Infrastructure, finance, and the sale of the future

A review of Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital

Also published on Resilience.

Imagine yourself as a housing developer – an entrepreneur, a big-time player, a real deal-maker. Your people devise a plan to borrow money, buy land, design and win approval for a new subdivision, and sell 1,000 new housing units. Then, perhaps years before the houses are completed and decades before the initial mortgages are repaid, you sell your shares in the venture for a tidy profit. A neat trick, this, cashing in today on bills that others will pay long into the future.

You have become wealthier, but have you been a “wealth creator”? For that matter, are you contributing to “economic growth”? Where does the money come from for this venture: is it capital accumulated from the past, or is this money newly created the moment credit is extended by banks and off-setting debts are recorded on balance sheets?

These are among the many questions addressed by Timothy Mitchell in his new book The Alibi of Capital, out on March 10 from Verso.

Mitchell works his way through a profound rewriting of economic history and economic theory. He wants us to think carefully about who pays for what is labelled “economic growth.” Is the earning of interest some natural property of money? Why was the phrase “the economy” almost never used until the mid-20th century, while today the economy is routinely invoked as the determinant of what is politically, socially, or environmentally acceptable? Why do banks continue to invest in new fossil fuel infrastructures, in full public knowledge that these infrastructures are robbing future generations of a stable climate?

Let’s begin with a simpler question: is “financialization” an adequate term for the process by which a housing developer turns still-unbuilt houses into immediate profit? Mitchell doesn’t think so. While the creation and swapping of financial instruments is one essential part of the process, two others are equally essential. First, the process depends on the manufacture of long-lasting infrastructure. Second and equally important, there must be a legal and political framework that ensures holders of the financial instruments can enforce their claims to ongoing revenues five, ten, or even fifty years in the future.

What is often termed financialization, Mitchell, argues is really a technopolitical “apparatus of capture.”1 Mitchell writes:

“The apparatus is neither fully public nor private but combines aspects of both; is made up of both materials and ideas; deploys both law and violence; and depends upon both careful calculation and the imaginative construction of prospective worlds.” (The Alibi of Capital, page 30) 

Rail lines converging on Hauptbahnhof (central station) in Zurich, Switzerland, July 2025.

 

Shipowners and rail barons

The use of an “apparatus of capture” to secure present profits from future events did not begin recently. Mitchell traces the process back hundreds of years to early joint-stock companies engaged in long-distance commerce.

Shipowners typically required credit to finance long voyages in which revenue from the sale of products would only come many months later. The letters of credit, which were also “letters of debt plus interest,” were sometimes traded, with the seller accepting a discount so that they could be paid immediately, while the buyer would receive the principal plus interest perhaps a year or more later.

The infrastructure was not very durable – ships often sank – and the time frames were short, just a few months to perhaps a couple of years. This commerce didn’t provide much scope for capturing revenue from the future. That changed in the nineteenth century with the development of railroads, which Mitchell describes as a turning point.

Railroads were large-scale durable infrastructures – and required major investment up-front. Once built they offered the promise of revenues coming in for decades. They were often built as colonial enterprises, requiring imposition of governance and military/police power to protect that revenue. The prospect of strikes also grew in importance, as workers increasingly organized against dangerous conditions, long hours, and inadequate wages; the realization of future profits required the suppression of organized labour power.

If the technical and the political factors were aligned, however, the issuance of the credit/debt associated with new railroads gave financial markets a way to buy and sell the future, earning profits immediately on services which workers would provide and customers would pay for decades later.

Railroads were followed by many other large-scale and durable infrastructures: bridges, wharves, assembly lines, oil wells, refineries, paved roads. Though some were financed by the private sector and some by governments, there were exponential increases in credit and debt. These debts, of course, were recorded as assets by financial institutions – assets which could be sold for immediate profit, as long as the buyers could be reasonably confident of the long-term collection of promised revenues.

The process moved beyond large scale commerce to involve most citizens in capitalist societies. The invention of the long-term mortgage in the first half of the twentieth century made average homeowners into ongoing revenue sources for banks. That was soon followed by the introduction of credit cards, auto financing, and university education loans, and in some countries, huge medical debts, “converting the course of human lives into repayment schedules.” (p. 8)

This process of creating new money by issuing credit, then marketing the corresponding debts as assets, is highly profitable for some while many others pay the costs for decades. Mitchell cites an estimate that between 1950 and 2000, from 75% to 90% of the price rise of housing was attributable to capitalisation by the mortgage industry.

Theodicy and oikodicy

Those who mis-spent their youth studying philosophy might recall the centuries-old conundrum of theodicy: if the world is governed by an all-knowing, benevolent god, then why does evil persist, frequently placing good people in terrible circumstances?2

Mitchell borrows the coinage oikodicy from Joseph Vogl. Based on the Greek word oikos (root of oikonomia), oikodicy helps draw attention to “the unacknowledged role of economics in the justification of suffering.” (The Alibi of Capital, p. 138)

If capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems, and the market represents the collective wisdom of all buyers and sellers, why is there drastic and crushing inequality, both between countries and within countries? Does “the economy” simply dictate, with the force of natural law, that a few will be rich while many will struggle to find food or shelter?

Mitchell sees the apparatus of capture of the future, so central to corporate capitalism, as a key mechanism in maintaining and worsening inequality. He argues that the profession of economics, as it is typically practiced in universities, the corporate world, and government, “both facilitates and obfuscates the capture of the future.” (p. 13)

Most significantly: what is economic growth? Growth of GDP is commonly presented as an obviously good thing and an obvious necessity; a temporary lull in this growth is a grave matter requiring government intervention. Mitchell argues, however, that a great deal of what is counted as “growth” is achieved at the expense of the future. In the language of economics, anticipated revenues are “discounted”; the full value will be repaid by a future generation; and the difference between the discounted value and the full value is chalked up as “growth”. But why should the impoverishment of future generations be considered as today’s “growth”?

This comes into sharp relief when considering fossil fuels and climate change. Fossil fuels are clearly precious substances, able to provide easily storable, transportable energy which can be used on demand.

It has been understood and accepted for more than a hundred years that fossil fuels are finite. The rapid extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, then, clearly leaves future generations with far less of a precious material. Yet this ongoing depletion has been celebrated for a hundred years as an engine of “growth.”

For forty years or more we have also understood that intensive exploitation of fossil fuels is depleting the future of something even more precious: a stable climate. This depredation too continues to be excused and celebrated as the “growth” which “the economy” depends on.

The rules-based order

The final chapter of The Alibi of Capital focuses on the climate crisis, but Mitchell takes a long and winding route to get there.

He includes a fascinating discussion of village society in the Nile River basin, the sophisticated ecological understanding embodied in centuries- or millennia-old hydrological management, and the way large-scale dams reduced the overall productivity of the Nile basin while making possible the colonial extraction of profits from large-scale sugar and cotton plantations. Several important figures in the history of economic theory appear here, including Joseph Schumpeter who posited a key role for “the entrepreneur” in his theory of creative destruction.

In his previous book Carbon Democracy Mitchell argued that “the economy” came into common parlance in the mid-twentieth century, coincident with a huge influx of low-cost energy from fossil fuels. In The Alibi of Capital he explores this at greater length. He delves into usage of the word economy over the past three hundred years, through various permutations of the discipline of political economy. Economy was seen as a process akin to “economizing” until shortly after WWII, when it took on a new guise as a noun, the new entity known as “the economy”. Then, suddenly, the economy became the powerful and vengeful god which might wreak havoc on society, if we didn’t allow specially-trained experts to make sure the needs of the economy are given constant priority.

Tracing these changes takes us through the development of new forms of credit and its calculation, new developments in physical infrastructure, and new rules by which the eventual repayment of debts can be assured. The new rules work on many levels from personal struggles with credit card debt or student loans, to national regulation of securities-trading, to contracts in which international financial institutions demand veto power over national budgets to make sure these banks have priority over domestic claimants.

I would have liked to see Mitchell’s concluding chapter provide further ideas on how to respond to the climate crisis. As it is, though, The Alibi of Capital elucidates how the economy, in claiming to produce growth, is extracting profits from the future while saddling coming generations with both financial debt and ecological deprivation. In closing, then, we can think of Mitchell’s ideas in relation to a recent work by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot (reviewed here).

Malm and Carton note that major banks have dramatically increased their investments in fossil fuel infrastructure since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Fossil-dependent infrastructure, however, goes far beyond the mines, the wells, the pipelines or the refineries, and includes airlines and airports, most current auto manufacturing, the plastics industry, the cement industry, and other sectors – who in turn receive financing through investment banks.

Equity and bond markets, then, together hold vast encumbrances on the future – they are profiting today from debts that they expect other people to be repaying, ten, twenty or thirty years from now. The rules of the game protect this extraction from the future, regardless of our full awareness that the burning of fossil fuels is more destabilizing, with each passing day, to the climate we all depend on.

All these fossil-dependent investments, then, are assets that must be stranded – written down, written off – unless we consent to valuing the profits of investors above the rights of future generations to health and prosperity.

Wim and Carton proposed a focus for climate justice work:

“Neither the Green New Deal nor degrowth or any other programme in circulation has a plan for how to strand the assets that must be stranded. … [This] is the point where strategic thinking and practise should be urgently concentrated in the years ahead.” (Overshoot, p. 244)

Mitchell’s new book reinforces this essential point. We must see through the alibi of capital, we must reclaim society from the grip of the economy, and we must change the rules of the game to save our collective future.

Footnotes

1 He credits the phrase “apparatus of capture” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987.

2 The Wikipedia entry quotes philosopher Alvin Plantinga: “theodicy is ‘an answer to the question of why God permits evil’”. As an undergraduate philosophy major more than 50 years ago I took a course taught by Plantinga.

Image at top of page: Negishi LNG Terminal, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Pref., Japan, January 2015, by Σ64, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

Wealth without wages, wages without wealth

Also published on Resilience.

Wage labour is often seen as a fundamental, even the fundamental, relationship in capitalism. Some twenty years before he completed his multi-volume Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx delivered a short set of lectures entitled Wage Labour and Capital; the lectures were published two years later as a series of five articles in the newspaper that Marx edited.

Marx wrote that “Capital … presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.”1

In her 2025 book Free Gifts: Capitalism and The Politics of Nature, Alyssa Battistoni described this important social and political relationship this way: “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58). (This is the fourth installment in a series on Free Gifts; the others are here, here, and here.)

Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value. She writes,

“‘Nature-based’ sectors, in which nature is directly cultivated or extracted, remain perpetually reliant on biophysical processes, which operate according to their own logics, and which often preclude rationalization on the factory model. These sectors have tended to deviate from the industrial rule.” (p. 85)

Such biophysical processes, and their implications for attempts at wealth extraction, play starring roles in Bathsheba Demuth’s 2019 book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. 

