This is Planet Money from NPR.
A few weeks ago, we got this kind of mind -bending question.
It was from our friends at Radiolab, which is a show about science and philosophy and just the sheer joy of curiosity.
And in this case, they were curious about growth, in particular, economic growth.
How could it possibly go on forever?
And can too much growth destroy us?
And in trying to answer their big question, we ended up in some pretty heady and unexpected places.
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Jeff Guo. And today we're doing something a little bit different.
We've teamed up with Radiolab and we're going to try to answer one of the biggest questions that often goes unsaid in economics.
Here's Latif Nasr from Radiolab to get us started.
Hey, this is Radiolab.
I'm Latif Nasser. What got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news, the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about.
What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by, of all people, an astrophysicist. So I'm going to sketch what we know about Earth's history, cosmically speaking.
Her name is Sandra Faber.
She goes by Sandy, brilliant scientist. She co -authored the standard model for thinking about how galaxies form.
She won a National Medal of Science back in 2011.
And she started the lecture by saying, We have a pretty happy little planet to live on.
Earth is a good place to live for, let's say, a border a hundred million years at least. Should be livable for a really, really long time OK.
Except, she goes on to say, and lessons from for us.
Over the last century or so, we've been seeing planet wide GDP growing exponentially.
So what she did is she took the average gross domestic product worldwide, and that's a rough measure of economic growth, and that had been growing recently around 3%, which for economists, is like a happy little growth number.
You will recognize 1 .03 % as the holy...
But Sandra took that 3%, And with some quick math, she started to just play it out year after year.
And in her lecture, she's showing this chart, where you can see this curve just shooting up.
We can see this number is completely ridiculous.
And she was basically like, look at all that growth.
That's eating up Earth's resources.
A large number here is bad because it means that we want more of that product.
and so even though Earth should be good for a hundred million years we're gonna just eat the planet up we're gonna devour the physical material level of this planet we're gonna eat it up in more like a couple thousand years and my concern is that we're not talking about this and when I heard that that was that was that was breathtaking and horrifying and honestly like I haven't been able to to stop thinking about that number, 3%, sounds like a specific thing, but also it's kind of abstract and mathy and I wanted help.
I wanted help to parse this out.
Like how bad is that really?
How bad could that possibly be?
And so I turned to someone who's job it is to literally make sense of this exact kind of thing.
Hello. Hi, how you doing?
Hi, I'm doing well, how are you?
And we had, what I felt like was a kind of roller coaster of a conversation.
So I'm just gonna play it for you right now.
Yeah, okay so I am Jeff Guo.
I'm one of the hosts of the Planet Money podcast at NPR.
Terrific show. Thank you and I guess what do I do?
I talk about economics all day that's, I guess that's what I do.
Oh my god. I need you.
I need you to help me.
It's more than scratch and itch. I need you to help me cure this existential dread that you have now.
That's exactly right, yeah.
Okay, um, well, I mean, I guess where I would start is, and, you know, I would hate to contradict a Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist. Uh, it just sounds like, you know, starting on dangerous territory there.
I mean, well, she won the National Medal of Science, not the Nobel, but… She's gonna, she's gonna, it sounds like she's gonna win.
Okay. Yeah, sure. Fair.
But you did ask me to kind of look into what things are we going to run out of?
Yes, yes, yes. Oh my gosh.
I'm so excited. After the break, can we cure Latif's existential dread?
Or did we just make it worse?
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Okay Latif, so I looked into your question about growth and stuff that we might run out of and I found a couple things that, you know, people are worried about.
And I just did some very rough back -of -the -envelope math, like this is so totally not precise.
It's so handwavy. Great, I love it.
Okay, so I don't know, what should we start with?
Copper? Yeah, that's a big one.
Copper's a big deal, right?
Very big deal. So, if you look at copper consumption over the past century since the Industrial Revolution, OK.
You know, our demand for copper has grown about 3 % every year.
OK. Like, you know, in recent years, it's we've consumed about 26, 27 million tons a year of copper.
