Joseph Tainter: Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

[GliderGuider]

This is an exceptional piece of thinking from an exceptional thinker. I know it's long, but the article is circulating on the net without a link back to an authoritative home. Accordingly, I decided to repost it intact as well as linking back to Jay Hanson's Yahoo! group where he posted it. The talk was was presented in the symposium “Human Macroecology: Understanding Human-Environment Interactions across Scales,” at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Albuquerque, 2-7 August 2009.

Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

Joseph A. Tainter

Few questions of history have been more enduring than how today’s complex societies evolved from the foraging bands of our ancestors. While this might seem of academic interest, it has important implications for anticipating our future. Our understanding of sustainability depends to a surprising degree on our understanding of the human past. My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, as are assumptions about sustainability that follow from them, and to present a different approach to assessing our future.

Cultural complexity is deeply embedded in our contemporary self image. Colloquially it is known by the more common term “civilization,” which we believe our ancestors achieved through the phenomenon called “progress.” The concepts of civilization and progress have a status in the cosmology of industrial societies that amounts to what anthropologists call “ancestor myths.” Ancestor myths validate a contemporary social order by presenting it as a natural and sometimes heroic progression from earlier times.

Social scientists label this a “progressivist” view. It supposes that cultural complexity is intentional, that it emerged through the inventiveness of our ancestors. Progressivism is the dominant ideology of free-market societies. But inventiveness is not a sufficient explanation for cultural complexity, which requires facilitating circumstances. What were those circumstances? Prehistorians once thought they had the answer: The discovery of agriculture gave our ancestors surplus food and, concomitantly, free time to invent urbanism and the things that comprise “civilization”–cities, artisans, priesthoods, kings, aristocracies, and all of the other features of early states.

The progressivist view posits a specific relationship between resources and complexity. It is that complexity develops because it can, and that the factor facilitating this is surplus energy. Energy precedes complexity and allows it to emerge. There are, however, significant reasons to doubt whether surplus energy has actually driven much of cultural evolution.

One strand of thought that challenges progressivism emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in the works of Wallace (1761), Malthus (1798), and Jevons. The economist Kenneth Boulding derived from Malthus’s essay on population three theorems: the Dismal Theorem, the Utterly Dismal Theorem, and the moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem. The Utterly Dismal Theorem directly challenges the progressivist view:

Any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for as long as misery is the only check on population, the improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population, which is to increase the sum total of human misery (Boulding, 1959: vii ).

The implication of this strain of thought is that humans have rarely had surplus energy. Surpluses are quickly dissipated by growth in consumption. Since humans have rarely had surpluses, the availability of energy cannot be the primary driver of cultural evolution.

Beyond a Malthusian view, there is another factor that undermines progressivism. It is that complexity costs. In any living system, increased complexity (involving differentiation in structure and increasing organization) carries a metabolic cost. In non-human species this is a straightforward matter of additional calories. Among humans the cost is calculated in such currencies as resources, effort, time, or money, or by more subtle matters such as annoyance. While humans find complexity appealing in spheres such as art, music, or architecture, we usually prefer that someone else pay the cost. We are averse to complexity when it unalterably increases the cost of daily life without a clear benefit to the individual or household. Before the development of fossil fuels, increasing the complexity and costliness of a society meant that people worked harder.

The development of complexity is thus a paradox of human history. Over the past 12,000 years, we have developed technologies, economies, and social institutions that cost more labor, time, money, energy, and annoyance, and that go against our aversion to such costs. Why, then, did human societies ever become more complex?

At least part of the answer is that complexity is a basic problem-solving tool. Confronted with problems, we often respond by developing more complex technologies, establishing new institutions, adding more specialists or bureaucratic levels to an institution, increasing organization or regulation, or gathering and processing more information. While we usually prefer not to bear the cost of complexity, our problem-solving efforts are powerful complexity generators. All that is needed for growth of complexity is a problem that requires it. Since problems continually arise, there is persistent pressure for complexity to increase.

Cultural complexity can be viewed as an economic function. Societies and institutions invest in problem solving, undertaking costs and expecting benefits in return. In problem-solving systems, inexpensive solutions are adopted before more complex and expensive ones. In the history of human food-gathering and production, for example, labor-sparing hunting and gathering gave way to more labor-intensive agriculture, which in some places has been replaced by industrial agriculture that consumes more energy than it produces. We produce minerals and energy whenever possible from the most economical sources. Our societies have changed from egalitarian relations, economic reciprocity, ad hoc leadership, and generalized roles to social and economic differentiation, specialization, inequality, and full-time leadership. These characteristics are the essence of complexity, and they increase the costliness of any society.

