Fleming believed that growth has natural limits. Things grow to maturity—kids into adults, saplings into trees, startups into full-fledged companies—but growth beyond that point is, in his words, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The bigger and more productive an economy gets, he argued, the more resources it needs to burn to maintain its own infrastructure. It becomes less and less efficient at keeping any one person clothed, fed, and sheltered. He called this the “intensification paradox”: The harder everyone works to make the GDP line point up, the harder everyone has to work to make the GDP line point up. Inevitably, Fleming believed, growth will turn to degrowth, intensification to deintensification. These are things to prepare for, plan for, and the way to do that is with the missing metric: resilience.

Whole Earth stuff. You know how it works.

All of this somewhat guilty running around led me back to the simplest answer: I can’t measure resilience. I mean, sure, I could wing a bunch of vague, abstract stats and make pronouncements. God knows I’ve done a lot of that before. But there’s no metric, really, that can capture it. Which means I have to talk to strangers, politely, about problems they’re trying to solve.

I hate this conclusion. I want to push out content and see lines move and make no more small talk. I want my freaking charts. That’s why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, hard drive sizes, bandwidth, users, point releases, revenue. I love when the number goes up. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world where it doesn’t. Or rather it used to be.

This article appears in the November 2023 issue. Subscribe now.