From 1972, when China and India could not feed their populations, both have become food exporters. The Club of Rome made the same mistake as their "limited world" predecessors, Malthus and Marx. They thought of people as reactive automatons, unable to change their behavior or their consumption. The Club of Rome should have known better. The "Green Revolution," which increased the world's production per acre of grains by a factor of five, had started in the 1960's. The Chinese peasant, allowed to farm 1/2 acre and sell his produce since 1965, had increased overall Chinese food production by 30% by 1972. The Reality: Resources are Expanding

It seems illogical, or nearly paradoxical, that as we use more resources, our resource pool keeps growing, but that is in fact the case. This is true for three reasons:

New methods of finding and extracting resources (ore, oil, gas, other) have allowed us to increase the amount of reserves substantially-to the point where we have more global reserves of most important minerals and energy today than we did in 1972.

We have become more efficient in what we produce, partly due to the increase in the price of resources.

Our economy has changed in the developed world. For example, a ton of steel and an Intel computer chip sells for about the same number of dollars: we're producing a lot more chips and a lot less steel than we used to in OECD countries. Since a chip only requires a few grains of sand, the world's resources are preserved.

What about sustainability?

If "sustainability" means the ability to maintain and even improve our way of life on...

Despite growing to nearly 7 billion people, humanity today is better fed, lives longer and enjoys more resources than ever before. As China approaches $10,000 per person in income, they will have undergone the same changes as those of us in OECD countries: fewer goods, more services, less pollution, better standards of living.
Conclusion

There is no harm in recycling our garbage or buying smaller cars -- if that's what we as individual consumers want to do. In choosing these options, we join the rest of the richest in the world -- the richer we get, the better we conserve.

The modern "sustainability worriers" make the same mistake as Marx, Malthus and Say. They assume that the pie is constant, and growing populations will suffer. The truth is that the pie is growing even faster than the number of mouths to feed.

Bibliography

Duchesne, R. "On the Rise of the West: Researching Kenneth Pomeranz's Great Divergence." Review of Radical Political Economics, 2004: 52-81.

Economist. "This week in comparative advantage." Economist, 2007: n.p.

Hollander, S. "Two Hundred Years of Say's Law: Essays on Economic Theory's Most Controversial Principle." History of Political Economy, 2005: 382-385.

Malthus, TR. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson, 1798.

Meadows, DH, Meadows, DL, Randers, J and Behrens, WW. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

Wrigley, RS. London. London: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Sustainable Development