In replying to tom abeles' question about how I envision the current model
of income from work, I speculated that people are now paid more in
proportion to the amount of energy they are warranted to consume at work and
not in proportion to actual differences in knowledge, skill or effort. Thus
small individual differences get leveraged into large income differentials.
I want to emphasize that my comment was news to me -- that is to say, it was
a "flash of insight" that came in the act of replying to tom's question. But
it was a flash of insight that was well prepared by my reading several years
ago of M. King Hubbert's 1936 essay on "Man Hours and Distribution".
What I think happened is this: I accepted Hubbert's argument intellectually,
without fully assimilating its implications into my own world view. The
implication, to put it as simply as I can, is that we have moved in the past
25 years since the "energy crisis" of the 1970s into a system of perverse
incentives that primarily REWARDS ENERGY WASTE and implicitly penalizes
resource conservation.
Rewarding people for their destructiveness could well be seen as a
pathological response to trauma according to the Freudian analysis of the
"compulsion to repeat". Positive re-inforcement for anti-social behaviour
is, of course, fundamentally different from a situation in which we simply
ignore or discount the consequences of that behaviour. Where Rowe referred
to an iatrogenic economics, we might instead recognize a CRIMINALLY INSANE
economics. Anyway, here is the passage from Hubbert's essay that I think is
extremely important:
GETTING SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
"In the distribution to the public of the products of industry, the failure
of the present system is the direct result of the faulty premise upon which
it is based. This is: that somehow a man is able by his personal services to
render to society the equivalent of what he receives, from which it follows
that the distribution to each shall be in accordance with the services
rendered and that those who do not work must not eat. This is what our
propagandists call `the impossibility of getting something for nothing.'
"Aside from the fact that only by means of the sophistries of lawyers and
economists can it be explained how, on this basis, those who do nothing at
all frequently receive the largest shares of the national income, the simple
fact is that it is impossible for any man to contribute to the social system
the physical equivalent of what it costs that system to maintain him from
birth till death -- and the higher the physical standard of living the
greater is this discrepancy. This is because man is an engine operating
under the limitations of the same physical laws as any other engine. The
energy that it takes to operate him is several times as much as any amount
of work he can possibly perform. If, in addition to his food, he receives
also the products of modern industry, this is due to the fact that material
and energy resources happen to be available and, as compared with any
contribution he can make, constitute a free gift from heaven.
"Stated more specifically, it costs the social system on the North American
Continent the energy equivalent to nearly 10 tons of coal per year to
maintain one man at the average present standard of living, and no
contribution he can possibly make in terms of the energy conversion of his
individual effort will ever repay the social system the cost of his social
maintenance. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that a distributive
mechanism based upon so rank a fallacy should fail to distribute; the marvel
is that it has worked as well as it has.
"Since any human being, regardless of his personal contribution, is a social
dependent with respect to the energy resources upon which society operates,
and since every operation within a given society is effected at the cost of
a degradation of an available supply of energy, this energy degradation,
measured in appropriate physical units such as kilowatt-hours, constitutes
the common physical cost of all social operations. Since also the
energy-cost of maintaining a human being exceeds by a large amount his
ability to repay, we can abandon the fiction that what one is to receive is
in payment for what one has done, and recognize that what we are really
doing is utilizing the bounty that nature has provided us. Under these
circumstances we recognize that we all are getting something for nothing,
and the simplest way of effecting distribution is on a basis of equality,
especially so when it is considered that production can be set equal to the
limit of our capacity to consume, commensurate with adequate conservation of
our physical resources."
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
