The Problem-Solving Animal, part 1

Chapter 7 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Previously: The Flywheel, part 1 and part 2

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I feel sorry for the Rev. Thomas Malthus. He was doomed to be misremembered by history.

His Essay on the Principle of Population is remembered as a prophecy of scarcity. But Malthus’s focus was how to deal with scarcity, which he took as a given. The subtitle of his book promised “remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers”—utopian thinkers whose visions of the ideal society included universal welfare.¹ Malthus countered that if supply of food is limited, then giving alms to the poor will only drive up the price of food—a point of economics on which he was correct.² The only way to deal with the inherent scarcity of food, he said, was to limit population—and if population were not limited deliberately, through delayed marriage and abstinence, then it would be limited by disaster, such as famine, plague, or war.³ With rational family planning, though, resource catastrophes were avoidable.

But what Malthus is remembered for is the starting assumption he tossed off casually in the first chapter: that while population increases exponentially, there was no conceivable way for agricultural production to increase more than linearly. He took this as obvious, not even bothering to give an argument for it beyond failure of imagination:

If I allow that by the best possible policy… the produce of this Island [Great Britain] may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person can well demand.

In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. … The very utmost that we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. … The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this.⁴

But Malthus had the misfortune of writing just at the moment when humanity was about to escape the condition we now give his name to—the Malthusian trap.⁵ And so he is remembered, not as an economist who warned against subsidizing demand in the face of limited supply (a warning that bears repeating today!), but as a prophet of stagnation.

As long as people have noticed progress, they have wondered: will we run out of natural resources? Malthus wrote at the tail end of the era when land, a relatively fixed resource, constrained economic growth. The Industrial Revolution that was just getting underway would change this equation: production would thereafter be driven by machinery and energy. But no sooner had we overcome the limited supply of land than people began to worry about the limited supply of energy.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons wrote The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-mines. Collecting statistics on the rate of production of coal, the depth of mines, and the cost of extraction, and comparing them to the growth of population and of industry, he warned that coal would eventually run out—and with it, Britain’s dominance in the world economy. He saw no solutions: not in substitute energy sources, not in fuel imports, not in energy efficiency (which, he pointed out in a famous paradox, tends to increase total fuel usage).⁶ “[I]t will appear that there is no reasonable prospect of any relief” from a future coal shortage, he concluded, and thus “we cannot long continue our present rate of progress.”⁷ All Britons could do was pay off their debt while the wealth was still flowing, and resign themselves to inevitable decline.⁸

Jevons did not anticipate what happened next: oil became a still greater resource than coal.⁹ But even as this happened, many observers, including staunch industrialists, expected those supplies to run out quickly as well. In 1885, less than thirty years after the first oil well, the state geologist of Pennsylvania called oil “a temporary and vanishing phenomenon—one which young men will live to see come to its natural end.”¹⁰ Charles Mann recounts:

Even as oil poured out of Texas, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the “imminent exhaustion” of fossil fuels and other natural resources—“the weightiest problem now before the nation.” Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued “the present rate of increase in production,” a “marked decline” would begin “within a very few years.” Output would hit zero about 1935—a prophecy the survey repeated, annual report after annual report, for almost twenty years. …

When I searched through an archive of 1920s newspapers, I turned up more than a thousand articles prophesying an inevitable “oil crisis,” “oil famine,” or “oil shortage.” Some of those articles mentioned that oil executives were baffled by the cries of doom. But the overall tone was ominous. “The United States is face to face with a near shortage in petroleum supplies so serious it threatens the very economic fabric of the nation,” cried the Los Angeles Times in 1923. A year later, the Houston Post-Dispatch forecast “oil famine within two years.” “Oil exhaustion in fifteen or twenty years,” said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1925. A special twelve-part wire-service investigation in 1928 flatly decreed, “There is no possible excuse for assuming an adequate future supply of oil.”¹¹

Fortunes were lost again and again betting on the end of oil. Andrew Carnegie tells of a scheme he invested in during the early days of the industry:

