Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Friday 5 April 2024
Monday 11 September 2023
Sunday 7 May 2023
Why the Technology = Progress narrative must be challenged
John Naughton in The Guardian
Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of giant corporations are busy peddling a narrative that says, basically, that what is good for them is also good for the world.
That this narrative is self-serving is obvious, as is its implied message: that they should be allowed to get on with their habits of “creative destruction” (to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase) without being troubled by regulation. Accordingly, any government that flirts with the idea of reining in corporate power should remember that it would then be standing in the way of “progress”: for it is technology that drives history and anything that obstructs it is doomed to be roadkill.
One of the many useful things about this formidable (560-page) tome is its demolition of the tech narrative’s comforting equation of technology with “progress”. Of course the fact that our lives are infinitely richer and more comfortable than those of the feudal serfs we would have been in the middle ages owes much to technological advances. Even the poor in western societies enjoy much higher living standards today than three centuries ago, and live healthier, longer lives.
But a study of the past 1,000 years of human development, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, shows that “the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”
Acemoglu and Johnson begin their Cook’s tour of the past millennium with the puzzle of how dominant narratives – like that which equates technological development with progress – get established. The key takeaway is unremarkable but critical: those who have power define the narrative. That’s how banks get to be thought of as “too big to fail”, or why questioning tech power is “luddite”. But their historical survey really gets under way with an absorbing account of the evolution of agricultural technologies from the neolithic age to the medieval and early modern eras. They find that successive developments “tended to enrich and empower small elites while generating few benefits for agricultural workers: peasants lacked political and social power, and the path of technology followed the vision of a narrow elite.”
A similar moral is extracted from their reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution. This focuses on the emergence of a newly emboldened middle class of entrepreneurs and businessmen whose vision rarely included any ideas of social inclusion and who were obsessed with the possibilities of steam-driven automation for increasing profits and reducing costs.
The shock of the second world war led to a brief interruption in the inexorable trend of continuous technological development combined with increasing social exclusion and inequality. And the postwar years saw the rise of social democratic regimes focused on Keynesian economics, welfare states and shared prosperity. But all of this changed in the 1970s with the neoliberal turn and the subsequent evolution of the democracies we have today, in which enfeebled governments pay obeisance to giant corporations – more powerful and profitable than anything since the East India Company. These create astonishing wealth for a tiny elite (not to mention lavish salaries and bonuses for their executives) while the real incomes of ordinary people have remained stagnant, precarity rules and inequality returning to pre-1914 levels.
Coincidentally, this book arrives at an opportune moment, when digital technology, currently surfing on a wave of irrational exuberance about ubiquitous AI, is booming, while the idea of shared prosperity has seemingly become a wistful pipe dream. So is there anything we might learn from the history so graphically recounted by Acemoglu and Johnson?
Answer: yes. And it’s to be found in the closing chapter, which comes up with a useful list of critical steps that democracies must take to ensure that the proceeds of the next technological wave are more generally shared among their populations. Interestingly, some of the ideas it explores have a venerable provenance, reaching back to the progressive movement that brought the robber barons of the early 20th century to heel.
There are three things that need to be done by a modern progressive movement. First, the technology-equals-progress narrative has to be challenged and exposed for what it is: a convenient myth propagated by a huge industry and its acolytes in government, the media and (occasionally) academia. The second is the need to cultivate and foster countervailing powers – which critically should include civil society organisations, activists and contemporary versions of trade unions. And finally, there is a need for progressive, technically informed policy proposals, and the fostering of thinktanks and other institutions that can supply a steady flow of ideas about how digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit.
None of this is rocket science. It can be done. And it needs to be done if liberal democracies are to survive the next wave of technological evolution and the catastrophic acceleration of inequality that it will bring. So – who knows? Maybe this time we might really learn something from history.
Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of giant corporations are busy peddling a narrative that says, basically, that what is good for them is also good for the world.
That this narrative is self-serving is obvious, as is its implied message: that they should be allowed to get on with their habits of “creative destruction” (to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase) without being troubled by regulation. Accordingly, any government that flirts with the idea of reining in corporate power should remember that it would then be standing in the way of “progress”: for it is technology that drives history and anything that obstructs it is doomed to be roadkill.
