Steven Stoll: The Great Delusion

Steven Stoll: The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (2008, Hill & Wang)

The story of John Adolphus Etzler, who in the 1830s invented various machines to harness solar and wind power to sketch out an utopia of endless growth. Serves as a cautionary story for the whole limits of growth problem.

The mad inventor of the title is John Adolphus Etzler, a German engineer who emigrated to the US in 1831. His inventions attempted to harness the abundant power of winds and ocean waves in ways that would enormously increase human productivity. He wrote several books on them, notably The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery (1833). "Death in the tropics" refers to Etzler's attempt to establish a settlement in Venezuela, which would capitalize on his sense of the abundance of free energy in the tropics. The settlement didn't turn out so well, probably resulting in Etzler's death -- he thereafter disappears from the historical record. Stoll uses this history to illustrate the emergence of the ideas of unlimited growth and progress that most recently are known as cornucopianism. He doesn't really go into the latter, prefering to focus on the internal contradictions of the developing theories.

(pp. 3-4):

I know the exact moment when I began to think about economic growth. It happened in 1996 while I was watching the televised vice presidential debate between Al Gore and Jack Kemp. Responding to a question by journalist Jim Lehrer about whether it would be possible to "balance the budget without reforming drastically the entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare," Kemp lit up in a corona of Republican energy: "We should double the rate of growth and double the size of the American economy. This means more jobs, more wealth, more income and more capital, particularly for our nation's poor and those left behind!" I don't recall anything else about the debate. It struck me then that doubling the economy meant doubling the rate of making everything -- the disposable coffee cups, cans of air deodorizer, copper pipe, jumbo jets, canned tuna. If Kemp had drawn out his meaning and spoken longer, he might have said this: "If the United States would only double the size of its economy, using the unlimited resources of the earth to do so, the created wealth would elevate everyone to a higher standard of living, eliminating the need for entitlement programs." In this view, poverty requires no domestic policy, no redistribution of wealth; rather, we eliminate it by increasing the transfer of matter and energy from environments into the economy. Kemp not only believed that the earth could sustain a doubling of American patterns, he saw a doubling as the fulfillment of a social vision. Growth will spark a transition to modern living and governance in the poor nations of the world, Growth will unify humanity by dissolving class distinctions -- all without sacrifice.

(pp. 18-19):

Progress became material. Social observers ceased to refer to God at all in their attempts to relate the story of civilization. The philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith, introduced a story meant to sync with the Bible and supersede every chronicle of kings and ministers, to reveal the primal motives and environmental influences behind human history. We all know how it goes. In the beginning there were poor savages who never accumulated enough food by hunting and gathering to sustain more than a few wretched people in scattered groups. Finally using their wits to escape their pitiful starvation, they captured horses and domesticated sheep, living as shepherds or (in the action-thriller version) as pillaging barbarians. Population increased to the point where wild forage became scarce, making it necessary for people to stay in one place and cultivate some of the large-seeded grasses their sheep had been gnawing on for millennia. Farmers produced more food than hunters or pastoralists, resulting in more births. Their surplus grain and milk could be traded in villages, sustaining a population of nonproducers, including princes, bureaucrats, soldiers, and merchants. Divisions of labor, rule by law, a free and open market, great commercial cities -- all these defined "civil society" -- and final stage of social evolution. Progress in the final stage took a different form than it had before: constant expansion. Society would never again evolve into something else; it would just get bigger and bigger, adding new markets, new territory, and more people into its benevolent vortex.

The theory of stages presented the way things must have happened, probably happened, should have happened. Its central assumption, that history has direction and meaning, originated with the messianic faith of the Torah and the New Testament. The narrative translated that faith into secular terms. It built a bridge between religious destiny and the new materialism. It redefined salvation as deliverance from dearth and hunger at the savage edge of subsistence, fulfilling God's Providence with a set of human institutions that mediated the attainment of necessary things. The soul ends up not in the Celestial City, but in the city of shopkeepers. Material progress differed from salvation in another way. It must not end. "If progress is not made," wrote the Scottish historian James Dunbar in 1780, "we must decline from the good state already attained." Edward Everett, as governor of Massachusetts, gave an extraordinary speech in 1840 in which he intoned, "The progress which has been made in art and science is, indeed, vast. We are ready to think . . . that the goal must be at hand. But there is no goal; and there can be no pause; for art and science are, in themselves, progressive and infinite . . . Nothing can arrest them which does not plunge the entire order of society into barbarism." Everett was very clear. Any pause would result in a terrifying regression, a falling back from plenty and refinement into the strife and violence of the past.

