{"id":3469498,"date":"2017-11-30T12:38:05","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T12:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3469498"},"modified":"2021-07-06T17:03:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T17:03:01","slug":"gdp-jobs-and-fossil-largesse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2017-11-30\/gdp-jobs-and-fossil-largesse\/","title":{"rendered":"GDP, Jobs, and Fossil Largesse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Working drafts copyright \u00a92010-2017 NJ Hagens & DJ White, EarthTrust<\/em><\/p>\n

Ecological economist Nate Hagens and earth-advocate DJ White (of Earthtrust.org) are collaborating on a synthesis paradigm to inform and engage on the converging crises of\u00a0\u201cpeak everything\u201d, with a working project title Bottleneck Foundation. The\u00a0\u201cremedial reality\u201d part of the paradigm has been taught by Nate for the last 3 years as an honors\u2019 college course at the University of Minnesota, “Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament’ . The essay below is an excerpt of what is becoming a large (~1,000 pages) body of work, with an objective to be an educational platform for college students worldwide. When finished, it will be paired with a next-phase set of materials – code name R201 – on how to use this knowledge to more effectively achieve change in the human world.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"First, some review of relevant points from earlier in semester:<\/p>\n

BASIC<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Fossil carbon compounds are incredibly energy dense, as their formation and processing was done by geologic forces over deep time. One barrel of oil contains about 1700 kWh of work potential.46<\/sup> Compared to an average human work day where 0.6kWh is generated, one barrel of oil, currently costing under than $50 to global citizens, contains about 10.5 years of human labor equivalence (4.5 years after conversion losses).47<\/sup> <\/em><\/li>\n
  2. As such, these \u2018fossil slaves\u2019 are thousands of times cheaper than human labor. Applying large amounts of these \u2018workers\u2019 to tasks humans used to do manually or with animals has generated a gargantuan invisible labor force subsidizing humanity \u2013 building the scale and complexity of our industry, complexity, population, wages, profits, etc. <\/em><\/li>\n
  3. GDP – what nations aspire to – is a measure of finished goods and services generated in an economy. It is strongly correlated with energy use, and given that almost 90% of our primary energy use is fossil fuels, with their combustion.48<\/sup> ‘Burning stuff’ (measuring how much primary energy is consumed) is a reasonable first approximation for GDP globally. <\/em><\/li>\n
  4. Outside of nuclear and hydro, ~99.5% of \u2018labor\u2019 in human economies is done by oil, coal and natural gas (measured by joules of output). Due to this cheap embodied labor residing in fossil carbon compounds, the average human being in 2016 enjoys 14x the goods and services as the average human being in the year 1800. (the average American=> 49x).<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. Regionally and nationally this relationship can decouple if the \u2018heavy lifting\u2019 of industrialization is done elsewhere, and the goods (and embodied energy) imported. (e.g. China). The relationship between global<\/u> energy use (which is ~87% fossil fuel based) and GDP remains tightly linked.49<\/sup> <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ADVANCED<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The common political mantra that higher GDP creates social benefits by lifting all boats has become suspect since the 2008 recession and \u2018recovery.\u2019 For the first time in the history of the USA, we now have more bartenders and waitresses than manufacturing jobs.50<\/sup> In order to maximize dollar profits, it often makes more sense for corporations to mechanize and hire \u2018fossil slaves\u2019 than to hire \u2018real workers.\u2019 Real income peaked in the USA around 1970 for the bottom 50% of wage earners.51<\/sup> <\/em><\/li>\n
    2. GDP only measures the ‘goods’ and doesn\u2019t measure the ‘bads’ (externalities, social malaise, extinctions, pollution). Actually, natural disasters like oil spills and hurricanes are ostensibly great for GDP** because we have to build and burn more stuff to replace the damaged areas. (**Note, only to a point \u2013 once a country \u2013 e.g. Haiti or the Philippines – cannot afford to replace what was lost, then natural disasters become a sharp negative to GDP as infrastructure underpinning future GDP is lost and can\u2019t be rebuilt) <\/em><\/li>\n
    3. On an \u2018empty planet,\u2019 pursuing GDP in order to gainfully employ people (and distribute money so they could buy needs and wants) seemed to make sense. However, on an ecologically full planet pursuing GDP with no other long-term plan is using up precious natural capital stocks just to maintain momentum and provide people brain-pleasing neurotransmitters. <\/em><\/li>\n
    4. There are numerous alternative measures to GDP that incorporate well-being and happiness and subtract environmental ills. But it won\u2019t be easy to switch objectives from GDP to e.g. G.P.I. (Genuine Progress or Happiness) because the present creditors will expect to be paid back in real GDP ($) rather than happiness certificates. Still, over time, strict metrics of success based on consumption alone are likely to change. <\/em><\/li>\n
    5. There will likely be a growing disparity between \u2018jobs\u2019 (occupations that provide income and contribute to the global human heat engine) and \u2018work\u2019 (those tasks that need to be accomplished by individuals and society to procure and maintain basic needs). However, at 2016 USA wage rates, moving from $20 per barrel (the long-run average cost for oil), to $150 per barrel, the army of energy slaves declines from 22,000 per barrel to under 3,000 \u2013 meaning the economy shrinks and therefore much more work needs to be accomplished via efficiency improvements, real humans, or making do with less. <\/em><\/li>\n
    6. Our institutions and financial systems are based on expectations of continued GDP growth perpetually into the future. Current OECD (2015) forecasts are for more than a tripling of the physical size of the world economy by 2050. No serious government or institution entity forecasts the end of growth this century (at least not publicly). <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Okay. Let\u2019s unpack all of this a bit.<\/p>\n