This book had been on my short list “to read soon” for the past six years without quite making it to the top2 – until last December. It did not disappoint. Floating Coast is a rich history of one particular area of the earth, its diverse species, and cultures which have learned over centuries how to be deeply-rooted participants in these ecosystems. At the same time it paints vivid pictures of other cultures which recently arrived in the Bering Strait, and which have tried many methods of extracting market value from the gifts of nature over the past 150 years. As such Demuth’s history of a specific place offers a wealth of examples of the often abstract principles in Free Gifts.3

• • •

“Does a worker in a factory produce only cotton?” Marx asked in 1847, and he answered “No. He produces capital.” But the necessary inputs for the surplus value that increased capital went beyond the hours of wage labour. The raw cotton, of course, was likely produced by slave labour or by share-croppers, not people who were selling their labour by the hour.

And there were other inputs which did not enter the market through wage labour. Factories needed lubricants, and in the mid-nineteenth century those lubricants came from the bodies of whales killed thousands of kilometers away. “Whale products were critical to textile production,” Demuth wrote. “A single factory would use nearly seven thousand gallons – three sperm whales’ worth – of oil in a year.” (Floating Coast, p. 27) Factories needed artificial light as well, and that came via lamps burning whale oil.

By the mid-19th century, however, Europeans and colonists had carried out intensive commercial whaling for hundreds of years. In most of the earth’s oceans whales were getting scarce. The Bering Strait was remote and its icy waters were only accessible to ships for a few months each year, but commercial whalers eventually found their way to the home of the large whales which summered there.

Demuth sets the context:

“The Bering Strait is the terminus for the world’s deep ocean circulation. Water that began in the North Atlantic arrives in the Bering Sea centuries later, dense with nutrients shed by great rivers. Where the continents lean toward each other at the strait, wind and undersea topography create turbulence. Warm waters mix with cold, roiling iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus upward. At the surface, these elements meet with summer’s abundant solar energy, with atmospheric carbon, and with the organisms that make their cells from this mixture. Where air touches water, over two hundred species of photosynthetic plankton give physical shape to sunlight. These algae and diatoms are the Bering Strait’s primary form of productive life.” (Floating Coast, p. 16)

Energy here was abundant but was diffused both temporally and spatially. Whales, however, were key agents in an age-old process. Demuth explains: “The work of a whale is to turn this distilled energy into hundred-ton bodies. … Bowheads carry more calories per pound of flesh than any other Arctic species on land or sea” (p. 16–17).

Among the many creatures whose lives depended on the energy-capture-and-storage talents of whales were the indigenous peoples who have inhabited Beringia’s shores for centuries or millennia. Whales fed families and villages through the long months of the arctic and subarctic winters, and indigenous people cultivated reverence for the lifeways of the whales. Thus they were able to find constancy in an environment with challenging seasonal dynamics, severe storms, and population booms and busts among smaller animals. Whales were their neighbours for just a few months each year, their numbers were never large, and their life cycles were measured in centuries rather than months. But people who adapted to those timetables, people who regarded themselves as part of this ecosystem, could, like the whales, thrive in this environment.

The new whalers who arrived on big ships about 1850 were also intent on capturing energy – but they regarded the region’s seasonal timetables as mere obstacles standing in the way of accumulation. Rather than asking, “How many whales will our village need to feed us for the coming year?” they asked “How can we turn as many live whales as possible into barreled oil? How can we kill even more whales this year than we did last year?”

The captains and the crews of the ships were the local face of this extraction; the drivers were financiers in the ports of New England and buyers for industrial concerns elsewhere in the US and in Western Europe. At the foundation of the extraction was a worldview that differed radically from that of the indigenous peoples of Beringia. In the increasingly dominant worldview, the ‘free gifts of nature” were being turned into wealth via exchange value. In Demuth’s phrasing, “As labor improved land by farming it, in the theory of the time, so turning whales into oil improved the sea by making it yield currency” (p. 30).

The new whalers in Beringia were cogs in a recognizably capitalist machine – but, key to our discussion here, hourly wage labour was absent. It simply didn’t pay for the heads of this industry to buy labour by the hour or to take direct command over when, where and how the work was done. The returns were too dependent on nature’s timetables, too far away in space, too far away in time, with too many uncertainties – a ship-wrecking storm enroute to the whaling waters, for example, or a late spring that might choke the Bering Strait with ice, preventing wooden ships from chasing bowheads.

Financiers preferred to shunt much of the risk onto the people who did the work. Thus the whaling ships departed home ports with each crew member promised a specified share of the eventual profits – assuming there were profits. In this nineteenth-century gig, workers might do very well at the end of a good year, or come home with little or no cash to claim for months of brutally dangerous work.

“Harbingers of an uncertain future”

Sending gig workers to the ends of the earth to turn whales into currency may sound like an archaic form of capitalism. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that there are many sectors, even today, in which taking direct control over hours of labour is not part of the capitalist playbook. One such sector is arguably the most fundamental of all economic sectors: agriculture.

A factory model works by controlling “abstract time” – the hours measured by the clock. Agriculture answers first of all to “concrete time” – in Battistoni’s words, “time measured in relation to natural processes, from the length of a day to the cycle of the seasons …” (p. 102).

Capitalism’s resulting aversion to exerting direct control over most agricultural labour was explored by Eric Holt-Giménez in his 2017 book A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism (reviewed here).

“Today, despite centuries of capitalism, large-scale capitalist agriculture produces less than a third of the world’s food supply,” Holt-Giménez wrote. “Peasants and smallholders still feed most people in the world, though they cultivate less than a quarter of the arable land.”

Even in the US, where most agriculture is highly industrialized, most farms are family-owned, not corporate-owned. As Holt-Giménez explained, family farms invest their own capital into expensive land and machinery, while bearing the inevitable risks of bad weather. The typically long but irregular hours of work needed to bring in crops are managed by the individual farmers or their families: “Ninety-seven percent of farms in the United States are family-owned and a full 87 percent rely mostly on family labor.”

While capital risk and labour management remain with farmers, there are many other ways in which corporate agribusiness can extract value. “The agrifoods sector is extraordinarily adept at inventing technologies or services to make profits without actually engaging in the risks and limitations of farming,” Holt-Giménez wrote. Farm commodities are bought, sold and processed through a tiny handful of huge corporations, leaving farmers with little control over the prices they receive. Likewise, the markets for inputs including chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery are also controlled by a few corporate players.

In the political economy of agriculture, capitalism employs different strategies than it uses in controlling wage labour in factories. Battistoni emphasizes that this should not be written off as a quirk of history:

“The oddities of agricultural production, then, are not so much the stubborn dregs of a bygone age as the harbingers of an uncertain future, as important for understanding the politics of capitalism as any struggle within the factory.” (Free Gifts, p. 115)

* * *

What capitalism has regarded as the “free gifts of nature” often come with very particular limitations that restrict how surplus value can be extracted. By paying close attention to these particularities, Battistoni provides insight into struggles that may not seem otherwise related. We’ll conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the constellation of subjects often grouped under the heading of “care work”.

The importance of care work has long been recognized as critically important to every aspect of society including the market economy. Where the economy is dominated by industrially organized wage work, children need decades of care before they can become the next wave of that industrial work force. Yet capital has typically declined to invest in this crucial work, leaving care work to be funded, if at all, not by the market but by a combination of families and governments. Why?

In a chapter entitled “Labor of Life,” Battistoni pays homage to the feminist Marxists who started the Wages For Housework movement4 and whose influence continues to be felt today. As Selma James wrote in 1972, “Wagelessness and the resulting dependence on men is the form patriarchy takes under capitalism”.5 Battistoni argues that, as important as patriarchy is, there is more to the devaluing of essential care work than sexism. She asks us to look also at the common factors that make some kinds of work amenable to value extraction through direct control of labour – while others are mostly left out of the labour market:

“It is the very indeterminacy and unpredictability of human needs, born out of the resolutely qualitative processes of bodily function and the subjective elements of human consciousness, that make the act of tending to these needs nearly impossible to standardize or mechanize – and that render the labor processes built around them especially difficult for capital to make productive.” (p. 171; emphasis mine)

“Productive” is used here in the capitalist sense – that is, producing exchange value for the benefit of the capitalist. Battistoni argues that, whether care work is waged or unwaged, and whether it is being done in a given case by women or men, it tends to be systematically undervalued in the market economy because it does not lend itself to the extraction of exchange value.

Image at top of page: The Chase of the Bowhead Whale, oil on canvas, 1909, by Clifford Warren Ashley. From New Bedford Whaling Museum. Photo in public domain; accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

Footnotes

1 In Wage Labour and Capital, accessed via Marxists Internet Archive. 

2 For an introduction to Demuth’s work check out this Cultures of Energy podcast episode from 2019.

3 The extractivist colonizers in Floating Coast include not only agents of capitalism on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait, but the self-styled disciples of Karl Mark on the Siberian side. Spoiler alert: the ecosystems and the cultures of Beringia suffered violent disruption in both cases.

4 Disclosure: I read this chapter with particular interest because one of my dearest friends, Francie Wyland, was a leader of Wages for Housework in Canada. During her last decade of life Francie was interviewed extensively by Christina Rousseau for her York University PhD thesis Housework and Social Subversion. I have no doubt Francie would have been keenly interested in Battistoni’s discussion of Wages for Housework and its successors, and I wish I could know Francie’s thoughts in response.

5 Selma James, “Women, the Unions, and Work, or, What is Not to Be Done,” in Sex, Race and Class, 68, quoted in Free Gifts, p. 153.

Do capitalists really hate capitalism?

Also published in Resilience.

In North America a belief that capitalism is by far the best economic system has long been an obligatory article of faith for successful politicians. Faith in capitalism is so dominant in public policy circles that most citizens find it hard to imagine that any other system could ever come to supplant capitalism.

But what about this system’s namesakes – capitalists? Do they share the love for the system that has made them and (so far) has kept them rich?

Not so, prolific author and speaker Cory Doctorow has written. In a post entitled “Capitalists hate capitalism,” he writes,

“They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, ‘competition is for losers,’ or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with ‘wide, sustainable moats.’” 1

In many blog posts as well as in recent books, Doctorow has described the extensive efforts by major corporate leaders to first achieve, and then maintain, monopolistic or oligopolistic positions in their various industries. While monopolies in past decades were frequently regulated or broken up in the name of protecting competition, recent business leaders have often felt little need to hide their monopolistic intentions.

