The one about resources, infiniteness, the long term, and Herman Daly in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

I haven’t written in here in so insanely long.

Checking: I see I’ve written a little more elsewhere, but it was all before the poem-entry I put in here on January 4th.

I’m surprised I didn’t crosspost a couple of things in here. One of them was a massive collection/survey, so that I could look at them all of a piece, of the dream-fragments that I remembered and wrote down over the course of 2017 (the one thing I’m certain that Facebook is good for is dream-journaling)… including what may be the sole complete night’s dreaming I’ve ever managed to pull out and get down all of a piece. There’s been precious little of that lately. The amnesia filters have been washing in very efficiently in the mornings. Maybe I’ll still crosspost that entry. But doing so is hardly new writing.

I’ve been feeling mute.

Well, not mute - I use Twitter as a screaming/acute-reaction hole as well as my personal news service - but unable to speak, if you see what I mean. And as usual there simultaneously are reasons for that (some of them - one of them - obvious) and no reason for that. And it’s palpable, and it sits on me. It makes me feel like a fossil of myself, is what it does.

The only practical cure is to marry a waking time of 3:30 to 4:00 a.m. (although this only works really well when it happens spontaneously) to an immediate dose of coffee and my ADD meds (I should keep one or both ready at bedside - it’s a long, dark dealbreaker of a walk through the dark house to the kitchen when I find myself groggily and briefly awake at a strange hour, not to mention the problem with running the coffee grinder in earshot of the other bedrooms) so that I can bother myself with an empty white page for a few unconnected hours floating in the darkness.
I happened to wake up and manage the hurdles this time. So here I am.

(A good mood image would go well here. But ever since Photobucket turned evil I haven’t found another hosting/linking solution.)

I wanted to say something about Steady-State Economics, by Herman Daly.

I’ve picked a couple of old good books out of my bookshelf recently to read during enforced downtime when I’m away from the house. Well, I always do that, but old good nonfiction. One of them was Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution, by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson. Published 1989, but lovely clear explanatory prose doesn’t age out of usefulness. I recommended it to a friend who, after sending her friend to a Christian school, found that the prep for test questions on evolution wasn’t terrific.

Steady-State Economics is another that makes my eyes go bright - that makes everything bright, really, or illuminated.

See, this is about The Great Carrying Capacity Question.

There has been a spectrum of books from pessimism through optimism. On the pessimistic side, for example, there’s William R. Catton’s Overshoot; on the optimistic side (superoptimistic) there’s The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon. Steady-State Economics is on the side of worry. How Steady-State Economics stands out for me, though, far beyond the others, is the logicality of its framing. Daly builds a logical case for his position (though by no means a flat or dry one; he can be fiery), but the logical framework is good enough to apply whatever the actual answers are or turn out to be. I think this makes Steady-State Economics a general-purpose telescope; reading it is important to building a way to think about the puzzle-topic in general. Whether or not you come to the same conclusions he does, you should use or understand his framings!

(This plus a routine magnificence of expression. The man can write.)

Herman Daly is also an economist - which means that he can deal in a supple manner with the unpredictable questions of economic change and technological development. I don’t think he nailed all the logic of this… which is 1) obvious and 2) perhaps egoistic because I’ve had my own thoughts on the matter, but my thoughts proceeded in part from his. But what I really mean to do in saying that is to contrast him with the very concerned but largely disastrous biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Paul Ehrlich specifically predicted imminent mass famine and worldwide societal collapse at least twice that I know of (Famine 1975 and then The Population Explosion in the 1980s). “Science says this will happen NOW.” And he was wrong. He failed to account for the adaptation of markets; he assumed they wouldn’t be able to adapt. So he forced an immediate showdown on the question of whether Malthus was ultimately right… and as a result neo-Malthusianism is now popularly largely seen as a completely discredited view. Julian Simon and his ilk, economists who do think in terms of market adaptation and technological advancement, won the argument. They won the argument far too broadly. Because of Paul Ehrlich.

In 1980 Ehrlich bet Simon $10,000 that the price of five metals would rise over the next ten years. He lost, and he paid off. … Which is an example of this broken framing of the question being about what happens right now. A trivial problem is that, had the bet been over a longer time period since then, Ehrlich would since have won. This is truly trivial because, then again, what the hell, he might also have lost. But the real question is about what eventually happens… in the long run, at a point unknown.