One of the many useful things about this formidable (560-page) tome is its demolition of the tech narrative’s comforting equation of technology with “progress”. Of course the fact that our lives are infinitely richer and more comfortable than those of the feudal serfs we would have been in the middle ages owes much to technological advances. Even the poor in western societies enjoy much higher living standards today than three centuries ago, and live healthier, longer lives.
But a study of the past 1,000 years of human development, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, shows that “the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”
Acemoglu and Johnson begin their Cook’s tour of the past millennium with the puzzle of how dominant narratives – like that which equates technological development with progress – get established. The key takeaway is unremarkable but critical: those who have power define the narrative. That’s how banks get to be thought of as “too big to fail”, or why questioning tech power is “luddite”. But their historical survey really gets under way with an absorbing account of the evolution of agricultural technologies from the neolithic age to the medieval and early modern eras. They find that successive developments “tended to enrich and empower small elites while generating few benefits for agricultural workers: peasants lacked political and social power, and the path of technology followed the vision of a narrow elite.”
A similar moral is extracted from their reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution. This focuses on the emergence of a newly emboldened middle class of entrepreneurs and businessmen whose vision rarely included any ideas of social inclusion and who were obsessed with the possibilities of steam-driven automation for increasing profits and reducing costs.
The shock of the second world war led to a brief interruption in the inexorable trend of continuous technological development combined with increasing social exclusion and inequality. And the postwar years saw the rise of social democratic regimes focused on Keynesian economics, welfare states and shared prosperity. But all of this changed in the 1970s with the neoliberal turn and the subsequent evolution of the democracies we have today, in which enfeebled governments pay obeisance to giant corporations – more powerful and profitable than anything since the East India Company. These create astonishing wealth for a tiny elite (not to mention lavish salaries and bonuses for their executives) while the real incomes of ordinary people have remained stagnant, precarity rules and inequality returning to pre-1914 levels.
Coincidentally, this book arrives at an opportune moment, when digital technology, currently surfing on a wave of irrational exuberance about ubiquitous AI, is booming, while the idea of shared prosperity has seemingly become a wistful pipe dream. So is there anything we might learn from the history so graphically recounted by Acemoglu and Johnson?
Answer: yes. And it’s to be found in the closing chapter, which comes up with a useful list of critical steps that democracies must take to ensure that the proceeds of the next technological wave are more generally shared among their populations. Interestingly, some of the ideas it explores have a venerable provenance, reaching back to the progressive movement that brought the robber barons of the early 20th century to heel.
There are three things that need to be done by a modern progressive movement. First, the technology-equals-progress narrative has to be challenged and exposed for what it is: a convenient myth propagated by a huge industry and its acolytes in government, the media and (occasionally) academia. The second is the need to cultivate and foster countervailing powers – which critically should include civil society organisations, activists and contemporary versions of trade unions. And finally, there is a need for progressive, technically informed policy proposals, and the fostering of thinktanks and other institutions that can supply a steady flow of ideas about how digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit.
None of this is rocket science. It can be done. And it needs to be done if liberal democracies are to survive the next wave of technological evolution and the catastrophic acceleration of inequality that it will bring. So – who knows? Maybe this time we might really learn something from history.
Sunday 24 November 2019
It's time to retire metrics like GDP. They don't measure everything that matters
The way we assess economic performance and social progress is fundamentally wrong, and the climate crisis has brought these concerns to the fore writes Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian
‘And it should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine.’ Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
The world is facing three existential crises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis and a crisis in democracy. Will we be able to prosper within our planetary boundaries? Can a modern economy deliver shared prosperity? And can democracies thrive if our economies fail to deliver shared prosperity? These are critical questions, yet the accepted ways by which we measure economic performance give absolutely no hint that we might be facing a problem. Each of these crises has reinforced the fact that we need better tools to assess economic performance and social progress.
The standard measure of economic performance is gross domestic product (GDP), which is the sum of the value of goods and services produced within a country over a given period. GDP was humming along nicely, rising year after year, until the 2008 global financial crisis hit. The global financial crisis was the ultimate illustration of the deficiencies in commonly used metrics. None of those metrics gave policymakers or markets adequate warning that something was amiss. Though a few astute economists had sounded the alarm, the standard measures seemed to suggest everything was fine.
Since then, according to the GDP metric, the US has been growing slightly more slowly than in earlier years, but it’s nothing to worry about. Politicians, looking at these metrics, suggest slight reforms to the economic system and, they promise, all will be well.
