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Peak Oil and Economic Growth: Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted by nate hagens on March 28, 2008 - 10:40am
This is a guest post by Rob Dietz and Brian Czech. Rob Dietz is the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). He received a master of science degree in environmental science and engineering from Virginia Tech and an undergraduate degree in economics and environmental studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Czech, the founder of CASSE, is also a professional biologist in civil service and an adjunct professor of Ecological Economics at Virginia Tech. Czech has a Ph.D. in Renewable Natural Resources ( University of Arizona, 1998) and is the author of "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train". (note: Herman Daly, who helped me choose my Phd path, first wrote about the steady state economy in 1977 - he is on CASSE's board)
When pundits, talking heads, and government officials debate policies related to oil consumption (e.g., gasoline taxes), they invariably ask, “Will it hurt economic growth?” This statement could be broadened to a whole range of policy debates on the environment, from climate change to endangered species. But since this is the Oil Drum, let’s stick with the topic of oil and economic growth.
Peak Oil and Economic Growth: Where Do We Go From Here?
Oil and the economy are clearly and inextricably linked. Many analysts call oil the engine of economic growth. Certainly U.S. oil consumption patterns and economic output have experienced similar upward trends over the decades (see graph). It is difficult to find anything produced or consumed in the U.S. economy that doesn’t require oil as an input to its life cycle. It logically follows that changing oil prices or altering oil consumption patterns will affect economic growth. That’s why people (although probably not enough) worry about peak oil. They fear that the age of economic growth will come to an end.
(Click to enlarge)
The real issue, though, is whether economic growth is a desirable goal to begin with! Economic growth is simply an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services. It is driven by increasing population and increasing per capita consumption, and is typically indicated by increasing gross domestic product (GDP). Theory and evidence suggest that continued growth is actually “uneconomic” or costly to society . Ecological footprint analysis shows that the global economy is consuming 30 percent more resources than the Earth can regenerate each year , a deficit that cannot be maintained for long.
If the growth paradigm is unsustainable and harmful to the environment and future generations, why is society still pursuing it? First, growth was a blessing for much of history, and it is difficult to change from something that worked in the past. Second, powerful interests from corporations to government agencies to universities have a stake in the growth economy and promote it doggedly, sometimes resorting to fallacious concepts and propaganda that confuse and mislead the public. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, society lacks knowledge of the sustainable alternative to economic growth.
The sustainable alternative is the steady state economy, which is characterized by stabilized (mildly fluctuating, that is) population and per capita consumption. The steady state economy is fully capable of meeting human needs and providing a high standard of living for all citizens. Such an economy aims for better, not bigger; quality, not quantity. It focuses on strengthening communities rather than making and using ever more stuff – including oil.
In a steady state economy, societies can redevelop local networks for commerce rather than misallocating precious energy resources. Changing the economic goal to a gradual transition toward a steady state economy is the best way to ensure ecological health and true wealth for this and future generations. In fact, a sober consideration of thermodynamics and basic ecological principles tells us it’s the only way.
Economic growth will end one way or another. Classical economists believed that after a period of expansion, the economy would stabilize. Current ecological economists have updated the theory, but largely reached the same conclusion – that a steady state economy of sustainable scale is a desirable scenario for society. Peak oil has the power to stop economic growth and even cause economic contraction. If economic growth is going the way of the passenger pigeon (or numerous other species that have been lost to economic growth), shouldn’t we attempt to make the transition on our terms? Why wait until our behavior and policies produce disastrous consequences? The sooner we get to work on the transition, the more we can avoid the pain of a forced transition. Peak oil is the messenger telling us it’s high time to change the economic goal.
For more information, visit the website of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) at , where you can sign the only position on economic growth available on the Web.
Rob Dietz
Executive Director, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
rob_dietz@steadystate.org
Brian Czech
President, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
brianczech@juno.com
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I can suggest one reason why economic growth has been a public policy imperative: greed! People, especially those already at the top, tend to have an insatiable thirst for money and power. Economic growth allows the "haves" to pursue the extremes of wealth and power without it being a politically explosive issue with the masses. In a steady state economy, growth in wealth of one individual has to come at the expense of someone else. So, a small elite amassing great fortunes would have to come at the price of impoverishing great swaths of society. With the continuous growth paradigm, however, it is possible to at least placate the masses with the belief that they too, someday, can join the privileged ranks of the wealthy.
In my opinion, continuous economic expansion is a necessary condition to allow the rich to amass even greater fortunes without political blow-back!
unless the 'rich' see that:
a)conspicuous consumption doesn't make them happy
b)other things do make them happy
c)conspicuous consumption among the rich makes poorer people ornery, and a little on the violent side
d)the economic system evolves in such a way that you can't spend your wealth on things of power/novelty that you used to be able to.
The bigger problem with the steady state economy (and my idea of changing the cultural carrot) isn't persuading people that these ideas are 'true', but that there is such momentum to the current system that theres no easy bridge to get to a Steady State Economy. We just need to use our remaining fossil fuels to build more local regional infrastructure as best we can and simultaneously demonstrate that more doesnt necessarily mean better - hopefully that awareness will snowball into a viable path.
Recently I've been blogging about a framework for transitioning from our current growth-oriented economic system to a steady-state economy in balance with the ecos. The entry point to this transition is to first make money a meaningful measure of economic activity. That involves developing a currency standard based on free energy. Money represents an amount of free energy (available to do useful work) and the amount of money in circulation should represent the total amount of free energy extant at any point in time.
The point of an energy standard is that it pegs the value of a currency directly to what it actually is supposed to represent, the ability to do work in the future. The valuation of wealth can then be done with a measure such as emergy, representing past energy expenditures on useful goods and services.
It is vitally important that we know what things cost in energy terms so that we can budget appropriately. This will become absolutely necessary in an era of shrinking net free energy.
The blogs are available at: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/
You might want to go back to the March 14th entry, "What's wrong with this picture?", for some background and introduction. But the March 25 entry, "What is money - really?", conveys the basic idea. I will be continuing this series (with minor diversions) by looking at other economic phenomena such as financing and profit making, etc. in future blogs. Then I will begin looking at possible implementation scenarios.
The main point is that if we are to achieve a realistic steady-state economy at some nominal population size and per capita consumption rate, then we need to be in a position to measure accurately and concisely the true costs of work and products/services to judge their worth.
George
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/
I am reminded of the Pacific Northwest Indian pot-latch tradition. Status was not what you owned but what you gave away. Very interesting tradition. Leadership was directly connected to generosity.
Even with the potlatch tradition someone somewhere had to produce what was given away.
True. But the tradition ensured that leaders were accumulating social wealth, not resource wealth. The fascinating thing was that the participants were producing surplus solely to re-distribute it.
This is fundamentally different from our model where surplus is converted to markers and then hoarded. Well... "invested" is the polite word.
You'd think that in a steady state economy there would be no such thing as surplus.
Plenty of surplus if one has far less people than what the local biosphere can provide.
That's fine if the things you give away were produced by you but perhaps the chiefs gained their status by giving away things that they appropriated from others.
perhaps the chiefs gained their status by giving away things that they appropriated from others.
Seeing as how you don't provide a link, I'd have to call that statement one of casting aspersions.
Here's
a google return with a snip about
revival from one of those returns:
I'd just guess that there wasn't much "appropriated from others", if any.
Except that, for the elite, it's not about happiness. It's about power and winning. And power, much more than mere happiness, really matters.
Happiness is nice but it's a side dish, irrelevant to many for whom it actually gets in the way and slows them down.
Except that, for the elite, it's not about happiness. It's about power and winning.
It's also just plain about the money. There was a quote floating around some years ago from a Dutch economist who'd stated at some big conference: "It may not be profitable to slow decline." That's the kind of insanity behind the growth paradigm. And the more I think about all this the more I am convinced the rich/elite are just plain bonkers... once upon a time, the overlords accumulated wealth as a means of consolidating power. Now they accumulate power for the sake of consolidating not wealth, but fiat currency notes — which they themselves have designed to be ultimately worthless — represented in binary code that is irretrievable without electricity. It is as if currency notes have replaced the sun as humanity's primary focus of worship and sacrifice.
Very thought provoking post! The idea that comes to mind with a "steady state economy" is not that the current system will evolve into a more humanistic system but that the system will devolve into Mercantilism.
"Mercantilism suggests that the ruling government should advance these goals by playing a protectionist role in the economy, by encouraging exports and discouraging imports, especially through the use of tariffs."
Conspicuous consumption may go out of fashion but old habits die hard. People will hoard wealth and resources and we will be looking at somewhat of a zero sum economy. In such an economic environment there will be winners and losers (just as now) but the difference is the losers will be hurting a lot more and over time will be unable to compete.
In America we have been sold the idea that "low taxes are good", "high taxes are bad". Our current tax structure is rigged for the wealthy and is punitive to those that are less wealthy, but any attempt to dismantle that system will be met with stiff (perhaps violent) resistance.
A lot of people are Utopian in outlook (I certainly fit in that group) but when you try and sell that idea to people who fear that they might be a "loser" in that new system, any further proposals to solve the "general problem" will fall on deaf ears.
I think that over time civilization will establish new systems that will be far more egalitarian and capitilism just as totalitarianism will fail, but these systems will initially take hold in small communal ventures (as they are already) but society at large will not reform.
Our current economic system will have to either collapse or be overthrown (violently).
"In a steady state economy, growth in wealth of one individual has to come at the expense of someone else."
That is true for all economies, steady state, expanding or contracting. Ignoring inherited gains and lottery wins, all individual gains in wealth come at the expense of others - the only issue is whether it is a small number of others or the collective commons.
If an individual stumbles upon a mountain of pure gold, or an ocean of oil, or a billion dollar gift from the (privately owned and money-issued-with-interest) Federal Reserve - then the wealth derives from the adverse impact imparted on the market (collective commons).
The highly trained professional (say a surgeon) derives increased wealth from others because society believes that their time is more valuable - using professional sports people as an allegory; if one swings a stick at a ball often enough, then one will inevitably get good at it. Does anyone truly believe that professional sports people and other entertainment people are really worth the millions they "earn", and don't get me started on "executives" at (for example) Bear Stearns, Carlyle Capital, Enron, US West, all the ratings agencies, the SEC, the FSA (in the UK), the actuaries and executives at the companies insuring the CDO's and on and on and on. They have bilked millions (literally) from the collective commons for far to long.
For people not to know the truth about entities like JP Morgan, the Federal Reserve System (sic), et al - is a VERY sad indictment of the USA.
Of course, it is possible to become wealthy without "bilking" the rest of society. Most normal (not athletes or CEO's) people you would consider wealthy followed a time tested formula. Simply consume less than you earn year after year, and over the course of a career, it's actually quite simple to amass wealth. What's evil about that? I'm only 26, so I have not had time to save enough to be considered wealthy, but I have saved quite a bit more than probably 95% of the people my age. I live off of roughly 40% of my income, and save/invest the rest. Who exactly am I bilking this wealth from? Why should I feel guilty if in 20 years I have accumulated more wealth than my peers who blew all of their money on mindless consumerism. How does my thrift impoverish "great swaths of society". There are always exceptions, but by and large, the wealthy got that way by consistantly making good financial decisions and the poor are poor because they consistantly make bad financial decisions. In my opinion most of the rage against the wealthy is misplaced.
If you "invest" your savings then in the long run most of your "wealth" will come from the investment gains rather than the actual savings. That's where the "bilking" is.
Alas, our current money system only allows us to save for our old age (or a rainy day) via the same system of usury. The only way to opt out is to for our earnings to be, right from the start, in an alternative currency.
"If you "invest" your savings then in the long run most of your "wealth" will come from the investment gains rather than the actual savings. That's where the "bilking" is."
Yeah, it really sucks when everybody wins.
Everybody loses, since this is what's driving "growth", i.e. unsustainable drawdown of natural resources, and that'll result in collapse and die-off.
Eventually sure.
If its after we consume the resources of the entire galaxy, who cares?
Well, that's the sort of dim-witted comment you became famous for on peakoil.com. Still the universe-raping, nuke-pushing cornucopian, I see.
You could also invest in a business... in traditional Judaism and in modern Islam, nobody gets interest on loans, they just invest in your business with you and share the profits for a while until you buy out their shares.
Modern Islamic banks still do this. The Gulf isn't prosperous just because of oil money, you know. That's most of it, but their banking system helps.
Being able to live off of 40% of your income might be seen in some quarters as being paid too much to begin with. There are many who loose livelyhoods because they are marginalized by corporate greed. Out-sourcing. The biggest problem in society was allowing corporations to be treated in law as citizens.
The reason corporations behave the way they do is because they are required to do what's best for the shareholders, i.e., what brings them the most (unearned) returns. Thus the "growth" imperative.
Your ability to save is admirable. Please tell me that your savings are not based in US Dollars. Please tell me that your interest rate is above the true rate of inflation, that being the one that takes into account essentials like the cost of food and fuel. And while you are at it, please tell me you are not an extreme exception.
What do you mean by "most normal people you would consider wealthy"? As far as I'm concerned the vast majority of people are normal and they are far from wealthy! The average American is looking at 30% interest on their credit card bills - and the Investment Banks are getting loans from the Federal Reserve at less than 5%. Can you truly, hand on heart, tell any of us that this is equitable?