(p. 47):

Hot and cold running water, illuminated roofs and walks, agreeable scents, elevators, every convenience, and no work (all by "a short turn of some crank") -- it sounds like an Arizona retirement village. And that's just the point. Etzler designed not a world to come, but the world that came. His knowledge of physics might have been faulty, but his sense that human happiness would be understood as the application of technology to convenience and leisure was dead-on. And rather than interpret Paradise as lunacy, it is more striking to consider all the ways that it reflected the thinking current at the time, the same thinking that has shaped expectations for growth into our time. Etzler took a leap, but not a very big one. His machines didn't work, but not because he fancied them as operating on some celestial plane. His greatest fault was his binding optimism, but in that he was hardly alone.

(pp. 52-53):

Beginning in the nineteenth century, progress became almost synonymous with energy-intensive production -- the making of more things with more concentrated force. It is not the engine that does the work, after all, but the combustion of fuel that overcomes resistance to friction and gravity. When we think about manufacturing, we tend to think of the matter transformed, but while matter can run scarce, it is by far the more abundant factor. Production is equally an expression of energy, but what is energy? The physicist Richard Feynman told students in one lecture, "It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is . . . It is an abstract thing." It can be measured, but we know it only by what it does. Energy is the capacity to do work, and work is the transfer of energy from body A to body B. Energy is everywhere and nowhere. A million stars burn in the night sky, but the heat and light available on Earth from the nearest star is surprisingly meager -- between 125 and 237 watts per square meter (W/m²) per year are received at the surface. Only a tiny fraction of this amount exists at any given time in plants and animals, and solar energy accumulates in only one durable form -- petroleum. Energy is scarce, and concentrated energy is even scarcer.

(pp. 57-58):

The scientists did not have it wrong, but they had only part of the picture. Science assembles models of reality in pieces. No one understood the delicate energetics of ecosystems until the twentieth century. Nonetheless, a vision of the human economy running parallel with physical laws took shape during this time of rapid discovery. Economic thinkers took what accorded with their views and then stopped listening. Science moved on, in other words, but most of the social theorists never did. The troubling thing is that economic growth still has nineteenth-century physics as its intellectual touchstone.

(pp. 59-60):

Of the three factors of production, labor stood apart from land and capital as the bodily form of the energy needed to turn field into food, cattle into beef, first nature into second. The most elegant formulation came from Karl Marx, who defined labor as "a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature."

No one knew the extent of environmental capacity, so none had any way of measuring it against the force of labor. Political economists treated labor as variable and nature as constant. "As human wants increase, in the progress of man from his primitive state towards that of civilization," stated one American, "so must his labor for their supply." Simple as that. Labor made all good things happen: it improved land, advanced the practical arts, and stepped up production. Charles Babbage, the English mechanical engineer who invented the difference engine -- often considered the first computer -- took it to the extreme: "The cost of any article may be reduced in its ultimate analysis to the quantity of labour by which it was procured." Adam Smith noticed that more people ate more fish, causing shortfalls. No problem, just add labor. "The fish must generally be sought for at a greater distance, larger vessels must be employed, and more expensive machinery of every kind made use of. The real price of this commodity, therefore, naturally rises in the progress of improvement." The additional labor and material needed to pull in the catch drives up the price, but that's all for the best because when people pay more, they add to the gross product of the state. This is the Enlightenment alchemy that transformed consumption into wealth.

(pp. 70-71):

Behind the idealism, however, land reform had its own war policy. Its supporters might have believed differently, but by seeking social solutions in Indian country, they expressed the same commitment to Manifest Destiny as Polk himself. This is the context for Etzler's call for the annihilation of Indians. Etzler revealed that he understood the human cost of land reform but that the blessed ends justified the bloody means. He sounded just like Thomas Ewbank (in many ways Etzler's industrialist counterpart), who also believed that human destiny depended on land seized from savages. Writing as commissioner of patents, he submitted what must be the most disturbing report of any government official. "'Onward!' is the standing order of God," he shrieked. "Those who refuse to obey must be pushed aside -- such is the inflexible fiat of Heaven." The weakhearted could not see how "the disinheriting and consequent annihilation of the entire occupants of half the globe can accord with Divine justice . . . they cannot see -- simply because they have yet to learn that the Creator has ordained distinct and independent laws for the material as for the moral world." Communitarian socialists, including Horace Greeley and Brigham Young, sympathized with Indians, but the fact remains that American-style utopia depended on midnight massacres and broken treaties. The irony of land reform is that while it set out to free people from the slow death of slums and shop floors, it reproduced some of the same patterns of the civilization it rejected.