      Often in the news today, you’ll hear people talking about job growth and job creation like it’s a good thing. Everybody wants a good job, right? The more jobs we have to do, the better off we are!<\/p>\n

      Yet if you kick open an anthill or a beehive, the insects will not be grateful for the sudden boost in job creation, and they will effectively utilize the cross-species language of biting and stinging to inform you of this opinion.\u00a0 From this we may infer that insects don’t understand economics<\/p>\n

      Alternately, it could it be that ants – having honed their behaviors for 130 million years and having attained a total biomass we have only recently (and temporarily) matched – might be in tune with some deep realities about jobs, energy, and the embodied cost of building complexity.<\/p>\n

      Since this is Reality 101, let\u2019s ask some basic questions. What ARE jobs, really? How do they relate to energy and wealth? How do we keep track of whether we\u2019re richer or poorer? We all kinda feel like we know. And (as a general rule) whenever \u201cwe kinda feel that we know<\/em>\u201d is the case, we should probably take a closer look.<\/p>\n

      To do so, we\u2019ll first need to add a few things to our story about ants. We need to revisit our invisible energy slaves, discover what \u201cfreaks out\u201d capuchin monkeys, and think about what wealth actually is.<\/p>\n

      Energy Slaves again<\/strong><\/p>\n

      As you recall – and as we\u2019ll discuss in greater detail as the course goes on – every American has over 250 invisible energy slaves working 24\/7 for them. (52<\/sup> That is, the labor equivalent<\/em> of 250 human workers, 24\/7, every day of the year, mostly derived from burning fossil carbon and hydrocarbons (60 barrel of oil equivalents of oil, coal and natural gas, X 4.5 years of human labor energy output in each). \u00a0Every American thus has a veritable army of invisible servants, which is why even those below the official poverty line live, for the most part, lives far more comfortable and lavish with respect to energy and stuff than kings and queens of old (but obviously not as high in social status). Being long dead and pulled from the ground – and thus a bit zombie-esque – these energy slaves don\u2019t complain, don\u2019t sleep, and don\u2019t need to be fed. However, as we are increasingly learning, they do inhale, exhale, and leave behind waste. Since they\u2019re invisible, we don\u2019t think about these fossil helpers any more than we think about nitrogen (which happens to be 78% of what we breathe in, but hey, it\u2019s just \u201cthere\u201d, so why think about it?) Same with our 250 energy helpers. The extent we think about them is when we fill up at the pump or pay our electric bill \u2013 and then only as an outlay of our limited dollars.<\/p>\n

      We use the \u201cslave\u201d metaphor because it\u2019s really a very good one, despite its pejorative label. Energy slaves do exactly the sort of things that human slaves and domestic animals previously did: things that fulfilled their masters\u2019 needs and whims. And they do them faster. And cheaper. Indeed, it probably wasn\u2019t a big coincidence that the world (and the USA) got around to freeing most of its human slaves only once industrialization started offering cheaper carbon labor replacements.<\/p>\n

      The things we value are created with a combination of human and energy-slave work combined with natural capital (minerals and ores, soils and forests, etc.). There are huge amounts of embedded energy in the creation and operation of something like an iPad and the infrastructure which makes it work. When we tap our screen to view a kittycat picture, the image is pulled from a furiously spinning hard drive which may be halfway around the planet, propelled by some fossil slaves, and routed through data centers which are likewise fueled. The internet uses over a tenth of the world\u2019s electricity – that\u2019s a lot of energy slaves.53<\/sup> The infrastructure itself has taken decades to build, and requires constantly increasing energy to maintain. But we don\u2019t think much about that either.<\/p>\n

