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THE THREE ECONOMIES

ONCE AGAIN, we can begin this exploration with Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations begins with the following sentence: “The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life.” This same concept, variously phrased, forms one of the least questioned assumptions in modern economics; even most of those who dispute it offer what are at most slight variations — arguing, for example, that the labor of previous years embodied in capital is also crucial to understanding the economic process. Left unrecognized is the crucial fact that the annual labor of a nation would be utterly useless without the goods and services provided free of charge by Nature, which enable labor to be done at all by making human life possible in the first place and by providing all that labor with something to labor on.

This recognition has not simply been missed by economists; as often as not, it has been flatly rejected. One classic example is David Ricardo (1772–1823), one of Adam Smith’s most influential successors. Ricardo remains a popular figure in economics, not least because his arguments on behalf of free trade arrangements proved to be highly useful to the British Empire in its time, and of course to the American Empire in ours; you can still find his arguments on this subject presented as simple fact in the pages of most freshman economics textbooks.¹ Another of the core elements of Ricardo’s economic theories, though, is the claim that land retains its “original and indestructible” economic value no matter what economic use is made of it.²

This is an odd claim. Even in the early nineteenth century, when Ricardo originally made it, plenty of people could have set him straight; the fact that bad farming practices could make soil useless for farming was well known in Ricardo’s time, and so was the impact of industrial pollution — though of course we have gained a great deal more bitter experience with both since then. Whatever the reasons for his claim, Ricardo’s ideas concerning land prefigured the way that natural resources have been treated by most economists ever since. This is as true of radical economists as of their capitalist rivals; recent proponents of “green socialism,” for example, might find it useful to reread Marx, who explicitly rejected the idea that the “free gifts of Nature” could have any value at all.³ (The disastrous mistreatment of the environment common under Marxist regimes in the twentieth century was thus not accidental, but a logically necessary outgrowth of Marxist theory.) Nearly the only concession made to the ecological dimensions of economics in the mainstream, and it’s a fairly recent one, is the concept of “externalities” — the recognition that if somebody does something that fouls the environment, other people may suffer a loss of economic value as a result, and might deserve compensation for that.⁴

Now of course this is true, and Garrett Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons built on that insight to remind us that a society that permits the advantages of ecological abuse to go to individuals, while the costs are shared by the whole society, is effectively subsidizing the destruction of its environment. Still, both the “externalities” argument and the structure Hardin built on it miss the central issues raised by the interface between the environment and economics. Both tacitly accept Ricardo’s fantasy of invulnerable land as the normal state of affairs, apply it to the entire environment, and then focus attention on those supposedly exceptional situations when somebody does manage to make land (or some other environmental resource) less valuable.

To show where this thinking falls short, let’s take a closer look at the land whose value Ricardo considered “indestructible.” He was talking primarily about land as an economic factor in agriculture, and so shall we. What he apparently did not realize, but every country farmer knew in his time — and ecologists have demonstrated in fine detail in ours — is that fertile land suitable for growing crops does not simply happen. Like anything else of value, it must be made, and once made, it must be maintained. The only thing that sets it apart from the products of human industry is that the vast majority of the labor needed to make and maintain agricultural land is not performed by human beings.

Soil suitable for crops, after all, is not simply rock dust; pound for pound, it is among the most complex substances in the known universe. A large part of it — in the best soil, well over half — is organic matter, some living, some dead but not yet wholly decayed, some dissolved into organic colloids complex enough to give analytic chemists sleepless nights. All of these are put there by the activity of living beings over long periods of time. Energy and raw materials flow constantly through soil, uniting bacteria, fungi, algae, worms, insects and many other living beings into one of the most intricate ecosystems on Earth. Plants participate in and depend on this bewilderingly complex world; they draw water and mineral nutrients from it, and cycle leaves, root fibers and a wide range of chemical compounds back into it.⁵

The farmer who wants to grow crops is attempting to extract wealth from the underground ecosystem of the soil. She can ignore that, and simply plant and harvest with no attention to the needs of the soil, but if she does, the soil will be depleted of nutrients in a few years and her crops will fail. Alternatively, she can replace nutrients with chemical fertilizers, predators with pesticides, and so on. If she does this she will have to use steadily larger doses of chemicals to get the same yields, and if the society she lives in runs short on petroleum and natural gas feedstocks for these chemicals — as ours shows every sign of doing — she will be left with soil too sterile and pest ridden to grow anything. If she wants to fulfill Ricardo’s promise and hand the land on to her grandchildren in the same condition that she received it from her grandparents, she will have to provide the things the soil needs for its long-term health. Put another way, she will have to barter with the soil, giving it the things it will accept in exchange for crops.

