2. An End to (Twentieth Century) Growth?

Today, there are various theories regarding how long humans have existed on earth, with anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years as a legitimate estimate. If we play it safe and use 100,000 years, Fig. 2.1 below represents the economic activity for only 2 % of our existence as specie, with the first 98 % registering either nomadic activity, or sustenance farming of little consequence. In this narrow band of the 2 % of human activity, shown in Fig. 2.2, approximately 90 % of this short period shows little economic activity as well; it has been the last 200 years, or 0.2 % of human existence, where we can actually measure technological progress to the extent we consider today. Therefore, for almost all of human existence, life has been in a “state of nature”, outside of an industrial economy, best described by seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Without question, there have been great inventions through the last millennium, but to use a term from Ted Kaczynski noted in the last chapter, it was “small scale technology” of a limited application. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most of humankind’s population was focused on matters of sustenance; in 1500, an estimated 75 % of the British workforce toiled in agriculture, and that number declined to 35 % in 1800 (The Economist 2014), and well under 10 % today. As technology got larger, moving from small scale to large scale, the machines took over in the fields, pushing the workforce into the cities to work in the factories, and then again, pushing the workers from the factories into the white collar jobs. Today, as we have discussed in this book, automation continues to displace labor through capital; the big question of this book is what to do about this paradoxical problem.