      So the internet is infrastructure we have invested energy in, just like a built anthill has been invested in with ant labor. If the internet (or an anthill) was destroyed and needed to be rebuilt, that situation would certainly create jobs. But it would also require a lot of energy, raw materials and work.\u00a0 Ants don\u2019t have energy slaves, so they don\u2019t want more work to do<\/em>. They are dealing with finite energy inputs in their ecosystem. If more energy (ant-labor) is devoted to rebuilding the anthill, less energy is then left to care for the larvae, forage for food, and defend the hive.<\/p>\n

      Energy slaves don\u2019t care either way about job creation. (Being zombies and all). But why do we?<\/p>\n

      Everybody wants a good job.<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Remember this, because it\u2019ll come up again and again in Reality101: evolution works with what it\u2019s got. It\u2019s a stepwise process, and each step is based on what was available in the step before. This is true both for biological and social evolution. That\u2019s why there are no animals on the Serengeti with wheels: there\u2019s no viable path to evolve wheels from feet, because even if there was a way of designing animals that had wheels, there are no viable intermediate stages. Hold that thought\u2026<\/p>\n

      Now in times past, a human\u2019s career, their societal function, was largely about their own individual labor and skills. A blacksmith worked with metal. A cooper made barrels. A shoemaker made shoes. Others made furniture, cloth, or other valuable commodities. Farmers created food. Preachers preached. Others did simpler labor like digging ditches or cutting down trees. The relative value of their labor was roughly set by how much other humans valued the end product of such labor, so a skilled blacksmith might be able to trade his services for more status and better accommodations than a ditch digger. Thus, it became an integral part of human culture that the products of some work were considered more valuable than others. It became a mark of social status and pride to have such a career. Hold that thought too, we\u2019ll be coming right back to it.<\/p>\n

      Cue the Screaming Monkeys. <\/strong><\/p>\n

      \u201cEqual Pay for Equal Work\u201d is currently the slogan for those opposed to sexual discrimination, which is usually characterized by women getting paid less than men. And it\u2019s a sentiment which has deep roots in the ape and even simian mind.<\/p>\n

      If you give capuchin monkeys the \u201cjob\u201d of doing a nonsense task in exchange for a reward, they will happily do it all day long as long as they keep getting a reward – cucumber slices. But if a capuchin sees the monkey in the next cage get a (better tasting so higher value) grape while it still gets a cucumber slice, it\u2019ll go ape, throwing the cucumber slice in the face of the experimenter in a rage. It gets the same cucumber slice it has been happy to work for before, but it no longer wants it<\/em>, because it no longer feels fair in comparison to its cage mate\u2019s effort and reward. Instead, it wants the experimenter and the other monkey to be punished for this inequity (we watched this video<\/a> of Frans deWaals experiment in class).54<\/sup><\/p>\n

      Think for a moment how central this monkey reaction is to the human world around you. <\/em>We\u2019ll come back to it later in the course, and will refer to the term \u201ccapuchin fairness\u201d because a similar mechanism turns out to be behind a great deal of human behavior. We\u2019re outraged at the notion of somebody getting more reward than we do for doing the same thing. Indeed, many large-scale human institutions now stress perceived fairness of process<\/em> over quality of end results<\/em>. (A prominent example might be the US Congress). <\/em>Moreover, this monkey-business also reiterates the concept of relative wealth being more important to a monkey mind (and a human mind, it turns out) than absolute wealth, which is kind of nuts, but that\u2019s monkeys for you.<\/p>\n

      It turns out that our brains are simultaneously trying to optimize two different, and somewhat incompatible pursuits, both of which have deep evolutionary roots in our social species. One is energy gathering and wealth creation: <\/em>obtaining food, procuring clothing and shelter \u2013 basically optimal foraging theory applied to the human biological organism. The other is equitable social distribution<\/em> and transparency of process. A tribe of hunter-gatherers needed to cooperate as a mini super-organism to get food and defend territory and stand together against competitors. But within the tribe<\/em>, an individual\u2019s success depended on it getting a reasonable share of what the tribe had. We\u2019re descended from tribe-members who insisted on at least<\/em> their fair share, as is every living capuchin, so it\u2019s not surprising it\u2019s such a strong feeling. But when both of these instincts are operating simultaneously, in an era where our species happened upon a buried treasure of fossil pixie dust, some interesting practices emerged\u2026<\/p>\n

      Ok. Ants. Monkeys. Energy Slaves. So where did \u201cjobs\u201d come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

