Global Warming Heat Meter

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Elizabeth Warren on Debt Crisis, Fair Taxation

A new clean energy deployment administration

A new clean energy deployment administration: pWe need CEDA to help channel private capital flows toward deployment of clean energy in this country. CAP’s Jake Caldwell and Richard W. Caperton, explain why. The U.S. Senate is finally preparing to take action on clean energy and climate legislation. And whatever form the final legislation takes, it must provide tools to drive renewable [...]/p

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Robert F. Kennedy challenged our Ponzi scheme pursuit of growth for growth’s sake, much as his heir, Barack Obama, does

Robert F. Kennedy challenged our Ponzi scheme pursuit of growth for growth’s sake, much as his heir, Barack Obama, does: "pRobert F. Kennedy was assassinated 41 years ago last week. He challenged our monomaniacal pursuit of GDP in “one of the most beautiful of his speeches,” as Obama described it an August 2008 NYT profile of his economic thinking. Obama is one of the few major politicians who constantly challenges our unsustainable economic worldview today [...]/p"

Friday, July 22, 2011

Blog This Rock: Poem of the Week: Susan Brennan

Blog This Rock: Poem of the Week: Susan Brennan: "Poets Against the War We stand at the Capitol seized in snapshots of curious tourists our rumpled posters reflect ..."

Sunday, April 10, 2011

In the Face of Catastrophe: A Surprise by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books

In the Face of Catastrophe: A Surprise by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books

Ecological Armageddon by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

Ecological Armageddon by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott by Ann Douglas | The New York Review of Books

Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott by Ann Douglas | The New York Review of Books

Obama and the Republicans by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books

Obama and the Republicans by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books

Carter and the New Constitution by Sheldon S. Wolin | The New York Review of Books

Carter and the New Constitution by Sheldon S. Wolin | The New York Review of Books

A Special Supplement: The Meaning of Vietnam by Stuart Hampshire, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Garry Wills | The New York Review of Books

A Special Supplement: The Meaning of Vietnam by Stuart Hampshire, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Garry Wills | The New York Review of Books

A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli by Isaiah Berlin | The New York Review of Books

A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli by Isaiah Berlin | The New York Review of Books

The New Conservatives by Sheldon S. Wolin | The New York Review of Books

The New Conservatives by Sheldon S. Wolin | The New York Review of Books

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Elephant Man by John Gregory Dunne | The New York Review of Books

Elephant Man by John Gregory Dunne | The New York Review of Books

Lifting the Silent Depression by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

Lifting the Silent Depression by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

Lifting the Silent Depression by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

Lifting the Silent Depression by Robert L. Heilbroner | The New York Review of Books

The Solzhenitsyn Archipelago by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of Books

The Solzhenitsyn Archipelago by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of Books

