Cheaters are lurking in the U.S. economy, corrupting what should be an honest game of production, commerce, and trade. “Cheater economics” refers to the corporate welfare system in which corporations are given special tax subsidies and granted access to loopholes for avoiding tax payments. Cheater economics drains away needed tax revenues, leaving governments with the lose-lose choice of running up deficits or reducing services, or both. Often this means cutbacks in environmental, health, and safety protections. Thanks in no small part to the cheaters, the debate on public finance in the United States has shifted to deficits and the need for cuts. To those seeking funds for worthwhile programs, the answer is, “Sorry, we’re broke!”

We must reframe the debate if we wish to eliminate corporate abuses and get serious about establishing a sustainable, steady state economy. And we should start by getting rid of the cheaters.

Some examples of cheater economics are blatant, such as welfare handouts to polluters. It’s bad enough that corporations are allowed to externalize the high costs of their polluting activities, but what’s worse is that taxpayer funds flow to dirty industries (e.g., oil and nuclear reactor companies) in the form of direct handouts and tax loopholes.

Other examples of cheater economics, however, are more subtle. One of the less well-known rip-offs, which benefits the top 1% of income earners, is a taxpayer subsidy for short-term speculation in derivatives. Traders, who can buy and sell complex derivatives in a matter of minutes, are allowed to claim a large portion of the resulting income not as a short-term capital gain, but as a long-term gain (which is taxed at a lower rate). Fortunately, the Senate is looking into this rip-off, and Senator Carl Levin (Democrat-Michigan) has introduced legislation to shut it down.

Republicans and Democrats alike have helped set the stage for cheater economics through financial deregulation. Today’s Republican leadership continues to push for deregulation, but prominent Democrats, going back to President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, have also been prime drivers of financial deregulation.

President Obama won the election in 2008 just as the financial system collapsed in response to the deregulatory extravaganza promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. Those that destroyed the financial regulatory framework by repealing effective laws, such as the Glass-Steagall Act of the 1930s, brought on the devastating subprime collapse.

But Obama, as a new President with tremendous support, failed to seize the initiative in 2009. Instead the aggressive right wing brilliantly framed the debate over the size of government, the tax code, and unemployment. Thus the Republican leadership established a strong message in favor of: 1) cutting government spending as the way to deal with the deficit, 2) abolishing EPA’s environmental regulations as the way to relieve unemployment, and 3) maintaining low taxes on the wealthiest 1%, because raising taxes is never the solution.

And now there’s another looming setback to efforts aimed at reining in the cheaters. The IRS, the tax collection arm of government, is being cut, which will seriously limit the agency’s reach when it comes to tracking tax dodgers and overseeing the collection of legitimate tax payments.

The election year offers a prime opportunity to push back against cheater economics by reframing the debate. Let’s start asking who is hijacking the revenue. We are not broke. Simply closing the numerous tax loopholes would bring in more than the $1.2 trillion the Republican leadership has been demanding in budget cuts over the next decade.

Annie Leonard, the creator of the popular Story of Stuff video, is leading the charge to reframe the debate. Her new video, The Story of Broke, calls for a shift in government spending to invest in renewable energy and other industries that can provide jobs and a healthy environment. Another movie, We’re not Broke, is also helping to change the message. This new film, backed by the Tax Justice Network, tells the story of how corporations are dodging taxes and how seven fed-up citizens are working to make the corporations pay their fair share.

Another way to reframe the debate is to showcase the benefits of environmental regulations. A review of the scientific literature on the causes of job loss shows that environmental compliance costs are small. Only among a handful of the big polluting industries are the costs greater than 2%. Furthermore, the health benefits of environmental regulation are enormous.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that safety and environmental regulations are responsible for only 0.1% of job losses. Frank Ackerman’s Poisoned for Pennies provides more details on this story. Despite the facts, various Presidential candidates and the Congressional Republican leadership persist in attributing the loss of jobs to environmental regulations and call for the elimination of the EPA.

So the question to both Republican and Democratic candidates this year should not be, “What are you going to cut or deregulate?” The question should be, “Why aren’t you getting rid of cheater economics?” Now is the time to demand the honest economy we all deserve.

One year ago this week I wrote that Barack Obama had finally done it. He had taken the tantalizing trail to a notoriously slippery slope. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he promised, “federal agencies (will) ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth.” In other words, we would have our environmental cake and eat it too, for the sake of economic growth.

For some time after the op-ed, Obama did little to promulgate this win-win rhetoric, and those of us who prefer the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth regained some hope. Economic growth is a serious topic, and so is environmental protection. We’d like Obama to come clean and tell it like it is: There is a fundamental trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection.

Maybe the truth about economic growth and environmental protection doesn’t make for an easier choice between the two, but what kind of a choice can be borne of a lie?

Now it’s fairly reasonable for Obama to say, as he did last month in a speech to EPA employees, that “Safeguarding our environment is also about strengthening the economy.” There is no doubt that safeguarding our environment protects the strength of the economy. But Obama’s exact wording is a stretch because strengthening usually connotes growing the economy. That cannot be done while truly safeguarding the environment. Economic growth — increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate — does and must have a growing environmental impact. That’s Ecological Economics 101.

Obama fell further down the slippery slope with “I do not buy the notion that we have to make a choice between having clean air and clean water and growing this economy in a robust way. I think that is a false debate.” But I don’t buy the notion that Obama is that oblivious to the truth. Surely he knows our skies, rivers and oceans gradually fill with the byproducts of production and consumption. But as with all politicians, he also knows that the average voter doesn’t detect the dulling of the skies or the graying of the waters during the course of one electoral cycle. So he hunkers down on the slippery slope, content in avoiding the attention of a really inconvenient truth.

