The dilemma of growth, as dramatized by the voices in my head

Smith: Hi there!

Daly: Hello.

Smith: Apparently we are the voices in David's head. It seems he can't decide what to think about economic growth.

Daly: How droll, a Socratic dialogue post. 2003 called, it wants its blog trope back. You ever miss print journalism?

Smith: I hear you. No sense grumbling, though, we're stuck in here. Might as well get on with it.

You're here to argue that economic growth cannot continue on its present path. Make your case!

Daly: OK. The deal is, one way or another, global economic growth is going to end in the foreseeable future. The logic is pretty simple: Our growth depends on natural resources and natural resources are finite; ergo, we can't grow forever. So says the Impossible Hamster:

Seems logical enough, doesn't it?

Smith: Not really, but we can get into that later. Tell me why we should think growth will end any time soon.

Daly: All right. According to scientists, we seem to be approaching numerous biophysical thresholds beyond which natural systems are going to start breaking down in unpredictable ways. This includes everything from species loss to freshwater depletion to ocean acidification to, of course, climate change.

At the same time, we're also approaching the "peak" of many natural resources on which the modern economy relies. This is most familiar from "peak oil," but the same basic logic is true for other natural commodities like coal, natural gas, phosphorous, and even soil.

As economist Peter Victor says, "We've had 125,000 generations of humans, but it's only been the last eight that have had growth. So what's considered normal? I think we live in very abnormal times. And the signs are showing up everywhere that the burden we're placing on the natural environment can't be borne."

The limitations on oil are starting to get traction in mainstream political and economic discussion, because we've reached a situation where there isn't enough spare capacity in world oil supply to cushion prices against swings caused by unexpected events. (See: Libya.) This is what happens when demand outruns supply: not a steady rise in prices but large, painful, disruptive fluctuations. That's the new normal.

If it weren't behind a paywall, "A Crude Predicament" in Foreign Affairs would tell you all about it. Or check out this post from Kevin Drum, drawing on the work of economist James Hamilton, who notes that 10 of the 11 post-war U.S. recessions were preceded by a large spike in oil prices. From now on, Drum argues, "every time the global economy starts to reach even moderate growth rates, demand for oil will quickly bump up against supply constraints, prices will spike, and we'll be thrown back into recession. Rinse and repeat."

Smith: Yo Daly, I'ma let you finish, but market capitalism is one of the best ways of dealing with supply and demand of all time!

Daly: Cute. Anyway, I think oil provides a decent conceptual model for lots of other phenomena. Whether it's soil, natural gas, or positive climate feedbacks, the closer you get to limits the more you get unpredictable swings in prices/supply/power/weather. That's what the 21st century is going to look like. And that makes it extremely difficult to plan, site, fund, build, or insure major investments. It makes it difficult to grow!

Smith: Are you done?

Daly: No. But go ahead.

Smith: Folks who claim "biophysical constraints" are going to lead to economic catastrophe have a history of being, oh, how would one put it. Wrong. We've been hearing it ever since Malthus, and especially since the '70s, but it keeps not happening.

Here's what happened to human wealth when democratic capitalism started catching on:

Wikipedia

Obviously there's more to this story than democracy and capitalism, but I think even you will have trouble denying that they've been an enormous net gain for humanity.

See over to the right there? Those are Human Development Index trends, amalgamating statistics on life expectancy, income, and education. Notice a trend? They're going up. People are being brought out of miserable poverty by the hundreds of millions. (In China alone, 600 million over 30 years.) Humanity's lot has been steadily improving.

Obviously the world still contains far too much suffering and injustice, but the point you anti-growth people never seem to fully absorb is that insofar as there have been advances in security, dignity, and equality, they have been fueled by growth.

Liberals need growth even more than conservatives do. They have to overcome status quo bias. Social psychology and history both show that people are more inclined to be generous, more likely to care about the disadvantaged, during times of shared prosperity. If we want to spend on clean energy, health care, infrastructure, and innovation, we need money -- tax revenue. For that, we need growth.

Demographic trends reveal the same need. There are more and more old people, fewer and fewer young people to pay for their health care and pensions. This is exactly what Biden was warning the Chinese about when he made his inartful comments on their one-child policy the other day. Unless countries want to sink into a pernicious spiral of higher taxes and lower productivity, they need ... growth.

