103. Facing Limits

Note: This post is the one hundred and third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.


"Hope you don't think users are the only abusers niggaz
Gettin high within the game
If you do then, how would you explain?
I'm ten years removed, still the vibe is in my veins
I got a hustler spirit, nigga period
Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it
Check out my swag' yo, I walk like a ballplayer
No matter where you go, you are what you are, a player
And you can try to change but that's just the top layer
Man, you was who you was 'fore you got here
Only God can judge me, so I'm gone
Either love me, or leave me alone"

From "Public Service Announcement" by Jay-Z

----

"It all belongs to Caesar, It all belongs to Caesar
Go to the bank, Go to the bank
We're going down to Mexico
To get away from this culture
Go to the bank..."

from "Go to the Bank", by James¹

----

I've been reading through the archives of Morris Berman's blog.

Writing this series of posts has led me into a habit of automatically classifying people as commercially or guardian minded (remarkably few people seem to manage to see both sides on a regular basis) and Berman is one of the clearest cut cases of a Guardian thinker I've come across. Whether he's decrying the building of a casino at Gettysburg (lack of respect for tradition), supporting efforts to take vengeance against the current U.S. elite (encouraging people to vote for Sarah Palin to speed up the collapse, for example), or recounting the loss of community in the face of a relentless self-interested thirst for more consumption, he is consistently singing from the Guardian songbook.

Berman is best known for a series of books on the decline of the American civilization, the most recent of which, "Why America Failed" traces the roots of America's cultural decline to its origins as a nation of 'hustlers' and the eventual takeover of the nation by commercial (hustling) interests.

Of course, there are lots of folks out there commenting on the decline of our civilization, and lamenting the commercial takeover of our communities. But it was one post in particular, that I wanted to mention here, the reason being that in this post Berman comes quite close to recounting some of the main points I've been circling here.

In this particular post, Berman likens humans to frogs:

"[In] An experiment with frogs some years ago ... [they] were wired up with electrodes in the pleasure center of the brain, and could stimulate that center–i.e., create a 'rush'–by pressing a metal bar. Not only did the frogs keep pressing the bar over and over again, but they didn’t stop even when their legs were cut off with a pair of shears."

Berman does allow that some of us frogs are a bit smarter than others:

"The first intelligent frog who comes to mind is the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, perhaps most famous for having been married to Margaret Mead. For Bateson, the issue was an ethical one. As he himself put it, 'the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are totally different ethical systems.' The ethics of maxima knows only one rule: more. More is better, in this scheme of things; words such as 'limits' or 'enough' are either foolish or meaningless. Clearly, the 'American Way of Life' is a system of maxima, of indefinite expansion."

Berman links the notion of respecting (or not) limits, with the goal of maximization vs. optimization, and from there, with the difference between individual and collective decision making:

"the economist Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times (12 July 2009), argues that 'traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance,' he goes on,

'a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.'"

The problem is that what was rational on the individual level was irrational on the collective level, thus leading to a systemic collapse.

We are thus led, quite naturally, from a consideration of optima vs. maxima to the question of individual vs. collective behavior."

Berman goes even further to note that democracy is a more tenuous method of transforming individual preferences into collective behaviour vs. dictatorship:

How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries–the Scandanavian nations come to mind–where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for most of Latin America, is the United States, where proposed “changes” are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 306 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones–Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al.–aren’t going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

...

"Of course, authoritarian systems don’t have these problems, which is a good indicator of how things will probably develop. Under the name of 'harmony', for example, China regulates its citizens for what it perceives to be the common good. Hence the famous one-child policy, introduced in 1979, supposedly prevented more than 300 million births over the next 29 years in a country that was threatened by its own population density. In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it, end of story. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury?"

So, just in this one post, Berman covers quite well one of the main areas that separates the guardian syndrome from the commercial one, the ability to deal with / impose limits. The commercial syndrome prioritizes individual competition which prevents collective (cooperative) decision making, which can work in an unlimited domain where maximization is the goal, but fails when faced by a limit because it becomes impossible to constrain individuals to respect the limits and to optimize rather than maximize, and to allocate shares within the limit rather than everyone just taking as much as they can.

