Starving Infinite Growth Every government on Earth, no matter its political system, measures its success by a single number: Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP is basically the total price tag of everything a country produces and consumes in a year. Even as the physical environment breaks down from too much consumption, governments do not want this number to stay steady. Every recognized country on the planet operates with a GDP growth target [1]. When politicians and international banks draft their annual budgets, they universally set goals to expand the economy, usually by 2 to 5 percent every single year. Developing countries often target even higher rates. If a country fails to hit this target and the economy shrinks, it is called a recession. Consuming less is globally defined as a disaster.
The agreement on this point crosses every geographical, cultural, and political line.
In the United States, President Joe Biden framed his administration’s success entirely around this number: “Our economy is growing… We have the best economy in
the world. Since I’ve come to office, our GDP is up. Our trade deficit is down. We are outcompeting China.” [2] In China, President Xi Jinping tied the survival of the state directly to expansion: “Development is our Party’s top priority in governing and rejuvenating China… We must fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy on all fronts… to promote high-standard opening up and high-quality economic growth.” [3] This demand is identical across the most populous nations of the Global South. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the G7 that his primary goal was mass consumption: “I want everyone to consume. And it is the developed countries that must give this initial kick-start… In my administration, this year, we are growing for the third consecutive year above 3 percent.” [4] In Nigeria, President Bola Tinubu set an aggressive target to push the nation’s GDP to $1 trillion: “A $1 trillion Nigerian economy is possible by 2026, and a $3 trillion economy is achievable during this decade. We can do it with double-digit, inclusive, sustainable, and competitive growth.” [5] In Indonesia, President Prabowo Subianto confidently told the World Economic Forum that the country was prepared to rapidly scale up: “Our growth will reach impressive numbers… I believe and I am convinced, that we will achieve, or perhaps even exceed, eight percent growth.” [6]
In Pakistan, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif built his government’s newly unveiled budget around a four percent economic growth target, telling the nation that the push for expansion marked the moment that “the time of prosperity has now begun.” [7] Even the nations most frequently celebrated as progressive or “green” demand continuous economic and population growth. Costa Rica is globally praised for running on nearly 100 percent renewable electricity and protecting its rainforests. Yet, its economy is entirely tied to the growth machine. President Rodrigo Chaves governs on a platform of aggressive economic expansion, explicitly pushing to accelerate GDP growth to pay off international debts and satisfy foreign investors [8]. New Zealand is marketed as a pristine ecological haven, but its political leaders view a stable economy as a failure. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon took office with a goal centered entirely on scaling up: “We are going to rebuild the economy… We need to grow our economy to lift our incomes and afford the public services we all deserve.” [9] Sweden and Denmark are considered pioneers of the environmental movement. Yet, they require constantly expanding populations to fund their welfare states. When Denmark faced a shrinking tax base, the government supported widespread campaigns urging citizens to “Do it for Denmark” and have more babies to save the economy [10]. Sweden’s world-renowned parental leave policies were created in the 1930s by economists explicitly as tools to
encourage births and ensure the state never ran out of workers [11].
Because growth builds on itself, aiming for just 3 percent annual growth means a country is attempting to double the size of its entire economy every twenty-four years. To double an economy, a nation must double the energy it consumes, the raw materials it digs out of the Earth, and the land it paves over. To justify pushing for endless growth while the environment collapses, leaders use a buzzword called “decoupling.” They claim an economy can double in size by shifting to tech jobs and green energy, without actually taking more physical stuff from the Earth.
The physical data prove this is a fantasy. Absolute decoupling on a global scale has never happened. According to extensive reviews by the European Environmental Bureau, the global “material footprint”—the total physical weight of fossil fuels, metals, and minerals extracted from the Earth—tracks almost exactly with global GDP. You cannot double the size of the global economy without doubling the amount of the physical planet you consume [12]. When the physical consequences of this extraction become undeniable, the system often just ignores them or changes the name. In the United States, Donald Trump made the physical strategy clear, declaring: “We have ended the war on American energy, and we have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal.” [13] The U.S. military, which buys more oil than any other institution in the world, took a different approach. As
the oceans heated, naval bases faced severe flooding. Under political pressure, Defense Department officials systematically deleted the term “climate change” from their reports. Because the oceans are actually rising and the bases are actually flooding, they couldn’t stop trying to fix the damage. They simply renamed their climate plans to “extreme weather resilience” and kept building seawalls, treating the symptoms while ignoring the root cause [14].
To keep this extractive machine expanding, you do not just need more coal and land. You need a continuously growing supply of consumers to buy goods, workers to extract materials, and taxpayers to pay off compounding national debts. The economy requires human bodies. When everyday people look at the high cost of living and a damaged planet and naturally begin to have fewer children, world leaders do not view it as a much-needed ecological break. They view it as an absolute crisis.
In Japan, where the median age is 49, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressed the National Diet with a dire warning: “Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions… It is now or never when it comes to policies regarding births and child-rearing.” [15] In Tanzania, President John Magufuli instructed the women of his country to stop using birth control, arguing that a massive, growing population was the only way to build the economy. “Women can now give up contraceptive methods,” he told a public rally. “Set your ovaries free.” [16]
In France, President Emmanuel Macron used the language of warfare to demand an increase in the national birth rate: “France will only be stronger if it revives its birth rate. A demographic rearmament is necessary.” [17] In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni officially declared the declining birth rate a “national emergency.” She explicitly tied having children to the survival of the economy: “We can invest resources, we can make important choices, but all this leads to nothing if we do not reverse the dramatic trend of the birth rate decline, which compromises any possible positive development for our nation.” [18] In Russia, President Vladimir Putin demanded that citizens return to historical family sizes to fuel the state: “Recall that in Russian families our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had both seven and eight children. Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm.” [19] In the United States, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing individual states to ban abortion outright. By stripping away reproductive choice, the state legally reasserted its power to force births, ensuring the domestic supply of human capital is maintained regardless of what the individual chooses [20].
Billionaires, whose fortunes depend entirely on the global economy expanding forever, echo these same fears.
