Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts

Thursday, 9 February 2017

Seeing Like a State

This time we'll be taking a quick look at James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

My purpose in reviewing Seeing Like a State is to draw attention to some concepts which I had never really thought about before reading this book. Awareness of these concepts has helped clarify my thinking since then. Or so it seems to me. As with my last post, I hope this may be helpful to my fellow Canadians. I certainly don't intend to speak down to my countrymen—they lean in a direction of which I heartily approve. But when it comes to evaluating the worth (or worthlessness) of states, a different approach is required here, where we are proudly carrying on with our experiment in progressive social democracy, than when talking to people from south of the border, whose newly elected leadership seems eager to dismantle much of their government.

I read this book a couple of years ago and there wasn't really time in the schedule I'd set myself currently to give it a thorough re-reading. So I went looking on the internet and found several detailed reviews and a youtube video of the author discussing the book.

As Scott says in the video, the essence of the thing is in the first 15 pages, the rest of it is just examples to prove the point.

Scott published this book in 1998, after he'd done his initial work on hill societies in Southeast Asia. He had noticed, and was trying to understand why:

...the state has always seemed to be the enemy of "people who move around"... In the context of Southeast Asia, this promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions between mobile, slash-and-burn hill people on the one hand and wet-rice, valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarizations) seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.

The more I examined those efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central project of statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it know precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed "map" of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to "translate" what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.

In order for a state to succeed in its projects, it needs control and to effectively exercise control it needs intelligence—information about its land and its people.

How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral (tax) surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.

This project of making society legible has been going on for centuries and where I live it is pretty much complete. But my wife and I both grew up on farms that didn't have street numbers. You can bet there were lot numbers for tax purposes, but nobody bothered with them for addresses. We knew where we lived and so did our neighbours—it just wasn't a problem for any of the locals, and mail came to "general delivery" at the local post office. It was only in the process setting up the 911 emergency call system, in the 1990s, that every house and farm in Bruce County was finally given a number. In rural areas, those numbers are now proudly displayed at the end of our driveways, so the police, fire and ambulance drivers can find us when we need them.

There was a time (and it's still the case in the third world) when even cities didn't have maps, street names were very informal and houses didn't have numbers on them. Only the people who lived in a neighbourhood could reliably find their way around it. Very inconvenient for strangers, but awfully handy for a local trying not to be found...

The concept of legibility is the first new idea I encountered in this book. We in the modern world are immersed in legibility and, in most cases, hardly aware of it. Even some politicians—governing ones—seem to be unaware of it. Steven Harper (a former Canadian Prime Minister) comes to mind, doing away with our "long form" census, because he didn't want to collect (and be confused by) facts that didn't fit his ideology.

Anyway, the government knows where we live, how much we make in a year, our phone number, the license number, make and colour of the car we drive, and so forth. Most of us accept this very meekly. It enables government to deliver the services we count on and to some it seems that legibility is only a disadvantage to criminals or those who actively oppose the state. I'd say, yes, but only if the state is using all that information to do what you want it to. This isn't always so, especially for those who don't fit so well in the one-size-fits-all mold that states tend to stamp out for their citizens.

And that leads us to another concept that goes along with legibility: simplification. The world is a very complex place, full of distracting details, most of which we ignore. This is true for individuals in day to day life, but even more so for states. There are a great many details that a state simply cannot afford to be interested in. What it needs is a synopsis that contains just the information which is significant to its projects. Who's to say what's significant? Well, therein lies a whole range of problems.

When I was the foreman of a crew of electricians, my boss frequently grew frustrated with my usual answer to his questions, which was: "it depends". He wanted a simple yes or no, but often the situation just wasn't that simple and my point was that if he was willing to let a little more information through his filters he'd be able to make better decisions.

Having acquired a measure of legibility, modern states set about a number of huge development fiascos.

But "fiasco" is too lighthearted a word for the disasters I have in mind . The Great Leap Forward in China, collectivizations in Russia and compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia are among the greatest human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of both lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted. At a less dramatic but far more common level, the history of Third World development is littered with the debris of huge agricultural schemes and new cities (think of Brasilia or Chandigarh) that have failed their residents.

It is not so difficult to understand why so many human lives have been destroyed by mobilized violence between ethnic groups, religious sects or linguistic communities. But it is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.

Scott identifies four elements, the combination of which leads to such tragedies. The first is the simplification that comes with legibilitiy.

The second element is what I call a high modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.

When I first encountered this it was another new concept for me, but when you look at it closely, it is nothing more than the religion of progress. In fact, I've rarely seen that faith so clearly described:

High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term "ideology" implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rational organized city, village, or large farm was one that looked regimented and orderly in the geometric sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization: the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.

By themselves, though, legibility, simplification, and an ideology like high modernism are not enough to do much real harm. A couple more elements are necessary for that.

The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.

A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarians state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

But why is it that these four elements, when combined, have led to disaster?

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowances for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisations in the face of unpredictability. ...I contrast the high-modernist views and practices of city planners and revolutionaries with critical views emphasizing process, complexity, and open-endedness.

...I attempt to conceptualize the nature of practical knowledge and to contrast it with more formal, deductive epistemic knowledge. The term mētis, which descends from classical Greek and denotes the knowledge that can come only from practical experience, serves as a useful portmanteau word for what I have in mind. Here I should acknowledge my debt to anarchist writers (Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Proudhon) who consistently emphasize the role of mutuality as opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordination in the creation of social order. Their understanding of the term "mutuality" covers some but not all of the same ground I mean to cover with "mētis."

Scott acknowledges that from today's perspective, a critique of the failings of high modernism is like a kind of quaint archaeology. Central planning has long since fallen out of favour.

...States with the pretensions and power that I criticize have for the most part vanished or drastically curbed their ambitions. And yet, as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety.

