I for one keep trying to re-think how a consumer driven paradigm may co-exist with biodiversity--a paradigm that faces the rigorous demands of life with a quantitative growth mandate. How can the current very wasteful consumer lifestyle co-exist with sustainable living, and naturally integrative lifestyles that keep the boundaries between the urban, "the wild", and the rural porous and mutually enhancing?
In other words, there must be a way for our free-market system, not as an ideology but as a current pragmatic reality, to think "greener", "smarter", and drive consumers to make choices that not only prolong our species remarkable presence on this planet, but bolster the biodiversity that is necessary to maintain that presence along with the blooming, budding breadth of our entire Ecosystem.
I am giving up this search slowly, because I believe if you look at the nuts and bolts of consumer capitalism, you may find that intrinsic to its very existence is a mandate of endless "innovative"/quantitative (rather than merely intensive) growth---GROWTH THAT IS NO WAY SUSTAINABLE. Consumer capitalism can not continue wisely, because the "efficient allocation of resources" a free-market should naturally facilitate are efficiently destroying the very ground from which a market may flourish. From a Cost-Benefit Analysis, clearing a mountain top may be the best answer to efficiently maximizing the unit production of coal, for example. Yet, the externalities of long term degradation, poisioned water tables, and destruction of biodiversity, cannot be naturally "adjusted" by the market---simply because our rate of growth is outstripping our ability to adjust, manage, or replenish--and that is because whole sets of irrational and short-term drives are what "naturally" allocate resources. Capitalism is a snake eating its own tail.
Let me share with you a short paragraph from a recent article from an Econ Journal, "Real World Economics Review" :http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue53/whole53.pdf :
Under the headline “Economic Growth ‘Cannot Continue’” the BBC on January 28,
2010 summarized a report issued by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) which asserts
that “continuing economic growth is not possible if nations are to tackle climate change.” The
NEF says that “unprecedented and probably impossible” carbon reductions would be needed
to hold temperature rises below 2°C (3.6°F) without which we face catastrophic global
warming. “We urgently need to change our economy to live within its environmental budget,”
said NEF’s policy director Andrew Simms, adding that “There is no global, environmental
central bank to bail us out if we become ecologically bankrupt.”
1 In Growth Isn’t PossibleSimms and his co-author Victoria Johnson reviewed all the existing proposed models for
dealing with climate change and energy use including renewable, carbon capture and
storage, nuclear, and even geo-engineering, and concluded that these are “potentially
dangerous distractions from more human-scale solutions” and that there are “no magic
bullets” to save us. The report concludes that even if we were to rapidly transition to an
entirely clean energy -based economy, this would not suffice to save us because: “Globally,
we are consuming nature’s services – using resources and creating carbon emissions – 44
percent faster than nature can regenerate and reabsorb what we consume and the waste we
produce. In other words . . . if the whole world wished to consume at the same rate it would
require 3.4 planets like Earth.” Given these facts and trends, Simms and Johnson argue, we
have no choice but to bring average global growth to a halt (with sharp reductions in growth in
the industrialized countries balanced by accelerated growth in the developing countries to
approximate equity but tend toward stasis on balance) and to radically reconstruct the global
economy to conform to “environmental thresholds, which include biodiversity and the finite
availability of natural resources.” The authors conclude that “a new macro-economic model is
needed, one that allows the human population as a whole to thrive without having to rely on
ultimately impossible, endless increases in consumption” and they point to Herman Daly’s
idea of a “Steady-State Economy” as their model. For a reaction to this report, the BBC asked
Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank, for
his response. Clougherty remarked that the NEF’s report exhibited “a complete lack of
understanding of economics .
The point the author of the article goes on to make is that the competitve nature of capitalism, namely the call to produce ever more units of production because of an ensuing enhancement of divided labor, requires endless growth or it will result in pure stagnation. Unlike Professor of Economics, Herman Daly's model of a "steady-state" free-market with the Government stepping into to limit the throughput of major vital resources, while the market allocates the rest ala Adam Smith, this author believes free-market consumer capitalism does not allow for truly restrictive interventions or slow-down. Why? Simple, share-holder based Corporate enterprises can in no way "slow down" profits in the name of sustainable growth or prudent ecological choices, because it has profits and investment shares to maintain (a CEO will be booted if that profit and growth does not continue yearly, quarterly, or whatever). Think about it: would you want your pension investments to "slow down". We see right now what a belly-up consumer economy looks like: high unemployment, and loss all the way down.
