Peak Oil and Economic Growth: Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted by Nate Hagens on March 28, 2008 - 10:40am
Topic: Economics/Finance
Tags: Brian Czech, CASSE, growth, Herman Daly, Rob Dietz, steady state economy, uneconomic growth [list all tags]
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
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):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 Nat