Despite what the politicians hope for, there can be no orderly march out of
the present economic recession of Western advanced countries. There is no
chain of brand-new products stretching ahead of the ordinary consumer as
there always was from about 1780 to 1980. During that period, every
wage-earning individual had in mind at least one new consumer good (or
service) to aim (and save) for, which, when gained, would raise the
customer's social status one more notch.
"Keeping up with the Joneses" may be a trite way of expressing this but
this has been the fundamental motivation for economic growth. This has been
the working method by which most members of the public -- except criminals
who take short cuts -- have, by and large, been kept sweet and orderly.
The first (and pretty well the only) prophet of the present dilemma was
Professor Fred Hirsch, the brilliant Warwick University economist who died
aged 46 in 1978 after a long illness, only two years after completing his
great work Social Limits to Growth. His thesis was that the availability of
desirable goods and services doesn't stretch ahead in a straight-line
fashion but starts to curve upwards -- and increasingly steeply, too.
In short, the privileged part of the population enjoy goods, services and
experiences which are limited by their very nature (and the limited size of
the planet). These, more often than not, concern living and working in
beautiful locations. They are not available to the majority of the
population, even in so-called advanced countries. Very little further
social advancement is available to the ordinary income-earner once his
house is stuffed with the latest fashionable versions of 'standard'
possessions and his time is fully occupied in earning and enjoying them.
But, as Fred Hirsch says at the end of his book, he doesn't "offer an
operational blueprint" to politicians. His early death was a double
tragedy. It not only cut short his own further thinking about his thesis
but also deprived him of the many immense discoveries of the genetic
sciences which have only burgeoned in the last two decades. The powerful
social implications of two of these are only just working their way through
evolutionary biology, never mind the general population or politicians.
The first is that evolution principally proceeds not from 'general'
survival-of-the-fittest but from the female choice of the characteristics
of male partners. The second is that females choose males from as high a
social status as she's capable of enticing in order to maximise the
economic future of herself and her children.
This social and evolutionary steam-roller has economic and political
repercussions. If social aspirations in the future are to become orderly
from the least able to the most, then advanced country populations had
better become very much smaller than they are now and develop entirely
different production systems than those that are now based predominantly on
the large-scale use of fossil-fuel energy and automation. If politicians
want to maintain any semblance of stability then they are going to have to
think in terms of much smaller governmental groupings in which social
status will be determined more by personal character and reputation than by
the exclusive personal possession of the best economic goods.
The unconscious wisdom of ordinary people in advanced countries is already
leading the way by deciding to drastically reduce the number of children
they produce and thus, within a century, start to slim down their
populations enormously (and, undoubtedly, increasingly restricting
immigration -- which is already starting in a serious way).
What remains then are new production systems to take over in a century or
two when fossil fuels are too expensive to exploit any longer. Fortunately
we have the beginnings of this technology already -- the development of DNA
'machine tools' fed directly by sunlight.
But between now and then a very great deal of new education and
re-education (on the part of politicians particularly) will have to take
place. This, as always between new economic eras, will not be an orderly
process.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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