A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

More on growth, happiness, and climate change

Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s an interview with Bill McKibbon that fleshes out some of his economic ideas a bit more.

McKibbon uses the term “deep economy” (the title of his new book) to describe an economy that

tends to draw in its supply lines instead of extend them. It produces using more people instead of fewer. It’s an economy that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material; that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability at least as important as increases in size.

Essentially his point seems to be that we need more local economies which can, in turn, be regulated more effectively by stronger communities. He’s clearly taking inspiration from thinkers like E.F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry here.

In fact, McKibbon says that tight-knit local communities might be needed for sheer survival:

[I]f you stop to think about it, you start to understand that the communities we need to build in order to slow down global warming are the same kind of communities that are going to be resilient and durable enough to help adapt to that which we can’t prevent. In the not very distant future, having neighbors is going to be more important than having belongings. Membership in a community is going to become important once again both psychologically and physically in the way that it’s been for most of human history.

The point doesn’t seem so much to be that we need to put a stop to growth, but that it needs to be effectively regulated, and that we need to put a check on our appetites. He points out that economic research is discovering what philosophy and religion have known for centuries: that after a certain point more stuff doesn’t make us happier. I think I’d like to read the book to get a better sense of what he’s describing at any rate.

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4 responses to “More on growth, happiness, and climate change”

  1. Consumatopia

    Just as the increasing production of memes allows us to, say, make an engine that goes just as far with less fuel, perhaps we could also use those memes to make ourselves more efficient, to be just as happy with less stuff, to study the innovations of ancient prophecy and become spiritual engineers. The greatest computer humanity has access to is the human brain and the human society–perhaps we should learn to master those before we replace them with less advanced silicon-based computers. Maybe now is the time for growth to be used to combat growth.

    It sounds almost like McKibbon’s book is exactly that–a new meme, a new technology that would allows to depend less on the production of new memes and technology.

    What makes life physically possible is that it acts as a barrier, a speed bump, a temporary eddy in the flow of the universe from low entropy to high entropy. In so far as a new idea (or an old idea) allows us to curb our own appetites, and thus curb our own tendency to push the universe towards greater entropy, it actually makes us MORE alive, not less.

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  2. Jack Perry

    It produces using more people instead of fewer. It’s an economy that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material; that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability at least as important as increases in size.

    Hmm. The history of the technological economy has been one of extending supply lines, using fewer people for production of higher-quality goods that provide greater and greater human satisfaction, with higher reliability and a longer lifespan.

    My only complaint about modern technological devices is that the manufacturers have made them unmaintainable; that is, if a chip in my Palm T|X breaks, I can’t replace it like I could on my old Amiga or my older TRS-80. Or as my father could replace vacuum tubes in his much older TV. BUT that’s the price of technological progress, because in fact the higher reliability of chips soldered onto the board is the reason that they are soldered so securely that only well-trained electricians can fix them rather than rank amateurs like myself.

    In any case, the guy’s notion of a “deep” economy baffles me. It sounds an awful lot like the Soviet Union, where the relevant central committee in Moscow decided that Computer Science wasn’t a “real” science and therefore not worthy of study.

    And in response to the previous comment, I’ll take a computer over a Mentat any day, thanks anyway.

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  3. Consumatopia

    Jack Perry, I think you misunderstand me. Think about how you use your computer today. Will you run some simulations on it? Crunch some numbers? Mine some databases? Maybe. But probably not. Probably, if you’re the average American, what you’ll use it for is to *communicate* rather than to *compute*. Read some e-mail, check some web-pages, write some documents. Using your computer to send signals to or receive signals from other human beings. There are still countless more neurons on the planet than transistors, which means that most of what we use transistors for is to give us access to other people’s neurons. Culture is still bigger and more powerful than technology.

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  4. CPA

    “It produces using more people instead of fewer.”

    In other words, it has lower wages.

    That’s a good program for a politician:

    “Vote for me and I’ll make sure you all get paid less for your 8 hours of work than you do today.”

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