Collapse, Unraveling, or Great Simplification?

Wim Naudé

Chapter Chapter 7 in Economic Growth and Societal Collapse, 2023, pp 125-146 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter outlines an approach beyond Green Growth and Degrowth: acceptance of an inevitable societal collapse (or unraveling) as a feature, and not a bug, of complexity, and managing such a collapse to minimize harm and get rid of obsolete structures. This may—and it is a big may—herald a phase-transition in economic growth and hence lay the foundation for rebound growth, and a transition to a new mode of “growth”: which could be as qualitatively different from that characterizing the current global economy as the industrial world was different from the world of the hunter-gatherer economy. It was speculated at the end of this chapter that perhaps the only sustainable outcome, bar a catastrophic collapse, could be some sort of homeostatic awakening. Perhaps the very fact that our Dataome is buzzing with analysis of our ecological overshoot predicament is suggesting that humanity may be experiencing a homeostatic awakening in our collective intelligence.

Keywords: Degrowth; Collapse; Unraveling; Great simplification; Phase-transition; Rebound growth; Artificial intelligence; Dataome (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-45582-7_7

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-45582-7_7

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