Growth

I've enjoyed a couple of Vaclav Smil's other books, so I was excited to dig into his latest, especially with it's promisingly broad subtitle: From Microorganisms to Megacities.  Unfortunately, while there's tons of interesting facts, and some interesting analysis, the book as a whole was a bit of a disappointment to me.  

The first problem may strike many netizens as churlish and old fashioned now that we live in the yolo age of tweets and gifs.  But the book is riddled with orthographic and grammatical errors and suffers from a lot of just plain shitty writing!  It's got the level of careful proofreading and editing of my blog (I mean not this, my original, blog, but the compromised second draft)  Which is to say none at all.  Now, with a live blog, you get what you pay for, but with a book I expect more.  This is annoying enough when it's just a simple typo that doesn't distort the meaning.  But that is merely a symptom of a more serious underlying condition -- nobody ever read this thing to make sure that the information and arguments were clearly presented!  Many sections are needlessly confusing.  They read as if each paragraph has simply been added in the order in which the author read the study that it cites.  Bob Loblaw said XXXX (Bob Loblaw, 1986), but this was based on some questionable assumptions.  Lorem Ipsum said YYY (Lorem Ipsum, 1973), but Bob Loblaw (Loblaw op. cit.) thought this was incorrect.  Eventually Foo Bar (Foo Bar, 1999) reestablished that YYY was actually a good approximation under certain conditions, but now that we've got more data we think ZZZ is true.  So, you know, the point is in fact ZZZ.  I am not exaggerating this.  Again and again it's liek readint he guy's wroking notes.  mAybe funnny as a one liner, but not something you;d like to spend 500 pages doing.

Even setting that objection aside though I still feel like the good lord gypped me a little with this one.  True to its title, the book is a survey of the growth trajectories of all kinds of different things.  First there's an introductory chapter on the mathematics of growth -- distinguishing linear, from exponential, logistic, and hyperbolic growth.  This is followed by successive chapters looking at the growth of various characteristics of natural organisms (the mass and size and populations of microbes, plants, and animals) the growth of human energy convertors (size and efficiency of waterwheels, windmills, various engines, all the way up to PV and nuclear energy sources) the growth of human-made artifacts (tools, buildings, modes of transport, electronics) and the growth of human societies (the size and extent of human populations, cities, economies, and empires).  While there's an enormous wealth of interesting detail in all these chapters, a survey so broad can't help but feel a bit summary and even somewhat arbitrary; you just can't cover everything.  

By the time you get to the last chapter, What Comes After Growth, the logic of what Smil chose to cover is already evident.  Exponential, and especially hyperbolic growth simply cannot go on for very long on a finite planet.  Every curve he's shown us in the past 400 pages is some variety of S-curve.  Some, such as the growth of transistors per chip or the output of the largest gas turbine, can look exponential over a surprising number of orders of magnitude.  Like 12 in the case of Moore's Law to date.  Which is pretty impressive growth.  But eventually, even this growth has its range and its limit.  And while we can debate what limits might apply to the growth of a completely human construct like GDP, insofar as there are physical constraints -- like mass and energy consumption and waste products and yields of photosynthesizing crops -- growth always comes to an end.  The points in his survey intend to show us the bounded growth and eventual plateau of everything humanity crucially depends on for its survival and comfort.  The inescapable conclusion is that all forms of human growth will also eventually come to an end.  We won't ever grow to be 12 feet tall.  There can't be 100m people on the planet.  We can't indefinitely continue to convert old dinosaurs to new heat, light, and motion, in order for ever more of us to consume ever larger houses and cars and Carl's Jr. ½ lb. Guacamole Bacon Thickburgers.

Which, but, really?  You needed 500 pages to tell me this? I mean, maybe some of the singularity obsessed tech brethren need to hear this stated as a long technical argument about the limits to the dematerialization of the economy.  Not that this is likely to convince them that the singularity has left the building.  For the remainder of our society, which is indeed unhealthily obsessed with growth, a book like this is not going to change their outlook.  Not least because they won't understand it.  So who, then is the book aimed at?  

Not me at least.  I needed no convincing.  I was instead hoping to gain a better understanding of mechanisms of plateau, of maintenance, of managed decline.  Or perhaps to at least understand exactly which limiting factors might bite first, so as to contemplate the consequences in detail rather than simply wave my hands around and warn that society will "collapse".  Smil at least cannot be accused of falling into this facile trap.  Since his discussion of growth was driven by quantitative data, he would like his discussion of "collapse" to be as well -- which variables collapse, and when and how, according to what mathematical function?  Unless you're going to describe all 9 circles in detail, hell is just a fairy tale to scare children.

Unfortunately, Smil is actually pretty vague on what comes after growth.  He only emphasizes that fitting curves and extrapolating unchanging trends has proved to be a terrible way of predicting the future.  This is an improvement on the hyperventilating Club of Rome view, which he heavily criticizes while sharing their concerns, but it doesn't leave us with much else to go on.  The closest he comes to exploring the issue is a few pages reflecting on Japan's "economic stagnation", which actually is entirely a function of their population decline and lack of immigration -- per capita GDP growth in Japan has been almost identical to the US over the past 30 years.  So I respect his caution and neutrality.  I too think that it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.  Yet the future always happens.  But what he offers us here seems like nothing more than a prequel to a longer discussion.