Elon Musk has repeatedly told his hundreds of millions of followers: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” [21]
When the speeches do not work, governments open their wallets. According to the United Nations, more than a quarter of all countries worldwide now have policies specifically designed to increase birth rates [22].
Governments are actively spending tax dollars to bribe their citizens into having more kids.
Hungary now spends roughly 5 percent of its entire national economy on these policies. Women who have four children are permanently exempt from paying income taxes, and the government hands out massive loans to newlyweds that are completely forgiven if the couple produces three children [23].
Nowhere is the panic more obvious than in South Korea. The country is packed with over 500 people per square kilometer. Facing grueling work hours, highly competitive schooling, and astronomical housing costs, South Koreans stopped having large families. The country’s fertility rate plummeted to 0.72, the lowest in the world.
The government’s response was not to accept this natural leveling off. In June 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol officially declared a “demographic national emergency.” [24] Over the past eighteen years, the South Korean government has spent 360 trillion won—roughly $260 billion—trying to force the birth rate back up through cash payments and subsidized housing [25]. The South Korean construction giant Booyoung Group recently started offering its employees a $75,000 cash bonus for every child they have [26].
Despite spending over a quarter of a trillion dollars, the birth rate has not recovered.
This coordinated global panic for more babies is a massive reversal. For much of the twentieth century, global leaders viewed population growth as a severe threat to economic stability.
To stop it, governments were willing to use brutal, state-sanctioned violence.
The legal foundation for modern population control was laid in the United States through eugenics—the attempt to control human breeding. In the 1927 case Buck v.
Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state had the constitutional right to forcibly sterilize citizens it deemed undesirable. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion, laying out the state’s chilling logic: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” He concluded the ruling with a now-infamous decree: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [27] By the 1970s, the United States was running a massive, federally funded sterilization system. In 1973, a federal lawsuit (Relf v. Weinberger) revealed that the U.S. government was funding the sterilization of 100,000 to 150,000 low-income women every single year through programs run by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare [28].
This system heavily targeted women of color. In the American South, forced sterilizations of Black women were so common they became known as “Mississippi appendectomies.” Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was sterilized without her consent in 1961, famously noted: “Six out of ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized for one reason or another.” [29] Native American populations were aggressively targeted. A 1976 investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) admitted that the government-run Indian Health Service had sterilized thousands of Native American women over a four-year period, often without proper consent. Independent researchers calculate that during the 1970s, between 25 and 42 percent of all Native American women of childbearing age were sterilized [30].
In Puerto Rico, U.S.-backed policies pushed sterilization so heavily as a way to control poverty that the procedure simply became known as “La Operación.” By the late 1960s, roughly one-third of all Puerto Rican mothers of childbearing age had been sterilized, the highest rate in the world at the time [31].
Internationally, the United States viewed population growth in developing nations as a direct threat to its own access to resources. In 1974, the Nixon administration drafted a classified document known as the Kissinger Report (National Security Study Memorandum 200). The report explicitly tied foreign population control to American economic interests: “The U.S. economy will
require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries.” To secure these resources, the U.S. tied its foreign aid to aggressive birth control initiatives across the Global South [32].
Other nations used similar state control to manage their own economies.
In 1975, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national “Emergency.” To curb poverty and stabilize the economy, the government instituted a strict population control program. In a single year, an estimated 6.2 million Indian men were forcibly sterilized. Access to basic food rations, water, and jobs was routinely withheld until citizens submitted to vasectomies [33].
In 1979, the Chinese Communist Party created the “One-Child Policy.” Following the death of Mao Zedong, the state calculated that unchecked population growth would eat the country’s economic surplus, preventing the average wealth per person from rising. To ensure economic growth, the state strictly regulated reproduction for over three decades through financial penalties, mandatory intrauterine devices (IUDs), forced sterilizations, and forced abortions [34].
Today, the policies have completely flipped.
The Chinese government ended the One-Child Policy and now actively urges citizens to have three children to prevent a shrinking labor force from stalling the economy.
Nations across Africa and Asia, once the targets of Western population reduction campaigns, now issue orders to increase birth rates. The United States, which sterilized hundreds of thousands of women and exported birth control around the world as a matter of national security, now legally forces domestic births.
The carrying capacity of the planet did not change to cause this reversal. The Earth did not get larger. The environment is in significantly worse shape today than it was in 1974. The physical math stayed the same; the economic math changed. The people running the global machine realized that you can build factories and print money, but you cannot expand a debt-based economy forever if the consumer base shrinks.
They figured out how demand works.
Supply and Demand Prior to industrialization, economic wealth was extracted primarily through agricultural labor. The ruling classes utilized human populations strictly as capital equipment—from European serfdom to the transatlantic slave trade, which trafficked over 12 million Africans to the
Americas to harvest sugar, tobacco, and cotton [35]. The labor class was not viewed as a consumer market.
The output of this labor was sold to a small global elite. In 1776, Adam Smith identified the physical ceiling of a market restricted only to the wealthy: “The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no certain boundary.” [36] Simultaneously, early economic models viewed massive labor populations as a structural risk. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the architectural threat of unchecked population growth: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio… This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.” [37] The advent of industrial manufacturing fundamentally altered this architecture. Factories generated a volume of goods that the elite class could not physically absorb. To
convert mass production into wealth, industrialists required mass consumption. In 1931, American retail executive Edward Filene outlined the new requirement: “Mass production is not simply large-scale production. It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that the increased production demands increased buying… Mass production cannot be maintained without mass consumption.” [38] The Great Depression demonstrated this structural dependency. While physical manufacturing capacity remained intact, the working population lacked the wages to purchase the output, triggering a global economic collapse.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes formalized this relationship, demonstrating that “aggregate demand”—the total spending by the general population—dictated the scale of the economy [39]. Macroeconomic policy subsequently tied aggregate demand directly to population size. In his 1938 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Alvin Hansen established the correlation: “A rapidly growing population demands a much larger per capita volume of savings [investment]… to provide housing, transportation, and all the facilities essential to modern living… Declining
population growth operates to restrict investment.” [40] Following World War II, this mechanism became the foundation of the global market. Continuous economic expansion required a continuously expanding population actively engaged in consumption. In 1955, retail analyst Victor Lebow detailed this operational mandate: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.” [41] This mandate to expand consumer populations appeared to contradict the aggressive population control policies executed by the United States, the World Bank, and China during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. However, economic planners differentiated between subsistence populations and consumer populations. Developing nations required massive infrastructure—power grids, highways, and ports—to build consumer markets. Rapid population growth in impoverished regions caused “capital dilution.” The population consumed the agricultural and financial surplus simply to survive, leaving the state with zero capital for infrastructure development. To transition these populations into consumer markets, state leaders determined the birth rate had to be artificially suppressed.