Yeah, yeah. So if you just, you know, extrapolate that out, if you just assume copper is going to keep growing at three percent every single year.
Right. Fair. Fair assumption.
I looked up how much copper people think we have, according to geologists.
What we know is out there and could theoretically get to.
And that number right now is five to six billion tons.
Okay. It's not nothing, but we're using it pretty quickly.
And if you just assume that that this number is going to keep growing at 3 % a year.
Yeah, yeah, sure. It would take about maybe another 70 years and then no more copper.
That's it, 70 years?
That's 70 years, 70 years.
Okay, so that sounds terrible.
It's true. It's true.
That's assuming of course that we do keep consuming copper that quickly.
copper and needing copper the same way that we are yay sure T minus 70 yeah no copper no any but no copper okay okay so then what but then so that's this seems to point exactly to sandy favors point right it's true it's true it's true don't do another one oh that's the end of it I thought you were gonna be like but there's a giant there's a copper thing that we're gonna no there's no butt that's it it's just like yeah she's right about copper okay but there's a You want to go through more of them before we get to the but that yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay Okay, okay next one okay next one
okay, so another one.
I looked into is sand Okay, yes, it seems like there should be a ton of that seems like there should be so much of it yeah, and you know the reason why we need sand right and why do we need sand for concrete So it's actually so important that we don't know how much we're using oh my god Like, we're using so much. We just, we actually don't know.
But, like, ballpark estimates we're using maybe 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year.
Okay, that sounds like a lot.
I don't even know. I can't even visualize that.
It's a lot. Right. And I couldn't even find how much sand and gravel there is in the world.
Like, nobody actually knows.
Okay. This is one of those numbers where it's like, oh.
But we're doing, like, back of the envelope math here, right.
Right. Right. So, I was like, well, if we don't know how much sand and gravel there is in the world, surely we know how much rock there is in the world, right?
Totally! Totally! Totally.
So I looked it up and, according to geologists, the Earth's crust, all of the Earth's crust, contains maybe like 23 quintillion tons of rock and stuff.
Okay. But it does seem like the whole point of is that it's like teeny -tiny.
It's the, like it would take a lot of energy to turn that rock in the sand.
It would, it would.
But assuming that we're able to do that, right?
Okay, okay great. Assuming that we're gonna use sand, that we're gonna use sand and gravel at a rate that grows by 3 % every year, year after year after year, it would take about, do you wanna guess how long it would take to deplete the entire earth's crust?
Wait, so a quintillion, and based on the growth rate and the uses now, I would imagine this one is not on Sandra Faber's side.
I'm gonna guess this one is way, way, way far from now.
This is gonna be a million years, or something.
Five to 600 years. That seems so short again!
It does, doesn't it?
That is way shorter for the whole crust!
I know! Oh my God! That's not...
It's long, But it's not that long like that's like that is nuts.
All right. I got a couple more just making me more and more Existentially worried.
Okay. That's how I felt when I when I started on this journey, right?
Um, I got I got a couple more.
Okay, great. Love it.
I got pull up my spreadsheet.
Um my talk about lithium Okay, great.
Good one Good one and lithium you imagine there are like those giant deserts filled with those like sand flats or whatever, right?
Yeah, in Bolivia and Argentina.
In Bolivia, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mm -hmm. Yeah, okay, so this one will be, again, like, I think this one ...
I feel like there's going to be a curveball in here where you're like, no, no, no, we have enough, not enough, you know, for millions of years.
Anyway, okay, keep going.
Okay, hang on, let me see.
Let me pull up my ...
Where did my notes go on this?
I can't wait when we have to fact -check all of this.
Okay, lithium. So we are using about 190 ,000, 200 ,000 tons of lithium every year.
Right, okay. And that's like in phones, electric cars, duh -duh -duh -duh.
Yeah, batteries. Batteries is the big one for lithium.
Very important. Lithium consumption, of course, has been exploding.
So over the past decade, lithium has been growing.
Do you want to guess how much it's been growing?