Do you think it is acceptable that Americans can buy Japanese cars with loans at 0% interest, but these same rates are not available to people in Japan (go read up on the carry trade).
I am not saying that working to become wealthy is immoral, I am saying that whichever way you look at it, someone else is losing something somewhere in order for you to be wealthy.
"There are always exceptions, but by and large, the wealthy got that way by consistently making good financial decisions and the poor are poor because they consistently make bad financial decisions." - this is ad hominem but you are naive.
I distinctly remember in college, my wife and I had an annual budget of $14,400, or 1200 a month, roughly equal to our combined part time incomes. That covered rent, insurance, utilities, food, and if we were lucky, one or two "dates" a month. It wasn't much, but I never remember feeling deprived.... it was actually a pretty good life. After graduation, our incomes grew a lot, but we had no desire to increase our standard of living by the same amount. It's that simple. We may be an extreme exception... but not because what we are doing is difficult.
As for credit card debt.... these are the "consistantly bad decisions" I refer to. People who hold credit card debt made that choice by their own free will. Most will claim they had no choice... but they often neglect the years of cumulative bad decisions that led them to be "forced" to rely on credit cards. Usually, they bought a house they couldn't afford, an SUV that burns hundreds of dollars a month, and dined out more often than cooking at home. When a crisis hit, they simply lacked the liquidity to cope, and the house of cards came crashing down. In short,they failed to keep expenses below income.
Dear Mr. Moneyman,
I think you have to be in your twenties to believe that the system is so fair.
What happens when the savings that you sock away becomes worthless through hyperinflation or Wall Street pirates?
What happens when the blue chip company that has your pension invested goes belly up and hides assets then goes bankrupt?
There are so many ways to lose...With oil production peaking there will be massive amounts of wealth that will literally evaporate.
The late great Joseph Campbell said the following about money: "Follow your bliss. If you find money so much the better. If you chase the money, chances are you may lose the money...and then you'll have nothing."
It's more than simple greed.
What it comes down to is that people will accept a big rich-poor gap if there's some social mobility, if there's some hope that the poor can become rich.
In imperial China they had the imperial civil service examinations, where any sufficiently educated person, regardless of background, could join the civil service and build a good life for themselves. This affected very few people, really, but it gave everyone hope. So they put up with a large rich-poor gap.
And in fact people have studied this, and found that around 1800 the exams became corrupted, fewer people were passing them and those who did pass were nephews of current officials, and so on. There was then less social mobility. It's no coincidence that China later had the Taiping Rebellion, until WWII the bloodiest war in human history. And in the words of the Taiping we hear the kernel of what would later become Chinese communism: they shared everything equally, men and women were equal, and the Taiping leader had a harem...
Societies which don't allow for social mobility get rebellions and revolutions. The genius of capitalism is that if offers this social mobility: not everyone can be rich, but anyone can be rich.
However, if the amount of wealth stays steady, then for some poor to become rich means some rich must become poor, it becomes a bit of a shell game. And so we seek economic growth. If the economy is growing, then not just anyone can be rich, but everyone, right? After all, the economy has quadrupled in real terms since 1960 and we have only one-fourth as many poor people, right? Er...
People will put up with great misery so long as there's hope of things improving. Economic growth offers that. Think of the poor of the West. Think of the people living in trailer parks, the homeless, the working poor, the welfare mothers, the young man just out of prison desperately looking for a job... now imagine telling them: "Sorry, this is as good as it gets - there's no hope of change."
Or if you do want the economy to just stay steady, but at the same time raise the condition of the poor, well then where does the money come from? The rich. "Look dear CEO, having 100 times the salary of a worker in your company is a bit much, let's drop it to 50 times and with your taxes we can support 100 poor people fairly well." I suspect the donations to the party would not be so generous that year...
It's a difficult thing. The genius of the capitalist system, that in its heart lies the promise of social mobility, that only works in a constantly growing economy. Take that away and... You may not get a bloody rebellion, but you certainly won't be re-elected.
Gowths' imperative is debt based leveraged banking, or the misnamed "fractional reserve banking".
Why is growth an imperative; without it the money supply shrinks then spirals downward. In our system all money is created by debt. The government gives banks the right to loan money at interest at a ratio of 10 to 1 to deposits or better. When you take out a loan they place money in your acccount and you pay for the article you purchased, money is created in the system. This a great deal for banks as $1 in deposits can fetch interest on $10 worth of loans.
The problem arises that more debt must be created every year to pay the interest, because the interest debt is not backed by money creation as was the loan. So there is a geometric progression of the need of further loans to create enough money to pay the principle and the interest. Without this geometric progresssion the money supply stagnates, leaving the system short of money to pay both the principle and the interest.
Money stagnation creates huge problems for the economy and the government. The economy winds down reducing profits and wages thereby reducing the taxable income. This is why the mantra is growth from both government and industry, they need the ever increasing suppply of money to run the system. That puts the bankers in charge as they control the spigot of credit that creates the money.
Is there a solution? Yes, Government created non interest bearing debt in the form of credit and money. Certainly, the money creation must be monitored closely so that there is enough to run the economy without increasing inflation. In this way government can fund its' operations much more cheaply and efficiently and break the dependence on unsustainable geometric resource depletion to underwrite ever more more "growth".
Hmm, given that peak oil will force us to live with ever fewer oil (and eventually fewer everything, as peak everything will hit), I can't see how even a steady state economy would be sustainable. I'd guess that a truly sustainable way of life would not only require to drop the paradigm of growth, but to redesign/rethink most of what we do.
There certainly has to be retrenchment before there is a leveling off to sustainability. How far we have to retrench, know one knows, but I think it could be quite a bit given our dependence on oil, and given that the population of the earth was 1 to 1.5 billion at the outset of the oil age -- and the earth (soil, water, etc) was a lot less used up then than it is now.
Not only that, retrenchment in the beginning is not going to be done consciously and collectively, but thru war and devastation, if what's happening currently is any indication.
Let's be blunt: capitalism is on trial. Capitalism requires growth. Greed existed before capitalism. Greed is personal attribute. We're talking about a system here. What's required is the ability to take conscious and collective action that may be and will be in direct conflict with the needs of capital and its expansion. Right now, here in the US, not even the tiniest thing can be done if it steps on the toes of some corporate interest, unless it benefits an even bigger one. Retrenchment!?
Fugeddahboutit!
Still, at some point, when the smoke clears, I believe that we will get it together and adapt. No choice really. Evolution bequeathed us brains. We've used them to produce better and better gizmos. Sooner or later it will dawn on us that using for them for collective betterment, or at least survival, is a reasonable course of action.
Dave - "Right now, here in the US, not even the tiniest thing can be done if it steps on the toes of some corporate interest, unless it benefits an even bigger one."
Here's further proof. This story appeared this morning: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23856723/
The grey wolf has come back slowly from near extinction and now they are going to murder them to make way for efFin' cheeseburgers. My kids and I adopted an orphaned grey wolf years ago. It was the sweetest animal I've ever known. It was killed in a housefire a couple of years ago. This action by Fish and Game makes me more angry than I can expres in this public forum...
We have been conditioned to be ego-centrice for so long that it would take a totalitarian state to nudge us out of our cars and suburban McMansions.
Seems to me that a growth economy helps dissipate some of the social pressures that arise from the unequal distribution of wealth by allowing more individuals to "improve" their social status as the pie expands.
If growth stops, will the redistribution of wealth also slow? Will the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor?
If growth stops, the redistribution of wealth away from the middle class will accelerate. Since the beginning of human civilization, there have always been poor, and there has always been a ruling elite. A middle class, however, is purely the product of economic growth. They are not very viable in a steady state economy. The permaculture movement at its heart is about returning the middle class to its peasant origins.
Thats the problem in general with the steady state theory - it doesnt take into account human nature. We are a social species - all social species constantly encounter tradeoffs between cooperation and competition. To completely share equally is not how we are wired. However, we are definitely wired to cooperate, especially when resources are scarce.
For those interested, there is an excellent and controversial new paper, 'Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology' out by DS Wilson and EO Wilson on group selection, basically refuting the last 40 years of individual selection models. In sum, from the papers conclusion, "“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
The level on which selection operates is neither the group (population) or the individual (organism). Selection operates by shifting the frequencies of alleles within a population back & forth as environmental parameters change over time. "Altruistic groups" is an oxymoron. Read William Hamilton on kin selection and Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism...
I've read and reread Trivers, etc. I agree with your first statement almost verbatim, except for when groups don't involve kin, its hard to invoke kin selection as a reason for cooperation.
My interest in all this is that social species shift in their levels of cooperation and conflict depending on resources. At the top levels we will certainly be competitive for the remaining oil, which likely means wars - this in itself is not the point (to me). After all that shakes out, (which is nearly unpredicatable), THEN there will be dramatic behaviour changes - I hypothesize a bimodal distribution of behaviours - some extremely competitive resource grabbers will thrive and a great number of strong reciprocal altruism communities/regions will thrive - the behaviours in between will be selected against.
The reason I liked this Wilson paper, is that the Dawkins model always seemed too simplistic to me. There easily could have been times in our history when a cooperative group was the only tribe that made it through the bottleneck - all the tribes with alleles/algorithms completely devoted to non-cooperative behaviour died out. I believe we ALL have both cooperation and competition hardwired behavioural algorithms, and the 6.7 billion of us probably make up a reasonably normal shaped curve of which of these behaviours dominate. As I said, I suspect the tails of the curve to do better in the coming 50 years.
All very fascinating if it weren't so real....
Good post. I agree with most of your points. A few comments:
Species and individuals differ in their mechanisms and abilities to detect degree of relatedness. Many species rely on olfactory cues. Human phyletic ascendancy occured under a social structure of extended family/small clan group membership. It may be that selection has ordained a primary kin recognition algorithm in humans such that those around you,those you're familiar with, most likely are kin so treat them as such. Hence, kin selected behaviors could be extended to genetically unrelated individuals living in close proximity, in a highly extended and modified social setting from that of Plio-/Pleistocene Africa. I.e., altruism extended to unrelated individuals could be regarded as a neoterically common behavioral aberration.
Dawkin's purple prose ("lumbering robots," "disposable soma") is intended as a popularization of the ideas of George Williams, as he admits up front. Popularizations tend to be overly simplified.
There's no question but what cooperation can be adaptive but a "Jesus" strategy (turn the other cheek) loses out to "tit-for-tat" in an iterated game of prisoner's dilemma. Just as cooperation can be adaptive so can the propensity to cheat. Maynard-Smith has written a cool little book on the application of game theory math to evolutionary biology. Distributive selection can result in a bimodal distribution but can it happen sympatrically? Interesting question...
Dawkins is very good in explaining how evolution actually works. Natural selection means that some variants ("alleles") of a gene end up copying themselves better than others - due to the way they influence the anatomy, physiology, or behavoir of the individuals carrying the gene.
You may think of armies of conscripts as "altruistic groups" but that altruism is coerced, and the "cheaters" (draft dodgers) will inherit the earth. As long as "cheating" is somehow possible, the "altruistic group" is evolutionarily vulnerable.
Another lesson from Dawkins is that evolution does not work "for the good of" anything. Certainly not "the good of the species". He brings up many examples of adaptations that were evolutionarily advantageous at some point, in certain circumstances, in the sense that the genes for them won out, but are a liability to the species. Peacocks' tails are a famous example. Most species go extinct sooner or later, and evolution certainly does not "care". It is not "trying to" achieve anything. It just happens.
Peacocks are a great example of runaway sexual selection leading to a trait completely maladaptive from a physical viability standpoint (the wasted energy and danger of a large, ornate tail). But the strength of sexual selection is SO strong (male male competition and females preferring brighter and more colorful tails) that it overcomes the lack of viability of these alleles.
This 'display' of sexual selection is at the root of our conspicuous consumption culture. I'm sure you can easily envision a laundry list of what our 'ornate tails' are.
In, "ESTIMATING THE STRENGTH OF SEXUAL SELECTION FROM Y-CHROMOSOME AND MITOCHONDRIAL DNA DIVERSITY", Shuster and Wade (Evoltuion 58(7) 2004 pp1613-1616 propose:
Ornate tails indeed....think of all the sexual selection pressure of our ancestors that overcame physical and other viability problems in order to successfully compete for mates. 55% may not be accurate, but the authors qualitative methods make sense. Sexual selection has been a HUGE driver for our species.
IN A GIVEN ENVIRONMENT!
So long as peahens mate preferentially with guys sporting mongo tails, the alleles coding for such tails certainly are NO liablity for the peacock!
But those tails are a liability for the peacock species, and may cause it to go extinct. And evolution does not care.
And Nate: such traits, a result of sexual selection, are NOT "maladaptive from a natural selection standpoint". Sexual selection is part and parcel of natural selection. So all you're saying is what I said: natural selection does not work for the good of the species. Only prefers some genes over others. That's the heart of Dawkin's argument, and why he titled his first (?) and most famous book "The Selfish Gene", although that title has been misinterpreted by many.
