John Sterman and the Dalai Lama: Investigating Growth with a Piece of Paper

By David Pedigo
August 27, 2013

Here’s a fun game you can play to get acquainted with systems thinking:

His Holiness the Dalai Lama having fun with systems thinking

Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Now fold it in half again. Keep going until you’ve folded it six times. At this point, you’ve already managed one more fold than the Dalai Lama when Climate Interactive team member Prof. John Sterman challenged His Holiness to do this at MIT’s Global Systems 2.0 Forum.

You might notice that each fold has a bigger effect on the paper’s thickness than the last one, and after six, it may be difficult to fold it again. At this point it should be about one centimeter thick, and while that might not seem like much, the relative change is significant, considering that the thickness was negligible when you started.

Now, with this in mind, guess how thick it would be if it were folded 33 times.

The correct answer may seem a bit counterintuitive: if the paper were folded 33 times, it would be about 3,400 miles thick—equivalent to the distance from Boston, MA to Frankfurt, Germany.

This is because you double the paper’s thickness each time you fold it. After one fold, it’s twice as thick, after two folds, it’s four times as thick, and after 33 folds, it’s about 8.6 billion times as thick!

This is an exercise in exponential growth, and it’s a crucial part of understanding climate change and how serious it is.

Just like piece of paper grows slightly with each fold, the world economy grows slightly with each passing year—an average of about 3.5% in recent years. In order to sustain that growth, humans need to consume more, and this means more resource extraction, more deforestation and more carbon emissions.

Again, 3.5% might seem small, but if the world economy continues the same rate of growth, it will double over the next 20 years, and in 100 years, it will be 30 times bigger than it is today. At the current levels of economic activity, we are already consuming more than the earth can support, so operating under business as usual will soon become totally inconceivable. (See more detail here)

The good news? Our global economy is so inefficient with materials and energy that there are tremendous opportunities to reduce our environmental impact. We can use technology to develop more and better forms of renewable energy and we can combine engineering with smart public policy to create more efficient infrastructure.

On top of that, we don’t really need this endless growth. Studies have shown that a country’s economic development is not strongly linked with the general happiness of its people, as long as they can meet their basic needs.

“This is enormously important and it’s also extraordinarily good news,” John Sterman says when explaining this phenomenon.

“If,” he continues, “only more wealth could bring happiness, then in order to live within the limits of our planets, we would have to create much misery. But because that’s not true, those of us who are so rich but not so happy can change the way we live and provide the opportunity for those who need more to develop.”

Managing that transition is going to take bright, passionate people. And those people will need tools, resources, and ideas—all of which we hope to contribute via the Climate Leader, a free online course open to anyone who is dedicated to making a difference on climate change. If that sounds like you, you can still enroll and join over 1,000 other climate leaders from across the globe.