Global Economic Downturn: War, or Sustainability?

[elbows]

The politics of population control are too emotive for anything to be overtly attempted on that front, at least unless there has been an extreme crisis for a very long time.

In the developed world we have seen reduction in children per couple for a few reasons. The free choice to use contraceptives, along with reductions in poverty and infant mortality, have changed what people, on average, want/need in terms of number of children.

But this leaves us with other demographic problems, ageing population, etc.

I suspect that any large reduction of global population is likely to come from things like the loss of effectiveness of antibiotics, influenza pandemic, famine, stuff like that. This stuff may actually increase the birthrate, but will reduce life expectancy, without any need for unthinkable policies which prevent births or cull the old. War plays a part too, though the atomic bomb and MAD has perhaps curtailed the possibilities on that front somewhat.

Phrases like abundance and scarcity, in the context of these being artificial phenomenon caused by a specific economic system, troubles me a bit. There is a lot of truth in it, but all the same there are some limits under any system I can think of. We probably can have an abundance of all we need to keep billions of people alive, but both this and scarcity comes down to peoples expectations about how much they really need. Im a meat eater but I expect to have to mostly give it up one day because it is a luxury that cannot be sustained.

Peak oil & other resources makes me interested in that stuff. Its a mixed bag, shortages of oil will certainly have a lot of dramatic effects, but some of these will involve an increased need for manual human labour. I fear the worst but there are sane paths which we might follow and avoid the worst case population slide.

 

[Dr Jon]

Malthus was wrong 200 years ago, and you are wrong now.

Don't be too hard on Malthus. He didn't know that petroleum would come along, allowing our population to increase exponentially, way beyond the planet's carrying capacity and for us to have enjoyed almost a century of unsustainable consumer luxury. His basic argument is as true again now as it was then.

I think that whichever way you look at it, we face the prospect of a significant reduction in population as oil runs out. Obviously it is preferable that people stop breeding voluntarily rather than go through the traumas of sterilisation, starvation and die-off. (Indira Gandhi was one proponent of enforced sterilization and look what happened to her. ) Indeed, I think the future will be so grim that suicide will become an attractive lifestyle option, especially for those unwilling to adapt to a life without the comforts of the consumer era. (For example, life without a reliable supply of proper beer is just too hideous to contemplate, so I reckon I'll be taking this route. )

... That Donatella Meadows quote above says it quite nicely for example. As one of the world's leading systems experts, she was invited to the NAFTA / GATT planning talks and found herself getting increasingly freaked out by all the crazy positive feedback loops they were building in to drive growth and by the extreme weakness of the control measures they were proposing to stop that growth running wild in various damaging ways.

Neoliberal capitalism in a nut-shell ...

You mean Donella Meadows? Yes, the positive feedbacks in play now make all this quite scarily unpredictable. In fact Benoit Mandelbrot (fractal / chaos theory guy) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of "The Black Swan") have been saying this for a while. See this interview.

Oh, and talking of positive feedback, I see that Jim Hansen has given Obama just four years to save the planet.

The politics of population control are too emotive for anything to be overtly attempted on that front, at least unless there has been an extreme crisis for a very long time.

I can see the advertising campaign now:

"Top Yourself! Go on - you know it makes sense"

 

[elbows]

I can see the advertising campaign now:

"Top Yourself! Go on - you know it makes sense"

Have you seen Soylent Green?

 

[Dr Jon]

Have you seen Soylent Green?

Made from people - yeah, long time ago.
I think the Quietus pill on Children of Men is a more likely scenario.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I do disagree that Malthus was correct apart from oil though. It seems pretty clear to me that if people have a reasonable amount of prosperity and security and that if women have access to effective contraception, then you don't get population growth running wild.

So the trick is to guarantee those things globally and to do so without behaving unsustainably in other ways.

Part of the problem though is that global capitalism a) requires a certain amount of primitive accumulation to keep going, which requires local elites in the developing world to be complicit in selling off resources at the expense of their fellow citizens, necessitating a lack of prosperity and security for anyone else but elites and b) requires that profitability be maintained by making sure that the people with the shitty end of the capitalist stick don't enjoy prosperity and security, so they can act as the 'reserve army of labour' and be played off against workers in the rich countries to keep costs low.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I do disagree that Malthus was correct apart from oil though. It seems pretty clear to me that if people have a reasonable amount of prosperity and security and that if women have access to effective contraception, then you don't get population growth running wild.

