Why we shouldn’t be pessimistic about the future

This week I finished reading two very different books; Limits to Growth¹ by Donella Meadows at al and The Beginning of Infinity² by David Deutsch. Initially I thought there was no connection between the two books, as I started reading them at different times and under completely different circumstances. However, upon finishing both within the same week, I realized that there are quite a few parallels; the Beginning of Infinity covers the nature of human progress while Limits to Growth covers potential limits to it. As such, I had an opportunity to reflect on the message presented by each book.

Have we already passed our limits?

Limits to Growth is about how we as humanity are on track to hit some fundamental limits to our growth in the near-term future. I started reading LTG as a follow-up to a paper I recently read, which spawned a popular blog post. The authors of this book claim that due to rapid population growth and ever-increasing industrial production, we are about to see our world population level off and potentially plummet within the next 20 years or so. This will occur because our current resource extraction and pollution generation has already overshot what the planet and our current production methods can reasonably accommodate.