In the progressivist view, surplus energy precedes and facilitates the evolution of complexity. Certainly this is sometimes true: There have been occasions when humans adopted energy sources of such great potential that, with further development and positive feedback, there followed great expansions in the numbers of humans and the wealth and complexity of societies. These occasions have, however, been so rare that we designate them with terms signifying a new era: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It is worth noting that these unusual transitions have not resulted from unbridled human creativity. Rather, they emerged from solutions to problems of resource shortages, and were adopted reluctantly because initially they created diminishing returns on effort in peoples’ daily lives.

Most of the time, cultural complexity increases from day-to-day efforts to solve problems. Complexity that emerges in this way will usually appear before there is additional energy to support it. Rather than following the availability of energy, cultural complexity often precedes it. Complexity thus compels increases in resource production. This understanding of the temporal relationship between complexity and resources has implications for sustainability that diverge from what is commonly assumed. I will explore these implications shortly. It is useful first to present a historical case study, the Western Roman Empire, that illustrates these points.

The Roman Empire collapsed in the mid 5th century A.D., but its last 200 years of existence had been a reprieve. It had been nearly destroyed in the 3rd century. In the half-century from 235-284 the empire was repeatedly breached by invasions of Germanic peoples from the north and the Persians from the east. When these invaders were not being repelled, Roman armies were fighting each other in the service of would-be emperors. Many cities were sacked and productive lands devastated. For a time, rival empires broke away in the east and the west. It seemed that the Roman Empire would not survive much longer.

The Roman government had a clear sustainability goal: the survival of the empire. In response to the crises, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine, in the late third and early fourth centuries, designed a government that was larger, more complex, and more highly organized. They doubled the size of the army. This was very costly. To pay for this sustainability effort, the government taxed its citizens more heavily, conscripted their labor, and dictated their occupations.

With the rise in taxes, population could not recover from plagues in the second and third centuries. There were chronic shortages of labor. Marginal lands went out of cultivation. Faced with taxes, peasants would abandon their lands and flee to the protection of a wealthy landowner. The Roman Empire survived the 3rd century crisis and achieved two centuries of sustainability, but at the long-term cost of consuming its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population. When crises emerged again in the late 4th century, the empire lacked the resources to respond adequately and in time collapsed.

The Roman Empire is a single case study in complexity and problem solving, but it is an important and representative one. It illustrates the basic process by which societies increase in complexity. Societies adopt increasing complexity to solve problems, becoming at the same time more costly. In the normal course of economic evolution, this process at some point will produce diminishing returns. Once diminishing returns set in, a problem-solving institution must either find new resources to continue the activity, or fund the activity by reducing the share of resources available to other economic sectors. The latter is likely to produce economic contraction, popular discontent, and eventual collapse. This was the fate of the Western Roman Empire.

This understanding of complexity and resources has implications for understanding sustainability. Both popular and academic discourse commonly assume that (a) future sustainability requires that industrial societies consume a lower quantity of resources than is now the case, and (b) sustainability will result automatically if we do so. Sustainability emerges, in this view, as a passive consequence of consuming less. Thus sustainability efforts are commonly focused on reducing consumption through voluntary or enforced conservation, perhaps involving simplification, and/or through improvements in technical efficiencies.

The common perspective on sustainability follows logically from the progressivist view that resources precede and facilitate innovations that increase complexity. Complexity, in this view, is voluntary. Human societies become more complex by choice. By this reasoning, we should be able to forego complexity and the resource consumption that it entails. Progressivism leads to the notion that societies can deliberately reduce their use of resources and thereby achieve sustainability.

The fact that complexity and costliness increase through mundane problem solving suggests a different and startling conclusion: Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase. As illustrated by the Roman Empire and other cases, this has commonly been the case. Many advocates of sustainability will find it disturbing that long-term conservation is not possible. Naturally we must ask: Are there alternatives to this process? Regrettably, no simple solutions are evident. Consider some of the approaches commonly advocated:

1. Voluntarily Reduce Resource Consumption. While this may work for a time, its longevity as a strategy is constrained by the fact that societies increase in complexity to solve problems. Resource production must grow to fund the increased complexity. To implement voluntary conservation long term would require that a society be either uniquely lucky in not being challenged by problems, or that it not address the problems that confront it.