The real intellectual fight over the long run is between Herman Daly and Julian Simon.

And the long run is really, really addressed by both. Julian Simon… perhaps has to be experienced to be appreciated. He says that technological advancement, and the wonderful way that markets have of fostering and disseminating it, will always keep us out of difficulties. New ways to extract resources, new ways to multiply the use we can get out of resources, new ways to substitute one resource for another, new ways to make formerly pressing problems completely irrelevant. Which certainly does happen; we’ve seen it happen. And Simon says that this will happen infinitely, and forever - and he means both of those words fully. The more people who are born, the more geniuses little and big among them, and therefore the more innovations there will be, and the more the bow wave of resulting plenty will expand ahead of the ship - forever. There can be no absolute, or even worrisome, resource problems or trade-offs over the long term, not even with a human population of, well, arbitrarily large size and a society of arbitrary large scale. (And in fact if anything you’d want populations as high as possible and population increase rates to be as high as possible, through all of that time, because that way you get the most innovating geniuses.)

Herman Daly thinks this is magical thinking, that it’s against the second law of thermodynamics, for one thing. (His discussion is so much better than that that I’m embarrassed; I’ll just move right on.)

I will say further - and I’m not sure how much is me agreeing with Daly and how much is me after Daly or separate from Daly, and I don’t want to derail myself by figuring it out - a couple of things:

Taken to the silly extreme that Simon himself does not shrink from, beyond some point this would seem to amount to the new geniuses inventing completely new physical laws that then work! As if each innovating genius is born with an actual magic wand. I would say instead that physical laws are in themselves fixed, and that our knowledge of them has consisted for a while of refining and reconfirming the increasing accuracy and fixity of our knowledge of those basic fixed laws. Magical breakthroughs can reasonably be expected to be few in number. The real picture would be one of finding ways to use the fundamentally fixed physical universe more and more efficiently. But increasing efficiency implies - or at absolute minimum leaves open the possibility of - more and more difficulty of doing so. At some point.

Even in the near-term, or at any term, the progress of technological advancement is not… nonchalant. It is a matter of trying new things and encountering new things - and doing some things, things envisioned in advance, turns out to be easy, and doing other things turns out to be hard. Technological advancement finds its way between these things, and some things it just doesn’t do. This process also translates into time taken. Doing some things envisioned in advance doesn’t take much time at all, and doing other things turns out to take a very long time indeed.

What this noses toward: The fundamental unpredictability of technological advancement. Absolutely fundamental unpredictability. An old joke, not mine: How do you predict a future invention with perfect reliability of the prediction? You invent it yourself and test it. But then you haven’t predicted the future at all.

I will say briefly what I once explored at length: To the extent that the topic of social/environmental/resource “crunches” or crises depends on future technological advancement warding them off, this fundamental unpredictability means that the only time that you can be certain, Paul Ehrlich-style, that our markets and technology will fail to cope is when they do fail to cope - when you actually go over the falls and nothing saves you. This means that specific warnings and worries can never be proven in advance… or disproven. You fundamentally, inescapably cannot know until you know in past tense. This also - crucially - means that demands for proof in advance are a fundamental misconception.

Back to Simon and Daly.

Simon really is sunny in a way that I’ll say is downright strange. Given our innovating, he says that everything we do leads only to improvement and expansion of possibilities. Reread the last sentence. Everything. Only. We literally cannot screw up. Somewhere he says that a strip mine creates a new valuable hole that someone can someday store things in. That’s how the universe is. (I think he also claims somewhere that human activities create new habitat for wildlife instead of destroying it.) I forget what his religious standpoint is, if I ever had any idea, but this is a universe in which God loves us.

So is Herman Daly’s end … more reliable? (I’ve already said that I admire the logicality of his questions and that they should be read and understood. I’m talking now about his answers.)

Sort of. The most solid end is his treatment of the second law of thermodynamics. Concentrated sources of energy run out and become useless, evenly distributed heat. Where this really bites for me is when he talks about material disorder: concentrated substances can be extracted, used, distributed… and in the end they can have been distributed or diffused or mixed with other things so widely that it is no longer possible, perhaps physically or certainly economically, to gather some or enough together again to use again, no matter how desperately you may want or need to.

