In 2002, Meadows and two other members of the original team revisited their original projections. They also ran a series of new simulations in which they included data from the intervening period. They showed that despite the antiquated computer hardware they used in 1972, their algorithms had done a remarkably good job of anticipating the changes that had occurred over the preceding thirty years. They also showed that updated simulations based on the new data only reaffirmed their initial conclusions that our preoccupation with growth might lead us to oblivion. The only real difference, they explained, was that in the intervening period, a critical threshold had passed. Dialing down economic growth was no longer enough. It needed to be dialed back.

Where history is a better guide to the future is on the nature of change. It reminds us that we are a stubborn species: one that is deeply resistant to making profound changes in our behavior and habits, even when it is clear that we need to do so. But it also reveals that when change is forced upon us we are astonishingly versatile. We are able to quickly adapt to new, often very different ways of doing and thinking about things and in a short time become as habituated to them as we were to those that preceded them. This being so, while automation and AI have made it possible for us to embrace a profoundly different future, it is unlikely that it will be the catalyst that causes the dramatic changes in “social customs and economic practices” that Keynes envisaged. Far more likely catalysts take the form of a rapidly changing climate, like that which spurred the invention of agriculture; anger ignited by systematic inequalities like those that stirred the Russian revolution; or perhaps even a viral pandemic that exposes the obsolescence of our economic institutions and working culture, causing us to ask what jobs are truly valuable and question why we are content to let our markets reward those in often pointless or parasitic roles so much more than those we recognize as essential.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.

Such co-evolution— of people and their foodstuffs, of science and technology, of social, political and economic institutions— is the history of economic development.

In business, in politics and in our personal lives, we do not often solve problems directly. The objectives we manage are multiple, incommensurable and partly incompatible. The consequences of what we do depend on responses, both natural and human, that we cannot predict. The systems we try to manage are too complex for us to fully understand. We never have the information about the problem, or the future, we face that we might wish for.

Satisfactory responses in these situations are the result of action, but not the execution of design. These outcomes, achieved obliquely, are the result of iteration and adaptation, experiment and discovery. Re-engineering— ‘tossing aside old systems and starting over’— is called for only when systems are seriously dysfunctional. And in almost all cases. The best means of re-engineering is not ‘going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work’ but trying models that have been successfully tested elsewhere. This is equally true of our personal lives, our corporate organisations and our social and economic structures.

Failure to recognise that economic growth is mostly better rather than more is why the sages who have repeatedly predicted that growth must end because we will run out of – first it was wood, then it was coal, then nitrates and then oil – have always been wrong. We haven’t run out of arable land and our progress will not be halted by a shortage of lithium. All physical resources have finite limits, but human ingenuity does not.