I've read your stuff for a long time, Noah. And, writing for a living myself, I tend toward that worst bias of regularly thinking I'm the best writer in the room.
So i am very sincere when i say: This? This is some of the best stuff you've ever done. Kudos!
This is one of Noah's best ever. There are about 10 sentences that I want to make into posters and hang on my wall. I was particularly glad that he recognized the moral imperative of China's rapid development, whether China remains a threat to us or not.
My one quibble comes from a historical and physiological perspective. Human beings are built to sustain periodic famine. The books that I have read say that the average human being stops feeling hunger after 72 hours without eating and can continue making moderate physical efforts for a month. Death from starvation becomes part of the picture after 40-60 days.
The ability of human beings to survive periodic famine was obviously essential in the preindustrial era. Indeed, I had a friend who often preferred NOT to eat— he felt much more clear-headed without food in his stomach. But none of this reflects my personal experience—the longest I have gone without food is 48 hours and I was miserable.
Ive done a week. It does get better after a day or so, but when you sleep your dreams are often about food. Harder to keep the body warm and a reduction in the desire to move. Anxiety grows about day 4
Just one point about the starvation comment. I guess it really depends on what kind of starting point you’re working with. If you’re coming from a position of a well fed modern western human it’s very different to the chronically malnourished 13th century peasant. In addition to that, the fact that humans are adapted to withstand such famine is merely a testament to the privation we faced during our early evolution (and supporting Noah’s point), whether it is better for us to be that way is very much up for debate. Fasting, compared to regularly being fed, leads to rather rapid lean mass loss (in addition to fat mass loss of course) to name one down side. Studies mirroring the effects of fasting, mTOR activation and autophagy and their effects on longevity in yeast and mice have yet to be replicated in humans.
I fully agree that the effects of food deprivation depend on where the individual starts from, and the course varies dramatically from individual to individual.
Really? It may not be as bad as when Noah's, say, come out in support of nuclear proliferation, but I thought this postletter was lazy, sloppy, self-satisfied, and hypocritical.
Hypocritical because Noah sneers at "smug intellectuals [who] sneer at 'economic growth' or 'GDP'"; Noah himself is a PhD-holder who's routinely blisteringly smug (including in this very postletter!).
Lazy and sloppy because, for instance, his link at the word "GDP" goes to an online Guardian letter from a professor pointing out that GDP "is a very poor way to measure the negative impacts of global warming", a perfectly legitimate argument to make, and not a claim that amounts to "denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence" — that's just Noah misrepresenting the letter (he probably found it in a Google search, glanced at the sub-editor's tendentious headline, and dropped it in). He claims that "degrowth would return us to a more savage, cutthroat existence", just above his own damn graph showing that global GDP per capita now averages upward of $16k — greater than that of China (https://datacommons.org/ranking/Amount_EconomicActivity_GrossDomesticProduction_Nominal_PerCapita/Country/asia?h=country%2FCHN&unit=%24), a country Noah goes on to praise for its "rise to wealth" with a population enjoying "something approximating a materially comfortable existence".
Self-satisfied because Noah grandiosely presents opposition to poverty as "the principles [sic] that underlie" his "political leanings", as if Poverty Bad is a principle narrow enough to determine one's political leanings. But pretty much every politician, and at least one (Jason Hickel) of the degrowthers Noah lashes out against, would agree that Poverty Bad, yet they mysteriously wind up disagreeing with each other and with Noah. Poverty Bad is not actually a very insightful or informative position to take, it's like declaring yourself against genocide or against rape. Maybe that's what Noah's writing up for next Monday, who knows.
I have been listening to Noah on his podcast and been reading a lot of his blogs recently, and I agree that he has a tendency to smugness. I was particularly taken aback with the line, "When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”,..." This type of ad hominem attack always leaves me cold, as it suggests to me one "smug intellect" having a petulant go at another so-called smug intellect fellow intellect.
It is pretty good, *except* that it puts itself to the lie when it inserts the “climate change is real” garbage at the end, since enabling low cost highly available reliable fossil fuel energy for the world’s poorest billions is one of the most important things to do to greatly increase their standard of living.
The inclusion of this one line puts to the lie the rest of it, and it becomes more leftist happy talk, while leftist actions explicitly deliver the opposite of the stated goal.
Both "burning fossil fuels has been a tremendous boon to humanity" and "climate change (as a result of burning fossil fuels) is real" can be true at the same time. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for both. As a result, the implied optimal course of action is complex, except that we shouldn't assume that fossil fuel consumption is the pinnacle of energy technology we can achieve.
I loved the part about " With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements"
Fantasies of an imagined past are pretty ripe in African countries unfortunately, partially due to poverty. Even though some racists will say nonsense like "Africa didn't have civilization", which is patently false. The opposite is when people glorify pre-industrial Kingdoms like the Mali Empire.
While it's cool to know who Mansa Musa is, at the end of the day, if we could go back in time, the Mali Kingdom was hellish by modern standards. Mansa Musa, the supposedly richest man who ever lived, died around age 40. Many of the Mansas (Emperors) of the Mali Empire died young by sleeping sickness, like the tsetse fly. The country was a slave state, and despite the Mosques and Islamic centers of learning, the only people who were literate according to the Arab Chroniclers were the elite, while most Malians were illiterate.
We shouldn't glorify the past and we should praise technological progress because poverty is the norm, not wealth.
Below I wrote about the West African Kingdoms if anyone is interested!
I have spent the last 8 years of my life on this quest and have arrived at the conclusion that it is only achievable with cheap energy to replace human power.
Agreed. Industrialisation and human flourishing is always and everywhere dependant upon access to cheap and reliable (that bit is important) energy. If that happens to be hydrocarbons for the time being there is nothing that will stop India, China & Africa from using them in their quests to lift themselves out of the mire of poverty. They care nothing for the squeals from the chattering classes. Nor should they.
And with birth control & family planning. Population growth rates of 3% will doom almost any non-industrial society, as infrastructure simply cannot keep up with the Malthusian pressure of more and more mouths to feed.
When I left Thailand in'94, they had dropped from 3% to 1.5% net. Now, thirty years later, they're at 0.1%. Partly due to industrialization; and partly due to a hundredth-monkey realization by an entire ethno-linguistic group that if they didn't get their pop growth rate down, they were screwed.
The fertility transition, throughout the world, doesn’t have anything to do with any collective “realization”! It’s individual preferences on a population level, due more to urbanization than industrialization. And within a few decades, below-replacement fertility is going to limit growth and human flourishing rather than enabling it. Personally I’m pro-growth and pro-natalist, too!
An excellent article. Africa is always on the brink of famine because it is the one continent that continues down the road to gross overpopulation. It will never become self sustaining until it reins in its population growth. Smaller populations will help all of humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Last year Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
I think Japan is both a cautionary tale to not follow its path, but also a role model in how to manage through it.
Living here, it's hard to tell that it's a country that has experienced an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline. Listening to stories of people who have lived here through the 1980s and 1990s, it's hard to imagine that so much real improvement in people's lives happened through an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline. Looking at photos comparing the same location between 1990 and today (or even just the 2010s), it's hard to imagine that it's Japan that went through an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline, and not the US.
I enjoy living here so much more than I did the US. It's the upper middle class developed country life that doesn't make me constantly long for upper class life in Thailand. However, I am objectively poorer, and Japan as a country seems on track to get objectively poorer. That's still a terrible track to be on, because nothing good awaits at the end of it, as this article makes clear.
Late to reading your thoughtful comment. As someone who lives there, do you think that Japan going forward would benefit from carefully managed but fairly large scale immigration? Do you think it’s a political possibility?
I think Japan would benefit a lot from much more immigration.
More immigration will happen. Polls suggest most people living here are generally pro-immigration, and anecdotally that's also the case. The government is extremely cautious with increasing immigration, not helped by elites tending to be more xenophobic than typical people, but immigration has increased a lot in the past 15 years, and general trends look good.
I think your point about how well Japan has managed its poor economic trajectory, especially with respect to quality of life, is something that outside critics should understand better
My point was that Thailand is a unique outlier, that while still an agrarian country, transitioned from a 3% to a 1% country. Thais, went from 8-kid families to 3-kid families, as poor farmers, in a single generation.
The Thais themselves ascribe this remarkable shift as being due to their cultural genius, or somesuch. Which may have something to do with being pretty much the only country in the world never colonized by an imperial power.
I wonder if societal traumas -- such as the Atlantic and Arab slave trades in Africa, the Mongol massacres in China and the Middle East, or rapacious imperialist rule (first Muslim, then British) in India -- made the cultures there more pro-natalist for centuries to come afterwards?
