Personally? I want to make sure my local community is strong. Even if no collapse occurs, a strong community is good. But if anything happens, a strong community is great. I do food coops (I buy a share of a farms crops ahead of the growing season, so the farmer shares the harvest with me. Sometimes I also pitch in to pack the shares for others in the coop!). I donate to community food availability(not just food kitchens but also paying way more for pay-what-you-can produce). I attend community events like cleanups, town halls, etc.
Most of us in tech are lucky enough to be able to work from the neighborhoods where we live, and be able to step out for the occasional chore. We inherently have more time to directly benefit our neediest. Why not take advantage?
Economic growth deals with money and things that can be expressed in money. If in the future human contact becomes a highly sought after commodity and people are willing to pay a market price of $1 million for a hand-holding session, then as far as the GDP is concerned, 1$ million of economic value has been created. For another example, a new smartphone delivers without any doubt orders of magnitude more economic utility than a traditional telephone in your home, while requiring a tiny amount of actual physical resources, miles and miles of dedicated copper wire for each subscriber etc.
Undoubtedly, there are still some human desires that are quite toxic to our limited planet and can't be virtualized easily - for example, the dream of suburban mcmansions a few billion earthlings share, and continuing to grow mindlessly would wreck a good part of the planet. It's quite a distant problem for all but the most prosperous and dense countries, but we will need to deal with it - "no, you can't have more than one home on each continent".
But fundamentally speaking, economic growth is about relative value we place on things not absolute consumption of resources.
Looking at a Python implementation of the model[1] I found this
dcfsn : float, optional
desired completed family size normal []. The default is 4.
Now, I assume there are many such nits to pick. I think the biggest limits to growth are the ERoI of fossil fuels, and the treatment of women and support for parenting in societies. Population crash is a real phenomenon in China, and most "developed" nations are somewhere on the curve, despite lifting an incredible portion of the world's population from crushing poverty, birth rates are falling.
Local change is about the only thing you can realistically have any effect on. Just try to pass on any knowledge and wisdom you can to others, especially with regard to repairing existing technology, and ways to work without it. As China goes offline in the next decade, and globalism collapses, we'll have a lot of jerry-rigging to get around the things we used to have in abundance.
[1] https://github.com/cvanwynsberghe/pyworld3/blob/main/pyworld...
- North enough that climate change will not affect it as much
- Inland so not at risk of sea level change
- Next to a large fresh water source
- Food security - weather suitable for all kinds of crops, even as temps rise
- A large enough group of people in a rich country that it will still be able to get resources as things get worse
- Because of the city/county split, the city crime rate is arbitrarily high despite being a safer metro than most. Means that housing prices are low. Places like Chicago are more at risk of becoming unaffordable as refugees crises get worse
- The region is one of the few that has been continuously settled from pre-colonial days, indicating some Lindy effect in play
That said, you should take the apocalypse as an opportunity to brush up on philosophy. We could have engineered our societies such that they are further constrained in their ability to violate human rights, and avoided this entire thing, but they didnt have a full deck when they wrote the constitution. You can help build a better tomorrow by demanding universifiable moral values and sound economics lie at the foundation of the society to come.
There is a reason every prediction of doom has been updated with new editions or "recalibrations" every decade or so for the last several centuries.
Anyway, in short, I would never try to prepare for worst-case global scenarios because the magnitudes don't make sense for me to try to influence. Even if I was a prepper - I would have no insight into what would signal me being prepared/safe.
I try to focus a lot on optimizing my local conditions because they influence my daily life much more significantly and with much higher guarantees.
I'm in the market to buy a house in the next year or so and even asking myself the question, "Will living in be a good choice in 50 years?" seems like a laughably difficult question to answer. I can look at how insurance prices are changing and historical patterns in temperature fluctuations, or I could bet on living next to civilization is better than living in the middle of nowhere, or I could bet living in a colder region is smart because it'll warm up, or I could find a warm region with geographical landscapes that insulate it from more extreme weather patterns, etc. etc.. but then what if the North Atlantic Current collapses and all the historical weather patterns are void?
In the end, I haven't found it good or healthy to try to build my life in the direction of that mindset. Instead, I strive to adopt an anti-fragile mindset and lifestyle (https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...).
I want to be healthy and fit so that my body and mind are adaptable to the ever-quickening pace of the world. I want to minimize my physical and mental addictions. I want to be kind, friendly, and outgoing to those in my local community as to strengthen them and to increase the likelihood of reciprocity. I want to be comfortable with leadership, and have enough confidence to lead when I feel I can get us to good outcomes. I don't want to make decisions based off of anxiety, fear, or scarcity. I want the systems I employ in my daily life to be efficient to the point of mindlessness. I want enough money to have a couple of years of runway if I have a serious injury.
None of my strategies guarantee me survival in black swan events, but who cares? Nobody's getting out of here alive anyway. Try to not make your lived-life hellish by envisioning what a worse tomorrow could be.
There's an important connection here I don't think the paper draws so explicitly. What will matter most to any of us, in terms of planning and preparation, is what masses of other people will do in response to these crises, and our models for that are still much less precise than our models for climate, resource depletion, etc. Hopefully we get closer to Foundation territory sooner rather than later, for the sake of better long-term projections, though as we've seen through relatively benign algorithms for engagement on social media, that too will probably lead to some uncomfortable places.
So in terms of personal preparation, until Hari Seldon shows up, our own human intuition (i.e. rolling the dice) will reign supreme. Unfortunately. Does it seem like your fellow humans will innovate sufficiently if every major port city goes underwater? Or does your gut tell you we'll panic, fight a global war, and send ourselves back to something that more closely resembles the 19th century? Feel it out and plan accordingly.
Studies prove that the majority of people are like this and I'm one of them.
Therefore I'm going to what everyone else does and that is work and drive to work, spend time with my family, spend time with my friends and not do anything different everyday. I guess being self aware of my own biases makes me slightly different, but in this case people who are self aware probably just choose to avoid thinking about it. We got daily problems to deal with and the environment is still too abstract to consider even when there's a lot of evidence suggesting it's too late.
This is the reality of people. It's predictable. Even people on this thread "claiming" to do something about it likely aren't doing much or doing anything meaningful. What's written in this thread is rationalization to keep doing what they're currently doing.
Only a very small small small percentage of the population can actually be genuinely panicked by what the evidence suggests. They will be making drastic changes to their own lives and attempting to change the world. People who build and construct their lives around rationality are the ones we classify as extremist.
I'm not saying these "extremists" are smarter or have higher IQ. It's more of a behavioral trait among a small portion of the population. They lack the normal biases people have, and I think this may have a small association with lower IQ as some of them are unable to weigh the rational logic against the consequences of going against the grain of popular opinion/behavior.
In their plots, they show non renewable inputs to industry and farming running out right about now.
This seems like complete nonsense? You can make a model say literally anything...
If this was true, we'd see commodity prices going through the roof as a long term trend. And even if that was happening, the food supply would be the last thing affected due to the demand being completely inelastic.
Human systems will continue to improve. We will produce better systems and better software and better hardware. We will renew what is already in place and settle the moon, Mars, Venus, Europa, Pluto, and beyond.
Keep in mind that the global population will drop significantly below replacement in the coming decades as well.
Everybody knows the limits of growth are bullshit and they are just some doomsdayer :-)