There is much fertile ground today for the sort of thing Scott was talking about. Take out high modernism, substitute in the current ideological fad and combine it with legibility, simplification, a generous dash of authoritarianism and an unsuspecting populace and away we go. We must remember, when getting rid of a bad government, not to usher in something even worse. Right wing populism, techno optimism and eco-modernism come to mind as ideologies that I would really rather not have forced on me or my community. Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have already done enough harm. All these are certainly just as uncritical, unskeptical, and unscientifically optimistic as high-modernism.

Scott goes on for 9 more chapters with a plethora of examples illustrating his thesis. This review discusses them in some detail, if you're interested. It also has some criticism of Scott's ideas, which I think is probably somewhat unfair.

In several places in the book Scott mentions Jane Jacobs, whose activism against, and critique of, modern urban planning I had not previously been introduced to. Here is a biographically article about her that is well worth reading.

This is the last book review I'll be doing for a while. Next time I'll finally get around to talking about what I see as lying ahead of us—the slow and tortuous collapse of industrial civilization. Of course, many people I run into think I am being needlessly dramatic. They would say that business as usual is still in pretty good shape and has a long future ahead of it. I'll begin with why I think that is the single biggest lie we are being told these days.

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Sunday, 23 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 4

This posts continues looking through the book The Limits to Growth, summarizing it and offering my thoughts on what it has to say. In my last post (insert link) we finished with Chapter IV, Technology And The Limits To Growth.

Chapter V—The State of Global Equilibrium

In real world finite systems there are negative feedback loops which stop positive feedback loops from generating exponential growth and collapse. The delays in the negative feedback loops allow overshoot to occur, which is wasteful of resources and actually reduces the carrying capacity of the environment, leading to a deeper collapse and making recovery more difficult. Technological solutions work by weakening the negative loops and allowing growth to continue for a while, but in the long run the result is the same.

Instead we need to stop growth and level out into a steady state system before we encounter limits.

We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is: 1. sustainable without sudden and uncontrollable collapse; and 2. capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.

How to do this? Well, we could strengthen the negative feedback loops. But most people would take a dim view of increasing the death rate in order to stop population growth or increasing the rate at which industrial equipment wears out in order to stop industrial growth.

What if we weakened the positive feedback loop instead? This has never been tried or even seriously suggested, but within a system dynamic model we can easily change a few numbers to see what happens if we reduce positive feedbacks, and see if it is worth trying in the real world.

In Figure 44 the positive feedback loop of population growth is effectively balanced, and population remains constant. At first the birth and death rates are low. But there is still one unchecked positive feedback loop operating in the model—the one governing the growth of industrial capital. The gain around that loop increases when population is stabilized, resulting in a very rapid growth of income, food, and services per capita. That growth is soon stopped, however, by depletion of nonrenewable resources. The death rate then rises, but total population does not decline because of our requirement that birth rate equal death rate (clearly unrealistic here).

What happens if we bring both positive feedback loops under control simultaneously?

The result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985 with no other changes is shown in Figure 45. (Capital was allowed to grow until 1985 to raise slightly the average material standard of living.) In this run the severe overshoot and collapse of Figure 44 are prevented. Population and capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food, industrial output, and services per person. Eventually, however, resource shortages reduce industrial output and the temporarily stable state degenerates.

What if we combine controlling both positive loops with technological changes? One example of such an output is shown in Figure 46.

The policies that produced the behavior shown in Figure 46 are:

1. Population is stabilized by setting the birth rate equal to the death rate in 1975. Industrial capital is allowed to increase naturally until 1990, after which it, too, is stabilized, by setting the investment rate equal to the depreciation rate.

2. To avoid a nonrenewable resource shortage such as that shown in Figure 45, resource consumption per unit of industrial output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value. (This and the following five policies are introduced in 1975.)

3. To further reduce resource depletion and pollution, the economic preferences of society are shifted more toward services such as education and health facilities and less toward factory-produced material goods. (This change is made through the relationship giving "indicated" or "desired" services per capita as a function of rising income.)

4. Pollution generation per unit of industrial and agricultural output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value.

5. Since the above policies alone would result in a rather low value of food per capita, some people would still be malnourished if the traditional inequalities of distribution persist. To avoid this situation, high value is placed on producing sufficient food for all people. Capital is therefore diverted to food production even if such an investment would be considered "uneconomic." (This change is carried out through the "indicated" food per capita relationship.)

6. This emphasis on highly capitalized agriculture, while necessary to produce enough food, would lead to rapid soil erosion and depletion of soil fertility, destroying long-term stability in the agricultural sector. Therefore the use of agricultural capital has been altered to make soil enrichment and preservation a high priority. This policy implies, for example, use of capital to compost urban organic wastes and return them to the land (a practice that also reduces pollution).

7. The drains on industrial capital for higher services and food production and for resource recycling and pollution control under the above six conditions would lead to a low final level of industrial capital stock. To counteract this effect, the average lifetime of industrial capital is increased, implying better design for durability and repair and less discarding because of obsolescence. This policy also tends to reduce resource depletion and pollution.

In Figure 46 the stable world population is only slightly larger than the population today. There is more than twice as much food per person as the average value in 1970, and world average lifetime is nearly 70 years. The average industrial output per capita is well above today's level, and services per capita have tripled. Total average income per capita (industrial output, food, and services combined) is about $1,800. This value is about half the present average US income, equal to the present average European income, and three times the present average world income. Resources are still being gradually depleted, as they must be under any realistic assumption, but the rate of depletion is so slow that there is time for technology and industry to adjust to changes in resource availability.

We might choose to make different tradeoffs in setting up a stable system, but this example does show the levels of population and capital that are physically maintainable on the earth, under the most optimistic assumptions. What if we go back a little in the direction of the real world and relax some of the restrictions imposed in Figure 46?

Suppose we retain the last six of the seven policy changes that produced Figure 46, but replace the first policy, beginning in 1975, with the following:

1. The population has access to 100 percent effective birth control.
2. The average desired family size is two children.
3. The economic system endeavors to maintain average industrial output per capita at about the 1975 level. Excess industrial capability is employed for producing consumption goods rather than increasing the industrial capital investment rate above the depreciation rate.

