Understanding Growth: Conclusion
Dec. 5th, 2021 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis is about the conclusion of the series on understanding growth.
The profession of economics has long had a moral component.
More like immoral component. Mostly what I see economists do is cobble up excuses for bad behavior and why some people deserve to be abused. >_<
Sedlacek starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient poem, and then spends time looking at the moral teachings of ancient Hebrews and early Christians. From restrictions against interest to the forced rest of land, people and debt (mandatory debt forgiveness), economic transactions have long had a moral dimension.
That's religion, not economics. God has spent thousands of years repeating emself because humans keep deciding that ey didn't really mean all that stuff about not using money to hurt each other. I will say that halal banking has some excellent concepts.
For example. the Invisible Hand -- Adam Smith's suggestion that individuals, acting in their own selfish, self-interest, will undertake endeavors that will benefit all of society -- is an accepted truism of modern economists. The "greed is good" belief is embedded in the entire structure of our market economy, essentially an elevation to moral of what, in a prior age, would have been called vice.
It's like they never heard about the tragedy of the commons, which is a major factor fucking up the world today. Now, that's not a universal problem. If you believe the world is alive and sacred, you will naturally treat it much better. If you even honestly believe it to be a gift from an all-powerful Creator, you would also not shred it. Today most people believe it's just inert matter waiting to be exploited. That's a recipe for disaster. They don't even treat their own land well then.
A system where growth is the main objective will fail, but only after it has exhausted every means to expand consumption.
No shit. You'd think they never made beer either.
>> Once we collectively believe that growth is the primary vehicle to prosperity, there is very little we won't do to achieve it. That includes bailing out Wall Street banks, turning the financial system predatory, taking on trillions in debt with no intention of ever paying it back except with more debt, reducing individual freedoms, etc... <<
All very stupid ideas with very obvious drawbacks.
>> We will use negative interest rates -- charge people to save money -- in order to force people to consume today instead of save for tomorrow. We will, in the words of Sedlacek, sell stability in order to buy growth. Ultimately, we will have neither.<<
That doesn't actually work well. If people realize that banks charge them more than it's worth to save money, then they'll stuff it under a mattress, which is exactly what they're doing now. At the point where saving money loses money, typically due to astronomical inflation, they don't hold it at all. They spend all of it immediately, converting worthless cash into useful food or other materials. Money ceases to be useful as exchange, so barter takes over. This is easy to foresee because we have ample historic examples of these things having happened.
Growth is good, but is not the most important thing. We need an economic system that can accept this fact and still continue to function.
Very true.
Economists have become so important to our country because we are now so dependent on growth. Without growth, our economic system falls apart. Economists thus fill a social role similar to the shamans or prophets of old. They look at the tea leaves and predict the future, albeit with spreadsheet instead of goat entrails. They tell us what us what we need to do now to satisfy our god: growth.
Predicting what will happen is easy. Predicting exactly when it will happen, and therefore how to handle it, is the hard part. Occasionally you can turn numbers into a graph with neat lines and say, "When these cross is the tipping point, and A will turn into B." More often it's like, "When people feel the cost exceeds the value, they will stop buying and it will crash." Predicting feelings is much harder than numbers. But if a price is going up and up, you can very easily tell that it won't go up forever -- if you're not an economist. They're stupid that way. Or maybe they know damn well it'll crash, but they make more money from lying about it.
A more localized set of economic institutions and practices would personalize transactions so that human values (beyond simple growth) could be expressed.
This is logical.
To extend this: produce everything as locally as possible. Long supply lines run up costs and create devastating vulnerability. Produce everything locally that can be, and only ship things that can't be made or grown there. This way, when there's a strike or a storm or whatever, you won't be fucked out of supplies.
Support small, local businesses that generate wealth for your town instead of global megacorps that suck out all the resources they possibly can. Think of those chainstores as pet ticks.
Note that I'm not suggesting that localizing fixes our problems. I'm firmly convinced that the problems we face -- the growth Ponzi scheme we've gotten ourselves into -- are not fixable. This system is going to break -- is already breaking apart -- and will be replaced by something else.
Well, at least someone else is admitting it. That's the first step to fixing this shit.
>> We can help that transition to be less painful and set ourselves up for a more prosperous future by starting to make these changes today. We can do that ourselves in our own cities, towns and neighborhoods.<<
Honestly, if we all made wiser individual choices, eventually the industries would swing around. If people stopped eating beef, farmers would stop raising beef cattle, because there'd be no profit in it.
The problem is, we no longer have time for that. Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971. If people had listened then, they could've fixed the food system. After ignoring the problem for decades, however, now climate change is a massive threat and we can't prevent it because it's HERE.
We're running out of time even to make things slightly less bad. The Paris Agreement is smoke and mirrors; this late, we'd barely have a chance to make it work if everyone busted ass to do it, and no major asses are busting. They're flapping their lips and dragging their feet and greenwashing like mad. Because of this we're going to blow right past 1.5°C and probably past 2 and 3 as well. Bend over and kiss the climate goodbye.
We can, however, make choices that somewhat buffer an individual household or community from the worst of other people's fuckups. We can't stop climate change, but we can grow heritage cultivars resistant to drought and heat. I've taken to favoring trees that resist wind and ice damage, which are worsening threats here. I'm also fond getting random mixed sunchoke seedling tubers from Oikos Tree Crops.
Anyone with a garden can make your own landrace crops. This is awesome. Get your hands on as many diverse seeds as possible and throw them all in together. Observe what grows best, produces most, and tastes best. Save the best seeds and replant. Lather, rinse, repeat. It typically takes a few years to stabilize a new variety, but then you have something adapted to your exact local conditions, just like your ancestors did.
