Malthus and vice

Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern culture, by and large, doesn’t see that it can exist only in the medium of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn’t see the water it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to perceive the waters around us.

Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly, we are coming to realize that Malthus was right.

It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s: