Ecology and Economics

Rhetoric, Reaction, Economics

A friend recently pointed me toward Albert Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. As I read it, I wondered, once again, "How many economic arguments are simply the stuff of reactionary rhetoric?" Too many, I fear.

In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman gives us three theses to ponder:

• The Perversity Thesis: reform efforts will backfire, tending toward effects opposite those desired
• The Futility Thesis: reform efforts are doomed to fail from the get-go
• The Jeopardy Thesis: reform efforts will unravel earlier (better) reforms, or they will unravel the entirety of whatever system is in play

Each "thesis" is traced back into early roots, often to American, English, and French reform moments, but sometimes as far back as Greek mythology. And each thesis is illustrated with examples drawn from politics and economics—"univeral sufferage" and who gets to vote or otherwise participate in the political realm, "welfare" and the so-called "Welfare State" in the realm of "political economy".

Although written in 1991, The Rhetoric of Reaction give us a good glimpse of too much of public "speak" today:

… In general, a skeptical mocking attitude toward progressives' endeavors and likely achievements is an integral part and highly effective component of the modern conservative stance.

In contrast, progressives have remained mired in earnestness. Most of them have been long on moral indignation and short on irony. …

Hirschman explains how easily both conservatives and progressives get drawn into the rhetorical standoffs, impasses really: "… To the dangers of action it is always possible to oppose the dangers of inaction. …" Here is how Hirschman frames a hypothetical point/counterpoint:

Reactionary: The contemplated action will bring disastrous consequences.

Progressive: Not to take the contemplated action will ring disastrous consequences.

Reactionary: The new reform will jeopardize the older one.

Progressive: The new and the old reforms will mutually reinforce each others.

Reactionary: The contemplated action attempts to change permanent structural characteristics ([natural]"laws") of the social order; it is therefore bound to be wholly ineffective, futile.

Progressive; The contemplated action is backed up by powerful historical forces that are already "on the march"; opposing them would be utterly futile.

Hirschman concludes with:

… [M]y purpose is not to cast "a plague on both your houses." Rather, it is to move public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent postures of either kind, with the hope that in the process our debates will become more "democratically friendly." …

Recent reflection on democracy have yielded two valuable insights …. Modern pluralistic regimes have typically come into being not because of some preexisting wide consensus on "basic values," bur rather because various groups that had been at each others' throats for a prolonged period had to recognize their mutual inability to achieve dominance. Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups.

This historical point of departure of democracy does not bode particularly well for the stability of these regimes. The point is immediately obvious, but it becomes even more so when it is brought into contact with the theoretical claim that a democratic regime achieves legitimacy to the extent that its decisions result from full and open deliberation among its principal groups, bodies, and representatives. Deliberation is here conceived, as an opinion-forming process: the participants should not have fully or definitively formed opinions at the outset; they are expected to engage in meaningful discussion, which means that they should be ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of arguments of other participants and also as a result of new information which becomes available in the course of the debate. …

If this is what it takes for the democratic process to become self-sustaining and to acquire long-run stability and legitimacy, then the gulf that separates such a state from democratic-pluralistic regimes as they emerge historically from strife and civil war is uncomfortably and perilously wide. A people that only yesterday was engaged in fratricidal struggles is not likely to settle down overnight to those constructive give-and-take deliberations. Far more likely , there will initially be agreement to disagree, but without any attempt at melding the opposing points of view—that is indeed the nature of religious tolerance. Or, if there is discussion, it will be a typical "dialogue of the deaf"—a dialogue that will in fact long function as a prolongation of, and a substitute for, civil war. Even in the most "advanced" democracies, many debates are, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a "continuation of civil war with other means." Such debates, with each part on the lookout for arguments that kill, are only too familiar from democratic politics as usual.

There remains then a long and difficult road to be traveled from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more "democracy-friendly" kind of dialogue. …

One question lingers with me: How far have we, particularly here in the US, backpedaled in our quest for pluralistic reasoning?

