A Thinking Reed

Category: Economy

  • We’re doomed

    I’m not sure what I think about the whole Peak Oil issue, but Georgetown political scientist Patrick Deneen has thought a lot about it and has a – “sobering” is too mild a word; “apocalyptic” maybe? – post up about the relationship between oil and food and the implications that might have for world population.

  • Carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade

    I missed this when it first came out, but this is a good article explaining the debate over the best way to reduce carbon emissions.

    It’s also heartening to see Reason of all places running articles that take the reality of climate change as a given. I’m not suggesting that some measure of skepticism can’t be justified, but I’ve been baffled at the response on much of the Right, which has consisted of little more than snarky dismissal and jokes about Al Gore.

  • A food bill, not a farm bill

    Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) writes about the unprecedented amount of attention the farm bill has been getting this year from environmental, health, and international development groups. Unfortunately, he says, the traditional interest groups have largely managed to craft a bill to their liking. They did this by adding on some programs as sops to farm bill critics, but leaving the subsidies – the heart of the problem – untouched:

    But as important as these programs are, they are just programs — mere fleas on the elephant in the room. The name of that elephant is the commodity title, the all-important subsidy section of the bill. It dictates the rules of the entire food system. As long as the commodity title remains untouched, the way we eat will remain unchanged.

    The explanation for this is straightforward. We would not need all these nutrition programs if the commodity title didn’t do such a good job making junk food and fast food so ubiquitous and cheap. Food stamps are crucial, surely, but they will be spent on processed rather than real food as long as the commodity title makes calories of fat and sugar the best deal in the supermarket. We would not need all these conservation programs if the commodity title, by paying farmers by the bushel, didn’t encourage them to maximize production with agrochemicals and plant their farms with just one crop fence row to fence row.

    And the government would not need to pay feedlots to clean up the water or upgrade their manure pits if subsidized grain didn’t make rearing animals on feedlots more economical than keeping them on farms. Why does the farm bill pay feedlots to install waste treatment systems rather than simply pay ranchers to keep their animals on grass, where the soil would be only too happy to treat their waste at no cost?

    However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off its critics, they won’t bring meaningful reform to the American food system until the subsidies are addressed — until the underlying rules of the food game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us.

    There remains a chance that a better bill will be crafted when it comes to the Senate floor. Pollan is optimistic that business as usual is no longer a viable option. The way the subsidy system shapes American’s food choices has become apparent to a lot of people, and so have the deleterious effects those choices have on our health, the environment, and struggling farmers in poor parts of the world.

  • Greener markets?

    Gristmill ran a rejoinder to the post I linked to last week advocating a localized, greener economy. The author, Ryan Avent, takes issue with the “buy local” mantra, arguing that local economies would reduce standards of living and that international trade and markets are compatible with reducing our ecological footprint.

    I’m not confident in my ability to adjudicate this dispute, but I am reminded of something in Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat. Singer and Mason examine the eating habits of several American families in order to determine what the most “ethical” diet is, with respect to things like environmental damage, worker’s rights, animal well-being, etc.

    One of the points they make is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, for most individuals to actually make an accurate assessment of the impact the food they buy has on the environment. For instance, food imported from halfway around the world might nevertheless have been produced in a less intensive way than more local products and may have been transported in a way (by ship, e.g.) that actually creates a smaller carbon footprint than, say, food trucked in from elsewhere in the country.

    But if free-market economics has taught us anything, it’s that the market is a vast transmitter of information. The price of goods reflects the cost of their production and make available knowledge that no single person possesses and that this enables a spontaneous order to emerge as people adjust to fluctuations in prices.

    However, as things stand now, many costs, such as environmental ones, aren’t incorporated into the prices of things we buy. But there are ways of rectifying this. A carbon tax, for instance, would mean that the CO2 emissions were reflected in the price of things we buy, so there would be no need for us to try and determine the exact conditions under which they were produced, at least with respect to this one area.

