MILL, MALTHUS, AND GROWTH WITHOUT END

...There have been times, most recently in 1969 and 1970, when wages actually advanced more rapidly during spells of mild contraction than in time of rapid expansion...

...498 ROBERT LEKACHMAN English capitalism was bad enough...

...Today as in Victorian England population limitation is absolutely essential to human survival at least in any manner that one might prefer to survive...

...One relates to the analysis of contemporary inflation...

...Rich men have reluctantly surrendered their tithes to improve the condition of men and women of their own nationality and citizenship, let alone those lesser beings whose color, religion, ethnic origin, or geographical location enforce even smaller claims to succor...

...Klein fears that] It would seem only too likely that the haves would man the barricades to defend their share of resources, against the have-nots...

...day totals around 2.5 billion, will have to support something like 40 billion by that date if it continues to double its numbers approximately every quarter-century...

...and energy-thrifty activities, appliances, autos, and residential patterns will displace their energy-wasteful alternatives...

...The world that Malthus predicted and feared is our world...

...Once growth stops, Immediately the competition for resources becomes a zero-sum game...

...in others, and perhaps finally in all, associations of labourers among themselves...

...e In the trade jargon, cultivation at both the extensive and the intensive margin infallibly yields smaller and smaller additional outputs per additional unit of labor and capital...

...Solow's nearly unqualified message was one of confidence in the capacity of societies organized on market principles to grow indefinitely into the future at the 3-4 percent annual per capita rates, which describe the economic history of the West since the Industrial Revolution...

...5 Even if new discoveries succeed in quintupling usable reserves and social discipline novel to the American experience allows us to reclaim and recycle 75 per cent of the irreplaceable resources now discarded, the additions would accommodate our rising rates of consumption for only a pitifully brief additional period—one that would be measured in decades rather than centuries...

...For the reasons earlier noted, energy prices will subside...

...and subsistence as —1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, &c...

...Nuclear blackmail is a real possibility, for a community as poor as India can explode nuclear devices...

...Yet, even though profit-sharing improved normal industrial relations, Mill judged the form transitional...

...The list is familiar...

...We have not been led to recognise that this ultimate goal is at all times near enough to be fully in view...

...Despite a "green revolution" in wheat and rice cultivation, aggregate food supplies in recent years have increased 5 American energy consumption has been steadily growing at 4.8 annual rates...

...The relationship between worker and employer was diseased by •the mutual suspicions of both parties...

...Why trouble about the fate of societies that prefer to evade rather than pursue the ethical goals of compassion, justice, and brotherhood, which spiritual leaders and secular prophets have vainly promoted over the millennia...

...The politics of compromise would be replaced by the politics of revolution, because the have-nots would be forced to challenge the whole basis of so ciety, and its distribution of wealth and power...

...Although food output has increased rather faster than Malthus anticipated, Latin-American and African population growth rates are frighteningly close to his speculations...

...Fishing, which has enjoyed its own technological revolution, is threatened by pollution as well as depletion of fish stock caused by the greed of the fishermen...

...One man's prize is another man's loss...

...For their part, the employees retaliated by conscientious malingering...

...but as Mill aged and witnessed ever more of market capitalism's corrupting effect on inlividual character, he became increasingly eager to soften the rigors of competition between persons, increasingly partisan to diminished inequality of income and wealth, more feminist than ever in his insistence upon the emancipation of women MILL, MALTHUS, AND GROWTH WITHOUT END 499 as a precondition to general progress, more inclined in 1871 than even in 1848 to judge English society harshly, and more confident than ever that only freedom of expression and parliamentary government promoted truth and enlightenment...

...Inflation is realistically unavoidable because depression has become a socially unacceptable technique for the treatment of MILL, MALTHUS, AND GROWTH WITHOUT END rising prices...

...Nor is the situation less ominous in other advanced communities...

...Profit-sharing was a promising technique...

...Since moderate inflation stimulates economic activity and reduces unemployment, wellorganized unions can successfully bargain for wage gains in excess of the inflation rate...

...For with all the ingenuity and imagination that science may muster, raw 3 In his First Essay on Population (1798), Malthus formulated the problem like this: Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of-1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, &c...

...With now approximately 4 bil lion, world population is increasing about 80 million annually, 13 million in India alone...