The model behavior that results from this change is shown in Figure 47. Now the delays in the system allow population to grow much larger than it did in Figure 46. As a consequence, material goods, food, and services per capita remain lower than in previous runs (but still higher than they are on a world average today).

We do not suppose that any single one of the policies necessary to attain system stability in the model can or should be suddenly introduced in the world by 1975. A society choosing stability as a goal certainly must approach that goal gradually. It is important to realize, however, that the longer exponential growth is allowed to continue, the fewer possibilities remain for the final stable state. Figure 48 shows the result of waiting until the year 2000 to institute the same policies that were instituted in 1975 in Figure 47.

In Figure 48, both population and industrial output per capita reach much higher values than in Figure 47. As a result pollution builds to a higher level and resources are severely depleted, in spite of the resource-saving policies finally introduced. In fact, during the 25-year delay (from 1975 to 2000) in instituting the stabilizing policies, resource consumption is about equal to the total 125-year consumption from 1975 to 2100 of Figure 47.

From my viewpoint in 2016, this is not encouraging. Yet it bears out much of what I have been saying is this blog all along—that resource depletion is already causing a collapse and it is too late for a solution that enables those of us in the western world to maintain our current lifestyles.

The rest of the chapter is spent considering the many obstacles to setting up a steady state system and arguing the value of doing so. Here are a few typical paragraphs that will give you the flavour of this:

Indeed there would be little point even in discussing such fundamental changes in the functioning of modern society if we felt that the present pattern of unrestricted growth were sustainable into the future. All the evidence available to us, however, suggests that of the three alternatives—unrestricted growth, a self-imposed limitation to growth, or a nature-imposed limitation to growth-only the last two are actually possible.

Achieving a self-imposed limitation to growth would require much effort. It would involve learning to do many things in new ways. It would tax the ingenuity, the flexibility, and the self-discipline of the human race. Bringing a deliberate, controlled end to growth is a tremendous challenge, not easily met.

By choosing a fairly long time horizon for its existence, and a long average lifetime as a desirable goal, we have now arrived at a minimum set of requirements for the state of global equilibrium. They are:

1. The capital plant and the population are constant in size. The birth rate equals the death rate and the capital investment rate equals the depreciation rate.
2. All input and output rates—births, deaths, investment and depreciation are all kept to a minimum.
3. The levels of capital and population and the ratio of the two are set in accordance with the values of the society. They may be deliberately revised and slowly adjusted as the advance of technology creates new options.

Population and capital are the only quantities that need be constant in the equilibrium state. Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely. In particular, those pursuits that many people would list as the most desirable and satisfying activities of man-education, art, music, religion, basic scientific research, athletics, and social interactions-could flourish.

Technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state. A few obvious examples of the kinds of practical discoveries that would enhance the workings of a steady state society include:

  • new methods of waste collection, to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling;
  • more efficient techniques of recycling, to reduce rates of resource depletion;
  • better product design to increase product lifetime and promote easy repair, so that the capital depreciation rate would be minimized;
  • harnessing of incident solar energy, the most pollution-free power source;
  • methods of natural pest control, based on more complete understanding of ecological interrelationships;
  • medical advances that would decrease the death rate;
    • contraceptive advances that would facilitate the equalization of the birth rate with the decreasing death rate.

One of the most commonly accepted myths in our present society is the promise that a continuation of our present patterns of growth will lead to human equality. We have demonstrated in various parts of this book that present patterns of population and capital growth are actually increasing the gap between the rich and the poor on a worldwide basis, and that the ultimate result of a continued attempt to grow according to the present pattern will be a disastrous collapse.

The greatest possible impediment to more equal distribution of the world's resources is population growth. It seems to be a universal observation, regrettable but understandable, that, as the number of people over whom a fixed resource must be distributed increases, the equality of distribution decreases. Equal sharing becomes social suicide if the average amount available per person is not enough to maintain life.

And they conclude with the following:

If there is cause for deep concern, there is also cause for hope. Deliberately limiting growth would be difficult, but not impossible. The way to proceed is clear, and the necessary steps, although they are new ones for human society, are well within human capabilities. Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society-one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the human will to achieve that goal. Without such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.

Forty plus years later we are no closer to having the goal they speak of. Our politicians still see "economic recovery"—the resumption of "robust" growth—as their main goal. Even though growth is the very thing that is causing most of our problems.

In my next post we'll (finally) wrap up this review.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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Tuesday, 18 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 3

This posts continues looking through the book The Limits to Growth one chapter at a time, summarizing it and offering my thoughts on what it has to say.

In my last post we stopped part way through Chapter IV, Technology And The Limits To Growth, having just looked at several runs of the World 3.0 model, each of which ended with a collapse of the world system as one sort of limit or another was reached. The rest of this chapter is spent discussing the implications of those model runs and some of the limitations of the model.

One limitation is that once collapse starts, there will be significant social change and the model's structure will no longer match the structure of the world's systems. So the models "predictions" are valid only up until things start to fall apart.

The model runs in this chapter make it clear that the basic behaviour mode of the world's system is exponential growth of population and capital followed by overshoot and collapse. This is so if we assume no change from the current system or numerous technological changes. All the model runs to this point assume that population and capital growth are allowed to continue until they reach some natural limit, since this seems to be a basic part of the current human value system.

Using the most optimistic estimates of the effect of technology in the model did not prevent the ultimate decline of population and industry, nor even delay it past the year 2100.

Delays are built into many of the feedback loops in the system, so that the effect of a change in one value is not felt immediately in other areas. The result of this is that a value which is approaching a limit will often actually overshoot that limit before collapsing.

I'd like to point out that during the first part of an occurrence of overshoot, when population and industry are still growing, it is difficult to tell that overshoot is actually occurring. Only after they peak and start to decline does it become obvious that the system has actually been in overshoot for some time. This leads us to what is for me the essential question that comes out of The Limits to Growth: are we already in overshoot or are we just starting to do really well as the techno-optimists and cornucopians would have us believe. It should be no surprise that I believe we are well into overshoot and heading merrily along toward collapse.

