Links

Exponential Growth is a topic that I resonates with me. Eventually I will write up something with coherent thoughts and structure, but for now here's a list of relevant links.

• Lecture by UC Boulder professor Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and growth. 
• Physical limits and order of magnitude calculations regarding economic growth: 
• This entire blog is full of great stuff; highly recommended, but here's a good place to start. 
• Why it seems unlikely that we will choose to stop growing. 
• An overview of Prosperity Without Growth.
• In the article, the link to the original report is broken, but here is one that works. 
• "...in reality brands are representations in the mind of the consumer. To achieve its objectives brands fight to gain space and to establish favorable links and associations in the minds of consumers. To this end brands compete with the religious, social and political representations. Myths, archetypes, symbols associated to the gods and heroes in the past are now being replaced by representations of brands. Young generations are more easily influenced by these changes."
• Economics of Happiness - challenges some of the assumptions and data used in Prosperity Without Growth. 
• Some key points from the video are summarized in this article.
• Noble Prize winner Daniel Kahneman talks about the difference between remembered happiness and experienced happiness. 
• Dan Gilbert talks about research about what really makes us happy. 
• Jevons paradox stating that increases in efficiency can, counter intuitively, lead to increased resource consumption.
• Good book: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben about what sustainable economy might look like. 
• Downsides of economic growth.
• Another post from Do the Math with a couple points I really like: 
• "The growth paradigm must end. A finite world with finite resources will not continue to support growth."
• "Many Americans huff at the suggestion that we need alter our own population trajectory, when it is the developing world that hosts dangerously high birth rates. Yet a newborn American will use 100 times as much energy as an infant born to a poor village, leveraging the resource burden squarely back on home soil."
• "But if a physically viable future is fundamentally incompatible with human nature, we may be fated to boom and bust cycles. .... We’ve seen civilizations boom and bust repeatedly through history, but the civilizations were always somewhat isolated, preventing the busts from being global."