    A similar approach is reflected in various labelling schemes like those proposed by Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein for creating markets in animal welfare. This involves using the market rather than fighting against it. While their plan requires that consumers are willing to seek out animal products produced in a more humane fashion, it still works on the same principle of making information available to the consumer at the point of purchase, and works within the market rather than against it.

    Now, it’s possible that a carbon tax would actually result in more local production simply because products shipped in from around the world could become prohibitively expensive. At the very least it would seem to create incentives for more local production of a lot of things. But deciding how to produce things in an ecologically sounder way would be left up to the market, that is, people making use of the widely dispersed knowledge and information it makes available.

  • Toward a green manufacturing economy

    This is interesting and relevant to some of the stuff I was talking about here.

  • Unresolved questions

    A couple of questions that I continue to turn over and which I’m not at all clear on the answers to:

    Is it necessary to seriously restrain economic growth for the sake of the environment (and ultimately ourselves) or can growth continue pretty much at present rates but in “sustainable” ways (with the help of technological breakthroughs, e.g.)?

    If present rates of growth do need to be curtailed, can this be done in a way that doesn’t drastically and disproportionately impact the very poorest people in the world, whose well-being would appear to be most directly tied to continued economic growth?

    If it’s necessary to do so, is it possible to transition to a more sustainable model of development without dramatic net increases in state power and intrusiveness?

    I think the semi-official answer to these questions would be that we must continue to grow economically and to expand trade globally, and that any environmental consequences will have to be dealt with by means of regulation, conservation and new technologies.

    The dissenting view (or cluster of views) would be that industrial capitalism has to be re-thought at a fairly fundamental level, and that we should re-tool the economy primarily for local production and consumption (with protectionist measures if necessary). This would include poor people in the Third World who should be producing for local markets rather than commodity export.

    These aren’t the only two possible views, but the first seems to represent, more or less, the elite consensus, while the second is more in line with the thinking of the anti-globalization movement. They also cut across the left/right division in that you have people on the “right” and “left” wings of both camps. There are liberal globalists and conservative anti-globalists, and vice versa.

    Like I said, I don’t have firm answers on any of this stuff. For one thing, I don’t really feel well-informed enough to have an solid view. And, of course, the environmental dimension insn’t the only significant one. But it does seem to be particularly pressing in that everything else depends on the continued health and wholeness of the biosphere.

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month:

    The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is a nice overview of environmental problems, a survey of the common philosophical and theological approaches to environmental ethics, and a defense of the notion that a traditional Christian outlook can ground concern for, and fairly radical positions on, the environment (as opposed to approaches of a lot of eco-theology which are fairly revisionist). Northcott also argues that social justice for human beings is not in opposition to care for the earth, but an essential component of it.

    Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce. Reviewed here.

    Animals and Their Moral Standing, Stephen R. L. Clark. A collection of papers dealing with various aspects of the moral problems associated with non-human animals. Hits most of the uniquely Clarkean themes: a traditionalist philosophical and theological orientation combined with radicial views on animal welfare. (A nice companion to Northcott’s book come to think of it.)

    A Case of Conscience by James Blish. I mentioned this book here. I’ve also just started The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, who seems, to say the least, to have borrowed some ideas from Blish as both books revolve around Jesuit priests who have disastrous encounters with alien civilizations. Russell’s book is contemporary, while Blish wrote his in the 50s. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.

    Early this mont the Templeton Foundation Press reissued Keith Ward’s Divine Action, which had been out of print virtually from the time of its original publication due to a publishing acquisition. This is his account of how modern science and philosophy allow us to give a coherent account of how God can act in the world. While taking some ideas from process thought, Ward goes beyond the view of many process theologians that God acts sheerly “persuasively” on the world. Ward argues that modern physics has given us a picture of the physical world that is much “looser” than that of classical Newtonian physics, and that, in principle, God can act in the world in ways that would make a real difference, but be undetectable by the methods of science. He also offers persuasive and insightful accounts of miracles, the Incarnation, and the relation of Christianity to other religions under the rubric of ways that God acts in the world.