Western institutions framed population control explicitly as an economic investment. In 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B.
Johnson addressed the United Nations: “Let us in all our lands, including this land, face forthrightly the multiplying problems of our multiplying populations and seek the answers to this most profound challenge… Let us act on the fact that less than five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” [42] Robert McNamara served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. Under his leadership, the World Bank tied financial loans for developing nations directly to their implementation of family planning programs. In a 1977 speech at MIT, McNamara explained the logic: “High population growth rates severely penalize economic progress… They dilute the resources available for increasing the amount of capital per worker… and they make the distribution of income more unequal.” [43] The Chinese Communist Party applied the identical calculation. Following the death of Mao Zedong, the state determined that the nation’s massive population was consuming the economic output just to survive. On
September 25, 1980, the Central Committee published an “Open Letter” officially launching the One-Child Policy.
The directive focused entirely on capital accumulation: “If population growth is not controlled… the increase in national income will be consumed by the newly added population, and accumulation [of capital] will be impossible. As a result, the state will not be able to gather sufficient funds to speed up economic construction, and the people’s living standards will not be able to improve rapidly… In order to reach the goal of a relatively comfortable life by the end of the century, we must urgently advocate that each couple has only one child.” [44] Through these interventions, states accumulated capital, built infrastructure, and engineered the high-consuming middle classes that exist today.
By the twenty-first century, globalization mobilized capital across borders. Western corporations—including Apple, Nike, and Foxconn—no longer required local governments to be wealthy enough to build factories.
Multinational corporations bypassed local governments and constructed the infrastructure themselves.
Because global supply chains solved the “capital dilution” problem, economic planners altered their modeling of population growth in the Global South.
Massive, impoverished populations were no longer classified
as a starvation risk; they were classified as an asset.
Multinational corporations recognized booming populations as an endless pool of cheap labor to manufacture goods, and a massive new market to purchase cheap plastics, cell phones, processed foods, and motorbikes.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic provided a direct stress test of this dependency. When global lockdowns paused daily purchasing, the global economy faced immediate collapse. To prevent a depression, governments bypassed banks and injected cash directly into citizen accounts to artificially simulate consumer demand.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), governments worldwide injected an estimated $16.9 trillion into the global economy [45]. In the United States, the federal government spent roughly $5 trillion on pandemic relief—an amount exceeding the total annual economic output of Germany [46]. State officials explicitly stated these payments were engineered to force consumption. In March 2020, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin explained the mechanism: “We need to get money to hardworking Americans now… This is about putting money in people’s pockets so they can spend it and support the economy.” [47] While the stimulus confirmed that the modern economy is structurally dependent on mass consumption, governments
cannot print trillions of dollars indefinitely without triggering severe inflation. Permanent, stable growth requires a continuously expanding baseline of human consumers.
With birth rates falling across the United States, Europe, and East Asia, financial institutions shifted focus to regions with expanding populations, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, to maintain global growth. Global institutions replaced the 1970s warnings of a “population bomb” with a new macroeconomic term: the “Demographic Dividend.” The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) frames massive youth populations strictly as a financial asset: “A demographic dividend is the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population is larger than the non-working-age share of the population.” [48] The UN framework defines this dividend as the period when a nation’s working-age population outnumbers its non-working dependents, generating a temporary surge in taxable income and consumer spending. McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, issued a major report titled Lions on the Move, highlighting the consumption potential of Africa’s population boom:
“Africa’s consumer spending is expected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025… driven by a young, growing, and urbanizing population. Household consumption has grown faster than GDP.” [49] While the physical resources of the planet are in rapid decline, global financial institutions and state governments universally mandate the production of more children and the expansion of consumer markets. This contradiction is not a policy error. It is a strict structural requirement of a system built on debt and interest.
Debt & Interest “The bank is a business yielding a hazardous revenue from money which belongs to others.” — Demosthenes, addressing a jury in ancient Athens during a banking dispute, circa 350 BCE [50].
Empire is structurally designed to create wealth inequality.
That is the purpose of tribute, tax, slavery, and plunder.
They move physical goods from the many to the few: grain, slaves, bitumen, salt, copper, tin, lead, iron, timber, granite, limestone, marble, brick, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, hides, wool, wine, and oil all flow upward toward emperors, priests, generals, landlords, and officials—the ruling class.
Accumulating physical wealth carries a logistical burden: it is difficult to store. Grain rots. Animals age and
die. To protect physical wealth, the elite had to build stone walls, hire armed guards, and constantly fight off mold, rodents, and thieves.
It costs to store wealth.
The easiest things to store and exchange are items that do not rot or degrade. Ancient populations noticed that silver and gold were too soft to be useful for tools or weapons, but they possessed a different kind of power: they never rusted, and nothing in nature seemed able to break them down. These metals were also beautiful, rare, and desirable. Therefore, silver and gold were an excellent form of stored wealth. A very small weight of metal could carry a massive claim on other people’s labor. They became the main form of trade exchange, or currency, in many parts of the world. Still, even long-lasting precious metal carries a physical burden: it gets stolen.
In seventeenth-century London, the wealthy needed a secure place to store their heavy reserves of physical metal. They took their money to the city’s goldsmiths, who already possessed thick vaults and armed guards. The goldsmiths then introduced a mechanical shift. Instead of charging the elite a fee to store their gold, the goldsmiths offered to pay depositors if they left their gold with them.
They introduced interest.