When "values" of various stripes are trotted out before us on a daily basis, asking us to pledge allegiance to 'values' framed as 'moral absolutes' in-ever-more-strident urgings, why are we not in the streets screaming, Stop! We are losing the very platform on which democracy can flourish!

Or maybe I'm just being reactionary?

UPDATE: Why Do Economists Disagree?, Dani Rodrik, 8/5/7, interrelates well with Hirschman's view. Here is a Keynes quote from the post:

The completeness of the Ricardian victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority. [JM Keynes, The General Theory]

Rodrik notes: "As usual, Keynes puts it best"

"Government Will Have To Be Rebuilt"

(via Economists's View:) Jamie Galbraith is not taking any prisoners in his review of two books, Consumed by political theorist Benjamin Barber and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by environmentalist Bill McKibben:

The Sins of Affluence, by James K. Galbraith, Washington Monthly: Overwritten does not begin to describe Consumed, in which Benjamin Barber takes aim at kid culture, mass market juvenilia, and the infantilization of just about everything in American life. A political theorist ... at the University of Maryland, ...[Barger is the] author of sixteen books, including the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld.... Barber is determined that Paradise has been Lost. ...

Consumed is..., to some degree, an instance of the problem it describes. Barber serves up some of the longest sentences since Proust, yet underneath is largely a simple moral tale, an allegory not more complicated than, say, social Darwinism or Horatio Alger.

Infantilization exists, of course. Dumbing down is big business. In a rare moment of syntactic simplicity, Barber gives the basic contours of the culture: “EASY over HARD, SIMPLE over COMPLEX, and FAST over SLOW.” The stages of capitalism reproduce the stages of physical and psychological development, except in reverse. We are trapped in a world dominated by the reduction of physical and cultural artifacts to the tastes and capacities of children. Fast food, fast sports, cheap love, shout-fest politics. No one with cable television could disagree.

And there are pleasures to be found in this relentless, one-message book. ... But you have to search for these gems, buried as they are in a vast bog of pop sociology and commonplace erudition.... One gets the picture very quickly: Standards have fallen. Yes! We know!

The question is, what are we going to do about it? ... Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood ... against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.

Barber offers no similar recourse. Everything he would do, he would do through markets, not against them or by bringing them under control. He speaks mainly of the “slow food” movement, of Hernando de Soto’s property-rights-for-the-poor and of the Grameen Bank’s micro-lending programs, each of these ... presupposing that markets can be as much a force for good in principle as they are presently a force for ill in practice. ... The New Deal and the Great Society are not Barber’s antecedents. He seeks merely the willed capacity to conduct one’s own life beyond the reach of mass culture, and offers the wishful thought that sensible people, each acting alone, will somehow manage to do just that. Good luck. ...

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is a better, shorter writer, and in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future he shows himself to be an adept critic of capitalism writ large. That is because McKibben, unlike Barber, drills into the fundamental question of the planet’s physical limits. (The term “climate change” does not appear in Consumed...) For as McKibben points out, the carbon blanket—a “mirror image in the sky” of every drop of oil, every ton of coal ever burned—will change everything, and quite soon.

So what comes next?

Climate change and peak oil ... are inevitable; we will have to scale back. But McKibben has hope, founded improbably on an emerging field within—of all subjects—economics: happiness studies. Here researchers have found (and McKibben accepts) that happiness does not depend on economic growth, after the first $10,000 per capita in GDP. So McKibben sets out to find happiness in simpler, less eco-destructive lives. ...

[A] sphere that both McKibben and Barber largely ignore ...[is] public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.

Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards—against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture—will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel...

At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way. I’d rather it didn’t. But, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, “There is no alternative.”...

Let's add back in Jamie Galbraith's concluding lines:

John Kenneth Galbraith, let me suggest, got it right, not merely in The Affluent Society but in Economics and the Public Purpose as well:

The role of the government, when one contemplates reform, is a dual one. The government is a major part of the problem; it is also central to the remedy. It is part of the problem of unequal development, inequality in income distribution, poor distribution of public resources, environmental damage and bogus or emasculatory regulation. And it is upon government that reliance must be placed for solution.