(p. 72):

The reaper and the combine held out the big dream: that energy and mechanics would free people from labor, delivering more food and greater stability to their lives. They were growth machines in that very simple sense -- they swelled the size of the economy by accelerating the transfer of resources into commodities. Anyone would sympathize with that goal, since one of its results was a larger, healthier society. Pulling the focus back, however, might change the way we look at growth. Civil society depended on expansion to continually prove and maintain itself, yet expansion boxed it in by pinning human progress to biophysical growth -- a phenomenon with inherent limits, requiring violence and finally imperialism.

(pp. 73-75):

The growth curve of world population remained nearly flat for six thousand years, up to about 3000 B.C. (about five thousand years before the present), when it began a slow rise. Then, within just a few decades, it took a nearly vertical turn, passing the one billion mark sometime between 1800 and 1810. Etzler knew of the one billion figure, and it inspired him to present his own tally of a future humanity. He noted that the surface of the globe consists of about two hundred million square miles, of which half (he estimated) was free of winter. He proposed that one acre in the temperate or tropical zones would feed sixteen people -- one square mile would feed close to ten thousand. He did the math. One hundred million square miles would sustain one trillion people. It required a truly strange imagination to predict that the earth could sustain one thousand times its present population -- and to promote that as a sign of progress.

Something fundamental had changed that made Etzler think that the world could sustain one trillion people. Agriculture had shattered its own ceiling. The rising availability of food in Europe seems like a minor story next to industrialism, beginning of the eighteenth century, the energy supply in a typical French diet (roughly 1,850 calories a day) equaled that of Rwanda in 1965, the year the World Bank named it the most malnourished nation in the world. Robert Fogel points out that at that level of nutrition, even the strongest males have limited vigor for work. Work energy is residual, meaning that it consists of the calories left over after metabolism. In the United States circa 2007, an adult male had 2,600 calories available for work; in 1807, an English worker had 858. Go back to the 1770s in Germany, just twenty years before Etzler was born, and harvests recurrently failed, causing starvation in Saxony and Prussia. No wonder eighteenth-century economists upheld agriculture as the basis of all wealth! Trade and manufacturing might earn money, but what kind of society do you have when nobody but the aristocracy has enough oomph to do more than get up in the morning? [ . . . ]

For all the hullabaloo about coal and waterpower, food remained the most crucial source of energy. Fogel argues that people became larger and more energetic beginning around 1900, but some of that began on the island of Great Britain spread to the United States in the 1820s, radically accelerating the productivity of land and its capacity to endure cropping year after year without decline. Cattle manure, wetland drainage, and convertible husbandry that rotated fields and pasture -- these ended famine in Britain by 1624, and their cumulative impact caused a sharp increase in the population of the island throughout the eighteenth century. By 1820 England saw its humans increase by 1.5 percent a year, an amazing reversal in less than two centuries. The population of the American colonies (and then the United States) doubled every twenty-three years beginning in the early seventeenth century, with an abundance of food energy that fueled fertility rates while mortality declined. European cities depended on in-migration from the higher birthrates of the countryside until the 1840s, when cities finally began to generate their own populations. These are some of the changes Etzler might have noticed. So while the big boost that Fogel documents had not yet begun, population already reflected a stability unknown in Europe before.