Well, another way I have seen this discussed is that "selection" acts at various levels of organization, whether the individual, family, tribe, etc. but that alleles are "sorted" as a result. In most circumstances, alleles are not directly "selected" for or against. This is an important distinction when getting into discussions of the emergent properties of gene-gene interactions on phenotype.
Selective deaths occur to individuals. Perhaps an entire population is wiped out but it is the individuals who do the dying. In diploid organisms, either one or two allele(s) is/are represented per locus. The population this individual belongs to may harbor scores or hundreds of alleles at that locus. When the individual selective death occurs, the allele frequency for the population at any given locus shifts: evolution has occurred.
I hope this clarifies the roles of alleles, individuals, and populations in the selective process.
The link to Wilson & Wilson appears to be broken. Try:
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/resources/publications_
resources/Rethinking%20sociobiology.pdf
The Steady State in Nature does not exist except for relatively short periods of geologic time. The central principle of evolutionary theory is that populations will always expand until there is a struggle for survival. It is a that critical juncture where a chance variation in an individual allows it to survive and pass on its genes while others without the gene die. Over long periods of struggle and chance variations which are passed on by the survivors, evolution does its thing. There is no predetermined outcome that one mix of genes is superior to another. It's what works that is passed on. What doesn't work must change or perish.
If we use nature as the model, the steady state is an illusion. It is a dead end. Even if it were to be achieved, the environment or some exogenous development such as aids or climate change would over a long period render the steady state impossible. The dinosaurs probable achieved a steady state in nature until an asteroid hit the earth. But few would argue that if their steady state had continued the earth would be a better place. It might have been an earth without birds or man. We don't know. Evolution is an unpredictable outcome of struggles among many forces and the outcome can not accurately be determined beforehand. To suppose that it can is the height of hubris. We are not gods that can tell the future ahead of time.
with the one POSSIBLE exception being that humans are the only species ever to figure out what you just explained. If we KNOW that there is no steady state in nature, perhaps we can use this knowledge as a foundation towards its emergence. Unlikely, but not impossible either.
I would say that ALL species have "figured out" this very thing. It's just that humans have evolved an arbitrary symbolic means for encoding it. Language is a pretty special ability, but no moreso than the ability to hover and to echolocate. Microbats would probably think that humans are retarded, if they cared about such things. Hubris and species chauvinism prevade this board, just as they do the human mindset at large.
The human hybris, to think that man is the best of all beings, the crown of creation, the endpoint of evolution is, I think, one of the most significant fallacies of the human mindset. Even more, as it is barely, if ever questioned.
It is our firm believe, and no more than that it is, that we are the most intelligent beings on this planet, the only animal that ia able to reason, and thus have the right to do whatever we want to all "lesser" creatures which inhabit the world around us.
We even go so far, to change the definitions of intelligence and cognition whenever we find them in other animals, so that they only apply to us, thus reassuring us of our uniqueness.
In science we deny that the feelings of animals are like ours, so we are not bound to apply the same ethics to them, as we do to us.
Whenever one extraordinary individual has forwarded mankind in any field of science or art, we claimed that it was an achievement of all humanity. In fact only few people are capable of thinking outside the boundaries and achieve something groundbreaking, while the masses only repeat those works over and over.
We have created a supernatural image of ourselves and our mind that lacks any relation to reality, just to satisfy our wish to be something special.
But the truth is, man is just like any other animal. Our history proves beyond any doubt that we follow the same desires as every other being, that we, as a whole, are not able to plan with foresight and can not overcome our most substantial drives in order to build a better world.
There is only one major difference between man and any other animal, and it is not a mental, but a physical one. It is the fact that evolution has equipped us with the most versatile tool ever created: The hand.
Without the hand, all intelligence would be meaningless, because we would be unable to manipulate our environment in the way, we do now.
But still we prefer to think that it was our brain that made us the dominant species on this planet.
The noblest work of God? Man. Who found it out? Man.
- Mark Twain
Really good insights in this post. Bravo.
"If WE can go to the moon, WE can do anything."
The hand (opposed thumbs),
the vocal chords (passing of knowledge from generation to generation),
and pay-per, yes pai-per ! (as explained in Kevin Costner's "WaterWorld" --a movie way ahead of its times-- we'll understand only after it's too late)
look -im not proud of what we've done. but all that has come before - most of it before my time. There is much I don't know, but one thing is for certain- 'microbats' are not going to help our situation. its at least possible that we can use all this knowledge and improve the future happiness of humans and the other web of life that makes up the planet. And this is true even if we have to be falloutmonkeys first.
It might be possible, but in view of our history, it might not.
I am a little bit at a loss here as you don't clarify where you are aiming with this statement, but I suspect that you don't agree with something or anything I have said.
Anyway, I think that, as long as man doesn't realize that he is part of a bigger context, the biosphere Earth, he can not achieve anything near to a sustainable civilization, because he is lacking the basics to do so. And one indispensable step to come to this conclusion is, to get off our high horse and admit that we, the homo wannabe sapiens, are like all beings on this planet, no better, no worse. If we do not do that, we will always think that we can live outside the natural order and behave ourselves accordingly.
Right now we think we can prevail against this world. We will see that we cannot.
So, to come back to your statement, I can't see, how my point of view could interfere with the founding of a better world.
I would contend that selective vectors change continuously. There used to be vigorous debate over whether selection served primarily to weed out deleterious alleles from a population vs. the view that widespread genetic polymorphism was to be expected. When polymorphism was found to be widespread the search for the mechanism that maintained it was on. For awhile, "overdominance" (i.e., heterozygote advantage) was the prevailing hypothesis, until it was realized that overdominance is rare in nature. All the while, the mechanism was right under biologists' noses. The environment is in constant flux. Selection tracks a moving target. A favored allele today becomes deleterious under tomorrow's conditions. Selective vectors shift long before any given allele can become either fixed or go extinct. Duh!
I would argue just that! Had Chicx not struck, furballs likely wouldn't have radiated to any greater extent than they had during the Mesozoic, and the precursors of Anthropus ecocidus never would have evolved. Sans A. ecocidus the sixth great mass extinction episode wouldn't have befallen the biosphere and biodiversity would be at its all-time peak. A "better place" indeed!
And FYO, birds ARE therapod saurischian dinosaurs.
Fine and dandy, If nature demands growth and we are creatures of natural behavior, we will extinct ourselves and some other species will begin to rise up who we are not in competition with.
I'll buy that.
But we can see that this is a species doomsday scenario and adapt a strategy to not extinct ourselves by managing our population. Eating the young won't cut it.
Maybe we can just produce few offspring?
Species don't exist for periods of geologic time. Evolution is much less about dinosaurs vs rodentish mammals and much more about species finding a niche. Just in my street there are birds that eat fruit on trees, birds that eat fallen fruit, birds that eat seeds, birds that eat worms, and so on. They don't compete for the same resources, they find a niche and settle in it. And there's a steady state.
The significant thing about humans is that because of our intelligence and our being so poorly-adapted to live in the wild, rather than adapting to fit the local environment, we adapt the local environment to fit us - we build houses and make fire to make the weather nice for us, we grow the food we can eat, and so on. Every other species finds a niche and settles in it; we make our niche everywhere.
The Steady State does not exist in Nature it is true, but the ecological tendency is towards mature communities where resources are recycled within communities. Such a natural phenomonon would be roughly equivalent to improving the quality of life by reinvesting in existing communities. (As opposed to always acting like immature growth ecosystems in which we sprawl outward constantly with large subsidies or inputs of energy (e.g. fossil fuels) from outside the ecosystem).
I'm a bit troubled by the institutionalized discount rate in the financial culture of Capitalism. It assumes that money will always be worth less in the future (eventually worthless). It becomes a crazy game to realize a "hurdle rate" (i.e. a rate of return better than the assumed or guessed discount rate) on investments. It is a fundamentally inflationary assumption and furiously feeds the notion of a growth imperative. I fear that unless we can fundamentally change this culture of Finance that we can not transition from mahematical growth to smart redevelopment.
Reform of the banking system would be in order.
I'd just like to nip this point in the bud. It is a mistake to assume that the cause of the discount rate is the financial culture. This is upside down. A discount rate is an intrinsic quality to anything of value, including money. The reason for this is much deeper than financial culture. It is due to the fact that people get old and die.
Ask yourself these simple questions. Would you rather have $100,000 in 1 year or in 2 years? In 10 years or 1000 years?
As you can see, even without any baggage of our modern financial culture, your average Neanderthal could ace this quiz. He understands that Neanderthals die, and so in order for the average Neanderthal to make use of his prize, he'd better get his hands on it as soon as possible.
This is the reason that a discount rate exists. Modern financial culture is about understanding, acknowledging, and exploiting the properties of the varying discount rates of different entities.
If you are still in doubt, here is a paper about the discount rate for grapes among populations of Chimpanzees.
http://www.benhayden.com/pub/Hayden_Platt_CB07b.pdf
Your comment is rather out of touch with my readings of modern evolutionary theory. Punctuationism is the defining characteristic of that theory, as I understand it. And that punctuationism occurs in relatively short periods compared to the far more static long geologic periods. This is not to suggest that some aspects of gradualism do not occur - they surely do but the question is how much of evolution's change is from gradualism versus punctuationism. And the evidence suggests very strongly that periods of tens of millions of years of relatively static speciation are then interrupted by periods of a few million years of punctuationism.
Thus I find your entire argument irrelevant. Evolution actually does support the notion of long periods of fairly static ecologies. Your statement suggests to me that your readings of evolution are out of date. This in turn suggests that you should re-evaluate the basis of your claims.
And before you throw rocks at me, perhaps you should throw rocks at Stephen Jay Gould and others like him.
Of course, if punctuationism is true, then your original argument, that the steady state in nature does not exist except for short periods of geologic time, is turned completely on its head. And instead we find that most of geologic history is fairly stable and that most punctuated evolution occurs in short bursts (frequently after large scale extinction events). And if that is true, then the steady state is not a dead end. It is the norm and the punctuated evolution is the extreme. Thus the entire basis of your objection is rendered meaningless.
Pumctuation and gradualism are two poles of a continuum. Extreme cases of each are rare. Most systems fall somewhere in between.
Nate Hagens writes:
“That's the problem in general with the steady state theory - it doesn’t take into account human nature. We are a social species ...”
Spot on --- and although I am a Brian Czech fan (at least I’ve twice read his ‘Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train’), I think that he doesn’t always factor human nature into his calculations. For example, there is a fascinating passage on page 155 of Brian’s book where he writes:
Actually the ‘pressure to marry into a higher class’ has been around every since the emergence of the human race, so I suppose you could indeed call it ‘antiquated’. But that’s precisely why it won’t go away – the ‘antiquated’ characteristics of our species are those that have survived the tests of natural and sexual selection. So I’d guess that any male who tries to follow Brian’s ‘steady state path’ of voluntary poverty is unlikely to find much in the way of female companionship! Sadly, the steady state path is a genetic cul-de-sac. Still, Brian’s book is thought-provoking and original, and whatever he writes is always a pleasure to read.
Which is why conspicuous consumption and the other trappings of social "status" won't go away, either. If I can afford to waste energy I can afford to support offspring. Doesn't matter if a potential mate is capable of or bothers to articulate this sentiment. She and I are human and are hardwired to think this way. It all boils down to Darwinian fitness and all our clever ape cognitive gymnastic prowess doesn't override 4 bys of selection. Culture is a thin veneer over a thick core of biology.
Not so fast!
In an environment of declining resource availability, it may be the ability to cleverly get by with less, and get along with others that prevails.
Evolution has many cases of "reversalism" where lines of ornate species that are highly specialized go extinct and the "simpler" forms carry on.
I think it a great oversimplication to describe female desire in general as "wanting more stuff." A lot of my friends are actively trying to discover what is "enough" materially so they have more time for the rest in life that matters. Like partying with each other.
I'll bring my own hard cider to a birthday party tomorrow night. She's a female, only 30, and she wants no gifts.
Individuals can affect the attitudes of Thoreauvian "voluntary poverty" and in certain elitist social settings this affectation may even help a person get laid. But the primate propensity towards displaying the trappings of social status, including conspicuous consumption, are hardwired and would take thousands of generations for selection to reverse. Do you think we have that much time?
Please provide some data (i.e. peer reviewed scientifc papers) to support this 'hard wiring' claim.
I fall short of saying we are hard wired to conspicuous consumption, but we are hardwired to compete, for something, and at least a foundation of what we compete for is resources and mates. I will let ddog provide his own references but a famous book on the topic of conspicuous consumption is The Handicap Principle by Zahavi. It lists many references at the end. But as long time oildrum readers know, one of my main points is that we are hard wired to compete - but we CAN change what we compete FOR, to a point.
One of my thesis papers is actually on The Origins of Conspicuous Consumption and will build on the post I wrote here last month, "I'm Human, I'm American, and I'm an Addict". Sexual selection and its power were underrepresented in my post, in retrospect.
I do not doubt that most human beings (including myself) enjoy competition in one form or another and that this enjoyment is an innate characteristic. However, this is a different claim than saying that displays of superior material wealth must inevitably accompany comepetitive behavior. People would like their acheivements to be recognized, but I suspect that the form of recognition which is regarded as appropriate is strongly culturally conditioned and does have to take the form of obsequious deference to the display of material wealth. I personally am more interested in the praise intelligent peers than in than having people bowing and scraping to the trappings of wealth which I do not possess and do not desire to possess. Possibly I am a genetic freak, but I need more evidence of this fact than was presented by ddog.
