zlacker

Thanks for the reading suggestions. And of course I am already thinking about the questions you mentioned and have been for a long time.

I agree that politics, ideology, and mass opinion matter a lot, and never meant to imply otherwise. Indeed in some of my posts I touch on how those factors might have affected technological developments. (See e.g. my analysis toward the end of my smallpox post: https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines)

Agree also about the importance of models & priors.

If there's any place where you think my specific factual conclusions are in error (whether from bad models or any other error), I always appreciate specific rejoinders.

>>jasonc+(OP)
I've only known of your project for about two days, so there's no in-depth assessment yet.

On politics, models, and media: I've simply found myself looking at these far more than the technical side. I think that's largely because tech simply hasn't moved all that much in 50-60 years, outside of infotech. In terms of energy, our options are largely the same as Hyman Rickover identified in 1957: wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear fission:

https://archive.org/details/rickover0557/mode/2up

(We've gotten remarkably better at solar, but the total flux remains constant.)

A close read of various cornucopians (Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, M.A. Adelman) shows numerous thin and flawed arguments. Nordhaus's Nobel is quite probably the biggest error in the history of that award, and that's with fierce competition.

What's notable is that we've 1) made little progress in coming up with a generally accepted, sensible, model of economic growth (Atkinson & Krugman: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3l6E3mUNW70&t=2333), 2) there's been a concerted rejection of limits at both the left and right of the political spectrum, despite scientific concensus, in both cases for ideological reasons (see Schoijet's discussion of this: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399), and 3) political will and/or capacity to address challenges has been all but entirely lacking (this is the general thesis of Ophuls in 1977, largely born out over the subsequent 43 years in both action (or lack) and rationales).

It's your framing that strikes me as most flawed, though I suspect you'll also be least inclined to address. Growth as a moral imperative is extraordinarily suspect.

Start there.

>>dredmo+di
Why “extraordinarily suspect”?

>>jasonc+zc3
That's a question I've found far more useful for others to work out on their own than to have explained. It's akin to tacit vs. explicit knowledge.

I've highlighted it as an area you should focus on. The rest is up to you.