Notes of a Neolithic Conservative March 26, 1970 Paul Goodman

1. For green grass and clean rivers, children with bright eyes and good color, and people safe from being pushed around—for a few things like these, I find I am pretty ready to think away most other political, economic, and technological advantages.
Some Conservatives seem to want to go back to the Administration of McKinley. But when people are subject to universal social engineering and the biosphere itself is in danger, we need a more neolithic conservatism. So I propose maxims like “the right purpose of elementary schooling is to delay socialization” and “innovate in order to simplify, otherwise as sparingly as possible.”
Liberals want to progress, that is, to up the rate of growth by political means. But if the background conditions are tolerable, society will probably progress anyway, for people have energy, curiosity, and ingenuity. All the resources of the State cannot anyway educate a child, improve a neighborhood, give dignity to an oppressed man. Sometimes the state can provide capital for people to do for themselves; but mostly it should stop standing in the way and doing damage and wasting wealth. Political power may come out of the barrel of a gun, but, as John L. Lewis said, “You can’t dig coal with bayonets.”
2. Edmund Burke had a good idea of conservatism, that existing community bonds are destroyed at peril; they are not readily replaced, society becomes superficial and government illegitimate. It takes the rising of a prophet or some other irrational cataclysm to create new community bonds. It is like a love affair or a marriage—unless there is severe moral disagreement or actual physical revulsion, it is wiser to stay with it and blow on the embers, than to be happily not in love or not married at all. The hard decisions, of course, are when people imagine that they are already in love elsewhere; but nations of people are rather cautious about this.
In his American policy, Burke was a good conservative; he was willing to give up everything else to conserve the community bonds. It is just here that phony conservatives become trimmers and tokenists and talk about “virtual representation” or “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” protecting their vested interests. A proof that the American Revolution was justified is that the British government did not take Burke’s and Pitt’s advice. Later, during the French Revolution, Burke was a sentimentalist clinging to the bygone, for after Louis tried to go over to the invaders, there were no community bonds left to conserve.
3. The problem is to avoid emergency, when dictatorship is inevitable and decent people sometimes commit enormities. There was the real emergency of Hitler, and we have not yet finished with the growth of the military-industrial that was rooted back there. But Woodrow Wilson foresaw the military-industrial in 1916 and we did get out of it. So long as ancient Rome had vitality, it was able to dismiss its dictatorships. We, however, have trumped up the at least partly paranoiac emergency of the Cold War now for more than twenty years.
But the worst is the metaphysical emergency of Modern Times: feeling powerless in immense social organizations; desperately relying on technological means to solve problems caused by previous technological means; and when urban areas are already technically and fiscally unworkable, extrapolating and planning for bigger urban areas. Then, “Nothing can be done.”
I think it is first to escape feeling trapped that I improvise dumb-bunny alternatives. I can then show that the reasons men are not free are only political and psychological, not metaphysical. Unlike most other “social critics,” I am rather scrupulous about not attacking unless I can think up an alternative or two, to avoid rousing metaphysical anxiety. Usually, indeed, I do not have critical feelings unless I first imagine something different and begin to improvise upon it. With much of the business of our society, my intuition is to forget it.
4. Coleridge was the most philosophical of the conservatives writing in English: “To have citizens, we must first be sure we have produced men”—or conserved them. The context of this remark, in The Constitution of the Church and State, was his critique of the expropriation of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The property was rightly taken away from the Whore of Babylon, to stop the drain of wealth from England to Rome; but Coleridge argued that it should then have been consigned to other moral and cultural institutions, to produce men, rather than thrown into the general economy. He made the same point vividly in another passage, in The Friend. A Manchester economist had said that an isolated village that took no part in the national trade was of no importance. “What, sir,” said Coleridge, “are 700 Christian souls of no importance?” The English factory towns destroyed people for the economy. We increasingly do not even need people for the economy.
As a man of letters, I am finally most like Coleridge (with a dash of Matthew Arnold when the vulgarity of liberalism gets me by the throat). Maybe what we have in common is our obsessional needs, his drug addiction and my frustrated homosexuality. These keep us in touch with animal hunger, so we are not overly impressed by progress, the Gross National Product, and credentials and status. For addicts and other starving people, the world has to come across in kind. It doesn’t.
My homosexual acts have made me a [negro], subject to arbitrary brutality and debased when my outgoing impulse is not taken for granted as a right. It is not that I don’t get what I want; nobody (except small children) has a claim to be loved. But there is a way of rejecting someone that accords him his right to exist and be himself and is the next best thing to accepting him. I have rarely enjoyed this treatment.
Stokely Carmichael once told me and Allen Ginsberg that our homosexual need was not like being black because we could always conceal it and pass. That is, he accorded us the lack of imagination that one accords to [negroes]. (Incidentally, this dialogue was taking place on national TV, that haven of secrecy.)
A vital [negro] can respond with various kinds of spite, depending on his character. He can be ready to destroy everything, since there is no world to lose. Or he might develop an in-group fanaticism of his own kind. In my case, being a [negro] seems to inspire me to want a more elementary humanity, wilder, less structured, more variegated. The thing is to have a Liberation Front that does not end up in a Nation State, but abolishes the boundaries.
5. Usually we ought to work to diminish social anxiety, but to break down arbitrary boundaries we have to risk heightening social anxiety. Some boundaries, of course, are just the limits of our interests and people beyond them are indifferent or exotic. But as soon as we begin to notice a boundary between us and others, we project our own unacceptable traits on those across the boundary, and they become foreigners, heretics, untouchables, persons exploited as things. By their very existence, they threaten or tempt us, and we must squelch them, patronize them, or with missionary zeal make them shape up.
Thus, the excluded or repressed are always right in their rebellion, for they stand for our future wholeness. And their demands must always seem wrong-headed, their style uncalled for, and their actions to violate due process. But as in any psychotherapy, the problem is to tolerate anxiety and stay with it, rather than to panic and be in an emergency.
Curiously, the half-baked and noisy culture of the young is hopeful in this respect just because it is so dreadful. It is embarrassed or brazen, sometimes resigned, sometimes spiteful, but it is not up tight. It is a kind of folk art of urban confusion, and where there is a folk art there might get to be a high art. It is not advance-guard, for they don’t know enough to have an edge to leap from. It is not even eclectic but a farrago of misunderstood styles. But it is without some previous boundaries. There is something in its tribalism, as they call it. It is somewhat a folk international. And it is boring, like all folk art; a little bit goes a long way.
6. Lord Acton, who understood conservatism, praises the character—George Washington was a good example—that is conservative in disposition but resolute in the disruptive action that has to be performed. A good surgeon minimizes post-operative shock, and having cut, he at once resumes as a physician, saying, “Nature heals, not the doctor.” The advantage of a conservative, even backtracking, disposition in a successful revolutionary is to diminish the danger of take-over by new bosses who invariably are rife with plans. After the American Revolution, the conservative disposition of the chief leaders blessed us with those twenty-five years of quasianarchy in national affairs, during which we learned whatever has made the American experiment worthwhile. “It’s a free country, you can’t make me”—every immigrant child learned to say it for over a century. The same would have occurred in the French Revolution if they had enjoyed our geographic isolation from invasion. The first French revolutionary leaders were the reverse of Jacobin; Danton wanted to get back to his wine and girls. But a defect of Leninist revolutions is that, from the beginning, they are made by Leninists. They have ideas.
7. I myself have a conservative, maybe timid, disposition; yet I trust that the present regime in America will get a lot more roughing up than it has, from the young who resent being processed; from the blacks who have been left out; from housewives and others who buy real goods with hard money at inflationary prices hiked by expense accounts and government subsidies; from professionals demanding their autonomy, rather than being treated as personnel of the front office; from every live person in jeopardy because of the bombs and CBW. Our system can stand, and profit by plenty of interruption of business as usual. It is not such a delicate Swiss watch as all that. Our danger is not in the loosening of the machine, but in its tightening up by panic repression.
8. It is true that because of massive urbanization and interlocking technologies, advanced countries are vulnerable to catastrophic disruption, and this creates a perceptible anxiety. But there is far more likelihood of breakdown from the respectable ambitions of Eastern Airlines and Consolidated Edison than from the sabotage of revolutionaries.
In a large modern complex society, it is said, any rapid global “revolutionary” or “utopian” change can be incalculably destructive. I agree; but I wish people would remember that the Establishment itself has continually introduced big rapid changes that have in fact produced incalculable shock. Consider, in the past generation, the TV, mass higher schooling, the complex of cars, roads, and suburbanization, mass air travel, the complex of plantations, chain grocers, and forced urbanization; not to speak of the meteoric rise of the military industries and the Vietnam War and the draft. In all these, there has been a big factor of willful decision; these have not been natural processes or inevitable catastrophes. And we have not begun to compound with the problems caused by these utopian changes. Rather, in what seems an amazingly brief time, we have come to a political, cultural, and religious crisis that must be called pre-revolutionary—and all because of a few willful fools.
9. There is also authentic confusion, however, not caused by bad will. Worldwide, we are going through a rapidly stepped-up collectivization which is, in my opinion, inevitable. I have just been watching the first lunar landing and the impression of collectivity is overwhelming. We do not know how to cope with the dilemmas of it. Surely the only prudent course is to try piecemeal to defend and extend the areas of liberty, locally, on the job, and in mores. Any violent collective “remedy” would be certainly totalitarian, whatever the ideology.
Needless to say, I myself have hankered after and pushed global institutional changes: Drastic cut-back of the military industries, of the school system, and of the penal system; giving the city streets back to the children by banning the cars, and the cities back to the citizens by neighborhood government; vigorous nourishment of decentralized mass-communications and rural reconstruction; guaranteed income and a sector of free appropriation. I look for the kind of apprentice system that would produce workers’ management, and the kind of guild association that would affirm authentic professionalism. The effects of these changes are also incalculable; it is hard to think through the consequences in our society that would flow from any and all of them. But I believe that in the fairly short run they would be stabilizing rather than explosive.
10. A moment’s reflection will show that in any advanced society there is bound to be a mixture of enterprises run collectively and those run by individuals and small companies; and either kind of management may try to be busy and growing or conservatively content to satisfy needs. Thus, there are always “socialism” and “free enterprise,” “production for profit” and “production for use.” The interesting political question is what is the right proportion and location of these factors in the particular society in the particular circumstances. Safety from exploitation, safety from bureaucratic tyranny, flexibility and style of innovation, the possibility of countervailing power, all those political things depend on this balance. But cost efficiency also depends on it: “For any set of technological and social conditions, there is probably a rough optimum proportion of types of enterprise, or better, limits of unbalance beyond which the system gives sharply diminishing returns. A good mixed system would remain within the efficient range.” (People or Personnel, ch. V)
But nobody wants to explore this subject any more. When I was young, it used to be a respectable liberal ideology called the Scandinavian Way. Now if I say that a mixture is inevitable and desirable, it is dismissed as “common sense,” meaning a trivial platitude.
Since I am often on Canadian TV and radio, I tell it to the Canadians. If they would cut the American corporations down to size, it would cost them three or four years of high unemployment and austerity, but then Canada could become the most livable nation in the world, like Denmark but rich in resources, space, and heterogeneous population, with its own corporations, free businesses, cooperatives, a reasonable amount of socialism, a sector of communism or guaranteed income as fits modern productivity, plenty of farmers, cities not yet too big, plenty of scientists and academics, a decent traditional bureaucracy, a non-aligned foreign policy. A great modern nation not yet too far gone in modern mistakes. There would be a flood of excellent immigrants from the south.
11. In one of his later books, The Third World War, C. Wright Mills had a conventional proposition far below his usual strong sense. The concentration of decision-making in our interlocking institutions, he argued, makes possible big changes for the better if the decision-makers can be rightly influenced—he seemed to be thinking of John Kennedy. It is doubtful if any administrator indeed has the kind of power to make an important change of policy; by the end of 1961, the Kennedy people complained that they could not. But even if it would and could make policy, concentrated power can’t produce human results anyway; it freezes what it touches. But, there is perhaps a different kind of truth in Mills’s idea. The interlocking of institutions, the concentration of decision-making, and the mass communications are the things that render people powerless, including the decision-makers; yet because of these same things, if freedom-loving people, honest professionals, or any other resolute group, indeed fight it out on their own issues, the odds are against them but their action is bound to have resonance and influence. In a reckless sentence in Growing Up Absurd I said, “One has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people in all walks of life stand up on their two feet and talk out and insist, we shall get back our country”—and damned if I don’t still think so, with more evidence than I had then.
12. The right style in planning is to eliminate the intermediary, that which is neither use, nor making for use. We ought to cut down commutation, transport, administration, overhead, communications, hanging around waiting. On the other hand, there are very similar functions that we ought to encourage; like travel and trade, brokering, amenity, conversation, and loitering, the things that make up the busy and idle city, celebrated by Jane Jacobs. The difference seems to be that in logistics, systems, and communications, the soul is on ice till the intermediary activity is over with; in traffic, brokering, and conversation people are thrown with others and something might turn up. It is the difference between urbanism that imperially imposes its pattern on city and country both, and the city of squares and shops and contrasting rural life.
It was the genius of American pragmatism, our great contribution to world Philosophy, to show that the means define and color the ends, to find value in operations and materials, to dignify workmanship and the workaday, to make consummation less isolated, more in process forward, growth as well as good. But in recent decades there has occurred an astonishing reversal: the tendency of American philosophy, e.g. analytical logic or cybernetics, has been to drain value from both making and use, from either the working and the materials or from moral and psychological goods, and to define precisely by the intermediary logistics, system, and communications, what Max Weber called rationalization. The medium is all the message there is. The pragmatists added to value, especially in everyday affairs. Systems analysis has drained value, except for a few moments of collective achievement. Its planning refines and streamlines the intermediary as if for its own sake; it adds constraints without enriching life. If the computation makes no difference to the data or the result, e.g. “garbage in, garbage out,” then, to a pragmatist, the computation adds to the garbage. In fact, the computation abstracts from the data what it can handle, and limits the possibilities to the questions. Certainly, cybernetics could be enriching, as psychiatry or as ecology, but it has not yet been so—an exception is the work of Bateson.
