This paper has in its conclusion that: "results indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade or so but leave open whether the subsequent decline will constitute a collapse". This seems prima facie implausible to me but I couldn't find any critiques to this paper so any thoughts as to why this paper is wrong, right or inconclusive would be appreciated or alternatively a pointer to a good critique.
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The original "Limits to Growth" report was produced during the 1970s amid an oil-price crisis and widespread fears of overpopulation and catastrophic environmental decline. (See also books like "The Population Bomb" from 1968.) These fears have mostly gone away over time, as population growth has slowed in many countries and the worst environmental problems (like choking smog, acid rain, etc) have been mitigated.
This new paper is taking a 1972 computer model of the world economy and seeing how well it matches current trends. They claim the match is pretty good, but they don't actually just plot the real-world data anywhere, they merely claim that the predicted data is within 20% of the real-world values. I suspect they avoided plotting the real-world data because this would make it more obvious that the real world is actually doing significantly better on every measure. Look at the model errors ("∆ value") in their Table 2:
So, compared to every World3-generated scenario (BAU, BAU2, etc), the real world has:
- higher population, higher fertility, lower mortality (no catastrophic die-offs)
- more food and higher industrial output (yay!)
- higher overall human welfare and a lower ecological footprint (woohoo!)
The only areas where humanity ends up looking bad are in pollution and "services per capita", where the real world has more pollution and fewer services than the World3 model. But on pollution, the goal-posts have been moved: instead of tracking the kinds of pollution people were worried about in the 1970s (since those problems have mostly been fixed), this measure has been changed to be about carbon dioxide driving climate change. Is climate change (which is predicted by other economists and scientists to cut a mere 10% of GDP by 2100) really going to cause a total population collapse in the next couple decades, just because some ad-hoc 1970s dynamical model says so? I doubt it. Meanwhile, the "services per capita" metric represents the fraction of global GDP spent on education and health -- perhaps it's bad that we're not spending more on education or health, or perhaps it's good that we're saving money on those things, but either way this doesn't seem like a harbinger of imminent collapse.
Furthermore, the World3 model predicted that things like industrial output would rise steadily until they one day experienced a sudden unexpected collapse. This paper is trying to say "see, industrial output has risen steadily just as predicted... this confirms the model, so the collapse must be just around the corner!" This strikes me as ridiculous: so far the model has probably underperformed simple trend-extrapolation, which in my view means its predictions about dramatic unprompted changes in the near future should be treated as close to worthless.
Personally, I'm more worried about this paper. Here is a vox writeup. I don't know that I think the linear growth story is true, and even if it was we could easily hit another break point (AI anyone?), but I'm more worried about this kind of decline than a blowup like LTG suggests.
I'm not an expert in this area, but think the paper you're pointing to is leaning way too hard on a complicated model with a bad track record, and I'm weirded out by how little they compare model predictions and real data (eg using graphs). If I wanted to show off how awesome some model was, I'd be much more transparent
(note: Jackson makes a similar point re: lack of transparency).
Curated and popular this week
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This work has come out of my Undergraduate dissertation. I haven't shared or discussed these results much before putting this up. Message me if you'd like the code :)
Edit: 16th April. After helpful comments, especially from Geoffrey, I now believe this method only identifies shifts in the happiness scale (not stretches). Have edited to make this clearer.
TLDR
* Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.”
* Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling.
* I test rescaling using long-run German panel data, looking at whether the association between reported happiness and three “get-me-out-of-here” actions (divorce, job resignation, and hospitalisation) changes over time.
* If people are getting happier (and rescaling is occuring) the probability of these actions should become less linked to reported LS — but they don’t.
* I find little evidence of rescaling. We should probably take self-reported happiness scores at face value.
1. Background: The Happiness Paradox
Humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives in history — yet we seem no seem for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flatover the last few decades, even in countries like Germany, the UK, China, and India that have experienced huge GDP growth. As Michael Plant has written, the empirical evidence for this is fairly strong.
This is the Easterlin Paradox. It is a paradox, because at a point in time, income is strongly linked to happiness, as I've written on the forum before. This should feel uncomfortable for anyone who believes that economic progress should make lives better — including (me) and others in the EA/Progress Studies worlds.
Assuming agree on the empirical facts (i.e., self-reported happiness isn't increasing), there are a few potential explanations:
* Hedonic adaptation: as life gets
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In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress:
* OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI"
* Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years"
* Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January.
What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028?
In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years.
In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning.
In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks.
We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.
On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.
No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote).
This means that, while the compa
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SUMMARY:
ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate.
Donate to ALLFED
FULL ARTICLE:
I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.
Read our funding appeal
At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety.
Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
The original "Limits to Growth" report was produced during the 1970s amid an oil-price crisis and widespread fears of overpopulation and catastrophic environmental decline. (See also books like "The Population Bomb" from 1968.) These fears have mostly gone away over time, as population growth has slowed in many countries and the worst environmental problems (like choking smog, acid rain, etc) have been mitigated.
This new paper is taking a 1972 computer model of the world economy and seeing how well it matches current trends. They claim the match is pretty good, but they don't actually just plot the real-world data anywhere, they merely claim that the predicted data is within 20% of the real-world values. I suspect they avoided plotting the real-world data because this would make it more obvious that the real world is actually doing significantly better on every measure. Look at the model errors ("∆ value") in their Table 2:
So, compared to every World3-generated scenario (BAU, BAU2, etc), the real world has:
- higher population, higher fertility, lower mortality (no catastrophic die-offs)
- more food and higher industrial output (yay!)
- higher overall human welfare and a lower ecological footprint (woohoo!)
The only areas where humanity ends up looking bad are in pollution and "services per capita", where the real world has more pollution and fewer services than the World3 model. But on pollution, the goal-posts have been moved: instead of tracking the kinds of pollution people were worried about in the 1970s (since those problems have mostly been fixed), this measure has been changed to be about carbon dioxide driving climate change. Is climate change (which is predicted by other economists and scientists to cut a mere 10% of GDP by 2100) really going to cause a total population collapse in the next couple decades, just because some ad-hoc 1970s dynamical model says so? I doubt it. Meanwhile, the "services per capita" metric represents the fraction of global GDP spent on education and health -- perhaps it's bad that we're not spending more on education or health, or perhaps it's good that we're saving money on those things, but either way this doesn't seem like a harbinger of imminent collapse.
Furthermore, the World3 model predicted that things like industrial output would rise steadily until they one day experienced a sudden unexpected collapse. This paper is trying to say "see, industrial output has risen steadily just as predicted... this confirms the model, so the collapse must be just around the corner!" This strikes me as ridiculous: so far the model has probably underperformed simple trend-extrapolation, which in my view means its predictions about dramatic unprompted changes in the near future should be treated as close to worthless.
Thank you for the detailed answer!