Thursday, June 10, 2004
(11:54 AM) | Anonymous:
The Return of the Native
It's been, some time since I've last posted, owing mostly to lots of other stuff going on in my life, as well as a raging insecurity as to whether I have anything useful to say. Life has calmed down somewhat, while the insecurity won't be going away any time soon (and given my current dating situation, seems to be growing exponentially, in fact), so I figure now is as good a time as any to start writing again. So much has changed since I last wrote--it appears I missed the Mike Hancock era altogether, what with him being officially listed as Lost at Sea (and presumed dead) for close to 2 months now. And Monica's joined the Weblog--indeed, it's one of her comments that prompted this post.In her last post, Monica mentioned her frustration with the near-unanimity of the view that economic growth is a Good Thing. Whatever their differences (and there seem to be fewer and fewer of those nowadays) economists all stress the cardinal importance of economic growth, to the exclusion of nearly every other indicator. And for a long time, I couldn't blame them--massive economic growth -is- fun to watch, and can do some pretty remarkable things. Look at East Asia--tens of millions of people lifted out of crushing poverty in the space of a few decades. In the case of Japan, it transformed a highly stratified, basically medieval society (albeit a highly advanced one, with a thriving cultural sector, a money economy, and something resembling shopping malls) into one of the world's major industrial powers in less than 30 years, to say nothing of all those cool woodblock prints of samurai walking around in three-piece suits and top hats. And I'd even say it led to more equality--farmers didn't have to be quite as worried about being hacked to death on a samurai's whim, and merchants were no longer viewed as insects, which I'm sure helped their self-esteem.
Of course, I'm deliberately overlooking all the really bad stuff that comes with economic growth--dreadful pollution, massive social upheaval, and the way it allows governments to get away with some truly awful behavior. All the East Asian economies that I mentioned were dictatorships for years, and all of them killed lots of people at least partially on the pretext that it was a small price to pay for stability and 10-15% annual GDP growth. The justification for all of this (one I've used before) is that these things tend to take care of themselves--once people's incomes reach a certain level, they won't stand for brutal authoritarian governments that pay no attention to their citizens' health and welfare. And this -is- what happened in Asia, for the most part--Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, all more or less democracies with governments basically accountable to the people.
There's a big problem with this analysis, though--I've only mentioned Asia! And only a very small section of Asia, at that. Yet that's what economists have tended to do--take the "Asian model", if there is one, and run with it as far as they can. Any problems a state might have can be solved with lots and lots of economic growth, and everything else will fall into place. Whether the experience of East Asia is even applicable to, say, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Russia, or wherever isn't a question that seems to come up. And even when it does, the importance of economic growth is not what's being questioned.
That's my first point--that a lot of the current thinking about economic growth might be based on a false premise, one requiring a set of historical, cultural, and political circumstances that might not even exist anymore. My second point, or rather the one Monica made and I'm currently running with, is that even if current thinking is valid, massive growth for everyone just isn't sustainable. I think the common reaction to this is to just dismiss it--"Hey, didn't that moron Thomas Malthus go on about the same thing like a million years ago? Wasn't he that guy who thought it was cruel to allow the poor to reproduce?" And so on. And since we do seem to keep finding ways to stretch our scarce resources ever further, it's been a pretty easy position to take. But I wonder if things haven't changed. For the first time in history, something like a third of the world's population is is engaged in a fairly rapid process of industrialization (China, of course, and i'm throwing India in there, too--that's 2.5 billion people right there). And we're already seeing the effects--the prices of commodities are skyrocketing owing to enormous demand, mostly from China. Oil, most importantly, but also stuff like scrap iron--apparently there's been an epidemic of manhole cover thefts in Great Britain because of the higher prices iron of any kind is fetching now (it's a silly example, I know, and I'm basing it on a recent NPR story--sloppy scholarship all around).
But maybe, just maybe, there's some sort of a break coming here. Like we're on the cusp of an energy crisis of such magnitude that real changes could take place--perhaps people will actually have the economic incentive to look for other alternatives--the oil shocks of the 70's did that, sort of, though we've moved completely away from that as of late. Or, rising energy and commodity prices will just further cement the power energy companies already have, as their profits are sure to go up in the future. I don't really know, though I do suspect what is happening is qualitatively different that what took place 30 years ago--we've never seen the emergence of an industrial power 5 times the size of the U.S. in terms of population, and already the second-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP (with a per-capita income that's still very, very low).
I guess what I'm saying is that the point where we actually have to deal intelligently with the issue of scarce resources may actually be coming, which could be a good thing. As for whether this will lead to a change in the thinking that an expanding economic "pie" is the essential goal of all economic policy, I don't know--that's not so much an obsession of economists, it's the discipline itself, it's what they do.
And of course I'm leaving a lot of things out, important stuff like food allocation and so on, mostly because i don't much feel like writing a 12-page post (or subjecting readers to that much of my prose), and also because I'd at least like to see if i've made any useful points in what I've written so far. And finally, I'm aware the whole process I mentioned might be a good deal more painful than I've suggested--I guess I'm figuring that, as insanely awful as the 20th century has been in terms of lives lost (with the potential to have been infinitely worse), it can't possibly be -that- bad. hopefully.
OK, I'm done now. On a completely unrelated note, does anyone out there know how to pronounce Rem Koolhaas' name? He's a Dutch architect/theorist who I plan on reading more of, and in the meantime I'd like to be able to namedrop without sounding like a complete idiot. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