The authors go on to say that technological change has social effects that are not included in the model and that these effects often manifest themselves after a delay as well. This is unfortunate since we may commit to a technology and become dependent on it, only to find out too late that it has some negative social consequences, which we now have to live with since we have become dependent on the technology.

As an example they point to the Green Revolution, which was intended to be a technological solution to the world's food problems. They claim it was also intended to be labour intensive so as to provide more jobs and not require large amounts of capital so as to be accessible to the poor in developing nations. In areas like the East Punjab in India this worked well—the number of agricultural jobs increasing faster than the rate of growth of the total population, with real wage increases of 16 percent from 1963 to 1968.

The principal, or intended, effect of the Green Revolution—increased food production—seems to have been achieved. Unfortunately the social side-effects have not been entirely beneficial in most regions where the new seed varieties have been introduced. The Indian Punjab had, before the Green Revolution, a remarkably equitable system of land distribution. The more common pattern in the non-industrialized world is a wide range in land ownership, with most people working very small farms and a few people in possession of the vast majority of the land.

Where these conditions of economic inequality already exist, the Green Revolution tends to cause widening inequality. Large farmers generally adopt the new methods first. They have the capital to do so and can afford to take the risk. Although the new seed varieties do not require tractor mechanization, they provide much economic incentive for mechanization, especially where multiple cropping requires a quick harvest and replanting. On large farms, simple economic considerations lead almost inevitably to the use of labor-displacing machinery and to the purchase of still more land! The ultimate effects of this socio-economic positive feedback loop are agricultural unemployment, increased migration to the city, and perhaps even increased malnutrition, since the poor and unemployed do not have the means to buy the newly produced food.

I would add that the Green Revolution was intended not as a final solution, but rather to give us a breathing space while we got population growth under control. That hasn't yet happened, and the social problems caused by the Green Revolution haven't been solved, either. It is also becoming evident that the Green Revolution and conventional agriculture in general is pushing up against resource limits such as arable land, fresh water, fossil fuels and mineral resources like phosphorous. That is exactly what the model runs earlier in this chapter should lead us to expect—that the application of technology to apparent problems of resource depletion, pollution or food shortage has no impact on the essential problem, which is exponential growth in a finite and complex system.

In any case as the world changes, we have to adapt by making social changes, which take place quite slowly. The authors comment:

The social delays, like the physical ones, are becoming increasingly more critical because the processes of exponential growth are creating additional pressures at a faster and faster rate. The world population grew from 1 billion to 2 billion over a period of more than one hundred years. The third billion was added in 30 years and the world's population has had less than 20 years to prepare for its fourth billion. The fifth, sixth, and perhaps even seventh billions may arrive before the year 2000, less than 30 years from now. Although the rate of technological change has so far managed to keep up with this accelerated pace, mankind has made virtually no new discoveries to increase the rate of social (political, ethical, and cultural) change.

They go on to discuss that there is a whole range of problems that cannot be solved by technological advances. Problems which yield only to social solutions.

Applying technology to the natural pressures that the environment exerts against any growth process has been so successful in the past that a whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities.

The basic choice... is the same one that faces any society trying to overcome a natural limit with a new technology. Is it better to try to live within that limit by accepting a self-imposed restriction on growth? Or is it preferable to go on growing until some other natural limit arises, in the hope that at that time another technological leap will allow growth to continue still longer? For the last several hundred years human society has followed the second course so consistently and successfully that the first choice has been all but forgotten.

The chapter ends with this:

Perhaps the best summary of our position is the motto of the Sierra Club: "Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress."

We would hope that society will receive each new technological advance by establishing the answers to three questions before the technology is widely adopted. The questions are:

1. What will be the side-effects, both physical and social, if this development is introduced on a large scale?
2. What social changes will be necessary before this development can be implemented properly, and how long will it take to achieve them ?
3. If the development is fully successful and removes some natural limit to growth, what limit will the growing system meet next? Will society prefer its pressures to the ones this development is designed to remove?

Let us go on now to investigate nontechnical approaches for dealing with growth in a finite world.

Answering those questions is likely to be difficult and such answers as we can get will not be terribly clear. But unfortunately, choosing not to adopt technology can also have severe consequences, as we'll see in the next chapter.

This is a rather short post, but including Chapter 5 would make it too long, so I'll break off here and be back in just a few days with my review of Chapter 5, which is already written.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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Sunday, 2 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 2

This posts continues on directly from my last post, working through the book The Limits to Growth one chapter at a time, summarizing it and offering my thoughts on what it has to say.

The graphic to the right is the "standard" run of the World 3.0 model, for which it is most famous. More on this soon—the graphic is just here so that when I post links to Facebook a graphic other than my ugly mug shows up.

Chapter III — Growth in the World System

In this chapter, the authors describe the formal model that they used in an attempt to understand the complex world system. The purpose of the model is to aid in study of the behaviour modes of the system, that is the tendencies of the variable in the system (population, capital, food, resources and pollution) to change in certain characteristic ways as time passes.

For example, it is well known that a population growing in a limited environment can behave in several different ways. It can adjust smoothly to an equilibrium below the environmental limit by means of a gradual decrease in growth rate, as shown in A below. It can over shoot the limit and then die back again in either a smooth or an oscillatory way, also as shown in B and C. Or it can overshoot the limit and in the process decrease the ultimate carrying capacity by consuming some necessary nonrenewable resource, as in D. This behavior has been noted in many natural systems. For instance, deer or goats, when natural enemies are absent, often overgraze their range and cause erosion or destruction of the vegetation.
A major purpose in constructing the world model has been to determine which, if any, of these behavior modes will be most characteristic of the world system as it reaches the limits to growth. This process of determining behavior modes is "prediction" only in the most limited sense of the word. The output graphs reproduced later in this book show values for caveats about the system dynamic model world population, capital, and other variables on a time scale that begins in the year 1900 and continues until 2100. These graphs are not exact predictions of the values of the variables at any particular year in the future. They are indications of the system's behavioral tendencies only.

Please note that the authors are claiming only "the most limited" predictive capabilities for their dynamic system model. They go on at some length about this and acknowledge that the model is extremely simplified. The whole world represented by a single general population, a single class of long lived globally distributed pollutants and a single generalized resource—this is necessary to keep the model understandable. They admit that this limits the information that can be gained from the model.

