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BBC documentaries dissecting modernity (Adam Curtis)
Bart Anderson, Energy Bulletin
For sizzling dissections of modernity, see the documentaries of BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis. These multi-hour presentations trace the rise of phenomena like advertising, pesticides, nuclear power and modern economics. Inevitably these ideas and technologies prove to have side-effects that negate the cheery optimism with which they were born.
The documentaries are fun to watch, with many mind-boggling clips. The style is similar to “The End of Suburbia”. Many are available online.
The Century of the Self
(“This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” – Adam Curtis”)
online
Pandora’s Box
(examines the dangers of technocratic and political rationality)
online
The Power of Nightmares
(political manipulation, the spectre of terrorism, neo-conservativism)
source
The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom
(the modern concept of freedom)
source
More links are at the YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js39hh9OkpQ (Click on “more info” in the upper right)
(12 April 2009)
Compiled to complement Sharon Astyk’s April 12 essay: Formulating a future: the case for anti-modernism (part 1).
Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy
Eric Zencey, New York Times
… [Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Frederick Soddy] offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.
A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.
Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”
Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”
(12 April 2009)
I Dream of GINI – Wealth (In)equality after Resource Depletion
Nate Hagens, The Oil Drum: Campfire
Increasingly, I think social limits to growth are occurring before strict resource limits will ever be realized (though the beginning of the latter had an influence on the former). As better data comes to light it is becoming apparent that we’ve been squeezing extra resources from the system via extended use of and confidence in, abstract fiat instruments, thus further decoupling our situation from longer term physical reality. Cheap energy has subsidized many things in human society; technology, leisure, peace, art, food, lifespans, spatial distribution, etc. But not often mentioned is its impact on social equality. I plan to write a more empirical, evidence based post in the future on this topic – tonight’s Campfire questions will revolve around whether the future will bring more equality between and among human groups, or less.
The GINI coefficient is one measure of inequality, typically relating to income, applied to a particular spatial population. A GINI coefficient of zero implies that everyone in the sample earns the same amount – there is no inequality. A GINI of 1, means that 1 person earns all the income -the population therefore has extreme inequality. There are all sorts of GINI sub-indices for counties, states, countries, etc. It is not a perfect science, as it leaves out debt, purchasing power, saved wealth, etc. It also completely ignores real capital measures of wealth and focuses on financial income. Still, GINI is not a bad proxy for social inequality.
Let’s first look at the USA.
… With that backdrop, here are some questions for tonight’s discussion:
1. What sort of social equity disparity fits us best, and for how many?
2. Would we be happier with everyone roughly at equivalent wealth levels, or a very few having most of the wealth, so long as basic social and physical needs are met for the masses?
3. Will all this sort itself out naturally, or by war(s), or be ‘chosen’ democratically?
4. If a paradigm shift arrives, and those previously in the ‘have-not’ category displace the previous ‘haves’, will this just reset the social timer on when such an inflection will happen again, in reverse?
5. What happens to US politics/economic system when middle class can no longer act as buffer between rich and poor?
6. Bonus question: If we find reasonable answers to the above, how would they apply, if at all, to inter-generational equity or inter-species equity?
(11 April 2009)
