Fair point it probably was much longer than I originally planned. In my defence I wanted to write something that would stand up to serious scrutiny. I appreciate that the main premise is obvious to many people outside economics, but I really wanted to show how defunct the economic mainstream is, and substantiate the argument. Other authors have taken far longer to get to the point, and others have written nice short punchy pieces too.

My aim was to show that the very foundation of economic growth theories are flawed, and that this could have serious consequences. Maybe breaking it into a two or three part series would have worked better.

I know that I did go around the houses a bit, but I hoped that the journey would be fun!! Sorry if it didn’t do it for you, and yes, a loss to us all if some passengers fell off along the way.

An economy depends on energy, and economic growth has occurred only with the input of increasing amounts of cheap, convenient energy from fossil fuels. And Paul Krugman and his ilk are dangerous fools.

Granted it would need some elaboration, especially for those who still haven’t heard of or can’t grasp the meaning of peak oil, but talk about going round the houses! Half as long would have been plenty – and maybe more readers would have made it to the important part.

http://philosophybites.com/2009/01/kate-soper-on-alternative-hedonism.html

Georgescu-Roegen’s 1975 essay “Energy and Economic Myths” –

http://www.jayhanson.us/page148.htm

And Christian Kerschner’s paper suggesting the Georgescu-Roegen may have been an optimist 🙂

http://www.web.ca/~bthomson/degrowth/degrowth_vs_steady_state.pdf

Fantastic thanks Hawkeye,

athough being honest I guess I was hoping you’d say no absolutely not so then I’d have another excuse for putting actual action on the long finger. I guess I talk a good game about ‘doing stuff’ because I’m hoping enough people will start at the same time that I just get carried on by the herd! Its a very small herd here in Ireland at the moment though. Plus I think Occupy would not be looked favourably on by my employers Clients and so I work for a small business so its taking me time to work up the courage.. urgh, excuses excuses.

Re not hoping they find the ‘golden algae’, I think backwardsevolution probably explained the point I was trying to make a bit better;
1. it would take away the impetus to change our current consumerist maerialistic ideologies and the capitalist system which views Labour as being just another resource to be squeezed dry, which I think is so so destructive on a spiritual and societal level and
2. I think climate change/peak oil are not the only constraints we face, oil is the only resource that can reach a peak, or a breaking point, the eco system is being wrecked on many different fronts – look at the bee situation – that really is frightening.
3. I would rather see us find a multitude of different solutions, preferably as ‘open source’ as possible – just look at how ugly the ‘dash for gas’ is already proving to be. Fracking is literally insane, poisoning giant areas of the water table so that we can extend and pretend a little longer!

Thanks for the links Hawkeye, I no about the transition movement but its got a huge image problem I think – its just too crusty and full on for most people. My idea would be to market talks not as anything but discussions, without tryign to make up peoples minds for them – I think the transition movement is great but its for people who are already on board, and they do tend to dress a certain way and the total earnest of the recently converted can just be too much for people just about getting to grips with recycling.

As for the doomsayers, who want to say there’s no hope unless we kill off 7m – you’re not helping – you play into the hands of some very nasty people with very unpleasant ideas. I don’t think that kind of shock and awe campaigning produces anything good and I don’t admire it from environmentalists anymore than in rapture cults, in fact if push came to shove I prefer the rapture cults I think they are less misanthropic. Many people round here often refer to Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine and really that kind of thing is just the eco equivalent of it. All it achieves is panicking those who believe it into accepting and acquiescing to some pretty unpleasant grand plans, some of them already underway.
I’m all for promoting ‘stop at two’ (and I did so I can feel nicely smug there all you selfish 3+ parents!Har!) but that’s my limit – after that I say we look at it as a positive challenge rather than sitting around seeing who can be the most serious and pessimistic. Think Gandalf in LOTR, he didn’t tell them there was never any hope when he was trying to persuade them to start out on the only way to fix things, he told them that at the end when they clearly fcuked anyways!
It think searching to make a catalogue of doom it is a mental disease as sure as wanting to just put blind faith in God or some as yet to be discovered discovery: both stall action. I’m not disputing that the eveidence is in and its bleak but here comes a point when I don’t see the point to it parsing it out. Better to see the problems and do your best to fix them while not allowing ourselves to descend to amoebic levels of morality and without getting transfixed on whether or not its going to work. I mean lets say we only have 10 year s left before the apocalypse how do you want to spend it?

