strategy+business, January 16, 2020
by Theodore Kinni
Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt
If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’re going to love Andrew McAfee’s latest book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next. Always optimistic, while still expressing minor notes of caution, McAfee, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder and codirector of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (with frequent collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson), believes that life on this planet is getting better all the time. He also thinks that though humans face some big challenges, we have at our command all the resources needed to meet them.
The principle support upon which McAfee constructs this thesis, which he admits will be hard for more skeptical readers to swallow, is an ongoing process of dematerialization that he finds occurring in mature economies. Building on research by environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel and writer Chris Goodall, McAfee charts resource consumption in the United States. For instance, he uses U.S. Geological Survey data to show that as of 2015, the consumption of the five “most important” manufacturing metals in the U.S. — aluminum, copper, steel, nickel, and gold — are all off their peaks since 2000. Steel consumption is down 15 percent; aluminum is down 32 percent; copper is down 40 percent. The same is true for energy consumption, as well as a variety of farming and construction inputs. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, U.S. consumption of resources has been falling, yet the nation’s economy has continued growing. Simply put, McAfee is arguing that it takes a lot less stuff to produce a dollar of GDP today than it did 50 years ago.
McAfee declares that the data shows “a great reversal of our Industrial Age habits is taking place. The American economy is now experiencing broad and often deep absolute dematerialization.” And the rest of world? Well, the data is incomplete. McAfee finds some evidence that Europe’s industrialized nations are “past peak” resource consumption, but developing countries, such as China and India, that are still in the process of industrializing, “probably are not yet dematerializing.”
Four forces drive the engine of dematerialization, according to McAfee. Read the rest here.
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