2. Employ the Price Mechanism to Control Resource Consumption. This is currently the laissez-faire strategy of industrialized nations. Since humans don’t commonly forego affordable consumption of desired goods and services, economists consider it more effective than voluntary conservation. Both approaches, however, lead eventually to the same outcome: As problems arise, resource consumption must increase at the societal level even if consumers as individuals purchase less.

3. Ration Resources. Because of its unpopularity, rationing is possible in democracies only for clear, short-term emergencies. This is illustrated by the reactions to rationing in England and the United States during World War II. Moreover, rationed resources may become needed to solve societal problems, belying any attempt to conserve through rationing. Something like this can be seen in the fiscal stimulus programs enacted recently.

4. Reduce Population. While this would reduce aggregate resource consumption temporarily, as a long-term strategy it has the same fatal flaw: Problems will emerge that require solutions, and those solutions will compel resource production to grow.

5. Hope for Technological Solutions. I sometimes call this a faith-based approach to our future. Members of industrialized societies are socialized to believe that we can always find a technological solution to resource problems. Technology, within the framework of this belief, will presumably allow us continually to reduce our resource consumption per unit of material well-being. Conventional economics teaches that to bring this about we need only the price mechanism and unfettered markets. The flaw here was pointed out by William Stanley Jevons: As technological improvements reduce the cost of using a resource, total consumption will actually increase.

In conclusion, sustainability is not the achievement of stasis. It is not a passive consequence of having fewer humans who consume more limited resources. One must work at being sustainable. The challenges that any society (or other institution) might confront are, for practical purposes, endless in number and infinite in variety. This being so, sustainability is a matter of solving problems.

In the conventional view, complexity follows energy. If so, then we should be able to forego complexity voluntarily and reduce our consumption of the resources that it requires. This approach to sustainability implicitly sees the future as a condition of stasis with no challenges.

In actuality, major infusions of surplus energy are rare in human history. More commonly, complexity increases in response to problems. Complexity emerging through problem solving typically precedes the availability of energy, and compels increases in its production. Complexity is not something that we can ordinarily choose to forego.

Applying this understanding leads to two conclusions. The first is that the solutions commonly recommended to promote sustainability–conservation, simplification, pricing, and innovation–can do so only in the short term. Secondly, long-term sustainability depends on solving major societal problems that will converge in coming decades, and this will require increasing complexity and energy production. Sustainability is not a condition of stasis. It is, rather, a process of continuous adaptation, of perpetually addressing new or ongoing problems and securing the resources to do so.

It is useful to think of sustainability in the metaphor of an athletic game: It is possible to “lose”–that is, to become unsustainable, as happened to the Western Roman Empire. But the converse does not hold. Because we continually confront challenges, there is no point at which a society has “won”–become sustainable in perpetuity, or at least for a very long time. Success, rather, consists of staying in the game.

[izquierdista]

1. No problem with #4

It doesn't mean that you have to quit fucking, just quit popping out more people. Every species on earth has the breeding capacity to overwhelm the planet if left unchecked. It's just that the apex species (human) have to be smart enough to be a check on themselves.

[The2ndWheel]

2. Is that a check on just population, or does that check include everything we do?

We humans aren't overwhelming the planet with just people. If we didn't give ourselves the ability to have so many people, we wouldn't have this many people.

[HamdenRice]

3. What a steaming pile of meaningless horseshit

I suppose I could go through it sentence by sentence showing why it's so much meaningless double talk, but life is short.

[pscot]

4. What I most admire about your posts

is the subtle brilliance with which you dissect the other fellow's argument. The power of your intellect shines through in every line.

[joshcryer]

6. I would find that very amusing though! But nah, let's not marginalize GG.

He's a good guy, and you can be a bit abrasive (but that's what makes it funny, sorry GG!).

[GliderGuider]

8. No problem.

It's just the internet, and we're all just electrons.

[HamdenRice]

10. Where to begin? I could keep a running tally.

"My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, "

Generally, whenever anyone starts out by saying entire academic disciplines are wrong and he has got it right, there's good bet that the writer is a crackpot. That is the case here.