National boundaries are not recognized. Distribution inequalities of food, resources, and capital are included implicitly in the data but they are not calculated explicitly nor graphed in the output. World trade balances, migration patterns, climatic determinants, and political processes are not specifically treated. Other models can, and we hope will, be built to clarify the behavior of these important subsystems.

The authors describe 4 steps they took in building the model.

1. We first listed the important causal relationships among the five levels and traced the feedback loop structure. To do so we consulted literature and professionals in many fields of study dealing with the areas of concern-demography, economics, agronomy, nutrition, geology, and ecology, for example. Our goal in this first step was to find the most basic structure that would reflect the major interactions between the five levels. We reasoned that elaborations on this basic structure, reflecting more detailed knowledge, could be added after the simple system was understood.
2. We then quantified each relationship as accurately as possible, using global data where it was available and characteristic local data where global measurements had not been made.
3. With the computer, we calculated the simultaneous operation of all these relationships over time. We then tested the effect of numerical changes in the basic assumptions to find the most critical determinants of the system's behavior.
4. Finally, we tested the effect on our global system of the various policies that are currently being proposed to enhance or change the behavior of the system.

They then go into some detail about the structure of the model, which I find very interesting. There simply isn't room to go into detail here and I can only encourage you to get a copy of the book and have a look. It is available as a pdf on line free of charge. (insert link here)

For those who have objected that the model is pulled out of thin air or question the numbers it is based on, I would point to the following statement by the authors:

The current state of knowledge about casual relationships in the world ranges from complete ignorance to extreme accuracy. The relationships in the world model generally fall in the middle ground of certainty. We do know something about the direction and magnitude of the causal effects, but we rarely have fully accurate information about them. To illustrate how we operate on this intermediate ground of knowledge, we present here three examples of quantitative relationships from the world model. One is a relationship between economic variables that is relatively well understood; another involves sociopsychological variables that are well studied but difficult to quantify; and the third one relates biological variables that are, as yet, almost totally unknown. Although these three examples by no means constitute a complete description of the world model, they illustrate the reasoning we have used to construct and quantify it.

They go on to discuss the three examples: per capita resource use (well understood), desired birth rate (well studied but difficult to quantify) and pollution effect on lifetime (almost totally unknown), describe the assumption they have made. They then discuss the usefulness of the model, given its limitations.

First, we hope that by posing each relationship as a hypothesis, and emphasizing its importance in the total world system, we may generate discussion and research that will eventually improve the data we have to work with. This emphasis is especially important in the areas in which different sectors of the model interact (such as pollution and human lifetime), where interdisciplinary research will be necessary. Second, even in the absence of improved data, information now available is sufficient to generate valid basic behavior modes for the world system. This is true because the model's feedback loop structure is a much more important determinant of overall behavior than the exact numbers used to quantify the feedback loops. Even rather large changes in input data do not generally alter the mode of behavior, as we shall see in the following pages. Numerical changes may well affect the period of an oscillation or the rate of growth or the time of a collapse, but they will not affect the fact that the basic mode is oscillation or growth or collapse.
Since we intend to use the world model only to answer questions about behavior modes, not to make exact predictions, we are primarily concerned with the correctness of the feedback loop structure and only secondarily with the accuracy of the data. Of course when we do begin to seek more detailed, short-term knowledge, exact numbers will become much more important. Third, if decision-makers at any level had access to precise predictions and scientifically correct analyses of alternate policies, we would certainly not bother to construct or publish a simulation model based on partial knowledge. Unfortunately, there is no perfect model available for use in evaluating today's important policy issues. At the moment, our only alternatives to a model like this, based on partial knowledge, are mental models, based on the mixture of incomplete information and intuition that currently lies behind most political decisions. A dynamic model deals with the same incomplete information available to an intuitive model, but it allows the organization of information from many different sources into a feedback loop structure that can be exactly analyzed. Once all the assumptions are together and written down, they can be exposed to criticism, and the system's response to alternative policies can be tested.

And now, at last, we get to actual behaviour of the world model, represented in a series of graphs based on varying assumptions. I can hardly avoid commenting that the graphs say a great deal about the primitive state of graphics software in the early 1970s.

The horizontal scale in each of the figures shows time in years from 1900 to 2100.
With the computer they plotted the progress over time of eight quantities:
solid heavy line—population, total number of persons
dashed line— industrial output per capita, dollar equivalent per person per year
solid light line—food per capita (kilogram-grain equivalent per person per year)
....... pollution (multiple of 1970 level)
-•-•- nonrenewable resources, fraction of 1900 reserves remaining
B — crude birth rate (births per 1000 persons per year)
D — crude death rate (deaths per 1000 persons per year)
S — services per capita (dollar equivalent per person per year)

Each of these variables is plotted on a different vertical scale. they deliberately omitted the vertical scales and made the horizontal time scale somewhat vague because they wanted to emphasize the general behavior modes of these computer outputs, not the numerical values, which are only approximately known. The scales are, however, exactly equal in all the computer runs presented here, so results of different runs may be easily compared.

The first is the famous (infamous?) "standard run", Figure 35, which is based on the assumption that there will be in the future no great changes in human values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.

The behavior mode of the system shown in figure 35 is clearly that of overshoot and collapse. In this run the collapse occurs because of nonrenewable resource depletion. The industrial capital stock grows to a level that requires an enormous input of resources. In the very process of that growth it depletes a large fraction of the resource reserves available. As resource prices rise and mines are depleted, more and more capital must be used for obtaining resources, leaving less to be invested for future growth. Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation, and the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, which have become dependent on industrial inputs (such as fertilizers, pesticides, hospital laboratories, computers, and especially energy for mechanization). For a short time the situation is especially serious because population, with the delays inherent in the age structure and the process of social adjustment, keeps rising. Population finally decreases when the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.
The exact timing of these events is not meaningful, given the great aggregation and many uncertainties in the model. It is significant, however, that growth is stopped well before the year 2100. We have tried in every doubtful case to make the most optimistic estimate of unknown quantities, and we have also ignored discontinuous events such as wars or epidemics, which might act to bring an end to growth even sooner than our model would indicate. In other words, the model is biased to allow growth to continue longer than it probably can continue in the real world. We can thus say with some confidence that, under the assumption of no major change in the present system, population and industrial growth will certainly stop with the next century, at the latest.

