A Thinking Reed

Category: Economy

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

    It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

    As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

    As he puts it:

    Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

    I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

    In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

  • Christians and markets

    Here’s a smart article by Kathryn D. Blanchard, a professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She argues that Christians, especially the Christian intelligensia, need to get beyond abstractions about “the market” and “capitalism” and look at the ways in which particular markets can serve or impede human flourishing.

    She makes some points that ought to be better known among Christian thinkers than they apparently are: that markets are as much about cooperation as competition, that in the real world human relationships, including market relationships, are better described by language more complex than that of narrow utility maximization, and that there is great potential for good and evil in the way markets work.

    Lately some Christian thinkers have taken to condemning “capitalism” or “the market” wholesale, but, instead of proposing some alternative system like communism or socialism, they propose the church itself as an embodiment of an alternative system of economic practice. No doubt there are good reasons for promoting alternative economic arrangements for various purposes, but Prof. Blanchard is surely right to point out that it’s folly to suppose that markets are evil per se or that one should try to extricate oneself from them:

    Most markets in the real world, however, tend to fall somewhere in the grey area between good and evil. They are the media by which moderately well-off, educated, responsible and well-intentioned Christians (you know who you are) acquire objects of ambivalence, such as organic food, liberal arts educations, modest homes, Italian wine, the internet, comfortable or even fashionable shoes, air conditioning, jogging strollers, or beds. These are items that most of us not only enjoy (or hope to enjoy someday) but—let’s be honest—believe we cannot live without, even if we feel somewhat sheepish about them.

    Later she writes:

    Quixotic attacks on a generalized capitalism can give way to fruitful interactions with particular markets and market behaviors, starting with our own and moving outward—especially with an eye toward the coercive externalities they may visit on our neighbors near and far. We must get up off the communion rail and bear witness to the “kin-dom” of God in small acts such as writing to our elected representatives about justice for migrant workers, supporting news sources that aim to reflect the truth, foregoing meat from factory farms or fresh blueberries in November, or buying carbon credits to offset the last flight we took to an annual meeting.

    With God’s help, such humble acts may lead us into bolder ones. It’s not enough to sit at our marketed computers in our market-sponsored offices writing marketable books and articles about how bad “the market” is. Like “the church,” the market is people. Our economic task is to create and support just markets, while crying out against and divesting from unjust markets.

    Obviously she isn’t proposing that the market should absorb all relationships. The error of at least some economists and libertarian types is to think that the unregulated market can effectively provide all the necessary goods for society. More sober thinkers realize the need for a strong moral, cultural, social and legal framework to keep the market “in the box.”

    Christians, I think, are often uneasy with markets in part because they rely on virtues less exalted than that of self-giving love. But Prof. Blanchard is surely correct when she says that the motives we have when we engage in behavior within markets (like in the rest of life) are more complicated than pure love or pure self-interest. As she wisely says, “the market is people” who are, decidedly, a mixed bag.

  • “Green consumerism” vs. consuming less

    A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story on the new “green consumerism.” Today George Monbiot writes that it’s not good enough to “buy green”; we have to buy less. His contention is that “green” consumption is at this point a supplement to rather than a replacement of conventional consumption and that people have started to by flashy “green” items more as a sign of social status than as concrete contributions to the problem. The result is that individual consumption ends up being seen as a replacement for political action.

    Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation – a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

    […]

    Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party pooper, the spectre at the feast, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Against the shiny new world of organic aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable restraints: carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations, coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article about that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.

    It does make you start to wonder if consumption is the only response we know how to make to any social problem. Hip articles associated with a particular cause become status signifiers, especially when they’re expensive. You can’t ostentatiously show off buying less stuff.

    In theory Christianity should be able to provide resources for dealing with this. Theologically we deny that our identity is grounded in what we buy and consume. And the tradition of living simply as part of the path of virtue goes back at least to the Desert Fathers. But how many churches have addressed this? And how many have encouraged being virtuous consumers instead?

    Not that the two should be seen as inevitably opposed. After all, we need to consume things! Things are good! And it’s probably better to drink organic fair trade coffee than conventional coffee. A lot of churches have been good at promoting things like that. But we’re probably less good at evaluating whether we really need the things we find ourselves wanting (I know I am!). What kinds of practices and resources do we have for making those distinctions? (By the way, yes I do need coffee, so don’t ask.)