Writing about Meta/Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Doctorow writes: “This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, ‘It is better to buy than to compete,’ and ‘what we’re really buying is time,’ and who described his plans to clone a competitor’s features as intended to get there ‘before anyone can get close to their scale again’.2

But as discussed in the previous post in this series, market rule is one of two key components of capitalism outlined by Alyssa Battistoni in her recent book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The other key element is class rule. While capitalists who have achieved the status of monopolists exhibit only a very conditional love for market rule, there is no evidence their ardour for class rule has waned. On the contrary, captains of industry and commerce court power through increasingly large contributions to those politicians who lower their taxes, reduce profit-hindering regulations, and help them maintain positions at the highest levels of both economic and political influence.

Who’s the boss?

Perhaps the most commonly recognized feature of class rule is that “capitalists control the means of production.” As a consequence they exert direct control over a large portion of many people’s lives: those hours spent at work. In the relationship between capital and wage labour, Battistoni writes, “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58)

This control over where, how, and for what purposes other people labour is a subject to which we’ll return to in the next post. Class rule, however, is more than the control over the working lives of others. Battistoni writes:

“[C]apital is not only title to command the labor of others … but the power to organize production and direct investment more generally. … Owners of capital thus have outsized power not only over the people whose labor they have purchased … but over the conditions of life for many people who have entered into no formal agreement whatsoever …. Capital, then, is the power not only to produce commodities but to produce the physical world, without most people’s consultation or consent.” (p. 59)

In commissioning and opening a factory, capitalists assume control over the working hours of employees who sign up to work in that factory. But that factory may have dramatic consequences for many others who have signed no contract: people living down river or down wind of the factory, for example; people in another province or another country who previously produced similar products and now lose their jobs; people in areas where environmentally ruinous mines are opened, because the factory creates increased demand for a particular mineral.

The power to direct investment is a crucial part of class rule – but as Battistoni notes, the corollary is perhaps equally important:

“[C]lass rule is equally evident in its seeming absences: in the ability to decide what not to produce, to decline to hire a worker, to disinvest from projects or regions, to withhold resources. It lies in the power to neglect those things that don’t promise adequate returns, however needed they might be – and crucially, to do so without being held responsible for the outcomes that might result.” (p. 59)

Due to class rule, decisions over how and where to invest resources are not made through democratic deliberations. Significantly, class rule extends beyond those investments intended to extract profits. Via charitable donations made through foundations that often bear their names, capitalists have outsized, non-democratic influence over which types of music, art and theatre get funding, which hospitals in which locations can afford the best equipment, which types of research universities are able to prioritize, and which projects in Global South countries receive crucial financial lifelines.

A handful of high-profile billionaires have pledged to give away their wealth – but the gifts come with many strings attached. As the teaser to an article by Vasilisa Kirilochkina sums it up: “the performance of billionaire virtue—where giving is grand, but control is eternal.”3

Kirilochkina writes, “According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost an estimated $175 billion per year—less than half the amount America’s ten richest individuals gained in personal wealth in 2023 alone.”

The stated goals of billionaire philanthropy tend to be grand, but Kirilochkina concludes that “while billionaires compete to cure the world, their wealth multiples faster than their giving.” Rare indeed is the billionaire who advocates steep increases in progressive taxation – rates that could reduce wealth and income inequality to the point that billionaires would no longer exist and there would be no need for their gifts.

Capitalists, at least those at the pinnacles of their industries, may have a distinct aversion to being subject to market rule, as Doctorow writes. But as Battistoni writes, they show no such ambivalence about class rule, which gives them non-democratic control over where and how investments are either made or not made.

Footnotes

1 Capitalists hate capitalism, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 09 June 2023. 

2 The long game, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 20 November 2025.

3 The Big Givers Club, by Vasilisa Kirilochkina, Observer, 6 April 2025.

Image at top of page: The Bosses of the Senate, a cartoon by Joseph Keppler, shows a Senate chamber with the sign “This is a Senate of the Monopolists, by the Monopolists, and for the Monopolists!” First published in Puck 1889, now in public domain. Accessed at Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia quotes a page from the United States Senate website: “Keppler’s cartoon reflected the phenomenal growth of American industry in the 1880s, but also the disturbing trend toward concentration of industry to the point of monopoly, and its undue influence on politics.”

Labour, capital, and the ‘free gifts of nature’

Also published on Resilience.

Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.”

Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.

Her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press, August 2025) is a brilliant study of topics including, but not limited to:

  • Marx’s theories of use value and exchange value
  • class rule and market rule;
  • organization and control of labour;
  • the roots of ecological economics;
  • debates about valuation of ecosystem services;
  • the Wages for Housework movement and recent theories of care work;
  • Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism;
  • freedom and unfreedom in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Free Gifts is not a quick or easy read, but as a guide to many of the most important issues in political philosophy this book is worth careful study. Each chapter builds on previous chapters to present a coherent and compelling vision.

This post begins a series on significant ideas in Free Gifts. Definitions of basic terms are essential, starting with “free”, “gifts”, and “nature”. Let’s take these keywords in reverse order.

What is nature? Is nature separate from humanity? Or is humanity, and all its works, part of nature?

In the framework Battistoni lays out in the opening chapter, we see “nature” as having two major components: non-human nature and human nature. All of humanity is part of nature, but not all of nature is human.

As such, every human activity is necessarily subject to non-human natural laws: for example, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. Human activity is also shaped by human norms and laws which are socially enacted.

Non-human nature is not necessarily shaped by human laws, and indeed throughout most of the history of the universe nature was entirely unaffected by human nature. Today, on the other hand, much of non-human nature on earth is deeply affected by human, socially-enacted activity. For example, the chemistry of the atmosphere and the physics of global heat absorption are now influenced by human activity.

Battistoni describes this conception of nature in these sentences:

“Rather than cordoning nature off from politics or abolishing the distinction altogether, this book starts from the premise that ‘nature’ pertains to politics of all kinds – not only those issues we tend to think of as ‘environmental.’ Instead of treating ‘politics’ as the organization of human life, to be distinguished from the scientific or technical organization of nonhuman matter, it holds that to organize human life is always also a material enterprise, and hence a natural one.” (Battistoni, page 8; except where otherwise noted, all quotes in this article are from Free Gifts)

Furthermore, because humans are social, our relationship with nature is shaped by human social relationships. In a capitalist society, the relationship between members of that society and nature – both human and non-human nature – is structured by capitalism. As explained more fully in later chapters of the book, “capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions.” (page 15)

So far … so good? I confess I found the opening section of Free Gifts slow going, and I had doubts about carrying on with what appeared at that point to be a very long book. But there was a pay-off – Battistoni used this carefully constructed conception of nature to good effect in ensuing chapters.

How about those other two key words, “gifts” and “free”?

It’s clear from the writings of early classical economists that they viewed non-human nature and its properties – the fertility of soil, the combustive potential of coal, and the forceful expansion of steam – as a gift, and a very important gift.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing the gifts of nature embed us in relationships of reciprocity. In classical economics, by contrast, the gifts of nature are unilateral, imposing no conditions on the humans who take these gifts. That takes us part of the way to understanding the “free” in “free gifts”.

In short, capitalism pays no price for nature’s gifts even though these gifts are immensely valuable. Yet they are valuable in only one of two key senses of value: they have use value but not exchange value. (Exchange value comes into play only later, after they have been harvested, extracted, appropriated, and offered on the market.) Because they have no exchange value, the “free gifts” are free because they are priced at zero.

And with that, we’re deep into the weeds with Karl Marx.

Does the air have a price tag?

John (Fire) Lame Deer told a story with an important implication:

“I always remember listening to my first radio. That was in the little town of Interior [South Dakota] way back in the [nineteen] twenties. There was a sign over a door: ‘Listen to wireless music from Sioux Falls—300 miles away! $1.50 per person.’ You had to plunk that much down to be allowed inside this café to give your ears a treat. We saw a guy fooling around with a needle on a crystal and heard a tinny, crackling voice saying something about winter feed, corn, and the price of prime hogs. At that moment an old Indian spoke up. ‘They took the land and the water, now they own the air too.’ So we have the green frog-skin world in which all things have a price tag.” (Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, by John (Fire) Lame Deer with Richard Erdoes, Washington Square Press, 1971; page 35)

This story helps to illustrate how some gifts of nature have come to be exchanged in the market, while others, so far, have not.

In this case the radio receiver itself was still a scarce commodity, and so it was feasible for a small-scale capitalist to charge a price simply to listen. Meanwhile there were new methods of setting value for a previously mysterious phenomenon of physics. The waves in the electro-magnetic spectrum had been part of the free gifts of nature, existing throughout space for billions of years. But in the twentieth century it became possible to chop that spectrum into pieces that were sold on the market. Before that date the spectrum was valued at zero; after that date the spectrum had exchange value.

It may not have been exactly true that the air itself had a price tag – yet – but the radio waves that travel through that air were indeed becoming “owned”, bought and sold.

The air we breathe, the sun that warms us and allows plants to grow, the clouds that bring rain, the forests that cool the landscape and slow the passage of rainfall to the sea – these are immensely valuable, both to us and to non-human nature. These and myriad other natural phenomena have immense use value. But in themselves they have no exchange value unless and until they are exchanged, for the abstract expression of value that is money, on the market.

And it is this abstracted value – exchange value – that determines whether something is treated as valuable in capitalism.

Unless and until a particular gift of nature is traded on the market, its valuation and its price remains zero.

When formerly free – that is, priced at zero – gifts of nature are exchanged on the market, our human relationships to those gifts are transformed. Yet the prior natural characteristics of those gifts remain, and shape the practices of capitalism in their own ways. Coal burns with a specific amount of heat per kilogram and is easy to transport. Methane produces even more heat per kilogram, but as an expansive gas it is tricky to transport. Dried spruce wood pellets can be combusted to produce a lot of heat, but the trees take decades to grow. Specially selected dairy cows produce a lot of milk each day for a period of months. But their lactation cycles are determined by a complex of biological factors that are only partially malleable by capitalist management.

All these physical and biological properties shape how capitalism extracts value when the free gifts of nature are brought into production processes. Of equal importance, the properties of non-human nature are important in determining which gifts of nature are not brought into capitalist production processes:

“[Capitalism’s] ability to wring profit out of every entity, activity, and process on Earth has often been overstated. Although capital seeks to absorb what it can make profitable, it abdicates that which it can’t. It doesn’t only appropriate and exploit; it also abandons and expels.” (p 47-48)

* * *

While capitalism enforces a particular relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, it likewise perverts our freedom and ensnares us in specifically capitalist forms of unfreedom. As Battistoni notes in the book’s epilogue, ending capitalist unfreedom would not necessarily bring about a better world, but it would “allow us to make different kinds of decisions than the ones capitalism offers.” (p 239)

Battistoni enlists the help of Jean-Paul Sartre in elucidating the character of capitalist unfreedom. We’ll delve into that conversation in the next post.