Once in awhile, though, a spotlight shines on the slope, such as in Sunday’s Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin, “Obama administration slows environmental rules as it weighs political cost.” Rules aimed at curbing auto emissions are on hold, as is a proposal to regulate soot, because of the toll these and other environmental protections would take from the rate of economic growth. In other words, the administration knows darn-tootin’ well that bona fide environmental “safeguarding” can’t be reconciled with economic growth. They also suspect that the political cost of prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth at this point in history is more than they are willing to pay.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, this prioritizing of economic growth over environmental protection in a world of endangered species, oil spills, and climate change, if only presidents who model themselves after Ol’ Abe Lincoln were at least forthright about the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. Why can’t Obama just come out and say, “I realize that the #1 concern among Americans today is jobs. That’s why I’m doing all I can to help grow the economy. And I’ll continue to do this, as long as we realize that growing the economy does have a growing impact on the environment too. So while we’re growing the economy today, we must turn some of our attention to how we can transition tomorrow to a stable economy, or what they call a ‘steady state economy.’ That’s the vision of the future, and the sooner we explore it, the more prepared we’ll be.” Or something like that? At least then we could respect him for telling the truth on economic growth and environmental protection.

Would that really get him unelected? Who says? How do they know?

But the truth-telling onus is not entirely on Obama. Frankly, I think we should be far more disappointed with the many “environmental” organizations and agencies who themselves pollute the internet and airwaves with the win-win wimpsmanship. They’re the ones who could empower Obama to tell it like it is without being so worried about political consequences. As it is now, it’s hard to blame Obama for fearing the role of Lone Ranger in a wilderness of intellectual laziness.

It’s too late in this article to elaborate on these organizations and what their problems are, but count on it for another day in the Daly News.

There are two dogmas that neoclassical economists must never publicly doubt lest they be defrocked by their professional priesthood: first, that growth in GDP is always good and is the solution to most problems; second, that free international trade is mutually beneficial thanks to the growth-promoting principle of comparative advantage. These two cracked pillars “support” nearly all the policy advice given by mainstream economists to governments.

Even such a clear thinker as Paul Krugman never allows his usually admirable New York Times column to question these most sacred of all tenets. And yet in less than 1,000 words the two dogmas can easily be shown to be wrong by just looking at observable facts and the first principles of classical economics. Pause, and calmly consider the following:

(1) Growth in all micro-economic units (firms and households) is subject to the “when to stop rule” of optimization, namely stop when rising marginal cost equals declining marginal benefit. Why does this not also apply to growth of the matter-energy throughput that sustains the macro-economy, the aggregate of all firms and households? And since real GDP is the best statistical index we have of aggregate throughput, why does it not roughly hold for growth in GDP? It must be because economists see the economy as the whole system, growing into the void — not as a subsystem of the finite and non-growing ecosphere from which the economy draws resources (depletion) and to which it returns wastes (pollution). When the economy grows in terms of throughput, or real GDP, it gets bigger relative to the ecosystem and displaces ever more vital ecosystem functions. Why do economists assume that it can never be too big, that such aggregate growth can never at the margin result in more illth than wealth? Perhaps illth is invisible because it has no market price. Yet, as a joint product of wealth, illth is everywhere: nuclear wastes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, the ozone hole, biodiversity loss, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, depleted mines, eroded topsoil, dry wells, exhausting and dangerous labor, exploding debt, etc. Economists claim that the solution to poverty is more growth — without ever asking if growth still makes us richer, as it did back when the world was empty, or if it has begun to make us poorer in a world that is now too full of us and our stuff. This is a threatening question, because if growth has become uneconomic then the solution to poverty becomes sharing now, not growth in the future. Sharing is now called “class warfare.”

(2) Countries whose growth has pushed their ecological footprint beyond their geographic boundaries into the ecosystems of other countries are urged by mainline economists to continue to do so under the flag of free trade and specialization according to comparative advantage. Let the rest of the world export resources to us, and we will pay with exports of capital, patented technology, copyrighted entertainment, and financial services. Comparative advantage guarantees that we will all be better off (and grow more) if everyone specializes in producing and exporting only what they are relatively better at, and importing everything else. The logic of comparative advantage is impeccable, given its premises. However, one of its premises is that capital, while mobile within nations, does not flow between nations. But in today’s world capital is even more mobile between countries than goods, so it is absolute, not comparative advantage that really governs specialization and trade. Absolute advantage still yields gains from specialization and trade, but they need not be mutual as under comparative advantage — i.e., one country can lose while the other gains. “Free trade” really means “deregulated international commerce” — similar to deregulated finance in justification and effect. Furthermore, specialization, if carried too far, means that trade becomes a necessity. If a country specializes in producing only a few things then it must trade for everything else. Trade is no longer voluntary. If trade is not voluntary then there is no reason to expect it to be mutually beneficial, and another premise of free trade falls. If economists want to keep the world safe for free trade and comparative advantage they must limit capital mobility internationally; if they want to keep international capital mobility they must back away from comparative advantage and free trade. Which do they do? Neither. They seem to believe that if free trade in goods is beneficial, then by extension free trade in capital (and other factors) must be even more beneficial. And if voluntary trade is mutually beneficial, then what is the harm in making it obligatory? How does one argue with people who use the conclusion of an argument to deny the argument’s premises? Their illogic is invincible!

Like people who can’t see certain colors, maybe neoclassical economists are just blind to growth-induced illth and to destruction of national community by global integration via free trade and free capital mobility. But how can an “empirical science” miss two red elephants in the same room? And how can economic theorists, who make a fetish of advanced mathematics, persist in such elementary logical errors?

If there is something wrong with these criticisms then some neoclassical colleague ought to straighten me out. Instead they lamely avoid the issue with attacks on nameless straw men who supposedly advocate poverty and isolationism. Of course rich is better than poor — the question is, does growth any longer make us richer, or have we passed the optimum scale at which it begins to make us poorer? Of course trade is better than isolation and autarky. But deregulated trade and capital mobility lead away from reasonable interdependence among many separate national economies that mutually benefit from voluntary trade, to the stifling specialization of a world economy so tightly integrated by global corporations that trade becomes, “an offer you can’t refuse.”

Will standard economists ever pull the plug on brain-dead dogmas?