...I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on...

...The feeling that these products are now too cheap for the good of future generations, that they are being selfishly exploited at too rapid a rate, and that in consequence of their excessive cheapness they are being produced and consumed wastefully has given rise to the conservation movement...

...Is it necessary, as the only viable alternative to such despair, to resign ourselves, as Robert Heilbroner appears to do, to the necessity of authoritarian governments, which alone, so his argument runs, can control resource use and regulate human reproduction in the interests of the survival of the species...

...Most Keynesians accept continuous but slight inflation as on balance socially beneficial...

...The bulk of this growth is occurring not in the richer industrialized nations but in the poverty stricken continents of Asia, South America, and Africa...

...gigantic, inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world...

...The Peruvian anchovies, now back in their usual haunts, swam mysteriously away, caused shortages of cattle feed, compelled substitution of soybeans, drove up soybean prices, and elevated American meat prices...

...But Sakharov, whose values approximate those of the editors and readers of DISSENT, does not pause to explain just how one "democratically" regulates human reproduction...

...Even if we don't all starve, men and women may perish from the adverse effects of the pollution of their water, atmosphere, and immediate environment...

...Harold Hotelling," who confided these fears to fellow economists way back in 1931...

...At present rates of increase the globe's population by the end of the present century will be between 6 and 7 billion...

...Little in the way of government action is necessary, for given half a chance, competitive markets will perform their routine miracles of allocation of existing resources and evocation of new ones...

...In the United States the Em ployment Act of 1946, emasculated though it was by congressional conservatives, never theless signaled political recognition of new public responsibility for the maintenance of high levels of employment and production, come what might...

...Examining numerous 19th-century French and English experiments, Mill concluded that under profitsharing laborers worked harder, enlarged their incomes, and even raised the profits of capital...

...The watchword then is, Keep Cool...

...Inequality between rich and poor nations is now embittered by the demonstration efforts upon the poor of the life-styles of the affluent...

...Such contests of each against all are likely to end in the extermination of some of the antagonists, the exhaustion of the remainder, and the emergence of the sort of authoritarian monarchs or governments that Hobbes postulated in his version of the social contract and Heilbroner describes as the likeliest of future political developments...

...The wars among nations over resources, the clashes within nations over income and wealth redistribution, and the games of nuclear blackmail that Heilbroner foresees, may indeed be the only responses to scarcity that "human nature," national egotism, and group hostility are capable of engendering once the realization becomes general that the economic pie cannot be indefinitely enlarged, that, in Malthus's words, there really are "unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank...

...It is unlikely in the extreme that the controllers of the printed word in this world to come would allot even recycled paper to their professional critics...

...Here a central dilemma was how to reconcile his admiration of competition as guarantor of free choice and economic efficiency, and his dislike of societies organized on the model of rat races...

...it was also and far more important, the circumstance that at the center of the factory operative's daily routine was a cancer...

...I don't think that they are...

...Moreover, hope for a technological "fix" is much less well-founded than economists and other optimists seem to believe...

...Administration blunders compounded misfortune...

...In the worst month of the worst post-World War II re cession, unemployment was less than 8 per cent...

...Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz retained acreage limitations long after worldwide crop shortages dictated reversal of American policy...

...Dynamic capitalist societies flourish when businesses take shrewd gambles in the hope of great gain...

...According to the optimists, however, these are transitional events...

...IV Obviously there is no occasion for rejoicing that Mill more than a century ago sketched an agenda for industrial societies that in 1974 is not only incompletely resolved but in significant respects barely started upon...

...The first edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy was published in that year of failed revolution, 1848, the last during Mill's own lifetime in 1871...

...Neglect of international commercial relationships necessitated three dollar devaluations, which predictably enlarged foreign demand for American products and contributed to domestic inflationary pressure...

...It follows that so long as output per worker grows faster than the cost of living, typical white- and blue-collar operatives can reasonably anticipate long-run improvements in their real income, which average the 3-4 percent secular improvement in per capita productivity...

...Or, as Malthus phrased the prospect, in a passage that led Thomas Carlyle to call political economy the dismal science, Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature...

...Should the living, to revise Herman Kahn, envy those who sooner then they themselves will be dead...