Photo at top of page: “Underground uranium mining in Nucla (Montrose County, Colorado)”, photo by Bill Gillette, 1972, public domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness

A review of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.

Also published on Resilience.

If you are a government-approved American hog farmer, you drive: a) a dusty pickup truck, from your barn to your local small-town feed store; b) a huge articulated tractor, through your thousand-acre fields of corn and soybeans; c) a private jet, which you fly from your midwestern corporate headquarters to a second or third home in Florida.

Barons, by Austin Frerick, published by Island Press, March 2024.

If you’ve read Austin Frerick’s new book Barons (Island Press, March 2024), you’ll pick the private jet. The hog farmer won’t drive to a small-town feed store, because small towns in agricultural areas are losing most of their businesses. The hog farmer won’t use a big tractor to till fields of corn and soybeans; as a hog specialist who raises no grain, he or she will buy feed “inputs” from big grain farmers who raise no animals.

But as two prominent US Department of Agriculture secretaries advocated, farmers should “get big or get out”. And a hog farmer who has really “got big” will want that private jet, either to get to a second home on the Gulf Coast or to make quick trips to Washington to lobby for subsidies and tax breaks.

In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.

Although two of the barons, Cargill Inc. and JAB Holding Company, are well over a hundred years old, all seven barons have seen explosive growth in the 40 years since the US government switched to very lax anti-trust regulations. Except for JAB (a little-known Luxembourg-based company that has recently swallowed coffee supply chains around the world), all the highlighted barons are US-based, and all are very much involved in international trade.

One of the companies is neither a grower, processor, nor retailer of food – its core businesses are in marketing and in owning and licensing genetics. Driscoll’s is the major brand of strawberries and several other berries sold in supermarkets in the US as well as in Canada. (Frerick writes that they control about one-third of the US berry market.) The company buys from 750 growers in two dozen countries, employing more than one hundred thousand people. The growers work to Driscoll’s specifications, but Driscoll’s has no legal responsibility to those hundred thousand workers.

Now that American consumers have learned to buy fresh – albeit nearly tasteless – fruit twelve months of the year, it’s essential for Driscoll’s to have suppliers in countries with different seasons. This has other business advantages, Frerick writes: “the Driscoll’s model is based on shifting farming out of the country to companies that don’t need to worry about US minimum wage laws or environmental regulations.”

For two of the barons profiled, most of the production as well as most of the environmental damage occurs closer to home. Jeff and Deb Hansen, who own that private jet from the opening paragraph, rule an empire known as Iowa Select which brings five million pigs to market each year. “Today,” French writes, “Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.”

Dairy barons Sue and Mike McCloskey own a vast complex in Indiana called Fair Oaks Farms. Besides being an (indoor) home to 36,000 dairy cows, and the midwest’s largest agri-tourism destination, Fair Oaks produces about 430,000 gallons of manure every day.

The huge hog, chicken, dairy or beef operations favoured by the current rules of the game share this problem – they produce far more manure than can be safely used to augment local soils. The result, in many locations across the country, is polluted groundwater, runoff that disrupts river and lake ecosystems – and an overpowering stench for residents unlucky enough to live just downwind.

For workers in the hog, dairy, berry, slaughter, and grocery businesses profiled by Frerich, working conditions are often dangerous and the pay is low. The book reflects on Upton Sinclair’s century-old classic The Jungle, in which immigrant workers toil for meagre wages in filthy and dangerous Chicago slaughterhouses. In the decades after Sinclair’s book became a runaway bestseller, workers unionized and working conditions and wages in slaughterhouses improved dramatically. Today, however, many of the unions have been defeated, many slaughterhouses have moved to small towns where there is little other opportunity for employment, and most workers once again are new immigrants who have little ability to fight back against employers.

The most widely recognized name in Barons is Walmart. The mega-retailer is far and away the largest grocer in the US. As such, there are obvious advantages in buying products in huge, uniform quantities – in short, products that barons in the hog, dairy, grain, and berry sectors are ideally suited to provide. It matters not whether these products are truly nutritious. What matters is whether the products are cheap and, in line with WalMart’s directives to suppliers, cheaper year after year. Still, French explains, not cheap enough for WalMart’s own employees to afford – WalMart employees in many states require government assistance just to feed their families.

Barons is not a long book – under 200 pages, not including the footnotes – but Frerick covers a lot of ground. He does not spend a lot of time discussing solutions, however, beyond some very good ideas sketched briefly in the Conclusion. Still, for people not already deeply familiar with industrial agribusiness and its associated environmental, labour, health and political ills, Barons is a compelling read.

Image at top of page: “State of the art lagoon waste management system for a 900 head hog farm,” photo by Jeff Vanuga for the United States Department of Agriculture, public domain, accessed on Wikimedia Commons.

Farming on screen

Bodies, Minds, and the Artificial Intelligence Industrial Complex, part six
Also published on Resilience.

What does the future of farming look like? To some pundits the answer is clear: “Connected sensors, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, robots, and big data analytics will be essential in effectively feeding tomorrow’s world. The future of agriculture will be smart, connected, and digital.”1

Proponents of artificial intelligence in agriculture argue that AI will be key to limiting or reversing biodiversity loss, reducing global warming emissions, and restoring resilience to ecosystems that are stressed by climate change.

There are many flavours of AI and thousands of potential applications for AI in agriculture. Some of them may indeed prove helpful in restoring parts of ecosystems.

But there are strong reasons to expect that AI in agriculture will be dominated by the same forces that have given the world a monoculture agri-industrial complex overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. There are many reasons why we might expect that agri-industrial AI will lead to more biodiversity loss, more food insecurity, more socio-economic inequality, more climate vulnerability. To the extent that AI in agriculture bears fruit, many of these fruits are likely to be bitter.

Optimizing for yield

A branch of mathematics known as optimization has played a large role in the development of artificial intelligence. Author Coco Krumme, who earned a PhD in mathematics from MIT, traces optimization’s roots back hundreds of years and sees optimization in the development of contemporary agriculture.

In her book Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization, she writes,

“Embedded in the treachery of optimals is a deception. An optimization, whether it’s optimizing the value of an acre of land or the on-time arrival rate of an airline, often involves collapsing measurement into a single dimension, dollars or time or something else.”2

The “single dimensions” that serve as the building blocks of optimization are the result of useful, though simplistic, abstractions of the infinite complexities of our world. In agriculture, for example, how can we identify and describe the factors of soil fertility? One way would be to describe truly healthy soil as soil that contains a diverse microbial community, thriving among networks of fungal mycelia, plant roots, worms, and insect larvae. Another way would be to note that the soil contains sufficient amounts of at least several chemical elements including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. The second method is an incomplete abstraction, but it has the big advantage that it lends itself to easy quantification, calculation, and standardized testing. Coupled with the availability of similar simple quantified fertilizers, this method also allows for quick, “efficient,” yield-boosting soil amendments.

In deciding what are the optimal levels of certain soil nutrients, of course, we must also give an implicit or explicit answer to this question: “Optimal for what?” If the answer is, “optimal for soya production”, we are likely to get higher yields of soya – even if the soil is losing many of the attributes of health that we might observe through a less abstract lens. Krumme describes the gradual and eventual results of this supposedly scientific agriculture:

“It was easy to ignore, for a while, the costs: the chemicals harming human health, the machinery depleting soil, the fertilizer spewing into the downstream water supply.”3

The social costs were no less real than the environmental costs: most farmers, in countries where industrial agriculture took hold, were unable to keep up with the constant pressure to “go big or go home”. So they sold their land to the fewer remaining farmers who farmed bigger farms, and rural agricultural communities were hollowed out.

“But just look at those benefits!”, proponents of industrialized agriculture can say. Certainly yields per hectare of commodity crops climbed dramatically, and this food was raised by a smaller share of the work force.

The extent to which these changes are truly improvements is murky, however, when we look beyond the abstractions that go into the optimization models. We might want to believe that “if we don’t count it, it doesn’t count” – but that illusion won’t last forever.

Let’s start with social and economic factors. Coco Krumme quotes historian Paul Conkin on this trend in agricultural production: “Since 1950, labor productivity per hour of work in the non-farm sectors has increased 2.5 fold; in agriculture, 7-fold.”4

Yet a recent paper by Irena Knezevic, Alison Blay-Palmer and Courtney Jane Clause finds:

“Industrial farming discourse promotes the perception that there is a positive relationship—the larger the farm, the greater the productivity. Our objective is to demonstrate that based on the data at the centre of this debate, on average, small farms actually produce more food on less land ….”5

Here’s the nub of the problem: productivity statistics depend on what we count, and what we don’t count, when we tally input and output. Labour productivity in particular is usually calculated in reference to Gross Domestic Product, which is the sum of all monetary transactions.

Imagine this scenario, which has analogs all over the world. Suppose I pick a lot of apples, I trade a bushel of them with a neighbour, and I receive a piglet in return. The piglet eats leftover food scraps and weeds around the yard, while providing manure that fertilizes the vegetable garden. Several months later I butcher the pig and share the meat with another neighbour who has some chickens and who has been sharing the eggs. We all get delicious and nutritious food – but how much productivity is tallied? None, because none of these transactions are measured in dollars nor counted in GDP.

In many cases, of course, some inputs and outputs are counted while others are not. A smallholder might buy a few inputs such as feed grain, and might sell some products in a market “official” enough to be included in economic statistics. But much of the smallholder’s output will go to feeding immediate family or neighbours without leaving a trace in GDP.

If GDP had been counted when this scene was depicted, the sale of Spratt’s Pure Fibrine poultry feed may have been the only part of the operation that would “count”. Image: “Spratts patent “pure fibrine” poultry meal & poultry appliances”, from Wellcome Collection, circa 1880–1889, public domain.

Knezevic et al. write, “As farm size and farm revenue can generally be objectively measured, the productivist view has often used just those two data points to measure farm productivity.” However, other statisticians have put considerable effort into quantifying output in non-monetary terms, by estimating all agricultural output in terms of kilocalories.

This too is an abstraction, since a kilocalorie from sugar beets does not have the same nutritional impact as a kilocalorie from black beans or a kilocalorie from chicken – and farm output might include non-food values such as fibre for clothing, fuel for fireplaces, or animal draught power. Nevertheless, counting kilocalories instead of dollars or yuan makes possible more realistic estimates of how much food is produced by small farmers on the edge of the formal economy.