And he raises an interesting question, if the citizens in a country face real limits, but would rather pretend those limits don't exist and will only elect politicians who act as if those limits don't exist, will democracy survive?



---
¹As an aside, I was looking up the lyrics for the James song I referenced at the top of the post, and ended up at the song meanings entry for a different (but similarly themed) James song, "Lost a Friend (to the sea)" about a man trying to free a friend from living in the world of television and bring them back to reality. While there, I found one of those occasional nuggets of gold that one gets if you sift through enough of the mountains of dirt that make up most comment sections on the web, a comment from 'draven66':

"I logged onto facebook.com for the first time yesterday and realized that I have lost my friends to the sea. A sea of electronic lies, bloated materialism, and denial that hides their suspended disbelief that modern western lifestyles of decay are not only consuming them but everyone we kill under "foreign policy" to maintain this sick way of life. You've seen it before .. those tired sore smiles that say "I am hypnotized, and adequately, even willingly! desensitized, and sedated! Please don't let my suspicions be true, please just give me another hit. The worst part is when everyone can capture it fifty times a day, digitally. This life was made possible by FUTURE SHOP, keep on pretending you sad empty sheep, you are owned and cultivated and laughed at! GOD I feel so alone.

Nice song though."

102. The Republic, Part 1c

Note: This post is the one hundred and second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Note also: this is a continuation from post 100 and post 101.

Note finally: Quotes are taken from this version of The Republic

After Glaucon and Adeimantus make their case for justice being just a means rather than an end in itself, they ask Socrates to convince them justice is more than that, and to show them how living a just life makes a man good and living an unjust life makes a man evil, regardless of what benefits or honours might flow from just or unjust behaviour.

Socrates suggests that they search for an answer by examining the state, rather than the individual since the truth will be easier to find in the larger case. What follows is the longest section of The Republic, where Socrates outlines the ideal state.

Initially, Socrates constructs a small state which is enough to satisfy man's basic needs. But Glaucon argues that people need more than just their basic needs, they need comfort as well,

"you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style."

Socrates sees where this simple, but potentially unlimited desire for comfort will lead,

"Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured."

Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is
no longer sufficient.

...

And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants
will be too small now, and not enough?

...

Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture
and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves,
they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the
unlimited accumulation of wealth?

...

And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?"

(emphasis added)

From the desire for luxury, from always wanting more than what is currently had, comes conflict, and with conflict, the need for guardians to protect the state.

Note: Der Spiegel had an interesting interview with economist/philosopher Tomas Sedlacek the other day, "Greed is the Beginning of Everything," which touched on this theme repeatedly.

---
Socrates explains that the guardians must have a somewhat philosophical nature, since they must welcome knowledge, since they will need to be gentle with their friends whom they know, while remaining ruthless with enemies, who are strangers.

Socrates identifies loyalty as a primary job requirement for guardians,

"Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true."

A little later on, he also notes that lying is not always a bad thing,

"the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive"

Later on, Socrates emphasizes the importance of only people with the right nature being in the guardian class (and vice-versa),

"Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed."

(emphasis added)

Socrates emphasizes that in order for guardians to be true guardians, they must renounce greed and a desire for material possessions,

"In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand."

Later on, Socrates defines justice as each man sticking to his own line of work and not meddling in areas he is not suited for.

"Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not. Suppose a carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?

Not much.

But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and
warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State.

Most true.

Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?

Precisely.

And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed by you injustice?

Certainly.

This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city just."

The final key element is that Socrates now explains that, like the state which has a philosopher at its head, loyal guardians protecting it and supporting the ruler, and a mass of citizens who seek to satisfy their desires for comfort and convenience, a man is the same, with a tri-partite nature, and that, like the state, a man is just when the rational part of his brain is in control of his material desires, with his spirit supporting the rational part of his brain in suppressing the material desires of his body from interfering with his pursuit of justice.

"now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster, having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he is able to generate and metamorphose at will.

...

Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second.

...

And now join them, and let the three grow into one.

...

Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull, may believe the beast to be a single human creature.

...

And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that, if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another--he ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.

Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.

To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the most complete mastery over the entire human creature. He should watch over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care of them all should be uniting the several parts with one another and with himself.

