Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

Nature today revisits the publication fifty years ago of The Limits to Growth by the System Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The journal (then) referred to is as another whiff of doomsday.

Zoologist Solly Zuckerman, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said: “Whatever computers may say about the future, there is nothing in the past which gives any credence whatever to the view that human ingenuity cannot in time circumvent material human difficulties.”

Which is surely akin to saying, there is nothing in the past to suggest we are already extinct. As for computers, there are three branches of science: theory, experiment, and computation. The song goes:

You’re obsolete, my baby

My poor old fashioned baby

I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

Well, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

Yes you are left out, out of there without a doubt

‘Cause baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

(Rolling Stones)

A pivot

Russia’s war will remake the world | Financial Times Martin Wolff.

A new world is being born. The hope for peaceful relations is fading. Instead, we have Russia’s war on Ukraine, threats of nuclear Armageddon, a mobilised west, an alliance of autocracies, unprecedented economic sanctions and a huge energy and food shock. No one knows what will happen. But we do know this looks to be a disaster.

And you thought it was just the Russians who spoke like this?

Augar response: ‘highest earners benefit’ in student loan revamp | Times Higher Education (THE)

The DfE also said ministers would be announcing “almost £900 million of new investment in our fantastic HE system over the next three years”, including “£300 million of recurrent funding and a total of £450 million in capital funding over the next three years to support high quality teaching and new state of the art facilities, which we will ask the Office for Students (OfS) to distribute through the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG).

“This funding will be used to drive up provision that the nation needs, including science and engineering courses, courses to support the NHS, and shorter degree alternatives focused on developing the right skills for our dynamic economy. [emphases mine]

Fan-bloody-tastic

But they are my own failures

Is the age of ambition over? | Financial Times

Here’s the second thing I learnt: it’s still better to be disappointed by your own dreams than shaped by the dreams of others. Patrick Freyne

Was my own research philosophy. I would rather my own less-than-perfect experiments than be a cog.

Very good article by Clare Gerada. Julian Tudor-Hart must be turning over in his grave.

‘In my 30 years as a GP, the profession has been horribly eroded’ | GPs | The Guardian

This last day was in many ways symptomatic of the changes I have seen over the course of 30 years. Today, with advances of medicines and technology, patients are living longer, often with three or even four serious long-term conditions, so having one patient with heart failure, chronic respiratory problems, dementia and previous stroke is not at all unusual, whereas 30 years ago the heart failure might have carried them off in their 60s. This makes every patient much more complex, and it can be much harder to manage them and to get the balance of treatments right.

Today, unlike 30 years ago, all patients are strangers and, as my catchment area now extends into different London boroughs, even the places I go are unfamiliar. Gone is the relationship between my community and me. Instead, I am part of a gig economy, as impersonal as the driver delivering a pizza. I ended the shift with a profound sense of loss and sadness.

I cannot help but think that as a society we have lost the ability to do many things that we once did moderately well. Things that often worked and were good.

Tidal waves from the GFC

Rana Foroohar In the FT

I have a dermatologist friend who recently sold his practice to a private equity firm, but couldn’t bear to stay on after because management forced him to cut the amount of time spent with patients in half, and focus more on scale and less on people…

Why does the idea of Leon Black or Stephen Schwarzman focusing on post-Covid health issues make me feel more depressed? Is healthcare going to become the new subprime, with surprise billing, crushing debt, and sub-par treatment? Our system is complicated and patchy as it is. But Peter, the larger issue is what I’d like your take on. Do you agree with folks who say that we’ve never left the great financial crisis? With debt at record levels, and the Federal Reserve about to raise rates significantly, where will you be looking for financial risk?

Dark money comes into the light | Financial Times

Life force

Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021)

“Oh, to be 80 again!”

A comment from just a few years back.

Edward Osborne Wilson, who wrote extensively on ants and popularized the field of sociobiology, died on 26 December 2021 at age 92.

Excess deaths England & Wales 2021

Paul Taylor LRB 2002

More than one actually.

Magical writing

Monday 3 January, 2021 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

I came across this article by Zadie Smith via John Naughton.

Zadie Smith on Joan Didion

Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes—as Didion has it, perfectly, in “The White Album”—“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She did that with her own sentences, too. [emphasis added]