The proportions of global food supply produced on small vs. large farms is a matter of vigorous debate, and Knezevic et al. discuss some of widely discussed estimates. They defend their own estimate:

“[T]he data indicate that family farmers and smallholders account for 81% of production and food supply in kilocalories on 72% of the land. Large farms, defined as more than 200 hectares, account for only 15 and 13% of crop production and food supply by kilocalories, respectively, yet use 28% of the land.”6

They also argue that the smallest farms – 10 hectares (about 25 acres) or less – “provide more than 55% of the world’s kilocalories on about 40% of the land.” This has obvious importance in answering the question “How can we feed the world’s growing population?”7

Of equal importance to our discussion on the role of AI in agriculture, are these conclusions of Knezevic et al.: “industrialized and non-industrialized farming … come with markedly different knowledge systems,” and “smaller farms also have higher crop and non-crop biodiversity.”

Feeding the data machine

As discussed at length in previous installments, the types of artificial intelligence currently making waves require vast data sets. And in their paper advocating “Smart agriculture (SA)”, Jian Zhang et al. write, “The focus of SA is on data exploitation; this requires access to data, data analysis, and the application of the results over multiple (ideally, all) farm or ranch operations.”8

The data currently available from “precision farming” comes from large, well-capitalized farms that can afford tractors and combines equipped with GPS units, arrays of sensors tracking soil moisture, fertilizer and pesticide applications, and harvested quantities for each square meter. In the future envisioned by Zhang et al., this data collection process should expand dramatically through the incorporation of Internet of Things sensors on many more farms, plus a network allowing the funneling of information to centralized AI servers which will “learn” from data analysis, and which will then guide participating farms in achieving greater productivity at lower ecological cost. This in turn will require a 5G cellular network throughout agricultural areas.

Zhang et al. do not estimate the costs – in monetary terms, or in up-front carbon emissions and ecological damage during the manufacture, installation and operation of the data-crunching networks. An important question will be: will ecological benefits be equal to or greater than the ecological harms?

There is also good reason to doubt that the smallest farms – which produce a disproportionate share of global food supply – will be incorporated into this “smart agriculture”. Such infrastructure will have heavy upfront costs, and the companies that provide the equipment will want assurance that their client farmers will have enough cash outputs to make the capital investments profitable – if not for the farmers themselves, then at least for the big corporations marketing the technology.

A team of scholars writing in Nature Machine Intelligence concluded,

“[S]mall-scale farmers who cultivate 475 of approximately 570 million farms worldwide and feed large swaths of the so-called Global South are particularly likely to be excluded from AI-related benefits.”9

On the subject of what kind of data is available to AI systems, the team wrote,

“[T]ypical agricultural datasets have insufficiently considered polyculture techniques, such as forest farming and silvo-pasture. These techniques yield an array of food, fodder and fabric products while increasing soil fertility, controlling pests and maintaining agrobiodiversity.”

They noted that the small number of crops which dominate commodity crop markets – corn, wheat, rice, and soy in particular – also get the most research attention, while many crops important to subsistence farmers are little studied. Assuming that many of the small farmers remain outside the artificial intelligence agri-industrial complex, the data-gathering is likely to perpetuate and strengthen the hegemony of major commodities and major corporations.

Montreal Nutmeg. Today it’s easy to find images of hundreds varieties of fruit and vegetables that were popular more than a hundred years ago – but finding viable seeds or rootstock is another matter. Image: “Muskmelon, the largest in cultivation – new Montreal Nutmeg. This variety found only in Rice’s box of choice vegetables. 1887”, from Boston Public Library collection “Agriculture Trade Collection” on flickr.

Large-scale monoculture agriculture has already resulted in a scarcity of most traditional varieties of many grains, fruits and vegetables; the seed stocks that work best in the cash-crop nexus now have overwhelming market share. An AI that serves and is led by the same agribusiness interests is not likely, therefore, to preserve the crop diversity we will need to cope with an unstable climate and depleted ecosystems.

It’s marvellous that data servers can store and quickly access the entire genomes of so many species and sub-species. But it would be better if rare varieties are not only preserved but in active use, by communities who keep alive the particular knowledge of how these varieties respond to different weather, soil conditions, and horticultural techniques.

Finally, those small farmers who do step into the AI agri-complex will face new dangers:

“[A]s AI becomes indispensable for precision agriculture, … farmers will bring substantial croplands, pastures and hayfields under the influence of a few common ML [Machine Learning] platforms, consequently creating centralized points of failure, where deliberate attacks could cause disproportionate harm. [T]hese dynamics risk expanding the vulnerability of agrifood supply chains to cyberattacks, including ransomware and denial-of-service attacks, as well as interference with AI-driven machinery, such as self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, robot swarms for crop inspection, and autonomous sprayers.”10

The quantified gains in productivity due to efficiency, writes Coco Krumme, have come with many losses – and “we can think of these losses as the flip side of what we’ve gained from optimizing.” She adds,

“We’ll call [these losses], in brief: slack, place, and scale. Slack, or redundancy, cushions a system from outside shock. Place, or specific knowledge, distinguishes a farm and creates the diversity of practice that, ultimately, allows for both its evolution and preservation. And a sense of scale affords a connection between part and whole, between a farmer and the population his crop feeds.”11

AI-led “smart agriculture” may allow higher yields from major commodity crops, grown in monoculture fields on large farms all using the same machinery, the same chemicals, the same seeds and the same methods. Such agriculture is likely to earn continued profits for the major corporations already at the top of the complex, companies like John Deere, Bayer-Monsanto, and Cargill.

But in a world facing combined and manifold ecological, geopolitical and economic crises, it will be even more important to have agricultures with some redundancy to cushion from outside shock. We’ll need locally-specific knowledge of diverse food production practices. And we’ll need strong connections between local farmers and communities who are likely to depend on each other more than ever.

In that context, putting all our eggs in the artificial intelligence basket doesn’t sound like smart strategy.

Notes

1 “Achieving the Rewards of Smart Agriculture,” by Jian Zhang, Dawn Trautman, Yingnan Liu, Chunguang Bi, Wei Chen, Lijun Ou, and Randy Goebel, Agronomy, 24 February 2024.

2 Coco Krumme, Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization, Riverhead Books, 2023, pg 181 A hat tip to Mark Hurst, whose podcast Techtonic introduced me to the work of Coco Krumme.

3 Optimal Illusions, pg 23.

4 Optimal Illusions, pg 25, quoting Paul Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm.

5 Irena Knezevic, Alison Blay-Palmer and Courtney Jane Clause, “Recalibrating Data on Farm Productivity: Why We Need Small Farms for Food Security,” Sustainability, 4 October 2023.

6 Knezevic et al., “Recalibrating the Data on Farm Productivity.”

7 Recommended reading: two farmer/writers who have conducted more thorough studies of the current and potential productivity of small farms are Chris Smaje and Gunnar Rundgren.

8 Zhang et al., “Achieving the Rewards of Smart Agriculture,” 24 February 2024.

9 Asaf Tzachor, Medha Devare, Brian King, Shahar Avin and Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, “Responsible artificial intelligence in agriculture requires systemic understanding of risks and externalities,” Nature Machine Intelligence, 23 February 2022.

10 Asaf Tzachor et al., “Responsible artificial intelligence in agriculture requires systemic understanding of risks and externalities.”

11 Coco Krumme, Optimal Illusions, pg 34.

Image at top of post: “Alexander Frick, Jr. in his tractor/planter planting soybean seeds with the aid of precision agriculture systems and information,” in US Dep’t of Agriculture album “Frick Farms gain with Precision Agriculture and Level Fields”, photo for USDA by Lance Cheung, April 2021, public domain, accessed via flickr. 

Profits of Utopia

Also published on Resilience

What led to the twentieth century’s rapid economic growth? And what are the prospects for that kind of growth to return?

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, was published by Basic Books, Sept 2022; 605 pages.

Taken together, two new books go a long way toward answering the first of those questions.

Bradford J. DeLong intends his Slouching Towards Utopia to be a “grand narrative” of what he calls “the long twentieth century”.

Mark Stoll summarizes his book Profit as “a history of capitalism that seeks to explain both how capitalism changed the natural world and how the environment shaped capitalism.”

By far the longer of the two books, DeLong’s tome primarily concerns the years from 1870 to 2010. Stoll’s slimmer volume goes back thousands of years, though the bulk of his coverage concerns the past seven centuries.

Both books are well organized and well written. Both make valuable contributions to an understanding of our current situation. In my opinion Stoll casts a clearer light on the key problems we now face.

Although neither book explicitly addresses the prospects for future prosperity, Stoll’s concluding verdict offers a faint hope.

Let’s start with Slouching Towards Utopia. Bradford J. Delong, a professor of economics at University of California Berkeley, describes “the long twentieth century” – from 1870 to 2010 – as “the first century in which the most important historical thread was what anyone would call the economic one, for it was the century that saw us end our near-universal dire material poverty.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, page 2; emphasis mine) Unfortunately that is as close as he gets in this book to defining just what he means by “economics”.

On the other hand he does tell us what “political economics” means:

“There is a big difference between the economic and the political economic. The latter term refers to the methods by which people collectively decide how they are going to organize the rules of the game within which economic life takes place.” (page 85; emphasis in original)

Discussion of the political economics of the Long Twentieth Century, in my opinion, account for most of the bulk and most of the value in this book.

DeLong weaves into his narratives frequent – but also clear and concise – explanations of the work of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Polanyi. These three very different theorists responded to, and helped bring about, major changes in “the rules of the game within which economic life takes place”.

DeLong uses their work to good effect in explaining how policymakers and economic elites navigated and tried to influence the changing currents of market fundamentalism, authoritarian collectivism, social democracy, the New Deal, and neoliberalism.

With each swing of the political economic pendulum, the industrial, capitalist societies either slowed, or sped up, the advance “towards utopia” – a society in which all people, regardless of class, race, or sex, enjoy prosperity, human rights and a reasonably fair share of the society’s wealth.

DeLong and Stoll present similar perspectives on the “Thirty Glorious Years” from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, and a similarly dim view of the widespread turn to neoliberalism since then.

They also agree that while a “market economy” plays an important role in generating prosperity, a “market society” rapidly veers into disaster. That is because the market economy, left to its own devices, exacerbates inequalities so severely that social cohesion falls apart. The market must be governed by social democracy, and not the other way around.

DeLong provides one tragic example:

“With unequal distribution, a market economy will generate extraordinarily cruel outcomes. If my wealth consists entirely of my ability to work with my hands in someone else’s fields, and if the rains do not come, so that my ability to work with my hands has no productive market value, then the market will starve me to death – as it did to millions of people in Bengal in 1942 and 1943.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, p 332)

Profit: An Environmental History was published by Polity Books, January 2023; 280 pages.