Yes, this is the key point that Malthus did not foresee. It's a modern phenomenon, so it would have been pretty impossible to forecast from his position, I would say. With prosperity, security and emancipated women, you don't get population growth at all.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Yep. Look at this graph someone posted on the other thread.

It's very clear that population growth is running wild where prosperity and security are generally low. You'll also notice a sharp upturn in that growth at the beginning of the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, as industrial agriculture is introduced on a wide scale in the developing world, for the most part without a corresponding increase in prosperity and security for the majority of people in the countries concerned.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Good point about where the sharp upturn occurs.

I dislike the euphemism 'developing world'. If you look at the last 50 years, we live in the developing world. Much of what is called 'developing' has seen precious little 'progress' in this period. The film Motorcycle Diaries brings this home. The real people in it are the same as they were 50 years ago. No need for period detail, because they face the same problems and have the same infrastructure as in the 1950s.

Until I see widespread developing, I'll not use that term for the poor, marginalised periphery.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Harry Cleaver has written some good stuff on the political impact of introducting 'Green Revolution' industrial agriculture.

Contradictions of the Green Revolution

Technology as Political Weaponry

Nature, Neo-Liberalism and Sustainable Development

 

[Dr Jon]

Yes, this is the key point that Malthus did not foresee. It's a modern phenomenon, so it would have been pretty impossible to forecast from his position, I would say. With prosperity, security and emancipated women, you don't get population growth at all.

I think zero growth is a bit optimistic, though I can see how the rate would be lower, as shown on the graph Bernie posted. The population stats here in Kerala seem to correspond with that, although I'm not sure how much things are skewed by external remittances and the high suicide rate. I'm not sure how much the latter is influenced by the higher rate of education.
I remain to be convinced that Kerala's example is actually sustainable in the long term. For example, there is a relentless loss of forest cover for housing development as living standards and expectations rise. It is the simple, palm-thatched huts inhabited by the rural poor which are sustainable, not the fancy houses and apartments of the new rich. As in other parts of India, water supply is a problem: water tables are falling, giving rise to problems like saline intrusion in coastal areas. Basically still too many people chasing too few resources, despite population growth of just 9.4% (1991-2001)

If we are going to get a truly sustainable world, it will require that we in the industrialised nations move toward a much more basic standard of living - and I just can't see that happening. Especially not in a democratic system, where every fuckwit thinks they know best.

When you throw potentially catastrophic climate change into the mix, the challenges ahead are quite staggering. Hence my mostly pessimistic outlook, I'm afraid.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> If we are going to get a truly sustainable world, it will require that we in the industrialised nations move toward a much more basic standard of living - and I just can't see that happening. <snip>

I'd frame it slightly differently.

I'd say we have to move towards a system that optimises for sustainability rather than profit, and for reasons summarised in the previous discussion I think that requires at least some level of prosperity and security to work.

The level of prosperity required though, assuming it was accompanied by genuine security (in terms of food, housing, energy, health and safety etc.) need not imply anything like our present level of resource consumption and resource degradation. If you're optimising for sustainability, dynamics of stuff like nutrient recycling in the absence of industrial fertilisers automatically lead to structures like lots of mostly self-sufficient eco-villages providing basic needs and sharing large scale infrastructure. With such structures a lot of the security aspects automatically follow, all other things being equal, especially because those sorts of structures naturally lend themselves to direct democracy and other egalitarian ways of doing things. Once you have citizens managing their own resource consumption and production of goods, on a mostly face to face scale, and remove profit as a driver for overconsumption, I think the per-capita consumption and resource degradation issues would be mitigated to a large or at least useful degree.

The big challenge is that level of security in a capitalist context permits the refusal of work unless the terms are attractive, so it wouldn't be tolerated by capitalism on a global scale. Hence I can't easily imagine this approach working unless you replace capitalism with something that does tolerate and indeed enable that level of security. Capitalism would most likely want to drop lots of bombs on anything like that if it looked as though it was going to take off on a global scale, because it would be extremely bad for business. Hence I don't think sustainability and capitalism can coexist.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I think zero growth is a bit optimistic

This is the experience of the rich world.

 

[Dr Jon]

... I do strongly suspect that capitalism would want to drop lots of bombs on anything like that if it looked as though it was going to take off on a global scale however.

The developments in Kerala have happened because of their democratically elected communist governments!

