The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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СКАЧАТЬ of energy available per person puts an upper limit on the level of economic development possible in a society, though other forms of development — social, intellectual, spiritual — can still be pursued in a setting where hard limits on energy restrict economic life.

      Third, Schumacher stressed the importance of a variable left out of most economic analyses — the cost per worker of establishing and maintaining a workplace. Only the abundant capital, ample energy supplies and established infrastructure of the world’s industrial nations, he argued, made it possible for businesses and governments in those nations to treat replacing human labor with technology as a benefit. In the nonindustrial world, where the most urgent economic task was not the production of specialty goods for global markets but the provision of paid employment and basic necessities to the local population, attempts at industrialization have commonly turned into costly mistakes. Schumacher’s involvement in intermediate technology unfolded from this realization; he pointed out that in a great many situations, a relatively simple technology that relied on human hands and minds to meet local needs with local resources was the most viable response to the economic needs of nonindustrial nations.

      Finally, and most centrally, Schumacher pointed out that the failures of contemporary economics could not be solved by improved mathematical models or more detailed statistics, because they were hardwired into the assumptions underlying economics itself. Every way of thinking about the world rests ultimately on presuppositions that are, strictly speaking, metaphysical in Nature: that is, they deal with fundamental questions about what exists and what has value. Trying to ignore the metaphysical dimension does not make it go away, but rather simply ensures that those who make this attempt will be blindsided whenever the real world fails to behave according to their unexamined assumptions. Contemporary economics fails to predict the behavior of the economy because it fails to criticize its own underlying metaphysics. Thus, a hard look at those basic assumptions is an unavoidable part of straightening out the mess into which current economic ideas have helped land us.

      These four propositions are among the key points made in Schumacher’s most famous book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, which was published in 1973 to immediate acclaim. Theodore Roszak spoke for many perceptive thinkers at that time in the closing words of his introduction: “We need a nobler economics that is not afraid to discuss spirit and conscience, moral purpose and the meaning of life, an economics that aims to educate and elevate people, not merely to measure their low-grade behavior. Here it is.”² The more thoughtful end of the alternative scene of the seventies took Schumacher’s ideas as one of the core foundations of its thought and practice; it’s no exaggeration to say that any bookshelf in that decade that had a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News on it generally had a copy of Small Is Beautiful perched nearby.

      Like the rest of the alternative thinking of that decade, Schumacher’s work went into eclipse in the following decades as industrial societies abandoned the promising steps toward sustainability taken in the seventies and embraced a radical new ideology that insisted on the free market’s infallibility. For a while, that new ideology seemed to work, but its successes rested on a foundation rarely discussed, then or later. The seventies had been defined in part by repeated energy crises and resulting economic troubles. Those difficulties helped catalyze a sharp decrease in energy use in the world’s industrial nations; it also drove frenzied efforts to locate untapped petroleum reserves — efforts that, as it happened, turned up large fields in the North Sea and Alaska’s North Slope.

      A reasonable approach to energy policy would have treated those discoveries as vital sources of energy to fill in the gaps while industrial nations made the transition to a new economy powered by renewable sources and structured to maximize energy efficiency — exactly the policy that Schumacher, among many others, detailed in his writings. Unfortunately for all of us, that was not what happened. Instead, the North Sea and North Slope fields were pumped at a breakneck pace, flooding oil markets around the world with cheap oil and sending prices plummeting to what, corrected for inflation, was their lowest level in history. As the efficiencies and innovative programs of the seventies gave way to the extravagances of the eighties and nineties, the possibility of a smooth transition to a sustainable future went by the boards.

      We are now living with the first consequences of that monumentally short-sighted decision. The wild swings in energy costs, the even wilder cycles of economic boom and bust and the sharp impacts of all this volatility on the social and political fabric of the world’s industrial nations have their source in the disastrous mismatch between an economic and technological system geared to exponential growth and the hard limits of a finite planet.³ The consequences to our descendants will be even more extreme. Still, it may be possible to mitigate the worst of those consequences, and make life considerably easier for generations to come, by revisioning the ways that human societies deal with the production and distribution of goods and services. The crisis of the present makes such a revisioning necessary, but it also provides a window of opportunity in which such a revision might just be able to find its way from theory into practice.

      This book is meant to further that hard but necessary process. I am not a professional economist, and the cult of expertise that pervades modern culture may make it seem presumptuous for someone without an economics degree to suggest a redefinition of contemporary economics. It may seem even more presumptuous in that several movements toward an ecologically sane economics have risen since Schumacher’s time; economists such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly and Robert Costanza have presented densely reasoned works of economic theory arguing for the inclusion of the value of “natural capital” — in Schumacher’s terms, primary goods — in economic calculations, and challenging the simplistic ways that conventional economic thought brushes aside environmental destruction and resource depletion as nonissues.

      Still, it may be worth noting that Adam Smith did not have an economics degree, and his pathbreaking study of economics lacked any trace of the intricate mathematical formulations that today’s economists too often consider essential to their craft. Smith worked instead on the level of fundamental ideas; Schumacher, whose writings are just as sparse in their use of calculations, did the same; so, in its own way, does this book. Like Smith’s and Schumacher’s works, too, this book is not addressed to economists. Rather, its goal is to communicate the failure of modern economics, and potential solutions to the crises driven by that failure, to the audience that has the final say in matters of public policy: the public itself.

      The predicament into which industrial civilization has backed itself at the end of the age of cheap energy, the subject of my previous books The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future, has a crucial economic dimension, and The Wealth of Nature is intended to help make sense of that dimension by applying E. F. Schumacher’s Copernican revolution in economic thought to the crisis of our time. If the ideas suggested here inspire others to rethink the foundations of contemporary economics, and set aside some of the mistaken ideas that have so consistently blocked a sane response to the largely unacknowledged roots of our current troubles, this book will have done its work.

THE FAILURE of ECONOMICS

      IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that you are on board a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean. You wake in the middle of the night with an uneasy feeling, as if trouble is brewing. You get dressed and go on deck. It’s a clear night with a steady wind, and you can see some distance over the water; as you glance off to starboard, though there is no land in sight, you are horrified to see waves crashing over black jagged rocks not far from the ship, setting the sea afoam.

      You hurry aft to the midship bridge to warn the crew members on watch, and find the first mate and several other crew members sitting there, calmly smoking their pipes and paying no attention to the rocks. When you ask them about the rocks, they deny that any such thing СКАЧАТЬ