The Invention of Infinite Growth

For decades now, mainstream economics has lost contact with reality. As early as 1974, the great Robert Solow made the outlandish claim that ‘the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources’. The important thing, they said, was growth. Growth would fix everything. Meanwhile, scientists were busy confirming the direct link between increasing economic activity and ecological upheaval.

It didn’t have to happen this way. Over the past century, economists have created a number of powerful ways to examine and predict the world, and they did not always consider the environment outside the scope of their inquiry. In fact, in 1931 Harold Hotelling published a vitally important article which might have changed history – if only anyone had understood it. Through the long battle to put a number on our world, Jones examines the series of choices made by the dismal science over the last two centuries, and lights the path for the new economic ideas we will need as we step into the Anthropocene.

Author Biography

Christopher Jones is a historian of energy, economics, and the environment based at Arizona State University. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Environment and was a Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resources and Political Economy at the University of California-Berkeley, and is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014).