The Emperor is Naked: An Exposé
If you have taken an economics class, you may remember that there are forces called supply and demand, that one of these drives the other (economists disagree as to which—hence classical supply-side economics and Keynesian demand-side),* that the collective free will of rational people acting in self-interest is sufficient (even ideal) regulation of market forces, that left mostly to its own devices the economy will keep growing indefinitely, and that the distribution of resources resulting from this arrangement (a.k.a. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace) is the best possible scenario for the well-being of the human race. This is how capitalism works.
But does capitalism work? Really? If by ‘working’ one means serving the purposes it claims to serve and functioning without significant glitches, supporting evidence is questionable at best. Use your own eyes and brains, people. This fancy outfit may not be quite what the tailors promised.
EARTH-SIDE ECONOMICS
Principle #1: Demand does not cause supply. You can’t buy it if it isn’t there. This is obvious.
Principle #2: Supply does not cause demand. The advertising industry, mimetic desire (formation by imitation), and bodily appetites (healthy and otherwise) do that. ‘Growing’ demand requires cultivating consumer insecurity and dissatisfaction or encouraging helpless dependence on manufactured conveniences or counterfeits for the meeting of legitimate needs. This is deplorable.
Principle #3: Demand is not the same thing as need (or even want). Both need and want become ‘demand’ only when they have buying power (money or credit) to back them up. If you don't have buying power, you don't get to demand anything. And most consumers demand (read: buy) things they don’t need (and really, let’s be honest, often don’t want—how big is your storage space? when is the last time you used that?). Then they neglect to demand what they do need and want (‘demand’ requires putting your money where your mouth is—remember, in this system what you buy counts infinitely more than what you say). This is absurd.
Principle #4: Capitalism’s accounting theory is bullshit.** Economic ‘growth’ measures how fast money is changing hands. Nobody is adding what of any goodness or lasting value gets created or subtracting anything, however priceless and irreplaceable, that gets destroyed. This is insane.
Principle #5: The global financial system is a pyramid scheme.*** When the source (buy-in plus buying power) dries up, the siphon fails and whoever got sucked in during the final stages comes up empty. The people at the top get away with a fortune and the people at the bottom get screwed. This is a crime.
Principle #6: Everything comes from somewhere. Wealth is not so much ‘made’ as it is taken away from someplace, rearranged, and deposited someplace else. The trade of commodities allows for a small percentage of the world’s population to control and profit from distribution of the substances on which all current and future residents of the planet depend for sustenance. (The handful of corporations dominating the food system are not so much feeding the world as they are owning the world’s food supply. And now people are working on owning the water.) Whether there will be enough tomorrow is beside the point.**** What counts, as far as the ‘owners’ are concerned, is how much something can be sold for, now. Scarcity is good for business. The less there is to go around, the better to get away with price-gouging, my dear. This is: a) waste, b) theft, and c) murder.
Principle #7: Private ownership and ‘development’ of land (or private enterprise conducted on public land) is a temporary cause of a permanent problem. Our culture deems this a legal and even sacred ‘right.’ People are financially rewarded for drastically reducing the capacity of land to offer anything of value (monetary or otherwise) to future residents. Killing individual plants and animals is not the problem here; this is natural and necessary. The real violence is breaking the circle and making it a line, killing the systems that allow for the renewal of life. (Example: 100 years ago, Africa had plenty of topsoil, forests, and clean drinking water—wells, springs, lakes, and rivers. War, famine, and disease were sporadic smash-and-grab intruders, not a tyrannical occupying force, until European colonists and post-colonial ‘globalization’ got involved and raped the continent within an inch of its life.)***** This is genocide.
Principle #8: People are not rational. Or perhaps more accurately, human reason, being limited and corrupt, allows people to rationalize all sort of things that don’t make sense. What capitalism calls ‘self-interest’ may turn out to be merely greed. If self-interest includes such things as contentment and health, not to mention survival, greed-based economics are actually counterproductive to self-interest. This is irony.
Principle #9: Progress is a myth. In the name of ‘progress’ we have built a machine that is too complicated and powerful for humans to control, and now it is running away with us. Our collective presumptuous effort to beat nature and overcome mortality has succeeded only in setting us up to succumb violently to the inexorable requirements of both. Our strength is our weakness. Our greatness is our downfall. This is tragedy.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
Economic ‘growth’ as traditionally understood is incompatible with the health and stability of the ecosphere (i.e., the planet-wide physiology in which all biological, chemical, geological, and atmospheric systems are connected). Pursuit of the former at the expense of the latter is the ultimate example of what behavioral psychologists call ‘the error of escalating commitment’: redoubling one’s efforts at any endeavor to prove that it was never a bad idea in the first place. Humans do not have the luxury of naming the terms or the schedule on which we respond to the ecological crisis. We will learn to cooperate with the conditions for the health and survival of the systems on which we depend, or we will not survive.