Daly: So what you're saying is, growth.

Smith: Growth, man. Growth.

Daly: Here's your problem. You think capitalism is limited only by human ingenuity, which is unlimited. You believe that Man Will Overcome.

And so, if soil's being depleted, tweak the market to reflect that -- raise soil prices. Price carbon. Price air and water pollution. Make sure the price of commodities reflects their externalities and watch the machine whir into action. The price signal goes to thousands, maybe millions of potential innovators at once, spurring them, through some mix of greed, ambition, and devotion to purpose, to devise solutions. Voila!

You think capitalism is a conceptual engine, that it transcends any physical substrate. As long as it incorporates correct information about relative value, it can continue growing in perpetuity.

But consider: What if the rocketing growth of the last 200 years has had much more to do with the physical substrate than you imagine? What if we're just uncommonly clever primates who figured out how to unlock the power of fossil fuels? If that's true, if our economies are mere subsets of the global ecosystem, utterly dependent on it for steady supply of resources, and we're about to overshoot its carrying capacity, then ... we might just go back to shivering in the dark.

For a less florid description of the problem, check out two of Richard Heinberg's more recent books, Peak Everything and The End of Growth. One of the points he makes is that there's no way to make renewables add up to the total energy that fossil fuels provide today, even with generous assumptions. To make up the gap with living standards intact, you need a truly enormous amount of conservation and efficiency. We're going to have to start decoupling capitalism from resource consumption -- dematerialize, move to a steady state economy -- and do it fairly quickly.

Smith: We also need to make sure that every young girl in America gets the chance to braid a unicorn's mane. I won't have a child left behind!

Daly: Yeah, ha, I get it. It looks impossible. But the point is, the dematerialization will happen one way or another. Either we'll do it on purpose or it will get done to us. Just because we have trouble imagining it doesn't mean it's not coming.

Smith: Nice modern civilization you got there. Shame if anything happened to it.

Daly: Don't blame me. Blame Mother Nature.

Smith: Here's the thing. We've been doing really well for 200 years with capitalist growth. Combined with some progressive taxation and redistributive programs, it's the best way we've figured out to raise the living standards of the most people. It's working well for us to this day, notwithstanding the current messiness.

You want us, on the word of a faction of economists, engineers, and wonks, to ... what, exactly? Nationalize and close coal mines? Ration commodities? Follow China's one-child policy?

Daly: Low blow, friend. I want to reduce population growth by empowering women.

Smith: Fair enough. Whatever, I admit it: it sounds impossible to me. Ceasing growth would give you two options: let the less fortunate suffer and die off, or radically ramp up redistribution -- i.e., take tons more money from rich people and give it to poor people. The thing about rich people is, they really don't like that. And it turns out, being rich, they have quite a bit of political clout. Today's rich people aren't attached to any country; they can move capital about as they please, punishing countries that dare to tax them excessively. Are all countries going to agree to aggressively tax the rich at once? Who's going to prevent cheating?

I have to say, if you're right that these biophysical thresholds and resource limits are looming around the corner, ready to abruptly reverse the progress of the last several hundred years, then sh*t, never mind taxation, we're probably doomed to Mad Maxation. (Like that one?) The idea that we're going to become radically more egalitarian, with substantially more modest material expectations, and we're going to do so voluntarily and peacefully, in less than a century ... that's unicorn porn.

I hear lots of happy ideas from the anti-growth folk, but I've never heard anything even close to a practical political plan to get from Point A -- a country gripped by fears over the deficit, suspicious of government, hostile to taxes, leery of social engineering -- to Point B, a vision of the future that would make John Lennon blush. "Imagine there's no growth ..."

Until that plan emerges, I'm going to stick with trying to wring incremental gains for justice out of social democratic capitalism. It doesn't work as well as one might like, but nothing else seems to work at all.

Daly: You lack imagination! A few more wild swings in gas prices, another hurricane or drought, a resource war or two ... things change quickly. We need to be working toward reform now, so we're ready when that moment comes.

Smith: Whatever you say, Comrade.

