1 Comment

Hi Jake, I've read the Peter Thiel's essay and also watched your video on stagnation, but I'm still confused on how exactly lack of growth degenerate into violence. I understand the general argument "If the pie stop grwoing, the only way to get more is to steal part of the pie from someone else", but this is a very high-level argument, describing an abstract model of a social dynamic. I have these questions:

1. Can you share books/articles/essays that show empirical data from history that explains exactly how a stagnant society degenerates into violence? What are the stages that a society goes through that end up in violence?

2. If a society realizes that constant growth is impossible, couldn't the EGO(Embedded growth obligation) problem be solved by just maintaining the number of population constant over time? Planning birth rates in such a way that in the next generation there are not more people than in the previous one.

Expand full comment