January 03, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Going to Hell in a Shopping Cart
I've always been tickled by arguments that reveal the political spectrum as a wrinkly circle, rather than a line. I picked out this column as a perfect example of the phenomenon and showed it to my wife, remarking that I might blog on it."Isn't that kind of easy?" she said, wrinkling her nose and handing it back between two fingers.
"What's wrong with easy? Why not a little barrel-Fisking on a cold winter night? Isn't this scolding boil crying out for a ride in the Tuschmobile and an application of Preparation F(isk)?"
Our Quality of Life Peaked in 1974. It's All Downhill Now
We will pay the price for believing the world has infinite resources
by George Monbiot
It turns out many of the self-styled "progressives" catalogued on Common Dreams are reactionaries. George Monbiot, in particular, stands athwart progress whining "NOOoooo, you're doing it all wrong!"
Or, as one of my childhood friends used to say, "pretend I won, OK?"
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.I guess if you really are travelling backwards it would look like things are getting worse (But to answer his question, here are a quick 25 factual "bases" for the belief they have improved, and here's an alternate take on pollution).
As for "taking into account such factors as..", anyone can use a customized "quality of life" index with subjective components to support their beliefs. Mine would substract points for the number of column-inches by George Monbiot, Robert Jensen, Tom Turnipseed, Molly Ivins and Bernie Sanders . Hmmm. Things are getting much worse! My Idiotarian Verbiage Index suggests the world really is going to hell in a hempbasket.
The reason should not be hard to grasp.
Not when you're busy wringing your hands, furrowing your brow and attempting to change human nature (while not chewing gum).
Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion. This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken.It's Voldenomics, the science that dare not speak its name!
It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.So let me see, you tell people they were better off in the age of disco and Watergate, that there was more pollution before catalytic converters, when much of the world was burning coal (and dung) as its primary energy sources and tires vaporized in 10,000 miles, telling people that this time we really will run out of all the things we need even though it didn't turn out to be true when you said it in 1974. People call you a cranky prig lunatic for that?
Where the Hell do they get off! Well, there's no accounting for the common folk.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.Capitalism only requires that human ingenuity be infinite. Capitalism deals quite ably with "finity". In fact, last I checked, capitalism was about the most efficient way to allocate resources and avoid authoritarian power. The marketplace assigns higher prices to things that are becoming scarce and profit-seekers (translation for Idiotarians: money-hungy amoral spendthrifts) develop substitutes.
I'm not a proselytizer for Christianity, but Monbiot's inadequate understanding of capitalism still seems to exceed his understanding of Christian salvation.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.A brief interlude to sing about the Laws of Thermodynamics:
Heat is work and work's a curseA Pfennig is currency, not a natural resource. Paper and electronic money are, for all practical purposes, infinite. Gold is not, but we took care of that a long time ago. GDP is measured in money, not consumption of natural resources. Since 1974 most of our growth has come from burgeoning trade in non-polluting services and intellectual property. But since Monbiot is living backwards, like Merlin, he sees it the other way around.
And all the heat in the universe
Is gonna cool down,
'Cos it can't increase
Then there'll be no more work
And there'll be perfect peace
Really?
Yeah, that's entropy, Man.
And all because of the second law of thermodynamics which lays down:
That you can't pass heat from a cooler to a hotter
Try it if you like but you'd far better not-a
'Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a rule-a
'Cos the hotter body's heat will pass to the cooler
-Flanders & Swann
Does anybody even understand the lunacy put forth in this paragraph? The power of compound interest makes our debt to natural resources unpayable? Or was it that lack of natural resources to understand debt is compounded by the lack of interest in lucid analogy? Something like that.
....One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity.....Funny, I thought it was infinity that was hard to understand.
is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labor and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future."Capitalism has moved its frontier.." Oops, you were almost on to something there, George.
Damn, even after the apex of the human condition that was 1974, that colonial past keeps mucking up our future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints.and that industry's profits are equal to those of the industry built upon the denial of progress.
Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.Help, the Limited,and Newell Rubbermaid are taking over the world! Short the knickers sector!
Or is it that people's jobs and livelihoods depend on consumer spending? Nah. Who needs all those empty retail and distribution jobs anyway. Oh, by the way, G., you can have my Victoria's Secret catalogue when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery. Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."Wow - Monbiot's correspondents are more hateful than mine. And that's saying something. Still - population control belongs exclusively to his side of the political ledger.
And how does this compare on the "unmediated savagery"-meter to what Monbiot's wishes: provoking the implosion of consumer spending and negative interest rates (see Leitaer below) so we can have double-digit unemployment and shove the billion or so people who have been able to raise their living standards in India and China (largely on the strength of Exports to the developed world) back to their desparate 1974 living standards?