The ‘health’ of the present financial system is a function of how fast the military-industrial-agribusiness-pharmaceutical-insurance-real/estate complex is running; ‘growth’ (read: running faster than it was running the previous quarter) inevitably worsens the illness and hastens the death of the planet. The Economy as we know it will stop one way or another. It remains for us to determine what sort of communities (people, relationships, and economic arrangements) will be in place when it does. The sooner we move to make substantive changes towards sustainable infrastructure, the more slowly non-renewable resources will dwindle and the more time we have to further adjust.
It would be delusionally optimistic to pretend that we can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again as if none of this had ever happened; there are deep scars that will fade only after millennia of geological activity, and some consequences (e.g. water pollution and species extinction) will remain as long as the Earth and Time endure. It is too late even to talk of turning the ship around. A good number of watch-women and -men saw the iceberg clearly in the 70’s. Some detected it sooner. They sounded the alarm. Our captains responded by not only staying the course but accelerating. Now there are a few billion steerage-class passengers locked in the hold with icewater up to their nostrils, and there may not be enough lifeboats even for the more privileged folks on board.
It’s NOT easy being ‘green.’ “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”****** I’ve been paying attention to and gradually realizing and coming to terms with this ecological crisis stuff for over half of my thirty years. I’ve known what ‘sustainable development’ was and why it mattered since the mid-90’s when I was in high school. Still, living it, putting my money where my mouth is, will require skills I don’t have and sacrifices I am not prepared to make on my own. I need help—mentors, companions, followers, friends. Any successful ecosphere triage efforts will require widespread commitment to humility, wisdom, courage, imagination, hard work, good work, goodwill, interdependence, and radical departure from comfortable conventions, maybe more than our society is prepared to muster. We don’t know for sure how or whether it will work but we must try. We are beginning to see what will happen if we don’t.
Endnotes:
* As with any good false dichotomy, the notions of supply-side and demand-side are presented as opposites and the only two alternatives, ruling out the possibility of other paradigms compared to which the asserted either/or options look like different flavors of the same thing.
** Apologies to sensitive readers. According to theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, in some cases ‘bullshit’ is a technical term. In this case I believe I am actually putting the matter politely.
*** Remember the Enron scandal? Putting ‘hypothetical future value’ on the books as an asset and keeping such complicated ledgers that to the untrained (or mis-trained) eye everything adds up? Lay, Skilling, and friends can’t even pride themselves on originality in fraud. Their corporation just internalized what the whole rest of The Economy already does. (Remember the Enron scandal? Haven’t we learned anything?)
**** Sure people sometimes do horrible things for cruelty’s sake alone, but in general if you want to stay on the trail of blood, just follow the money. Some guy named Jesus said that, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Maybe he actually meant it.
***** Nowhere is it written that God loves North America more than (s)he loves any other continent. Anything that can happen anywhere can happen here.
****** The Princess Bride has an insightful if sometimes obnoxious remark for just about any occasion.
But does capitalism work? Really? If by ‘working’ one means serving the purposes it claims to serve and functioning without significant glitches, supporting evidence is questionable at best. Use your own eyes and brains, people. This fancy outfit may not be quite what the tailors promised.
EARTH-SIDE ECONOMICS
Principle #1: Demand does not cause supply. You can’t buy it if it isn’t there. This is obvious.
Principle #2: Supply does not cause demand. The advertising industry, mimetic desire (formation by imitation), and bodily appetites (healthy and otherwise) do that. ‘Growing’ demand requires cultivating consumer insecurity and dissatisfaction or encouraging helpless dependence on manufactured conveniences or counterfeits for the meeting of legitimate needs. This is deplorable.
Principle #3: Demand is not the same thing as need (or even want). Both need and want become ‘demand’ only when they have buying power (money or credit) to back them up. If you don't have buying power, you don't get to demand anything. And most consumers demand (read: buy) things they don’t need (and really, let’s be honest, often don’t want—how big is your storage space? when is the last time you used that?). Then they neglect to demand what they do need and want (‘demand’ requires putting your money where your mouth is—remember, in this system what you buy counts infinitely more than what you say). This is absurd.
Principle #4: Capitalism’s accounting theory is bullshit.** Economic ‘growth’ measures how fast money is changing hands. Nobody is adding what of any goodness or lasting value gets created or subtracting anything, however priceless and irreplaceable, that gets destroyed. This is insane.
Principle #5: The global financial system is a pyramid scheme.*** When the source (buy-in plus buying power) dries up, the siphon fails and whoever got sucked in during the final stages comes up empty. The people at the top get away with a fortune and the people at the bottom get screwed. This is a crime.
Principle #6: Everything comes from somewhere. Wealth is not so much ‘made’ as it is taken away from someplace, rearranged, and deposited someplace else. The trade of commodities allows for a small percentage of the world’s population to control and profit from distribution of the substances on which all current and future residents of the planet depend for sustenance. (The handful of corporations dominating the food system are not so much feeding the world as they are owning the world’s food supply. And now people are working on owning the water.) Whether there will be enough tomorrow is beside the point.**** What counts, as far as the ‘owners’ are concerned, is how much something can be sold for, now. Scarcity is good for business. The less there is to go around, the better to get away with price-gouging, my dear. This is: a) waste, b) theft, and c) murder.