A 1676 pamphlet, titled The Mystery of the New Fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers, documented this exact
transition, noting that the goldsmiths “began to receive the rents of gentlemen’s estates remitted to town, and to allow them, and others who put cash into their hands, some interest for it if it remained but a single month in their hands, or even a lesser time.” [51] The pamphlet noted how the mechanism functioned: “This was a great allurement for people to put money into their hands, which would bear interest till the day they wanted it; and they could also draw it out by one hundred pounds or fifty pounds, &c., at a time as they wanted it, with infinitely less trouble than if they had lent it out on either real or personal security.” [52] The author recognized the danger: the bankers were pulling huge sums of physical wealth into their own vaults and using other people’s cash to gamble and enrich themselves.
The catastrophic risk of this system had already become obvious in 1672. The London bankers had taken their depositors’ money and lent massive sums of it to the English Crown against future tax revenues. King Charles II stopped paying his debts—an event known as the Stop of the Exchequer, and the scheme collapsed.
A contemporary letter from lawyer Richard Langhorne stated: “I believe it certain that the trade of bankers is totally destroyed by this accident.” [53] Historian
Gilbert Burnet later wrote: “The bankers were broken, and multitudes who had put their money in their hands were ruined by this dishonourable and perfidious action.” [54] Langhorne’s prediction that banking was destroyed proved premature. The system had imploded and thousands lost wealth, but society kept the mechanism going and scaled it up. People already knew that it was far easier to trade the paper receipt the goldsmith handed them than to haul the heavy silver and gold out of the vault. Once that paper became linked to the idea of earning interest, the rest was history. That paper receipt became the banknote—the foundation of modern paper currency. When the bankers saw that the physical gold rarely left the vault, they saw an opportunity. If someone put ten pounds of gold in the vault, the banker gave them a paper receipt for it. But when a borrower came in asking for a loan, the banker didn’t hand them physical gold. The banker simply wrote out a new note promising that the holder of this paper could come and pick up gold. Since it was unlikely that everyone would come asking for their gold at the same time, the bankers realized they did not need to put aside new gold to write this IOU note. They just wrote it.
Suddenly, there were two pieces of paper circulating in the town, both claiming the exact same physical gold in the vault. The banker had just created money out of thin air by selling the exact same piece of gold to multiple people at the same time. This was the birth of what economists call
“fractional reserve banking”—a system where banks legally lend out money they do not actually have in their vaults.
Before modern paper banking, debt already existed.
Temples, merchants, and wealthy patrons made loans, charged interest, and recorded what was owed. That was all closely tied to physical stores of wealth: grain, silver, animals, land, and slaves. Modern bank credit changed the scale. It allowed institutions to lend more than what they possessed.
Large parts of society openly embraced this approach because debt acts like a gas pedal for buying things. For an owner of goods, instead of lending out tools or cattle and hoping they were returned, they simply sold them for bank notes. This seemed less risky. But the risk had not disappeared; it was merely hidden. The risk was now whether the paper itself would remain valuable, which ultimately depended on whether the borrowers out in the real world actually succeeded in their businesses.
This economic acceleration had a profound physical consequence. Humanity stopped extracting resources at the speed of savings and started extracting at the speed of printing. The speed of deforestation and mining was no longer limited by how fast we could dig up silver or grow grain; it was limited only by how fast someone could put together a reasonable-enough loan proposal.
When a bank types a $100 credit into an account out of nothing, the borrower signs a contract agreeing to pay back $110. The borrower uses that $100 to buy bricks, raw wool, human labor, and a textile mill. The bank knows it
can seize the physical assets if the borrower fails, but seizing assets is not the bank’s main goal. They want the borrower to succeed. They want the borrower to go out into the physical world, manufacture things, sell them, and turn that $100 into $200. The borrower pays the interest, takes out more loans, and keeps extracting, growing, and consuming.
The temptation to issue credit was high, and banks routinely printed far too much paper money. When crop prices dropped or rumors of bad loans spread, fear triggered a “bank run.” People rushed the vault to exchange their paper notes back into physical metal.
Because the bank had issued multiple paper claims for every one piece of gold, the first people in line drained all that actually existed. Once the vault was empty, the bank locked its doors. People only believed the notes had value because of the physical metal behind them—when the metal was gone, the notes became instantly worthless. “For you must know, men of Athens,” Demosthenes had continued to the jury in 350 BCE, “that in the business of banking, trustworthiness is the best capital for making money.” [55] This structural flaw routinely wiped out the savings of entire populations and triggered massive national depressions, most notably the Panic of 1837, when banks across the United States simultaneously ran out of silver and collapsed [56]. To stop these devastating bank runs while still adding the debt fuel to the economic fire, governments did not force the banks to actually hold the physical gold. They simply severed the
paper from physical reality entirely. In the 1930s, the United States removed its citizens from the domestic gold standard.
By 1971, the U.S. severed paper money from the gold standard completely.
Today, there is no physical metal backing the global financial system. Modern commercial banks do not even rely on fractional reserves of cash. When a borrower walks into a bank to get a mortgage, the bank does not take money out of a vault, nor does it lend the money of other savers. The bank simply types numbers into a computer. They create the loan out of thin air.
In a 2014 report detailing how the modern economy functions, the Bank of England explicitly admitted this reality: “In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money… banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them.” [57] Without any real physical assets needed to back cash, central banks can and do simply print more money. This inevitably
causes the paper money to lose value. When money loses enough value to drive up the prices of everyday goods, we call that inflation. Central banks openly declare that they will print enough money to raise prices, setting official “inflation targets.” While it is notoriously difficult to actually control how much inflation is caused by printing money, they set targets and print money regardless.
Inflation acts as a mechanical whip, penalizing saving and forcing the public to keep buying things and taking out loans. There is no real restriction on how much money and debt can be created, so long as people believe the paper money is valuable and are willing to accept that it will lose value over time. All countries have rules around what banks can and cannot do, but in the modern world, it is exceptionally difficult to monitor, regulate, and enforce these rules. Regulators typically find out about rogue behavior only after a financial crisis has occurred.
When this math is applied to the entire planet, the extraction hits a physical wall. Today, the world is carrying roughly $353 trillion in debt across consumers, businesses, and governments [58]. For debt that massive, the principal is rarely paid back. The borrower pays the interest. When it is time to pay the full amount, the borrower takes out a new loan to cancel out the old debt. This process is called refinancing.