And he talks about very long time scales in this context. How long are we planning on living in reasonable style on this planet? How far ahead do our descendants go? This is the part that can make our imperfect and inconstant recycling - or the simple business of throwing something in the trash - feel really, really creepy.
In light of the very large, unknown number of future human generations to come, Daly says we should be taxing new extraction of ores to the breaking point, prohibitively, so that we’d have to refine our recycling to the breaking point. We want those concentrated ores to last a long time. We want to be here and in good shape a long time. The logic is not easy to find a hole in.

As I say, I started out just wanting to direct attention to Herman Daly’s work and the reading of it, Steady-State Economics in particular. I think his logic should be understood - because that logic must be involved in, or must be satisfied by, any form our human-ecological thinking does take.

(His conclusions are separable, a few are dated - and the datedness doesn’t invalidate the logic. Like, he didn’t have confidence in the “demographic transition” that other had faith in; that demographic transition seems to be happening to some extent - but as he talks about it you can see the way that element of things plugs into the general consideration, however it goes.)

I would say that in these latter days the form of the human/biosphere sustainability question is complex. There isn’t presently the specter of an exponentially increasing human population, but there is the question of whether the population we are going to have (at a level higher than present), and the living standard and total physical plant it is going to have, is going to degrade the state and the carrying capacity of the system/the planet/etc. Or how much and in what ways.

This is a more complex, nuanced question than “will we crash?” or “will we crash absolutely”? It includes “will we go in - in what style? with what options, or what trade-offs, or what losses?” Going on (however long) in worse condition than we could have is the main and most omni-applicable question. Will current problems at any point be linked to their environmental causes? If they are, the only point of such linkage would be strategic attention and action. Enough of the big worry about the environment departed when Ehrlich’s disasters didn’t appear that I would be tempted to wonder if the very frame of “a distinct acute gigantic Crash” is a disaster for environmentalism. Except that it all must be understood.

And except that it would be wrong to take the matter of Crashes off the near-term table when we haven’t yet transitioned our high-energy civilization off of fossil fuels to something truly sustainable, whether from the perspective of global warming or of simple depletion…

This has to be deeply and systematically and strategically thought about. I worry about that. Including in regard to present and future crops of the people who would call themselves concern.

Which is brought up, tangentially, by a… well, hopefully just amusing annoyance.

Let me say that I loved the movie Avengers: Infinity War.

But the villain’s motivation - his concern for depleted resources, taken generally from all of the above… well, it’s incoherent.

It’s probably a good idea from the point of view of choosing his motivation. In the original comics, Thanos wanted to wipe out half the population of the universe because he was in love with Death - the spirit, the being, the anthropomorphic personification, whatever, of Death - and he wanted to get her to notice him. Which is sweet, but hard to take seriously, so in the movie they came up with a more interesting motivation where mad Thanos is actually wanting to save everyone. Well, everyone meaning those who survive, and their descendants.

“This universe is finite, its resources, finite… if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.”

And indeed Thanos reveals that a formerly troubled planet where he killed half the population is now a paradise. His own impoverished homeworld ignored his genocidal recommendation and is now nothing but uninhabited ruins.

Well, okay.

But.

I’ll give my own objection first.

Look, I’ve thought in regard to our near future - more or less consistent with Daly and Simon, I think, whether or not they’d agree - is that the question about our relatively early, and resource-rich, time and the environmental problems we face in it is this: Whether we can achieve take-off.

Daly is far from sure (that this is possible at all), and favors a sustainable austerity. Simon thinks we’re already @#$%& flying and there can be no need to worry.