In Europe, the impact of 2008 was more severe, especially in countries most affected by the euro crisis. But even there, apart from high unemployment numbers, standard metrics do not fully reflect the adverse impacts of the austerity measures, either the magnitude of people’s suffering or the impacts on long-term standards of living.
Nor do our standard GDP measures provide us with the guidance we need to address the inequality crisis. So what if GDP goes up, if most citizens are worse off? In the first three years of the so-called recovery from the financial crisis, about 91% of the gains went to the top 1%. No wonder that many people doubted the claims of politicians who were then saying the economy was well on the way to a robust recovery.
For a long time I have been concerned with this problem – the gap between what our metrics show and what they need to show. During the Clinton administration, when I served as a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, I grew increasingly worried about how our main economic measures failed to take into account environmental degradation and resource depletion. If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.
These concerns have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis. It has been three decades since the threat of climate change was first widely recognized, and matters have grown worse faster than initially expected. There have been more extreme events, greater melting of glaciers and greater natural habitat destruction.
It is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we assess economic performance and social progress. Even worse, our metrics frequently give the misleading impression that there is a trade-off between the two; that, for instance, changes that enhance people’s economic security, whether through improved pensions or a better welfare state, come at the expense of national economic performance.
Getting the measure right – or at least a lot better – is crucially important, especially in our metrics- and performance-oriented society. If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing. If our measures tell us everything is fine when it really isn’t, we will be complacent.
And it should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine. We see this in the political discontent rippling through so many advanced countries; we see it in the widespread support of demagogues, whose successes depend on exploiting economic discontent; and we see it in the environment around us, where fires rage and floods and droughts occur at ever-increasing intervals.
Fortunately, a variety of advances in methodology and technology have provided us with better measurement tools, and the international community has begun to embrace them. What we have accomplished so far has convinced me and many other economists of two things: first, that it is possible to construct much better measures of an economy’s health. Governments can and should go well beyond GDP. Second, that there is far more work to be done.
As Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has written: “It is only by having better metrics that truly reflect people’s lives and aspirations that we will be able to design and implement ‘better policies for better lives’.”
The world is facing three existential crises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis and a crisis in democracy. Will we be able to prosper within our planetary boundaries? Can a modern economy deliver shared prosperity? And can democracies thrive if our economies fail to deliver shared prosperity? These are critical questions, yet the accepted ways by which we measure economic performance give absolutely no hint that we might be facing a problem. Each of these crises has reinforced the fact that we need better tools to assess economic performance and social progress.
The standard measure of economic performance is gross domestic product (GDP), which is the sum of the value of goods and services produced within a country over a given period. GDP was humming along nicely, rising year after year, until the 2008 global financial crisis hit. The global financial crisis was the ultimate illustration of the deficiencies in commonly used metrics. None of those metrics gave policymakers or markets adequate warning that something was amiss. Though a few astute economists had sounded the alarm, the standard measures seemed to suggest everything was fine.
Since then, according to the GDP metric, the US has been growing slightly more slowly than in earlier years, but it’s nothing to worry about. Politicians, looking at these metrics, suggest slight reforms to the economic system and, they promise, all will be well.
In Europe, the impact of 2008 was more severe, especially in countries most affected by the euro crisis. But even there, apart from high unemployment numbers, standard metrics do not fully reflect the adverse impacts of the austerity measures, either the magnitude of people’s suffering or the impacts on long-term standards of living.
Nor do our standard GDP measures provide us with the guidance we need to address the inequality crisis. So what if GDP goes up, if most citizens are worse off? In the first three years of the so-called recovery from the financial crisis, about 91% of the gains went to the top 1%. No wonder that many people doubted the claims of politicians who were then saying the economy was well on the way to a robust recovery.
For a long time I have been concerned with this problem – the gap between what our metrics show and what they need to show. During the Clinton administration, when I served as a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, I grew increasingly worried about how our main economic measures failed to take into account environmental degradation and resource depletion. If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.
These concerns have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis. It has been three decades since the threat of climate change was first widely recognized, and matters have grown worse faster than initially expected. There have been more extreme events, greater melting of glaciers and greater natural habitat destruction.
It is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we assess economic performance and social progress. Even worse, our metrics frequently give the misleading impression that there is a trade-off between the two; that, for instance, changes that enhance people’s economic security, whether through improved pensions or a better welfare state, come at the expense of national economic performance.
