Adam Rome revisits five prescient classics that first made sustainability a public issue in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Rome, A. Sustainability: The launch of Spaceship Earth. Nature 527, 443–445 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/527443a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/527443a
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Hiro Kawabata
Rather, what these five books do demonstrate is that the track record of experts in predicting the future is no better than that of back page psychics:
https://reason.com/archives...
tl;dr:
http://www.ihatethemedia.co...
Cory Cutsail
@Hiro, the author of the piece you just linked makes his fair share of nonsense arguments, but the one that stood out to me the most was that "lower prices mean that things are becoming more abundant, not less." (Page 2, Paragraph 8) This shows a tenuous grasp on the underlying economics – supply shocks are not the only cause of price fluctuations. He is making an argument about prices of metals and minerals in a time when the demand for these things has fallen substantially in response to the availability of synthetic alternatives. I'll openly acknowledge that the functional forms in the model presented in "The Limits to Growth" are suspect at best, but I'll take a poorly composed mathematical model that can be worked with over qualitative arguments rooted in pseudo-economics any day of the week.