Thus, a new mandate arises. I believe we are at the brink of a paradigm shift that must arise if our species is to survive--and I believe there is enough credible evidence to show that we have very little time, and a short, short window before we reach thresholds that simply leave our predictions dangerously moot.
We have to think outside consumer culture---not because it is "evil", but because we simply will not survive in any sort of pleasant manner on this planet much longer.
Here are some basic practical questions to address (or individual actions that may be taken in an everyday way), and in later postings we can sink our teeth into abstract macro-economic models:
(1) Can we really maintain consuming so many disposable items? We can only effectively recycle in balance with our environment. In other words we consume at a level that outstrips an ability for the environment to replenish itself. Recycling is fine, but reduction is the only real answer. In other words, we might begin giving up certain conveniences that will have a larger impact of destroying the possiblity of any future conveniences (i.e. conveniences whose full outcomes are species die-off).
IT CAN BE DONE. How? Just do it (as the maxim goes).
The can of soda--the disposable camera--the endlessly plastically packaged consumer products at the grocery store.
Do you remember when you washed a head of lettuce instead of buying plastically packaged lettuce? Do you remember when bags were not all made of plastic?
(2) Avoid--if you can---buying plastic of anysort (when at all possible). There are plenty of grocery stores where you can bring packs or satchels and fill them with rice, beans, pasta, cereals, flour, without having to purchase so many plastic packaged items.
(3) Next time you are at Starbucks and typing on your computer, sipping coffee, bring your own cup or ask them why they don't offer you "to stay" ceramic cups. We simply cannot keep up with all that must be recycled by endless lids and to-go products.
THEY ARE DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT IN A VERY REAL AND VERY NON-ABSTRACT WAY.
--It is our built urban environment, that has kept us more and more separate from "the wild" and "the natural" that fogs our ability to see the depletion and destruction we are standing upon. However, smarter more integrative civil engineering can reduce that fog---we don't all have to become "tree-loving" nature people. We simply have to rethink how our activites relate to a broader natural and cultural context---maximizing structural and environment integrity (not just short-term financial investment gains). We have models of cities that better integrate "natural" and urban environments without resorting to sprawl.
(4) Pay attention to who you buy from. Huge industrial and agro-business that works from monocultures (like Tyson Chicken, Chiquita Bannanas, etc.) are doing more to deplete our water tables, destroy arable top-soils via over fertilization, and run-out smaller local and organic farmers. We know this---the facts are all there---we simply have to say no with our purchasing power.
Finally, we must re-think where a mandate of endless growth will lead us. The opposite is not stagnation. The opposite is a revaluation of our values, a world in which we foster attentive virtuosity rather than sporadic quicktime sound bites of consciousness and consumer saturation--where we dare to slow down and ask ourselves how our actions effect a larger whole--not for moral rightousness, but because diversity and ecological growth requires recognizing and maximizing (rather than depleting) our natural environments.
This is a mandate for a more creative future. A future not only based on immediate animal conveniences, but a recognized and evolved sense of interdependence.
Consumer capitalism will not bring us this future. Remember what has been in the past need not be in the future--we can evolve new forms of exchange and new types of markets---but we have to slow down and dare to ask, think, and sacrifice along the way. On the upbeat, not every "sacrifice" is a privation--rather every change of direction is an opportunity to create different types of relationships and relatedness to ourselves, our world, and eachother.
Best to You---K
Interesting post, Mr. Perri. I'll just raise a few points to give you food for thought.
