Sustainability

aje on December 7, 2023

⭐ Required readings:

Lecture handout: Sustainability

Here’s how to visit the grave of J.B. Say. Here is a photo from a book written by Richard Cantillon, published in 1755, which uses the word “entrepreneur”.

Here is the Outdoor Boys video about building a snow shelter:

 

Here is the Bushradical video about building a log cabin in the woods:

Here is a video on poverty being a lack of cash, not a character trait:

Here’s a nice visual showing different carbon pricing initiatives:

After the collapse of communism there was a well-known problem within the environmental movement,

“Creating Green parties in much of Eastern Europe was a uniquely difficult process, in large part because of “melons” and “cucumbers” (melons are green on the outside but red inside; cucumbers are green all the way through” (Feffer, J., 1999, Shock Waves, p.171)

In October 2025 Nature published the following article:

It’s really quite remarkable that the world’s most prestigious scientific journal published what is little more than a consultanty op-ed.

Here is a TedX talk about the doughnut model:

Some spinning donuts (you see! it is meant to be measured after all!):

Here is a savage review:

  • Andrew Lilico: ‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth, June 24th 2024 – including this zinger: “I can safely say I have never hated a book more than this one… It makes assertion after assertion about economics that is simply false, and even if the initial assertion were true, what is done with that assertion would still be wrong… We don’t need to reinvent economics. We just need to understand it properly and apply it correctly and with imagination. Unfortunately, reading this book will not help you to achieve any of that.”

And here is an academic review:

Degrowth

Recently there has been increased attention to the concept of “degrowth”.  I’m not convinced.

  • Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help, Nature, December 12th 2022 – the authors claim that economic growth is based on production for its own sake and the necessary depletion of natural resources required to fuel it. But this is a fundamental misconception of economics, which is about increasing utility (i.e. people’s subjective judgment of what improves the quality of their life) in the most efficient way possible. As Sam Bowman said, economic growth is about “innovations that use fewer resources & less labour to produce more wellbeing – the [exact] thing the blurb says we should do”.
  • Degrowth and the Monkey’s paw, by Stian Westlake, Works in Progress, May 15th 2023 – Stian Westlake points out that “the UK has been remarkably successful in weaning itself off its growth addiction. I’m surprised that supporters of degrowth don’t celebrate these charts more.”
  • Ivan Savin, Jeroen van den Bergh, 2024, “Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?“, Ecological Economics, Volume 226 – the authors provide a comprehensive survey of 561 articles from the degrowth literature. It found that: “the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; few studies use… data… most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice… various studies represent a “reverse causality” confusion, i.e. use the term degrowth not for a deliberate strategy but to denote economic decline (in GDP terms) resulting from exogenous factors or public policies; [and] few studies adopt a system-wide perspective – instead most focus on small, local cases without a clear implication for the economy as a whole.”

I also recommend the following:

Depopulation

Paul Erlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ warned that we would be unable to feed a growing global population and that the solution was to reduce birthrates. He said “we can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out”. Suggested methods included adding sterlients to the food supply (see Ritchie 2024, p.155). That didn’t happen, but fears about overpopulation were so influential it led to the sterilisation of 8 million Indian men. And yet as of January 2023 Paul Erlich was still receiving media coverage when warning about unsustainable growth. Note:

As the lecture argues, we are more than capable of providing good living standards for the population. And if you are worried about exponential population growth then don’t be. Population growth has fallen from over 2% in the 1960s to 0.8% by 2022. We have now passed “peak child”, with the highest number of children peaking in 2017. The global population is expected to stabilise at 11bn. It turns out that when you are successful at reducing poverty people tend to have fewer children. We have sufficient natural resources as well as the socio-economic system necessary to support a thriving global population. Like John Lennon, we do not need to be concerned about overpopulation:

Recommended books

  • Ridley, M., 2011, The Rational Optimist, Fourth Estate
  • Munger, M., 2019, Is Capitalism sustainable?, American Institute for Economic Research
  • Rosling, H., 2018, Factfulness, Sceptre
  • Tupy, M.L., and Pooley, G.L., 2023, Superabundance, Cato Institute
  • Ritchie, H., 2024, Not the end of the world, Chatto & Windus
Lecture handout: Sustainability Survey

Recommended podcasts

Learning Objectives: This session considers whether infinite growth is possible on a planet with finite natural resources.

Spotlight on sustainability: Doh!