Year: 2012

Capital, debt, and alchemy

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The ancient alchemists wanted to transmute corrosion-prone base metals into permanent, non-corruptible, time-resistant gold. Modern economic alchemists want to convert spoiling, rusting, and depleting wealth into a magic substance better than gold — not only does it resist corrosion, but it grows — by some mysterious principle the alchemists referred to as the “vegetative property of metals.” The modern alchemical philosopher’s stone, known as “capital” or “debt,” is not only free from the ravages of time and entropy, but embodies the alchemists’ long-sought-for principle of vegetative growth of metals. But once we replace alchemy with chemistry we find that the idea that future people can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness is just another perpetual motion delusion.

Should we care about the human future? If so, how much?

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In virtually every institution in human society, we humans concern ourselves with the continuation of the species. We have children, we raise them in some sort of family, we educate them for the world of work and citizenship, and then we see them couple and start the cycle all over again. All the while we seek to defend ourselves from disease, violence, economic deprivation, in fact, anything that might cut short our lives or those of our children. It ought to be self-evident that human beings do care about the future. What I want to examine is whether they should and if so, how much.

Education in a post carbon world

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Merit pay for teachers is a distraction; it ignores the larger context that should be the focus of debate in education: what curriculum (knowledge and skills) will best prepare students and their families for life in a post-carbon world? If we don’t shift our focus to this larger question and begin implementing such changes soon, all other concerns may be moot.

Peak eggs: Hubbert and the Easter Bunny

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Here is a little Easter post where I try to model the Easter Egg hunt as if it were the production of a mineral resource. A simple model based on system dynamics turns out to be equivalent to the Hubbert model of oil production. We can have “peak eggs” and the curve may also take the asymmetric shape of the “Seneca Peak.” So, even this simple model confirms what the Roman Philosopher told us long ago: that ruin is much faster than fortune.

Talking happiness

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I’m writing this on a plane, on my way home from four conferences on the “new economy.” The UN conference on “High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm,” organized by the nation of Bhutan, was especially noteworthy.

I had the sense of being at a milestone event, at which a couple of heads of state and several high-level national government representatives were saying almost exactly what ecological economists like Herman Daly have been telling us for years. Here is a nation—a tiny one, but a nation nonetheless—making its voice heard in the international community, calling for an end to the monomaniacal pursuit of GDP growth above all else. Despite the difficulties ahead, this is a cause worth celebrating and supporting.

Regional food analysis

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The models and thinking about regional food have been too simple – either they fail to take into account the real and serious challenges we face because of an excess of optimism, or they leap, in an excess of pessimism, to disaster. The fact, for example, that New York City can’t feed its present population or itself at all does not mean that New York City will cease to exists in a lower energy future. And yet, many analysts have stopped there, or allowed a long-term conclusion (ie, eventually we might find some kinds of shipping and transport interrupted by shortages of fossil fuels) to lead them to skip over the nearer term likelihoods (period interruptions, higher prices, less refrigerated shipping) and assume “we’re all doomed.”

America: The Eagle and the Lion

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Critics of today’s American empire too often seem to believe that it’s something unique in world history. It’s hard to think of better evidence for the pervasive historical illiteracy of American intellectuals, for nearly all the charges leveled against America’s empire today were made, with even better justification, against the British Empire that preceded it. The interaction between these two empires — the British lion and the American eagle — defined much of what we now call the modern world, and set the stage for the decline of American empire now looming in the near future.

The Race for BTU

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The world’s major central banks — including the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve — appear to have finally won a major battle in the deflationary war that broke out five years ago in 2007. While the ultimate victor is yet to be determined, it now seems likely that a period of nominal growth could ensue for another two years, perhaps even longer.

Nature’s Promises Kept Again

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Every year in the brown, sere days before the great greening in spring, I begin to have doubts. Will the flowers come again? Will the birds return? Will the trees leaf out? With all the despair and calamity rife in the world, the ancient fear that the end is near is as believable as ever.