So, to summarize Plato's argument:

A state functions best when the three classes each stick to their own work. A philosopher to rule with wisdom, a guardian class to serve with honour and courage, shunning all material possession and desire, and a trading class to pursue material comfort and provide for the basic needs of the state. Mixing people into the wrong tasks is, by definition, injustice, and will lead to the destruction of the state.

And a man is the same, his sense of reason must be the primary decision maker, his spirit or passion acting in service of reason, and the insatiable desire for material wealth and comfort must be tamed and controlled so that it does not exceed it's natural domain.

74. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process

Note: This post is the seventy-fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week's post covers the work of economist Nicholas Georgecsu-Roegen. Geoergescu is best known for his book, 'The Entropy Law and the Economic Process' but I don't really recommend reading that book as I found it long, dense and filled with large sections where I wondered what point the author was trying to make. A better bet is this online essay on energy and economic myths provides an online source that covers many of his core points.

The primary point that Georgescu-Roegen emphasizes is that the second law of thermodynamics means that the energy in the universe is constantly moving from a more 'ordered' or concentrated state (in which we can make it do useful work for us) to a less ordered, more dispersed state (which is useless to us). Imagine a glass of hot water poured into a glass of cold water – eventually all the water converges to a standard temperature.

It is the more concentrated or 'low entropy' components of the world that have allowed us to build our current highly complex civilization. But the low entropy source we are relying on primarily is the mineral / terrestrial sources such as coal, gas and oil. Georgescu emphasizes that we must begin transitioning from these sources to a more sustainable future in which we rely on energy from the sun in order to power our civilization.

The message of switching from non-renewable to renewable fuels is familiar to us now (as a child in school, I recall watching a film with the bad red-hatted non-renewable fossil fuels pitted against the happy, good, blue-hatted renewable fuels such as hydro and nuclear (I grew up in Ontario)) but was controversial when Georgescu-Roegen started writing about it in the 60's and 70's.

Considering he was writing in the 70's, Georgescu-Roegen does make some telling points regarding our current trajectory,

"From the viewpoint of the extreme long run, the terrestrial free energy is far scarcer than that received from the sun. The point exposes the foolishness of the victory cry that we can finally obtain protein from fossil fuels! Sane reason tells us to move in the opposite direction, to convert vegetable stuff into hydrocarbon fuel"

(as indeed we currently are trying to do, replacing oil with biofuels. Of course whether there is enough low entropy available from crops to make running automobiles feasible on a large scale remains to be seen)

"a great stride in technological progress cannot materialize unless the corresponding innovation is followed by a great mineralogical expansion. Even a substantial increase in the efficiency of the use of gasoline as fuel would pale in comparison with a manifold increase of the known, rich oil fields."

(witness the U.S. spending billions or trillions of dollars to free up the oil in Iraq for global consumption.)

".... If progress were indeed exponential, then the input i per unit of output would follow in time the law i = i0(1 + r)-t and would constantly approach zero. Production would ultimately become incorporeal and the earth a new Garden of Eden."

(Compare the incorporeal nature of the economic explosion of the internet to previous, very corporeal, revolutions driven by coal and railroads or oil and cars.)


Georgescu-Roegen's work comes back to a central theme we have encountered many times in this series, the conflict between a worldview with no limits and one which does have binding limits. It's no surprise that most of Georgescu-Roegen's arguments are directed at economists since economists are the keepers of the commercial syndrome's, 'more is better, no limits' ideology.

In this case, despite making some good points as noted above, I didn't find Georgescu-Roegen's arguments particularly relevant to current decision making. I agree that human civilization is not immune from the force of the second law of thermodynamics, but what would interest me more is a more pragmatic assessment of what risks we face due to our rising consumption of low entropy sources of energy, as opposed to simply making the abstract argument that we will run out of low entropy sources of energy at some (potentially very distant) point in the future.

Georgescu-Roegen felt that we could make the necessary changes to subsist solely using the energy from the sun if we had the desire and organizational capacity to do so, but we was skeptical that we would take this path,

"Will mankind listen to any program that implies a constriction of its addiction to ... comfort? Perhaps the destiny of man is to have a short but fiery, exciting, and extravagant life rather than a long, uneventful, and vegetative existence. Let other species -- the amoebas, for example -- which have no spiritual ambitions inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine."

