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138 comments on The Problem of Growth

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Roger K on March 21, 2008 - 12:59pm

André

It is not clear to me, either, that hierarchy per se is the problem. It seems to me that the empires of ancient Egypt existed for centuries without creating economic growth in the modern sense of the word. Undoubtedly increased food security lead to increased population as is inevitable without some effective from of birth control, but population growth is not the same thing as constantly increasing material standards of living. However, I think Jeff is right in pointing to the monetary institutions of private finance capitalism as creating a growth imperative. When the primary engine driving economic infrastructure development is the desire of money to make money then a hierarchy of wealth and a growth imperative are simultaneously created.

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Keith Akers on March 24, 2008 - 12:25pm

This is a good question, and I'd be interested in hearing more.

I think the basic argument is that hierarchy implies a uniform valuation system, and that within any such system the rich (by the standards of this valuation system) get richer and the poor get poorer. (While anyone can invest, the rich have more to invest whereas the poor have to spend proportionately more of their income on basics like food.) You tend to centralize wealth in the hands of a few who have an active interest in expanding their wealth further. The less neurotic capitalists who quit after their first million or so are dominated by the more neurotic capitalists who don't know when to stop. This sounds vaguely Marxist, but Mark Buchanan made this kind of argument in his recent book "The Social Atom."

In the case of ancient Egypt, we have a relatively stable form of hierarchy. But Egypt was lucky. O. K., you're absolute ruler of Egypt, and you have countless slaves, where else can you expand? Build bigger pyramids? That's limited by the supply of rocks and the number of slaves you have, which is in turn limited by the food supply which is limited by the Nile. You can expand your conquests but that's hard to do because you've got the desert on one side and the Hittites or whoever elsewhere. There's not much chance of "overshoot" of environmental resources here, so maybe the Egyptians were lucky.

If you waved your magic wand and suddenly got rid of the empires to the east and allowed Egypt to expand, then Egypt might have "overshot" its social and political abilities just like Rome and everyone else. Fossil fuels, in our context, constitute just such an Egyptian "magic wand" for the expansion of wealth. That's why disregarding the question of social organization is dangerous. We may think we've solved the problem (e. g. by continuing to "grow" but just with solar and wind) when actually we've only solved the fossil fuel problem, and will encounter the problem of growth again (and again and again) down the road.

A more difficult question to address, at least in my mind, would be this: suppose we had a society which had a steep progressive income tax, so that no one could make more than some maximum amount (say, $100,000 U. S. / per year or less)? Or, suppose we had a world market which (by treaty or whatever) increased the price on fossil fuels, non-renewables, and biodiversity or "wild" ecosystems, to prevent their depletion below a certain level? Wouldn't these still be hierarchies, but wouldn't they "constitutionally" limit growth?

I also still have trouble in visualizing what a "rhizome" organization would look like. If a country, or the world, were organized this way, what would it look like? What kind of government would you have? How would you deal with crime, threats of war, the threat of a large meteor headed towards earth, overpopulation, etc.? So I'm still exploring here.

Keith

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Roger K on March 24, 2008 - 11:32pm

Keith,

That's why disregarding the question of social organization is dangerous.

The question of social organization is indeed central. If it is not addressed then all the clever engineering in the world will not save us from eventual social chaos. Jeff's proposal for small self sufficient economic groups is a proposal to return to neolithic technology. Not every small local group will have access to metal ores, so that self sufficiency at this level implies that rock, wood, and bone will be the building materials for tools. Depending on your point of view a return to neolithic life styles might not be a bad thing. Here for instance is a description of the system of economic production of the Iroquois which substantially resembles Jeff's rhizomes. The egalitarian, cooperative nature of this system of production as well as the close connection with nature are appealing to me. Nevertheless, I find myself unwilling to embrace neolithic technology as the complete future of the human race.

Rather than dismissing the Iroquois system as technologically primitive and appropriate only to small groups of people, my approach is to try to understand what structural features allow this economy to function as it does and then try to figure out if these features could be incorporated into a more complex economy. I perceive three essential features which allow the Iroquois economy to function as it does.

1. A social definition of economic sufficiency

2. Equitable sharing of economic output

3. Future economic security is based on community support and not on the piling up of personal wealth

We need to develop a socially agreed upon definition of a reasonable amount of personal wealth. We can then set out to produce this amount of wealth as efficiently as possible. I do not say that the definition of economic sufficiency has to be fixed for all time. It can change as population, or technology, or resource availability changes. Nevertheless, this definition should change relatively slowly . The expectation and desire for constantly increasing personal wealth on the part of every currently living individual has to be brought to and end.

Economic output should be shared equitably. Many people are horrified at this 'communistic' idea. I believe that this horror proceeds from the belief that there really is not enough wealth to go around. "If some person who works hard at some humble but necessary work like picking fruit or pounding nails earns as much as an (engineer, accountant, etc) like me, then I will become poor." Notice that these people who are horrified at the prospect of loss of wealth do not seem concerned about the poverty of hardworking people doing society's dirty work for even less money than that miserable level of income to which the richer people would sink in a system of equitable sharing. However, I do not propose equitable sharing of wealth primarily for moralistic reasons. I propose it because I do not see how social stability can be maintained otherwise in a democratic society after the end of economic growth. People accept being low in the pecking order today because they believe that in a growing economy their ship or the ships of their children may eventually come in. Without this belief a police state and/or a theocracy will probably become necessary to maintain a system of hierarchical wealth in a post growth world.

If our future economic security depends upon our piling up wealth to purchase economic services when our personal productivity has declined, then a constant desire for personal accumulation will inevitably follow. In point of fact everyone who is not working is being supported by the people who are working. It does not matter if you are a retired CEO with 9 digits of personal wealth, or a widow living on social security. In all cases working people produce economic output and give it to the people who are not working any longer. Social security, pension funds, stock funds, etc. are merely claims against the output of the community. The community which we have supported during our working life should support us in our old age without our having to purchase that support with accumulated private wealth.

The question, of course, is how to accomplish these goals without creating a social system that is impossibly bureaucratic and/or authoritarian. Jeff maintains (possibly correctly) that there is no way to accomplish these goals in a complex economy. However, I am unwilling to accept as certain the validity of the argument that if a certain kind of behavior has not appeared for a long period of time then it can never appear. After all the history of life on earth contains many contradictions to this principle; Multicellular life forms, land based life forms, higher intelligence, civilization, modern science, etc only emerged after long periods of time in which these kinds of behavior were completely absent. Thus I indulge in a fantasy that a cooperative, community based economic system and higher civilization may yet merge together. Some of my speculations on this subject can be found Here.

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