Sad, but still true.

Making World Development Work: New book

Making Development Work, edited by Grégoire Leclerc and Charles A. S. Hall challenges mainstream economic thinking. Now we just have to find some reviews of the book to see whether any of us want to shell out the big bucks for this tome. Anybody seen any reviews?

From University of New Mexico Press:

Making World Development Work
Scientific Alternatives to Neoclassical Economic Theory
Edited by Grégoire Leclerc and Charles A. S. Hall

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Making World Development Work is about economic development and its relation to population, environment and resource issues in less affluent countries. These essays presented here criticize the way most large development projects are designed and conducted and are written by professionals from a broad range of disciplines involved in current development research.

Making World Development Work explains why overly simplistic economic models of development have led to many failures and unnecessary environmental destruction. The editors contend the preferred method of development is through a systematiic process that integrates the natural sciences with economics and one that is based on scientific method instead of ideology.

Leclerc and Hall review the logical and methodological basis of neoclassical economics and its application to development. They provide a series of historical perspectives, including less developed countries that have improved successfully and others that have not been as successful. They complete the demonstration with a portfolio of current development research innovations in the social and economic sciences as well as in the natural sciences, including a new logical basis for economics called biophysical economics.

Making World Development Work offers new ways to consider development including the limitations of cheap energy, environmental degradation, and human population growth as the fundamental issues for any economic model that can have any hope of working in the future.

Grégoire Leclerc is senior scientist with the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD).

Charles A. S. Hall is professor of environmental and forest biology at SUNY, Syracuse. He is the author of more than 200 publications and author or editor of seven books including Quantifying Sustainable Development: The Future of Tropical Economies.

While awaiting reviews on Making World Development Work, here is more on "biophysical economics" from the Encyclopedia of Earth

Learning from Nassim Taleb: Knowledge and Ignorance

This last week I have been sorting through 30 years of accumulated books and papers. I've also been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb provides catch-all 'boxes' that easily house most of my "stuff." Loosely the boxes might be labeled: a) Stuff we think we know, but we don't based on faulty reasoning, b) Stuff that 'historians' have force-fit into a false or too-narrow historical molds, and c) Stuff that 'experts' force-fit into too narrowly constructed categories, and we too easily accept as our own.

To Taleb:

… History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions. …

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

1. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
2. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history book than in empirical reality); and
3. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify" [that is, when they mistake "the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined 'forms,' whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias …. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures …."]

So now I've got more than 20 boxes (file drawers) of papers and several hundred books to deal with. We will have to see how frequently the boxes of papers are visited as time goes by. As for the books, I'll again take my lead from Taleb, as he stresses the importance of books you've not read yet and those you disagree with (i.e. the odd notion that you tend to learn more from those you disagree with than from those you agree with). No doubt there will be more books in the library as time goes by, particularly if I heed:

[Taleb's] … simple step to a higher form of life…. [S]hut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions…. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. … Also bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. … Above all learn ot avoid "tunneling."

To be able to foucus is a great virtue if you are a watch repairman, a brain surgeon, or a chess player. But the last thing you need to do when you deal with uncertainty is to "focus"…. This "focus" makes you a sucker….

Jared Diamond on 'Failures of Group Decision-Making'

The other day our servers got hit with a virus scare. While we were without our 'electronic tools', I borrowed Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed from a colleague. In the book Diamond deals with a question posed by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies: "How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?"

After taking us on a tour of ancient societies as well as contemporary societal failures, Diamond works toward "Practical Lessons." So, "How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?" In grappling with the question Diamond's students, along with Tainter, identified what they call "a baffling phenomenon": Failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups. Diamond sets up four categories of potential failure:

… First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it, but may not succeed.

