Its hard to imagine a calm, reasonable, informed person with any degree of empathy reading this depressingly eloquent piece and not agreeing, at least with its broad outlines.
Yet we are ten years later and the interim period didn't just see no alternative metaphor make any inroads, its been regressive in very visible terms. At some point there is a need to understand what is going on? There are several possible scenarios:
* psychopaths really do rule the roost. a tiny minority of well placed individuals hinder any chance of systemic change, essentially sacrificing the majority (and future generations) so that they maintain their current status quo for a few more decades
* there is positive change but its imperceptibly slow, dominated by "noisy" short term regression. the timescale of change is simply too slow to satisfy the impatient activist. the tumor is ultimately under control, too bad for the current generations, just keep persisting
* there is no change, because there can be no (controllable) change. the system is trapped in its own logic and sources of legitimization. Like a Jenga game we are at the point where removing any piece will bring down the whole. Like a runaway tumor, the faulty DNA will keep expanding until the organism is dead.
Maybe there are other narratives that better explain the situation or maybe its a combination of things. But we need to start understanding what is really our true condition.
It is easy to say, very eloquently, "There is a problem." In fact, mostly, everyone agrees there is a problem.
It is rather more difficult to say, "Here is a solution that will suck less."
In fact, it is hard to say, "Here is what a solution would look like." Government planning? (In the most generous terms; "government" is the mechanism that large groups of people use to make large decisions. I find myself somewhat dubious, particularly if your take is, "psychopaths really do rule the roost.") Eliminate economic growth, somehow? (But people want cures for Alzheimer's and cancer, and all those people currently living in huts and squalor may not want to continue doing that forever.)
(Given the history of such things, I'm personally beginning to suspect that saying, "there is a problem," without also saying, "and here's what I want to do about it," is akin to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.)
I don't think everyone agrees that growth is a problem. Is the way our societies are organized and it is very difficult to reason against it.
Another aspect that western societies have difficulty to reason about is to think in negative terms. Nassim Taleb calls this “Via Negativa”. We normally think about solving problems by doing things (adding), but we can also solve the same problems by avoiding doing harm (subtracting). But avoiding doing harm normally doesn't make a profit, it doesn't contribute to growth.
Health is a perfect example of this, most of the modern diseases could be preventable by eating less, sleeping more, and having a less stressful life.
I think her answer might have been to consider an alternative structure for society, such as the system used on Anarres in her novel "The Dispossessed".
at the moment, strong arguments can be made that what have seen for the last 20 years is a combo of "psychopaths ruling the roost" and "the system is trapped in its logic".
sara chayes has some observations on this:
How competently have our own leaders been governing for the past twenty years? Meanwhile, how successful have they been at achieving that other objective: adding zeroes to their bank accounts? Which of those was in fact their primary objective?
https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/failing-states
And yet there was a systemic change last year. The system objective changed from brainless growth to saving human lives, and the Jenga game holded.
I don't want to romanticize the pandemic but it disproved the TINA hipotesis (there is no alternative)
As Donella Meadows pointed out [1], the most powerful leverage point is to change the objective of the system. We can make it if we start to be citizens and be involved politically. Let’s be involved in movements like extinction rebellion and Fridays for the future. And most of all let's question growth and employment as the goal of society.
What systemic change happened? The Pandemic further increased the disparity between the rich and the poor. The massive stock market and housing price increases caused by the government and loan programs purely benefited the few.
Again I don’t want to romanticize the pandemic but we should critically analyze what happened.
When I talk about the system changes, I’m referring to the paper that I wrote in the thread.