Principle #7: Private ownership and ‘development’ of land (or private enterprise conducted on public land) is a temporary cause of a permanent problem. Our culture deems this a legal and even sacred ‘right.’ People are financially rewarded for drastically reducing the capacity of land to offer anything of value (monetary or otherwise) to future residents. Killing individual plants and animals is not the problem here; this is natural and necessary. The real violence is breaking the circle and making it a line, killing the systems that allow for the renewal of life. (Example: 100 years ago, Africa had plenty of topsoil, forests, and clean drinking water—wells, springs, lakes, and rivers. War, famine, and disease were sporadic smash-and-grab intruders, not a tyrannical occupying force, until European colonists and post-colonial ‘globalization’ got involved and raped the continent within an inch of its life.)***** This is genocide.
Principle #8: People are not rational. Or perhaps more accurately, human reason, being limited and corrupt, allows people to rationalize all sort of things that don’t make sense. What capitalism calls ‘self-interest’ may turn out to be merely greed. If self-interest includes such things as contentment and health, not to mention survival, greed-based economics are actually counterproductive to self-interest. This is irony.
Principle #9: Progress is a myth. In the name of ‘progress’ we have built a machine that is too complicated and powerful for humans to control, and now it is running away with us. Our collective presumptuous effort to beat nature and overcome mortality has succeeded only in setting us up to succumb violently to the inexorable requirements of both. Our strength is our weakness. Our greatness is our downfall. This is tragedy.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
Economic ‘growth’ as traditionally understood is incompatible with the health and stability of the ecosphere (i.e., the planet-wide physiology in which all biological, chemical, geological, and atmospheric systems are connected). Pursuit of the former at the expense of the latter is the ultimate example of what behavioral psychologists call ‘the error of escalating commitment’: redoubling one’s efforts at any endeavor to prove that it was never a bad idea in the first place. Humans do not have the luxury of naming the terms or the schedule on which we respond to the ecological crisis. We will learn to cooperate with the conditions for the health and survival of the systems on which we depend, or we will not survive.
The ‘health’ of the present financial system is a function of how fast the military-industrial-agribusiness-pharmaceutical-insurance-real/estate complex is running; ‘growth’ (read: running faster than it was running the previous quarter) inevitably worsens the illness and hastens the death of the planet. The Economy as we know it will stop one way or another. It remains for us to determine what sort of communities (people, relationships, and economic arrangements) will be in place when it does. The sooner we move to make substantive changes towards sustainable infrastructure, the more slowly non-renewable resources will dwindle and the more time we have to further adjust.
It would be delusionally optimistic to pretend that we can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again as if none of this had ever happened; there are deep scars that will fade only after millennia of geological activity, and some consequences (e.g. water pollution and species extinction) will remain as long as the Earth and Time endure. It is too late even to talk of turning the ship around. A good number of watch-women and -men saw the iceberg clearly in the 70’s. Some detected it sooner. They sounded the alarm. Our captains responded by not only staying the course but accelerating. Now there are a few billion steerage-class passengers locked in the hold with icewater up to their nostrils, and there may not be enough lifeboats even for the more privileged folks on board.
It’s NOT easy being ‘green.’ “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”****** I’ve been paying attention to and gradually realizing and coming to terms with this ecological crisis stuff for over half of my thirty years. I’ve known what ‘sustainable development’ was and why it mattered since the mid-90’s when I was in high school. Still, living it, putting my money where my mouth is, will require skills I don’t have and sacrifices I am not prepared to make on my own. I need help—mentors, companions, followers, friends. Any successful ecosphere triage efforts will require widespread commitment to humility, wisdom, courage, imagination, hard work, good work, goodwill, interdependence, and radical departure from comfortable conventions, maybe more than our society is prepared to muster. We don’t know for sure how or whether it will work but we must try. We are beginning to see what will happen if we don’t.
Endnotes:
* As with any good false dichotomy, the notions of supply-side and demand-side are presented as opposites and the only two alternatives, ruling out the possibility of other paradigms compared to which the asserted either/or options look like different flavors of the same thing.
** Apologies to sensitive readers. According to theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, in some cases ‘bullshit’ is a technical term. In this case I believe I am actually putting the matter politely.
*** Remember the Enron scandal? Putting ‘hypothetical future value’ on the books as an asset and keeping such complicated ledgers that to the untrained (or mis-trained) eye everything adds up? Lay, Skilling, and friends can’t even pride themselves on originality in fraud. Their corporation just internalized what the whole rest of The Economy already does. (Remember the Enron scandal? Haven’t we learned anything?)
**** Sure people sometimes do horrible things for cruelty’s sake alone, but in general if you want to stay on the trail of blood, just follow the money. Some guy named Jesus said that, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Maybe he actually meant it.
***** Nowhere is it written that God loves North America more than (s)he loves any other continent. Anything that can happen anywhere can happen here.
****** The Princess Bride has an insightful if sometimes obnoxious remark for just about any occasion.
posted by Ingrid at 3:01 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks. Principle 3 strikes me as a (the?) dealbreaker in the system. For some reason your wording struck me significantly. It's a supply and demand system, not a supply and need system. Big frickin' difference.
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