The question is: Can we develop and implement (a crucial element I neglected earlier) ample sustainable energy supplies so that unwanted tightness of energy doesn’t keep pushing us toward less sustainable practices? Can we develop better environmentally relevant technologies, fast enough, that our ecological problems dwindle - perhaps increasingly? Can we manage the difficult job of getting to where we’re harvesting the non-ecologically-relevant resources of space in a big way before our Earth-based resources, or our attitudes about them, get tight enough that we don’t try to get there? Can we do well enough now, while we can, while the cost and the trade-offs and the damage aren’t too bad, to push our worries into a probable much more Simon-consistent trajectory?
(“Simon-consistent” - ahem - by that I mean something more “with strategically improved odds and more options for quite a while” than the literal guaranteed-forever path Simon suggests. A higher, stabler threshold with more concrete reason to think so than Simon’s “keep shaking the magic markets.”)

Takeoff. Takeoff versus the end of the runway (the latter conceived either as a crash or as bumpy ground and decreased, or no more, chance of takeoff). Very uncertain. Very much in play. Some things make it look like we may have missed the boat. Some forms of the boat may not be possible (in which case I’d say we need to find out about those early). I’m focused on this idea enough that multiplying science and R&D funding is absolutely central to my strategic ideology, while you may find it completely unlikely and uninteresting…

But here’s the problem with Infinity War, or with Thanos’s idea:

The movie is full of star-faring, maximally technologically wonderful species across the universe.

All of whom would have achieved at least our version of takeoff! They’ve got incredible technology. Fusion. Maximum nanotech. AIs. Everything. They are post-take-off.

And they all developed independently - so, with different, at least to some degree wildly varying technology.

So… Which finite resources - at that stage - are going to doom all of them, even potentially? If the stars had burned out, I could see it, but they haven’t.

And, if this is in fact the resource situation, well, that sounds pretty severe… but…

… in that case, how is everybody suddenly having a 50% population drop going to help them, long term? And help them that much?

It’s possible that this might give us some extra room to achieve takeoff. Whether or not we then managed it.
But them?
They’re not us. If they’ve all got resource problems that horrible - the only candidate I can think of would be Daly’s entropy of materials, where they’ve turned all the rich resources of the asteroids and everywhere into a scatter that’s evenly mixed with everything - then they may have needed their entire populations to be able to desperately keep up with the titanic job of grabbing for enough more! Being massacred wouldn’t help. They’d be at the end of the line.
It’s like Thanos thinks that in the pause all the resources would then just grow back.

So, the movie’s picture of resource scarcity is incoherent. (It did mess with people’s heads, and mine, very nicely by making the implacable villain Thanos a genuinely well-meaning intended savior, though.)

… And then the real-world humans reacted to the movie.

Julian Simon’s fans - who represent the current economic mainstream, as far as it goes - used the movie to point out how absolutely wrong Paul Ehrlich was, and to gleefully retell how the bet with Julian Simon went.
Julian Simon was proclaimed to be right all over again.

As for the more conscious/concerned people…

… They angrily had the same idea.

One fellow I saw in Twitter protested that all problems with scarcity were actually distributional, the result of fat cats hogging the resources.

And this is presently true. Of social scarcity, food and stuff. But can you see why seeing that made me want to claw my head off and throw it out the window?

He’d picked up a sound/text-bite about how the doomsayers had been wrong about the causes of famine, and that was the picture. And the background question of the environmental constraints… or of the long term… had just disappeared.

(To inject a side factor also: I’ve been surprised and puzzled at the lack of activist support for higher levels of national science funding, R&D funding, space funding, funding at 1960s levels, “funding as though we meant it”… It’s as if that stuff is kind of there, and good, but we have other concerns. But I’ve recently been HORRIFIED at the widespread lefty reaction to Elon Musk investing in space, doing stuff the national funding isn’t… the reaction being that he should raise his people’s wages (yes) and distribute his money instead; the space thing is a stupid evil rich man’s hobby. No thought of the low state of space and long-tailed R&D investment otherwise; no remnant thought of getting giant space solar collectors or of mining helium-3 from Uranus; nothing. Apparently we don’t need new options from that sciency stuff, and rich people who spend on it are garbage.)

So I picked Steady-State Economics out of my bookshelf to read at the plasma donation center. And it was as good as I remembered.

And I think that people in general should understand… well, my own takeoff-or-not focus, obviously, because I think it’s the useful strategic focus. But I think people had better understand the ideas in Steady-State Economics, and other books too, and use them as a lens.

We’re supposed to have an eye on this stuff.

It’s our job.

Last updated June 05, 2018