The Impermanence of Our Good Intentions

Well, this is scary.

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data. . . . 

In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.

The controversial MIT analysis generated heated debate, and was widely derided at the time by pundits who misrepresented its findings and methods. But the analysis has now received stunning vindication from a study written by a senior director at professional services giant KPMG, one of the 'Big Four' accounting firms as measured by global revenue.

The study was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website. It concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040. . . . 

Herrington’s new analysis examines data across 10 key variables, namely population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint. She found that the latest data most closely aligns with two particular scenarios, ‘BAU2’ (business-as-usual) and ‘CT’ (comprehensive technology). 

“BAU2 and CT scenarios show a halt in growth within a decade or so from now,” the study concludes. “Both scenarios thus indicate that continuing business as usual, that is, pursuing continuous growth, is not possible. Even when paired with unprecedented technological development and adoption, business as usual as modelled by LtG would inevitably lead to declines in industrial capital, agricultural output, and welfare levels within this century.”

Study author Gaya Herrington told Motherboard that in the MIT World3 models, collapse “does not mean that humanity will cease to exist,” but rather that “economic and industrial growth will stop, and then decline, which will hurt food production and standards of living… In terms of timing, the BAU2 scenario shows a steep decline to set in around 2040.” . . . 

Unfortunately, the scenario which was the least closest fit to the latest empirical data happens to be the most optimistic pathway known as ‘SW’ (stabilized world), in which civilization follows a sustainable path and experiences the smallest declines in economic growth—based on a combination of technological innovation and widespread investment in public health and education. . . . 

While focusing on the pursuit of continued economic growth for its own sake will be futile, the study finds that technological progress and increased investments in public services could not just avoid the risk of collapse, but lead to a new stable and prosperous civilization operating safely within planetary boundaries. But we really have only the next decade to change course. . . . 

The best available data suggests that what we decide over the next 10 years will determine the long-term fate of human civilization. Although the odds are on a knife-edge, Herrington pointed to a “rapid rise” in environmental, social and good governance priorities as a basis for optimism, signalling the change in thinking taking place in both governments and businesses. She told me that perhaps the most important implication of her research is that it’s not too late to create a truly sustainable civilization that works for all.

I'm afraid I have trouble being optimistic. I really wonder what kind of world my kids are inheriting.

I've long railed against our economic model requiring growth to be considered healthy. Nearly ten years ago on this blog I wrote: I've often asked myself why experts consider the economy unhealthy unless there is new development and construction, why it's not possible to create something good and be happy to maintain.

I referenced it last year in sharing an Aeon essay titled Economics for the People. An excerpt:

Standard economic thinking both seeds and feeds the underlying fear by instructing that we’re all in a race to compete for limited resources. Most definitions of mainstream economics are based on some version of Lionel Robbin’s 1932 definition as the ‘efficient allocation of scarce resources’. The answer to scarcity coupled with people’s presumed desire for more is, of course: keep producing stuff. Not surprisingly, the guiding star for success, of both policymakers and economists around the world, is a crude, if convenient metric – GDP – that does nothing but indiscriminately count final output (more stuff), independent of whether it’s good or bad, whether it creates wellbeing or harm, and notwithstanding that its ongoing growth is unsustainable.

It’s circular logic: (1) scarcity makes people have endless needs, so the economy needs to grow; (2) for the economy to grow, people need to have ever more needs. Such thinking dominates the field of economics, and much of contemporary culture: Man (yes, those ideas overwhelmingly come from men) as the endless optimiser of self-interest; people reduced to producers and consumers; all aspects of life that go beyond the mere accumulation of stuff – morality, joy, care – confined to kindergarten, fiction and the occasional ethics course in high school or college. The result is what Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times calls a ‘moral myopia’ threatening to collapse under a mounting pile of stuff. . . . 

In the modern world, more is actually less. Indeed, the costs of economic growth have begun to outpace their benefits, visible in the plunder of the environment and escalating inequality. We no longer need more, but rather better and more fairly distributed, in order to provide prosperity for all. Collectively, we produce and grow enough for every child, woman and man to have a good and dignified life wherever they live. As a world community, we know more and create more than we know how to process. It’s a huge accomplishment. We should celebrate and enjoy it together, rather than remain on the deplorable path of pitting one against the other in the race for ever more, one dying of too much, the other of too little.

And yet, our dominant economic systems continue to follow colonial extraction and brutal exclusion, in the process creating two organically related, existential problems: the perpetuation (and in some cases intensification) of poverty, and the violation of the biophysical limits of our planet. What a tragic irony that, in the early 21st century, higher education’s economics departments worldwide still instruct some of our brightest minds in simplistic economic models about the efficient allocation of scarce resources, rather than in how to sustainably build the good life based on an abundance of knowledge and resources. . . .

Still, I suppose the fact that the article exists is reason to hope. And, more tangibly, an article I shared earlier this year about a new model being implemented in Amsterdam and a few other places called "doughnut economics."

Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” . . . 

Raworth argues that the goal of getting “into the doughnut” should replace governments’ and economists’ pursuit of never-ending GDP growth. Not only is the primacy of GDP overinflated when we now have many other data sets to measure economic and social well-being, she says, but also, endless growth powered by natural resources and fossil fuels will inevitably push the earth beyond its limits. “When we think in terms of health, and we think of something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we recognize that immediately: that would be a cancer.” . . . 

In a doughnut world, the economy would sometimes be growing and sometimes shrinking.

We'll have to see if it's in time, but some things are changing.

This came across my feed today and seems an appropriate accompaniment to the reports above.

Sam Hamill

TO ERON ON HER 32ND BIRTHDAY

When the last shadow

of the forest vanishes

under the broad wings

of the last river falcon,

I will be alone again.