44. Social Limits to Growth

Note: This post is the forty-fourth in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

The book Social Limits to Growth by Fred Hirsch, has two primary themes:

1) As the economy grows over time, more and more of our consumption becomes status oriented / suffers from positional externalities, with the result being that greater economic activity doesn't necessarily make us better off, to the extent that most of that activity is just trying to keep up with (or get ahead of) the Jones.

2) Over time our society is becoming 'commercialized' in that more and more things are treated as a matter of commerce. And this commercialization, resting on an ethical system that promotes self-interest over public service, gradually erodes the ethical basis upon which society and the market based economy itself rest.

I think I've covered the first point fairly well (although Hirsch covers it in the most depth that I have seen in any reading to date), but I think it's worth spending a bit more time on this second point. Says Hirsch,

"The market system, left to itself, tends to fill this vacuum [in social organization] in the same way it fills others [through appeal to individual self-interest]; but here it may sabotage its own foundations. An extreme but pertinent example illustrates the wider point. If judges were regularly to sell their services and decisions to the highest bidder, not only the system of justice but also of property would be completely unstable ... If everything can be privately appropriated, including the judge, then nothing can be - for who will save the system from the first entrepreneur to be able to raise enough credit to buy the judge and everything else through him. As [economist Kenneth] Arrow put it: "Thus the definition of property rights based on the price system depends precisely on the lack of universality of private property and of the price system." Some minimum area of social obligation therefore has to be held. The problem is how to reconcile this social responsibility with the opposing mainstream of the market ethos."

Hirsch argues that those who theorize that politics runs along commercial lines of self-interest are mistaken,

"Economic theories of bureaucracy and of political action, which have been extensively developed in Virginia and in Chicago during recent years, are built exclusively in the individualistic norm. Political and bureaucratic activity are seen, in the same way as market activity, as means to private ends. As such, they tend to be inherently inefficient. The inference drawn by exponents of this approach is that the sphere of political action should be minimized.

An alternative inference flowing from the same analysis is that where individual preferences can be satisfied in sum only or most efficiently through collective action, privately directed behaviour may lose its inherent advantages over collectively oriented behaviour even as a means to satisfying individual preferences themselves, however self-interested."

Finally, Hirsch links his two main points by arguing that it the increased competition for status that results from positional goods taking up more and more of the economy (competition to get into the best schools, to get the best jobs, to own the best land, etc.) drives people away from concern for the public interest and towards self-interest by increasing the personal costs to giving a little ground in the battle for status by putting the social interest ahead of the personal interest.

There's a lot more in 'Limits to Growth' than I've covered here, I'd certainly recommend it to anyone interested in the topics I've covered in this series. It's a bit depressing that it came out in 1976 and yet so little progress had been made since then in even recognizing, let alone reacting to the social limits that he describes.

42. Cowboys on a Spaceship

Note: This post is the forty-second in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

I remember a cartoon I saw once, many many years ago during the debates over the cod fishery.

The left side of the panel showed a fisherman in the office of a banker, with the banker pointing at a graph with a steeply rising line, the implication being that the fisherman's revenue needed to grow at that rate for him to be able to borrow the money he needed from the bank. The right side of the panel had the fisherman at the water's edge, showing the same chart to a fish in the water, with the fish saying, "But I can't grow that fast!"

---
Imagine you were given stewardship over a vast forest, and the conditions were as follows:

* You receive a fixed amount of money for every tree you chop down and place in a pickup area.
* No matter how many trees you chop down, you could never make any kind of dent in the size of the massive forest.

Under these conditions, you might take on a set of values similar to the ones I classified under the 'moral conditions of economic maximization' earlier. You would be open to strangers and aliens, inviting anyone who was interested to come chop down trees, as long as you got a cut of their profits, of course. You would want everyone to be productive and industrious and to innovate for the sake of the task of chopping down more trees.

Now imagine you were given stewardship over a different forest, and the rules were as follows:
* You received a large profit from the first 10 trees you chopped down each week,
* But, you were not allowed to chop down any more than 10 per week, because the forest wouldn't regenerate otherwise.