I grew up in a small South African town 16,000 kilometers and more than a hundred years away from America’s Wild West, but nevertheless watched many a cheap Saturday morning movie set in the mesquite and chaparral of that mythically violent but oddly honorable land. They mostly had similar themes — honest, hard-working homesteading family set upon by a variety of villains, whether cattle barons, railroad tycoons, “eastern” mining companies and more, each capitalist with armies of thugs for hire, ready to drive our hero off his land. One of the most common revolved around the hapless prospector (usually shown with pickax and mule to show his essential poverty) who finds a rich seam of gold, somewhere up in them thar hills, but never gets to stake his claim, either because he is killed by thugs on the way to the claims office, or because said thugs have raced ahead and filed ahead of him. All generally worked out by the end of the final reel; the prospector (or if dead, his deserving family) vindicated, and villainous mining corporation driven off, often with the help of a virtuous senator or otherwise honest politician. An oddly anti-capitalist saga, for the America of the post-Depression and I Like Ike years.

Unasked, in all this, was a simple question: who owns the gold in the first place? The answer would have been, of course, whoever finds it first.

Those days in the Bijou came back to me after an anecdote told me by Maurice Strong, who had recently chaired the Rio conference on the environment that had come to be called the Earth Summit. Maurice, and a company he controlled, had come into possession of one of Colorado’s historic cattle ranches, the 1823 grant to Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca and still known as the Baca Grande Ranch, in Comanche country near Crestone, looking out on the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Among its other assets, the ranch happened to sit on top of one of the west’s great untapped aquifers. Maurice’s company got into dispute with others about this water. First of all, his opponents suspected he wanted to “mine” the water and ship it north to Canada, a nice reversal of the conventional power politics between the two countries. Then, when it became clear that he really didn’t want to do anything with it, claims were filed by other parties demanding access. The legal rationale was simple: in much of the west, water rights operated under the “use it or lose it” principle. If you didn’t use the water, others had to right to appropriate it and use it themselves. There really couldn’t be a clearer anti-conservationist ethic.

Who owned the gold that the prospectors found in all those Westerns? Who owned the water under Maurice Strong’s Baca Grande ranch? The answer is, no one, everyone, anyone.

The question can be extended indefinitely. Who owns, say, the natural gas deposits that have lain, untapped, under the ocean near Sable Island, a hundred kilometers from my house? Who owns the Gorgon gas field under Barrow Island off Australia’s west coast? Who owns the methane hydrate deposits off the shore of New Jersey? Who owns the limestone deposits under California’s central coast (deposits that yield up some of the world’s sublime wines)? Who owns the great boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada? Who owns the rocks of the earth? Who, indeed, owns the air? The birds of the air? The water? The oceans? Fish stocks? Who owns the whales?

Who owns nature?

And then another set of questions, about another kind of commonwealth: who owns culture? Who owns languages, science, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has the right to sell it?

In an empty world, these questions, or at least the ones about nature, didn’t much matter. Nature seemed inexhaustible. Still, natural philosophers, as scientists were once called, have wrestled with the issue for millennia, as have political authorities. In Roman times, the Senate put together a series of laws that classified several aspects of what came to be called “the commons” as explicitly owned by the people collectively. These res communes, common things, included water and the air, but also “bodies of water,” that is lakes, and shorelines generally. Wild animals, as opposed to domesticated ones, were included. After the Roman empire collapsed, overrun by what the Romans were pleased to call barbarians, some aspects of the res communes came into dispute — feudal lords, and then kings, claimed to control them.

The implications of a commons is that since no one owns it, anyone can use it, exploit it, and pollute it at no charge.

So where, in a well-ordered world, do private property rights stop? How best to treat the commons so it survives for the benefit of all? How best to allocate the profits that flow from what exploitation is allowed? Private property is the engine of prosperity. Common property is the backdrop before which private actors perform. Both are necessary. So an answer is critical. We have three economic sectors: the private sector, the public (or state) sector and the commons sector. Only the last has no body of law to protect it, and no accounting systems for its profits or losses.

So the question becomes: if the various natural systems of the earth, especially the air, the water, the land and its minerals, and the complex life systems they sustain, are indeed “the commons,” how do we guard against the “tragedy of the commons?” If no one owns the resource and anyone can use it, how do we protect it from depletion?

The tragedy of the commons as a phrase owes its origins to Garrett Hardin’s essay in Science magazine in 1968, though the notion of a social trap involving a conflict between individual interests and the common good goes back, at least, to Aristotle.

Here is Hardin’s description of the tragedy :

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is [obvious]. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction [of the burden] … The rational herdsman concludes [from this] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another, and another … But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit, in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Hardin’s argument was widely accepted by economists and free-market enthusiasts. The solution to the dilemma, it seemed obvious, was privatization, the enclosure of the commons.

But it is not obvious. Hardin’s theory was the purest poppycock, and widely adopted only because it seemed to convey the essence of free market competition. It was a truly corporatist view.

The main error was to adopt a key proposition of the free market, and of Adam Smith’s, that man is a rational being who always acts in his own best interests, and then to assume that those interests automatically involved multiplication of personal assets. But what Hardin was describing was not rational behavior — it was the purest selfishness. And there is, after all, a crucial difference. A rational being, faced with a dilemma of the commons, would be able to calculate long-term prospects and conclude, quite rationally, that some sort of short-term limit, arrived at through negotiation, would be in his own interests. In other words, in the context of a limited commons, cooperation is a more rational decision than independence. Hardin derived his views from biology — he wasn’t an economist — and preferred a hard-line version of Darwinism called, not surprisingly, survival of the fittest. But “fit” was interpreted narrowly and stripped of its social context. Hardin simply assumed that when men came together without rules, violence or conflict ensued. He had no knowledge of the equally Darwinist view that natural selection could just as easily select for mutual cooperation as for continual family warfare, a view that has been gaining credence among biological evolutionists in the past few decades. He took no account, therefore, of the human ability to develop rules for accessing and using common resources.