...Should the middle-aged rejoice because they are likely to disappear before the steaks, lobsters, and vintage wines vanish from the tables of all but Greek bilionaries...

...In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 13: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable...

...the American version was plain dreadful, an object lesson of what happens to a society that pursues wealth above all other goals: The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this state of civilization in very favourable circumstances...

...And as the most cheerful will concede, in the short run no relief is in sight...

...Rich nations have erratically, at best, recognized a community of interest with less fortunate neighbors...

...MILL, MALTHUS, AND GROWTH WITHOUT END materials of some kind are essential, but as Benoit observes The presently estimated usable reserves of most of the world's irreplaceable raw materials will be exhausted in 50 to 100 years if the present growth of demand continues...

...It was Keynes himself who set the tone by looking forward wistfully to the "euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcityvalue of capital...

...As a protypical technological fix, the green revolution relied heavily on petrochemical fertilizers, chemical insecticides, forest clearing to extend cultivated land, and tilling of new land in regions of marginal rainfall...

...and they often finish the dreadful work themselves...

...Benoit cites a Japanese expert to the effect that in his country "where illnesses attributed to pollution number in the hundreds of thousands . . . half the population will be dead in twenty years if economic growth continues at present rates...

...Employers coldly insisted upon the last possible ounce of effort from their employees, treating them as particularly refractory machines...

...that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress . . . the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward...

...Arthur F. Burns, take such drastic anti-inflationary action as to cause a genuine deep recession...

...At exactly the wrong moment, the Administration in January 1973 dismantled its relatively effective (though inequitable) Phase II wage-price controls and moved to an ambiguous Phase III which was generally interpreted by the business community as a license to elevate prices and profits as high as the market would bear...

...Economic growth, less alarming inflation, and renewed improvement in living standards will soon resume, if we don't panic and, following the lead of Dr...

...It is fair to say that contemporary scientific advances have actually accentuated Malthusian dangers...

...But here we are richer than ever...

...If, by some succession of miracles, the scientific community invents solutions to each of these difficulties, there is still no reason to count on the technology improving at requisite speed...

...He chose for his title, "The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics," and began with this quotation: Contemplation of the world's disappearing supplies of minerals, forests, and other exhaustible assets has led to demands for regulation of their exploitation...

...For some time to come the multinational oil companies will continue to enjoy record windfall profits...

...And the new Ford administration may have learned enough from its predecessor's experience to avoid repetition of the most egregious blunders...

...regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school...

...At worst, zero or negative rates of growth imply a Hobbesian universe, a specter that animated the British economist Rudolf Klein's June essay in the New York Times Magazine...

...Benoit reminds his readers that It is now a quarter of a century since the basic technology of nuclear power has been understood, yet nuclear plants still account for only a small fraction of world energy production, the breeder reactor is still in the development stage, and serious unresolved safety and pollution problems impede rapid expansion of the program...

...If the blacks want to improve their share of desirable goods, it can only be at the expense of the whites...

...If so, magazines like DisSENT and essays like this one will be among the minor casualties in the regimented societies just over the horizon...

...What concerns me here is the continuing confidence of mainstream American economists and their colleagues in Japan and Western Europe that growth can and will continue at its usual pace...

...Mill's prescription for a better society emphasized what now are called quality-of-life issues...

...His ideal solution was syndicalist...

...In June 1973 an Indian smallpox epidemic has killed tens of thousands in the province of Bihar...

...THUS FAR I have written of slow inflation...

...Inflation makes it easier to borrow and enlarges prospective capital gain as well as profit...

...Should success be still incomplete...

...In the absence of changes such as these, the human prospect would be truly dismal...

...As Benoit aptly comments, "The fact that someone once cried `wolf' does not prove that a wolf may not finally arrive...

...the African continent as a whole every 27 years...

...I have far less than complete confidence that we shall take the enlightened route signposted by Mill...

...In such a context it is sobering to note the almost casual comment of a Russian scientific humanist like Andrei D. Sakharov that "The scientific and democratic regulation of the world economy and all social life, including the dynamics of population [emphasis added], is not, I am profoundly convinced, a utopia but a very real necessity...

