Another BRILLIANT chapter by one of the most important thought leaders on the planet, Jason Crawford. Having deeply absorbed in my clueless college days (early 70s) the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist of "Limits to Growth", the writings of Deutch and Pinker were paradigm shifting. Crawford has summarized the pardigm that "sustainable" is a perjorative, not an unallowed good. We must have a GROWTH mentality for the future to be open, bright, and exciting for humanity.
Your argument may be fine, but I couldn't get past the common but ultimately inaccurate interpretation of Malthus that you begin with. Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?
"The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."
Giorgi Kallis's book "Limits," even if you disagree with his argument about the environment, does a great job of extracting what Malthus was all about. He saw population as growing geometrically, if unchecked, but natural checks are plentiful. He opposed family planning, because he saw it as a "vice." He attacked ideas to "prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural," because "to remove the difficulty in this way will, surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners." Those are the good reverend's own words.
Malthus opposed the poor laws not because it caused unchecked population increase but because it removed the misery that was the impetus for industriousness, and therefore reduced the potential for economic growth. Malthus's book is a celebration of inequality and attack on redistribution, not a paean to limits.
Hardly anyone writing today has their head on straight as much as you do, and I wish I could multiply your influence 100X. You have flair and a lot of knowledge. I love it!
But you do have a tendency to be too obvious and uncontroversial. I tend to relish and learn from your details and examples, while being a little bored by your overall argument because I know it already.
So it was refreshing when you got all feisty, insisting that the idea of sustainability needs to die. That punched things up a bit. It made things really interesting.
However, it's kind of wrong.
It actually does make sense to ask whether various aspects of our lifestyle are sustainable or not, and to prefer sustainability over the alternative.
Of course, it's true that progress often overtakes an unsustainable practice with a better alternative, causing its abandonment without any sacrifice or reluctance long before, its resource base is exhausted. It's also true that when the scarcity of some resource, such as European arable land or firewood, starts to cause hardship, The hard chip off and turns out to be temporary because innovation discovers alternatives. You're right to highlight how misguided is the recurring intellectual blunder of thinking that progress must lead to collapse because it relies on some non-renewable resource.
But if we are dependent on some resource that is in limited supply, and is destined to get more expensive, while that's not a cause for despair, it is a cause for concern. It makes sense to be on the lookout for ways to switch to a more sustainable practice, if it can be done without too much sacrifice.
It is a happy relief that there are progressive people who focus on growth and production over redistribution . Hopefully we can convince more people with our ideas .
Another BRILLIANT chapter by one of the most important thought leaders on the planet, Jason Crawford. Having deeply absorbed in my clueless college days (early 70s) the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist of "Limits to Growth", the writings of Deutch and Pinker were paradigm shifting. Crawford has summarized the pardigm that "sustainable" is a perjorative, not an unallowed good. We must have a GROWTH mentality for the future to be open, bright, and exciting for humanity.
Your argument may be fine, but I couldn't get past the common but ultimately inaccurate interpretation of Malthus that you begin with. Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?
"The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."
Giorgi Kallis's book "Limits," even if you disagree with his argument about the environment, does a great job of extracting what Malthus was all about. He saw population as growing geometrically, if unchecked, but natural checks are plentiful. He opposed family planning, because he saw it as a "vice." He attacked ideas to "prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural," because "to remove the difficulty in this way will, surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners." Those are the good reverend's own words.
Malthus opposed the poor laws not because it caused unchecked population increase but because it removed the misery that was the impetus for industriousness, and therefore reduced the potential for economic growth. Malthus's book is a celebration of inequality and attack on redistribution, not a paean to limits.
Fantastic article. The sad thing is that most “educated” people are convinced of the exact opposite.
Hardly anyone writing today has their head on straight as much as you do, and I wish I could multiply your influence 100X. You have flair and a lot of knowledge. I love it!
But you do have a tendency to be too obvious and uncontroversial. I tend to relish and learn from your details and examples, while being a little bored by your overall argument because I know it already.
So it was refreshing when you got all feisty, insisting that the idea of sustainability needs to die. That punched things up a bit. It made things really interesting.
However, it's kind of wrong.
It actually does make sense to ask whether various aspects of our lifestyle are sustainable or not, and to prefer sustainability over the alternative.
Of course, it's true that progress often overtakes an unsustainable practice with a better alternative, causing its abandonment without any sacrifice or reluctance long before, its resource base is exhausted. It's also true that when the scarcity of some resource, such as European arable land or firewood, starts to cause hardship, The hard chip off and turns out to be temporary because innovation discovers alternatives. You're right to highlight how misguided is the recurring intellectual blunder of thinking that progress must lead to collapse because it relies on some non-renewable resource.
But if we are dependent on some resource that is in limited supply, and is destined to get more expensive, while that's not a cause for despair, it is a cause for concern. It makes sense to be on the lookout for ways to switch to a more sustainable practice, if it can be done without too much sacrifice.
Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but is there a plan to publish the whole thing as a ebook or similar?
Yes once it's finished!
It is a happy relief that there are progressive people who focus on growth and production over redistribution . Hopefully we can convince more people with our ideas .