Cooperation, when you look for it, is not hard to find. Fishermen in several places have banded together to set sustainable catch quotas. The same thing is true, as Jonathan Rowe pointed out in an essay for WorldWatch, in the rice paddies of the Philippines, in the Swiss Alpine pasturelands, the Maine lobster fishery, the Pacific haddock fishery, and many other places. The case could even be made that as long as settled communities remain intact, the commons flourishes. The community merely needs to be enabled to protect it.

–

Marq de Villiers is an award-winning writer of books and articles on exploration, history, politics, and travel.  He is also a graduate of the London School of Economics, and his latest book puts his training in economics to good use.  Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World offers a refreshing menu of economic options for an overly consumptive population living on an environmentally stressed planet.

Choosing a college (not to mention getting in) can be a trying experience, especially for the nerdier souls among us. In my case, I had absolutely no plan for what to do with the rest of my life, so I selected a big university that offered degrees and classes in everything. I figured that I could explore several branches of knowledge, take a few detours down unusual alleys of academia, and figure something out for my future along the way. That’s how I ended up in Marketing 101 as a freshman. And reflecting on the offerings of that class, I’m pretty sure the whole thing was based on an erroneous assumption.

Before attending the class, I didn’t really know what marketing was. In fact my preconceived notions about marketing came mostly from cartoon characters who inhabited the Technicolor landscape of sugary breakfast cereals: Count Chocula, Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, the cuckoo bird who becomes agitated in the presence of artificial choco-balls, and the leprechaun who refuses to share his bounty of marshmallows with sugar-starved children. The class was structured around the 4 P’s (product, price, place, and promotion), a mnemonic to remind students that a marketer has to consider an awful lot of stuff to sell a product. Much to my disappointment, neither the professor nor the textbook entered the realm of children’s breakfast cereals, but we certainly did explore case studies from other sectors to get a sense of what makes a successful marketing strategy.

What feats of marketing can differentiate these two seemingly identical products? Wouldn’t this be the most instructive marketing case study of all time?

The first and most carefully considered case study was the United Colors of Benetton. It was all about “branding.” We studied how the company had used international flair and bright colors to sell lots and lots of clothes. The point for us students was to learn some things about branding that might help us blossom into successful marketers. Looking at that class in the rearview mirror today, I see that a faulty assumption formed the foundation of everything we studied. Let’s call it the BIG ASSUMPTION. Simply put, the BIG ASSUMPTION is that more is better. Without question, the Benettons of the business world should always sell more, and marketing techniques should be used to achieve that outcome.

Why is the BIG ASSUMPTION always there, and why does it go unquestioned, especially at a university with a big-name business school? It all has to do with visibility. The upsides of successful marketing campaigns — of selling more — show up right in front of our faces, popping with bold, Benetton colors. When you sell more, you get more money. And more money gets you more perks — more jobs, more toys, more status, more choices about where you live, what you eat, and what you wear. This lesson gets ingrained in our thinking and worldview from an early age. By college, I certainly understood it.

I used to go to the ATM in the student union to take out cash for food on the weekends (the dining halls were closed on Saturdays and Sundays). On one such occasion, I stuck my card in the machine, entered my PIN, and hit the button for “account balance.” The machine spit out a slip of paper that reported my life savings at $11.43. Next I punched the buttons to request a withdrawal of $5 (that way, I’d still have $5 for the next weekend). While the machine was taking its time to count all those bills, I noticed a pile of discarded account slips strewn atop the machine. I sifted through them while the ATM continued to sift through its stacks of cash for my $5. Many accounts were of the 5-digit variety — lots of rich kids at college. As I prepared to go searching for the best deal on noodles, I couldn’t help but think what sort of gourmet meals I might be able to get with a 5-digit account instead of a 5 dollar bill.

So it’s really quite simple. The assumption to which marketing students (and just about every participant in the economy) submit is this:

More sales (through more marketing) = more money = more consumption of goods and services = better lives.

But blind submission to this assumption generates plenty of downsides. If Benetton keeps selling more, and Kellogg’s keeps selling more, and GM, and Sony, and Exxon, and Apple, and Wal-Mart, and on and on, we find ourselves bumping up against the limits to growth. But the consequences are much less visible. It’s hard to notice the climate warming. It’s hard to notice species going extinct. It’s hard to notice the drawdown of aquifers. It’s hard to… (ok, ok, you get the point). The downsides of accepting the BIG ASSUMPTION are less visible than the upsides, but there’s also another problem. The upsides accrue to a select few, while the downsides accrue to society at large. As Benetton sells more and more shirts, it makes more and more profits. Its employees enjoy higher salaries and more status. At the same time, it does not suffer the consequences from increased emissions and use of natural resources — someone somewhere else, often sometime in the future, feels the pain. In essence, the economy operates by concentrating benefits and diffusing costs, especially for those businesses with the most successful marketing departments.

To debunk an assumption, especially one with the visibility problems of the BIG ASSUMPTION, you have to study. You have to learn about the concealed downsides. For the BIG ASSUMPTION, that means studying ecology and understanding (to the extent we can) the science behind environmental systems. The author and activist Bill McKibben is certainly someone who has done his homework. His studies have led him to question the BIG ASSUMPTION. On the first page of his book, Deep Economy, he writes:

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production…  But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better.

I vant to sell you crud!

More Count Chocula actually makes everyone worse off, except of course for the few people who manufacture and market Count Chocula. By the day, it becomes more and more obvious that it’s time to replace the outdated fixation on More with a modern appreciation of Enough. The challenge is to configure the economy in such a way that people and organizations can pursue Better instead of More. Maybe we can start by overhauling Marketing 101.

by Brian Czech

“Failure breeds success,” I hope some famous person once said. For I have failed to accomplish the goal set out in Part 1 of Technological Progress for Dummies. The goal was to summarize an article — in plain language and in less than a thousand words — that described why technological progress cannot reconcile the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. I found I couldn’t do it without several thousand words, and too much plain language is as difficult to digest as a dollop of jargon. As for the article itself, it’s long and full of jargon.

And now for the successful offspring of such abject failure. (Drumroll, please.) I can successfully say that most folks have tightened a nut or two.

