** 23rd book of 2021: Nothing Lasts Forever **

Humans are terrible at anything other than linear thinking. Our collective inability to understand the difference between linear and exponential growth during COVID shows even with life hanging in the balance, we choose wrong. In academia, exponential growth becomes dogma, where constraints are ignored and experts create trend-lines so divorced from reality that they can be “dismissed as meaningless mechanical calculations”. As Smil quotes: *Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical on a physically limited planet is either mad, or an economist. *

Growth is a book about the path of complex, self-replicating phenomena through time. Smil spends the first chapter describing growth: simple mathematical functions such as linear, exponential, or logarithmic growth, and more importantly the ∫-shaped (s-shaped) functions such as the Gompertz curve or symmetric logarithmic curve that model both starting conditions where progress is difficult and final conditions where progress is constrained. What each of these functions shares is a long rampup, a period of intense growth, followed by a long decay in growth rate towards some maximum asymptote.

If this math feels dry, then stock up on water because the next chapters are a trek through a Sahara desert of trivia and turbines. (Similar content is much better captured in Smil’s own Energy and Civilization). Luckily, by the time Smil returns to sociological phenomena such as cities, empires, and economies, there is a reward to justify the trek.

By painstakingly charting s-curves through natural and biological phenomena, Smil can make the argument about the inevitability of decaying growth. In economics, Smil goes right for the jugular:

Their search for the cause of economic growth can be divided into proximate causes and ultimate reasons, but neither approach has all the answers, Their traditional explanations have been indefensibly narrow as they have focused on just a few proximate causes. The neoclassical version of growth theory is a perfect example of this reductionism.

Like bacteria, or any living organism in a finite system, humanity, and thus human economy goes a slow start, into a phase of growth, and to an inevitable plateau as unavoidable constraints overwhelm otherwise available resources. When it comes to the energy consumption of modern high-energy civilization, there is a limit to the capacity of our system.

All of these long lasting trends will have to end, deliberately on involuntarily. There is no possibility that we will be saved by a singularity or an early terraforming of mars. Such fictions make great news headlines but are worthless for dealing with civilizational challenges.

In the last century, wild animal biomass has halved, and the 6th extinction is already well under way. Smil doesn’t predict the limit precisely, but in the next century, humanity will start to face the carrying capacity of the planet, and to Smil degrowth is likely the only long term solution. Overall ‘Growth’ is the least enjoyable 4-star book I’ve read, yet paints a simple, compelling narrative of modernity and the future of humanity as just another complex, self-replicating, and eventually capped phenomena.

If you don’t want to read the book, just read this paragraph instead: “Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago.”