Set The Controls...

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Two things: first, the other day, I was listening to a Radio Four dramatisation about the 1972 report " The Limits To Growth", how it came about and how for at least thirty years its findings were poo-pooed into obscurity by the economic establishment. The other is the news that the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, has gone into full banzai mode over oil and gas production in the North Sea, threatening - should her ailing party of ineffectual no-marks ever get near power again - to rip up every climate control agreement made in the last twenty years and drag us back into the nineteenth century.

The first points out a very salient - and to be frank, blindingly obvious - concept: that unlimited growth is impossible in a finite system. I mean, for chrissakes, the basic arithmetic is not difficult: what is finite is finite, after all. I know the arguments are far more nuanced than that bald statement, but at the end of the day, finite is just what it says on the tin. As to Badenoch; politically, her pronouncements are akin to tomb-stoning into a tar pit and expecting to emerge all shiny and new. All I can say is, carry on digging: make your idiotic party and its ideas unelectable in perpetuity. However, no-one seems willing to grasp the nettle of the prevailing economic theory that threatens to lay waste to the world and simply listen to common sense.

Money is money: all currencies now are fiat: there is no bullion standard, and so money is not a finite resource, unlike the natural world. Currencies can be made, unmade, controlled and manipulated. Currency and its balancing force, taxation, are both within the remit of governments to control at will. The environment on the other hand, is finite, fragile and needs care and nurturing on our part, otherwise we and our economies along with us, will simply cease to exist. The power to do things properly lies squarely with us: if we don't exercise that power and admit that the economy and markets are malleable and not immutable, then were are in deep shit...

Comments

  1. Anonymous3 September 2025 at 13:20

    First: Finite and Infinity are concepts and do not fit into simple Arithmetic; ask Bernoulli
    Second: I coined FinitePlanet many years ago; which encompasses all that R4 was on about
    Dancing on the head of a pin comes to mind in your recent discourses mate
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sideways3 September 2025 at 13:38

      The BBC drama was about an actual report produced in 1972, not an op ed piece on behalf of the Beeb. The report is updated every few years. Finite is a simple concept in and of itself: you have a number or quantity of something: it's de facto finite. Use more than that number or quantity and you've run out. Economists and politicians, for the last fifty years at least, have put unlimited [ergo, tending towards infinity] growth at the centre of their policies as the sole arbiter of the health of the economy, in direct contradiction to the actuality of the real world issues of supply and demand. My point above is simply that. I have no angels and if I had, I would avoid pinhead-dancing ones!

      Delete

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