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 3: The Christian revolution

    (See previous posts here and here.)

    In chapter 8 Jardine discusses what he calls the cosmological and anthropological revolution wrought by Christianity and why it holds the key to facing the dilemma of the technological society. That dilemma, recall, is that we human beings have found ourselves with the capacity to radically alter our environment but without a moral understanding adequate to direct us in using that power. Traditional moral theories, such as those inherited from Greek philosophy, have assumed a static order both in the natural world and in human nature. Consequently, natural law theories don’t provide guidance in how we should use our ability to alter what was previously thought to be an unchanging order.

    Furthermore, Jardine thinks, liberalism doesn’t provide an answer to this dilemma either. This is because of its inbuilt tendency toward nihilism. While liberalism recognizes the human capacity for altering the environment, in seeking a “neutral” ethic that prescinds from making judgments about the good it fails to set direction or limits to that capacity. Thus, he thinks, individual preference becomes the sole source of value in a liberal society.

    Despite the fact that Christianity would seem to be one of the main foundations of Western civilization, Jardine thinks that we haven’t sufficiently assimilated its cosmological and anthropoligical outlook. Unlike either ancient paganism or Greek rationalism, Christianity is characterized by two distinct tenets that can help re-orient our technological society. First, Christianity recognizes that human beings, while creatures, have a share in God’s creative power. We are co-creators in a sense. Secondly, the Bible views the universe as a dynamic expression of the divine being. In “the word” we find the key metaphor for understanding the biblical view of the universe.

    God, Genesis tells us, speaks the world into existence. Unlike ancient paganism which viewed the gods as capricious, the biblical God is trustworthy and faithful. Thus his creation will display a certain order and reliability. But unlike Greek rationalism, which saw the world’s order as unchanging, the biblical God is dynamic and involved in history. History becomes a key concept for understanding the creation: it is more like an ongoing process with new potentialities unfolding over time. This dual view of humans as co-creators and the universe as an orderly but dynamic process, Jardine thinks, is much more in tune with the world revealed by our technological capcities and scientific knowledge.

    And this view provides the foundation for an ethic that can grapple with the problems of being co-creators in such a world. Just as God speaks the world into being, humans can think of themselves as speakers before God. Speech is key because, in a sense, speech is what allows us to create new worlds of possibility and thus is at the root of our creative capacities. “Using language in certain ways creates human capacities that could not exist otherwise” (p. 175). Our creative powers are real, though limited.

    The proper response of such creatures, living in a dynamically ordered world created by a good God, is to try to be “faithful speakers before God.” Jardine provides an illuminating interpretation of the story of the Fall. The human situation is that we seek to transgress the limits of our knowledge and creative powers in order to be like God:

    We are creators, but we are also creatures. As such, there are limits to our creative capacities, and limits to our knowledge. But because we are creators, we will have a powerful tendency to forget, or willfull ignore, the fact that we are creatures, and we will frequently try to be only creators–that is, to be God. This behavior is what is meant by the term sin, and its paradigm is attempting to claim absolute knowledge, which of course only God can have.

    The reason people sin is precisely because of our ambiguous situation as creators and creatures. As creatures we are limited beings, but as creators we can imagine ourselves as unlimited beings, and thus we will tend to attempt to cast off all limitations–or, in theological terms, we will be tempted to be like God. Or, putting this in terms of our model of creating a world through speech, sin is the attempt to become creators only, instead of cocreators, and to create our own little world. This is precisely what one does when one lies; one attempts to replace the world created by God and the speech of other humans with a world created only by oneself. More generally, all attempts to dominate other people are cases of trying to create one’s own world by force. Similarly, the delight that humans sometimes–indeed, rather often–take in acts of destruction can be understood as another attempt to create one’s own world by force. Stating the idea of sin in these terms makes it clear that fundamentally, sin comes from a lack of faith, that is, a lack of trust, in God and his created world; it is an attempt to replace God’s creation with our own. Sin means essentially unfaithful human acts.(pp. 186-7)

    If sin is essentially unfaithfulness, then faithfulness will be embodied in an ethic of unconditional love. Since human beings are co-creators with the capacity to create their own “worlds” plurality is an essential feature of the human condition. You and I may well disagree about how we should live together, or how our powers of creativity should be used. Jardine defines unconditional love as the persistent attempt to understand and empathize with those whose perspective differs from our own. Concretely, this means practicing forgiveness and mutual correction. These balance each other because while we must stop the person who is sinning, a recognition of the limits of our knowledge highlights the importance of forgiveness.