      A funny thing happened on the way to the Anthropocene. To an ever-increasing degree over the last two centuries, wealth has been created more by fossil slaves than by human labor, significantly more – and it\u2019s at its all-time peak about now. (you\u2019ll have the information to derive this yourself by the end of this course).<\/em><\/p>\n

      If you don\u2019t believe that, try hiring a bunch of people to push you and your SUV around hundreds of miles per week with their own muscles and see what it costs you, and then see how little it costs you to buy the same work in a tank of gasoline. In fact, the vast majority of the tasks and stuff that used to be done by human labor is now done by fossil slaves and the infrastructure they have enabled. The slaves have also made shipping nearly free, so any actual human labor we need can also be hired in the cheapest places on earth (under essentially slave labor conditions), and shipped to us by planes, trains, ships and trucks for next to nothing. So rather than buying furniture from local artisans, we make local firms compete with furniture made halfway across the world which is cheaply shipped to a local store. To a good first approximation, the USA doesn\u2019t make anything anymore (well, movies\u2026).<\/p>\n

      We have amassed a huge amount of wealth, even if much of it is dumb stuff like plastic toys and salad shooters and things that quickly break. There are so many things we think we want, so we get them. We eat salads with fresh veggies which may be grown 5000 miles away and air-flown to our stores by energy slaves running the planes, refrigerators, trucks, and stores. The average dinner travels over 1400 miles to get to your plate in USA.55<\/sup><\/p>\n

      We increasingly buy disposable everything – used once and tossed away. Most everything is short-life these days; when your authors were young if you bought a fan, you expected it to last 20+ years. Now if it lasts 2-3 before you toss it, that\u2019s about par for the course. Planned obsolescence exists because it\u2019s \u201cgood for GDP.\u201d A new dishwasher now lasts 6-8 years when it used to last 12-16, because they now have integrated cheaper<\/span> electronics that fail. Our GDP has become tethered to rapid product-replacement cycles keyed to our short attention spans and our enjoyment at buying new things. This creates \u201cjobs\u201d for car salesmen, advertising executives, etc., but has tilted the scales in favor of \u201cuseless GDP\u201d rather than real societal utility. We know how to make things with high quality that last, but due to time bias and the financialization of the human experience, such an objective is relatively unimportant in our current culture. Many people get a new phone every 18 months with their cell plan, and perfectly functional ones wind up in the landfills.<\/p>\n

      But how should we distribute the largesse of the energy slaves? Does everyone get equal shares? Do we take the total number of dollars (which is the way we count such things) created by energy-slave work and divide them equally among the population?<\/p>\n

      Heavens no. We haven\u2019t yet even acknowledged that the energy slaves are responsible.<\/p>\n

      Rather, with a bit of help from opportunism, social evolution co-opted the pre-existing \u201cwork for pay\u201d concept into an uneven distribution system that \u201cfelt\u201d fair.<\/em><\/p>\n

      These days there are a lot of jobs in the USA, which keep us very busy not making much of anything of long term value. We do advertising, hairstyling, consulting, writing, and a lot of supervising of the things our fossil slaves do. We don\u2019t care all that much what we\u2019re doing as long as we feel we\u2019re getting paid at least as well for the same task as the other capuchins \u2013 er… people – around us, and that with our compensation we can buy things that give us pleasing brain-reward experiences. These days in this culture, a \u201cgood job\u201d is defined by how much it pays, not by what it accomplishes. Many people would consider it an optimum situation, a great job, to sit in a room for 40 hours per week and make $100,000 per year, just pulling a lever the way a capuchin does for a cucumber slice. You know they would (would you? Think about it. Now think about how that compares to the career you\u2019re currently planning).<\/em><\/p>\n

      And that\u2019s where the perceived equality is: the<\/em> equality of inconvenience<\/em>. The 40-hour work week is a social threshold of inconvenience endured, <\/em>which is now what we keep primary social track of rather than the productive output of a person\u2019s activity. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes predicted that wealth would increase 600% in the next century (which is only 15 years away) and because of this wealth, people would only need to work 15 hours per week.56<\/sup> He was right about our wealth increase, but paradoxically, we are working longer hours than ever!\u00a0 Because socially, everyone who isn\u2019t a criminal is supposed to have a job and endure roughly equivalent inconvenience. Any segment of society which went to a 15-hour work week would be treated as mooching freeloaders, and be pelted by cucumber slices and worse.<\/p>\n