...For Mill as for such spiritual descendants as William Morris, R. H. Tawney, and J. K. Galbraith, the relevant measure of social achievement was moral rather than material...

...Panglosses, right...

...Interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does the rent of land...

...A precursor of things to come...

...having, apparently, got rid of all social injustices and inequalities •that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct...

...Optimistic Keynesians argue that a combination of bad luck, poor national leadership, international politics, and coincidence explain the present price explosion...

...On the record, poor nations have preferred war to painful efforts at solution of their internal problems...

...Real transfers of wealth will continue to be made not only between oil consuming and oil producing nations but between average American motorists and Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco stockholders, a generally more affluent collection of men and women...

...Syndicalist solutions preserved the formal value of competition...

...it is a very eminent economic theorist...

...After this preliminary skirmish with the catastrophists, Solow treated his auditors to an elegant analysis of the manner in which market forces in the future as in the past can be expected to evoke new resources, improve the technology of their extraction, and impose salutary cost constraints upon individuals and enterprises purchasing resources in either raw or processed form...

...The near quadrupling of petroleum prices by the OPEC cartel reinforced these inflationary tendencies...

...FOR REASONS that will become speedily evident, I shall term what follows a Millian alternative...

...That economists tend, one suspects for their own convenience, drastically to underestimate the impact of monopoly is a story for another occasion...

...In sum, Robert Solow's optimism is close to fatuous at a time of demographic, raw material, food, and environmental threats to which the deified market, worshiped by every respectable economist, seems the most trivial of responses...

...As I read our contemporary catastrophists, I find it hard not to nod my head in agreement...

...17-21...

...There are plastic as well as stable elements in human behavior, just as there are instances of institutional improvement as well as rather more cases of institutional deterioration...

...What about the double-digit pace at which prices are now marching upward...

...In this spirit, I shall briefly speculate about a somewhat different and less depressing reMILL, MALTHUS, AND GROWTH WITHOUT END ponse to the ending of the Era of Growth and the inauguration of the Era of Redistribution...

...As luck would have it, business boomed simultaneously in Western 494 Europe, the United States, and Japan, a coincidence of business cycle peaks which accentuated demand pressure upon all manner of finished goods and raw materials...

...I assume that true believers in the efficacy of competitive behavior will do their bit to revivify the antitrust statutes and fragment concentrated industries...

...No divine principle insures human survival...

...Thus, whereas we can expect that the industrialized areas of the world will have to support roughly 1.4 to 1.7 billion people a century hence, the underdeveloped world, which to 1 An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974...

...Generally speaking, alternatives to petroleum all entail either threats to safety (as in nuclear power plants), enormous pollution problems (as in strip-mining and oil shale extraction), vast water requirements, threats to marine life and protein supplies from the ocean, enormous capital expenditures, or some combination of these costs and hazards...

...I mention only parenthetically the embarrassing limitations which monopoly imposes upon market efficiency, certainly in petroleum extraction and marketing, as well as in autos, steel, and a long list of manufacturing industries...

...The richest and most prosperous countries would very soon attain the stationary state, if no further improvements were made in the productive arts, and if there were a suspension of the overflow of capital from those countries into the uncultivated or ill-cultivated regions of the earth...

...Workers ought by peaceful purchase to acquire factories, run them in their own interest, and compete with other enterprises similarly managed...

...The chapters on socialism took an increasingly kindly view of the ethical desirability if not the economic practicality of the versions of Utopian socialism promulgated by Fourier and Owen...

...ROBERT LEKACHMAN UT III hat next...

...Latin America every 24 years...

...It seemed to Mill that a transformation of industrial relations was essential so that the interests and emotions of workers and owners might coincide instead of conflict...

...AS THIS ACCOUNT RUNS, the coincidence of steady growth and persistent inflation since the end of World War II is the necessary and benign consequence of the power of organized business and union groups to extract somewhat larger profits and wages than, at current prices, a given economy is capable of generating...

...3 The Malthusian "solution," which Heilbroner judges to be probable, features famine, disease, 4 and other calamities...

...The relatively puny military weaponry of the 19th century made genocide at worst a localized affair...

...For us as for Mill such a society requires a decrease in the gap between rich and poor, managers and workers, educated and less educated, black and white, male and female...