    Jardine goes on to distinguish this Christian ethic from that of liberalism. Unconditional love is not the same thing as liberal tolerance. Tolerance implies a kind of indifference to what others are doing so long as they harm no one but themselves. But unconditional love corrects and forgives out of a concern for the well-being of the other. “From the standpoint of an ethic of unconditoinal love, liberal tolerance is, for the most part, indifference, and fails to help or correct people unless their actions affect others in a direct, blatant way” (p. 189).

    Indeed, Jardine goes on to argue that “[g]enerally speaking, liberalism is best understood as a distortion of–or better yet, a reductionisitc version of–Christiainity, or more specifically of the Christian ethic of unconditional love” (p. 189). Liberalism enjoins toelrance and avoiding persecution rather than the deeply involved personal love commanded by the Christian ethic. Christianity may have inspired the idea that all people are fundamentally equal and thus one could engage in productive exchanges with those outside of one’s family, clan, or culture, but liberalism goes too far in reducing all social relationships to market exchanges. The Christian ethic of unconditional love provides the foundation for faithful speaking before God and communal deliberation about the good.

    I think this would be a good point to ask some critical questions. Jardine has argued that liberalism leads to nihilism and that only Christianity can provide the means for a fruitful deliberation about the good, providing some guidance in the use of our powers as cocreators in a dynamic and creative, but ordered and reliable universe. He maintains that liberalism is a reduction of the Christian idea of equality and unconditional love to a bland tolerance. However, does he grapple sufficiently with what gave rise to liberal tolerance in the first place? As good as mutual correction and forgiveness sounds, it’s very difficult to see how this would apply to society as a whole, rather than to close-knit Christian communities. Liberalism flourished initially in part because the churches were being rather too zealous in the cause of fraternal correction. In other words, “mere” tolerance is no mean accomplishment and not something to be dismissed lightly. In a vast society tolerance may be the best thing we can give to a lot of our fellow citizens. Mutual correction requires a degree of intimacy and trust that isn’t easily attained. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, the modern nation-state may well be incapable of being a genuine community in the sense of providing an arena for communal deliberation about the good.

    Secondly, Jardine seems to conflate political liberalism, understood as a regime that refrains from enforcing a particular vision of the good, with liberalism as a way of life. The latter takes human autonomy as the highest good and is in that sense itself a comprehensive philosophy of life. But not all political liberals are liberals in this sense. In his book Two Faces of Liberalism the political philosopher John Gray distinguishes between liberalism understood as a way of life and liberalism understood as a kind of modus vivendi that allows different ways of life to peacefully co-exist. A modus vivendi liberalism isn’t necessarily committed to enforcing liberalism as a way of life, the kind of philosophy of life that may well lead to nihilism as Jardine fears.

    It might be worth pointing out that most people in modern Western liberal societies are not in fact nihilists. And this may be because they have adopted more of a modus vivendi style of liberalism that allows different ways of life to co-exist. This doesn’t mean that every person in a liberal society suddenly becomes an atomized individual unattached to any larger context for making sense of her life. Granted that liberalism as a way of life has certainly made inroads in these societies, it doesn’t seem to follow, either empirically or as a matter of logic, that it must overwhelm all more communitarian or traditional ways of life.

    And this brings me to one more point. Jardine, like some writers in the Radical Orthodoxy school of thought, holds that liberalism necessarily leads to nihilism and that only Christianity provides a viable alternative to liberalism. But I think we’re well beyond the point where Christian thinkers can ignore the plurality of other points of view in the world and treat secular liberalism as though it were the only serious rival to Christianity. The irreducible fact of pluralism – of a diverse array of religious and philosophical ways of life – is, in my view, precisely the best argument for some variety of modus vivendi liberalism. This would be an order that allows people to live in relative peace without denuding themselves of their particular religious, cultural, and other kinds of identity.