I'd say its a draw. Monbiot's program is population control by another name - he doesn't want to get his hands dirty with forced sterilization, but he's willing to let starvation and disease wipe out all those resource consumers instead. When it comes to suffering (as opposed to anything else), Monbiot is willing to let a severely weakened market sort it out.
Besides, taking your most insane reader correspondence and generalizing it to the unwashed masses - that's just a cheap rhetorical trick to be outraged*. Imagine how you could portray society using James Lileks and Steven Den Beste's hate mail!
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.Somewhere in there is a retraction for parroting all that Worldwatch "population bomb" doomsaying. Did you hear it? Now its farm animals! Once again, despite Monbiot's averred affection for the little guy and dislike for technology, it's the vast numbers living hand to mouth in an agrarian fashion that get the shaft on the Monbiot plan. After all, all that dung-burning is pollution, right? Let them go without milk, fire OR the progressive community's bete noir, "'Untrammelled' Economic Growth."
....[snip...]It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.Call up Lietaer's book on Amazon and you'll see that "people who bought this book also bought books by John Pilger and George Soros". Sigh. Amazing how many suppressed utterers of the "the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken" get published on dead trees, isn't it? Do you suppose they would be "taxed out of existence" as well?
I'm not even sure how to evaluate the effects of paying someone to take money off your hands (negative interest rates). I do know the Lietaer has predicted some sort of disaster with the world's currencies, and it seems like negative interest rates might just do the trick. In addition, it would trigger an enormous (relative) boom in exploration and development of natural resources. Somehow, I don't think this is what Monbiot has in mind.
Monbiot's assertion here is that growth is finite because resources are finite. Growth in GDP is not identically constrained by natural resources (although it does require either population or productivity growth). GDP is measured in dollars, which are not resource constrained. Monbiot takes no notice of the fact that less and less of the world's trade is in natural resources. similarly, his debt analogy is a loser because debt can be monetized (in fact, that's what lietaer seems to be recommending).
Strangely, the best sense I can make out of this paragraph is that Monbiot wants to make the economy more resource-dependent by making currency worthless and bringing on an era of rampant inflation. This would seem to be at odds with his general concern for natural resources (not to mention people's desire to work and earn a living), but I don't think he's thought it through that far. It fits his hatred of money, and that's enough.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. (emphasis mine- Ed.)It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.One of the faults of the "progressive screed", typified here, is that they typically call for nothing other than the overthrow of those in power and a general sea-change in people's attitudes. Even if we accepted their "factual" assertions, just how are they going to make all of humanity play according to all their unpleasant, quality-of-life-decreasing rules?
(repeat)Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad.How sick are you of this deluded, prudish, finger-wagging snobbery? Doesn't that just sum up the "progressive" philosophy? Unwittingly, Monbiot has revealed the puritan reactionary disguised in the "progressive" left. It's the progressive hair shirt - there MUST be a downside to these so-called "improvements" in the quality of life because, dammit, they happened without our permission! You're not playing by our rules! If consumers like it, if its an "exciting present" it must be bad for you. If we don't like it, it's clearly immoral.
Beware the apocalypse, the sky is falling, Gaia will sit in judgment and declare us unfit to pursue our dreams. And, by George, her standards will be... Monbidiotarian.
* sort of like fisking a monbiot column, I guess...
It appears that I missed Samizdata and Layman's Logic having fun with this one. Sorry Guys!
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at January 3, 2003 09:30 AM
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Way to go! Agree with every word. George Monbiot and his ilk are essentially reactionary puritan snobs and should be seen and identified accordingly. Monbiot and others have built lucrative media careers playing this tune, which probably explains the howls of outrage and abuse which greeted the publication two years' ago of Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the publication of Julian L. Simon's many debunkings of green nonsense years earlier.
Posted by: Tom on January 3, 2003 11:13 AMMr. Dreck--
You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself for wasting valuable electrons in the process of writing your intemperate screed. By contrast, Mr. Monbiot's worthy reflections should be widely reprinted ... no, scratch that ... made telepathically available so that more of us can see the errors of our ways. (Does his endorsement of Leitaer's negative-interest mean that he'll pay royalties as his essay is plucked out of the ether? Or is he confusing this concept with readers' lack-of-interest? Just wondering.)
It would be truly inspirational if mass ideological movements could be crafted from inspiring pastiches of Big-Sounding Ideas that were put together by a True Leader. It's so bo-o-oring when small-minded people like you pout about logic, consistency, tiresome facts, and respect for the ""individual"". I only hope there would be some way of getting rid of those pesky kulaks, etc. Like Mr. Monbiot, I don't know much history--by any chance, has such a thing ever been tried?