In DeLong’s and Stoll’s narratives, during the period following World War II “the rules of the economic game” in industrialized countries were set in a way that promoted widespread prosperity and rising wealth for nearly all classes, without a concomitant rise in inequality.

As a result, economic growth during that period was far higher than it had been from 1870 to 1940, before the widespread influence of social democracy, and far higher than it has been since about 1975 during the neoliberal era.

During the Thirty Glorious Years, incomes from the factory floor to the CEO’s office rose at roughly the same rate. Public funding of advanced education, an income for retired workers, unemployment insurance, strong labor unions, and (in countries more civilized than the US) public health insurance – these social democratic features ensured that a large and growing number of people could continue to buy the ever-increasing output of the consumer economy. High marginal tax rates ensured that government war debts would be retired without cutting off the purchasing power of lower and middle classes.

Stoll explains that long-time General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan played a key role in the transition to a consumer economy. Under his leadership GM pioneered a line-up ranging from economy cars to luxury cars; the practice of regularly introducing new models whose primary features were differences in fashion; heavy spending on advertising to promote the constantly-changing lineup; and auto financing which allowed consumers to buy new cars without first saving up the purchase price.

By then the world’s largest corporation, GM flourished during the social democratic heyday of the Thirty Glorious Years. But in Stoll’s narrative, executives like Alfred Sloan couldn’t resist meddling with the very conditions that had made their version of capitalism so successful:

“There was a worm in the apple of postwar prosperity, growing out of sight until it appeared in triumph in the late 1970s. The regulations and government activism of the New Deal … so alarmed certain wealthy corporate leaders, Alfred Sloan among them, that they began to develop a propaganda network to promote weak government and low taxes.” (Profit, page 176)

This propaganda network achieved hegemony in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took the helm in the US and the UK. DeLong and Stoll concur that the victory of neoliberalism resulted in a substantial drop in the economic growth rate, along with a rapid growth in inequality. As DeLong puts it, the previous generation’s swift march towards utopia slowed to a crawl.

DeLong and Stoll, then, share a great deal when it comes to political economics – the political rules that govern how economic wealth is distributed.

On the question of how that economic wealth is generated, however, DeLong is weak and Stoll makes a better guide.

DeLong introduces his discussion of the long twentieth century with the observation that between 1870 and 2010, economic growth far outstripped population growth for the first time in human history. What led to that economic acceleration? There were three key factors, DeLong says:

“Things changed starting around 1870. Then we got the institutions for organization and research and the technologies – we got full globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation. These were the keys. These unlocked the gate that had previously kept humanity in dire poverty.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, p. 3)

Thomas Edison’s research lab in West Orange, New Jersey. Cropped from photo by Anita Gould, 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, via Flickr.

These may have been necessary conditions for a burst of economic growth, but were they sufficient? If they were sufficient, then why should we believe that the long twentieth century is conclusively over? Since DeLong’s three keys are still in place, and if only the misguided leadership of neoliberalism has spoiled the party, would it not be possible that a swing of the political economic pendulum could restore the conditions for rapid economic growth?

Indeed, in one of DeLong’s few remarks directly addressing the future he says “there is every reason to believe prosperity will continue to grow at an exponential rate in the centuries to come.” (page 11)

Stoll, by contrast, deals with the economy as inescapably embedded in the natural environment, and he emphasizes the revolutionary leap forward in energy production in the second half of the 19th century.

Energy and environment

Stoll’s title and subtitle are apt – Profit: An Environmental History. He says that “economic activity has always degraded environments” (p. 6) and he provides examples from ancient history as well as from the present.

Economic development in this presentation is “the long human endeavor to use resources more intensively.” (p. 7) In every era, tapping energy sources has been key.

European civilization reached for the resources of other regions in the late medieval era. Technological developments such as improved ocean-going vessels allowed incipient imperialism, but additional energy sources were also essential. Stoll explains that the Venetian, Genoese and Portuguese traders who pioneered a new stage of capitalism all relied in part on the slave trade:

“By the late fifteenth century, slaves made up over ten percent of the population of Lisbon, Seville, Barcelona, and Valencia and remained common in southern coastal Portugal and Spain for another century or two.” (p. 40)

The slave trade went into high gear after Columbus chanced across the Americas. That is because, even after they had confiscated two huge continents rich in resources, European imperial powers still relied on the consumption of other humans’ lives as an economic input:

“Free-labor colonies all failed to make much profit and most failed altogether. Colonizers resorted to slavery to people colonies and make them pay. For this reason Africans would outnumber Europeans in the Americas until the 1840s.” (p. 47)

While the conditions of slavery in Brazil were “appallingly brutal”, Stoll writes, Northern Europeans made slavery even more severe. As a result “Conditions in slave plantations were so grueling and harsh that birthrates trailed deaths in most European plantation colonies.” (p 49)

‘Shipping Sugar’ from William Clark’s ‘Ten views in the island of Antigua’ (Thomas Clay, London, 1823). Public domain image via Picryl.com.

Clearly, then, huge numbers of enslaved workers played a major and fundamental role in rising European wealth between 1500 and 1800. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the 19th century, as slavery was being outlawed in colonial empires, European industries were learning how to make effective use of a new energy source: coal. By the end of that century, the fossil fuel economy had begun its meteoric climb.

Rapid increases in scientific knowledge, aided by such organizations as modern research laboratories, certainly played a role in commercializing methods of harnessing the energy in coal and oil. Yet this technological knowhow on its own, without abundant quantities of readily-extracted coal and oil, would not have led to an explosion of economic growth.

Where DeLong is content to list “three keys to economic growth” that omit fossil fuels, Stoll adds a fourth key – not merely the technology to use fossil fuels, but the material availability of those fuels.

By 1900, coal-powered engines had transformed factories, mines, ocean transportation via steamships, land transportation via railroads, and the beginnings of electrical grids. The machinery of industry could supply more goods than most people had ever thought they might want, a development Stoll explains as a transition from an industrial economy to a consumer economy.

Coal, however, could not have powered the car culture that swept across North America before World War II, and across the rest of the industrialized world after the War. To shift the consumer economy into overdrive, an even richer and more flexible energy source was needed: petroleum.

By 1972, Stoll notes, the global demand for petroleum was five-and-a-half times as great as in 1949.

Like DeLong, Stoll marks the high point of the economic growth rate at about 1970. And like DeLong, he sees the onset of neoliberalism as one factor slowing and eventually stalling the consumer economy. Unlike DeLong, however, Stoll also emphasizes the importance of energy sources in this trajectory. In the period leading up to 1970 net energy availability was skyrocketing, making rapid economic growth achievable. After 1970 net energy availability grew more slowly, and increasing amounts of energy had to be used up in the process of finding and extracting energy. In other words, the Energy Return on Energy Invested, which increased rapidly between 1870 and 1970, peaked and started to decline over recent decades.

This gradual turnaround in net energy, along with the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideologies, contributed to the faltering of economic growth. The rich got richer at an even faster pace, but most of society gained little or no ground.

Stoll pays close attention to the kind of resources needed to produce economic growth – the inputs. He also emphasizes the anti-goods that our economies turn out on the other end, be they toxic wastes from mining and smelting, petroleum spills, smog, pervasive plastic garbage, and climate-disrupting carbon dioxide emissions.

Stoll writes, 

“The relentless, rising torrent of consumer goods that gives Amazon.com its apt name places unabating demand on extractive industries for resources and energy. Another ‘Amazon River’ of waste flows into the air, water, and land.” (Profit, p. 197)

Can the juggernaut be turned around before it destroys both our society and our ecological life-support systems, and can a fair, sustainable economy take its place? On this question, Stoll’s generally excellent book disappoints.

While he appears to criticize the late-twentieth century environmental movement for not daring to challenge capitalism itself, in Profit’s closing pages he throws cold water on any notion that capitalism could be replaced.

“Capitalism … is rooted in human nature and human history. These deep roots, some of which go back to our remotest ancestors, make capitalism resilient and adaptable to time and circumstances, so that the capitalism of one time and place is not that of another. These roots also make it extraordinarily difficult to replace.” (Profit, p. 253)

He writes that “however much it might spare wildlife and clean the land, water, and air, we stop the machinery of consumer capitalism at our peril.” (p. 254) If we are to avoid terrible social and economic unrest and suffering, we must accept that “we are captives on this accelerating merry-go-round of consumer capitalism.” (p. 256)

It’s essential to curb the power of big corporations and switch to renewable energy sources, he says. But in a concluding hint at the so-far non-existent phenomenon of “absolute decoupling”, he writes,

“The only requirement to keep consumer capitalism running is to keep as much money flowing into as many pockets as possible. The challenge may be to do so with as little demand for resources as possible.” (Profit, p. 256)

Are all these transformations possible, and can they happen in time? Stoll’s final paragraph says “We can only hope it will be possible.” Given the rest of his compelling narrative, that seems a faint hope indeed.

* * *

Coming next: another new book approaches the entanglements of environment and economics with a very different perspective, telling us with cheerful certainty that we can indeed switch the industrial economy to clean, renewable energies, rapidly, fully, and with no miracles needed.


Image at top of page: ‘The Express Train’, by Charles Parsons, 1859, published by Currier and Ives. Image donated to Wikimedia Commons by Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

‘This is a key conversation to have.’

This afternoon Post Carbon Institute announced the release of the new book Energy Transition and Economic Sufficiency. That brings to fruition a project more than two-and-a-half years in the making.

Cover of Energy Transition and Economic Sufficiency

In May 2019, I received an email from Clifford Cobb, editor of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. He asked if I would consider serving as Guest Editor for an issue of the Journal, addressing “problems of transition to a world of climate instability and rising energy prices.” I said “yes” – and then, month by month, learned how difficult it can be to assemble a book-length collection of essays. In July, 2020, this was published by Wiley and made accessible to academic readers around the world.

It had always been a goal, however, to also release this collection as a printed volume, for the general public, at an accessible price. With the help of the Post Carbon Institute that plan is now realized. On their website you can download the book’s Introduction –which sets the context and gives an overview of each chapter – at no cost; download the entire book in pdf format for only $9.99US; or find online retailers around the world to buy the print edition of the book.