That may explain how Thailand was more easily able to lower its birth rate, if it didn't have any such traumas in its historical memory. It would also explain why one of the most fertile rich countries today is Israel: a country which rose from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust.
Only the Burmese--with their exceptionally warlike nobility--severely wounded the Thais. With their sacking of Ayutthaya. From the 15th to 18th centuries the Thais carved out a regional empire at the expense of the Khmer, Lao, and Malays--but were then preyed upon by the Brits and French; losing much of their conquests in the 18th C.
But their most famous monarch, Rama IV, is credited with saving the kingdom by playing the European powers against each other.
Perhaps it's the confidence that comes from an Imperial past...But whatever the reason, Thais have a lot of cultural confidence bordering on arrogance. It must have had something to do with their lowered birthrate zeitgeist.
As for democracy: what is the minimum necessary implementation for a form of government to "be" "democratic"? And for bonus points: do you think the curriculum (both inclusive and exclusive) *chosen by your "democratic" government* that your mind was subjected to (or not) might have some effect on your ability to competently consider such complex matters? For example: did you learn about set-theory + non-binary logic (ternary, modal, etc) based epistemology in school? If not: *do you wonder why you did not learn such things*?
I have been an email subscriber for a couple of years and this post finally pushed me into the paid status. Thank you for once again keeping the main goal of all this front and center.
A welcome reminder that with all the election fuckery going on, and sucking up all the media oxygen, there are higher goals that are more worthy of our focus.
I feel compelled to point out that this election fuckery has a lot to do with whether we can sustain attention to those higher goals. That seems worth a bit of focus like it or not.
This article seems to me to be a pretty good "Why we fight" call for economists (and more).
So much of the world's suffering is actually lack of understanding, and it is worthwhile to say every once in a while... Earnest quest for knowledge which helps other people is worthwhile.
Really nice read. One thing I'd love to see you expand on further in this article is what I usually call the Problem of Counting. Generally speaking, it's the idea that "Not everything that counts is countable, and not everything that is countable counts." I don't know who first said it, but someone wiser than me. More specifically, there are couple dimensions of this notion that I think relate to your argument and addressing them would help you make your case even better. To be clear, my premise is that many who think they want degrowth may actually just want *better* growth. So, here's how the Counting Problem relates:
Firstly, gdp has become our primary way of counting societal advancement... But of course there are other metrics. This is obvious and non-controversial. You yourself use declining poverty rates as evidence for *why* increasing economic activity is good (and I agree, fwiw), but is more gdp, since it's a measure of economic activity, always good, and is gdp all we need to consider? I dont think you would say so, but some may inadvertently draw that conclusion. If you want to define the degrowth movement as seeking lower gdp, and thus, inherently problematic, that's ok... but it doesn't address the idea that some units of economic activity are more helpful to sustaining civilization than others.
Secondly, there are so many examples over the years of economic activity that helped its investors become wealthy, but which necessitated costs for others down the line. An easy one is the oil and gas wells still leaking greenhouse gasses long after they have been abandoned and the operating companies have dissolved. You might argue, well, that's just more (un-enumerated) future gdp in the form of environmental cleanup activities, and it is. But if the initial drillers knew they had to bear those costs instead of passing them on to society at large, how many would have still drilled? Some projects would surely not be profitable if their full costs were considered, and thus that economic activity would not have been undertaken. This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing, even if it means less of one specific economic activity it allows those resources to be used elsewhere. But these examples are so common. A *huge* amount of industrial economic activity has been undertaken for the financial benefit of a relatively small group of people with large downstream costs being born by the public -- either now, or as a "bill" that the society must still somehow find a way to pay. PFAS contamination, micro plastics, soil infertility, rising sea levels, acidifying and warming oceans, and car-centric urban/suburban development are just few that in are in the headlines daily.
Fundamentally, all of these are due to an element of the Counting Problem -- the fact that we have not required the actors initiating economic activity to bear the full lifecycle costs of their activity (often because we didn't think to - or couldn't - quantity those costs at the time). If we did there would be less of certain kinds of economic activity, and also more of others. Would it net out to more or less overall? I don't know, but things would surely be different. My guess is that there may actually be less rapid, but more sustainable and more broadly beneficial growth in economic activity in this alternate world. Of course, we cannot visit this world. But maybe we could create it -- if only we could find a better way to count the "beneficialness" of economic activity.
I think what you are trying to talk about is usually referred to as negative externalities. When companies can privatize profits but the cost of environmental cleanup is born by tax payers. Clearly that's an important issue to address, but when it comes to climate change its harder to just blame the companies themselves. If they sell me gas and I burn the gas then who's responsible for the emissions? I think it's clear in that situation that we both are responsible.
Deciding who exactly pays for fixing climate change isn't what Noah is talking about though. Degrowth requires more poverty, there's no way around that.
Like many metrics, GDP is a proxy for the things we actually care about, and is most useful when we aren't trying to maximize it in particular. For example, if our only goal were "number go up," we could have two people sell the same object to each other back and forth, and that could increase some simplistic measures of GDP, but obviously has no real value. Instead, we try to increase the things we *actually value*, such as perhaps employment or productivity, and then we can measure GDP as one way of estimating if we have actually gotten them.
When WWII was launched, finding enough fit people to be soldiers was a problem; malnutrition from the Great Depression was widespread. China and Japan both knew starvation in living memory, and when I lived there, there were still so many echos with smaller portions, not wanting to waste, etc.
My son now lives in Hawaii, and in one of his classes at U.H, they talked about how dependent Hawaii was on imported food. They estimated a serious disruption would have the islands run out in a couple weeks. The COVID pandemic gave a foreshadow of that - on Molokai, isolation rules meant the ferry was prohibited from bringing goods from Oahu for quite a while. People there told me it was lucky Molokai is the most agricultural island and doesn't have a lot of people, so they didn't starve, but local gardens were at their limits and they were getting worried.
Hopefully the pandemic rang a few alarm bells about supply chains in a lot of places.
But the food supply is a wonder that we take way way way too much for granted.
I really resonate with what you are saying here. Economics also needs to be about our universal responsibility to care for everyone, not just the already well-off. It is our collective responsibility. I would also add, in light of what you've said here, that denial of global warming, and inaction on pollution are profound moral abdications.
True, but it would also be a moral abdication to pretend that the affects of climate change on those living in deep poverty would be worse than the effect of degrowth. Bringing them out of poverty is goal number one. Fixing climate change is goal number two.
I think one of the points of Noah's post was that these two goals, minimizing global warming, and ending poverty, need not be conflicting. For one thing, if we don't decrease our consumption of fossil fuels it will hit the poor far harder than otherwise, causing mass migrations, and threatening Democracies everywhere. Furthermore, there is great benefit to the poor in increasing their access to renewable energy. Besides, everyone's lungs and general health will benefit from a reduction in fossil fuel combustion.
Obviously we can do both but there are potential conflicts. China is the number one builder of renewable energy but they are also the number one builder of coal plants. They have lifted people out of poverty and their emissions have gone up even though they are building so many wind turbines/solar farms/nuclear. If they had refused to build any fossil fuels there would be more of them living in poverty. Other poor countries should follow China's model even if it means that their emissions go up in the short term.
No need for more coal fired plants since renewables have become so much cheaper now, they are in fact cheaper than coal. A lot of poor countries get plenty of sun.
I feel like conservatives are generally more attentive to the precarity of civilization than progressives. That’s why they’re so concerned with maintaining the achievements of the past and not blowing everything up with utopian schemes. Though admittedly many republicans are not actually conservatives in any meaningful sense.
Trump won’t be constrained by the achievements of the past any more than he’ll be constrained by any societal restrictions of today. He’s not a conservative, he’s a radical.
Also conservatism: "It's not enough that I should succeed; others must fail", obsession with desert (not the geographic feature, but the noun form of the verb "deserve"), cultural pessimism, deterministic and/or fatalistic justifications for outcomes and hierarchies.
The same attentiveness that you admire also suffocates everyone who bears the brunt of hierarchy, or points out that the hierarchy in place is the source of suffering.
I’m not a conservative (I’m a moderate Dem), and I do think you’re right about conservatism ultimately being about maintaining existing hierarchies which undoubtedly hurts people on the bottom of those hierarchies. On the plus side, they don’t think you can blow up society and remake it from scratch and expect a positive result which seems to me to be the totally unrealistic assumption underlying much of progressive politics.
I do agree with you about progressive assumptions. I'm a liberal and pro-progress but would never apply the progressive label for myself. (I've seen progressives in the wild, many are my friends, and its off-putting and has a real-life track record of failure, like California's criminal justice reform.)