For refinancing to work, the global economy must grow. The next lenders will only allow a borrower to refinance their debt if they believe the borrower can pay the
interest on time. If there is less money floating around than the previous year because the economy is shrinking, the borrower cannot pay the same amount of interest. In a shrinking economy, lenders know there is more risk. As a result, they may raise interest rates. That means the borrower can borrow even less money. If a borrower cannot borrow as much as last year and the old debt is due, the system fractures.
The U.S. government is now spending a massive and rapidly growing portion of its annual budget simply paying interest on its own national debt [59]. If the economy shrinks, countries, companies, and consumers carrying heavy debt loads will not be able to pay. If the economy keeps growing, institutions can keep creating money out of nothing and buying up more of the physical world.
As former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince admitted to the Financial Times in the summer of 2007, just months before the global financial system collapsed: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” [60] The financial system requires its participants to dance until the environment collapses and mass starvation begins. Wealthy financiers and politicians globally continue to remove banking and financial restrictions. According to Oxfam International, the 12 richest billionaires now own more wealth than the poorest half of the entire global population—roughly 4 billion people [61].
Governments are printing and spending more money than ever. Rules and regulations have been gutted. In the U.S., the government granted billionaires sweeping internal access to federal systems, under the premise of structural efficiency [62].
The financial system runs on debt and interest.
Because interest builds on top of interest, the total amount of debt grows faster and faster the bigger it gets, speeding toward infinity. The real economy requires physical things: topsoil, timber, fresh water, oil, and human labor.
The Earth is finite. When the amount of debt and money available to buy things keeps going up, but the total amount of valuable physical things is not increasing, the system generates a different type of inflation: asset inflation. This means the prices of existing properties, stocks, and companies skyrocket.
U.S. stock market valuations have reached the highest levels in recorded history [63]. Corporate stock buybacks have surged to an all-time high, with companies repurchasing over $1 trillion in their own shares. The highest-paid CEOs in history are using their surplus money to buy shares in the most expensive companies in history.
The timeline ends when the infinite math of debt crashes into the hard, physical limits of the planet. Currently, the global market still believes the economy will keep growing, so the debt and asset price bubble has not burst yet. It
inevitably will. The remaining question is how much of the Earth’s resources will be drawn down before that happens.
The financial system relies on the promise of future profits. When global populations begin to steadily fall, the market realizes growth has hit a wall, and the illusion breaks.
The loans default, businesses fail, governments cannot pay their bills, and the banking system collapses.
Bankruptcy Happens “I’ve done it four times out of hundreds, and I’m glad I did it.
I used the laws of the country to my benefit.” [64] This was the response of the current President of the United States during an October 2015 national debate, addressing his businesses filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—a legal process that allows a company to restructure and erase its debts while continuing to operate. A decade earlier, regarding the 2004 bankruptcy of his hotels and casinos, his assessment was identical: “I don’t think it’s a failure. It’s a success.” [65] He is correct.
Bankruptcy is a legal solution to a common problem. When an individual, a corporation, or a sovereign nation cannot pay a debt, the mechanical process is
identical. The borrower declares an inability to pay. The lenders, recognizing that forcing the issue will result in a total loss, negotiate a new agreement. The borrower absorbs a penalty, the lender accepts less money than originally contracted, and the economic system continues.
Canceling unpayable debt is a foundational legal tradition. In ancient economies, rulers recognized a structural problem: compounding interest on debt grows faster than linear agricultural output. If debts were strictly enforced, the working class would inevitably lose all their land to the wealthy. To prevent societal collapse, rulers regularly executed “debt jubilees”—sweeping legal cancellations of all outstanding debt [66].
In 1646 BCE, King Ammisaduqa of Babylon issued an edict that simply erased the mathematical ledger. The decree stated: “Whoever has given silver or barley as an interest-bearing loan… his document is voided.” [67] The physical clay tablets recording the debts were publicly smashed with hammers.
In 594 BCE, the city of Athens faced a civil war driven by debt. The city’s leader, Solon, canceled the debts and legally freed citizens who had been forced into slavery to service their loans. Solon recorded the action in a surviving poem: “I plucked up the boundary stones… the land that was enslaved is free.” [68] The erasure of the debt did not destroy the city; it preserved the physical population. When a modern nation defaults—failing to pay its national debt to foreign
lenders—the same mechanical principle applies. The financial ledger collapses, but the physical nation remains intact.
In the late 1990s, Argentina attempted to service a massive foreign debt by cutting domestic wages, pushing the population into severe poverty.
By December 2001, panicked citizens began withdrawing their physical cash from banks. To prevent the banks from running out of money, the government froze the accounts, legally restricting citizens to withdrawing just $250 a week—a policy known as the Corralito (the “little playpen”) [69]. The financial system imploded. Argentina defaulted on $93 billion in debt. Because the currency was locked in the banks, citizens could not purchase food.
However, the physical environment had not vanished. The agricultural land still grew crops, and the manufacturing infrastructure remained standing. The population bypassed the paralyzed financial ledger and reorganized the physical reality.
Millions of citizens established direct barter networks. The New York Times reported from Argentina in 2002: “With cash scarce and the country in its deepest economic crisis in modern history, millions of Argentines are swapping everything from food to medical services.” [70] When bankrupt factory owners abandoned their facilities, the workers broke the locks, restored power to the machines, and resumed production autonomously. At the Brukman textile factory in Buenos Aires, a worker stated: “We realized
that the owners were not necessary… We can run this ourselves.” [71] The Argentine government eventually negotiated a restructured agreement with global lenders, paying roughly 30 cents for every dollar originally owed [72]. The paper debt was altered. The physical nation survived.
A persistent historical error is conflating a financial collapse with a physical collapse. This confusion stems largely from the 1930s, when two simultaneous disasters were blended into a single historical event known as the Great Depression. One was a failure of the financial ledger.
The other was a failure of the physical biosphere. Both were driven by the identical mechanism of compounding debt.