Focusing in on the third — failure to even attempt to solve a problem once it is perceived — Diamond identifies a variety of factors that keep groups from attempting solutions, including:

• Rational behavior problems, i.e clashes of interests
• good for me (as an individual, corporate body, or ruling elite), bad for you and everybody else
• good for me (or us) now, bad for everyone later; e.g. shortsightedness rationalized by discounting
• Irrational behavior problems, i.e. collision of needed new values with deeply held values
• collision with deeply held religious or sectarian values
• collision with deeply held secular values, e.g. individualism, communalism, technological optimism, technological pessimism, group cohesion and protection from outsides (e.g. dislike for groups like "environmental groups" who first perceive and complain about a problem)
• crowd psychology; individual interests cowed by group pressure (e.g. groupthink, Abilene Paradox)
• psychological denial (subconscious suppression due to, e.g. "painful emotion")

In attempting solutions we have to get beyond rationalizing. Rationalizations include, according to Diamond:

• It's not my problem, it's someone else's problem
• The future has always (near-term history) proven to be better (technologically) than the past, therefore the problem will take care of itself. This boils down to "Technology will solve our problems."

Will we make it out of our current messes that increasingly well-up on a global scale, as well as welling-up locally in more and more places? Diamond sums up his assessment of our prospect at the end of his book:

I'm a cautious optimist. … [O]n the one hand, I acknowledge the seriousness of the [environmental and other] problems facing us. If we don't make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don't succeed at that effort, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse. … On the other hand, we shall be able to solve our problems — if we choose to do so. … Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for grabs, lying in our own hands. We don't need new technologies to solve our problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most pare we "just" need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course that's a big "just." But many societies did find the necessary political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others.

… [It depends] on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time then problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. This type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes our elected politicians ….

Darwin's Other Idea

The other day I stumbled onto a link between Hazel Henderson — futurist, and long-time critic of economics as commonly practiced — and Charles Darwin. That led me to The Darwin Project, a site devoted to promoting the forgotten half of Darwin's ideas: the idea that human progress ought to be self-organized more by "love" and "sympathy" than by natural selection via "survival of the fittest" and "selfishness above all".

The Darwin Project was founded by David Loye. Here is a snip from the prologue to Loye's Darwin's Unfolding Revolution: And the Liberation of the 21st Century [PDF]:

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THE TRUTH ABOUT DARWIN—AND US

… What would Darwin say were he living today?

What would he think, for example, on finding out that the rain forests of Brazil, about which he rhapsodized in The Voyage of the Beagle — seemingly eternal in their wonder then, with their central function as "the lungs of the planet" widely known today — were being clear cut to run cattle to provide hamburgers for the mushrooming of quasi-lethal fast food outlets all over the face of this earth?

What else should we tell him of what presently seems to check or drive us backward in human evolution? … Environmental devastation … devastation of war … Widening of the gap between rich and poor in countries and between nations … continuing valuing of the stereotypical violence-oriented male or "macho" values … and the devaluing of the more peaceful "feminine" values … over-population … terrorism and the fearful perpetual presence of nuclear overkill — both the products of the unholy mix of 20th century science, religion, and politics at its worst.

… [W]hat do you suppose Darwin would say if he was told that to a newly alarming degree he was personally responsible for this mess? What do you think he would say if he was told that over 100 years these roadblocks to the better world were rolled in place by the mindset of "survival of the fittest" and "selfishness above all" that his theory of evolution had popularized?

If he was told that for over a century, via all fields of science, all levels of schools, and the ever more rampant new power of the media, the Darwinian idea that "survival of the fittest" was the essential driver for all levels of evolution was locked in place throughout America, Europe, and Western culture more generally. That thereby heralded as the champions of progress by scholars, as well as by themselves, a loose global alliance of regressive economic and political interests and oligarchies had gradually circled the earth? That by the end of the 20th century this alliance was so powerful it could seize the leadership of the richest and militarily most powerful, thereby hypothetically "fittest," nation on this earth, i.e., the United States?

And what would Darwin say if he was told that now — whether voted in or out of office, behind scenes remaining in power and blinded by greed to the consequences — this alliance was the implacable super-driver of industrial, governmental, religious, and scientific policies that were steadily increasing all of these threats to global well-being, and indeed threatened the very survival of our species.

What would he say?