The collapse in Figure 35 is the result of a resource crisis, even though it is based on the optimistic assumption of a static resource reserve of 250 years. But let's be even more optimistic and assume that new discoveries or advances in technology can double the amount of resources economically available. A computer run under that assumption is shown in figure 36.

The overall behavior mode in figure 36—growth and collapse—is very similar to that in the standard run. In this case the primary force that stops growth is a sudden increase in the level of pollution, caused by an overloading of the natural absorptive capacity of the environment. The death rate rises abruptly from pollution and from lack of food. At the same time resources are severely depleted, in spite of the doubled amount available, simply because a few more years of exponential growth in industry are sufficient to consume those extra resources.
Is the future of the world system bound to be growth and then collapse into a dismal, depleted existence? Only if we make the initial assumption that our present way of doing things will not change. We have ample evidence of mankind's ingenuity and social flexibility. There are, of course, many likely changes in the system, some of which are already taking place. The Green Revolution is raising agricultural yields in nonindustrialized countries. Knowledge about modern methods of birth control is spreading rapidly. Let us use the world model as a tool to test the possible consequences of the new technologies that promise to raise the limits to growth.

Chapter IV — Technology and the Limits to Growth

Of course, there are always technological optimists eager to explain how we can overcome the limits to growth. In this chapter, several additional runs of the world model are presented, each an attempt to overcome one or more of the limits which cause collapse in Figures 35 and 36.

Let us assume, however, that the technological optimists are correct and that nuclear energy will solve the resource problems of the world. The result of including that assumption in the world model is shown in figure 37. To express the possibility of utilizing lower grade ore or mining the seabed, we have doubled the total amount of resources available, as in figure 36. We have also assumed that, starting in 1975, programs of reclamation and recycling will reduce the input of virgin resources needed per unit of industrial output to only one-fourth of the amount used today. Both of these assumptions are, admittedly, more optimistic than realistic.
In figure 37 resource shortages indeed do not occur. Growth is stopped by rising pollution, as it was in figure 36. The absence of any constraint from resources allows industrial output, food, and services to rise slightly higher than in figure 36 before they fall. Population reaches about the same peak level as it did in figure 36, but it falls more suddenly and to a lower final value.

"Unlimited" resources thus do not appear to be the key to sustaining growth in the world system. Apparently the economic impetus such resource availability provides must be accompanied by curbs on pollution if a collapse of the world system is to be avoided.

OK, if pollution is the problem, what if we use technology to control pollution?

As figure 39 shows, the pollution control policy is indeed successful in averting the pollution crisis of the previous run. Both population and industrial output per person rise well beyond their peak values in figure 37, and yet resource depletion and pollution never become problems. The overshoot mode is still operative, however, and the collapse comes about this time from food shortage.
As long as industrial output is rising in figure 39, the yield from each hectare of land continues to rise (up to a maximum of seven times the average yield in 1900) and new land is developed. At the same time, however, some arable land is taken for urban-industrial use, and some land is eroded, especially by highly capitalized agricultural practices. Eventually the limit of arable land is reached. After that point, as population continues to rise, food per capita decreases. As the food shortage becomes apparent, industrial output is diverted into agricultural capital to increase land yields. Less capital is available for investment, and finally the industrial output per capita begins to fall. When food per capita sinks to the subsistence level, the death rate begins to increase, bringing an end to population growth.

OK, if too little food is the problem, what if we increase agricultural yields?

In figure 40 we assume that the normal yield per hectare of all the world's land can be further increased by a factor of two. The result is an enormous increase in food, industrial output, and services per capita. Average industrial output per person for all the world's people becomes nearly equal to the 1970 US level, but only briefly. Although a strict pollution control policy is still in effect, so that pollution per unit of output is reduced by a factor of four, industry grows so quickly that soon it is producing four times as much output. Thus the level of pollution rises in spite of the pollution control policy, and a pollution crisis stops further growth, as it did in figure 37.

OK, if that doesn't work, what if we had perfect birth control?

Figure 41 shows the alternate technological policy-perfect birth control, practiced voluntarily, starting in 1975. The result is not to stop population growth entirely because such a policy prevents only the births of unwanted children. The birth rate does decrease markedly, however, and the population grows more slowly than it did in figures 39 and 40. In this run growth is stopped by a food crisis occurring about 20 years later than in figure 39.

Or, what if we had both increased agricultural yield and perfect birth control?

In figure 42 we apply increased land yield and perfect birth control simultaneously. Here we are utilizing a technological policy in every sector of the world model to circumvent in some way the various limits to growth. The model system is producing nuclear power, recycling resources, and mining the most remote reserves; withholding as many pollutants as possible; pushing yields from the land to undreamed-of heights; and producing only children who are actively wanted by their parents. The result is still an end to growth before the year 2100. In this case growth is stopped by three simultaneous crises. Overuse of land leads to erosion, and food production drops. Resources are severely depleted by a prosperous world•population (but not as prosperous as the present US population). Pollution rises, drops, and then rises again dramatically, causing a further decrease in food production and a sudden rise in the death rate. The application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth.

I have discussed this with many techo-optimists who point out that, with enough energy and technology, the problems in Figure 42 (and many others) can be overcome, allowing prosperity to spread worldwide and increase indefinitely. Of course, I happen to doubt that we can find enough energy and develop enough technology, but even if we do there is still a problem. All the energy that we use ends up as waste heat. This isn't something we are doing wrong—it's just how the world works.

Tom Murphy discusses this in detail in a post at his blog "Do The Math". This a framed as a discussion between a physicist and an economist and I find it quite entertaining.

