The Story Behind Limits to Growth

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I have a confession to make. Even with a self-image as a world-weary cynic, I’m as vulnerable to manipulation as anyone else, especially for stories I grew up with.

The Limits to Growth came out the year I was born. I grew up in the US in the 80s. So we heard a lot of things like this:

So even though I’m late to it, I was delighted to have come across the work of Katy Shields, who presents (and co-produced with Vegard Beyer) a beautifully executed 3-episode audio documentary series about Limits to Growth, which makes its principal author Danella Meadows the main character.

Hearing Katy’s telling of the story of this extraordinary woman who tried to warn us against the future we now inhabit, often in her own words - thanks to an unpublished book outline by Danella to which Katy got exclusive access - made me a bit embarrassed to have previously accepted the bracketing of Limits to Growth in the same category of far more problematic stuff like Malthus, Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb or (the MAGA-right fave) Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints. Many such works seem not so troubled by population growth per se as much as the hue of the babies being produced.

While I’m not completely convinced by the arguments Meadows made and Katy Shields/Vegard Beyer excavated and made fresh, Katy does have an excellent series of essays where she takes forward the thinking of Meadows et al as a way to investigate how economics was hijacked by the opponents of Limits to Growth.

In this Conversation

00:00 Introduction: Questioning Growth

00:32 Meet the Guest: Katy Shields

02:21 Discovering 'Limits to Growth'

04:38 The Impact of Systems Dynamics

07:30 Critiques and Misunderstandings

09:37 Danella Meadows' Influence

11:23 Uncovering Unpublished Diaries

14:43 Life on Foundation Farm

18:51 Economic Theories and Climate Inaction

19:12 The Abundance vs. Scarcity Debate

20:08 Historical Influence on Modern Economics

21:41 The Chicago School's Dominance

23:26 Challenges in Modern Economic Education

28:54 Donella Meadows' Legacy

31:15 Visioning a Sustainable Future

34:34 Future Directions and Final Thoughts

At the top of the episode we clip a 1994 speech by Danella Meadows that is an extraordinary few minutes that seem to foreshadow the ‘abundance discourse’ currently all the rage on the centre-left.

Which is not actually to shame those who, I believe in good faith, believe that ‘perpetual growth’ is the only potential solution to the challenges of the mid-21st century.

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