What like like 5 % or 10 % on average around 20 %?
Okay. Wow So we need a lot and we need a lot more lithium, which is good, which is good Which means like more electric cars more right more recyclable batteries and stuff.
That's great Yeah, so geologists think that of all the lithium that we know is out there There's probably like a hundred five million tons of it like out there That sounds a lot less than the sand you're ta— like, this doesn't sound… this is gonna get worrying.
Yeah. Okay, keep going.
Right. And so, you know, if you do this all— you know, the same math, and you just— if you assume— if you just assume, just, you know, for the sake of argument, it's only gonna grow at three percent a year, right?
Yeah, sure. We probably run out of lithium around...
About.. March. I feel like you're going to say, like— I feel like you're going to say, like, so soon.
Okay, tomorrow. No, no. About 100 years.
Okay, 100 years, again.
Which is not bad. No, it is bad, it's bad, Jeff.
It's bad. We need that.
Like, we're gonna need that later for even better stuff.
It's true. Okay, keep going.
I'll do one more. I'll do one more, which is, this is a big one.
Oil. Mm, really scary one.
But hopefully we're weaning off of this one, so maybe this one is a different.
Hopefully. Like, it's going in the opposite direction.
Hopefully. Doesn't seem like it's really happening yet.
Oh god. But. I don't think you have had a single piece of good news here!
Just wait for it. Okay, alright.
Um, so if you look at oil right, how much do we consume every year?
About 37 billion barrels of oil as a world.
How much is left? Probably 1 .6 trillion barrels.
Really?! Yeah. So it's not - That's a lot!
It's a lot but it's maybe less than I thought.
So another way to say 1 .6 trillion is 1600 billion.
Right, right. So, 37 billion a year, we have about 1600 billion barrels left out there.
Yeah, when you say it like that, it sounds quite, quite alarming.
Not great. Um, so, you know, if you do the math again, exponential growth — But, would you want to use less of it anyway?
Right, yeah, I, I'm, I'm ambivalent about this.
Trying to. Yeah, yeah, okay.
About 28 years. No way.
Yes, yes. That is nothing.
2052 might be the day we run out of oil.
Maybe, maybe. I was worried about, when Sandra Faber said we had thousands of years and you're like, you were taking me even an order of magnitude less in that.
Yeah, it's like maybe decades.
Yeah, so I started to get, you know, a little nervous.
And so, I thought, well, like, what happened in the past, you know, like when we were overexploiting some resource And it looked like it was gonna run out and when I looked into it.
There's this funny thing that happens hmm and So just for example.
Let me tell you a story Please it's about medieval, England.
Okay, so it's the 1400s Okay, it's like medieval England.
It's a 1400s and this Amazing new technology has just arrived on the shores of yolde England, and it is this new way of making iron it's called the blast furnace just so just like very briefly like before the blast furnace you kind of had these backyard ovens basically where you kind of baked the iron ore to make the iron and they were like super inefficient and really slow and not great okay but this blast furnace the scientific innovation was that if you blew air onto the fire you could get it really hot hot that you You could just melt the iron and it was amazing.
And this like revolutionized iron -making.
So these blast furnaces, they're these huge 20 -foot tall stone towers.
You would have these giant bellows at the bottom blowing in air.
I was just imagining the bellows.
Okay, cool, okay. So that's the key innovation here.
Yes, and medieval England iron was so precious, so important.
and you needed it for plows and spades or shoes, pots, kettles, nails, hammers, yeah, whatever.
And so now you had this technology that you could make, these blast furnaces, they could make a ton of iron a day.
A ton, a literal ton.
A literal ton, which is, like, just unprecedented.
The problem with all of this is, what was the fuel that went into this blast furnace?
And at the time, it was charcoal.
Which is charcoal is made out of wood, is that right?
No. Yes, yes. So so this was a good so they're like slurping down forests.
Basically. Yes. Yes Just picture the English countryside Right about these blast furnaces and Ng up These huge plumes of smoke and then everyone's just chopping down trees as fast as they can to feed these giant blast furnaces It's it's yeah, and it makes people really concerned Yeah, like really concerned they're like, oh my god, where are the trees going?