The profession of economics has long had a moral component.
More like immoral component. Mostly what I see economists do is cobble up excuses for bad behavior and why some people deserve to be abused. >_<
Sedlacek starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient poem, and then spends time looking at the moral teachings of ancient Hebrews and early Christians. From restrictions against interest to the forced rest of land, people and debt (mandatory debt forgiveness), economic transactions have long had a moral dimension.
That's religion, not economics. God has spent thousands of years repeating emself because humans keep deciding that ey didn't really mean all that stuff about not using money to hurt each other. I will say that halal banking has some excellent concepts.
For example. the Invisible Hand -- Adam Smith's suggestion that individuals, acting in their own selfish, self-interest, will undertake endeavors that will benefit all of society -- is an accepted truism of modern economists. The "greed is good" belief is embedded in the entire structure of our market economy, essentially an elevation to moral of what, in a prior age, would have been called vice.
It's like they never heard about the tragedy of the commons, which is a major factor fucking up the world today. Now, that's not a universal problem. If you believe the world is alive and sacred, you will naturally treat it much better. If you even honestly believe it to be a gift from an all-powerful Creator, you would also not shred it. Today most people believe it's just inert matter waiting to be exploited. That's a recipe for disaster. They don't even treat their own land well then.
A system where growth is the main objective will fail, but only after it has exhausted every means to expand consumption.
No shit. You'd think they never made beer either.
>> Once we collectively believe that growth is the primary vehicle to prosperity, there is very little we won't do to achieve it. That includes bailing out Wall Street banks, turning the financial system predatory, taking on trillions in debt with no intention of ever paying it back except with more debt, reducing individual freedoms, etc... <<
All very stupid ideas with very obvious drawbacks.
>> We will use negative interest rates -- charge people to save money -- in order to force people to consume today instead of save for tomorrow. We will, in the words of Sedlacek, sell stability in order to buy growth. Ultimately, we will have neither.<<
That doesn't actually work well. If people realize that banks charge them more than it's worth to save money, then they'll stuff it under a mattress, which is exactly what they're doing now. At the point where saving money loses money, typically due to astronomical inflation, they don't hold it at all. They spend all of it immediately, converting worthless cash into useful food or other materials. Money ceases to be useful as exchange, so barter takes over. This is easy to foresee because we have ample historic examples of these things having happened.
Growth is good, but is not the most important thing. We need an economic system that can accept this fact and still continue to function.
Very true.
Economists have become so important to our country because we are now so dependent on growth. Without growth, our economic system falls apart. Economists thus fill a social role similar to the shamans or prophets of old. They look at the tea leaves and predict the future, albeit with spreadsheet instead of goat entrails. They tell us what us what we need to do now to satisfy our god: growth.
Predicting what will happen is easy. Predicting exactly when it will happen, and therefore how to handle it, is the hard part. Occasionally you can turn numbers into a graph with neat lines and say, "When these cross is the tipping point, and A will turn into B." More often it's like, "When people feel the cost exceeds the value, they will stop buying and it will crash." Predicting feelings is much harder than numbers. But if a price is going up and up, you can very easily tell that it won't go up forever -- if you're not an economist. They're stupid that way. Or maybe they know damn well it'll crash, but they make more money from lying about it.
A more localized set of economic institutions and practices would personalize transactions so that human values (beyond simple growth) could be expressed.
This is logical.
To extend this: produce everything as locally as possible. Long supply lines run up costs and create devastating vulnerability. Produce everything locally that can be, and only ship things that can't be made or grown there. This way, when there's a strike or a storm or whatever, you won't be fucked out of supplies.
Support small, local businesses that generate wealth for your town instead of global megacorps that suck out all the resources they possibly can. Think of those chainstores as pet ticks.
Note that I'm not suggesting that localizing fixes our problems. I'm firmly convinced that the problems we face -- the growth Ponzi scheme we've gotten ourselves into -- are not fixable. This system is going to break -- is already breaking apart -- and will be replaced by something else.
Well, at least someone else is admitting it. That's the first step to fixing this shit.
>> We can help that transition to be less painful and set ourselves up for a more prosperous future by starting to make these changes today. We can do that ourselves in our own cities, towns and neighborhoods.<<
Honestly, if we all made wiser individual choices, eventually the industries would swing around. If people stopped eating beef, farmers would stop raising beef cattle, because there'd be no profit in it.
The problem is, we no longer have time for that. Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971. If people had listened then, they could've fixed the food system. After ignoring the problem for decades, however, now climate change is a massive threat and we can't prevent it because it's HERE.
We're running out of time even to make things slightly less bad. The Paris Agreement is smoke and mirrors; this late, we'd barely have a chance to make it work if everyone busted ass to do it, and no major asses are busting. They're flapping their lips and dragging their feet and greenwashing like mad. Because of this we're going to blow right past 1.5°C and probably past 2 and 3 as well. Bend over and kiss the climate goodbye.
We can, however, make choices that somewhat buffer an individual household or community from the worst of other people's fuckups. We can't stop climate change, but we can grow heritage cultivars resistant to drought and heat. I've taken to favoring trees that resist wind and ice damage, which are worsening threats here. I'm also fond getting random mixed sunchoke seedling tubers from Oikos Tree Crops.
Anyone with a garden can make your own landrace crops. This is awesome. Get your hands on as many diverse seeds as possible and throw them all in together. Observe what grows best, produces most, and tastes best. Save the best seeds and replant. Lather, rinse, repeat. It typically takes a few years to stabilize a new variety, but then you have something adapted to your exact local conditions, just like your ancestors did.