    That said, Jardine’s re-interpretation of the story of the fall and its relation to our technological capacities is suggestive, and something I think Christians would do well to bring to the debate on how those capacities should be used. They might well find common ground here with believers from other traditions. In the next (and probably final) post in this series I’ll talk a little about Jardine’s concrete proposals for social change in light of the discussion so far.

  • Localism versus/and nationalism?

    I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit sympathetically disposed to Bill Kauffman’s paean to neo-secessionists in Vermont, but I’m not so sure that ultra-localism is the solution to the problems that the secessionists identify.

    For one thing, to the extent that they deplore the effects of the global marketplace, it’s not clear that smaller communities are able to effectively resist it.

    This is one of the reasons that Daly and Cobb give for their qualified nationalism. They actually hope to see a greater devolution of economic and political power, but believe that right now the nation-state is the only entity capable of putting checks on globalization that has some measure of democratic accountability:

    Nation-states are today extremely important societies. They are in many instances the only loci of power capable of asserting themselves effectively against those forces that erode all community. They do, in many instances, contribute strongly to the self-identification of their citizens, and at least some of them allow for considerable participation in governance. Most of them have concern for the well-being of their citizens, and some affirm the diversity among them. Hence nations can be communities, and some are quite good communities. At the present time we join [Dudley] Seers in calling for economics to serve national communities.

    It is important to see what difference this would make. The current economic ideal is that national boundaries not impede the global economy. Increasingly this means that economic decisions of determinative importance to the people of a nation are made by persons who are not responsible to them in any way. In short, whatever form of government the state may have, its people cannot participate in the most important decisions governing their daily lives. This weakens the possibility for a nation-state to be a community. With a national community, on the contrary, there is some possibility for the people through their government to share in decisions. A healthy national community is possible.

    There can be no effective national economy if a people cannot feed themselves and otherwise meet their essential needs. Hence a national economy for community will be a relatively self-sufficient economy. This does not preclude trade, but it does preclude dependence on trade, especially where the nation cannot participate in determining the terms of trade. (Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good, p. 173)

    Invoking the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, Daly and Cobb enunciate, as a general principle that decentralization is good if the community can effectively exercise control over its economic life:

    In many instances the nation-state is already too large and too remote from ordinary people for effective participation to be possible. Decentralization of the economy within the nation should accompany nationalization in relation to the global economy. Many regions within the United States could become relatively self-sufficient. With economic decentralization there could come political decentralization as well. The main formal point is that a political community cannot be healthy if it cannot exercise a significant measure of control over its economic life. The second formal point is that of the Catholic teaching of “subsidiarity”: power should be located as close ot the people as possible, that is, in the smallest units that are feasible. Our special emphasis is that except for a few functions, political power that cannot affect the economic order is ineffective. Hence we tie political decentralization to economic decentralization. (p. 174)

    The secessionists of the Second Vermont Republic, however, don’t see the nation-state as a potential ally. They see it as the enemy and themselves as the foes of “giantism” in all its forms.

    From Kauffman’s article:

    “The left-right thing has got to go,” declares Ian Baldwin, cofounder of Chelsea Green Publishing and publisher of Vermont Commons. “We’re decentralists and we are up against a monster.”

    What might replace left and right, liberal and conservative, as useful political bipolarities? Globalist and localist, perhaps, or placeless versus placeist. Baldwin argues that “peak oil and climate change are linked and irreversible events that will within a generation change how human beings live. The world economy will relocalize.” He dismisses homeland security as “fatherland security”—for “homeland,” with its Nazi-Soviet echoes, has never been what Americans call their country. What we need, says Baldwin, is “homestead security”: sustainable agriculture, small shops, a revival of craftsmanship, local citizenship, communal spirit. The vision is one of self-government. Independence from the empire but interdependence at the grassroots. Neighborliness. The other American Dream.

    Personally I like the idea of acheiving the ends of community and sustainability through noncoercive libertarian means. I’m just not sure it can be done. I certainly think that Daly and Cobb would agree with much of the spirit of the SVR folks, but their view is that the nation-state has to play an essential role in shielding local economies and communities from the ravages of the global marketplace. But the radical decentralists of the SVR are likely to reply that you can’t strengthen localities by concentrating more power in the center.

