<
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower>
"John Maynard Keynes once observed that dating from “say, to two thousand years
before Christ—down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very
great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised
centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine,
and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.” At best, he
calculated, the average standard of living had no more than doubled in the
previous four millennia, essentially because, when that epoch began, we already
knew about fire, banking, the sail, the plow, mathematics; we learned little
new that would have accelerated economic growth; and throughout that stretch
the planet mostly ran on the muscles of people and animals, supplemented by the
power of wind and water. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we
started to harness the combustion of coal, gas, and oil, and everything
changed. That’s because a barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British thermal
units’ worth of energy. Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the
Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same
amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years
of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of
oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price.
To call that energy revolution liberating hardly suffices. Suddenly, people
could easily venture beyond their villages, or build dwellings large enough to
afford some privacy, or stay up all night if they wanted to read. After four
thousand years of economic stasis, we were suddenly in a world where the
average standard of living doubled in a matter of decades, and then doubled
again and again and again and again. And we liked it so much that it became the
raison d’être of our political life. In the United States, the per-capita
G.N.P. grew twenty-four per cent between 1947 and 1960, when Jack Kennedy,
campaigning for President, pointed out that Russia’s growth rate was “three
times as fast,” a gap he tried to narrow while in office. Between 1961 and
1965, the G.N.P. grew at a rate greater than five per cent a year, and the
percentage of Americans living in poverty dropped by nearly half by the end of
the decade. If there was anything Americans agreed on, it was that they wanted
more, please. In the 1996 campaign, for instance, the Republican
Vice-Presidential nominee, Jack Kemp, demanded that we double the rate of
growth, while Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, said
that we “cannot and will not accept any ‘speed limit’ on American economic
growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-wash-poverty-usa-seabird-conservation/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