The gist of it, though, is that while currently the amount of waste heat is small enough that it isn't much of a problem, as it increases it will become an even worse problem than the climate change we are experiencing because of the greenhouse effect. Yes, there are ways to minimize (but not eliminate) temperature increases due to waste heat. Ultimately though, as growth continues, if we are clever enough to find ways around all the other limits this will be the limit that gets us.

But I digress—time to get back to The Limits to Growth. The rest of this chapter is spent discussing the implications of the model runs we've been looking at. But I've gone on long enough already, so we'll continue with that in my next post.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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Monday, 30 May 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2: BAU and The Religion of Progress

In my last post I talked about our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU), the people who are working to oppose it (Crunchies) and the woo (pseudoscience) involved in that sort of binary thinking, on both sides. Having brought up pseudoscience, I went on to discuss science as the only reliable way we have of knowing things about the material world (nature), and looked at the spectrum of ways that people do look at nature, noting that BAU and Crunchiness are at two extremes. I finished up by promising to look deeper into those two positions in future posts. Today I'll be talking about BAU.

On the surface, BAU is very practical and down to earth, interested only in what works—the farthest thing from woo. Its proponents would have us believe that they use exactly those reliable thinking tools I talked about in my last post, and proceed as indicated by science and reason. They have to a great extent co-opted science into their ideology, convincing us that their ideology is not just completely supported by science, but really is science, period. Of course, if you are allowed to pick and choose results, you can make science say anything you want.

They would also have us believe that everything is going fine with BAU and our industrial civilization is the best way to live, really the only way anyone would want to live. While they do acknowledge that there are some minor problems with the way BAU is working at the moment, they are sure that a little tinkering should fix them up in no time. And even if the big problems that I am always going on about are real, technology can no doubt be developed to solve them before it is too late.

Underneath that optimistic wallpaper, though, there are some pretty big cracks. Rather than being purely rational, BAU is based on the religion of progress. Supposedly, humanity is special—not strictly a part of nature like other species. Because of our intelligence, and our ability to evolve culturally as well as genetically, we have a clear destiny which places us on a path from the caves to the stars. Limits are something we are made to transcend via technology, not to live within. And however bad our current situation, we can always trust that things will improve, if not for us, at least for our children.

"What's so bad about that—what's wrong with progress?" you may ask. Or more pointedly, "what have you got against progress, Irv?"

I have nothing particular against things getting better, which must surely be what one means when talking about progress. What I am against is "progress as a religion", which involves several problematical ideas:

  • Progress is predestined.
  • Progress must continue, regardless of the consequences and despite any limits we may encounter.
  • Progress occurs in one direction, along a single path. If you don't like where progress is taking us, the only alternative is to move in the other direction, "backwards".
  • Cultures which are not part of BAU are "undeveloped", and that is a bad thing. Their only option is to start moving forward along the path of progress, to begin "developing" and eventually become "developed".

In the developed and developing world, all of us (even Crunchies) are immersed in a culture that worships progress, where those ideas are so obvious that we aren't even aware of them as such. It's like water to fish. I am no different, and I have to work hard to even consider the idea that progress may not be taking us to a good place. But I have done so and I would invite you to join me for a moment and have a closer look at those ideas and where they lead.

First, predestination.

The thing is that the belief in predestined progress is a religion. In North America, it seems to me that the majority of main stream Christian churches are little more than fronts for the religion of progress. For those folks, I guess that means progress is predestined by God. Health, happiness and success in business/work are the rewards of the faithful.

For those of us that aren't religious, though, the word "predestined" seems to mean that the nature of human beings, or perhaps more precisely, of human societies, is to progress. If you want to remain a true believer in progress, it's probably best not to look too closely at what "progress" means. But it's pretty clear that within BAU, it means that the human population grows and attains an ever higher level of material prosperity, comfort and convenience. Since health these days is maintained by the fruits of modern medical science and happiness consists (or so we are told) of ever increasing material prosperity (the fruit of success in business/work), this isn't very different from how the religious (Christian) folks see things. Not surprising, since we are talking about the religion of progress.

But let's take a more skeptical look at this. Is progress really part of human nature?

This idea is based on our ability to pass on advances via language—to evolve culturally as well as genetically. We've had this ability for two to three million years and during all but the last bit of that period, progress has been very, very slow. Cultural evolution during that period led to a wide variety of fairly stable small scale societies adapted to the many environments we encountered as we spread across the surface of the earth to every continent except Antarctica. About 10,000 years ago agriculture was invented in a handful of societies across the world, and the pace of progress in those societies "picked up" to just very slow (one less very).

Then a few hundred years ago the pace of progress began to accelerate dramatically. Looking back on this, those who believe in the inevitability of progress conclude that we finally got our act together and began to realize our potential. Many would credit much of this to the Enlightenment and the technological advances that came with it. I would say they are confusing cause and effect.

Something changed, for sure, but what? In the period leading up to when the change started, European society had just about run out of empty land to expand into and had maximized its use of the energy available from biomass (mainly firewood). Then the "New World" was discovered with great expanses of "empty land" and vast as yet untapped resources. Not long after this, coal began to replace firewood and heat engines (burning coal) began to replace muscle power.

And yes, a great deal of progress came about as a result of these changes. It probably was in some sense "inevitable" that this would happen, that some culture would eventually undergo the changes that European culture did. But this was progress driven not by destiny or human nature, but by the consumption of finite and non-renewable resources. The Enlightenment (while no doubt a good thing) was an effect of this progress, not the cause.

Now we find ourselves in the position of having already filled up essentially all the empty land on this planet and reaching the point of diminishing returns for fossil fuels. It appears that this period of progress will be of limited duration and is already starting to falter.

This is what makes me say the religion of progress is just woo. And the worst kind of woo, since it holds out the hope of continued progress which distracts us from the reality of our situation and the challenges we need to face up to.

Next, the necessity of continuing progress, regardless of the consequences.

BAU defines progress as increasing material prosperity and equates this to economic growth. This is a wonderful thing since there is money to be made in that business. For the financial industry this is literally true, since this industry creates money as debt to allow rapid economic growth. And growth must continue in order for the loans to be paid back with interest and the businesses involved to continue operating profitably. In order for economic growth to continue natural resources are consumed and pollution and waste (the by-products of the process) are created, both in ever greater quantities.

Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet, with strictly limited natural resources and limited sinks to absorb pollution and waste. BAU propaganda would have us believe that this is not so, that technology will always give us a way to surmount the limits we face. But the fact is that, in BAU, progress must continue because anything else is bad for business in the short run, and what happens in the long run isn't a concern in the short run.

BAU propagandists hold up examples of technology enabling continued growth, such as the success we've had in refining ever more depleted ores to get the metals we need and in getting oil and natural gas from deposits that formerly weren't economically accessible. We are told that when one resource runs out we will always find another to substitute for it.

There is even a movement, "eco-modernism" dedicated to this kind of approach.

Ted Trainer, a de-growth advocate, has this to say in an article debunking eco-modernism:

"Central to this sort of thinking is the claim that the economy can be “decoupled” from nature, from resource demands and ecological impacts. That is, technical advance can enable output and consumption to go on growing, presumably forever, while resource demands and ecological impacts are reduced way down to tolerable levels."

Sometimes all you have to do is hear a program's goals so clearly stated to realize how bizarre they really are and how unlikely their success really is.

Clearly, eco-modernism is more BAU woo. It seems very likely that the consequences of continued economic growth will be more unpleasant than we are willing to accept. But accept them we must, since there is no way to change the direction the BAU is headed. Or so it seems.

Then, the idea that progress is one dimensional.

If we object to any of the negative consequences of progress we are told that we can accept progress and go forward to better things or turn away from progress and go back (presumable to worse things), but those are the only choices. That is why Crunchies are painted as "dirty hippies" who want to go off grid and forego the benefits of modern society. It is even true in many cases, since having grown up in BAU society, it is very hard even for Crunchies to imagine any other alternative. It's no wonder that it is difficult to imagine change in other directions, when we have no clear examples of such and are continually told it is not possible. But this does not mean that such change is truly impossible, just that BAU desperately wants us not to head in any such direction.

Again from the same article by Ted Trainer:

"This world-view fails to grasp several things.... There can be many paths towards many end points, and we might opt for other end points than the one modernization is taking us to. In addition we might deliberately select desirable development goals rather than just accept where modernisation takes us, and with respect to some dimensions we might choose not to develop any further. Ecomodernism has no concept of sufficiency or good enough...."
"... we could opt for a combination of elements from different points on the path. For instance there is no reason why we cannot have both sophisticated modern medicine and the kind of supportive community that humans have enjoyed for millennia, and have both technically astounding aircraft along with small, cheap, humble, fireproof, home made and beautiful mud brick houses, and have modern genetics along with neighbourhood poultry co-ops. Long ago humans had worked out how to make excellent and quite good enough houses, strawberries, furniture, dinners and friendships. We could opt for stable, relaxed, convivial and sufficient ways in some domains while exploring better ways in others, but ecomodernists see only two options; going forward or backward. Modernity is a whole package we move further towards or retreat from and you must take the bad with the good. They seem to have no interest in which elements in modernism are worthwhile and which of them should be dumped. The Frankfurt School saw some of them leading to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Why on earth can’t we design and build societies that embody the good ideas and ways humans have figured out over thousands of years, taking some from high tech arenas and some from hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., that we thrive best in small face-to-face communities)?"

It seems to me that the path a society follows is determined largely by what it does with its surpluses. BAU's path is one dimensional path because in BAU there is only ever one thing to be done with a surplus—invest in more "progress" and make sure the profit from that goes to the investors and those who are in charge of things. But in fact there are many choices, which one we choose is determined by what we think is important and this can lead us in many different directions.

And lastly, cultures outside of BAU are undeveloped and need to progress.

The picture we are given of the remaining non-BAU cultures is a very negative one, focusing on all the things we have that they don't. I can recommend Jared Diamond's book "The World Until Yesterday" for a more balanced treatment of life in traditional societies.

And to borrow some ideas from Daniel Quinn, as expressed in his book Ishmael it seems that during those 2 to 3 million years before the invention of agriculture people were evolving genetically while their societies evolved culturally and the result was something that worked. Of course I am not saying that these societies were perfect or even particularly "nice" from our modern viewpoint, but they did provide their members with just enough of what they needed, both materially and in the more "spiritual" sense of having a "place"—worthwhile work which contributed to the group they lived in, and lifelong security provided by the group they lived in.

Note that I am not talking about the sort of societies that arose with the invention of the state not long after the invention of agriculture. These societies mark the beginning of BAU, and I find there is little good to be said of them. Although the argument can be made that in some ways, even those societies were better that the way most of us live now. If you are a North American, compare the number of days you get off work in year with a serf in medieval Europe. You may be surprised to find yourself on the short end of the comparison, though admittedly, most of his days off were church holidays.

Still, it is very hard to get away from the idea that positive change must be in the direction that BAU defines as progress. Surely, the people in those "primitive" societies would be better off if we could help them to progress.

Well, maybe not. An honest look at BAU makes it clear that the fruits of progress aren't very evenly spread around and that the promise of things getting better is, for the majority of people (or even their children), an empty one. If you don't already have a secure position in the upper levels of BAU, your prospects here in the early twenty first century aren't very good.

But beyond BAU's failure to deliver the fruits of progress as promised, there is the plain fact the BAU's kind of progress may not be what is really needed for us to live happy and fulfilling lives. Yes, it is true that if you are struggling just to get by, some improvement in your material prosperity will make life better for you. But once you have just enough, further increases yield diminishing returns, until eventually we find ourselves officially part of the rat race and begin asking if it is all really worth the effort.

To sum up all this talk about the religion of progress, it is the third religion that I have embraced and then been forced to abandon when confronted with reality.

It turns outs that I have somewhat more to say about what's wrong with BAU, so my next post will cover that, and then I'll finally go on with a closer look at Crunchiness.

Thanks to my youngest child Lidean for ideas and inspiration they have given me.

This is the second post in a series of six:

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