Just as the "It's not enough that I should succeed; others must fail" worldview is the dark tail-of-the-coin of conservatism, progressivism has a dark mirror image of this worldview that is from the standpoint of envy. For a progressive, "It's not enough that I should not fail; others must not succeed." This is NIMBYism in bumper-sticker/tweet meme form. That's not an opposite, that's a mirror image.
I suppose you can assert Smith is pronounced Jones, but realistically conservatives admire achievement, celebrating those who do rather than progressive inclination to pull them down. Furthermore, where is the society devoid of hierarchy? Many societies are quite rigid. The US has much of its success by being open to talent, regardless of origin (though it is clearly tougher for a Clarence Thomas than a JFK).
Achievement is banal. Literally every ideology and social group venerate achievement. Heck, birds do this unconsciously through pecking orders. Conservatives don't have a monopoly on being arbiters of achievement.
"where is the society devoid of hierarchy?"
Haiti. Sudan. Yemen. Iraq after the U.S. invaded two decades ago. You could even say Iran and Myanmar, which have stable governments but it's very telling that the governments are at war with their own populations.
"Many societies are quite rigid."
Many societies are quite rigid *because* of how much material and intellectual energy are devoted to the maintenance of hierarchy. Karl Marx developed a vocabulary for it, economists and sociologists, just to name two disciplines, built upon and refined that work, and social movements and political parties periodically rattle the scaffolding.
Bob Altemeyer put hierarchy under a metaphorical microscope and developed the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) framework to show the social-psychological aspects of hierarchy. Altemeyer's breakthrough was to show that RWA was a personality type, rather than a political preference.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply. I think we define terms differently. You state that even birds establish a hierarchy. So I finally gather that your objection is to the various hierarchies in contemporary western societies. You cite Marx. Do you view the world as competing economic classes? If so, though I believe that Marx had some interesting insights, I take the, to me, pragmatic view that those who attempted to implement his ideas to create the extremely fuzzy objective of a classless, cooperative society have been violent failures. Compare Mao’s and Deng’s Chinas.
Haiti, Sudan, Yeman all have hierarchies. Rather than the nation state, their boundaries contain a kind of warlord society that has been commonplace in history. In Iraq, the underlying tribal system came to the fore with the removal of Hussein and the US attempt to fill the power gap with democracy in a place that has no tradition of trust in anything beyond the tribe.
I know nothing of Altemeyer. Your précis of his conclusion doesn’t inspire a desire to learn. I grew up when Freud was the fashion, and was permanently inoculated against notions of “personality types” being the explanation for why the people with whom you disagree are irredeemably despicable.
Altemeyer is famous for devising a survey system to detect authoritarian attitudes in societies. Psychologists and social scientists use some variant of this framework and apply culturally contextual answers. Again, this is a survey of a large population, not individuals. You might have seen it:
The survey gives responders a 5- or 7-point scale of agreement or disagreement with a political position, with the midpoint generally being neutral/no opinion. There are a long list of statements, usually at least 20. Each statement is asked twice: once framed as an authoritarian response, the second framed as a liberal response. (Example: 1-7 Strongly disagree to strongly agree, "The government must crack down on homosexuality, pornography and sexual deviant behavior." Later, "Sexual behavior is a private, personal matter that is not for the government to regulate." These are the same proposition framed in opposite ways; one reason is to control for acquiescence bias. Also, this might or might not have been a proposition on a real test, so it's for illustrative purposes only.)
One of the other things the number scale does is the values are also flipped for the liberal/conservative framing. This is to avoid the test-taker "playing for points" and giving an honest response. (Low RWA societies tend to have more moderate scores toward the median, so a lot of 3, 4, 5 responses and few 1, 2, 6 and 7 responses.)
For clarification, Altemeyer is modern psychology, not Freudian. In this case, Altemeyer means that an authoritarian personality type is a predisposition toward authoritarianism, rather than a preference. That's because personality is externally mediated. The self is shaped by parenting, the culture they grew up in, as well as how much material deprivation and warfare the culture has experienced. You could readily see how authoritarian societies are arranged geographically.
The electrification pursued under Biden's term is going to be a big deal, like the internet economy that flowered under Clinton, though credit should go to his running mate for "inventing" the internet.*
(Context: Al Gore never said he invented the internet, but the architects of the internet know that Gore as a senator authored the bill that allowed for the commercialization of what we know as the internet. This got almost no attention at the time but proved to me one of the most civilization-changing advances in technology in all of human history.)
A talking point is a pre-established message or formula used in the field of political communication, sales and commercial or advertising communication. The message is coordinated a priori to remain more or less invariable regardless of which stakeholder brings the message in the media.[1][2][3][4] Such statements can either be free standing or created as retorts to the opposition's talking points and are frequently used in public relations, particularly in areas heavy in debate such as politics and marketing.
"An irrelevant conclusion,[1] also known as ignoratio elenchi (Latin for 'ignoring refutation') or missing the point, is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument whose conclusion fails to address the issue in question. It falls into the broad class of relevance fallacies."
I can do other cool things, like defend the talking point and simultaneously call out the Fallacy Fallacy. A talking point is not invalid because it is talking point, because there are facts to support the conclusion.
For starters, under the 2021 infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act (read: a spending bill that Congress passes routinely), billions of dollars will go into electricity generation, transmission and storage and passenger vehicles and buses. This spending is mostly going toward the private sector, creating jobs that are temporary (construction and installation jobs for plant buildout and manufacturing facilities) and permanent (manufacturing, sales and marketing, R&D). There is also infrastructure money going to specialized electrification with very localized benefits, namely conversions of seaports. A lot of the transportation and movement infrastructure within relies on heavily polluting fossil fuels, like cargo ships that leave their engines on while idling in dock and drayage trucks that shuffle around containers. Ports are concentrated around our waterways and while the benefits of commerce are spread nationally, the impacts of air pollution are borne locally.
Again, saying "talking points" doesn't negate the substance of the policies, and throwing Wikipedia snowballs of logical fallacies are no substitutes for argument and rebuttal.
You don’t think the Demo-crazies need this too? They like to make the jump directly from “poverty” to “luxury” with all the jewels and Range Rovers and cruises and Mc-mansions. And urbanization without solid intellectual footing leads to the “bread and circuses” of failed empires in the past. Africa needs to stop the quasi-religious slaughter wars and develop a sustainable agriculture system. And their mineral resources need to be protected. But look at the dysfunctional governments they establish. Look where the $ goes: to a 1% lifestyle for their kleptocrats. None of this w/be easy or guaranteed in any way. By singling out a political group you distrust you are not understanding how everyone is involved in any possible solution. Follow the money, all the way to Martha’s Vineyard and Davos and Jackson Hole and Silicon Valley and Washington DC and in the Saudi kingdoms. Therein lay the bad actors who want everything to remain the same. But I imagine in your quiet moments you already know this and wish it wasn’t so. As The Who sang: “No easy way to be free…”
This seems amazing. I’d be curious to see a follow up discussing to what extent non-oil energy sources make this possible. Feels pretty clear that the emergence of energy we don’t have to constantly go to war over would be a big factor in this new reality
I believe wide-spread use fossil fuels are key to promoting long-term economic development. If you exclude oil, you are kneecapping opportunities for all nation, particularly developing nations:
This is why I’m interested in the discussion. Not because I’m arguing in favor of denying anyone oil or coal, but because I’m curious if countries can eventually (and even today) simply leapfrog over fossil fuels entirely
I do not think that leapfrogging over fossil fuels entirely and still achieving long-term economic growth will be possible for many generations. It I will be particularly hard for developing nations.
I think world civilization will be fine. As Noah has shown in several articles here, renewables like solar, wind and hydro are now at the point where they are economically viable to manufacture and install. It's not a 1:1 replacement, but for developing countries, and China eager to supply them with the infrastructure for economic and geopolitical reasons, it enables them to leapfrog conventional electricity and fuel infrastructure to a point where they can fulfill local and subnational economic needs.
Just look at China. They are building more wind/solar/nuclear than anyone else in the world. Also they are consuming more coal/oil/natural gas. China has picked an all-of-the-above energy policy. Seems like a pretty good balance, and their cheap solar panels will make it easier for other nations to adopt renewables also.
Tanks and planes and warships still run on petrochemicals. That's changing, mainly due to battery tech. But given China's lock on rare earths, petrochems will remain top dog here in the West. At least until some new tech paradigm comes along.
And that's not even counting the role of petrochems in plastics and other polymer building blocks of industrialization. All of which is why the Persian Gulf--where ~50% of the feed source is still produced--is so strategically important to the US & NATO.