But it got so bad that by the late 1500s you have Parliament banning new iron mills from starting up in different places.
They're like, we cannot do this.
We just cannot deal with this.
Cuz we, we have one tree left and, uh, everyone's about to cut it down.
We got to save the trees!
The tree, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
You even have Queen Elizabeth I.
Not the second, the first. Okay, alright.
You have Queen Elizabeth I, she is issuing Royal Edicts saying, No more charcoal making in my royal forests.
Wow. Like, we just can't, we can't do this anymore.
but then something happened okay so in 1709 this english guy named Abraham Darby, he figured out how to use a different kind of fuel so not charcoal so maybe you want to guess what he figured out?
Oil probably right?
Coal he figured out coal yes he figured out you can use this sort of modified coal to run these blast furnaces and this changed everything, I'm not exaggerating The iron industry took off, this led to the industrial revolution.
We avoided the problem, we avoided the shortage.
And it's not an isolated example.
This is a pattern that comes up.
We did this with whales.
When we stopped using whale oil for lamps and started using kerosene, we did this with rubber, we started making synthetic rubber instead of getting all our rubber from trees.
It's happened over and over again, We have stood at the edge of the cliff, where it looked like, oh crap, if we keep doing what we're doing, we are going to run out of some precious resource.
Then, somehow, at the last minute, catastrophe is averted.
I mean, this has happened so often, I feel like we should give it a name.
I know. I was going to say, do economists have some kind of wonky name for this?
Not that I could find, so I'm going to take the opportunity to give this a name.
Jeff, it is yours. Yours the name, please.
Okay, I -I -I think we should call this the Malthusian Swerve.
Swerve. Malthusian swerve.
Okay? Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
And why that? Cause, remember, ah, do you remember Thomas Malthus?
Yeah, and I, if I remember, he, his whole thing was like...
No, you tell me what his whole thing was like.
Yeah, so he was this famous English philosopher type, uh, he lived, you know, in the, he grew up in the 1700s.
pretty much around the time that coal was taken over England.
Right? So he was seeing a lot of this happen.
And he's famous for predicting that humanity's growth would hit a limit.
That populations would grow faster than we could provide food for them, right?
And so the future of humanity was to be limited and trapped by our own lack of resources and that everybody would just be miserable and sad and poor and hungry forever.
He does not sound like he would have been fun at parties.
Yeah, yeah, he's a real bummer.
But maybe what he's more famous for is that none of that happened.
The reason that Malthus' prophecy didn't come true...
Yeah. ...is due to what I would say is the most important Malthusian swerve of all time.
Okay. And this one is fertilizer.
Right. Right? Wait, it was like the Green Revolution or whatever, right?
Is that right? The fertilizer revolution.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So... I don't know if you want to hear the guano story.
Please, I love the guano story.
I know the guano story, but I love the guano story.
And I want to hear you tell the guano story.
Ok, let's do it together, then.
So this is like the 1800s, a little bit after Malthus' time.
In the 1800s, Europeans are starting to realize you can really supercharge food production if you use better fertilizer.
Yeah. And specifically there's this one fertilizer that Indigenous people in South America were using that was amazing Guano!
Guano! Which is basically just bird poop Yeah Right Okay, so basically you'd have all these seabirds and they would poop on these rocky islands and coastlines along South America and the poop would just… accumulate?
So the Europeans, so like in the 1800s, the Europeans are importing hundreds and thousands of tons They're literally fighting wars over control of these guano islands like Spain is getting into wars with Peru and Chile Yeah, like just just a hoot who gets to seize the poop Islands right?
And but the problem is We were using guano way faster than the birds could, you know make the guano. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah then in the 1900s in the early 1900s, some German chemists figured out a way to to basically make synthetic guano. They invented an industrial process to literally pull nitrate.
Nitrogen. Yeah, that's like the key ingredient in guano. To pull it out of the air and make synthetic fertilizer.