Getting the measure right – or at least a lot better – is crucially important, especially in our metrics- and performance-oriented society. If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing. If our measures tell us everything is fine when it really isn’t, we will be complacent.
And it should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine. We see this in the political discontent rippling through so many advanced countries; we see it in the widespread support of demagogues, whose successes depend on exploiting economic discontent; and we see it in the environment around us, where fires rage and floods and droughts occur at ever-increasing intervals.
Fortunately, a variety of advances in methodology and technology have provided us with better measurement tools, and the international community has begun to embrace them. What we have accomplished so far has convinced me and many other economists of two things: first, that it is possible to construct much better measures of an economy’s health. Governments can and should go well beyond GDP. Second, that there is far more work to be done.
As Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has written: “It is only by having better metrics that truly reflect people’s lives and aspirations that we will be able to design and implement ‘better policies for better lives’.”
Friday 25 November 2016
Don’t fall for the new hopelessness. We still have the power to bring change
Suzanne Moore in The Guardian
After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: ‘You don’t start worrying about apocalypse.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
A friend posts a picture of a baby. A beautiful baby. A child is brought into the world, this world, and I like it on Facebook because I like it in real life. If anything can be an unreservedly good thing it is a baby. But no ... someone else says to me, while airily discussing how terrible everything is: “I don’t know why anyone would have a child now.” As though any child was ever born of reason. I wonder at their mental state, but soon read that a war between the superpowers is likely. The doom and gloom begins to get to me. There is no sealant against the dread, the constant drip of the talk of end times.
I stay up into the small hours watching the footage of triumphant white nationalists sieg-heiling with excited hesitancy. My dreams are contaminated – at the edge of them, Trump roams the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. But then I wake up and think: “Enough.” Enough of this competitive hopelessness.
Loss is loss. Our side has taken some heavy hits, the bad guys are in charge. Some take solace in the fact that the bad guys don’t know what they are doing: Farage, Trump, Johnson, Ukip donor Arron Banks, wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. One of the “liberal” values that has been overturned is apparently basic respect for knowledge. Wilful ignorance and inadequacy is now lauded as authenticity.
However, the biggest casualty for my generation is the idea that progress is linear. Things really would get better and better, we said; the world would somehow by itself become more open, equal, tolerant, as though everything would evolve in our own self-image. Long before Brexit or the US election, it was clear that this was not the case. I have often written about the way younger generations have had more and more stripped away from them: access to education, jobs and housing. Things have not been getting better and they know that inequality has solidified. Materially, they are suffering, but culturally and demographically the resistance to authoritarian populism, or whatever we want to call this movement of men old before their time, will come from the young. It will come also from the many for whom racism or sexism in society is nothing new.
Resistance can’t come personally or politically from the abject pessimism that prevails now. Of course, anger, despair, denial are all stages of grief, and the joys of nihilism are infinite. I am relieved that we are all going to die in a solar flare, anyway, but until then pessimism replayed as easy cynicism and inertia is not going to get us anywhere. The relentless wallowing in every detail of Trump or Farage’s infinite idiocy is drowning, not waving. The oft-repeated idea that history is a loop and that this is a replay of the1930s induces nothing but terror. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. That is why we learn history.
I am not asking for false optimism here, but a way to exist in the world that does not lead to feelings of absolute powerlessness. A mass retreat into the internal, small sphere of the domestic, the redecoration of one’s own safe space, is understandable, but so much of what has happened has been just this abandonment of any shared or civic space. It is absolutely to the advantage of these far-right scaremongers that we stay in our little boxes, fearing “the streets”, fearing difference, seeing danger everywhere.
Thinking for ourselves is, to use a bad word, empowering. It also demands that we give up some of the ridiculous binaries of the left. The choice between class politics and identity politics is a false one. All politics is identity politics. It is clear that economic and cultural marginalisation intertwine and that they often produce a rejection of basic modernity. Economic anxiety manifests in a longing for a time when everything was in its place and certain. But the energy of youth disrupts this immediately, as many young people are born into a modernity that does not accept that everything is fixed, whether that is sexuality or a job for life. Telling them: “We are all doomed” says something about the passivity of my generation, not theirs.
The historian and activist Howard Zinn said in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: it reproduces by crippling our willingness to act.”
Indeed. Campaigning for reproductive rights isn’t something that suddenly has to be done because of Trump. It always has to be done. LGBT people did not “win”. The great fault line of race has been exposed, but it was never just theoretical. The idea that any of these struggles were over could be maintained only if you were not involved in them.