It is interesting to notice the change in the style of scientific explanation. At the turn of the century they spoke of evolution, struggle, coping, the logic of inquiry. Now they emphasize code, homeostasis, feedback, the logic of structure.
13. A decade ago it was claimed that there was an end to ideology, for the problems of modern society have to be coped with pragmatically, functionally, piecemeal. This seems to have been a poor prediction, in view of the deafening revival of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and Law and Order rhetoric. Yet it was true, but not in the sense in which it was offered. The ideological rhetoric is pretty irrelevant; but the pragmatic, functional, and piecemeal approach has not, as was expected, consigned our problems to the province of experts, administrators, and engineers, but has thrown them to the dissenters. Relevant new thought has not been administrative and technological, but existentialist, ethical, and tactical. Administrators and planners write books about the universities and cities, extrapolating from the trends—and asking for funds; but history does not seem to be going in their direction.
Rather, pragmatism has come to be interpreted to include the character of the agents as part of the problem to be solved; it is psychoanalytic; there is stress on engagement. (Incidentally, this is good Jamesian pragmatism.) Functionalism has come to mean criticizing the program and the function itself, asking who wants to do it and why, and is it humanly worth doing. Piecemeal issues have gotten entangled with the political action of the people affected by them. Instead of becoming more administrative as expected, affairs are becoming more political. The premises of expertise and planning are called into question. The credentials of the board of trustees are scrutinized. Professionalism is a dirty word. Terms like “commitment,” “dialogue,” “confrontation,” “community,” “do your thing” are indeed anti-ideological—and sometimes they do not connote much other thought either; but they are surely not what The End of Ideology had in mind. And it turns out that they are relevant to the conditions of complex modern societies.
14. An advantage I have had over many others—I don’t know whether by luck or by character—is that I have never had to do, nor forced myself to do, what was utterly alien to me. I was good at school work and liked it. From age fifteen I never had a job that was altogether useless, or harmful, or mere busywork, or that did not use some of my powers, so that I could try to do a good job in my own style. This does not mean that I did what I wanted. Sometimes the work was unpleasant or boring and it was almost never what I should have been used for. I was poor, without connections, bisexual, and socially inept, so that I was always driven by need and had to take what turned up, without choices. But I could not do—I did not consider as a possibility—anything that I could not somewhat identify with. If somebody had offered me a stupid job at good pay, I could hardly have refused, but this never happened. I always worked hard in a way that made sense to myself—and sometimes got fired. I often had no job at all, and wrote stories.
It is devastating that this is not the common condition. If people go through motions that do not make sense to them and do not have their allegiance, just for wages or other extrinsic rewards, there is an end to common sense and self-respect. Character is made by behaviors we initiate; if we initiate what we do not mean, we get sick. And we see, the accumulation of such motions that are not continually checked up as meant can produce calamities.
15. The time I spend on politics—it is not much time but it is more than I have—is a fair example of how I work at what is mine but is onerous and boring. As a conservative anarchist, I believe that to seek for Power is otiose, yet I want to derange as little as possible the powers that be; I am eager to sign off as soon as conditions are tolerable, so people can go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships. Naturally, politics is not for me. In principle I agree with the hippies. They become political when they are indignant, as at the war or racist laws, and they also have to work at power and politics in order to protect their own business and community, e.g. against police harassment; but otherwise they rightly judge that radicals are in a bag.
But I am political because of an idiotic concept of myself as a man of letters: I am that kind of writer who must first have done his duty as a citizen, father, and so forth. Inevitably, my disastrous model is John Milton—and it’s a poor state to be waiting to go blind in order to be free to write a big poem. But at least, thereby, I write with a good conscience. I do not have to be a political poet. I am immune from the stupidity of Sartre’s artist engagé—how the devil would an artist, relying on the random spirit as we do, choose whether or not to be engagé?
16. In normal fiscal conditions, the way for free citizens to check the government has been to grant or refuse taxes, usually through the parliament, but if both the parliament and the government are illegitimate, by individual refusal. At present, some are refusing their Federal taxes, or 70 percent of the amount, in protest against the armaments and, of course, the Vietnam War. (They estimate the military budget as about 70 percent of the total.)
I agree with the principle of refusal, yet, except for the surtax and the telephone tax, I pay the taxes because of a moral scruple; for in the present fiscal set-up, the kind of money I get is not really pay for my work, is not mine, but belongs to the very System I object to. I have a comfortable income. I well deserve an adequate one and a little more; I worked hard till forty-five years of age, and brought up children, on an income in the lowest tenth of the population; nor have I found that my late-come wealth has changed my thoughts, work, or even much my standard of living. But most of my money is “soft” money, from the military economy and the wasteful superstructure, and I cannot see how I am justified to keep Caesar’s share from dribbling back to him through my hands. For instance, I am paid a large sum to give a lecture—mainly because I am a “name” and they want to make their series prestigious; the lecture series is financed by a Foundation; and you do not need to scratch hard to find military-industrial corporations supporting that Foundation—perhaps as a tax dodge! I give the lecture innocently enough; I am probably not indispensable to give it, but I do by best and say my say. But it would not help to refuse the money, or most of it, since by Parkinson’s law that all the soft money will be spent, the money will certainly be spent.
I wouldn’t know how to estimate the pay that I get for hard work in hard money, on which I would feel justified in refusing the tax because it is mine to give or refuse, but it cannot be much of the whole. There is an hypothesis that in our society pay is inversely proportional to effort. The idea, I guess, is that big money accrues from being in the System, and the higher you are in the System, the less you move your ass. But empirically it is not quite accurate. Top managers and professionals work hard for long hours for high pay; those on a thirty-six-hour week work much less, for varying pay; farmers, hospital orderlies, dishwashers, and others work very hard for miserable pay; some students work hard and it costs them money; unemployable people do not work for inadequate pay. In my experience there has been no relation whatever between effort and pay. For twenty years I averaged a few hundred dollars a year for good writing that I now make good royalties on; I work hard for a possibly useful cause and lay out fare and a contribution, or I do the same work at a State college for a handsome honorarium and expenses. Third class on planes is usually the most luxurious because, if the plane is not full, you can remove the seat arms and stretch out. My editor takes me to costly lunches at the firm’s expense, and the food is poor.
The lack of correlation between effort and pay must be profoundly confusing and perhaps disgusting to the naive young. In my opinion, it is unfortunate at present but promising for the future: it creates the moral attitude, “It’s only money,” and politically, a soft-money affluent society can easily come to include a sector of communism, in the form of guaranteed income or free appropriation or both.
The telephone tax, however, was explicitly a war tax and my wife and I don’t pay it, getting the spiteful satisfaction that it costs the government a couple of hundred dollars (of the tax-payers’, our, money) to collect $1.58. We also have refused the 10 percent surtax, which rose directly out of the Vietnam War. This tax for this war is like the ship tax that Charles I exacted for his Irish War, that John Hamden refused. The FBI seems to be breathing down our necks about it, but if they arrest me I’ll bring up that shining precedent—and they’ll be sorry that they picked on me. (No, they finally simply attached my account.)
17. In otherwise friendly reviews and expostulatory fan mail from young people, I read that there are three things wrong with my social thinking: I go in for tinkering. I don’t tell how to bring about what I propose. I am a “romantic” and want to go back to the past. Let me consider these criticisms in turn.
My proposed little reforms and improvements are meaningless, it is said, because I do not attack the System itself, usually monopoly capitalism; and I am given the philological information that “radical” means “going to the root,” whereas I hack at the branches. To answer this, I have tried to show that in a complex society which is a network rather than a monolith with a head, a piecemeal approach can be effective; it is the safest, least likely to produce ruinous consequences of either repression or “success”; it involves people where they are competent, or could become competent, and so creates citizens, which is better than “politicizing”; it more easily dissolves the metaphysical despair that nothing can be done. And since, in my opinion, the aim of politics is to produce not a good society but a tolerable one, it is best to try to cut abuses down to manageable size; the best solutions are usually not global but a little of this and a little of that.
More important, in the confusing conditions of Modern Times, so bristling with dilemmas, I don’t know what is the root. I have not heard of any formula, e.g. “Socialism,” that answers the root questions. If I were a citizen of a Communist country, I should no doubt be getting into (more) trouble by tinkering with “bourgeois” improvements. The problem in any society is to get a more judicious mixture of kinds of enterprise, and this might be most attainable by tinkering.
18. A second criticism is that I don’t explain how to bring about the nice things I propose. The chief reason for this, of course, is that I don’t know how or I would proclaim it. Put it this way: I have been a pacifist for forty years and rather active for thirty years, and…. But ignorance is rarely an excuse. What my critics really object to is that I accept my not knowing too easily, as if the actuality of change were unimportant, rather than just brooding about it, when in fact people are wretched and dying.
As I have explained, I do not have the character for politics. I cannot lead or easily be led, and I am dubious about the ability of parties and government to accomplish any positive good—and which of these is cause, which is effect?—therefore I do not put my mind to questions of manipulation and power, I do not belong to a party, and therefore I have no tactical thoughts. Belief and commitment are necessary to have relevant ideas. Nevertheless, somebody has to make sense, and I am often willing to oblige, as a man of letters, as part of the division of labor, so to speak.
I do agree with my critics that there cannot be social thought without political action; and if I violate this rule, I ought to stop. Unless it is high poetry, utopian thinking is boring. “Neutral” sociology is morally repugnant and bad science. An essential part of any sociological inquiry is having a practical effect, otherwise the problem is badly defined: people are being taken as objects rather than real, and the inquirer himself is not all there.
For the humanistic problems that I mostly work at, however, the sense of powerlessness, the loss of history, vulgarity, the lack of magnanimity, alienation, the maladaption of organisms and environment—and these are political problems—maybe there are no other “strategies” than literature, dialogue, and trying to be a useful citizen oneself.
19. I am not a “romantic”; what puts my liberal and radical critics off is that I am a conservative, a conservationist. I do use the past; the question is how.
I get a kind of insight (for myself) from the genetic method, from seeing how a habit or institution has developed to its present form; but I really do understand that all positive value and meaning is in present action, coping with present conditions. Freud, for instance, was in error when he sometimes spoke as if a man had a child inside of him, or a vertebrate had an annelid worm inside. Each specified individual behaves as the whole that it has become; and every stage of life as Dewey used to insist has its own problems and ways of coping.
The criticism of the genetic fallacy, however, does not apply to the negative, to the lapses in the present, which can often be remedied only by taking into account some simplicities of the past. The case is analogous to localizing an organic function, e.g. seeing. As Kurt Goldstein used to point out, we cannot localize seeing in the eye or the brain, it is a function of the whole organism in its environment. But a failure of sight may well be localized in the cornea, the optic nerve, etc. We cannot explain speech by the psycho-sexual history of an infant; it is a way of being in the world. But a speech defect, e.g. lisping, may well come from inhibited biting because of imperfect weaning. This is, of course, what Freud knew as a clinician rather than a metapsychologist.
My books are full of one paragraph or two page “histories”—of the concept of alienation, the system of welfare, suburbanization, compulsory schooling, neutral technology, the anthropology of neurosis, university administration, citizenly powerlessness, missed revolutions, etc., etc. In every case my purpose is to show that a coerced or inauthentic settling of a conflict has left an unfinished situation to the next generation, and the difficulty becomes more complex in the new conditions. Then it is useful to remember the simpler state before things went wrong; it is hopelessly archaic as a present response, but it has vitality and may suggest a new program involving a renewed conflict. This is the therapeutic use of history. As Ben Nelson has said, the point of history is to keep old (defeated) causes alive. Of course, this reasoning presupposes that there is a nature of things, including human nature, whose right development can be violated. There is.
An inauthentic solution complicates, and produces a monster. An authentic solution neither simplifies nor complicates, but produces a new configuration, a species adapted to the on-going situation. There is a human nature, and it is characteristic of that nature to go on making itself ever different. This is the humanistic use of history, to remind of man’s various ways of being great. So we have become mathematical, tragical, political, loyal, romantic, civil-libertarian, universalist, experimental-scientific, collectivist, etc., etc.—these too accumulate and become a mighty heavy burden. There is no laying any of it down.
20. I went down to Dartmouth to lead some seminars of American Telephone and Telegraph executives who were being groomed to be vice-presidents. They wanted to know how to get on with young people, since they would have to employ them, or try. (Why do I go? Ah, why do I go? It’s not for money and it’s not out of vanity. I go because they ask me. Since I used to gripe bitterly when I was left out of the world, how can I gracefully decline when I am invited in?)
I had three suggestions. First, citing my usual evidence of the irrelevance of school grades and diplomas, I urged them to hire black and Puerto Rican dropouts, who would learn on the job as well as anybody else, whereas to require academic credentials puts them at a disadvantage. Not to my surprise, the executives were cogenial to this idea. (There were twenty-five of them, no black and no woman.) It was do-good and no disadvantage to them as practical administrators. One said that he was already doing it and it had worked out very well.
Secondly, I pointed out that dialogue across the generation gap was quite impossible for them, and their present tactics of youth projects and special training would be taken as, and were, co-optation. Yet people who will not talk to one another can get together by working together on a useful job that they both care about, like fixing the car. And draft-counseling, I offered, was something that the best of the young cared strongly about; the Telephone Company could provide valuable and interesting help in this, for instance the retrieval and dissemination of information; and all this was most respectable and American, since every kid should know his rights. Not to my surprise, the executives were not enthusiastic about this proposal. But they saw the point—and had to agree—and would certainly not follow up.
My third idea, however, they did not seem to know what to do with. I told them that Ralph Nader was going around the schools urging the engineering students to come on like professionals, and stand up to the front desk when asked for unprofessional work. In my opinion, an important move for such integrity would be for the young engineers to organize for defense of the profession, and strike or boycott if necessary: a model was the American Association of University Professors in its heyday—fifty years ago. I urged the executives to encourage such organization; it would make the Telephone Company a better telephone company, more serviceable to the community; and young people would cease to regard engineers as finks. To my surprise, the prospective vice-presidents of A.T. and T. seemed to be embarrassed. (We were all pleasant people and very friendly.) I take it that this—somewhere here—is the issue.
I am pleased to notice how again and again I return to the freedoms, duties, and opportunities of earnest professionals. It means that I am thinking from where I breathe.
Letters
O Canada! June 18, 1970