Mr. Coleman, ever ready at suggestion, proposed to make a lake of oil by excavating a pool sufficient to hold a hundred thousand barrels (the waste to be made good every day by running streams of oil into it), and to hold it for the not far distant day when, as we then expected, the oil supply would cease. This was promptly acted upon, but after losing many thousands of barrels waiting for the expected day (which has not yet arrived) we abandoned the reserve. Coleman predicted that when the supply stopped, oil would bring ten dollars a barrel and therefore we would have a million dollars worth in the lake. We did not think then of Nature’s storehouse below which still keeps on yielding many thousands of barrels per day without apparent exhaustion.¹²

Carl Bosch, the brilliant industrialist behind the Haber-Bosch process that gave synthetic fertilizer to the world, also invested enormous sums of his company’s money developing a process to synthesize gasoline from coal, an expensive way of producing fuel that only made sense in the expectation of a coming shortage.¹³ Bosch achieved little with this process other than helping the Nazis prolong WW2.¹⁴

Despite over a century and a half of worries, worldwide fossil fuel production has grown steadily since Jevons, with only few and minor dips, and is now at an all-time high.¹⁵ Britain’s coal reserves did not run out. Its coal production did peak and decline, but as part of a shift to oil and gas, especially after large oil deposits were discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s—Britain actually became a net energy exporter in the ‘80s and ‘90s.¹⁶ Teddy Roosevelt and the USGS made their predictions before major oil deposits were found in the 1920s and ‘30s in Oklahoma and Texas, and then even bigger deposits in the Middle East. US oil production declined for a while after the 1970s, but fracking and horizontal drilling reversed that trend, and in 2024 US oil production reached an all-time high of 4.8 billion barrels.¹⁷

Fossil fuels are not the only resource people thought would run out. Metals have been a popular concern as well. In the 1870s, geologist Eduard Suess warned that “from geologic indications we must expect in the future a scarcity of gold,” expecting that silver would fully replace it as money.¹⁸ Ed Conway recounts in Material World that when copper became crucial to the electric industry, “wise observers of the day predicted that the new technology of electricity would be toppled by its reliance on this scarce natural resource. In 1924 prominent geologist Ira Joralemon predicted that ‘the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years,’ adding: ‘Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.’”¹⁹ We did, in fact, use up the best grades of copper ore, which dropped from 12% or more of copper in the 18th century to less than 1% by the end of the 20th. It now takes 16 times as much stone to produce a unit of copper as it did in 1900. But the price of copper since then has remained mostly flat, because we’re also about 16 times more efficient at extraction.²⁰

Steven Pinker suggests that:

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages.

What is that flaw? First, shortages are often predicted based on proven reserves: resources that are known to exist and to be economical to extract with current technology. But proven reserves can thus expand when we discover new deposits or improve our technology, or when the price of a resource rises, making it profitable to work marginally productive reserves.

Nor is it a coincidence when this happens just in time to rescue us from a shortage: it is the shortage itself, or the prospect of one, that drives these factors. Shortages raise prices, and anticipation of future demand motivates the search for both new deposits and new technologies. As Tyler Cowen has said and I have often repeated, “Never underestimate elasticity of supply.”²¹

On the demand side, the same factors drive the search for efficiency and for substitutes. Thus, when specific resources do truly run out, we switch to other ways of satisfying the same need. We saw an example of this in Chapter 5, when the imminent exhaustion of natural fertilizer motivated innovation in synthetic fertilizer. This was part of a general theme of the late 19th and early 20th century: the shift from unscalable biological resources to far more abundant mineral resources. Whale oil for lighting, for instance, was replaced by kerosene.²² Similarly, using tortoise shells for combs and brushes, or elephant tusks for piano keys and billiard balls, was unsustainable; and fears of elephant extinction drove the search for substitutes that ultimately helped to create the plastic industry.²³

Any resource is just a solution to a problem. It was selected because it was the most effective, abundant, or cheap. If it stops being the best way to solve the problem, we can find a different solution.