After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: “You don’t get into a foetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say: ‘OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.’”
Where can you push to keep it moving forward? Locally? Globally? Get out of that foetal position. Look at some cats online if it helps. We render those in power even more powerful if we act as though everything is a done deal. Take back control.
A friend posts a picture of a baby. A beautiful baby. A child is brought into the world, this world, and I like it on Facebook because I like it in real life. If anything can be an unreservedly good thing it is a baby. But no ... someone else says to me, while airily discussing how terrible everything is: “I don’t know why anyone would have a child now.” As though any child was ever born of reason. I wonder at their mental state, but soon read that a war between the superpowers is likely. The doom and gloom begins to get to me. There is no sealant against the dread, the constant drip of the talk of end times.
I stay up into the small hours watching the footage of triumphant white nationalists sieg-heiling with excited hesitancy. My dreams are contaminated – at the edge of them, Trump roams the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. But then I wake up and think: “Enough.” Enough of this competitive hopelessness.
Loss is loss. Our side has taken some heavy hits, the bad guys are in charge. Some take solace in the fact that the bad guys don’t know what they are doing: Farage, Trump, Johnson, Ukip donor Arron Banks, wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. One of the “liberal” values that has been overturned is apparently basic respect for knowledge. Wilful ignorance and inadequacy is now lauded as authenticity.
However, the biggest casualty for my generation is the idea that progress is linear. Things really would get better and better, we said; the world would somehow by itself become more open, equal, tolerant, as though everything would evolve in our own self-image. Long before Brexit or the US election, it was clear that this was not the case. I have often written about the way younger generations have had more and more stripped away from them: access to education, jobs and housing. Things have not been getting better and they know that inequality has solidified. Materially, they are suffering, but culturally and demographically the resistance to authoritarian populism, or whatever we want to call this movement of men old before their time, will come from the young. It will come also from the many for whom racism or sexism in society is nothing new.
Resistance can’t come personally or politically from the abject pessimism that prevails now. Of course, anger, despair, denial are all stages of grief, and the joys of nihilism are infinite. I am relieved that we are all going to die in a solar flare, anyway, but until then pessimism replayed as easy cynicism and inertia is not going to get us anywhere. The relentless wallowing in every detail of Trump or Farage’s infinite idiocy is drowning, not waving. The oft-repeated idea that history is a loop and that this is a replay of the1930s induces nothing but terror. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. That is why we learn history.
I am not asking for false optimism here, but a way to exist in the world that does not lead to feelings of absolute powerlessness. A mass retreat into the internal, small sphere of the domestic, the redecoration of one’s own safe space, is understandable, but so much of what has happened has been just this abandonment of any shared or civic space. It is absolutely to the advantage of these far-right scaremongers that we stay in our little boxes, fearing “the streets”, fearing difference, seeing danger everywhere.
Thinking for ourselves is, to use a bad word, empowering. It also demands that we give up some of the ridiculous binaries of the left. The choice between class politics and identity politics is a false one. All politics is identity politics. It is clear that economic and cultural marginalisation intertwine and that they often produce a rejection of basic modernity. Economic anxiety manifests in a longing for a time when everything was in its place and certain. But the energy of youth disrupts this immediately, as many young people are born into a modernity that does not accept that everything is fixed, whether that is sexuality or a job for life. Telling them: “We are all doomed” says something about the passivity of my generation, not theirs.
The historian and activist Howard Zinn said in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: it reproduces by crippling our willingness to act.”
Indeed. Campaigning for reproductive rights isn’t something that suddenly has to be done because of Trump. It always has to be done. LGBT people did not “win”. The great fault line of race has been exposed, but it was never just theoretical. The idea that any of these struggles were over could be maintained only if you were not involved in them.
After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: “You don’t get into a foetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say: ‘OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.’”
Where can you push to keep it moving forward? Locally? Globally? Get out of that foetal position. Look at some cats online if it helps. We render those in power even more powerful if we act as though everything is a done deal. Take back control.
Sunday 13 November 2016
Does Trump’s win mean that progress is history?
David Mitchell in The Guardian
A fortnight ago, when the clocks went back, a joke was doing the rounds in various forms. They all went something like: “Don’t forget to turn the clocks back this weekend. Unless you voted for Brexit, in which case you’ve already turned them back 30 years.”