coping with a finite planet: takings law

coping with a finite planet: takings law

Friday, April 1, 2011

From an open flyleaf of my poetry journal, dipsey-doodling poesy down by the old seashore

shuffling my bare feet in the deep beach sand
I take my pencil nibs and writing papers
down to the edge of surf
and listen
to the ocean surge I ask."what are
you looking for now"?
I am a poet
I am looking for loose words
to a song
about a wayward soul dear to me
But, the words race far ahead
blurred in my myopic vision
My pencil cannot scribble fast enough
to keep pace with the verbal tide
"Then", the ocean bellowed,"use your notes
from a childish tune you once played
on a zither
that gathers dust in the bedroom closet
or use nasal sounds, farts, coughs, and
silly faces and hisses----
from deep within your diaphragm".
"And," I answered," what if I am
not understood'?
"Hooey"!,chortled the surf , "Do you think
that you're the only poet
to claim misunderstanding?"
"Clearly, your inarticulate moans
are forming a new symphony of sounds
from dwarfish skills
in need of time and experience
to grow".
The poet sat back on his haunches
the waters lapping cold on his ass
for a long time
He listened to the ocean
curl and crash
ebb and flow
over one wave and over another
In the cacophony of his chaotic yawp
a harmony crept into his ears
When friends listen to each other's hearts
An epic poem is forever being created
It will be a performance for the ages
A sly Muse weaves a halo above me
of sun and sky
and made from the cloths of heaven.