Also because a significant number of the rich and powerful were prepared to give up some of their wealth and power for the good of all. So it's not impossible, just not likely in the West, I think.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Yep. I don't know as much about recent developments in Kerala as I'd like to. A very good friend of mine lived there for a year when he was an anthropology post-grad and told me a lot of interesting stuff, but that was a decade ago.

 

[Dr Jon]

... Hence I don't think sustainability and capitalism can coexist

Just spotted your edit.

No, not under the ludicrous system of Fractional Reserve Banking they can't. While we remain stuck on the hamster wheel of perpetual growth, we can only run faster and faster toward doom and destruction. As has been said elsewhere, the god of growth is dead: not only dead, but now starting to smell really bad. It has actually been dead for some time: only smoke, mirrors and Ponzi schemes have maintained the illusion of life.

So, we must move on smartly to a sustainable system like that which you propose.
NEF's Green New Deal would be a move in the right direction, but we really do need to move now and move quickly if we are to avoid the worst.

 

[elbows]

I dont think we can avoid the worst, just make the most of it by using the opportunity to change things. We were not prepared to end the boom and harm our economy by transitioning, but now the economy is ruined anyway may as well change things.

As for the god of growth that I so often proclaim as deceased, I guess it might end up not looking that straightforward. By declining a lot, we give some wiggle room for some growth to reoccur in future, it just wont get us beyond where we had originally grown to before the bubbles burst. I suppose this is related to people wondering what would happen during the oil production plateau - would we just have a long decline, or bounce along the top, going through periods of decline than then growth.

Either way it seems to be that the economic outlook is now strongly related to the large carbon cut targets. Eg if we are going to be using 80% less carbon by 2050, 50% of that could come from having less economic activity overall, with perhaps 30% from new energy technology an greater efficiency.

Hark the angels of consumption sing, glory to the newly deceased king.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Do you think though, that if either of the major parties thought that they could restore the growth of capital accumulation by some extreme measures, say by adopting fascism or something horrible like that, that they wouldn't?

 

[goebfwai]

I remember when I went to see the film Children of Men that was mentioned, I thought it painted a horrifically realistic vision of a future global dystopia. Population growth, resource depletion, war, terrorism, euthanasia, rioting, economic collapse, government collapses, fertility/sterility, toxicity of the environment feature large within the plot. In short, a lot of today's issues, racheted up several orders of magniture worse than they are now.

Hopefully it offers such a frightening view of a world that doesn't transition and adjust through the oil-fuelled expansion of the 20th Century, that people will do everything they can to work on harmonious, constructive solutions to avoid them.

 

[Dr Jon]

Do you think though, that if either of the major parties thought that they could restore the growth of capital accumulation by some extreme measures, say by adopting fascism or something horrible like that, that they wouldn't?

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, which is exactly why we need to move away from such a crap / useless system of government asap.

Of course, the tossers in power will try to resist this, but their ability to do so is evaporating in tandem with their reputation for prudent finance. Such a change can only really come from the bottom up, I think. Think globally, act locally...

 

[elbows]

Do you think though, that if either of the major parties thought that they could restore the growth of capital accumulation by some extreme measures, say by adopting fascism or something horrible like that, that they wouldn't?

I dont know. There is going to be a lot of pressure to keep capitalism of some form alive. I guess they would consider especially unpleasant flavors of capitalism if the alternative was not capitalism at all.

But Im not sure what options they've got. We dont know if the pressure from the masses on government, will outweigh the pressure from business. We dont know what the masses will end up demanding, we dont know what the new relationship between business and government will be - eg when the government bails out business, how much control will it end up wanting over that business. We can presume that government will want to save itself and its institutions, but we dont know whether it will end up putting some ideology before pragmatic compromise, see the stubbornness of Thatcher for a mild(!) example.

If a modicum of sanity prevails, the large centralised systems and mass manufacturing setups we have now, will be used to build the stuff and infrastructure we need to live in a low-energy world in future. This could be done in a number of different ways, the industries could be state controlled, or they can try to keep alive the current system as some sort of hybrid, or it could look like communism or fascism or corporatism.

But its quite possible that the masses will not like this for a large number of different reasons, and countries might fall out more. Either domestic or international strife could bring a more rapid end to the sorts of sophisticated industry we have today. And that would lead to a very different way of transitioning to a low carbon world. The future may be local, but some things we have today are not likely to be easily made on a local, deindustrialised basis, say for example computers. This is one of the reasons that whilst I find the current system horrific, I would not wish it to vanish overnight. We may as well use it to build a new foundation for a very different future.

