The End of Ingenuity

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

The New York Times ran a lengthy commentary by Thomas Homer-Dixon on November 29. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

The commentary may be one of the first to appear on the Op Ed page of a major newspaper and speculate about the end of growth.

Two excerpts follow and the full commentary is here.

. . . The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world’s supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind’s enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the earth’s climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy. . . .

. . . we really need to start thinking hard about how our societies — especially those that are already very rich — can maintain their social and political stability, and satisfy the aspirations of their citizens, when we can no longer count on endless economic growth.