"The concepts of civilization and progress have a status in the cosmology of industrial societies that amounts to what anthropologists call “ancestor myths.”"

Uh, no. Ancestor myths are unverifiable and often untrue. Our modern understanding of history is based on evidence -- archaeology, linguistics, documentary and archival records, oral history, etc. It is not myth.

"Social scientists label this a “progressivist” view."

No they don't. Google "progressivist" and nothing comes up. The progressive movement comes up, but not a "progressivist" view of history. This is a classic strawman. I could as well say that the dominant view of history is Khmer Rougist, and I will now show why it is wrong. In other words, I can make shit up about how "most social scientists" view history that is blatantly false and then shoot it down, but I would not be demonstrating anything.

So proving the progressivist view of history wrong is a meaningless enterprise.

The closest thing to what the writer calls a progressivist view of history is perhaps what's known as "Whig history." But it is about politics, not economics.

"Progressivism is the dominant ideology of free-market societies."

Actually the dominant free market view of history is that it is not a deliberate attempt at progress, but the result of individual decision making, and not the result of intentionality. Not that I agree with free market history, but at least describe it accurately.

I'll leave it there for now, but I have to warn, the essay actually gets worse and worse, and more and more incoherent as it goes on.

[Terry in Austin]

11. "Our modern understanding is not myth."

Depends on what we're calling "myth," doesn't it?

In anthropological terms, "myth" just refers to the core narratives of a culture -- its beliefs, its values, its aspirations, its conflicts. Often, they're told in very allegorical ways, but not always. Referring to any of them as a "myth" makes no claim about the "truth" or "falsehood" of it -- such is irrelevant to the observations about what the myths are and how a particular myth serves the culture in question.

Every culture has its myths, and we're no exception. It's also worth noting that usually a myth is propagated in the context of some verifying authority -- "word of God," "said by the old ones," "scientifically verified," "written in the stone tablets," "historically proven," or what have you. Different cultures have different criteria for verification.

Unfortunately, criteria for verification cannot verify themselves in any meaningful way. That's what happens when we say "yeah, but we're different, we're modern, we're right." Sadly, no -- certainty remains elusive. But at least in our culture we are more or less free to be critical about which criteria we accept, and to work out for ourselves which ones we think are the best bets.

Personally, I regard the empirical methods of science as being a pretty good bet, especially when its claims to "the truth" are kept suitably modest -- no good scientist ever claims to "prove" anything.

I'm a lot more skeptical about "historical proof," to take another example from our own cultural narrative. It's much more vulnerable to political slant than, say, the results of a well-conducted physics experiment.

The two important things to ask when someone makes a claim of "historical proof" are
a. Whose history, and
b. What are you calling "proof?"

Granted, there's much that's off-putting about Tainter's narrative style, with no shortage of bones ripe for the picking. But I think that the essentials of his analysis -- the increase of complexity as a social adaptive response, and the self-limiting nature of it -- provide a useful model for figuring out how we got into this mess, and maybe some clues about how best to mitigate it.

[Terry in Austin]

9. Curious - what would be your meaningful non-horseshit?

You seem to disagree rather sharply with this analysis. What analysis would you agree with?

[joshcryer]

5. "As technological improvements reduce the cost of using a resource..."

"...total consumption will actually increase."

I want to respond to this bit, I might write a more lengthy response later (if someone doesn't beat me to the more esoteric aspects of the article), but I will say that I did read the whole piece in full, I did not just cherry pick that statement.

As technological improvements reduce the cost of using a resource, total consumption will actually increase.

Total consumption of any species is limited by that species' resource utilization. You have some free roaming goats in the mountains. Their populations, and indeed, their consumption levels will be met by their natural environment. The cost of things in their environment is only equal to their capacity to acquire it. When a goat gets hungry, it eats. When a goats belly gets full, it stops eating. When a goat needs to go to the bathroom, it does so. Live and die, mate, have offspring. If you have too many offspring, they starve to death (or are easily preyed upon; but let's ignore that part of the equation for the sake of brevity since humans don't have a natural animal predator). So a goats population level is limited by their utilization of resources in the natural environment.

Humans are distinct in that they are able to utilize resources outside of the natural environment, and indeed, create their own human ecology. Their overall capacity to utilize resources is then *not* limited by the natural environment. Their environment is always changing.

