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As our politicians head back to Westminster, we asked our contributors: what should be on the cabinet’s reading list? What book might bring helpful insight regarding the coming challenges? Ralph Leonard recommends Austerity Ecology and Collapse-Porn Addicts, by Leigh Phillips.
The country is in an economic black hole. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown that put all economic life on standby, Britain will soon experience its worst recession since records began. Companies have laid off staff. Unemployment has skyrocketed, and is set to rise further after the furlough scheme ends in October and firms plan for more redundancies.
Britain’s GDP fell in the second quarter by 20.4% — the biggest quarterly decline in recorded history. Particular industries reliant on social interaction, such as hospitality and leisure, are facing economic Armageddon. The gravity of this crisis, which will define the 2020s, still has not been fully grasped yet — but it will be soon.
Above all the current economic orthodoxy — what some call “neoliberalism” — already facing a crisis since the 2008 financial crash, has nakedly been revealed to be obsolete. The Government has tried to reboot the economy through incentivising consumer spending with the Eat To Help Out Scheme, but that is chicken feed compared to the radical transformation that is required. There are huge changes needed, and every shade of the political spectrum will have their own interpretation.
Ever since the beginning of this crisis uber-environmentalists, in true Malthusian style, have claimed that Covid-19 showed humans were the “real virus” all along. Inger Andersen, the UN environmental chief, said in March that nature was “sending a message”. They argue that this crisis has revealed the rotten nature of an economic system based on “Promethean” delusions of grandeur such as dominating nature and “infinite growth” in such a way that humanity is playing with “dark forces” it has no idea of, such as novel diseases transmitting from animals to humans.
Some see the Covid-19 crisis as the perfect opportunity to reformulate global capitalism around an economic regime based on “degrowth” and a steady state economy where economies are relocalised, cities are decentralised and activities like international travel are reined in.
Against this, members of the cabinet should read Austerity Ecology and Collapse Porn Addicts, published in 2015. The author, socialist writer Leigh Phillips, argues for the value of economic growth, industry, technological progress and production, precisely what will be needed to drag Britain out of this depression.
His book was originally a critique of the Left for betraying its founding values rooted in the Enlightenment and surrendering to Malthusianism, moralistic anti-consumerism and anti-industrial “small is beautiful” ideology, but it could apply as a critique of Right as much as Left.
Phillips’s core argument does not deny the reality of climate change or the various environmental challenges that exist. Indeed, he believes that society should grasp onto the forces of industry and technology to lessen the impact on the environment while ensuring innovation and development. For instance, investment in cultured meat could mean Britain satisfying its demand for meat without a single animal needing to be slaughtered — a far more effective way of ensuring animal welfare than moralising vegan puritanism.
Phillips also mentions nuclear power as a way to provide clean energy that is also abundant, while mainstream environmentalists are radically against nuclear energy, not merely because the supposed dangers of exceptional accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but because nuclear can help solve the energy problem without the need for eco-austerity.
Unlike the Government, Phillips is a socialist, so his argument partially holds the free market responsible for the mess we are in, largely because of its irrational tendencies that produce inequalities and externalities against the environment, problems which it can’t solve. He declared: “It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism.” Instead Phillips proposes democratic planning as a more rational way to organise an economy. Even if you are against planning, it is clear the state has to take a more intelligent and prominent role to spur innovation in place of cautious private firms who are more concerned about their profit margins.
Overall, the impulse towards austerity should be resisted. The only way Britain can get itself out of its economic rot is to grow itself out of it through an economic renaissance. Which means the government researching and investing in new forms of energy, transport and communication, and in new forms of production and industry that can produce new forms of wealth that will enrich society and raise living standards through plentitude and abundance, as well as tackling egregious hyper-exploitation of the natural world.
Phillips’s important cris de coeur can contribute to an alternative, ecologically intelligent vision of neoliberalism that need not be regressive hair-shirted moralism.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeAnyone who thinks the State should play a larger role in innovation than private companies needs to spend just a few days fighting the bureaucracy it wraps around the most simple task. Bureaucrats will always go too far in support of a bad idea that they proposed, because of how their career progression is incentivised. Lysenko, anyone?
Quite. We need less Public Sector, not more.
The Public Sector always succumbs to administrative bloat and becomes into an organization that believes its main remit is its employees’ careers and its own expansion, not the purpose or service it was set up for in the first place. Thus, you get a health service with more administrators than clinicians, schools and colleges with more admin than faculty, Armed Forces with more MOD staffers than soldiers etc. and all of those clerks and managers with the attitude you describe.
No the state shouldn’t tell SONY how to make TVs.