    Also currently working on Wandering Home by Bill McKibben, which narrates his hike from the Champlain river valley in Vermont into the Adiorondacks in New York. Along the way McKibben encounters various friends and acquaintances trying to find new ways of living sustainably, from localist vinters making wine for the region to an Earth First!-er living in an electricity- and plumbing-free shack in the woods. All of this provides much fodder for McKibben’s ruminations on possibilities of treading more lightly on the earth.

    On deck is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. I blogged about Alison’s Raising Abel a bit here. Although impressed by the way Alison’s Girard-inspired exegesis sheds new light on the biblical texts, I expressed some skepticism about aspects of his project. But, inspired in part by this review of Alison’s work from Charles Hefling that Christopher tipped me off to, I decided it was worth delving in more deeply.

  • Libertarians as social parasites?

    George Monbiot writes a scathing column about a British scientist-turned-businessman who used biological research to argue for laissez-faire but then turned to the gummint for a bailout when his business failed.

    The charge of hypocrisy seems accurate in this particular case, but applied to libertarians as a whole this column is a cheap shot, especially as Monbiot rather breezily skirts over the issue that motivates a lot of libertarian thinkng, viz. that if humans are essentially self-seeking (a point he concedes) then restraining the State becomes of paramount importance:

    Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people’s resources, they will dump their waste in other people’s habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

    The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

    Now surely Monbiot realizes that “treat[ing] the state like a member of the hominid clan and punish[ing it] when it acts against the common good” is easier said than done! This is where Hobbes’ argument for an all-powerful Leviathan runs into trouble. Hobbes says that, in order to guarantee social cooperation and avoid the war of each against all we need Leviathan to keep things in check. But who will keep Leviathan in check? Especially if, per Hobbes’ scheme, it’s invested with nigh-absolute power.

    Indeed, as some anarchists have argued, on those terms you’re better off staying in the state of nature since your chances of surviving the depredations of your fellow human beings seem better when vast power isn’t concentrated in a single entity. It’s this drastic imbalance of power that makes the subject’s position vis a vis the State so precarious.

    I’m not disagreeing with the need for regulation of business; Monbiot makes a good point when he says that globalization makes it easier for businesses to skirt responsibility to the communities it does business in or with. But I’ve always thought that progressives tend to overestimate the ability of governments to wisely and disinterestedly regulate things. If humans are fundamentally self-interested, then that goes for lawmakers and bureaucrats too.

    The trick, it seems to me, is to make both business and government accountable to the people whom their actions affect. I’ve become convinced that small-d democracy needs to extend to the economic sphere as well as the political sphere. But I wonder if there’s a way of doing that without concentrating more power in the national state (or, worse, a kind of global superstate). The libertarian critique of state power can’t be so easily dismissed.

  • Economics as master narrative

    Did you know that economists can tell us how much we should care about future generations or how risk averse we ought to be? Yeah, me neither!

    I’ve recently found myself increasingly irritated at the way economics (or, worse, a popularized version of it) has begun to function as a kind of master narrative among our pundit classes and the airport bookstore set. In fact, one of the things that prompted me to rethink my former mostly uncritical support for free trade was that I got sick of condescending economists telling me I shouldn’t care about things like whether the stuff I buy was made in a sweatshop, or whether my hometown is being hollowed out by de-industrialization.

    This new style of economic punditry creates the illusion of promising value-free solutions to political conflicts. And it allows dissenters to be dismissed as economically illiterate troglodytes. I don’t generally buy into the more catastrophic critiques of political liberalism offered by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, but I can’t help but wonder if this econo-mania is a way of filling the vacuum left when moral debate has been expunged from the public sphere.

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.

