* The “Limits to Growth” debate that began in the early 1970s remains unresolved half-a-century on.
* The argument that we will “run out of resources” and/or “die from pollution” is simplistic.
* The counter-argument that “technology will save us” is equally simplistic.
* True limits to growth are likely to be an unstable function of:
a) resource limits as noted
b) instabilities generated by economic and political inequalities that necessarily accompany output growth
c) instabilities and disutilities generated by new hyper-technologies necessary to sustain output growth
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Publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 kicked off a contentious debate that to this day remains unresolved. It's difficult to imagine a world in which economic growth continues forever, yet it's equally difficult to imagine a world in which economic growth has forever come to an end.
The question of limits to growth has profound implications for the question of economic justice. So long as economic growth continues we can reduce economic inequality without requiring that upper income sectors experience any significant income decline. But in a zero growth world the most well-off will have to do with quite a lot less if the less well-off are to do even just a little bit better.
At regular intervals scholars and pundits look back at The Limits to Growth and offer assessments. With few exceptions those sympathetic to Limits find that the historical record is vindicating its claims while those who are unsympathetic find that the historical record is conclusively refuting them. Scholars sympathetic to Limits regularly generate new studies documenting how ever closer we are to transgressing hugely consequential biogeophysical limits while their opponents just as regularly invoke the unlimited potential of technological innovation to transcend those limits and, in fact, "leave us better off than if the problem had never existed." For a topic of such great import there has been remarkably little independent, rigorous theoretical or empirical study. Why is this, and what might a full and frank review of current thinking and research on the topic reveal?
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For more see the Working Paper Expanded Outline Sections II and III, Discussion Notes 10-18, 30, 43-46, 57-60, 67, 84-91 and 109-112, and Attachments B.4, E.1, and G.2. See also Background Materials Section II.A.