Complexity, Competition and the Destruction of the Commons

Complexity, Competition and the Destruction of the Commons

Recently I was reading a discussion in an on-line peak oil forum about economic growth and whether or not GDP is a good measurement of societal well being. One person was arguing that GDP does not account for negative externalities and is therefore a poor measure of well being. Someone on the other side of the argument made the following statement (Since I am not supporting a comments feature on this site, thus not allowing this person to defend himself or herself I will not mention the name of the author.):

"I can assure you that I, like most people, view my personal income as unambiguously good, and would not need to start chipping off bits of it and changing the sign on them."

My reply to this statement was as follows:

This attitude arises from the atomized nature of our economic system. Your primary job as an economic actor is to make sure that you and your immediate family are secure. After all if a personal financial disaster were to befall you, you would be hung out to dry by society. However, if your pursuit of such security creates negative externalities (pollution, global warming, etc) then the amount of income that you need for security is larger than it would be if such externalities were reduced or eliminated. In fact, if such externalities become so bad that they lead to systemic collapse, you are going to lose a lot more than bits of your income.

It is a curious question why, nearly two and a half centuries after the start of the industrial revolution, even in the richest societies on earth only a tiny elite of super rich people feel reasonably secure in a material sense. The answer, I think, lies in two facts.

The first is our addiction to ever increasing levels of complexity. We do not leverage technological progress to simplify our lives; We leverage it to increase our total economic output as rapidly as possible. Of course, among these outputs are various conviences which allow us to accomplish many tasks more quickly and easily than we did in the past, but because we need to keep increasing our productivity exponentially in order to keep the economy ‘healthy’, these conveniences do not create relaxed lives or allow us to pursue intellectual or aesthetic interests which are independent of immediate economic need.

The second fact is the above mentioned atomization of the economic system. Not only do we need constantly rising levels of income to meet our day to day needs, we also need to save up large quanties of money in order to feel reasonably secure about our old age.

This combination of addiction to increasing complexity and having our material security being primarily dependent on the competitive accumulation of wealth is the perfect formula for the destruction of the commons. The physical reality is that our material security is dependent upon a healthy economic community. If Bill Gates along with his entire fortune in the form of gold bars was teleported to an uninhabited planet he would not be rich any more. An economic system in which people regularly do damage to the true source of their wealth in the name of amassing private fortunes is functionally insane. Voluntary simplicity and mutual support is the only path to a humane democratic future. If human nature truly makes it impossible for such things to be, then no path exists whatsoever.

Feb. 1, 2008