Under these conditions, your values would be quite different. Openness to strangers and aliens would simply dilute your profits. Industriousness and productivity would do you no good. Innovativeness might help you chop down the 10 trees faster each week, but it's benefits would be limited. Rich use of leisure would keep people away from the temptation to chop down the forest too quickly.

This example highlights how, from an economic and moral perspective, everything changes once the concept of limits is introduced. It is this importance of limits which explains why notions such as the Club of Rome's 'Limits to Growth' or the notion of 'Peak Oil' have proven to be so controversial.

This leads me to the title of today's post. Back in 1966, economist Kenneth Boulding published a prescient essay titled, 'The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth'.

Boulding argued that,

"We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier. That is, there was always some place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of the deterioration of the natural environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live. The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we find it hard to get rid of.

Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity."

The metaphor that Boulding used was that of moving from the mentality of a Cowboy, roaming a limitless plane, to a Spaceship where everything is in finite supply.

Much like my forest example above, Boulding noted that different principles would be required in these two worlds,

"The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past.

...

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 tile 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 throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to distinguish that 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 tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts."

I find Boulding's notion of moving from the 'income statement' approach to the 'balance sheet' approach fascinating, although I'm not really sure what more to make of it, at the moment.

Another point worth noting is that the spaceship model requires restraint from all participants in order to work. If 9 out of 10 people refrain from consuming a finite resource, but this just means that more is left over for the 10th person who is taking as much as they can, this is ineffective. Only unanimous (or monopoly) restraint will be effective.

In his essay Boulding seems to believe that the spaceship world is something that we will only encounter in the distant future, but it seems a little more present now in a world of global warming, a hole in the ozone layer and peak oil.

Of course there's one critical economic ingredient that we largely ran out of hundreds of years ago, but isn't mentioned by Boulding even though his choice of metaphorical Cowboys and Spaceships shows how it must have lurked in his subconscious - what am I referring to? Land, of course, they aren't making any more as any real estate agent will tell you. We hit peak land a long time ago (the last time we had an open frontier was the Cowboy era), but more on that another time.

26. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Note: This post is the twenty-sixth in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

Other than Plato's 'Republic', the historical work that gets the most
discussion in Jane Jacob's 'Systems of Survival' is probably 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' by Max Weber.

This isn't surprising since it turns out that Weber held a view quite similar to Jacobs':

"We will define a capitalistic economic action as one which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is, on (formally) peaceful chances of profit. Acquisition by force (formally and actually) follows its own particular laws and it is not expedient , however little one can forbid this, to place it in the same category with action which is, in the last analysis oriented to profits from exchange."

In addition to distinguishing the ethics of force from the ethics of exchange, Weber also makes a clear (and somewhat unusual) distinction between capitalism and greed.

"The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. The impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naive idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all. Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering of this impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit

(bold face added).

Note the contrast with David Gauthier - where Gauthier viewed the perfect market as a morally free zone which allowed man to pursue his natural bent for 'more' without restraint, Weber sees capitalist activity as involving a restraint on the natural impulse for more, where the restraint serves to further the long term accumulation of capital. For Weber, there is a distinction between a rational calculation of how to accumulate as much capitals over time as possible, and an impulsive or irrational greed that can sabotage the accumulation of capital (although Weber later notes that there is a certain irrationality in just accumulating wealth without ever making any personal use of it).

Weber repeatedly makes the distinction between the man with a capitalist spirit and the 'adventurer' who seeks personal gain but by whatever means possible not within any specific capitalist approach.

"This kind of entrepreneur, the capitalistic adventurer, has existed everywhere. With the exception of trade and credit and banking functions, their activities were predominantly of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force, above all the acquisition of booty, whether directly in war or in the form of continuous fiscal booty by exploitation of subjects.

The capitalism of promoters, large scale speculators, concession hunters, and much modern financial speculation, even in peace time, but, above all, capitalism especially concerned with exploiting wars, bears this stamp even in modern countries. ...

But in modern times the Occident has developed, in addition to this, a very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour."