And we usually do. Rarely if ever have we suffered a catastrophic resource shortage. The most compelling examples are the ones furthest back in history—the megafauna hunted to extinction in prehistoric times; or silphium, a plant used by ancient Romans for food, perfume, and medicine, and evidently used up in the first century BC²⁴—bolstering my contention that human agency has increased over time. When Ed Conway, author of Material World, decided to start a series of essays on “lost materials,” he canceled it after one installment:

[I]n trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything. … while we like to tell ourselves humankind has exhausted this or that resource, we are much better at talking about it than actually, well, exhausting said resource.²⁵

Keep all this in mind when you hear about an imminent lithium shortage, or that “the world is running out of sand,” or that all of world semiconductor manufacturing crucially depends on a specific variety of extremely pure quartz found only in a single town in North Carolina.²⁶

The fundamental mistake behind the predictions of resource doom is thinking of fuels or metals or plants as “natural” resources. There are no natural resources.²⁷ All resources are artificial: the product of knowledge. Iron ore is useless without the knowledge of how to smelt it and work the result. Sand becomes far more valuable when we know how to turn it into integrated circuits. Even water needs to be purified for health, and needs extensive systems to make sure it’s available when and where we want it. Even fire, as David Deutsch eloquently explains:

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially… people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not know how. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge.²⁸

By about 1970, one might have expected that the world had internalized this lesson. Since Malthus first wrote, GDP per capita had risen over 5x in the UK, over 9x in the US and Germany, and almost 11x in Japan—even as the populations of these countries had tripled, quadrupled, or in the case of the US, grown well over 30x.²⁹

But history does not interpret itself. Instead of going away, Malthusianism returned with a vengeance.

In 1972, a group of researchers at MIT published a report on the future of industrial civilization, based on what was for the time a sophisticated computer model of the industrial economy and the global ecosystem. Their guiding philosophy and their bottom-line conclusion were contained in the title: The Limits to Growth.

They had run dozens of scenarios for the future of humanity, and the picture was bleak: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse” (emphasis original).³⁰ If world population and the economy were allowed to grow exponentially, then both population and living standards would crash as we used up all the world’s resources.³¹ If we solved the resource problem, then the world would be poisoned by pollution.³² If we controlled pollution, then we would succumb to famine as we ran out of farmland.³³ If we increased agricultural yields, one of the other problems would return.³⁴ If we tried to solve all of this using birth control, bringing world population growth to zero, then we would still suffer from resource shortages and pollution as long as industry was allowed to grow.³⁵ The only way to stave off catastrophe was to stop both population growth and industrial growth, and to throw all of our efforts at resource efficiency and pollution control—a world of complete stasis.³⁶

But all the Limits authors had done was to take the old Malthusian assumption of fixed resources and formalize it in a computational model. The model was not validated against or fit to historical data. It had no term to represent the advance of technology—even though economists, who were trying to fit the data, had incorporated such a term into their models since the 1950s.³⁷ They claimed to take technology into account, even devoting a whole chapter of the report to it, but they modeled technological effects as one-time changes to certain parameters, such as pollution intensity or agricultural yields—not as an ongoing, cumulative process of improvement. This choice was a philosophical position: they believed that “technological optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings from the world model. Technology can relieve the symptoms of a problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem—the problem of growth in a finite system—and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it.”

Their modeling forecast “a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capita land requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today.”³⁸ But per capita land requirements did not remain as they were: cereal yields since 1972 have doubled, allowing us to feed a growing population with less than a 10% increase in land usage.³⁹ “Even the ocean,” they said, “which once appeared virtually inexhaustible, is losing species after species of its commercially useful animals. Recent FAO statistics indicate that the total catch of the world's fisheries decreased in 1969 for the first time since 1950, in spite of more mechanized and intensive fishing practices.”⁴⁰ But fish and seafood production continued unabated, and have tripled in volume since the book was published.⁴¹ They thought it “unlikely” that the world population would reach much above 8 billion without a rise in the death rate from factors such as pollution and famine.⁴² Population passed 8 billion in 2022; the death rate has continued to fall, and is now about 40% below its 1972 levels.⁴³ The authors disclaimed that their model could not make exact predictions, only demonstrate the general dynamics of a system; and in any case, their main prediction of global collapse was only supposed to arrive sometime in the 21st century. But they felt that the conclusions were certain enough to warrant immediate action to slow growth.⁴⁴

The Limits to Growth was just one of several books in that era sounding the klaxon over population growth: we’ve already mentioned some others, such as The Population Bomb and Famine 1975!. Fear of “overpopulation” is the logical conclusion of the focus on fixed, “natural” resources: if resources are fixed, then more people implies diminished resources per capita.