...Persistent 2-3 percent annual increases in the consumer price index tilt the odds in favor of debtors, entrepreneurs, and innovators at the expense of less active elements in the community such as creditors and rentiers...

...The human condition is now more desperate than in 1871, in good part because of the warlike uses of science...

...If the world is Malthusian, we are likely to be better guided by Malthus and Mill than by Robert Solow...

...Businessmen are not the only winners...

...Effective limitation of population is essential to human survival...

...Mill's intellectual strategy embraced the stationary, zero-growth state as a huge opportunity for personal development, not at all as a menace to humankind...

...Even terminal cancer victims dream of spontaneous remissions and new therapies...

...II re the economists, our contemporary Dr...

...Malthus would be at home in the 1970s...

...Attempts to clear forest and cultivate marginal land appear to increase soil erosion and lower water tables...

...For orthodox contemporaries of Mill, who defined prosperity after the fashion of James R. McCulloch not as a "large production and a good distribution of wealth but a rapid increase of it" stimulated by "high profits," such a condition was unmitigated disaster, much as it appears today to writers like Rudolf Klein...

...Is the specter of scarcity as distant as ever...

...A century ago Jevons feared that exhaustion of its coal deposits would halt England's progress...

...The diagnosis embodied in this forecast was premised upon increasing population and diminishing returns from the cultivation of less and less fertile land, as well as overcultivation of higher quality farms.° As a result, both the pace of real growth and the rate of return upon capital declined...

...Still, hope, like despair, is a human tendency...

...So it shall be...

...Population limitation is not an end, but a precondition of a society friendly to the best of human aspirations and potentialities...

...These days wages, once flexible in both directions, are now flexible only upward...

...Notoriously uneven in its impact, science and technology have been better at draining marshes, controlling malaria, reducing infant mortality, eliminating epidemic disease, and purifying water supplies than in sweetening the routine of daily life, raising the level of public education, comprehending the roots of crime and mental disorder, moderating the hostile and aggressive impulses of individuals, groups, and nations, and generally promoting the altruistic, cooperative side of "human nature...

...Pay heed to the market...

...alternative energy sources will be exploited by entrepreneurs for the usual profit-maximizing reasons...

...Hunger, nuclear war, and authoritarian social control may lie just over the horizon...

...and all that these advantages do for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters...

...Reading Mill, one finds it easy to grasp his premonition of such recent episodes as the Lordstown strike, which centered on just such an effort by the General Motors As sembly Division to extract extra labor and just such a sabotaging reprisal by the human targets of its policy...

...What, then, should be done simultaneously to preserve competition's benefits and dissipate its dehumanizing side effects...

...In 33 years a steady 3 percent annual increase in real wages ensures that real wages double those in force at the beginning of the period, even if an individual never becomes a foreman or supervisor...

...Although Mill's account of the internal governance of worker-owned factories was less than precise, his expectations of benefit were high: "The relation of masters and workpeople will be gradually superseded by partnership, in one of two forms;_ in some cases, associations of the labourers with the capitalists...

...Moreover, because workers took into their own hands factory discipline and punished malingerers, the quality of workmanship tended steadily to rise...

...500 ROBERT LEKACHMAN...

...Dollar devaluation, in addition, for a time turned American food into a world bargain...

...As Heilbroner puts it, Southeast Asia...

...496 only at about the same pace as population, leaving no margin for improvement in standards of nutrition and no cushion against localized famines, like the one in progress caused by a five-year sub-Saharan drought or the catastrophe looming in that new nuclear power, India...

...THE PROSPECTS for adequate food are even more discouraging...

...The routine marvels of science and technology by themselves do not suffice...

...In one place Mill phrased this vision of a better future in this way: It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but postponement of this, and that each step in advance is an approach to it...

...Plentiful American and Russian harvests, for instance, are far more likely to revive apprehensions about the reappearance of crop surpluses than to demonstrate Malthusian theoROBERT LEKACHMAN rems about faster growth in mouths to be fed than in food to feed them...

...Sound economics explains why pessimists err and optimists are wise...

...The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation...

...Bad luck has abounded...

...Profits also tend to resist erosion, whatever the economic weather...

...If the over-65's are to be given higher pensions, or improved medical services, it can only be at the expense of the working population or of the young...