This is the premise of organic agriculture, of course. It’s a premise that has proven itself in the Asian farming regions that inspired the organic pioneers of the early twentieth century to devise a more general system of agriculture that works with rather than against natural cycles,⁶ and in the farms now using organic methods to get yields roughly comparable to those of chemical agriculture. The organic approach has many dimensions, but one may not have received the importance it deserves. To an organic farmer, land is not a commodity that can be owned but a community with which she interacts, and that community has its own economy on which the farmer’s economy depends.

Imagine, to develop this concept into a metaphor, that our farmer got her crops, not from her fields, but from the village of an indigenous tribe near her home. The inhabitants of the village are deeply conservative, and their own economy follows traditional patterns not subject to change or negotiation. If the farmer wants crops, she must find out what the villagers are willing to take in exchange for them, and that will be determined by the internal dynamics of the village economy: what is already produced in surplus amounts, what is scarce, what is desired and what is detested by the villagers. Her relations with the village, in other words, would be exactly the same in outline as those of an organic farmer with her land.

The same thing is true of every other form of economic activity, though the dependence on Nature may be less obvious in some cases than in others. Behind the human activities that produce secondary goods lie a bewildering range of nonhuman activities — the biological cycles that yield soil fertility, crop pollination and countless other things of economic value; the hydrological cycles that put fresh water into reservoirs and taps; the tectonic processes in the crust that put economically useful metals and minerals into veins in the rocks; and, of central importance just now, the extraordinarily complex interplay of biological and geological processes that spent half a billion years storing away countless billions of tons of carbon under the earth’s surface in the form of fossil fuels.

Conventional economics assumes that these things get there by some materialist equivalent of divine fiat. This disastrously misstates the situation. These natural goods are produced by an exact analogue of the way that secondary goods are produced: raw materials are transformed, through labor, using existing capital and available energy, to produce goods and services of value. The difference is that all this economic activity takes place in the nonhuman world. Human beings do not manage the production of natural goods, and the disastrous results of attempts to do so to date suggest that we probably never will. In at least some cases, however — maltreated farmland is a good example — we can interfere with the production of natural goods, and suffer the consequences when this mismanagement impacts our own economies.

What must be understood here is that human economic activity is far less independent of the natural world than too many economists try to pretend. The scale of this dependence is as rarely recognized as it is hard to overstate. One of the few attempts to quantify it, an attempt to work out the replacement costs for natural services carried out a few years back by a team headed by heretical economist Robert Costanza, came up with a midrange figure equal to around three times the gross domestic product of all human economic activity on earth.⁷ In other words, out of every dollar of value circulating in the world’s human economies something like 75 cents were provided by natural processes rather than human labor. What’s more, most if not all of that 75 cents of value had to be there in advance for the production of the other 25 cents to be possible at all. Before you can begin farming, for example, you need to have arable soil, water and an adequate growing season, as well as more specialized natural services such as pollination. These are nonnegotiable requirements; if you don’t have them, you can’t farm. The same is true of every other kind of productive work in the human economy: Nature’s contribution comes first, and generally determines how much the human economy can produce.

The Power of Paradigms

Unfortunately, these reflections unfold from a way of thinking about the Nature of economic activity that is not shared by most people in the industrial world. The core of that way of thinking, and the focal point of the disagreements that surround it, is the issue of environmental limits. It’s no exaggeration to say that either you believe in these limits or you don’t. If you do, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization, which depends on ever-increasing exploitation of finite and nonrenewable resources, is in deep trouble, and the only viable options are those that jettison the fantasy of perpetual growth and aim at a controlled descent to a level of energy and resource use per capita that can be sustained over the long run.

If you don’t believe in limits, by contrast, such notions are the height of folly. Since, according to this way of thinking, progress can always overcome any limit Nature might impose on human beings, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization needs to push progress into overdrive so that it can find and deploy the innovations that will get us past today’s problems and launch our species onward toward its glorious future, whatever that happens to be.

Disbelief in environmental limits, as it happens, is far more common these days than belief in them. That’s a fascinating twist of fate, because the evidence for the power of environmental limits over human life is overwhelming. Ecologists have documented the myriad ways that environmental limits play a dominant role in shaping the destiny of every species, ours included. Historians have chronicled the fate of many civilizations that believed themselves to be destiny’s darlings, and proceeded to pave the road to collapse with their own ecological mistakes.⁸ From a perspective informed by these facts, the insistence that limits don’t apply to humanity is as good a case study as one might wish of that useful Greek word hubris, defined as the overweening pride of the doomed. Still, this makes it all the more intriguing that the power and relevance of environmental limits are anything but self-evident–to most people in the industrial world today.