Daly: I guess we'll leave it there.

Smith: See you next time. Unless David gets psychological help in the interim.

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist. We've just upgraded our comments section! Read more about this change here.

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The Dilemma of Illegal Immigration - Constitutional Execution of Valid Federal Laws Versus Reform

George Orwell, British author of the satirical novels "1984," and "Animal Farm," once quipped in political commentary, "What, at first, is absolutely strange, if forcibly fed to a population of human beings in small digestible bites, through the clever medium of government sponsored propaganda, will, over time, become accepted tradition and commonplace, even if sorely corrupted and evil." What this basically means is that a government, any government, may spend hundreds-of-thousands of taxpayer dollars to legislate a law of great benefit for the people of a nation, the majority of which may eagerly support its passage, and, over time, gradually and duplicitously, for spurious reasons, de-emphasize the importance of the law's enforcement, incrementally decreasing the means of enforcing it, until very few concerned citizens actually question why such an important law has gone un-enforced. During the interim time, however, as the law has regularly gone un-enforced, the very evil thing that the law was originally intended to proscribe has become a tolerated practice to a great percentage of the population and, moreover, the electorate. This evil will continue to be tolerated by a duped populace until its deleterious effect on the nation is much too great to be ignored.

Almost identical to the above scenario, U.S. immigration laws, under Title 8 of the U.S.C, were originally legislated by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives with overwhelming, if not total, support from both Democrats and Republicans during the first four decades of the 20th Century. As with any federal law, the legislative mandate of the U.S. Code directly addressing illegal immigration, 8 U.S.C. § 1325, 1326 (which propelled the legislation through Congress) was placed into the hands of the President of the United States, or the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, to faithfully enforce.

The due proper enforcement of the U.S. Immigration Code proceeded along pretty well until around 1960, when the passage of U.S. Civil Rights legislation and the strict enforcement of illegal Hispanic immigration collided head-on in the political arena. Subsequently, the legislative mandate of the laws, which was to keep illegal (especially Hispanic) aliens from entering the nation from across the Southern border, was unfortunately subjugated, at that time in history, to political whims and sympathies emanating from, primarily, Democratic U.S. senators and representatives. These legislators cared more about scratching the backs of their wealthy farmer constituents during their seasonal picking times (ensuring that they had ample illegal alien fruit and vegetable pickers) than making sure that immigration laws were faithfully enforced. Consequently, enforcement of immigration law became inanely geared much more to political favoritisms and special interests than to the rule of law. This placed the U.S. Border Patrol in the ambiguous posture of enforcing illegal immigration not according to prescribed federal law, but, rather, according to the whims of powerful men and women in high political offices. I know this to be true because, in 1985, a senior U.S. Border Patrol agent told me that he was extremely frustrated with the differing orders coming from Washington, D.C. telling him and his officers to substantially reduce the number of raids made on known employers of hundreds of illegal aliens in San Diego County. At the time, I was a San Diego County deputy sheriff working at the Vista San Diego County Jail.

Currently, there are millions of parasitic undocumented illegal Hispanic aliens at large throughout the United States, especially in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas due to the U.S. Executive Branch's refusal to properly enforce the current immigration laws that are an integral part of the U.S. Code. Many of these illegal aliens are crooks and felons, who are going about with false identifications, bogus driver's licenses, and fraudulent Social Security numbers for the express purpose of ripping-off American citizen taxpayers, obtaining food stamps, medical care, and other public services at taxpayer expense. Of the 15-to-20 million illegal aliens presently here, more than 20 percent of them are violent felons, burglars, robbers, thieves, and gang members. Over 20,000 of them are presently serving federal and state prison sentences for felonies they have committed. But all of these undocumented aliens have one felonious thing in common. They are all guilty of violating federal law by illegal entry into the United States.

Recently, Barack Obama had the unmitigated gall to call, misguided, Governor Jan Brewer's signing into law a new Arizona legislation giving state and local law enforcement officers the authority to detain, and arrest, suspected illegal aliens. How dare Obama say such a thing! When he (and the eight Presidents before him) have blatantly refused to honor their oaths of office, to faithfully execute the (immigration) laws of the United States, it is utterly reprehensible for him to criticize a responsible state governor for honoring the legislative mandate of a vital federal law when its lack of federal enforcement has critically upbraided the peace and security of her state.