I wonder if the example of the Bowerbird is relevant here. (Sorry to butt in.) The Bowerbird is a close relative of the Bird of Paradise, a bird species whose males have elaborately-colored tail feathers. The Bowerbird, however, is a dull grey color but the male builds huge bowers to attract females with shiney objects collected from miles around.
So it seems that at some point a common ancestor of these two species developed a tendency for females to react strongly to elaborate displays. But in one descendent species the displays took a physical form and in another it took a behavioral form. This is something that I have found fascinating ever since I read about it many years ago.
I don't have research to back it up but relate to it as self-evident: I assert that our need to look good (or at least not look bad) in front of others is hardwired. I assume this comes from evolutionary selection pressures. Aside from pure survival pressures (I'm hungry, I need to get food somehow), I believe this plays an enormous role in how we humans operate. Why do I choose this car rather than the other? This piece of clothing instead of that? I couldn't possibly mention the problem with this product we developed, my company would "look bad." I couldn't possibly remove those missiles, I would "look bad" in front of my people, etc.
That's not to say that the machinery can't be interrupted. As far as I can tell, it takes a person being conscious of the machinery though, and that requires:
a) someone pointing out to you that you have this machinery, or noticing it oneself
b) the actual skill of interrupting the machinery as it is operating rather than noticing it afterward when it is too late.
Noticing it afterward is a useful skill in itself but not anywhere near the value of noticing the machinery and interrupting it before it does too much damage. How many relationships ended because a person wouldn't take responsibility for something that would make them "look bad?"
-André
I suspect that the internal perception of what makes us 'look good' is strongly culturally conditioned, and that there is no need for it to include conspicuous displays of wealth.
Absolutely — societal discourses play an immense role, in my view.
But it doesn't seem to matter, as far as I can tell, what one uses to "look good" in front of others. An individual "chooses" the criterion as a function of their society, their upbringing, their socioeconomic class and so on.
I noticed in your comment above that you prize the praise of intelligent people — that's the measure you use. Billionaires use super yachts. People living in slums might use the amount of food they can offer a guest. What an individual uses is absolutely a function of their environment but everywhere I look this human phenomenon is in operation.
Even people who eschew material trappings, well, they are using that to "look good" in front of whatever peer group they value. And though they may protest that they aren't doing it for that reason, I don't generally believe them.
-André
Human beings are weak and at various times in their lives are concerned with 'looking good' to peer groups to a greater or lesser degree. However, I believe that in addition to looking good there really is such a thing as being good. By 'being good' I do not mean practicing altruistic behavior. I mean being something that is inherently good. Being good is not a result of making conscious choices. It is something that arises as a spontaneous expression of our inner nature. It is possible to eschew material trappings in order to impress a peer group, but it also possible to eschew material trappings through spontaneous instinct. I am not claiming, by the way, that I personally possess in any significant degree such genuine goodness. I merely claim to believe in its existence.
Bold claim, got any evidence to support it or just your opinion?
John asks for evidence supporting darwinsdog's claim that humans are hardwired to think and act the way they do.
Well, evidence from approx. all 4000 societies known to man --- ranging from Papua New Guinea to Manhattan...
And now to Gentlemen prefer Blondes (1953):
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Dorothy Shaw: Honey, did it ever occur to you that some people just don't care about money?
Lorelei Lee: Please, we're talking serious here.
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Lorelei Lee: [sing] A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, / But diamonds are a girl's best friend. / A kiss may be grand, but it won't pay the rental on your humble flat. / Or help you at the automat. / Men grow cold as girls grow old, and we all lose our charm in the end. / But square-cut or pear-shaped, these rocks won't lost their shape. / Diamonds are a girl's best friend.
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Lorelei Lee: I always say a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a diamond tiara lasts forever.
For 'kiss on the hand' read 'steady state economy' or 'voluntary poverty'.
No, I did not not ask for evidence that human thought and action are "hardwired", it's quite clear to me that they are (at the level we are speaking of here) not. I asked for evidence that the claim implied by:
is hardwired.
If you are going to reply to this its really not sufficient to say:
what you really need to do is go on and say what the actual evidence is, rather than just making a non-specific claim that the evidence exists.
Please provide peer reviewed references in support of this outrageous assertion!
Sorry, can't prove a negative...
It is excellent, but I read it more as summary of a now broadly established refutation than as the refutation itself. I see it also as a public handshake between its two authors over an already shifted paradigm. D.S.W was the most prominent long time supporter of multi-level selection -- the new name for group selection -- and E.O.W was one of its most famous opponents. There is a history of proposals of the importance of group selection stretching back to Darwin. The beginning of the paradigm of the insignificance of group selection in evolution is marked by a paper by Williams in the 1960s. Darwin himself suggested that group selection was necessary to the evolution of altruism, a view that seems to have now resumed place in the mainstream. My googling indicates that there is now a very rich range of applications of multi-level selection in solving evolutionary problems, involving much theorizing, observation, and experiment. There has even been an important commercial application of group selection! In 1996 Craig and Muir selected hens for egg laying prowess not by selecting individual hens that laid the most eggs, but by selecting multi-hen cages that had the highest egg productivity. The result was more rapid and larger increases in average egg productivity than were obtainable by selection of highly productive individuals.
I am now looking for assessments of the significance of this development for understanding human behavior.
Good description - this paper is still very controversial among hard core sociobiologists, which is more what I was referring to. VC Wynne Edwards 'naive' group selection models were essentially blown out of the water by George Williams in the 1960s and until recently anyone bringing up group selection as anything more than a theoretical possibility was looked at with biological condescension.
Regarding your last statement, I think its telling that on a post about steady state economy, we have sidetracked to a discussion of multilevel selection - indeed thats where the rubber hits the road. How thin or thick the veneer of culture and cooperation over the core of our biology will shed light on the paths open to us during energy descent.
It's very difficult PROVING multilevel selection in humans, for obvious reasons - much easier in insects (or chickens) that have much shorter lifespans and whose lives can be spent in a lab...(fyi - the chicken experiment wasn't really 'natural' selection, but human assisted selection - a minor quibble)
This paper is a bridge to what comes next -I share your interest in the future assessments and implications for further work. At a minimum, it shows we are not killer apes, or at least, not JUST killer apes...;-)
~Ah, if only group selection were true all my egalitarian & utopian fantasies might come true... If only I can find ONE example of group selection operating in nature, my fondest dreams for the future might be vindicated...~
George Williams published "Adaptation and Natural Selection" in 1966. This classic book shattered the rather bizarre early 20th century notion of group selection, and is required reading for any serious student of biology. Richard Dawkin's 1975 "The Selfish Gene" is a popularization of William's insights, as Dawkins himself proclaims up front in the preface. Perhaps you've read Dawkins but you apparently haven't read Williams.
Laying hens in "Confined Animal Production Units" as the longed for example of group selection operating in nature? Please! Confining debeaked hens in such units is so entirely pathological that up to 10% of them "commit suicide" by rubbing their breasts against the wires until they bleed to death. What you so hopefully trumpet as the holy grail example of group selection is in fact individual artificial selection: Hens are assigned randomly to cages, some cages - entirely by chance - end up occupied by hens who happen to be good layers and the offspring of these hens tend to be good layers too. No whacko group selectionist explanation necessary. All that's being artificially selected for are the alleles carried by the individual hens who happened to end up in a cage together. Sorry, but you'll have to dig deeper for that ONE example of group selection operating "in nature" that will justify and rationalize your egalitarian longings.
Dear darwinsdog,
Your response to the Craig and Muir experiment does not not explain how greater improvements to egg laying prowess were obtained by group selection than by individual selection -- the point of mentioning it in the first place, the reason that it is widely cited, and the reason it forms the basis of commercial practice.
Your presumption that you have guessed my unexpressed motives ("egalitarion longings"), and your willingness to think it appropriate to attribute the generation of my views to the results of your guesses, make me unwilling to debate this subject with you in detail.
If you are interested in improving your knowledge of evolutionary theory, you might try reading the paper in question, and others of the numerous papers on the subject. The W and W paper contains several examples of the occurrence of MLS in single-cell and multi-cell organisms.
Some reading suggestions:
1] (Overview) D.S. Wilson and E.O. Wilson, "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundations of Sociobiology",
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2gtcbp
2] (Particularly good in clarifying of the concepts of MLS.) Okasha, Samir (2004) Multi-Level Selection and the Major Transitions in Evolution. In [2004] Philosophy of Science Assoc. 19th Biennial Meeting - PSA2004: Contributed Papers (Austin, TX; 2004): PSA 2004 Contributed Papers, Austin, Texas.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001888/
3] (Intellectual history of both the "insignificance of MLS" paradigm, and the reasons for the shift away from it.) Field, Alexander J., "Why Multilevel Selection Matters" . Journal of Bioeconomics, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1095943,
I quite clearly explained how the Craig and Muir "experiment" didn't involve group selection, but individual artificial selection, rather. It isn't my fault that you are incapable of following the logic.
Your defensiveness makes it quite apparent that I've hit your "unexpressed motives" right on the $$$!
References to Philosophy of Science and Bioeconomics journals... Please! Learn some basic genetics and evolutionary biology, would you? I don't get paid to provide the minimal level of education you would need in order to comment cogently on these issues.
So, selecting the poorer layers (all the hens)in each of the better cages, _as well as_ the better layers, is the same as selecting just the better layers? It is clearly not the same, and produces better results. I don't seem to be able to find your explanation for this.
Kenny - that's interesting what you said about permaculture. I'm going to a one day seminar regarding permaculture in April with my wife. People can talk about sustainable cities but the concept of a sutainable city is a fiction. Derrick Jensen defines a city as a system that relies on areas outside of it's locality for all or most of their resources. That system is anything but sustainable.
I have become intensely interested in learning how to live within the limits of a given environment if that's possible.
I have become intensely interested in learning how to live within the limits of a given environment if that's possible.
Ahhh, but any given environment has external demands in the form of taxes.
You can build your framework to live within an environment, but the tax man can come by, claim the 'value' has 'increased' and now you will have to figure out a way to satisify the tax man or he will take what you have and sell it.
I'm not sure how to solve the problem of the steady state economy W/O tackling the nature of large orginizations like governments beyond my normal pitch of Open Records.
Dear Stevemon,
The answer to both your rhetorical questions is unequivocally 'yes'. The rich will stay rich and become, relatively speaking even richer, though this is hard to fathom, and the poor will be even poorer. In a Post Peak world the the non-redistribution of wealth will speed up considerably. Mt guess is a form of neo-fuedalism. What's extraordinary is the massive concentration of wealth that's occured in the United States and the United Kingdom over the last few decades. Here one has a highly educated, sophisticated population, with voting rights and a sort of 'democracy', and yet the majority has accepted or allowed the richest two or three percent to become fabulously richer for no apparent reason. Now if this absurdity can occur in democratic and advanced societies, what could happen in poorer and less advanced form of society? What I still find hard to understand is how ordinary folks have internalized the ideology of the rich to such an extraordinary degree. How on earth is this possible? That the false narrative about the character of society is believed by so many, slap in the face of logic, history and objective reality! Maybe it's like in the old John Lennon song;
"There's room at the top, they are telling you still,
But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
You're all fuckin' peasants as far as I can see."
relatively speaking even richer, though this is hard to fathom,
Not at all. Many cases are profit via the force of government. Examples are the often cited 'military industrial congressional complex', the 'public music playing' license bars get to pay, or the laws like the DMCA or the new proposal - manditory fee so internet users will be magically licensed for 'all music use'.
The other 'rich getting richer' catagory is the 'rental' class - rent money (credit cards/loans) rent 'media' (them fancy moving pictures/music)
Now, I *COULD* try an opt out of the 'military industrial congessional complex' - hardcore quakers try. Opting out of the 'rental' economy is also possible - but ones life is not 'as simple' as others - and it becomes harder to 'enjoy' 'leasure time'.
And, well, most people prefer sitting their butts infront of TV.
How fast will money melt?
Who will retain ownership rights of property?
What incentive is there for businesses to remain operating if they can't make a profit?
How long can a barter system operate for "Things" before the lack of producers causes shortages in staple items?
Who will haul away trash on Wednesdays?! (Kidding)
The current system's propaganda machine has been so successful, that many intelligent people cannot seem to distinguish between "profit" and "growth". Growth means that the profit (along with the resources consumed, etc) keeps getting bigger over time. What's wrong with it staying the same?
Take for example a baker: he buys ingredients, bakes bread, sells it at a profit, and uses the profit to live on (and support his family, and save for retirement, and pay his fair share of communal expenses, otherwise known as taxes). He does the same thing every day. The profits are the same every day. No growth. Just a honest living. To greedy capitalists this is considered slavery, or "communism", or other nasty words, because it does not make the rich richer.