      In a society in which we\u2019re all basically idle royalty being catered to by fossil slaves, why do we place such a value on \u201cjobs\u201d? Well, partly because it\u2019s how the allocation mechanism evolved, but there also exists considerable resentment against those who don\u2019t work. Think of the vitriol with which people talk about \u201cfreeloaders\u201d on society who don\u2019t work a 40-hour week and who take food stamps. The fact is, that most of us are freeloaders when it comes down to it, but if we endure 40 hours of inconvenience per week, we meet the social criteria of having earned our banana pellets even if what we\u2019re doing is stupid and useless, and realized<\/em> to be stupid and useless. <\/em>Indeed, a job that\u2019s stupid and useless but pays a lot is highly prized.<\/p>\n

      So \u201cjobs\u201d per se aren\u2019t intrinsically useful at all, which is why ants don\u2019t want more of them. They\u2019re mostly a co-opted, socially-evolved mechanism for wealth distribution and are very little about societal wealth creation. And they function to keep us busy and distract us from huge wealth disparity. We\u2019re too busy making sure our co-workers don\u2019t get grapes to do something as radical as call out and lynch the bankers. Keeping a population distracted may well be necessary to hold a modern nation together.<\/p>\n

      And since most of our wealth comes from invisible, mute slaves we don\u2019t even think about, it isn\u2019t clear to us that what we\u2019re actually doing in current economies is distributing the wealth they create. That means we can now have wild disparities in pay, as long as it \u201cfeels like\u201d others are doing something qualitatively different. The amount paid to a wall street vice president is hugely greater than that paid to a college professor, which in turn is greater than that paid to an environmental campaigner. This has pretty much nothing to do with the relative worth of each function to society, and everything to do with how well-connected such jobs are to the flow of energy-slave-created wealth. Yet if higher pay is received by someone in another \u201ctribe\u201d who we don\u2019t directly interact with, we don\u2019t feel the urge to scream and throw our paycheck. We just wish we had a \u201cbetter\u201d job.<\/p>\n

      If we reflect on the possibility that we have en-masse simply accepted the premise that the job is somehow paid what it\u2019s worth, we arrive at some disturbing conclusions. Is a teacher, farmer, or fireman really of less value to society than a real-estate flipper? The amounts paid for jobs have been allowed to float freely, detached from actual societal value as the degree of political connectedness of those with such jobs varies.\u00a0 The vast majority of our wealth comes from primary natural capital in tandem with fossil slaves and from the fruit of empire; jobs are mostly an ad-hoc mechanism for distributing this wealth unequally in a way which effectively conveys the illusion of egalitarian process.<\/p>\n

      For now, are most of us just idle princes and princesses in a fossil-slave kingdom, none of us really at huge risk, and mostly doing things which have little net value? And what happens when our fossil slaves grow wings and fly away into the atmosphere? What will the princes and princesses do then.<\/p>\n

      That\u2019s just Gross.<\/strong><\/p>\n

      This leads us to the story of how we keep track of our wealth and productivity and success. How DO we keep track of that collective wealth anyways?<\/p>\n

      Well for real <\/em>wealth, mostly we don\u2019t. The value of a healthy ecosystem, clean air, seas full of fish, fresh drinkable water\u2026 love, joy, happiness and fulfillment\u2026 all these things our market system considers to be of essentially zero value. Armadillos, dolphins, hummingbirds, rainforests\u2026 you get the idea<\/p>\n

      But our economists have a metric called \u201cgross domestic product\u201d GDP which is what our society uses to roughly keep track of our \u2018success\u2019. It represents the dollar value of all finished<\/em> goods and services produced in a time period (typically, a year) within a nation\u2019s borders. Since that other stuff- you know, the natural world- doesn\u2019t consist of finished goods and services, it isn\u2019t counted (now if you kill the hummingbirds and make them into ornaments for hats, or turn armadillos into ashtrays, they then can be added to GDP because they\u2019re now products which are \u201cfinished\u201d!).<\/p>\n

      The fact that parts of the environment which have been \u201cfinished\u201d are considered more valuable than parts which are \u201cunfinished\u201d is one way in which GDP sets a fairly screwy default value in our current world. It\u2019s a tacit societal value system: anything without a transacted money value isn\u2019t part of GDP. So a nation which chops down all its trees to sell to another country for firewood has a better GDP than one which leaves its trees standing. It\u2019s a funny way to figure wealth, but it\u2019s what we\u2019ve got. And oh, by the way, we\u2019re betting everything on it.<\/p>\n

      GDP is based on money transaction (money is, roughly speaking, a claim on future energy), and since most current wealth is created by our fossil energy slaves, GDP is directly tied to the energy burned by society. Indeed, it has recently been shown that GDP is tied to fossil fuel energy, and thus CO2, in a way which may be described very simply by treating human society as essentially a giant heat engine. In other words, a very simple model which treats human civilization as an essentially mindless consumptive system – a thermodynamic amoeba in search of energy – suffices to match the GDP with the quantity of energy burned.<\/p>\n