All the rain forests,

the endangered species and

flora and fauna

bearing testimony found

in hydrocarbons of stone …

going, going, gone.

Thus all our good intentions

are moving along—

their going is our going,

each bound to the other by

shared impermanence.

There’s nothing that’s not Nature.

And yet we are moved

almost to tears by the thought

of the last salmon or whale,

last wolf in the wild,

last California condor.

With a veil of tears

we shroud the dead we’ve tortured,

building great castles of sand.

Here at Kage-an,

we’ve golden and black bamboo,

white blossoming moss,

dark-leafed Japanese maple,

irises just being born—

emptiness in each,

as in this transient world.

Rexroth asked whether

meaning has being. I ask

how tall can the foxglove grow.

How long can the crow

strut his stuff, or the robin

continue to sing

the sun down under the earth?

I want to live a moment

in that song, to die

in that moment afterward,

when daylight has gone,

the world embalmed with silence

until the first marsh frog calls.

How much grief can one

life sustain?—ask the Rabbi

of Auschwitz who died

with his dignity intact,

or ask Chuang Tzu who laughs

loud at the question.

“I am not ashamed,” Merwin

wrote in a poem,

“of the wren’s murders nor the

badger’s dinners on which all

worldly good depends.”

Apologies to the slug

dissolving slowly

in the garden, and to the

mosquito thoughtlessly slapped;

and praise to the rice,

praise to the wine and to songs

that follow after;

and praise for our suffering

which ennobles all our joys.

I have no wisdom

to offer on your birthday,

but here is a song

to celebrate emptiness,

to celebrate years to come.

When I come at last

to be a passing shadow,

I’ll sound like a whale,

and plunge deep into the past.

We are devoid, Hayden says,

of essences, thus

neither young nor old, male nor

female, flesh nor stone.

Happy birthday, my dear one.

What outlasts us is our love.

—from Rattle #8, Winter 1997

Thus all our good intentions

are moving along—

their going is our going,

each bound to the other by

shared impermanence.

There’s nothing that’s not Nature.

Also this. It speaks to the Kansas I grew up in in addition to today's themes. Excerpts from a poetic essay.

The Wind Farm Does Not Require a Farmer

By Jeff Gundy

The wind farmer has no responsibility for maintenance or oversight, no duties or obligations, no investment except nostalgia, sentiment, and an obscure sense of possible sublimity, interlaced with layers of disaffection, boredom, suspicion, impatience, with faint undertones of rage and grief that he believes ought to be stronger. His title, like his duties, is entirely imaginary. . . . 

The wind farmer wishes he could write a large, important, terrifying book. He regrets his lack of the aptitude, energy, and commitment required to write hundreds of earnest, grave, thoroughly researched pages about the collapse of prairie cultures and ecosystems, about poisons and environmental crises, but even the imagining bores him beyond all his capacities to resist. . . . 

The turbines have numbers but no names. Nobody watches from the top of the towers. Mostly they are lonely as widowers in farmhouses. There’s a long ladder inside, and a lift for heavy parts, but only rarely must workers go up for maintenance and repairs.

What to do with such absence, such emptiness, such vacancy, all of it blown over by the relentless winds? Why not fill a little of it with steel and copper and aluminum, with blades to shift a little of the wind, to draw its restless energy into another form, to make it into light and heat and images on 10,000 screens?

Every time I drive through that countryside lately, I see more wind turbines.

This only marginally connects, but I've was fascinated by the concept of ego depletion when I discovered it, find this super interesting, and it does connect at the end.

Against Willpower

Willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether. . . . 

The modern definition of willpower, which is described in both the academic and popular press as the capacity for immediate self-control--the top-down squelching of momentary impulses and urges. Or, as the American Psychological Association defined it in a recent report, “the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.” This ability is usually portrayed as a discrete, limited resource, one that can be used up like a literal store of energy. . . . 

If ego depletion does turn out to be wrong, it’s striking how seemingly well-established it became before more rigorous investigations dispelled the assumptions it rests on. The story of its rise and fall also shows how faulty assumptions about willpower are not just misleading, but can be harmful. . . . 

Some behavioral economists argue that self-control should not be seen as simply suppressing short-term urges but instead understood through the lens of “intrapersonal bargaining”: the self as several different decision making systems often in conflict with one another. This model allows for shifting priorities and motivations over time. . . . 

Regulating emotions also includes skills such as shifting attention (distracting yourself ), modulating your physiological response (taking deep breaths), being able to tolerate and wait out the negative feelings, and reframing beliefs. . . . 

Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing. But these ideas also have a pernicious effect, distracting us from more accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our efforts toward meaningful self-control. The best way forward may be to let go of “willpower” altogether.

Doing so would rid us of some considerable moral baggage. Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline. An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices. Unhealthy moralizing creeps into the most quotidian corners of society, too. When the United States started to get concerned about litter in the 1950s, the American Can Company and other corporations financed a “Keep America Beautiful” campaign to divert attention from the fact that they were manufacturing enormous quantities of cheap, disposable, and profitable packaging, putting the blame instead on individuals for being litterbugs. Willpower-based moral accusations are among the easiest to sling.

This same "moral baggage" and the policies related are intertwined with our belief in the necessity of constant economic growth.

And another piece of evidence making the case that diversity is good for us, not only in intangible but very tangible terms as well.

Boardroom Diversity Pays Off

There's a fresh data point on how corporate America fared during the pandemic year. Businesses with more diverse boards came out on top, according to data provided first to Axios by BoardReady, a nonprofit.

Why it matters: It adds to a ballooning body of research that shows that generally better business comes alongside boardrooms that are less old, male and white.

I'm ready to be less relevant.