Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (46 page)

The development economists conceived of “progress” as a transhistorical process available to all who were willing to modernize. The concept of quasi-inevitable stages of economic growth drew on the economistic assumption that the availability of physical sources and sinks is irrelevant, given the cleverness of human technologies. They assumed that the Western pathway to wealth could be pursued in any context and disregarded the specifics of the so-called empty world, ripe for exploitation, that furnished Europe with its means.

By the middle of the 1970s, it was clear that the postwar boom was over, a fact complicated—and possibly partly precipitated—by the oil crises of that decade. All of this occurred soon after the dawning of awareness of environmental crisis. Pressed by scientists pointing to environmental decline, UN bodies began attempting to develop what became known as sustainability. However, even as they struggled somewhat ineptly to incorporate the concept, the onus for development was being handed over to the free market and the TNCs that controlled it. There is little evidence that transnational capitalism has had any interest in designing operations that can continue indefinitely. The prevailing faith in technology and substitution involves the notion that it is
rational
and
efficient
to liquidate resources before moving on to the next option; in this scenario, long-term sustainability is neither necessary nor desirable.

In the free market era, when the user pays principle replaces the concept of the common good, private investment is regarded as the appropriate source of aid. Direct foreign investment quintupled in the 1990s and has become the dominant source of financial assistance to developing countries. Profit-based, its primary aim is not to serve the needs of the poor so much as to expand markets for people who can pay. Growth has generated a larger class of such people, but at the same time, hundreds of millions are excluded. The poorest countries are not favored for direct investment, and the poorest people in emerging countries are in much the same situation.
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John Milios argues that the intent is a “class offensive,” one aimed at “reshuffling the relation of forces between capital and labour on all social levels to the benefit of capital.”
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If this is not the case, it certainly looks like it. The UNDP’s 2005 report found that “the world’s richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million,” while Oxfam calculated in 2014 that the richest 85
individuals
own wealth equal to that of the poorer half of the world’s population, more than 3.5 billion people.
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Citigroup’s second Plutonomy Report is also instructive; it points to the boom in luxury consumption by the rich and ultra-rich and the superiority of an investment strategy aimed at “businesses selling to or servicing the rich, be it for example luxury goods, stocks or private banks.” The Citigroup analysts are clear that “global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years, as capitalists benefit disproportionately from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”
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Worldwide inequality has not been remedied, despite the claims of CEOs and IMF bureaucrats. As of 2004, 95 percent of the first world’s population fell within the top quintile of world income, making our middle classes and employed working classes part of the global rich.
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UNICEF’s 2011 report suggests slightly lower estimates but still places some 83 percent of the first world population in the top income quintile in 2007.
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Claims for the globalization era, which is supposed to have lifted millions out of poverty, are overblown. Some sections of the Chinese population and smaller numbers elsewhere have benefited, but the wealth generated during the neoliberal era has overwhelmingly gone to those who were already rich, most of it to the top decile, with only 10 percent going to people in the poorer half of the world’s population. The Brundtland Commission’s modest proposal that “part of the increases in the income of the rich should be diverted to the very poor”
¹⁷
has been ignored, and the opposite has occurred. Internationally, despite a world pie that has grown eight to ten times larger than in 1950, the slices available to the poorest people have certainly not; immense inequality persists within and between nations. Even if higher percentages of people are better off—which may be the case—the gross numbers of people in difficulty (with incomes less than $2 a day) have been similar for the last three decades, and the numbers of those without discretionary income (the “non-middle class”) are also static and expected to remain so.
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World Council of Churches economic justice executive Rogate Mshana points to the contrast between discretionary spending in the first world and unmet needs in the third:

Today, tremendous amounts of money are being expended on superfluous and even life-destroying goods. For example, in 2005 alone, global military spending reached well over US$1 trillion (about US$3.1 billion daily) with the United States accounting for nearly half that amount. Europeans spend around US$105 billion on alcohol and US$59 billion on cigarettes per year. The UN estimates that a budget of US$150 billion is required to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty by 2015; the annual amount of US$25 billion would be sufficient to eliminate hunger and malnutrition as well as provide clean drinking water for everyone in the world.
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The neoliberal version of the bigger pie expects to address poverty by integrating everyone into the world market and building an expanding global consumer class. In this version, the entire world population of seven billion ascends the stairway to imitative affluence, as described in chapter 5. No account of any physical parameters is thought necessary. The Chinese political economist Minqi Li, on the other hand, recognizes that the ecological limits of world resources and sinks are likely to preclude what might otherwise have been the ascent of China to world dominance over the next century—just as the United States rose to dominance as two world wars weakened the British Empire. The sheer quantity of resources needed to render everyone—or even most people—middle class as we now understand the term seems absolutely beyond the capacity of planet Earth.
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In the words of Wolfgang Sachs, “The style of affluence in the North cannot be generalised around the globe, it is oligarchic in its very structure.”
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The history of development shows that, after nearly seventy years, a much-multiplied pie has utterly failed to yield sufficiently large slices to afford everyone even modest security. While the middle class in a few selected countries has expanded, the billions at the bottom of the scale remain poor. The plan to generalize first world affluence to the rest of the world is shown to be a dangerous folly. As Sachs insists, what is required is “the revision of goals rather than the revision of means.”