And that is on the order of a like alchemy discovery.
That is like this thing that is super abundant in the air all around us.
It is literally the majority of the air, But it was unusable and then we there was a hack where we then figured out how to make it usable that that seems like That's like a miraculous Technological breakthrough.
Yeah, it's a miraculous story And it is like maybe one of the best examples of this thing that I'm going to call theJulian swerve swerve I like it right like it And the sword so the swerve is like it's like like when you say swerve.
I'm picturing like it's like a in this car about to collide into a cliff and then right at the last second swerves out of the way.
And Malthus is driving the car thinking that of course we're gonna hit the cliff and really it's like the passenger who then just like yanks the steering wheel.
It's like, nope, not gonna happen right at the last second we figured it out.
Yeah, and if you look at human history, this is a pattern that happens over and over again.
I find this somewhat of a relief.
It is sort of encouraging.
But it also seems like there's so much drama here.
And there might be a time where we can't swerve in time.
Like, what happens if and when we can't swerve in time?
And also, I would argue, sometimes the swerves, sometimes we swerve right into another cliff.
So for example, the example you talked about, from charcoal to coal, which is great for the trees, except after a while, it's also bad for the trees, right?
Like, it's like global rising temperatures lead to wildfires lead to trees not able to grow where they once were able to grow.
Like it's like we're - more time, right?
We've bought ourselves more time.
But then we just always use that time to step on the gas to the next thing, right?
And then maybe when we do swerve, then we'll swerve into something worse, something that causes you know, war, exploitation, or just messes up the planet in a way that is un -swerve -backable from.
I mean, yes, that is all totally right.
It is a mess. But you know, to help us unpack it, I think we should talk about a swerve that we are in the middle of right now.
Actually, first, we're going to swerve to break, but only for a minute, then we'll swerve back and step on the gas directly towards a currently oncoming cliff.
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So we have been talking about a couple historical examples of this this thing I'm calling the Malthusian swerve, where it looks like society is about to run out of some resource, but at the last minute, some new resource or idea or innovation comes along and saves the day and when I was looking into this I was like okay is there a more recent example is there an example of a malthusian swerve that happened just in the last couple years and you know what there is one oil oh we were in the middle of the malthusian oil yes remember do you remember like in the 80s and 90s all of the talk about peak
oil yeah you remember yeah yeah yeah No, and even before that, like I think in the 70s and stuff, it's like that we keep having this conversation over and over again, peak oil, peak oil.
Yeah, exactly, yeah!
You have people, you have geologists, distinguished geologists saying, warning us, that we're gonna run out of oil, that we're gonna reach peak oil very soon, and that oil's gonna diminish.
You just said it in 52 years or whatever, like you just said it, the same thing, yeah.
Yeah, well, back in the 1990s, they were saying, It's going to happen in the 2000s.
They were saying, oh, crap, like we're going to start running out in the year like 2000 something.
And if you look at oil production, like yeah, it does, especially in the US, yeah, it does kind of start to slow down in the 2000s.
A lot of people were wondering about what are we going to do, how are we going to adapt, how are we going to move away from oil.
And if you look at the chart, you'll see the oil production.
It goes, it kind of starts to dip in the 2000s, and then it starts to rise again more and more and more there's there's a swerve and That was caused by the fracking revolution But is that a swerve like I mean if we're now we just found another way to get more fossil fuels like is that even really a so that feels like a we swerved it swerved right back in the same direction That is one way to think about it the way think about it is like it's a mini swerve You know like oh crap.
We're running into the cliff We can't find any alternatives, but we did find a way to get a little bit more oil out of the ground in the meantime.
But in a way, running out of oil isn't even necessarily the problem here.
The problem is the thing it's doing for everything else.
It's true. The problem with fossil fuels, it's not that we're gonna run out of them.
We have too much of them.
It's too easy to go and find oil on the ground.
It's too easy—we have a problem, it's not a scarcity problem, it's an anti -scarcity problem, right?