- Ray Johns

In a Democracy, Freedom of Assembly Trumps “Free Enterprise”

In a Democracy, Freedom of Assembly Trumps “Free Enterprise”

Monday, March 21, 2011

Republican Study Committee Announces $2.5 Trillion in Budget Cuts

"In announcing its package of $2.5 trillion in budget cuts, the Republican Study Committee's announcement includes the graph above and a list of cuts. Among them:The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, $445 million annual savings
# National Endowment for the Arts, $167.5 million annual savings
# National Endowment for the Humanities, $167.5 million annual savings
# Amtrak Subsidies, $1.565 billion annual savings- maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_.../5893349-on-the-list-of-gop-spending-cuts-amtrak-public-broadcasting-and-mohair ---while they approved $50 billion dollars to extend the war in Afghanistan. I guess the Republican's BIG OIL donors made their demands loud and clear.

"Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren't going to have anything to read or write about" -from the movie, "Mr. Holland's Opus".

The kids won't need an education , or an energy efficient rail system , or less greenhouse gas emissions, or cleaner air, water, and open space, because they'll be cannon fodder for the next war.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

GIP RIP by Eric Zencey

IF there’s a silver lining to our current economic downturn, it’s this: With it comes what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” the failure of outmoded economic structures and their replacement by new, more suitable structures. Downturns have often given a last, fatality-inducing nudge to dying industries and technologies. Very few buggy manufacturers made it through the Great Depression.
Creative destruction can apply to economic concepts as well. And this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of how much wealth Americans make, and it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy whips and VCRs on the dust-heap of history.
The first official attempt to determine our national income was made in 1934; the goal was to measure all economic production involving Americans whether they were at home or abroad. In 1991, the Bureau of Economic Analysis switched from gross national product to gross domestic product to reflect a changed economic reality — as trade increased, and as foreign companies built factories here, it became apparent that we ought to measure what gets made in the United States, no matter who makes it or where it goes after it’s made.
Since then it has become probably our most commonly cited economic indicator, the basic number that we take as a measure of how well we’re doing economically from year to year and quarter to quarter. But it is a miserable failure at representing our economic reality.
To begin with, gross domestic product excludes a great deal of production that has economic value. Neither volunteer work nor unpaid domestic services (housework, child rearing, do-it-yourself home improvement) make it into the accounts, and our standard of living, our general level of economic well-being, benefits mightily from both. Nor does it include the huge economic benefit that we get directly, outside of any market, from nature. A mundane example: If you let the sun dry your clothes, the service is free and doesn’t show up in our domestic product; if you throw your laundry in the dryer, you burn fossil fuel, increase your carbon footprint, make the economy more unsustainable — and give G.D.P. a bit of a bump.
In general, the replacement of natural-capital services (like sun-drying clothes, or the propagation of fish, or flood control and water purification) with built-capital services (like those from a clothes dryer, or an industrial fish farm, or from levees, dams and treatment plants) is a bad trade — built capital is costly, doesn’t maintain itself, and in many cases provides an inferior, less-certain service. But in gross domestic product, every instance of replacement of a natural-capital service with a built-capital service shows up as a good thing, an increase in national economic activity. Is it any wonder that we now face a global crisis in the form of a pressing scarcity of natural-capital services of all kinds?
This points to the larger, deeper flaw in using a measurement of national income as an indicator of economic well-being. In summing all economic activity in the economy, gross domestic product makes no distinction between items that are costs and items that are benefits. If you get into a fender-bender and have your car fixed, G.D.P. goes up.
A similarly counterintuitive result comes from other kinds of defensive and remedial spending, like health care, pollution abatement, flood control and costs associated with population growth and increasing urbanization — including crime prevention, highway construction, water treatment and school expansion. Expenditures on all of these increase gross domestic product, although mostly what we aim to buy isn’t an improved standard of living but the restoration or protection of the quality of life we already had.
The amounts involved are not nickel-and-dime stuff. Hurricane Katrina produced something like $82 billion in damages in New Orleans, and as the destruction there is remedied, G.D.P. goes up. Some of the remedial spending on the Gulf Coast does represent a positive change to economic well-being, as old appliances and carpets and cars are replaced by new, presumably improved, ones. But much of the expense leaves the community no better off (indeed, sometimes worse off) than before.
Consider the 50 miles of sponge-like wetlands between New Orleans and the Gulf Coast that once protected the city from storm surges. When those bayous were lost to development — sliced to death by channels to move oil rigs, mostly — gross domestic product went up, even as these “improvements” destroyed the city’s natural defenses and wiped out crucial spawning ground for the Gulf Coast shrimp fishery. The bayous were a form of natural capital, and their loss was a cost that never entered into any account — not G.D.P. or anything else.
Wise decisions depend on accurate assessments of the costs and benefits of different courses of action. If we don’t count ecosystem services as a benefit in our basic measure of well-being, their loss can’t be counted as a cost — and then economic decision-making can’t help but lead us to undesirable and perversely un-economic outcomes.
The basic problem is that gross domestic product measures activity, not benefit. If you kept your checkbook the way G.D.P. measures the national accounts, you’d record all the money deposited into your account, make entries for every check you write, and then add all the numbers together. The resulting bottom line might tell you something useful about the total cash flow of your household, but it’s not going to tell you whether you’re better off this month than last or, indeed, whether you’re solvent or going broke.
BECAUSE we use such a flawed measure of economic well-being, it’s foolish to pursue policies whose primary purpose is to raise it. Doing so is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — mistaking the map for the terrain, or treating an instrument reading as though it were the reality rather than a representation. When you’re feeling a little chilly in your living room, you don’t hold a match to a thermometer and then claim that the room has gotten warmer. But that’s what we do when we seek to improve economic well-being by prodding G.D.P.
Several alternatives to gross domestic product have been proposed, and each tackles the central problem of placing a value on goods and services that never had a dollar price. The alternatives are controversial, because that kind of valuation creates room for subjectivity — for the expression of personal values, of ideology and political belief.
How, after all, do we judge what exactly was the value of the services provided by those bayous in Louisiana? Was it $82 billion? But what about the value of the shrimp fishery that was already lost before the hurricane? What about the insurance value of the protection the bayous offered against another $82 billion loss? What about the security and sense of continuity of life enjoyed by the thousands of people who lived and made their livelihoods in relation to those bayous before they disappeared? It’s admittedly difficult to set a dollar price on such things — but this is no reason to set that price at zero, as gross domestic product currently does.
Common sense tells us that if we want an accurate accounting of change in our level of economic well-being we need to subtract costs from benefits and count all costs, including those of ecosystem services when they are lost to development. These include storm and flood protection, water purification and delivery, maintenance of soil fertility, pollination of plants and regulation of our climate on a global and local scale. (One recent estimate puts the minimum market value of all such natural-capital services at $33 trillion per year.)
Nature has aesthetic and moral value as well; some of us experience awe, wonder and humility in our encounters with it. But we don’t have to go so far as to include such subjective intangibles in order to fix the national income accounts. As stressed ecosystems worldwide disappear, it will get easier and easier to assign a nonsubjective valuation to them; and value them we must if we are to keep them at all. No civilization can survive their loss.
Given the fundamental problems with G.D.P. as a leading economic indicator, and our habit of taking it as a measurement of economic welfare, we should drop it altogether. We could keep the actual number, but rename it to make clearer what it represents; let’s call it gross domestic transactions. Few people would mistake a measurement of gross transactions for a measurement of general welfare. And the renaming would create room for acceptance of a new measurement, one that more accurately signals changes in the level of economic well-being we enjoy.
Our use of total productivity as our main economic indicator isn’t mandated by law, which is why it would be fairly easy for President Obama to convene a panel of economists and other experts to join the Bureau of Economic Analysis in creating a new, more accurate measure. Call it net economic welfare. On the benefit side would go such nonmarket goods as unpaid domestic work and ecosystem services; on the debit side would go defensive and remedial expenditures that don’t improve our standard of living, along with the loss of ecosystem services, and the money we spend to try to replace them.
In 1934, the economist Simon Kuznets, in his very first report of national income to Congress, warned that “the welfare of a nation can ... scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” Just as this crisis gives us the opportunity to end the nature-be-damned, more-is-always-better economy that flourished when oil was cheap and plentiful, we can finally act on Kuznets’s wise warning. We’re in an economic hole, and as we climb out, what we need is not simply a measurement of how much money passes through our hands each quarter, but an indicator that will tell us if we are really and truly gaining ground in the perennial struggle to improve the material conditions of our lives.
Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Pepsi unveils its eco-friendly bottle Container is all plant material