I think of this distinction Weber raises as the distinction between someone like Donald Trump - aggressive, ostentatious, frequently in bankruptcy, spendthrift, a promoter, large scale speculator and concession hunter - and Warren Buffett, mild mannered, legendary for his frugality and thrift, not particularly prone to self promotion, perennially focussed on increasing profits.


Much of the essay is devoted to Weber's notion that the restraint that serves the accumulation of capital, takes the form of a set of ethics that transforms a person's desires, as opposed to simply a technique that will best serve a person's pre-existing desires.

"The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us." 

 (emphasis added)

Weber reinforces the point by looking at the writings of Benjamin Franklin, who was not particularly religious but was known as an exemplar of the early American dedication to the values of hard work and thrift.

"...all Franklin's moral attitudes are colored with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues. A logical deduction from this would be that where, for instance, the appearance of honesty serves the same purpose, that would suffice, and an unnecessary surplus of this virtue would evidently appear to Franklin's eyes a unproductive waste.

And as a matter of fact, the story in his autobiography of his conversion to those virtues, or the discussion of the value of a strict maintenance of the appearance of modesty, the assiduous belittlement of one's own deserts in order to gain general recognition later, confirms this impression. According to Franklin, those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actually useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance always sufficient when it accomplishes the end view. It is a conclusion which is inevitable for strict utilitarianism. The impression of many Germans that the virtues professed by Americanism are pure hypocrisy seems to have been confirmed by this striking case. But in fact the matter is not by any means so simple. 
 
Benjamin Franklin's own character, as it appears in the really unusual candidness of his autobiography, belies that suspicion. The circumstance that he ascribes his recognition of the utility of virtue to a divine revelation which was intended to lead him in the path of righteousness, shows that something more than mere garnishing for purely egocentric motives is involved.  

In fact, the summumbonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should "money be made out of men", Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colorless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings" (Prov. xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin's ethic"

So what virtues actually make up this ethic that Weber is describing? Weber never actually spells out (as far as I could tell) the specific virtues, but they can be easily extracted from various quotes.

A story Weber tells about how a 'traditionalistic' industry might be transformed to a 'capitalistic' one, captures many of the elements of the cpaitalist spirit.

"Until about the middle of the past century the life of a putter-out was, at least in many of the branches of the Continental textile industry, what we should today consider very comfortable. We may imagine its routine somewhat as follows: The peasants came with their cloth, often (in the case of linen) principally or entirely made from raw material which the peasant himself had produced, to the town in which the putter-out lived, and after a careful, often official, appraisal of the quality, received the customary price for it. The putter-out's customers, for markets any appreciable distance away, were middlemen, who also came to him, generally not yet following samples, but seeking traditional qualities, and bought from his warehouse, or, long before delivery, placed orders which were probably in turn passed on to the peasants. Personal canvassing of customers took place, if at all, only at long intervals. Otherwise correspondence sufficed, though the sending of samples slowly gained ground. The number of business hours was very moderate, perhaps five to six a day, sometimes considerably less; in the rush season, where there was one, more. Earnings were moderate; enough to lead a respectable life and in good times to put away a little. On the whole, relations among competitors were relatively good, with a large degree of agreement on the fundamentals of business. A long daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and a congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable and leisurely. 

The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the entrepreneur's activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital, turned over in the business, was indispensable; and finally, the objective aspect of the economic process, the bookkeeping, was rational. But it was traditionalistic  business, if one considers the spirit which animated the entrepreneur: the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of regulating the relationships with labor, and the essentially traditional circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones. All these dominated the conduct of the business, were at the basis, one may say, of the ethos of this group of business men.  

Now at some time this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed, and often entirely without any essential change in the form of organization, such as the transition to a unified factory, to mechanical weaving, etc. What happened was, on the contrary, often no more than this: some young man from one of the putting-out families went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigor of his supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into laborers. On the other hand, he would begin to change his marketing methods by so far as possible going directly to the final consumer, would take the details into his own hands, would personally solicit customers, visiting them every year, and above all would adapt the quality of the product directly to their needs and wishes.

At the same time he began to introduce the principle of low prices and large turnover. There was repeated what everywhere and always is the result of such a process of rationalization: those who would not follow suit had to go out of business. The idyllic state collapsed under the pressure of a bitter competitive struggle, respectable fortunes were made, and not lent out at interest, but always reinvested in the business. The old leisurely and comfortable attitude toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they did not wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with the old ways were forced to curtail their consumption.  