Kinda unrelated to my point, I think? I'm not talking about the ability to wage war. I'm talking about the need to wage war over a scarce resource. If undeveloped nations don't need oil to pull themselves into the industrial and post-industrial age, that's a big, big deal.
Oil currently has an irreplaceable role in modern war & industry. Which is precisely why nations fight over it. Until/unless there are some major advances in battery tech, petrochems will remain the most important strategic resource. And there are already wars in Africa over lithium and other strategic minerals as the battery revolution progresses.
Developing nations may be able to leapfrog over *oil-as-energy*, by going fully electric, since electric power now outcompetes in so many applications. But organics like bamboo or bacterium still cannot yet compete with the *oil-as-polymers* industrial model.
No argument on oil being irreplaceable for polymer. My impression is that we don’t need nearly as much oil for that, compared to oil for fuel, so if we rapidly reduce reliance on oil for fuel, the polymer side of the equation should be pretty cheap.
I could be wrong about this. I’m certainly no expert on polymer/plastic
That'd be a question for Noah and other economists: "If petrochemicals could be 100% replaced right now for use as energy; how much would the price of oil drop?"
Even asking such a question no doubt gives the CEO's of oil companies cold sweats.
Until we invent an energy source like nuclear fusion (which may or may not ever happen), energy will always be scarce and constrained by geography. And energy will also always have a big impact on geopolitics.
The war in Ukraine made clear that dependence on oil remains a crappy thing. I don’t think it showed much more than that. Based on the speed of current advances in alternative energy sources, I don’t think it’s crazy to think that 30 or so years of innovation will make it possible for undeveloped nations to advance without need of fossil fuels
Since the US is the world’s top oil producer, who would we be going to war over it? We could increase production even more and make the number 2 and 3 (Russia and Saudi Arabia) suffer instead.
Every year I have a few students who are convinced that capitalism is destroying the planet. I always answer them the same way. American air and water today are cleaner than they have been since prior to the industrial revolution. By nearly any measure, water and air quality improve the wealthier a society gets. For a modern example, see India. Why? Because people who are struggling to feed their kids and put a roof over their head don't have the luxury of worrying about pollution or global warming. Capitalism isn't going to destroy the world; capitalism is the only thing that might save it.
From a practical perspective, we no longer have the ability to undo industrial capitalism even if we wanted to. Using only current sunlight, all reasonably arable land, and animal manure as fertilizer, the carrying capacity of the Earth is about 3-4B people. Fossil fuels are both the feedstock and energy source for the production of chemical fertilizers, which Paul Kingsnorth (writes here on Substack) calls "fossilized sunlight" (I love that term). In short, sans industrial capitalism, half the population of the Earth dies within 1 year.
BTW: I use that same exponential graph in class too.
Why are you saying "capitalism" here rather than "industrial civilization"?
There are plenty of capitalist societies that failed to industrialize (for example countries that ended up specializing as commodity exporters), nor is it conceivable that no non-capitalist system (including ones we haven't yet imagined) could possibly support industry.
Partially because I use that graph in by economics classes, so that's the subject of the class. However, capitalism is only system that has successfully produced an industrial civilization. The 20th century featured several alternatives, and they failed catastrophically. In the example I used above about chemical fertilizers, while Norman Borlaug was busy commercializing the wheat strains that could better utilize "fossilized sunlight" based nitrates that would eradicate famine... Trofim Lysenko was causing famine in Ukraine by trying to produce socialist crops.
Didn't Lysenkoism post-date the Ukrainian Holodomor (which AFAIK was caused more by the Soviets confiscating crops for export rather than by a failure to produce enough food in the first place) while also substantially pre-dating Borlaug's Green Revolution?
Perhaps. I don't remember the exact dates. But the point about Lysenko stands. His ideas were bunk and caused routine famines everywhere they were tried (incl by Mao), but the political and economic system in which he was embedded was incapable of acknowledging that fact.
Have you ever read Farm to Factory? It's an economic history of the Soviet Union by Robert Allen, who is definitely not a commie or a tankie. It makes what to me is a pretty convincing case that the Soviet Union was a successful twentieth century development story (only second to Japan) that got waylaid by really bad luck involving war and political circumstances. The latter two might tell the whole story, but it's hard not to look at every post USSR state, Baltics excepted, and realize what could have been.
Just because capitalism is currently hegemonic doesn't mean it will be forever: note how many African countries have built mobile phone infrastructure without bothering to build landline phone infrastructure first.
Oh, I don't at all think capitalism is forever. I actually suspect that that hybrid of modernity that we call liberal-secular-democratic-capitalism may well be one of the largest systems of lies ever created. I am deeply skeptical that man is, at his core, a selfishly-motivated, utility-maximizing, materialist being. Noah Harari says that modernity "exchanged meaning for power" as a compliment; I think it's a Faustian bargain.
However... pretending (as many Utopians of both the Left and Right variety do) that our present system can be abolished without causing mass death and poverty is absurd. So even though I think the system is a lie built on a false view of man, I see little practical alternative but to hope that I'm wrong.
> I am deeply skeptical that man is, at his core, a selfishly-motivated, utility-maximizing, materialist being.
I think that not very many men are such, and fewer still among those are competent... but those few are both the most dangerous and the hardest for any societal system to steer toward prosocial behavior, so a society which does so reliably (even if at a terrible cost) may thus come out ahead.
If mistaking a vine or tree root for a snake costs only a delay of a few heartbeats, while carelessly stepping on an actual venomous snake costs your life, it's a reasonable survival strategy to have your snake-identifying algorithm lean pretty hard toward false positives. Same principle applies for metaphorical snakes wearing business suits.
I think it was Noah a few weeks ago who suggested that the distributed information problem (which is what really killed communism and fascism and all other centrally planned systems in the 20th century) may be less important in the 21st. The rise of the Internet has lowered the cost of information by 99%. The rise of AI could easily reduce the workload of the central planning agency by 99%.
From an economic perspective, the key value of capitalism was never individual freedom. That was a byproduct. The value was the efficient allocation of resources under limited information. Capitalism is incredibly inefficient overall though. 6 in 7 new business ventures fail inside of 5 years. Even if the system is vastly more efficient than 20th century planned economies, losing 85% of all entrepreneurial work is hardly anything to crow about.
As much as I like industrial capitalism (and I do), like Enlightenment liberalism, it was a solution to a set of problems that existed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. And it worked. We solved those problems. There's no reason to believe that either system is "the end of history" as Francis Fukuyama tried to convince us of 30 years ago. New technologies will create new challenges and require new solutions, some of which may be very anti-capitalist and illiberal. While I think we should be wary of altering something that works so well to feed and clothe and shelter billions of people, pretending that it's "the best of all possible worlds forever" (as many do) is foolish as well.
Thanks for this. The main lesson I learned from my peace corps years in West Africa was exactly this- that absolute poverty is humanity's greatest enemy, and has to be eradicated. Understanding this principle, the conclusion that Deng Xiaoping was the greatest world leader of the 20th century then follows. What's truly striking is that when I talk to people about these two ideas it tends to be viewed as highly counter-intuitive.
I've read your stuff for a long time, Noah. And, writing for a living myself, I tend toward that worst bias of regularly thinking I'm the best writer in the room.
So i am very sincere when i say: This? This is some of the best stuff you've ever done. Kudos!
Agree, this is the best I’ve read.
This is one of Noah's best ever. There are about 10 sentences that I want to make into posters and hang on my wall. I was particularly glad that he recognized the moral imperative of China's rapid development, whether China remains a threat to us or not.
My one quibble comes from a historical and physiological perspective. Human beings are built to sustain periodic famine. The books that I have read say that the average human being stops feeling hunger after 72 hours without eating and can continue making moderate physical efforts for a month. Death from starvation becomes part of the picture after 40-60 days.
The ability of human beings to survive periodic famine was obviously essential in the preindustrial era. Indeed, I had a friend who often preferred NOT to eat— he felt much more clear-headed without food in his stomach. But none of this reflects my personal experience—the longest I have gone without food is 48 hours and I was miserable.
Ive done a week. It does get better after a day or so, but when you sleep your dreams are often about food. Harder to keep the body warm and a reduction in the desire to move. Anxiety grows about day 4
Interesting.
Just one point about the starvation comment. I guess it really depends on what kind of starting point you’re working with. If you’re coming from a position of a well fed modern western human it’s very different to the chronically malnourished 13th century peasant. In addition to that, the fact that humans are adapted to withstand such famine is merely a testament to the privation we faced during our early evolution (and supporting Noah’s point), whether it is better for us to be that way is very much up for debate. Fasting, compared to regularly being fed, leads to rather rapid lean mass loss (in addition to fat mass loss of course) to name one down side. Studies mirroring the effects of fasting, mTOR activation and autophagy and their effects on longevity in yeast and mice have yet to be replicated in humans.