      And over the last 100 years, our burning of energy, and thus our world GDP, has gone through the roof. The number of dollars representing the wealth created from the burning has also increased, and exponentially so in the last 50 years, and since the 2008 crisis, even faster.<\/p>\n

      It may be reasonable to reflect that during this same period, sometimes called The Great Acceleration, the planet has been largely laid to waste, a mass extinction has accelerated, the seas have been depopulated of most fish, and the systems which sustain large complex life on earth have been progressively compromised. Yet we continue to grow the scale of the heat engine to accomplish the primary objective of the modern human economy: to <\/em>maximize dollars and jobs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

      Bear in mind that what we\u2019re doing – if we get right down to it – is converting trillions of watts of fossil-slave energy into a few watts of pleasing stimulation inside our brains. (alternately: tiny amounts of brain-reward chemicals) And the side-effect of this process is all around us. Mountains of waste, acidified oceans, altered climates, pollution, mass extinctions, and mischief. Here we use \u201cmischief\u201d as the general term for things humans do en-route to pleasing themselves, which may include building racetracks, using disposable diapers, making wastebaskets out of elephant feet, overbuilding fishing fleets, throwing out our electronics every two years to replace them with new ones, etc. It doesn\u2019t \u201cfeel like\u201d waste at the time. But if you ask someone in 200 years what percent of fossil magic was wasted, they will likely say \u201call of it,\u201d because not much useful fossil fuel (or anything previously built with it) will likely remain.<\/p>\n

      The ubiquity of fossil slavery during our lifetimes has caused us to conflate wants and needs. Most of what we \u201cfeel like\u201d we need these days is nothing we evolved to need. Consumerism is driven largely by social competitiveness. Most capuchins \u2013 er\u2026, people – find it more important to have a bigger house than their neighbors, than to have an even bigger house in a neighborhood where it\u2019s the smallest one. Relative wealth – it\u2019s not just for monkeys (we and the monkeys like fairness, but it feels more fair<\/em> if we\u2019ve got stuff at least as good<\/em> as the people we interact with).<\/p>\n

      And this signaling of status is important socially and sexually. A lot of the things we feel we need are just for show.<\/p>\n

      And do you remember the \u201chedonic ratchet\u201d effect from earlier discussions on bias, heuristics, fallacies and delusion? To get the same mental stimulation we got yesterday, we require the expectations of ever-increasing reward. That means more money and more energy slaves. Or at least the expectation of same.<\/p>\n

      Happiness\u00a0 is not correlated with wealth<\/em> beyond having the basics of life covered. Most of the things which actually make us happy, joyful, and fulfilled are in our virtual mental worlds, and not in the physical world at all. A Filipino may have only a small percent of the number of energy slaves as an American, but be every bit as happy, and surveys have shown that to be true.57<\/sup> It\u2019s quite possible to be \u201cpoor\u201d and happy. Equally, it\u2019s quite possible to be rich and miserable. Our brains are even primed for it, seemingly.<\/p>\n

      So where does this leave us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Well, you already know that our amoeba-like heat-engine of an economy is wrecking the earth, acidifying the seas, melting the polar caps, causing what could become the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, and throwing our future into doubt.<\/p>\n

      But at least we have our good ol\u2019 energy slaves to continue creating GDP. Right?<\/p>\n

      Well\u2026<\/p>\n

      Thing is, the energy slaves will soon be going away forever. In the last 30 years we\u2019ve burned a third of all fossil energy that has been used since it was discovered thousands of years ago.58<\/sup> Since your authors have been alive, humans have used more energy than in the entire 300,000 year history of homo sapiens.59<\/sup> We are just now passing through the all-time peak of liquid hydrocarbon availability, which is the chief driver of our economies due to its special attributes.<\/p>\n

      Each year, basically from now on, most of us will have fewer fossil energy slaves marching behind us. You\u2019d think this wouldn\u2019t make much difference, right? Since they\u2019re invisible anyhow? But in fact it\u2019ll make a great deal of difference, because we\u2019re heading back into times \u2013 either gradually or suddenly, but inexorably – in which human labor makes up an increasing percentage of the total energy we have available. One day human (and perhaps animal) labor will again be the majority of the work done in human societies \u2013 just like it is in an anthill.<\/p>\n