A steady state economy does not mean doing away with property rights, or "money" (as opposed to a barter system). Read Herman Daly if you want to know what it actually is, and how it differs from a failed growth economy. Some of the requisits of a steady state economy (according to Daly) are: zero population growth (by whatever mechanism - this is not easy!), and a limit on income inequality (say a floor of safety-net income to all, and a (much higher) limit above which the income tax rate is 100%). Also needed is government intervention to limit (ration) the use of the finite resources that are in most limited supply, oil would be an obvious one.
Despite such "draconian" measures, a steady-state economy would allow unlimited advancement in science, technology, art, and human happiness - the latter having been stagnant under the rule of the "growth economy", according to those who've actually measured it rather than parroting the party line.
For small family businesses, profit is the part that provides the family's living (for food, accommodation, etc) and we don't see much growth from those businesses. However, bigger businesses probably don't view profit as the owner's living, rather as money to be spread round the gambling stock-holders and executives (sometimes increased wages for the workers). Some profit also gets reinvested to grow the business.
It's hard to see the profit motive of bigger businesses decline to a steady state. Indeed, it could be argued that all larger businesses should not obtain a profit at all. After all, don't they only need enough income to purchase materials for the next batch of goods or services they supply, plus salaries, rents and taxes of various kinds? I don't see the need for profits in a steady state or sustainable economy. Indeed, one could even view the profits of family businesses as exactly equal to the salary of the family workers and so no real business profit at all.
I don't see a role for banks, as they are currently constituted.
In fact, I've yet to see a good description of a sustainable society, in terms of how it is organised and what its members would do. This doesn't mean I don't advocate one. I'm not like those who argue that because you can't get people to accept less, in material terms, then the economy must keep growing and it is nonsense to suggest otherwise. As Rob Dietz and Brian Czech, and others, have argued, economic growth must end sometime, so it would be better to end it in a managed way than a chaotic way. I just don't know how that is going to work.
Not really sure how useful the graph comparing GDP to oil consumption is. GDP alone (i.e. not adjusted for population) is little more than a graph of population growth. In other words, is it really a surprise that more people are using more oil?
I'd wager a guess that we could substitute any number of things for "oil" and get a similar graph. Paperclips used vs. GDP. Seaglass found vs. GDP. Etc.
I would not then say that paperclips were an integral part of GDP growth and that, were paperclip manufacturing to collapse, that so would GDP.
Yes, but what's enabling that population growth is oil--stored solar energy that is being consumed by the growing population, transformed into a growing population--not paperclips. Oil does a lot more work than paperclips.
All those extra people are walking oil.
I, for one, don't have very many answers about the "how to" when it comes to transitioning to a steady state economy. There are certainly many challenges to overcome, but they are minor compared to the challenges of lost ecosystems and resource shortages. If you want to help advocate for a transition to a steady state economy, please sign the position on economic growth at the CASSE website (link available at the top of the main article).
Thanks,
Rob
I'm afraid that I'm pessimistic about "transitioning" to the steady-state economy, unless the transition is first through the overshoot economy, followed by the rapid contraction economy.
The "haves" will fight tooth and nail to prevent such a transition, because the current system is how they keep getting richer. There will be no peaceful transition, I'm afraid. Greed has been the order of the day ever since agriculture was invented, providing hoardable surplus.
This post is just a Mom an Apple Pie statement that we cannot grow forever. This statement is certainly worth repeating, but unless it is accompanied by specific proposals about how a steady state economy is to be organized it has little practical value. When my older sister was in college she took an introductory economics course. When she understood the standard neo-classical model which assumes unending growth, she was immediately and instinctively repelled by it. Her response was: ‘Why do we have to grow all of the time? Why can’t we just produce what we need?’. Today she is a small business owner with debts. She has no desire to turn her business into a mega-corporation or to have an IPO that makes her a gazillion dollars. She wants to earn a living and save enough money for retirement. But if the economy does not grow she’s screwed. The fact that she agrees in principle that endless growth is not possible is not really relevant to her practical economic behavior. We need structural reform of our economic and political system and not just philosophical statements about why endless growth is destructive.
I went to the CASSE website to get some idea of what is being suggested in practical terms. As far as I can figure out the idea is that the economy and the political system will function more or less like they do now but without growth. In particular followed a link to publication Czech and Daly entitled: In My Opinion: The steadystate economy—what it is, entails, and connotes. In this paper I find the following quote:
I cannot comprehend how a stock market is going to function effectively in a steady state economy. Of course even in a steady state economy we need to keep investing in capital stocks or our productive power will decay, but the purpose of these investments is to preserve wealth rather than to increase it. Having a market for wealth preserving investments does not make sense. If my money represents the economic output that I have produced and which I have a right to trade for the economic output produced by other people why should I put this money into a market where I risk losing value? To me this idea seems crazy. I understand that you want some mechanism for distinguishing efficient enterprises from inefficient ones, but in a steady state economy I do not see how a stock market can provide a good mechanism. I prefer the idea of community finance. Public banks should provide interest free loans to enterprises that the community views as desirable. The rate of repayment of the loan is the measurement of how successful our investment has been. The capital of inefficient enterprises can be repossessed and put into the hands of more competent proprietors.
Of course reform of the finance system is a necessary but not sufficient condition for producing a steady state economy. We also need to flatten the income distribution and to find some way make future security largely independent of the storing up of wealth by private individuals.
Today our society is run primarily for the benefit of private finance capital. This structural fact has engendered consumer culture and the advertising industry. Yes, we need to change our personal attitudes toward wealth, but we also need to change the underlying social and political structures so that resources can be intelligently directed to the production of sustainable community wealth.
Roger, despite our disagreement on low energy gain tech accelerating usage of high energy gain fuels, we seem to agree on just about everything else! I too think stock market wouldn't work much longer after the end of growth, except in the following circumstance. If we had a dieoff, or some sort of resource wake up call that the entire population 'got it', that resources were finite, and that strict planning of production and consumption were mapped out. Then a system of community finance that you propose could arise from the rubble. I think its a high odds longshot that such community finance could be created while the current production JITI system is still intact. But one can hope. Nice post.
Nate,
Unfortunately I have to agree that a 'rising from the rubble' scenario is the most likely path to any kind of sustainable future. The chances of a rational turning back from our current growth oriented, wealth concentrating economy appear to be extremely low. Even if we enter a major global recession or depression, the majority of people will be hoping for some kind of technological fix which will allow us to 'grow out' of our problems. The spell of 'normality' cast by our current cultural norms is extremely difficult to break. However, I believe that the more people who have thought and written about alternative paradigms, the better off we will be when the time comes to forge new social and political agreements.
Related to that change in finance, we also need to change the way money is created. Instead of creating it via interest-bearing loans from private banks, it should be created by government spending. A lot has been written about this. Read Douthwaite for example. As long as virtually all money is based on debt and interest needs to be paid (how else would the rich get richer?) then growth is imperative: that's how the interest is paid, in aggregate.
My first thought against "steady state" is to see that it isn't at all how nature works. Nature works through explosive growth in times and places of expanding opportunity and decline in times and places of limits. Rising and falling are a part of who we are, so the "sin" maybe isn't overconsumption but too narrow of a perspective on the nature of growth as transitory.
I can think of my own perspective. I'll "sell my soul" for money, to pay off the mortgage, get the necessities of life. And when I reach a certain level of prosperity, I can relax, "get spiritual" and abandon the road to materialism, right? Well, maybe I shall, but it offers me no moral high ground to judge anyone else's choices for materialistic goals.
To talk of a "steady state" economic would appear to neglect the WORLD reality that poverty is the NORM, not the exception, and that whatever level of personal prosperity I want, it's likely going to be more than the earth can sustain if everyone could equal my aspirations.
On a different side, I argue at times with people like that the U.S. consume 25% of the world's energy, and the most frequent "informed" comeback is that the U.S. has earned this consumption by our vast productivity. I stop arguing despite thinking its nonsense. Anyway, I do think measuring productivity by money flow may be flawed - I mean if I buy a $1000 haircut from you, and you buy a $1000 digital photo from me, that's a hell of a lot of money (compared to the average Indian or Chinese), but didn't really consume a lot of resources perhaps to accomplish these transactions. So I don't really know what the numbers really mean, at least by GDP and money supply growth.
I do think we're entering "The long emergency". Talking about "steady state" is confusing to me when I imagine economic contraction whatever we do. Population growth seems more real to me, and "steady state" doesn't even work for me in a world that I imagine must decline in population in the next century.
"Nature works through explosive growth in times and places of expanding opportunity and decline in times and places of limits."
Somewhat. Growth (and decline) happens in nature during times of change, i.e., climate change, geologic change, or introduction of invasive species. But during more or less stable periods, something we might call equilibrium does occur. Maybe that is what you mean by opportunity and limits.
Exactly. I think the folks saying a steady-state isn't natural are forgetting about things like homeostasis and autopoiesis. Life evolved mechanisms for maintaining balance in stable environments or to counter unstable ones when necessary. There is nothing unnatural about steady-state conditions. One does need to recognize that such states are generally meta-stable, however. Even a homeostatic condition can be brought down by a large enough shock.
Positing that a steady-state economy is not only desirable but necessary doesn't seem untoward. Yes we need to consider human nature but maybe human nature in an economy is more like genetic variation is in a population. You need some internal noise to keep the system exploring the adjacent possible. Regardless, there are principles of cybernetics - hierarchical control theory - that can be brought to bear to establish a steady-state architecture (as in the body) applied to governance. Our current forms of governance, tripartite government, semi-regulated markets, the press (and now blogs), etc. are pieces of what has evolved as a hierarchical control system. It's just emerging and is still very imperfect. We haven't yet found the right formula.
I say we should give evolution a hand.
George
When "informed" people justify our 25% use of world-wide energy resources by citing our productivity, how do these "informed" explain our balance-of-trade deficit?
By explaining that a trade "deficit" is, by definition, an Investment Surplus.
Yes-in the same way that using your VISA card to buy booze is an "Investment Surplus"-the fact that VISA is choosing to lend money to you (like China) shows your power and vitality.
And when I reach a certain level of prosperity, I can relax, "get spiritual" and abandon the road to materialism, right?
Only if you opt to hold no property - as if you hold property you are subject to taxation.
And the tax man's expenses keep rising - oil, metals, food, et la.
So I visited the CASSE site. I love the honesty! I especially like this FAQ:
Let me know when you have all this figured out, and maybe I will get on board your little movement.
A steady state implies a steady world population of humans - the long term proven, viable, sustainable, population has been just 250,000,000 or less.
We will never agree how to adequately reduce population to sustainable levels - so, all these ideas about a steady state are just that - ideas. In the real world things either grow or decay depending on available resources.
Nature has run life on this planet very sucessfully for more than 3 billion years through all sorts of climate change - that's what I call sustainable!
The world is NOT a stable place, get used to it! - humans are but a very small, transient, part of complex life on this planet - enjoy life while you can, life is too short - nature, not humans, controls things - it is madness to think otherwise.
Relax Xeroid, I agree with you; I am a biologist by training. My post was a dig at the CASSE people for promulgating an idea that isn't even worked out yet.
Planned economies just don't work for humans.
This statement appears to me to be nonsense. Do you think that the economy of ancient Egypt was not planned? It lasted for millenia. I am not trying to defend the social organization of ancient Egypt, but you should really try to avoid making statments which are competely devoid of common sense. I agree that the CASSE people have not got a clue about how to run a steady state economy, but that does not mean that it is impossible to do so. Human beings plan like crazy. Governments plan, corporations plan, families plan, etc. What is your basis for claiming than planning cannot be applied to macroeconmic organization other than that non-human animals do not do it?
The fact that our current planning algorithms include the assumption of everlasting growth almost guarantees that we will experience overshoot and collapse, but the claim that it is impossible for human being to learn anything from this experience and to create different kinds of economic organization in the future is an unproven assertion.
Roger, you are mixing up Planned with Regulated. Yes governments set up regulations to smooth the sharp edges of capitalism, but it is not planned in the same sense that the Soviet economies were planned.
Ants have planned economies; humans can't. Humans have a natural inclination towards self-interest because they want to maximize the number of their offspring. This natural inclination lends itself to an unplanned system.
You cannot prove this statement. Many people in advanced industrial economies are choosing to have few or no children. Having lots of children is a rational survival choice in specific economic circumstances. When those circumstances change people make other choices. Capitalism, in its current form makes a certain amount of sense in cirmcumstances in which the availability of resources is not limiting production. We do not currently attempt macro-economic planning because we do not believe that there is any necessity for it. When circumstances change I see no reason to beleive that we will not eventually learn to make a new set of economic choices.
Why do people want to have offspring?
This may be the result of sexual lust and religious teaching and the need to be supported by your own little group of offspring.
But people can choose to not take the burden of offspring, leave smaller footprint and actually enjoy more of the efforts, a different kind of self interest.
True, and I hope that happens in more parts of the world. My original point though was that humans are individual organisms that need to make that choice. When governments decide to centrally plan their societies to the extent that economic growth is stopped, population growth is stopped or reversed, and all unnecessary consumption is curtailed, I say this is not possible for humans. You will not get a steady state; you will get a failed state.
I don't know if that is what CASSE intends, in fact, they don't know what they intend, but if so, it will fail.
"You cannot prove this statement." Oh yes I can.