These obviously weren’t pro-Brexit jokes. The notion of turning the clock back is not supposed to connote a return to the good old days or a restoration of youth: it signifies regression, progress reversed, a deliberate worsening. So an obvious implication is that their writers think, and think that most people think, that in general things get better over time.
Well, milk doesn’t. And look at the natural world: things age and die and rot. Or grow and infest and destroy. And sometimes they germinate and bloom. They don’t necessarily get worse, I’m not saying that; but they don’t always improve, either.
Technology confuses this, because that seems to be on a pretty steady upward graph, though it has its blips: in Europe, central heating had a chilly hiatus between the fourth and the 19th centuries. And this whole technological up-graph, from the discovery of fire onwards, may get retrospectively flipped into a huge down-blip in overall human fortunes if it transpires we were gradually making the planet uninhabitable. It’s possible that everything any of us has done since we first started scrabbling around for flint has been a mistake.
You may sense from the last sentence that I’m in a bad mood. When I recently expressed disquiet on Twitter at Donald Trump’s election victory, one respondent said: “You should have been afraid months ago, by now [you should be] slipping into misanthropic apathy.” It seemed like an excellent suggestion.
I’d been hoping Hillary Clinton would win, as you probably were, unless my evaluation of the Observer readership has descended to pollster levels of accuracy. Though, for me, it was mainly a hope that Donald Trump would lose. I didn’t have strong feelings about his opponent. She seemed OK, but then people would darkly say things beginning “Of course you realise…”, the end of which I never properly heard, focused as I was on avoiding the social embarrassment of looking like I didn’t realise whatever it was.
It’s like when I’m introduced to people – I never catch their name because I’m so anxious not to screw up the handshake. “Just look like you realise, for God’s sake!” my brain always hissed over the details. “Everyone else here seems to have realised. You’re an educated person who realises all the complicated stuff that needs to be realised. You can Google it later.”
I never Googled it later, which turns out to have been an efficient non-use of time. Nevertheless, I assembled a vague sense that Hillary wasn’t all that, but at least she hadn’t said that Mexicans are rapists. If there were terrible things about her, she had the grace to keep them secret rather than proclaim them from a podium. Which, under the circumstances, seemed to me a good enough reason to make her the most powerful person on earth. Then I went back to watching Trump.
Trump is so watchable – that’s surely something his supporters and detractors can agree on. It’s not the hair, it’s not the extremist rhetoric, it’s the sheer magnetism of his self-satisfaction. The density of his self-joy is so great it drags your eyes towards it like galactic debris to a black hole. When he puts on a statesmanlike face, you just know his inner monologue is delightedly singing “My amazing face looks so statesmanlike right now!” This is what Ed Miliband never grasped: it’s not about being convincing, it’s about relishing the role.
If politics were just a reality TV show (rather than mainly a reality TV show), Trump would never get voted out. So perhaps it’s surprising that he polled fewer votes than Clinton – though not quite as surprising as the fact that he will become president despite this.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
Trump’s win hit me in several ways. First, it denied me his defeat scene. I wanted to see that. His character seemed designed expressly for that sort of comeuppance, as surely as the diner redneck in Superman II. I was desperate to see him spun round on his bar stool, all scared. It really feels like a missed opportunity, for him as much as everyone else.
Second, it robbed me of a comforting certainty: he can’t win – he’s too awful. That’s the sentiment I’ve been vacuously exchanging with people for months: “Surely he can’t win,” one of us says. “I know,” says the other. I’ll miss that even though I now regret every time it happened. “It would be a disaster,” was the consensus among me and other out-of-touch liberals, even more so than over Brexit.
And third: I’ve started to look on the bright side and it makes me despise myself. Because, frankly, “It would be a disaster” is much easier to live with than “It willbe a disaster” or “This is a disaster”. So I fail to follow through on my certainty. A mixture of apathy and fear-avoidance extorts a sickly optimism from my brain.
Maybe he didn’t mean what he said; maybe the Republican party will restrain him; politicians never get much done anyway; maybe it’ll all be fine. This either makes me an overdramatising hypocrite a few days ago, or a reality-denying fool now. So I feel lazy, stupid and humiliated by the disturbance to my complacency, as if someone had burst in while I was eating a cream cake in the bath.