But the state can (and should) finance high ending research.
Companies (Bell Labs is the perfect example) used to do that but now shareholders are not willing to invest for deep research that might be monetized by another company.
This is a fair point and there are still good examples around even now. I still doubt, though, that government would be capable of the necessary arms length operation that would make it wildly successful. Not that it is all one-sided. The tendency of the media and public these days to pounce on any spend that does not appear to have an immediate and obvious return does not help.
It’s the same circular reasoning over and over again, also in this article. Every solution creates new problems and all of these new problems will create new solutions and so on, as long as physical growth/purchasing power remains the underlying economical paradigm. Cultured meat: more growth, more people. Nuclear energy: more growth, more people. Electric cars: more growth, more people. In fact most innovation creates growth and/or people demanding more growth because of the underlying economical paradigm. To think that new growth is better than old growth is just short term naivety.
That said, I do think technological innovation can play a positive role, since I do believe that it can create more comfort/welfare which plays a role in diminishing birthrates. But what we really need is not just more technological innovation. Above all we need spiritual innovation that redefines growth as a mental activity rather than a physical one. The question is not if this is naive but the question is what kind of naivety do you want live in?
‘…investment in cultured meat could mean Britain satisfying its demand for meat without a single animal needing to be slaughtered’. But what will happen to all the existing livestock? It can’t all be preserved on ‘heritage farms’. Maybe we’d have one giant holocaust, after which there’ll be no more cows, sheep etc and all pastureland will be turned over to arable (or new houses on flood plains).
Better to carry on eating real meat, but less of it and with improved animal welfare and rural husbandry
Or eat the cattle available then breed less maybe??
Sterilise them, then release them to the wild?
There are two problems I see that need addressing :
1. The “state” becomes inefficient but that does not mean private companies don’t, they can be just as bad if big enough. I suspect both are resolved by having smaller versions of both and by ensuring both are accountable to local communities. The “state” are bad at managing companies and so are private companies hiding behind secrecy !
2. The obsession with growth is unsustainable unless you have infinte resources. We really need to have an alternate economic model that does not rely on growth. Maybe one that focusses on improving the wellbeing of all.
One thing is for certain the two party left-right centralised state model is not fit for purpose and neither is the laissez-faire capitalist / neoliberalism economic model. Yes we have cheap TV’s but we also have millions of hungry people in the world.
Yes, that is certainly true of large and monopolistic companies. In some instances the only thing worse than the public sector is the private sector.
I agree with 1. wholeheartedly. The problem with a state monopoly, is not that it is a state monopoly, but that it is a state
monopoly.The state should be busily cutting the most innovative firms in half when they’ve got too big. Otherwise they “grow” by gobbling up smaller more innovative firms which then get the life squashed out of them, stopping innovation in its tracks. This is the opposite approach than trying to create growth through the state or allowing allow monopolistic firms to grow huge in order to create global contenders.
I dont’ agree with 2. Creating 100% more efficient cars is a form of growth, which doesn’t necessarily need any more resources. However sucking 100% more oil out of the ground is not sustainable. GDP does not distinguish between the two. Don’t get me wrong, emotionally I’m not a green (because I’m not green with envy) but green policies, which can only really be a product of the state can lead to better growth. Once again, the government reining in or incentivising private enterprise is the model here.
The need for growth is to make the wealthy more wealthy!
Nice to hear he believes in growth, but the environmental record of socialist economies is far worse than that of capitalist – see the Aral Sea.
And it is precisely because private firms are “concerned about their profit margins” that they don’t waste money on white elephants as Governments do – see Concorde. Far from being “clear”, there’s certainly no need to involve the state in innovation, planning, and growth…
Who is against innovation?
People confuse BIG technological changes (think of printing press and electricity) with unimportant (but flashy) things such as Uber.
Since the mid 70s (e.g. UK) the economic growth has been driven by an ever increasing private sector debt load. In mid 70s private sector debt (consumer + business) was c. 45% of GDP. Now it stands at c.230% of GDP. We have brought forward future consumption because it was politically unacceptable to have slower growth.
There are 2 theories when it comes to innovation:
1) The best is yet to come (smart factories, AI, etc.)
2) Robert Gordon’s theory that we have run out of BIG innovations.
We can protect nature by doing small and big things; small things such as banning plastic products or taxing SUVs. Big things such as nuclear power. They are not mutually exclusive.
There are many theories about the influence that technology has on society, and they often seem to be nothing more than spooky prophecies or horoscopes (Kondratiev, Schumpeter etc.) However they point to a fascinating fact, which is that the technological forces that pushed us forward always looked like science fiction or magic to the generation that initiated them. If we want to see how to push our economy forward now look at SpaceX.
