth, you can't actually think past it
at all. Yeah. You know what I, what I, what I think it is is actually taking Reagan's statement, right? And he said there are no limits to growth or human progress, right? And if you actually split those apart, he conflated them. Right. And I think that that's been our general policy and our attitude for decades on end. And we've actually embedded that in our institution
except for RFK who said we shouldn't be a following GDP. We know what happened to, he was an outlier. Right? And
he didn't last very long. Um, so, so, you know, those two things have been conflated, progress and growth, right? We see them as interchangeable, synonymous, you know, uh, mutually dependent, whatever you want to say. Right. And I actually think it's the opposite. I, at this point, despite whatever the, the, uh, OECD guy wants to say, um,
is it OECD or OCD?
I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with my growth. Um, that, uh, w despite all that we've actually hit the limits. We're seeing that we're seeing that. And in fact, if you look at economic growth, we've seen that it's taking an incredible amount of intervention into the economic system to try to grow it. And it's not been benefiting everybody, right? So on a string, that system itself is wobbly, right? At best.
And, and then clearly the plan is trying to tell us, whoa, you know, you're going to continue on this path. You're going to get bitch slapped pretty hard, right? 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 inhibiting our problem, just like, you know, what's the, what's the eight foot 11 guy, Robert, Robert Wadlow, right? Growth was inhibiting his progress, right?
So if we could let that go, I know that sounds Kumbaya because we actually have to take that attitude and then 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.
That is clearly the first thing. I agree. That's the first thing has 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 the sending innovation can take off. That's the crazy thing. I want people to be innovative within limits 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. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to be innovative when you're dead.
I remember there was, I heard about the study where they looked at behavior of children in terms of how they explored the world when if they're there or backyard was fenced in or not fenced in. Right okay. So like maybe the, these were farm kids or whatever in their backyard, went out into farms. It's a little similar to your property here, Jason will read, right? But you actually have a fence.
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. That's where, you know, because for them in a sense, having a boundary allowed them to feel like they could explore, you know, and it, to your point, I think Jason, that if we said, okay, well let's, let's sort of be creative within these limits, right?
You know, we, we've got a cap CO2 emissions, we've got a cap economic activity, you know, what do we do with that? You know, and, and it changes the ballgame. And it does provide a huge opportunity for thinking more innovatively about how we tackle things. And
one opportunity that, 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 a real prominent economist head of the US Central Bank. He, 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, you know, so, well, guess what, you know that 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. You know, that one of these innovations we could really work toward if we agree that, that there are limits to growth. Yeah. Anymore.
Well, it makes me think of what you had said about Robert Robert Kennedy, right. That was in '68, you know, you're saying, uh, what was the co the GDP measures everything except that which is
now, which makes life worthwhile or worth living. Yeah.
Um, and, and I would say in terms of the things that we need, we do need politicians that are going to be brave. You know, they all obviously have to be educated by this thing because they'd been steeped like every, I can, you know, a 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. You know?
Well that brings us right back to Carter and Reagan. Carter was a nuclear physicist and a peanut farmer. Okay boy. So he certainly understood some things about science and some things about the way the natural world works and what was Reagan an actor. He certainly understood, make believe. Yeah,
exactly. Yeah. So we I think have a lot of in a sense power in terms of deciding, you know, who is going to represent us. And, and the other thing I would say to people is to consider, and this is really hard, right? Cause we're all locked in the system too. So just to tell people, this is kind of like Gulp. Think about what you're doing with your money. You know, if we need to shift this trajectory, maybe don't think about trying to maximize you know, your investments within the stock market.
There's probably good reasons to, to be a little skeptical that any in any case in terms of protecting your assets, but why don't you put that money to work in a way that's going to provide you benefits long term and immediate ones. You know that may not be monetary, but that puts you in a position where you can actually progress and thrive and be happy in the future.
Either that or go on Amazon and buy as much plastic shit as you can. One of the two, I don't know. Yeah, you'll jump. You make the choice. Definitely
get a nice buzz when you, when you get that ball.
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