I am bewildered by everyone’s conviction that anyone who disagrees with them has been misinformed. Another response to my worried tweet mentioned an article I’d linked to about Trump in the New Yorker: “That’s like reading about Obama on the KKK newsletter,” they told me. Is it? I really don’t think it is. But they seemed so much surer that I’m wrong than I am that I’m right. I’m enough of a historian to understand the insecurity of the lines of communication between what I read has happened and what actually has, but not enough to know what to do. Should I go to that place in Kew?
Civilisations, like investments, can go down as well as up – that’s never been clearer. Trump has routed the Whig interpretation of history along with the metropolitan liberal elite. Things don’t always get better over time. But I’m grateful to have lived through an era when it was still widely assumed that they did.
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Criticism of Schumacher - if you curtail growth, living standards drop
Schumacher was no radical – if you curtail growth, living standards drop
By suggesting it's
better to be economically poorer and spiritually richer, Schumacher
ignores links between growth and wellbeing
Consumer revolution … a customer inspects washing machines at a supermarket in Wuhan, China. Photograph: Darley Shen/Reuters
EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful is widely viewed as a humanistic and radical tract. Nothing could be further from the truth. Viewed in its proper context it is both profoundly anti-human and deeply conservative.
The central idea in Schumacher's text is that there is a natural limit to economic growth. As he put it: "Economic growth, which viewed from the point of view of economics, physics, chemistry and technology, has no discernible limit, must necessarily run into decisive bottlenecks when viewed from the point of view of the environmental sciences."
Schumacher objected to organising the economy on a large scale precisely because he believed that more prosperity would damage the environment. He correctly understood that small-scale communities cannot produce nearly as much as those operating on a regional or global scale. A modern car, for example, typically relies on components, raw materials and know-how from around the globe. From the perspective of Schumacher's "Buddhist economics", it is better for people to be poorer in economic terms if they can be spiritually richer.
This argument flies against a huge weight of evidence showing that material advance is closely bound up with progress more generally. The past two centuries of modern economic growth have seen huge advances in human welfare along with technological innovation and social advance. Perhaps the most striking single indicator of this improvement is the increase in human life expectancy from about 30 in 1800 to nearly 70 today. Note that this is a global average, so it includes the billions of people who live in poor countries as well as the minority who live in rich ones.
Almost every other measure of wellbeing has increased hugely over the long term, including infant mortality, food consumption and level of education. Most of humanity, even in the developing world, has access to services our ancestors could only have dreamt of, including electricity, clean water, sanitation and mobile phones.
None of the arguments used by Schumacher's followers to counter this narrative of progress are convincing. Greens often side-step the broader case for growth by deriding the accumulation of consumer goods and services. Environmentalist arguments have more than a tinge of elitism, with comfortably middle-class greens scoffing at the masses for wanting flat-screen televisions and foreign holidays. It should also be remembered that some consumer goods, such as washing machines, have directly led to huge improvements in human welfare.
Anti-consumerism reveals more about the narrowness of the green vision than it does about economic growth. Viewing rising prosperity simply in terms of consumer goods is incredibly blinkered. Growth provides the resources for much else including airports, art galleries, hospitals, museums, power stations, railways, roads, schools and universities. Popular prosperity provides the bedrock for much that we value in contemporary society.
Another common green rebuttal to the benefits of growth is to point to the existence of inequality. Of course it is true that there are huge disparities both within countries as well as between the developed and developing world. The key question, however, is how best to tackle the problem. From Schumacher's perspective it is desirable to reduce the living standards of everyone except the poorest of the poor. His is a narrative of shared sacrifice and lower living standards for almost all. The alternative vision, the traditional position of the left, was to argue for plenty for everyone.
Finally, there is the argument about the environment itself. The most popular variant of the idea of a natural limit nowadays is that growth inevitably means runaway climate change. However, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. There are many forms of energy, including nuclear, that do not emit greenhouse gases. There are also ways to adapt to global warming such as building higher sea walls. Since such measures are expensive it will take more resources to pay for them; which means more economic growth rather than less. If anything the green drive to curb prosperity is likely to undermine our capacity to tackle climate change.
Schumacher's fundamentally conservative argument chimes well with those who want to reconcile us to austerity. It suits those in power for the mass of the population to accept the need to make do with less. Under such circumstances it is no surprise that David Cameron, like his international peers, is keen for us to focus on individual contentment rather than material prosperity.
It is hard to imagine a more anti-human outlook than one advocating a sharp fall in living standards for the bulk of the world's population.
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