And, what is most important in this connection, it was not generally in such cases a stream of new money invested in the industry which brought about this revolution -- in several cases known to me the whole revolutionary process was set in motion with a few thousands of capital borrowed from relations -- but the new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism, had set to work. The question of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism. Where it appears and is able to work itself out, it produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its ends, but the reverse is not true. Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust, sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator. Often -- I know of several cases of the sort -- regular legends of mysterious shady spots in his previous life have been produced. It is very easy not to recognize that only an unusually strong character could save an entrepreneur of this new type from the loss of his temperate self-control and from both moral and economic shipwreck. Furthermore, along with clarity of vision and ability to it is only by virtue of very definite and highly developed ethical qualities that it has been possible for him to command the absolutely indispensable confidence of his customers and workmen. Nothing else could have given him the strength to overcome the innumerable obstacles, above all the infinitely more intensive work which is demanded of the modern entrepreneur. But these are ethical qualities of quite a different sort from those adapted to the traditionalism of the past.  

(emphasis added)

Here we see the innovation, hard work, competitiveness, openness to new ways of doing things, frugality, and productive investment of the capitalist spirit contrasted with the leisure, respect for tradition and non-competitiveness of the old ways of business.

Weber notes the somewhat internally contradictory nature of the capitalist spirit in that on the one hand, pursuing it properly leads to the accumulation of wealth, yet the same spirit generally forbids spending that wealth on any sort of luxury or self-gratification that might justify (in rational terms) the work and hardship that went into accumulating it.

"This worldly Protestant asceticism, as we may recapitulate up to this point, acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially of luxuries. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of traditionalistic ethics. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisition in that it not only legalized it, but (in the sense discussed) looked upon it as directly willed by God. The campaign against the temptations of the flesh, and the dependence on external things, was, as besides the Puritans the great Quaker apologist Barclay expressly says, not a struggle against the rational acquisition, but against the irrational use of wealth.  

But this irrational use was exemplified in the outward forms of luxury which their code condemned as idolatry of the flesh, however natural they had appeared to the feudal mind. On the other hand, they approved the rational and utilitarian uses of wealth which were willed by God for the needs of the individual and the community. They did not wish to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means for necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort characteristically limits the extent of ethically permissible expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a manner of living consistent with that idea may be observed earliest and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this whole attitude toward life. Over against the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid comfort of the middle-class home as an ideal." 

Finally, although Weber tries to keep his own opinions out of it, his concerns about the effect of the capitalistic spirit do occasionally show through, especially in a passage near the end of the essay where he bemoans how once this spirit was a choice but now there is no choice but to adopt it,

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt."

The last line is interesting. Weber imagines that the capitalist spirit's drive for more and more will be unstoppable until it literally runs out of energy in the sense that there is no more natural support for further expansion of human activity. People largely moved on to oil and gas before we ran out of coal (although we've used up a lot of the best supplies of coal available to us, and continue to use more, all the same) but with peak oil a current topic of discussion, Weber's comment is as timely as ever.

Are those who see an end to our way of life because of peak oil (or global warming) simply looking for a saviour from the capitalistic treadmill we are unable to take ourselves off without outside 'help', or are cornucopians who see no real danger of running out of any resources or hitting any environmental constraints simply dismissing anything which might derail the capitalistic train that is driving progress and which we would be crazy to want to get off?


But back to the main point, which is that Weber viewed successful capitalism as involving a set of ethical restraints on behaviour. Where David Gauthier simply assumed that man always wanted more and that whatever action he took automatically reflected that desire for more, Weber sees that actually achieving a certain kind of more (more profits and wealth) required a form of ascetism and a set of ethics that privileges one set of desires (the desire for accumulation) ahead of another (the desire for consumption and ostentation).

This is how Warren Buffett, whose license place says 'Thrifty' is now one of the world's richest men while Donald Trump, whose license plate has his own initials, repeatedly ends up in bankruptcy.


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Note: All quotes from the Talcott Parsons translation, first published in 1930 as viewed here or here.