Written by
Associated Press
PepsiCo Inc. unveiled a new bottle Tuesday made entirely of plant material that it says bests the technology of competitor Coca-Cola and reduces the bottles' carbon footprint.
The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark and corn husks, among other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.
The new bottle looks and feels the same as the current bottle, said Rocco Papalia, senior vice president of advanced research at PepsiCo. "It's indistinguishable," he said.
Coca-Cola Co. currently produces a bottle using 30 percent plant-based materials and recently estimated it would be several years before it has a 100 percent plant bottle that's commercially viable.
"We've cracked the code," Papalia said.
PepsiCo said it plans to test the product next year in a few hundred thousand bottles. Once the company is sure it can successfully produce the bottle at that scale, it will begin converting all its products over.
That could mean a switch of billions of bottles sold each year. Of Pepsi's 19 biggest brands, 11 are beverage brands that use PET plastic bottles.
Scientists said the technology is an important innovation in packaging. "This is the beginning of the end of petroleum-based plastics," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and director of its waste management project. "When you have a company of this size making a commitment to a plant-based plastic, the market is going to respond."
There are other plant-based plastics available or in development, but Hershkowitz said they are not environmentally preferred because they typically use plants grown solely for that purpose, rather than using the estimated 2 billion tons of agricultural waste produced each year. And these alternative plastics cannot be recycled.
PET plastic is a go-to material for packaging because it's lightweight and shatter-resistant, its safety is well-researched and it doesn't affect flavors. It is not biodegradable or compostable but it is recyclable.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Other Road to Serfdom by Eric Zencey

Why are neoconservatives so unswaveringly dedicated to (supposedly) free markets, even in the face of clear evidence that unregulated markets produce some nasty things (like global climate change and regular financial crises) that we'd be better off without?  Why this knee-jerk answer "free markets! Free markets!" to every policy problem?
The answer, I think, has to do with the influence of an Austrian economist, F. A. Hayek.  Though he didn't support totally unregulated market capitalism, he did make a strong case against government intervention and control.  His book, The Road to Serfdom, was an indictment of the Soviet system with its centrallly planned economies, and was read by millions.  Neoconservatives still think of Hayek (and his progeny:  Friedman, Greenspan et al.) as having made the definitive case that civil freedom depends on unregulated economic activity.
But Hayek's argument is flawed.  Because of that flaw, the course he set us on turned out to be just The Other Road to Serfdom.
This is a repost of a diary published a few days ago; several commenters recommended I republish it, so here it is.  I've added some links.
Let's begin with one of my favorite thinkers, John Stuart Mill.  A hundred and fifty years ago, in his Principles of Political Economy, he looked ahead to the sort of world we'd have if human population and economic activity continued the growth rates he was seeing in 1848.  He did this in order to argue against the idea that more is always better, but today his reductio ad absurdum reads like dismally accurate prediction.  There isn't much to like, he said, in a world

with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; [with] every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, [with] every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated in the name of improved agriculture.