I fully agree that the effects of food deprivation depend on where the individual starts from, and the course varies dramatically from individual to individual.
Yeah, this is a truly magnificent piece of writing.
Really? It may not be as bad as when Noah's, say, come out in support of nuclear proliferation, but I thought this postletter was lazy, sloppy, self-satisfied, and hypocritical.
Hypocritical because Noah sneers at "smug intellectuals [who] sneer at 'economic growth' or 'GDP'"; Noah himself is a PhD-holder who's routinely blisteringly smug (including in this very postletter!).
Lazy and sloppy because, for instance, his link at the word "GDP" goes to an online Guardian letter from a professor pointing out that GDP "is a very poor way to measure the negative impacts of global warming", a perfectly legitimate argument to make, and not a claim that amounts to "denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence" — that's just Noah misrepresenting the letter (he probably found it in a Google search, glanced at the sub-editor's tendentious headline, and dropped it in). He claims that "degrowth would return us to a more savage, cutthroat existence", just above his own damn graph showing that global GDP per capita now averages upward of $16k — greater than that of China (https://datacommons.org/ranking/Amount_EconomicActivity_GrossDomesticProduction_Nominal_PerCapita/Country/asia?h=country%2FCHN&unit=%24), a country Noah goes on to praise for its "rise to wealth" with a population enjoying "something approximating a materially comfortable existence".
Self-satisfied because Noah grandiosely presents opposition to poverty as "the principles [sic] that underlie" his "political leanings", as if Poverty Bad is a principle narrow enough to determine one's political leanings. But pretty much every politician, and at least one (Jason Hickel) of the degrowthers Noah lashes out against, would agree that Poverty Bad, yet they mysteriously wind up disagreeing with each other and with Noah. Poverty Bad is not actually a very insightful or informative position to take, it's like declaring yourself against genocide or against rape. Maybe that's what Noah's writing up for next Monday, who knows.
I have been listening to Noah on his podcast and been reading a lot of his blogs recently, and I agree that he has a tendency to smugness. I was particularly taken aback with the line, "When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”,..." This type of ad hominem attack always leaves me cold, as it suggests to me one "smug intellect" having a petulant go at another so-called smug intellect fellow intellect.
It is pretty good, *except* that it puts itself to the lie when it inserts the “climate change is real” garbage at the end, since enabling low cost highly available reliable fossil fuel energy for the world’s poorest billions is one of the most important things to do to greatly increase their standard of living.
The inclusion of this one line puts to the lie the rest of it, and it becomes more leftist happy talk, while leftist actions explicitly deliver the opposite of the stated goal.
That's a logical fallacy, sorry.
Both "burning fossil fuels has been a tremendous boon to humanity" and "climate change (as a result of burning fossil fuels) is real" can be true at the same time. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for both. As a result, the implied optimal course of action is complex, except that we shouldn't assume that fossil fuel consumption is the pinnacle of energy technology we can achieve.
I loved the part about " With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements"
Fantasies of an imagined past are pretty ripe in African countries unfortunately, partially due to poverty. Even though some racists will say nonsense like "Africa didn't have civilization", which is patently false. The opposite is when people glorify pre-industrial Kingdoms like the Mali Empire.
While it's cool to know who Mansa Musa is, at the end of the day, if we could go back in time, the Mali Kingdom was hellish by modern standards. Mansa Musa, the supposedly richest man who ever lived, died around age 40. Many of the Mansas (Emperors) of the Mali Empire died young by sleeping sickness, like the tsetse fly. The country was a slave state, and despite the Mosques and Islamic centers of learning, the only people who were literate according to the Arab Chroniclers were the elite, while most Malians were illiterate.
We shouldn't glorify the past and we should praise technological progress because poverty is the norm, not wealth.
Below I wrote about the West African Kingdoms if anyone is interested!
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-26c
I have spent the last 8 years of my life on this quest and have arrived at the conclusion that it is only achievable with cheap energy to replace human power.
Agreed. Industrialisation and human flourishing is always and everywhere dependant upon access to cheap and reliable (that bit is important) energy. If that happens to be hydrocarbons for the time being there is nothing that will stop India, China & Africa from using them in their quests to lift themselves out of the mire of poverty. They care nothing for the squeals from the chattering classes. Nor should they.
And with birth control & family planning. Population growth rates of 3% will doom almost any non-industrial society, as infrastructure simply cannot keep up with the Malthusian pressure of more and more mouths to feed.
When I left Thailand in'94, they had dropped from 3% to 1.5% net. Now, thirty years later, they're at 0.1%. Partly due to industrialization; and partly due to a hundredth-monkey realization by an entire ethno-linguistic group that if they didn't get their pop growth rate down, they were screwed.
The fertility transition, throughout the world, doesn’t have anything to do with any collective “realization”! It’s individual preferences on a population level, due more to urbanization than industrialization. And within a few decades, below-replacement fertility is going to limit growth and human flourishing rather than enabling it. Personally I’m pro-growth and pro-natalist, too!
An excellent article. Africa is always on the brink of famine because it is the one continent that continues down the road to gross overpopulation. It will never become self sustaining until it reins in its population growth. Smaller populations will help all of humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Last year Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
I think Japan is both a cautionary tale to not follow its path, but also a role model in how to manage through it.
Living here, it's hard to tell that it's a country that has experienced an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline. Listening to stories of people who have lived here through the 1980s and 1990s, it's hard to imagine that so much real improvement in people's lives happened through an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline. Looking at photos comparing the same location between 1990 and today (or even just the 2010s), it's hard to imagine that it's Japan that went through an entire generation of economic stagnation and decline, and not the US.
I enjoy living here so much more than I did the US. It's the upper middle class developed country life that doesn't make me constantly long for upper class life in Thailand. However, I am objectively poorer, and Japan as a country seems on track to get objectively poorer. That's still a terrible track to be on, because nothing good awaits at the end of it, as this article makes clear.
Late to reading your thoughtful comment. As someone who lives there, do you think that Japan going forward would benefit from carefully managed but fairly large scale immigration? Do you think it’s a political possibility?
I think Japan would benefit a lot from much more immigration.
More immigration will happen. Polls suggest most people living here are generally pro-immigration, and anecdotally that's also the case. The government is extremely cautious with increasing immigration, not helped by elites tending to be more xenophobic than typical people, but immigration has increased a lot in the past 15 years, and general trends look good.
I think your point about how well Japan has managed its poor economic trajectory, especially with respect to quality of life, is something that outside critics should understand better
My point was that Thailand is a unique outlier, that while still an agrarian country, transitioned from a 3% to a 1% country. Thais, went from 8-kid families to 3-kid families, as poor farmers, in a single generation.
The Thais themselves ascribe this remarkable shift as being due to their cultural genius, or somesuch. Which may have something to do with being pretty much the only country in the world never colonized by an imperial power.
I wonder if societal traumas -- such as the Atlantic and Arab slave trades in Africa, the Mongol massacres in China and the Middle East, or rapacious imperialist rule (first Muslim, then British) in India -- made the cultures there more pro-natalist for centuries to come afterwards?
That may explain how Thailand was more easily able to lower its birth rate, if it didn't have any such traumas in its historical memory. It would also explain why one of the most fertile rich countries today is Israel: a country which rose from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust.
Only the Burmese--with their exceptionally warlike nobility--severely wounded the Thais. With their sacking of Ayutthaya. From the 15th to 18th centuries the Thais carved out a regional empire at the expense of the Khmer, Lao, and Malays--but were then preyed upon by the Brits and French; losing much of their conquests in the 18th C.
But their most famous monarch, Rama IV, is credited with saving the kingdom by playing the European powers against each other.
Perhaps it's the confidence that comes from an Imperial past...But whatever the reason, Thais have a lot of cultural confidence bordering on arrogance. It must have had something to do with their lowered birthrate zeitgeist.
If Malthus or John ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich were right we would all be dead now.
Agreed. Affordable, abundant and secure energy is a key to long-term economic growth, particularly for developing nations:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-developing-nations-need-to-use
What if we tried non-fake democracy & journalism?
I would be interested to know what non-fake democracy and journalism is supposed to look like if this isn't it.
"is *supposed to* look like" is an interesting choice of words in this context.