The crisis began in the physical soil a decade before the stock market crashed. During the 1920s, American farmers took out heavy bank loans to purchase gasoline-powered tractors. When global wheat prices dropped, farmers were trapped. To pay their fixed bank loans, they were forced to produce vastly more wheat.
Between 1925 and 1930, indebted farmers utilized their tractors to rip up over 5 million acres of deep-rooted native prairie grass across the Great Plains to plant shallow-rooted wheat [73]. They destroyed the physical environment to service the financial debt.
In October 1929, the stock market crashed. The financial system imploded. Between 1929 and 1933, roughly 9,000 banks failed. Because federal deposit insurance did not yet exist, an estimated $7 billion in personal savings vanished
into thin air [74]. The currency vanished because the administrators of the system refused to issue more. The Federal Reserve prioritized protecting the value of the dollar, which was pegged to physical gold reserves. Instead of injecting emergency currency to sustain the banks or issuing direct stimulus checks to citizens, the U.S. government restricted the money supply.
Decades later, Ben Bernanke, who would eventually serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, formally apologized on behalf of the central bank. Addressing the economists who documented the policy failure, Bernanke stated: “Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” [75] The money supply constricted and physical commerce halted. By 1932, the U.S. unemployment rate reached 25 percent, leaving roughly 15 million Americans without wages [76]. Without currency to pay rent, hundreds of thousands of families were evicted. They utilized scrap wood, cardboard, and tin to construct massive shantytowns—nicknamed “Hoovervilles”—within major cities. In New York City alone, breadlines and soup kitchens served over 80,000 meals a day to citizens who had lost access to the financial system [77].
As in Argentina decades later, the American population realized the physical world remained intact.
Citizens formed massive barter networks to bypass the paralyzed banks. In Washington State, jobless workers
formed the Unemployed Citizens’ League. Recognizing the local forests still contained timber and the orchards still produced fruit, tens of thousands of members organized to cut wood and harvest crops, trading physical labor directly for physical calories [78].
On the Great Plains, when banks attempted to foreclose on family farms, farmers organized “penny auctions.” Neighbors attended the bank’s auction armed with shotguns and nooses to intimidate outside buyers.
They bid a single penny to purchase the foreclosed farm from the bank, and immediately returned the property deed to the original owner [79]. While millions bypassed the financial system to survive, the physical Earth continued producing food. Because farmers had plowed massive acreage to pay their debts, they produced an extreme surplus of crops, causing the market price of food to collapse.
To raise market prices high enough for farmers to service their 1920s bank loans, the federal government intervened to intentionally destroy physical food. In the spring and summer of 1933, while urban populations stood in breadlines, the government purchased and slaughtered 6 million pigs and discarded the carcasses in trenches.
This did not have to happen.
Henry A. Wallace, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, documented the mechanics of this decision in his 1934 book, New Frontiers:
“To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature. Yet 10 million acres of cotton and some 6 million little pigs were destroyed in 1933… It was not that they were not needed… It was because the market could not absorb them at a price.” [80] While the government destroyed livestock to correct the financial accounts, the physical environment reached its absolute limit. A severe drought developed on the Great Plains. When the rain stopped, the shallow-rooted wheat died. Because the deep-rooted prairie grass had been eradicated years earlier to service bank loans, there was no biological structure left to anchor the soil.
The wind lifted the dry soil into the atmosphere.
On April 14, 1935—recorded as Black Sunday—an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil blew across the continent, blacking out the sun as far east as Washington, D.C. [81]. The administrative state recognized the cause.
The official 1936 Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee submitted to President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated: “the basic cause of the present Great Plains situation is an attempt to impose upon the region a system of agriculture to which the Plains are not adapted.” [82] Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger, who coined the term “Dust Bowl,” wrote from the ground that year: “Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—if it rains.” [83]
When a financial system collapses, the governing authority can engineer a solution. The state can print currency, draft new laws, smash clay tablets, restructure bonds, and issue stimulus checks. The ledger can be reset.
When the physical biosphere collapses, there is no negotiation. Once an aquifer is drained or the topsoil is eradicated, the biological extraction ceases. A population can survive financial bankruptcy. It cannot survive physical starvation.
Not in the Same Boat In 1912, the White Star Line built the Titanic as a monument to luxury. For the wealthy passengers in First Class, the ship featured a Parisian café, a heated swimming pool, Turkish baths, and sprawling promenade decks.
When asked about the safety of the vessel, Philip Franklin, the Vice President of the White Star Line, stated publicly: “There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable.” [85] Safety equipment was treated as an unsightly waste of space since the vessel was classified as unsinkable. During the design phase, Alexander Carlisle, the ship’s original chief designer, proposed outfitting the Titanic with 48 lifeboats.
J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, reduced the number to just 20. When Carlisle later testified at the British Wreck Commissioner’s inquiry, he confirmed
the boats were removed since the owners felt extra lifeboats would “clutter up the decks” and obstruct the ocean views for the First Class passengers [86].
On April 14, the unsinkable ship struck an iceberg and began taking on water. There were not enough boats.
The boats they had were not filled. The crew prioritized launching the First Class passengers as quickly as possible.
Lifeboat No. 1 was built to hold 40 people. It was lowered into the freezing Atlantic with only 12 aboard. Among them were Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, a Scottish baronet, his wife and famous fashion designer, Lady Lucile Duff Gordon, her secretary, and several crewmen. Hundreds of people were still on the ship. Many would soon be in the water [87]. Down below, the crew locked the steel gates leading up from the steerage decks, physically trapping the Third Class passengers in the flooding lower levels to keep them from rushing the lifeboats.
Daniel Buckley, a third-class passenger, testified later in court that there was a gate between steerage and the first-class deck. He noted that it was not locked at first, then someone locked it, and a passenger broke the lock. After that, he said, “All the steerage passengers went up on the first class deck.” Buckley concluded they had “as good a chance” as first and second class once they reached the deck, yet the crew tried to keep them down on their own deck at the start [88].
That mechanical delay dictated the survival rate. When the vessel sank, 62 percent of the First Class passengers survived.
Only 25 percent of the Third Class passengers lived [89].
The defining trait of a ruling class is not solely the accumulation of wealth; it is the enforced belief in their biological or divine superiority. There is no biological distinction between kings and slaves, rich and poor, so this superiority must be artificially manufactured and enforced.
