Read Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet Online
Authors: Kerryn Higgs
Tags: #Environmental Economics, #Econometrics, #Environmental Science, #Environmental Policy
In the UK, the editors of the
Ecologist
took up these same questions in their first issue of 1972, with the essay soon republished in book form as
A Blueprint for Survival
.
2
They drew on the work of ecological economists, scientists who were worried about environmental decline, and the
Limits to Growth
team itself.
Criticism of
The Limits to Growth
was multifaceted. It ranged from the accusation that the Club of Rome was a covert agent of international capital, across questions about the nature and validity of the model, to acknowledgment of the need to address very real problems. Much of it, however, especially from economists, was unmitigated abuse and denigration, often mixed with outright denial of the existence of the problem under consideration; much of it also asserted an unwavering faith in economic growth and indefinite material progress.
Rhetorical Attacks
When
Limits to Growth
was published, to considerable fanfare and advance publicity, responses from scholars in the sciences were generally favorable. Scientists also aligned themselves with
A Blueprint for Survival
. The UK edition began with an explicit statement of support from thirty prominent scientists across the natural, physical, and medical sciences from several countries; a further 150 signed a supporting letter to the London
Times
shortly after publication.
3
Mainstream economists, on the other hand, were unimpressed, so much so that “Club of Rome” became an epithet of scorn—and remains so to the present, especially within economics. Even at the outset, when both the public and many institutions in the developed world were relatively open to these ideas, economists went on the attack. One explanation for their reflexive hostility came from Robert Gillette of
Science
magazine, who covered the star-studded launch of
Limits
at the Smithsonian Institution. A critic of the “messianic impulse” he attributed to the MIT team, Gillette argued that the “assumption of inevitable economic growth” constitutes “the very foundation” of the profession of economics,
4
perhaps explaining some of the intensity of the assault from that quarter. Curiously, in light of its academic context, the criticism from economists was characterized by several lines of attack that fall under the general banner of tirade rather than argument. The most prominent of these were simple ridicule and accusations of both catastrophism and Malthusianism.
Wilfred Beckerman, who had just been appointed to the political economy chair at University College London, adopted a derisory attitude from the start, dubbing
Limits
“brazen impudent nonsense” and a “ludicrous study.” He also quoted fellow economists calling it “spurious scholarship” and “computerized mumbo-jumbo” and claimed that “since the natural scientist is not concerned with human beings, the relationships that he studies are not of the kind that are amenable to human policies.”
5
His dominant tone was mocking and disparaging, a tone that persisted through his subsequent decades-long defense of the neoclassical orthodoxies. Beckerman published his 1974 celebration of economic growth in the United States under the title
Two Cheers for the Affluent Society: A Spirited Defense of Economic Growth
.
6
He went on to debate Daly and others in academic journals over concepts of sustainability and published a further withering assessment of environmentalists’ ideas in 1995 (
Small Is Stupid
). Beckerman was not the only academic who resorted to ad hominem attacks rather than rational critique. For example, John Koehler, then at the Rand Corporation, suggested “fraud,” “fantasy,” and “fudge” were involved, and the sociologist Robert McGinnis described
Limits
as fostering “that faddish hysteria which passes as concern for The Ecology.”
7
In the same vein, many economists applied the “doomsday” label. Mention of Doom, Doomsters, Doomsayers, Ecodoom, Hysteria, Catastrophism, Disaster, End of the World, Chiliasts, or Apocalyptics (usually capitalized) appeared in a great number of articles on the subject, mainly from economists.
8
The celebrated British physicist John Maddox was one of the few scientists who adopted this terminology; he called his polemic
The Doomsday Syndrome
. The University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit published a book of essays by economists and others, including a few scientists; this book too was peppered with “doom” and its cognates, and in the United States was titled
Models of Doom
.
9
So persuasive was this avalanche of “doomster” terminology that even ecologically aware analysts have adopted the doom/doomsday shorthand to refer to the
Limits
warnings of the early 1970s.
10
“Doomsday” originated as a Christian concept referring to the Last Judgment at the end of the world, an idea based on faith rather than on science. Discourse about doom and apocalypse is inappropriate from the point of view of academic or scientific values and in any case suggests derangement, religious obsession, and irrationality. It implies that the main thrust of the researchers is the circulation of prophecies designed to inculcate fear rather than a serious attempt to explore the likely consequences of continued economic growth. This kind of rhetoric has been effective in blunting the impact of the critique of growth and remains popular with think tanks and economists today.
The epithet “Malthusian” (sometimes “neo-Malthusian”) was applied to the MIT team in a manner similar to how it was used against Osborn and Vogt. The accusation that the
Limits
authors were merely repeating the ideas of Malthus acted as another easy shorthand whereby concerns about possible limits could be dismissed without further argument.
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Again, it was not only the neoclassical economists who dealt out the Malthusian label; many Marxists were equally skeptical about the idea of limitations on human “progress” (box 4.1).