I would agree with you, people exaggerate the power of innovation in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
Uber isn’t flashy. My Uber driver grabs his next fare, locally, before he’s even dropped me off. That’s twice as efficient as a mini cab, and probably four times as efficient as a black cab. A close-to 100% efficiency boost is a huge technological improvement.
It has always been clear to me as a former businessman that one thing we should reduce is the ever increasing number of people who purport to ‘know’ what should be done to solve problem A through to Z. In other words ‘experts’ and of course their bed fellows plagiarising journalists who like the author of this piece with an attractive CV can write a piece pontificating ‘ex’ says this and so and so recommends ‘Y’ and so on. My reaction to this, have any of these incredibly important self promoting saviour’s of the world, the economy the political system all accompanied with grand sounding but meaningless words, ever actually worked?
There is a rapidly reducing number of people who do work,called doer’s, and more and more people who don’t produce or do anything meaningful. The tipping point I feel is past. Take the state if more people are employed by the state than people who pay tax, where does the money come from? Bearing in mind that state employees pay tax, true, but those outside the system have already paid tax so they can be paid and in a sense are paying twice!
We must create an environment that uses innovation, creativity, and just plain common sense and stop listening to claptrap.
Don’t bother reading that book. Just research the UN Agenda 21 and 20 30 Agenda. This is dovetailed nicely into The World Economic Forum “Great Reset” That is where we are heading folks, we will all be equally poor. Well, some will be more equal than others. These are not conspiracy theories, it is rolling out now and has been for a number of years, you just didn’t know. https://www.weforum.org/gre… To a one world government.
How does a statement like: “It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism” even make sense? It’s the consumerist economic model that is destroying the world. In order to keep economic growth moving forward, it actually requires that products be designed for shorter and shorter lifespans, leading to toxic mountains of electronic waste and other garbage. Not to mention the strip-mining of mountains required to keep us all in digital gadgets.
One of the things that most separates us from our ancestors is the material expectations we have been conditioned to accept. A medieval person probably had a half dozen personal possessions, mostly useful tools. By the Victorian age that had grown to a hundred or so items. Now most people possess thousands of things. The great experiment of modern materialist civilization, in human terms, has resulted only in record rates of mental illness, with up to 50% of our children suffering chronic illnesses linked to environmental toxins we have created. This cannot continue. Ralph Leonard is correct to say that “radical transformation is required,” but NOT along the lines of today’s monopolistic, growth-obsessed capitalism.
Why shouldn’t we require, by law, that tech manufacturers design their products so that you buy your iPhone or computer once only, then simply swap out a tiny data card with new software for each generation of technological improvements. Same even for cars; their chassis should be designed to last a lifetime and never have to be replaced, other than the usual things that inevitably wear out and upgrades that require a minimum of materials. I have home stereo equipment from the 1970s that still functions beautifully and is easily repairable for someone with the skills. It not only can be done, it has already been done.
Or better yet, replace the railway networks we enjoyed a century ago. Passenger rail travel was deliberately destroyed in North America by a consortium of oil, tire and bus manufacturers who, where possible, ripped out electric streetcar systems to replace them with expensive, polluting buses. Unless you live in a remote part of Canada or America with few transit options, the idea of everyone owning a car”or several”is one that must be mostly consigned to history. Electric cars only replace one form of strip-mining for another.
However, in order to accomplish this paradigm change, peoples’ minds need retraining. In a sense, they need to return to a quasi-medieval state of material expectations. By placing emphasis again on craft”people trained to keep things working as long as possible rather than constantly manufacturing new things in robotic factories”we can revive the sense of personal integrity and accomplishment once enjoyed by the village blacksmith or cobbler. Shift the economic value from the product to the services such persons provide to maintain them.
Leigh Phillips is a proponent of Luxury Automated Communism who envisages a largely synthetic future that is devoid of Nature because the planet is absolutely full of humans.
Each human requires land and whilst a planet full of high rise mega cities requires less land per human for habitation, land is still required to build and maintain the synthetic goods that humans will increasingly need.
Thousands of nuclear power stations with thousands of silos containing radioactive waste will create a dual world of radioactive shielded domes of the haves and the wasteland of the have nots. The former being woke communists with liberals 2nd class citizens and the latter being conservatives.
The government already has the Industrial Strategy and Clean Growth Strategy, both of which articulates the need for a post carbon economy with the required research and development.
I’ve looked at a bit of this book on Amazon. It looks extreme,y reactionary and woke or worse to me.