And then we burn them and then there's these horrible side effects for the environment, and then the world's getting hotter and wildfires are popping up.
It's a much harder sell, though.
It's a much harder sell to tell people, we have too much of this thing that's going to hurt you as opposed to we have not enough of this thing, so take care of it.
Yes, that is the key thing here, I think.
Like, you look at how these Malthusian swerves, if we're going to call it that, how they happen.
I love it, I love it.
Keep doing it. How did they happen, right?
And it was people who were motivated by the terror of, we're gonna crash into this giant problem in so many years, and we need to figure out how we're going to do it.
Necessity is the mother of invention kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah. Desperation is the inventor's best friend.
Yeah, yeah, right. And you look at how an economy works, and I'm not saying this is the ideal way to operate, but an economy works through incentives.
It's one of those things where the more you use, the less you have, the less you have, the higher the price, the higher the price, then all of a sudden new pockets of that resource that would've been too expensive before to get, now become unlocked.
Yeah, exactly, or also we might try to innovate, right?
Now there's an incentive to invent something newer, cheaper, better than what we had before.
I would bring up the example of lithium.
Now there is so much money, and if you can invent a battery that doesn't need lithium, you will like, I don't know, win the Nobel Prize, right?
Like, you will, like, there is a lot of energy and motivation to solve that problem.
And if we were all just gonna be like, well, we don't need that much lithium because we're just gonna conserve it and recycle it and we're not gonna grow, then what's the point of trying to make anything more efficient or better?
There's no incentive.
Yeah, but it feels like a trap.
like an especially capitalist kind of a trap where the only thing that will inspire us to innovate, or to swerve, to use your word, is the immediate danger of the cliff.
Like, like, like, like I mean, we're talking about resources and economics, GDP, and blah, blah, blah.
But really, this is all like a head game.
It's like all like people's minds work in this very specific way, and long -term thinking is so hard for us, and it's like, we've got this system that leans into a thing that is already a problem with us and the way we think.
It's like, we're just gonna use it as long as it's there, and when it starts to almost not be there, we'll figure it out in something else.
Yeah, right. How do we get people to actually do the thing that is in the long -term interests of everybody?
Do you, like, is the solution to have, like, some intergalactic Queen Elizabeth come down and say, No, no, no, no, guys.
You're using way too much oil.
You gotta stop. You gotta stop.
You gotta put a pause on it, right?
But is it that, or is it we're all left to our own devices and some combination of the free market and also government leaders worrying about this thing, hash out some kind of, you know, compromise?
That's kind of what we're stuck in right now.
But we're all so smart enough to—can't we figure out a system where we don't have to just drive into the cliff and swerve at the last minute every time?
You know? If this was your car, and there was—I mean, this is such a weird analogy.
There's only one car and you whoever is in the driver's seat really it's all of us But whoever's in the driver's seat keeps driving pedal to the metal Accelerating faster and faster at cliffs.
Yes, you would take their keys away.
You'd be like Sorry this you are not fit to drive It's scary.
Yeah, I don't know what why do we keep doing that then like do you think growth is inevitable?
Do you think growth is good?
What do you after all this?
What is your take on growth in particular?
I think that growth is ah Maybe we should talk about what growth even is Like there are always gonna be parts of the economy that we point at and we're gonna say that's bad growth we don't want that but Growth is not just us burning a lot of fossil fuels and polluting the planet right growth can be good Like, growth could be starting a new business, mentoring kids, inventing a new kind of medicine that saves lives.
That is also growth.
And so, for me, I guess it's hard for me to say that growth is bad.
And maybe it's because I've just been too economics -pilled, but when people say the word growth to me, I think of a country like China, you know, China's economy grew so fast That it lifted 800 million people out of poverty, right?
It's like hard to say that.
Impossible seeming.
It's hard to say that's bad.
That's funny, that was probably the population of the entire earth in Malcolm X's time.
Yeah, and that's amazing.
And so I think it's about figuring out specific things that we can do to be smarter about it, to make it less harmful.
But... Yeah, I agree with that.