… Today the focus is mainly on Darwin’s Origin of Species. But in the 828 page sequel in which he tells us he will now deal with human evolution, The Descent of Man, Darwin writes only twice of "survival of the fittest," but 95 times of love.

He writes of selfishness 12 times, but 92 times of moral sensitivity.

Of competition 9 times, but 24 times of mutuality and mutual aid.

… While most of his successors still remain bogged down in what has become the status quo and regressive science of where Darwin was 150 years ago, the man himself — as in this book we are to see — actually went on in Descent to leap 100 years and more into the future to write of where the most advanced, i.e., progressive, science is today. …

The Unquiet Second Darwinian Revolution

Thousands of books have been written about the first Darwinian revolution, which Origin of Species set in motion. Historically, the message has been that the first Darwinian revolution ended the power of authoritarian religion over science, thereby transforming our world by freeing the rise of modern mind.

This is the first book to be written to report the rise and unfolding of the second Darwinian revolution. It is of the threat to our species and to all species now being driven by what happened to the first revolution. But much more so, it is of the immense hope for the future that the uphill struggle of this second revolution now offers us. Born out by the deeply grounded work of many who have been hailed as among the best scientists of our age, it is of the rise of the case for a better world out of the bold venturing of a progressive science that few read of today and fewer still can understand.

It is, simply put, what we must at last understand and put to good use if our species is to evolve and survive.

Out of my move out of journalism into science I was led to this conclusion through my discovery of what in terms of our brains, and how our minds work, is an astonishment. For what I found functionally amounts to a hole in the head of modern mind.

The Triumph of PseudoDarwinian Mind

… [I]f you ask almost anybody what they think or know about evolution you find that for a century practically all the space and time allotted by our schools or the media to evolution has been sopped up by two hoary and scientifically long outdated battles fueled by religious and scientific extremists. One is the battle between the Creationists and the Evolutionists, which has sopped up scarce news, book, movie and mind space for 150 years. The other is the battle of the so-called "Darwin Wars."

This pivotal struggle for the control of 20th century mind began in the early part of the century with a friendly skirmish between those who came to be known as the NeoDarwinists, who were attempting to update Darwin in terms of biology, or the Neos, and everybody who disagreed with them. But where the Wars began in earnest was with the rise of the Super-Neos— the sociobiologists in the 1970s who morphed into the evolutionary psychologists of the 1980s and 1990s. With a barrage of colorful and superbly marketed books, the Super-Neos set out to bind all the higher levels of evolution — that is, what this book reveals of the lost second or completing half for Darwin’s theory — to a theory that was only the first half of what Darwin actually wrote about.

In other words, for a century most of us have either been the captives of religious ignorance or a scientific half-truth — and the social consequences … are horrendous.

Not at all a matter of coincidence is the fact the Super-Neos rose and rapidly took over much of academia and the world of popular trade book publishing during a time of massive political and religious regression. After a century of the virtual exclusion of alternatives to traditional Darwinism from all but a fractured minority of scientists, what now globally confronts us is the immense power of "hate thy neighbor" religion and an ostensibly Darwinian paradigm of "survival of the fittest" and "selfish genes" embedded not merely in science but in every other area of life. Politics, business, education, the military — all are driven by the dark mantras of PseudoDarwinism ….

Meanwhile barreling down on our species — as we’ll also look at then — is the nightmare prospect of Dr. Strangelove's doomsday bomb and all the other disasters this hole in the head of modern mind helped lead to and leaves us poorly equipped to handle.

Invisibilizing Darwin

Some measure of how deep the hole in which the rest of Darwin was buried is the fact it took me a decade to gain the Ph.D. qualifying me to dig for it, another decade to begin to go beyond merely a glimpse here and there, and then another decade of struggling to express what I had found in a way that any but my closest scientific associates could begin to understand, appreciate — or believe.

The main clue that lured me on was the discrepancy between Darwin the man and Darwin the theory. From the little I knew of him, it seemed to me dreadfully out of character that this kind and gentle scientific visionary — a notably loving father, and to a much greater degree than was assumed a liberal or progressive politically — could really have fathered what in the hands of his successors became a basically arch-conservative as well as actively regressive formula for disaster. What did Darwin really believe? What did he actually write and say?

