Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil

Half a century later, ENIAC was reconstructed on a 7.4 × 5.3 mm silicon microchip that contained 174,569 transistors: their total was ten times larger than the original count for vacuum tubes because the transistors also replaced all resistors, capacitors, and other components (Van der Spiegel et al. 2000). ENIAC was more than 5 million times heavier, it consumed about 40,000 more electricity but its speed was no more than 0.002% that of the reconstructed processor (100 kHz vs. 50 Mhz), all of it thanks to solid-state electronics and its continuous advances.

It is a classic case of lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps—only with today’s increasingly powerful computers can we design tomorrow’s chips”

agriculture was impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene.

rising temperatures and growing populations actually provided the stimulus for the introduction of agriculture.

they concluded that population growth was governed primarily by the global climate and species-specific factors rather than by the regional environment or particular subsistence practices.

If, nevertheless, it turns out that nations really grow by superposition of cycles, as Pearl describes them, it would tend to indicate that the growth of human populations is not, after all, comparable to that of fruit flies in a bottle.

Even after Europe began to reorganize itself into relatively more prosperous political entities, the size of its cities remained limited.

Remarkably, even the post-1950 rise of inexpensive long-distance transportation (first large bulk carriers and tankers, then container ships in maritime trade; containerized diesel or electric railway shipments; long-distance trucking) and the rapid post-1980 diffusion of highly affordable instant communication, information and data sharing have not weakened the process of agglomeration.

the intensity of that urbanization effort is perhaps best illustrated by the astonishing fact that China has been recently emplacing every three years more concrete than the United States used in construction of its infrastructure, housing, and transportation during the entire 20th century (Smil 2014b).

And megacities also face what Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurance companies, calls megarisks, as the unprecedented accumulations of population, infrastructures, economic activities, and wealth also pose the possibility of unprecedented payoffs in the case of major natural catastrophes, terrorist attacks, or war (Munich Re 2004; Allianz 2015).

“many real systems do not show true power law behavior because they are incomplete or inconsistent with the conditions under which one might expect power laws to emerge.”

As a result, the law largely holds (approximately) for the city sizes of each EU country but fails completely for the entire EU set, while the reverse is true for the US, where the complete national set is nearly Zipfian but individual state sets fail to conform. This difference reflects the fact that European cities grew for centuries as parts of national systems, while US expansion took place more rapidly within the confines of an economically united state.

To put it differently, world populations are not yet sufficiently globalized to form a coherent integrated system where the rank-size distribution would follow the power law rather than, as it does now, deviating significantly from it.

The long-term adaptation of empires is thus a far more fascinating subject to study than trying to find the closest mathematical fit for their expansive period, and the contrast between Rome and China offers some revealing specificities.

Although both empires had to rely on large armies to defend their vulnerable borders, the institutions for doing so were different: Rome delegated power to its military and that made the Roman generals both kingmakers and contenders for the supreme power, while China’s governance relied on top-down bureaucracy that checked the authority of generals (Zheng 2015). These realities are illustrated by comparing the transfer of power in the Roman Empire and in the Qin and Han dynasties: 62% of Roman changes of power involved military accession, while in China hereditary successions accounted for 87% of changes.

Clearly, the amalgam of China’s cultural forces was strongly centripetal, that of the Roman ways steadily more centrifugal.

Although economists have a long history of ignoring energy, all economic activities are, in fundamental physical (thermodynamic) terms, simple or sequential energy conversions aimed at producing specific products or services.

The rest of Europe, Asia, and the newly created US remained overwhelmingly wooden economies until the 19th century (Smil 1017a).

Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel, releasing about 90 g CO2/MJ, while natural gas emits 25% less, or only about 68 g CO2/MJ; because in the US coal generated nearly half of all electricity in 2005 and only 30% by 2016, the country achieved a faster reduction of its CO2 emissions during that period than any other high-income economy, including Germany with its heavily subsidized PV and wind electricity generation.

Stated inversely, two out of every five people alive (and every second person in China) is now adequately fed thanks to the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia.

These advances have led to the unintended effect of raising general expectations regarding the pace of technical progress. This is a clear pars pro toto mistake or, as I have called it, Moore’s curse (Smil 2015a).

pure silicon costs 100 times more than aluminum and 800 times more than steel;

All single-item theories of value suffer from what Rose (1986) called selective inattention to the complexity of civilizations and to the interconnectedness of things, and “treating all non-energy entities merely as energy transformations and pricing everything according to embodied energy content is forcing the multifaceted reality into dubious one-dimensional confines” (Smil 2008, 344).

the most notable 20th-century surge did not come as a result of post-1970 information and communication advances: it began early in the 19th century and it peaked during the Great Depression (with effects reaching into the 1970s), with mass adoption of electricity, telephones, automobiles, and new chemicals being the main sources of growth.

Cf robert gordon

research and development efforts were increasingly concerned with product differentiation rather than with product (or process) innovation, a focus that improved consumers’ welfare but did little for economic growth.

And David (1990) noted a historical analogy between the apparent failure of microprocessor-driven innovations to create a surge in US productivity during the 1980s and the limited impact of pre-1920 electrification, decades after the commissioning of the first power plants. US productivity growth, below 1.5%/year between 1973 and 1995, was reversed during the late 1990s when its rate of 2.5%/year was nearly as high as it was between 1960 and 1973.

Yet another explanation sees the slowdown primarily as a lag in realizing productivity benefits following the adoption of new techniques (Manyika et al. 2017).

Interplay of secular decline and fiat money?

Gordon (2016) sees six headwinds that will reduce long-term growth even if innovation were to continue at rates similar to the recent past: a changing population structure, changing education, rising inequality, impacts of globalization, challenges of energy and the environment, and the burdens of consumer and government debt.

They presented a helpful graphic summary of possible interactions in the economic growth process by aggregating the set of factors into nine groups (capital and labor; technology; demography; geography (including climate); culture; institutions; income distribution; government policies; macroeconomic stability and economic growth) and by interpreting long-run growth as a net outcome of multilateral interactions among these sets and the economic growth itself.

Moreover, in a fascinating feedback, it appears that economic depressions acted as triggers of innovative activity (Mensch 1979): the last deep global downturn during the 1930s brought us such fundamental advances as gas turbines (jet engines), fluorescent lights, radar, and nuclear energy.

the share of living phytomass in the total standing forest mass is almost certainly no higher than 15% (Smil 2013a).

an expected quantitative confirmation of the fact that imperial survival is remarkably idiosyncratic and distinct,

this reality is known as the Red Queen effect: longevity confers no advantage, survival demands constant adaptation, evolution, and proliferation merely to maintain one’s place against the onslaught of competing species—or adversarial groups, be they upstart nomadic marauders, neighboring, or even distant, states, or other already established empires.

We can forecast and assemble alternative scenarios but we will not truly understand the

new dynamics of very low or no-growth economies with declining populations until they have existed for some time.

In relative terms (per unit of economic product) the global economy has shifted in the direction of greater sustainability but in absolute terms it has shown no tendency toward deliberately slower growth, and degrowth remains a cherished topic for ecological economists, not a guiding principle for any companies or governments.

degrowth not by choice but as a reaction to cumulative (economic, extraction, consumption, environmental) excesses.

objects of desire change, desire remains.

There is no need to be a catastrophist in order to see what I call the great obverse: all that we have lost as a result of growth in general and mass consumption of artifacts and experiences in particular, the extent to which we have already imperiled the life on Earth, and the potential for further damage resulting from a growing population and rising aspirations.

We may not know every detail of doing the right thing, but the direction of the required actions is clear: to ensure the habitability of the biosphere while maintaining human dignity.