A lot of people are still judging today’s leaders against the backdrop of an expired world: surplus energy, cheap materials, deep trust in institutions, and enough cooperation to negotiate trade-offs without everything turning existential. That period is over. The old playbook assumed there was slack in the system. Now there isn’t.

I’ve shared this same insight. A lot of people I speak to in person have not really been aware that growth is over globally, and are not considering what that *might mean * for the future.

People correctly see all these systems resetting and the way they assimilate the change is to layer a couple of cognitive biases on top of the analysis. For example, they believe the changes are reversible. Or they see the changes as bad but think some of the civilization goals from years ago are still possible. Or they think we can overcome a small bottleneck and get back to growth.

The old system has a mental inertia and there is a conservatism bias that kicks in when people are being confronted with new information that should challenge their beliefs. I think a lot of people are starting to build their lives on a foundation of sand.

I look back and think that there are a lot of problems we have right now that economic growth didn’t solve, prevent or reduce, and that even when we threw growth at those problems it was not the easy fix we wanted it to be…