ReplyDelete“[M]any more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive[.]” - Charles Darwin
I believe that the exponentially growing birthrate is the true culprit of environmental devastation and capitalism is merely a tool. The fact is, it is ingrained in human nature (as it is ingrained in the nature of all animals) to reproduce far faster than any environment can sustain – that is, OUR BIRTHRATE IS UNSUSTAINABLE. Capitalism, however, has mitigated this effect by permitting the production of goods and services at unprecedentedly high levels. With greater production, more individuals are living to the age of maturity instead of dying. In sum, capitalism has expanded our environment to be able to sustain more individuals as compared to any other economic system. Only with economic growth can our societies sustain our population growth.
So, the choice is between saving lives with capitalism, or death with stagnation. Are you ready not only to kill any newborns that exceed what our environment can sustain, but also kill off many more people so that consumption can fall to sustainable levels? Further, you must be prepared to tell people when and in what number they can reproduce, under harsh penalties.
Which leads to the second point I want to offer: I believe that capitalism will, in fact, deliver humanity from certain destruction. I do not believe that any attempt to force the world to stop their reproduction will succeed. Instead, the world's population growth will continue to exceed environmental sustainability, and humanity will continue to fight and kill for resources. A switch from capitalism to a system with less capacity for production will instantly shrink available resources and ignite brutal conflict both between societies and between individuals within societies; in short, the world will return to the Hobbesian state of nature.
Capitalism's greatest contribution to humanity (and indeed Life as a whole) is its ability to EXPAND the environment by discovering and making-useful previously unusable resources (this point, btw, is what I cryptically refer to in my paper as “the other” genius of Capitalism (the one listed in my paper being the harnessing of man's inherent self-interest). Only with new resources can new lives be sustained. And I believe, in the foreseeable future (and long before earth's resources are depleted or dies-off from global warming), capitalist innovation will penetrate resources on distant planets. On that date, capitalism will have delivered humanity from annihilation.
Anyhow, just some points that I think should be considered. Capitalism has transformed our environment for the better, by expanding our environment's ability to nourish lives, and it will continue to do so in perpetuity. This fact must at least be considered before we hastily toss capitalism to the wolves.
For Benjamin.
ReplyDeleteCapitalism does in fact expand "goods" and "services", but I think the problem is that we are dealing with what Nobel Recipient and Columbia Economist Joseph Stiglitz called, "information asymmetry". Here is a citing from (with an embarrassed grin)...Wikipedia:
[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics[3] in 2001 "for laying the foundations for the theory of markets with asymmetric information" with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence.
Before the advent of models of imperfect and asymmetric information, the traditional neoclassical economics literature had assumed that markets are efficient except for some limited and well defined market failures. More recent work by Stiglitz and others reversed that presumption, to assert that it is only under exceptional circumstances that markets are efficient. Stiglitz has shown (together with Bruce Greenwald) that "whenever markets are incomplete and/or information is imperfect (which are true in virtually all economies), even competitive market allocation is not constrained Pareto efficient". In other words, they addressed "the problem of determining when tax interventions are Pareto-improving. The approach indicates that such tax interventions almost always exist and that equilibria in situations of imperfect information are rarely constrained Pareto optima."[12]:229, abstract Although these conclusions and the pervasiveness of market failures do not necessarily warrant the state intervening broadly in the economy, it makes clear that the "optimal" range of government recommendable interventions is definitely much larger than the traditional "market failure" school recognizes.[13] For Stiglitz there is no such thing as an "invisible hand".[14] According to Stiglitz:[15]
Whenever there are “externalities”—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well. But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always.
The real debate today is about finding the right balance between the market and government. Both are needed. They can each complement each other. This balance will differ from time to time and place to place.]
Although, this speaks to a somewhat different set of issues, I draw on it to point out that not only will asymmetry in information make for markets that do not cleanly and most efficiently correct themselves...but I would add that we have to look at distributions of goods and services over time, and recognize that demand may fuel allocations that succeed on the short-term, but are devastating on the long term. For example, clearing a mountain in order to most efficiently extract mineral resources---short term gains, that may lead to long term devastation with totally exasperating social and economic and environmental costs (costs that may far outweight the short term benefits in supplying short term demands).