It's not quite literally true to say that we have exterminated every animal we haven't domesticated, or that "every rood of land" has been brought into cultivation.  The human estate continues to expand, as forests are clear-cut to make way for cattle, as rocky slopes and other marginal lands are brought under the plow.  But this growth in arable land has slowed in the past decade, and it now no longer outpaces the rate at which arable land is lost (mostly through salinization from irrigation) to desertification.  Total cultivated acreage is declining.  As population continues to grow, arable land per person is declining even more rapidly.  One result:  land that's farmed has to be farmed hard--with techniques that amount to "soil mining" (to use the phrase that Edward Hyams coined)-- an unsustainable draw-down of soil fertility that will reduce further the amount of arable land in the future.
And, while there are non-domesticated species that continue to share our planet with us today, they are there largely because we allow them to be--or because there's a time lag between our acts (like dumping CO2 into the atmosphere) and the consequences of our acts (like the disappearance of polar bear habitat from global climate change), or because extinction-producing processes currently underway (the cutting of rainforest, for instance) have not yet reached their full expression in the world.
In many places, including the U.S., the few remaining ecosystems that register as "wild" are not large enough to support the spontaneous operation of nature within their juridicially defined borders.   We have to manage the wilderness in order to sustain it--and the oxymoron inherent in "wilderness management" has long since faded from view, as necessity makes routine what logical consistency would have forbidden.
To many of us who were born into the fossil fuel era, it seems normal and ordinary that we should have vast energies available to us to effect our will in nature.  It's all we've ever known, and the pages in history books that tell us it was ever different can be dismissed as reporting a remote, quaint and benighted time.  But the handful of centuries that comprise the fossil fuel era are just an instant in geological time, the time scheme in which life evolved, the time scheme in which the natural processes of the planet largely operate.
To put things in a bit of historical perspective:  biologists speak of the Net Primary Productivity of ecosystems, the amount of food energy present within them that comes from the conversion of solar energy into biomass through photosynthesis.  It's the planet's energy budget, the fuel for all life. Two centuries ago humans made an insignificant dent in Net Primary Productivity, taking a fraction of one percent, with the rest being available to power Mill's "spontaneous operation of nature."  Today, biologists estimate that humans are responsible for consuming or destroying an astounding forty percent of the Net Primary Productivity of planetary ecosystems.  The remnants of nature that we have so far allowed to remain must make do with what's left.  Many ecologists and biologists fear it isn't enough; systems that evolution designed to make maximum efficient use of 100% of the available solar energy are having difficulty adapting to little more than half of that.  To keep those ecosystems alive and operating in something like a stable (albeit stripped-down) state requires human intervention:  management, regulation, husbandry, legal protection, seeding, stocking, subsidy.
Because of the power unleashed by oil, the dystopia that Mill envisioned in 1848 is very much the world we have today----not an Edenic  paradise, not even a garden planet, but a world in which the "spontaneous activity of nature" has been circumscribed, bounded, broken, eliminated.
Call it Factory Planet:  a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.
It's a world that King Midas  would have recognized.  Having built our economy beyond the limits of what the planet can sustainably give to us in the form of resource inputs, and sustainably take from us in the form of the wastes it struggles to absorb, we face the problem Midas faced.  He enjoyed his power to transform everything he touched into gold until he sat down to dinner and touched his daughter; that's when he learned that an unlimited power to create wealth was neither sustainable nor especially desireable.
I think that like Midas, we're headed for a similar epiphany.
Factory Planet, as it's operated now, is not sustainable.  But even were we to make it so--even were we to rein in our productive engines to the level the planet can sustainably support-there's another problem:  our conversion of nature into wealth at the maximum rate practicable within environmental limits would still leave very little room for something we cherish as much as Midas cherished his daughter.  I don't mean wilderness hikes or the possibility of encountering whales or polar bears or virgin forest --things that only some of us seem to cherish-but something more far-reaching and widely valued:  democracy and civil liberty.
One strong principle underlying our freedoms--the rights encoded into our Bill of Rights--is the idea that citizens should be left alone in all things except those that directly affect others.  (This distinction between what's public and what's private, and not the false ground of release from work or duty or responsibility, is the true foundation of our experience of freedom, Wendell Berry tells us.)  This democratic ideal, fresh and new three hundred years ago, evolved on Garden Planet:  a world in which there was a vast distance between what culture took from nature and what nature could sustainably provide.  Back then, humans lived in ecosystems that were lush, healthy, resilient.  But on Factory Planet the ecosystems that support civilization are strained to the breaking point.  In consequence, acts that were private on Garden Planet have public consequences that make them legitimate subjects of public regulation and control.
For instance:  two hundred years ago if you burned a bit of carbon fuel or clear-cut a forest, it was pretty much nobody's business but your own.  (This simplifies things:  English kings and nobles did reserve forests and game for their own use and harvest, and some civilizations disappeared because they cut down the forests and mined the soils that sustained them. But the point is valid:  on Garden Planet, humans generally had more discretion to do with nature what they wanted.)  In our era, when every ton of CO2 emissions puts a burden on the planet's limited ability to absorb it, and when forests and their necessary services to civilization are becoming scarcer and scarcer worldwide, its clear that carbon emissions and deforestation impose real and measurable damage on us all, and are therefore legitimately controlled by public authority in pursuit of the public good.
Or, suppose you live in Colorado and want to catch the rainwater falling on your roof for use to water your lawn.  This is a fundamental prerogative; rain is the free gift of nature, right?  Not in Colorado River Compact States.  In the watershed of the Colorado River every drop (and then some) of the river is assigned to a use--mostly irrigation to grow food,  pace Mill--and law forbids property owners to impede the flow of rainwater to the river.
Or suppose you fancy making a living as a fisherman or lobsterer.  Sorry--there's no room for you on the water anymore, not unless you can be taken on by one of the existing quota holders.  Every ton of many species of fish, every pound of lobster that nature is capable of producing has been anticipated, counted, assigned to a harvester, a market, a use.
Because our economy exceeds the limits of what nature can sustain, we are experiencing an increasing need for resource regimes:  an International Whaling Commission to limit the harvest of whales, a Fishing Treaty to apportion tonnages of catch from world oceans, a Green House Gas treaty to apportion the planet's strained carbon-absorption capacity, international water compacts to apportion river flow among users, and on and on.
The alternative to this kind of rule of law is the absence of the rule of law--and a world in which "extra-legal" conflict over increasingly scarce resources will flourish.  Countries in a state of war find it difficult to hang on to civil liberties.  Resource shortages displace populations, create failed states, breed resentments on which terrorism feeds, and send nations to war--circumstances under which we'll see  further erosion of civil liberties.
The one option that is not available is to continue things as they once were:  no  resource regimes telling us what we can and can't do, and economic growth without apparent limit.  The sad truth is there are limits to sustainable economic activity: the planet can support only a finite amount of throughupt.  Our transgression of those limits will force change of one sort or another upon us.
The conclusion is inescapable:  if we grow farther beyond the planet's ability to support us, the best option we face is that more and more of our lives will be hemmed in by the imperative to control our collective environmental impact while maximizing our production of food and wealth.  To extend the metaphor:  factories are marvelously efficient, but they are not generally places where humans are given much room to exercise prerogative, discretion, choice or free will.  A factory planet, budgeted right up to the edge of what's ecologically sustainable, and run for the sole purpose of maximizing the wealth that the human species enjoys, is a planet from which we've eliminated the literal ground on which democratic freedoms flourish.
And this is where Hayek's argument, and its flaw, enter in.  Fifty years ago Hayek argued that centralized economic planning like that being done in Soviet style socialist countries was The Road to Serfdom. There is, he said, "an irreducible clash between planning and democracy."  He argued that a country can maintain its democratic institutions and civil liberties only if it has a free-market economy and the egalitarian free-for-all of (relatively) unregulated capitalism.
His argument has a great deal of merit and influenced generations of neoconservatives, many of whom have cheapened it quite a bit.  Hayek was not opposed to government regulation of the economy, though the million-selling Reader's Digest Condensed Version of his long, dry treatise didn't dwell on that element, and so Hayek's delineation of the legitimate grounds for governmental control of markets went largely unread and generally underappreciated.  Today many conservatives take Hayek to have supported an idea he would have found abhorrent, that there is no public good other than the one that emerges from the cumulation of private greeds expressed in markets. (Or, as Reagan famously put it, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.")
Even correctly understood, Hayek's argument has a serious flaw.  Hayek, unlike Mill, implicitly and comfortably assumed that we could have infinite economic growth on a finite planet; ecological limits to economic development played no part in his theory.  From our perspective fifty years later it's easier to see this truth:  
planning is planning whether it's done to minimize poverty and injustice, as socialists were advocating then, or to preserve the minimum flow of ecosystem services that civilization requires, as we are finding increasingly necessary today.
 In the absence of limits on population growth and resource uptake, the free-market economic development that Hayek advocated turns out to have been just The Other Road to Serfdom.
It's going to take some work to preserve democracy in an era of ecological constraint.  A key element is achieving a sustainable, stable level of human population; if we need to budget ourselves to a finite, sustainable level of resource throughput, then continued growth in the human population will reduce the average standard of living that humans can enjoy, and democracy doesn't flourish when the standard of living is in decline.  World wide, education of women and girls has an effect in depressing birth rates, (though the linkage is not as strong and direct as UN agencies have long asserted.  But because there is a linkage, women's equal access to education world-wide should be seen not just as a civil right, but as a necessary step toward ecological sustainability--and, therefore, a necessary step toward the preservation of democratic liberties for all of us.
Also paramount is the development of a sustainable economic infrastructure--the smart grid, energy from renewable sources, and conservation of all forms of energy through retrofitting and the gradual redesign of how and where we live, work, travel, shop, grow food, recreate.  Under a stable rate of throughput, such technical change and innovation will be our only avenue of increasing output--a process ecological economists call development to distinguish it from footprint-increasing growth. There is an enormous amount of waste of resources in our system because resources, particularly energy, were underpriced for most of the twentieth century.  We need to pick that low-hanging fruit-and then we'll need to pick quite a bit more.
But these changes, alone, won't be enough.  We need, also, a green intellectual infrastructure:  reconstruction and adaptation of the mistaken ideas on which our unsustainable institutions and practices were built.
What ideas needs changing?  First and foremost, economic theory.  I've written elsewhere about the need to devise a better measure of our standard of well-being than the current default, GDP, which was never designed to perform that service.  Among the other places in which economic theory presumes that an economy's ecological footprint can grow forever is the concept of Pareto Optimality.  Back at the close of the nineteenth century Wilfred Pareto helped split Political Economy in two, separating "scientific" economic theory from the messier, less-easily-quantified realm of political theory.  Crucial to the split was his notion that because satisfactions and pleasures are subjective and not interpersonally comparable, all an economist can say, scientifically, is that one system is better than another if it satisfies more needs and wants than another.  The implication:  we cannot be confident that we improve the level of satisfaction in the world if we take a dollar from a billionaire and give it to a starving man to buy food.  For all we know the billionaire might derive as much satisfaction from that last dollar spent as the starving man does buying food.  This counter-intuitive result, as hard-hearted and absurd as it is on its face, remains fundamental to economics as it is practiced today.  It is one strong impetus pushing us toward unsustainable growth.   Thanks to Pareto, in economic circles (and among policy makers who listen to economists), all talk of income redistribution is off the table.  If you care about the starving masses of the world, economics tells you, the only solution is to work to increase production, to produce two dollars where before there was only one.  Thus, through Pareto, a supposedly value-free science became committed to infinite economic growth--a value-laden, quixotic ideal if ever there was one.
Once we recognize that the planet is finite, and that there is a limit to the stream of resources that can sustainably be used to make wealth, we have to face the difficult questions of distribution of wealth instead of simply--childishly, romantically-assuming the problem away.
And, in our calculations of the minimum amount of nature that should be left alone to preserve a necessary flow of ecosystem services, we need to remember Hayek's warning:  democracy and planning are irreducibly in conflict.  If we want to avoid the technocratic administration and centralized economic planning of Factory Planet, if we want to make unnecessary the development of an international technocratic elite who manage our interactions with earth's ecosystems in order to preserve the grand project of industrial civilization, we need to preserve some substantial and additional measure of Mill's "spontaneous activity of nature."  Only by doing so will we inhabit a planet on which civil liberties remain possible.