      And this will happen in the context of a more used-up natural world. Rather than being able to catch dinner by throwing a hook in the nearby ocean, the nearest healthy schools of fish may be ten thousand miles away in Antarctica, and hard to get to without dirt-cheap energy slaves to make giant refrigerated ships to pursue and move them around for us. The copper mines will be mostly used up. The inorganic phosphate deposits we used to make fertilizer, mostly gone. And so on.<\/p>\n

      Or rather than \u201cgone,\u201d let\u2019s use the more accurate term energetically remote.<\/em> That is, there will still be loads of \u201cstuff\u201d underground, but it won\u2019t be the very pure ores of yesteryear. It\u2019ll be stuff that requires digging up a huge amount of rock for a tiny amount of whatever we\u2019re after. Because (remember the Easter candy story) we always use the best stuff first. Yet we\u2019ll be going after worse and worse ore with fewer and fewer slaves.\u00a0 And the heavy breathing of the fossil slaves will have pulled our seas and climate back towards conditions in which they were born – a hellish primordial world of toxicity.<\/p>\n

      This all raises the question – or at least should – of whether it might not be a good idea to set the fossil slaves free and let them rest, since they\u2019re going away soon anyhow<\/em> and when they do we will really need a livable planet.<\/em> They don\u2019t need jobs, and we don\u2019t need dollars for happiness. Yet this flies in the face of capuchin entitlement and evolved mechanisms for brain reward, which \u2013 in effect – take our current societal arrangements for granted. As our fossil slaves eventually retire \u2013 childless \u2013we might have to rediscover the difference between jobs and work, just like the ants.<\/p>\n

      On GDP, Stone Heads and Babies<\/h3>\n

       <\/p>\n

      \u201cCan you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?\u201d <\/em>Al Bartlett<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      So other than using up non-renewable resources and degrading the natural world, what other consequences can there be when maximizing GDP is our plan for the future?<\/p>\n

      Well, for one thing, it can lead us to really screwy societal choices.<\/p>\n

      For instance in the infamous Easter island culture, there was an organizing belief in belief<\/em> that all food, resources, and other good things came from their dead ancestors, and that the way to make your dead ancestors happy was to build giant statues for them. This was actually not that different an organizing concept from GDP, in that both exhibit a near-hallucinatory level of disconnect from physical reality and ecology.<\/p>\n

      As ecological changes on Easter island worsened due to rats cutting into food supplies, it \u201cmade sense\u201d to vastly ramp up the production of giant stone statues, making them ever-bigger (and hence presumably more pleasing to the dead ancestors… \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d, perhaps…). This was a colossal undertaking for a stone-age people using human muscle power, and required a lot of wood for rollers and leverage. So they cut the trees down, which caused erosion to begin washing away their productive farmland.<\/p>\n

      The worse things got, the harder they worked making stone giants. The final generation of stone giants never left the quarries – they were too big to move. As a part of this process, eventually the last large tree was cut down, which made sense based on their organizing beliefs, but was in retrospect not a good plan. It not only meant their fertile soil washed away, but meant they could no longer make boats to go fishing. So they starved, fought, and suffered a lot as their populations crashed.<\/p>\n

      For the Easter Islanders, erecting these stone monuments was an example of \u201cjobs\u201d masquerading as \u201cwork\u201d – basically tasks done for social-obligation reasons that did not provide actual biological or group-fitness benefits.\u00a0 (do you think there may be modern-day equivalents?) <\/em><\/p>\n

      Today it\u2019s easy to joke about these islanders and their \u201cgiant stone heads\u201d as a high point in the history of human doofus-ness. Yet our adherence to GDP is a similarly skewed metric, equally detached from the realities of ecology, from human happiness, and from the potential for future generations with decent life quality. On a much larger scale, we too are eroding farm land (which these days is largely a dead medium used to hold the seeds in place and receive industrially-produced fertilizer and pesticides), destroying the ability to get fish (by wiping out fisheries), and, because of our numbers, mucking things up to a degree the Easter Islanders never reached.<\/p>\n

      We\u2019ve already mentioned that – due to being blind to the energy slaves who do nearly everything for us – we now tend to conflate \u201cjobs\u201d with \u201cwork\u201d, where \u201cjobs\u201d are just a social distribution mechanism for energy-slave largesse – an entitlement entwined with social status – and \u201cwork\u201d is what is necessary to temporarily improves an individual, tribe, nation, or species\u2019 circumstances.<\/p>\n

      We\u2019ve also noted that we have folded \u201cplanned obsolescence\u201d into most built consumer devices, so they break more quickly and require replacement, tuning their life-cycle to human whims and brain rewards rather than to real utility. Mostly we don\u2019t really even want or expect gadgets to last as long as they used to; as long as we can afford it, we want the newer, cooler, stuff. And advertising helps keep our culture primed for it.<\/p>\n

