Sunday, December 02, 2012

Grantham is depressing

Last year, legendary investor Jeremy Grantham of GMO published a treatise on exploding commodity prices.  He also offered a startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.

Grantham believes the world has undergone a permanent "paradigm shift" in which the number of people on Earth has finally and permanently outstripped the planet's ability to support us.

Grantham believes that the planet can only sustainably support about 1.5 billion humans, versus the 7 billion on Earth right now (heading to 10-12 billion). For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.

The headline of the article was what caught my eye.  We're Headed For A Disaster of Biblical Proportions.  But it wasn't Grantham who said it.  It was, of course, Dr. Peter Venkman.

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