...When they calculate the odds correctly, inflation affords them the opportunity to sell their inventories at prices higher than those at which the merchandise was acquired...

...So it has been for two centuries at least...

...Conventionally, the American Federal Reserve and the central banks of other nations validate the claims by printing enough new money and generating sufficient credit to pay into corporate treasuries and workers' hands the amounts targeted 'by corporate managers or embodied in union contracts...

...They are the precursors in the great army of destruction...

...In the absence of that universal solvent, genuine and continuous economic growth, it is hard to deny the plausibility of the dreadful futures variously envisaged by Heilbroner, Klein, and other pessimists...

...In 1972 simultaneous Russian, Chinese, and Indian crop failures generated explosive demand for American food...

...Solow's intent was playful, for as he immediately revealed, "The author of those sentences is not Dennis Meadows and associates, not Ralph Nader and associates, not the president of the Sierra Club...

...A long time ago Malthus predicted doom because of too many people...

...By somber contrast, on the eve of World War II, after nearly seven years of the New Deal, unemployment persisted at 12-14 percent levels...

...Every extinct species and civilization was a success story for a while—often for a long while...

...Insecticides frequently enter into food chains and imperil human health and life, encourage the breeding of poison-resistant strains of crop pests, and occasionally destroy the natural enemies of plant vandals...

...They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty...

...The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race...

...I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition...

...With the help of Robert Heilbroner 1 and Emile Benoit, 2 the situation can be readily summarized...

...If this conventional economic wisdom contains the root of the matter, then the current flood of gloomy social prophecy—of which Robert Heilbroner's eloquent An Inquiry into the Human Prospect is this year's best example, as Dennis Meadows' Limits of Growth was last year's—symbolizes no more than a recurrent fashion...

...Although in the last gen eration American employment performance leaves much to be desired, particularly by comparison with Western Europe and Japan, the contrast between pre- and post-World War II experience is striking...

...The implications of that conviction are momentous...

...Unfortunately, just as though Emerson's law of compensation were malignly at work, artificial fertilizers tend to diminish the natural fertility of the earth...

...2 "What Future Spaceship Earth ?" Social Policy, November—December 1973, pp...

...Possibly no one ought to weep for a species so prone to aggression, cruelty, deception, and misuse of its own intellectual and esthetic powers...

...Very much like Karl Marx in his own time and our own analysts of worker alienation, Mill worried about the deficiencies of factories as social institutions...

...It was not only, in Mill's bitter judgment, that "hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being...

...The contest demeaned both groups...

...But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands...

...Perceiving much that was wrong with Victorian capitalism as remediable in a stationary state, Mill reached a precisely opposite evaluation: I cannot...

...Powerful chapters entitled "Of the Stationary State" and "On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes" grappled ever more devotedly with the definition of a state of society superior to Victorian capitalism...

...White House pursuit of detente as well as sheer incompetence allowed Russian trade negotiators quietly to purchase far more wheat at far lower prices than the Nixon administration realized or perhaps wished to realize until the damage had been done...

...Energy prices will drop for predictable reasons: the OPEC cartel, like cartels before it, will disintegrate as the interests of its members come into sharper and sharper conflict (already Iran and Saudi Arabia have semipublicly quarreled over crude oil prices) ; new deposits of conventional energy will be located because higher prices encourage exploration...

...that we are always on the verge of it, and that if we have not reached it long ago, it is because the goal itself flies before us...

...During the 1973-74 recession profits increased more rapidly than they did in 1971 and 1972, and both were years of general business expansion...

...During the intervening generation, Mill's detestation of the moral and esthetic impact of English and American capitalism steadily deepened, partly as his Autobiography disclosed, because of the influence of his wife, Harriet Taylor...

...We may and very possibly will fail to limit population, transform the character of work, transfer resources within rich societies and between rich societies and poor ones, and learn to prefer cooperation to competition...

...From this instance of doom averted and scarcity denied, Solow inferred the encouraging conclusion that "The world has been exhausting its exhaustible resources since the first caveman chipped a flint, and I imagine the process will go on for a long, long time...

...is growing at a rate that will double its numbers in less than 30 years...

...new technologies will become economically important for the same reasons...