In the old days you would have used a monkey wrench. Then a tidbit of technological progress happened and you had a box wrench, which allowed you to tighten that nut a tad more efficiently. When they finally invented the ratcheting socket wrench, you were really in business. It seemed like you could tighten far more nuts with the same amount of elbow grease; five nuts to one when you threw in some coffee!

Such is the basic pattern of technological progress. Invention and innovation allow you to do more with less. Well ok, maybe not actually “less.” If you tighten five nuts to one, you’re prone to using five times the nuts. And the ratchet set is something you have to add to the toolbox. But you can definitely tighten more nuts without working harder, so in workaday parlance, you’re doing “more with less.” If you want to get technical about it, you could say you’re producing more output per unit input. Your productivity is increasing.

For the economy as a whole, productivity increases with technological progress. It’s an impressive process; nearly awesome at some points in history. It makes us proud of the human race, boosts our confidence, makes us think the sky is the limit. Many are even led to believe we can grow the economy without impacting the environment. After all, if we can do more with less, how about doing more with a lot less?

And why stop there? If we invent and innovate enough, maybe we can do more with no more! We can just keep growing GDP without using any more wood, water, minerals, petroleum — natural resources in general. No more steel, nuts, or tools. No more stuff, no more energy.

It’s reminiscent of the alcoholic announcing, “I’m not drinkin’ any more, but just as much.” We may not be using more natural resources to produce more goods and services, but if we’re still using the same amount we can’t really say we’ve stopped impacting the environment, can we? Especially since we had to dig deeper for the minerals, drill deeper for the petroleum, etc. And notice we haven’t even mentioned the flow of pollution (and won’t, to keep things simpler.)

So it’s time for the really big guns. Now we’re going to produce more, not only with way less, not only with no more, but with nothing at all! We’ll just beam it all up. Why not? After all, research and development expenditures in the United States alone are some $300 billion per year. That oughta buy us out of any problem, including this one! That’s why economists like Robert L. Bradley, Jr. announce, “Natural resources originate from the mind, not from the ground, and therefore are not depletable.”

Now if you’re a scientist worth your stellarator, you can see through the subterfuge in a nanosecond. The first law of thermodynamics tells you there’s no producing something from nothing. You can’t even get perfectly efficient with the resources you do use, because that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. So there’s a limit to technological progress — doing more with less — as it applies to the full collection of materials at our disposal along with the energy we receive from the sun.

The problem remains, however, that for purposes of plain language, the laws of thermodynamics and even the phrase “laws of thermodynamics” don’t cut it. Only in plain language can we make a difference in everyday life and public policy. That’s why President Obama signed the Plain Language Act of 2010.

So here’s some more nuts and bolts. Remember how doing “more with less” leads to five times the nuts? Tell your local Robert L. Bradley, Jr. that we shall all refuse to tighten five times the nuts without five times the bolts and washers, along with additional material to be tightened. And if we’re assembling things for market — quite necessary for GDP growth — we’re now assembling more of them. That leads to more transportation, storage, and retail services. More electricity all around, too, along with the wiring, fuses, bulbs and such. Plus that power plant in the background, with all the nuts and bolts therein.

Now with this type of expansion going on everywhere that the proverbial nuts are tightened (all around the world, in other words), information services help to orchestrate it all. Everybody better have a computer, cell phone, and Twitter feed. Operating at this level, you may as well start advertising, too. Banking, insurance, and other service sectors will also play an expanded role.

Notice that, in addition to not even mentioning the flow of pollution, we also haven’t mentioned the agricultural sector — farming in plain language. But of course we’re going to need plenty of it, to feed all the folks with the manufacturing and service jobs. With all the food they’ll have to produce, they’ll need cell phones and GPS units in the air-conditioned cabs of those 30-foot-wide combines. And plenty of extra nuts and bolts.

So that old ’90′s notion that we could keep growing the “Information Economy” without using more resources — and without any more environmental impact — was like a highly productive conversion of grass into bullpies. All that information, which was supposed to beam us up to Shangri-La, was nothing if not tied into the regular old economy down on the farm and everywhere else in the Land of Nuts and Bolts. The computer was nothing more than the ratcheting socket wrench of the IT sector, which was distributing marching orders for an ever-larger ecological footprint.

At a thousand words now, I’m thinking this is all the success my failure can breed. Enough for one column at least. Someday I may also find a way to convert that earlier-mentioned article, condensing concepts such as niche breadth, trophic levels, and economies of scale into plain language of a thousand words or less, refuting the macroeconomic environmental Kuznets curve and solving the Jevons paradox (which really isn’t so paradoxical) in the process.

But it’ll drive some nuts. In fact, many more nuts, albeit more efficiently.

Not you, CASSE signatory. You’re no dummy. You already know that the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection can’t be overcome with technological progress.

But we’re all dummies about something. Most of us are dummies about toothpick manufacturing, for example. Toothpick dummies range from presidents to pot-scrubbers. So do plasma physics dummies, Arabic language dummies, and root canal instrument dummies. So don’t take this the wrong way if you think technological progress can overcome the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. You may be wrong about that, but you are legion!

Now among dummies, there’s dumb and dumber. That’s just the way it is. But toothpick dummies and other specific dummies can be smart overall. So the generally smart and smarter are specifically dumb and dumber.

Technological progress sure brings out the dumb in the smarter. This I discovered by trying to get scientific organizations to adopt positions on economic growth. Invariably, the biggest hurdle was the notion that, with technological progress, economic growth and environmental protection could go hand-in-hand.

And frankly, it is an extremely difficult notion to refute, at least in plain language. It’s different if you’re a physicist; you probably get it immediately. You know that, no matter how much invention and innovation, you can’t make something from nothing and you can’t get perpetually more efficient. You know it because you’re steeped in the first two laws of thermodynamics.

But there we go, with “laws of thermodynamics,” already outside the vernacular, way beyond plain language. Few among us are physicists. Legion are we thermodynamic dummies, from presidents to pot-scrubbers.