Obviously, we cannot police demands (in a free society, barring certain anti-social "demands"). But ultimately, a mandate to manipulate and grow "demands"/desires for stuffs that on one level may seem "frivilous" at best, and outright destructive at worst are exactly the kind of anti-social "demands" that may require some sort of regulatory mechanism or policing.
Capitilism has required regulatory mechanisms that allow the "invisible hand" to remain "invisible"--but the hand has been there all along, and I believe that is an important duty for the government to uphold (i.e., not letting the bottom fall out of an economy, because manipulative power structures have capitalized on asymmetric relationships of information and power, and stunted whole populations for the benefit of a small elite).
..Continued Comment..
ReplyDeleteBut the ultimate gist of this essay or editorial is that we as individuals can rethink how we relate to environment. Moreover, there have been many other cultures before us who have very successfully found balance with their consumption and environment.
For example, ancient Hawaiins farmed fish---and they maintained a very keen and simple system of harvesting an optimal number of fish at a certain level of maturity, and creating a "gating/trap" system that allowed smaller less mature fish to survive in order to keep a sustained population for consumption. Certain values develop along side such systems (e.g. a reverance for the intricate interdependencies of human and eco-systemic life, etc.).
I am simply stating that captilism as a free for all play of desire and consumption, will do as well as the individuals who make up the society, and that the profit motive alone can equally drive a culture to destruction as much as "innovation". So my answer is not necessarily socialism--certainly not soviet communism---my answer is, as you probably guessed, an individual revolution of consciousness. Developing an attention span for interdependency, and understanding how far-reaching the consequences of an action or purchase really extends. Also, a kind of existential-internal personal account of what truly drives most "demands" that require so many resources. Increased bare pleasure and convenience has not always cleanly equalled maximum happiness---and for that we must have a relationship to past cultures, values, and lifestyles--and even current communities not driven purely by a desire for The Next Best Thing.
However, stagnation and fascism are not my answers. Capitalism can help expand environment, but right now, it is simply depleting at a greater level than expanding or replacing or replenishing.
So we have to think of a model that moves beyond neoclassical economics and all the ontological/philosophical and anthropological presuppostions it entails.
I do not believe we have the time necessarily to penetrate these distant resources, if we do not solve the very real and very immediate catastrophes of imbalance that exist right now. Rethinking the "innovation" addiction is an important first step, because it demands that and individual evolve a capacity to understand her matrix of conditioning desires, and what exactly fuels the "demands" she deems so integral to her existence. It demands rethinking a life of cooperation (with eachother, with the planet, with other species)or simply developing and defending old economic models that justify a kind of "blind" or "invisible" press forward into a world of purely self-interested consumer manipulations.
Here to offer my layman's devil's advocate opinion on the subject! The latest episode of Radiolab on Cities (which I highly recommend), noted that (arguably), city life is more efficient from a conservation standpoint than country life. Public transportation aside, fewer water pipes are needed to supply water to more people, fewer powerlines carry electricity to more people, and, of course, environmental programs implemented within a city have a larger impact on more people. I bring up the subject of cities because they are a direct result of capitalism and consumerism.
ReplyDeleteHuman evolution developed us to be consumers and reproducers... these instincts are why we're still here. However, with the exponential increase of population since the agricultural revolution, there's no way we can change these instincts into instincts of conservation under such a comparably short period of time. However, there is one instinct that we can make work for us: efficiency. Getting the most energy or resources using as few resources and little energy as possible is also why we're still here, and using these instincts to our advantage is the only way we can take what our instincts of consumerism have created and transform this into a sustainable environment for our future. This goes along with the huge increase in green jobs and green energy in the past decade, along with conservation movements (such as curbside recycling in Savannah!) that all result because of groups of people brought together by cities (read: capitalism), who want to make their lives more efficient and more *aware*. In conclusion, we can't fight *against* capitalism, but need to work with it in order to create a sustainable future.
Okay, there you go, tear me apart now. ^_^
Side note, sitting at the Bean where they give you a 25 cent discount if you bring your own mug (which I did). Monetary incentives have recently been shown to help students succeed academically, and I believe are key to implementing green policies. Another example of capitalism working with sustainability instead of against it.