Railwayst's Blog

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

Economists spouting ceteris paribus do not even begin to glimpse the future their consumptive growth is causing.

We who see the effects of the cause are subject the same entropic constraints as the economy. Only we choose not to disregard the ecosystem that gives us life. The economy seems to think it can exist without life, who knows, maybe the future really is digital.

Privatisation of the means of producing capital is a tenet of capitalism, private owners make decisions based on higher profits, business growth, and market share i.e. returns to shareholders.

There is nothing inherently efficient about that other than that the decision making criteria rarely takes into account, let alone compensates for, the resources, energy and lives wasted. If these do not effect private profit then these are known as externalities and the cost is borne by society at large and the environment.

It is worth noting that as the global energy return on energy invested continues its long decline, the average standard of living only rose during the last two or three generations because of rising household debt.

The only thing capitalism is really any good at is consuming the resources of the future today through fractionally reserved debt arrangements. I think you will find that while mainstream politicians preach jobs and growth, schools are teaching about mountains of plastic in the ocean, mass global coral deaths, accelerating species eradication, global warming, ERoEI, and the impossibility of infinite growth based on the consumption of a finite natural resource stocks.

Maybe read some shit before spouting that stupid party line that the market will fix everything through efficiency. The market has effectively and efficiently gotten us to the brink of system collapse while espousing every known social corruption as a virtue.

It is really worthwhile to look at the first and second laws of thermodynamics and whether one should consider the biophysical reality of entropy in the context of economic growth.

But, generally speaking, economic growth is a human construct that uses the theory of infinite substitutability to deny any Liebig type limit. Not only that, but the prevailing economic theories ignore the externalities of production through a very liberal application of ceteris paribus as well as discounting the value of the future.

While much of this seems patently ridiculous in terms of the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature, infinite growth is a hypothesis that has a lot of appeal at a political level. To decouple from the growth paradigm would almost certainly immediately cause a global economic recession that would have very similar impacts to the actual effects of non-substitutability. There may simply no other way to sustain the wants of the current population.

The other part of the answer lies in the ability of capital to promote the interests of capital and pevert our social and cultural value systems. Modern propaganda, tries to teach us that the seven deadly sins are in fact virtues, that fiscal profit equates with social profit. Greed is good and economic self interest is the new political capital.

Because of this, and a number of other factors, the individual will to self sacrifice for future generations and to acknowledge limits to consumption simply does not exist in an enlightened democractic majority. The majority prefer to believe that everything will keep getting better and this is the message the political class sells.