That doesn’t mean you must be a physicist to get it. Farmers tend to get it too, as do many people who work with their hands, city or country. The fact that you can’t make something from nothing, that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, is really a matter of common sense. Or it should be.

The problem is that common sense is not very common any more. It’s been vanquished by disingenuous marketers, truth-bending politicians, and scholarly “smart-dummies” (generally smart, specifically dumb on technological progress) who have legions thinking there is no limit to economic growth. But surely it’s not far below the surface. Surely there is latent common sense to invoke.

For several years in the early 2000′s, I looked high and low for a thorough explanation of why technological progress could not reconcile the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. I felt I had common sense — horse sense, farm sense, construction sense — and I couldn’t believe the best-selling authors blathering about perpetual growth in the “information economy” and the politicians chanting the mantra, “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.” All this was based on a fuzzy notion of technological progress, and had most Americans (64% according to a Roper poll) believing there was no limit to economic growth. So I searched for scientific literature to refute the fallacious rhetoric.

Much to my chagrin, there was almost nothing. There were rigorous explanations for limits to growth, most notably by our Daly News namesake. Herman Daly had used laws of thermodynamics to demonstrate limits to growth and to advocate a steady state economy. He and others also described how economic growth required natural capital, which helped to explain the basic trade-off between growth and environmental protection. All this implied that technological progress could not reconcile the trade-off, at least in the long run, and here and there were statements to that effect.

There were also critiques of technological progress that were focused less on limits to growth and more on cultural impacts. Perhaps the most famous was by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful. Schumacher called for “appropriate technology.”

Yet there seemed to be a missing concept. Nowhere was there a thorough, rigorous, and compelling explanation for why technological progress could not allow a nation, or the world, to continue growing the economy without necessarily degrading the environment in the process. After all, there seemed to be many examples of technological progress that helped protect the environment, even in the midst of rapid economic growth. These examples, along with the lack of a rigorous trade-off thesis, explained why legions were unwilling to acknowledge limits to growth, or even a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection.

It also explains why very smart dummies in academia, government, and the private sector are paid handsomely for “science and technology policy” affairs. These folks are often brilliant in general terms, and about many specific topics, yet many are dumber than a boot about the relationships among economic growth, technological progress, and environmental protection. Invariably they recognize that economic growth and technological progress are tightly linked, and they know that many new technologies are “greener.” They therefore figure it’s a slam dunk that economic growth may be reconciled with environmental protection via technological progress. For them, the object of science and technology policy is to steer science toward providing technological progress, thereby growing the economy and protecting the environment. It’s a classic win-win!

Partly because they’re paid so handsomely, jetting from conference to conference, most others think they must be experts on the subject. They should, therefore, be believed. Meanwhile, because their win-win message is political gold, politicians find them useful. Smart-dummies are appointed to high governmental posts, becoming more credible yet in the eyes of the public.

If you go to a typical science and technology policy conference, you’ll find one group of speakers talking about where the money for science is coming from or could come from. Another group will point to where the money is going; what kind of science is being conducted, who is conducting it, and what new technologies are coming online as a result. Another group will address what it means to the environment, and another will address what it means to the economy. Keynote speakers weave these threads into the tired message that we need newer technology and therefore more science – we’ll just have to find funding for it – so we can continue growing the economy while protecting the environment. Then it’s time for wine and hors d’ oeuvres and planning for the next highfalutin conference.

Clearly we have to look elsewhere for a clear description of why the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection cannot be reconciled with technological progress. Ideally this description would not rely exclusively on the laws of thermodynamics, either, but could be put in much plainer language. That would make it relevant to the public and policy makers.

When I found no such description during those years around 2000, I decided to attempt it myself. The experience was daunting and taught me how easy it would be to slip into accepting the idea of perpetual economic growth, or at least the idea of reconciling growth with environmental protection for extended periods of time. But I got lucky in stumbling upon an overlooked concept — maybe the overlooked concept in these matters. It’s a concept necessary to explain how economic growth and technological progress can continue in lockstep, but not without environmental degradation. It’s actually a well-known concept in the economics profession, but hadn’t been applied to the issue at hand. I stumbled upon it while studying the methods and findings of national income accounting, especially the findings of the late Edward Denison, a pioneer in the measurement of GDP.

Now I won’t claim that the concept — “economies of scale” — is exactly plain language either. Yet it is much plainer than laws of thermodynamics. For one thing, far more citizens are businessmen than physicists, and economies of scale resonate with them.

I wrote it all up in a peer-reviewed paper published in 2008 for the journal Conservation Biology. The paper isn’t plasma physics, but neither is it plain language. So I haven’t yet completed the plain-language part of the task. There’s no better place to try than the Daly News.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can do it, and I’m not sure it can be done by anyone. The topic may be just tricky enough to defy the vernacular. We’ll see how it goes in the conclusion of this two-part column next week…

Early in 2011 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a profound condemnation of the global economy’s ill-conceived pattern of growth: “For most of the past century, economic growth was fueled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. These days are gone… Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.” (Spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2011).

That’s a somber statement, but there’s hope that the U.S. will break free from this “global suicide pact” and develop a fundamentally different economy.  My prediction for 2012:  decentralized forces, formed in response to the unsustainable and unfair economic situation, will begin to fundamentally change how our national economy works. People in the Occupy Wall Street movement and groups working on human rights, public health, clean energy, and social and tax justice are laying the groundwork for a shift to a steady state — a dynamic and sustainable economy that pursues prosperity and full employment without GDP growth.

The grassroots mobilization to support clean energy and a healthy environment is a sign of the shift to come. The work of diverse groups protesting the dirty tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas motivated a huge turnout at the White House, with over 1,000 people being arrested. These protests were strong enough to get President Obama’s attention.  He delayed a decision on the pipeline and elevated the issue to center stage on the Republican agenda.

Statistics give us another hint that we’re headed in the right direction toward a steady state economy in 2012. Despite efforts by the Republican Congressional Leadership to undermine environmental protections (e.g., ongoing denial of climate change and attempts to gut EPA regulations), U.S. emissions have dropped by 7% in the last four years and are in line to drop further. Vehicle miles driven have declined, and ridership of public transportation is up 2%.