The places to intervene in the system are:
Places to Intervene in a System
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
8. Regulating negative feedback loops
7. Driving positive feedback loops
6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection
5. Information flows
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system
2. The goals of the system
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture arises
We intervene in the second most powerful leverage point, but we need to change our growth mindset (most powerful leverage point). If we don’t we will recover to the old system that is depleting earth's nature. You are talking about the 3rd leverage point “The distribution of power over the rules of the system” which I agree it’s important. We can implement UBI for instance. The thing is, there is an alternative.
yes, love this point. the pandemic revealed so many things, mostly damning. but it was also a loud assertion of the primacy of life, an instinctive collective behavior that was so profound and universal it went almost unnoticed. maybe we are ashamed of admitting it as it invalidates all those other behaviors.
but somehow this event has not yet worked its way through into the system. the collective assumed all liabilities, the usual suspects benefited handsomely and position again to resume the feast. back to bean counting and "calculated risks" so as not to hinder the "recovery" etc.
It’s really interesting to think about what caused last year's systemic change. I think that was the fact that the illness threatened our life directly, but most of all the consequences were short term.
For me “recovery” is the new substitute word for growth, which is a term that politicians avoid lately. Academically there are more and more evidences that decoupling growth from ecologic damage is very unlikely [1]
https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
> The system objective changed from brainless growth to saving human lives
Haltingly, ineffectively, and temporarily. 4-7 million people and counting have died from a disease that most experts still agree could have been stopped if we were willing to actually move away from a growth goal.
But, I think your conclusion is right. The people have the power to change our goals, even if those in power refuse.
I think even the broad outline of the article is flawed.
The vast majority of life at all scales persist through primarily maximizing "growth" (replication), implying that the associated risks (cancer, resource exhaustion) have been acceptable and are sufficiently mitigated through various mechanisms.
It would be hard to find a superior strategy (or metaphor) that won't be catastrophic once your ecosystem shifts.
The vast, vast majority of life today has gone extinct. I don't know how to quantify that, and it's possibly a close call for Homo viewed in isolation.
Obviously, the growth of Homo required other taxa to be consumed, since man don't feed on inorganic material. The principle of entropy guaranties that this equation holds even if inorganic input and outout into an arbitrarily defined system of organisms is considered.
It simply doesn't make sense to view living beings as either open systems without a clear boundary (and I don't mean cell walls), or as closed systems to the extent of inclusing ev-ery-thing.At best you have defined living being as open system that is "growing", but then you have excluded cancer already, as though any system were only open if in principle fungible for man.
You have completely missed that growth ad infinitum is problem, not re-growth.
That there is any life left at all is because it has kept on reproducing. The only other viable strategy to persist is to be a rock.
Re-growth (from what starting point?) is insufficient. You either expand in number or you run the risk of ceasing to exist when your numbers are threatened.
I'd choose going for growth ad infinitum and the associated risks. Trying anything else will get me killed.
the vast majority of organisms are not as unary as human society has become. we are so tightly coupled, so well connected to each other, that a cancer in one place threatens the whole. Cancer is fine for an individual from the perspective of a large collection, but a cancer in an individual when one individual is all there is would be catastrophic. the analogy we continue to use for growth in "the economy" abstracts out this fact.
yes, that's an important point. we are not a normal species and there is no point to pretend otherwise. every other sort faces a constant struggle for survival with their numbers being modulated by natural predators. Predators in turn get modulated when they overfeed on their prey. Our problem is that our prey is the entire planet.
i'd say that humanity is the least tightly coupled organism when it comes to survivability. when our ecosystem changes we are able to adapt better than any other organism.
Look for professor Steve Keen in various media. He has explanations for these phenomena, and some potential solutions.
In the linked article, the term "economic growth" is used without definition. One of the main causes of inequality is credit growth - not growth in economic output, which wouldn't be problematic but there is almost no such growth in the west.
Keen sees a potential solution in what he calls a modern debt jubilee.
I also recommend catching Lacy Hunt when possible. These two economists have different perspectives, but both have fresh perspectives.
Money and power inevitably corrupt the systems we build for guiding collective socioeconomic development. Even in Le Guin's anarchist "utopia" on fictional Anarres, it happens: people with a tendency toward consolidating power do so, creating ad hoc structures that actively erode the society's expression of its founding principles in favor of a mindless, jealous, cynical politics.
