Responding to Malthus
DAVIDSON, PAUL
Responding to Malthus The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth By Steven Stoll Hill and Wang. 210 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Paul...
...Stoll suggests that, in 193 8, Fuller chided his readers for not realizing the universe is so big that one's sense of the possible has to be enlarged...
...In France, nuclear power provides approximately 80 per cent of the electricity generated and is certainly an important element in the country’s economic growth...
...In his view that notion is, as the title of his new book puts it, The Great Delusion of our time...
...It is called industrial ecology, and it has been waiting for its moment for half a century...
...The result was a disaster, with many of the participants in Etzler's Venezuelan experiment dying in the tropics...
...His warning is of course not new...
...Make cars lighter to save fuel...
...He cautions his readers that in the 20th century there were others who, à la Etzler, promoted a vision of a future where continuous economic growth would assure prosperity and progress for all mankind...
...Italics mine...
...At the end of The Great DelusionStoll gives us his solution to the Malthusian disaster he foresees: “Eliminate waste in production...
...author, "John Maynard Keynes" Economists maintain that human progress requires continuous growth in aggregate consumption...
...Make its materials recyclable and its by-products ecologically absorbable so that manufacturing becomes environmentally benign...
...That South American country's abundant sunlight and fertile land he was convinced could be made a virtual Garden of Eden where everyone "would live like royalty . . . and the ability to consume that defined the rich would belong to everyone...
...Shouldn’t government insure that all citizens have some share in any economic growth that occurs...
...Stoll provides no answer to this question...
...Instead he recounts the experience of a 19th-century German engineer, John Adolphus Etzler, the "mad inventor" of the book's subtitle...
...Friedman finds that rising incivility and intolerance is associated with a flattening of the Gross Domestic Product and incomes...
...As early as 1798, mAn Essay on thePrinciple ofPopulation, Thomas Robert Malthus famously argued that while the number of people on the earth would grow geometrically, the production of food and other necessities of life could only advance arithmetically...
...He sees disaster around the corner as consumption per se by an expanding world population results in mountains of waste that is buried in overloaded landfills, depletes our planet's limited natural resources and destroys its ecosystems...
...Designed to be propelled by such unlimited energy sources as wind power, sunshine and wave motion, they were gigantic failures...
...Indulging in a bit of satire, Stoll titles his last chapter "The Seven Billion Billionaires," referring to the almost 7 billion people who currently inhabit our planet...
...Etzler believed that innovation and technical progress could harness the universal abundance of Mother Nature and help mankindpermanently eliminate class conflict and poverty...
...Does Stoll’s concept of industrial ecology mean changing the way things are produced while still permitting total output and consumption to grow, or limiting total output and consumption globally to current levels, or requiring a reduction in total output and consumption so that the almost 7 billion people populating the planet must do with less...
...The author’s enthusiasm for a Malthusian constraint on economic growth has clouded his view of the historical growth of some nations or regions where alternatives are already inexpensive enough to replace significant quantities of oil use...
...By "employing an I-have-seen-the-future language that might have come right out of Etzler," Stoll says, Fuller predicted "industrial changes greater than any in history are at hand...
...But he does not make his case by presenting the kind of worrying statistical analyses and mathematical models put forward by organizations like the Club of Rome in the 1970s...
...One example he cites is R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the Dymaxion house...
...Disturbing as it sounds," Stoll responds, "growth on the scale known to industrial societies over the last two centuries is a historically exceptional condition" that is no longer with us...
...He states: "Fossil fuels underwrite our material lives___Yet if petroleum keeps rising over $100 per barrel, ourperfectly ordinary, highly dispersed energy-intensive economic geography will become unworkable...
...Backed by a wealthy businessman named Conrad Stollmeyer, Etzler attempted to develop a Utopian Socialist Society in Venezuela...
...Consequently, instead of society progressing toward a world of plenty obtained through new tools provided by capitalists, society was condemned to a losing struggle between mouths to feed and an increasingly insufficient bounty from Mother Nature...
...If oil is too expensive, then after a period of transition other sources of energy—whose cost of safe delivery exceeded that of oil when it was $10 to $30 per barrel—can, and will, come into play...
...Better yet, redesign the factory . . . to acknowledge that all production is a subsystem of the larger biophysical system of the earth...
...He claimed that in the near future we would be free of scarcity and with a global population at the time of approximately 4 billion, Fuller wrote: "We have 4 billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealthy Such optimists, Stoll complains, possessed "some idea or habit of mind [that] prevented them from seeing our economy as part of the environment...
...Stoll tries to put a final nail in the coffin of growth advocates by attacking the analysis in Benjamin M. Friedman’s book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005...
...Does that mean we should abandon economic growth, or does it suggest that government must constrain self-interest actions in the marketplace that inflict socially undesirable results on segments of the population...
...the capacity of a system to transfer raw material from environments to consumers through a widening process of production...
...Yet 210 years after Malthus wrote his Essay population has swelled enormously, and in most developed nations the nutritional problem is not the lack of food it is obesity...
...Stoll counters that during the booming 1980s and ’90s the lives of the poor did not significantly improve, while the detachment of business “executives from any duty to the public weal has resulted in spectacular scandals that have left thousands without secure retirement funds...
...Reviewed by Paul Davidson Editor, "Journal of Post Keynesian Economics...
...Nevertheless, Etzler was convinced the wind sun and sea could provide all the energy needed "to afford a sufficiency for all our wants" because "no material is consumed...
...From this he concludes: “If growth does not result in social equality and the reduction of poverty, it abdicates its single social justification...
...Steven Stoll, a professor of history at Fordham University, strongly disagrees...
...Stoll discusses the inventions to increase production that Etzlerpatented...
...Oil is not simply implicated in everything we call growth— there has never been growth without it___Yet even though the end of its production is in sight, there is no substitute for oil—nothing stands ready to replace even 10 per cent of present consumption...
...AT THIS POINT Stoll appears to be questioning John F. Kennedy’s contention that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” which in the 1960s was probably true...
...That moment has arrived...
...But since the 1980s, with the start of the movement to deregulate markets and promote self-interest unfettered by government interference, the problem of increasing income distribution inequality has arisen even in periods of economic growth...
...But the history of economic growth in the Tennessee Valley is tied to water power, not fossil fuels...
...To illustrate the disaster we are currently facing, Stoll takes up the problem of oil availability in the 21 st century...
...The lesson Stoll wants us to learn from the mad inventor's biography is clear: Despite our optimism that we can harness all the energy necessary to increase production, we cannot fool Mother Nature into permitting a perpetual continuous growth in consumption...
...Replace petroleum-burning engines with hydrogen-burning fuel cells...
...Economic growth," Stoll asserts, "is a measure of'throughput...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
