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Comment by jbond23 | Hacker News Reader

The future doesn't stop at 2100. There are people being born now who will see it. We are starting to badly need some narratives for the 22nd Century and beyond.

As for Pinker; the techno-optimists don't seem to get that the Limits to Growth forecasts predicted substantial exponential growth. The huge success and progress we've seen and celebrated by them doesn't invalidate LtoG. The lesson is not that they didn't or can't happen. It's that they can't continue for ever and will inevitably result in over-reach, peak and crash. And that's the part that Pinker et al won't accept. They're attempting to portray and an unlimited rosy future without really looking at all the implications.

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> doesn't invalidate LtoG

Yes it does. There is no limit to growth. Its an absurd notion. As long as we can produce more energy, there is absolute no limit to growth.

We have gigantic amounts of energy resources left. The Uranium and Thorium in the world alone could power all human energy need for 1000s of years with current technology. We have HUGE amounts of coal left, not to mention gas and oil. The sun is putting out huge amount of energy that we can use. That is all without considering things like space resources or fusion.

We already have the technology needed for unlimited amount of growth.

The same is true for everything else, we have enough land and food. Humans actually use less land over time. We easily have the ability to produce huge amounts of food and we can absolutely supply a massively growing population. We produce so much food that Brazil and US run whole fleets of cars with ethanol. There is large potential for GMO to increase yields. If you want to take it to the next level you can do true factory farming, the only reason we don't is because land is still so cheap.

After 200 years of people predicting limits to growth and population we should finally figure out that this whole narrative is simply wrong. Economists like Julian Simon spent their whole live showing this is true.

Thats a bit of a straw man. Most people even Pinker would agree that there are limits to growth they just don't agree that we are currently at the limit.

Julian Simon. Herman Kahn. John Maddox. William Nordhaus. Thomas Piketty. Paul Krugman. Milton Friedman. Christine Lagarde. M.A. Adleman. Robert Rubin. Robert Bryce. Stewart Brand. Ray Kurzweil. Michael Lynch. Robert L. Bradley. Peter Huber.

Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976, also awarded the National Medal of Science (1988), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988), and the John Bates Clark Medal (1951)), in "The Energy Crisis: A Humane Solution", 1977:

You will all recall ["Limits to Growth"] was a report in which engineers were saying we have finite resources -- a finite amount of coal, a finite amount of space, and so on and so on; things grow at exponential rates, and so long as things grow at exponential rates they are ultimately going to become infinite; and since resources, are finite, we're going to bump into it and therefore we are faced with a terrible future in which sooner or later we are going to run out, of steel or coal or whatever you want to name. We're going to run out, and we really have to adjust our sights; we can no longer take the view that we can have growth forever; we must recognize that there are, in their title, limits to growth and reconcile ourselves....

Now this approach, whether adopted by the Club of Rome or by Mr. Schumacher or by the CED, is completely wrong. The plain fact is that from an economic point of view the volume of resources available to us is larger today than it has ever been in history. We are less dependent today on natural resources than we have ever been.

http://0055d26.netsolhost.com/friedman/pdfs/other_commentary...

(I've made a small hobby of collecting all the action figures: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...)

"The plain fact is that from an economic point of view"

Thats a different discussion than the one I read the parent talking about.

You're welcome to read Friedman's remarks in full to see that, as I understand your comments, it isn't.

Or a peer comment to yours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16930843

https://web.archive.org/web/20180426113749/https://news.ycom...

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