The first group of humans to leave Africa probably numbered in the hundreds, now there are 6 BILLION people on the planet. That is Billion with a "B". Our ancestors wanted to maximize their offspring and their offspring's ability to produce offspring. They did a good job. Incidentally, this is one reason why people in advanced countries have fewer children; they want to maximize their chance of having children. Uneducated, knuckle-draggers have a hard life and have a worse chance of living long enough to reproduce. There are some people that truly don't want children, but their genes will be swamped in the population by the genes belonging to people that do reproduce successfully.
I have long been curious about the function of homosexuality in humans (it also exists in animals). Is there really a large increase in homosexuality today, or is that just because it is more public? Regardless, the increasing tolerance of homosexuality might be nature's way of limiting human population. Maybe we should encourage it!
Another point: It's well known that when populations of animals such as rats get extremely overcrowded, this has a very negative effect on the birth rate, as well as increased violence. This is another way populations can regulate themselves (to some degree). It doesn't always work like a bunch of bacteria in a petrie dish.
Here's the scoop on male homosexuality:
The sisters of homosexual men have, on average, more children than the sisters of heterosexual men do. Sufficiently more, in fact, to make up for the reduced fecundity of their gay brothers. The same genes that foster homosexuality in men apparently foster motherhood in women. Male homosexuality is kin selected.
An interesting corollary is that the frequency of male homosexuality cycles over the generations in at least Western and Chinese society, where the phenomonon has been studied, and probably in all human societies. As societal tolerance for homosexuality increases, homosexuals "come out of the closet" and form non-reproductive pair bonds. After a few generations, the frequency of homosexuality in the society declines and societal norms against homosexuality become reestablished. Once homosexuality is frowned upon, the few remaining homosexuals are forced back in the closet, to marry heterosexually for "cover" and thereby pass on the genetic propensity for homosexual orientation to their offspring. The frequency of homosexuality increases and the cycle repeats.
This is not a proof. People like to have sex, not large numbers of children. Before the invention of birth control, one led to the other. I do agree, by the way, that we are hard wired to enjoy sex. You could conclude with equal validity that the vast growth in automobiles is proof that we are hard wired for automobile ownership.
I do not know in which universe you think that this statement makes any sense. I cannot refute it because I do not know how to assign any meaning to it.
And their genetic propensity to have fewer or no children dies out along with their phenotype.
I really don't think ants have planned economies. Ant economies emerge out of the interactions of the colony members based on genetically-determined reactions to these interactions and to the environment. This is nothing like Soviet-style top-down planning, which is not so much incompatible with human nature as it is inadequate for managing a complex industrial economy.
I am not advocating Soviet-style planning. Something market-like needs to evolve that involves input from a large fraction of the members of the community into an impersonal decision-making process.
CASSE doesn't have anything specific worked out. No-one does. CASSE is trying to set up the conditions in which something could be worked out. They are to be applauded for this. One thing they have established to my satisfaction is that for an economy to work in the world of the future it needs to be steady-state.
Economies don't arise by design. They emerge from the individual and collective choices of the people who participate in them. Our choices can be guided by what we conclude from observing the world around us and what our reasoning abilities tell us the consequences of certain actions would be. We are not ants.
What planet do you live on?
Of course our economics has been designed, largely by lawyers. And where do lawyers go to... the government.
There's very little meaningful 'choice',
it's the law of necessity.
You've been drinking that libertarian kool-aid(the intellectual toilet bowel).
Please grow up.
Planned economies just don't work for humans.
So far, no one can show a working planned economy. Most have failures surrounding gaming of the system for private benefit.
Figure out a way to prevent the private benefit - and a planned economy could actually happen/work.
One major way to develop good policy measures for operating a steady state economy is to recognize that it is a more appropriate goal than unsustainable growth. As we discuss these points, financiers, economists, government representatives, business leaders, and citizens are all united in pursuing economic growth. So all the policies and activities are geared toward growth. If their goal was to figure out how to run a prosperous economy of optimal size with just distribution and efficient allocation, then these policies and activities would change. Without the right goal in mind, we won't be able to develop appropriate means for achieving it.
Our politicians are not interested in sustainable economics. Time and time again, they mouth the word "growth" when speaking to our economic situation. Just yesterday Barack Obama delivered a major speech on economics, which included the words "sustainable growth" on at least 3 occasions. Over the past few years, the money pundits have twisted the concept of "sustainable economics" into "sustainable growth" and now this has become the new buzz phrase which the politicians have adopted to soothe the sheeple.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27text-obama.html?pagewant...
The U.S. economy is addicted to deficit spending from the Government. Any downturn leads to more and bigger deficits, with no attempt to face the realities of ultimate limits on this finite Earth. I think that the Great Depression scared many people into accepting the idea of continued growth, as the alternative was so painful at the time. Of course, the ultimate "consumption economy" is that of war, where everything produced is thrown away and the associated destruction guarantees future employment to replace the destroyed buildings and infrastructure. I'm afraid that our present situation with Peak Oil will lead to the sort of thinking we saw before WW II, when Germany went to massive production of war materials and the unemployment rate went to zero. What fraction of the U.S. economy is involved in our war machine today? Are we not on a permanent war footing in Iraq and the Persian Gulf?
E. Swanson
Hi, Rob and Brian. André here...thanks for posting this.
I love the work that you and Brian are doing and I believe that it is best applied for whatever comes during and after (but mostly after) The Great Economic Unwinding (or whatever one's favorite term is). I don't hold much hope for us moving to a steady state before the decline begins. I don't think it's possible to get us there given the oil situation.
The readers of TOD will be familiar with these graphs:
Here is Campbell's model for oil rollover and decline, which does not incorporate a plateau:
Laherrère's model shows a more gentle rollover but you can see that we've already begun the break with $100+/barrel oil:
Skrebowski sees the decline happening much more quickly:
And, finally, Robelius plots several different futures:
Although it's still too early to call which model will be the closest to reality, the world economy as we know it is in its final days.
Right now, unfortunately, the model that is in the lead to be closest to reality is Skrebowski's:
There simply aren't enough projects to make up for the decline rate and all the new oil is really expensive and really hard to get. For that reason, the majority of oil that will come online in 2013 will be oil from delayed projects -- not from brand new projects.
That's why Exxon isn't planning any increase in production:
All graphs except for the last credit of Elsevier via Mitigation of Maximum World Oil Production:Shortage Scenarios, Hirsch, Energy Policy, February 2008. The last is Inspiring Green Leadership and the numbers are the result of the excellent work of the Oil Megaprojects Task Force.
Nice charts :)
A word of caution about the Oil Megaprojects database: there is an horizon window of about 4-5 years beyond which it is hard to get public information about future megaprojects simply because 5 years seems to be the median time between project financing approval and first oil in the oil industry. The apparent drop after 2012 is rather a drop in information than an actual drop in new supply.
The horizon window is longer for tar sands where available data about new projects goes up to 2020.
Thanks for adding that, Khebab.
Typically when I explain the megaprojects numbers I say something like "Now, the numbers in 2013 and forward will increase as we get closer to those years, but it's still important to note that large and important projects in difficult areas have long lead times, between 5 to 10 years according to the CEO of Hess Oil. So we are not blind about that time frame."
Would you say that's a fair comment?
It's a fair statement, also there is a buffer of small projects (below 50 kbpd) that are not tracked in the database. Stuart has made an attempt to extrapolate this contribution (around 15% or ~1-2 mbpd extra):
Small projects may become more attractive with the current oil prices. In the other hand, addition of small projects have an infrastructure overhead more important relative to total amount of oil produced compared to large projects which can be a problem in an environment where costs are up.
Ah, very good. I had wondered how much oil was represented by projects < 50kbd. It's possible that it's asymptotic but even if that were the case it wouldn't turn out to be much more than 2mbpd.
Following your last comment, an interesting plot would be cost per barrel of production by size of project. I presume that with the normal economies of scale that number would decrease as project size increased within a category of production. So onshore projects would likely have a consistent curve, offshore another curve, tar sands another, etc.
And just to be clear I'm not being improperly credited, those graphs are Elsevier's via Hirsch. And they are great graphs :-).
I was told by a Shell Oil engineer that major projects now take a minimum of 7 years to complete, due in part to tight supplies of critical equipment, and schedules slips are almost becoming the norm.
I would not expect any major new project to come on-line before 1-1-2016.
Alan
"tight supplies of critical equipment"
Last July I paid $69.84 for a generic 3" brass gate valve, the year prior it was about 45. This year it is $132.58. The 3" brass ball valve was $737 and change. I can only imagine new prices on high pressure/temperature specialized valves and fittings.
Last month my cost on a 3 part 1/2 inch stainless steel 304 was $21. 10 days ago $31. Todays order $36.
Investing in the materials of production.....doesn't seem to be a loosing position.
There is no way humanity will enter any kind of steady state without a complete rolling back of scientific progress and advance. Which is pretty much impossible at our current level of technology without a major collapse.
The tech won't sit still. If it gets enough time, the tech will solve the energy issue, the limited biosphere issue, whatever problems we have or can think of will be solved, while of course spawning a host of others. Given enough time our children will be living in orbital ecologies circling Saturn.
Note I'm not going all cornucopian on you, not saying we are going to GET the time we need. However, if we do get the time, the fact that a solution will be found seems like a no brainer to me.
Both a "decline/collapse" scenario and a "bump in the road and on to limitless energy" scenario are more likely then any kind of steady state. You'd need something like ancient Egypt on a world scale for a steady state.
So there is this big ball room with a bunch of people in it.
The caterer unveils the banquet table, which is mounded with all sorts of goodies and leaves.
A) Nobody tells anyone that this is all there is. Everybody for themselves, first gets the most, many get nothing. Anger erupts and fighting breaks out, screaming, trampeling, Party over.
B) An announcement is made that this is all there is. Everybody takes a little making sure all get some, (even the band). Party goes on everyone has fun. Oops, the bouncer let in another bunch of people and there is no food or booze for them so they take some from others. Anger erupts and fighting breaks out, screaming, trampeling, Party over.
Resources and population growth.
People need to be told, every day in every way that Earth has a limited amount of resources and can only support a limited population at a certain level of existence.
Although this truth makes it difficult to rationalize the HUGE discrepancy between the rich and poor. It’s easier to maintain BAU if we repeat the meme that there is plenty for all it’s just a matter of distribution.
Money as an Indicator of Throughput
George Mobus notes the importance of currency that indicates the level of throughput, such that we can gauge the scale and sustainability of the human economy based upon metrics such as GDP. I agree with him. However, I believe the currency we have (dollar, yen, etc.) already provides a good indicator of throughput. I have presented this argument - the trophic theory of money - in Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train and also in a book review, "Roll Over Adam Smith:"
http://steadystate.org/Roll_Over_Adam_Smith.pdf
Brian Czech, President
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Brian,
I haven't read your book but I did read the book review you pointed to. I've also read Daly, Costanza, et al. I am missing something. I could not find a definitive statement in your article to relate to the notion of currencies providing an accurate measure of wealth creation vis-a-vis the flow of energy (throughput). I am working on a blog entry regarding the distortions in the relationship between money and free energy as a result of things like fractional deposit banking and secondary markets. In that blog I will argue that money has gotten so out-of-whack with regard to its role in providing information about the availability of energy to do useful work that it no longer serves that purpose. Perhaps by good indicator you mean in terms of direction, i.e., throughput is up or down, rather than a direct measure.
I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter. My contact info is at my academic web site:
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/
Regards
George
Thanks for the article.
When I look at the energy and the larger ecological situation, it is fairly obvious we are moving toward some sort of steady state economy. The question is whether we can manage that transition or whether we will be blindsided by it. In fact, it's not even clear who "we" is; are we talking about a worldwide steady state economy or something more closely resembling Jeff Vail's rhizome model?
At any rate, I certainly agree that it is better to attempt an orderly transition to the steady state economy rather than try to continue the present system until it fails.
That said, I see several major challenges that will need to be addressed. First, how can we manage the transition in our financial system from one in which money represents debt to one in which money represents value? In a steady state economy, stock exchanges, banking, credit cards, and mortgages make little sense. There would be some lending, but it would be a mere shadow of what we do now. Furthermore, the current financial system, since it is based on debt, contains a growth imperative and will fail as soon as growth stops for any length of time. How do we manage that?
Another, related issue I see is that the lifestyle changes inherent in a steady state economy are likely to be much more extensive than reducing consumption. If all we had to do was cut back on house and car sizes and electronic junk, I would be thrilled. But one consequence of the steady state economy is that it will probably be much harder to obtain student loans. That means fewer career options for people, which might be viewed as a loss of freedom that would be hard to accept. Also, home loans would be hard to find, which means that we might go back to the days of hereditary property ownership.
Finally, can a steady state economy avoid the Malthusian trap?
In order to convince people we should be working torward a steady state economy, we need to have an honest vision of what that economy looks like, and that vision would have to be palatible. Most people tend to stop listening when I say, "This idea is bad, but all alternatives are worse".
Why? Human meddling has gotten us into the predicament we're in. Why presume that more meddling will get us out of it? Why not just let Nature take its course?