What I found still astounds and infuriates me every time I think of it. I found that in the comparatively neglected years of his life, long before and well after the bombshell success of The Origin of Species, Darwin was thinking and writing 100 years ahead of his time. That is, he was probing concepts that open-minded scientists — free of the hold of PseudoDarwinian Mind — began to actively deal with only within the final decades of the 20th century. …

In a sampling over a decade of hundreds of books on Darwin and evolution theory spanning the entire 20th century, I could find only about a dozen people who recorded any awareness of the "other Darwin" — or more accurately the top or completing half for his theory.

And of this dozen I could find only four people — identified in chapter five — who sufficiently comprehended what Darwin was saying to write about it with some degree of understanding.

What Was and What Might Have Been

… [H]ad Darwin’s full theory prevailed we might have known an entirely different 20th century. …

[H]ad there been widely known and taught the morally-oriented full truth about ourselves and our future, as Darwin in actuality saw it — which emerges in the neglected writings of Darwin for the first time pulled together in one place in this book — a good case can be made that … America and the rest of the world have entered the 21th century with the hardcore Darwinism of survival of the fittest and selfishness uber alles enthroned in a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation engaged in an imperial expansion of "business as usual." …

Darwin's Greatest Adventure

… [If we study Darwin's early and later life we discover that he] writes of who we really are.

Of how, rather than as we have been brain-washed over many centuries to believe, we are basically good — that is, of how far more often than we are aware of we are driven by moral sensitivity. Of how, though selfish, we are also driven by love to transcend selfishness. Of how, though of necessity fiercely motivated to survive and prevail, we are also driven by the transcendent need to respect and care for the needs of others.

We are there as he writes of how though in part, or even throughout much of our lives, we may be the captives, victims and even slaves of forces larger than ourselves, above all we are driven by a brain and a mind with the hunger and the capability for a choice of destiny in a world in which choice of destiny is an option.

And we are there as he writes of where we are going. Not of how we are driven blindly, witlessly, through a life with no predictability — which has convinced far, far too many of us that we are but sheep in need of the wolf as leader.

Instead we are there as he writes of how we are driven by a brain that demands of life a sense of meaning and purpose, and by the vision of a better future.

We are there as he writes in the conclusion to The Descent of Man these two startling lines almost wholly ignored for a century: "Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of our nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced either directly or indirectly much more through the effects of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion, etc., than through natural selection."

As he writes, "But the more important elements for us are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy."

And of how, "The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events that our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion."

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After reading Loye's "prologue" I decided I need to read further. After pondering which of Loye's books I ought to read, I ended up ordering instead The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Loye's wife and partner Riane Eisler (whose book The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future remains one of my personal favorites).

New: Encyclopedia of Earth

From Cutler J. Cleveland, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Earth:

…With the recent public release of the Encyclopedia of Earth (http://www.eoearth.org/), scientists from around the world are joining to create a comprehensive, authoritative source of information about the environments of Earth and their interactions with society. The Encyclopedia is written and governed by experts working in a unique collaborative environment, and it has been released through the initial work of about 350 Authors and 120 Topic Editors. All content is free to the public and free of advertsing. The Encyclopedia's oversight comes from an outstanding group of international scholars, our International Advisory Board (see below).

The Encyclopedia is built, maintained, and governed by experts like you via a specially adapted "wiki," an online resource that allows users to add and edit content collectively. Significantly, unlike other wikis, access to the Encyclopedia wiki is restricted to approved experts, and all content is peer reviewed and approved prior to being published at the free public site.

From the study carbon taxes to the valuation of ecosystem services, envirionmental economics is central to charting a sustainable course for society. I urge you visit the Encyclopedia and to consider joining our community.

Contributing is easy: visit http://www.eoearth.org/, click on click on CONTRIBUTE TO THE EOE, and follow the guidelines there. The site also contains additional information about the project.

