Growth versus Limits

[IrateCitizen]

The following article does a compelling job (IMHO) of demonstrating the wholesale disconnect between economic discourse and ecological realities. I've posted an excerpt that, I believe, lays this out. But please, read the article in its entirety, as it is much more deeply nuanced than this one excerpt.

Doctor, please don’t turn your head away!
by Peter Pogany
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49176

SNIP...

Technology is more endogenous than modern growth theory postulates.

The subject of growth is so central to the science of economics that generally-held convictions about it may be called upon to characterize socioeconomic evolution in broad brush endeavors of macrohistoric periodization. As one might expect, such “signs of the times” doctrines are Oedipal in nature. Each must kill its progenitor before it can mount the throne and fulfill its destiny.

Since the 1980s, the so-called endogenous growth theory (EGT) has held sway. It is distinguished from its predecessors by “endogenizing” variables formerly considered to be exogenous. Through their simultaneous interactions, all the variables are solved within a mathematical formulation of long-run economic expansion, typically captured by growth in productivity (output per capita). Particularly noteworthy is the “endogenization” of technological progress and demographic expansion.

Concerning technology, EGT symbolically eliminated its exogenous forerunner by permanently associating it with the derisive sound bite -- “manna from heaven;” that is, for considering technological progress an unfailingly delivered gift (as if from a deus ex machina) rather than the result of a complex interplay among all demographic and economic variables. Ironically, EGT also has a quasi-religious belief in inevitable progress.

As much as it gropes to incorporate ecological considerations, the reigning growth theory is impervious -- sometimes overtly hostile -- to recognizing the entropy law’s importance in the economic process. It essentially denies that humans cannot create something out of nothing. It embraces creatio ex nihilo in a universe where creatio ex materia is the fundamental law.

By focusing on an enlarged concept of capital (called “generalized capital”), which includes knowledge and monetary gains from research and development, EGT heroically bans diminishing returns, i.e., the gradual disappearance of economic growth opportunities. The adherents (most of whom had topped off their wisdom tanks at unregenerate neoclassical filling stations) believe that, as long as human ingenuity prevails, the flow of new ideas into the global network of ever more efficient industrial assets -- coupled with an insatiable entrepreneurial spirit -- will ensure permanent growth.

In light of the second law of thermodynamics, EGT’s technical progress is also exogenous because it treats ideas about products and techniques of production as if they were independent from the terrestrial sphere’s overall physical condition. EGT redefined “manna from heaven” but remained dependent on it, abetting the insane theology whereby “growth forever” is possible in a thermodynamically closed system. In short, EGT misses and obfuscates the most essential.

The accumulation of entropy (unidirectional and irreversible), owing to the depletion of free energy contained in matter implies that the errant focus of scientific interest (always finding free energy for a purpose) is on its way to be statistically defeated. Matter may have an infinite number of qualities, but its growing dispersion decreases the probability that any particular set of qualities can be used without increased amounts of energy and matter. Importantly, the potentially unlimited energy pent up in matter cannot pick up the tab alone. More energy means increased use of matter, increasing the share of bound energy in our ecological niche.

Believing in the independence of technical innovativeness is the same as considering information a free variable that can undo entropic accumulation. The approach inadvertently equates entropy with ignorance and, hence, unconsciously assumes a loophole in the second law, the existence of perpetual motion machines.

The phsyico-chemical drain imposed on terrestrial matter will tend to frustrate particular solutions to the opportunistic acquisition of free energy from the global environment. Eternal substitution of one material for another is a sheer thermodynamic impossibility. But when and how will this already accessible rational insight begin to shape thinking and behavior and become the primal empirical paradigm of global self-organization is an indecipherable mystery.

END OF EXCERPT

In summary, by ignoring the second law of themodynamics and by considering parts of ecological-economic systems as representative of the whole, modern economic discourse seems to be setting us up for a grand fall.

Thoughts?

[Cresent City Kid]

1. I've tried to make this point, although less eloquently

The economy started from stuff we dug up or harvested from the surface of earth. Through violence and/or agreement, it was determined who owned what.

[GliderGuider]

2. He's preaching to my choir.

However, I still maintain that the worldview Pogany describes so ably is more profitably seen as a proximate cause of our predicament rather than a root cause. I believe the root cause is to be found in our sense of separation -- the primal dualism that is rooted in our self-awareness, the Faustian price we have paid for our neocortex.

"If I am not a part of the universe but rather am apart from it, then anything I can conceive of is possible. Even physical limitations must surrender to the all-conquering power of my reason!"

[IrateCitizen]

3. I think what you describe is primarily a modern phenomenon

Namely, what Adam Curtis explored in his excellent documentary, "The Century of the Self".

I'm not saying that humans didn't cause environmental collapses in the past -- they did. However, the elevation of self-centered desires to the very definition of "freedom" has only expanded any of these self-destructive tendencies exponentially.

This is, also, IMHO, one of the greatest failings of the Enlightenment -- the elevation of the self over all, along with the elevation of "reason" (I prefer the term "rationalization, as it is more accurate) to the source of all-encompassing truth.

[GliderGuider]

4. Our sense of separateness is very, very old.

It goes back to the beginning of our self-awareness, since that is its essential root. The results of the sense of separateness, like environmental collapse, took a while to build up. We have indeed heightened our sense of separation and rationalized its results in the last few centuries as our scientific and technological knowledge base accumulated. However, I claim that such activities as totalitarian agriculture, sport hunting and slavery are evidence that our sense of separateness goes way back in history.

[IrateCitizen]

5. I don't view those things as "separateness"

I view them as attempts at socio-economic centralization and trying to make life easier -- tendencies that have only accelerated exponentially since the neolithic revolution. Slavery has almost always been about gaining access to greater amounts of energy in order to make life easier for those who exploit the slaves' work. It's no accident that the portion of the original US that became so wedded to slavery -- the antebellum South -- was the same one that experienced the greatest labor shortages in order to work the land. It's also no coincidence that the end of slavery coincided with the growth of industrialization and fossil fuel use. All we did was replace human energy with fossil fuel energy, to the extent that every one of us has slave-equivalents working for us, 24/7. Personally, I would not be surprised to see various forms of indentured servitude come back in the wake of the decline of fossil fuels.

But, I digress. I agree that this notion of "separateness" does come from the human capability of reason. However, my analysis from a historical viewpoint tells me that this notion has gone into hyperdrive as modern society has socially and physically separated us from nature and each other. I think it is as sure to regress as reality makes us again much more interdependent upon nature and each other.

[GliderGuider]

6. We're more in agreement than not.

I'd say that the ability to enslave another human being requires one to see them as "other". The specifics of slavery practices are cultural and economic, and differ between antebellum America and, say, 2000 BCE in China. The ability to be OK with owning another human being as a slave rather than simply employing them requires us to believe that they are not like us, that there is an essential difference between us and those we enslave that renders their feelings inconsequential.

I agree that our sense of separateness has definitely gone into hyperdrive in the last two hundred years or so, but it didn't spring from the use of fossil fuels or industrialization. IMO those were consequences.