I see many comments and questions on this blog that are addressed or answered - at least to a reasonable degree for one article - in "The steady state economy: what it is, entails, and connotes:"
http://www.steadystate.org/files/SSE.pdf
And of course there is much else in the published literature on the social, political, and economic movements and policies needed for a steady state economy. Another good reference is the Daly/Farley textbook:
http://www.steadystate.org/Review-EcologicalEconomics.pdf
But in a nutshell...
In a democracy, yes even a "capitalist" democracy (quotes indicate the absence of laissez faire in the 21st century), the polity muddles toward, as they would say in poli sci, the optimum scale with the help of copious policy adjustments, just as there are constant and copious policy adjustments currently in the service of economic growth.
Granted, Peak Oil is a mother-level supply shock, but the muddling toward optimal scale will continue before, during, and after it. And optimal scale itself changes with the times, but it is not a randomly fluctuating figure, either. The key thing for achieving optimal, or even any sustainable, scale is that the public and policy makers fully understand the trade-offs between economic growth and environmental protection, national security, and international stability. That public understanding is challenge number one, and it will be hard-won because of all the "win-win" growth propaganda.
Brian Czech, President
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
www.steadystate.org
Hi Brian, I really love your book and web site and thank you for this essay.
About your comment regarding public understanding....
A couple day ago I had a meeting with my U.S. congressman and this was a core concern. He thought of himself as ahead of the electorate on the severity of climate change.
Many are cynical about politicians, believing they will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. I don’t think Rep. Mike Thompson is like that. Consider this.
Later in the day, Mike met with the Mendocino-Lake County Medical Society. Here’s how the Ukiah Daily Journal began its coverage of that event:
Mar. 27, 2008, by Rob Burgess
When California 1st District Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) stopped by the Mendocino-Lake County Medical Society in the 200 block of West Henry Street Wednesday for a midday meeting slated to focus on rural health care, the first thing they talked about, oddly enough, was global warming.
“I think the climate change we’re seeing now is cyclical,” said Jens Vinding, a radiologist and society president who has lived in the county since 1972. “I think we need to wait a few more years to see what happens.”
Before he could settle into his seat, but without missing a beat, Thompson said he respectfully disagreed.
“Well I won’t be coming to you for any medical procedures I might need,” he said, laughing. “I don’t think we have a few more years to wait on this issue. The good news is that very few people share your view.”
My point is that quite possibly talking to other people about this stuff actually matters and shifts their thinking and emboldens them. So if people would spend a little less time hand wringing and whining about "human nature" and the corrupt wealthy people will "never listen" and instead used their frontal lobes to do something constructive there might be some hope.
Thanks again for your work.
Hopefully, it's a vision problem of the radiology profession, but I doubt it.
I had a similar situation talking with a radiology tech the other day. What I carried away from the conversation was that this snowier winter will set any serious examination of climate change back another couple years. It has become a rallying cry, a point of no return.
Other points made and that are gaining credence in the hinterland is a plot to push the US into the subservience of world government.
A view of what I think the USA could evolve towards is at:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3140#comments
IMVHO, evolving towards a steady state economy is a multi-step process, and one goal would be to minimize the human suffering along the way.
Very high efficiency and durable infrastructure will help.
Passiv Haus standard multi-family buildings in a beautiful urban landscape, great food and music, know your neighbors, with groceries etc. within walking distance, bikeable and served by Urban Rail and the city served by excellent rail and water transportation can sustain a higher population, with a higher quality of life, than any other alternative I can think of. (Except for the Passiv Haus efficiency, that is my home in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans).
Measured by the metric of quality, this life style is an improvement over the average Suburbanite IMHO.
Some things can continue growing. Music, Art, Software, (will Moore's Law be repealed ?), innovations in cuisine, writing, quality in footwear, and more for quite some time yet. Our current culture allows for dramatic growth in quality even if quantity shrinks.
Perhaps the focus of growth should be shifted, to quality (including how we spend our time) and away from quantity ?
Best Hopes for a Better Future,
Alan
Looks to me like for most of the US population you already have a steady state economy.
The only really substantial growth is on the top 20%, and the only really impressive growth the top 5%. If their growth stopped, would the other 80-95% even notice? Would the top 5% be really suffering if they had to stop around $165,000?
Kiashu: This is using bogus CPI numbers-IMO the median is down quite a bit, with only the top 5% up-the top 20% are probably holding steady.
(will Moore's Law be repealed ?),
There are limits to the sizes of gates, gate gemotry and speed.
Some are claiming Si based machines have about 4 years of growth left.
If so, to get speed would then require a change back to hand coding in Assembly.
"If so, to get speed would then require a change back to hand coding in Assembly."
Assembly is already being used where it is useful(e.g. SSE vectorized code. SSE intrinsics map to assembly in a near 1:1 fashion). Besides, it's only about 1% of code that needs to be optimized, as that's where 90% of execution time is spent.
The compiler is more clever than you are, and if it isn't you are one of an elite group of coders who should be working on compiler development.
Very large speed-ups can still be had by developing better algorithms, by profiling code better, by making better use of multiple cores and by developing faster memory and hard drives, on-die DRAM cache, tighter integration and possibly an integrated FPGA where the most often executed code can be implemented as "hardware" and run very quickly.
On the one hand economic growth has done little to nothing to improve the lot of the world's 5+ billion destitute people. On the other hand if all income were equally distributed then it would only increase the number of poor to the entire population of the earth. What if productive assets such as farmland, timber stands, and manufacturing were equally distributed. How much would each person own and would it produce enough to meet their basic needs? It all depends on population growth. There is a milenia long tradition of have enough children to care for you if you live long enough to get old. The developed world has created ways of caring for the aged and disabled via investment dividends and taxation as a replacement for large numbers of children. Doomers keep saying we can't trust in future investment dividends or taxation so that leaves trusting in children again even though they predict a population collapse.
"The developed world has created ways of caring for the aged and disabled via investment dividends"
- that is a pyramid scheme that is now unraveling. So is old-age security via having many children - only works while per-capita resources are abundant. We're entering a different world now, with essential resources clearly being in limited supply.
The way towards security in old-age is a government-organized social compact to guarantee support for the old (and everybody else). This can only be done (on a true and sustainable, rather than pyramid-scheme, basis) if those who have more than enough agree to limit their consumption. The _aggregate_ consumption must be limited to the sustainably-available resources.
That said, there must be incentives for people to produce something, not just be supported, thus a SSE is not based on absolute equality. And there _must_ be disincentives to breeding.
Since virtually all the goods and services of the growth economy come directly from ecosystems, economic growth can be considered an increase in throughput, or flow of natural resources, through the economy and back to the environment as waste. When the GDP goes up, invariably an ecosystem somewhere has been appropriated, polluted, or otherwise degraded and, along with it, the biodiversity it holds and the life-supporting services it provides.
While the GDP may have a close correlation with paper clips, I doubt anyone could conceive of paper clips driving the economy. Even population growth and per-capita consumption would unlikely have reached current levels without access to cheap, portable energy. So the tie between GDP and oil production is significant.
Most of the comments here seem to agree that we need a new, sustainable economic model to replace our current and fatally-flawed macroeconomic model. The current model has no connectivity with the biosphere, does not address matters of scale or just distribution, and considers the economy as the whole, bounded by nothing, which can, thus, grow forever on its own output—a perpetual motion machine exempt from the laws of thermodynamics!
Unlike the conventional economic model, with its primary focus on ever-expanding growth and the efficient allocation of scarce resources, the steady state economy focuses on 1) scale (how large can the economy grow before it actually becomes “uneconomic,” causing more harm than good?), 2) just distribution (ending growth would require a focus on just distribution as we could no longer tell those living in abject poverty that, although they have only a tiny piece of the economic pie, as the economy grows their piece of the pie will get larger and bring them up to $3 per day!) and, 3) the efficient allocation of scarce resources, in that order.
In the steady state economy, the throughput to the economy would have to be well within the regenerative and absorptive capacities of the biosphere and sufficiently below the global ecological limits to provide adequate ecosystems and biodiversity for the provision of their global, life-support services.
While we may not have all the answers about how to make the transition from our current predicament to a steady state economy, we know beyond doubt that the conventional economic model is placing us on a very slippery slope, principally through the negative impact it has on ecosystems, their biodiversity, and the life-support services they provide.
Knowing that, would it not be wise for us to gain a critical mass of those who agree that this current model is faulty while at the same time working to establish policies and other means that will get us to a sustainable economy rather than doing nothing until we know how to make the transition?
Signing the CASSE position is a first step and aligns the signee with a number of professional and amateur organizations who have recently adopted positions on the fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. This step allows us to counter--now with considerable support--claims by politicians, industry and conventional economists that an ever-growing economy and a healthy environment go hand-in-hand, claims that have here-to-fore gone unchallenged.
While peak oil will undoubtedly change the way we do things and affect our growth economy, continued biodiversity loss will affect the very life-support systems of the planet. And biodiversity loss will persist so long as economic growth continues to steamroll over ecosystems in its demand for more and more resources with an ultimate result that could make the impacts of peak oil and climate change look like a walk in the park.
I have a problem with using economic growth as a measure of limited resource consumption. Economic growth is a measure of the market value of all goods produced and services delivered. It mixes both high resource consumptive activities and low ones. If one writes good songs, she produces more economic value than if she writes mediocre ones. So being against economic growth is being for writing poor songs.
As we move towards a stable (or better yet declining) population and less detrimental impact on the world, presumably the world will move away from the production of physical goods and towards the production of intellectual property. People have to do something. Think carefully about that. As long as the market value of what they produce/deliver grows, you have economic growth. But that could be in the situation where the negative impact on the world declines. For example, I could write a computer program that allows people to work together without travelling, and that could be worth more in the market than the gas and metal that it saves.
This may seem like a nit (and perhaps not as sexy) but I think you should not be focusing on economic growth, per se, but on restraining physical growth or perhaps consumption of limited resources. Otherwise you are opposing good ideas (they have high economic value) no matter their impact on the world.
The Great Unwinding in global economic circles is the 'Peak Finance' that looks like it is unstaging both Peak Oil and Peak Climate.
The Great Unwinding looks like it is capable of kicking the legs out from under any financing of schemes for PO projects and climate re-mediation solutions. Short of blowing a really big 'Green Bubble', I don't see too much muddle-through-wiggle-room for reinventing the economic Wheel with steady state models, which are the only way to salvation and sanity in the not-to-distant future.
In the US, the military Adventure budget is still growing and shows no sign of being redirected into any PO productive activities. Even if the US economy goes straight into the toilet, the military, if necessary will fund itself from the FED 'borrow against the future indefinitely discount window'. The whole Iraq war is 'off-budget' (i.e. not payed for), and the combined alternative energy budgets within the federal government wouldn't buy you a bucket of luke warm spit at this point.
I studied the precursors of today's 'steady-state' economic theories in the early 70's.
Low these many years, it's been like "Waiting for Godot"
Or "where's the Beef?" from and old political campaign. The financial ship, from which the capital and resource allocation should be coming from for all these very cool new ideas on steady-state economic models, is sinking, very fast I might add. Like that piece of ice that broke off from the West Antarctic Ice fields the other day, it was reported as several time the size of Manhattan, hahaha, great news segue lead in to reports from Wall St.
Having lived in DC, I can testify that it is still Not a "Let's Live Within our Means" kinda town. No leadership is coming out of the Swamp of Washington even as we blog here, they're too busy bailing.
The only silver lining I can see is that alot of people are shortly going to have way more spare time to contemplate their living situatuions and be forced, by their reduced economic circumstances, to make do with less, a euphemism for 'relocalizing'. Remains to be seen if they will take to this gracefully.
You think so? Seems to me like people might be pretty busy scrounging for something to eat, instead...
Steady State? Okay, but how do you get people to quit thinking, and trying?
Petrosun to start Commercial Operation of 4.4 MGY Algae Oil Plant. I guess them Texans ain't ever heard about "Steady State" economics.
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/
Okay, but how do you get people to quit thinking, and trying?
We're trying to get them to start thinking and trying to do that which will help create the means to keep their descendents thriving.
recommended reading...
Atlantic Monthly - October 1995
If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ecbig/gdp.htm
I just found a presentation of BP chief scientist - Stephen Koonin - prof. of physics at CalTech - the video of presentation can be found here:
http://www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/03/Energy-Trends---...
well, he mentions climate change as a serious problem, on the other hand, dismiss the "peak oil" as a non-problem with having a lot of *economically extractable* oil with current technologies for decades... he even mentions that unconventional oil reserves *are* extractable with curent price of oil around 100 dollars/barrel. Will somebody make an effort and will watch his presentation? Is there clear debunking of the claim, that there is a lot of relatively cheap energy in the ground? Cheers, Alexander
Interesting background he has.
Caltech Provost to Take Corporate Position
The article's answer to this question leaves out the most powerful motivations for economic growth. Consider the two most powerful, as described in "What to do in a failing civilization":
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ey83c
1.
2.
Smirking Chimp comment
WWIII imminent?
There are solutions available to help fix this mess, but they are meeting resistance at the local government level.
See this post:
http://lawnstogardens.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/local-governments-are-hav...