The power of nonrational assumptions in shaping human thought was mapped out decades ago by Thomas Kuhn, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is as famous as it is rarely read. Kuhn was among the first historians of science to put the popular image of scientific progress to the test, and he found it wanting. In place of the notion that science advances toward objective truth by the accumulation of proven facts — a notion that still shapes histories of science written for popular consumption — he showed that scientific beliefs are profoundly shaped by social and cultural forces, and that the relation between scientific theory and the facts on the ground is a great deal more complex than conventional ideas allow.

Kuhn’s take on things has been misstated often enough that it probably needs a summary here. During a period of what he calls “normal science,” scientists model their work on a paradigm. This isn’t some sort of vague worldview, in the sense too often given to the word; rather, it’s a specific example of science at work, an investigation in a given field by an exemplary scientist and the successful theory resulting from that research. In bacteriology, for example, Louis Pasteur’s research program in the 1870s and 1880s, which led to the first artificial vaccines, became the paradigm that later researchers followed; good bacteriological research — in Kuhn’s terms, normal science — was research that followed Pasteur’s lead, fine-tuned his theories and asked the same kinds of questions about the same kinds of phenomena that he did.

Sooner or later, though, a mismatch opens up between the paradigm and the facts on the ground: the research methods drawn from the paradigm stop yielding good answers, and the paradigmatic theory no longer allows for successful prediction of phenomena. Scientists normally respond by pursuing the research methods with redoubled energy while making the theory more elaborate, the way that Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology was padded out with epicycle after epicycle to make it fit the vagaries of planetary motion. Crisis comes when the theory becomes so cumbersome that even its stoutest believers come to realize that something is irreducibly wrong, or when data emerges that no reworking of the paradigmatic theory can explain. The crisis resolves when a researcher propounds a new theory that makes sense of the confusion. That theory, and the research program that created it, then becomes the new paradigm in the field.

So far, so good. Kuhn pointed out, though, that while the new paradigm solves questions the old one could not, the reverse is often true as well: the old paradigm does things the new paradigm cannot. It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the questions the old paradigm answered better no longer count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.

Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses by replacing false beliefs with more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions — or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy; if you want to know how the movements of the planets appear when seen from Earth — for the purposes of navigating a boat by the stars, for example — the Ptolemaic approach is still a better way to go about things.

These same considerations sprawl outside the limits of the sciences to define the rise and fall of paradigms in the entire range of human social phenomena. The difference between the believers and the disbelievers in limits is a difference in paradigms. Those who believe that modern industrial society is destined for, or capable of, unlimited economic expansion have drawn their paradigm from the Industrial Revolution and its three-century aftermath, with James Watt and his steam engine playing roughly the same role that Louis Pasteur played in the old paradigm of bacteriology. Like any other paradigm, the Industrial Revolution defines certain questions and issues as important and dismisses others from serious consideration.

This is where the problems arise, because a solid case can be made that some of the questions dismissed from consideration by the “normal culture” of industrial expansion are those our species most needs to face just now, as the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the soaring costs of environmental damage become central facts of our contemporary experience. The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into it.

Thus the current predicament of industrial society demands a change of paradigms. The belief in limits just discussed derives from a different model — the model of ecology, which is still sorting out its historical vision and has not yet quite found its paradigmatic theory, researcher and discovery. From within the emerging paradigm of ecology, the models that provide the most insight into our contemporary situation are those found in nonhuman Nature — above all, the cycles of increase, overshoot and dieoff which afflict so many other species that rely on outside forces to control their numbers. The ecological paradigm suggests that unless we take that model and its implications into account, some of the most important factors shaping our future are completely out of sight.

The change from one paradigm to another, however, is not an overnight thing. Kuhn points out that in the sciences it usually has to wait until most of the older generation of scientists, who have been trained in the old paradigm, have been removed from the debate by old age and death. The same thing is too often true in other fields. Thus it’s uncomfortably likely that even as the industrial paradigm fails to explain an increasingly challenging world, a great many people will cling to the faith that progress will bail us out, and ignore the fact that all the complex economic activities of the industrial world depend ultimately on Nature itself.

Primary and Secondary Goods

This is one of the many places where E. F. Schumacher’s work provides a vital analytical tool. As mentioned in the Introduction, Schumacher made a distinction between what he called primary goods and secondary goods one of the foundations of his economic thought.⁹ Secondary goods are the goods and services provided by human labor, the ordinary subject of economics as the discipline is currently practiced. Primary goods are the goods and services provided by Nature, and they make the production of secondary goods possible.