Advance praise for Energy Transition and Economic Sufficiency:

“Energy descent is crucial to stopping climate and ecological breakdown. This is a key conversation to have.” – Peter Kalmus, climate scientist, author of Being The Change

“This lively and insightful collection is highly significant for identifying key trends in transitioning to low-energy futures.” – Anitra Nelson, author of Small is Necessary

“The contributors to this volume have done us a tremendous service.” – Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

“For those already applying permaculture in their lives and livelihoods, this collection of essays is affirmation that we are on the right track for creative adaption to a world of less. This book helps fill the conceptual black hole that still prevails in academia, media, business and politics.” – David Holmgren, co-originator of Permaculture, author of RetroSuburbia

“The contributors explain why it is time to stop thinking so much about efficiency and start thinking about sufficiency: how much do we really need? What’s the best tool to do the job? What is enough? They describe a future that is not just sustainable but is regenerative, and where there is enough for everyone living in a low-carbon world.” – Lloyd Alter, Design Editor at treehugger.com and author of Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle: Why Individual Climate Action Matters More Than Ever

Some sources for the print edition:

In North America, Barnes & Noble

In Britain, Blackwell’s  and Waterstones

In Australia, Booktopia

Worldwide, from Amazon

Reclaiming hope from the dismal science

Also published on Resilience

Post Growth is published by Polity Press, 2021.

“Empowering and elegiac” might seem a strange description of a book on economics. Yet the prominent author and former economics minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, chooses that phrase of praise for the new book Post Growth, by Tim Jackson.

In many respects the book lives up to that billing, and in the process Post Growth offers a hopeful vision of its subtitle: Life After Capitalism.

My dictionary defines an elegy as “a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.” In writing an obituary for capitalism, paradoxically, Jackson also gives us a glimpse of a far richer way of life than anything capitalism could afford us.

Along the way he takes us through the origins and later distortion of John Stuart Mill’s theory of utilitarianism; the demonstration by biologist Lynn Margulis that cooperation is just as important an evolutionary driver as is competition; the psychology of ‘flow’ popularized by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi; and the landscape-transforming campaigns of Kenyan environmental justice activist Wangari Maathai.

Jackson accomplishes all this and more, elegantly and with clarity, in less than 200 pages.

The dismal science and its fairytales

Since the mid-19th century, under the influence of the ideals of competition and survival of the fittest, economics has earned the sobriquet “the dismal science”. At the same time, contemporary economics grew in significant part from the theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in which the goal of economics would be the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. During our lifetimes, mainstream economics has proclaimed a gospel of unending economic growth. What gives?

In Mill’s day, Jackson writes, the word ‘utility’ was “a kind of direct proxy for happiness.” But meanings change:

“Economists today use ‘utility’ to refer to the worth or value of something. They tend to measure utility in monetary terms. The argument that we are driven to maximize our expected utility then assumes a very different meaning. But perhaps it’s easier to see now why the pursuit of GDP growth is seen as an irreducible good by economists and policymakers alike.” (Post Growth, page 52)

Speaking to the UN Conference on Climate Change in September 2019, Greta Thunberg famously dismissed economic orthodoxy as “fairytales of eternal economic growth.” Jackson devotes much of Post Growth to demonstrating, first, that this fairytale contradicts fundamental laws of physics, and second, that capitalism does not deliver ever-greater happiness, even for the minority in the upper half of the income scale, even during the brief and anomalous burst of growth following World War II. He explains,

“An infinite economy (the ultimate end of eternal growth) means infinite depreciation. Infinite maintenance costs. An infinite need for available energy to turn back the tide of entropy. At the end of the day, the myth of growth is a thermodynamic impossibility.” (Post Growth, page 79)

Jackson’s elegant discussion of thermodynamic limits notwithstanding, I found his discussion of the end of economic growth less than fully satisfying. He notes that labour productivity grew greatly up to about 1960, that this growth in productivity was the major enabler of rapid economic growth, and that as labour productivity growth stalled over the past several decades, so too has economic growth. He mentions – without clearly endorsing – the idea that this labour productivity was directly tied to the most easily accessible fuel sources:

“A fascinating – if worrying – contention is that the peak growth rates of the 1960s were only possible at all on the back of a huge and deeply destructive exploitation of dirty fossil fuels ….” (Post Growth, page 31)

But his primary focus is to outline why we not only must, but how we can, lead prosperous lives that give freedom to limitless human potential while still respecting the unyielding limits that thermodynamics set for our economy.

Growth when necessary, but not necessarily growth

Is money – and therefore, also GDP – a good proxy for happiness? In an important but limited sense, yes. Jackson cites what is now an extensive body of evidence showing that

“more income does a lot to increase happiness when incomes are very low to start with. Looking across countries, for instance, there’s a rapid increase in measured happiness as the average income of the nation rises from next-to-nothing to around $20,000 per person.” (Post Growth, page 52)

Beyond that modest income, however, the measured increase in happiness that goes with increased income dwindles rapidly. At the same time, research shows that “Society as a whole is less happy when things are unequal ….” From a utilitarian viewpoint, then, trying to constantly provide more for those who already have more than enough is pointless. But by closing the inequality gap – “levelling up our societies” – we can greatly increase the happiness of society as a whole.

Jackson doesn’t stop, however, with merely making that assertion. He dives deeply into discussions of the true value of care work, human creativity, the psychology of flow, and love. In the process, he goes a long way toward fulfilling a major goal of his book: presenting a realistic vision of a future “in which plenty isn’t measured in dollars and fulfillment isn’t driven by the relentless accumulation of material wealth.”

Late-stage capitalism, in fact, goes to great lengths to ensure that people are not happy.

Merchants of discontent

In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, Jackson says, the industrialized economies were able to produce material goods beyond the needs of citizens. The response of capitalism was to develop ways of ensuring that consumers constantly feel they “need” more. The burgeoning advertising industry “drew on another metaphor, borrowed from an emerging ‘evolutionary psychology’: the insatiability of human desire.”

This development “turned Mill’s utilitarianism completely on its head”, trading not in happiness but in discontent:

“Anxiety must tip over into outright dissatisfaction if capitalism is to survive. Discontentment is the motivation for our restless desire to spend. Consumer products must promise paradise. But they must systematically fail to deliver it. … The success of consumer society lies not in meeting our needs but in its spectacular ability consistently to disappoint us.” (Post Growth, page 91)

Fortunately there are ways to pursue fulfillment and satisfaction which do not depend on ever-increasing consumption. In this respect Jackson draws extensively on the work of Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi and his classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).

In Jackson’s description, 

“People ‘in flow’ report an unusual clarity of mind and precision of movement. They experience a sense of confidence and control over the task. But there is also a sense of being lost in the moment, sometimes even being carried along by a momentum that is entirely outside of oneself. People describe a sense of wonder, a connectedness to the world, a feeling of satisfaction that goes beyond happiness or the gratification of pleasure.” (Post Growth, page 101)

Fleeting pleasure can be bought and consumed. By contrast enjoyment, in Jackson’s use of the terms, typically takes work – the enjoyment from playing a sport well or playing music well may involve an investment of hundreds of hours of focussed attention. This work need not and often does not have adverse environmental impacts.

Clearly one needs a basis of material prosperity – beginning with adequate nutrition and housing – in order to pursue what Jackson describes as high-flow activities. But in a relatively egalitarian society which provides basic needs for all, people can achieve lasting satisfaction in activities which, Jackson and colleagues have found, tend to be both high-flow and low-impact.

“Flow exemplifies with extraordinary clarity the kinds of dividends that remain available to us in a postgrowth world,” Jackson writes. “Flow offers us better and more durable satisfactions that consumerism ever does.” (Post Growth, page 102)

While celebrating human creativity, it is equally important to restore the dignity of “the labour of care.” Some activities are fundamental to maintaining human societies: providing the food we need every day, taking care of children, providing comfort and care to those stricken with illness or in the fragility of end-of-life. Jackson notes that many people suddenly realized during the pandemic how fundamental the labour of care is. But we have done precious little to afford workers in these sectors the respect and security they deserve.

When we honour and reward all those who perform the labour of care, and we promote the lasting enjoyment that comes from flow activities rather than the resource-sucking drain of consumerism – then, Jackson says, we will have the foundation for a resilient, sustainable, postgrowth society.

Can we get there from here?

Jackson cites an oft-told joke in which a tourist on a road-less-travelled asks an Irish farmer about the best way to Dublin. The farmer replies, “Well, sir, I wouldn’t start from here.” The point being, of course, that no matter how inauspicious our present location may be, we can only start from exactly where we are.

Unfortunately I found Jackson’s road map to a post growth society unconvincing, though he makes an honest effort. In successive chapters he relates the work of Kenyan environmental justice activist Wangari Maathai, and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich That Hanh. Their examples are moving and inspiring and Jackson draws important lessons from their achievements and from the obstacles they faced.

But Jackson’s book is likely to reach primarily an audience in wealthy countries, and primarily readers who have at least a basis of material prosperity if not far more than they need. If we are to reach a post growth society soon enough to avoid both environmental conflagration and social collapse, a large number of relatively wealthy people need to realize they can be much happier by escaping the treadmill of constantly greater wealth accumulation and constantly greater consumption. I think Jackson is right on the mark in his discussion of flow, and I’d like to believe that his vision will catch on and become a civilization-defining vision – but Post Growth doesn’t convince me that that appealing future is likely.

In the concluding chapter Jackson writes, “In the ruins of capitalism, as I hope to have shown in this book, lie the seeds for a fundamental renewal.” I believe he has identified the seeds we need, and I dearly hope they will grow.

Illustration at top of page, from clockwise from top left: Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, in photograph from Wikipedia; author Tim Jackson, photo copyright by Fernando Manoso-Borgas, courtesy of press kit at timjackson.org.uk; philosopher John Stuart Mill circa 1870, photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Going to extremes

It only took us a century to use up the best of the planet’s finite reserves of fossil fuels. The dawning century will be a lot different.

Also published on Resilience

In the autumn of 1987 I often sipped my morning coffee while watching a slow parade roll through the hazy dawn.

I had given up my apartment for a few months, so I could spend the rent money on quality bike-camping equipment for a planned trip to the Canadian arctic. My substitute lodgings were what is now referred to as “wild camping”, though most nights I slept in the heart of downtown Toronto. One of my favourite sites afforded a panoramic view of the scenic Don Valley Parkway, which was and remains a key automobile route from the suburbs into the city.

Even thirty-five years ago, the bumper-to-bumper traffic at “rush hour” had earned this route the nickname “Don Valley Parking Lot”. On weekday mornings, the endless procession of cars, most of them carrying a single passenger but powered by heat-throwing engines of a hundred or two hundred horsepower, lumbered downtown at speeds that could have been matched by your average cyclist.

Sometimes I would try to calculate how much heavy work could have been done by all that power … let’s see, 1000 cars/lane/hour X 3 lanes = 3000 cars/hour, X 200 horsepower each = the power of 600,000 horses! Think of all the pyramids, or Stonehenges, or wagon-loads of grain, that could be moved every hour by those 600,000 horses, if they weren’t busy hauling 3000 humans to the office.