This logic is called “Malthusian,” but even Malthus at least allowed for some ongoing rate of technological improvement; he just thought it could never keep up with the exponential growth of population. And he at least had the excuse that this assumption was true up until his time, and the acceleration of growth before his era was too slow to be noticeable given the scant data available to him. The neo-Malthusians of recent decades give Malthus a bad name: they are more pessimistic and with less excuse.

The Limits to Growth called its static world “equilibrium,” but this concept soon became known as “sustainability.” It is the ideal of moderating our consumption and choosing technologies and resources such that the same processes and way of life can be maintained indefinitely.

“Sustainability” is a disastrous concept. It is based on false assumptions and on the wrong moral standard. It negates the basic principles of techno-humanism. This concept must be destroyed.

There is no inherent superiority to a process that can go unmodified indefinitely.⁴⁵ If our standard is human well-being, then what we want to sustain is not a particular mode of production. What we want to sustain is growth and progress. “Sustainability” is actually stagnation, the opposite of progress. In the words of David Deutch, it means “forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes.”⁴⁶

To sustain progress means to not use any one resource or technology forever. Each particular mode of production is temporary. Often, instead of being forced onto a new technology by resource scarcity, we willingly abandon an old process simply because we invented something better. The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, nor did the iron age begin when we ran out of bronze, nor did oil rise when we ran out of coal, nor did we invent the Internet because we ran out of paper.⁴⁷ What matters about a particular process is not whether it can last indefinitely, but whether it can last until it is obsoleted by an improved successor.

In this light, we should redefine what it means for a resource to be “sustainable.” In common usage, resources are considered “sustainable” if they are regenerated on short timescales, regardless of their cost or abundance. Instead, resources should be considered sustainable only so long as they can grow along with the economy. “Sustainable” biological feedstocks for commodities such as fuel or plastics, for instance, are a bizarre regress to the unsustainable pre-industrial reliance on plant and animal resources—such as guano fertilizer, whale oil, and elephant ivory—that we moved on from in the 19th century.

Discussions about “sustainability” often equivocate between moral and practical concerns. On its face, “sustainability” can be posed as a practical argument: its advocates warn against impending doom and talk about progress as an unhealthy “addiction.” But underneath is a moral argument that rests on denial of the value of progress: an exaggeration of the costs and minimization of the benefits. The “sustainability” ideal is a fantasy world in which people can be perfectly well-off, even better off, with reduced consumption and slower growth. The Limits to Growth authors claimed that “global equilibrium need not mean an end to progress or human development,” and even that innovation would be more likely in a world without growth.⁴⁸ It is telling that the examples of progress they envision are all “green” technologies such as recycling, solar power, natural pest control, and contraception—all focused on reducing human impact, and very little on improving human well-being. In an afterword, the committee that commissioned the work stated that “no fundamental human value would be endangered by a leveling off of demographic growth.”⁴⁹

Such statements neglect the effects discussed in Chapter 3: economies of scale, network effects, and the non-rivalry of ideas that allows everyone to benefit from anyone’s discovery or invention. They belie a deeply impoverished view of humanity’s potential: a world with less pollution and lower mortality perhaps, but with no increase in material wealth, no reduction in physical labor, no bigger homes, no faster transportation, no space exploration, no (energy-hungry) artificial intelligence. This “sustainable” future would not be a victory for humanity, but a defeat.

