More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next

by Andrew McAfee

I’ll show, capitalism continued and spread (just look around you), but tech progress changed. We invented the computer, the Internet, and a suite of other digital technologies that let us dematerialize our consumption: over time they allowed us to consume more and more while taking less and less from the planet. This happened because digital technologies offered the cost savings that come from substituting bits for atoms, and the intense cost pressures of capitalism caused companies to accept this offer over and over. Think, for example, how many devices have been replaced by your smartphone.

I call tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government the “four horsemen of the optimist.”

Over thousands of years it is remarkable how little progress we made at taking more from the planet—enough more to make a meaningful difference in how big or prosperous human groups could be. We are tenacious creatures and we strove mightily, but it would be far too big a stretch to say we conquered nature prior to the end of the eighteenth century. Instead, it held us in check.

Haber won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 for synthesizing ammonia. Bosch and his colleague Friedrich Bergius won theirs in 1931 for “chemical high pressure methods.” Today, the Haber-Bosch process for producing fertilizer is so fundamental to human enterprise that, according to the energy analyst and author Ramez Naam, it uses about 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy. Is that energy well spent? Absolutely. Vaclav Smil, a prodigious scholar of humanity’s relationship with our planet, estimates that “the prevailing diets of 45 percent of the world’s population” depend on the Haber-Bosch process. Author Charles Mann writes, “More than three billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensively vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.”

When we look at this era’s great mistakes this way, an interesting pattern emerges. As industrialized countries advanced and became more prosperous, they first started treating humans better. They stopped enslaving people or making children work and eventually gave up claims to foreigners’ lands. Better treatment of animals was slower to come and in some cases arrived too late to save a species. And better treatment of our planet came last of all. We kept heedlessly plundering and polluting it for almost two centuries after the Industrial Revolution started.

Rather than making a dry point about economic growth rates, Marshall was making a deep statement about human nature: we want more. We do not get satisfied at any level of affluence or consumption. Instead, even as we grow comparatively rich, we continue to want more. We might not even know exactly what we desire next—these are the “wants growing up in” us—but some clever innovator or entrepreneur is going to help us realize what those wants are and offer them to satisfy them, for a price. In doing so, it’s reasonable to assume that some of the planet’s finite natural resources are going to be used up.

In his bestselling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich laid out a scenario that made Malthus look like a sunny optimist. Early editions of the book began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

It is hard to convey to people who came of age after Earth Day just how broad and deep the concerns were at the time, and how the tone of the mainstream conversation about our planet was somewhere between alarmist and apocalyptic. Modern discussions around climate change sometimes have the same flavor, but very different timescales.

First, small-scale farming is less efficient in its use of resources than massive, industrialized, mechanized agriculture. To get the same harvest, homesteaders use more land, water, and fertilizer than do “factory farmers.”

Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling. City folk live in high-density, energy-efficient apartments and condos, travel only short distances for work and errands, and frequently use public transportation. None of these things is true of country living. As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.”

Like innovation itself, technologies are combinatorial; most of them are combinations or recombinations of existing things. This implies that the number of potentially powerful new technologies increases over time because the number of available building blocks does.

How could these predictions about resource availability, which were taken seriously when they were released, have been so wrong? Because the Limits to Growth team pretty clearly underestimated both dematerialization and the endless search for new reserves. Capitalism and tech progress combine to drive both of these trends—the use of fewer resources and the hunt for more of them—and neither of these two drivers is about to become less powerful. So we’ll continue to innovate our way to greater dematerialization while we keep finding more reserves.

The earth is finite, so the total quantity of resources such as gold and petroleum is limited. But the earth is also very, very big—big enough to contain all we need of these and other resources, for as long as we’ll need them. The image of a thinly supplied Spaceship Earth hurtling through the cosmos with us aboard is compelling, but deeply misleading. Our planet has amply supplied us for our journey.

The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all. —Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905

Capitalism is not going to host the debate about which of these offerings are to be permitted. That essential debate needs to happen elsewhere in a society. Smith got right the fundamental principle we should apply: “The interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” We also need to attend to the interests not only of the producer or the consumer but also of the people (such as slaves or children) and the animals that are used in production but don’t want to be.

Hayek realized that fluctuating prices for such things as aluminum and wheat are signals about scarcity and abundance. These signals cause people who buy and sell to take action (to slim, swap, optimize, evaporate, and so on). So free-floating prices in capitalist economies do an important double duty: they provide both information and incentives. Prices fixed by a socialist government do neither of those things.

Authoritarianism is bad for social capital because it offers trust and reciprocity only under the conditions of obedience and conformity. Those conditions are clearly unacceptable to those who value diversity, so ties don’t form between pluralists and authoritarians. As authoritarianism moves from latent to active in more people, existing ties break and social capital erodes.

Most formal models of economic growth, as well as the informal mental ones most of us walk around with, feature decreasing returns—growth slows down as the overall economy gets bigger. This makes intuitive sense; it just feels like it would be easier to experience 5 percent growth in a $1 billion economy than a $1 trillion one. But Romer showed that as long as that economy continued to add to its human capital—the overall ability of its people to come up with new technologies and put them to use—it could actually grow faster even as it grew bigger. This is because the stock of useful, nonrivalrous, nonexcludable ideas would keep growing. As Romer convincingly showed, economies run and grow on ideas.

In the Second Machine Age, the global stock of digital tools is increasing much more quickly than ever before. It’s being used in countless ways by profit-hungry companies to combine raw materials in ways that use fewer of them. In advanced economies such as America’s, the cumulative impact of this combination of capitalism and tech progress is clear: absolute dematerialization of the economy and society, and thus a smaller footprint on our planet.