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It’s perfectly acceptable and prudent to make predictions about future resource scarcity, so long as you remember that such predictions are based on our current level of scientific knowledge. Such analyses play a crucial role in motivating us to invest more in advancing our knowledge, but Hickel mistakenly interprets their findings as fatalistic signs that we must cease economic growth altogether. And this, as I’ll show below, is simply not an option.

1. A world with no growth?

How might the world look if Hickel has his way, and global economic growth is brought to a halt? He thinks we’ll be just fine, claiming that ‘our planet provides more than enough for all of us; the problem is that its resources are not equally distributed.’

It’s a claim often made: that the world is plenty rich enough for everyone, if only those wealthy fat-cats had the empathy to share their billions with the rest of humanity. Recently the distinguished British physicist Sir Martin Rees similarly exclaimed:

‘We have a billion people in the world in abject poverty, which could be alleviated by the wealth of the thousand richest people on the planet. That we allow that to continue surely says something significant about how much — or little — moral progress we’ve made since medieval times.’

In his critique of Hickel’s argument, Noah Smith dismissed the panacea of global wealth redistribution as a political and logistical impossibility. In his response, Hickel reassured Smith that we can indeed distribute global wealth with policies like introducing a global minimum wage, democratizing global economic governance institutions, implementing subsidies and tariffs in developing countries, cancelling national debts, or rolling out a global basic income.

Hickel appreciates the political difficulties of implementing these policies, but the more important question is whether such measures can actually achieve their intended aims in principle.

The notion that redistributing world income is the solution to global poverty is both intuitively plausible and spectacularly false. It makes sense to us on an emotional level when we are confronted with images of billionaires swanning around on mega-yachts on the Mediterranean, juxtaposed with children starving in a war-induced famine in Yemen. But we need to put this visceral imagery aside for a moment and look at some stark numerical realities.

How much wealth is there in the whole world? Credit Suisse puts it currently at around $317 trillion USD. How much would each person in the world have if that were divided equally among all 7.6 billion of us? $41,710.

To be clear, this is the amount of cash each human being would have if everything of economic value (houses, cars, furniture, spectacles, intellectual property, everything) was traded to aliens for cash in return. (Try to ignore the logical and inflationary issues of aliens forging vast amounts of US currency — it’s just a thought experiment).

As is comically depicted by Tim Urban on his blog Wait But Why, we would then all just be huddled naked together next to our equal piles of cash, which we would then presumably try to eat or burn for warmth. But suppose we could actually buy goods and services back from the aliens, at their current day prices. What could each of us afford? Perhaps a new car and some tanks of fuel, enough basic food supplies for a few years, a decent tent, warm clothes, and other survival equipment. That’s about it.

No houses. No electricity. No internet. No schools, no hospitals, no government.

In other words, we would all be living in what is generally considered today to be dire poverty. And this is presuming that all wealth is somehow convertible into cash, which it isn’t. Thus the aliens. In reality the vast majority of economic wealth does not exist in fungible, divisible, monetary form.

Take the approximately one trillion dollars of value that the company Apple represents. You can’t divide up ownership of such a company equally among the world population and expect it to still exist in any recognisable form. And a company is one of the more abstract kinds of things one can own. Forget about divvying up something more physically tangible like a toy-making factory or a uranium mine.