    It may be that what’s needed is a mixture of both approaches. In reviewing WorldChanging, a vast compendium of ideas for saving the planet (and a pretty nifty book that we received as a gift from some friends), Bill McKibben writes:

    If there’s one flaw in the WorldChanging method, I think it might be a general distrust of the idea that government could help make things happen. There’s a Silicon Valley air to the WorldChanging enterprise – over the years it’s been closely connected with Wired magazine, the bible of the digerati and a publication almost as paranoid about government interference and regulation as the Wall Street Journal. Like Internet entrepreneurs, they distrust both government intentions and abilities – bureaucrats tend, after all, to come from the ranks of those neither bold nor smart enough to innovate. A libertarian streak shines through: “When we redesign our personal lives in such a way that we’re doing the right thing and having a hell of a good time,” Steffen writes, “we act as one-person beacons to the idea that green can be bright, that worldchanging can be lifechanging.” I’m sympathetic to this strain of thinking; I believe we’re going to need more local and more nimble decision-making in the future to build strong, survivable communities. But it also makes it a little harder to be as optimistic as you’d like to be when reading these pages, which are filled with good ideas that, chances are, won’t come to all that much without the support of government and a system of incentives for investment.

    Frankly I’m not sure what the right balance is. It may be that one of the necessary functions of government is to create a protective framework or space within which communities can flourish. This wouldn’t have to entail either bureaucratic micro-management or utter laissez-faire. Rather, what may be needed is some way to permit communities to freely experiment in different ways of living while enjoying a measure of protection from the levelling effects of the market.

  • Peak oil and the end of liberalism

    Patrick Deneen writes that modern liberalism – “the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., bio-technological improvement of the species)” – rests ultimately on our ability to exploit fossil fuels. All that freedom, autonomy, and material progress is a one-shot affair since the reservoir of energy that made it possible took hundreds of millions of years to build up.

    Deneen says that the view of life that underlies liberalism is profoundly anti-natural:

    Oil has been the silent but world-altering source of our collective delusion that we could live in this way and get away with it. It has allowed us to contrive a civilization based upon a theoretical fantasy, and to make it functional for about a century, during which time we took the exceptional for the ordinary, the unnatural for the given, the hubristic for the norm. We have reshaped the world to accord with a self-delusive fantasy, with the only stipulation being that there continue to be unlimited quantities of this external power source that would let growth and its attendant power over nature go on forever. Most of us assume there’s no problem with this basic presupposition – except that we are about to discover that you can only defy gravity for so long, as the example of Icarus ought to have served as a reminder.

    Conservatism, while a salutary reaction against the excesses of liberalism, usually fails to grasp the underlying economic realities that make those excesses possible:

    Conservatives rightly decry the decline of culture, the assault on the family and the unlimited infanticide of our abortion regime, but find nothing else wrong with the basic arrangement and largely do not question whether our political and economic arrangements have contributed to what we denounce. Books will be written about how this could have happened. But, perhaps we are not long from the day when conservatives will realize the fantasy they have themselves been purveying, and will demand that we prepare ourselves now for a post-petroleum reinstatement of human culture, cultivation, and tradition.

    I take peak oil and global warming catastrophists with a grain of salt if only because their predictions of what will happen post-catastrophe seem to align so neatly with the kind of society they would like to see. Still, the fossil fuel binge does seem like it will have to come to an end at some point, so it’s well worth thinking about what that implies.

  • Globalization from above

    This interesting piece by NYU economist William Easterly calls bs on the “Ideology of Development” – the notion that all nations can become “developed” by instituting reforms orchestrated by elite technicians and experts from the IMF-World Bank-UN axis.

    Easterly points out that 1) the countries that have most closely followed the advice of the experts have the worst track record in developing economically and 2) the countries that have done the best have frequently ignored that same advice. His essential point is that there are many paths to development and, since societies differ in many ways, letting them chart their own course is vastly preferable to the imposition of a one-size-fits-all technical fix.

