Comment by myrmidon

Looking at this somewhat critically, did the predictions not turn out to be completely incorrect?

Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve.

In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions.

Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper.

I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition.

But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).