Whether it's right to classify these people as "sociopaths" is up for debate, but their role is pretty clear. In particular, the career politicians and others existing at the interface between capital and government are looking out for themselves and their careers first, and the mid- to long-term health of the economy last. I do think it's illuminating to practice some empathy for these people, given that most humans are selfish to some degree (and for very good reason), but I strongly believe that they are the problem in a very real sense. We need a system that bends their ambition to the benefit of the people, but it's not clear what such a system would look like or if it could exist at all.
On a somewhat related tangent, I think commenters here are misunderstanding the linked UKL piece. My interpretation is that it's not calling all expressions of economic growth bad, but rather suggesting that growth (in so many words) as a guiding metaphor is incomplete, deceptive, and ultimately harmful.
power seeking behavior is certainly a homo sapiens invariant. feeding this beast while containing it is still the stuff of utopias. one would speculate that actually its an instinct that could be satiated in less damaging ways.
but money (or that other favorite punching bag, corporate structures) are really straw men. they are just recent, transient and evolving constructs. it is conceivable that we could do better with improved versions, or even additional such tools that we haven't yet imagined.
there is, in this respect an interesting data point. this other "pandemic" (cryptomania). this too is mostly depressing in the amount of financial / economic ignorance it reveals - but it offers a silver lining in showing how indeed "made-up" the money system actually is, and thus its in-principle malleability
It really took off once that big finance started to invest, keeping the bubble bubbeling up with astronomic inflation rates. This was possible because enough people had been speculating with $$$ as the only goal, ie. involving big finance whethwr they wanted it or not.
> Its hard to imagine a calm, reasonable, informed person with any degree of empathy reading this depressingly eloquent piece and not agreeing, at least with its broad outlines.
It's hard to imagine a calm, reasonable, informed person with any degree of empathy making this kind of judgement about any significant piece of writing. What does being calm and reasonable mean if you rush to this kind of judgement? What does being informed mean if you don't know any other perspectives on a topic? What does empathy mean if you can't imagine people not agreeing with you?
This might be a fine rebuttal, if this wasn't a decade old article about a decades old problem that everyone has been living through. Ursula K. LeGuin (author of this article) wrote The Lathe of Heaven in 1971 which featured Malthusian-style overpopulation problems and the societal problems that go with it. With that context, your comment is like "another History Channel show about the Nazis, excellent, mustn't rush to judge them".
It took humans ~15 years between discovery of CFCs destroying the ozone layer, and 197 countries signing up to a worldwide ban on CFC manufacturing and use. Depending what it is you're objecting to, we've seen people raising issues of CO2 and climate change almost since oil was discovered, 100+ years ago, and decades of stagnant wages, increasing value capture by the economic elites, destruction of coral reefs, increasing wild fires, floods, storms, melting of polar ice and glaciers, increasingly hot summers.
What is it you aren't hurrying to judge, and how long more are you planning to wait? Have you honestly not heard any other perspectives on any topics of population, energy use, environmental problems, social organisational problems, economic problems, growing imbalance between rich and poor, etc?
What issues did ppl raise with co2 100 years ago? I know 40 year old school books claiming global warming to be a good thing either offsetting the next ice age or allowing for two harvests per year.
Yet we are ten years later and the interim period didn't just see no alternative metaphor make any inroads, its been regressive in very visible terms. At some point there is a need to understand what is going on? There are several possible scenarios:
* psychopaths really do rule the roost. a tiny minority of well placed individuals hinder any chance of systemic change, essentially sacrificing the majority (and future generations) so that they maintain their current status quo for a few more decades
* there is positive change but its imperceptibly slow, dominated by "noisy" short term regression. the timescale of change is simply too slow to satisfy the impatient activist. the tumor is ultimately under control, too bad for the current generations, just keep persisting
* there is no change, because there can be no (controllable) change. the system is trapped in its own logic and sources of legitimization. Like a Jenga game we are at the point where removing any piece will bring down the whole. Like a runaway tumor, the faulty DNA will keep expanding until the organism is dead.
Maybe there are other narratives that better explain the situation or maybe its a combination of things. But we need to start understanding what is really our true condition.