This car culture is making someone a lot of money, I thought, but it isn’t making a lot of sense.

One early autumn afternoon a year later, in the arctic coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk, I dressed in a survival suit for a short helicopter trip out over the Beaufort Sea. The occasion was perhaps the most elaborate book launch party on record, to celebrate the publication of Pierre Berton’s The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and The North Pole. The publisher had arranged for a launch party on an off-shore oil-drilling platform in said Northwest Passage. As a part-time writer for the local newspaper, I had prevailed upon the publisher to let me join the author and the Toronto media on this excursion.

The flight was a lark, the dinner was great – but I couldn’t shake the unsettling impression made by the strange setting, beyond the ends of the earth. I thought back, of course, to those thousands of cars on the Don Valley Parkway alternately revving and idling their powerful engines. We must be burning up our petroleum stocks awfully fast, I thought, if after only a few generations we had to be looking for more oil out in the arctic sea, thousands of kilometers from any major population centre.

This post is the conclusion of a four-part series about my personal quest to make some sense of economics. I didn’t realize, in the fall of 1988, that my one-afternoon visit to an off-shore drilling rig provided a big clue to the puzzle. But I would eventually learn that dedicated scholars had been writing a new chapter in economic thought, and the quest for energy was the focus of their study.

Before I stopped my formal study of economics, I sought some sort of foundation for economics in various schools of thought. I devoted a good bit of attention to the Chicago School, and much more to the Frankfurt School. It would not have occurred to me, back then, to understand economics by paying attention to the fish school.

Schooled by fish

Well into the 21st century, I started hearing about biophysical economics and the concept of Energy Return On Investment (EROI). I can’t pinpoint which article or podcast first alerted me to this illuminating idea. But one of the first from which I took careful notes was an April 2013 article in Scientific American, along with an online Q & A, by Mason Inman and featuring the work of Charles A.S. Hall.

The interview ran with the headline “Will Fossil Fuels Be Able to Maintain Economic Growth?” Hall approached that topic by recalling his long-ago doctoral research under ecologist H.T. Odum. In this research he asked the question “Do freshwater fish migrate, and if so, why?” His fieldwork revealed this important correlation:

“The study found that fish populations that migrated would return at least four calories for every calorie they invested in the process of migration by being able to exploit different ecosystems of different productivity at different stages of their life cycles.”

The fish invested energy in migrating but that investment returned four times as much energy as they invested, and the fish thrived. The fish migrated, in other words, because the Energy Return On Investment was very good.

This simple insight allowed Hall and other researchers to develop a new theory and methodology for economics. By the time I learned about bio-physical economics, there was a great wealth of literature examining the Energy Return On Investment of industries around the world, and further examining the implications of Energy Return ratios for economic growth or decline.1

The two-page spread in Scientific American in 2013 summarized some key findings of this research. For the U.S. as a whole, the EROI of gasoline from conventional oil dropped by 50% during the period 1950 – 2000, from 18:1 down to 9:1. The EROI of gasoline from California heavy oil dropped by about 67% in that period, from 12:1 down to 4:1. And these Energy Return ratios were still dropping. Newer unconventional sources of oil had particularly poor Energy Return ratios, with bitumen from the Canadian tar sands industry in 2011 providing only about a 5:1 energy return on investment.2 In Hall’s summary,

“Is there a lot of oil left in the ground? Absolutely. The question is, how much oil can we get out of the ground, at a significantly high EROI? And the answer to that is, hmmm, not nearly as much. So that’s what we’re struggling with as we go further and further offshore and have to do this fracking and horizontal drilling and all of this kind of stuff, especially when you get away from the sweet spots of shale formations. It gets tougher and tougher to get the next barrel of oil, so the EROI goes down, down, down.”3

With an economics founded on something real and physical – energy – both the past and the immediate future made a lot more sense to me. Biophysical economists explained that through most of history, Energy Return ratios grew slowly – a new method of tilling the fields might bring a modestly larger harvest for the same amount of work – and so economic growth was also slow. But in the last two centuries, energy returns spiked due to the development of ways to extract and use fossil fuels. This allowed rapid and unprecedented economic growth – but that growth can only continue as long as steady supplies of similarly favourable energy sources are available.

When energy return ratios drop significantly, economic growth will slow or stop, though the energy crunch might be disguised for a while by subsidies or an explosion of credit. So far this century we have seen all of these trends: much slower economic growth, in spite of increased subsidies to energy producers and/or consumers, and in spite of the financial smoke-and-mirrors game known as quantitative easing.

The completed Hebron Oil Platform, before it was towed out to the edge of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland Canada. Photo by Shhewitt, from Wikimedia Commons.

The power of the green frog-skins

John (Fire) Lame Deer understood that though green frog-skins – dollars – seemed all-important to American colonizers, this power was at the same time an illusion. Forty years after I read Lame Deer’s book Seeker of Visions, the concepts of biophysical economics gave me a way to understand the true source of the American economy’s strength and influence, and to understand why that strength and influence was on a swift road to its own destruction.

For the past few centuries, the country that became the American empire has appropriated the world’s richest energy sources – at first, vast numbers of energy-rich marine mammals, then the captive lives of millions of slaves, and then all the life-giving bounty of tens of millions of hectares of the world’s richest soils. And with that head start, the American economy moved into high gear after discovering large reserves of readily accessible fossil fuels.

The best of the US fossil energy reserves, measured through Energy Return On Investment, were burned through in less than a century. But by then the American empire had gone global, securing preferred access to high-EROI fossil fuels in places as distant as Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iran. That was about the time I was growing to adulthood, and Lame Deer was looking back on the lessons of his long life during which the green frog-skin world calculated the price of everything – the blades of grass, the springs of water, even the air.

The forces of the American economy could buy just about anything, it seemed. But dollars, in themselves, had no power at all. Rather, biophysical economists explained, the American economy had command of great energy resources, which returned a huge energy surplus for each investment of energy used in extraction. As Charles Hall explained in the Scientific American interview in 2013,

“economics isn’t really about money. It’s about stuff. We’ve been toilet trained to think of economics as being about money, and to some degree it is. But fundamentally it’s about stuff. And if it’s about stuff, why are we studying it as a social science? Why are we not, at least equally, studying it as a biophysical science?”4

The first book-length exposition of these ideas that I read was Life After Growth, by Tim Morgan. Morgan popularized some of the key concepts first worked out by Charles Hall.5 He wrote,

“Money … commands value only to the extent that it can be exchanged for the goods and services produced by the real economy. The best way to think of money is as a ‘claim’ on the real economy and, since the real economy is itself an energy dynamic, money is really a claim on energy. Debt, meanwhile, as a claim on future money, is therefore a claim on future energy.”6

The economic system that even today, though to a diminishing extent, revolves around the American dollar, was built on access to huge energy surpluses, obtained by exploiting energy sources that provided a large Energy Return On Investment. That energy surplus gave money its value, because during each year of the long economic boom there was more stuff available to buy with the money. The energy surplus also made debt a good bet, because when the debt came due, a growing economy could ensure that, in aggregate, most debts would be paid.

Those conditions are rapidly changing, Morgan argued. Money will lose its value – gradually, or perhaps swiftly – when it becomes clear that there is simply less of real, life-giving or life-sustaining value that can be bought with that money. At that point, it will also become clear that huge sums of debts will never and can never be repaid.

Ironically, since Morgan wrote The End of Growth, the dollar value of outstanding debt has grown at an almost incomprehensible pace, while Energy Return On Investment and economic growth have continued their slides. Is the financial bubble set for a big bang, or a long slow hiss?

Platform supply vessels battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, 2010. Photo by US Coast Guard, via Wikimedia Commons.

The economy becomes a thing

When I was introduced to the concepts of biophysical economics, two competing thoughts ran through my head. The first was, “This explains so much! Of course, the value of money must be based on something biophysical, because we are and always have been biophysical creatures, in biophysical societies, dependent on a biophysical world.”

And the second thought was, “This is so obvious, why isn’t it taught in every Economics 101 course? Why do economists talk endlessly about GDP, fiscal policy and aggregate money supply … but only a tiny percentage of them ever talk about Energy Return On Investment?”

Another then-new book popped up right about then. Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, published by Verso in 2013, is a detailed, dry work of history, bristling with footnotes – and it was one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read. (That’s why I’ve quoted it so many times since I started writing this blog.)7

As Mitchell explained, the whole body of economic orthodoxy that had taken over university economics departments in the middle of the twentieth century, and which remains the conventional wisdom of policy-makers today, was a radical departure from previous thinking about economics. Current economic orthodoxy, in fact, could only have arisen in an era when surplus energy seemed both plentiful and cheap:

“The conception of the economy depended upon abundant and low-cost energy supplies, making postwar Keynesian economics a form of ‘petroknowledge’.” (Carbon Democracy, page 139)

Up until the early 20th century, Mitchell wrote, mainstream economists based their studies on awareness of physical resources. That changed when the exploding availability of fossil fuels created an illusion, for some, that surplus energy was practically unlimited. In response,

“a battle developed among economists, especially in the United States …. One side wanted economics to start from natural resources and flows of energy, the other to organise the discipline around the study of prices and flows of money. The battle was won by the second group, who created out of the measurement of money and prices a new object: the economy.” (page 131)

Stated another way, “the supply of carbon energy was no longer a practical limit to economic possibility. What mattered was the proper circulation of banknotes.” (page 124)

By the time I went to university in the 1970s, this “science of money” was orthodoxy. My studies in economics left me with an uneasy feeling that the green frog-skin world was, truly, a powerful illusion. But decades passed before I heard about people like H.T. Odum, Charles Hall, and others who were developing a new foundation for economics. A foundation, I now believe, that not only explains our economic history, but is vastly more helpful in making sense of our future challenges.

* * *

Lame Deer’s vision of the end of the green frog-skin world was vividly apocalyptic. He understood back in the 1970s that we are all endangered species, and that the green frog-skin world must and will come to an end. In his vision, the bad dream world of war and pollution will be rolled up, and the real world of the good green earth will be restored. But he had no confidence that the change would be easy. “I hope to see this,” he said, “but then I’m also afraid.”

Today we can study many visions expressed in scientific journals. Some of these visions outline new worlds of sharing and harmony, but many visions foretell the worsening of the climate crisis, economic system collapse, ecosystem collapse, crashes of biodiversity, forced global migrations. These visions are frightening and dramatic. Are we caught up, today, in an apocalyptic fever, or is it cold hard realism?

We have much to hope for, and we also have much to fear.

Image at top of post: Offshore oil rigs in the Santa Barbara channel, by Anita Ritenour, CC 2.0, flickr.com

Footnotes