Book Review - The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource Limited World by James Bradfield Moody & Bianca Nogrady
Written by: James Bradfield Moody & Bianca Nogrady
Vintage, 2010, 311pp,
ISBN 97817416688962011
Reviewed by: Major Cameron Leckie, Department of Defence
The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource Limited World is a bold attempt to lay out a road map for a future where economic growth can be decoupled from resource consumption. The premise of the book is that through changes in technologies, institutions and markets, a sixth wave of innovation will dramatically change the global economy, creating a better world while adapting to the limits to growth such as climate change and peak oil.
The book is laid out in two parts. Part one defines the next wave of innovation while part two explains how that wave can be caught.
Part one commences with an examination of innovation cycles, known as Kondratiev waves, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. With the global economy approaching the ‘limits to growth’, the authors propose that resource efficiency will be the next great market which will drive the sixth wave of innovation. This will be supported by institutional changes where ‘externalities’ such as greenhouse gas emissions are internalised into the price of goods and services. The final element will be ‘CleanTech’, that is, technologies that achieve more using fewer resources in an environmentally friendly manner.
Part two explores five ideas that will enable entrepreneurs, business and government to ‘catch the sixth wave’. These ideas include using waste as an opportunity, a move from selling products to selling services, producing physical items locally while sharing information globally, a convergence between the digital and natural worlds and looking to nature to solve problems.
The Sixth Wave is an easy read with some complex topics being explained in a light hearted and easily understood manner. The message they are attempting to sell, namely that affluent Western societies can continue to live in a similar but better fashion than we do now, is appealing, and offers hope through numerous examples of current and projected changes. The key question is whether this hope is misplaced or not.
There are a number of weaknesses in the arguments presented in The Sixth Wave which may well undermine the achievement of the vision explored in this book. The first is the timeframe that is considered. Industrial civilisation is a relative newcomer in human history. A longer term view, as identified by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, would suggest that socioeconomic systems increase in complexity until they outrun their resource base, after which they contract to a lower level of complexity. The author’s suggested approach to mitigating the limits to growth, namely adding additional complexity to a world that is already hypercomplex to solve a predicament that is largely due to too much complexity is an experiment that is unlikely to end well. This is a lesson that can be drawn from numerous past civilisations.
The second criticism is whether increasing resource efficiency as an approach to the limits to growth is even feasible. With the global population expected to reach around nine billion by mid century and billions more people aspiring to developed world living standards (and hence resource consumption), the authors offer little analysis to identify the magnitude of the increases in resource efficiency required and how such increases could be achieved. This is particularly salient given that such changes in resource efficiency are subject to diminishing returns and as the authors identify, increases in resource efficiency have ‘not yet been able to keep pace with increases in population and affluence’.
This leads on to a final criticism being that even if it was feasible, it may already be too late for the approach proffered in The Sixth Wave to be applied. While it will only become clear well into the future, it could well be that the global economy has already reached the limits to growth. If this is the case then many of the changes proposed will become subject to the ‘law of receding horizons’ and never come to fruition.
James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady are to be congratulated on their attempt to define an approach to managing industrial civilisation’s battle with the limits to growth. This is an area that, given its importance, is the subject of far too little discussion including within Army. Unfortunately the authors suggested solution, in this reviewer’s opinion, is one that is unlikely to succeed. With Army on a capability development approach of ever increasing complexity, this raises some serious questions on how we adapt to a world subject to the limits to growth.