But given the laws of physics we know that in fact humans, like all other entities in this universe, *are* limited by their resource utilization. Just like our goats. It's just that we have a problem with allowing nature to overly impinge on our ecology, and we can do something about it. Our limitations then do not start with our populations or individual capacities being affected by the natural environment, but rather by our inability to further experience and utilize resources as individual entities.

The questions then arise:

Q: 1) Are humans near a resource limitation in their environment?

Q: 2) If they are not, what stops them from continuing to increase their resource utilization?

A: 1) No, they are not, humans are such ingenious creatures that they can geoengineering a whole planet (albeit accidentally, which makes them not geniuses so much). Technological capability is not a matter of faith, it is simply a matter of fact. And the conservation of matter is on our side, in that regard. Nature has used the simple fact to persist for billions of years. We can (and sometimes do) use it to our advantage. It's called recycling. Nature is extraordinarily efficient at it. Human ecology, not so much. Yet.

A: 2) The answer is simple. The same reason a goat stops eating when its belly is full, humans in a technological society stop consuming when their "belly is full." There are only so many hours in a day to do a given activity. There is only so much energy utilization a human can muster. If you had more efficient technological systems and could calculate the average energy usage for all human beings, it would probably still be less energy than our friends the algae use. It really does put things into perspective. Only instead of algae, we exist was beings that enjoy the environment, experience, and utilize it without it deeming our limitations for us, by creating our own human ecology within it. This results in population decline (as is universal in societies with a good standard of living).

[GliderGuider]

7. The rebound effect is a bit more complex than Tainter made it appear in this article

(Probably because he was speaking to a group that understood the issue well, he used a bit of shorthand.) Rebound is also a tricky thing to measure, due to the complexity of economic and social activity. One of the things that happens is that as increasing efficiency reduces the effective price of a resource, some economic capacity is released (especially as usage of the resource under consideration approaches saturation). That spending power is then diffused into other areas of the economy. So the overall economy (and aggregate consumption) continues to grow, and the growth is enabled by increased resource efficiencies of all kinds -- efficiencies that are made possible by our ingenuity. The rebound doesn't need to be greater than 100% in order for that to occur. I read this book last year, which shed a lot of light on the concept.

Making the case that our bellies are full is going to be tough. 80% of the planet's population has yet to reach the rate of resource consumption we have demonstrated is possible and desirable. Our capacity to utilize resources may not be limited by the natural environment. But on our way to saturating the material wants of everybody on the planet I suspect I suspect we're going to find some unintended consequences.

[joshcryer]

12. I'm well aware of this economic analysis of human ecology.

Basically it attempts to show that economics are the limiting factor for growth, and that consumption is kept down due to cost factors.

But as I was arguing, if it wasn't clear, human ecology basically exists independent of economics (indeed, I would argue for it to reach its full potential it must reject economics entirely).

When you look at any ecological system you see that the natural environment is the limiting factor for consumption, I am arguing that in a human ecology, human limits are the limiting factor for consumption.

The reason I disagree with this "cost analysis" concept is simple; humans have been getting stuff for "essentially no cost" for about 20 years now, and it has not resulted in resource consumption "going up." TV shows, movies, music. Once your iPod is full, once your hard drive is full, there is a limit to your consumption. My brother recently finished watching Star Trek Voyager. It took him a *month.* You cannot watch that show without putting aside at least 5 days of waking hours. And that's watching continually, and only taking a break to go to the bathroom! Therefore, the limitation here is in ones ability to do something, it's internal, not external.

You look at electrical consumption in the United States. Electrical costs are ridiculous, nearly free (cents for the kilowatt hour). But does it magically "go up"?



No. It follows *population*. Per capita the USAs energy usage hasn't change very much since 1970. That's almost 40 years! Now am I going to believe that if energy were 'free' (not cents on the kilowatt, nothing on the kilowatt), people would just start consuming more? That's not how the trend has worked. And giving *physical limitations of entities* that's not how reality works.

While you can argue that diffusion has caused world energy usage to go up "not per capita" I can agree with that. However, the vast majority of the world don't have 1970 standard of living, either, they're still catching up. But once they do then their energy usage only follows population. At which point their populations even out or even go in the negative. Indeed, the United States has nearly 1:1 population growth (from babies; one parental group has two children). In the United States, population growth is mainly due to immigration (the highest number of immigrations in the world).