In antiquity, the ruling class achieved this by claiming literal divinity. This messaging was not merely performative; the rulers often internalized their own mythology. In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great marched his army on an extended detour deep into the Egyptian desert to the Oracle of Siwa. He needed the priests to confirm a story his mother told him: his true father was not King Philip of Macedon, but the god Zeus. When Alexander returned, he had internalized this belief. He demanded proskynesis—the physical act of prostrating oneself, or bowing low, before a superior. His Macedonian generals, who viewed him as a “first among equals,” were ordered to drop to their knees and press their faces into the dirt before addressing him. This physical act of prostration was reserved strictly for deities. Alexander demanded they acknowledge he was no longer a mortal man [90].
To reinforce this psychological separation, ancient rulers utilized monumental scale. In 210 BCE, Qin Shi
Huang, the First Emperor of China, commanded 700,000 conscripted laborers to construct a massive mausoleum city.
The Grand Historian Sima Qian documented the project: “Mercury was used to simulate the hundred rivers, the Yangtze, Yellow River, and the great sea, and set to flow mechanically.” [91] By forcing hundreds of thousands of citizens to build an eternal, miniature universe, the emperor physically established himself as the “Son of Heaven.” In the first century CE, the Roman Emperor Caligula made it clear that there were no limits to his power. “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.” [92] In the twelfth century, King Suryavarman II of the Khmer Empire utilized 300,000 workers and 6,000 elephants to move millions of sandstone blocks to build Angkor Wat. It was constructed as an earthly replica of Mount Meru, the mythical home of the gods, formally establishing the cult of the devaraja—the God-king [93].
The requirement to be viewed as a deity holds across geographically isolated cultures. In the sixteenth century, when the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II walked outside, nobles swept the dirt ahead of him, laying down cloaks so his divine feet would never touch the physical earth [94]. In 1610, King James I of England stood before Parliament and stated the absolute law of the land: “Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth.” [95]
When absolute monarchies gave way to republics and constitutional systems in the nineteenth century, hereditary titles faded, yet the psychological requirement to broadcast superiority remained. In the United States, industrial capitalists became the new kingly figures. They replaced divine bloodline propaganda with an illusion of being divinely blessed and possessing exceptional genius.
John D. Rockefeller made the new narrative explicit by publicly stating, “God gave me my money.” [96] In 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote The Gospel of Wealth, asserting that the millionaire was a “trustee for the poor… administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done itself.” [97] Henry Ford represented the ultimate expression of this elevated self-perception. When a young reporter mentioned the modern age, Ford corrected him: “Young man, don’t tell me about the modern age. I invented the modern age.” [98] This capitalist divinity was and is based on financial paperwork. Losing your wealth means losing your godly status. Sociologist Émile Durkheim documented that among the extremely wealthy, sudden financial ruin causes suicide not because the individual will physically starve, but due to their social identity being erased [99]. When these individuals lose their fortunes, they lose who they are. They kill themselves rather than become commoners.
During the 1929 stock market crash, James J.
Riordan, the president of County Trust Bank and a close
friend of Winston Churchill, watched his fortune evaporate.
He was not going to starve. His status, however, was diminished. He went to his home and shot himself [100].
As global capitalist systems fractured in the 1930s, the authoritarian regimes that took over adopted similar mechanisms of supremacy. They built secular religions around their working-class ascent. Joseph Stalin mandated state media refer to him as the “Brilliant Genius of Humanity.” [101] Adolf Hitler demanded state orphanages force children to pray directly to him for their food: “Führer, my Führer… I thank thee today for my daily bread.” [102] Following World War II, absolute totalitarianism and blunt rhetoric became public relations liabilities. The hyper-wealthy adapted through media training, performing a calculated relationship with their wealth while remaining above the common population. J. Paul Getty embodied this era, declaring, “Men of means look at making money as a game which they love to play.” He adopted a performative detachment around money, and continued the legacy of framing the wealthy as superior allocators of capital with lines such as, “Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.” He later wrote a book titled How to Be Rich, offering advice to aspiring billionaires: “To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all that there is to know about that business.” [103] In 1982, Malcolm Forbes, a publisher who inherited his media empire from his father, launched the Forbes 400 list. The list explicitly excluded monarchs and
heads of state, driving a cultural shift: it isolated billionaires as distinct, “self-made” entities whose wealth was proof of pure merit, intellect, and supremacy.
Initially, the old-money establishment viewed this public tracking as a physical threat. Reporter Jonathan Greenberg, who helped compile the inaugural list, recalled that wealthy heirs treated the publication as a “shopping list for kidnappers and terrorists,” with one heir stating: “You are putting a target on my children’s backs.” [104] Business magnates strongly denied their wealth to avoid the scoreboard. When Forbes estimated entertainer Bob Hope’s net worth at $280 million, Hope called the magazine to protest: “I don’t want you to put any phony figures in there… if my estate is worth over fifty million dollars, I’ll kiss your ass.” [105] Media mogul Ted Turner summarized the disdain among the wealthy: “This list is going to cause nothing but trouble. It’s going to make everyone who isn’t on it envious, and everyone who is on it miserable.” [106] While the old money attempted to hide, a new class of billionaires realized the scoreboard could be leveraged to acquire capital and influence. Donald Trump, whose actual net worth was under $5 million in 1982, aggressively lobbied the magazine using a fictional persona named “John Barron.” In audio recordings, Greenberg asks if Fred Trump’s wealth had been transferred to Donald, to which “Barron” replies: “Correct. That’s correct… an excess of 90 percent.” [107] To capture the mindset of this performative era, Trump provided quotes to public magazines such as
this: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” [108] The public was socialized to believe billionaires are the most capable minds on earth. Modern people now look to the wealthy to solve the planetary crises caused by, ironically, the harmful environmental practices of corporations run and owned by the wealthy.