A cynic might say that the reason is simply the recession, but that’s only a small part of the story. Important actions such as renewable energy standards at the city and state levels are helping. Religious congregations participating in the Interfaith Power and Light initiative are reducing their carbon footprints. The campaign to shut down coal power plants and the substitution of natural gas for coal are also significant. Coal used to be the source of over half of U.S. electricity, but its share dropped to 43% in the first half of 2011 and is scheduled to drop even further.

As we enter 2012, we should redouble our support of those groups pushing for an economic paradigm shift based on sound governance and the principles of a just democracy. And it’s time to build a broad coalition of such groups to include those working on clean energy, public health, climate stabilization, financial reform, and other pieces of a sustainable economic system. Growing support for these groups and mutual reinforcement among them will provide the necessary spark to ignite the economic shift.

As we push for a just, environmentally sustainable world, we must continue to highlight the unabashed attempts by the richest one percent to continue fleecing the rest of us. December has featured a full array of proposed new financial gimmicks and tax breaks to benefit the very rich. For example, corporations with billions stashed in offshore tax havens are now seeking to bring these funds back to the U.S. with minimal tax under a so-called “Repatriation Act.”  They’re angling for a repeat of their lucrative repatriation flim-flam in 2004, a plan that saw 15 corporations bring back $150 billion at a 5 and ¼% tax rate instead of 35%. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that these 15 companies did not add jobs or increase research expenditures, but rather increased spending on executive pay and stock buybacks. Now more companies are petitioning Congress to allow them once again to bring the loot back home with the same tax break.

Although the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly supports such repatriation, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce, with 500,000 dues-paying members, opposes it. The members of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce aren’t benefiting from the offshore tax havens or the repatriation scams.

As 2011 gives way to 2012, outrage is in the air.  But that can be useful for uniting and motivating people of conscience across the political spectrum to work for change — to break free of the suicide pact described by Ban Ki-Moon. Mr. Ban has called on governments to supply “visionary recommendations” for the upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in June of 2012. Here are two recommendations that, at this point in history, seem obvious, but would certainly be radical in the business-as-usual economy:

1. Stop pursuing the ruinous pipe dream of continuous economic growth and work toward a steady state economy.
2. Take power back from the oligarchy of the 1% to reclaim our democracy.

Best wishes for the new year.

Note from the editor:  The Natural Resources Forum (vol. 35, no. 4) asked 29 experts, including Herman Daly, “What do you think should be the two or three highest priority political outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in June 2012?”  His answer succinctly sums up the steady-state perspective.

The conclusion of the 1972 Limits to Growth study by the Club of Rome still stands 40 years later. Even though economies are still growing, and still put growth in first place, it is no longer economic growth, at least in wealthy countries, but has become uneconomic growth. In other words, the environmental and social costs of increased production are growing faster than the benefits, increasing “illth” faster than wealth, thereby making us poorer, not richer. We hide the uneconomic nature of growth from ourselves by faulty national accounting because growth is our panacea, indeed our idol, and we are very afraid of the idea of a steady-state economy. The increasing illth is evident in exploding financial debt, in biodiversity loss, and in destruction of natural services, most notably climate regulation. The major job of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development is to help us overcome this denial and shift the path of progress from quantitative growth to qualitative development, from bigger to better. Specifically this will mean working toward a steady-state economy at a sustainable (smaller than present) scale relative to the containing ecosystem that is finite and already overstressed. Since growth now makes us poorer, not richer, poverty reduction will require sharing in the present, not the empty promise of growth in the future.

Last week European leaders met in Brussels and, like sophomores cramming before a final, pulled an all-nighter. Their exam was a real-world project: restore investor confidence in the Eurozone. A lot of pressure was put on David Cameron to bring the UK into the new agreement; he was adamant in his refusal. Even without the UK, the measures that the Eurozone nations have announced may restore investor confidence, but one thing is certain: they shouldn’t, because they’ll fail miserably at staving off future financial crisis.

That’s because “restoring investor confidence” and “fixing the broken system” are two very different goals.

If more investors were like Jeremy Grantham, who’s got a clear view of the origin of the financial crisis, the two would line up a lot better. But most investors, like all of the policy makers who met in Brussels, are working out of an old-fashioned and mistaken economic model. Restoring confidence in a system built on that model isn’t going to fix what’s wrong.

What, exactly, is wrong? The New York Times articulated the conventional thinking when it opined, a few days before the all-nighter in Brussels, that the root of the debt crisis is “lack of growth.” The first step toward success in solving any problem is to define it accurately, and the conventional diagnosis gets it wrong because it looks at just half the problem. A more complete diagnosis: Some of the European economies haven’t been able to grow fast enough to pay back the burden of debt that has been wagered on them.

This formulation lets us see the path to a sturdy solution: if we want to avoid crises of debt repudiation, we need to limit the total creation of debt, public and private, to the amount that we can reasonably expect to be paid back through economic growth.

But instead of solving the problem of recurrent (and increasingly painful) crises of debt repudiation by looking at the system as a whole, the policy makers who met in Brussels went after just the most recent and obvious symptom: government deficits and threatened government defaults by the weaker economies of the Eurozone. When deficits are created by sovereign governments — governments that have the power to print money to cover them — they’re inflationary, and inflation is one way that a system’s need for debt repudiation can be met. But within the Eurozone, the European Central Bank holds inflation in check, so the necessary and expected debt repudiation has to take a different form. It has come this time as Greece’s move to renegotiate bond liability under threat of default — holders of Greek government bonds will get fifty cents on the dollar, not the full amount they expect. The conventional view sees that and thinks, “if Greece didn’t run deficits it wouldn’t have to default.”

That’s true, but too limited to get at the root of the problem. What the conventional frame of analysis doesn’t foresee: If you let the burden of total debt grow unchecked, and if you control both inflation and governmental default by mandating balanced budgets, you’ll simply displace the pressure for debt repudiation to somewhere else in the system. It will come out as bankruptcies and foreclosures or other private defaults, as stock market crashes, as cuts in pension promises or wage contracts, as loss of paper assets or expected future income of any kind. We can’t forestall the next crisis of debt repudiation unless we rein in the total creation of debt.

