Being a bit of a columnist, I like a good column. I think the best column I’ve done was on greenhouse. I’ve just read the best column I’ve read this year, and it’s on greenhouse. By a master of the column – Martin Wolf. Go read it – I’ve reproduced it below the fold for you. It’s not as good – not nearly as good as this column by Freeman Dyson. And I’ve just noticed that I posted that in July this year. Which goes to show that Martin Wolf’s is the best column I’ve read in the last six months.
Well five months. But no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
By Martin Wolf
Published: December 18 2007 19:02 | Last updated: December 19 2007 08:05
We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely.
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How long might such a world last, and what might happen if it ends? The debate on the connected issues of climate change and energy security raises these absolutely central questions. As I argued in a previous column (Welcome to a world of runaway energy demand, November 14, 2007), fossilised sunlight and ideas have been the twin drivers of the world economy. So nothing less is at stake than the world we inhabit, by which I mean its political and economic, as well as physical, nature.
According to Angus Maddison, the economic historian, humanitys average real income per head has risen 10-fold since 1820.* Increases have also occurred almost everywhere, albeit to hugely divergent extents: US incomes per head have risen 23-fold and those of Africa merely four-fold. Moreover, huge improvements have happened, despite a more than six-fold increase in the worlds population.
It is an astonishing story with hugely desirable consequences. Clever use of commercial energy has immeasurably increased the range of goods and services available. It has also substantially reduced both our own drudgery and our dependence on that of others. Serfs and slaves need no longer satisfy the appetites of narrow elites. Women need no longer devote their lives to the demands of domesticity. Consistent rises in real incomes per head have transformed our economic lives.
What is less widely understood is that they have also transformed politics. A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad. In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal from another one. Some peoples made almost a business out of such plunder: the Roman republic was one example; the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, who reached their apogee of success under Genghis Khan and his successors, were another. The European conquerors of the 16th to 18th centuries were, arguably, a third. In a world of stagnant living standards the gains of one group came at the expense of equal, if not still bigger, losses for others. This, then, was a world of savage repression and brutal predation.
The move to the positive-sum economy transformed all this fundamentally, albeit far more slowly than it might have done. It just took time for people to realise how much had changed. Democratic politics became increasingly workable because it was feasible for everybody to become steadily better off. People fight to keep what they have more fiercely than to obtain what they do not have. This is the endowment effect. So, in the new positive-sum world, elites were willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses. The fact that they no longer depended on forced labour made this shift easier still. Consensual politics, and so democracy, became the political norm.
Equally, a positive-sum global economy ought to end the permanent state of war that characterised the pre-modern world. In such an economy, internal development and external commerce offer better prospects for virtually everybody than does international conflict. While trade always offered the possibility of positive-sum exchange, as Adam Smith argued, the gains were small compared with what is offered today by the combination of peaceful internal development and expanding international trade. Unfortunately, it took almost two centuries after the industrial revolution for states to realise that neither war nor empire was a game worth playing.
Nuclear weapons and the rise of the developmental state have made war among great powers obsolete. It is no accident then that most of the conflicts on the planet have been civil wars in poor countries that had failed to build the domestic foundations of the positive-sum economy. But China and India have now achieved just that. Perhaps the most important single fact about the world we live in is that the leaderships of these two countries have staked their political legitimacy on domestic economic development and peaceful international commerce.
The age of the plunderer is past. Or is it? The biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits. If, for example, the entire planet emitted CO2 at the rate the US does today, global emissions would be almost five times greater. The same, roughly speaking, is true of energy use per head. This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge indeed, they are already emerging within and among countries.
The response of many, notably environmentalists and people with socialist leanings, is to welcome such conflicts. These, they believe, are the birth-pangs of a just global society. I strongly disagree. It is far more likely to be a step towards a world characterised by catastrophic conflict and brutal repression. This is why I sympathise with the hostile response of classical liberals and libertarians to the very notion of such limits, since they view them as the death-knell of any hopes for domestic freedom and peaceful foreign relations.
The optimists believe that economic growth can and will continue. The pessimists believe either that it will not do so or that it must not if we are to avoid the destruction of the environment. I think we have to try to marry what makes sense in these opposing visions. It is vital for hopes of peace and freedom that we sustain the positive-sum world economy. But it is no less vital to tackle the environmental and resource challenges the economy has thrown up. This is going to be hard. The condition for success is successful investment in human ingenuity. Without it, dark days will come. That has never been truer than it is today.
Ithink the bloke who wrote this has recognised the problem, but he’s still hoping for a sprinkling of pixie-dust to make it go away.
Very interesting point made by Wolf; and I warm to it.
At the risk of being facetious (or facile) maybe this explains one reason to deny Iran the ability to create nuclear weapons. Another good reason for us to speed along with alternative energy. And I like your concept of allocating emission quotas on a per capita basis. Times will be interesting!