The incentives and mindsets of the wealthy differ greatly from those of ordinary citizens. In 2008, Adolf Merckle, the 94th richest person on Earth, saw his investments collapse during the global financial crisis. He was not wiped out and still retained millions of dollars. He walked to a set of train tracks in Germany and stepped in front of a moving locomotive. His family released a statement: “The distress to his companies… along with the helplessness of no longer being able to act, broke the passionate family entrepreneur, and he ended his life.” [109] These actions demonstrate that some extremely wealthy people would rather die than lose a large portion of their fortune. This suggests that these individuals do not prioritize the long-term viability of the Earth over their net worth, and therefore should not be asked how to avoid further ecological decline.
The modern ruling class continues the tradition of building massive palaces to celebrate their grandeur. Only their greatest monuments to wealth float. The modern mega-yacht operates with the infrastructure of a small sovereign state. The Eclipse, launched in 2010 for Roman
Abramovich at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion, is 533 feet long and equipped with two helipads, a mini-submarine, armored glass, and a military-grade missile defense system.
The Dilbar, launched in 2016 for Alisher Usmanov, contains nearly 16,000 tons of interior volume. The maritime industry standard dictates that maintaining a superyacht requires an annual operating budget equal to roughly 10 percent of the vessel’s original value. The owners expend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to employ dedicated crews of up to 100 people—engineers, deckhands, and security forces [110].
The wealthy of today are not oblivious to what is happening in the world. They have access to excellent sources of information, not filtered by the media outlets, search engines, and AI tools they themselves often control.
By 2017, the wealthy recognized that structural collapse was mathematically inevitable, and they actively began securing physical lifeboats. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman admitted to The New Yorker that prepping for collapse was widespread among the ultra-wealthy. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent of Silicon Valley billionaires have bought some level of apocalypse insurance,” he stated, citing underground bunkers in New Zealand [111].
Even those who acknowledge the environmental crisis explicitly reject the concept of consuming less. In May 2019, Jeff Bezos stood at a podium to present his vision for his space company, Blue Origin. He outlined the math of overshoot, noting that global energy demand grows by 3
percent annually. “What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources?” he asked. “The answer is incredibly simple: rationing… It would lead for the first time to where your grandchildren and their grandchildren would have worse lives than you.” Rather than reducing demand to prevent this, Bezos framed ecological limits as an outcome to be avoided at all costs. “That’s a bad path,” he continued. “We get to choose: do we want stasis and rationing, or do we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice.” To Bezos, living within the Earth’s limits is “stasis”—a state of inactivity or equilibrium.
His proposed solution is to move humanity beyond the Earth. “If we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources,” he argued. “We could have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.” In this vision of infinite growth, the physical planet is simply repurposed. “Earth will be zoned residential and light industry,” he concluded [112].
In 2021, Bill Gates published How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, frequently asserting on his book tour that climate change will not be solved by asking people to consume less. He advocates focusing entirely on green technology and innovation, while becoming one of the largest private owners of American farmland [113].
In August 2022, Elon Musk tweeted his worldview regarding the planet’s limits: “Population collapse due to low
birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” [114] That same year, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff published an account of being paid a massive speaking fee to address five unnamed technology billionaires at a remote resort. They spent the duration of the event asking him how to survive the collapse. They did not ask how to save the world. They asked how to maintain authority over their armed guards after their money became worthless, questioning if they should mandate disciplinary shock collars for their security forces to ensure loyalty [115].
In 2023, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a techno-optimist manifesto declaring: “We are conquerors… we are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.” [116] Simultaneously, Mark Zuckerberg began constructing a 1,400-acre, $270 million fortress on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Hidden beneath the luxury mansions is a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker featuring an escape hatch and doors made of metal poured with concrete—the exact physical specifications required to withstand a bomb blast [117].
In January 2024, Donald Trump shared a video to millions of followers titled “God Made Trump,” wherein a narrator states: “And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.” [118]
The statistical reality contradicts the premise that these caretakers have earned their authority through merit.
In 2025 alone, an estimated $6 trillion was passed down through inheritance, including $297.8 billion inherited by just 91 billionaire heirs [119]. To maintain these legal and tax mechanisms, the ruling class captures the political structure. According to a 2026 Oxfam report, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens [120].
The richest 1 percent—roughly 60 million adults—control nearly half of all global wealth, while a handful of billionaires own more than the bottom four billion humans combined [121]. For a wealthy person whose identity is tied to their bank account, seemingly illogical decisions around infinite growth and ecological decline make sense in the context of their definition of self-preservation.
The other 8.2 billion people on Earth have countless reasons to want the planet to remain habitable, even if it means less concentrated wealth.
When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the physical health of the common peasant improved. Modern archaeology demonstrates their average height increased.
Since they were no longer taxed to feed the centralized rulers in Rome, they retained their own grain and ate better [122].
For decades, historians discussed the “mystery” of the Mayan collapse around 900 CE, assuming the population vanished.
Millions of Mayan people remain alive today. What vanished
was the k’uhul ajaw—the divine kings who demanded endless labor to construct monumental pyramids. When the environment failed, the hierarchy failed. The commoners abandoned the debt of the rulers and returned to planting corn, beans, and squash in the highlands.
In many historical instances of imperial collapse, the ruling class lost their titles and their fortunes. The citizens adjusted. The paper wealth disappeared, but the physical Earth remained.
Humanity is depleting the resources required for survival at an unprecedented rate to fuel economic expansion. Instead of reducing consumption to keep the planet habitable, Elon Musk advocates mining the Earth to fund colonizing Mars—a planet with no liquid water, average temperatures of −60°C, and a toxic atmosphere. He frames this as “a life insurance policy.” [123] To construct a self-sustaining city on Mars, humanity must execute the largest extraction of physical resources in history. To move the industrial payload to Mars, fleets of massive vehicles must be built and launched tens of thousands of times. This requires mining millions of tons of raw iron, chromium, and nickel to forge the stainless-steel rockets, drilling and refining massive quantities of propellant to break orbit, and consuming billions of gallons of fresh water to cool the launch pads. To build the actual colony—the sprawling solar arrays, battery banks, habitats, and atmospheric processors—millions of additional tons of copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals must be extracted [124].
Musk claims to be all in on Mars.
We are not all in the same boat. We do not have to follow him, or anyone else, over the edge of the physical Earth.