The closed earth of the future requires economic principles
which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of
the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call
the open economy the 'cowboy economy', the cowboy being symbolic
of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless,
exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic
of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly
be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become
a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything,
either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore,
man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which
is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even
though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference
between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the
attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption
is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the
success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput
from the 'factors of production', a part of which, at any rate,
is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic
objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs
of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material
can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then
the through-put is at least a plausible measure of the success
ofthe economy. The gross national product is a rough measure
of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to
distinguish a good part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible
and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well
as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that
which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody,
as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in
this way, although it would be an interesting and extremely
important exercise, which is unfortunately beyond the scope
of this paper.
By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means
a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to
be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of
the success of the economy is not production and consumption
at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the
total capital stock, including in this the state of the human
bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy,
what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and
any technological change which results in the maintenance of
a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less
production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that
both production and consumption are bad things rather than good
things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed
with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock
concepts.
There are actually some very tricky and unsolved problems involved
in the questions as to whether human welfare or well-being is
to be regarded as a stock or a flow. Something of these elements
seems actually to be involved in it, and as far as I know there
have been practically no studies directed towards identifying
these two dimensions of human satisfaction. Is it, for instance,
eating that is a good thing, or is it being well fed? Does economic
welfare involve having nice clothes, fine houses, good equipment,
and so on, or is it to be measured by the depreciation and the
wearing out of these things? I am inclined myself to regard
the stock concept as most fundamental, that is, to think of
being well fed as more important than eating, and to think even
of so-called services as essentially involving the restoration
of a depleting psychic capital...
It may be said, of course, why worry about all this when the
spaceman economy is still a good way off (at least beyond the
lifetimes of any now living), so let us eat, drink, spend, extract
and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry
about the spaceship earth. It is always a little hard to find
a convincing answer to the man who says, 'What has posterity
ever done for me?' and the conservationist has always had to
fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity
of the individual with some human community or society which
extends not only back into the past but forward into the future.
Unless the individual identifies with some community of this
kind, conservation is obviously 'irrational'.
Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at
the cost of posterity? Apres nous, le deluge has been the motto
of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer
to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare
of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify
himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual
identity is that which identifies not only with a community
in space but also with a community extending over time from
the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized
as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not
have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes,
it has votes too. This whole problem is linked up with the much
larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and
'nerve' of a society, and there is a great deal of historical
evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity
with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future
loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon
falls apart...
All these considerations add some credence to the point of
view which says that we should not worry about the spaceman
economy at all, and that we should just go on increasing the
GNP and indeed the gross world product, or GWP, in the expectation
that the problems of the future can be left to the future, that
when scarcities arise, whether this is of raw materials or of
pollutable reservoirs, the needs of the then present will determine
the solutions of the then present, and there is no use giving
ourselves ulcers by worry ing about problems that we really
do not have to solve...
As an old taker of thought for the morrow, however, I cannot
quite accept this solution; and I would argue, furthermore,
that tomorrow is not only very close, but in many respects it
is already here. The shadow of the future spaceship, indeed,
is already falling over our spendthrift merriment. Oddly enough,
it seems to be in pollution rather than in exhaustion that the
problem is first becoming salient. Los Angeles has run out of
air, Lake Erie has become a cesspool, the oceans are filling
up with lead and DDT, and the atmosphere may become man's major
problem in another generation, at the rate at which we are filling
it up with gunk. It is, of course, true that at least on a microscale,
things have been worse at times in the past. The cities of today,
with all their foul air and polluted waterways, are probably
not as bad as the filthy cities of the pretechnical age. Nevertheless,
that fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity
in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the
whole world society; and one certainly cannot view with equanimity
the present rate of pollution of any of the natural reservoirs,
whether the atmosphere, the lakes, or even the oceans.
Source: Michael Allaby, ed.,
Thinking Green: An Anthology of
Essential Ecological Writing, Barrie & Jenkins, London,
1989, pp. 133-137. (This essay was first published in 1966.)
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