After I wrote about the front cover before reading the articles, I was concerned that perhaps the cover was an exaggerated attention grabbing device, that the articles would be measured and reasonable, and that I’d have to retract my prediction of how bad it would be. I needn’t have worried: it’s utter toss.
A more dense concentration of economically illiterate drivel is impossible to imagine. The Independent could only dream of reaching such heights of doom-mongery. The writers are the very definition of watermelons. I couldn’t possibly fisk the whole thing. But, some highlights:
- “The graphs climbing across our page are a stark reminder of the crisis facing our planet.” Great big exponential lines with no scales and labels like “Northern hemisphere average surface temperature” (the graph conveniently ends in 2000), “Fisheries exploited”, “Ozone depletion” (huh?) and “Water use” (ah yes, *that* finite resource).
- The Ehrlich equation, I=PAT is presented, where I is impact on the planet, P is population, A is income per person and T is a factor for technology. But technology is what drives growth and simultaneously makes it possible to feed more people and have them earn more with less resources. A person can only *do* so much. For A to go up, T has to come down. Yet the article just assumes that I is proportional to A and concludes that growth is damaging the planet.
- An interview with a zoologist asks is anything is more important than the environment (no) then follows up with “So why do we put the economy first, and use it to define progress?” as if the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, only rich people can afford to care about the environment. “Has any human society ever lived sustainably?” Only hunter-gatherers, apparently. Well, if that’s what it takes…
- Ecological economist Herman Daly’s article is all about how the world is a finite resource that the economy uses up. The amount of water, land, air and minerals is fixed. The only way to get richer is to use more of these. Water can’t be re-used (it gets dirty). Agriculture can’t get more efficient. We just run out of minerals and don’t develop more efficient ways of using them when they get more expensive to dig up. Human labour has no value. Food is not a renewable resource.
- “The last line of defence for advocates of indefinite global economic growth is that it is needed to eradicate poverty. This argument is at best disingenuous.” Apparently it’s a myth that when rich people get richer, poor people do too. Outsourcing to places like India doesn’t really happen, Africans don’t have mobile phones, and better farming methods can’t possibly help starving people. No, “we have to overcome our knee-jerk rejection of the ‘R’ word — redistribution.” Never mind that it discourages production and doesn’t really help the recipients.
- “Politically, ecological Keynesianism is a win-win scenario”.
- Adam Smith is quoted. “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Except the key word is masters. He was talking about “ancient methods of expense” such as feudalism where landlords simply maintain their property and thereby become the masters of their tenants. He contrasts this with those who consume goods, thereby “maintaining tradesmen and artificers” who are not dependent solely on one rich person and are therefore free. Watermelons are red on the inside and can not be expected to grasp this point.
- “Want to do your bit?” “Buy less stuff. And join Friends of the Earth.”
- “How we kicked our addiction to growth”, a fictional scenario, is just Herman Daly’s masturbatory fantasy. “…a cap-and-trade system, under which companies can buy and sell emissions permits. This is working well for reducing carbon emissions, for example.” “All that excess supermarket packaging disappeared overnight.” “We are gradually redistributing resources by setting upper limits for income inequality.” It doesn’t say how. “…we only make what we need, and products are built to last — so no more fun consumer tech that has to be updated every six months.”
What all of this misses is that economic growth does not depend on increased consumption of resources. It depends on finding better ways of doing things with what we have. This is even admitted in the introductory article. “But, as Daly says, shifting from growth to development doesn’t have mean freezing in the dark under communist tyranny. Technological innovation would give us more from the resources we have…” But “development” and “technological innovation” *are* growth. Somehow the dots aren’t connected, and we’re presented with a vision of what looks awfully like communist tyranny.
Oddly enough, immediately before the section on growth is an excellent article by Jim Horne explaining that modern life does not make us sleep-deprived, as we are led to believe.
Compare today’s sleeping conditions with those of a typical worker of 150 years ago, who toiled for 14 hours a day, six days a week, then went home to an impoverished, cold damp, noisy house and shared a bed not only with the rest of the family but with bedbugs and fleas.
Does it take significantly more resources to live in a comfortable, clean, warm, dry house? Not really. Does it need economic growth? Yes, because without it everyone will be toiling at just keeping themselves fed and alive and won’t have the time for inventing double glazing and building nice warm houses or the spare money to buy them with.