    He also contends that this Developmentalist ideology is frequently seen as a kind of neo-colonialism which gives rise to backlash in the form of illiberal leftist and populist movements. When the development schemes fail people not unreasonably blame the outsiders and self-appointed experts who have taken it upon themselves to run other people’s countries.

    (via The American Scene)

  • The Humane Society vs. the farm bill

    The Humane Society is opposing section 123 of the proposed 2007 Farm Bill which is supposed to be voted on by the House very soon.

    The section says that:

    Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has—
    (1) inspected and passed; or
    (2) determined to be of non-regulated status.

    The HSUSA interprets this to mean that states and localities would be prohibited “from banning activities they deem to be contrary to public health, safety, and morals. Section 123 would undo bans on horse slaughter, intensive confinement of pigs and calves raised for veal, force-feeding of ducks and geese to make foie gras … [etc.]”

    This piece at Grist describes further implications of this provision:

    [T]his broad statement basically says that if the USDA says something is safe, a state or local government is not allowed to regulate it. For example, there have been a number of counties around the country that have banned genetically modified organisms from being produced within their borders. This preemption-style language, if it’s passed in the Farm Bill, would void those local laws.

    This seems to me to be a bad idea both substantively and on grounds of democracy and local control. The HSUSA encourages people to contact the congressional representative about the provision here.

  • Economics for community

    As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an abstraction as exhaustive of the reality it describes as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

    Chief among these abstractions is the market. While the free exchange of goods and services is key to any flourishing economy, treating “the market” in isolation has some built in limitations. These include the tendency for competition to be self-eliminating (monopoly), the corrosive affect of encouraging the pursuit of self-interest on the moral context necessary to sustain the virtues the market order requires, the need for public goods and the existence of public “bads” (externalities), and the market’s blindness to judgments of value such as those pertaining to the distribution of wealth or the overall scale of the economy in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.

    Daly and Cobb also criticize the reliance on GNP as a measure of economic well-being. They argue that it doesn’t accurately reflect income, much less genuine economic welfare. Homo economicus is the model of the human self posited by much economic thought. It assumes a human being who’s interested primarily in maximizing utility understood in terms of consumption. Economics qua economics forbids us from making value judgments about individual preferences and seeks instead to understand how those preferences can be maximized. Finally, “land,” the economic stand-in for all of non-human nature, rather than being seen as a productive and living system with its own intrinsic value, is reduced to a largely passive and inert commodity. An overly idealistic point of view tends to see all resources as having their ultimate source in human ingenuity, presdisposing economics to ignore the question of the finitude of resources.

    All of these abstractions, Daly and Cobb contend, serve to create an overly individualistic and short-term picture of the world and lends support to similarly constituted policies. Their goal is to reconceive the context of economic life as being in service to community, including the wider community of non-human nature.

    To this end, they advocate a shift from short-term to long-term thinking, with particular attention to the scale of the economy. Their argument here is fairly simple: the economy is situated within an ecosystem which is finite in size (i.e in terms of resources). Therefore, the economy cannot grow indefinitely. They define “scale” as population x per capita resource use rate and maintain that our trajectory of growth is pushing against the limits imposed by the natural ecosystem within which our economic life exists.

    Consequently, what they think is necessary is an economy that is oriented away from growth and toward more of a steady-state model. Economic well-being shouldn’t be measured in terms of increasing consumption, but by a combination of economic and non-economic welfare. Individualism should be replaced by a vision of human beings as persons-in-community whose relationships to others are seen as constitutive of their identity. Economic development should focus on the well-being of the community as a whole rather than individuals.

    Concerning this last point, Daly and Cobb see communities as the fundamental building blocks of a sound economic order. But they are also decentralists who would like to see a revival of local communities over against the atomized cosmopolitanism that globalization promises. They envision a world in which one’s primary loyalty is to one’s local community, with increasing and overlapping circles of loyalty expanding outward. Unlike many on the Left, they have no particular affinity for “post-national” globalism.