Hat Tip: John Whitehead, Environmental Economics

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Book Review teaser: "Diamond argues [that] environmental concerns are at least equal in importance, and inextricably linked, to all other aspects of a society's success. … when it comes to the environment, a stitch in time means more than saving nine—it's the difference between keeping and losing your shirt."

via Grist: Don't Do as the Romans Do
Jared Diamond's Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment
BY MICHAEL J. KAVANAGH
[writer and public radio reporter]
08 Feb 2005

If [Guns, Germs and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies ] venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond's newest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society's demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can "choose to fail."

Diamond … identifies the 12 environmental problems that are portents of doom: destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact. …

Inconvenient Truth

Last night, Karen and I saw Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  It is, in my opinion, a very clear, compelling, and heartfelt documentary that profiles one man's authentic effort to educate people around the world about the need to deal with the global warming crisis. 

Thanks to the superb direction of Davis Guggenheim, the film offers an unexpectedly pleasant balance and interweaving of technical and factual analysis, moral and ethical challenges, and personal introspection and disclosure, with Al Gore speaking through all three of these voices in a manner that sounds completely authentic and genuinely above the deplorable politics of this controversial issue.  In philosophical terms a la the universal pragmatics of Jurgen Habermas, there is in this film a very effective differentiation and integration of validity claims in the three domains of what is true, what is right, and what is sincere--the critical ingredients of the shared understanding and coordinated action that is the apparent goal of this film.

Supply-Side Sustainability

Supply-Side Sustainability (T.F.H. Allen, Joseph A.Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra) is a good place to begin our review of books.

Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra's supply-side sustainability bears no resemblance to the trickle-down, supply-side economics of the Reagan era (seemingly in vogue once-again today, although wrapped up in "free market" rhetoric). Instead the book helps us better understand how far we need to go to begin to embrace sustainability as an ordering principle for civilization. And it helps us to get a feel for what we might do to slow our progress away from what we might call a path to sustainability, as well as what we might do to approach such.

When developing principles for ecosystem management in public lands management, we learned that we must work across various spatial and temporal scales in order to begin to get a better grasp on the wicked problems we face. Confucius knew this well and said something like, "Those who give no thought to that which is distant will find trouble close at hand." We seem to be living in a whole society that has forgotten ancient wisdom.

In public lands ecosystem management, we used to talk of looking up a scale to address context and down a scale to address contribution of various ecosystem or social systems components in complex adaptive systems. In Supply-Side Sustainability, the authors admonish us to look up a scale for both context AND management.

In particular the authors focus on roles of hierarchy and complexity in sustaining ecological systems, human societies, and problem solving. They argue that being sustainable consists, in part, of using approaches that:

• Manage for productive systems rather than for their outputs.
  
• Manage systems by managing their contexts.
  
• Identify what dysfunctional systems lack and supply only that.
  
• Deploy ecological processes to subsidize management efforts, rather than conversely.
  
• Understand the problem of diminishing returns to problem solving.

Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra say that,

We will achieve sustainability when it becomes a transparent outcome of managing the contexts of production and consumption rather than consumption itself. If we shift our management emphasis to managing from the context for whole ecosystem functions, rather than for resources, the cost of problem solving will diminish and the effectiveness of management greatly increase. When a manager gets the context right, the ecosystem does the rest. Because the material ecosystem supplies renewable resources and makes them renewable, we call our approach supply-side sustainability. (p. 14)

At the first international conference on Ecological Economics, educator Mary Clark suggested that our culture needed to undergo what she termed a Gestalt Shift. Specifically, Clark suggested that we need to reorient our cultural focus away from growth and development and toward sustainability. And we needed new economic and new ecological thinking to help us get there. Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra’s Supply-Side Sustainability is a beginning.

Back in 1990, when I attended the first Ecological Economics conference I believed we had a better short-term chance than I do now of that cultural reorientation. But the world works in mysterious ways and we may be closer now than then, with but a generation-long crisis needed to trigger a cultural reawakening—which is the subject matter, in part, of The Fourth Turning.

Note: This first appeared June 7, 2005 on Econ Dreams - Econ Nightmares