Again and again, it emerges that the much-vaunted efficiency of neoliberal economics means efficient profit-making only and serves as an ideological excuse for excluding those who cannot pay. What is described as “optimal allocation” is the circulation of goods according to the payment of the highest price. While economists like to think this will equate to the most productive use, it seems clear that cigarettes and whisky, however profitable they may be, do not constitute a more productive use of resources than bowls of rice and clean water.

Propaganda and Politics

Given such grave doubts about the availability of sources and sinks and the comprehensive failure of Truman’s stated project for the oppressed, how can ongoing growth remain the accepted wisdom? In the preface to their thirty-year update to the
Limits to Growth
, Meadows and colleagues noted that perception often carries more weight than material reality. They point to

those groups (largely comprised of economists) who have spent the past 30 years pushing the concept of free trade. Unlike us, they have been able to make their concept a household word. Unlike us, they have convinced numerous politicians to fight for free trade. . . . Ecological overshoot seems to us to be a much more important concept in the twenty-first century than free trade. But it is far behind in the fight for public attention and respect.
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Here, the Meadows team is wrestling with the same puzzle that launched this study—the outrageously successful discourse of mainstream economists, in contrast to the concurrent eclipse of scientists’ warnings of ecological peril. The scientists, of course, issued very little literature for public consumption and were engaged in research rather than shaping public opinion, while economists, on the other hand, were embedded within the ruling ideology of material progress and the burgeoning propaganda institutions of big business. The huge power commanded by the new corporations that consolidated at the beginning of the twentieth century was channeled through a diverse web of propaganda arrangements, utilizing the ever-changing technologies of the new era.

The machinery assembled over the first sixty years of the century, described in chapter 10, was ready to respond when environmental concerns emerged in the 1960s. From 1970, a renewed burst of advocacy for private enterprise, disguised as an educational service to the community, reached “almost everyone,” according to
Fortune
magazine.
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Business’s propaganda techniques were further institutionalized with the establishment of a massive and well-paid in-house intelligentsia capable of defining both government policy and media debate.

Concurrently, old political alignments began to shift. Despite a strong bipartisan consensus on environmental matters before 1972 in the United States,
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the conservative side of politics moved toward categorical opposition to environmental regulation, a trend that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism (itself ably propagated by the “free market” think tanks). Indeed, the antiregulatory strand of neoliberal doctrine was a perfect weapon against environmentalism. With its roots in the business struggle against the control of toxic products for more than a century, the new mantra of deregulation appealed to criteria of supposed cost-effectiveness.

Free market fundamentalism emerged as the dominant ideology of policymakers at the same time that evidence of anthropogenic global warming began to coalesce and become accepted by the scientific establishment. Although it has been suggested that the two developments might have been coincidental,
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this is probably not entirely so. Environmental decline and its attempted remedies were part of the complex of problems that neoliberalism was responding to. The attack on environmental amelioration was an intrinsic element of free market ideology, especially in the United States, and extended to attacks on sectors of the scientific community. Once scientists began investigating the damage caused by postwar industrialization, business interests and their mouthpieces began a campaign to undermine science. Regarded as an indispensable foundation of progress and an engine of invention for a century or more, the science mainstream came to be seen as a potential enemy of business in the course of two or three decades. Professionals subject to peer review were attacked as proponents of “junk science” while industry-funded front organizations professed a commitment to “sound science.” This attack on science emerged during the tobacco industry’s campaign to create doubt about the link between smoking and cancer and has been used ever since to foster uncertainty where uncertainty does not exist.

The elites of the early twentieth century were forthright. They were open about their intention to shape opinion in the interests of the business community they were allied to, and to maintain the power it had exercised through the nineteenth century. Today’s elites, despite railing against what they call “political correctness” or “the invisible muzzle,” do not admit openly, as Bernays did, that their central objective is the protection of corporate interests from meddling citizens. Nonetheless, today’s think tank networks have quietly admitted their intention to transform the policy agenda of government along lines congenial to business; they have accordingly recruited bright young intellectuals who would be able to influence public opinion and the policy of governments, and have marshalled an intellectual artillery to target “enemy strong points.”

There is a plethora of evidence that the “free enterprise” think tanks of the late twentieth century were funded—and continue to be funded—by industries intent on curbing democratic regulation. Similarly, there is evidence that the same polluting industries buy direct influence in governments and bureaucracies, exert direct influence over media conglomerates that belong to the same business class, and campaign relentlessly to depict free market capitalism as a preordained aspect of the natural order. The think tank operatives of the last thirty to forty years have indeed softened up the positions of their opponents and, despite their dense connections with the conservative wing of politics in their respective countries, have presented themselves as “nonpartisan” or “independent,” and enjoyed the same tax deductions as charities. Yet, on closer inspection, the idea that the free market is a spontaneous outgrowth of human nature, inexorable and natural, is contradicted by the immense effort expended in advertising it.

A Massively Inconvenient Truth

Even at the outset, when
Limits
was first published and some institutions in the developed world seemed open to its ideas, economists, both academic and popular, went on the attack. For nearly forty years, questions about physical limits have met systematic derision from business interests and mainstream economists. Most of the vocal critics of
Limits
have ruled out any notion of slowing or restraining growth. Some simply ignored the MIT scenarios that moderated growth and led to stability.
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“Club of Rome” became easy shorthand for dismissive comments about prophets of doom.