The new EU plan would take a major step toward making the Eurozone monetary union into a fiscal union, with stronger centralized control of inflationary deficits. Under the new rules, Eurozone member nations will have to balance their budgets over the economic cycle (if they go into deficit in times of recession, they’ll have to run a surplus in times of growth) and submit their budgets to the European Commission for review and approval. Currently member nations face penalties if they run persistent deficits — penalties that Greece consciously chose to ignore rather than see its economy sink into unemployment and recession under the onslaught of cheap imports from countries running a surplus. The new plan would have Eurozone member nations suffer larger, automatic penalties if they don’t obey the budget-balancing rules.

That will control inflation and bond default as methods of debt repudiation by imposing austerity budgets on struggling Eurozone members. (There are no penalties for the countries, like Germany, that create the other half of the problem by running trade surpluses.) Governments will have to cut social services and regulatory enforcement — cuts that will be touted as the best way to restore growth, and which will work to the benefit of the 1%. The rich get richer and government gets smaller — just what neocons and moneyed interests like to see.

As plenty of commentators have noticed, fiscal integration under the new budget rules and procedures means a loss of national sovereignty within the Eurozone. As only some of those commentators have cautioned, this makes government in Europe less democratic and less responsive to citizen concerns. “No problem,” say bankers and financiers. Democratically empowered citizens are likely to demand the level of governmental services and environmental protection that well-to-do nations are expected to provide — and those are luxuries their country can’t afford, not if it’s to grow rapidly enough to pay back the burden of debt it labors under.

The movement toward fiscal union and budget austerity thus represents the victory of growth-for-the-sake-of-growth over democracy-for-the-sake-of-democracy.

On an infinite planet, the two need not be at odds, and in fact can be seen to support each other. They certainly seemed to track together through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as market economies expanded into an underdeveloped world. But in a world built out to the limits of what ecosystems can handle, it becomes increasingly obvious that there’s a tradeoff.

As should be obvious to policy makers, the expansionary phase of human economic history is over. It is no longer possible to have both democracy and robust, footprint-expanding growth. The freewheeling creation of debt, whether public or private, drives the latter. To preserve it as a very profitable feature of the economy, bankers and financiers are perfectly willing to sacrifice the former. That’s the deep and troubling lesson of the European Debt Crisis: today, the largest threat to democratic forms of government is the fact that the planet hosts a human debt-creation system suited for perpetual growth on an infinite planet.

Because an economy deals in physical reality — that is, it runs on matter and energy drawn from a finite planet — it is impossible for economic production to grow infinitely. Debt, being entirely imaginary, can grow however rapidly we choose to let it. A crisis of debt repudiation is the unavoidable result of a mismatch between the two. The conventional frame does not admit this, and it leads us straight toward regressive and destructive policies, including the elimination of environmental and social safeguards. Those safeguards set limits to what we let ourselves do in pursuit of economic growth, and thereby give us a higher standard of living by protecting us from environmental harms and economic insecurity.

Since a higher standard of living, and not growth for its own sake, is the ultimate purpose of the economy, it makes sense to allow for the possibility that the solution to our system’s regular crises of debt repudiation lies in controlling the creation of debt. The alternative — demanding more and more economic growth, ever larger throughput of matter and energy — is impossible to sustain on a finite planet.

Even in the short run, the infinite growth model is counterproductive. It leads to a declining standard of living and a loss of democratic freedom for the majority of the world’s population — Americans no less than Greeks, Italians and other Europeans. It does so because whether we’re prepared to admit it or not, we’ve reached the limits to growth. More often than not, further growth in GDP is uneconomic growth, because it costs us more in lost ecosystem services and other “disamenities” than we get in benefits.

Pro-growth people don’t see it that way, of course, no doubt because many of them are the ones who receive those benefits by imposing losses on the rest of us. Many of those losses emanate from, and aren’t fully contained within, the rapidly developing nations of China and India — countries whose leaders have mistakenly accepted a demonstrably flawed element of neoclassical thinking, the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This is the idea, much beloved of pro-growth advocates and members of the 1% everywhere, that environmental quality is a luxury that nations will be able to afford only after they develop more — which they can do by cashing out their natural capital for sale on world markets, and by hosting “sink” services, poisoning their land and mortgaging their future by absorbing the global economy’s waste stream.

The ecological footprint of the global economy is currently larger than the globe it inhabits. But you don’t have to believe that we’ve reached the limits to growth in order to see that the basic problem behind the European Debt Crisis is the mismatch between our rate of debt creation and the rate at which we can grow real wealth in order to pay that debt off.

How much can real wealth grow under reasonable environmental safeguards and with reasonable protection of worker (and citizen) health and safety? The answer is, in part, empirical. The non-empirical part has to do with those environmental and health and safety standards: what counts as “reasonable”? Opinions will differ, but only an out-and-out infinite planet theorist can argue that environmental constraints need to be lessened, and only an unreconstructed robber baron could argue that workers ought to be free — “free” — to starve or take on employment that could kill them.

Here’s how to begin to fix the broken system: Agree to minimum standards for environmental and health and safety regulation, such as those promulgated by the UN; find the sustainable rate of economic activity that’s possible within those limits; and limit the growth in debt — all debt, public and private — to what’s needed to support that activity. With such a fix, the human standard of living would be raised not though footprint- expanding growth, but through technological innovation that allows us to achieve more benefit from a constant, sustainably sized throughput.

If more investors understood that the excessive creation of debt in all its forms — not just government deficits — is the driver of our crises of debt repudiation, this reining in of the creation of debt would be the only way to restore their confidence.

Educating investors and policymakers about the economic and financial realities of a finite planet is a huge task, but eventually they’ll come around. They’ll have to. The planet is, after all, finite, and it’s going to keep offering the lesson until everybody gets it.