This paper was written as a masters thesis for the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. It describes the unsustainable nature of our civilization and suggests ways to achieve sustainability. It won the Liberal Studies department’s first Annual Thesis Prize for best departmental thesis. William Kornblum served faculty advisor for the paper.

Read the The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase .pdf.

Read in Portuguese!

Janos Biro took it upon himself to create abridged translations of this thesis in Portuguese so that the material would be available for a Brazilian audience.

Changing the Economic Paradigm
Human expansion and the theory of r-K selection

Based on…

This thesis was in great part based on the following papers, written earlier in Mark’s masters studies:

• Population Ecology and People, by Mark S. Meritt — December 14, 1999
• The Social Full House: Circumscription and the Evitability of Complexity, by Mark S. Meritt — May 18, 1999
• Sociobiology and the Nature/Nurture Debates, by Mark S. Meritt — December 31, 1999
• The Unsustainability of Economic Growth, by Mark S. Meritt — May 25, 2000

Spinoffs

From the completion of the thesis until the birth of his daughter in mid-2003, Mark did a large amount of additional research as part of developing a general audience book which expands on this paper. A full book proposal was completed though without accompanying sample chapters. For this reason and other more dramatic ones (described in Mark’s essay Forcing the Balance), the book project has not yet made further progress since the writing of the proposal. Mark sincerely hopes that the right circumstances will evolve one day to allow him to write the book, as well as to develop companion projects in other media, most notably a website and a documentary motion picture.