For journalism, you could start here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/
And if you're *genuinely* curious:
https://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
As for democracy: what is the minimum necessary implementation for a form of government to "be" "democratic"? And for bonus points: do you think the curriculum (both inclusive and exclusive) *chosen by your "democratic" government* that your mind was subjected to (or not) might have some effect on your ability to competently consider such complex matters? For example: did you learn about set-theory + non-binary logic (ternary, modal, etc) based epistemology in school? If not: *do you wonder why you did not learn such things*?
Possibly related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze
https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/
seems you haven’t finished the post
Is there a key portion I missed?
I have been an email subscriber for a couple of years and this post finally pushed me into the paid status. Thank you for once again keeping the main goal of all this front and center.
A welcome reminder that with all the election fuckery going on, and sucking up all the media oxygen, there are higher goals that are more worthy of our focus.
I feel compelled to point out that this election fuckery has a lot to do with whether we can sustain attention to those higher goals. That seems worth a bit of focus like it or not.
Wow.... love this article !
This article seems to me to be a pretty good "Why we fight" call for economists (and more).
So much of the world's suffering is actually lack of understanding, and it is worthwhile to say every once in a while... Earnest quest for knowledge which helps other people is worthwhile.
Really nice read. One thing I'd love to see you expand on further in this article is what I usually call the Problem of Counting. Generally speaking, it's the idea that "Not everything that counts is countable, and not everything that is countable counts." I don't know who first said it, but someone wiser than me. More specifically, there are couple dimensions of this notion that I think relate to your argument and addressing them would help you make your case even better. To be clear, my premise is that many who think they want degrowth may actually just want *better* growth. So, here's how the Counting Problem relates:
Firstly, gdp has become our primary way of counting societal advancement... But of course there are other metrics. This is obvious and non-controversial. You yourself use declining poverty rates as evidence for *why* increasing economic activity is good (and I agree, fwiw), but is more gdp, since it's a measure of economic activity, always good, and is gdp all we need to consider? I dont think you would say so, but some may inadvertently draw that conclusion. If you want to define the degrowth movement as seeking lower gdp, and thus, inherently problematic, that's ok... but it doesn't address the idea that some units of economic activity are more helpful to sustaining civilization than others.
Secondly, there are so many examples over the years of economic activity that helped its investors become wealthy, but which necessitated costs for others down the line. An easy one is the oil and gas wells still leaking greenhouse gasses long after they have been abandoned and the operating companies have dissolved. You might argue, well, that's just more (un-enumerated) future gdp in the form of environmental cleanup activities, and it is. But if the initial drillers knew they had to bear those costs instead of passing them on to society at large, how many would have still drilled? Some projects would surely not be profitable if their full costs were considered, and thus that economic activity would not have been undertaken. This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing, even if it means less of one specific economic activity it allows those resources to be used elsewhere. But these examples are so common. A *huge* amount of industrial economic activity has been undertaken for the financial benefit of a relatively small group of people with large downstream costs being born by the public -- either now, or as a "bill" that the society must still somehow find a way to pay. PFAS contamination, micro plastics, soil infertility, rising sea levels, acidifying and warming oceans, and car-centric urban/suburban development are just few that in are in the headlines daily.
Fundamentally, all of these are due to an element of the Counting Problem -- the fact that we have not required the actors initiating economic activity to bear the full lifecycle costs of their activity (often because we didn't think to - or couldn't - quantity those costs at the time). If we did there would be less of certain kinds of economic activity, and also more of others. Would it net out to more or less overall? I don't know, but things would surely be different. My guess is that there may actually be less rapid, but more sustainable and more broadly beneficial growth in economic activity in this alternate world. Of course, we cannot visit this world. But maybe we could create it -- if only we could find a better way to count the "beneficialness" of economic activity.
I think what you are trying to talk about is usually referred to as negative externalities. When companies can privatize profits but the cost of environmental cleanup is born by tax payers. Clearly that's an important issue to address, but when it comes to climate change its harder to just blame the companies themselves. If they sell me gas and I burn the gas then who's responsible for the emissions? I think it's clear in that situation that we both are responsible.
Deciding who exactly pays for fixing climate change isn't what Noah is talking about though. Degrowth requires more poverty, there's no way around that.
Like many metrics, GDP is a proxy for the things we actually care about, and is most useful when we aren't trying to maximize it in particular. For example, if our only goal were "number go up," we could have two people sell the same object to each other back and forth, and that could increase some simplistic measures of GDP, but obviously has no real value. Instead, we try to increase the things we *actually value*, such as perhaps employment or productivity, and then we can measure GDP as one way of estimating if we have actually gotten them.
Wouldn't a better metric than GDP be the number of hours people need to work to afford essentials: lower being better of course?
Really excellent post.
Being fat and happy makes it easy to forget.
When WWII was launched, finding enough fit people to be soldiers was a problem; malnutrition from the Great Depression was widespread. China and Japan both knew starvation in living memory, and when I lived there, there were still so many echos with smaller portions, not wanting to waste, etc.
My son now lives in Hawaii, and in one of his classes at U.H, they talked about how dependent Hawaii was on imported food. They estimated a serious disruption would have the islands run out in a couple weeks. The COVID pandemic gave a foreshadow of that - on Molokai, isolation rules meant the ferry was prohibited from bringing goods from Oahu for quite a while. People there told me it was lucky Molokai is the most agricultural island and doesn't have a lot of people, so they didn't starve, but local gardens were at their limits and they were getting worried.
Hopefully the pandemic rang a few alarm bells about supply chains in a lot of places.
But the food supply is a wonder that we take way way way too much for granted.
If any Americans should stock a survivalist pantry it's obviously Hawaiians.
Yeah, it would be very hard for the current population to live as they originally did with only poi, papaya and an occasional kahlua pig.
I really resonate with what you are saying here. Economics also needs to be about our universal responsibility to care for everyone, not just the already well-off. It is our collective responsibility. I would also add, in light of what you've said here, that denial of global warming, and inaction on pollution are profound moral abdications.
True, but it would also be a moral abdication to pretend that the affects of climate change on those living in deep poverty would be worse than the effect of degrowth. Bringing them out of poverty is goal number one. Fixing climate change is goal number two.
I think one of the points of Noah's post was that these two goals, minimizing global warming, and ending poverty, need not be conflicting. For one thing, if we don't decrease our consumption of fossil fuels it will hit the poor far harder than otherwise, causing mass migrations, and threatening Democracies everywhere. Furthermore, there is great benefit to the poor in increasing their access to renewable energy. Besides, everyone's lungs and general health will benefit from a reduction in fossil fuel combustion.
Obviously we can do both but there are potential conflicts. China is the number one builder of renewable energy but they are also the number one builder of coal plants. They have lifted people out of poverty and their emissions have gone up even though they are building so many wind turbines/solar farms/nuclear. If they had refused to build any fossil fuels there would be more of them living in poverty. Other poor countries should follow China's model even if it means that their emissions go up in the short term.
No need for more coal fired plants since renewables have become so much cheaper now, they are in fact cheaper than coal. A lot of poor countries get plenty of sun.
Love this more than I can say.
In general, it seems* like we are so easily distracted. Even the smartest, most informed amongst us (example: https://www.mattball.org/2024/03/mind-frame.html )
Thank you for this, Noah.
Excellent post. I wish I could forward it to every Republican voter in America.
I feel like conservatives are generally more attentive to the precarity of civilization than progressives. That’s why they’re so concerned with maintaining the achievements of the past and not blowing everything up with utopian schemes. Though admittedly many republicans are not actually conservatives in any meaningful sense.
Trump won’t be constrained by the achievements of the past any more than he’ll be constrained by any societal restrictions of today. He’s not a conservative, he’s a radical.
I agree. I’m not a conservative and neither is Trump (I’m also not a MAGA guy, I’m a moderate Dem).
Also conservatism: "It's not enough that I should succeed; others must fail", obsession with desert (not the geographic feature, but the noun form of the verb "deserve"), cultural pessimism, deterministic and/or fatalistic justifications for outcomes and hierarchies.
The same attentiveness that you admire also suffocates everyone who bears the brunt of hierarchy, or points out that the hierarchy in place is the source of suffering.
I’m not a conservative (I’m a moderate Dem), and I do think you’re right about conservatism ultimately being about maintaining existing hierarchies which undoubtedly hurts people on the bottom of those hierarchies. On the plus side, they don’t think you can blow up society and remake it from scratch and expect a positive result which seems to me to be the totally unrealistic assumption underlying much of progressive politics.
I do agree with you about progressive assumptions. I'm a liberal and pro-progress but would never apply the progressive label for myself. (I've seen progressives in the wild, many are my friends, and its off-putting and has a real-life track record of failure, like California's criminal justice reform.)