    Small Is Still Beautiful is one among a recent spate of books re-thinking what it means to be conservative in light of the apparent triumph of global capitalism and the preeminence of America as global hegemon. Fans of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (review here) and Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America (review here) will find much to like here, as Pearce upholds the small, familiar and local against the forces of globalized homogeneity.

    Pearce doesn’t break much new ground in terms of fundamental ideas; this book is more of an update of Schumacher’s original. But this actually works well since Schumacher’s ideas seem just as timely now as they did thirty years ago. The issues that this book grapples with – our insatiable appetite for growth, environmental despoilation, and the plight of local communities – have gained a new resonance in recent years.

    If you had to boil down Schumacher’s (and Pearce’s) message into a pithy maxim, I think it would be that “Economics was made for man, not man for economics.” Schumacher’s vision was rooted in a view of humankind as having transcendent worth, but also part of an ordered cosmos that has its own beauty and integrity. For Schumacher, much of the problem of conventional economic thinking was that it subordinated the ends of human life to the means of economic production – a complete reversal of the proper order of things.

    Pearce sees both cause for worry and celebration in the events that have transpired since Small Is Beautiful was originally published. On the one hand, many of the worrying trends Schumacher identified have only accelerated: neoliberal globalization and its attendant monoculture, skewed theories of development that privilege intensive industrial production and agriculture, and, of course, the worship of centralization and “giantism.” On the other hand, a counter-movement of organic farmers, craft brewers, proponents of local economies, co-ops, and movements for political decentralization have also made a surprising amount of headway.

    The underlying premise of Schumacher’s work is that unlimited economic growth in the pursuit of meeting a never-ending stream of consumer demands is “unnatrual” in the deepest possible sense. It goes against the grain of human nature in that it won’t satisfy our deepest longings, and it threatens to destroy the fragile biosphere upon which we and all other life depend. Only a reorientation of our economic and political life toward proper human ends – joy, wisdom, peace – can stave off an ecological disaster.

    This view is both radical and conservative in that it requires a massive re-thinking of the political and economic status quo, but does so in the name of a very traditional, even religious, view of human beings and their destiny. Schumacher’s less-known work, A Guide for the Perplexed, actually presents the key to his thought here. His aim in that work was to recover the traditional metaphysical view of humanity and the universe that underlies what Huston Smith calls the “wisdom traditions” of the world. This philosophia perennis stands in stark opposition to the materialism of post-Englightenment modernity.

    Pearce, like Schumacher, is a practicing Catholic who combines what we’d call social conservatism with economic positions well to the “left” of most Democrats, much less Republicans. He opposes “free trade” and thinks government policy should favor small businesses and local producers. He takes the issue of climate change and environmental degradation with the utmost seriousness, seeing them as direct consequences of growth-oriented and inequitable economic policy. He excoriates the World Bank and IMF and their regimes of “structural adjustment” programs for developing nations. And he opts for organic farming as the only way to save the land from destruction at the hands of intensive agriculture.

    Somewhat confusingly, and despite the subtitle, Pearce says little directly about families. There are a few asides about the ways in which market capitalism breaks up social bonds, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. But very little is said about how families in particular are affected. For instance, it seems to me that Pearce could’ve made a lot of hay out of the way that our current economic practices force parents to work long hours, depriving them of the opportunities to spend time with their children as well as to participate in their communities.

    I have to say that this book likely won’t convince anyone who isn’t already at least somewhat familiar with and somewhat sympathetic to Schumacher’s original arguments. But Pearce has done us a service even if the only effect of his book is to send people (particularly the more conservative-leaning people likely to read this) back to Schumacher’s original works. And beyond that, it’s nice to see Schumacherian principles applied to the current scence, giving us a picture of their continuing relevance.

    P.S.     Dear Publishers: I would be happy to review books like this when they come out instead of waiting till they’re available at the library. Please feel free to send review copies. 😉