Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
Marx gives a good example of the fallacy of extrapolating existing trends to their “logical” conclusion in Chapter 24 of Volume 3 of Capital when discussing “the fabulous fancies of Dr. Price, which outdo by far the fantasies of the alchemists”:
“Money bearing compound interest increases at first slowly. But, the rate of increase being continually accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid, as to mock all the powers of the imagination. One penny, put out at our Saviour’s birth to 5 per cent compound interest, would, before this time, have increased to a greater sum, than would be contained in a hundred and fifty millions of earths, all solid gold. (…)
His fancy flies still higher in his Observations on Reversionary Payments, etc., London, 1772. There we read:
“A shilling put out to 6% compound interest at our Saviour’s birth” (presumably in the Temple of Jerusalem) “would … have increased to a greater sum than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn’s orbit.”
The claim that all insect life “will” be extinct in a hundred years falls into the same category of fanciful (“would be if the existing rate of extinction were to be maintained” would be more acceptable, but then that wouldn’t attract the same headlines).