Just as the "It's not enough that I should succeed; others must fail" worldview is the dark tail-of-the-coin of conservatism, progressivism has a dark mirror image of this worldview that is from the standpoint of envy. For a progressive, "It's not enough that I should not fail; others must not succeed." This is NIMBYism in bumper-sticker/tweet meme form. That's not an opposite, that's a mirror image.
I suppose you can assert Smith is pronounced Jones, but realistically conservatives admire achievement, celebrating those who do rather than progressive inclination to pull them down. Furthermore, where is the society devoid of hierarchy? Many societies are quite rigid. The US has much of its success by being open to talent, regardless of origin (though it is clearly tougher for a Clarence Thomas than a JFK).
"but realistically conservatives admire achievement"
Achievement is banal. Literally every ideology and social group venerate achievement. Heck, birds do this unconsciously through pecking orders. Conservatives don't have a monopoly on being arbiters of achievement.
"where is the society devoid of hierarchy?"
Haiti. Sudan. Yemen. Iraq after the U.S. invaded two decades ago. You could even say Iran and Myanmar, which have stable governments but it's very telling that the governments are at war with their own populations.
"Many societies are quite rigid."
Many societies are quite rigid *because* of how much material and intellectual energy are devoted to the maintenance of hierarchy. Karl Marx developed a vocabulary for it, economists and sociologists, just to name two disciplines, built upon and refined that work, and social movements and political parties periodically rattle the scaffolding.
Bob Altemeyer put hierarchy under a metaphorical microscope and developed the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) framework to show the social-psychological aspects of hierarchy. Altemeyer's breakthrough was to show that RWA was a personality type, rather than a political preference.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply. I think we define terms differently. You state that even birds establish a hierarchy. So I finally gather that your objection is to the various hierarchies in contemporary western societies. You cite Marx. Do you view the world as competing economic classes? If so, though I believe that Marx had some interesting insights, I take the, to me, pragmatic view that those who attempted to implement his ideas to create the extremely fuzzy objective of a classless, cooperative society have been violent failures. Compare Mao’s and Deng’s Chinas.
Haiti, Sudan, Yeman all have hierarchies. Rather than the nation state, their boundaries contain a kind of warlord society that has been commonplace in history. In Iraq, the underlying tribal system came to the fore with the removal of Hussein and the US attempt to fill the power gap with democracy in a place that has no tradition of trust in anything beyond the tribe.
I know nothing of Altemeyer. Your précis of his conclusion doesn’t inspire a desire to learn. I grew up when Freud was the fashion, and was permanently inoculated against notions of “personality types” being the explanation for why the people with whom you disagree are irredeemably despicable.
Wikipedia is a good place to start with Bob Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist. Sadly, I just learned from Wiki that he died earlier this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer
Altemeyer is famous for devising a survey system to detect authoritarian attitudes in societies. Psychologists and social scientists use some variant of this framework and apply culturally contextual answers. Again, this is a survey of a large population, not individuals. You might have seen it:
The survey gives responders a 5- or 7-point scale of agreement or disagreement with a political position, with the midpoint generally being neutral/no opinion. There are a long list of statements, usually at least 20. Each statement is asked twice: once framed as an authoritarian response, the second framed as a liberal response. (Example: 1-7 Strongly disagree to strongly agree, "The government must crack down on homosexuality, pornography and sexual deviant behavior." Later, "Sexual behavior is a private, personal matter that is not for the government to regulate." These are the same proposition framed in opposite ways; one reason is to control for acquiescence bias. Also, this might or might not have been a proposition on a real test, so it's for illustrative purposes only.)
One of the other things the number scale does is the values are also flipped for the liberal/conservative framing. This is to avoid the test-taker "playing for points" and giving an honest response. (Low RWA societies tend to have more moderate scores toward the median, so a lot of 3, 4, 5 responses and few 1, 2, 6 and 7 responses.)
For clarification, Altemeyer is modern psychology, not Freudian. In this case, Altemeyer means that an authoritarian personality type is a predisposition toward authoritarianism, rather than a preference. That's because personality is externally mediated. The self is shaped by parenting, the culture they grew up in, as well as how much material deprivation and warfare the culture has experienced. You could readily see how authoritarian societies are arranged geographically.
Yesterday's conservatives. Today they are in burn-it-all-down mode.
The Democrats have a major initiative for global or even domestic normalization of wealth do they, other than some standard talking points?
The electrification pursued under Biden's term is going to be a big deal, like the internet economy that flowered under Clinton, though credit should go to his running mate for "inventing" the internet.*
(Context: Al Gore never said he invented the internet, but the architects of the internet know that Gore as a senator authored the bill that allowed for the commercialization of what we know as the internet. This got almost no attention at the time but proved to me one of the most civilization-changing advances in technology in all of human history.)
"other than some standard talking points"
?
"The electrification pursued under Biden's term..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_point
A talking point is a pre-established message or formula used in the field of political communication, sales and commercial or advertising communication. The message is coordinated a priori to remain more or less invariable regardless of which stakeholder brings the message in the media.[1][2][3][4] Such statements can either be free standing or created as retorts to the opposition's talking points and are frequently used in public relations, particularly in areas heavy in debate such as politics and marketing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
(I could go on and on....)
From Wikipedia, redirected from Missing the Point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion
"An irrelevant conclusion,[1] also known as ignoratio elenchi (Latin for 'ignoring refutation') or missing the point, is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument whose conclusion fails to address the issue in question. It falls into the broad class of relevance fallacies."
I can do other cool things, like defend the talking point and simultaneously call out the Fallacy Fallacy. A talking point is not invalid because it is talking point, because there are facts to support the conclusion.
For starters, under the 2021 infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act (read: a spending bill that Congress passes routinely), billions of dollars will go into electricity generation, transmission and storage and passenger vehicles and buses. This spending is mostly going toward the private sector, creating jobs that are temporary (construction and installation jobs for plant buildout and manufacturing facilities) and permanent (manufacturing, sales and marketing, R&D). There is also infrastructure money going to specialized electrification with very localized benefits, namely conversions of seaports. A lot of the transportation and movement infrastructure within relies on heavily polluting fossil fuels, like cargo ships that leave their engines on while idling in dock and drayage trucks that shuffle around containers. Ports are concentrated around our waterways and while the benefits of commerce are spread nationally, the impacts of air pollution are borne locally.
Again, saying "talking points" doesn't negate the substance of the policies, and throwing Wikipedia snowballs of logical fallacies are no substitutes for argument and rebuttal.
Biden should have Jill read it to him, since he says “climate change is the ONLY existential threat to humans”.
You don’t think the Demo-crazies need this too? They like to make the jump directly from “poverty” to “luxury” with all the jewels and Range Rovers and cruises and Mc-mansions. And urbanization without solid intellectual footing leads to the “bread and circuses” of failed empires in the past. Africa needs to stop the quasi-religious slaughter wars and develop a sustainable agriculture system. And their mineral resources need to be protected. But look at the dysfunctional governments they establish. Look where the $ goes: to a 1% lifestyle for their kleptocrats. None of this w/be easy or guaranteed in any way. By singling out a political group you distrust you are not understanding how everyone is involved in any possible solution. Follow the money, all the way to Martha’s Vineyard and Davos and Jackson Hole and Silicon Valley and Washington DC and in the Saudi kingdoms. Therein lay the bad actors who want everything to remain the same. But I imagine in your quiet moments you already know this and wish it wasn’t so. As The Who sang: “No easy way to be free…”
Wow. Incredible article. Should be must-read in every school on Earth
This seems amazing. I’d be curious to see a follow up discussing to what extent non-oil energy sources make this possible. Feels pretty clear that the emergence of energy we don’t have to constantly go to war over would be a big factor in this new reality
I believe wide-spread use fossil fuels are key to promoting long-term economic development. If you exclude oil, you are kneecapping opportunities for all nation, particularly developing nations:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-developing-nations-need-to-use
This is why I’m interested in the discussion. Not because I’m arguing in favor of denying anyone oil or coal, but because I’m curious if countries can eventually (and even today) simply leapfrog over fossil fuels entirely
I do not think that leapfrogging over fossil fuels entirely and still achieving long-term economic growth will be possible for many generations. It I will be particularly hard for developing nations.
I think world civilization will be fine. As Noah has shown in several articles here, renewables like solar, wind and hydro are now at the point where they are economically viable to manufacture and install. It's not a 1:1 replacement, but for developing countries, and China eager to supply them with the infrastructure for economic and geopolitical reasons, it enables them to leapfrog conventional electricity and fuel infrastructure to a point where they can fulfill local and subnational economic needs.