Quite ironic it is that the Executive Branch of the federal government can build and staff what they regard as secure top-secret installations for military weapons research, intelligence gathering, or for what they want to consider important in the amorphous name of national security, and thoroughly protect the sites from illegal entry with all sorts of armaments, aircraft, and high-tech gadgetry, while at the same time insisting that protecting the Southern U.S. against illegal entry is almost impossible. Case in point, Area 51, comprising thousands of acres of desert, mountains, and forested land, which is guarded day and night against illegal entry. Take, for instance, an ordinary American citizen who merely wants a job working inside Area 51, and obtains false identification in order to gain entry. Let's say that that citizen gets a job working at one of the government-run restaurants on the installation with his false identification. Two weeks later, Joe Blow is hard at work serving food when government agents harshly arrest him for illegal entry onto U.S. Government property. The poor fellow is charged with a dozen federal crimes, put on trial in a federal court, and subsequently convicted and sentenced to 30 years in a federal prison. Yet, most U.S. citizens will read about the person's conviction and strongly agree that the intruder had it coming when he illegally entered a restricted federal area. So, why isn't prevailing U.S. public opinion against men, women, and families who conspire to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border? Such an act is as much a crime as illegal entry onto Area 51. Perhaps it is as George Orwell said, that through deliberate government inaction, and the effective dispersal of government sponsored propaganda, a law vital to a nation can, over time, be de-emphasized to a point where the average citizen does not consider its enforcement as essential.

I sincerely believe that our second President, the late great John Adams, who coined the expression, "We are a nation of laws and not of men," would be completely devastated by how the American republic has become a nation of men and not of laws. Mr. Obama obviously wants to see the U.S. Constitution pragmatically changed to give the federal government total control over every matter the Framers considered state concerns. In essence, Obama wants revise the Bill of Rights and to remake the American republic to resemble the Federal Republic of Germany, which has no bill of rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to be free of unwarranted invasions of privacy. But, most of all, he wants to see the evisceration of the 10th Amendment, which currently reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States (the federal government) by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It seems to be sad, but true, that if a standing President does not like the laws that pervious congresses legislated, and that previous Presidents signed into force, that President will not make an effort to enforce them. This refusal to faithfully execute "all" standing federal laws is, in my opinion, an impeachable offense constituting a high crime. Nonetheless, a President who has a majority of a U.S. Congress rubber-stamping every thing he does, and wants to do, is in no fear of impeachment. A candidate for President, who is not a natural born citizen of the United States, can even be elected and sustained with impunity with a Speaker of the House of Representatives and a Senate Majority Leader supporting him. What was true about "Dubya" and his rubber-stamping Republican Congress is equally true, if not more so, with Barack Obama and his rubber-stamping Democratic Congress. The Obama administration is saying, in effect, that President John Adams, his historical regard for the application of law, and every other salient precedent illustrating the importance of following law instead of human whim, can all go to hell.

Perhaps, during the November 2, 2010 mid-term congressional elections, indignant American citizens, the majority of the voting electorate seeking the rule of law, will go to the polls to cast out of the U.S. Senate and the House those representatives who voted for a legislation to deprive the American public of their freedom of choice, which will force them, by federal mandate, to, either, buy into federally controlled health care, or be penalized for not doing so. The Obama administration is systematically working with the Democratic controlled Congress against the interests of American citizen taxpayers by seeking a federally controlled, essentially totalitarian, regime that will only increase national debt, tax burdens on individuals and families, control over a citizen's daily life, and do away with the type of federalism established in the U.S. Constitution. I sincerely pray to Nature's God that a great majority of American citizens, registered voters seeking the rule of constitutional law, regardless of political party affiliation, will converge on the voting places this coming November to elect new U.S. Representatives and Senators who will abide by the U.S. Constitution instead of the whims of an aberrant, power-hungry President.

Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has attended LaJolla, California's National University and Malibu's Pepperdine University to attain graduate credits in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies and psychology, from the University of Texas at Tyler. A paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.

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