Box 4.1
Marxists and Growth
Despite the exploration of what he called “metabolic rift” in his later work, Marx himself was firmly embedded in the mid-nineteenth-century “material progress” ideology of industrial capitalism and did not foresee any serious limits to economic growth. Following this trajectory, most Marxists embraced the promise of scientific and technological advance fully and saw no constraints on industrialization throughout the world—at least under socialism. Concerns about population growth, environmental damage, and resource depletion were sometimes seen as symptoms of a reactionary collusion with the ruling class and as distractions from the real issues of poverty and imperialism. The “ecology movement” was thought to embody the misguided foolishness of “Malthusian pessimists.”
a
Although some Marxists were less dismissive, acknowledging that modern capitalism “threatens all the natural bases of human life,” most insisted that a radical redistribution of wealth and resources under socialism was the crucial requirement.
b
Marxists have been especially dismissive of the case for population policy, an attitude that continues in much ecosocialist thinking today.
c
Some socialists, however, have sought to reconcile their Marxism with concern for ecological decline. The Welsh critic Raymond Williams noted the “triumphalist arguments about production” embraced by many socialists, especially in North America. Williams accepted what he called the “fact of material limits” and called for negotiated reductions in first world consumption so that redistributive justice could be ecologically accommodated.
d
Meadows and colleagues never suggested that population was the paramount issue; they saw it as one of several vital problems and were fully aware and deeply disturbed that existing patterns of economic growth were not lowering levels of poverty. They argued that a stationary state economy with a stabilized population would give humanity a better chance of providing for the basic needs of all.
e
Though they did not specify how such redistribution might be achieved, they regarded freedom from hunger and poverty as mandatory and were hardly apologists for international capital.
It is a strength of the ecosocialist analysis, however, that it draws attention to redistribution and makes this a central aspect of realizing environmental objectives. Most ecosocialists have favored global reallocation, and some, like Williams, have advocated a severe contraction of Western consumption as well. These priorities parallel the work of the “ecological footprint” theorists who emerged in the 1990s and of advocates of “contraction and convergence” approaches to carbon emissions.
f
Ecological commentary from the Left, however, has often argued that redistribution under socialist organization will solve most if not all problems of scarcity and degradation. In this argument, the elimination of production for profit rather than for need will remedy capitalist waste, and concern about natural limits will become redundant. This approach is partial and less helpful than it could be, since both avenues seem vital to any genuinely regenerative outcome.
Notes
a
Fuchs 1970.
b
Enzensberger 1974, 28.
c
Angus and Butler 2011; Monbiot 2009; Pearce 2010.
d
Williams 1982.
e
Meadows et al. 1972, 183–184.
f
Wackernagel and Rees 1996; Athanasiou and Baer 2002.
Early Criticism of the Modeling
The relatively new nonlinear modeling pioneered by Jay Forrester at MIT, and further developed by the MIT team, was one common target of critics. Some were skeptical about the complexity involved in the feedback mechanisms, and one such critic satirized the “mind-bending flowchart” as resembling “a diagram of one of the secret plays that President Nixon sent in to the Washington Redskins.”
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Many argued that the entire model was merely a construct of the Club of Rome’s preconceptions—“Malthus with a computer,” or “garbage in, garbage out.”
13
The MIT researchers conceded that their models were pioneering a new field and were definitely “not perfect,” but insisted that an exploration of interconnected processes, including those with delayed effects, was essential to a proper understanding of the dynamic behavior of a complex system such as the real world. Models, they argued, are simplifications by definition, but models offer explicit assumptions that critics can scrutinize far more effectively than the entirely unexamined preconceptions that normally underpin policy decisions affecting the world for decades ahead.
14
The data the project used from the previous seventy years were also panned as inadequate, though no critic indicated where better data could have been obtained—the world was far less forensically measured before 1970 than it is today, and even less again before World War II.
Economists often stated that the model failed to incorporate price mechanisms and technological advance, which are supposed to solve problems of scarcity automatically by creating incentives for innovation and substitution. The MIT team of researchers wrote an extensive reply to their critics in which they acknowledged that price and technology were not specified separately in the long-term aggregated model but were explicitly included in the submodels they had used to explore precisely these factors. They agreed with the economists that price does function as a signal of scarcity and an incentive to solve it. They argued, however, that price is merely a link between scarcity and society’s response to it; price was one of many feedback mechanisms explored in the submodels and implicit in the aggregated model. And, they pointed out, it was not a
failure
to specify technological advance that led to collapse in the MIT scenarios but just the reverse: some of the scenarios led to collapse “
because
of the accumulated costs and side-effects of technical successes.”
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Here again we see the gulf between economists and physical scientists. The positive influence of technical innovation is an unchallenged assumption of the growth agenda. Even if it seems to lead to environmental catastrophe, its proponents remain confident of its ability to solve its own problems.
Resource economists were less dismissive than other economists and tended to approach the debate as a conventional argument about facts. Alan Kneese and his colleague Ronald Ridker at Resources for the Future conceded that economics needs to take resource inputs and pollution outputs into account. They were interested in quantifying what they called negative externalities—the uncounted costs of the environmental side effects of production. Like most economists, they believed the MIT model had failed to incorporate price mechanisms and technological advance, but they did not deny that resources are ultimately finite and that collapse is a possible outcome of unfettered growth. They thought that pollution, specifically the increasing concentration of CO
2
in the atmosphere, was more likely than resource scarcity to impose limits on economic growth.
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Models: The Clash of Assumptions
The prominent US economist William Nordhaus directed his critique of the modeling at Jay Forrester, who built the initial World1 and World2 models and published
World Dynamics
in 1971.
17
Although he frequently referred to Malthusianism and subtitled his 1973 article “Measurement without Data,” Nordhaus did make a more serious attempt to engage with the system dynamics work than most mainstream economists. He and Forrester were, nonetheless, bedeviled by the clash of assumptions discussed in chapter 2.
Nordhaus faulted Forrester for ignoring “standard economic terminology,” substituting “vague and often confusing” language, and drawing his conclusions “without the scantest reference to economic theory.” For Nordhaus, Forrester’s work was a “major retrogression from current research in economic growth theory.”
18
In their response, Forrester and his coauthors, Gilbert Low and Nathaniel Mass, were equally unhappy with what they characterized as Nordhaus’s “static and geometric frame of reference,” which “overlooks the long-term processes of technological change and resource constraints clearly embodied in the
World Dynamics
formulations.” They argued that Nordhaus simply “does not recognize the dynamic behavior of multiple-loop feedback systems.”
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