> It's not a 1:1 replacement
Before the end of the current decade it will be. https://www.terraformindustries.com/
Just look at China. They are building more wind/solar/nuclear than anyone else in the world. Also they are consuming more coal/oil/natural gas. China has picked an all-of-the-above energy policy. Seems like a pretty good balance, and their cheap solar panels will make it easier for other nations to adopt renewables also.
Tanks and planes and warships still run on petrochemicals. That's changing, mainly due to battery tech. But given China's lock on rare earths, petrochems will remain top dog here in the West. At least until some new tech paradigm comes along.
And that's not even counting the role of petrochems in plastics and other polymer building blocks of industrialization. All of which is why the Persian Gulf--where ~50% of the feed source is still produced--is so strategically important to the US & NATO.
Kinda unrelated to my point, I think? I'm not talking about the ability to wage war. I'm talking about the need to wage war over a scarce resource. If undeveloped nations don't need oil to pull themselves into the industrial and post-industrial age, that's a big, big deal.
Oil currently has an irreplaceable role in modern war & industry. Which is precisely why nations fight over it. Until/unless there are some major advances in battery tech, petrochems will remain the most important strategic resource. And there are already wars in Africa over lithium and other strategic minerals as the battery revolution progresses.
Developing nations may be able to leapfrog over *oil-as-energy*, by going fully electric, since electric power now outcompetes in so many applications. But organics like bamboo or bacterium still cannot yet compete with the *oil-as-polymers* industrial model.
No argument on oil being irreplaceable for polymer. My impression is that we don’t need nearly as much oil for that, compared to oil for fuel, so if we rapidly reduce reliance on oil for fuel, the polymer side of the equation should be pretty cheap.
I could be wrong about this. I’m certainly no expert on polymer/plastic
That'd be a question for Noah and other economists: "If petrochemicals could be 100% replaced right now for use as energy; how much would the price of oil drop?"
Even asking such a question no doubt gives the CEO's of oil companies cold sweats.
Well that’s most of where a barrel of oil goes so the price would drop to a fraction of what it is now https://www.visualcapitalist.com/whats-made-barrel-of-oil/
Until we invent an energy source like nuclear fusion (which may or may not ever happen), energy will always be scarce and constrained by geography. And energy will also always have a big impact on geopolitics.
This feels like an answer from 10 years ago
Really? I think the Ukraine war made this abundantly obvious, and it is only 2 years old.
The war in Ukraine made clear that dependence on oil remains a crappy thing. I don’t think it showed much more than that. Based on the speed of current advances in alternative energy sources, I don’t think it’s crazy to think that 30 or so years of innovation will make it possible for undeveloped nations to advance without need of fossil fuels
Since the US is the world’s top oil producer, who would we be going to war over it? We could increase production even more and make the number 2 and 3 (Russia and Saudi Arabia) suffer instead.
Every year I have a few students who are convinced that capitalism is destroying the planet. I always answer them the same way. American air and water today are cleaner than they have been since prior to the industrial revolution. By nearly any measure, water and air quality improve the wealthier a society gets. For a modern example, see India. Why? Because people who are struggling to feed their kids and put a roof over their head don't have the luxury of worrying about pollution or global warming. Capitalism isn't going to destroy the world; capitalism is the only thing that might save it.
From a practical perspective, we no longer have the ability to undo industrial capitalism even if we wanted to. Using only current sunlight, all reasonably arable land, and animal manure as fertilizer, the carrying capacity of the Earth is about 3-4B people. Fossil fuels are both the feedstock and energy source for the production of chemical fertilizers, which Paul Kingsnorth (writes here on Substack) calls "fossilized sunlight" (I love that term). In short, sans industrial capitalism, half the population of the Earth dies within 1 year.
BTW: I use that same exponential graph in class too.
Why are you saying "capitalism" here rather than "industrial civilization"?
There are plenty of capitalist societies that failed to industrialize (for example countries that ended up specializing as commodity exporters), nor is it conceivable that no non-capitalist system (including ones we haven't yet imagined) could possibly support industry.
Partially because I use that graph in by economics classes, so that's the subject of the class. However, capitalism is only system that has successfully produced an industrial civilization. The 20th century featured several alternatives, and they failed catastrophically. In the example I used above about chemical fertilizers, while Norman Borlaug was busy commercializing the wheat strains that could better utilize "fossilized sunlight" based nitrates that would eradicate famine... Trofim Lysenko was causing famine in Ukraine by trying to produce socialist crops.
Didn't Lysenkoism post-date the Ukrainian Holodomor (which AFAIK was caused more by the Soviets confiscating crops for export rather than by a failure to produce enough food in the first place) while also substantially pre-dating Borlaug's Green Revolution?
Perhaps. I don't remember the exact dates. But the point about Lysenko stands. His ideas were bunk and caused routine famines everywhere they were tried (incl by Mao), but the political and economic system in which he was embedded was incapable of acknowledging that fact.
Which non-capitalist industrial civilization significantly reduced poverty?
In fact, every successful society has been a mix of the things we call "capitalism" and "socialism"...
Have you ever read Farm to Factory? It's an economic history of the Soviet Union by Robert Allen, who is definitely not a commie or a tankie. It makes what to me is a pretty convincing case that the Soviet Union was a successful twentieth century development story (only second to Japan) that got waylaid by really bad luck involving war and political circumstances. The latter two might tell the whole story, but it's hard not to look at every post USSR state, Baltics excepted, and realize what could have been.
Just because capitalism is currently hegemonic doesn't mean it will be forever: note how many African countries have built mobile phone infrastructure without bothering to build landline phone infrastructure first.
Oh, I don't at all think capitalism is forever. I actually suspect that that hybrid of modernity that we call liberal-secular-democratic-capitalism may well be one of the largest systems of lies ever created. I am deeply skeptical that man is, at his core, a selfishly-motivated, utility-maximizing, materialist being. Noah Harari says that modernity "exchanged meaning for power" as a compliment; I think it's a Faustian bargain.
However... pretending (as many Utopians of both the Left and Right variety do) that our present system can be abolished without causing mass death and poverty is absurd. So even though I think the system is a lie built on a false view of man, I see little practical alternative but to hope that I'm wrong.
> I am deeply skeptical that man is, at his core, a selfishly-motivated, utility-maximizing, materialist being.
I think that not very many men are such, and fewer still among those are competent... but those few are both the most dangerous and the hardest for any societal system to steer toward prosocial behavior, so a society which does so reliably (even if at a terrible cost) may thus come out ahead.
If mistaking a vine or tree root for a snake costs only a delay of a few heartbeats, while carelessly stepping on an actual venomous snake costs your life, it's a reasonable survival strategy to have your snake-identifying algorithm lean pretty hard toward false positives. Same principle applies for metaphorical snakes wearing business suits.
true communism has never been tried
"Marxist communism doesn't work" doesn't necessarily imply that _no_ conceivable non-capitalist system can work.
you might as well wish for an alternate theory of electricity that doesn't involve electrons
Mobile phone’s won’t save us.
I was just using it as an example: suggesting that a future industrial society could conceivable "skip" capitalism just as Africans skipped landlines.
I think it was Noah a few weeks ago who suggested that the distributed information problem (which is what really killed communism and fascism and all other centrally planned systems in the 20th century) may be less important in the 21st. The rise of the Internet has lowered the cost of information by 99%. The rise of AI could easily reduce the workload of the central planning agency by 99%.
From an economic perspective, the key value of capitalism was never individual freedom. That was a byproduct. The value was the efficient allocation of resources under limited information. Capitalism is incredibly inefficient overall though. 6 in 7 new business ventures fail inside of 5 years. Even if the system is vastly more efficient than 20th century planned economies, losing 85% of all entrepreneurial work is hardly anything to crow about.
As much as I like industrial capitalism (and I do), like Enlightenment liberalism, it was a solution to a set of problems that existed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. And it worked. We solved those problems. There's no reason to believe that either system is "the end of history" as Francis Fukuyama tried to convince us of 30 years ago. New technologies will create new challenges and require new solutions, some of which may be very anti-capitalist and illiberal. While I think we should be wary of altering something that works so well to feed and clothe and shelter billions of people, pretending that it's "the best of all possible worlds forever" (as many do) is foolish as well.
What does it say that I just started reading The Affluent Society just a few hours before this went up 😵💫
Thanks for this. The main lesson I learned from my peace corps years in West Africa was exactly this- that absolute poverty is humanity's greatest enemy, and has to be eradicated. Understanding this principle, the conclusion that Deng Xiaoping was the greatest world leader of the 20th century then follows. What's truly striking is that when I talk to people about these two ideas it tends to be viewed as highly counter-intuitive.