(pp. 142-143):

Recall that in the 1840s, social thinkers of all kinds, blown away by the explanatory power of Newton's bodies in motion, argued that laws akin to gravity regulated the economic motion currency and cotton. By the 1870s, economic thought had fallen into a murky place. The very people who should have been most capable of observing the actual stock of resources became blind to the effects of economic and territorial expansion. Under systematic hunting, bison plummeted from fifteen million animals in 1865 (some put the original number as high as twenty-five million) to near extinction by 1885. Passenger pigeons went the same way, once numbering as many as five billion individuals, comprising 40 percent of all the birds in North America, but nearly extinct by 1879 (extinct by 1914). The Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, along with rivers throughout New York and New England, stank with the runoff of human sewage and the chemical waste pouring in from hundreds of factories. Then, in 1865, the USDA warned the public of a "permanent national famine of wood." Others wrote that the rising demand for forest trees would make wood too scarce to satisfy even "the ordinary necessities of life." Lots of things once thought to be as immeasurable as the sky seemed to be crashing.

Henry Carey was the foremost US political economist of the mid-nineteenth century. He embraced parts of the science of the times, particularly the conservation of matter (but not of energy) to base his cornucopian theories (pp. 147-148):

It is unfortunate that Carey never debated one of his most insightful contemporaries, George Perkins Marsh. While Carey considered every incursion into the forest a sign of increasing order and harmony in the world, Marsh had a more sober view. [ . . . ] Marsh believed that moving from barbarism to civilization inevitably heightened the conflict between people and their environments, that attaining modernity meant attaining the technological power and the force of numbers to do real damage. He presented his own theory of stages, only his story does not turn out very well for the civil society. People multiplied; filled the riverbanks, the meadows, and the coastlines; then realized that they could find more "room for expansion and further growth" only by removing the forests. That historical moment meant something profound to Marsh: "The destruction of the woods, then, was man's first physical conquest, his first violation of the harmonies of inanimate nature." He worried about the collapse of his civilization under rampant deforestation and soil erosion -- effects he himself had witnessed in New England's rocketing economic development. But if there is one passage that expresses his ambivalence toward progress, it might be this one: "Every human movement, every organic act, every volition . . . is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the atoms of universal matter." The interconnectedness of all things implies the very feedback that advocates of growth denied at all costs.

(pp. 150-152):

Economists must have sensed the danger posed by feedback from the environment. In their way of thinking, stretching back to the Scottish Enlightenment, civil society could not change into anything else. It had nowhere to go but out, and its outward development confirmed the superiority of modernity. What if expansion ceased to be profitable? What if growth in population, territory, markets, and infrastructure maxed out because nature rudely interjected itself? Observers had long said that civil society could not endure a falling rate of profit, the great fear being havoc as defining institutions, such as the division of labor, stagnated under high factor costs. They saw the mechanism breaking down and people scattering, going to war with each other, sliding back into barbarism. Every financial hiccup during the nineteenth century provoked this kind of rhetoric. Anthropologist Joseph A. Tainter arrives at nearly the same conclusion. Tainter studied the collapse of complex societies and identifies one symptom common to the Romans and the Mayans: diminishing returns to complexity itself. [ . . . ]

Ignoring extinction and pollution allowed economic thinkers to shield their beloved model, but it put them into deep water without chart or compass. We are all in the same water now. The only monsters really to be feared are the ones we allow to feed in the depths of ideology. [ . . . ] The political economists left us an overarching model of the economy that might not adapt to the end of expansion, along with an ideology of progress that cannot assimilate its own negative effects.

(pp. 163-164):

We are likely to look back at the period between 1600 and 2050 as the Era of Expansion. The first date marks the beginning of surplus agriculture in England, when its population began to climb out of famine, when agrarian people all over the world began a period of wildfire frontier settlement, and the world began a period of wildfire frontier settlement, and when capitalism appeared. The second date marks the year when present trends in consumption will reach a level equal to double the earth's capacity, requiring a second planet. The UN projects that humans will increase by 36 percent between now and 2050, to around nine billion. Rising population will offset any savings from improved efficiency and any reduction in per capita consumption. According to World Watch, even U.S. beef consumption would be five million tons greater in 2050 simply because there will be more people. Economists have long insisted that wealth is not a zero sum, that it can be created. Yet if the biophysical capacity of the earth comes under strain, the wealth of one nation could come at the expense of others. China and India now demand an increasing share of the energy and resources that the United States and Europe once claimed for themselves, triggering unprecedented oil prices that reverberate throughout the economy.

Faith in economic growth ignited during a certain moment, when a providential belief in the limitlessness of the earth coalesced around the accelerated production made possible by fossil fuels. Progress toward salvation became the progress of a more durable existence. Growth has since become a condition of the political order, but that way of thinking might not survive much longer.

posted 2009-04-25