One of my most popular posts ever is a brief musing about the “trophic theory of money” I wrote back in 2014. Brian Czech, who developed or at least clarified and named the theory, has a new journal article about it here. He writes pretty well for a lay audience so I would encourage people to read the paper rather than rely on me to summarize, but nonetheless here are a few key points in my own words so people can start yelling at me:

• Before humanity figured out how to produce an agricultural surplus, everybody was trying to scratch a living out of the dirt and there was no need for money to be invented. Once the agricultural surplus became significant, many people were freed up to do other things and this led to money. So money is essentially measuring the amount of activity happening outside of agriculture, and indirectly measuring the amount of agricultural surplus that allows this to happen.
• Towards the end of the paper, Mr. Czech acknowledges that improvements in technology over time (usually driven by intentional investment in research and development) have been able to reduce environmental impact per unit of economic activity, even though total environmental impact has continued to grow. However, he believes this process has nearly reached its limit and will not continue much longer.
• It is possible the economy could transition to a steady state where GDP (adjusted for inflation) is no longer growing. It is also possible our environmental impact will overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity enough and for long enough that a sharp contraction in GDP (and necessarily, the amount of agricultural surplus) will occur.

Where do I stand on this? I take the laws of thermodynamics, and the fact that humanity is a species existing within and not apart from nature, as a given. I think there is a lot of knowledge out there yet to be discovered, and if our society took the right steps we might be able to keep growing in a sustainable way for some time. I don’t think there is any evidence that our sociopolitical system even understands the problem let alone is likely to take those steps. I don’t think action on the necessary scale will take place unless and until we reach a crisis stage. About the most positive I can be is to hope for a relatively minor crisis rather than a civilization ending one.