creative destruction

Last year in a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering, Professor Rod Smith of Imperial College explained that a growth rate of three percent means economic activity doubles every 23 years.

At 10 percent it takes just seven years. This we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he shows that “each successive doubling period consumes as much resource as all the previous doubling periods combined.� In other words, if our economy grows at three percent between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs . Reading that paper I realized for the first time what we are up against.

Dave Oswald Mitchell, Briarpatch