Deutch captures the clash of ideas here as, at heart, two different conceptions of people:

In the pessimistic conception, they are wasters… In the optimistic conception… people are problem-solvers: creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem. In the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure. In the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.⁵⁰

“Infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet,” I hear them rebuking me right now.⁵¹ Literally, this is true—but it does not imply that stagnation is imminent. There are many orders of magnitude left to grow. From where we stand, growth is practically if not literally infinite: the true limits to growth are currently unknowable and need not affect any decisions we make today. As we saw in Chapter 5, Earth has truly massive energy resources: incoming solar alone is almost ten thousand times our current energy usage; fusion fuel resources are potentially more than a billion times annual consumption. Deposits of iron, copper, aluminum, nickel, and lithium are all estimated to be almost 100 times current annual material usage or more; phosphate and potash (used in fertilizer) over 1,000 times; salt and sulfur millions of times.⁵² Limestone is so abundant that the USGS doesn’t even bother to estimate reserves, simply calling them “sufficient”; and arguably the most important resource today—silicon—is effectively inexhaustible, as it makes up 27% of the Earth’s crust.⁵³

And of course, we are not limited to Earth—by the time we come anywhere close to using up the mass and energy on our home world, we’ll be ready to make use of the solar system and someday the galaxy. Our only real limits are those imposed by physics—the speed of light, the matter and energy within our lightcone, the time remaining until the heat death of the universe. If we ever reach those, humanity will have had a pretty good run.

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For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

1. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 46–7, 55–8.

2. Malthus, 24–5.

3. Malthus, 41–4.

4. Malthus, 7.

5. See Chapter 6.

6. Jevons, The Coal Question. Substitutes: 117ff; imports: 220ff; efficiency: 102ff.

7. Jevons, Coal Question, xiv–xvi.

8. Jevons, Coal Question, 339, 347–9.

9. Jevons, Coal Question, 141.

10. Yergin, The Prize, 52.

11. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet, 260–3.

12. Carnegie, Autobiography, 138 .

13. Hager, Alchemy of Air, 225–6, 230; Yergin, The Prize, 314.

14. Hager, Alchemy of Air, 263, 265–6.

15. Ritchie and Rosado, “Fossil Fuels.”

16. OWID, “The Death of UK Coal in 5 Charts”; OWID, “Fossil Fuel Production Over the Long Term, UK”; ONS, “UK Energy: How Much, What Type, Where From?”; EIA, “Coal Power Generation Declines in UK.”

17. US Energy Information Association, “Crude Oil Production.”

18. Suess, The Future of Silver, 3.

19. Conway, Material World, 282.

20. Conway, Material World, 282–4.

21. Cowen, “Friday Assorted LInks,” June 14, 2024.

22. This story has been told many times; see for example Richard Rhodes, Energy, 140ff.

23. Fenichell, Plastic, 38–41.

24. Gorvet, “The Mystery of the Lost Roman Herb.”

25. Conway, “Hang on, are there ANY lost minerals?”

26. Beiser, “Why the World is Running Out of Sand”; Ying Shan, “A Worldwide Lithium Shortage Could Come As Soon As 2025”; Potter, “Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz?”

27. I’m not the first to make this point. E.g., Boudreaux, ‘The Ultimate Scholar” and “There Are No Natural Resources.”

28. Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, 207.

29. OWID, “GDP Per Capita, 1798-1970,” “Population, 1800-1970.”

30. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 142.

31. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 124–5.

32. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 126–7, 132–3.

33. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 136–7.

34. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 137–41.

35. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 160–1.

36. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 163–8.

37. The Solow model, which we’ll cover later in this chapter, includes a term for technological growth.

38. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 51.

39. OWID, “Change in cereal production, yield, land use and population.”

40. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 151.

41. OWID, “Fish and Seafood Production.”

42. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 183.

43. OWID, “Crude Death Rate.”

44. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 182–3.

45. I owe this formulation to Alex Epstein, see e.g. Fossil Future, 377; his emphasis on “evolution” here echoes David Deutch’s focus on “progress.”

46. Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, 441.

47. The “stone age” quip was frequently used by Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, and is often attributed to him (although others have used it as well and the origin is unclear), e.g. “Farewell to riches of the earth.” Credit to Quote Investigator for researching this phrase.

48. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 179.

49. Meadows et. al, The Limits to Growth, 191.

50. Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, 435. Emphasis added.

51. See for example Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Chapter 8.

52. USGS, “Commodity Statistic and Information,” see 2025 Annual Mineral Commodity Summaries.

53. USGS, “Stone (Dimension)”; Tikkanen, “Silicon.”