Like we all have needs, and there are increasingly more of us.
But I do think that taking like, and I still am sort of struck by the Sandy favors, like stone cold, like zoom out.
There's nothing that's wrong about that logic either.
She just has a seemingly a different priority than most economists, which is like she's thinking at a different scale.
We have been given the gift of cosmic time.
We have hundreds of millions of years, if not another billion years, But we have not solved the problem of combining human nature with living in abundance So I should tell you we actually ended up talking to Sandy Faber my cosmic point of view at this moment is to try to figure out How people will live the best possible life on earth after cheap energy?
Has passed away and telling her about your Malthusian swerve idea.
Where is the next swerve?
That's that's the thing That's the thing.
Specifically with regard to energy.
And the thing that she was most concerned about was that energy is just so wrapped up in all these different parts of our lives, basically everything we do.
And it has these huge effects on the environment.
She says we're actually dealing with a bunch of different cliffs and a bunch of different kinds of cliffs all at the same time.
Some people call it the polycrisis, and some people call it the meta -crisis.
Basically, we're facing a crisis of crises, a crisis of crises.
Yeah, so every time we think of one of these possible swerves, I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue them, but they leave a large fraction.
Everyone leaves a gigantic fraction of the problem unsolved.
So I, I would say a huge issue for a long -term happy human history in the future is having a more mature picture of wealth.
How it should be managed and how growth should be managed.
Hm. I think Sandy and I were totally in agreement about what we want for the world, for the future.
It's just about how we get there.
And so can I give you can I give you my my silly galaxy brain way of thinking about all of this?
Yeah, please, please.
So you're talking about like, why can't we this is, you know, the earth is our home.
so why can't we all get together and take care of it and cooperate and all of that, right?
And if you're just a household of, like, a couple people, you have a relationship.
If you're just a village, you, like, know everybody, you know, you can help each other out, give each other things, all of that.
But when you get bigger and bigger, when you get to the scale of countries and, like, the world, right, it's very hard to get people to cooperate.
it's very very hard everybody has different opinions no one's gonna agree everybody's gonna have different motives and what an economy is is a way of turning all of that of organizing us at a global scale into something productive and obviously you know the economy is not perfect there all kinds of problems we didn't even have the time that to talk about today but when it comes to dealing with issues of scarcity, like running out of some resource, markets are a tool that you know, historically have kind of worked, even if it's been super messy and dramatic and swirvy and may have created way bigger
problems down the road.
I'm not saying that the economy is the answer, right, but it does give me a little bit of hope that the economy finds a way, most of the time, hopefully.
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I like is Are we talking about a swerve away from resources, or should we really be talking about a swerve away from a certain kind of thinking, or a certain kind of economy, or just thinking about growth in general?
Like, it's true, you're right that an economy is a way to organize a globe, But like, but maybe we need to be acting more like a household.
Uh, because, because we only have this one house.
If you can figure out a way to do that, they will give you a Nobel Prize like on the spot I guarantee you.
Okay, well, thank you, Geoff.
I don't know if you exactly chased away my existential dread, but uh, but I appreciate you, sort of holding my hand through it.
It's all we have in the end, each other.
That's right. That was my conversation with the ferociously curious and thoughtful Latif Nasser over at Radiolab.
We are huge fans of their podcast, they tackle all these big questions, and little questions with so much joy and wonder.
They just did an episode on other kinds of growth.
So like, can fingertips grow back, or how do you grow the biggest pumpkin in the world?
Though, I gotta add, my favorite episode of theirs recently has to do with this weird quirk in law where you can kind of plead guilty and not guilty at the same time.
It's really weird and it has to do with, spoiler, the economics of justice.
Anyway, a big thanks to the Radiolab team Pat Walters and Soren Wheeler who edited and produced this conversation, Natalie Middleton who fact -checked it, they're running a version of this episode in their feed, our version was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Jang, and Alex Goldmark.
And a special thanks to Jennifer Brendell.
I'm Jeff Guo, this is NPR, thanks for listening.
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