C’mon, this is just ridiculous. He offers the choice of either limiting emissions and dying in war, or not limiting emissions, and dying from a destroyed environment.
Then he tacks on a “third way”, of having unlimited emissions and unrestrained economic growth, and a healthy environment. He forgot to add “and a pony”.
It’s just one of the standard right-wing responses to climate change: well yes, there’s a problem, but it’ll just cost too much to fix it, so we shouldn’t do anything and hope that the problem goes away.
SJ,
He says he ‘sympathises’ with the view you quote and then in the next para he calls for it to be synthesised with the opposing view. I presume he means restraints, but not restraints that take us into the logic of zero sum thinking. Zero sum thinking is pretty much where the US and the developing countries are right now.
Nick, Stern shows that it’s not zero sum.
The US and the developing countries may or may think that it is zero sum. The US stance is certainly unhelpful, but Wolf is advocating what exactly? Nothing whatsoever as far as I can tell.
may or may not think…
“I think we have to try to marry what makes sense in these opposing visions. It is vital for hopes of peace and freedom that we sustain the positive-sum world economy. But it is no less vital to tackle the environmental and resource challenges the economy has thrown up. This is going to be hard. The condition for success is successful investment in human ingenuity.”
I take that to mean that he agrees with me !! :)
Ie that we should tackle the problem with as strong policy action as the world can manage. So we should reject right wing calls not to do so. Just so long as we reject left wing (or perhaps ‘new age’) calls to take the issue as a great opportunity to end economic growth. Wolf is saying that growth is the correlative of a ‘win-win’ world and thus of a ‘win-win’ mentality and morality etc.
I like the essence of Wolf’s suggestion. Take the best of the various approaches and philosphies to create a model that accomodates the physical constraints of living on a planet of finite size and at the same time allows for “growth”.
The challenge however is encapsulated in this quote
It’s very hard to see what Wolf’s ideal model might look like if our definition of “growth” remains underpinned by inceasing energy intensification, unless that energy is mostly delivered in renewable form.
And certainly ‘growth’ to date has been characterised by massive energy intensification (sourced from Wolf’s fossilised sunlight) and resource consumption. So how that can continue indefinitely within a closed system is beyond the ken of those of us who only completed second year Physics at Uni.
Of course the problem would be solved if economists could come up with a definition of growth that placed a greater emphasis on the products of the human mind, rather than emphasising consumption (and the people bought into it too).
Time I think to experiment with some new growth indicators. How about “Number of lines of poetry per head of population” as a start?
Rex, economists have come up with that definition of growth. As the increasingly unlamented Alan Greenspan was wont to say, economic growth has been getting lighter and lighter in the West – lighter as in less heavy. If people will pay more for it, then it’s growth. I just don’t see why it’s so hard to ‘decarbonise’ growth and then start decarbonising existing economic activity. What will it cost us – with energy about 6% of our bills, 1,2 3% of GDP max.
If it did really costs 1,2,3% of GDP at a maximum then that’s not a big deal and I would agree it should’t be a problem. I know Stern ran some numbers along those lines I presume they are his.
A question: If the economic growth in the West has been getting ‘lighter’ as Greenspan puts it – where has the ‘heavy’ part of it gone?
Maybe the ‘heavy’ component has remained static and the lighter component has increased or perhaps a big chunk of the heavy component has been outsourced to China. If that is so then the problem hasn’t really gone away has it?
I presume also that if you looked at Chinese and Indian growth that the ‘heavy’ component of their growth would be much greater. I would guess that all developing nations would have the majority of their growth as ‘heavy’.
I wonder then, if you factor in the China and Indian and other developing countries growth, if the cost of decarbonising growth worldwide would still be only 1,2,3%
Where’s the weight gone? Into thin air. Cars are lighter now than they were and that will continue. Stereos, computers, bottles, you name it.
So tech change is going on all the time, and really kicks in when it gets price signals – and governments subsidise research etc. In most parts of the world you can get a hell of a lot of carbon out of energy at (say) double the cost you’re already paying. And that’s without attending to so many things that are genuinely no regrets and/or much more marginal. (reducing leaks from gas mains, methane capture in coal mining and a million other things).
In stationary energy at least in Australia it might take a bit more than doubling cost, but not much more. Have a look at this graph. Elsewhere less so.
And there will be some big big breakthroughs – we just don’t know what they are. But things like paint which might be applied to roofing that might turn households into net exporters to the electricity grid and on and on. We are a very clever bunch of dudes. So we will get some of it perhaps a lot of it done with sheer dude power. I’d be very surprised if it got to 3%, but would be happy to put more into it if we had to – but unfortunately the world won’t see it that way and would prefer to take the risk of catastrophe if it can’t do what it wants pretty much on the cheap.