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html

I won't disagree with you that our standard of living isn't hurting the environment, but that's the beautiful thing about human beings. If we start to over saturate the natural environment, we become more and more compelled to make our own human ecology better, so that it has less and less effect on the environment (and those aspects of the natural ecosystem which we do rely on). You suck the Great Midwest Aquifer dry, you gotta start thinking about ways to utilize water more efficiently (most of it evaporates away or is perspired). But this kind of thing is what humans are good at.

[GliderGuider]

13. A few comments

Resources are of course the ultimate limit to material consumption. Since there are resources that are not yet fully exploited, though, the economics of substitution still comes into play for those that are.

If my iPod is full, I buy a bigger one. Or erase the music on it and download a new batch from my new terabyte hard drive.

If the market for electricity is saturated, money that might have been allocated to it if the price was higher is simply freed up to be used in other parts of the economy (i.e. for exploiting different parts of the resource base).

Along with others I've argued that the energy requirements of bringing the world up to western consumption standards is prohibitive. It would require probably four or five times our current consumption to do that, and for a population of 9+billion would probably take six or eight times that. We've been able to triple our global energy consumption in the last 40 years, but that's been possible because of petroleum exploitation. The engineering required to septuple the world's energy production, especially in the absence of oil, within the same time frame, seems a quixotic hope. Then of course there's the added ecological damage that will be entrained in all that development -- electricity doesn't mean much to the individual beyond heat and light, and people might also want resource-rich stuff as a consequence of their energy enrichment. IMO inducing a benign Demographic Transition by enriching the people of the planet is a forlorn hope.

Your argument that as we saturate our environment we find better and better ways to do things is not supported by the evidence. Read Jared Diamond's "Collapse" to get a good look at civilizations that have foundered on precisely that failure.

I'm a great believer in ecological economics. The one thing that distresses me most about our current system is that no cost is attached to primary natural resources -- they are assumed to be free, aside from regulatory or access costs. That imposes horrifying distortions on the economy that is built on them, IMO. Just as the cost of waste disposal is often socialized in the name of profits, so ultimately is the more obscure cost of resource depletion.

[joshcryer]

14. If we look at factual stats, though, we see that as technology develops it becomes more efficient.

From 1970 until now per capita energy usage changed very little (it did go up but not significantly). Why is this? In the same time frame microwaves, computers, TVs became ubiquitous. Along with Internet, of course. It's because things like "Energy Star" said "Dishwashers, TVs, refrigerators, washer/dryers, all appliances should meet a gold standard." So while *more* new appliances came online, and why *more* new ways of interacting with the environment were invented, the *overall* net result was that energy, per device, was lowered, and that individual energy usage was mostly unchanged.

Now a days we have clothing washers that can wash a load of clothes for a cup or two of water per piece of clothing. Back in the 70s it was probably closer to a gallon.

Your iPod being full is largely irrelevant, because we are still not at a state of total human consumption limit. Your iPod can't hold all music ever made ever recorded, ever. In 20 years devices will exist that can hold all media ever made, every movie, every piece of music. Are we then going to believe that people will still desire devices that *hold more information than that which exists*? It's kinda silly. And to top it off, when we look at the past and future of technological efficiency, we see that it covers all bases. You look at movies or TV shows. First we had MPEG1, then MPEG2, now we have h.264. Each iteration halved the size of video files while more than doubling the resolution. If Tim Sweeney is correct, in 10-15 years we will have "perfectly realistic graphics." At that point whole movies will require the storage space a thousand times less! Instead of filming actors on a set, cutting, splicing, and distributing the resulting film, you distribute the CG models and sets, all utilizing procedural graphics and the like.

The substitution argument is one of economics, I make no statements about economics, merely the basic ecology of humans (which is different from other animals in that our limits are internal, and theirs are external). I only say that "technological progress" (not to be confused with "progress") does result, eventually, inevitably, in a resource wall. I can only drink a few gallons of water a day, I can only eat so many cheeseburgers.

So how do we solve this? Well, we take human ecology seriously, all waste produced, we recycle. All. We're heading in that direction but we're still some ways off. Until we do this, until we can produce food without relying no natural gas produced fertilizers, until we can produce energy without relying on coal or any other non-renewable resource, we aren't going to be able to exist without harming our natural environment.

The argument is that we can't. I have been hearing the argument in whatever form or another for about 20 years. I am simply not convinced by the argument.