On other political levels I also worry about whether we will end up throwing the baby out with the bath water. When I look at the likes of China, I wonder if they will end up more like us, or whether we will end up more like them. More stick and less carrot seems quite possible for our future. Whilst it is reasonable to be cynical about the levels of freedom and human rights that we have attained, we still have plenty to potentially lose.

How will we co-operate in future? Infinite bickering or common purpose? We could spend a generation or 2 getting things even more wrong, or we might get it right first time. As if the prediction were not already hard enough to make, nuclear stuff has certainly had a complicating effect on both the energy and war possibilities of the future.

 

[elbows]

Or to put it another way, we are going to have to learn some lessons the hard way. But if we have to relearn all the lessons from history the hard way again, we're screwed. So lets hope we've come further will our collective sanity than it may appear on a bad day.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Yeah, it was China's example that sort of got me thinking. You could argue that neo-conservatism, of the kind represented by Bush and nuLabour is a reactive attempt by elites to deal with some of the inherent contradictions of neo-liberalism, the social chaos it produces, the increasingly theadbare claims that it can deliver prosperity and security when what it actually delivers is a redistribution of wealth in favour of a tiny elite at the expense of everybody else; by imposing a claim of moral authority through propaganda and by authoritarian means, by imposing more and more social disciplines, one might even say moral disciplines, while letting capitalism continue to consume the public sphere and letting markets continue to run wild.

You can kind of see in China something a bit like the place where our elites appear to be trying to go. A single party (perhaps with some vestigial illusion of choice being retained for PR purposes) presiding over out of control capitalism.

 

[toblerone3]

Fascinating thread. Well done everybody for keeping it going for ten pages without descending (much) into personal abuse. I thought that Wolveryeti got a bit of hard time for advocating population control as a solution to getting off the treadmill of fractional reserve banking.

I think he got a bit fixated on it though and underestimated the social and human costs of population control a la China. But I would think that the harshness of the Economic and Environmental crisis would not rule it out as a possible policy in some places at some point in the future.

 

[Dr Jon]

On the subject of sustainability, I spotted this post on the Guardian's Road To Ruin
page:

Looking out from my windows, back and front of my house, I clearly see the beautiful English countryside as it was before E.E. regulations and the binding chains of unnecessary political interference made small scale farming as a means of raising a family an impossible task.

Yet thousands of square miles of useful green fields are empty of live stock and are fast reverting back to useless moorland while the farm buildings are rapidly being converted into builders yards or places to store vehicles and materials for the building industry.

On recent frost, and light snowfalls, it was easy to see just how high up the hillsides the successful cultivation had reached during the 1939 to 1945 war when even wheat was grown for the war effort, and potatoes and greens flourished.

The barren Lancashire hills are quite capable of producing vast quantities of food, especially lamb, beef, pork, chickens and eggs, thus not only helping our own economy, but with the drying processes fashionable in wartime, we could export food to help to feed the starving children of the world.

We should remember that it was these small farmers who launched the Industrial Revolution in the first place the Rochdale Coop in particular.
There is scope to turn back the clock and do it again, beginning with the ancient idea of a house a barn and a few acres of land adjoing the moorland roads, these would sell for good prices as fast as they could be built, thus reducing the pressure off taking too much green belt land for house building purposes.

It is true that those who routinely object to any measures of progress will do so, and will say as usual that the idea does not conform to a moorland landscape, but those foolish persons of little knowledge do not realise that this is how it was previously.

In fact it was wrongly stated that trees did not conform with the landscape, without realising that they were actually talking about part of the former Forest of Rossendale.

Nor is it realised that we are missing the best opportunities within living memory at the present time because the one good thing about Climate Change is that the lush grass crop is better than it has ever been and it is growing all the time, even in Winter.

Not many countries would deliberately waste such assets as we possess, such as the good soil tended and nourished for hundreds of years or the huge stocks of energy rich peat that was producing oil more than a hundred years ago.

Kind regards and best wishes.

H.

I have noticed this when I come to UK: more farms abandoned or sold off for property developments. Farmers complaining that they can't grow food at a price Tesco will pay...

We have a great untapped potential for greater self-sufficiency. Food can be produced at reasonable prices if we buy from farmers direct and tell Tesco to fuck off. If you have to buy from a supermarket, buy from the Co-Op, who support local farmers. Check out your local farmer's market and grow as much of your own food as possible.