this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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That articles always mention the economic models will cause catastrophic disasters since they are based on infinite growth. But economics models are notoriously bad. They can never perfect a recession and predictions are almost never hit. So why would this be any different. We will get by but maybe just in a different way
Economic models are bad at predicting the exact time of a recession, but basically all economist can agree that we will have a recession in the future. We had enough of them in the past.
However the point in the article is that we live on a planet with limited resources and resource consumption and the size of the economy are linked. So the idea is that we run out of resources. A good example of that is climate change. We have a limited somewhat save carbon budget and are on the edge of moving past it. This is why we see a massive heat wave in India right now, for example. That heat wave is really bad for the economy. This is one of the ways civilizations have collapsed in the past.
Also I'd like to add: if the maths behind economic models have yet to be perfected (and are inadequate), we can still look to historical examples as models for collapses from resource shocks. Some good examples include the Late Bronze Age (likely drought), Mayan (drought from warming), Khmer (drought), Ming (drought from cooling), which are all climate/resource related. Food has been the primary energy resource besides wood (which has also led to collapses), but nowadays oil might hold that title. I do think it's possible that we may get by in a different way, but that's only because there's others things we still missed out on our better models (new invention, alien contact, nuclear physics breakthrough, divine intervention, nature of reality revelation, etc.)