Word: outputted
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...European Common Market Commission, has remarked that in Western Europe, America and Japan, gross national product "has been thought of as something sacred-but G.N.P. is diabolical." Walter Heller, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists, complains that a speaker who ventures a good word for rising output is immediately assailed as a "growth maniac" or an "abominable growthman...
...applied to a larger base; the result is that growth accelerates rapidly, like compound interest. In the M.I.T. computers, exponential growth showed a terrifying tendency to "overshoot and collapse." The study asserts that if the world's population continues to grow at about 2% annually, and global industrial output expands about 7% a year (as they do now), then some time during the life span of children born today, the world will begin running out of natural resources such as coal, oil and metals. For lack of them, industries will collapse by the mid-21st century (give or take...
...study closes almost every escape hatch. Technology, it concedes, can multiply usable resources; but if that happens, industries will grow at an exponential rate and will ultimately foul the atmosphere enough to kill most people. Pollution per unit of output could perhaps be cut by three-fourths. But that would do nothing to check the exponential growth of population, and the world would soon run out of arable land, leading to mass starvation. Population growth could be halted; but that would only postpone the cataclysm unless industrial growth were stopped too. If it persisted, output would soon quadruple, canceling...
...pollution, says Commoner, has been caused not by growth per se but by changes in the composition of growth-for example, the postwar shifts from soaps to detergents. Shifting back to cleaner (and costlier) products and techniques could decrease pollution much more than the Meadows team foresees, while permitting output to continue rising. In essence, the Meadows team projected current trends into the future without analyzing how man might alter them. The whole exercise, say critics, proves again that the past is a shaky gauge of the future, and that the value of the conclusions coming out of a computer...
...very reason, this program would conserve resources and minimize pollution, and it could result in a truer as well as a cleaner kind of economic growth. Litter-free streets, safer trains, better medical care and increased protection against muggings might well increase human well-being more than a higher output of cars, chemicals and electric can openers. Unemployment would not rise; fewer people would work in basic industries, but more people would find jobs as teachers, park attendants and medical technicians. Poorer nations could continue to concentrate on increasing G.N.P., though the poor, too, should ponder whether they might...