Another way of looking at it

What I'm not going to do in this post is to make any attempt to convince you that the developed world's economy is headed towards imminent decline. Some people are convinced that it is; some people are convinced that it isn't; others are somewhere in the middle. It doesn't matter to me where on this continuum of probability you are, but I hope that regardless of your opinion on the matter that you are able to enjoy today's post. Because in today's post I will assume that the developed world's economy is indeed headed towards some sort of imminent decline (even though I am unconvinced of this myself) and illustrate a counterintuitive idea that I hope is new to you.

So don't worry; I'm not trying to change your world view. Instead, I'm trying to show you a glimpse of another one, and after I'm done we can all go back to assigning our our probabilities to the event.

Are you ready? Let's begin. The developed world's economy is soon to undergo an unstoppable decline…

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Our economy is about to undergo a long and hard decline, possibly one that proves terminal; our very way of life is threatened. This is terrible news. Hopefully our leaders are doing something about the problem! While we as individual citizens steel ourselves for the future and make whatever preparations we can, we can only hope that policy changes are enacted that make a bad situation as good as it can be.

But what would such policy changes look like?

I won't claim to be an expert on classifying Malthusian catastrophes or on proposals for circumventing them, but I have spent a lot of time reading what a lot of people have to say about what kinds of policy changes we should be making, and I've noticed a common assumption being made in most cases. It is the idea that if uncontrolled growth got us into this unsolvable mess then we should be limiting if not outright countering those forces of growth so as to soften the upcoming decline. In other words, we should try to un-grow our way to something more manageable.

Even proponents of this idea recognize that this is not a popular course of action. After all, it generally entails getting people to consume less stuff. For example, if carbon dioxide emissions will be our downfall then we should consume less fossil fuel and deal with the consequences, be they pleasant or unpleasant: e.g., driving our cars fewer miles, maintaining backyard gardens, warmer houses in the summer and cooler ones in the winter. While most of us are all for the idea of our neighbor consuming less fossil fuel, we generally balk at the idea of doing so ourselves (except in a few exceptional cases here and there), and when most people think this way, that it is our neighbors who should be cutting back, we find ourselves stuck in a stalemate.

But stepping around the anti-consumption policies' unpopularity and assuming that such policies somehow could be implemented and executed, what then? There remains a basic problem called Jevons effect. Briefly stated, this is the phenomenon that an efficiency increase in resource consumption actually leads to an overall increase in the demand for that resource.

The problem going on here with Jevons effect is that as more people reduce their consumption of a resource there is necessarily created additional incentive for using that resource. To illustrate, imagine the following scenario. Imagine that everyone reduced their gasoline consumption by driving their cars fewer miles. What would happen is that we would happily find ourselves with an oversupply of gasoline and the price of gasoline would drop. This drop in price would create an economic incentive for businesses to find new ways to develop new goods and services that, to put it bluntly, convert gasoline into profit. While we would all benefit from the innovation of new goods and services, we would eventually find ourselves consuming as much or more gasoline as we did previously, only now our economy is even more dependent the stuff than it was before. And if gasoline consumption is to be our downfall then this is a bad thing.

Call me unimaginative, but I don't see anyway around this problem. More generally, I don't see any way around the problem of un-growing a complex system. The risks of overgrowth are obvious, especially to those of us still contemplating the ramifications of the recent pop in the housing bubble, but the risks of not growing are every bit as real, too. You may be willing to give up a portion of your fair (or unfair) share of resources of the planet, but that means that someone else will swoop in and gobble up what you painstakingly forwent.

In my previous post, Mr. Rook and Mr. Bishop discussed this very dilemma, though through in a somewhat contrived scenario. It was revealed that Mr. Rook's home town, Goodsizetown, is poised to face some obvious problems if it grows according to the diabolic schemes of Mr. Knight and Mr. King. But wait! It turns out that if the town doesn't grow then it's poised to be swallowed by neighboring towns who are growing. Maybe Mr. Knight and Mr. King aren't so diabolical after all. It should be no surprise that Mr. Rook has no real solution to the problem except to try to leave Goodsizetown and foul up someone else's nest.

So what's going on? Does life inherently suck? Is there no solution to this problem? I think the answer is both yes and no.

Yes, I believe there is no mathematical solution to the problem. That is, I believe there exists no long-term, effective method for complex systems dynamically to un-grow as their environmental constraints tighten and to regrow as their environmental constraints are lifted. Don't take my word for it; I urge you to look for counterexamples in nature (and in human history) of complex systems that un-grow. Yes, complex things can become smaller, but in such cases it's rarely a peaceful shrinking. Rather, it tends to involve a whole lot of struggle and death. Un-growth doesn't seem to be a common design pattern in the natural world, and nature has had eons to solve countless problems. That un-growth is rarely an applied solution after so much opportunity should be our hint that un-growth is not a successful strategy for dealing with resource constraints.

But this means that the answer to questions is also no. Nature has found a general solution to problem in death and rebirth. Organisms, species, and entire ecosystems grow and mature and increase in both complexity and heterogeneity until growth can no longer be obtained; then the thing passes away only to be replaced by nature's next attempt to exploit available resources. This pattern is so common as to suggest that, however some of us may struggle to fight against it, entire societies, economies, and civilizations are bound to same cycle of rise and fall. And I for one am suspicious of a strategy of un-growth as an attempt to break or “soften” the cycle even though growth is, on the surface, what gets us into the mess to begin with.

After all, if nature most often applies the pattern of grow and die (or rise and fall) and not grow and un-grow, then it seems probable to me that nature has endowed us with tools best suited for growing and dying, not growing and un-growing—however painful growing and dying may be.

So to our imminent decline I say: bring it on. Let's grow our way right into it and through it. I trust that the pattern of rebirth will lead to something worthwhile in the end, and meanwhile the ensuing suffering is inescapable anyway. Even in the worst of cases nature will have eons more to try new iterations.

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And that is that. Now we are all free to go back to believing whatever we wish about the likelihood of our world's imminent decline. Whatever likelihood of this it is that you believe, I hope you are now armed with yet another way of thinking about it.