The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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СКАЧАТЬ sense less productive, since the only value credit swaps have is that they can, under certain arbitrary conditions, be converted into funds that can buy concrete goods and services, such as potatoes. By the standards of productivity universal in the industrial world these days, however, replacing potato farmers with whatever you call the people who manufacture credit swaps counts as an increase in productivity. If you have been wondering why so many corporations with no obvious connection to the world of finance, such as auto manufacturers, launched large financial branches in recent decades, this is part of the reason why: the higher income per worker hour from manufacturing financial paper enables the firm to claim increases in productivity.

      As important as the misinformation produced by these inappropriate statistical measurements, however, is the void that results because more important figures are not being collected at all. In an age that will increasingly be constrained by energy limits, for example, a more useful measure of productivity might be energy productivity — that is, output per barrel of oil equivalent (BOE) of energy consumed. An economy that produces more value with less energy input is an economy better suited to a future of energy constraints, and the relative position of different nations, to say nothing of the trend line of their energy productivity over time, would provide useful information to governments, investors and the general public alike.

      Even when energy was still cheap and abundant, the fixation on labor productivity was awash with mordant irony, because only in times of relatively robust economic growth did workers who were rendered surplus by such “productivity gains” readily find jobs elsewhere. At least as often, they added to the rolls of the unemployed, or pushed others onto those rolls, fueling the growth of an impoverished underclass. With the end of the age of cheap energy, though, the fixation on labor efficiency promises to become a millstone around the neck of the world’s industrial economies.

      Economic Superstitions

      After all, a world that has nearly seven billion people on it and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels can do without the assumption that putting people out of work and replacing them with machines powered by fossil fuels is the way to prosperity. This is one of the unlearned lessons of the global economy that is now coming to an end around us. While it was billed by friends and foes alike as the triumph of corporate capitalism, globalization can more usefully be understood as an attempt to prop up the illusion of economic growth by transferring the production of goods and services to economies that are, by the standards just mentioned, less efficient than those of the industrial world. Outside the industrial nations, labor proved to be enough cheaper than energy that the result was profitable, and allowed industrial nations to maintain their inflated standards of living for a few more years.

      At the same time, the brief heyday of the global economy was only made possible by a glut of petroleum that made transportation costs negligible. That glut is ending as world oil production begins to decline, while the Third World nations that profited most by globalization cash in their newfound wealth for a larger share of the world’s energy resources, putting further pressure on a balance of power that is already tipping against the United States and its allies. The implications for the lifestyles of most Americans will not be welcome.

      To extract ourselves from the corner into which we have backed ourselves, however, requires coming to terms with the fact that a very large number of the previous choices all of us have made were founded on folly. If we lived in a world in which people always made rational decisions to maximize benefits to themselves, recognizing our past folly would be simply another rational decision, but in the real world things are not quite so simple. To understand why, it’s necessary to talk a little about the role of superstition in human affairs.

      In the area where I live, the Appalachian mountains of eastern North America, superstition is very much a living phenomenon. Many local gardeners, for example, choose times to plant seeds according to the signs and phases of the moon. This habit may reasonably be considered a superstition, but that word has a subtler meaning than most people remember these days. A superstition is literally something “standing over” (in Latin, super stitio) from a previous age; more precisely, it’s an observance that has become detached from its meaning over time. A great many of today’s superstitions thus descend from the religious observances of archaic faiths. When my wife’s Welsh great-grandmother set a dish of milk outside the back door for luck, for example, she likely had no idea that her pagan ancestors did the same thing as an offering to the local tutelary spirits.

      Yet there’s often a remarkable substrate of ecological common sense interwoven with such rites. If your livelihood depends on the fields around your hut, for example, and rodents are among the major threats you face, a ritual that will attract cats and other small predators to the vicinity of your back door night after night is not exactly foolish. The Japanese country folk who consider foxes the messengers of Inari the rice god, and put out offerings of fried tofu to attract them, are mixing agricultural ecology with folk religion in exactly the same way; in Japan, foxes are one of the main predators that control the population of agricultural pests. The logic behind planting by the signs is a bit more complex, but it may not be irrelevant that the sequence of signs include all the tasks needed to keep a garden or a farm thriving, more or less equally spaced around the lunar month, and a gardener who works by the signs can count on getting the whole sequence of gardening chores done in an order and a timing that consistently works well.

      There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the world of superstition. Nearly all cultures that get any significant amount of their food from hunting, for example, use divination to decide where to hunt on any given day. According to game theory, the best strategy in any competition has to include a random element in order to keep the other side guessing. Most prey animals are quite clever enough to figure out a nonrandom pattern of hunting — there’s a reason why deer across America head into suburbs and towns, where hunting isn’t allowed, as soon as hunting season opens each year — so inserting a random factor into hunting strategy pays off in increased kills over time. As far as we know, humans are the only animals that make decisions with the aid of horoscopes, tarot cards, yarrow stalks and the like, and it’s intriguing to think that this habit may have had a significant role in our evolutionary success.

      Is this all there is to the practice of superstition? It’s a good question, but one that’s effectively impossible to answer. For all I know, the ancient civilizations that built vast piles of stone to the honor of their gods may have been entirely right to say that Marduk, Osiris, Kukulcan et al. were well pleased by having big temples erected in their honor, and reciprocated by granting peace and prosperity to their worshippers. It may just be a coincidence that directing the boisterous energy of young men into some channel more constructive than street gangs or civil war is a significant social problem in most civilizations, and giving teams of young men huge blocks of stone to haul around, in hot competition with other teams, consistently seems to do the trick. It may also be a coincidence that convincing the very rich to redistribute their wealth by employing huge numbers of laborers on vanity buildings provides a steady boost to even the simplest urban economy. Maybe this is how Kukulcan shows that he’s well pleased.

      Still, there’s a wild card in the deck, because it’s possible for even the most useful superstition to become a major source of problems when conditions change. When the classic lowland Mayan civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its fragile environment, for example, the Mayan elite responded to the rising spiral of crisis by building more and bigger temples. That had worked in the past, but it failed to work this time, because the situation was different; the problem had stopped being one of managing social stresses within Mayan society, and turned into one of managing the collapsing relationship between Mayan society and the natural systems that supported it. This turned what had been an adaptive strategy into a disastrously maladaptive one, as resources and labor that might have been put to use in the struggle to maintain a failing agricultural system went instead to a final spasm of massive construction projects. This time, Kukulcan was not pleased, and lowland Mayan civilization came apart in a rolling collapse that turned a proud civilization into crumbling ruins.

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