Posted by: AMac on January 3, 2003 11:38 AMI say the Moanbot's crazy like a fox. Prosperity is the one "problem" that the radical left knows how to solve.
Posted by: Paul Zrimsek on January 3, 2003 11:45 AMFunny comments, Paul and AMac. Paul- The other night Alan Greenspan was questioned vigorously about the Fed's responsibility to identify and puncture a bubble. He finally responded -
"Look George (Kaufman), if your question is 'how do we prevent bubbles?', we know how to do that."
Prosperity is not the natural condition of man, so getting rid of it isn't so hard.
Posted by: "Mindles H. Dreck" on January 3, 2003 11:56 AMThe laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production.This is true. And given that the sun beams around 100 jillion megawatts on the earth, and each human using around 100W, that means the human population is inherently limited to just a million jillion!
Unless we go out into the solar system. But even then, the human population is limited! See, the earth captures around a ten millionth of the total solar flux. We can build a Dyson sphere around the Sun, but our resources are still limited! So our population is in fact limited to 10 billion jillion!
Unless we go out into the galaxy. But even then,the human population is limited! See, there are only estimated to be about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy! We can only build a Dyson sphere around every sun. So our population is in fact limited to 10000 billion billion jillion!
The sky is falling! Help!
Oh wait, I forgot about birth control.
It's a generational thing. Somehow I don't think 20-somethings have the same view.
Posted by: Sandy P. on January 3, 2003 12:49 PMat least one 40-something doesn't agree with Monb-idiot.
:D
Posted by: Chris on January 3, 2003 01:11 PMI'm not that old but I lived through the 70s, 80s, and 90s; 2003 is much better than all of them. Every staple of human life, food, clothes, shelter, entertainment, medicine, education, is better, cheaper, more abundant, and more accessible than ever. Food is rediculously cheap (I know, I've been poor more than once, it's good to live in a country where you can feed yourself very well on a fraction of minimum wage), clothes as well. Entertainment has boomed big time: more movies, more TV, the internet, lots of books, lots of magazines, and now we have awesome computer games. The dual miracle of artificial fibers and new farming technologies has made all types of clothing cheaper and more abundant. Go to any backwoods corner of the Earth and you'll find that the poor there wear western clothing (e.g. t-shirts) because it's so abundant and because artificial fiber clothing is incredibly durable. Cars too are better and surprisingly more affordable, they are more efficient (even SUVs!), more comfortable, and less polluting. Communications and trade advances (the internet especially) have brought the world increasingly closer to everyone. The internet has allowed me and countless others to interact with each other across continents, cultures, and social groups. I have friends and acquantances in many countries (from Canada to Japan to the UAE) which I simply would not have had in the 1970s. Medically, the advances we have made are astounding. Organ transplants are much more common and much more successful. Genetic engineering and biotechnology has allowed us to do everything from increase the quality of insulin (which is now human insulin, rather than animal insulin, thanks to genetic engineering) to developing a workable treatment against a deadly disease (AIDS) which was previously unknown only a few decades before.
Socially things have improved immensely. I remember the trailing end of the bad old days of real, entreched sexism, racism, and especially gay hatred. Now nobody bats an eye at a powerful business woman, or a successful and rich minority. And homosexuality has become mainstream or so close to it as to be within a gnat's whisker.
Living in 2003 is very much preferable to living in 1974.
Robin, you are so blind.
2003 just SEEMS better than 1974 to you because you do not see the TRUE costs of everything associated with your modern, comfortable, life. If you had to pay the TRUE costs for everything, you would realize you cannot afford your current lifestyle. But you don't have to pay the TRUE costs, because your lifestyle is being subsidized by the poor. (Which is why they are poor.) The poor subsidize your lifestyle by working for slave wages, by selling their natural resources for less than the resources REAL worth, and by putting up with all the pollution your lifestyle creates.
But some day (soon), the poor will tire of subsidizing your exorbitant lifestyle. They will demand an accounting. Boy, will you be sorry. On that day, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth and you will rue the day you lived so high on the hog! (It may be better to have loved and lost, but its not better to have lived in luxury and then having to take a step down.) So, even though you think you are happy now, you're really not. Because how could you be happy (as opposed to simply thinking you are happy, when you really are not) living a lifestyle that cannot be sustained (or not sustained for more than a few 100 years)?