      The fact is, we have designed a social system that requires growth. Money \u2013really a claim on future energy and resources \u2013 comes into existence irrespective of whether such future energy and resources will be available. Each year we need growth in a household\/city\/state\/nation\/world to service and pay off monetary loans that were created previously. No serious government or institutional body has plans for anything other than continued growth into the future. Growth requires resource access and affordability but starts first with population.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      So, right as our energy slaves are about to start going away forever, leaving 7-10 billion humans without the things they have come to take for granted, our nations have decided the answer is to make more babies<\/em>! Yep, to raise GDP you need more demand<\/em> for toys, diapers, teachers, etc\u2026 more jobs, because more jobs means more transactions which means more GDP! More GDP means \u201cgrowth\u201d so growth is good! China has just reversed its 1-child policy, which prevented massive starvations and slowed the horrendous assault on China\u2019s environment.60<\/sup> Many other nations, such as Japan, Germany, and Sweden, are now offering bonuses for getting pregnant. In Denmark advertising firms are encouraging couples to have more babies for the good of the economy via sexy commercials<\/a>.<\/a>61<\/sup><\/p>\n

      Paradoxically, as traditional drivers of GDP growth \u2013 development of virgin land, credit expansion, low cost fossil fuels, and groundbreaking innovation- wane in their impact, there may be renewed incentives proposed not to shrink our population as ecology would advise, but instead to grow it! Currently we are having (as a species) over 120 million babies per year.62<\/sup> This works out to over 335,000 human babies born every day \u2013 compared to a total extant population of all the other Great Apes (bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas) of about ~200,000!63<\/sup> Since \u2018demand\u201d is considered a quasi-magical force in current economic theory, babies are considered to be good for business (yet children brought into the world now for GDP reasons will face some real challenges in their lives. Nate and DJ decided not to do that for a host of reasons).<\/em><\/p>\n

      China is building massive empty cities now.64<\/sup> No kidding. Cities with nobody in them, ready to be moved into by the bonus babies to grow GDP. That\u2019s edging perilously close to building giant stone heads.<\/p>\n

      When you get right down to Reality101 and the intermediate human future, this is actually worse<\/em> than building giant stone heads, because stone heads don\u2019t suffer, reproduce, or require further degradation of the ecology to provide for. In many real ways, the world and human species would be far better off if we immediately moved from GDP to \u201cgiant stone heads\u201d as a metric for success (and say, doesn\u2019t that imply to you that we might even do better<\/em> than giant stone heads, if we put our minds to it?).<\/p>\n

      GDP sets a money value on everything in the natural world and in human experience, and the most important things are currently valued at or near \u201czero.\u201d\u00a0 Yet as we\u2019ve seen, GDP is currently tied to the work of fossil slaves, who will be gradually flying away. There\u2019s no way, even in principle, for \u201cgrowth\u201d such as we\u2019ve recently seen to continue indefinitely, and considerable data points to it ending quite soon. GDP will begin a long decline because it\u2019s tied to finite realities in the physical world.<\/p>\n

      The good news, of course, is that GDP is an insane metric for success, just as \u201cgiant stone heads\u201d was (though to give the Easter islanders their just due, at the time they had no evidence their belief was nuts, while in 2016 we have demonstrable proof that the conclusions of neoclassical economics are refuted by basic science).<\/em> If we decide that we value happiness, quality of life, and a healthy planet with uncounted thousands of human generations left, we could in principle jettison GDP and do things differently.<\/p>\n

      It won\u2019t be easy, only necessary. It\u2019ll be easier to fail than succeed, for the societal inertia of a raging amoeba hungry for growth is a hard thing to change. Nothing much depends upon it other than the human destiny and the fate of complex life on the planet.<\/p>\n

      Learn to see the giant stone heads around you, and think about them.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The good news, of course, is that GDP is an insane metric for success, just as \u201cgiant stone heads\u201d was (though to give the Easter islanders their just due, at the time they had no evidence their belief was nuts, while in 2016 we have demonstrable proof that the conclusions of neoclassical economics are refuted by basic science). If we decide that we value happiness, quality of life, and a healthy planet with uncounted thousands of human generations left, we could in principle jettison GDP and do things differently. It won\u2019t be easy, only necessary. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3484441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,79717,213524,79716],"tags":[163844,114441,95033],"class_list":["post-3469498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-economy","category-editors-picks","category-energy","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-energyslaves","tag-gdp"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3469498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3469498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3469498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3484441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3469498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3469498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3469498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}