I think we need to be careful with our definitions, as they can constrain our thinking if we are not careful. I would prefer to think of the desirable end state as an economy with fixed material inputs. The ability to dispose of waste can also be thought of as a fixed material input. In this case as the level of human knowledge increases, and/or the amount of long term infrastructure builds up, the economy can still experience something that would resemble growth -at least as it pertains to meeting human needs. We are likely to be at least a century away from this saturation point of knowledge and infrastructure. The real trick is the avoidance of overshoot of these material inputs in getting there. I doubt this is going to be easy, either politically -or even scientifically, as the identification for maximum sustainable resource usage, for many dozens of inputs is likely to be a difficult problem. Better to realize the uncertainty of the science, and shoot for resource usage well below the theoretical maximum rates. Of course a stable population, at a level not too high is a precondition for such a state.
Peak oil doesn't necessarily mean peak energy. Peak solar would be spooky,but that's thousands of years away.
Peak solar is millions of years away, not thousands.
But you need to consider net energy and the energy surplus of the transportation sector. We have become dependent on high energy gain liquid fuels. To have a surplus of solar rays hitting the earth doesnt help if we transport everything globally by oil, and it takes decades to change this infrastructure. Kind of like a heroin addict being told there is no more opiates to be had, but there is plenty of beer.
When people talk of peak energy, they mean peak harnessable energy. In terms of total energy, harnessable or not, I'd guess that we've been on a plateau for billions of years.
Rant Alert!
I think I will puke if I hear the word "sustainable" again.
This is foundation-speak from the early 1990's that has reached mind-numbing proportions of triteness.
I am continually amazed at the turgid material coming out of grad schools these days in what are purported to be the social sciences.
"Conspicuous Consumption"
Thorstein Veblen was an eccentric character, an economist from the institutional school which greatly influenced Roosevelt and the New Deal at the depth of the depression. You might remember that Veblen was the one that gave us the term "conspicuous consumption", another favorite here on TOD. Veblen was the first to raise the topic of "consumerism". See his "Theory of the Leisure Class".
"Steady State" is a term I associate more with discredited cosmology than economics. Marshall, the Neo-Classical School and others have tried unsuccessfully to define a demonstrable theory of equilibrium economics.
IMO "steady state economics" is a theoretical construct with little bearing on the real world, similar to the theoretical constructs of "the random walk" and "perfect competition", which are beloved in academia, but have little bearing on what really happens on Wall Street.
However, with the prevailing zeitgeist and the demise of "Voodoo Economics", I am proposing forthwith, a competition and a call for papers in the new field of "Panglossian Economics".
The winner will be solely determined by TOD ballot and be nominated as understudy to Helicopter Ben.
End of rant.
I share your dislike of the words 'sustainable' and 'steady state'. Two rebuttals however:
1)Herman Daly was talking about these issues over 30 years ago. His message was about paradigm shift in the system and steady state was one of his many forward thinking ideas. Unfortunately just now is the general population starting to wake up to the idea of limits. Steady state was kind of a utopian answer to neo-classical economics - it's purpose wasn't to be right, but more that to highlight the problems with the existing system.
2)the words 'steady-state' have different meanings to different people. To me it just represents a system/society that slows down drastically the material throughput and maintaining a high 'satisfaction' throughput, while keeping ecosystems intact. We need stepping stones for the non-heretics to jump to (mentally) on the way to something better. Steady state, to a non-scientist, is unthreatening and hopeful. I have met Brian and Rob and Herman and I really don't think the FOCUS of CASSE is on creating a steady state, but rather changing the existing paradimg as urgently and as 'sustainably' as possible - that road map is what we need. (more 'sustainably' just means much slower entropy, which gives us the asset of time, to get other details right)
Nice article. To get past any semantics I would guess one needs to define what is meant by "the rubble."
Since the reality of increasing resource shortages in the face of the root cause, increasing population expansion is so far "off the radar" what kind of "rubble" will necessitate social change.
I imagine mass starvation as being the only trigger for reorganizing social perspectives toward birth control. Although I guess, disease could help. But perhaps the rich and powerful have a different view.
If you'd like to see a dynamic, sustainable, steady state in nature, try training a telescope on Saturn's North Pole. There is a swirling wave form that is known as a 'standing wave' or "stationary wave" It's been spinning there for a long time and shows no sign of quiting.
I used to live near a river in New England once, which also had several 'standing waves'. They were in the same spot in a dynamic flow of water for the several years I lived there. They never moved more than a foot or two from there positions. Kids and the simple minded thought they were 'magic'.
Standing waves are just a dynamic equilibrium of opposing forces that emerge from static geometric conditions.
You can 'construct' standing waves anytime you want in a lab. It's not 'rocket surgery' as some kids would say.
Sustainable economics is some type of standing wave phenomenon.
A state of compensating equilibrium of dynamic opposing forces.
Put several groups of people, each on their own islands that initially can sustain them at present population levels and resource consumption per capita.
Leave them for a thousand years with no external inputs from off-island.
If any are still humming along in close to their initial states (not devolved like Easter Island) after a thousand years, then there is your steady state economics in practice.
If some island experiments have over populated and have used up all their natural resources, and are just barely hanging on and on the verge of collapse and cannibalism, there is your 'lazy fare' economics of the 21 century in a nut shell.
I bet the riverbed was rocky, and that floods didn't move the rocks around much. The San Juan River in New Mexico and Utah is famous for its standing waves, but they are transitory. The current is strong and bottom sandy. When the current drops sand, standing waves form and may persist for minutes at a time before the current picks up the sand again & deposits it downstream. If you are rafting the river, it's quite fun to have standing waves up to two meters high form under or right in front of your boat. But you can't predict where or when they will form, or how long they will last.
My guess is that the "standing waves" in any "steady state" economy would be more like the transient standing waves on the San Juan, than like the persistant waves on your New England river. Minor and unforseeable perterbations would have totally unpredictable effects on the dynamics. The "state" wouldn't be "steady" at all.
Our goal should not be to create a pure steady state economy which never changes in any respect, but rather to create an economy which can adapt intelligently to changing circumstances. We should be able to grow those parts of the economy which it makes sense to grow, to shrink those parts of the economy which it makes sense to shrink, and to maintain with maximum efficiency (i.e. without concern for sales volumes) those parts of the economy which require only maintenance. If circumstances require that the shrinking parts of the economy outweigh the growing parts, then so be it. If circumstances require that our overall economic output remain relatively constant for long periods of time, then so be it. But to cling to economic forms which require us to instantly leverage any technological advances to increase the total manufacturing volume of new toys as rapidly as possible without regard to the long term health of our resource base is crazy. Even if you insist on viewing the world exclusively through the prism of evolutionary fitness, private finance capitalism would appear to be a poor survival adaptation in the long run.
Again, if you look at the graph I posted above, for 80-95% of the US population there already is a steady-state economy; they're getting neither richer nor poorer overall.
Now, I've no idea if this "steady state economics" - which I've seen referred to in no mainstream economic textbook - talks about the modern US in those terms. But in fact that's the reality. For most of the population, their real wealth isn't changing much at all.
That is, they've entered a steady state. Now, whether their particular steady state is desirable is another question entirely. But it's plain that a steady state, a period of neither growth nor recession, can actually exist.
I think the steady state being addressed in this article is meant to be an enduring steady state, not just some short period of steady state. If one takes short enough periods (years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes or seconds), any economy might look steady state, but that is not really the point of this article.
A quarter-century is a "short period"?
Yeah, okay.
Your graph doesn't show steady state for 25 years. The median income has seen a 17% rise in that period (admittedly small but not steady state). If you think any country is already at steady state (as opposed to being in a period of stagnation), then you have almost certainly misunderstood what steady state means to CASSE.
Few people seem to understand what the word means. We even hear the meaningless phrase "more sustainable", as if a slow death is preferable to a quick death.
Richard Heinberg's essay about five axioms of sustainability is a pretty good guide to the characteristics of a sustainable society.
The idea of sustained economic growth is the economic equivalent of perpetual motion. Most economists appear to be ecologically illiterate, yet it is economists to whom governments listen.
Earthlings consume about 15 terawatts of power each year. Earth receives about 174,000 terawatts annually from that big nuclear plant in the sky. Hydrocarbons were nice while they were abundant and cheap,but they're just stored solar energy folks. World reserves of hydrocarbons never approached more than a tiny fraction of the energy we receive each and every day from the sun. Peak oil just means more and better jobs in bigger and cleaner industries.
Hydrocarbons were nice while they were abundant and cheap,but they're just stored solar energy folks.
So?
The reality of things - if "we" have society and societal expectations that are based on this 'cheap' energy - what happens when that changes?
Peak oil just means more and better jobs in bigger and cleaner industries.
Oh Really? So the people employed NOW in the 'smaller and dirtier' industries are going to just shift to the new jobs?
Exactly how does your vision change the institutions of government, the military and the finance industry?
Go ahead. Lay out how "this all ends well" beyond "more and better jobs in bigger and cleaner industries and everyone lives happly ever after the end." Because *I* don't see "the government" and all the hangers on just giving up what the cheap energy has brought.
I used to think like this. But after over a year on the TOD, it just seems like believing in magic or santa clause
I continue to see the expressed opinion of influential persons that we must "grow or die" economically, technologically, etc. But David Brower said that growth is only healthful in adolescence, and someone said that on the cellular level unlimited growth is called cancer.
I agree in principle with Czech and Dietz that mankind must inevitably cease economic growth, but I would take it a several steps beyond what I have seen them propose.
First, we can define the limits of appropriate economic growth in terms of ecological health by simply stating that the maximum level of economic growth must calculate the recovery and sustanance of biodiversity when economic growth imperils the world's plants and animals. In other words, our human economy is too large when endangered or threatened species serve as warning lights to tell us that our economic activity or growth is too large. We have an appropriate economy when we scale it back so as to recover all endangered species of all types.
The other consideration that is NEVER mentioned in this regard is the highly disproportionate DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH amongst all of humanity among and between nations. There is plenty of wealth to go around if there was equitable distribution of wealth. If mankind does not change its perception of greed as ecologically and economically unhealthy then not only will the earth's planetary life support system ultimately fail, but violence, wars, (especially resource wars) threaten all of humanity, but the end result is tragedy or even extinction of the human species itself as an unsustainable irruptive species with infinite resource "needs" on a finite planet.
Stan Moore
Petaluma, CA
One issue that has not been raised in this discussion is that, imo, a stable state/sustainable economy must be productive. In other words, the current "consumer"/wash-each-others-laundry economy is a paradigm that won't work.
Unfortunately, as I have posted before, to be productive, people need to have useful skills which the current education system does not provide. Therefore, I would argue that a sustainable economy is not possible unless the education system is overhauled first. And, it is only at that point that even the beginnings of a revised economy can be considered.
Going back over 50 years, all the boys were required to take "shop" in 7, 8 and 9th grade while the girls had to take "home economics" in my school district. Although the skills learned were rudimentary, we were at least exposed to using tools to "produce" something. In my case, even though I was college bound, I continued to take some shop courses in HS that were useful later in life.
Todd
The sustainable economic development may be desirable for the already developed countries in Europe, North America, and some parts of Asia. But what does this mean to the underdeveloped countries or the rising countries like India and China?
It seems as if the developed countries think that as the world hits the peak oil, the party is over and they just want to keep the status-quo. What does this mean to the late comers to the party? These countries want to enjoy the party, too, and want to develop their economy. Do the developed countries just say, "Sorry, you’ve come too late. The party is over."?
This kind of reminds me of the late comers to Imperialism like Germany and Japan at the end of the 19 century. They wanted to have their own colonies, but most areas of the worlds were already taken by other colonial powers such as the UK and France. This situation eventually led to World War 1 and 2 (with many other reasons). Today's disagreement on the energy issues between the already developed nations and the rising nations may very well trigger another world war.
Clearly any vision of a sustainable global economy will be politically unworkable unless a relatively universal standard of living emerges. If we are really running into resource constraints on total global productivity then the only way to reach such economic equity is for the OECD countries to greatly reduce their consumption of resources while the developing world's consumption rises to meet them on some reasonable common ground. That is to say that economic contraction (in the OECD countries) would have to proceed the emergence of a steady state. The chances that such a transition will occur in a rational orderly way is, of course, near zero. However, the idea that constant striving by the OECD countries to increase their net wealth is going to help the developing world rise out of poverty in an environment of steadily increasing energy prices is nonsense.
Excellent discussion. I've added it to the diary roll at the latest Burning the Midnight Oil, which just coincidentally happens to be one of the Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence series.
One note, though ... if we live better lives, as opposed to just more lives converting more of the natural environment to waste ... might that not be accounted as being economic growth as well?
That is, the traditional marginalists may pretend that "real" GDP is an actual amount and nominal GDP is an actual amount seen through a veil of money ... but nominal GDP is the actual amount that can be aggregated, and real GDP is actual GDP corrected for inflation.
So if the better is accounted for as being more valuable, that's economic growth.
What it won't be, of course, is the steady diet of quarterly increments of economic growth that comes from consuming non-renewable resources at an accelerating rate ... that kind of economic growth would come from pure technological progress, and so like innovation would ebb and flow in waves.
And certainly, we do not presently have a collection of economic institutions that are capable of functioning with periods of some modest economic growth followed by periods with very little.