Now, that your eyes are opened and you realize gas costs more than the $1.35 you pay at the pump, (it really costs $135.99 when you include the TRUE costs of the natural resources, pollution, the lack of a living wage, etc.) you are likely fairly depressed. Well, you should be! You have consumed more than your fair share of OUR resources long enough. Not only depressed, you should be ashamed!
Hey, being a liberal scold can be fun, but I'll stop now. My head's starting to spin.
Mindles wasn't the only one to be drawn to this like a fly. I've had some fun with the cumulative interest and negative interest claims.
Summary:
Cumulative interest, Mindles hits some big points. Even Moonbat you treat him with a little respect, he's still talking gibberish as he's ignoring inflation, risk, etc.
Negative interest rates: even if you buy into Leitaer's stuff, the idea it's environmental salvation is nonsense, and peripheral to his work. FOrce people to spend money very quickly, and the consumption economy gets a massive boost. The best returns will be on investments in manufacturing (etc) companies, just as today, and the relative return on different types of investment will be little changed. Modest extra investment might occur, but the environmental impact is (for various reasons) likely to be small.
Posted by: The Philosophical Cowboy on January 3, 2003 03:11 PMStagnant economy...high unemployment...urban decay...racial tensions...
Actually, it seems like Europe's problems ARE the same ones the U.S. faced in 1974. Too bad Monbiot hasn't been over here since then.
Then again, maybe not.
Posted by: ArtD0dger on January 3, 2003 03:17 PMhey isn't nkor listening to this guy?? they've eliminated the economny and people aren't being wasteul flying, driving or even eating.. just leaving the earth a wilderness paradise...or maybe nuclear wasteland, but who can keep up these days
Posted by: Libertarian Uber Alles on January 3, 2003 03:29 PMLeonard, you hit the nail on the head. I didn't read all of Monbait's article. I can only handle so much stupidity in one day. Also, does Monbait realize that the West has been off the gold standard for quite a while? Money is digital nowadays.
Posted by: set on January 4, 2003 10:19 AMActually, it seems like Europe's problems ARE the same ones the U.S. faced in 1974.
Europe is suffering from stagflation???
Posted by: Jason McCullough on January 4, 2003 06:39 PM"Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the 'disappointing' volume of sales before Christmas."
They did here in the US, too. And it was quickly pointed out (to their credit, often by retailers) the disappointment was that instead of 12.4% increase they got 9.98%.
As to the interest thing, it was a few years ago that a trust set up by Ben Franklin with a penny, to demonstrate this point, was distributed. It was several millions, yes, but not enough to make the designated recipients very happy and certainly not the astronimical figure bandied about... Ben would personally have been better spending it on some candy for an inamorata.
The running-out-of-oil is interesting, in that a 10-year limit was opined in, I think 1964. Not that it is limitless, but his figures are way off and highly speculative.
Ah well, except for that Christmas sales thing, better people than I have pulled the article apart. Too bad we are largely preaching to the choir. I have occasionally tried to read the other, as I do believe there is a minimum of two sides to most disputes, but when I read an interview with Ghaddafi's son saying his father has nothing to do with the Libyan government I have to take a few days to recuperate before venturing out again.
John, perhaps you're thinking of this:
Julian L. Simon:
The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, chapter 11
(ok, here's the address: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/)
The Long-Running Running Out of Oil Drama
Just as with coal, running out of oil has long been a nightmare, as this brief history
shows:
1885, U.S. Geological Survey: "Little or no chance for oil in California."
1891, U. S. Geological Survey: Same prophecy by USGS for Kansas and Texas as in 1885
for California.
1914, U. S. Bureau of Mines: Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels,
perhaps 10 years supply.
1939, Department of the Interior: Reserves to last only 13 years.
1951, Department of the Oil and Gas Division: Reserves to last 13 years.
Hey, David Walser's comment was obviously a spoof since there is no way he could be serious, could he?
The assertion that the West's wealth is a direct cause of the Third World's poverty is based on the zero sum assumption that wealth is never genuinely created, only redistributed. If that were the case, much of the enormous gains made by much of the world over the past 200 years would be inexplicable. Two sides to a trade gain, since why else would they make the trade in the first place?
Of course there is one major zero-sum actor in the world - government. And somehow I don't get the impression that Mr Monbiot and other Flat-earthers are the least concerned about that.
Posted by: Tom on January 7, 2003 10:04 AMI distinctly remember reading in about 1957 or so in Scientific American that we were going to be out of oil by 1970 or so...
Don't these guys EVER give it a rest? Do they have any idea about the magnitude of the size of the Earth and atmosphere? Finite, yes, but pretty damn large... do the calculation and see.
Comments are Closed.