Playing Casssandra/Saying f it lets live it up while we can/doing your best to not let it happen…for anyone/doing your best to keep you and yours safe?

Forget gay marraige this is the defining moral question of our time

My Dad is a 75 yr old who climbs mountains, he always says when the going gets tough you look at where your putting each foot and count your steps – suddenly you’re there! on the other hand if you keep looking up searching for the summit and getting despondent every time you reach a false summitt then the whole thing is pure hell and you may well turn back!

Ok enough metaphors, thanks for all kind comments,

Love you all comprades y comadres

Hi Gordon

No, not heard of Mary Mellor, but will check out the video. I have been meaning to watch the Just Banking videos for a while. I think Steve Keen was among them, so good to see some UK academic support for this line of thinking too.

Hawkeye,

Have you come across Mary Mellor, Social Science professor at Northumbria University? She gave a presentation to the Just Banking conference in Edinburgh last year (http://www.justbanking.org.uk/video/).

In her book, The Future of Money, she comments on Tim Jackson’s view in Prosperity Without Growth that we do not currently have a macroeconomics based on integrating economy, society and environment.
“Certainly there is not one in the mainstream, but ideas are emerging through heterodox frameworks. One is ecofeminist political economy, which sees gender as the key to the separation of the economy from society and the environment…. The exclusion from money value of domestic and communal work around human mental and physical existence is akin to the way capitalist patriarchy externalises the natural world. The resilience of the natural world, like caring work, is treated as a free resource.”
She argues for a ‘provisioning economy’ in which “the provisioning of necessary goods and services would be the main focus of the economy and the activities of production and exchange would be fully integrated with the dynamics of the body and the environment. A money system for such an economy would need to embrace this wider notion of provisioning. It would need to enable the building of a non-gendered, egalitarian and ecologically sustainable provisioning economy. It would therefore need to prioritise these needs and this work in the issue of money…. Privatisation of the social resource of money is central to capitalism; if a provisioning sufficiency economy is to be achieved, money must be reclaimed for the benefit of the public as a whole.”

Gordon

Thanks for the links. Harvey’s lectures and books are always thought provoking.

I haven’t come across John Bellamy Foster though, but I am intrigued by his ability to synthesise Marx with the Ecological Economics view (judging by his references to Odum, Daly, Jackson, Georgescu-Roegen etc.). Seems like a latter-day Ruskin?

I think one of the reasons behind the resurgence interest in Marx’s ideas recently, apart from the need to explain the economic crises erupting in global capitalism, is that Marx provides a very different view of the relationship between human beings and nature. the term ‘ecological marxist’ describes those such as John Bellamy Foster, author of The Ecological Revolution and co-author of The Ecological Rift – Capitalism’s War On The Earth, at The Monthly Review (http://monthlyreview.org/) who have developed this line of thinking.
“Labour,” Marx wrote, “is first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the matabolism between himself and nature.” It is this central metabolic relation between human beings and the natural environment which is now being called into question by capitalism on a planetary scale generating constant and ever-growing metabolic rifts. Even as global monopoly-finance capital falls prey to an endless stagnation crisis due to its own internal contradictions, it is also crossing all ecological boundaries in its drive for endless accumulation, thus activating its external contradictions on the broadest, most planetary scale. (from John Bellamy Foster, The Planetary Emergency, Monthly Review, December 2012)

David Harvey claims to have identified 17 contradictions of capital, three of which he says are fatal. One of these is its reliance on 3% compound growth forever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8UD-QqYFJqY