The Impossible Hamster

What the impossible hamster has to teach us about economic growth. A new animation from nef (the new economics foundation), scripted by Andrew Simms, numbers crunched by Viki Johnson and pictures realised by Leo Murray.

www.neweconomics.org
www.onehundredmonths.org
www.wakeupfreakout.org
www.impossiblehamster.org

We wanted to confront people with the meaning and logical conclusion of the promise of endless economic growth. We used a hamster to illustrate what would happen if there were no limits to growth because they double in size each week before reaching maturity at around 6 weeks. But if a hamster grew at the same rate until its first birthday, wed be looking at a nine billion tonne hamster, which ate more than a years worth of world maize production every day. There are reasons in nature, why things dont grow indefinitely. As things are in nature, sooner or later, so they must be in the economy. As economic growth rises, we are pushing the planet ever closer to, and beyond some very real environmental limits. With every doubling in the global economy we use the equivalent in resources of all of the previous doublings combined.

Concept, script and narration: Andrew Simms
Animation: Leo Murray & Thomas Bristow
Sound: Louis Slipperz
Scientific Adviser: Victoria Johnson

• Category

  Film & Animation

[longhornsforeva]

Am I the only person who finds this fucking hilarious?

[Ne0Que]

37 people think the world is still flat

[rbc13183]

It could be solved (for the most part) today. We've got the technology and the research to feed, clothe, and house everyone right now, but the current economic system stifles such advancements until it can find a way to monetize them.

The age of Abundance and automation is struggling to push us past the industrial age, but those who still benefit the most from the current system will fight, tooth and nail, to the end, to keep it alive.

We must fight for a sustainable future or we die.

[CptMcMilligan]

Just ignore this idiot. He's a conspiracy nut who believes that everything is a plot by some secret Marxist organization to take over the world and kill everybody. He won't listen to reason, logic or evidence.

[NuclearWizard]

See my most recent comments to that other fool.

[NuclearWizard]

So you condemn all of the world's posterity to torturous deaths for your own avarice.

Plus, you would have all advancement of society shuddered for no good reason. Inflation is a natural economic thing. You can never get rid of it.

[CptMcMilligan]

You think that abandoning an infinite growth economic model for a steady-state one is "death medicine"? What a joke, if anything, our current infinite growth model is a death sentence. Like a tumor we will keep growing until we have exhausted all our resources and then we will all die.

[NuclearWizard]

How about you go take a dose of your own medicine? The death medicine that you advocate, that is.

[Gustavo Direitinho Almeida]

pretty much all people is aware that the only way to have long term economic growth is to have increases in productivity.

This means that you consume the same amount of resources(inputs) and obtain more outputs.

I am not saying that these inputs are ilimited. They are obviously scarce and we face a sustainability problem here.

[Komputerowy Chomik]

Wujek?

[Thomas Mason]

For those that don't get it this is trying to demonstate that continued growth in unsustainable in a world with a finite amount of space and production (our own), and we will eventually have to reach equilibrium to survive

[TheMathGeek341]

this is deep