    In fact, Daly and Cobb acknowledge that in our world the only entities currently able to resist globalization and foster steps toward an economic order more in line with their aspirations is the nation. They are more or less unapologetic nationalists, resulting in some surprising policy prescriptions that would put them at odds with much of the Left. They are against free trade and for protectionism for domestic industries by means of tariffs, they favor population control, and the form they advocate for most developed countries, including the US, is a curtailment of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Sounding for all the world like Pat Buchanan, they argue that a chief function of the nation-state is to secure its borders against unwanted immigrants. They oppose not only economic entanglements with foreign nations, but also foreign aid. All nations need to be self-sufficient, at least in essentials. Finally, the support a defense policy of what could fairly be called non-interventionism and suggest that a United States less enmeshed in a global market would have less cause for foreign meddling.

    The keystone of Daly and Cobb’s position, then, is a community of more or less self-reliant communities whose economic life is geared to stability and self-sufficiency rather than expanded growth. This is rooted in what they describe as a biocentric and theistic vision that sees all of creation as related to a good God and having value apart from human needs and interests. Their emphasis on the value of the biosphere leads them to support sustainable and organic agriculture and to favor subsistence agriculture over agriculture for commodity export as well as a tax system similar to that proposed by Henry George that treats land as a trust rather than a commodity.

    A lot of what’s contained in this volume will be familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to debates about the economics of sustainability. What I find appealing about Daly and Cobb is their desire to foster a more decentralized, humane, and participatory economy instead of increased centralization. I also think they’re more realistic than some in viewing the nation-state as the best hope for gaining some measure of democratic control over economic life. Too often folks on the Left put what appears to me as an unrealistic hope in international institutions like the UN which, after all, are even further removed from popular control and participation than most national governments.

    However, I still can’t help but have some reservations about Daly and Cobb’s vision. On a sheerly factual level, I wish they’d spent more time making the case of a finite economy. To a certain extent they seem to cherry-pick their opponents, using the most extreme-sounding quotes from people like George Gilder. I would’ve liked to see more engagement with serious opponents of their view. Secondly, they seem to me at times insufficiently appreciative of the real benefits of liberal individualism. Like many who oppose “community” to “individualism” they tend to paint the former almost exclusively in glowing terms that downplay the genuine difficulties of close-knit community. There’s a real tension between individual liberty and community control, however democratic. To the extent that the community exercises control over a particular area of life, it leaves less room for indvidual discretion. There’s a genuine balancing act there and I’m not sure Daly and Cobb have paid much attention to it (their discussion of population control, for instance, is disturbingly sanguine about China’s coercive policies without actually advocating them). Finally, they don’t, in my view, deal adequately with the objection that participation in an expanding economy is necessary for many people in the world to escape from grinding poverty.

    Overall, though, Daly and Cobb seem to me to be asking the right questions: Is an ever-expanding economy consistent with the limits imposed by ecological fragility? How do we reconcile the need for democratic control over the economy with individual freedom? What kind of balance should be struck between ties to local community and a more cosmopolitan outlook? How do we honor the value of God’s creation without sacrificing vital human interests? These all strike me as among the most important questions we face in the 21st century, even if I’m not satisfied in every case with Daly and Cobb’s answers.

  • Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

    I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books.

    Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process theologian John Cobb.

    My views on economics have been in flux for the past few years. I was at one time attracted to the libertarian exaltation of the free market, but I’ve become increasingly convinced of the limitations of that view.

    The conservative side of me is skeptical that a system based on acquisitiveness can really be conducive to virtue, especially as the logic of the market threatens to take over more and more areas of life. The liberal side of me is unconvinced that the rising tide will really lift all boats, at least at a rate fast enough to forestall ecological disaster. As I’ve become more interested in environmental issues I’ve been exposed to the arguments of those who maintain that unlimited growth is a dead end, literally.

    Daly and Cobb seem to be following in the footsteps of thinkers like E.F. Schumacher. They embrace the market and recognize that central planning is unworkable, but they also want to situate the market within a social and moral framework that respects the integrity of communities, both national and more local ones.

    In this respect their project seems to hark back to the decentralized “humane economy” of conservative Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, a thinker I admire a lot. Their goal is to rethink economic policy in a way that treats human beings as more than an abstract homo economicus, as well as being sensitive to what, following Wendell Berry, they call the “Great Economy” of all life on Earth.

    I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m eager to see where Daly and Cobb go with their project and will probably post more on these ideas as I go.