The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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СКАЧАТЬ the real world, in other words, a laissez-faire market doesn’t always produce improved access to better and cheaper goods and services, as Smith argued it would;¹³ instead, it can put desirable products out of reach of consumers who would be happy to pay for them, but are not numerous enough to generate enough business to keep a shop from shutting its doors. It can also have disastrous impacts on such non-economic goods as healthy communities. The shift from an economy of local firms, which spent most of their income locally, to an economy of multinational firms that effectively pump money out of most of the world’s communities to concentrate it in a handful of important cities, has played a massive role in the economic debacle that has overwhelmed so many towns and rural regions in the industrial world.

      These effects can be understood by recognizing that a market is a commons, along the lines sketched out by the Garrett –Hardin essay mentioned above. Like any other commons, it can break down when it is not managed in ways that keep the common interest of all participants from being harmed by the actions of individuals. This does not mean that markets ought to be abolished, any more than Hardin’s arguments show that commons ought to be abolished; the idea that markets ought to be replaced by government bureaucracies was tested thoroughly in the Marxist states of the twentieth century and turned out to be a comprehensive flop. What it means, as I propose to show later on in this book, is that the same logic of checks and balances that has proven to work tolerably well in the political sphere needs to be applied to the economic sphere, particularly to those dimensions of economics that overlap with non-economic realities.

      Energy’s Rules

      Despite the problems just outlined, the faith in free markets governed by supply and demand remains central not only to contemporary economics but to much of the modern world’s collective conversation about the future. It’s very common, for example, to hear well-intentioned people insist that the market, as a matter of course, will respond to restricted fossil fuel production by channeling investment funds either into more effective means of producing fossil fuels, on the one hand, or new energy sources on the other. The logic seems impeccable at first glance: as the price of oil, for example, goes up, the profit to be made by bringing more oil or oil substitutes onto the market goes up as well; investors eager to maximize their profits will therefore pour money into ventures producing oil and oil substitutes, and production will rise accordingly until the price comes back down.

      That logic owes much of its influence to the fact that in many cases, markets do behave this way. Like any description of a complex system, though, the use of the invisible hand as an explanatory tool needs to be balanced by an awareness of the situations in which it fails to work. The economics of energy defines one of these situations. Energy, as E. F. Schumacher pointed out,¹⁴ is not simply one commodity among others; it is the ur-commodity, the foundation for all economic activity. It follows laws of its own — the laws of thermodynamics — which are not the same as the laws of economics, and when the two sets of laws come into conflict, the laws of thermodynamics win every time.¹⁵

      For a useful example, consider an agrarian civilization that runs on sunlight, as every human society did until the rise of industrialism three centuries ago. In energetic terms, part of the annual influx of solar energy is collected via agriculture, stored as grain and transformed into mechanical energy by feeding the grain to human laborers and draft animals. It’s an efficient and resilient system, and under suitable conditions it can deploy astonishing amounts of energy; the Great Pyramid is one of the more obvious pieces of evidence for this fact.

      Agrarian civilizations of this kind very often develop thriving market economies in which goods and services are exchanged between individuals. They also develop intricate systems of social abstractions that manage the distribution of these goods and services among their citizens. Both these, however, depend on the continued energy flow from sun to fields to granaries to human and animal labor forces. If something interrupts this flow — say, a failure of the annual grain harvest — the only option that allows for collective survival is to have enough solar energy stored in the granaries to take up the slack.

      This is necessary because energy doesn’t follow the ordinary rules of economic exchange. Most other commodities still exist after they’ve been exchanged for something else, and this makes exchanges reversible; for example, if you’re the pharaoh of Egypt and you sell gold to buy marble for your latest pyramid, and then change your mind, you can normally turn around and sell marble to buy gold. The invisible hand works here: if marble is in short supply, those who have gold and want marble may have to offer more gold for their choice of building materials, but the marble quarries will soon be working overtime to balance things out.

      Energy is different. Once you turn the energy content of a few million bushels of grain into a pyramid, say, by using the grain to feed workers who cut and haul the stones, that energy is gone, and you cannot turn the pyramid back into grain; all you can do is wait until the next harvest. If that harvest fails, and the stored energy in the granaries has already been turned into pyramids, neither the market economy of goods and services or the abstract system of distributing goods and services can make up for it. Nor, of course, can you send an extra ten thousand workers into the fields if you don’t have the grain to keep them alive.

      The peoples of agrarian civilizations generally understood this. It’s part of the tragedy of the modern world that most people nowadays do not, even though our situation is not all that different from theirs. We’re just as dependent on energy inputs from Nature, though our inputs include vast quantities of prehistoric sunlight, in the form of fossil fuels, as well as current solar energy in various forms. Atop that foundation, we have built our own kind of markets to exchange goods and services, and an abstract system for managing the distribution of goods and services — money — that is as heavily wrapped in mythology as anything created by the archaic agrarian civilizations of the past.

      The particular form taken by money in the modern world has certain effects, however, not found in ancient systems. In the old agrarian civilizations, wealth consisted primarily of farmland and its products. The amount of farmland in a kingdom might increase slightly through conquest of neighboring territory or investment in canal systems, though it might equally decrease if a war went badly or canals got wrecked by sandstorms. Everybody hoped when the seed grain went into the fields that the result would be a bumper crop, but no one imagined that the grain stockpiled in the granaries would somehow multiply itself over time. Nowadays, by contrast, it’s assumed as a matter of course that money ought automatically to produce more money.

      That habit of thought has its roots in the three centuries of explosive economic growth that followed the birth of the industrial age. In an expanding economy, the amount of money in circulation needs to expand fast enough to roughly match the expansion in the range of goods and services for sale; when this fails to occur, the shortfall drives up interest rates (that is, the cost of using money) and can cause economic contraction. This was a serious and recurring problem across the industrial world in the nineteenth century, and led reformers in the Progressive era to reshape industrial economies in ways that permitted the money supply to expand over time to match the expectation of growth. Once again, the invisible hand was at work, with some help from legislators: a demand for an expanding money supply eventually gave rise to a system that built a constantly expanding money supply into the foundations of its economy.

      That system, taken very nearly to its furthest possible extreme, is the economy that exists today in most nations of the industrial world. Created in response to an age of unparalleled growth, it assumes that perpetual growth on the same scale is an inevitable fact of economic life. The notion that growth might turn out to be a temporary, if protracted, phenomenon of the recent past, and will not continue into the future, will be found nowhere in contemporary mainstream economics or politics. It’s true, of course, that three centuries of statistics support the idea of perpetual growth; it’s not often remembered that those three centuries represent a tiny and very unusual fraction of humanity’s trajectory on this planet, but there is another problem with those numbers. These СКАЧАТЬ