The Financial Crisis Is the Environmental Crisis by Eric Zencey

In May of 2009, U.S. federal legislation created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, charged with investigating the causes of the financial crisis that led to the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Commission’s report is due in January. But don’t get your hopes up; they’re more than likely to get it wrong.
The Commission has held hearings with and gathered testimony from quite a few experts, all of them entrenched within the mainstream of neoclassical economic theory. The experts have named the usual suspects: cyclical swings between greed and fear; feedback effects that “disequilibrate” markets; cheap and “poorly documented” mortgage financing; bank accounting that kept some liabilities “off balance sheet;” the international sale of debt that guaranteed that a collapse in one market in one country would ripple out to affect the world; foreign demand for American debt, which created demand-pull for riskier and riskier American investments; and unworkable hedge funds that appeared to transform sure-to-fail loans into sure-to-pay investments.
It’s likely that all of these played a role. Fixes for most of them ought to be undertaken on their own merits. (Who could be in favor of “poorly documented mortgages” or “off-balance-sheet” investments?) But none of the testimony makes this point: the financial crisis is also the environmental crisis. We won’t solve the former until we start solving the latter.
Two facts about this crisis stand out: the world came to the brink of global economic collapse, and the world is and remains on the brink of ecosystem collapse. The economy is humanity’s primary instrument for interacting with its environment; this suggests that these two facts are somehow related. And yet none of the standard diagnoses come anywhere close to acknowledging that there might be a connection, let alone start to illuminate it. In the standard view, the financial crisis beset an economy that consists solely of humans acting within formalized systems of their own creation —systems that have no connection to a larger world.
And that’s why the standard view won’t succeed in fixing the problem. The spasm of debt repudiation with which the crisis began — the collapse of the sub-prime lending market — is what happens when an infinite-growth economy runs into the limits of a finite world.
That insight comes from the reference frame suggested by Frederick Soddy, as elaborated by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, and others. Soddy offered a vision of economics as rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief in the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth. That belief is nowhere more clearly manifest than in how we treat money. Soddy distinguished between wealth, virtual wealth, and debt. Real wealth, even the provision of services, is irreducibly rooted in physical reality. The money we use to represent this wealth isn’t real wealth, but virtual wealth — a symbol representing the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate real wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, Soddy said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”
Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy materials and energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment and by the amount of high-entropy effluent that natural systems can sustainably absorb. (We can in practice exceed those sustainable limits, but only temporarily; that is the definition of “unsustainable.”)
There are only two ways that an economy can increase the rate at which it creates wealth: it can process a larger and larger flow of matter and energy, increasing its ecological footprint on both the uptake and the effluent side; or it can achieve efficiencies in its use of a constant flow of matter and energy. Both means of growth have limits. Increasing an economy’s ecological footprint decreases the ability of healthy ecosystems to provide us with a civilization-sustaining flow of ecosystem services (like climate stability, a service currently in critically short supply). Efficiency gains in the use of a constant flow offer large returns today and will probably do so into the future, but those gains will become harder and harder to achieve as we run into diminishing returns. Technological advances and efficiencies will allow us to make more with less, especially in places where we’ve been profligate in our use of low-entropy inputs; but no technical advance will get us around the first law of thermodynamics, which tells us “you can’t make something from nothing, nor can you make nothing from something.” Creation of wealth is irreducibly physical, and all physical phenomena obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Thus, the creation of wealth has physical constraints, set by ecosystem limits, physical law, and the limits of the technology we currently employ. But debt, being imaginary, has no such limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we choose to let it.
These considerations led Soddy to this incontrovertible truth: whenever an economy allows debt — a claim on wealth — to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a structural need for debt to be repudiated.
Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power of the monetary units in which debt is denominated. And debt repudiation can be exported — some of the pressure to reconcile wealth and debt is released when other nations in the system inflate their currencies or default on obligations.
But when there is no inflation, and when the economy becomes one integrated global system in which export to outside the system is no longer possible, overgrown claims on future wealth will produce regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, waves of bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets in any shape or form. As Lawrence Summers noted in a speech last year at the Brookings Institute, “In little more than two decades, we have seen the stock market crash of 1987, the savings and loan scandals, the decline of the real estate market, the Mexican crisis, the Asian crisis, LTCM, Enron and long-term capital. That works out to one big crisis every two and a half years.” He went on to add: “We can and must do better.” Each and every one of the crises he listed was, at bottom, a crisis of debt repudiation. We are unlikely to avoid their recurrence until we stop allowing claims on real wealth to grow faster than real wealth can grow.
The cause of the financial crisis, Soddy would certainly say, isn’t simply opportunistic financiers exploiting the lag between innovation and regulation, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, isn’t a cascading lack of confidence that could be solved with some new and different version of the F.D.I.C. The problem is a systemic flaw in our treatment of money. Whenever and wherever growth in claims on wealth outstrips growth in wealth, our system creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernie Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager or a hedge fund innovator willing to play their part in setting us up for a spasm of debt repudiation. Regulation will always be retrospective.
The best solution is to eliminate that niche. To do that, we must balance claims on future production of wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth.
Soddy distilled his vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable. One: abandon the gold standard. Two: let international exchange rates float against one another. Three: use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools, countering cyclical trends. Four: establish bureaus of economic analysis to produce statistics (including a consumer price index) that will facilitate this effort. These proposals are now firmly grounded in conventional practice. Only Soddy’s fifth proposal remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom: stop banks from creating money, and debt, out of nothing.
Soddy’s work helped to inspire the short-lived “100% Money” movement that emerged during the Depression, which offered a diagnosis that went beyond treatment of symptoms (the cascading collapse of confidence that led to bank failures, which was addressed through creation of the F.D.I.C.) to reach the underlying cause: the leveraging of debt through the practice of fractional reserve banking. Irving Fisher at Yale and Frank Knight, the prominent Chicago School economist, also supported the elimination of fractional reserve banking. For a time the movement counted no less an economic eminence than Milton Friedman as a sympathizer. (Perhaps because he saw that the tide of history was against him, Friedman eventually dropped his call for elimination of fractional reserve banking from his policy recommendations.) The 100% money movement finds a contemporary advocate in ecological economist Herman Daly, who has called for the gradual institution of a 100 percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what he has called “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”
In such a system, banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing, loan intermediation, and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would not generate income by lending out, at interest, the money entrusted to them for safekeeping — money that does not belong to them. Banks would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” people who forego consumption today in order to take money out of their checking account and put it in time deposits (e.g., CDs, passbook savings, and 401Ks). In return these savers would still receive interest payments — a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.
In a 100% money system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving — abstinence — on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. To achieve 100% money, the creation of monetarized debt through other mechanisms — repackaged mortgages and securitized derivatives and the like — would also have to be brought under control.
An added benefit: establishing 100% money would have an enormous and positive effect on the public treasury. Seigniorage, the profit that comes from the creation of money, is currently given away free to banks (which collect it as the payment of interest and the repayment of principle on loans made with money that is not actually theirs). Under a 100% money regime, money would be created — spent into existence — by a public authority. (This is what Friedman advocated.) The capture of seigniorage would have obvious benefits for governmental budgeting: the seigniorage on a modest 3% growth in M1 (one of the chief measures of the money supply) amounts to $40 billion a year. And, when you come right down to it, to whom does seigniorage, by rights, belong? Despite long-standing custom to the contrary, the profit that comes from the issuance of money belongs to the sovereign power that guarantees that money. In the U.S., that’s us: We, the People.
This change in our banking system would eliminate the structural cause of spasms of debt repudiation. It would also eliminate one strong driver of uneconomic growth —growth that costs more in lost ecosystem services and other disamenities than it brings in the form of increased wealth. The change is thus economically and ecologically sound. It is, obviously, politically difficult — so difficult that advocacy for it sounds hopelessly unrealistic. But consider: in the 1920s, the abolition of the gold standard and the implementation of floating exchange rates sounded absurd. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.