More From Less

call tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government the “four horsemen of the optimist.”

it possible to profitably grow while taking less and less. In the Second Machine Age, that has changed.

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

In 1977, Stigler published in the normally staid Journal of Political Economy his article “The Conference Handbook.” It grew out of his frustration at how often discussions at economics conferences kept going over the same topics. So Stigler proposed shortening these repetitious conversations by replacing the sentences heard most often with numbers

institutions are that they’re devised by humans

impose constraints

“voice and accountability” and “control of corruption,”

My story is basic economic theory, phrased in the language of the four horsemen of the optimist: capitalism, tech progress, responsive government, and public awareness. The story is that in recent years capitalism and tech progress have combined not only to increase human prosperity but also to bring us post-peak in resource consumption in America

All of these principles are about the combination of technological progress and capitalism, which are the first of the two pairs of forces causing dematerialization.

Enlightenment. This intellectual movement began in the second half of the eighteenth century with many societies in the West embracing what Steven Pinker characterizes as four values: reason, science, humanism, and progress. According to Mokyr, the Enlightenment created a “culture of growth” that let both capitalism and technological progress flour